There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean “the New,” “the Hidden,” “the Inactive,” and “the Alien.” They are indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they do not interfere in any chemical reaction, do not combine with any other element, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries. As late as 1962 a diligent chemist after long and ingenious efforts succeeded in forcing the Alien (xenon) to combine fleetingly with extremely avid and lively fluorine, and the feat seemed so extraordinary that he was given a Nobel prize. They are also called the noble gases—and here there’s room for discussion as to whether all noble gases are really inert and all inert gases are noble. And, finally, they are also called rare gases, even though one of them, argon (the Inactive), is present in the air in the considerable proportion of 1 percent, that is, twenty or thirty times more abundant than carbon dioxide, without which there would not be a trace of life on this planet.
The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases. Not all of them were materially inert, for that was not granted them. On the contrary, they were—o r had to be—quit e active, in order to earn a living and because of a reigning morality that held that “he who does not work shall not eat.” But there is no doubt that they were inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion. It can hardly be by chance that all the deeds attributed to them, though quite various, have in common a touch of the static, an attitude of dignified abstention, of voluntary (or accepted) relegation to the margins of the great river of life. Noble, inert, and rare: their history is quite poor when compared to that of other illustrious Jewish communities in Italy and Europe. It appears that they arrived in Piedmont about 1500, from Spain by way of Provence, as seems proven by certain typical toponymic surnames, such as Bedarida-Bédarrides, Momigliano-Montmélian, Segre (this is a tributary of the Ebro which flows past Lérida in northeastern Spain), Foà-Foix, Cavaglion-Cavaillon, Migliau-Millau; the name of the town Lunel near the mouth of the Rhône between Montpellier and Nîmes was translated into the Hebrew yareakh (“moon” ; luna in Italian), and from this derived the Jewish- Piedmontese surname Jarach.
Rejected or given a less than warm welcome in Turin, they settled in various agricultural localities in southern Piedmont, introducing there the technology of making silk, though without ever getting beyond, even in their most flourishing periods, the status of an extremely tiny minority. They were never much loved or much hated; stories of unusual persecutions have not been handed down. Nevertheless, a wall of suspicion, of undefined hostility and mockery, must have kept them substantially separated from the rest of the population, even several decades after the emancipation of 1848 and the consequent flow into the cities, if what my father told me of his childhood in Bene Vagienna is true. His contemporaries, he said, on coming out of school used to mock him without malice, greeting him with the corner of their jackets gathered in their fists to resemble a donkey’s ear and chanting, “Pig’s ear, donkey’s ear, give ‘em to the Jew that’s here.” The allusion to the ear is arbitrary, and the gesture was originally the sacrilegious parody of the greeting that pious Jews would exchange in synagogue when called up to read the Torah, showing each other the hem of the prayer shawl whose tassels, minutely prescribed by ritual as to number, length, and form, are replete with mystical and religious significance. But by now those kids were unaware of the origin of their gesture. I remember here, in passing, that the vilification of the prayer shawl is as old as anti-Semitism—from those shawls, taken from deportees, the SS would make underwear which then was distributed to the Jews imprisoned in the Lager.
As is always the case, the rejection was mutual. The minority erected a symmetrical barrier against all of Christianity (gojim, narelim, “Gentiles,” the “uncircumcised”), reproducing on a provincial scale and against a pacifically bucolic background the epic and Biblical situation of the chosen people. This fundamental dislocation fed the good-natured wit of our uncles (barbe in the dialect of Piedmont) and our aunts (magne, also in the dialect): wise, tobacco-smelling patriarchs and domestic household queens, who would still proudly describe themselves as “the people of Israel.”
