What To Do With Your Hands

Natalia Ginzburg, Sagittarius

Bad speakers, bad writers, and bad liars have something in common: they don’t know what to do with their hands. We use our hands naturally, unconsciously, until the moment when we know we’re being watched: then, they stay stiff at our sides, or ball into fists, or whiz around like flies. I remember being coached on what to do with my hands when I’d finished playing a piece on the piano (keep them poised on the keyboard, then gracefully lift and lower them into my lap, then get up from the bench). Pavarotti, according to a recent documentary, brought his famous handkerchief on stage because he didn’t know what to do with his hands without it. George H. W. Bush was famously excoriated for checking his watch during a Town Hall debate (a gaffe that Biden repeated in 2020).

Mediocre writers don’t know what their characters should be doing with their hands. The stock gestures — sipping drinks, smoking cigarettes, stroking chins, chopping vegetables — run out quickly, and then they’re as bereft as the politicians. So when I read Natalia Ginzburg’s novellas Valentino and Sagittarius this week, her attention to gesture felt like something very special, something to note carefully. Of course, she was Italian, and the Italians are legendary for their gestures; perhaps that is why she she is so skilled at communicating with them.

For instance, this passage in Valentino, showing a tense interaction between parents and son, absolutely crackles:

My mother smoothed the pleats in her dress, sighed, and said nothing; my father refilled his pipe and trembled. He struck a match against the sole of his shoe to light his pipe but Valentino, noticing this, went up to him holding his cigarette lighter. My father glanced at Valentino’s hand proffering the light, then he suddenly pushed the hand away, threw down his pipe and left the room. A moment later he reappeared in the doorway, puffing and gesticulating as if about to launch into a speech; but then he thought better of it and turned away without a word, slamming the door behind him.

This is done with particular vivacity for the protagonist in Sagittarius, known only as my mother (the story is narrated by her daughter, a passive observer). Most of the time, describing someone’s morning routine in a book is a bad idea. Here, it is masterful:

My mother’s morning routine was unvarying; I knew every gesture by heart. She would sweep to and fro between the bathroom and her bedroom giving orders to Carmela; she brandished her lavender powder-puff, creating a perfumed cloud; licking her index finger, she would draw it along her eyebrows and over her eyelashes, then, peering into the mirror, she would pluck a hair or two from her chin, wrinkling her nose and puffing out her cheeks with a malevolent gleam in her eye; she would smear her lips with a greasy lipstick, pick at her teeth with the tip of a nail, give her woolen beret a good shake and, pulling a wry face, cram it on her head and secure it with a hat pin; then, standing in front of the mirror, smoking and humming a popular song, she would slip into her fur coat and turn round a few times to check on her stockings and the heels of her shoes. Then she would leave to go to her sisters, to see what they were having for lunch and whether they had counted the takings. 

We know immediately her age, her social class, and something of her character.

This snippet of a scene, between the mother and a prospective son-in-law of whom she disapproves, charmed me completely:

When he came round to see her one rainy evening, she whisked his wet jacket furiously off the sofa. The doctor picked up his jacket, hung it on a hook and went on reading Hofmannstahl to Giulia in his gentle, monotonous voice.

One of the early indicators that the mother’s new friend will be a malevolent force in her life is signaled with a gesture:

We sat around a table that had a small cactus in a pot in the middle, and my mother immediately crossed her fingers because cacti are unlucky.

Trying to get an unwelcome guest to leave, “she glanced pointedly at her watch and went round plumping up the cushions.” In moments of fury, “she frowned and rattled the big pearls of her necklace against her chest.” And after visiting a friend with a cat, she spends the tram ride home picking hairs out of her clothes.

Ginzburg certainly has her share of stock gestures. The mother is perpetually smoking, and her friend has an ex-husband who endlessly strokes his mustache. Many of her characters also wear berets, which they’re always taking on and off, adjusting, or crushing in their hands. But stunning gestures keep leaping out. We meet a young girl, Barbara, with beautiful long red hair:

As she spoke, Barbara played with her pony-tail, pulling it forward onto her chest and combing it with her fingers; and every now and then she turned to look at herself in the dressing-table mirror, fingering the spots on her chin which were the result of eating all those liqueur chocolates. 

We begin with something of a cliche, the vain girl fussing with her hair in the mirror, but then Ginzburg turns it around by showing how she can’t keep her hands away from her pimples. Later, we meet the young girl’s jealous boyfriend, and he does violence to some drapery: Pinuccio just stood by the curtains, chain-smoking and pulling bits out of the curtain with hands that sweated. 

In a very affecting scene, the mother’s anxiety is shown to us primarily in hand movements:

My mother had a long wait in the coffee bar, sitting there alone, twisting and turning the paste brooch and powdering her nose every five minutes. The day was windy, and the effect of the wind and possibly her own agitated state of mind, had been to make my mother’s skin rough and blotchy, and now, after repeated applications of powder, her nose turned yellow. She regretted that Valeria was not going to see her in one of her better moments; the wind had messed up her hair and she tried in vain to poke it back underneath her beret; she kept opening and closing her bag, dabbed the tip of her nose with her handkerchief, and, as always happened when she was nervous, felt her underarms bathed with cold perspiration.

For the most part, we don’t want to be thinking about our hands. It’s perhaps the most keen form that self-consciousness takes — it’s the bodily manifestation of knowing, or not knowing, what we should do. And to look at the hands of others is like seeing something hidden, an expression that may not accord with someone’s face and speech, which we are better at controlling and falsifying. Many other qualities make Ginzburg’s stories vivid and lifelike — her characters also talk in wonderful ways — but her attention to gesture marks her out to me as a true observer of people. And she was certainly aware of her devices: at the end of Sagittarius, we are told that the mother takes up crochet, not because she has anything to make, but just so she can have something to do with her hands.