A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  I told the children about our city. They were very small when we left, and had no memories of it. I told them how the houses had many floors and there were lots of streets and buildings and beautiful stores. “But here we have Girò’s,” the children said.

  Girò’s shop was right opposite our house. Girò stood in the doorway like an old owl, his round, impassive eyes fixed on the street. He sold a little of everything—groceries, candles, postcards, shoes, oranges. When the goods arrived and Girò unloaded the cartons, the children would run over to eat the rotten oranges he threw away. At Christmas, almond nuggets and liquors and candies arrived too. But he would never give an inch on the prices. “You’re so mean, Girò,” the women said. And he’d retort, “If you’re good you get eaten alive.” At Christmas the men returned from Terni and Sulmona and Rome, stayed a few days, then left after slaughtering the pigs. For several days people ate nothing but pork sausages and scraps of fried bacon, and did nothing but drink. Then the cries of the new piglets would fill the streets.

  In February the air grew damp and soft. Heavy gray clouds drifted across the sky. One year during the thaw, the gutter pipes burst. Water poured into the houses till the rooms were virtual swamps. It was like this all over town; not a single house was dry. The women emptied buckets out the windows and swept water from the doorsteps. Some people slept under open umbrellas. Domenico Orecchia said it was a punishment for some sin. This went on for more than a week, until at last every trace of snow was gone from the rooftops and Aristide repaired the pipes.

  The end of winter awakened a vague restlessness in us. Maybe someone would come to visit, maybe something would finally happen. Surely our exile, too, must have an end. The roads cutting us off from the world seemed shorter, the mail came more often. All our chilblains slowly healed.

  There is a certain dull uniformity in human destiny. The course of our lives follows ancient and immutable laws, with an ancient, changeless rhythm. Dreams never come true, and the instant they are shattered, we realize how the greatest joys of our life lie beyond the realm of reality. The instant they are shattered we are sick with longing for the days when they flamed within us. Our fate spends itself in this succession of hope and nostalgia.

  My husband died in Regina Coeli prison in Rome a few months after we left the village. When I confront the horror of his solitary death, of the anguished choices that preceded his death, I have to wonder if this really happened to us, we who bought oranges at Girò’s and went walking in the snow. I had faith then in a simple, happy future, rich with fulfilled desires, with shared experiences and ventures. But that was the best time of my life, and only now, now that it’s gone forever, do I know it.

