by Anna Banti
What will happen to me if I never in all my life learn to do them right? And what will happen to me if I do? Nonna says that the discipline of the spirit can be seen in one’s handwriting and in the steadiness of one’s hand. A musician, too, must have a steady and precise hand just like a watchmaker, says Nonna. She wants me to color without going outside the lines, too. I can’t understand how Nonna, so shapeless that you don’t know where she begins and where she ends, can think of making me do things of such precision.
Nonna has to have everything handy next to her because to get her upright and walking requires a very strong and calm person. Only Zio Eugenio can do it so she has to wait until he gets home in the evening. My big cousins tried once to lift her. “Come on, Nonna,” they cried. Nonna got frightened because she was sure they were about to let her fall. Zio Augusto can manage it only in moments of great urgency. Nonna says he’s becoming like a woman, always attached as he is to his wife.
After I’d been making O’s, rods, a few words and even a few whole sentences for about an hour, Nonna turns around very slowly in her revolving chair and gropes around on the buffet behind her for Mr. Tommaseo’s Dictionary of the Italian Lan-guage.
I call him Mr. Tommaseo because for a long time I thought he was an old friend of my aunt who came to see her every so often. You see, they sometimes speak in Latin so we can’t understand. It is very important to Nonna that she teach me words and all their meanings. This is the only part of the day, the only part of Nonna and of the world that I care about.
Nonna opens the dictionary at random. I wait for the surprise. Often it opens to the same pages, but Nonna’s mind is like a steel trap, and, in irritation, she shuts the book immediately, ruffles the pages a little, blows on them and opens it again. Let’s say the word “tongue” comes up. Nonna begins a rapid interrogation: “Where is your tongue? Show me it! What tongue do you speak? Do you like ox tongue or do you want to eat a tongue of land? What’s the tongue of a shoe? Is your tongue coated? Does your tongue wag too much?”
She’s like a witch gone crazy! Quickly back and forth in the dictionary she goes, pronouncing her abracadabra. For this reason, too, I say that Nonna is not alone in this room and in this house, because from her revolving chair she gives names to everything in the world. She can never die until all the shoe tongues disappear from fashion and the last tongue of land has sunk.
About an hour and a half or two hours later Giulia returns. Only when someone arrives can I leave the room and go to the entrance hall. Giulia smells like the outside, especially the vegetables she carries. She’s so small and thin that she is lost beneath the two huge shopping bags. Poking out of one are the long loaves of bread and from the other, parsley and other herbs. Today the vegetables and fruit are all wet. Perhaps it rained this morning and I didn’t notice. Since my cousins hung on the drapes and broke the valance and the wooden rod, Nonna keeps the shutters closed so that the neighbors can’t look in. In spite of the expense, we have the electric lights on. Everyone here says that, sooner or later, someone will fix the drapes. Watching rain is the second best thing I like in the world.
Giulia opens all the bags and packages on the dining room table and Nonna checks it all: the weight, the price, the quality. This is the only way, Nonna says, to get by on the money we have. And now, not even twenty-thousand lire a day are enough. “When I was young and teaching school,” says Nonna, “I wasn’t able to do all this. Nearly all my salary went for food. Often we didn’t have a hot meal and you spend much more if you don’t do a hot meal. Fortunately my mother came to live with us and she checked everything as I do now. And then we spent only two-thirds of my salary, even though she meant an extra person.”
Giulia consistently allows them to sell her grated cheese that is rancid. She can’t tell the difference. She says she hasn’t been able to smell for several years. “Luckily,” comments Nonna weighing the mortadella on the scale, “there are a lot of us and we have to buy in quantity, fifty grams a person means nearly three-quarters of a kilo. Percentage-wise, therefore, the weight of the paper liner doesn’t count much. Sometimes they use as many as three liners: wax paper, heavy paper, and then cellophane to make it look nice. When there were just four of us and we didn’t buy large amounts, the weight of the paper counted for more than thirty percent.
