A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Our city, in any case, is melancholy by nature. On winter mornings it has its own special smell of station and soot, diffused through all the streets and avenues. Arriving in the morning, we find it gray with fog, wrapped in its smell. Sometimes a faint sun filters through the fog, tingeing the heaps of snow and the bare branches of shrubbery with rose and lilac. The snow on the streets and boulevards has been shoveled and gathered in little piles, but the public gardens are still buried under a thick blanket, soft and intact, an inch high on the abandoned benches and the rims of the fountains; the clock on the riding path has stopped, from time immemorial, at a quarter to eleven. Across the river rises the hill, it, too, white with snow, but dappled here and there with a reddish stubble, and at the top towers a round, rust-colored building that was once the National Balilla Organization.3 With a bit of sunlight, the glass cupola of the Auto Exhibition Hall glistens and the river flows with a greenish sparkle under the great stone bridges, and then for an instant the city can seem bright and welcoming, but this is a fleeting impression. The city’s essential nature is melancholy: the river, vanishing in the distance, evaporates in a horizon of violet mists that suggest sunset even if it’s high noon, and everywhere you breathe the same somber, drudging smell of soot and hear the whistle of trains.

  Our city, we realize now, resembles the friend we lost, who loved it dearly. It is industrious, as he was, frowning in its fevered, stubborn busyness, yet at the same time indolent, inclined to be idle and dream. In this city that so resembles him, we sense our friend come to life again wherever we go. At every corner, at every turn it seems he might suddenly appear—the tall figure in his dark martingale coat, face hidden in the collar, hat pulled down over his eyes. Stubborn and solitary, our friend paced the city with his long stride. He used to hide out in the most secluded and smoky cafes, where he would hurriedly throw off his overcoat and hat, but keep his ugly little light-colored scarf flung around his neck; he would twist long strands of his brown hair around his fingers, then suddenly muss up his hair with a lightning gesture. He filled pages and pages with his broad, swift writing, crossing out furiously, and in his poetry he commemorated the city:This is the day the mists rise from the river

  In the beautiful city, amidst the meadows and hills,

  Sending it up in smoke like a memory....

  His poems echo in our ears whenever we return to the city or think of it, and we can’t even tell anymore if they are beautiful poems—they are so much a part of us, they reflect so keenly the image of our youth, those faraway days when we listened to our friend read them aloud for the first time and learned, to our profound amazement, that even from our gray, heavy, and unpoetic city, one could make poetry.

  Our friend lived in the city like an adolescent, and lived that way until the end. His days, like those of adolescents, were very long, with plenty of time: he could find space to study and to write, to earn a living and to idle along the streets he loved, while we floundered, embattled, between laziness and diligence, wasting hours trying to figure out whether we were lazy or diligent. For many years he refused to submit to office hours or accept a regular position, but when he did agree to sit at a desk he became a scrupulous and tireless worker, all the while preserving an ample margin of spare time for himself: he downed his meals at top speed, eating very little, and he never slept.

  He had spells of great sadness, but for a long time we thought he would get over the sadness once he made up his mind to grow up: his sadness seemed like a boy’s, the voluptuous, dreamy melancholy of a boy who hasn’t yet come down to earth and moves in an arid, solitary fantasy world. Sometimes he would come over to see us in the evenings; he would sit himself down, pale, the scarf around his neck, and twist his hair or crumple a sheet of paper, without uttering a single word all evening, not even answering any of our questions. At last he would abruptly seize his coat and leave. Feeling mortified, we wondered if we had disappointed him, if he had sought to cheer himself up in our company and failed, or whether he had simply decided to spend a silent evening under some lamp other than his own.

  To converse with him was never easy anyway, even when he was in good spirits. And yet an encounter with him, no matter how few words were exchanged, could be stimulating and invigorating like nothing else. In his presence we became far more intelligent; we felt impelled to express whatever was best and most serious in us; we cast aside platitudes, imprecision, incoherence.

