Happiness, as Such

by Natalia Ginzburg

  In a previous letter, I told you that me and the pelican were going to get married. That was a dumb idea. Pretend I never said that. Tear that letter up, because I’m ashamed of having said it. He never dreamed of marrying me and maybe I never wanted to marry him either.

  He’s gone now. Before he went out the door, I yelled, “And you can stop treating me like a high-class call girl!” There was no soft voice left in me, that voice I had when I felt good and small. This harsh sound came out of my mouth, like a land­lady’s. He didn’t answer me.

  He left.

  There are times that I get furious. I think to myself: I’m so pretty, charming, so young and good, and I have such a handsome baby. I do this person the great favor of living with him in his house and spending the money that he doesn’t need. But what does this asshole want from me in the end. Sometimes I’m so angry, that’s what I think.

  Mara

  26

  March 29, 1971 — Novi

  Dear Angelica,

  You’ll be surprised to hear that I’m writing you from Novi Ligure. I arrived yesterday. I’m here with the baby at the house of my cousin’s maid. She put a mattress down in the kitchen for me. She’s old. Her name is Amelia. She said I can stay here for a few days, but not more than that because she doesn’t have the space. I don’t know where to go, but that’s not important, because I always end up somewhere.

  I left suddenly. I wrote Fabio a note. He wasn’t home. I wrote, “I’m leaving. Thank you. Bye.” I took the fur because it was a present and also because I was cold. And the silver and black dress that I wore to your mother’s house. I took that too, it’s not like he can use it. Anyway, they were presents.

  I want to ask you a favor. In my rush to leave I forgot my kimono, the black one with the sunflowers. Can you get it and send it to me here in Novi Ligure, 6 Via Della Genovina. It should be in the dresser in our room in the bottom drawer. I realize that I wrote “our room” because it was “our room” for a time and we were so happy, me and him. If there is such a thing as happiness, that was it. Only it didn’t last long. You see, happiness doesn’t last long. Everyone knows that.

  You might think it’s weird to fall in love with a man like that, he isn’t the least bit handsome and he has that big nose. A peli­can. When I was little I had a book with pictures of all the animals, there was a pelican, with his giant red beak and short legs rooted to the ground. That’s him. But you know you can fall in love with anyone, even absurd, weird, sad men. I liked how rich he was because all the money he had seemed different from all the money that other people have. It was as if his money stuck to him like the tail of a comet. I liked how intelligent he was, that he knew about so many things that I didn’t. His mind seemed to stretch behind him like a comet tail too. I don’t have a tail. I’m poor and stupid.

  When I first met the pelican, I didn’t think much of him, and I didn’t think of him romantically at all. I thought, This guy here is going to swallow me up like a raw egg. And I’ll spend all his money. I stole him from that ridiculous Ada. I set up myself and my baby in his house and that was that. I was cool, calm, and happy. Then this dreadful sadness started growing in me. He put all of his depression onto me, the same way you pass on a virus. I could feel it in my bones, even when I was sleeping. I couldn’t free myself of it. But his depression made him smarter and I just got stupider. Because depression is different for everyone.

  That’s how I figured out I’d fallen into a trap. I was madly in love with him and he couldn’t have cared less for me. He was bored of having me around. But he didn’t have the courage to kick me out, because he felt bad. And he made me feel bad. Living in the middle of all those bad feelings was exhausting, exhausting for me and for him.

  I’ll bet that he was just as indifferent to Ada. Except that she’s strong, lively, optimistic, and always has a million things to do. She’s not clingy at all. But I’m heavy and clingy. He would just sit there, lost in his misery and I could tell that I would never fit into this misery, there was never any room for me. The “never” scared me. So I left.

  I frightened Amelia to death when I arrived last night. We haven’t seen each other in three years and she doesn’t know about anything that’s happened. I never wrote her, not even a rotten postcard. She didn’t know that I’d had a baby. She looked at me, the baby, the fur coat, and couldn’t understand any of it. I told her I had a baby with a man who later turned me out onto the street. I asked her for a place to sleep. She pulled this mattress out of a wardrobe. I told her I was hungry and she made me dinner, a fried egg and a plate of beans. I figured she would let me stay because she felt sorry for me. That’s how you get through life, making people feel sorry for each other.

  During the day, Amelia cooks for my cousins. There are a lot of them and lots to cook. I asked her not to say anything about me to my relatives but she went and told them first thing that I was staying with her. And so all of a sudden two of my cousins and my brother show up, my twelve-year-old brother who lives with them and helps around the store. They love my brother. But he’s not very affectionate. He’s a cold fish. He wasn’t surprised by the baby. He didn’t act happy. Neither did my cousins. If I’d shown up with a cat they might have acted more excited. My fur coat was hanging over a chair and they were excited by that. They said I could live for years off what I’d get selling the coat. I could tell they were thinking about buying it from me themselves. But I told them I didn’t have any intention of selling it at this point. I’m fond of my fur. I remember the day we went to buy it, me and the pelican, holding hands, when he was happy to walk down the street with me. Maybe back then he was already starting to think that I was a little clingy and too heavy. But I didn’t know then he was thinking that.

