Lost Words

by Nicola Gardini

  All she saw was a mass of individuals struggling and barely managing to speak the same language. She saw a population, not a popolo. Please, please, please!—let’s not confuse the country with the state. There never was a state. It’s nothing but fumo—smoke and mirrors! Back then some imbeciles went around waging war on the state, planting bombs, but they didn’t realize they were attacking a phantom. Instead there was a country. The country had a geographic grandeur. With bombs you could only hope to destroy the soil of Italy. She thought it was appropriate that Italy, the land of the downtrodden, was shaped like a boot. The so-called Italians were the inhabitants of this spectacular boot, just like lice or other parasites that nest in discarded shoes in the attic. What I needed to understand—she stressed—was that Italy, unlike France or England, did not recognize a true connection between the political constitution and the people. The 1948 Constitution, in literary terms, was excellent. But the people? Awful! Why? Because the Constitution was a gift to them from a minority of thinkers who had fought against the war and against fascism. The Italians themselves didn’t really earn it. The Italian Constitution was an ideal, something to hope for, but not something real. And this awful population would never live up to this ideal. They would only get worse. What kind of future could you expect when the fascist party still managed to be the fourth largest political party in 1972? What will the boot look like in twenty, thirty, forty years? Ah, she wouldn’t be around to see. But I would. And what would I see? A mass of idiots, materialists, and mangioni—parasites! A freak show. Corruption would be rampant, fascism would come to dominate hearts and minds once again. People would forget how to think. Well, not everyone, and the few who were still capable of thinking would be forced to leave the country, or assimilate, if they wanted to get anywhere. Those who stayed would become cynical social-climbers, betraying their own intelligence. So let the school keep spinning its lies. One day I would get it.

  And although I didn’t understand everything she said, with all those English words scattered here and there, hearing the foreign sounds gave me an immense pleasure, even more than the already great pleasure of discovering such a different way of reasoning and understanding things. English made me feel refreshed, or rather uplifted, into the true dimension in which the Maestra had made me believe my life was destined to unfold.

  I threw myself headlong into studying the vocabulary and rhetoric of Shakespeare’s language, which was taught very badly at school, if at all. Every day I tried to memorize dozens and dozens of expressions, often repeating them to myself over and over, even in bed, reciting them with my prayers before falling asleep. After a while I started using them around the house, to answer my mother—who would look at me with perplexity and irritation—or to translate her responses into English. I began to punctuate my speech with expressions like “of course,” “well,” and “indeed.”

  At my request, tea with the Maestra became a language class: not without occasional digressions. She strove to correct not only my grammar and pronunciation but also my way of seeing the world. She would sit in the low armchair while I was at the table, in front of my India bowl filled with yellow custard. “Let’s begin,” she would say. And we would begin.

  Much of the lesson was dedicated to learning vocabulary. The Maestra would look up words I didn’t know in one of her many dictionaries and read me the definition. I quickly learned how to tell her in English what had happened that day at school, describing my teachers and classmates, or talking about my parents, the only people the Maestra never allowed herself to criticize. Nevertheless, by her very nature she represented a complete, radical critique of everything I had learned from them.

  She often interrupted me to comment, to probe—without the least malice—to correct me, or to ask me for an explanation when I expressed myself poorly. If I didn’t understand something, she would say, “Would you like me to repeat the question?” with delicacy and grace, savoring the honeyed tones of her own voice. And that honey blended like wildflowers in a spring meadow with all the adventures and encounters of her mysterious life, in an indefinable accent that was both foreign and familiar, and actually more than familiar, dripping from my ears down into my heart. And I prayed that the Maestra would continue to speak with me like that forever, while I jotted down in my notebook every detail of a life I hadn’t lived, a life she was bequeathing to me through her words.

  “What’s your name?” she asked me one afternoon. I thought I had misunderstood the question. The Maestra already knew my name. But she insisted: “Do tell me your name. What is your name?” Although I was used to her unpredictability, I was completely confused.

