Lost Words (8 page)

“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 opinions.
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?”

“Yes . . .”

“So it means ‘also being one of the others'—‘being another.' It's difficult but not impossible. I've spent my whole life trying to think of myself as different from what I am, trying to
become what I am
. Do you understand?”

“Yes . . .”

I continued to answer yes, although I understood less and less. I mouthed her words to myself, more enthralled by her passion than what she was trying to explain.

“Let me go over this more carefully, I would hate for you to misunderstand. Democracy is the condition that enables us to be ourselves, to experience—without hurting others—all the instincts that are inside us. Men are evil, Luca, this much is certain—may Machiavelli be forever glorified for establishing this truth once and for all—but people can live together in peace, and even pass themselves off as good, if they find that special condition that transforms their instincts into positive energy. Flaubert wrote a beautiful book about the risks of desiring to be someone else, of reshaping yourself according to impossible images of happiness.” She got up to take a volume from the bookshelf. “Madame Bovary would have been a perfect fascist: she wants to be someone else, but not just one of the others. She wants to become someone different from everyone else, different from what she might have become if she had followed her own nature rather that her absurd image of society. Am I making any sense?”

I said yes again, but I could barely find my way through the many contradictory definitions of a single word. Not to mention that I had never read
Madame Bovary
.

“Let me give you an example.” The Maestra tried to explain. “One day, when I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to visit a wonderful garden in Cornwall. We found an immense aviary for owls. There were owls of every size and color. Although they were in the bright sunlight they didn't seem to mind: they kept their big yellow or orange eyes wide open, with an air of enigmatic, slightly annoyed wakefulness. Some of them were nesting amid the branches in the far corners of the cage, and you could hardly make them out, those emblems of Olympic indifference. Or wisdom. And—horror of horrors—on the floor of the cage was their meal: piles of dead chicks. But the owls didn't touch them—they wouldn't even look at them. They were waiting for the night, I suppose. But the flies were already feasting. And there, standing in front of those poor slaughtered chicks, tossed together in a macabre heap that erased the physical individuality of each one, I tried to picture the scene of the massacre. How did the aviary keepers kill them? With poison? There weren't any signs of blood or violence. The chicks were simply lifeless, dangling, deflated—hundreds, thousands of chicks if you counted all the cages. I thought: what pleasure can owls get out of gorging on such a mess of carcasses? I imagined legions of soft chirping innocent little chicks scattering to every corner of the cage, running from one part to the other, in search of a non-existent shelter, while the owls swooped down on them. Yes, that's how I would've fed the owls. It's nature's way. The owl is a predator: you have to let it live its life. First, don't lock it in a cage. It's not right for us to appropriate its place and functions. But man never misses an opportunity to usurp the place of someone, even a neighbor. People have forgotten that everyone has his own life, his own being! Sometimes
we ourselves
are the first to renounce this and let others speak or decide for us, including our friends. What are friends if not vampires—enemies on a par with parents, husbands, children?
Friendly advice
!” she snickered. “When I think back to the time in my life when I was drowning in it! And how much it pained me when advice took the form of criticism! But advice is criticism, Luca! No one wants you to be
you
, Luca. They all expect you to be different. And so we grow up with the idea that the way we're living is wrong: we don't even like our own bodies, and yet we come to expect something different from our neighbors—different behaviors, different manners, different words . . . And maybe it's right, because in the end we know—yes, however vaguely and uncertainly we soooooooo deeply know—there is no one, no one at all in the world who is completely what he or she is supposed to be . . .
Che tragedia!
… But I digress. I only meant to say that we are like owls in a cage, Luca, digestive machines whose nutritional instincts have been removed, and I don't mean the mere act of feeding ourselves. After that visit I reduced the amount of food I consumed to the bare minimum. That same evening I skipped dinner and the next morning I skipped breakfast. I would have stopped eating entirely if it weren't for the fact that it would lead to my death. But I wanted to live!
Vita
: what a wonderful word! So I started to eat the least amount necessary to avoid dying. And that is how I have lived, day after day, one step away from death, seeing it waiting for me on the opposite shore, separated from me by a glass of water, a slender rivulet. I could even give up the tiny amount that I do ingest, why not? All I can say for myself is that I have not lived by virtue of my daily bread . . . I am a cactus, Luca. A desert plant. Do you know what's inside a dead cactus?”

She suddenly turned pale. She realized she had said too much.

She opened the book, in which she had kept her finger the whole time, read a few lines in silence, and out of her mouth came the words: “
Ridicula sum
.”

*.

The last envelopes came in, along with a few more Christmas cakes. The package from the landlord, Signor Spinelli, arrived right on time, and true to a long tradition, it contained a bottle of Prosecco, a pandoro, and a card that read, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your family.”

