Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  Repetition as I learned it as a young woman in books meant Nietzsche’s eternal reoccurrence, Sartre’s nausea; we wanted the new. Instead, inside bread’s humble position there is tough-minded room for staying together even through great change. Bread is finally not linked to money. It falls to the spirit.

  In Parma, too, much bread has lost its real power—and easily becomes banal weight and torpor. In Parma’s context, the micca is often only food, no more, and no more creative. Here, women are on the edges of seeing the family structure change on a large scale. They might even begin to see that bread can represent ego and power. It can be denial and silence that does not cry out for help. It can be a tyrannical ritual and a crust that leaves others on the outside, unable to penetrate beyond the formal sameness of appearance: “We all eat micca.” Its mouth-stuffing impersonality and binding control is becoming an issue in some homes. The context of bread, its absolute meaning, is being torn from its nearly officially perfect history and freed to tell stories again.

  Time is turning into mere handfuls. I have a mad wish to sing. I want to feel the world’s patterns, not just house or city. But when I say world this wish suddenly becomes so much harder to gauge. The questions remain: How does it happen? How far must one travel to be?

  In a strange coincidence, a new story for bread was made real in historical fact and image the other day. I saw an exhibit on the painter Lavinia Fontana, who lived from 1552 to 1614. She was born in Bologna and had eleven children as well as a career as a painter of great sensitivity and success. She paints herself playing the harpsichord, reading. We never see the servants who must be carrying life ahead. But we see her vision, which is psychological. She puts women and children, each with a point of view, into group portraits. Their feelings occupy as much artistic space as the men’s.

  To me, in the perspective Fontana uses, it seems as if the figures are drawn at a previously unnoticed, closer range. To me, this seeing is startling because it may mean that women are telling their own stories, as Woolf says, from their own standpoint in experience. Fontana’s portraits are up close, effortlessly true, and convey multiple points of view. Her work, which extended from formal portraits to religious pale and altarpieces, mythology, and even nudes, showed that she, working alongside her father as well as alone, had no limits in talent and training and lived her talent in the world.

  Another woman’s work was shown—that of Santa Caterina of Bologna. A handwritten story was integrated into her portrait, done in 1594. She had written an intense book of spiritual thoughts, which she kept hidden among her possessions, under the leather cushion of her chair. When the pages were discovered (by a nun who spied on her from behind a curtain), the words at the bottom of the painting say, “the oven for baking bread was heated up” and her writings were thrown “into its flames.” Caterina manages not to crack up. Her spiritual investigations give her hope. She goes on to write another book, because the spirit does not die. This time her book survives in the convent, is accepted and printed. The painting shows her in a cell, a tiny private space, where a nimbus glows from her head and a pen is in her hand.

  The image of the oven for baking bread incinerating a book of spiritual words seems an arresting one. Bread’s oppression, the physical world and all its demands and limits and economic pressures that turn bread into money, does continuously consume precious individual gifts. Bread as domestic tasks weighs most often on women’s lives, but on men’s lives and children’s lives, too, if it burns up the spirit. The book, I say to myself, does get written. Caterina persists.

  In Parma micche are part of the language. That’s not true for me; yet we can all tell stories. We can learn more about giving, making domestication an open flow into life. We can take bread, too, and make it multiply. We could even try to find new meanings for the word—sacrifice.

  I am learning about bread’s power and how it slipped from our hands in English. Bread has always had an economic component as well as a moral one, a price to pay. Yet as much as bread, I think yeast interests me I think Thoreau and Cato were wrong. Bread needs yeast and we need it in households. I’d be curious to see in Parma how bread with Caterina’s image on it would sell. I would be so happy to create its packaging. The nightmare of lunch would be over. The beams of light would shoot from her head and the table. The wrapper might say, “Micche’s body can give more space to soul. Don’t live at bread’s margins.”

  You will laugh and laugh

  [29]

  BOWL OF FIRE

  Today it stopped raining, and the thick, nearly suffocating smell of the linden trees is no longer filling the June air. Everyone is licking an ice-cream cone. Children, grown-ups are out again, neatly, joyously licking or digging with plastic spoons. The white linden blossoms have fallen and sidewalks are covered in their brown rotting soup. When the heat comes, it will dry up, leaving the yellow pollen smeared like saffron. Now the muck sticks to shoes and is trotted into the neat shops that forbid dripping umbrellas. The thin, hungry shopgirls can’t bring themselves to hiss at the customers to remove their shoes. These unsuitable romantic trees touch all the city with their messy undone state. Their seeds, round as peppercorns, have fallen, and under the wheels of a bike they pop and crunch.

  The windows of the shops are filled with the beige and white, taupe and black clothes that have been declared in fashion. The pale desert look is put on dutifully by the old and the young, the frail and the fat, with an effect that shows in the center of town. Everyone is in the group, looking as if a glamorous safari of wealthy people from the 1920s had strayed into town. The men and women have obeyed. We see the women on bikes with their skirts fluttering, and on the buses, where together they blend into a single shade. Ask in a shop for red, and a young girl will put you in your place. “No one is wearing bright colors this year. Not here.” A woman who runs her own shop told me that she would like to carry light colors but she doesn’t wish to insult anyone. “In my own house, I might wear something bright, but I don’t want to offend the other shopkeepers or my customers.” I asked, “Why don’t you just offer some bright sweaters if you like them?” Her reply: “Who am I to do that? Who am I to question the designers? I am no one.”