  1944

  my craft

  My craft is writing—this I know well and have known for a long time. I hope I won’t be misunderstood: about the value of what I write, I know nothing. I know that writing is my craft. When I sit down to write, I feel supremely at ease, supremely sure of being in my own element; I use tools that are familiar and habitual and feel firm in my hands. If I do anything else, study a foreign language, say, or try to learn history or geography or stenography, if I try to speak in public or knit or travel, I’m in pain, constantly wondering how others manage those things; I always feel there must be some proper way to do them that others know and I don’t. I feel deaf and blind and have a kind of deep-down nausea. But when I write I never think maybe other writers know some better way of doing it. I don’t care in the least how other writers go about it. Let me be clear: I can only write stories. If I try writing a critical essay or newspaper article on request, it goes fairly badly; I have to labor to find the words somewhere outside myself. I do it a bit better than studying a foreign language or speaking in public, but only a bit. And I always have the impression of cheating the reader with words borrowed or pilfered here and there. I suffer and feel like I’m in exile. But when I write stories I’m like someone in her native land, on streets known since childhood, among her very own walls and trees. My craft is writing stories, either invented or recalled from my own life but stories nonetheless, not grounded in learning, only in memory and imagination. This is my craft, and I will do it till my dying day. I’m very happy with this craft and wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. I realized it was my craft a long time ago. Between the ages of five and ten, I wasn’t yet sure; I toyed with the notion that I might paint, or maybe capture territories on horseback or invent very important new machines. But since the age of ten I’ve known for certain, and began struggling as best I could with novels and poetry. I still have those poems. The earliest ones are clumsy, with bungled lines, but still rather entertaining; then as time went on I gradually began writing poems that were less clumsy but more and more dull and idiotic. I didn’t know this, though. I was ashamed of the clumsy poems and thought the not so clumsy but idiotic ones were very good. I always thought that some day or other a famous poet would discover them and have them published and write long articles about me; I conjured up their words and sentences, composing entire articles in my mind. I thought I would win the Fracchia Prize—I had heard this was a prize given to writers. Since I was unable to publish my poems in book form, not being acquainted with any famous poet at the time, I copied them out neatly in a notebook, drew a little flower on the title page, made a table of contents and so on. Writing poems had become easy for me. I wrote almost one a day. I found that if I didn’t feel like writing, all I had to do was read some poems by Pascoli or Gozzano or Corazzini and I’d suddenly get the urge. I’d come up with Pascolian or Gozzanian or Corazzinian poems, then finally poems in the style of D’Annunzio, when I discovered him as well. Still, I never thought I would be writing poetry all my life; sooner or later I wanted to write novels. I wrote three or four during those years. One was called Marion or the Gypsy, and another was called Molly and Dolly (a comic detective story), and another was called A Woman (in the manner of D’Annunzio, told in the second person, the story of a woman abandoned by her husband; it also had a black cook, I remember), then there was a very long, complicated one with frightening tales of kidnapped girls and carriages—I was even afraid to write it when I was alone in the house. I don’t remember anything from it except one sentence I loved; it brought tears to my eyes as I wrote it: “He said, ‘Ah! Isabella is leaving.’” The chapter ended with that sentence, which was very significant since the man who spoke it was in love with Isabella but didn’t realize it, hadn’t yet admitted it to himself. I don’t recall anything about the man; I think he might have had a reddish beard. Isabella had long black hair with blue highlights, who knows what else. I do know that for a long time I shivered with joy whenever I repeated to myself, “Ah! Isabella is leaving.” I also often repeated a sentence I had found in a serialized novel in the back pages of La Stampa that went, “Assassin of Gilonne, what have you done with my child?” But I wasn’t as confident about my novels as I was about my poems. Reading them over, I would always discover some weakness, something wrong that ruined everything and that was impossible to fix. For one thing, I constantly mixed up ancient and modern times; I couldn’t place them properly in any period. There would be convents and carriages and a French Revolution atmosphere mixed in with police carrying night-sticks, then all of a sudden a proper little gray-haired lady with sewing machines and cats would turn up, as in Carola Prosperi’s books, and she didn’t fit well at all with the carriages and convents. I vacillated between Carola Prosperi and Victor Hugo and the Nick Carter stories, not really knowing what I wanted to do. I also loved Annie Vivanti. There’s a line in The Devourers, when she writes to an unknown man and tells him, “My clothes are brown.” This too was a sentence I often repeated to myself. Throughout the day I’d murmur those phrases I loved so much—“Assassin of Gilonne,” “Isabella is leaving,” “My clothes are brown”—and I was gloriously happy.

  Writing poetry was easy. I was very pleased with my poems; they seemed almost perfect. I couldn’t see how they were any
different from real poems, published poems by real poets. I couldn’t understand why when I showed them to my brothers they snickered and said I’d be better off studying Greek. Most likely, I thought, my brothers didn’t know much about poetry. Meanwhile I had to go to school and study Greek, Latin, mathematics and history, and I suffered enormously and felt I was in exile. I spent my days writing my poems and copying them into notebooks, and didn’t study my lessons, then I would set the alarm for five in the morning. The alarm rang but I didn’t get up. I got up at seven, when there was no time left to study and I had to get dressed for school. I was unhappy, always feeling terribly frightened and guilty and confused. At school I studied history during Latin class and Greek during history class, and I learned nothing this way. For a good while I thought it was worth it because my poems were so wonderful, but at a certain point I began to suspect maybe they weren’t so wonderful; I began to feel bored writing them, struggling to find subjects; it seemed I had already plumbed every possible subject, used up every word and rhyme: speranza lontananza, pensiero mistero, vento argento, fragranza speranza. I had nothing left to say. That was the start of a very bleak period for me. I spent afternoons tinkering with words that no longer gave me any pleasure, full of guilt and shame about school. It never crossed my mind that I was mistaken about my craft; I wanted to write as much as ever, only I couldn’t understand why all at once my days had become so barren and stripped of words.

