The Little Virtues

by Natalia Ginzburg

  ‘Who are the others and who are we?’ we wonder. Sometimes we stay alone in our room for a whole afternoon, thinking; with a vague feeling of dizziness we wonder whether the others really exist at all, or if it is we who have invented them. We say that perhaps when we are not there all the others cease to exist and disappear in an instant; and miraculously reassemble, suddenly appearing from the earth, as soon as we look at them. Isn’t it possible that one day when we turn round unexpectedly we shall find nothing, no one, and be left staring into emptiness? And so there’s no reason, we say, to get so upset about the others’ contempt, because perhaps the others don’t exist and therefore think neither about us nor about themselves. While we are absorbed in these dizzying thoughts mother comes and suggests we go out for an ice-cream; and we feel inexplicably happy, excessively happy, thinking about the ice-cream that we are going to eat in a little while; and however has the prospect of an ice-cream made us so happy we wonder, we who are so adult, with our dizzying thoughts, who are so strangely lost in a world of shadows? We agree to mother’s suggestion, but we are careful not to show her how happy we are about it; our lips are sealed as we walk to the cafe with her.

  Though we constantly tell ourselves that perhaps the others do not exist, that it is we who have invented them, we inexplicably continue to suffer from the contempt shown to us by our schoolfellows, and from our heaviness and clumsiness which we ourselves find shamefully contemptible; when others talk to us our face feels so ugly and shapeless that we want to cover it with our hands; and yet we are always daydreaming that someone will fall in love with us, that he sees us in the café while we are having an ice-cream with mother, that he secretly follows us home and writes us a love-letter; we wait for this letter and every day we are extremely surprised that we haven’t received it yet; we have murmured its phrases so often that we know them by heart, and when this letter does arrive we really shall have a marvellous mystery that is nothing to do with home, a secret intrigue whose ramifications are entirely outside the house; because we have to confess that at the moment our mystery is a poor thing and that behind the stony mask which we offer to our parents for their goodnight kiss we are hiding very little; after that kiss we hurry to our room while our parents whisper suspicious questions about us.

  In the morning we go to school after having stared concentratedly at our face in the mirror: our face has lost the soft delicacy of childhood; now we think regretfully about childhood and when we made little heaps of earth and our only unhappiness was when there was quarrelling in the house: now they do not quarrel so often in the house—our elder brothers have gone off to live their own lives, our parents have become older and quieter; but now we don’t care about the house; we walk to school alone in the mist; when we were little mother came to school with us and came to collect us; now we are alone in the mist and terribly responsible for everything we do.

  God has said ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’. This seems absurd to us; God has said something absurd, he has imposed on man something that is impossible to carry out. How can we love our neighbour when he despises us and won’t let us love him? And how can we love ourselves—disgusting and heavy and gloomy as we are? How can we love our neighbour who perhaps doesn’t exist and is only a crowd of shadows while God has created us, only us, and placed us on an earth that is a shadow where we live on our dizzying thoughts? We have believed in God since we were little, but now we think that perhaps he doesn’t exist, or he exists and doesn’t care about us because he has placed us in such cruel circumstances, and so for us it is as if he didn’t exist. Then at table we refuse some dish we particularly like and we pass the night stretched out on the rug in our room in order to mortify ourselves and punish ourselves for our hateful thoughts, and be loved by God.

  ‘But God does not exist’ we think, after an entire night shivering on the floor with our limbs numbed by cold and sleep. God does not exist because he could not have invented this absurd, monstrous world, this complicated contrivance in which a human being walks alone in the fog each morning, between high houses inhabited by his neighbour who does not love him and who is impossible to love. And that monstrous inexplicable race who are of a different sex from us and who possess a terrible ability to do everything good and everything evil to us, who have a terrible secret power over us, they are also our neighbour. Could we ever be attractive to that other race, we who are so despised by our companions of our own sex, who are considered to be so boring and empty, so useless and clumsy at everything?

