A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Who are others and who are we? we wonder. Sometimes we spend the whole afternoon alone in our room, lost in thought, wondering, with a slight sense of giddiness, if other people really exist or if we ourselves are inventing them. Maybe in our absence everyone else ceases to exist, vanishes in a flash, to be miraculously reborn, springing forth from the earth the moment we turn around. What if one day we turned around very suddenly and saw nothing and no one, we were just peering out into the void? In that case, we decide, there’s no need to get so unhappy over the scorn of others; if those others don’t exist, then they can’t be thinking anything, either about us or about themselves. In the midst of these giddy notions, our mother comes to invite us out for ice cream, and we feel unaccountably, inordinately happy at the thought of the ice cream we’ll soon be eating. Why such happiness at the prospect of ice cream, we wonder, we who are so grown up with our giddy thoughts, so weirdly lost in a world of shadows? We accept our mother’s invitation, but make sure not to show how happy it makes us: we walk beside her toward the café with our lips sealed.

  Though we constantly remind ourselves that others may not exist and we may be inventing them, we still suffer inexplicably from our schoolmates’ disdain and from our own dull heaviness and clumsiness—we ourselves feel ashamed to be so contemptible. When others speak to us we want to hide our face in our hands, it feels so shapeless and ugly. Yet all the while we dream of someone falling in love with us: he sees us having ice cream with our mother at the café and secretly follows us home and writes us a love letter. We wait for the letter, deeply shocked each day that it hasn’t yet arrived; we know its contents by heart, we’ve murmured them to ourselves so often. Once the letter finally arrives, we’ll really have a luxuriant mystery, a secret story that will unfold totally beyond our home. For we have to admit that as of now our mystery is nothing much, there’s very little hidden behind the stony face we offer our parents for their good-night kiss; after the kiss we hurriedly escape to our room while our parents whisper suspicious questions about us.

  Mornings, we go to school after staring anxiously at our face in the mirror: our face has lost the velvety softness of childhood, and we regret our lost childhood, when we made mudpies and our only grief was the arguments in the house. Now they don’t argue as much as they used to—our older brothers have gone off to live on their own and our parents are older and calmer. But we no longer care what goes on at home. We walk to school alone in the fog; when we were very small, our mother took us to school and came to pick us up, but now we’re alone in the fog, and frighteningly responsible for everything we do.

  Love thy neighbor as thyself, God said. This seems absurd. God said something absurd, commanded us to achieve the impossible. How can we love our neighbor if he rejects us and won’t let himself be loved? How can we love ourselves, despicable and dull and dismal as we are? How can we love our neighbor who might not even exist, is merely a mass of shadows, while God created us, us alone, and put us here in a world of shadows, all alone to feed on our giddy thoughts? As a child, we used to believe in God, but now we think he might not exist, or if he exists, he cares nothing about us since he put us in this cruel situation, and so it’s as if he doesn’t exist. Still, at dinner we refuse a dish we like, then spend the night stretched out on the rug in our room to mortify and punish ourselves for our hateful thoughts and make God love us.

  But God doesn’t exist, we decide after a whole night on the floor, our limbs totally stiff, shivering up and down with cold and sleepiness. God doesn’t exist, because he couldn’t possibly have created this absurd monstrosity of a world, this complicated scheme where a human being has to walk alone in the fog every morning amid tall buildings where her neighbor lives, the neighbor who doesn’t love her and whom it is impossible to love. And one’s neighbor includes that monstrous, inexplicable species, the opposite sex, endowed with the terrible capacity to bring us every sort of good or harm, endowed with that terrible secret power over us. Could this other species ever find us lovable, we who are so scorned by companions of our own sex, considered so boring and insignificant, so inept and clumsy at ever ything?

  Then one day it happens that the most admired, the most sought after of all our classmates, the head of the class, suddenly makes friends with us. How this could have occurred, we have no idea: she suddenly cast her sky-blue gaze on us, walked us home one day, and began to appreciate us. In the afternoons she comes over to do homework: the head of the class’s precious notebook is in our hands, written in her beautiful, crystal-clear handwriting in sky-blue ink; we can copy her homework, which is letter-perfect. How has such happiness befallen us? How have we managed to win this friend who’s so haughty with everyone, so hard to get close to? She’s ambling around our very own room, tossing her tawny ponytail right beside us, tilting her sharp profile, sprinkled with pinkish freckles, over the familiar objects in our room: it’s as if some rare tropical beast, miraculously tamed, has ventured within our four walls. She walks around our room, asks where various things came from, asks to borrow a book; together we have a snack and together we spit the plum pits down onto the terrace. We who were scorned by everyone have been singled out by the most unattainable, the most unhoped-for friend. We chatter feverishly so she won’t get bored in our company and abandon us forever; we let loose all our dirty words and everything we know about films and sports. Alone again, we repeat insatiably the syllables of her wonderful, sonorous name, planning a thousand things to talk about tomorrow; mad with joy, we imagine she’s exactly like us in every way. The next day we try to talk to her about everything we planned, we tell her everything about us, even our giddy suspicions that people and things don’t really exist. She looks askance, snickers, teases us a bit. And so we realize we’ve made a false move, we can’t talk to her about this; we revert to sports and dirty words.

