Warner - The Lost Father

Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic. Her fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (awarded a Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), the collection of stories, Mermaids in the Basement and most recently The Leto Bundle. Her historical quests into areas of myth and symbolism Alone of All Her Sex, Joan of Arc, Monuments and Maidens, and No go the Bogeyman led her into the exploration of fairy tales. She is the editor of Wonder Tales, a collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries and the author of a study of the fairy tale, From the Beast to the Blonde. In 1994 she gave the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.

Like Viscontis film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism.

According to family legend, Davide Pittagora died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mothers background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York where they find only humiliation and poverty and after their return to Italy in the early 1920s. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her own imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.

I would like to thank the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities for its patronage while I was finishing this book, and the staff of the Center for their generous help.

I am grateful to Czeslaw Milosz and The Paris Review for permission to quote verses from My Faithful Mother Tongue which first appeared, in The Paris Review, No. 87, Spring 1983.

The lines from Makin Whoopee by Donaldson and Kahn 1928 Bregman Vocco & Conn Inc., USA, are reproduced by permission of Keith Prowse Music Publishing Co. Ltd/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H OLD, and of Bregman Vocco & Conn Inc., Los Angeles, CA 90069, USA. The lines from Stormy Weather by Arlen and Koehler 1935 Mills Music Inc., USA, are reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H OLD, and of Mills Music Inc., Belwin Music Corporation, Burbank, CA 91505. USA.

Faithful mother tongue

I have been serving you.

Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colours

so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch

as preserved in my memory.

This lasted many years.

You were my native land; I lacked any other.

I believed that you would also be a messenger

between me and some good people

even if they were few, twenty, ten

or not born, as yet

Faithful mother tongue,

perhaps after all its I who must try to save you.

So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colours

bright and pure if possible,

for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.

LONDON , 1985

LIKE THE NEEDLE her mother would burnish in a candle flame before probing for a splinter under her skin, memories of those days pierced her with sudden clarity: a sisters footfall on the scoured stairs, the nursery smell of clothes boiling in the copper cauldron on the stove, the angle of another sisters head, intent on the pattern she was cutting on the table. For long stretches she preferred to live in deliberate forgetfulness.

But sometimes, she couldnt stop the memories coming. In the same way as shed sometimes want an ice cream even though she knew her teeth would feel skinned alive, shed lift the blinds and look into the sunlight of those days, and then, above all, shed see her father, and he was shaving.

I paused. Your head remained cocked so that you could see through your bifocals the button you were sewing.

What do you think so far? I asked. I tapped the pages of the manuscript together on my lap.

You said, thoughtfully, I wouldnt say deliberate forgetfulness. I could hear a catch in your voice, under the vibrating rs, the echo of your first language. I dont want to forget. Its just happened like that. After I married your father and we came to live here. You glanced around, at the walnut kneehole desk, the Welsh carvers in the window embrasure, the decanters of pale amber sherry in a Tantalus on the sideboard behind the television set.

But what do you think? I asked again. Is my Fantina you? Does she make sense to you?

You laughed, lightly, and nipped the thread neatly with your teeth, making sure not to get lipstick on the blouse. I like the bit about ice cream, you went on, looking up at me for a moment. You know, we used to have hot ices too, believe it or not. Straight from the oven.

Baked Alaska!

They werent called that. You pressed the cloth around the shank of the button smooth and swung the blouse onto the arm of the chair. I cant remember what the gelateria called them. They were expensive in fact I think I only had one, once. Your small neat head, bent over the sewing basket, was still dark-haired, soft in texture and close-set like plumage. You found the spool you needed and reached into the tidy heap of mending to fetch out another garment in need of repair. My father used to wait until the end of the festa to buy up the leftovers. Hed wake us up in the middle of the night, for heavensakes and wed sit up in bed and eat ice cream.

Ill put that in, I said, opening my current scarlet and black Flying Eagle notebook, the sixth since I started putting together an imaginary memoir of my southern Italian mother. Whats a good name for Baked Alaska Ninfania-style? How about a Theda Bara? Was she around then? No, I know, a Pola Negri!

You laughed again, and I went on reading to you. Id filled two notebooks with a draft of the early part, The Duel, and I was trying to weave that story together with other memories of your childhood, of the Mussolini years and your fathers last day when you were eight years old and youd been out with your sisters gathering snails after a shower. Usually, Id bring over my own eight-year-old, Nicholas, on a Sunday afternoon to see his Grandma, but on this occasion, Nicholas was at the zoo with his father to visit the repellent insect he has adopted. For ten pounds a year, he can help save the species.