A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Still, my father didn’t want me going out alone. The maid was supposed to accompany me to school, since, as he was always saying, “she never did anything anyway.” “It’s on your head if you send her to school alone,” he shouted at my mother, and she assured him that the maid would go with me at all times. She was lying and I knew it. I was aware that my father was told lies now and then; that was necessary, my mother said over and over, because he had “a terrible temper”: the lies gave us all a little breathing space in which to arm ourselves against his numerous commands and prohibitions. I had noticed, though, that while my brothers’ lies had some chance of survival, my mother’s were born sickly, from an inherent weakness, and died out in the space of a day. I myself never lied to my father, simply because I didn’t have the courage ever to address a word to him: I lived in holy dread of him. If he happened to ask me something, I answered so faintly as to be inaudible, and he would shout that he couldn’t hear me. Then my mother would tell him what I had said, and my words, in my mother’s voice, sounded pathetic. I would give that broad, stupid smile, the smile that spread over my face when I quivered with fear and with the shame of my fear.

  I was sure my father would promptly discover that no one was taking me to school. As a rule, his anger would lash out at my mother’s lies with gale force. I hated being the cause of my parents’ quarrels; it was the one thing in the world I hated and feared the most.

  Thus far I had led a charmed life, before going to school. It was definitely the life of a hopeless case, but how I loved looking back on it. I would get up late and take long, very hot baths, disobeying my father, who insisted and believed that I took cold baths all year round. I would linger over my fruit and bread, and then settle down to reading, scrunched up on the floor with my piece of bread. Of all the awful catastrophes that might befall me, I often thought, one was that my father might decide to stop working at his institute, where he spent his days in a gray laboratory smock, and instead would bring everything home, his smock, his microscope, and the slides he pored over, and then my entire morning routine would be forbidden, from the hot baths to the bread I nibbled on the floor while I read. I wasn’t studious. My father took no interest in my studies since, as he often stated, he had “enough on his mind.” He was, on the contrary, preoccupied with the education of one of my brothers, who was a few years older than I and “had no ambition whatsoever,” which made my father “lose the gleam in his eye.” From time to time my mother would inform him that I “didn’t grasp arithmetic,” but this information failed to rouse him. Still, as a matter of principle he would thunder against “laziness.” My mornings were pure laziness—I knew it and brooded over it as I munched bread and read novels, vaguely guilty and profoundly contented.

  When my teacher arrived I stood up bemused, with pins and needles in my knees; I joined her at the table and handed her my unfinished, incorrect homework. She would get angry and yell, but I wasn’t afraid; accustomed as I was to my father’s rages, Miss Tedem’s shouts were like the cooing of doves. I studied her felt hat, her pearls, her silk scarf; neither her chignon speared with tortoiseshell hairpins nor her purse lying on the table, very like my mother’s purse, could inspire the least shiver of fear. It was my father’s features that evoked terror: his furrowed brow, his freckles, his narrow cheeks, wrinkled and hollowed, his bristling, curly eyebrows, his grim red crew cut.

  My life changed abruptly when I started school. I had just learned to tell time—till then I had never needed to know what time it was. Now, when I woke up I checked the clock a million times, both the alarm clock on the night table and the huge clock on the street corner just opposite my window. I hated those two clocks. My life was gradually being taken over by things I hated. On waking, I would roll up the blinds with a vast melancholy, to gaze out at the street that awaited me, still dark and deserted, the clock lit by a dim streetlamp. I had to go to school by myself: thus my mother had decreed. I could have told my father, but I quickly banished that notion in dread. The ensuing storms would overwhelm me. Strangely enough, my mother’s lie about the maid going with me held up—one of her rare lies endowed with vital force.

  I hated the porcelain washbasin in my room, where I washed carelessly and inadequately, fiddling around with the cold bar of soap; I hated going out in the hall and possibly meeting my father on the days he was late, and hearing his unflattering exclamations about my appearance: my dressing gown, which he found ridiculous, my dazed face, my pallor. He hurled these comments at my mother, who was still in bed and answered in a plaintive stammer. My great worry was that he might linger at home long enough to see me leaving by myself. With relief, I would watch him wrap himself in his enormous raincoat, tug his beret down on his fiery crew cut, and slam the glass-paned door on his way out, leaving it to tremble in his wake. In the dining room the light was on, the signs of his passage still evident: the smell of his pipe, the teapot on the table, the little tube of anchovy paste and a piece of gorgonzola on a flowered plate, his chair shoved aside and his napkin tossed against the teacup. I found his habits odious; I couldn’t see how he could possibly eat gorgonzola at the crack of dawn. I would swallow two sips of tepid caffelatte; my mother wanted me to “get down something hot” before I went out. The maid gave me a small package containing bread and butter and anchovies, which I stuck in my coat pocket. My mother called that “a little snack” to have during the mid-morning recess.

  “Did you get down something hot?” she would ask from bed. I didn’t answer; I punished her with a cold silence. I punished her for sending me to school alone, for buying me a leaky fountain pen, for making me wear a coat she considered “still good” and I considered ghastly; I punished her because she said “little snack,” because she said “ginasio” with only one “n,” and because she didn’t have a “visiting day” as all my classmates’ mothers did, as I had lately discovered to my profound chagrin. I punished her; I left without kissing her good-bye.