  We often felt humbled in his presence, for we could not be as sober as he was, nor as unassuming, nor as generous and fair-minded. He treated us, his friends, brusquely and didn’t excuse any of our faults, but if we were sick or in pain, he immediately became as solicitous as a mother. He refused on principle to meet new people, yet he could suddenly, out of the blue, become warm and expansive with someone quite unknown and unexpected, someone maybe even vaguely contemptible, lavishing his time and his plans. If we pointed out that that person was in many ways unpleasant or despicable, he said he was well aware of it, for he always liked to know everything and would never give us the satisfaction of telling him anything new. But why he would become so close with some such person and then deny his friendship to others more deserving, he would never explain and we never discovered. At times he would become intrigued by someone he thought came from an elegant milieu, and would become friendly with that person; perhaps he was gathering material for his novels. But his judgment of elegance of manner or appearance was unreliable—he took the glitter for the gold. In this and only this, he was very naïve. He was mistaken about elegance of manner, but about elegance of spirit and cultivation he could never be deceived.

  He had a cautious, miserly way of shaking hands, a few fingers granted and withdrawn; he had a diffident, parsimonious way of taking tobacco out of his pouch and filling his pipe; and he had a brusque, abrupt way of giving us money if he found out we needed it, so brusque and abrupt that we were dumbfounded. He said he was stingy with money and that it hurt to part with it, but the minute he had parted with it, he didn’t give a damn anymore. If we were far away he neither wrote to us nor answered our letters, or else would answer with a few curt, chilling sentences. He was unable to love his friends when they were far away, he said; he didn’t want to suffer from their absence, and so he promptly reduced them to ashes in his mind.

  He never had a wife or children or a home of his own. He lived with a married sister who loved him and whom he loved, yet he kept his usual brusque ways in the family, behaving like a boy, or like a stranger. At times he would come to our houses and, with a good-natured frown, scrutinize the children we were raising, the families we were making for ourselves. He too thought of having a family, but he thought of it in a way that over the years grew ever more complicated and tortuous, so tortuous that no simple resolution could possibly spring from it. Over the years he had created a network of such tangled, inexorable thoughts and principles that it barred the fulfillment of the most simple reality; and the more forbidden and unattainable that reality, the more profound was his desire to overcome it, twisting and branching out like a snaking, choking vine. He could be so sad at times, and we wanted so much to help him, but he never allowed us a sympathetic word or a comforting glance. And so it came about that we too, following his example, refused his sympathy in the hour of our own grief. Not that he was a teacher to us, although he taught us many things. We saw quite clearly the absurd and twisted mental convolutions in which he imprisoned his simple soul, and we would have liked to teach him something ourselves—how to live in some more fundamental way, with room to breathe. But we never managed to teach him anything, for whenever we tried to explain our reasoning he raised his hand and said he already knew all about it.

  In his final years his face was deeply lined and hollowed, devastated by mental torments, but to the last his body kept the grace of an adolescent. Toward the end he became a famous writer, but this didn’t change his retiring habits in the least, neither the modesty of his disposition nor the careful,
painstaking humility he brought to his daily work. When we asked him if he enjoyed being famous he would reply, with an arrogant smirk, that he had always expected it—this cunning, arrogant smirk, childishly malevolent, would flash across his face once in a while, then disappear. But his having always expected it meant that the achievement no longer gave him any joy, for he was incapable of enjoying and loving things once he had them. He used to say he knew his art so thoroughly by now that it held no more secrets for him, and without secrets, could no longer interest him. Even we, his friends, he said, held no more secrets and bored him infinitely. We were so mortified at boring him that we couldn’t tell him we saw exactly where he went wrong: in his unwillingness to give in and love the daily course of life, which proceeds uniformly and apparently without secrets. And so he was always in struggle against daily reality, both thirsting for it and loathing it; yet it was invincible and forbidden to him. He could only gaze at it as if from an infinite distance.

