Mother Tongue Read online

  Clare comes in. At eighteen, she’s not one for coffee. These days it’s Ovaltine and milk. Some cookies. She, too, has had a dream. It bursts out like something spilled. Her mother is sick in the dream. She thinks she has to stay with me to keep me alive. I will die if she doesn’t cover me, giving up her body. The dream scares her so much that she awakens. The dream alarms me too. The business of separation has begun late and slowly. Recently she boils over at the injustices of a woman’s existence.

  The sun pushes very peachy spring light through the large front windows. I don’t want to hear others’ dreams. They float like extra-heavy clouds into my farseeing heart and are too intimate. I’m worried amidst all this—what? What is it?

  A fight broke out in parliament yesterday. The country can’t find a center. It was a physical, unhealthy fight, with physical injuries, hate, and insults. I think of Ezra Pound’s confused notions of country after living on the rocky seacoast two hours from here, mixing art and life, in Rapallo, until he thought rousing poetic words were a solution to politics. The cage the American soldiers put him in outside the village of Metato, north of Pisa, was horrifying. His madness turned into an old definition of treason. He was frail, a mere poet. I sympathize with him—not his views, but with his wish to speak, his confusion about place, and his inflationary sense of his voice in art. H. D., another American exile, whose work became what I would call religious, didn’t speak politically. She entered analysis with Freud and went further and further in “an ocean of universal consciousness” until she reached “the clearest fountainhead.” After World War I was over, she had broken down. She went on to write an odyssey for women, she who did not return to her country. How many times have I thought of that? The painful wish to unify suggests over and over the fantasy of cutting off pasts that cannot be developed. Clare told me the other day that a British friend with an American mother was obliged to go to the consulate in order to pick up an American passport. The child, torn, fearful of that double tug, threw up as she left the building.

  Misha is looking for food. Thank God there is nothing complicated in his nature. He’s not had a bad night. Fortuna’s arthritis shows, but she can still swipe at Misha. Lulu, like the refugees gathering to wash car windshields at the stoplights on the grand boulevard, the Stradone, stares in through the porch-door glass. She’s completely conditioned by the beginning we didn’t set up. Raise your voice and she pees. The entire household is awake.

  Nobody asked me about my dreams. In the past few weeks they’ve changed to inviting events. The Geneva analyst I meet with every few months sees ontology as a useful base for understanding dreams. From that point of view, I like this new series. I got up at four last night, the usual hour, to write the shimmering piece down.

  I breathe well in the predawn. Alone, staring out a window, I feel primed. I slide from the noose into apparent nothingness. My senses grow more acute. No slippers. When my feet touch him in bed, Paolo scolds me about feet that have lived and grown up free, loving the feel of grass and creek, until my habit of earth-contact has created tough soles. My toes wiggle on the chilly marble. My feet press down on cold, flat, smooth, waxed heaven.

  The dream was a slow reel in Technicolor, out of the archive where such spellbinding beauty is released that you resist waking. A Russian poet is reading. A gorgeous sensation of pinks and oak-green deepens as the lines go out over the crowd. An Italian friend is talking and I try to devise a way to get him to be quiet. But the poet continues and I realize that she is unstoppable. Her voice goes on. The group breaks up with the idea of attending a dance. I am about to join the group, when someone stops me and says, “You must learn the three meanings of zero.”

  The day has begun like this. So much intimacy in the family and yet no real tools to solve another life. We cannot and we must not. If only we could leave just gifts in each other’s houses. Zero. Learning suits my mood.

  Zero starts with the Arabs. Greek monks five hundred years ago discovered worlds where zero cannot be touched. The closer one gets, the more zero deflects, sending numbers arcing toward infinity. As a recipe, fractions of zero would bake the biggest batch ever of divinity fudge:

  1/0 = ∞ 21/0 + 9/0 = ∞. Etc. ∞

  These hermetic minds picked up the possibilities as occult truths. Now any engineer or math student is privy to this. Zero’s tricks still singe the brain that truly intuits. When it is acting like nothing that is not nothing, not even almost nothing, it happens in space that logically cannot exist. Words too, like zero, sometimes perform this way.