I’d like to go into the kitchen to stay with Giulia but she shoos me out. She says she doesn’t want anyone underfoot when she cooks, not even Zia-Nonna, should she want to help or keep Giulia company. Above all, she adds, I should keep in mind that in the forty years that she has been in this house never has any child been underfoot in the kitchen.
Forty years ago she made a pact with Nonna that she would see to everything. She would be housemaid, kitchen maid, and cook, but never a nursemaid. If one of the children enters her kitchen not only does she shoo him or her out, she goes to complain to Nonna immediately: “You know our pact. And you also know why I insisted on it. I raised four of my mother’s kids and when the fifth was born, I had had it. I said, ‘Mamma, I am going out to work as a maid and I’ll give you my whole salary, but I’m done with raising children.’ So if the child says it’s fun to shell peas, I’ll bring her here to you but she can’t do it in the kitchen with me. You know I’ve never wanted anyone in the kitchen and you know why, too....” Standing in the door, she starts her speech all over again, sometimes three or four times over. Her face is beet-red because she’s just left the stove or perhaps because she’s indignant.
She goes on till Nonna gets irritated. If we’ve done the word “tongue” that day, Nonna shouts, “You evil tongue, you!” If we’ve done “tremble,” it’s “Tremble, Giulia!” If our word was “rigmarole,” Nonna says, “Giulia, please, stop it with all this rigmarole.” And if we haven’t done an applicable word, she takes the wooden ruler (for which she has a thousand uses: to teach us to make straight lines, measure cloth, reach under the table for something, draw lines to make music paper for my cousin who is studying piano and solfeggio, scratch her legs, which always itch because of bad circulation) and she raps it impatiently on the table. “Hear, hear!” Giulia says as she disappears into the kitchen. “Hear, hear!” Nonna repeats back and adds, “What a peasant!” or she starts laughing.
The dining room, where Nonna and I pass the day almost completely alone, at two in the afternoon fills up with practically the entire family: Zia-Nonna, who is really my grandmother; Zio Augusto, who fortunately comes home for lunch otherwise Nonna would have to wait for evening to go to the bathroom. She often says she doesn’t want to drink anything so that she won’t have to go to the bathroom. But sometimes she is unquenchably thirsty and then she can’t wait.
Zio Augusto’s wife is expecting another baby. Nonna keeps saying: “I had advised her against it: what if it comes out like Totó?” Then, getting mad, adds, “You know what she wants to name him, the fool? Guess! Guess! She wants to name him Totó. Now if that isn’t inviting bad luck.”
My mother is there, too. She goes back to work at three. Then my six older cousins. Zio Eugenio comes only at night and Zio Augusto has no control over my cousins who make a constant racket and have terrible table manners. “The mother’s fault, poor thing. She was a foreigner and had other customs. In fact, no hot meals were cooked at their house,” comments Nonna. “Perhaps only on Sunday. She used to make a dish she said was Dutch but it was identical to our veal stew with potatoes and carrots. Every other day the children ate sandwiches and milk and as many apples as they wanted, since she always had a basketful. They never sat at the table, everyone got what he wanted when he wanted it.” It’s unthinkable for most of my cousins to stay seated at the table to wait for the second course.
My great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father are not present because my great-grandfather is dead, my grandfather left his wife and children on the pretense of going to Rome to work and my father left my mother before I was born, nobody has ever explained why to me.
“Men,” Non
na says, “are either boring like my husband was, once the honeymoon was over. Just as well I had my teaching. Or they’re crazy like my daughter’s husband or else think only of having a good time like your father.” So I ask Nonna, “What about Zio Eugenio? And Zio Augusto?” “Augusto, don’t you see it, is already so boring. And Eugenio is about to be driven crazy by his kids. How did he ever think of having six and these are modern times. Though I was born before this century began, I had only two! Who knows why they had so many. His wife wasn’t low-born at all, she came from Amsterdam! Perhaps at that time people thought Paradise was about to come to earth, that over the world cornucopias would spill or that the tree of plenty was so tall and well-laden that they could all climb up it without coming to blows. See how your cousins fight over a piece of chocolate?
