A distant relative outside Oslo climbed daily to the roof of her house, where the wind and water gauges for the village perched. I encountered the eighty-eight-year-old Norwegian relative thirty years ago when I arrived there behind a boy straddling a Norton 750, two decades before my mother discovered this high-altitude streak in herself. In the Norwegian woman’s small house was a street map of Chippewa Falls, where my grandfather’s parents had settled the century before. It was enormous, so detailed in its boxy divisions, it made me laugh. Here was middle earth and a starting point. Grandpa’s street was so plain I could nearly see the fence.
What does this have to do with bread? Its shared usefulness was not transmitted to us, growing up. It didn’t hold together for the immigrants who wanted to lose that tradition.
A place I ran toward once in St. Petersburg, the shore of the Baltic Sea in a ferocious November wind, seemed almost a home. In the mid-nineteenth century most of my ancestors made the Atlantic crossing leaving the Baltic Sea, choosing to enter the New World. There are some letters and newspaper clippings, but basically the earliest stories got lost. The persons are missing. The optimism and suffering gone. The real stories and people might have changed our lives and brought us closer to the heart of bread’s precious admission of need and willingness to share, with little sense of competition.
I have the barest clues about the women who went before me. One grandmother died in the hour I was born. My other grandmother lived in Washington. Distance and bread are antonyms. But I have a photo of her, too, on a roof. She is at college and has hoisted her long skirts and is sitting with a group of young men and women on the top of a boathouse. This image of women on rooftops is curious. I myself climbed out a college dormitory window one night, and shinnied up the thin ladder on a freight train car. I lay down on its roof. Fortunately for me, the train did not go out that night. What story lies in those rooftop samples? High spirits looking for liberation; craziness with no place to go.
Growing up, we often visited the family graves; on holidays, we would plant my father’s family’s plot, and in the summer, we would visit Mother’s dead. In those graveyards, so amazing in the plethora of Norwegian names in my mother’s family and German ones in my father’s family’s cemetery, the images are of great silence and peace. My great-great-great-grandmother’s five infant graves behind the family stone in Chippewa Falls speak of the tough-minded heartbreak of pioneer beginnings. But we never mentioned even a sentence about the people who left behind land and language and reached out willingly to a better future as trauma closed over them. Tocqueville noted that Americans lose track of their social origins, often in one generation. The graveyards then peacefully absorb in neat order the next three generations, all northern peoples by blood and belief. These markers are comforting for the fact that we know where these people died—not in camps and wars—but they are remarkably solid, perhaps with an unwillingness to intermarry or venture out. They were always presented as evidence of family, continuity, order, decency. Who these people really were, what their lives felt like, is basic silence and stretches into the sky. It is almost as if we came to honor the stones themselves. More quiet even than the stones are the lives of the women—until I found Emiline.
I know very little beyond the starting points: Silesia and Pomerania, the bitter white cold in Norway, rugged open spaces in Wales where plentiful water still cruelly froze. Shining, mystical whitecaps, remote independence, foreboding, and peace speak to me. Although socialists left Germany after losing the 1848 revolution, and I often placed my father’s ancestors in this crowd of thinkers and rebels, they were much more likely to have been farmers, land people conservative about human nature. My father never told us, but his mother’s father was a boat pilot. There was nothing Father preferred to paint as a boy more than boats.
Bodies of water remain powerful emotional experiences for me. In two languages I have never learned, German and Norwegian, I am amazed by how familiar the inner spaces feel, a dreaming of speech without words and some feeling of affinity for landscape and nature. Herman Hesse complains that German is a “matriarchal language” in which, as in music, “form is given to formlessness.” Perhaps there are resonances captured by my cells, for I recognize that female place of deep stillness. “Alles das Eilende / wird schon vorüber sein; / denn das Verweilende / erst weiht uns ein.” (“All that is hurrying / will already be over; / for first the abiding / initiates us.”) (Rilke.) I shiver, as if I, too, know its deeply dialectical inversion: “Ein Nichts / waren wir, sind wir, werden / wir bleiben, blühend; / die Nichts-, die / Niemandsrose.” (“A nothing / we were, are, shall / remain, flowering; / the nothing-, the / no one’s rose.”) (Paul Celan.)
Celan’s exploration of nonpersonhood inside a language that exterminated his people opens a set of sounds and a place where language can undo and unbecome. In my own completely different experience this space to express annihilation attracted me. Doubleness arises in German. It fits with my sense of inner speech and the severe conditions imposed on expression. In Norwegian, to please my grandfather, I could pipe out in high falsetto the country’s national anthem. He would smile and remind me that in Norway there is no word for country. Lond, land, means country. “In fact,” he would say, “the law allows anyone to walk across anyone else’s fields.”
Anglo-Saxon English—at least in its capitalist and male-dominated bourgeois centuries—has suppressed darkness and fertility in the mother tongue. One’s own darkness—which may not be all that terrible—nevertheless pertains to life. If it is not found and acknowledged, progress will be seen as pure light, and others’ differences as bad. There are so many darknesses once one begins looking in the dark.
