Read Online A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tiziano Terzani
Ads: Link
child my real parents had given me to another family, and that only thanks to this had I survived. What a risk he took in saying such a thing! In the vast majority of cases it cannot be true, as it was not true in mine. Or perhaps it was? The Oriental Hotel’s car inched slowly through the traffic; my thoughts flew rapidly and delightfully in every direction.
There can be no doubt that I am my mother’s son. Where else would I have got this potato nose, which has reemerged identically in my daughter? Yet it is equally true that in a certain sense I have never belonged to the family I grew up in. I felt this from an early age, and my relatives recognized it too, jokingly saying to my father: “But that one, where did you ever dig him out from?”
The blind man had got the facts wrong, but he had hit on something profoundly true. One only had to interpret, to focus on that part of us that goes beyond our physical being, and ask where it comes from. In my case it does indeed come from “another family,” that is to say from another source than the genes that determine the shape of my nose, my eyes, and even certain gestures which now, the older I grow, I recognize more and more as those of my paternal grandfather.
In the tenor of my parents’ ways there was not so much as a germ of the life I have lived up till now. Both of them came from poor, magnificently simple people. Calm people, close to the earth, chiefly concerned with survival—never restless or adventurous, never looking for novelty as I have always done since childhood. On my mother’s side they were peasants who had always worked other people’s land; on my father’s side, stonecutters in a quarry that is still called by their name. For centuries the Terzanis have chiseled the paving stones of Florence, and—it was said—those of the Palazzo Pitti. Nobody in either family had ever gone regularly to school, and my mother and father’s generation was the first that had learned, barely, to read and write.
Where then did I get my longing to see the world, my fetish forprinted paper, my love of books, and above all that burning desire to leave Florence, to travel, to go to the ends of the earth? Where did I get this yearning for always being somewhere else? Certainly not from my parents, with their deep roots in the city where they were born and grew up, which they had left only once, for their honeymoon in Prato—ten miles from the
duomo
.
Among all my relatives there was not one to whom I could look for inspiration, to whom I could turn for advice. The only ones I felt indebted to were my father and mother, who I saw literally go without food to allow me to study after primary school. What my father earned never lasted to the end of the month, and I well remember how sometimes, holding my mother’s hand and trying not to be seen by anyone who knew us, I would go with her to the pawnbroker in the Via Palazzuolo with a linen sheet from her trousseau. Even the money for a notebook was a worry, and my first long trousers—new corduroy ones, good for summer and winter, indispensable for secondary school—were bought by installments. Every month we would go to the shop to hand over the amount due. It is hard to imagine today, but the pleasure of putting on those trousers is one I have never felt again with any other garment, not even those made to measure for me in Peking by Mao’s own tailor.
As I grew up I had a great affection for my family and its history, but I never felt any real affinity for them—as if I really had been put there by accident. My relatives were irritated by the fact that I studied and did not start working at a very young age, as they had all done. A brother of my father’s, who dropped in every evening before dinner, used to say: “What’s he done today, the layabout?” Then he would trot out the wisecrack that so offended my mother: “If he carries on like this he’ll go farther than Annibale!” Annibale was a cousin,
There can be no doubt that I am my mother’s son. Where else would I have got this potato nose, which has reemerged identically in my daughter? Yet it is equally true that in a certain sense I have never belonged to the family I grew up in. I felt this from an early age, and my relatives recognized it too, jokingly saying to my father: “But that one, where did you ever dig him out from?”
The blind man had got the facts wrong, but he had hit on something profoundly true. One only had to interpret, to focus on that part of us that goes beyond our physical being, and ask where it comes from. In my case it does indeed come from “another family,” that is to say from another source than the genes that determine the shape of my nose, my eyes, and even certain gestures which now, the older I grow, I recognize more and more as those of my paternal grandfather.
In the tenor of my parents’ ways there was not so much as a germ of the life I have lived up till now. Both of them came from poor, magnificently simple people. Calm people, close to the earth, chiefly concerned with survival—never restless or adventurous, never looking for novelty as I have always done since childhood. On my mother’s side they were peasants who had always worked other people’s land; on my father’s side, stonecutters in a quarry that is still called by their name. For centuries the Terzanis have chiseled the paving stones of Florence, and—it was said—those of the Palazzo Pitti. Nobody in either family had ever gone regularly to school, and my mother and father’s generation was the first that had learned, barely, to read and write.
Where then did I get my longing to see the world, my fetish forprinted paper, my love of books, and above all that burning desire to leave Florence, to travel, to go to the ends of the earth? Where did I get this yearning for always being somewhere else? Certainly not from my parents, with their deep roots in the city where they were born and grew up, which they had left only once, for their honeymoon in Prato—ten miles from the
duomo
.
Among all my relatives there was not one to whom I could look for inspiration, to whom I could turn for advice. The only ones I felt indebted to were my father and mother, who I saw literally go without food to allow me to study after primary school. What my father earned never lasted to the end of the month, and I well remember how sometimes, holding my mother’s hand and trying not to be seen by anyone who knew us, I would go with her to the pawnbroker in the Via Palazzuolo with a linen sheet from her trousseau. Even the money for a notebook was a worry, and my first long trousers—new corduroy ones, good for summer and winter, indispensable for secondary school—were bought by installments. Every month we would go to the shop to hand over the amount due. It is hard to imagine today, but the pleasure of putting on those trousers is one I have never felt again with any other garment, not even those made to measure for me in Peking by Mao’s own tailor.
As I grew up I had a great affection for my family and its history, but I never felt any real affinity for them—as if I really had been put there by accident. My relatives were irritated by the fact that I studied and did not start working at a very young age, as they had all done. A brother of my father’s, who dropped in every evening before dinner, used to say: “What’s he done today, the layabout?” Then he would trot out the wisecrack that so offended my mother: “If he carries on like this he’ll go farther than Annibale!” Annibale was a cousin,
Similar Books