  “Have something hot before you leave” and “don’t talk to anyone on the street” were the two things my mother kept repeating over the course of the day. The street, shrouded in mist, was fittingly silent and hostile. I wanted to run but didn’t: I was very early and would have been the first to arrive at school, and besides, I was afraid of looking ridiculous. I walked, carrying my school bag and my atlas. Twenty times my shoelaces came undone and twenty times I stopped to tie them. When I got to the avenue I waited for a long time before crossing, since I could never find the right moment, all the while thinking how if I were run over by a tram, maybe even killed, my mother would lament her gross negligence for the rest of her life. From what I could surmise, it was my sister who had convinced her to send me to school by myself, maybe by telling her I was “such a hopeless case” and had been raised “as cloistered as a nun.” I had often heard my sister’s harsh criticism of my upbringing. I didn’t resent my sister for this: all my resentment was directed at my mother, who had turned me into a hopeless case and then cast me out on the streets.

  At school, there was no friendly face to welcome me, for I hadn’t yet made any friends. This I found inexplicable. I couldn’t tell if my coat was to blame, or my beret, or what. My coat had big green and black checks; my mother said it was English wool, but I couldn’t have cared less about English wool: it was old and I’d been wearing it for three years; it was short, so that several inches of my skirt stuck out, but this was true of other girls as well. My yellow angora beret was new and expensive, but possibly comical—I wore it flattened down over one ear. My stockings were all wrong. They were brown, made of ribbed cotton; the other girls wore either short white socks, if they were younger or smaller than I, or else sheer silk stockings. My mother said she didn’t like young girls wearing women’s stockings and my sister agreed. Still, my ribbed cotton stockings were all wrong because no one else wore them; later on I saw one girl wearing them, but she was in another class; in my class no one had stockings like that, as I tirelessly repeated
to my mother when I got back home. She replied that she had bought several pairs and could hardly “toss them out,” a reply that struck me as the height of idiocy.

  The only person at school who seemed to notice my existence was the teacher—tall, old, slightly stooped, rosy-cheeked, with a goatee. I idolized him from the very first day, because when my pen rolled near his desk and I went to pick it up, he smiled at me. My love for him was drenched in fear. On occasion he would erupt with rage, screaming because the class was noisy; he pounded his fists on the desk and the ink stand shook. And yet my fear didn’t seem to rise from his fits of rage, but from something else, I wasn’t sure what. He was totally in charge here: it was his blackboard, his chalk, his map of Italy hanging behind him; those objects poisoned him and he poisoned them: his white linen handkerchief and his goatee exuded terror.

  I was aware that he knew my teacher, Miss Tedem, and that she had spoken of me, so perhaps he was kind because I had been “recommended” and not out of genuine liking. Yet his kindness, even if clouded by this suspicion, won me over anyway and comforted me. I made up my mind to study for him. It grieved me that he had to see me alone and friendless at my desk, alone during the lunch break, that every morning he had to gaze out at my isolation. I would have liked to appear triumphant, happy and radiant for him, just as I would have liked to hand in perfect homework. My isolation and my ignorance seemed to merge, forming a single and terribly heavy burden, a combination of guilt and disgrace that I dragged behind me wherever I went and would never be free of.

  I came to the conclusion that no one was making friends with me because of the notorious “visiting day.” My classmates’ mothers each had a specific “visiting day,” when they had the other mothers over for tea and cakes while the children played and drank hot chocolate. My mother had no such “visiting day” and had never had one. Her friends turned up at odd times and she received them wherever she happened to be—in her room, or on the balcony, or in the ironing room, where they would sit around the table and chat with the seamstress who came for the day. She rarely served her friends tea. She didn’t know my classmates’ mothers and showed no interest in meeting them. At school the girls would talk about those afternoons: I heard discussions of the cakes, the hairdos and clothes of the various mothers, the furnishings of the various living rooms, discussions that made me feel totally at a loss. I knew nothing about furniture or hairdos, and besides, neither I nor my mother, alas, would ever be invited to those houses. I wasn’t even sure I wanted my mother to take part in the teas, for she might well come out with some sudden shameful revelations—that we weren’t religious, or that we were antifascists. I had suffered since earliest childhood from my family’s lack of religion, but I had always been quite proud of the fact that we were antifascists. Now this too was coming to feel like one more wretched complication.

  Twice a week I had to return to school in the afternoon for gym. The first time, I went to gym wearing my usual clothes, and the gym teacher, an old lady with a huge, shaggy gray hat, told me that I had to come “in uniform.” The next time, my mother went to see her and explained that I wasn’t enrolled in the Fascist Youth Movement and didn’t have a uniform. The teacher told her I still had to wear a black pleated skirt and a white piqué blouse for gym, and said she could find the proper skirt and blouse in a store on Via Bogino, where they sold uniforms for the Fascist Youth. The words “Via Bogino” alarmed and distressed me. My mother went to Via Bogino one morning on her own; she reported that when she asked for the blouse and skirt, the saleswoman said, “For a girl in the Fascist Youth, right?” My mother quickly replied, “No, no, it’s for gym class,” and the saleswoman gave her a dirty look.