I help Signor A. cross the street. He is heading to the newspaper kiosk. He can maneuver, but he feels slightly uneasy at the more complicated crossings. The kiosk has been upgraded in a flush period when the average person spends twenty dollars a week on papers and magazines. Ingeniously fitted into a few square meters, the prefab structure with a jaunty awning has heat, electricity, and a toilet. Passing around the traffic barrier planted with white roses, I pretend that I don’t see a woman furtively snipping them and getting pierced by the thorns, pushing them into her purse. The city planted the roses, and therefore she feels she’s entitled to some. A badly hunched back, a head with straight white hair, she is the old crone, a stereotype, bent from scrubbing and polishing. At home, on a table, the roses’ white petals will add a perfume to a bare living room with a television set and a credenza covered with solitude. Her husband, deep in a depression, holes up in the house. She follows him around, casting her round shadow on his.
Many of our Parma friends have their parents living in the house. Many are sick and complaining and ungrateful to be living with their children. Clare’s first English teacher retired because both her parents had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. Her mother often didn’t recognize her, and her father couldn’t be trusted to light the stove. Matches’ small phosphorus flare became an eerie pursuit. “I am too young to retire” (and she was), “but being the unmarried sister, I am the one to take on my parents. It’s hard,” she said, her eyes bulging with the terrible pressure of what would become of her life in the following years. The mother of another friend, after she broke her leg, refused to attend physical therapy classes. The crippled woman doesn’t want to live in an upstairs room, so she sleeps downstairs in her daughter’s living room on a hospital bed. The family can no longer gather past eight o’clock. They cannot entertain. The daughter does not really complain to me. “I can’t do any research. My loads have increased. But what do you want? I worry about our daughter, but my mother is part of life. My husband agrees. After all, where could Mother live without walking except with us? She is taken by my brother’s family six months a year, so we survive.”
A colleague at the university has nearly broken down while looking after his father, who has lung cancer. His father accuses him daily of slights, of not spending en
ough of his time under his unforgiving hell storms of rage. The fifty-year-old son sits with bowed head, and when he leaves the room for a smoke, he asks his wife, “What more can I do?” A priest we know has his senile mother in the house. She rails and reacts wildly, grabbing a bunched piece of his cassock when he tries to open the door to leave. But it is as if she connects him to his entire life each time she strikes out, reaching for him. When is guilt so much a part of the skin that it is not only guilt but the only covering one has? In this acceptance is much strength and decency. Of course, there is also slavery. Joyce said he left Ireland for good once he stared into his mother’s coffin and saw that she had been worked to death.
The blind man and I go around a man standing with his feet planted like two shovels. Absorbed, indifferent to possible traffic, holding the newspaper open, he concentrates on the obituary page. News of death is one of the main reasons the Gazzetta sells. On the pages for the dead, their photos often appear, above lists of mourners. The condolences cost a ransom, more than fifty dollars a line. Columns of friends and business associates publicly cluster along with the enlarged name of the deceased—Silvio, or Uncle Silvio. The boldfaced name, sometimes as a diminutive, sometimes as a role, repeats in each ad. Swift cruel fates like the motorcycle accident of a youth are openly laid at God’s feet in published cries of pain.
Signor A. is buying two papers. One is the Gazzetta. A young woman has just paid thirty-five dollars for five magazines with names like Bride and Bride Today, a bundle of confections for orchestrating a wedding. In Parma, if traditional celebrations are held, the expenses can reach $40,000 or $50,000.
In the Gazzetta, alongside current deaths there is a special section for anniversaries of deaths. Photos commemorate the deceased. As in the Roman portraits painted on Coptic tombs, the dead stare out from the last page. The man firmly planted in the middle of the road has found what he feared. It’s true. He shakes his head in disbelief. He doesn’t stop to read the headline reporting that Berlusconi’s brother Paolo has been arrested.
Today the government has announced that the number of people receiving pensions has run into a new hitch. The number of babies being born is less than the number of people dying. In the north, 35 percent of marriages end in divorce. Demographically, going ahead in this way, Italy would have more people above age sixty than below that age and the workforce could not pay for everyone’s pension. Something deep in the country known for family is not working or is in ferment. The future has a special meaning concerning senescence and immobility. There is a spectacular prudence and materialism, not so much among the old as among the generation that were children during the war. Here women and men seem unable to go on with yeast’s magical power to increase and perpetuate. They are overburdened, focused on themselves.
Parma’s population growth is below zero. Industrialized northern Italy is withering like a sick tree, still putting out fruits, large money fruits, but fewer and fewer of the living ones with taste and worms. For the past five years, legal abortions in Parma have outnumbered live births. Like the pig swill that is dumped from time to time into the irrigation ditches outside the city, this is a raw fact.
