Diego Valeri
My Mother’s Voice
Translated from the Italian by Laura Valeri
Such strange stories my mother used to tell about that place then unknown to me that was my hometown; marvelous things about the palazzo she first entered as a young bride, where she gave birth to my two brothers, and where, with a significant lag, (sixteen years from the first, and fourteen from the second) she also gave birth to me.
Born late, and right as the family was packing to relocate to the city—in fact, swept away after my first month of life—I grew up knowing nothing about my birth town outside of what my mother told me, which seemed at once fantastical and familiar. How clearly, through her stories, I visualized places and people I had never seen. How passionate I was for those novelized retellings, which revisited the same events and people as always, yet felt new and different each time.
To a child, a mother’s voice has a sound like no other, and there is never again another like it. Listening to it, the child is re-immersed into the flux of prenatal life, lifted away by a wave sweet and warm like blood, and it’s not even necessary for the child to listen; it’s enough to hear that sound.
But I did listen to my mother, and how! Because she told me things worthy of a novel. I could see the town of her youth as a sketch, attaining color, coming alive, and turning into a reality more definite than the one before my eyes—more definite, yet more indefinite, more ungraspable, without body or substance.
The town was little more than a piazza, an empty lot filled with sunshine crossed by the moving shadows of the church and an old tower with two rooftops, bi-level like a chair. There was no dearth of towers and churches in the city where I was growing up, and there were many piazzas, immense and superb, but lacking the same living vibrancy and the aura of mystery that surrounded all things about my mother’s town when I saw it through her voice.
Over there, in that piazza, extraordinary things occurred.
One day, in the year 1866, Italian soldiers rode into the village, and my mother, a young girl then, dressed in a white dress and a tri-colored sash across her breast, offered, on behalf of the town, a blower bouquet to the handsome captain who rode on horseback ahead of everyone. Hurray! Trumpets and bells, and flags in all the windows . . . The very next day, once the Italians had departed, an alarm rang suddenly, and the piazza emptied within moments as if threatened by a cyclone—down went the flags and the vegetable garlands. A farmer had rushed over to warn that the Croats were coming back; they were coming to reclaim the town they had abandoned only days earlier. Already, a cloud of dust trailed after their marching column, rising over the main road with the noise of stomping boots and tinkling bells. But, as they later saw, it was nothing more than a large, migrating cattle herd, minding its own business as it ambled on.
Another time, arriving in town on a carriage was none other than Garibaldi himself, and again it was my mother who had the honor of offering a welcome flower bouquet. I don’t know why she was chosen for these official honors; maybe because she was a pretty blonde, or maybe because her father was a “hothead,” a liberal. Stepping out of the carriage, the hero in the red shirt bent over the girl and stamped a kiss on her cheek; that was why, for several days, she refused to wash her newly christened face.
On Sunday afternoons, the piazza turned into a field for a fistball match, to wit, the game Leopardi sang about in his Pindaric ode to “the blessed youth.” I never knew my grandparents except through tales, but one of those four ghosts of my imagined memories takes on a bit more substance: it’s my mother’s father, whom I visualize in my imagination as he’s about to land a tremendous punch on an airborne ball. That relative of mine was a famous Sunday athlete. (On weekdays, he used those large hands for the delicate and patient work of jewelry making). It happened once that, by his hand, a ball hurled too high and too far ended up bouncing off the nose of a young spectator, causing irreparable dam- age. I saw that nose in real life, on the face of a dear old woman, so squashed and sprawling that it looked like a mushroom.
Beneath the porticos, in front of the church, glimmered the window shops of the pharmacy and nearby Café Grande. Where the rays of those lights crossed, handsome gentlemen gathered in frock coats and half-top hats, and I personally learned to recognize them through the photographs of a red felt album that was more wonderful to me than a magic lamp. All of them were illustrious hunters, and more importantly, illustrious eaters: bearded faces, large shoulders, chests blown out in button-snapping fashion. Their eating prowess survived in the memories of an entire generation.
The women went to the piazza only on holidays, to attend the grand mass hosted by the archbishop at the duomo. A young woman who lived right next to the church would often sit by the window and observe the world; the young men who passed by would stop, enchanted by her, noses turned up as if struck by the apparition of an angel . . . The shocking and perplexing truth is that in the end, nobody married the angelic Elvira. Her life passed without a wedding; she wilted, disappeared in silence; and today, perhaps I am the only one who still treasures the melancholy memory of her. The red felt photo album has long disappeared, together with many other objects from the old home, but I still see her photo; I see her long, pale face, softly shaped into an oval, her large blue eyes lost in their own light, blond locks of hair falling voluptuously over pale shoulders, suffused in a tender shade of flesh. I am not making up these colors; the photo was retouched with paint, as was the practice in those days. That is how I saw her, and how I see her now; and hers is the first image that stayed with me, the first poignant revelation of feminine beauty I knew.
