Down across the torrente, in the popolare part, where barricate were erected as a permanent method of riot control at the time of Fascism, the electric company is digging up the Via D’Azeglio. Once again remains are coming to light. The Via D’Azeglio is a long road leading into what was the Via Emilia, a Roman road that ran parallel to the Po River and eventually reached the sea near Rimini. A Roman villa will be backfilled. Nothing exceptional; there is no real reason to save the modest two-thousand-year-old evidence. The stones and bricks will recede into soil shoveled over them and go back to sleep. Finds are always a conflict. If the installation of the electric wires had been stalled too much longer, the drivers on the surface would have revolted. This time, the new wires will prevail.
The discovery of a Longobard tomb, though, tempts fate. So much less is known about the northern barbarians who left imprintings and ideas, even some that were worked into the Duomo stones, of a contrasting, untamed strain. The burial will be studied. In the Duomo, a distinct Romanesque figure, a man whose legs split apart (like a woman giving birth) into two wolves, has always caught my eye. In the carvings around the cathedral and on the columns inside, these earlier symbols obviously spoke to the artisans of nearly a thousand years ago. Their energies were borrowed as a contrast to Christian themes. The Romanesque animals howl and grin. They peer down, out of present shadows, from the darkness of the cathedral columns—vital, animistic visions.
As one stares through the modern maze of pipes to see the signs of the Roman villa in the Via D’Azeglio, any grand preconception of archaeology gets adjusted by the reality of the broken, reduced rubble and bare stone outlines. Excavation is painstaking, physically tough, and usually undramatic. Digging up the past is an art, deliberate training in inference and linkage. The handling, processing, and conservation of any material creates months of toil. The results, the facts learned, can usually be summed up in a page. Occasionally, in the dust, the thrill of life appears: the head of a young Roman girl found in Velleia that now sits in the Parma Museum. Looking at her impertinent bronze features, you know she lived.
Last night, Paolo knocked down a small glass jar from America that I used to hold spoons on the counter. Much to my dismay, he put his head on the table and cried. “Why does it always have to be me who breaks things of yours? I’ll mend it,” he said. “Don’t you dare,” I said. “It happens.” “No, I’ll mend it,” he said, gathering up the pieces. The little jar had transatlantic memories stuck to its sides. But it was never meant to outlast the world. It was glass, poured from sand and fire. He put the pieces on a high shelf. He seems to feel breaking all around.
Paolo can be merciless with himself and, as a consequence, harsh on others. Often, during a day of hard physical fieldwork, with students, up in the mountains at the timberline, this pressure will blow away. He’ll feel renewed. “Just working against a blue sky, I come back into life.” Helping a student tie bags over pollen in pinecones, he loves hearing the wind rattle the papers. Paolo draws energy from nature, nearly any experience of it, preferably on land. Physically, he revives easily. But he gives himself no reprieves. Wearying grudges seem to be riding on his shoulders, hounding and snapping. He can’t let up on despising unpurposeful existence. His mother, being so powerful in life, has left her judgments on all of them. His rich nature seems to withdraw into duty, as if he has no right to an easier life.
Last night, after the glass jar broke, I thought about the Longobard tomb, all that was buried and the little that can be retrieved. How separate and unique we are. How important and agonizing that is. I am worried by the depth of Paolo’s exhaustion. Unkind things that have never been said before are inching between us. There is so much feeling kept inside, eating at arrangements that have been disturbed—by his mother’s death and even by the politics that now tell everyone that what they mouthed is old, false, something that can no longer exist in the way they told it. Italy is in deep trouble. The crises in government seem large and frightening, but so do private issues. It’s been nearly two years since Paolo went up to Alba’s house. He can’t face the empty rooms.
No one knows how much to dig up in a family and how much, like the daily traffic, is an inhibiting and even sane rush against excavation and dwelling in the past. Psychological discoveries might be commonplace, like the Roman villa that we assume we understand because so many have been recorded. Or like the Longobard tomb, they might be more creative, revealing a way into the blocked and unknown. Sometimes what needs to be found is there; and sometimes it’s completely lost. Our family now is buried under a kind of past that suddenly is over, and full of ghosts.
