[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_52

Familiar Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg, 1963

A conversation with two friends left a profound impression on me some time ago. At the time, I was living in Bologna, and a dear friend, who had just gotten engaged, invited me to dinner at his partner’s house.

He was an Italian scholar of foreign languages and cultures who collaborated with the University to help integrate immigrants into Italy. His partner was an Italian photojournalist in the Middle East, and she came from a linguistic background that had led her to learn, in addition to English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. The girl was the same age as me, 27 years old, yet she seemed much more mature than me; she had something in her bearing that gave her a sense of great authority, an aura of profound seriousness; she spoke a lot, densely and articulately, and never laughed. I was impressed and admired. I wondered how it waspossible that such a young person spoke all those languages and had come to a profession that was as dangerous as politically active. In comparison, I seemed to have remained locked in the playground combing my dolls, incapable of asking "Hi, how are you?" in English, indolent towards my duties as a citizen (voting in elections had always seemed like a useless farce to me) and paralyzed in an endless university course.

As she introduced herself, telling me about her latest reportage from Syria, my eyes roamed around the house: it was a delightful apartment, which smelled of wood and new, with plants in ceramic pots on every window, books on every shelf and photos of travels from all over the world hanging in steel frames. It was an unusual experience for me to be a guest of friends in a house that wasn't a terrifying dump. In Bologna,the unsustainable rents of the historical city center force young people to make unhappy housing compromises. It was, therefore, an absolute pleasure for me that evening to sip good wine in a beautiful place with two passionate people, comfortably seated on new furniture and not on objects recovered from the landfill, as I was used to. I was already in love and inspired.

She talked about politics and did it in a theoretical way. There were many seductive words in the air that evening: equality, freedom, justice, humanity, solidarity; it seemed like the intellectual backstage of the French Revolution. There was little pragmatism, no connection with everyday reality, the one everyone carries on their shoulders in the morning when they get out of bed. While these cumbersome ideals filled the room and the conversations, I slowly finished the wine, wondering how it was possible to combine the will to be there for others with the will to be there for oneself. How do you reconcile everyday problems with the energy and time that activism requires? I still hadn't said a word since I arrived and regretted what had become a political rally instead of an aperitif with friends. My friend intervened occasionally, recounting his experiences, not in Syria but in South America, or “Sweetheart, do you remember when I was in India?”. The more I heard them talk, the more I felt the thirst inside me, as if I had been the one speaking and had already used up all my saliva. With the excuse of opening the second bottle of wine, I got up and walked around the living room, peeking at the books and leaning on the shelves. Names such as Bruce Chatwin and Edward Said appeared among the titles. They were all travel literature texts or post-colonial political essays, except one: “Family Lexicon” by Natalia Ginzburg, a novel, the only Italian text in the entire room.

“Ah yes, that is one of my favorite books,” the girl told me as she reached me and took it off the shelf. This is the symbol of the resistance of Italian intellectuals,” she told me, handing the book to her companion; “oh yes,” he echoed, “this is the example of the beautiful Italy, an Italy that no longer exists. “In "Family Lexicon," some big names of Italian left-wing intellectuals appear as the same ones who opposed the system of power during Fascism.

“Now the Italians are all fascists again,” she continued with contempt. “They don't want migrants”.

“They think they are better,” he added disdainfully. “They have forgotten that we Italians used to be migrants, too.”

Then, they began to talk about the episodes that had just occurred in a neighborhood of Rome. People had demonstrated against the opening of a reception center for refugees, holding signs that read "Italians first."

“That fascist scum,” she exclaimed in a poisonous tone, “They are a handful of yokels who can't read or write, but they're the ones ruining the country.”

The radicality of her contempt struck me deeply. I knew well the Rome neighborhood that was at the center of the demonstration; it is the neighborhood my uncle grew up in; it is a neighborhood that in my memories remains warm, welcoming, and familiar, which is full of people who struggle to make a living but who lend a hand to those in need. A neighborhood is entire of people who live in apartments far worse than those that young people are forced to dwell in Bologna, who are "yokels" because they spend much more time in the street rather than in a “political aperitif.” I watched the girl click her fingers on the glass of wine; she had soft and shiny skin and a little silver ring on each finger. I automatically thought of my uncle's hands, which looked like two bundles of purple sandpaper ravaged by 45 years of factory work.

“But don't you think there is a reason why they demonstrate against the center's opening?” I asked, thinking that the situation was much more complex than an ideological contrast between fascism and communism or a struggle between Good and Evil in which we were the good guys and the others were the bad ones. It was the first time I'd opened my mouth, and unfortunately, my question hadn't resonated as I'd hoped.

“What are you doing, defending fascists? Look, the victims here are the refugees, not those assholes who throw stones at them."

I thought about how the far right spread propaganda on people's skin, how fears are manipulated, and how suffering is exploited; I thought about how the void of political offering towards a large segment of the population who lives in conditions of hardship is filled by hateful rhetoric and how this rhetoric is welcomed because it represents an angry scream against the injustice which would otherwise remain silenced. I thought about my uncle, who could have been one of the demonstrators, about how he doesn't consider himself a fascist, about how perhaps a large part of those people don't consider themselves as such either. I thought about all these things, but I couldn't say anything because the wine had started to roll my tongue, and anger clouded the clarity I had left.

“Try to empathize with those who deserve solidarity,” my friend told me paternally, convinced I had switched to the enemy side. And I found it funny that he used this very word: solidarity. What did the two of them know about solidarity? They who, satisfied with their travels, studies, and jobs, sat in their beautiful apartment in a nice and quiet neighborhood of Bologna, spitting on those below them, on those who, living in challenging neighborhoods, in occupied or shared houses, far from the beauty of great ideals, made the wrong choices.

My friends looked at me, annoyed: they were intellectuals; they worked in that field. I wondered how much of their anger was sincere disappointment and how much was instead desire to mark a difference between right and wrong. And a chain of angry questions was spinning in my head: “Don't they know that someone born in an estate dies in that estate eight times out of ten? Do those who are poor only know necessity? That feeding the spirit doesn't feed the bellies? Does everything a worker brings home go into taxes, diapers, and humiliation? That there is no time left to think, understand, know? That there isn't even time to cry? Why, instead of taking a plane to do the white saviors in other countries, don't they get on their bicycles and go ask their neighbors why they voted for the far right?”

I felt deeply frustrated at not being able to explain myself and at being thought of as someone who ideologically agrees with the far right. But then I quickly realized that they were not curious to understand what was behind my question; they only wanted to judge me, too.

They bitterly despised a portion of the population, and that same portion bitterly despised migrants. From this point of view, they didn't seem that different.

Years later, I still feel sorry when I think back to this evening, and I still feel the same sense of helplessness and danger when faced with these issues. These topics quickly earn you cumbersome labels that you never can shake off. But I am still convinced that the nationalist wave cannot be treated only through the moralistic lens of right and wrong, much less only through that of racism. Many other axes intersect this point; gender and class are just some of them.

Above all, I am still convinced that making the right choice when you are born right is straightforward.