The palazzo was not in the piazza. It towered a little further away, who knows where, amid humble homes kneeling at its feet. It had many rooms, and a great hall where a crystal chandelier hung, the kind that daylight would set ablaze, its hundred facets sparkling in all the colors of the rainbow. (In the confines of our narrow apartment in the city, I used to dream of those splendors and those wide spaces, resigned to poverty like a young little Job, but all the same proud of our past grandeur.)
In that palazzo reigned my other grandfather, Signor Zamaria, a small, round man, with a fringe of a white beard around his honest face, and lively little eyes smiling through soft pillows of fat. In earlier times, he had sold produce in a little shop under the shadow of the piazza’s grand tower; now he owned many fields, that magnificent palace, three dogs, and even a parrot. He was a serene and peaceful man, and because of it, he was forced to battle perpetually with Signora Teresa, his wife, who was hard-faced, stony, with eyes like ice.
My mother, of course, did not happily discuss the sanctified memory of her mother-in-law, but she often remembered her own mother, who died young. (She had been somewhat eccentric: loose dark hair reaching past her knees, she would spend hours locked inside her room singing the forbidden songs of 1848, accompanying herself on the guitar.) Nonetheless, with Signor Zamaria, the young bride got along quite well, so much so that in her tales, she couldn’t speak his name without sighing softly: “Ah, if only he had lived just a few more years! All the same, before he left us, that provident old man purchased a family tomb at the cemetery . . .”
My mother’s tales weren’t always happy, especially if they were about that phantom palazzo. But they were joyous when they recalled the carnival balls, the masked dances that drew dames and gentlemen from neighboring precincts, or when they touched upon a few odd characters who were the talk of the town. There was a rich heiress, wealthy but hunchbacked; she was lost in love with a schoolteacher, and at all hours of the day she would tell whoever listened, “Ciceri was my first love. Ciceri is the one I desire.” There was a priest who had been defrocked, and at night he preached in the deserted streets, calling on those who slept to wake up and do penance right then and there, because no one knew who might live to see the dawn. There were enough odd people to supply the next town over. Around them moved a confusing crowd of Bepis and Tonis, Emmas and Adeles, just like around the towers and the palazzo, the village spread out without shape or plan.
One thing that I could easily visualize was the Sanctuary of the Graces, sitting in a solitary grove at the head of a country road that coasted a small green river. That’s where my mother used to pay devotion to a portrait of the Madonna reputed to work miracles; for my mother, the image inspired faith, especially because of its subtle beauty. (My mother wasn’t wrong: that tiny portrait turned out to be a perfectly authentic sanctified work of Giovanni Bellini.) Then I saw the endless open plains spreading on all sides like an abyss, and the river nearby, heading for the sea through those high, lone embankments; and the marshes with those peculiar names—Pirinpie’, Contarina, Centovalli; heat clouds and wild ducks lazily floating by.
One night in winter, the river, inordinately swollen by the rains, broke through the levees and swept over trees, homes, people, and animals, dumping its rage over the humble village. A terrorizing silence reigned under the desperate hammering of all the church bells. Though it happened before I was born, I can still hear those bells; I hear them even now inside my ears.
Peace eventually returned. Over the still mirror of those swamps, stagnated the ardent silence of hot summers, broken only by beating wings in sudden flight, or by the popping guns of hunters hiding inside barrels. The village resumed its calm existence and peaceful sleep. The defrocked priest would vent in vain all night, prophesying other inundations and other scourges of God.
As a young man, I rode my bicycle to my old hometown to acquaint myself with it, but I found, of course, that it was quite different from the image I had formed in my mind.
The name was the same, the people’s names were the same, but everything else was another thing entirely. It was time to accept reality and to consign those precious images to my youthful fantasies.
And yet . . . And yet, even today, whenever it comes to me to think of that dear town, that, by the way, has now become a city, there I see it before my eyes, not as I know it now, but as my mother used to describe it, as it existed inside her voice—a voice like no other voice, a voice I no longer hear, a voice forever lost.
Diego Valeri (1887–1976) was a renowned writer of the Italian Novecento, best known for his poetry, art criticism, and literary translations.
Laura Valeri is the author of five books of stories and essays. She teaches at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, GA.