Paolo believes he must work. Like his mother, he can barely turn over time without using it, filling it with tasks. This is disastrous because there is very little he cannot do—from science to writing, from cooking to gardening. There is little he cannot do except to trust a bit more and to rest.
Our house remains permeated with internal walls, memories that only Paolo knows, like the crawl space under half of the house outside. Our house, too, embraces Italy in the 1950s, when morality was a living force. As a story, it fascinates me. After the renters, after the house was paid for, the basement was consecrated as a church and offered rent-free to the parish. Now the basement is in an upheaval. Two men with a cellular phone are here to redo all the wires. Every thread they touch is dead to me and alive, quick with memories, to Paolo.
The parish used the cellar for six years, while the official church was being built. Marriages, funerals, and masses started belowground where the driveway leads. Pietro was married there, not far from the stone wall that he now scales to practice rock climbing. His fingers cling to the unmortared spaces between stones. Sometimes, flattened out, suspended against the wall like Batman, he scares me to death.
When Alba’s house was turned into a church, with its daily masses and ordering of people’s lives, the cellar was a holy space. Having people come into the cellar seeking solace and community must have been inspiring. It must have also been inhibiting. All seasons fell within the Christian message, often full of heavy symbols. At Easter, the altar was draped in black for the last week of the Passion. Wheat, forced and grown in the dark, put up unearthly white stalks. Fasting was required. From Good Friday to Easter the clappers of bells were clamped and tied. Then, on Pasqua, the black covers and drapes were removed. Priests carried the wheat into the light, placing it on the altar. The muffled bells sounded, clear. The cellar, dug into an incline, is deep and rather dark. When it was the church, people came in every day. They were prepared for living, but I often wonder if joy was offered here.
Before the church was settled in the basement, authentic capitalism expanded in that same space. The other day, La Gazzetta ran an article on Signor Rossi, who had started his electric engine parts business there. This year his company had receipts of more than $50 million. Paolo remembers the earsplitting whines and the hot smell of the saws’ cutting precision blades. He remembers how hard-driving, impatient Signor Rossi took off the red safety bars from the simple cutting machines in order to speed up work. The man’s mother lost a finger in the basement. His wife, later on, would lose one too. Ten workers eventually assembled in the basement every morning at eight, much to the neighbors’ dismay. Paolo studied the workers, as he watched projects on any type of site in the city, analyzing what the men did. What the men did, since there wasn’t one in his family, continued as an ongoing study. He catalogued every detail, so he would be capable of activating things in the world of gears, wires, and levers.
Signor Rossi’s parents had left their small house in the country and moved the family into Alba’s house, because their son had a dream of owning a business. When Signor Rossi stopped renting from Alba four years later, his dream of energetic basement capitalism, unstrangled by bureaucratic regulations and rules, had taken successful root. He had created a specialization and identified a market that steadily grew in other parts of Italy and then Europe.
The old man is today an emblem of the entrepreneurial spirit of people on the Po plain. They have strong business instincts. The idea of niches and specialization developed an ingenious and widespread pattern in this area’s powerful and stable economy. In one village the economy is based on processing salami, another on prosciutto, another on tiles, and in the end, each of these specialties will be repeated by perhaps two, three, ten, or fifty or more different companies in the same locale. Co-ops, guilds, and consortiums then regulate prices, controls, marketing. The highly skilled workers are trained to perfection and form the basis for prosperity in the city or village. The food products, like prosciutto and Parmesan cheese, go back to the 1200s and have trademarks that can only be applied by specific cities. In northern Italy, even in these time-intensive jobs in which some products age for up to three years, speed (the verb is correre), running, rushing, a bottled-up pressure, is seen as part of business.
Rossi’s spirit of entrepreneurial risk taking was in some ways similar to Alba’s buying properties with loans. Capitalism flourished in the basement: hard, teeth-grinding work, courage, and some vision. People were busy after the war, and what went on in the basement competed with the strong 1950s version of Communism, a different idea of how to liberate the majority of Italians from generations of poverty. The Communists, through cooperatives largely in the north, have also been highly successful in economic terms.