  If the pelican asks you for my address you can give it to him.

  Mara

  Ti abbraccio

  27

  April 2, 1971

  Dear Mara,

  Angelica came over to get your kimono. We looked for it for a long time because it wasn’t in the dresser in the bedroom but had ended up in my office, under a stack of newspapers. It was dusty and I hesitated to ask Belinda to wash it, I didn’t want to remind her of you. She erased every trace of your stay here the morning you left. She threw away the face cream in the bathroom and all the baby food. I told her that I liked to eat baby food but she told me that you bought a particularly bad quality baby food. Angelica shook out your kimono a little, beat it with her hands and said she could just send it like that.

  I’m sending you money because I think you’ll need it. Angelica is going over to San Silvestro to mail the kimono and wire money.

  I am deeply grateful to you for leaving. In all honesty it was my most ardent desire and you understood that; perhaps because my behavior led you to want to leave. My words may seem uselessly cruel to you. They are in fact cruel but they are not useless. If you were to harbor deep down some dark, confused notion about coming back, you should extinguish those hopes entirely. I cannot live with you. I probably cannot live with anyone. My mistake was to fool myself and fool you into the idea that a long-term relationship between the two of us would be possible. Yet, I did not invite you, you are the one who came to me. Our already fragile union was shattered under the stress of trying to live together. Regardless, I share the blame and don’t want to minimize my part. These grievances accumulate upon the ones I already have about life — a burden that is already too heavy. I feel great pity for you and was not brave enough to tell you to leave. You will say I’m criminal. Indeed, that word perfectly describes me. I feel great pity for you and also for myself, it is the tattered self-pity of a criminal. When I returned home the other night and you weren’t there and then I read your note, I sat down on the couch and missed you. I felt such emptiness. In the middle of this feeling though there was a kind of giddiness and the most overwhelming relief, an ardent joy, nothing I should hide from you bec
ause it’s right for you to know what I was feeling. In short, I could not stand you for another minute.

  I wish you all the best opportunities for the future and I wish you happiness if there is such a thing as happiness. I don’t believe there is, but other people do, and who am I to say they are wrong.

  The Pelican

  28

  March 27, 1971 — Leeds

  Dear Angelica,

  Mara wrote. Can you go visit and comfort her? She’s got so many problems. That editor she’s living with — apart from his dreadful error of judgment in having published Polenta and Poison — has infected her with all this sadness and confusion.

  Maybe I can come during Easter vacation. I’m not sure. I miss my family sometimes, “my people,” as they say, even though you’re not at all mine as I am not at all yours. But if I were to come, you would all be watching me. Your eyes would be on me the whole time. Do I even need to add that you’d be watching my wife too because she’d be with me and you’d all try to figure out the nature of our relationship, how good it is. I couldn’t bear that.

  I also miss my friends a lot, Gianni, Anselmo, Oliviero, and the others. I don’t have friends here. I even miss some parts of Rome. There are other parts and other friends who I miss but who I also find repulsive. When nostalgia and repulsion get mixed together then all the places and people we love from a distance seem to sit at the far end of a broken, impassable road.

  Sometimes the nostalgia and repulsion are so intertwined in me that I can feel them when I’m sleeping, it wakes me up and I have to get out of bed and go smoke. Then Eileen takes her pillow to go sleep with the children. She says she has the right to her sleep. She says we each have to deal with our own nightmares. She’s right. She’s not wrong.

  I don’t know why I’m writing these things to you. But I’m in a place right now where I think I could sit and chat with a chair. I can’t talk to Eileen because first of all, it’s Saturday and she has to cook meals for the whole week. Second, because she doesn’t really love listening. Eileen is very intelligent, but I’ve discovered that all her intelligence gives me nothing because it’s reserved for things that have nothing at all to do with me, like nuclear physics. Deep down, I think I’d rather have a stupid wife who stupidly and patiently listens to me. Right now, I wouldn’t mind having Mara around. I couldn’t stand her in the long run, because she’d listen to me and then she’d dump all her problems on me and she’d stick to me like taffy and I’d never have a moment’s peace ever again. I wouldn’t want her as a wife, but in this particular moment, I wouldn’t mind having her here with me.

  Michele

  Ti abbraccio

  29

  April 2, 1971

  Dear Michele,

  I just got your letter. It left me with an awful feeling. You’re obviously very unhappy.

  Maybe I shouldn’t overdramatize your letter. Maybe I should tell myself that you had a little fight with your wife and you’re feeling alone. But I can’t help overdramatizing. I’m worried.