A death wish can be felt in the Parma generation who were children during World War II. Many remain unmarried or they married friends of their original families. In any case, most live within blocks of their parents. Everyone is growing older. Brushed poodles, white huskies, exotic Tibetan shar-peis have begun to leap and yip in childless homes. At an emotional level, the war perhaps has never been looked at for its effects on those who were children then. Expectations, too, for what family means are so high that many cannot face them. The family’s destructive powers, while not acknowledged, are vaguely present. Paolo’s generation wear straitjackets that no one seems to know how to untie. My husband, always citing natural laws, says that, cyclically, generations like that arise. “Under tall trees, some must grow without direct sunlight for even fifty years. When the large ones are chopped down, the ones underneath often die from infection. It falls to the next lot, the scrub, to grow up strong.” Too neat, I think to myself, and too passive, and intellectual. Oh, dear. And then I think: It’s a story that could change.
Progress, in myth and Protestantism at least, insists that a clean straight path exists. I don’t believe in progress as something straight. It is the darkness in me that holds out for the spirit and it is within the spirit that movement takes place. Bread’s mystery is a story that goes round and round in a circle. These two shapes—the line and the circle—are deeply different stories about the world.
A recent regional law has made it obligatory for the community to celebrate each relatively rare birth by planting a tree for each child born. The maple and poplar clusters planted in various parks are puny. The new spindly trunks are waiting for reasons to increase. The new government blows a headline into news. Perhaps women with jobs can have three years off for each pregnancy. Young women are not biting the apple.
Signor A. rarely complains. He tosses out a joke about the sun as we finally leave the newspaper stand. He’s dressed as if he worked in the upper regions of a bank, a stone-colored suit and blue tie. In a gentle voice he says, “Rain is better for me. Like Dante in hell, I can see gradations if I meet shade on shade.” His unobtrusive culture is a pleasure.
His son is a prominent international journalist. He asks me if I have been following his articles on Milan and even scandal in Parma. He says querulously, “He’s merciless.” We are on interesting ground, the cross-fabric of truth or self and the deforming power of family loyalty. “He denounces even friends of mine.” His face, oriented toward the sound of my voice, shows signs of excitement.
“What do you think of that?” I ask, almost knowing the answer.
“He has no children. He has no financial worries. His wife is retired. He can afford that freedom.” The words recite a familiar litany. Often conversation has the feel of recitation. “I had a wife and the two boys. You couldn’t do what he is doing with my load. He doesn’t need recommendations from anyone. If he had children, he couldn’t attempt to do or dream of doing what he is doing now. Yesterday and the day before, he ran a full page about the famous glass-domed Galleria in Milan. Do you know it? It’s full of underground rats and bogus rents. Craxi has a palatial apartment there for a rent of eighty dollars. Just imagine if we could get that kind of deal. The same old story is always the same old story.” The logic seems nearly comforting to him.
The old man smiles with justifiable pride. “I’m all right with my friends. Believe me, they complain. They think C. is being disloyal. I’m eighty-six. I tell them I can’t control my son anymore. He’s over sixty.”
Sometimes I feel painfully jealous of the Italian family’s strength: the flow of cousins and baptisms and the way old people are not abandoned. I know its inertia, its endless tensions, its guilt and lack of letting one make free choices. Nevertheless its commitment speaks to the heart of life’s interconnected needs. It is a unit like bread with a long fundamental link to meaning, order, and identity. Yet sometimes what most disgusts me is the family’s lack of trust in the larger world and the family’s way of undermining conscience. The family, among all its powers and effects, can so insensitively blunt a deep awakening. It can compress souls into doughs that cannot, and (if they live here) seemingly need not, stand up alone and challenge what is known to be in other places as normal.
As I walk Signor A. back across the street, he eagerly talks and I know that he’s counting. We are noted, observed, and filed away in the eyes of the three people inspecting us from their position at the bus stop.
The beats in Signor A.’s steps are small but of this place. They leave marks, like the snipped roses that work in at the corner of our eyes. I caught his frail arm this morning because the small multiplies for me. Like yeast spores worked into the board where bread is kneaded. The wood remains impregnated, yeast’s sour magical action ready to begin again. Scale is an important level to
understand in the world of this moment, in this Italy where we each could count. Most actions for me operate under the butterfly factor. A butterfly opens its wings and energies are released. Who can prove that across the earth the tidal wave engulfing the shore was not set off by that small flight? I am keenly aware of the responsibility of stories. This is a time when words cannot cover nearly as much general ground as they did even fifty years ago. They are being shaken and rolled. In my way of believing, any human may suddenly find a place new and unknown, un-assumed. The forgiving space in a family’s elasticity, where time stands still enough so that one can pick up dropped stitches or mistakes and try slowly to straighten them out, is a necessary story. But perhaps forgiveness is not the only story for public life. Perhaps smaller virtues, taken from families, sharing, not stealing, asking, respecting, should be enforced and worked on, so that forgiveness or the condono would not be such a ready public solution.
Mother Tongue Page 33