Rounding off our Translation Tuesday feature’s little Italian sojourn, we present the lilting prose of Marzia Grillo. “Mother” and “shelter” are her twinned themes—each contains the other perfectly, like synonyms, tautology, or an infinite matryoshka, and she demonstrates her point neatly with a text full of recursions, in which a mother’s housing houses housing mothers. Cosy!
My mother called to tell me my mother is dead?
—A.M. Homes
Houses were this: mothers. And matryoshkas were: continents, countries, cities, and wooden apartments—mothers’ furnished rooms.
All around she could see women carrying the future forward. Newborns hiding newborns yet to come, life germinating deep in springtime.
*
Seated at a coffee shop belonging to another generation, she leafed absent-mindedly through PortaPortese. The rentals section was filled with ads for mothers—one-bedroom apartments, studios, central heating, fireplaces. She’d have liked some above-fireplace shelving, for knick knacks and keepsakes. As she warmed herself she could watch a parade of her old mothers inside the Panasonic frame they’d given her years ago. Mothers small, big, bright, ancient. Mothers different to one another; some welcoming, others bare. She’d not need a television.
On her finger she wore a wedding ring that wasn’t hers: inheritance or hereditary? Her parents had been as mistaken about her as they had about themselves, cradling after their own bad choices as if she could right a wrong. And since apples don’t fall far from the trees that nourished them, she’d decided to live in a rose garden. She’d covered herself with thorns, starving but intoxicated by her self-sufficiency.
*
Since receiving the eviction notice, she’d started losing weight. At first strikingly, and then gradually, one pound at a time. Her first step was to stop drinking alcohol, as if she were pregnant. She’d say to waiters: “I can’t drink. It’s not official yet, but…” They’d congratulate her, serve more attentively, with fervour, voraciously beaming, dazzled by life. Since hearing she’d no longer have a home, she’d become hope in the eyes of the world. She carried this in her womb as she dwindled.
Do you remember sardines? she’d say to the mirror. She remembered this was what you called the residents of crowded houses but it was a misnomer. Cans aren’t mothers. They are just cans, no matter how crowded.
*
She kept her mother’s old keys in her bag, though they no longer unlocked anything. That house had been sold ten years ago. That mother had been buried even earlier, and coffins have metal nails crammed against their wood, as well as waterproof gloss paint—replacing their crosses with locks would be out of place: a message of exorbitant faith.
Her latest mother’s keys she’d instead soon return, and was wondering if she should cut a copy set. If she should hold onto the chance to overstay her welcome, to sleep in others’ wardrobes like a ghost, before becoming a skeleton. She’d keep more or less silent. She’d not scream from ceiling corners, nor haunt fears room to room. She’d be, rather, an unobtrusive daughter to an unassuming, enduring fear.
The trauma of moving house is second only to bereavement, she’d read in Focus. But still: moving from one mother to another, seeing them emptied of her life as much as of their own.
The trauma of moving is second only to itself; she screamed, arms crossed, at the gates of her family home, which was now turned into a nursing home.
What about fathers? read a poster on the wall near number 15, a house that had been leased at a still-reasonable price. In the image were two women, a child, and an interrobang. There’d been much discussion of parenthood in recent times, of de facto couples, adoptions. What about fathers, then? Every street, neighbourhood, newspaper, was asking it. But had anyone ever asked a matryoshka if she were missing anything? Fathers were another story, impossible to fill in. Fathers were asked to pay mothers’ living expenses.
She’d made an appointment with a real estate agency to see two mothers with different square footage in the same building.
The tenants of the first were still there, spread throughout the rooms, observing with bulging eyes as she crossed corridors and leaned out windows. A frightened elderly couple, tense and haggard. “Pretend they aren’t there” said the agent, ignoring them. But it was impossible. That space belonged to them as much as to the insects in their kitchen cupboards, the nails in their walls, the cobwebs in the corners of their mouths half-closed in farewell.