  The first serious thing I wrote was a story. A short story, five or six pages: it miraculously wrote itself in one evening, and when I went to sleep I was exhausted, dazed, and astounded. I could sense it was something serious, for the first time ever: the poetry and the novels with girls and carriages suddenly seemed very far away, naïve and absurd creatures from another age, a vanished epoch. This new story had characters. Isabella and the man with the reddish beard weren’t characters; I didn’t know anything about them besides the words and phrases I had used to describe them; they had been entrusted to chance and to my own willful caprice. The words and phrases I had used for them were plucked out by chance—it was as if I had a sack and had fished things out at random, a beard and a black cook and anything else that might serve. This time, though, it wasn’t a game. This time I had invented people with names I couldn’t possibly have changed. I couldn’t have changed anything about them, and I knew a great many details about them; I knew what their life had been like up to the moment of my story, even if I didn’t mention any of that in the story—it hadn’t been necessary. And I knew all about the house and the bridge and the moon and the river. I was seventeen years old and had failed Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I wept when I heard the news. But once I had written the story, I felt a little less ashamed. It was summer, a summer night. The window was open onto the garden and dark butterflies were fluttering around the light. I had written my story on squared paper and I felt happier than I had ever felt in my life, rich with words and ideas. The man was called Maurizio and the woman was called Anna and the baby was called Villi, and there were also the bridge and the moon and the river. Those things lived within me. And the man and the woman weren’t good or bad, only comical and slightly wretched, and I thought I had discovered just what people in books should always be—comical and wretched at once. From whatever angle I regarded it, the story was wonderful: there were no wrong moves, everything happened at the right moment, the timing was perfect. Now, I thought, I could write millions of stories.

  And I actually did write quite a few, one every month or two, some fairly good and some not. I learned it was exhausting to write seriously. It’s a bad sign if you’re not exhausted. You cannot expect to produce something serious in any casual way, with one hand tied behind you, as it were, flitting around as the spirit moves you. You can’t get off so easily. When you write something serious, you sink into it and drown right up to your eyes, and if you happen to be assailed by strong emotions, if you’re very happy or very unhappy for some reason—call it terrestrial—which has nothing to do with what you’re writing, then to the extent that the writing is valid and worthy of life, every other feeling will become dormant. You cannot expect to preserve your precious happiness fresh and intact, nor your precious unhappiness; everything recedes, disappears, and you’re alone with the page; no happiness or unhappiness can survive that isn’t intimately linked to that page; you possess nothing, you belong to no one, and if you don’t feel this way, that is a sign that your page is worthless.