“And what can I say about the women, poor things? Fewer of them think only of having fun. Almost all of them are tedious, many are mental. But the tediousness of women is different from that of men, I think. It’s much larger and deeper, it’s ancient, ancient like that which comes to me from the crust of the earth. Luckily every so often they go mad. Look how tedious I am, always saying and doing the same things. Still the boredom I cause you is nothing next to that which I bring myself. And I’ve never had a moment of madness, never, in all my eighty-five years.”
After lunch this is how Nonna begins talking with me. They all leave right away and the two of us are alone again. The signal is given by my cousins who push their chairs back noisily, leaving their napkins all bunched up and stained with sauce on the table or on the floor. My mother hugs me and has to leave right away. In exchange she brings me a present every night.
To accommodate so many people, the table has been pulled out and extra leaves added. I sit squeezed against the glass door of the china closet. I am stuck here. Until Giulia comes to clear the table, I cannot move. If I try to get down or to slide under the table, I might hit the glass with my elbow or strike it with my foot, break it and hurt myself. That’s what my cousins would have done. That’s why I was seated there, because I’m not like my cousins. I’m not boisterous and I never break anything.
Giulia takes a long time to get here. She’s first got to put some order in the kitchen, on the table and on the drainboard. If she doesn’t she won’t know where to put the things she clears away from the dining room. Nonna sits opposite me at the other end of the table. We’re far apart but she can’t help but see me. So she chats on to me. The meal energizes her. After eating, she talks continuously until her head nods and she falls asleep.
“I will never go to heaven,” she goes on.
“Can you see me going up to heaven with my weight? I can’t even get to the door to go out of the house. I’d need twenty angels and archangels, stronger than the men who carry the Lilies at Nola’s feastday, to get me up to heaven. Even if I die, I won’t be able to leave this house, let alone this world....
“All the people and all the things in the house are attached to me and carry my imprint. Their souls I have modelled like wax. You’ll see that the day after my death, your grandmother Linda will sit right here, in my very place and will become just like me.
“And in the little next room there’ll always be someone, a monster, like this awful mastiff Moby Dick who pants all day, unable to move at all, foaming saliva and looking out the window. My paralyzed mother was there first, then poor little Totó, now the dog. If Eugenio gets rid of him as he’s promised, if he sells him to that friend of his who lives in the country or even lends him to him, you’ll see, someone else will move in there.
“Your cousins have talked about putting a white mouse farm in there – ‘our fondest dream,’ they say. It would be loads of fun and also practical, according to them, because they could sell them to other kids and to a biological lab where they know a technician. They met him at judo and he said not this year as there is already someone who is supplying them, but next year they can go hunt cats in the alleyways for him. You catch them with a big net like butterflies and then put them in a sack.”
Finally Nonna falls asleep and I play with a six-sided cube puzzle I know almost by heart. What will I do tomorrow? My mother often brings me stupid toys that I don’t know what to do with. I hope tonight Zio Eugenio will fix the balcony drape as he promised he would. I like to look out at the light and especially at the rain. I’d rather look out than go out.
Every afternoon when Giulia has finished putting the kitchen in order, she has to take me out to buy an ice cream so that I can get some fresh air. She doesn’t want me in the kitchen but she doesn’t mind taking me out in the afternoon, especially because Nonna pays for her ice cream, too. I have to hold her hand because there are a lot of cars in the street and a big crowd of people. Giulia’s hand is soft and moist like a sponge, and seems boneless. That’s why I say she’s like a snail that has come out of its shell. In the street she is terrified that something will happen to me.
Once I saw a color TV. Everything in the street resembles what you see on color TV. If Nonna were to buy one, there’d be no need to take me out. Other than for fresh air.
Nonna has only a black and white TV. As soon as I get back home I turn it on to watch cartoons. One of my cousins comes in and lies quietly on the floor stretched out on his stomach. In her intolerable way, Nonna starts in: “What have you accomplished, Corrado? Have you done your homework? Has Anna got back from the gym? Did Anselmo go to the piano teacher’s? Come over here and let me blow your nose! You look so much like poor Ettore. Come, come here next to me....”