The second mother had white, plaster teeth, light cotton clothing with a floral print, green eyes, and medium height: she resembled her own mother.
*
When her mother died, she’d been in bed but couldn’t sleep. She was watching a movie on tv. It was her birthday month, il maggio delle spose. The same window as when she was a teenager. Her father called to warn her and before hanging up said: “Don’t leave the house. Stay where you are.”
In the real world, rentals are adoptions. It doesn’t matter how many mothers you’ve lost, or left behind—it’s not the sum total of abandonments that counts, you just need to avoid being without a mother. Without a mother, rain wets your eyes, and from there on down. Cold scalds, wolves kill, streetlights have no switches.
In a world that would never belong to her, mothers could sell themselves anyway, stoking a sense of guilt.
*
There were sperm banks, and employment offices, orphanages, real estate agencies and foster homes; there were luxury hotels and fickle, two-bed tents. There were construction sites where mothers were raised with cranes, one floor at a time. Workers hosed them down with lime, built iron rebar and steel cores that stood naked for a few weeks before being clothed.
Her grandmother had died before she was born. And her mother’s last mother had been left a queenless beehive, the constant buzz destined to fade.
*
“Come stay with us for a while,” the other families had told her. They’d tucked her in, made her coffee. They’d entertained her, clothed her, fed her. Combed her hair. Although she was an adult, she looked fifteen: she’d become these other families’ youngest child.
She’d left her belongings in her father’s garage, keeping only the bare essentials. And since it’s necessity that makes virtue, she was a step away from sainthood. A hint of halo snagged her in the lower branches of trees, she had to clean it nightly—she kept the leaves and twigs in a red lacquered box. Her smile was radiant, the other families glistened in its reflected light.
*
Week by week, her hair lightened, bringing out a fiery, scarlet shade. Her body had dwindled, becoming wood-like: all new. From a corner of the sidewalk she watched the entranceway to her future mother.
Her joints barely rustled as she climbed the two flights of stairs.
She rang the doorbell, greeted the real estate agent, admired his tie with its unobtrusive pattern of orange seahorses on a dark blue background. He offered her a seat in a kitchen of white and red chequered curtains. He stretched out a sheet of paper and a biro. “Take all the time you need,” he told her.
*
Mothers’ lease contracts are printed in tiny, almost illegible fonts, punctuation arbitrary. They’re contracts of mutual belonging, fixed-term. They’re signed in block letters, with names aligned, repeated, and legible. Of blood they create no ties.
She’d abandon that mother after three years, or perhaps five. She’d have paid for her on a timely basis. She’d have given her back, if necessary. She’d have loved her as much as she could, and likely received her love in return. She certainly wouldn’t have allowed her to die.
Translated from the Italian by Lourdes Contreras and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe
Marzia Grillo is a writer, editor, and event organiser from Rome. Her short-story collection “Il punto di vista del sole” (2022, Giulio Perrone Editore) pushes the boundaries of genre expectations and the first person perspective itself. In 2016, she edited a volume of experimental Emily Dickinson machine translations, “Charter in delirio! Un esperimento con i versi di Emily Dickinson” (Elliot Edizioni), probing the evolution of the Italian language through Dickinson’s gripping poetic fantasies. Grillo has worked as an editor with publishing houses such as Fazi, Elliot, Giunti, Bompiani, and Fandango, and collaborates regularly with literary journals and fanzines. Among her projects, she organises the Premio Strega’s official event Strega OFF.
Lourdes Contreras researches Italian literature, visual arts, and oral histories at the intersection of Ecocriticism and Gender Studies. Her writing focuses on twentieth-century women’s depictions of plant and animal life. She is a co-editor for the Bibliotheca Dantesca journal and teaches language and content courses at the University of Pennsylvania.
Julia Pelosi-Thorpe’s translations of Latin, Italian, and Parmesan dialect poetry are published in the Journal of Italian Translation, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Poetry Society’s The Poetry Review, and more. She can be found at @jpelosithorpe and her website is jpelosithorpe.com.
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