  He died in summer. Our city is deserted in the summer and feels vast, open and resonant, like a piazza. The sky is clear but not luminous, with a milky pallor; the river runs flat as a road, giving off neither moisture nor coolness. Billows of dust rise from the avenues; huge trucks drive by, loaded with sand from the river; the asphalt of the streets is layered with pebbles baking in the tar. Out in the open, the café tables under their fringed umbrellas are scorched and deserted.

  None of us were there. To die, he chose an ordinary day in that torrid August; he chose a hotel room near the railway station, wishing to die like a stranger in his very own city. He had envisioned his death in an old poem of many years ago:There’ll be no need to leave the bed.

  Only dawn will enter the empty room.

  The window alone will clothe each thing

  in a tranquil radiance, almost a light, casting

  a gaunt shadow on the upturned face.

  The memories will be clotted shadows

  spread flat as old embers in the hearth.

  Memory will be the flame

  that yesterday still stung the burnt-out eyes.

  A short time after his death we went out to the hills. Along the road were cafés with arbors of reddening grapes, games of bowls, stacks of bicycles; there were farmhouses with clusters of corncobs and cut grass spread out in stacks to dry. It was the landscape he loved—the edge of the city, the verge of autumn. We watched the September night rise on the grassy slopes and the plowed fields. We were all close friends who had known each other many years, people who had always worked and thought together. As happens with those who love each other and are grief-stricken, we tried to love each other more, to protect and take care of each other, because we felt that he, in his mysterious way, had always protected and taken care of us. More than ever, he was present on that sloping hillside.

  Every returning glance keeps a taste of grass, of things infused with evening sun on the beach. It keeps a breath of sea. This vague shadow is like a nocturnal sea, its ancient dreads and shivers skimmed by sky returning every evening. Dead voices resound like the breaking of that sea.

  1957

  II

  mai devi domandarmi (You Must Never Ask Me) was published by Garzanti in 1970 and contains essays written over the previous seven years. I Some hark back to earlier days, for example, “My Psychoanalysis” and “Laziness,” whose context is the bleakness of postwar Rome. Given Ginzburg’s situation at the time—the death of her husband, her aimless, bedazed state and uncertain future—their dry wit is all the more potent.

  Other essays are critical or occasional pieces, represented here by “The Great Lady” and “Film,” and first appeared in the La Stampa, the newspaper where Ginzburg wrote a regular column for some years. (Though Ginzburg’s speculations on Ivy Compton-Burnett’s circumstances in old age, in “The Great Lady,” reflect the truth and coherence of a novelist’s imagination, they are rather wide of the mark in actuality. According to her biographer, Hilary Spurling, Compton-Burnett had many friends, indeed was so sought after that her housekeeper had to “keep callers at bay.” Moreover, she could “radiate an energy, amusement, humor and sympathy that captivated strangers.” And yet Ginzberg astutely surmises that “the great lady” saved her true and tragic voice for her work.)

  This collection also shows the author scrutinizing herself under new aspects: as a reluctant tourist, in “Clueless Travelers,” as a househunter, in “A Place to Live,” and as a grandmother, in “The Baby Who Saw Bears.” Certainly these very funny pieces strike a lighter note than usual, yet in the end they, too, are carried off by the same undertow of restless bewilderment, and by a whiff of tragic destiny.

  laziness

  In October of 1944 I came to Rome to find work. My husband had died the previous winter. In Rome there was a publishing house where he had worked for years. The publisher was away in Switzerland at the time, but the firm had resumed business right after the liberation of Rome, and I thought that if I asked, they would give me a job. The prospect of asking was oppressive, however, because I thought they would be hiring me out of pity, since I was a widow with children to support. I would have liked someone to give me a job without knowing me, on the basis of my skills. The trouble was that I had no skills.

  I had brooded over all this during the months of the German occupation, which I spent in the country, in Tuscany, with my children. The war had passed through there, followed by the usual silent aftermath, until finally, in the quiet countryside with its ravaged villages, the Americans arrived. We moved to Florence, where I left the children with my parents and went on to Rome.