  I could come to you if you’re not coming here. It wouldn’t be easy because I don’t know what to do with my child, or Oreste, and plus I don’t have any money, but that’s the least of my concerns because I can get some from Mamma. Mamma isn’t well, she keeps getting a slight fever and of course I’m not going to tell her that I got a letter from you that worried me. If I decide to come visit, I’ll ask her for money. I’ll just tell her you’re not coming because of work and so I decided to go visit you myself.

  You say that right now you don’t want the eyes of the people who love you watching you. It is really difficult to bear the gaze of people who love you when you’re having a hard time, but you can get over that. People who love you may be judgmental, but their vision is clear, merciful, and severe, and that can be rough, but it’s just healthy to face clarity, severity, and mercy.

  Your friend Mara has left Colarosa. She wrote me from Novi Ligure where she is staying with her cousins’ maid. She’s not doing well, she doesn’t have anywhere to live, and has nothing to call her own, except for a black kimono with sunflower embroidery, a fox-fur coat, and a baby. But I feel like all of us are vulnerable to the gentle art of ending up in terrible situations that are unresolvable and impossible to move out of either by going forward or back.

  Just write back a single line to let me know if I should come. I don’t want to if the idea strikes you as unbearable.

  Angelica

  30

  April 5, 1971

  Dear Angelica,

  Don’t come. Eileen has family coming in from Boston. We only have one guest room. We might all go to Bruges. I’ve never seen Bruges.

  Also, I’ve never met these relatives. Sometimes it’s easier to be with strangers.

  Avoid forming hypotheses about me. Anything that you would hypothesize would be wrong because you don’t have all the essential information.

  I would have liked to see you but it will have to be another time.

  Michele

  31

  April 8, 1971

  Dear Michele,

  I just got your letter. I’ll confess that I’d already packed my bag to come to you. I didn’t ask Mamma for money, I asked Osvaldo. Uncharacteristically, he had it and didn’t have to run to Ada.

  Your letter made me laugh, the phrase, “I’ve never seen Bruges” . . . as if Bruges was the only place in the world you hadn’t seen.

  I want to see you, not just to talk about you but also to talk about me. I’m going through some things too.

  But, as you say, that will have to be for another time.

  Angelica

  32

  April 9, 1971

  Dear Michele,

  Angelica told me you’re not coming for Easter. I’ll be patient. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had to be patient when it comes to you. With every passing year, one’s store of patience inevitably grows. It’s the only resource that grows. All the others tend to wither.

  I had arranged the two rooms on the top floor for you. I made the beds and hung towels in the bathroom. The bathroom on the top floor is the loveliest in the whole house, with its green arabesque patterned tiles, and I was pleased to think your wife would see it. The rooms are still in perfect order, the beds are ready. I haven’t gone back up there. I will tell Cloti to go up and unmake the beds.

  While I was arranging the rooms, I kept thinking about how your wife would feel comfortable here and that she would think that I have a nice house. What a stupid thing to think because I don’t know your wife. I don’t know what makes her comfortable or if she’s the sort of person who likes well-kept houses or people who keep them.

  Angelica tells me that you’re going to Bruges instead. I can’t imagine why you’re going to Bruges, but at this point I’ve had to stop asking myself why you ever go one place or another. I try to imagine myself in one place or another in your life, but sense at the same time that your life is different than what I imagine, so the stories I imagine for you have become hazier and less and less reliable.

  When I’m feeling better I want to come with Angelica to visit you, if you’d like that. We wouldn’t stay at your house because we wouldn’t want to be a bother to your wife, who I think always has a lot to do. We’d stay in a hotel. I don’t love traveling and I don’t love hotels either. But I’d rather stay in a hotel than feel as if I were being a burden, taking up space in a small house, because one of the very few things I know about your life is that you live in a small house. I can’t come now because I haven’t completely recovered from the pleuritis, which is to say that I don’t have pleurisy anymore but the doctor says I still have to take care of myself. He says my heart is in disrepair. Explain to your wife that I’m a person whose house is in order but whose heart is in disrepair. Tell her what I’m like so that when she meets me she can compare the real me to your des
cription. That’s one of the few pleasures life affords, comparing the way others describe you with your own fantasies and with reality.

  I think of your wife often and try to imagine her, even if you haven’t tried to describe her and the picture you sent when you wrote to say you were getting married is small and blurry. I look at it frequently but can’t make out anything except a long, black raincoat and a head wrapped in a scarf.

  You never write me, but I’m glad you write Angelica. I think it comes more naturally for you to write her because you’re closer to her than to me. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I like to think that when you confide in her you’re secretly confiding in me too. Angelica is very intelligent. She might be the most intelligent of all of us, even though passing judgment on the intelligence of your own children is a tricky matter.