  Then one day it happens that the most admired, the most sought after of all our school-fellows, the top of the class, suddenly becomes friends with us. How this has come about we do not know. She suddenly fixed her blue eyes on us, walked home with us and began to think well of us. In the afternoon she comes to our house to do her homework; in our hands we hold the precious exercise book belonging to the top of the class, with her beautiful angular handwriting in blue ink: we can copy her homework which has no mistakes in it. How has such happiness come to us? How have we acquired this friend, who is so proud with everyone and so unapproachable? Now she wanders within the walls of our room, shaking her mane of red hair beside us, leaning her sharp profile—which is covered in pinkish freckles—over the familiar objects in our room: it seems to us that some rare tropical animal has miraculously been domesticated and appeared within the walls of our house. She wanders around our room, asks where things come from, asks if she can borrow some book or other; she has tea with us, and she spits plum stones off the terrace with us. We who were despised by everyone have been chosen by the most unapproachable, the most unexpected companion. We talk to her convulsively so that she will not be bored by our company, so that she will not leave us forever: in a rush we tell her all our obscene words and everything we know about films and sport. When we are alone we say the syllables of her beautiful sonorous name over and over again, and we prepare a thousand things to say to her the next day; we are wild with happiness and begin to imagine that she is like us in every way; the next day we try the speeches we have prepared on her, we tell her everything about our life, even our dizzying suspicion that neither people nor things exist: she looks at us uneasily, giggles, and makes fun of us a little. Then we realize that we have made a mistake and that it is not possible to talk to her about this subject; we fall back on obscene words and sport.

  Meanwhile, our situation at school has changed overnight: everyone begins to respect us when they see that we are respected by the most respected person in the group; the comic verses we have written ‘and which we now recite are received with shrieks of shrill applause: before, we could not make our voice heard above the general hubbub of voices, now everyone listens in silence when we speak; now they ask us questions and walk arm in arm with us, they help us with the things we are less good at, like sports or homework we don’t know how to do. The world no longer appears to us as a monstrous contrivance but like a simple, smiling little island populated with friends: we do not thank God for such a lucky change in our fortunes because we no longer think about God; it seems impossible to us to think about anything except the cheerful faces of our friends gathered around us, the way the mornings flow happily and easily past, the crazy things we have said that made everyone laugh; and our face in the mirror is no longer something gloomy and shapeless but the face which our friends greet happily every morning. Sustained in this way by the friendship of companions of our own sex, we look with less horror at that other race, the people of a different sex from ours; it almost seems to us that we could easily do without this different race, that we could be happy without their approbation; we almost wish we could spend our whole life surrounded by school friends, saying crazy things and making them laugh.

  Then little by little we discover one friend, in the midst of the crowd of friends, who is particularly happy to be with us and to whom, we realize, we have an infinite number of things to say. She is not the top of the class, she is not particularly well thought of by
the others, she does not wear showy clothes: in fact her clothes are made of fine, warm cloth very like that which our mother chooses for us; and when we are walking home with her we realize that her shoes are identical to ours—strong and simple, not showy and flimsy like those of our other friends; we laughingly point this out to her. Little by little we find out that the same habits prevail in her house as in ours: and that she bathes often, and that her mother does not let her go to see romantic films just as our mother doesn’t allow us to. She is a person like us; she is from the same social background. By this time we are very fed up with the company of the top of the class who still comes to see us every afternoon; by this time we are fed up with repeating the same old obscene words and now we proudly confront the top of the class with remarks about the subject that interests us, our doubts about existence; we do this so disdainfully and carelessly, and with such pride, that the top of the class doesn’t really understand us, but smiles shyly; we see that shy, cowardly smile on her lips; she is afraid of losing us. We are no longer bewitched by her blue eyes, and when we are with her we long for the round, hazel eyes of our other friend; and the top of the class realizes this and is upset by it, and we are proud of making her upset; and so we too are capable of making someone suffer.