Now this august cellar—full of sociological archaeology—is being rewired. Each and every wire and switch put in at the time the house was built is being changed, according to law. The European Community has legislated the change. Its laws cross frontiers and are, for me, a hope pulling Italy into Europe. The subtlety of the old wire is as eye-straining as fine black print. The new wiring, so much thicker and wrapped in bright tubes of colored plastic, is a relief. I want more light, more sources for it, more insulation, more safety, less tangle, a clearer sense of the system. The old wires—pinched, tenacious, visibly stretching resources in small low-watt bare bulbs—did the work required of them. Pulled out, their dangerous lack of insulation seems nearly a symbol of this strange phase of transition. They are as complex as the country and its unimaginable, twisted political figures like Giulio Andreotti, who are products of a very different set of assumptions. Now exposed, their intertwined, elaborate, makeshift workings must be thoroughly untangled and understood. Our cellar, that part of the house that once belonged not to the family but to society, is about to be strengthened by new, straightforward norms for safety.
My own house while I was growing up was a bourgeois structure, dedicated completely to the private lives and invisible beliefs of its members. The wish for larger purposes and links was projected entirely into the sphere of adults. At our house, furniture arrangement, table manners, lawn cutting, and pool maintenance were part of the shell of the physical house’s routines and look. Events were few, because their real meanings never surfaced. Father changed jobs without ever sharing the dramas or his frustrations. Father succeeded in every executive job he held, but he never found an answer to his deep need for higher values and intellectual problem solving. His asthma, stoked by his chain smoking of cigars, grew progressively more choking. Unable to breathe, in later years, he often needed to put on an oxygen mask and suck its relief. This was lived without searching for causes or ways to change.
My parents’ air-conditioned bedroom was at the dead end of a long corridor of closets, and we were forbidden even to knock if the door was closed. Our own narrations of our personalities, monitored and described by our parents’ perceptions of our flaws and characteristics, gestated in separate and yet interrelated rooms. We four children enjoyed immensely (and were not allowed to dislike) one another’s company. This narration seems fictive, but consistency, surely a great value in invented writing, was perpetuated on a daily basis as a measure for our actions. With that, our lives, since we didn’t want to slip from that standard, made our experiences remarkably close to introspection. Intention and interpretation, beliefs, were large components of even the simplest action. As children, we were isolated, as a consequence of our so-called social privilege, which in truth was our father’s antisocial nature and poor health and our mother’s inability to propose a more dynamic social life inside the house.
The rules, to be followed literally and with strict obedience, were laid down by Father. We were not to lie, to cheat, not to thunder up the stairs and crack the plaster, not to forget to turn off the swimming pool pump, and not, when we grew up, to commit adultery. We were to be loyal, trustworthy, and Republican. In our rooms, behind closed doors, we talked to ourselves about contraventions and had lots of empty space to commit minor explorations. Above all, we began to read. From my window seat, instead of the Lutheran base for thought, Albert Camus and Baudelaire and Tolstoy came floating in.
Growing up, we had scarce contact with the outside world. It didn’t reach into the suburb, which was segregated and private. Life was bland and boring, except for the close ties my brothers and I shared. My father called the house his castle, and surely did not mean to be ironic. He liked us around and no one else. We were never permitted to have one single friend to dinner as we grew up. Nor could we fill up our pool with friends, who would splash or might slip while roughhousing on the decks. The four of us, each excellent and busy at school, lived in suspension, thinking of how to get beyond the sense of how protected we were and how well behaved we had to become, not to mention isolated and unable to join in with our peers. We were intense, frustrated innocents, formed in spaces unfilled by our parents—types that remain a mystery to Europeans, who think of America as avantgarde.
