A Place to Live by Natalia Ginzburg

Author:Natalia Ginzburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

November, 1969

the baby who saw bears

Three years ago I went to America for the first time in my life. One of my sons had been living there for a year and my grandson was born there. My son, his wife and the baby would be staying another year. The baby was already several months old and I had never seen him except in photographs. And so I was introduced to America and my grandson Simone at the same time. I can’t claim to have seen and understood much about America since my responses are slow and I’m not good at grasping new places quickly. What I recall of my trip is this: the afternoon was extremely prolonged, with the plane, apparently motionless, whirring above the white, rounded peaks of clouds in an intensely blue sky where the sun had no intention of sinking. Then all at once came night and rain. That instant when the motionless, glorious afternoon was transformed into a nocturnal storm must have been very swift since I have no recollection of it. When we landed, the wind was raging and covered walkways had been set up on the landing field, the rain pelting down on their zinc roofs.

The first things I saw were streets lashed by the thunderstorm and long, very brightly lit, rumbling underpasses. The city was Boston. Over the course of my life I had read a great many books that told of Boston, but for some unknown reason the only one that came to mind just then was a novel called The Lamplighter, which I had read and loved at the age of nine. It took place in Boston and was about a poor, wild, mistreated girl named Gertrude who was taken in and adopted by a very kind old man, a lamplighter by trade. I was promptly cheered to find myself in Gertrude’s city. However, there were no streetlamps around, and in those rumbling underpasses it was hard to find a trace of the serene and spacious images I had constructed around the name of Boston in my distant childhood. Nonetheless the memory of The Lamplighter stayed with me the whole time I was in Boston, and in the end, after close scrutiny I found that the city was not so unlike the one I had unearthed from the ashes of my childhood fantasies. What I recalled about Gertrude was that in her most impoverished state she used to eat garbage. So I carefully examined the huge cans of garbage stationed in front of the houses on the Boston streets. In the morning my son explained to me that there were two cans for garbage, one for organic and the other for inorganic. Therefore, whenever I threw something out I had to stop to consider whether it went in the organic can or the inorganic can. Later when I was back in Italy I would still ponder over organic and inorganic even while I was throwing everything into one pail as we do here.

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