As for this term “uncle,” it is appropriate here to warn the reader immediately that it must be understood in a very broad sense. It is the custom among us to call any old relation uncle, even if he is a distant relation, and since all or almost all of the old persons in the community are in the long run relations, the result is that the number of uncles is very large. And then in the case of the uncles and aunts who reach an extremely old age (a frequent event: we are a long-lived people, since the time of Noah), the attribute barba (“uncle”) , or, respectively, magna (“aunt”) tends gradually to merge with the name, and, with the concurrence of ingenious diminutives and an unsuspected phonetic analogy between Hebrew and the Piedmontese dialect, become fixed in complex, strange-sounding appellations, which are handed down unchanged from generation to generation along with the events, memories, and sayings of those who had borne them for many long years. Thus came into existence Barbaiòtô (Uncle Elijah), Barbasachín (Uncle Isaac), Magnaiéta (Aunt Maria), Barbamôisín (Uncle Moses, about whom it is said that he had the quack pull his two lower incisors so as to hold the stem of his pipe more comfortably), Barbasmelín (Uncle Samuel), Magnavigaia (Aunt Abigail, who as a bride had entered Saluzzo mounted on a white mule, coming up the ice-covered Po River from Carmagnola), Magnafôriña (Aunt Zepora, from the Hebrew Tsippora which means “bird”: a splendid name). Uncle Jacob must have belonged to an even remoter period. He had been to England to purchase cloth and so “wore a checked suit”; his brother Barbapartin (Uncle Bonaparte, a name still common among the Jews, in memory of the first ephemeral emancipation bestowed by Napoleon), had fallen from his rank as uncle because the Lord, blessed be He, had given him so unbearable a wife that he had had himself baptized, became a monk, and left to work as a missionary in China, so as to be as far away from her as possible.
Grandmother Bimba was very beautiful, wore a boa of ostrich feathers, and was a baroness. She and her entire family had been made barons by Napoleon, because they had lent him money (manòd).
Barbabarônín (Uncle Aaron) was tall, robust, and had radical ideas; he had run away from Fossano to Turin and had worked at many trades. He had been signed up by the Carignano Theater as an extra in Don Carlos and had written to his family to come for the opening. Uncle Nathan and Aunt Allegra came and sat in the gallery; when the curtain went up and Aunt Allegra saw her son armed like a Philistine, she shouted at the top of her lungs: “Aaron, what are you doing! Put that sword down!”
Barbamiclín was simple; in Acqui he was respected and protected because the simple are the children of God and no one should call them fools. But they called him “turkey planter” since the time a rashan (an unbeliever) had made a fool of him by leading him to believe that turkeys (bibini) are sowed like peach trees, by planting the feathers in furrows, and that then they grow on the branches. In any event, the turkey had a curiously important place in this witty, mild, and orderly family world, perhaps because, being presumptuous, clumsy, and wrathful, it expresses the opposite qualities and lends itself to being an object of ridicule; or perhaps, more simply, because at its expense a famous, semi-ritual turkey meatball was confected at Passover. For example, Uncle Pacifico also raised a turkey-hen and had become very attached to her. Across the way from him lived Signor Lattes, who was a musician. The turkey clucked and disturbed Signor Lattes; he begged Uncle Pacifico to silence his turkey. My uncle replied, “Your orders will be carried out; Signora Turkey keep quiet.“
Uncle Gabriele was a rabbi and therefore he was known as Barba Moréno, that is, “Uncle Our Teacher.” Old and nearly blind, he would return on foot, under the blazing sun, from Verzuolo to Saluzzo. He saw a cart come by, stopped it, and asked for a ride; but then, while talking to the driver, it gradually dawned on him that this was a hearse, which was carrying a dead Christian to the cemetery: an abominable thing, since, as it is written in Ezekiel 44:25, a priest who touches a dead man, or even simply enters the room in which a dead person is lying, is contaminated and impure for seven days. He leaped to his feet and cried: “ I’m traveling with a pegartà, with a dead woman! Driver, stop the cart!”
