Constellation

When I think of the free time my mother spent with my father, in our small town outside Turin, this is the scene I usually picture: she’s on the couch, working through La Settimana Enigmistica, a weekly word-puzzle magazine, while he reads a book.

- ANDREA BAJANI

She looks bored; her glasses have slipped down the bridge of her nose, where they remain out of carelessness rather than to help her eyes focus. She’s waiting for him to finish reading and decide what to do with whatever time remains before dinner. Did she find crossword puzzles interesting? Fun? I suspect they were mostly a way to kill time. In my memory, she’s often distracted, looking out the window. Or, more often still, she’s dozing off, pencil dropping from her hand, head lolling onto the back of the couch or to one side, mouth half open. I don't know if she had a passion for fitting words into boxes as much as a desire to conform to the version of herself that my father had laid out.

“This is a book for your mother” was my father’s way of declaring that a novel wasn't any good. The phrase did contain a kind of affection, the perverse, frank, aggressive kind that follows, or underlines, an assertion of control. To admit such a book to our home library—which he, an eager autodidact, had gradually built over the years—was a concession he made to her. But labelling a book as “for your mother” meant, above all, that its proper place was in the bin.

I don’t remember where all these supposedly second-rate novels came from, the ones that ended up on my mother’s nightstand. I know some were gifts from my father himself, birthday or Christmas presents wrapped in bookstore paper. She'd unwrap them and say thank you. Eventually, even she began to say “these are books for me,” as if seeing herself through his eyes—holding on, through self-deprecation, only to the part of the phrase that passed for affection.