A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  When love was like fire, time was neither slow nor fast: it no longer existed. We could spend hours entranced, watching the world burn. What others said or did or experienced, we found suffocating; we felt we were breathing and swallowing ashes, practically smothering in ashes. Our mind, or what remained of our mind, drifted dazedly between flames and ashes. We couldn’t do anything except daydream. But our fantasy life was wildly irrational, spinning madly on turbulent ground, and in our rare moments of lucidity it felt very dangerous, as everything is dangerous in the presence of fire. It wasn’t depicting unusual or prodigious events, but rather simple, lifelike ones, and for that very reason it was dangerous—too close to reality, trying to clasp it tight and force it into the shapes of fantasy. The retaining wall between reality and dream was cracked and collapsing. We would find ourselves saying and doing exactly what we had said and done in fantasy. Our words sounded sharp and shrill, our actions were senseless and grievous. We thought our fantasy life was the worst enemy of our real life. It was our dreaming that had made us awkward, solitary, and wretched. It was our dreaming that had made us morbid and paralyzed, bloating our spirit with such huge clouds that it was too heavy to move freely in the real world.

  Looking back on our youth, we remember living through whole long love stories as if on two paths, an imaginary path lush with happy events and a real and desolate path where we knew only sorrow. We suspect that if we hadn’t known such happy events in fantasy, the sorrows of real life might not have been so desolate and profound.

  Our fantasy life, with its profusions of happiness, brought us bad luck. It colonized our actual life, plundering whole provinces and regions. It was as if someone had decreed that since we had already lived through such a happy story in fantasy, there was no need for us to relive it in reality. Looking back on those happy imaginings, we are surprised to discover how lifelike and attainable they were, full of words and incidents that felt real. The only unreal thing about them is that they never happened.

  For long years our fantasy life was calm. Every so often we might glance coolly and absently at its blossoms, drained of color beyond the windowpane of our hurried mornings. Walking down the street alone, now and then we might erect a hasty gallows and climb up, to die with marvelous serenity. Or fling ourselves under a moving train and save a few lives. From the offhandedness of these scenes, it was clear they were superfluous. We were tossing a dash of martyrdom, a dash of blood, into a life devoid of martyrdom. Our fantasies didn’t spring from melancholy but from joy. They weren’t a refuge; they were a vacation.

  So when we try, in old age, to remember what happiness was like, we remember it as a time of calm fantasies. A time when we had natural, limpid relations with others. A time when we never wondered if we were or would be protagonists. We felt physically located in the center of the universe, or rather we occupied the only point in the universe that was right and fitting for us to occupy.

  It was a time when silence and leisure nurtured ideas, not privation and not longings. Our fantasy life was at rest. The occasional imaginary dialogues with people who didn’t much matter, the occasional scenes of death and glory, of trumpets blaring and bells ringing and flags waving, were the light, happy blossoms we carried around with us, in our happiness.

  In old age, we think of everything we have had and will never have again, of everything we’ve done and will never do again, as well as everything we have not been and never will be. In this way, we come to know inexorability. In youth, we knew it only in times of calamity; our daily life was the opposite of inexorable. At the first glimpse of approaching calamity, we would offer our destiny the gift of possible change. When we were bruised by misfortune, our fantasy life would rush in to soothe us the minute we were alone. It thronged our solitary paths with friends; it filled our empty days with promise; voices and whispers rose up out of the silence; even though we alone were uttering the questions and answers, these imaginary dialogues were so comforting that they seemed to come from outside. In old age, inexorability has settled into our daily life. To know the inexorable in daily life means that our mind intimately embraces our death—real, not imaginary.

  In old age, we sometimes get the notion of replacing certain facts in our past by other facts, that is, of emending our lived reality. We realize, then, that we are no longer inventing for the future but for the past, and that in emending the past we are crossing over into a world of things we perceive and know to be impossible. In youth, our fantasy life never crossed over into impossibilities, for whatever unusual and prodigious happenings we might conceive of, somewhere within them always lurked a hope or a thirst or a need or a plea or a genuine longing. In old age, when we emend our past, we plunge abruptly into a fantasy life devoid of hope and devoid of thirst, devoid of any pleading or longing, because one doesn’t plead or long for what is impossible—or more accurately, one does so with the definite sense of desiring, invoking, and touching the void. So we turn away from those fantasies and throw out every emendation. We have a kind of allegiance to whatever has happened. And this allegiance to what has happened leads us to a place that is the polar opposite of our long, drawn-out fantasy life, a place where everything is clear, inexorable, and real.

  May, 1974

  IV

  ginzburg wrote the following impassioned declaration in response to the storm of controversy in Italy and the Italian press over the Serena Cruz adoption case in 1989. As she notes, the case tore the country apart, dividing friends and allies along ideological lines. Her purpose, as stated in an Author’s Note, is “to bear witness to my solidarity” with all the families who were devastated by inhumane and generalized application of the adoption laws—inhumane precisely because generalized.

