A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  And we leave our home and go to live with him forever. Not that we’re convinced he’s the right person, in fact we’re not at all convinced; we still suspect the real right person is hiding somewhere in the city, who knows where. But we have no urge to find him: we’d have very little to say to him now, since we say everything to the person we’re living with, maybe not the right one; we want to accept life’s good and evil from him and with him. Sometimes violent conflicts erupt between us, yet they cannot destroy that boundless inner peace. And only years later, many years later, after a dense web of habits and memories and violent conflicts has been woven between us, do we finally know that he truly was the right person and we couldn’t have lived with anyone else; only in him could we seek all our heart requires.

  Now, in this new home we’ve made for ourselves, we no longer want to be poor, we’re even a little frightened of being poor. We feel a curious fondness for the things around us, for a table or a rug, we who would always spill ink on our parents’ rugs; this new fondness of ours for a rug is somewhat troubling, we’re somewhat ashamed of it. We still walk through the streets at the edge of the city now and then, but back home we carefully wipe our muddy shoes on the doormat. We take a new pleasure in sitting at home under the lamp, the shutters sealed against the dark city. We don’t feel much need for friends anymore, because we tell all our thoughts to the person who lives with us, eating our soup together at our brightly lit table: it hardly seems worthwhile to tell anyone else anything.

  We give birth to children, and our fear of poverty grows. Indeed we harbor endless fears—every possible danger or suffering that might strike our children in their mortal flesh. We never used to feel our own flesh, our own body, as so fragile and mortal. We were ready to fling ourselves into the wildest adventures, always ready to take off for the most far-flung places, among lepers and cannibals: the prospect of war or epidemics or cosmic disasters left us totally unmoved. We never knew our bodies could harbor such fear, such fragility; we never dreamed we could feel so bound to life by a bond of fear, of excruciating love. How strong and free our stride was when we walked alone through the city, as if we could go on forever! We used to pity the families strolling down the avenues on Sundays, the mothers and fathers slowly pushing the baby carriages; they looked so dull and dreary. Now we’re one of those families strolling slowly down the avenues pushing the carriage, and we’re not dreary, we may even be happy, but it’s a happiness that’s hard to acknowledge, given our panic at possibly losing it forever, from one moment to the next. The baby we’re pushing in the carriage is so small and weak, the love that binds us to him so painful and terrified! We’re afraid of a puff of wind, a cloud in the sky—is it going to rain? We who strode bareheaded through heavy rain, sloshing through puddles! We carry an umbrella now. We’d even like to have an umbrella stand in the front hall. We’re seized by the strangest longings we could never have imagined when we wandered alone and free through the city: we’d like an umbrella stand and a coat rack, sheets, towels, a country-style oven, an icebox. We don’t seek out the city limits anymore; we walk along the avenues, past houses and gardens; we’re careful to keep our children away from people who look too dirty and poor, for fear of lice and disease; we flee beggars.

  We love our children in such a painful, frightened way that it seems no one else was ever our neighbor, or could ever be again. We’re not quite used to our children’s presence in the world; we’re still stunned and unhinged at their turning up in our life. We have no friends anymore, or rather, if our child gets sick, we suddenly feel a flash of hatred for those few friends we do have; it almost seems their fault, for it was in their company that we were distracted from our single, excruciating love. We don’t have a vocation anymore; we used to have a vocation, a beloved craft, and now if we give it the slightest attention we immediately feel guilty and rush right back to that single, excruciating love. A sunny day, a green landscape signify only that our child can play in the grass and get rosy cheeks in the sun: we ourselves have lost every capacity for pleasure or contemplation. We regard everything with frantic suspicion, keeping an eye out for rusty nails, cockroaches, dangers for our child. We’d like to live in clean, wholesome towns with clean animals and well-bred people; the wild alluring universe lures us no more.