  At school, meanwhile, our situation has changed dramatically: all at once everyone prizes us, seeing us highly prized by the most prized of all the girls; now our comic verses are greeted with squeals and applause; before, we couldn’t even make ourselves heard in the din of voices, and now when we speak ever y-one stops to listen; they ask us questions, they walk arm in arm with us, they help us out in our weak subjects, in sports or with homework we can’t do. The world is no longer a grotesque scheme but a simple, radiant little island peopled with friendly faces everywhere. We don’t thank God for this lucky transformation of our fate because God is far from our mind; we can’t think of anything except our friends’ merry faces all around us, the smooth, light-hearted flow of our mornings, the funny things we said that made everyone laugh; our face in the mirror isn’t dreary and shapeless, it’s the face our friends are delighted to greet every morning. Sustained thus by the friendship of our own sex, we view that other species, those of the opposite sex, with less horror; we almost feel we could easily do without them, live quite happily without their approbation; we almost want to spend our whole life surrounded by our girlfriends, thinking up clever jokes to make them laugh.

  Then little by little, in this crowd of friends we find one who’s especially glad to spend time with us, and we realize we have countless things to say to her. She’s not the head of the class, she’s not greatly prized by the others, she doesn’t wear flashy clothes but clothes of warm, good fabrics, like what our mother picks out for us. Walking home with her, we notice that her shoes are exactly the same as ours, simple and sturdy, not showy and flimsy like those of the other girls, and we point this out with a laugh. Gradually we discover her family’s ways are just like ours: she takes frequent baths, and her mother doesn’t let her go to romantic movies just as our mother doesn’t. She’s one of us, from the same social background. We’re pretty tired, by now, of the company of the head of the class, who still comes over in the afternoon: we’re fed up with repeating the same dirty words and so we act supercilious, overwhelming the head of the class with the subjects we care about—our doubts about existence; we’re so supercilious and n
onchalant, so arrogant that the head of the class doesn’t quite get it, but gives a timid smile. We take note of the timid, cowardly smile on her lips—she’s afraid of losing us. No longer spellbound by her sky-blue gaze, now when we’re with the head of the class we long for the round, hazel eyes of our other friend, and the head of the class realizes this and is hurt, and we’re proud of hurting her: so we too have the power to cause pain.

  With our new round-eyed friend we scorn the head of the class and the other girls, so rowdy and coarse—all those dirty words they’re forever repeating. Now we want to be very refined, and along with our new friend we appraise people and things from the standpoint of good and poor taste. We discover that it’s in good taste to remain children as long as possible, and to our mother’s great relief we get rid of all the flashy, vulgar touches we had insinuated in our dress; in our clothes as well as in our bearing and manners we aspire to a childlike simplicity. We spend marvelous afternoons with our new friend, never tiring of talking and listening. We look back with amazement on our brief friendship with the head of the class, whom we’ve stopped seeing: being with the head of the class was so exhausting that by the end our facial muscles were stiff with the strain of fake laughter, our eyelids burned, our skin tingled; it was exhausting to have to pretend to naughtiness, to hold back confidences and always be choosing from among our words those few that were fit to be shared with the head of the class. Being with our new friend is a great comfort. There’s no pretending or holding back; our words can flow freely. We can even confide our giddy doubts about existence, and dumbfounded, she tells us she has the very same doubts. “Well, do you really exist?” we each ask, and she swears that she does, and we’re thrilled beyond words.

  We both regret that we’re of the same sex, because if we were of different sexes we could get married and be together forever and ever. We’d never be afraid of each other, or feel ashamed or appalled. We could be quite happy now, but for this shadow on our life: not knowing whether a member of the opposite sex will ever love us. The members of the opposite sex walk alongside us, they brush past us on the street, they may even be thinking about us or have designs on us that we’ll never know; they hold our destiny and our happiness in their hands. Among them might be just the right one, who could love us and whom we could love—the perfect one for us. But where is he? How to recognize him and be recognized in the city crowds? Where in the city, in which house, on which precise point on earth is the right one for us, who is like us in every way, ready to respond to all our needs, to listen to us endlessly without getting bored, to smile at our shortcomings and spend the rest of his life looking at our face? What words should we speak so that he recognizes us among thousands of others? How should we dress, where should we go to meet him?