While my mother counted her haul, my father and I started decorating the Christmas tree in the lobby. Until last year trimming the tree had been one of my favorite things, but now it had lost its appeal and actually irritated me. In a single move I managed to shatter three ornaments. My father yelled at me to go away—I was only making a mess. Mother, too busy with her calculations to reprimand me, said to look through the top drawer and replace the three ornaments I had broken with some old woolen pom-poms. As the finishing touch, we hung two strings of flickering Christmas lights over the doorframe and around the window.

At two o'clock sharp we closed up.

My father went out for a walk. My mother started to make the pasta, folding the eggs into flour.

“When I was a little girl, Christmas was a real holiday!” she started reminiscing. “A holiday for the stomach! All we ever got every other day was a boring meal—a plate of spaghetti or vegetables—that was supposed to keep us going until we went to bed at night. But on Christmas we would stuff ourselves. On Christmas Eve we would eat zeppoles, eel, and roasted cod with cooked greens. On Christmas Day we would have tagliolini or raviolini in brodo, and lamb or pork roast. We never touched cow—like Indians—cows were needed for milk. There was a mountain of sweets: torrone, dried figs, chocolate cookies, almond cookies, chickpea cookies . . . For a few days our misery would vanish. Never again have I seen such abundance, not even in Milan, when I started working for the Oreficis. The only thing those cheapskates fed me was bread and water! When I think about it . . . Well, Chino, your mother was always unlucky. As a child and a teenager I was stuck with my father, that old drunk, and in Milan I learned how mean the rich can be. At least my father was illiterate, poor devil. But the Oreficis? Did I ever tell you about the time . . .”

Of course she had, not once but three, four, ten times, and not just on Christmas.

Encouraged by my silence, she started. “He was a doctor and she was a teacher. At least they taught me how to speak properly . . .” (in the meantime she kept feeding the dough into the pasta machine). “The lady of the house had decided that she wanted her husband to go to bed with me . . . they wanted a child, but she was well along in her years. Every night he tried to get into my room, but I locked the door. At one point I saw the door handle rotating downward. And then he would call out to me, pleading. It was awful. He would go on for half an hour—as if I was the master and he was the servant! But I never gave in. The next day he would act as if nothing had happened and ignore me completely . . . Can you believe it? He destroyed me with indifference, while she treated me like a slave, constantly humiliating me . . . and she gave me nothing to eat.”

She took the pastry wheel and started to cut the ribbons of pasta dough into squares.

“Did you hear that!”

Suddenly we could hear a loud rumbling of voices.

We went up to the second floor. A cluster of people were gathered in front of the Malfitanos' door.

“What happened?” my mother asked.

“Signora Malfitano was attacked by the parrot and is fighting with her husband,” Signorina Terzoli reported.

The parrot wouldn't stop screeching, “You were asking for it! You were asking for it!”

“On Christmas Eve of all days!” exclaimed Signora Rovigo. “They don't even have respect for the holidays!”

Vezzali took Malfitano's defense. Ever since that damn bird arrived, the poor woman hasn't had a moment's peace—it was hardly the first time she'd been attacked by the parrot.

My mother was worried about the marble floors. All of those people were destroying her hard work. “Wouldn't you know it, I'll have to go over the whole thing again with the buffer—on Christmas Eve of all days!”

I looked up but she wasn't there. Not even all this screeching had induced her to come out. No, the Maestra remained in her retreat, alone in her apartment, high above, sovereign. As Olympian as the owls in her story.

*.

The snow had already blanketed the stairs and the pine grove. It fell at a regular pace, thick and dry.

My father had on a blazer and tie, my mother a dark dress that Signora Dell'Uomo had given her a few years ago, with a smattering of sequins around the hem and the neckline. “How does it look on me?” she asked. It was the first time she was wearing it.

“You look like a real signora,” my father teased her.

We picked up the baking dishes full of food and headed to the building next door. My mother struggled to walk in the snow. She held onto me, afraid she might fall, and shivered from the cold because her dress was too light and her overcoat wasn't long enough. “What the hell is going on back there?” my father exclaimed while we were going through the gate.

“I'll wait for you at Gemma's,” she said, without turning around.

At the other side of the garden, some of the tenants had assembled around the fountain to pray. Each of them held a lit candle in their left hand, while their right was cupped around the flame to keep it from being snuffed out by the snowflakes. Pale, motionless, with their faces illuminated from below, they looked like a gathering of the dead. The seamstress was there, too. Signora Dell'Uomo's husband officiated. On behalf of the whole apartment complex he invoked the name of Christ the Savior, beseeching him to protect those present and their loved ones, granting health and prosperity to everyone, and easing the difficult road that lay ahead. “Blessed be the day that Christ the Savior was born!” he intoned. And the others behind him repeated, “Blessed be the day that Christ the Savior was born!”