  So for a while I wrote short stories, and this lasted about six years. Since I had discovered the existence of characters, I believed that simply having a character sufficed to make a story. Thus I was always on the prowl for characters. I studied people in the tram and on the street, and when I found a face that seemed right for a story, I would weave moral details and a little story around it. I was also on the prowl for details of clothing and appearance, or the interiors of houses and other places; when I entered a new room I would strive to formulate a description of it and to find some minute detail that might fit well in a story. I kept a notebook where I wrote down various details I’d noticed, or little metaphors or incidents that I vowed to use in my stories. For example, I would write in my notebook: “He came out of the bath dragging the belt of his robe behind him like a long tail.” “‘The toilet in this house really stinks,’ the girl told him. ‘When I go in there I don’t even breathe,’ she added sadly.” “Her curls like bunches of grapes.” “Red and black blankets on the unmade bed.” “A face as pale as a peeled potato.” And yet I found it difficult to make use of these phrases when writing a story. The notebook became a kind of museum of phrases, all of them crystallized and embalmed, barely usable. I tried any number of times to stick the red and black blankets or the curls like bunches of grapes in some story, and I could never succeed. In the end, the notebook was of no use. And so I learned that in this craft there can be no savings. Supposing you think, “This is an excellent detail, but I don’t want to waste it in the story I’m writing now, which already has lots of excellent material, so I’ll save it for a later story.” That detail will then crystallize inside you and never be of any use. When writing a story, you must toss in the best of everything you have seen and possess, the best of everything you’ve gathered throughout your life. Details can dissipate: if they’re carried around for long periods without being used, they wear out. And not only details but ever ything—ideas, clever turns of phrase. In the era when I was writing my short stories, the era of my taste for well-chosen characters and minute details, I happened to see a cart pass by on the street carrying a mirror, a huge mirror with a gilt frame. It was reflecting the greenish evening sky, and I stopped to watch it go by, feeling an immense happiness, the sense that something important was taking place. I had been feeling very happy even before seeing the mirror, and suddenly I felt as though the very image of my happiness was passing by, the resplendent green mirror in its gilt frame. For a long time I thought of putting it in a story; for a long time recalling the cart with the mirror on top made me want to write. But I never managed to put it anywhere and at a certain point I realized it was dead inside me. And yet it had been of great importance. For at the time of writing those short stories I was always arrested by dismal, seedy people and things; the reality I sought was contemptible, without any splendor. There was a touch of malice in my taste for digging up minute details, an avid petty interest in tiny things, tiny as fleas. I was a dirtdigger, perversely bent on hunting for fleas. The mirror on the cart seemed to offer new possibilities, maybe the capacity to focus on a more glorious and radiant reality, a brighter reality that didn’t call for minute descriptions and clever conceits but could be realized in one joyous, resplendent image.

  In essence, I felt contempt for the characters in the short stories I was writing at that time. Since my discovery of the wonderful effects of comical, wretched characters, I had used comic touches and pathos to create beings so worthless and lacking in radiance that I myself couldn’t
love them. My characters always had tics or obsessions or some physical deformity or faintly grotesque vice; they’d have a broken arm in a black sling, or a stye in their eye, or else they would stutter or scratch their behinds while they spoke, or have a slight limp. I always found it necessary to distinguish them in some such way. It was a means of evading my fear that they would turn out amorphous, of eliciting their humanity, which I myself unconsciously had no faith in. For I didn’t grasp back then—but at the moment of the mirror on the cart I was beginning murkily to grasp—that I wasn’t dealing with characters but with puppets, quite well-drawn and resembling real people, but still puppets. The moment I conceived them I would define and label them with a grotesque detail, and there was something a trifle malicious in this, a kind of spiteful resentment I was feeling towards reality. It wasn’t a resentment based on anything real, since I was a happy young girl at the time; rather, it arose as a reaction to my naïveté; it was that specific resentment used as a defense by naïve people, who always tend to think they’re being taken in—the peasant newly arrived in the city who sees thieves everywhere. At first I was proud of this: it seemed a great triumph of irony over naïveté, and over the sentimental adolescent outpourings so apparent in my poetry. Irony and malice struck me as critical weapons to hold on to; I could use them to write like a man; I had a horror that my writing might reveal that I was a woman. I almost always created male characters who would be as remote and distinct from me as possible.

  I had become quite adept at constructing a story, whisking away everything useless and inserting the details and dialogue at the right moment. I wrote dry, lucid stories, carried off smoothly from beginning to end, without clumsiness, without errors of tone. And then at some point I found I was fed up. The faces I saw in the street no longer yielded anything of interest. One had a stye and another had his hat on backwards and another was wearing a scarf instead of a shirt, but none of it mattered anymore. I was tired of looking at people and things and formulating descriptions of them. The world fell silent for me. I couldn’t find words to describe it, I no longer had any words that could give me much pleasure. I had nothing. I tried to remember the mirror, but even that was dead inside me. I was hauling around a load of embalmed things, mute faces and words made of ashes, towns and voices and gestures that sent out no vibrations: a dead weight on my heart.