  With our new friend who has round eyes, we despise the top of the class and our other friends who are so noisy and vulgar, with all their obscene words that they are always repeating: now we wish to be very refined, with our new friend we judge people and things according to criteria of refinement or vulgarity. We discover that it is refined to stay children as long as possible; to the great relief of our mothers we give up all the vulgar showy things we had added to our clothes; in our clothes as in our demeanour and habits we look for a childlike simplicity. We spend extraordinary afternoons with our new friend; we are never weary of talking and listening. We are astonished when we think of our friendship with the top of the class whom we have now stopped seeing; being with the top of the class became so tiring that in the end we felt our eyelids smarting, our skin itching and the muscles of our face aching with the effort of keeping up our false smile; it was tiring to hide our dislike, to suppress confidences, to constantly choose those few words that could be said to the top of the class; being with our new friend is so pleasant, we have nothing to hide or suppress and we can let our words flow freely. We even confide our dizzying suspicions about existence to her: and then she tells us with astonishment that she has had the same suspicions: ‘but do you exist?’ we ask her, and she swears that she exists, and we are infinitely happy.

  We and our new friend are sorry that we are of the same sex, because if we were of different sexes we could get married so that we would be together for ever and ever. We have no fear of each other, or shame, or horror: and so a shadow hangs over our life which could now have been so happy—the uncertainty as to whether one day someone of the opposite sex will be able to love us. People of the opposite sex walk next to us, brush against us in the street, perhaps think about us or have designs on us which we can never know; they have our fate—our happiness—in their hands. Perhaps the person who is suitable for us, who could love us and whom we could love, is among them: the person who is right for us; but where? How can we recognize this person, how can we make him recognize us, in the crowded city? In which house in the city, at which point on the earth, does this person live who is right for us, who is like us in every way, who is ready to answer all our questions, ready to listen to us forever without getting bored, to smile at our faults, to live with our face all his life? What words ought we to say so that he will recognize us among thousands? How should we dress, what places should we go in order to meet him?

  We are tormented by these thoughts and when we are with people of the opposite sex we feel extremely shy because we are afraid that one of them could be the right person for us and we could lose him with a word. We think carefully about all our words before uttering them and then we say them hurriedly, in a strangled voice; because of our fear we glance about gloomily and have tiny, abrupt gestures; we are aware of all this but we tell ourselves that the person who has been made for us must recognize us even though we have these abrupt gestures and this strangled voice: if he doesn’t give any sign of having noticed us it is because he is not the right person; the right person will recognize us and pick us out among thousands. We wait for the right person; every morning when we get up we think that this could be the day when we meet him; we dress and comb our hair with infinite care, and overcome the desire to go out in an old raincoat and shapeless shoes; the right person might just happen to be on the corner of the street. Thousands and thousands of times we think that we are in the presence of the person made for us: our hearts beats tumultuously at the sound of a particular name, at the curve of a nose or a smile, and only because we have suddenly decided that this is the nose and the name and the smile of the person made for us: a car with yellow wheels and an old lady make us blush uncontrollably because we think them the car and the mother of the right person for us—the car in which we will set off on our honeymoon, the mother who will have to place her hand on us in benediction. All at once we realize we have made a mistake—that wasn’t the right person, he is of no interest to us whatsoever, and we don’t suffer because we have no time to suffer; suddenly the car with yellow wheels, the name and the smile fade away and are absorbed into the thousand useless things that surround our life. But we don’t have time to suffer; we are leaving for a holiday in the country and we are absolutely certain that during these holidays we shall meet the right person; because we are convinced that the train will take us to the right person we are more or less unmoved by parting from our friend with the round eyes; and she for her part is convinced of the same thing: goodness knows why we are suddenly convinced that the right person will be met on a summer holiday in the country. The long, lonely, boring months pass by: we write interminable letters to our friend and to console ourselves for the meeting that never happens we carefully collect together all the favourable judgements passed on us by old acquaintances of the family or by aged relatives and write them out for our friend; she writes to us similar letters containing the favourable judgements on her intelligence and beauty passed by her aged relatives. When autumn comes we have to admit inwardly that nothing extraordinary has happened; but we are not disappointed, we eagerly rejoin our friend and our other companions and contentedly settle down to the autumn; the right person is waiting for us, perhaps, at the comer of the avenue.

