How many times I listened to that cassette! One of the jollier songs told how the Madonna went off to market leaving Bambino Gesù with… guess who? Easier to guess who she didn’t leave him with, isn’t it? Lucky Giuseppe. No, she calls on a group of angels with incongruously Italian names who happily agree to babysit. But in her absence Jesus wakes and begins to squall. The angels try more or less everything we ourselves had been trying to get our own little baby back to sleep. Angelo Lilla tries camomilla. The angelo d’oro suggests a bel coro — a choir. Various other rhyming spirits propose easing off the swaddling clothes, massaging the little fellow’s tum, playing the violin, pulling faces at him, etc. But still the baby cries disperato, still the Madonna remains al mercato (grabbing a cappuccino if she was my wife). Finally, back comes Maria to announce that Gesù is just a smidgin hungry. She sends the angels off to market for something she has unaccountably forgotten, but by the time they get back with the goods the Son of God is, of course, asleep in the Madonna’s arms.
One says ‘the Son of God’, but minor details of this variety have no place in the endless Italian lullabies that feature the Virgin and her little boy. Very soon you begin to appreciate that, contrary to the Anglican tales I was told as a child at Sunday School, Jesus’s claim to prominence depends only very marginally on his being the Son of God and far more importantly on his having the Madonna for his mother. In any event, the only vitally defining factor about these two is that he is her bambino and she is his mamma. She has no other men after him and he no other women. This is what has remained sacred. Everything else is accidental.
But the lullabies I like most are the ones that allow the sad truth of their generative context to sneak into the lines themselves. The brutally simple ‘Fa la nanna e la nanna faremo…’ (Go to sleep, then we can all go to sleep) is something I might well have made up myself around the end of the third week with Stefi. While rhyming bargaining gambits of the variety: Non fare più capricci / se no sarann’ pasticci (Come on, don’t fool about / or there’ll be trouble no doubt), followed up by the rather more threatening Alla tua mamma dài già tante pene / potrebbe creder che non le vuoi bene (You already make things so hard for your mother / she might end up thinking you don’t really love her), are the sort of thing I might have tried another week or so on. But the ninna nanna I finally began to identify with, say, by the end of a month or two, is the one that goes as follows:
Nanna O, nanno O
Il mio bambino a chi lo do?
Lo darò al suo angiolino
Che lo tenga fino al mattino
I make no apologies for my inability to rhyme the translation…
Lullaby, lullaby
Who shall I give my baby to?
I’ll give him to his little angel
Who’ll keep him till the morning
In short, here’s a mother who’s reached that point where all she wants to do is find somebody else who’ll look after her child…
Nanna O, nanna O
Il mio bambino a chi lo do?
Lo darò al suo cherubino
Che lo tenga a se vicino
Lullaby, lullaby
Who shall I give my baby to?
I’ll give him to his little cherub
Who’ll keep him close by his side.
The poor mother then goes through a list of possible surrogates for herself including, notably the befana, an ugly but kindly witch, and at the last, inevitably, Gesù and Maria, this final solution rhyming with e così sia — so be it, as if to say: at this point I wash my hands of the whole miserable affair.
The tone of the song, in minor key, is insuperably plaintive, at once desperate and desperately resigned, perhaps faintly vindictive in places, especially when the befana is invited to keep the child a settimana, a whole week, and again, though more subtly, when the singer lights on the idea of unloading her sleepless brat on the Madonna and child, as if the whole awful situation were somehow entirely their fault in the first place. Not the father’s at all. And apparently father is a more unlikely babysitter than all these supernatural candidates. In any event, he’s never mentioned, not a whisper of papà, not even a plea that the fellow do his duty. So that pacing up and down with Stefi in the small hours and listening to those southern voices rolling their sad ‘r’s and dragging out doleful vowel sounds through heartbreaking, accordion-wheezed cadences, I felt I had good reason to wish I’d been born in the times when those lullabies were written. For in that case I would probably have never had to hear them at all.
One day I remarked to Marta, while Michele and Beppe were fooling around with their model cars together in the still huge pile of rubble outside their house, on this total absence of fathers in lullabies. Not true, she objected. I couldn’t have heard ‘Ninna nanna al mio papà’ — Lullaby for my dad. Sing it to me, I said. Instead, she went and got a tape from a shelf arranged in the kind of meticulous order my things will be in only after my final departure. Here, listen, she said. Very sure of herself. And, with bated breath, I did. It turned out to be one of those splendid cases of the exception that not only proves the rule but insists on it. Sung by the most winsome infant voices, here is how it goes:
Ninna nanna al mio papà
Al più buono e al più caro dei papà
Dormi, dormi, mio papà,
Il tuo bimbo a te vicino resterà
Lullaby lullaby for my dad
For the best and the dearest of dads
Sleepy byes, sleepy byes, Daddy,
Your little boy is by your side.
In short, rather than Daddy helping to get baby to sleep, this is baby, or little boy, singing Daddy to sleep. Rather than being the sufferer struggling to have someone else accept the embrace of Morpheus, Dad is himself the baby, the object of soothing vocal caresses. A mad fantasy, you might think, a hallucination spawned from the exasperated nerves of the modern and politically correct father in the middle of another night in bianco. But I’m afraid not. No, I suspect the generative context of this little song is quite different and once again far less flattering to the paternal figure. For we’re in Italy, remember, and this must be siesta time. Dad is back from work, he wants a nap after lunch before starting his long afternoon, and quite probably he’s threatened the kids, now somewhat older, with God knows what if they don’t shut up and let him sleep. (Why else the appeasing ‘for the best and dearest of dads’?) Nobody is interested here whether the children sleep or not, so long as they don’t bother Papà. Thus, after the verse above, all that remains of the song is a soft spoken, almost fearful whisper:
Dormi, dormi, Papà