  It was at the top of the Via Mazzini, Clare, that I kissed you goodbye a few minutes ago. You are a month away from twenty. You just announced that you’ll never date another boy who gives you Waiting for Godot. You’ve received three copies in the last two years. “Next time, when the name Beckett rolls off a boy’s tongue, I’ll tell him then and there he’s not my type.” You stayed in town, lingering to visit N. in the hospital. But now you must get back on the train to take your last exam in analytical geometry. Then back here for a quick stop before you pack your strawberry-red wheeled bag for Paris. You are looking for the Paris of painting, the Paris of novels. It will be there in faces and streets.

  Paolo was funny this morning talking about driving school, wasn’t he? When he, as a young man, enrolled as you have, he signed up for the cheapest driving school. Most of the instructors were inexperienced drivers and also untrained teachers. His school was famous for having teachers who shouted. The one he had was particularly hated for his hysterical criticisms. Mr. Rossi, the man who made steel blades in the basement and became a millionaire, took lessons at the same school in the early 1960s. So few people knew how to drive then, so few had cars. Mr. Rossi had Paolo’s teacher before Paolo did. Rossi hated being shouted at, and one day he pulled the car over to the curb and left it. He couldn’t take it anymore. Paolo, the young boy, remonstrated with Mr. Rossi. He urged him not to change schools and insisted that it was a good way to save money. If the teacher was unbearable one learned as fast as possible. How like a part of Paolo that perception was.

  Paolo was offhand, wasn’t he, as he talked about how he took only sixteen lessons. There was no man in the family to teach him. And when he took the test for his license on the first possible day, he knew he had only the raw basics. There had been no prac
tice sessions, no father coaching, no money to waste. He was so funny this morning describing the old tricks that served in those days, the resourceful gestures that substituted for actual experience. He lovingly showed how if you wanted to impress the instructor you turned with a great show, practically swiveling your head 360 degrees, but with a nonchalance, so typical of Italy. You did this before putting the key in the ignition, in order to convince your examiner that you always checked your rearview mirror but you didn’t trust the mirror or its illusion. No, you were serious and scouted prudently the entire situation on the road before you began, even though in the 1950s and early 1960s roads had an empty grandeur.

  Then he showed how you always set the hand brake when parking, pulling it up as if you were waving to far-off friends. Not a sloppy little gesture but a full motion meant to catch the examiner’s attention and underline the end of the session, like halting a symphony. How funny he was explaining the survival tactics and the bluff. You and I looked at each other while we laughed. In his own teaching at the university he swims against the tide—trying to get students to speak, to participate, to be taught without fear tactics and passivity. He’s deeply changed his ideas about education. Paolo let you choose a driving school where they shout less and you pay more. “The Italy of those poor tricks,” he said, “is gone. Undoubtedly, though, a new generation of techniques for passing has been cooked up.”

  I felt so many emotions, Clare, watching you walk away. Above all, I felt a beginning. I loved seeing you in front of me. All your life, Clare, I have talked to you inside myself. So often I have wanted to spill out some of the running inner tapes, but they are often just babble and fear, or things that shouldn’t be laid on children. I have talked to you always out loud and inside myself and I have listened.

  You still talk in your sleep. Sometimes you cry out, in English. Sometimes in two languages. Sometimes you are alarmed and asking for something to stop. I hate to hear your cries. But I also remember hearing you play games. I don’t know what kind of games, but you wanted to win. You got furious and wanted the ball to come in your direction. And sometimes I heard you laugh in your sleep—loud, cheery raucous sounds. A kind of paranoia that belongs to the sensitive and the conscious would not have been an early strand in your life if you had been less deep or less divided. And now those two languages and two lives are feeding into a life you are taking into your own hands as you let your own nature out. You said it: “Mom, I’m a pretty passionate person.”

  These teenage years have been dull and rough. Personalities have shot out of you and I have seen you tear up situations and insist on differences that few others can see. Here the mothers hang on. They lean over their children. They baby them. They offer them time. Yet for two years I have prayed for nothing else than that you would feel that you could leave. I have prayed with my invisible heart that you would take your space. And you have.

  The house is empty. But it would be emptier still if you were at home, flicking the TV from channel to channel. Clare, there is something so important in touching time as your own. We organize time in tenses but it isn’t that. It’s a substance that gets counted, but it really is a number, like the hair on our head, that we don’t ever know. It’s a number and ours alone and never one thing.

  Going to Paris, the train just before yours will derail and burn up. I see the news flash on TV and never hear it from you. Sixteen people will die. In Paris, you will meet bombs. One will explode on a subway where a friend of yours is traveling. But she will walk out unscratched. And you will continue, unscathed, visiting the sea on weekends and, in museums after class, you’ll stop for a long time in front of the exile Chagall. You will make a pilgrimage to Van Gogh’s last house and stand in fields of sunflowers, still golden and turning, with a Japanese friend. Those photos will show you with arms lifted to the sky.