  Bridges are built with fractions calculating on zero’s solid side. Instead, the monks snared some strands leading to theoretical heavens. You still see a few frati in Parma wearing their brown sackcloth, sandals, and ropes. On bikes, they gather their cassocks up and look like prehistoric birds. Youths who enter the priesthood now in this northern Italian city are so rare they’re treasured like newborns raised from incubators. The young priests and nuns are from the Third World. The old priests, the ones we know, were put in the seminary when they were no more than six. Given by their parents, hoping for education, it is no wonder they are bent, discouraged, dour. In the night, at my desk, sometimes I feel like them. Far from home. Cut off from the source. And then it returns, all of a sudden—a day, then two, three, a flow of energy with opening spaces.

  The idea of three meanings for zero seems simple. Zero as nothing. Zero as the point between nothing and something. Zero as increase. Aren’t those the planes?

  The exercise needs room. I’ll use the connected back sides of Paolo’s computer simulations. Between us, we put two distinct languages on each page of printout before throwing the sheaves away. His endless statistical runs on ostracods, crustacean life, creatures on the divide of parthenogenesis, sexless and sexed, now sectioned into chromosomal matter, leave hundreds of pages of patterns. And my thoughts adhere to the other side. Go on, ostracods with your light-cued, inspiring lives. The paper marked by research has been turned over, the mechanical numbers lie facedown. In mud and dust without water, you found ways to wait for water. In absolute quiet, you’ve colonized the world. They’ve cloned you, making identical copies, one after another. And you continue, exquisitely, to elude them in subtle ways.

  How do I see zero? Flat daily time on my watch, the lira with its silly denominations. And then?

  The infinitesimal specks that turn into leafy basil plants emitting the scent of green blackout.

  A cipher that looks the same to everyone. It can’t. Nothing looks the same to everyone.

  Zero’s the moment. Turn back and try to reach for a face you loved. Look at your fingernails—ten ovals like zeroes.

  Zero is the matrushka mystery through which we all enter the world—bloody, pressed down, expelled and freed. Always beginning, zero never exists alone. It’s fertile, flanked by what it squeezes out.

  Often we hammer zero into a child’s sweated-over copybook. The banal column of taxes we have to pay. A gun’s barrel.

  Usurpers. Usurpers, and yet that’s the way it is. There is life, art, and life beyond art, each obtainable and unobtainable. Isn’t the dream saying just that—distinguish; see; be more precise? Signora Biocchi, flipping your cigarette butt so skillfully over our fence, you do tell us lies.

  She has a Katharine Hepburn look—high cheekbones, a mysterious distance

  [3]

  ALBA

  This morning another envelope, a large orange variety sold in tobacco shops here, arrived neatly slit on three sides. This is the third time in recent weeks that I have received opened mail. At the Parma post office, as I sent a registered letter, the clerk told me that although they are keeping three copies of each insured piece, about one-third are not arriving. At the bank, Ernesto, a bespectacled man with a slightly malign smile, insists that I not renew my treasury certificates for more than ninety days. “Anything could happen,” he says ambiguously. “You may want to get the money out fast.” The train Paolo was on yesterday stoppe
d for two hours because of a bomb search. A few weeks before, another train Paolo had taken halted outside Turin because a man committed suicide by throwing himself under the wheels of the train. Chaos is not particularly novel to the years I have lived in Italy, but for more than a year, since 1992, possible connections among events of this sort have been interpreted as expressions of the political crisis. Institutions that do not function along rules of conventional market capitalism or representative constitutional democracy have come closer to having their essences laid bare. In this moment it looks like oligarchy, criminality, farce, Hapsburg bureaucracy, and foreign intervention in the name of the Cold War. The present system is near collapse. All of us are groping to understand what’s really going on.