We were intense, frustrated innocents—types that remain a mystery to Europeans
I surprise myself thinking of the contrast with Paolo’s Italian upbringing. His house boiled over with real life. Alba, as long as she was alive, offered certainty that she would take responsibility for anything she considered right for her children. But the house, with its other added elements, was always chaotic and traveling at many levels toward an invaded, unprivate reality. It was a place of extreme constraints and virtually no limits. The physical structure always retained an epic plasticity. Alba lived without a roof, for example, for nine months when Pietro returned and built a second floor. Like Atlas, she held the dripping-wet walls and children together. And the church added intellectual support and debate as well as social structure, which extended very far in those days. In the mountains, on vacation, for example, when Paolo’s mother had spent her closely calculated funds and her stipend had not arrived, she thought first of borrowing from the local priest. The priest gave her a small sum, smaller than what a friend offered, but it helped. The church, too, told you how to vote, openly, from the pulpit. I remember my own grandfather telling me that one must always vote his conscience. “I don’t need your vote,” the senator said, “I need you as my granddaughter, someone who thinks and does what she believes is right.” That kind of sentence is why my mother loved that man, her father. Yet it was he who wiped the lipstick off her mouth.
In my parents’ house, in its most hopeless corners, we never lived pain the way it was lived here. Having two parents, some money, no war, no church in the basement, no mad grandmother—objectively our life had much more space. But we suffered from having only unrealistic, far-off glimpses of the world. Action remained an abstract idea of following rules of conscience and reasonableness, with no way to verify it with real actions. Both parents had terrible views on girls. Mother thought they should never appear smarter than men; they should never show their physical hand to the man until he had declared himself; women who reacted strongly could castrate men; and women’s working was entirely a question of social class. Father believed that no man would marry an argumentative woman like me, and if no one did, he was more than happy to have me stay around. Russian novels in their extraordinary ways of expressing conflict and identity as emotional and intellectual bombshells became for me, as an adolescent, the lost world I was looking for. More than Anna Karenina, I thought of myself as Raskolnikov.
Father was pushed by Mom into a rare family trip in 1955. Executives in those years had only two meager weeks of vacation, and he resisted spending them in travel or with the hassle of kids. I was thirteen when my brothers and baby sister and I saw New York City for the first time. Safe and conservative Father had chosen a hotel on Fifth Avenue. What he didn’t realize was that it was on Fifth Avenue just above Greenwich Village. To me every sight and smell was like a sensation reaching a person who had never tasted salt. Each street possessed a wonderful match-striking friction that filled us with a sense of transgression as we galloped off like horses hearing a starting gun. My brothers wanted to see the Polo Grounds. I wanted to see museums (and we never did go, not even to one), but it didn’t matter, because the city’s rich variety exploded beyond my fondest dreams. I saw interracial couples holding hands. We saw lovers necking on benches. We stared with hot, bulging eyes—at all the different kinds of sex out in the open. As if a cleansing wind had swept out all the shame of our father’s fear and admonitions, I reveled in the mingling races. I found a bookstore with the Beat poets. We saw elegantly dressed grown-ups whom I knew must be talking about painting and politics in Israel and Adlai Stevenson. They were not like us, these New York human beings walking up and down the streets. We saw shoeless, drunken people living in the mouths of subway stairs and propped against trash cans. One had skin opening at his ankles, in flaps and sores. I had always known our country was not white and rich, reasonable, boring, and clean. Our focus was sharpened forever in just a few days. My sources for authority swung open, free of those limits stated so firmly in the house. Father, after carefully discarding plays he considered inappropriate, bought matinee tickets for George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. For its shattering effects, he might as well have taken us to see a bumpy line of strippers. Besides viewing an argumentative woman debating with her father, I can still feel the shock of experiencing a play which ends without a positive resolution and in favor of the lords of war. So it’s true, I thought to myself, neither sad nor happy, but rather awed. The world is really true.
Perhaps we had some of the sensitivities and the rational minds of Henry James’s characters—but what he called “the beautifully unsaid” was often taken over by Father’s articulation of a Germanic, dualistic sense of the world. There was a strain of dark fatality and moralism that stripped deeds of their emotional push and pulse to become. Feelings were choked. We were encouraged to find formal, external, responsible positions. Yet this description remains paltry and insufficient. These years have been pulled out and superseded. There on the ground, what can be seen in the plain snaky mass? Certainly not the life: the caring and love, the dialectic on morality, the innocence and egocentric views that were curses and, in some ways, the greatest blessings of this elusive beginning.