Mother Tongue Read online

  We know she is going to die. The sentence is so heavy, we begin not sleeping at night. The blackness is absolute. It is life’s tether and now it dangles like a noose in the dark of our bedroom. No one we know in Parma feels free to talk about death. Since we know hers has come to call, it makes day-to-day plans a joke. Death is the raven haunting us every morning. There will be no way out. It is a sadness that expands into an inescapable obvious shadow. Often, it is unbearable. My husband returns from the hospital and weeps. Tears start to flow when he is cutting a carrot or potatoes for soup. Even in dreams, Paolo wakes crying; only now, his father has appeared among the images. His father, a tall, handsome, curly-haired man with a cleft in his chin, has fallen in the snow. He coughs up blood and it stains the whiteness. Someone carries him home. My husband never knew his father. He left for a TB sanatorium before Paolo turned one. Paolo says one morning, “I was never given the chance to help him,” and begins to weep. The dead are beginning to appear. I worry when I hear our daughter resume an old pattern of talking loudly in her sleep.

  The fatalistic texture of death is ever-present in Italian literature, from Verga to Montale. Is it an economic texture—caused by malaria and famines, wars, foreign occupations, and the cruel realities of poverty? Or is it a religious one, once kept before everyone’s eyes by the crucifixes in schools and offices, even on trains? In English literature, death as a focus is one of many. It especially ceases as a focus of social injustice. Doesn’t Tiny Tim live? Does this happen because the industrial revolution gives a wide berth to real and mythical progress? Does the idea of social progress in capitalism bring the focus of living onto work and relationships and making money? Does the political system promise so much that death seems a distant topic for the middle-class concerns of Christians? Does the subject leave art because it becomes a concern of politics? It takes a working-class Lawrence to lay out a coal miner’s body.

  People don’t talk about death in Parma. They wait for it. They visit cemeteries on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. But talking about death is bad taste and bad luck. Cancer remains a word that goes unsaid. Il male, la malattia, but cancro is not pronounced. Pietro and his wife, both doctors, follow the unspoken rule. You should say she is doing well. You should say she’s not bad. You should not ever say to someone’s face when they ask after her that she has terminal cancer. I say it and see that I frighten people. I have committed a violence, walked through a taboo. The lawyer who feeds Misha corners me in the local grocery store. Leaning down to pick up a liter of milk, he asks, “How is she doing?” “She’s slipping, quite noticeably,” I say. He stops for a moment and then smiles. “Signora, don’t be such a pessimist. I’m sure she’ll get well. Pietro says she’s stronger than she was a few weeks ago.” There we are again: someone, me, is biting her tongue.

  Today, Alba’s face is sunken. Her skin is a color tending toward walnut. Her short gray hair has lifted into a topknot that makes her look vulnerable and sweet. Paolo and his sister have decided that Alba should die at home. She is not eager to leave the hospital. She still hopes something can be done. No one knows quite how to convince her that a bed at home will be better than this hopeless cardboard-colored room. She is disappointed today. She can’t work up an appetite. She apologizes over and over. She can’t drink enough. Then she says, from somewhere deep inside, “La malattia ha vinto.” The cancer has won. My husband, wanting to help her, doesn’t deny it. She looks at him steadily and then shuts her eyes, the way cats do when they are being scolded. She drops to sleep immediately. The lids of her eyes don’t quite close. Sitting in a chair, irrationally, I feel that she is watching us, looking for clues.

  Alba’s white embroidered nightgown is yoked with small blue daisies. Her daughter changes the gowns twice a day. One is more beautiful than the next in its simplicity. Angela always wished that her mother would have clung to this female vision of herself. Alba was insistent about wearing hand-me-downs, clean clothes but unfussy. Running errands in Parma after she retired, she was often mistaken for a cleaning lady. She wanted clothes only to cover her. The thin hump on her back, from a progressive scoliosis, required a loose top. She accepted hanging something on her sticklike body, but no showy effects. She was always willing to give, but any encroachment on the stone she had laid over what she needed to deny or control and she would snap open in steely resistance. The nightgowns become her. As she lies on the pillows, her absolute beauty shows. Dressed in white, she is elegant, the image of the doctor’s wife. She looks the way Angela wants her to look. She is too sick to fight over the issue. Something in her vulnerable beauty strikes a chord of memory in me.