  “For a girl in the Fascist Youth, right?” “No, no, it’s for gym class,” I would mutter to myself angrily. I imagined this exchange inevitably ricocheting from Via Bogino all the way back to my school. With loathing, I put on the black pleated skirt and the piqué blouse: the skirt was exactly the same as the ones my classmates wore on gym days, but my blouse didn’t have the Fascist party insignia all the other girls had sewn above the little pocket. My whole life I had longed to fight fascism, to dash through the city with a red flag and to sing, covered with blood, on the barricades. Oddly enough I didn’t renounce these dreams, and yet the thought of going into gym class without the insignia, confronting the teacher’s sullen face under her huge hat, was a painful humiliation.

  The hours spent in gym class were the most dreadful of my life. I couldn’t climb up the poles, nor could I jump. I wasn’t athletic: at home I had been told time and again that I “wasn’t athletic,” and now, with the pole before me, I felt I was made of lead. When I was very young I used to go to a gymnastics class—Swedish gymnastics—and I was the best of all. How far away were those happy days! The teacher with the huge hat handed each of us two little barbells to take home so we could exercise there too, in front of the mirror. We were supposed to swing the barbells in a circle and say, “Twirl, twirl, circle, four.” What loathsome words! They echoed inside me drearily all day long, relentlessly reminding me of the huge, gray shaggy hat shaped like a cylinder, the sullen mouth that hated me and that I hated, because I turned right when I should have turned left, because I didn’t have the insignia, because at the gymnastics display held in the stadium at the end of the year I would disgrace her, as she had warned me. I would heap shame on both our heads.

  One morning, as I stood on the avenue waiting for the right moment to cross, a man rose up out of the fog and greeted me. He was a short, rosy-cheeked man with a big drooping white mustache. I mistook him for an acquaintance of my father’s, one Professor Sacchetti, who I knew lived in this neighborhood, so I greeted him in return. He took my arm and crossed the street with me. He asked how old I was. Then he asked a very odd question. He asked, “Do you have a papa?” I realized he couldn’t possibly be Professor Sacchetti; my father’s image suddenly loomed before me, immense and furious. I was walking arm in arm with a stranger. Yet I didn’t dare to disengage myself and I kept walking, politely holding his arm. He gave off a strong smell of cologne and he wore gray wool gloves with snaps. A few steps from the door of the school, he raised his hat to me and receded into the fog. One of my classmates, a girl with blonde bangs, asked who was that man I was walking with. I told her I’d never seen him before. Was I out of my mind, she said, walking arm in arm with a total stranger? She said it was wrong of my mother to send me to school all alone. The words “wrong of your mother” wounded me to the core. This girl always came to school with a maid and a cousin. For her mother, the maid hardly counted. She insisted on the cousin as well. I had no girl cousins. I envied everything about this girl, her blonde bangs, her starched collar with the blue ribbon, her great prudence, her father who was an army officer, the inscribed portrait of Prince Umberto in her living room. I’d never seen the portrait, but I had heard it mentioned by girls who’d been to her house.

  A bitter remorse swept over me. I had done what my mother always told me not to do. I had “talked to a stranger.” I was horrified to recall our conversation, so polite and subdued. I had had several frightening encounters in the past, in the public gardens and at the movies, but right now there was nothing quite so incomprehensible as those gloves with the snaps and that genteel mustache.

  I stared at the teacher explaining the lesson: in his rosy cheeks and his wrinkled, white-haired temples I could see some faint resemblance to the man with the white mustache.

  The strange thing was that I couldn’t possibly tell my mother I had walked and talked with that man. It struck me that my conversations with my mother, since I started going to school, had become so offhand and depleted that they left no room for entire sentences. My tone with her was contemptuous, stinging, and terse. There was simply no way, in that stinging tone, to confess to a mistake or ask for help.

  I should have stripped away my scorn. But to strip it away even for a moment was unthinkable—it encased me like a straitjacket.
What on earth had happened to me, I wondered. How had I suddenly come to scorn my own mother?

  I thought of confiding in my sister. My sister was married and lived in another city, but she sometimes visited on the weekends. She and my mother would sit and talk in the living room, and often my mother would weep: it grieved her that my sister had left home. She felt all alone, old and useless. My sister would comfort her. I felt excluded from all of this; if I came in, they told me to go away. I didn’t like seeing my mother weep so often. This, I thought, was what made me scorn her: those tears, which spread insecurity and gloom through my life. If I wished to speak to my sister, I would have to call her into my room. This was far too difficult. I stared straight into my isolation: there wasn’t a person in the world I could readily speak to about the white mustache.

  I decided I would run to school every day. I saw him there all the time, every morning, standing at the corner, facing the avenue: tranquil, rosy-cheeked, courteous, with his dark overcoat, his silk scarf, his hat raised in greeting. I dashed past him, running like a hare. Panting for breath, I took refuge in the doorway of the school. I would see him again when school was out. Then, after a while, I didn’t see him anymore. He disappeared.