  The selections below amount to slightly less than half of the original book, which is a brilliant example of polemic filtered through a highly literary sensibility. The omitted passages pertain to technicalities of Italian adoption laws and practices, or are lengthy quotes from leading intellectuals and journalists, or summaries of other cases that outraged Ginzburg, cases of children being snatched from their homes without warning for unjustifiable cause (the parents’ poverty or unusual marital arrangements, for instance), or of wrongful charges of parental abuse.

  The issues raised by the Serena Cruz case were the perfect challenge for one of Ginzburg’s temperament and inclinations. She spent her life painstakingly unraveling the meaning and implications of individual experience, both personally and politically. Inevitably she would find the abstractions so dear to the legal and social work professions profoundly offensive, especially when applied to a specific family. To readers of her novels and essays, her loathing of legalism and bureaucracy and the rigidities they produce could come as no surprise. Nor would her scorn of the “lukewarm” mentality, and the resulting obfuscation and debasement of language which she so deplores.

  The Italian adoption laws are in the process of being revised, partly along the lines Ginzburg suggests, and certainly her book was instrumental in bringing about needed change. According to the new provisions, the principle that a child has a right to be raised in its own family would be strengthened, and the law and its application made more flexible. Social service agencies would no longer be permitted to remove a child from its family simply because of poverty, and families would be notified in advance of pending investigations or legal action. All parties involved would be entitled to legal representation, provided by the state if necessary.

  However, these new rulings are not yet final, and some critics say they are superficial and do not go far enough. Obviously they cannot undo the damage already done to the Giubergia family.

  As far as I could discover, Serena Cruz’s whereabouts after she left the Giubergias were never made public, and none of the Italian journalists I consulted knew what happened to her.

  serena cruz , or the meaning of true justice

  I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither col
d nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

  REVELATION 3 : 15 - 16

  I

  What follows is the story of Serena Cruz as I learned it from the newspapers and from scattered hearsay. Her adoptive parents, who were judged to be illegal, give an entirely different version, which I will relate further on. But I offer here the version I found in the papers, which set me thinking along certain lines. To follow the thread of my thoughts and feelings along the way, I shall limit myself to what I read last spring, in the month of March [1989] to be precise, when the discussion and debate over the Serena Cruz case first began.

  Here is the story given in the papers:

  Serena Cruz was born in Manila, in the Philippines, on May 20, 1986. She was discovered in a garbage can, barely breathing. It is not clear how her date of birth was established. Evidently whoever found her determined that she was just a few hours old. Or perhaps her mother, who didn’t want her and had abandoned her, was traced. The child was entrusted to public welfare and sheltered in an orphanage.

  A year and a half later, toward the end of 1987, Francesco Giubergia, a railroad worker from Racconigi, arrived in Manila. He and his wife had lost a son some years earlier and couldn’t have any more children. Afterward, they had adopted a baby boy in Manila. Now they wished to adopt another child, so that the boy already living with them in their house in Racconigi could enjoy having a brother or sister from his native country.

  They had adopted that first child, called Nazario, when he was seven months old. At the time, he weighed a little over seven pounds and was sick with a lung ailment—a pulmonary infection, the doctors explained—and bone decalcification. Because of this, other couples had rejected him. The Giubergias took him. Once the necessary adoption procedures were completed, they brought him to Italy, to Racconigi, where he made a complete recovery. Now he was three and a half and doing well.

  When Francesco Giubergia returned to Manila in 1987, alone this time, someone told him about a baby girl in an institution, in wretched condition. He visited and found her crowded together with hundreds of other children. When he saw her, he vowed to get her out of there as soon as possible.

  Francesco Giubergia was a man of humble station. Had he been rich, he and his wife would have established residence in the Philippines for eighteen months, as Filipino law now requires of foreigners wishing to adopt a child—a stipulation urged by Cory Aquino. It was not in force earlier, when they adopted the first child. Now it was. How could a railway worker from Racconigi and his wife spend eighteen months in the Philippines? He didn’t have enough money. His wife was a nurse in USL.11 They would both lose their jobs. He was also told that if the baby girl remained in the institution much longer she would die. On January 7, 1988, Francesco Giubergia went to the Italian Embassy in Manila and declared the child to be his daughter, born of his relationship with an eighteen-year-old girl from Manila, Marlene Vito Cruz, a midwife’s apprentice. He had the child entered on his passport.

  He handed over four documents to the Italian Embassy: the baby’s birth certificate, which said she was born at 17 Largit Street in Caloocan, a neighborhood in the Maypajo section on the outskirts of Manila, to Francesco Giubergia, 35, Italian, state employee, and Marlene Vito Cruz, 18, unmarried. An acknowledgement of paternity. A statement by the mother affirming her wish to give up the baby, certified by a notary named Sulpicio Benigno. A certificate from a local court attesting to the qualifications of the notary, Sulpicio Benigno.

  That was the newspaper account.