Gnôr Grassiadiô and Gnôr Côlômbô were two friendly enemies who, according to the legend, had lived from time immemorial face to face on the two sides of an alleyway in the town of Moncalvo. Gnôr Grassiadiô was a Mason and very rich. He was a bit ashamed of being a Jew and had married a goyà, that is, a Christian, with blond hair so long it touched the ground, who cuckolded him. This goyà, although really a goyà, was called Magna Ausilia, which indicates a certain degree of acceptance on the part of the epigones; she was the daughter of a sea captain who had presented Gnôr Grassiadiô with a large, varicolored parrot which came from Guyana and would say in Latin, “Know thyself.” Gnôr Côlômbô was poor and a Mazzinian. When the parrot arrived he bought a crow without a feather on its back and taught it to speak. When the parrot croaked, “Nosce te ipsum,” the crow answered, “Wise up.“
But as for Uncle Gabriele’s pegarta, Gnôr Grassiadiô’s goyà, Nona Bimba’s manòd, and the havertà of which we will speak, an explanation is required. Havertà is a Hebrew word, crippled in both its form and meaning and quite suggestive. Actually it is an arbitrary feminine form of haver, which equals “companion” and means “ maid,” but it contains the accessory notion of a woman of low extraction and of different customs and beliefs that one is forced to harbor under one’s roof; by inclination a havertà is not very clean and is ill-mannered, and by definition she is malevolently curious about the customs and conversations of the masters of the house, so much so as to force them to use a particular jargon in her presence, to which, besides all the others mentioned above, the term havertà itself obviously belongs. This jargon has now almost disappeared; a few generations back it still numbered a few hundred words and locutions, consisting for the most part of Hebrew roots with Piedmontese endings and inflections. Even a hasty examination points to its dissimulative and underground function, a crafty language meant to be employed when speaking about goyim in the presence of goyim; or also, to reply boldly with insults and curses that are not to be understood, against the regime of restriction and oppression which they (the goyim) had established.
Its historical interest is meager, since it was never spoken by more than a few thousand people; but its human interest is great, as are all languages on the frontier and in transition. In fact it contains an admirable comic force, which springs from the contrast between the texture of the discourse, which is the rugged, sober, and laconic Piedmontese dialect, never written except on a bet, and the Hebrew inlay, snatched from the language of the fathers, sacred and solemn, geologic, polished smooth by the millennia like the bed of a glacier. But this contrast reflects another, the essential conflict of the Judaism of the Diaspora, scattered among the Gentiles, that is, the goyim, torn between their divine vocation and the daily misery of existence; and still another, even more general, which is inherent in the human condition, since man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. The Jewish people, after the dispersion, have lived this conflict for a long time and dolorously, and have drawn from it, side by side with its wisdom, also its laughter, which in fact is missing in the Bible and the Prophets. It pervades Yiddish, and, within its modest limits, it also pervades the bizarre speech of our fathers of this earth,* which I want to set down here before it disappears: a skeptical, good-natured speech, which only to a careless examination could appear blasphemous, whereas it is rich with an affectionate and dignified intimacy with God—Nôssgnôr (“Our Lord”), Adonai Eloenó (“Praise be the Lord”), Cadòss Barôkhu (“Dear Lord”).
Its humiliated roots are evident. For example, there are missing, because useless, words for “sun,” “man,” and “city,” while words are present for “night,” “to hide,” “money,” “prison,” “dream” (the last, though, used almost exclusively in the locution bahalom, “in a dream,” to be added jokingly to an affirmation, and to be understood by one’s interlocutor, and by him alone, as its contrary), “to steal,” “to hang,” and suchlike. Besides this, there exist a good number of disparaging words, used sometimes to judge persons but more typically employed, for example, between wife and husband in front of a Christian
*This is an allusion to the Christian prayer that begins, “Our Father, who art in heaven.“shopkeeper’s counter when uncertain about the purchase. We mention: n saròd, the royal plural, no longer understood as such, of the Hebrew tsara, which means “misfortune” and is used to describe a piece of goods or a person of scant value; there also exists its graceful diminutive, sarôdĭnn, and at the same time I would not want forgotten the ferocious linkage sarôd e senssa manód used by the marriage broker (marosav) to describe ugly girls without dowries; hasirud, an abstract collective from hasir, which means “pig” and therefore is more or less equivalent to “filth, piggishness.” It should be noted that the sound “u” (French) does not exist in Hebrew; instead there is the ending “ut” (with the Italian “u”) , which serves to coin abstract terms (for example, malkhut, “kingdom”), but it lacks the strongly disparaging connotation it had in jargon usage. Another use, typical and obvious, of these and similar terms was in the store, between the owner and the clerks and against the customers. In the Piedmont of the last century the trade in cloth was often in Jewish hands, and from it was born a kind of specialized sub-jargon which, transmitted by the clerks become owners in their turn, and not necessarily Jews, has spread to many stores in the field and still lives, spoken by people who are quite surprised if by chance they happen to find out that they are using Hebrew words. Some, for example, still use the expression na vesta a kinim to describe a polka-dot dress: now, kinim are lice, the third of the ten scourges of Egypt, enumerated and chanted in the ritual of the Jewish Passover.