  After Paris you will go to Sardinia, and there, sailing, when the boat tips for the nth time, you will swim out again from under it. Only this time, the ropes will wrap around your neck. The winds the day before will have been one hundred kilometers per hour, and on the beach water will fill the air you are breathing. The sea will roil and writhe and be full of power. The boy who tipped with you will swim out before you do, and he will say as he dives deeper, “You can do it.” And you will. You will take the ropes off your neck, bang your head against the side of the boat, and swim out. You will laugh and laugh.

  I dreamed last night that five American Indians were renting my grandfather’s house. They interest me. They were discouraged, in need of attention. They were wrapped in ponchos and huddled together. Their brown skin was so vivid I jumped and asked them why they came. They didn’t speak. Their discouragement left an impression on me. I’m sick of discouragement, but this period has been one in which nothing can be taken for granted. So much has come to an end and the dream seemed to suggest the way back to the New World.

  When I woke up, I was struck by how real the men had seemed. Indians got their knowledge from dreams. As I washed my face, I vaguely enjoyed the cool tap water splashing. Sunlight from the window played through it. In my cupped hands I saw that light had settled for a few seconds. I held my hands still. That bowl of fire was enough for me.

  Clare, once or twice a year in Parma, I see an American astrophysicist and her Italian astrophysicist husband. They were on a team that discovered a galaxy being born. The galaxy has no name. It’s tagged with a number. I always ask her about the heavens when she comes. She always tells me the same thing. “It’s hostile in space. Unbelievable out there. Freezing storms and killer winds. Nuclear fires. Inhospitable like nothing you ever imagined. It’s all dead, as far as we know. All dead or at the beginning. The earth, say what you want, but the earth is very, very special.”

  The streets curve in appealing human ways

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Here is a list of some books used in the writing of this book. Many may be of interest to the reader who wishes to go further. Many are written in Italian. In an attempt to reproduce a texture and a glimpse of life here, I purposely avoided systematic presentations which would have taken this book into a more distant or academic perspective. It would have been safer and simpler, but those pictures of Italy have been drawn quite often. Books in English were pulled from my own shelves. There were other books I could have used, if I could have found them easily in a library. These references have a highly subjective and nonexhaustive quality. Many generated stories of their own. The enormous tome on Verdi was a piece of research done over nearly a lifetime by an American woman with five children in tow. I discovered her book by reading a review in The New York Review of Books, which has been a harbinger and mainstay in my intellectual life here. My friend Pips carried it back in a suitcase from the United States. The book Donne di Parma, which portrays the lives of twenty women who have generally been overlooked, I found on a newsstand on one of my early-morning walks. Since I have not used footnotes, I want to acknowledge the help I was given in background and facts gathered by others working methodically and artistically on topics I touched.

  PARMA HISTORY

  Luigi Alfieri, Parma, La Vita e Gli Amori (Parma: Artegrafica Silva, 1993)

  Luigi Batteri, Storia di Parma (Parma: Ferdinando Bernini, 1979)

  Marzio Dall’Acqua, ed., Il Monastero di San Paolo (Cassa di Risparmio di Parma, 1990)

  Leonardo Farinelli, and Pier Paolo Mendogni, Guida di Parma (Parma: Artegrafica Silva, 1981)

  Janet Penrose Trevelyan, A Short History of the Italian People (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956)

  ART HISTORY OF PARMA

  Francesco Barocelli, Il Correggio e la Camera di San Paolo (Comune di Parma, 1988)

  Pier Paolo Mendogni, Il Correggio a Parma (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1989)

  Roberto Tassi, La Corona di Primule—Arte a Parma dal XII a XX Secolo (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1994)

  BIOGRAPHIES AND LITERATURE ABOUT PARMA

  Attilio Bertolucci, La Camera da Letto, Vol. 2 (Milan: Garzanti, 1988)r />
  Anna Ceruti Burgio, Donne di Parma: 20 Profili Femminili tra 1400 e 1800 (Parma: Proposte Editrice, 1994)

  Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1992)

  Harvey Sachs, Toscanini (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981)

  Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (New York: Signet, 1962)

  OTHER WRITING ON ITALY AND ITALIANS

  Vera Fortunati, ed., Lavinia Fontana, 1552–1614 (Milan: Electa, 1994)

  Mario Luzi, Viaggio Terrestre e Celeste di Simone Martini (Milan: Garzanti, 1994)

  Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi), trans. by Bruce Penman (London: Penguin Books, 1972)

  Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia (Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1988)

  WOMEN’S WRITING

  Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, commentary by Matthew Fox (Santa Fe: Bear and Company, 1985)

  Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993)

  Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986)

  Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (London: Grafton Books, Harper-Collins, 1989)

  Virginia Woolf, A Woman’s Essays, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1992)

  OTHER CLASSICS

  Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, trans. by Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1989)

  Richard Ellmann, ed., Joyce: Selected Letters (New York: Viking, 1975)

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1982)

  E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979)