It happened exactly as Nonna always said it would. Nonna is dead but it is as if she were not. Zia-Nonna tells the friends who come or telephone to express their condolences that she died of old age. She herself hadn’t realized the end was coming but Giulia told her the morning after Nonna’s death that Nonna no longer wanted milk for breakfast but only a little coffee and this was definitely a sign. At the table Zia-Nonna hadn’t noticed but Giulia also told her that actually Nonna was eating hardly anything at all. In all that confusion at the table nobody could have noticed anyway, except Giulia who found Nonna’s plate full when she cleared the table.
Giulia related, too, that on the last mornings when she put the shopping on the table, Nonna said: “Giulia, please, you check the weight of the prosciutto....” Now, says Giulia, Nonna knew very well that she didn’t know how to read the new scale, the one with a single pan and the needle with the numbers. Giulia only understands the scale with two pans, the one Pippo broke, which had to be replaced, or the old weigh-bridge type, which she knew from practice. How could Nonna, if she were in her right mind, have Giulia work a scale that she didn’t understand. Giulia told her patiently: “But Signora, you know very well that I can’t read this scale!” and Nonna pretended not to have heard and added: “Well, then, is the weight correct?”
The last day, I remember, instead of saying “Let’s find the words in the dictionary,” Nonna said, “Let’s find the little words in the dictionary.” This is what Zia-Nonna would have said, not Nonna. Nonna would never have said that. The word “tongue” came up again but Nonna didn’t notice. Our game lasted much less than usual.
Now, just as Nonna had predicted, it’s my Zia-Nonna who is sitting here. She’s asked for a leave of absence from her job and has announced that she’ll retire as soon as possible. Otherwise, she said, the household could not go on, everything would go to pieces. And it would cost much more than the difference between her salary and her pension.
Before, Zia-Nonna wore brightly colored clothes and bleached her hair. She’s had the hairdresser make her hair gray again and she wears black. No more color on her fingernails or lips.
When Zia-Nonna dies, my mother will have to sit at the table. Then, according to the rule, it would be my turn. But I’m going to leave this house and Naples, too. My only fear is that Nonna may have occupied the whole world. Even the face of the moon, if you see it close up, resembles Nonna.
Unhappily for
me, Zia-Nonna doesn’t play the word game using Mr. Tommaseo’s Dictionary. She tweaks me under the chin instead and always says, “Cutie-pie, cutie-pie!” She spends whole minutes tying bows in my hair. Instead of going out with Giulia, I go out with her in the afternoon. My mother, too, when she was a little girl, went out with the other Nonna who is now dead. Until she got too heavy and her legs gave out.
Translated by Barbara Dow Nucci
* * *
The Electric Typewriter
by
Francesca Sanvitale
The rainy September cast a low, melancholy, beautiful light. Day after day it caused feelings of detachment and separation, even despair, especially at sunset.
For hours Carlo hadn’t moved and had passed the idle afternoon without enjoying the September light. His gaze had shifted from the bookshelves, and slowly moved from one object to another. Like one wretched, depraved, or obsessed, he had stared at the orderly piles of newspapers and magazines on little benches and tables, separated according to a personal work method, and gazed at the flowers in the rugs, the elaborately decorated borders. Everything scrutinized in detail but without thought.
He had been trying to pursue, gather, differentiate and thereby destroy a fog behind his eyes that came out to cloud his glasses. This fog had a peculiar characteristic: it dissolved backgrounds and perspectives and outlined things in dusty lights.
For more than a month he had calmed his aggravating restlessness by devoting the entire afternoon to the observation of his studio and he no longer felt the need to go out.
Iris would come back soon and he was waiting for her. His eyes stopped searching the shadows and were cast outside himself, like an object in a surrealistic painting, towards an imagined door. Everything would return to normal in his sight and in the room as soon as Iris turned the key in the lock. As always she would slam the door carelessly and break into his space. She would open a window and lean out, exposing her fat hips, crying out, “Air! Air!” She would observe with disgust the ash tray full of butts. She would hurriedly question him (“How many pages?” “Have you finished?” “How far did you get?”).