There is also a rather large assortment of not very decent terms, to be used not only with their real meaning in front of children but also instead of curses, in which case, compared to the corresponding Italian and Piedmontese terms, they offer, besides the already mentioned advantage of not being under- stood, also that of relieving the heart without abrading the mouth.
Certainly more interesting for the student of customs are the few terms that allude to things pertaining to the Catholic faith. In this case, the originally Hebraic form is corrupted much more profoundly, and this for two reasons: in the first place, secrecy was rigorously necessary here because their comprehension by Gentiles could have entailed the danger of being charged with sacrilege; in the second place, the distortion in this case acquires the precise aim of denying, obliterating the sacral content of the word, and thus divesting it of all supernatural virtue. For the same reason, in all languages the Devil is named with many appellations of an allusive and euphemistic character, which make it possible to refer to him without proffering his name. The church (Catholic) was called tônevà, a word whose origins I have not been able to reconstruct, and which probably takes from Hebrew only its sound; while the synagogue, with proud modesty, was simply called the scola (“school”), the place where one learns and is brought up. In a parallel instance, the rabbi is not described with the word rabbi or rabbenu (“our rabbi”) but as morénô (“our teacher”) , or kbakhàm (“the wise man”) . In fact in “school” one is not afflicted by the hateful khaltrúm of the Gentiles: khaltrúm, or khantrúm, is the ritual and bigotry of the Catholics, intolerable because polytheistic and above all because swarming with images (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me; Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image . . . and shalt not bow down thyself to them,” Exodus 20:3) and therefore idolatrous. For this term too, steeped in execration, the origin is obscure, almost certainly not Hebraic; but in other Jewish-Italian jargons there is the adjective khalto, in the sense precisely of “ bigot” and used chiefly to describe the Christian worshiper of images.
A-issá is the Madonna (simply, that is, “the woman”). Com- pletely cryptic and indecipherable—and that was to be fore- seen—is the term Odo, with which, when it was absolutely unavoidable, one alluded to Christ, lowering one’s voice and looking around with circumspection; it is best to speak of Christ as little as possible because the myth of the God-killing people dies hard.
Many other terms were drawn exactly as is from the ritual and the holy books, which Jews born in the last century read more or less fluently in the original Hebrew, and more often than not understood, at least partially; but, in jargon usage, they tended to deform or arbitrarily enlarge the semantic area. From the root shafòkh, which is equivalent to “pour” and appears in Psalm 79 (“Pour out Thy wrath upon the heathen that have not recognized Thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not invoked Thy name”), our ancient mothers have taken the homely ex- pression fé sefkh, that is, “to make sejokh,” with which one described with delicacy the vomit of infants. From rúakh, plural rukhòd, which means “ breath,” illustrious term that can be read in the dark and admirable second verse of Genesis (“The wind of the Lord breathed upon the face of the waters”) was taken tiré ‘n rúakh, “make a wind,” in its diverse physiological significances, where one catches a glimpse of the Biblical intimacy of the Chosen People with its Creator. As an example of practical application, there has been handed down the saying of Aunt Regina, seated with Uncle David in the Café Florio on Via Po: “Davidin, bat la carta, c’as sento nen le rukhòd!” (“David, thump your cane, so they don’t hear your winds!”), which attests to a conjugal relationship of affectionate intimacy. As for the cane, it was at that time a symbol of social status, just as traveling first class on the railroad can be today. My father, for example, owned two canes, a bamboo cane for weekdays, and another of malacca with a silver-plated handle for Sunday. He did not use the cane to lean on (he had no need for that), but rather to twirl jovially in the air and to shoo insolent dogs from his path: in short, as a scepter to distinguish him from the vulgar crowd.
