Happiness, as Such

by Natalia Ginzburg

  He ducked into a narrow alley filled with children and entered his store. Signora Peroni was carrying piles of books back and forth, limping on her massive calves. She smiled at him.

  “How’s it going,” he said.

  “She’s gone back to Via dei Prefetti,” she said. “No way around that. She was no help in the house. My mother ended up taking care of her plus doing all the cooking. She never remembered to dry off after a shower and left wet footprints all over the floor. The other day, she went out when both me and my mother were also out and forgot her keys and the baby was alone, crying, poor thing, and she couldn’t find a locksmith so the porter called the fire department and they had to break a window to get in. My mother has become very fond of the baby. But that girl was going out too much and leaving the baby behind. My mother was always having to change him and give him his bottle.”

  “Forgive me,” said Osvaldo. “I’ll pay for the window.”

  “Don’t think of it. We would have taken her on happily. It’s a good deed. But it wasn’t practical. She’d wake us up in the middle of the night to help change the baby. She said it was too sad to be alone. She’d wake us both up, me and my mother, saying that the more people there were the more comforting it was. We felt sorry for her. But it’s hard to figure out why she had that baby given how unhappy it makes her to take care of him.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Osvaldo. “But deep down it makes perfect sense.”

  “So she left today. We bundled the baby inside that big yellow bassinet so he wouldn’t catch cold. We had to call her a taxi. And my mother loaned her a sweater because she didn’t have anything warm to wear. She burned that kimono with the dragons — she burned it ironing.”

  “What a shame,” said Osvaldo.

  “Yes, a shame. It was a nice robe. Very charming. But she just put the iron down on top of it and went to answer the phone. Then she spent a long time on the phone. She told me it was Angelica. So now there’s a big iron burn, right in the middle of the back, where the dragons are. The iron caught fire too . . . for just a moment. My mother was so frightened. I worry about mother. She’s old. It was all wearing her out and frightening her. If it was just me, I might have made it work.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry,” said Osvaldo.

  9

  December 18, 1970

  Dear Michele,

  I went to see the girl on Via dei Prefetti last night. Mara . . . what a silly name. Maria would have been better. Just add one “i” and everything would have been different.

  I brought her a little money. I got it from Mamma. But Osvaldo says rather than give her money, we should try to help her get set up, which is not easy because she can’t do anything right. Osvaldo situated her with Signora Peroni and her mother. There’s another, older, Signora Peroni. She’s in her eighties but still sharp. They live in Montesacro. They took in her and the baby to live there and gave her some money every month. Mara was supposed to help out a little around the house. She was only there a few days before she set the house on fire and called the fire department. At least that’s what I can make out from the long, jumbled story she told me. There wasn’t much to eat at the Peronis’, she said. A piece of salt cod at lunch, another piece reheated with onions for dinner. Mara says she couldn’t digest any of it and was living on Alka-Seltzer. She’d wake up in the middle of the night with a blinding hunger and go hunting through the house, looking for cheese. That’s why her milk dried up. But Osvaldo says that she lies. It’s a cute baby but not yours. He has a large mouth and long black curls. Though he might have gotten the hair from our father. She and the baby are back on Via dei Prefetti now.

  That boy, Ray, you sent, stayed with me for a week but then he argued with Oreste. Ray called him a “revisionist.” That made Oreste so angry he punched him. His mouth was bleeding and I was scared he’d broken his teeth. But he just split his lip a little. Me, Sonia, and Ray went down to the drugstore and Oreste stayed upstairs. He was shocked. Ray wasn’t shocked, but his lip was bleeding so much that it got all over his windbreaker. The pharmacist told us not to worry and treated the cut. The next day I called Osvaldo. Now Ray is staying in your studio. Sonia brings him things to eat and things to read, newspapers and comics, because he’s trying to learn how to draw comics. His friend who draws comics promised to introduce him to an editor at a newspaper. So he’s endlessly sketching women with enormous breasts and enormous eyes. He saw your owl paintings and added a few owls flying around the enormous breasts.