  I wanted to work because I had no money. True, had I remained with my parents I could have managed. But the idea of being supported by my parents was also very oppressive, and besides, I wanted to make a home for myself and my children again. We hadn’t had a place of our own for a long time. During those last months of the war we had lived with relatives and friends, or in convents and inns. Driving to Rome in a car that stalled every half-hour, I dallied with fantasies of adventurous jobs, such as being a governess or covering crime for a newspaper. The major obstacle to my career plans was the fact that I didn’t know how to do anything. I had never taken a degree, having dropped out when I failed Latin (a subject no one ever failed back then). I didn’t know any languages except a little French, and I didn’t know how to type. Aside from caring for my children, doing housework very slowly and ineptly, and writing novels, I had never done a thing in my life. Moreover, I was very lazy. My laziness didn’t run to sleeping late in the morning—I’ve always awakened at dawn, so that getting up was no problem—but to losing an infinite amount of time idling and daydreaming. As a result I had never been able to complete any studies or projects. Applying for work at the publishing house, where they would take me on out of pity and understanding, suddenly seemed the most logical, practical idea, even though I might find their motives painful. Just around that time I had read a wonderful book called Jeunesse sans Dieu, by Odon de Norvath, an author I knew nothing about except that he died young, hit by a falling tree while leaving a movie house in Paris. I thought that as soon as I began work at the publishers I would translate this book I loved so much, and have them bring it out.

  In Rome I took a room in a pensione near the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The pensione’s particular virtue was that it cost next to nothing. I knew from experience that during the war and right after, such pensiones tended to turn into something like barracks or encampments. This one was a cross between a pensione and a boarding school. It housed students, refugees, homeless old people. Every now and then a gong with a deep hollow ring would resound up and down the stairs, summoning people to the telephone. In the dining room, frugal communal meals were taken— Roman cheese, boiled chestnuts, broccoli. In the course of these meals, a little bell would ring from time to time and the manager of the pensione would read aloud some of her thoughts, which were exhortations to simplicity.

  I spoke to a friend who was runni
ng the firm in the publisher’s absence. This friend was short and fat, as round and bouncy as a ball. When he smiled, thousands of tiny wrinkles rippled across his pale, clever, sweet Chinese-baby face. Besides running the publishing firm, he was involved in countless other activities. He said he would take me on part-time, by the hour, and when the publisher returned my position would be defined more clearly. He told me to come to the office the next morning, and also said that in my very pensione lived a girl who worked in the firm, in an administrative position: I could walk to work with her in the morning.

  Back at the pensione, I climbed upstairs to knock at the door of a room two floors above mine. A pretty girl with curly brown hair and red cheeks appeared and I asked if we might walk to work together the next day. She said she had to go to some bank or other and so would be taking another route. She was polite enough, but cool and reserved. I went back down feeling vaguely despondent, overcome by a fatal sense of inadequacy. That girl must have been working for years, maybe forever; her work was administrative and therefore well-defined, necessary, and indestructible. In addition, she had a nine-year-old brother with her, whom she was supporting, while I wasn’t sure if I would be able to support my own children.

  I was restless all night, full of agonizing thoughts. I was convinced that the moment I entered the office everyone would discover the vast sea of ignorance and laziness inside me. I thought of the friend who had hired me, and of the publisher, far off but perhaps on his way back. I had tried to explain to my friend that I had no degree of any kind, I didn’t know English, and couldn’t do anything. He had replied that it didn’t matter, I would find something to do. But I hadn’t told him about my laziness, my vice of slipping into a state of inertia and dreaminess as soon as I was faced with a specific task. I had never before been truly horrified by this vice, but that night I confronted it with fright and profound horror. I had always been a poor student. Everything I had ever begun just remained hanging. Villon’s famous lines echoed in my ears: “Hé Dieu! si j’eusse étudié/au temps de ma jeunesse folle,/et à bonnes moeurs dédié/j’eusse maison et couche molle/mais quoi! je fuyais l’école/comme fait le mauvais enfant...”4