In the autumn, I went with my mother to visit Mario, who was now living in a small town near Clermont-Ferrand. He was teaching in a boarding school. He had become great friends with the school’s headmaster and his wife. He said that they were extraordinary people, very sophisticated and honest, the kind of people you could only find in France. In his small room he had a coal stove. From his window you could see the countryside covered in snow. Mario wrote long letters to Chiaromonte and Cafi in Paris. He translated Herodotus and fiddled with the stove. Under his jacket, he wore a dark turtleneck sweater that the headmaster’s wife had made for him. To thank her, he’d given her a sewing basket. Everyone in the town knew him. He stopped and chatted with everyone and he was asked by all to come home with them and drink “le vin blanc.”
My mother said, “How French he’s become!”
In the evenings, he played cards with the headmaster and his wife. He listened to their conversations and discussed educational methods with them. They also spoke a long time about whether or not there had been enough onion in the soup served at dinner.
“How patient he’s become!” my mother said. “How patient he is with these people. With us he never had any patience. Whenever he was home, he thought we were all so boring. These people seem even more boring than we are!”
And she said, “He’s patient with them only because they’re French!”
From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.
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