  Many of Alba’s stories are unforgettable. This one reveals a woman’s mountain—a trifle, a detail that arranges a landscape forever. Alba’s husband, Libero, ran a tuberculosis clinic. During the war, as starvation took over in the mountains, as the Germans patrolled the streets, he realized that he was probably sick. An expert in the care of TB patients, he knew there was little to do outside of what Thomas Mann describes in The Magic Mountain. You wait and hope and rest, giving the body its slim chance to find strength. Instead he had no rest. He went on treating patients, sometimes in the dark, hiding in the woods. He worked in the hospital after it was bombed by the Americans as they pursued the Germans. He had one sheep, on which he did research. He signed false papers and saved many from going to concentration camps. In 1947 he left the house for Naples, because he did not want to infect the children or his wife. He had been sleeping in a small separate room for the nine months that Paolo had been alive.

  Alba and Libero wrote every day that they were apart. When she could, she left the children, aged one, four, and five, to visit him. The trip took nearly two days. She had to reach Reggio Emilia before she could get her train. There were still three classes for travel in those years. Animals could be transported by trains. Sometimes men would make advances. Once, going through a tunnel outside Florence, Alba kicked a man in the shins as hard as she could. There was no money for sleeping cars. Trainsick, heartsick, she sat up trying to stare out the window as hours of sea rolled by. She knew as well as Libero did that he was doomed. Yet neither talked in those terms.

  She never told him she was studying to become an elementary school teacher. She thought it would have made him feel too guilty. They discussed the children and the future. In desperation, he insisted that she not feel obliged to educate them. Let them work.

  Libero knew her headstrong side. Once she left him when he slapped her for having put a piece of meat where a stray cat knocked it down. She defied the gossiping judgment of the entire village when she moved out with two small children. Fifteen years her senior, Libero couldn’t have fully realized when he married her how amazing and willful she was. Perhaps he didn’t perceive beforehand that she was more than his match. They had not even kissed before the official ceremony of marriage. In those times, affection between unmarried couples could not be shown in public places. On a bus in Genoa, where they spent a day of their honeymoon, a passenger stopped the obviously older man for having his arm around a young woman.

  Libero didn’t know her if he believed that she would sacrifice her children. It must have been guilt that pushed him to insist after nine years that she not take on extraordinary burdens. He had known a woman who would give anything she had if it seemed right to her. He had known her to walk alone and through enemy lines more than sixty kilometers to bring back money and a few of his beloved books. She had left her children, realizing she might never see them again. She had jumped into ditches as bombs fell. The Germans stopped her and found her papers out of order. A young German soldier took her arm, told her she could be arrested, and then a bit further on, let her go, telling her not to look back. At one point, she surrendered her wedding band when borrowing a bike. She reasoned that if she was shot and the man never got his precious means of transportation back, her conscience was in order. At least she had paid for the bike. The man could sell the gold ring.
r />   The detail that I feel is like a mountain—like the tectonic motions that hurled them up in the first place—is her changing clothes on the train before going to see him. Alba wanted to be the picture of a young, desirable ideal wife. Her hat, blue with a wide rim, went on last. She took it out, tipped it jauntily, making a brave show of love. Her linen blouse, perfect, crisp, unwrinkled, strikes me in its ideal magic as the complete giving of a woman to a man, not as a fantasy but as a gift. The abstract challenge of linen is extravagantly unstressed. She put on that nonchalant cloud of timeless ease to be lovely for him. Wearing that blouse, on what became her last visit, she is told that he died hours before she started on the grueling journey the day before. Cruelly, the telegram reached the red house in Castelnovo too late to find her. Invisible arcs of hope brought her all the way down to the hospital above the sea. Thirty years old, beautiful, the faith-filled woman asks to see him. She brushes off the doctors’ advice. She brushes off the law that prescribes that infective bodies be buried within twenty-four hours. “My children,” she tells them, “must have a father. His body will return with me.”