  Then little by little we withdraw from our friend. We find her a bit boring, ‘bourgeois’; she is always obsessed with elegance and refinement. Now we want to be poor: we become involved with a group of poor friends and every day we proudly go to their unheated house. We wear our old raincoat now, and with pride: we still count on meeting the right person, but he must love our old raincoat, he must love our shapeless shoes, our cheap cigarettes and our bare, red hands. Dressed in our old raincoat we walk alone at dusk past the houses on the edge of the city; we have discovered the edge of the city, the signboards of the little cafés beside the river, and we linger lost in thought in front of little shops where long pink bodices are hung up, and workmen’s overalls, and coffee-coloured underpants; we stand gaping in front of a shop window of old postcards and old hairpins: we like everything that is old, dusty and poor: we go searching through the city for poor, dusty things. Meanwhile it pours with rain onto our old raincoat, which lets water through, and on to our uncovered head; we don’t have an umbrella—we would rather commit suicide than go out with an umbrella; we don’t have an umbrella or a hat or gloves or the tram fare: all we have is a dirty handkerchief in our pocket, and some crushed cigarettes and kitchen matches.

  Suddenly it occurs to us that the poor are our neighbour, the poor are the neighbour whom we have to love; we watch the poor as they pass by us; we look out for a chance to take a blind beggar across the road, to offer our arm to some old lady who has slipped in a puddle; we
shyly caress—with the tips of our fingers—the filthy hair of children playing in the alleyways; we return home soaked to the skin, chilled to the marrow, and triumphant. We are not poor, we do not spend the night on a bench in a public park, we do not drink cloudy soup from a tin saucepan; we are not poor, but only by chance: we shall be extremely poor tomorrow.

  Meanwhile the friend whom we have stopped seeing suffers on our account, just as the top of the class suffered when we stopped seeing her. We know this, but we don’t feel sorry about it; it even gives us a kind of underhand pleasure, because if someone suffers on our account it means that we—who for so long thought of ourselves as weak and insignificant—have in our hands the power to make someone suffer. We don’t suspect that we are perhaps cynical and wicked because we don’t suspect that our friend is also our neighbour: neither do we think that our parents are our neighbour: our neighbour is the poor. We give our parents severe looks as they eat their good food at their well-lit table; we also eat this good food, but we think that this is by chance, and it will only be like this for a very short time: in a little while we will have nothing more than a bit of black bread and a tin saucepan. One day we meet the right person. We are unmoved, because we haven’t recognized him; we walk with the right person along the streets at the edge of the city, and little by little we fall into the habit of walking together every day. From time to time we wonder absent­mindedly whether we are not perhaps walking with the right person, but we think that probably we are not. We are too calm; the earth and the sky are unchanged, the minutes and hours flow quietly on without awakening any deep echo in our heart. We have been mistaken so often; we believed we were in the presence of the right person and we weren’t. And in the presence of each wrong right person we were impetuously swept away in such a tumult of emotion that we scarcely had strength left to think; we found ourselves living at the centre of a landscape on fire; trees, houses and objects burst into flames around us. And then all at once the fire had died down and there was nothing left but a few warm embers: there are so many burnt out landscapes behind us that we cannot even count them. Now nothing around us is on fire. For weeks and months we spend our days with the right person without realizing; only sometimes, the thought of the curve of his lips, of certain of his gestures and the intonation of his voice, produces a slight tremor in our heart: but we don’t think anything of such a slight, muffled tremor. The strange thing is that when we are with this person we always feel so well and at peace, able to breathe deeply, and our forehead which has been so wrinkled and grim for so long is suddenly smooth again; and we never tire of talking and listening. We realize that we have never had a relationship like this with any other human being; in time all human beings had seemed so inoffensive, so simple and small to us; but when we walk beside this person with his pace that is different from ours, and his severe profile, he has an infinite capacity to do to us everything that is good and everything that is evil. And yet we feel infinitely calm.