  Plagued by such thoughts, we suffer from an intense shyness in the presence of the opposite sex, for fear that the right one is among them and we might lose him by a single word. We agonize at length over every word we speak, and we speak in haste, in a choked voice: fear makes our face sullen and our movements brusque and tense; we realize this, yet we think the right person can’t help but recognize us, even with our tense gestures and choked voice; if he takes no notice of us, then he’s not the one: the right one will recognize us and pick us out among thousands. We wait for the right person. Waking every morning, we tell ourselves this could be the day; we dress and comb our hair with infinite care, overcoming the urge to go out in an old raincoat and shapeless shoes: he might be just around the corner. Time and again we think we’re in his presence; our heart beats violently at the sound of a name, at the curve of a nose or a smile, merely because we’ve suddenly decided that that nose and that name and that smile belong to the person destined for us. A car with yellow tires or an old lady can make us blush violently—they might be his car and his mother: the car we’ll ride in on our honeymoon, the mother who’ll give us her blessing. Then all at once we see we were mistaken, he wasn’t the right one, we feel nothing at all for him, nor do we suffer over it—we have no time to suffer; the car with yellow tires, the name and the smile fade swiftly away, sinking back among the thousand superfluous things that surround our life. We have no time to suffer, we’re leaving for the summer holidays and we’re absolutely sure that this summer we’ll meet the right person. We hardly mind parting from our round-eyed friend, sure as we are that the train is carrying us to the right person, and our friend, for her part, is sure of the same thing for herself. Who can say why we’re suddenly so sure the right person will turn up on a summer holiday? The long summer months go by, tedious and lonely; we write our friend interminable letters, and to console ourselves for the meeting that never took place we carefully collect all the compliments given us by old relatives or family friends and transcribe them for our friend; she in turn writes similar letters, with compliments on her intelligence or beauty from her old relatives. In the fall we have to admit that nothing out of the ordinary has occurred. Still, we’re not disappointed: it’s fall, we’re happy and excited to see our friend and the other girls at school, we throw ourselves joyfully into the season, the right person might be waiting around the corner.

  Then gradually we begin to break off with our friend. We find her rather dull, “bourgeoise”; she has such a mania for good taste and refinement. Now we want to be poor; we’re drawn to a group of poor classmates and take pride in going to their unheated houses every day. We take pride in wearing our old raincoat: we still count on meeting the right person, but he’ll have to love our old raincoat, love our shapeless shoes and cheap cigarettes and bare, chapped hands. As evening draws on we walk alone in our old raincoat past the houses on the edge of the city: we’ve discovered the outskirts, with the signs for little bars along the river; in a trance, we linger in front of tiny shops hung with long pink undershirts, workers’ coveralls, and coffee-colored underpants; we’re enchanted by a shop window displaying old postcards and old hairpins: we like everything old, dusty, and shabby, we go hunting through the city for dusty, shabby things. The rain comes down in buckets on our bare head and our old raincoat isn’t waterproof; we have no umbrella, we’d rather die than carry an umbrella; we have no umbrella, no hat, no gloves, no carfare—all we have in our pocket is a dirty handkerchief, some crushed cigarettes and a few kitchen matches.

  We’ve made up our mind that the poor are our fellow men, the neighbors we must love. We scrutinize the poor people coming and going around us, watching for the chance to help a blind beggar cross the street or offer our arm to some old woman who slipped in a puddle; timidly, with the tips of our fingers, we stroke the dirty hair of the children playing in the alleys; we go home soaked to the skin, chilled, and exultant. We’re not poor, we won’t be spending the night on a park bench, we’re not eating murky soup out of a tin pot. We’re not poor, but that’s only by accident—tomorrow we could be poverty-stricken.

  Meanwhile the friend we’ve dropped is hurt on our account, just as the head of the class was hurt when we dropped her. We know this but we have no regrets, indeed we feel a kind of covert pleasure, for if someone suffers on our account, it shows we have the power to cause pain, we who for so long felt utterly weak and insignificant. It doesn’t occur to us that maybe we’re being harsh and cynical, because it doesn’t occur to us that our friend is our neighbor too; nor do we think our parents are our neighbors: our neighbor is the poor. Sternly, we regard our parents sitting at their brightly lit table, eating their wholesome food; we’re eating the same wholesome food, but just by chance—this will last only a little while longer: soon we’ll have nothing but a crust of dark bread and a tin pot.

  One day we meet the right person. We don’t feel anything much because we don’t recognize him: we walk together through the outskirts of town, little by little we get in the habit of taking walks together every day. Now and then, absentmindedly, we wonder if we might possibly be walking with the right person, but we tend to think not. We’re too calm. The earth and sky haven’t changed, the min
utes and hours flow calmly, no bells peal in our heart. We’ve already been mistaken so many times, thinking we were in the presence of the right person, but he wasn’t. We were overwhelmed, in the presence of these false right people, by such violent turmoil that we hardly had strength left to think—it was like living in the midst of a burning village. Trees, houses, everything was bursting into flames all around us. Then all at once the fire was out, leaving nothing but a few tepid embers. We’ve left behind so many burnt-out villages, we can’t even count them. Now nothing is burning. For weeks, months, we spend our days with the right person without knowing it, only sometimes when we’re alone we think about him, the curve of his lips, certain gestures and inflections of his voice, and at the thought of them our heart leaps ever so slightly, but we take no notice of such a muted little leap. The strange thing is that we always feel so good, so at peace with him; we can breathe freely; our brow, for years so furrowed and sullen, suddenly relaxes; we never tire of talking and listening. We realize we’ve never had a relationship like this with any human being; all human beings, after a while, come to seem quite harmless, simple and small. Walking beside us at his own distinct pace, with his austere profile, this person possesses an infinite power over us: he can do us any kind of good or harm. And yet we feel a boundless tranquillity.