  The Giubergias, as I said, give a different version: During his first trip to Manila, Francesco Giubergia met a girl and had sexual relations with her. When he went back the second time, it was not to adopt simply any baby, but to take his own daughter home with him, as the young mother had requested. He is now able to produce additional documents confirming that the child is his daughter. It was his mistake not to take the blood test as the judges ordered. Now he says he is willing to take it. His behavior with the judges was naïve and inept, he says, but there was no deception on his part.

  On January 13 Francesco Giubergia returned to Racconigi with the child. Serena Cruz was then twenty months old. The other child, Nazario, was there. The fact that he too was Filipino made everything easier. In her new home, Serena could see a face something like her own, like the faces she had been seeing all along. And so it was easier for her to understand and accept the rest.

  Her name was entered in the town registry as Serena Cruz Giubergia.

  She was a big baby, with a big belly. Her adoptive mother, knowing she was not well, had pictured her as tiny and frail. Instead she seemed fairly robust. Actually, as they and the doctors soon realized, she was bloated. She had wide eyes, round cheeks, and thick black bangs. Her adoptive mother noticed that her ears were pierced, an odd feature in a child whom surely no one had ever paid much attention to.

  In Racconigi the doctors found that she had perforated eardrums, a vaginal infection, and lice in the cavities of her ears.

  During the trip the child had grown fond of her father and at first she rejected her mother. But this lasted only a few days. Very soon her mother became the center of her universe.

  She learned Italian quickly. At first they would hear her constantly repeat a word from her own language, tamanà. But once when her father said tamanà to her, she got upset and hid under the table. Apparently tamanà was some kind of command or prohibition.

  Those twenty months in the orphanage had made her an anxious child. She had nightmares, phobias, peculiar habits. She would hunt for food in bags of garbage. She didn’t want to sleep in a bed, only on the floor. She wanted to wash her hands all the time, as if she was afraid of never being clean enough. She would start with fear each time the doorbell rang. Her adoptive parents tried to reassure her and foster new habits. Everyone who knew them said they were excellent parents, ready to make any sacrifice so that their children would lack for nothing. Since they both worked, they hired a babysitter. A year and a half went by. Serena Cruz loved her parents and was loved dearly by them. She loved her brother. She was a healthy, sturdy little girl now, though at times she still had nightmares, phobias, and anxieties. Everyone in Racconigi knew her. Everyone saw them as a happy family.

  The Giubergias’ small two-story house, which I later visited, is on a quiet street lined with similar houses and surrounded by countryside. It has a small garden. The children would spend whole days playing in the garden—two happy children who got along well. Serena was the assertive one; the boy had a more timid nature.

  The details about the pierced ears, the perforated eardrums, and tamanà I didn’t read in the papers but learned from the Giubergias themselves during my recent visit, which I shall describe later on.

  The Juvenile Court learned of this child who had arrived from abroad and for whom no adoption papers had yet been submitted. On January 23, 1988, the Giubergias were summoned to court. Rosanna Giubergia appeared and said her husband was not feeling well. She told of an adulterous liaison her husband had had in Manila. Francesco Giubergia was summoned again for the twenty-ninth of the same month, and appeared.

  He said the child was his daughter, as he had already told the Italian Embassy. He had had relations with a girl when he was in Manila before, to adopt the first child. Later on, in a phone call from the girl, he learned he was the father of a baby daughter. He hadn’t gone there right away because he didn’t have enough money for the trip. Once he had the money he went and brought the child back to Italy. Her birth mother didn’t want her. She was very young and very poor. That was his account.

  Rosanna Giubergia was summoned to court again, without her husband, and asked how many times her husband had slept with the girl. She said she didn’t know.

  In February, Francesco Giubergia applied to have Serena, his illegitimate daughter, officially listed as a member of his family.

  The Juvenile Court ordered that he take a blood test. On the appointed day, Francesco Giuber
gia did not show up.

  He had hired a lawyer, and this lawyer claimed that the blood test could not be required because the child had been acknowledged by both biological parents, even the mother. Later on he changed lawyers. The new lawyer asked for a postponement. The new lawyer challenged the Juvenile Court’s jurisdiction in the matter of the blood test. The Court rejected his challenge and once again demanded the test. Francesco Giubergia did not appear. He subsequently claimed he hadn’t received the new summons until it was too late. Thus the summer passed.

  On October 27 the prosecuting attorney of the Juvenile Court “on the assumption that Serena would in the future inevitably be removed from the Giubergia family (given the almost certain falsity of identification), requests that the child be placed in a foster family, obviously a family other than the Giubergias.”

  On November 7 the court grants the prosecuting attorney’s request.

  On November 17 the Giubergias are summoned to court and informed that they cannot keep the child. Only at that point, they say, were they alarmed. Before that, they hadn’t thought there was any intention of actually taking her away. The court clerks they had dealt with had always seemed cordial and well disposed. That is what they say. They look back on that day, November 17, as a terrible day….

  In the opinion of the judges, Francesco Giubergia had lied in claiming the child was his daughter, and there was no familial relationship between him and Serena. Therefore, in their opinion, he had failed to notify the authorities. But the law says failure to notify may lead to the forfeiture of guardianship of the child. The judges ruled as if it said must.