As his mother was a weaver, Silone spent much of his youth assisting her at the loom. For him, these were rare idyllic moments of reprieve in his childhood, even as his mother counseled him in the traditional fatalism and resignation of the peasants. He listened with fascination to the stories the women told to pass the time: of bandits and hermits, villains and martyrs, episodes from the Bible and lives of the saints. He later likened the art of storytelling to weaving: placing one tangible, substantive word after another with patience and humility until the image appears woven together.
It was from his father that the boy discerned the possibility of another way. When, in 1907, the local aristocrat, Prince Torlonia, stood for election to parliament, Paolo Tranquilli and his older brothers met to discuss their options. A timid local unknown, an eye doctor named Mariano Scellingo, had announced his candidacy on the list of the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano. Since about eight thousand families of the region (the majority of the local population) were engaged in cultivating the prince’s thirty-five-thousand-acre estate, it was simply assumed that everyone would vote for the prince, even though none of “his” eight thousand families had ever laid eyes on the man. Paolo Tranquilli was the only one who suggested that since the ballot was secret, they should all vote their conscience. His older brothers were aghast at this breach of protocol and tradition. Silone, seated by the fire, silently followed the proceedings, debate, and arguments with fascination. When Scellingo was scandalously elected, Prince Torlonia was compensated by King Vittorio Emanuele III by being named a senator, offering the boy another valuable lesson in politics. The glaring discrepancy between private and public life tormented him. “In school all my prayers ended with one request: ‘Oh, God, help me to live without betraying myself.’ ”
As with many families of the Mezzogiorno, the Tranquillis had their share of misfortune and tragedy. Most typical were the early deaths of children. An older sister, Elvira, died in childhood. On May 6, 1903, Maria Tranquilli, a mere twelve days old, died. A year later, on May 23, 1904, a younger brother, Romolo, destined to play a critical role in two of the tragedies of Silone’s life, was born. Three years after Romolo’s birth, Marianna Tranquilli gave birth to another son. This time Paolo was able to assert his will and have the child named after a hero of the Risorgimento, Cairoli. But ten days after he saw the light of the world, little Cairoli too died. The scourge of infant mortality continued when another daughter named Maria died in 1910 shortly after her first birthday. “Many babies died in the first few months,” Silone wrote later, “It was a periodic massacre of the innocents.” Domenico, Silone’s older brother, was forced to take the father’s place in the fields, abandoning a promising academic career. But two months after their father’s death, Domenico too died after fracturing his spine in a fall steps away from the family home. Marianna was forced to redouble her work at the loom. Malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis, and accidents combined to ensure that the women of the Mezzogiorno wore the vestments of mourning for most of their adult lives. “My memories of childhood and adolescence are almost all sad,” Silone wrote. “After the earthquake of 1915 which destroyed a good deal of the Marsica, I was an orphan and homeless . . . The events following led me to undergo three essential experiences: poverty, religion, and communism.”
The novelist Ferdinando Camon has richly described the vanishing world of the Italian peasantry. Perhaps no country in the twentieth century besides Russia went through such a radical transformation from a rural peasant society to an urban and industrial one. In 1900, illiteracy was the norm in many areas of the Mezzogiorno. The standard of living had decreased since the unification of Italy in 1861. Economic prospects were dim. A Piedmontese army of occupation attempted to control brigandage and “primitive rebels” in the south. Thousands were imprisoned, exiled, or killed. There is no more eloquent testimony to the failure of Italian unification than the mass wave of emigration that sent millions of cafoni, braccianti, mezzadri (sharecroppers), and others sailing to the Americas, Australia, and other strange shores.
The mountain towns of the Apennines were particularly isolated well into the 1950s. Then, through the so-called “economic miracle,” Italy transformed itself into a relatively affluent society. Although radios were available under the Fascist regime, they had been strictly controlled and a license was required to own one. Now, in addition to the radio, television made fateful inroads into Italian society. Fiat introduced the 500, the Italian version of the Model T Ford, a car affordable to the masses. By the early 1960s, Silone could write that Italian youth of the postwar generation simply could not imagine the monotony of life in the mountain towns of his childhood. While parents, relatives, and other adults discussed inscrutable matters, the children watched the fire. With his usual deadpan style and studied understatement, Silone remarked that “it was not a very stimulating life.” Those evenings before the hearth could dull the mind or might fire the imagination of a future poet; one could also acquire a taste for reflection and meditation.
Enrolled in the local seminary school, Silone soon earned a reputation in Pescina as a studious if enigmatic child. “But the most interesting things I learned on the street going back and forth to school. Even later, I must confess, what I learned I learned from the street.” The rural counterparts to the infamously cunning Neapolitan scugnizzi, the young village ruffians, constituted a separate community, with “its own laws, its own rites, and its own dialect . . . Mothers shouted at their sons from morning till night, and the air often resounded with the most terrible curses, but these were so frequent that no one took any notice.”