Barakhà is the benediction a pious Jew is expected to pronounce more than a hundred times a day, and he does so with profound joy, since by doing so he carries on a thousand-year-old dialogue with the Eternal, who in every barakhà is praised and thanked for His gifts. Grandfather Leonin was my great- grandfather. He lived at Casale Monferrato and had flat feet; the alley in front of his house was paved with cobblestones, and he suffered when he walked on it. One morning he came out of his house and found the alley paved with flagstones, and he ex- claimed from the depths of his heart, “’N abrakha a coi goyim c’a I’an fait i losi!” (“A blessing on those unbelievers who made these paving stones!”). As a curse, however, there was the curious linkage medà meshônà, which literally means “strange death” but actually is an imitation of the Piedmontese assident, that is, in plain Italian, “may he drop dead.” To the same Grandpa Leonin is attributed the inexplicable imprecation “C’ai takeissa ‘na medà meshônà faita a paraqua” (“May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella”).
Nor could I forget Barbaricô, close in space and time, so much so that he just missed (only by a single generation) being my uncle in the strict sense of the word. Of him I preserve a personal and thus articulated and complex memory. Not figé dans une attitude, like that of the mythical characters I have mentioned up until now. The comparison to inert gases with which these pages start fits Barbaricô like a glove.
He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. That is, he liked men, and especially women, the meadows, the sky; but not hard work, the racket made by wagons, the intrigues for the sake of a career, the hustling for one’s daily bread, commitments, schedules, and due dates; nothing in short of all that characterized the feverish life of the town of Casale Monferrato in 1890. He would have liked to escape, but he was too lazy to do so. His friends and a woman who loved him, and whom he tolerated with distracted benevo- lence, persuaded him to take the test for the position of ship’s doctor aboard a transatlantic steamer. He won the competition easily, made a single voyage from Genoa to New York, and on his return to Genoa handed in his resignation because in America “ there was too much noise.”
After that he settled in Turin. He had several women, all of whom wanted to redeem and marry him, but he regarded both matrimony and an equipped office and the regular exercise of his profession as too much of a commitment. Around about 1930 he was a timid little old man, shriveled and neglected, frightfully nearsighted; he lived with a big, vulgar goyà, from whom he tried at intervals and feebly to free himself, and whom he described from time to time as ‘na sôtià (“a nut”), ‘na hamortà (“a donkey”), and ‘ na gran beemà (“a great beast”), but without acrimony and indeed with a vein of inexplicable tenderness. This goyà even wanted to have him samdà “baptized” (literally, “destroyed”): a thing he had always refused to do, not out of religious conviction but out of indifference and a lack of initiative.
Barbaricô had no less than twelve brothers and sisters, who described his companion with the ironic and cruel name of Magna Morfina (Aunt Morphine): ironic because the woman, poor thing, being a goyà and childless could not be a magna except in an extremely limited sense, and indeed the term magna was to be understood as its exact opposite, a non-magna, someone excluded and cut off from the family; and cruel because it contained a probably false and at any rate pitiless allusion to a certain exploitation on her part of Barbaricô’s prescription blanks.
The two of them lived in a filthy and chaotic attic room on Borgo Vanchiglia. My uncle was a fine doctor, full of human wisdom and diagnostic intuition, but he spent the entire day stretched out on his cot reading books and old newspapers: he was an attentive reader, eclectic and untiring, with a long memory, although myopia forced him to hold the print three inches from his eyeglasses, which were as thick as the bottom of a beer glass. He only got up when a patient sent for him, which often happened because he almost never asked to be paid; his patients were the poor people on the outskirts of town, from whom he would accept as recompense a half-dozen eggs, or some lettuce from the garden, or even a pair of worn-out shoes. He visited his patients on foot because he did not have the money for the streetcar; when on the street he caught a dim view, through the mist of his myopia, of a girl, he went straight up to her and to her surprise examined her carefully, circling from a foot away. He ate almost nothing, and in a general way he had no needs; he died at over ninety, with discretion and dignity.
