The Epistolary Genius of Natalia Ginzburg

Twenty years ago, when I was writing my novel and living in Italy, I discovered an incredible Italian writer named Natalia Ginzburg. She was from Turin. I just rediscovered a classic Ginzburg novel, The City and The House (published in German as Die Straße in die Stadt or The Street to the City). This epistolary novel influenced some of the fictional elements of Ostraca: Re-membering Sophie/Re-membering Me.

In the following excerpt, Lucrezia, eternally pregnant, mercurial, and impulsive, alternately childish and mean, is writing a letter to Giuseppe, her former lover, the father of her fourth child. Her husband, the long-suffering Piero, from whom she has just separated, has had to endure yet another one of Lucrezia’s affairs. This time she is pregnant with her sixth child, but by her new lover, Ignazio, whom she refers to as “I.” But “I” has been in love with and partnered with Ippo for twenty years—a childless anorexic he will not leave. However, Lucrezia believes “I” will leave Ippo for her.

In this letter, Lucrezia writes to Giuseppe, who has just married his dead brother’s wife, a woman named Anne-Marie. Lucrezia cannot help being jealous over this fact, despite her affair with Giuseppe having ended years ago.

LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE

Rome, 12th December

Dear Giuseppe,

So you're married. I'm not surprised because it was very clear from your recent letters that you were considering the idea. I thought to congratulate you. I can't because this marriage of yours doesn't make me feel in a congratulatory mood at all.

I keep all your letters. I keep them in my wardrobe in a cardboard box. Every now and then I get them out and look at them. How you hated Anne-Marie when you first arrived in America and then later, too, all the time your brother was alive. ‘We haven't anything to say to each other in any language. I can't stand her long neck or her clear squinting eyes or her smile or her plait or her bun.’ I'm picking out phrases from your letters at random.

Roberta says that when you and your brother were children, you always wanted to do what he did. And so now you've married his wife, but I think you finished up in a real stinking mess. I've seen a photograph of you and Anne-Marie. Roberta showed it to me, Anne-Marie is ugly. Those eyes, that raincoat, that smile. She's cross-eyed. Her smile is false. You have your usual look of a bird that's just fallen off a roof.

I'm fine. I'm in Rome in an apartment someone's lent me in Piazza del Paradiso. I see Roberta a lot. She is a great help to me. I see Serena who has come to live in Rome in Albina’s bedsit. Albina is at Luco dei Marsi. Her mother's died.

My apartment is a bit dark. It's cold. I bought some more electric heaters. There were already three of them, but I feel the cold a great deal. However, the children are happy and they like Rome. Vito goes to a kindergarten run by nuns. Cecilia takes him and picks him up. I feel sick all the time. My new baby will be born in April. I brought one of the dogs, Joli, with me because the children like him a lot. I gave the other dogs to the help at Le Margherite.

Piero comes to see us quite often. Relations between us are calm now. He phones before he comes because he doesn't want to bump into “I”—I call him “I” now. Even the children call him “I.” Once however, “I” and Piero did bump into each other. It didn't go too badly. First, they talked about the price of houses, then about the price of pictures. “I” hasn’t come to live here yet. He's coming, but not at the moment. He has to think things over for a while.

He usually eats lunch with us. At suppertime, he has to go to her place, to Ippo's. It's a relationship that's gone on for 20 years and he can't just break it off in one fell swoop. And she, Ippo, has a bad heart. My God, what a bloody nuisance she is. She has a bad stomach and she has a bad heart. I, on the other hand, am as strong as a horse. She has such a bad stomach and she can't eat. She has a horror of getting fat and because of this she stopped eating years ago, and this has made her stomach shrink. A carrot, a glass of hot water with a slice of lemon in it. That's what her meals are. “I” has to go to her house every evening to see that she eats her carrot. Ippo. All day, her name goes round and round inside my head. What with “I” and Ippo, I feel that i is the only letter in the alphabet. I asked “I” if Ippo knows that I'm pregnant. He said, yes, she knows, but he says very little about her to me. Before, I used to ask a lot of questions about her, and he answered me to some extent. Now he doesn't answer, so I've stopped.

I keep all these questions inside me now. They swell my belly up like the baby. I don't sleep well at night. I'm always waiting for “I” to phone me or I'm waiting for the noise of the lift and his key. He doesn't always come. Sometimes he phones me at 1:00 in the morning, worn out, really worn out from Via Della Scrofa. It's difficult to get back to sleep, to find reassuring thoughts that will make me sleep.

Yours,

Lucrezia.