  The mental Constitution I carry in my head, the United States Bill of Rights, has little reality within these borders. My observation is not the philosopher Bishop Berkeley’s elaboration—if the tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it … —but a more concrete statement about historical fact. Italy, a country that has been unified for little more than one hundred years, has attempted a form of postwar democracy for less than fifty. During those fifty, its Communist Party, the largest in Europe, made the country of strategic interest to the East and the West. Italy also encompasses the Vatican, an independent religious state that in an absolute sense is the oldest political government in the world. Everywhere in Italy, like archaeological traces, other forms of rule by dynasties, often of foreign origin, like the Bourbons of Spain who governed Parma for a brief span, are still remembered, and sometimes nostalgically invoked. Amato, an interim socialist Prime Minister and a political scientist, was heavily criticized recently for saying that the religious ideas of duty and honor as opposed to the liberal ones of individual rights and responsibility are the basis of any stability in recent Italian society.

  The longer I live outside my language, the more it turns abstractly into ideas, to memories and thick-skeined mats and flows of feelings kept inside. With fewer and fewer landmarks to tack English to in a close one-to-one relationship of objects to words, in part it has become the white blips rushing across the dark computer screen I work at. I destroy or save altered parts of speech. Language floats between oral and formal writing. Tenses lift away from exact time. I understand how exiles like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H. D., and Gertrude Stein each felt and explored as a subject new dissolutions and creations inside the mother tongue. I want to make use of a past/present tense that moves around. It is a synthetic inner voice, where its weight is consciousness and time turns into water.

  Late yesterday afternoon, the clouds lifted some. I decided to lug the heavy woolen mattresses we sleep on out into the fresh air. In rainy periods they often grow musty. Moving one is like picking up a long rectangular cow. I have cursed the mattresses, as I have so many other labor-intensive prizes in our house. Into the open window the first goes, until it is levered like a U in the white casement frame. I turn back toward the second and see a huge scorpion—dark brown, shell-like body, forked tail—crawling on it. Our old-style Catholic marriage bed consists of two pieces, now more easily kept together thanks to contour sheets. I feel terror watching the scorpion’s fast run along the welted edge of the mattress, still resting on the springs. Tail to claw, it would cover a small child’s palm. Its perfect, intricate detail leaves me chilled. It has been hiding under our sheets. Watching the brownblack scorpion move as I turn from the open window, I’m overcome with the sense that I have entered the inescapable logic of a dream.

  Like is a conjunction that expresses similarity to. It implies a baseline reckoning. What is its focus? Childhood? Another nation? In all the snow-filled landscapes and humid northern Wisconsin summers of my growing up, the tidy suburban lawns and spotless basements, no memory in my experience touches anything like the foreign menacing pincers and hook of that insect from the shadows. In Wisconsin I have come upon bear and deer, or they upon me. They were warm-blooded and large. We locked eyes. It is the intimate way that the scorpion had been hiding in our bed that does me in. More than the idea of poison, I don’t like its sudden visibility. I have no access to this essentially shy Mediterranean creature. D. H. Lawrence’s “pettiness” comes to my mind: he threw a rock at the great snake that surprised him. I opt for a similar refutation. I use Paolo’s abhorrent solution for eliminating bugs. I vacuum the scorpion up, sucking in my fear as well.

  Two days later, my mother-in-law is operated on. They make an exploratory incision and after twenty minutes stitch her closed again. She has cancer of the stomach, the liver, the lymph. The doctor lies to her as she wakes from the anesthesia. Before she asks, he volunteers. “We fixed your troubles. Gallstones,” he says with a serious face and heavy-lidded eyes. A quick fixing of the truth. No dignified silence. No territory to explore. Paternalism. Fear of death. Anyway, there it is, shining like a slippery slug: a lie. My husband is already on full alert to an issue in Italy that leads into nearly every sector of public life. What can he say to his mother? He can’t override the doctor while she’s still woozy with pain. But he feels helpless, imagining how she has already gripped, like a strong infant, the warm false hope.

  Lying is not puritanical here. It is a complicated web of survival, fear and habit, avoidance and fantasy that asks for complicity and is assumed as normal, accepted as integral to realism. Sometimes lying means little more than flexibility; sometimes the creativity of allowing for the invisible. It hides as a level of skepticism in discourse between any two public parties. Pinocchio, a story taught as literature in the elementary grades, describes with precision the lie as childish helplessness in a monarchist, feudal society. Truth is pleonastic, complex, ultimately a point of view. Lying is forgiven and forgiven.