  The casket will follow her on another train, using false certificates. At home in Castelnovo, the trunk that holds the letters they exchanged for almost three years is burned. The photos of the children growing up were inside the envelopes traveling back and forth. They, too, are burned. Only four or five pictures of the children in childhood remain. The written history of those years receded into the privacy of her heart. The oral records exist as tales, where Papa grows bigger and bigger. A large marble tomb, a gift from his patients, will establish a fixed and peaceful resting place. His photo smiles on it inside a little steel frame.

  Alba, her face tired even in sleep, suddenly awakes. “I’m afraid,” she says. “My dreams are terrible.” “What did you just see?” I ask from my hospital chair. She remains silent. Perhaps she will refuse to talk. Then her voice starts. She murmurs slowly. Talking is difficult because her lungs are spotted with fluid that might rise like a flood. Conversation is difficult, too, because she is keenly aware of what is going on. Life is futile with no battle to fight. She can’t accept that. She reaches for hope. She knows the weight of words. She is talking because she believes I like touching dreams. Her eyes are luminous. “Di Pietro is the doctor,” she says. Antonio Di Pietro is the tireless, miraculous prosecutor who has set the discovery of Italian graft in motion. The man stands for courage and doing the impossible. He’s a Rock of Gibraltar. “He is the doctor. But the dream is ugly. My shoes are dirty. I still have to clean them. Why?” And here she begins to cry. I do not hide my own tears. If there is a God, surely Alba will never again be asked to polish or clean or scrub. One version of her would be that—a bar of strong, harsh laundry soap that never wears down. She scrubs and cleans everywhere. That cleaning was against disease, against poverty, but most profoundly it was in answer to her mother, who was always at her back, belittling the job or shouting down the stairs into the basement as she monitored the number of times Alba beat the sheets as she washed them by hand. Rosalia knew the number of times each sheet should be beaten to free it of the ashes used as soap. Alba never whacked them enough. Alba never dusted enough. Alba, born illegitimate, was never in order enough. No, I see the pale linen blouse as a gentle sign that must turn into a pair of wings. It is the female without guilt and need of control. Dressing on the train that day was the last time she looked after herself as a woman not alone. Her blouse is Egypt and rebirth with the sun. It is not willful, nor is it the absolute mother. “No, Alba, you need never polish another pair of shoes,” I nearly shout with emotion. “You have polished enough. You have polished too many. Your shoes, your shoes, Alba, are without a speck of dust.” The phone in our house starts ringing around lunchtime. Lunch in Parma is a complicated event that, like school on Saturday, violates my natural rhythms. Will I ever get used to it? Lunch is a tourniquet. It cuts the day in half, takes the wind out of my sails, leaves me wandering around the house, detached from the morning. In the United States, where my mother and sister can get cheaper long-distance rates before seven, they have learned to rise in order to call me. In the winter they get up in pitch dark. In summer the sun is beginning to show. They stumble around and ring, just as someone in our house, my husband or I, is putting a pot on to boil water for the pasta. The two worlds come together in this unsatisfactory best of all possible combinations. I often can’t concentrate. I move from the hall around the corner into the bathroom. We talk, but sometimes even to chat about politics or the elections is hard. The scandals in Italy have forced budget reductions that cut American news programs from our schedules. Politics to my American family means only American news. We talk, stumble, and try to find the heart’s pitch, somewhere or sometimes.