Beginning in 1908, Silone surreptitiously began writing letters on behalf of an illiterate woman to her son in prison. Francesco Zauri had been convicted in 1897 of the premeditated homicide of Giuseppe Zauri and sentenced to life in prison. Francesco Zauri refused to defend himself against the charges and would not tell the court what he had been doing at the time of the murder. Nor did he have any explanation for the rather large sum of money on his person at the time of his arrest. In writing the letters, the eight-year-old Silone was soon convinced of the man’s innocence. That lost soul would haunt Silone for forty years.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the Tranquilli family’s social standing as small landowners, the young Silone more often found himself drawn to the lowest rung of the social ladder in Pescina, the peasants. In the local dialect and throughout Italy, they were referred to as cafoni, then as now a truly derogatory term. Yet Silone sought to rescue the term: With his sardonic irony, he pointed out that it was poor peasants all over the world—whether they were fellahin, coolies, peons, muzhiks, or cafoni—who, by “sweating blood,” made the soil fertile and grew the food yet were always hungry. “They form a nation, a race, a church of their own.” The cafoni themselves have no illusions about their place in the world. A peasant in Fontamara simply and eloquently maps out their mental topography of the cosmos:
“At the head of everything is God, the Lord of Heaven. Everyone knows that. Then comes Prince Torlonia, lord of all the earth.
“Then come Prince Torlonia’s guards.
“Then come Prince Torlonia’s guards’ dogs.
“Then, nothing at all.
“Then nothing at all.
“Then nothing at all.
“Then come the cafoni. And that’s all.”
On another occasion, a clerical worker in town sneeringly reminds the peasants that they are cafoni, “flesh used to suffering.”
Silone cannot be charged with romanticizing the cafoni: He is quite conscious of the ridiculous tourist-industry image of southern Italy as a place of beautiful landscapes where “peasants go caroling joyfully to work, echoed prettily by a chorus of country girls dressed in traditional costume, while nightingales trill in the neighboring wood.” The songbirds, Silone brutally reminds us, have been pitilessly exterminated for food; and besides, there “is not even a word for nightingale in the local dialect.” The peasants, for t
heir part, don’t sing on their way to work; if anything, they curse, swear, and blaspheme—and not very creatively, at that. A reader can understand why the good people of the Abruzzo might be offended by Silone’s portrait of the peasants; in his pages they are ignorant, scheming, torn by petty jealousies and an insatiable envy; and often the victims of townsfolk and the local bourgeoisie. At one point, Berardo Viola, the hero of Fontamara, even equates his status as a cafone with a donkey, but the careful reader of Silone will come to recognize the high regard the writer had for donkeys, the author’s favorite animal. The donkey for Silone is the antithesis of the wolf; it is eternally patient and bears its suffering with dignity.
The cafone, Silone insisted, was in no way a “primitive”; on the contrary, in a certain sense he is “too civilized.” The experience of generations has induced him to believe that the state is a criminal enterprise, just better organized than “organized” crime. Through their “intimate contact with animals and nature, through their direct experience of life’s great events such as birth, love, and death, many peasants acquire an immense wisdom.” He compared the cafoni to Europe’s Jews, “so crushed by their sorrowful experiences with the state that they can no longer imagine a government composed of human beings.” A society could be said to be “developed” or “civilized” only when the classes that were most oppressed by their privations were recognized and judged by their effective worth. “I am proud,” he wrote, “to have given a new name, that of cafoni, to those sufferings.” Even after he had grown disillusioned with formal politics, he always insisted that in the workers and peasants of Europe he found “those traits of generosity, frankness, solidarity and lack of prejudice which were the genuine and traditional resource of Socialism in its struggle against bourgeois decadence and corruption.” In the peasants, Silone found the possibility of a pure, “primitive” Christianity, a possibility of sharing bread and companionship, and it was this—paradoxically—that led him to left-wing politics.
Our Christian Heritage
Just as the mountains and Fucino plain exerted an enormous influence over the young Silone, so too did a native tradition of “primitive” Christianity. Benedictine and Franciscan monks, hermits, apocalyptic orators, visionaries, and alms seekers wandered the countryside. Local fables stressed the deep mysticism and frail humanity of believers. Well into the twentieth century, it was still common to greet visitors in the Mezzogiorno with a biblical “Peace be with you.” Silone felt a lifelong attraction to a Christianity deeply rooted in the folk culture of the Abruzzo. In place of an elaborate theological definition, a Christmas custom of the region might serve as an example.
Although the Nordic Christmas tree is today ubiquitous in Italy, it was not always so. In the Abruzzo, it was customary to burn a log (il ceppo) in the fireplace on Christmas Eve; in fact, “il ceppo” is a colloquialism for Christmas in this part of the world. The log had to be oak or beech (a luxury) so as to burn all night. The Christmas meal was to be left on the table and the door to the house unlocked because that night the Holy Family was abroad in the land, refugees seeking shelter, persecuted by the authorities. With hearth ablaze and food prepared, the Holy Family could find refuge in any humble home of the Mezzogiorno that night. For a young boy like Silone, the tale exerted considerable influence. On Christmas Eve it was impossible to sleep, not in expectation of extravagant gifts (an orange was considered a rare present) but because the Holy Family might at any time suddenly appear on one’s threshold. Besides that thrill of anticipation, the tale inculcated a respect and solidarity for the persecuted and oppressed. The moral complexity of such a worldview was not lost on Silone. It left an indelible impression on a susceptible soul and was an integral part of what he called “our Christian heritage.”