  My mother-in-law was not perfectly well, but she lived her symptoms as signs of old age; now suddenly we are facing a death. At all levels it will touch us. Like the scorpion, the process will enter into this piece of writing, crawling up from a dark, frightening place. Alba is an extraordinary human presence, as much for her unhappiness as for her generous, luminous joy. She is a central part of our life.

  Every day, as I write in my study at home, all that goes on crosses into my work. Space is not an idea. I have no maid. My child comes home and expects a hot lunch. My husband too, helpful and brilliant, a wonderful cook, still has no love of space; in fact he wants to fill it in. The noise and upset over things not found or done—expectations seen from an oddly absolute perspective of what should happen in a home—are daily fireworks. Felt as heart-pounding by Anglo-Saxon me, the way words are wasted is one level of what it is like to write in Parma. Minor dramas are blown into hysteria. Now something of another order has landed on our plates. Death, Alba’s death, will take over and infuse the summer with its reality. It will be awful and horribly sad.

  Alba built the house we live in. It was completed in 1954, when this area—ten minutes on foot from the medieval center of Parma—was on the outskirts, surrounded by uncut fields. Many streets are named for partisans and victims of World War II. Ours is named for a peak in the Apennines—Monte Penna. Penna means quill as in feather; it also means pen.

  Alba was widowed at age thirty. The country, in the north, was putting out the last flames of a bloody, undeclared civil war. It was 1949. Libero, her husband, died in a TB sanatorium in Naples, far from the family, where he vainly hoped that the warm sea air would help heal his perforated lungs. Penicillin—bought on the black market from the Vatican, which received the drug as part of the Marshall Plan—came too late to save his war-wasted body. Alba, an elementary school teacher with three children, left the supporting relationships in the mountain village of Castelnovo nè Monti, where her husband had been the head doctor, five years after he died.

  The young widow was forced to move when schooling for her children ended like an unfinished road. There was no upper school, no Greek teacher, no physics in a village composed largely of farmers and a thin veneer of salubrious tourism that r
evived in summer. Her thirteen-year-old daughter threatened to kill herself if sent to the boarding school offered to doctors’ widows for continuing their children’s education. So Alba took upon herself a man’s scheme, except that its slim base in reality put it in the sphere of a mother’s dreams. She had no money whatsoever. The land she bought—a substantial postage-stamp size—was sixty kilometers from the place she taught. No one could supervise the workers who would build the house. But in a long-range plan—after the debt had been paid, after the children had had their educations—it seemed an action that would help them all. She, as a mother, decided to carry it off.

  Alba chose Parma, where she had spent time in a boarding school. The tireless woman plunged into the project, once it had been drawn and argued over and sealed in contracts and knotty building laws. She tried to get the upper hand with the workers who began construction while she taught in Castelnovo. Alba built the seven-room house on some well-meant but impossible promises from men who remembered her husband; many felt they owed their lives to him. Their cost estimates were woefully wrong. She was cheated and sometimes rescued wholly out of pity. Loans were still bound to a Catholic sense of usury as sin. She obtained some of her funds interest-free from friends.

  The family—consisting of Alba, the children (Angela, Pietro, and Paolo), and Alba’s mother, Rosalia—moved into their new life before it was ready. They camped for six months in a boardinghouse in the center of Parma, where they shared a gas ring and a toilet with eight other people. The new house was a rough shell at its predicted completion date. There were no cement mixers to hurry things along. Electricians were self-taught. Permits withered in clogged piles. As the children finally directed the men who lugged in their large mahogany dinner table and their mother’s art deco bedroom set through the front door, unexpected March snow fell and continued falling until the new water pipes froze. Closing the front door, Alba already knew that debt was a new taskmaster. The final cost was five times the estimate. A family of three named Rossi was the first to move into the north side of the house. They rented two rooms and the basement, shared the stark bathroom, the party-line phone, paid for their own space heater and cooking rings, as the process of paying off the debt began.