  How stupid we’ve grown, we sometimes think bitterly, studying our child’s head, so familiar, more familiar than anything in the world has ever been, watching him sit and make a mudpie with his chubby hands. How stupid we’ve grown, and how trite and dull our thoughts are, trite enough to fit in a nutshell, and yet so exhausting, so suffocating! What has become of the wild world that once lured us, where is our strength, the free, lively rhythm of our youth with its intrepid discovery of new things each day, our proud, resolute gaze, our exultant stride? Where is our neighbor now? Where is God now? Only when our child is sick do we remember to call on God: we tell him to let all our teeth and hair fall out, but make our child well. As soon as the child is well we forget God; we still have all our teeth and hair, and we take up our dull, exhausting little thoughts all over again—rusty nails, roaches, green pastures, cream of wheat. We’ve grown superstitious as well. We’re constantly knocking on wood; if we sit down to work, to write, we’ll jump up to knock on wood and turn the light on and off three times—it suddenly seems this alone can save us from disaster. We fend off sorrow; we feel it coming and hide behind chairs, behind curtains, so it can’t find us.

  But sorrow does find us. We’ve been expecting it, but we don’t recognize it right away; we don’t call it by its name at first. Stunned and incredulous, trusting that everything will turn out all right, we walk down the steps of our house and close that door forever. We walk endlessly down dirt roads. We’re pursued and we hide: we hide in convents and in woods, in barns and in alleys, in the holds of ships and in cellars. We learn to ask for help from whoever comes along: we don’t know if he’s a friend or enemy, if he’ll rescue us or betray us, but we have no choice, and for that instant we entrust him with our life. We also learn to give help to whoever comes along. And we cling to the faith that very soon, in a few hours or a few days, we’ll return to our house with the rugs and the lamps, we’ll be caressed and comforted, our children will sit playing in clean overalls and red slippers. We sleep with our children in train stations, on church steps, in shelters for the poor: we’re poor, we think with no trace of pride; every trace of our childhood pride has disappeared. We’re genuinely hungry, genuinely cold. We’re not afraid anymore: fear has seeped inside us to merge with our exhaustion and emerge in our withered gaze, oblivious to everything around us.

  Only at moments, from the depths of our exhaustion, does a true awareness of things surge up, so piercing it brings tears to our eyes: we may be looking at the earth for the last time. Never before have we felt so potent a love linking us to the dust of the roads, to the shrill cries of the birds, to the panting rhythm of our breath. But we feel more powerful than that panting rhythm, so muffled and distant that it seems no longer our own. Never before have we loved our children so deeply, their weight in our arms, their hair brushing our cheek. We don’t even fear for our children anymore: we ask God to protect them, if that is his will. Thy will be done, we tell him.

  Now we are truly adult, we think one morning, staring in the mirror at our grooved, hollowed face: we stare without pride and without curiosity. Simply with compassion. We have a mirror again, and four walls; who knows, maybe soon we’ll have another rug, maybe even a lamp. But we have lost the people we love most, so who cares about rugs and red slippers now? We learn to put away and take care of what belonged to the dead, to return alone to the places we used to go with them, to ask questions of the silence all around. We’re no longer afraid of death, we gaze at death every hour, every minute, recalling its great silence on the face we loved the most.