  Mamma got it into her head that Oreste had attacked Ray because he was jealous. But Oreste can’t be jealous because Ray and I are basically indifferent to each other. I don’t think he’s especially nice. But he’s not mean. He’s an amoeba. According to Oreste he has fascist ideas. But Oreste sees fascists and spies everywhere. Again, there’s nothing going on between me and Ray, and he had sex with Sonia in your studio in your bed under Mamma’s lovely blankets. I told Mamma about it and she asked me to take the nice blankets and leave something less nice. But I don’t think I’ll do that because it seems unfriendly. Sometimes Mamma’s ideas are unfriendly. And she has unfriendly ideas about people she’s never met. If she were to meet Ray, I don’t think she’d want him sleeping under ugly blankets. I washed his windbreaker thinking that it was something you could wash but it wasn’t because it dried stiff, like a piece of salt cod.

  I ate at Mamma’s on Sunday. Oreste didn’t come because there was some kind of union meeting. I brought the baby. Osvaldo was there with his daughter. Mamma has rabbits now. The girls had so much fun playing with the rabbits. I don’t know how they managed to have so much fun because they’re not fun rabbits, they sleep all the time. The twins pulled them out of their cages by the ears. They lounged on the grass and didn’t even try to escape. They’re the kind that shed a lot. The twins spent hours picking fur off their jackets. It was a beautiful sunny day. Mamma seemed depressed.

  I think our father’s death has crushed her. I think it brought back all those years they were together. She’s always on the verge of tears, always getting up and leaving the room. She took father’s painting of her sitting at the window in the house at Pieve di Cadore and hung it in the living room. You won’t remember because you were little but I remember everything. That was an awful summer. They’d stopped fighting but there was something in the air, a sense that something was about to happen. Sometimes I could hear Mamma crying at night.

  I don’t know who was right or wrong. I don’t even wonder. I only know that waves of unhappiness streamed out of their bedroom into the whole house. There wasn’t a corner of the house spared. There was unhappiness everywhere. We had so much fun in that house for so many summers. It was a beautiful house. There were so many places to play, the woodshed, so many nooks to hide in, turkeys in the yard. You wouldn’t remember. Then Cecilia came and took us to Chianciano. After a few weeks our father arrived and told us they were separating. He told us that you would be staying with him. Us girls with Mamma. No explanations. That was what they’d decided. He stayed in Chianciano for two or three days. He sat out in the hotel lobby, smoking and drinking Martinis. When Cecilia spoke to him he told her to shut up.

  Maybe Mamma is still in love with Filippo. I don’t know. They were together for years and I think she always assumed he would come live with her. Instead he got married to someone who’s younger than I am. He didn’t have the courage to tell Mamma about the marriage and asked me to be there with him. Filippo is not a brave man. It was a horrendous morning. That was last May. I remember it was May because the trellis under the windows in Via dei Villini was full of roses.

  Mamma is really very lonely now. The twins pay no attention to her. You’re not here. Viola and I have our own things to take care of. She’s alone with Matilde and Matilde drives her crazy. But at least there’s someone, a presence in the house, a voice, footsteps in the empty rooms. I have no idea why Mamma bought t
hat enormous house. She must regret it. She probably also regrets having asked Matilde to live there, even though she knows that total solitude would be worse. But Matilde really gets on her nerves. Matilde calls her “Little Bear” and keeps asking “How are you?” while stroking her chin and looking into her eyes. Every morning she goes into Mamma’s room to do yoga in her bathing suit because she says it’s the only warm spot in the house. There’s no way Mamma has it in her to ask her to leave, she becomes a meek lamb. She’s even taken to sitting and listening to Matilde read to her aloud from her novel Polenta and Poison. Matilde dug it out of her suitcase and wants to revise it now because Osvaldo thoughtlessly mentioned that Ada is close with a book editor. His name is Colarosa. He has a very small publishing house. I think he’s Ada’s boyfriend. Matilde is consumed with the idea of this editor. She reads Polenta and Poison out loud every night to Mamma and Osvaldo, who’s there almost every evening. He and Mamma have become pretty good friends. There’s nothing sexual between them, naturally. I don’t think Osvaldo is interested in women. I have this notion he’s a repressed pedophile. I also have a notion that he is subconsciously in love with you. I don’t know what you think but it’s what I think.