Like Barbaricô in her rejection of the world was Grandmother Fina, one of the four sisters whom everyone called Fina: this first name singularity was owed to the fact that the four girls had been sent successively to the same wet nurse in Bra whose name was Delfina and who called all her “nurslings” by that name. Grandmother Fina lived at Carmagnola, in an apartment on the second floor, and did splendid crochet work. At eighty-six she had a slight indisposition, a caodana, as ladies used to have in those days and today mysteriously no longer do: from then on, for twenty years—that is, until her death—she never left her room; on the Sabbath, from her little terrace overflowing with geraniums, fragile and pale, she waved her hand to the people who came out of the scola (“synagogue”). But she must have been quite different in her youth, if what is told about her is true: namely, that her husband having brought to the house as a guest the Rabbi of Moncalvo, an erudite and illustrious man, she had served him, without his knowing, a pork cutlet, since there was nothing else in the pantry. Her brother Barbaraflín (Raphael), who before his promotion to Barba was known as I fieul d’ Moise ‘d Celin (“the son of the Moses of Celin”), now at a mature age and very rich because of the money earned from army supplies had fallen in love with the very beautiful Dolce Valabrega from Gassino; he did not dare declare himself, wrote her love letters that he never mailed, and then wrote impassioned replies to himself.
Marchín, too, an ex-uncle, had an unhappy love. He became enamored of Susanna (which means “lily“ in Hebrew), a brisk, pious woman, the depository of a century-old recipe for the confection of goose sausage; these sausages are made by using the neck of the bird itself as a casing, and as a result in the Lassòn Acodesh (the “holy tongue,” that is, in the jargon we are discussing), more than three synonyms for “neck” have survived. The first, mahané, is neuter and has a technical, generic use; the second, savar, is used only in metaphors, as “at breakneck speed”; and the third, khanèc, extremely allusive and suggestive, refers to the neck as a vital passage, which can be obstructed, occluded, or severed; and it is used in imprecations, such as “may it stick in your neck” ; khanichésse means “to hang oneself.” In any event, Marchín was Susanna’s clerk and assistant; both in the mysterious kitchen-workshop and in the store, on whose shelves were promiscuously placed sausages, holy furnishings, amulets, and prayer books. Susanna turned him down and Marchín got his abominable revenge by selling the recipe for the sausage to a goy. One must think that this goy did not appreciate its value, since after Susanna’s death (which took place in a legendary past) it has no longer been possible to find in commerce goose sausage worthy of the name and tradition. Because of this contemptible retaliation, Uncle Marchín lost his right to be called an uncle.
Remotest of all, portentously inert, wrapped in a thick shroud of legend and the incredible, fossilized in his quality as an uncle, was Barbabramín of Chieri, the uncle of my maternal grandmother. When still young he was already rich, having bought from the aristocrats of the place numerous farms between Chieri and the Asti region; relying on the inheritance they would receive from him, his relations squandered their wealth on banquets, balls, and trips to Paris. Now it happened that his mother, Aunt Milca (the Queen) fell sick, and after much argument with her husband was led to agree to hire a havertà, that is, a maid, which she had flatly refused to do until then: in fact, quite prescient, she did not want women around the house. Punctually, Barbabramín was overcome with love for this havertà, probably the first female less than saintly whom he had an opportunity to get close to.
Her name has not been handed down, but instead a few attributes. She was opulent and beautiful and possessed splendid khlaviòd (“breasts”): the term is unknown in classic Hebrew, where, however, khalàv means “milk.” ) She was of course a goyà, was insolent, and did not know how to read or write; but she was an excellent cook. She was a peasant, ‘na ponaltà, and went barefoot in the house. But this is exactly what my uncle fell in love with: her ankles, her straightforward speech, and the dishes she cooked. He did not say anything to the girl but told his father and mother that he intended to marry her; his parents went wild with rage and my uncle took to his bed. He stayed there for twenty-two years.
As to what Uncle Bramín did during those years, there are divergent accounts. There is no doubt that for a good part he slept and gambled them away; it is known for certain that he went to pot economically because “he did not clip the coupons” of the treasury bonds, and because he had entrusted the admin- istration of the farms to a mamser (“bastard”), who had sold them for a song to a front man of his; in line with Aunt Milca’s premonition, my uncle thus dragged the whole family into ruin, and to this day they bewail the consequences.
It is also said that he read and studied and that, considered at last knowledgeable and just, received at his bedside delegations of Chieri notables and settled disputes; it is also said that the path to that same bed was not unknown to that same havertà, and that at least during the first years my uncle’s voluntary seclusion was interrupted by nocturnal sorties to go and play billiards in the café below. But at any rate he stayed in bed for almost a quarter of a century, and when Aunt Milca and Uncle Solomon died he married a goyà and took her into his bed definitively, because he was by now so weak that his legs no longer held him up. He died poor but rich in years and fame and in the peace of the spirit in 1883.