  Now we are truly adult, we think, stunned that this is what being adult means, nothing at all like what we thought it meant as children
, certainly not self-confidence, certainly not a serene mastery over all worldly things. We are adult because we carry with us the mute presence of the dead, from whom we ask counsel in our present actions, from whom we ask forgiveness for past offenses; we’d like to rip away all our past cruelties of word and deed, from the time when we still feared death but had no idea, couldn’t yet fathom, how irreparable and irremediable death was. We are adult because of all the silent answers, all the silent pardons of the dead that we carry within. We are adult by virtue of that brief moment when we looked at life head-on, when we looked at all the things of this world as if for the last time and renounced them for good, restoring them to the will of God. And suddenly all the things of this world, including human beings, appeared in their just and proper proportions under heaven, while we ourselves stood suspended, regarding it all from the single proper place accorded to us. People, things, memories, all were self-evident, all in their proper place under heaven. In that brief moment we found equilibrium in our fluctuating life, and it feels that we’ll always be able to retrieve that secret moment and find in it words for our craft and words for our neighbor; we’ll be able to cast a free, just gaze on our neighbor, not the timorous or scornful gaze of one who is always wondering, in the presence of his neighbor, whether he will be master or servant. All our life, we knew only how to be master or servant, but in that secret moment, that moment of complete equilibrium, we understood that there is no true mastery or true servitude on earth. So whenever we retrieve our secret moment, we’ll be seeking to discover if others have ever experienced such a moment or if they are still far from it: this is what we need to find out. It is the greatest moment of a person’s life, and we need to be with others whose eyes are fixed on the greatest moment of their destiny.

  We’re surprised to find, as adults, that we haven’t lost our ancient shyness vis-à-vis our neighbor: life has not served in the least to free us from timidity. We’re still timid. Only it doesn’t matter now: we’ve earned the right to be timid; we’re timid without timidity, boldly timid. Timidly, we seek out the right words. And we rejoice to find them, timidly but almost effortlessly; we rejoice to possess all those words, so many words for our neighbor that we’re practically drunk with fluency and ease. And the history of our human relations never ends, for after a time they start to become too easy, too natural and spontaneous, so spontaneous and effortless that all richness and discovery and choice are gone: they end up merely as habit and complacency, an intoxication of ease. We think we can always return to our secret moment and draw forth the right words, but that’s not so, for very often our returns are false returns: our eyes light up with a false gleam, we feign concern and warmth for our neighbor while in truth we’ve withdrawn again, huddled and frozen in our heart of darkness. Human relations must be rediscovered and reinvented every day. We must always remember that every single encounter with our neighbor is a human action, and therefore always good or evil, truth or lie, generosity or transgression.

  We are so adult now that our adolescent children are already starting to look at us with eyes of stone. We’re hurt, though we know quite well what this look means; we remember well having had that identical look. We’re hurt and aggrieved, we whisper suspicious questions, all the while knowing so well how the long chain of human relations takes its course, making its long and inevitable parabola, the whole long road we have to travel to feel, at last, a bit of compassion.

  1953

  winter in the abruzzi

  Deus nobis haec otia fecit.1

  In the Abruzzi there are just two seasons: summer and winter. Spring is snowy and windy like winter, and autumn is hot and clear like summer. Summer begins in June and ends in November. Gone are the long sun-baked days on the low, parched hills, the yellow dust of the streets and the children’s dysentery; winter sets in. People stop living in the streets; barefoot children disappear from the church steps. In the village I speak of, nearly all the men would vanish after the last harvests, going off to work in Terni, in Sulmona, in Rome. It was a village of bricklayers, and a number of the houses were elegantly built, with terraces and balustrades like small villas, so when you entered it was startling to find huge dark kitchens with prosciutti hanging from the ceiling, and vast, dreary, empty rooms. The kitchen fires would be lit; there were various kinds of fires—big ones made of oak logs, fires of leaves and branches, and fires made of dry twigs picked up one by one along the road. It was easy to distinguish the poor from the rich by their fires, easier than judging by the houses and the people, or their clothing and shoes, which were more or less the same for everyone.

  When I first came to the village, all the faces seemed the same to me; the women, rich and poor, young and old, all looked alike. Nearly all had missing teeth: the women down there lose their teeth at thirty, from hard work and poor nutrition as well as from the strains of childbirth and nursing babies that come one after the other relentlessly. But soon, little by little, I could single out Vincenzina da Secondina, Annunziata da Addolorata, and I started visiting all the houses and warming myself at their various fires.