  I’d love to see you again. I’m doing well. Flora started school. She eats lunch there and comes home at four. Sonia has been picking her up because I’m usually in the office until seven. My work is still dreary and ridiculous. Right now, I have to translate a long article about water contamination. I get home and go shopping, make dinner, iron Oreste’s shirts because he won’t wear the ones that don’t need ironing. After that he goes into the office and I fall asleep in front of the television.

  Angelica

  Ti abbraccio

  10

  “I think she’s utterly stupid,” said Mara.

  “You’re wrong,” said Osvaldo.

  “Utterly,” said Mara.

  “She has moments of great insight and wisdom — she does. She’s limited, of course. No matter what, she’s my wife and I’d like you stop calling her names. I’ve been here for a quarter of an hour and you haven’t talked about anything else.”

  “You’re split up. She’s not your wife anymore.”

  “It still bugs me when people talk poorly of her in front of me.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t think she’s pretty or elegant.”

  “She actually is pretty and can be quite elegant.”

  “She wasn’t elegant yesterday. Or the other time. She’s always wearing the same fur. American wolf. The streets must be full of wolves over there. Wolves everywhere. I couldn’t even see her body because she was covered in so much fur. She has nice calves but her knees are fat. And the huge tortoiseshell glasses. Why doesn’t she get the glasses with invisible frames? She had a little mustache. It’s bleached, but I could see it. She came in here and kept her hands in her pockets. She was judging me, the baby, the apartment. When you asked her if she’d seen how big the baby had gotten she said he was cute. The same way you’d say a lamp was cute. She wasn’t polite at all.”

  “Ada is shy, underneath” said Osvaldo.

  “The way you see it they’re all shy. You told me that if she ever came here the first thing she’d do would be to summon electricians and contractors. She didn’t summon anyone. She hasn’t lifted a finger. All she had to say was that it smells like a sewer. I already know that.”

  “She didn’t say it smells like a sewer, she said you could smell the courtyard, or something like that.”

  “I am at war with the smell of this house and nothing works. Some houses smell and this is a smelly house. I bleach, use ammonia. You have no idea how much money I’ve spent here. She didn’t have any wonderful advice. She just recommended a dish rack. What an insight!”

  “Did you buy it?”

  “No. I didn’t have time. I’ve been taking care of those damn Peroni ladies the whole week. They aren’t mean, actually, they were nice. But they made my milk dry up with all the salt cod. I got back here and the ceiling had flooded. I called a handyman. I called the handyman, not your wife. All sorts of things had gone wrong. I’m so worried I’m not going to be able to stay here. My friend, the one who loaned me the apartment, came over the other day with a Japanese friend. They say they want to start an ‘Oriental boutique’ in here. I told them that I didn’t think the apartment was suitable, it’s the top floor, there’s no elevator, and it smells like a sewer. The Japanese guy was friendly enough, and he said I could be a ‘vendeuse’ in the boutique. My friend said that no matter what, boutique or not, she’s going to want the apartment back because she needs money. Then we had a fight and it ended badly. The Japanese guy was still nice to me and said he’ll get me a kimono because I told him how my other one got burned. If she kicks me out, I don’t know where I’ll go. It’s true that I could always go live in the famous studio. Michele isn’t coming back anytime soon.”

  “The studio belongs to Ada. I don’t know what her plans are. She might want to rent it out.”

  “Good God, you people are attached to money. I can’t pay rent. Maybe eventually. The studio is pretty dark and it’s probably damp too. But I could work with that. It would be convenient because you’re right upstairs and I could call you at night if I needed something.”

