We spent not just one or two mornings on the research, but an endless amount of time, measurable only in combinations of sounds and signs, as if the hours were made up of buccàlə, scummarèllə, chiastuléllə, cummuógliə, misuriéllə.
The effects of this task on my grandmother, who spoke, and on me, who wrote, were starkly different. She, who started out deeply concerned for my exam, grew more and more overwhelmed by herself. She ended up inside the noise in her head, her cheeks and forehead were red and splotchy, her bell-pepper nose glistened with sweat, her gaze had been rejuvenated, her eyes were so lively they seemed to be inhabited by countless other eyes. She started giving herself airs as never before. When my brothers came home from school and my father from work, they peeked in the kitchen to see what was going on, wondering why there were no smells of food cooking, why the table hadn’t been set for lunch, and she’d gleefully reply, we’re doing something important for the university, and only then would she make her way over to the stove and say, fine, let’s cook a little something. She surprised us all by neglecting to sweep, dust, pick up our dirty clothes, wash them, hang them out to dry, iron them. She even instructed my mother to take care of the cooking and the table for a while, as she was too busy. It was as if the university, by making her the foundation for my studies, had suddenly given her value and granted her freedom from her role as our servant, or anyone’s servant for that matter. Even with my father, her sworn enemy, she became less of a subaltern.
“Mother-in-law, what’s going on? Are you on strike?”
“Yes.”
“And when are you going to start working again?”
“No idea.”
This was the only time she even stopped doting on me. The fact that I was the one who hung onto her every word, that she didn’t have to run after me with her love, made her overly bold, even impudent (stattezittonumumènt, ecchecàzz, fammepenzà), and then she’d come crashing down like a rainstorm, indifferent to whether someone below had an umbrella or not. She was like a pot boiling over, feeling ever more entitled to sollevare ’o cummuógliə—to raise the lid—independently of my academic needs, finding immense pleasure in scummigliarsi—write it down, Mimí, scummiglià, not cummiglià, what a beautiful word, you spend your whole life cummigliàtə, stifled, putting the lid on everything, hidden in fear, and then all of a sudden you scummuógliə. To explain better, she mimed someone throwing off their bedding, their clothes, even their silence, and that grand liberatory gesture seemed to bring her joy.
I tried to keep up with her but soon I had more than enough words for the exam. The more cards I filled out, the more it seemed like the entire alphabet and all of phonetic writing were losing ground, unable to keep up with her Neapolitan. Nothing—I thought—will ever be able to stop this merry-go-round, nothing will ever be able to control this uncontrollable material. The more unrestrained she grew, the more inclined I was to wrap it up: basta, why keep collecting words, writing is just another kind of lid being slapped down on this poor old woman, that’s enough. And yet, mesmerized, I let her reveal herself, raise her own lid, scummigliarsi. Her tone grew richer, the volume of her voice increased, her ardor grew such that in her eyes I saw other eyes, her gestures were those of other people, her mouth was composed of other mouths, in her words were endless words belonging to other people, her voice so dysregulated that no tool could ever record it, much less the act of writing. Oh, how much time I was wasting. Thanks to my studies, with practice, I could, at the very least, hope to bring structure and shape to the echoes of the voice of the girl from Milan; they were like a gift. But the teeming sounds uttered by my grandmother were impossible to get down on a clean sheet of paper: literature retreated, the alphabet backed down, even phonetic writing came up short. At one point, it seemed like it wasn’t just her talking, but her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother, speaking words that were pre-Babelic, antediluvian, words about the earth, plants, bodily humors, blood, work, an entire dictionary of the struggles she had survived, another dictionary of critical illnesses that struck both children and adults. L’artéteca—she/they said—was an intolerable disquietude that you can’t calm; riscenziélə was that sensation of falling, fainting, eyes rolling back into your head; and then there was loving and kissing, il bacio, ’o vase, ah vasarsi, Mimí, there’s nothing better on this earth than kissing, hugging, squeezing each other tight, and if you don’t understand kissing, well what good is all this studying?
She spent an endless amount of time talking about that subject. She told me about the first kiss her husband ever gave her, back when he was a young and terribly handsome twenty-year-old, and she already twenty-two but had never been kissed: a kiss that was so intense that he had stayed right there in her mouth, to this day his mouth was in her mouth, his voice was her voice, they spoke together when she spoke, the words that I heard came from the depths of time, his breath and hers, his voice and hers.