  “My name is Chino,” I reminded her.

  “Are you sure? Chino must be a nickname. I’d love to know your real name . . .”

  I had to admit that my real name was different. It was Luca. But no one ever called me that. Satisfied, she explained to me that Chino literally pulled you down. It meant “bent toward the ground.” Chino—and to explain this she shifted to Italian—and it was the posture of a farmhand. Chino was the head of an old man who had received bad news . . . “Go ahead, look it up in the dictionary . . .” She preferred Luca. She said that, although the etymology was different, my name was similar to luck.

  “Luca,” she repeated, “The Son of Luck.”

  *.

  My mother didn’t know what to say—only, with a somber air: “Go upstairs to see Riccardo. He needs you.” For the first time I wasn’t allowed to go to the Maestra. I conveyed the news to her over the intercom. “How disappointing,” she sighed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  The Lojaconos’ apartment was a corner unit with one bedroom. I knocked softly and right away they opened the door. It was the first time I had been inside. In the doorway I was greeted by three embroidered flowers enclosed in a frame, and a porcelain dish with the words, “Guests are like fish. After three days they stink,” and a trout painted in the middle. The wall around the telephone was decorated with postcards. The air was stagnant with the smell of hot soup and damp laundry hanging to dry.

  Signora Lojacano was perfectly still. She appeared wet and shriveled from head to toe, as if she had just emerged from a flood of tears. She had the face of someone with a bad cold. I noticed for the first time that she had two beautiful blue eyes, which she had passed on to her son Riccardo, but right now she looked more like his grandmother. “Go on in,” she encouraged me.

  I went down the hall and stopped at the door to his bedroom. Riccardo’s voice invited me in. The room was sunken in darkness—the shutters were closed. I made my way to his big bed. “Can you see me?” he asked. I could barely make out his profile, his naked arms on the bed-sheets, the shape of his head against the pillow. His eyes and other facial features remained in the darkness. I lowered my gaze to the tassels of the satin bedcover, which were illuminated by the yellow light coming in from the hall, and I prayed to God to get me out of there as quickly as possible.

  “Man did I ever take a beating,” he muttered.

  I could hear him fumbling with the light switch hanging next to the crucifix. Before turning it on he warned me, “Try not to get upset.” He flicked the switch and in the cone of light you could see two half-closed eyes, all black-and-blue, a mouth covered with cuts, a broken nose . . . He was unrecognizable. I couldn’t even reconstruct his ruined features into a human face . . . His lips were swollen into a weird smile. One of his front teeth was missing. His split upper lip was stained with fresh blood.

  “They hit me everywhere, Chino. My head, my back . . . it went on and on. At one point they even used a crowbar . . .”

  “Who did this to you?” I found the strength to ask. He started coughing and couldn’t stop. “The fascists!” he said, in a strangled voice. “They nabbed me in Piazza Medaglie d’Oro, in broad daylight. They jumped in my car when I was stopped at a traffic light and pointed a gun at me. Where the fuck are the pol
ice when you need them? . . . I felt like I was having a nightmare. We drove out of Milan. I don’t know which road we took . . . I was shitting my pants . . . The only thing I remember is at one point, after I’d been driving for a while, we got off the highway and were in the open countryside . . . We turned down a dirt road . . .”

  He stopped speaking. His eyes filled with tears and his upper lip shook, puffy and red. Slowly and with great difficulty, he pulled the covers off all the way down to his legs. His naked body was covered with marks from the beating. His right side was as black as coal, his upper body a patchwork of purple bruises. My eyes came to rest on his hairy crotch and I immediately looked away. But Riccardo wanted me to see.

  “Take a good look,” he insisted.

  He lifted his scrotum. Some punches had even been landed down there. He pulled the sheet back up very slowly and started coughing again. His mother ran in with a glass of water. “Drink, drink . . .” she said, lifting his head from the pillow. She sat next to him on the bed.