  “I aspire to not be woken in the night,” said Osvaldo.

  11

  December 29, 1970

  Dear Michele,

  Your sister Angelica came to see me. I’d never met her before. She is nice and very pretty. She gave me money. Sixty thousand lire. I can’t do anything with sixty thousand lire, but it was a nice gesture. I know that you told her to give me money. Thank you. I told your sister that I would go visit your mother one day. She says that your mother has been very depressed lately but that soon, when she’s less depressed, I can go see her.

  Angelica gave me your address because I wanted to send my condolences to you. I can say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year while I’m at it. Of course Christmas has passed. I was sad and alone on Christmas day, the baby was crying and had a stuffy nose. But later in the day a Japanese guy I know brought me a kimono. It’s black with two giant sunflowers, one on the front and one on the back.

  I have good news. I found a job. I’ve already started. I take the baby to a lady to be looked after and she keeps him until six. I pick him up on my way home. She costs twenty thousand lire a month. Ada, Osvaldo’s wife, got me the job. She also found me the lady who takes care of the baby. I think Ada is a fool, but she’s been very nice to me.

  I’m working for an editor, named Fabio Colarosa. He’s Ada’s friend. They might be sleeping together. It’s not totally clear. Osvaldo says it’s possible they’ve been sleeping together for two years now. He is short and thin and has a huge round nose. He looks like a pelican. The office is on Via Po. I sit all alone in one big room. Colarosa sits all alone in another big room. He sits at his desk thinking. When he thinks, he wrinkles up his nose and his lips. Sometimes he talks into his Dictaphone. He’ll shut his eyes and stroke his hair, very, very slowly. I type his letters and anything else he says on the Dictaphone. Occasionally he’ll put thoughts on the Dictaphone. Complicated thoughts that I don’t entirely understand. I’m also supposed to answer the telephone but no one ever calls except sometimes Ada. There’s another big room where two boys work, they box the books and design covers. We are going to publish your Aunt Matilde’s book. It’s called Polenta and Wine, or something like that. They’ve already designed the cover. It has a sun and some piles of dirt with a hoe sticking out of one, because the book is about a peasant girl. The two boys say that the cover looks like a socialist political poster. Your mother put up the money for the book. Not as if I needed the money or anything, because I do. I make fifty thousand lire a month there. What can I do with fifty thousand lire a month? Nothing. But Colaro
sa told me he’d give me a raise. He says he doesn’t care that I can’t speak English.

  Osvaldo said that it took him two days to convince Ada to recommend me to Colarosa. When she did recommend me to him, she told him I was crazy. He told her he didn’t have any problem with crazy people. I think that’s a great response.

  At noon every day, I go down to the cafe and get a cappuccino and sandwich. The other day Colarosa saw me heading to the cafe and invited me to go with him to a restaurant. He’s a quiet type, but not like the totally silent kind of person who makes you uncomfortable. He asks the occasional question and when he listens to the answer he wrinkles his nose and mouth. I had a fun lunch. I don’t know why it was so fun since he barely said a word. He told me that the Dictaphone thoughts are notes for a book. I asked him if your Aunt Matilde’s book is any good and he said it was a pile of garbage. But he took it on as a favor to Ada, who wanted to do a favor for Osvaldo who wanted to do a favor for your aunt, etc., etc. In the end, your mother was the one who put up all the money.

  The baby looks like you. His hair is black and straight and yours is curly and practically red but children’s hair changes and might grow out differently. His eyes are the color of lead. Yours are green but I’ve heard that even eye color can change. I’d like it if he was yours but I’m not sure. But you shouldn’t think that I’ll try to make you the father when you come back. I’d be a fool to do that to you and also an asshole since I’m not even sure you’re the father. As it stands, this baby will have no father and sometimes that feels really heavy, but then other times I feel okay about it and think everything will turn out fine.