  The phone starts to ring often for Alba. A friend, a famous scientist, calls from the States. He has had word that she’s sick. He chokes up. Then there’s quiet. “Excuse me,” he says after a wet silence. “I can’t talk. I’m thinking of my mother now.” He’s Italian, this man. The cleaning woman who helps me with the windows—a woman with one kidney, who if she breaks something tells me the cat did it, such is her fear—comes to the house crying. She has heard about Alba. “She was like a mother to me.” A teacher we know jumps off her bike. She is weeping. “We are so alike she and I. She’s a real mother.” The priest from the local Boy Scout troop calls. His voice is full of tears. “She is a mother. There are only a few like that. She’s a utopian who looks for the steep challenge. A woman of strong messages.” I try calling my own brother and have to deal with his secretary. “I’m his sister.” “Is it important?” she asks. I feel guilty and angry enough to say “no” when she begins to act protective, telling me how precious his time is.

  Paolo is the chairman of his department at the university, a member of Common Market groups, a man with research under way. From the day he learned of his mother’s illness his agenda was wiped so clean it could have been brain-dead. He canceled all conferences. He decided he would give her medicine or baths or whatever was needed, day or night. He started cooking to tempt her to take a mouthful or two. His colleagues concurred. They left him alone or caught him during his kamikaze visits to his office. What is the distance between cultures? What is it like—that freedom that starts so early in the States—where a mother and father want you to become … to go. Why would it seem unnatural to give over an unmeasured amount of time to someone who is dying?

  Fax machines hurt your ears. That terrible squeal pokes like a needle when one expects a human voice. I get that noise calling a friend in the States this morning. In New York the last time I was there, I had my first five exchanges with answering machines only. Time as money has worked its many roots into our American lives. I don’t know how to quantify it or render the feel—but its purposefulness seems to perk up and define territory, vast and often important territory, in nearly every conversation. Time as money was not part of Latin culture, until recently. It has begun: changing the clock from agricultural rhythms and seasons, from bells, from a circular vision of life and death, from the indissoluble family to individuals living for work. The only credit everyone gives Mussolini is that he made the trains run on time. Beyond the trains, no one seemed to mind what time was. But time clearly was never money in Italy. Time was thicker, personal, often the size of a village and the brutal physical labor of planting and harvest. In any season, it huddled in the kitchen. There are people talking on cellular phones on most street corners in Parma now. Young women drive with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a phone, as if time has become money. They look like people who are imitating scenes from TV. Sometimes I overhear them at stoplights. Orders are being rushed through. They are a new breed pushing for a few seconds’ advantage. But other commanding voices suddenly melt: “Mamma—how are you? I thought I’d come over for lunch.”

  I write here using a computer and the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses. I can th
ink of no stronger sign of the health of democracy than the freedom to try. The book, a do-it-yourself manual, is a practical, spiritual, and cultural concept; there is no hiding of information. Open-mindedness, cheap materials, and practical advice are crammed together into possibilities. The reality fosters freedom of thought and opinion. My acceptances recrossed the ocean in self-addressed stamped envelopes that accompanied unsolicited submissions. The Emersonian faith involved in making contact in this unmanipulated way is vital. One never knows enough to exclude discovery. The practice of fair competition is a fascinating treasure, whatever lapses may occur. It is ingrained deep in the American promise. Its applications may be slow and often distorted, but since it is believed to exist, the imperfect system can search for it, revise and self-correct. Nothing even remotely similar to such faith exists in the Italian mind. Even Marxist thought here, which has brought in many concrete offerings of opportunity and leveling, has distorted competition into an idea of debilitating evil. Philosophically and practically, no one believes competition can be fair.

  For twelve years, stamps and envelopes have been my work’s means of entry into the wider world. I have landed on the desks of people I never encountered, and have been met with respect, interest, and care. Some editors put their hands and brains to my words. Some, liking a little adventure, journeyed all the way to Parma to see what extensions could be made. Excellence and passion drive them. The work of a small magazine offers only its own reward, which is providing a tiny and unquantifiable buffer against the brute force of commercialism or closed elite systems. It believes in diversity as a way of fostering thought and undoing banality. I have hung on here, surviving because of the fairness of little magazines. These human, barely commercial networks stretching across borders are as important as bees. The efficiency and professionalism of tracking all this work, leaving open so many doors, are a texture of culture built up over decades of American democracy and, perhaps, even over a few centuries. The resources for open-mindedness are now both strong and frail.