  As the first snows began to fall, a slow sadness took hold of us. Our lot was exile. Our city was far away, our books, our friends, the shifting ups and downs of a real existence, all far away. We would light our green stove with the long pipe running across the ceiling; we used to gather in the room with the stove—we cooked and ate there, my husband wrote at the big oval table and the children scattered their toys on the floor. A picture of an eagle was painted on the ceiling, and I would stare at the eagle, thinking that that was exile. Exile was the eagle, it was the humming green stove, it was the vast, silent countryside and the motionless snow. At five o’clock the bells of the church of Santa Maria rang and the women, with their black shawls and red faces, went to prayers. Every evening my husband and I took a walk, every evening arm in arm, our feet plunged in snow. The people on our street were all friendly and familiar, and would come to their doors to greet us: “A good evening to you.” Now and then someone would ask: “Well, when are you going back home?” My husband would say, “When the war is over.” “And when will this war be over? You’re a professor, you know everything—when will it be over?” They called him “the professor” because they couldn’t pronounce his name, and they came from far and wide to consult him on all kinds of matters—the best time of year to have their teeth pulled, municipal subsidies, every variety of taxes.

  In winter some old person would die of pneumonia, the bells of Santa Maria tolled the death knell, and Domenico Orecchia, the carpenter, built the casket. A woman went crazy and was taken to the asylum at Collemaggio and the whole town talked about it for quite a while. She was young and clean, the cleanest woman in the village: they said it must have been because of her great cleanliness. Girl twins were born to Gigetto di Calcedonio, who already had boy twins, and he made a big fuss in the town hall because they wouldn’t give him a subsidy, seeing as he owned several acres of land and a vegetable garden as big as seven cities. Rosa, the school caretaker, had a neighbor who spit in her eye, and she went around with a bandage on it in order to collect damages: “Eyes are sensitive and spit is salty,” she explained. And they talked about this for quite some time too, until there was nothing left to say.

  We grew more homesick every day. It was even pleasant at times, mildly heady, like being in the company of close friends. Letters from our city came bearing news of weddings and deaths we couldn’t take part in. At times the nostalgia turned sharp and bitter, turned into hatred: then we hated Domenico Orecchia, Gigetto di Calcedonio, Annunziatina, and the bells of Santa Maria. But we kept this hatred hidden, knowing it to be unjust, and our house was always full of people, some come to ask and others to offer favors. Sometimes the little dressmaker came to make us sagnoccole. She would tie a dish towel around her waist and beat eggs, and send Crocetta all over town to find someone who could lend us a big enough pot. Her red face was absorbed in her work and her eyes glittered wit
h an imperious will. She would have let the house go up in flames just to have her sagnoccole turn out good. Her clothes and hair grew white with flour, as the strips of dough were carefully spread out on the oval table where my husband used to write.

  Crocetta was our cleaning woman. She wasn’t a woman, actually, since she was only fourteen years old. The dressmaker found her for us. The dressmaker divided the world into two camps: those who comb their hair and those who don’t. You have to steer clear of those who don’t comb their hair, for of course they have lice. Crocetta combed her hair, and therefore she came to work for us and told the children long stories of deaths and cemeteries. Once upon a time there was a child whose mother died. His father married a new wife and this stepmother didn’t love the boy. So she killed him while the father was out in the fields, and made a stew out of him. The father came home and ate, but when he finished, the bones left on the plate started singing:My stepmother mean and cruel

  Cooked me into a gruel

  And my greedy father ate

  Every bite upon his plate.

  The father killed his wife with a scythe and hung her from a nail on the front door. Sometimes I catch myself humming the words of this song, and then the whole village rises up before me, bringing the special flavor of its seasons, the icy gusts of wind, the sound of the bells.

  I took my children out every morning. People were shocked and scolded me for exposing them to the cold and snow. “What sin did these poor creatures commit?” they would say. “This is no weather for walking, Signora. Go back home.” We took long walks through the deserted white countryside, while the rare people we met up with looked pityingly at the children. “What sin did they commit?” Down there if a baby is born in winter they don’t take him outdoors till summertime. At noon my husband would join me with the mail, and we all went home together.