Susanna of the goose sausage was the cousin of Grandmother Malia, my paternal grandmother, who survives in the figure of an overdressed, tiny vamp in some studio poses executed around 1870, and as a wrinkled, short-tempered, slovenly, and fabulously deaf old lady in my most distant childhood memories. Still today, inexplicably, the highest shelves of the closets give us back her precious relics, shawls of black lace embroidered with iridescent spangles, noble silk embroideries, a marten fur muff mangled by four generations of moths, massive silver tableware engraved with her initials: as though, after almost fifty years, her restless spirit still visited our house.
In her youth she was known as “the heartbreaker”; she was left a widow very early and the rumor spread that my grand- father had killed himself in desperation over her infidelities. She raised alone three boys in a Spartan manner and made them study; but at an advanced age she gave in and married an old Christian doctor, a majestic, taciturn, bearded man, and from then on inclined to stinginess and oddity, although in youth she had been regally prodigal, as beautiful, much loved women usually are. With the passing of the years she cut herself off completely from any family affections (which in any case she must never have felt very deeply). She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to “ free a little black boy.” Perhaps out of a fear of making a mistake in her definitive choice, on alternate days she attended the scola on Via Pius the Fifth and the parish church of Sant’ Ottavio, and it appears that she would even go sacrilegiously to confession. She died past eighty in 1928, watched over by a chorus of unkempt neighbors, all dressed in black and, like her, half demented, led by a witch whose name was Madame Scilimberg. Even though tormented by her renal occlusion, my grandmother kept a sharp eye on Scilimberg until her last breath for fear she might find the maftekh (“key”) hidden under the mattress and carry off the manòd (“money”) and the hafassim (“jewels”) , all of which turned out to be fake.
At her death, her sons and daughters-in-law spent weeks, filled with dismay and disgust, picking through the mountains of household debris with which the apartment overflowed. Grand- mother Malia had indiscriminately saved exquisite objects and revolting garbage. From severe carved walnut closets issued armies of bedbugs dazzled by the light, and then linen sheets never used, and other sheets patched and threadbare, worn so thin as to be transparent, curtains, and reversible damask bedspreads; a collection of stuffed hummingbirds which as soon as touched fell into dust; in the cellar lay hundreds of bottles of precious wines which had turned into vinegar. They found eight overcoats belonging to the doctor, brand new, stuffed with mothballs, and the only one she had allowed him to use, all patches and darnings, its collar slick with grease and a Masonic emblem hidden in its pocket.
I remember almost nothing about her, whom my father called Maman (also in the third person) and loved to describe, with his eager taste for the bizarre, slightly tempered by a veil of filial piety. Every Sunday morning my father took me on foot in a visit to Grandmother Malia: we walked slowly down Via Po, and he stopped to caress all the cats, sniff at all the truffles, and leaf through all the secondhand books. My father was l’ingegné (“the engineer”), with his pockets always bulging with books and known to all the pork butchers because he checked with his logarithmic ruler the multiplication for the prosciutto purchase. Not that he purchased this last item with a carefree heart: superstitious rather than religious, he felt ill at ease at breaking the kasherut rules, but he liked prosciutto so much that, faced by the temptation of a shop window, he yielded every time, sighing, cursing under his breath, and watching me out of the corner of his eye, as if he feared my judgment or hoped for my complicity.
When we arrived at the tenebrous landing of the apartment on Via Po, my father rang the bell, and when my grandmother came to open the door he would shout in her ear: “He’s at the head of his class!” My grandmother would let us in with visible reluctance and guide us through a string of dusty, uninhabited rooms, one of which, studded with sinister instruments, was the doctor’s semi-abandoned office. One hardly ever saw the doc- tor, nor did I certainly want to see him, ever since the day on which I had surprised my father telling my mother that, when they brought him stammering children to be treated, he would cut the fillet of skin under the tongue with his scissors. When we got to the good living room, my grandmother would dig out of some recess the box of chocolates, always the same box, and offer me one. The chocolate was worm-eaten, and with great embarrassment I would quickly hide it away in my pocket.