  “Are you ready for your medicine?” she asked him quietly. She patted his forehead and left us alone again. I stared at his face the way you might look at a lifeless object, an expressionless mask. Riccardo understood my repulsion. “You’re shocked, huh? Don’t worry. It’ll go away . . .”

  Signora Lojacono came back holding a small brown bottle. “People are crazy, Chino,” she explained. “Don’t listen to anyone! Not a soul! Look at what they did to my son . . . Now be a good boy and get along home to your mother.”

  *.

  “I spent my youth convinced that if I knew the exact meaning of words, it would unlock my understanding of things. I loved difficult words, obscure words, foreign words. Not neologisms, which aren’t real. I had my own cult for dictionaries. Maybe all young people, whether they realize it or not, love dictionaries—I’d go so far as to say that children are the ideal lexicographers. They don’t know the language of the community very well because they still think that meanings exist independently of people. You could write a fairy tale about it: Once upon a time there was a meaning . . . and then? What happens to this meaning? . . . Let’s say it meets a little girl. And the little girl misunderstands it, that is to say, she believes it. A while later she discovers that the meaning doesn’t only signify what it claims. One night she sees it in the company of a few adults and realizes that it behaves in a questionable manner—like a mother who says she’s only your mother but later turns out to be the mother of many other children, and as a matter of fact, the meaning wasn’t a meaning at all. It was a word. Meaning, by itself, doesn’t exist! A word is a meaning that comes into contact with people and assumes a variety of appearances. Everyone sees a little of themselves in it, everyone understands what they can or what they want to understand. Bello, ma . . .! A mother can be the mother of many children, even if each of them will say that she’s his or her mother … I know—it’s a bad fairy tale … One day I realized that I was the hero of this fairy tale. Yet there are people who have a lifelong belief in the absolutely perfect correspondence between words and meanings. Lucky them!—I don’t, I’m sorry—some writers are that way, whether they express themselves in prose or poetry. In Italy, Pascoli, Gadda, and Landolfi are writers of meanings. For them, the word serves to indicate a precise meaning, and is indeed the meaning itself, which by itself is indescribable, undefinable. If you seek to define it you end up destroying it, as Shelley said about the rose, which, ‘if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed.’ Writers of words are of a different breed: they think in sentences. The meaning stems from the sum of the words, the relations that words establish with each other: taken individually they say very little, because they need the others to signify. For other writers—Woolf, Stendhal, T.E. Lawrence—the meaning emerges from the chain of relations between words, from the discourse, and these writers, unlike the others, require a listener. They require answers. For the first type, the meanings themselves are answers! Every word, for writers of words, has meaning because it is connected to another word—and not to just any word. Every word has a predisposition to sympathize with one word rather than another. Every word has its own destiny, which is fulfilled in the sentence. And a word doesn’t function only in the construct of the sentence. It also functions in relationship to certain hidden words that are not written down, invisible words like ghosts, impalpable but as present as shadows: words that have already been written by someone else and now are evoked by the words that we put down on paper. There are sentences, chains of words that ripple beneath the surface of the page and descend into remote depths where our conscience is unable to plunge, even in moments of great acuity. The writers of words are actually readers. The writers of meanings are more similar to scientists, anatomists, or botanists. They catalog. The others collect and forget to classify their findings, because they prefer to scatter around the house whatever they come up with, even at the risk of losing something—what an enviable freedom! If only I . . .”

  After a long pause, she related that when she was young, when she lived in India, she had compiled a dictionary of the English language. She revealed this to me almost accidentally, without dramatizing this extraordinary confession, as if it had escaped her. I begged her to tell me more.

  “The children of the village needed a study aid . . .” she started to explain, shrugging her shoulders, “as well as a few ideas . . .” When she uttered the word “ideas,” she suddenly came alive. “Writing a dictionary even for the ordinary purposes I had assigned myself was an immense enterprise!” she said, jumping to her feet. “A most wonderful enterprise! You have the eyes of the past and the future upon you . . . I was obviously not the first person to try my hand at one: over the centuries other individuals—not that many, in the end—tried to gather all the words in a book, with only the help of a copyist . . .” She approached the tall walnut bookshelf and started to flip randomly through her Webster’s. “And, let us not forget, I was a woman, making my enterprise all the more exceptional. A woman who collects and defines words! Unprecedented! Yet a legend tells us that it was a woman who invented the Latin alphabet: Carmenta, the mother of Turnus, Aeneas’ enemy . . . Sometimes I think the Trojans are like the Jews and the Romans are like the Arabs . . . The Egyptian god of writing was also a woman. You can’t imagine the kind of people who occupy themselves with gathering the lexical heritage of a nation! You find the strangest characters. Can you believe that one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, that monument to British lexicography, the dictionary of all dictionaries, was criminally insane, literally—and what’s more, an American! I won’t tell you his fate . . . The same fate as Attis, from the poem by Catullus! He was eventually deported to America, where I visited his grave.”

  She sat back down and spoke to me about Doctor Johnson, about the hoary-haired James Murray, about a word that was not included in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary because a slip of paper—on which the entry had been written—fell behind a pile of books . . . She told me that she wanted to imitate the style of Doctor Johnson, although her own goals were quite different. In fact, the perpetuation of the English language and its phonetic and semantic stabilization mattered little to her. What mattered to her was the circulation of a few essential ideas, and she knew that once these ideas began to spread, they would make her dictionary perfectly useless, in the same way that a magic formula becomes useless once it has performed the intended transformation.

  “And where is it?” I asked her.

  “What? My dictionary? . . . I have no clue . . . Lost somewhere, I suppose.”

  *.

  I told her we had read some articles from the “Corriere della sera” at school. Signorina Salma believed that newspapers were even more important than books, because they tell you how life really is.

  “Nonsense!” the Maestra thundered. “Journalism is the death of thinking and language, Luca. What do journalists do? They create op
inions. Doxa, as the ancient Greeks called it. We shouldn’t listen to them. We don’t need opinions! We need ideas! . . . We need para-doxa, the opposite of opinions! Are you following me?” Here she paused for an instant, then, smiling, she resumed her explanation as if a revelation was at hand. “I stopped reading newspapers at an early age and, following in the footsteps of my friend Herodotus, I went out into the world to see how it turns and what ideas move it . . . And I saw what no newspaper could ever report . . . We need dictionaries, not newspapers . . .”

  She was deep in thought. A shadow passed over her face.

  “Dictionaries are everything, Luca,” she resumed, solemnly. “Everything! I’m not exaggerating . . . What is history if not a collection of words? The words we have been repeating for centuries, or perhaps for only a few years. The important thing is to realize that words do not belong to one person in particular, they belong to everyone. Only the poets, the great writers, have the power to restore the quality of something exclusive to the work—a personal asset. ‘Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle’—So dear to me was this lonely hill. Everyone knows Leopardi’s L’infinito by heart, or at least they should. Let’s take ‘ermo’—was there ever a word that was more typical of him? But Leopardi knew that words weren’t private property. We all borrow them. Even Leopardi. Even Shakespeare, who invented so many of them. Comunque, he took many of his words from the language of the people. The fact that they make their first appearance in the English language in his works does not make them his exclusive property. For example, the word ‘accommodation’ appears for the first time in Othello, but it was already being spoken.” After a short pause, she added, her eyes growing moist, “Dictionaries teach us democracy. They’ve taught you what democracy is at school, haven’t they?”

  “Yes . . .” I answered.

  “And what have they taught you? . . . No one can understand the deeper meaning of the word ‘democracy’ if they don’t love their language. The meaning of democracy grows out of the love of the languages we speak and the languages we learn . . . ‘To be one of the many’ . . . I wouldn’t know how else to define it . . . This is what democracy is . . . Do you understand?”