He often admitted little formal training in literature and the arts, saying that the first time he attended the theater he was seventeen years old and living in Rome. Instead, his early cultural formation consisted almost entirely of the culture of the church. Before the earthquake, Pescina was a town of approximately five thousand people, mostly peasants. Yet there was a bishop’s seat with curia, a seminary, seven churches, and a cathedral. “An imbalance,” Silone once dryly remarked, “to be found only in the Mezzogiorno.” In such an environment, it was only natural that the liturgical feasts and the solemn rites of the church would exert a singular and otherwise “unimaginable poetic fascination” on the young boy. Vespers, funeral rites, and popular festivals honoring local saints offered the only expression of “true art” that was accessible. The choreography of the priests, the haunting melodies of the Gregorian chant, the eloquence of the Latin, all in service of the “sacred mystery” left a profound mark on Silone. More than four decades after having left the church, “the work that today still touches me most profoundly is Bach’s ‘Saint Matthew Passion.’ ”
Ironically, it was a secular Jew from northern Italy who penetrated and best understood the primitive Christianity described by Silone. Carlo Levi was active in Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), a movement founded in Paris in 1929 by Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lussu, Alberto Tarchiani, and others. Justice and Liberty was critical of the dogmatism and orthodox Marxism of the Italian Communist Party and the passivity of the Italian Socialist Party. It soon acquired a reputation as the “party of intellectuals” as well as the party of “Jewish intellectuals.” Carlo Levi had been sentenced to confino (domestic exile) in the Basilicata region in 1935. From that experience came his most famous book, Christ Stopped at Eboli. As Levi slowly came to realize, cristiano in the Mezzogiorno had no theological connotations; rather, it was synonymous with civilization and “being civilized.” Hence, if, in the local parlance, Christ stopped at Eboli, a town near the coast, he never ventured far enough into the mountains to bring History and Civilization to the poor people of the Mezzogiorno. Small wonder, then, that an ancient pagan past is never far from the surface of a thin veneer of Christianity in southern Italy.
Michael P. McDonald has noted how Silone’s “creative vision sprang from and remained rooted in Scripture” and compares Silone to André Gide, who also employs biblical stories to serve his fiction. But McDonald makes an astute distinction: “Whereas the Bible was a psychological sounding board to Gide, a means to plumb the paradoxes and perversities of human nature, to Silone it was less a means to promote greater individual self-awareness than a hallowed reminder of the perennial want of human solidarity.”
An incident from childhood reveals Silone’s tortured relationship with the institutional Catholic church. An animated discussion unfolded in catechism class between the children and the priest. The day before, the children had seen a puppet show in which a young boy, pursued by the devil, hid under a bed on stage. The devil, unable to locate the boy, turned toward the audience for assistance and politely asked where he might find the young scoundrel. Immediately and in unison, all the children responded that they had not seen the boy or that he had fled. As Silone points out, since none of the children had foreseen that they were to be questioned by the devil himself, their answers were entirely spontaneous and sincere; all children around the world would probably respond the same way. Yet to the astonishment of the children the next day, the priest charged with the catechism was not pleased. In fact, he told the children that he was disappointed in their behavior, for they had told a lie; a lie for a good end, perhaps, but a lie nonetheless, and they should never lie.
“Not even to the Devil?” we asked in astonishment.
“A lie is always a sin,” answered the priest.
“Even before a judge?” asked one of the boys.
“I’m here to teach you Christian doctrine, not to talk nonsense,” he said. “What goes on outside the Church does not concern me.”
As the priest launched into a fine theoretical and theological exegesis, the children grew impatient: Should they or should they not have told the devil where the boy was hiding? With the devil on one side and the boy on the other, and the
children eager to help the boy, they wanted to know what to do. Silone raised his hand and asked a question “of unheard of perfidy”: “What should we have told the Devil if it had been a priest instead of a boy?” For his impertinence, Silone was required to kneel by the priest’s feet for the remainder of the lesson. At the end of the session, the priest, sure that he had tempered the boy’s impudence, asked if he had repented. “Of course,” Silone answered. “If the Devil asks me for your address, I’ll certainly give it to him.”
Earthquake
At 6:52 on the morning of January 13, 1915, Pescina and the surrounding mountainous region of the Marsica were devastated by a massive earthquake. Tremors were felt as far away as Rome. Within thirty seconds, thirty-five thousand people were killed and more than five thousand dwellings destroyed. In Pescina, a huge crevice, nearly a thousand feet long, opened up from the mountain to the Giovenco River. Houses along the fissure simply tumbled into the gaping chasm, including parts of the ancestral home of Cardinal Mazarin. The only house left undamaged was, ironically, uninhabited at the time. “When the earthquake demolished the roofs,” a character notes in The Seed Beneath the Snow, “it exposed things that generally remain hidden.”
Forty years later, the effects of the earthquake were still vivid in Silone’s mind.
All of a sudden there was a thick fog. Ceilings opened and the plaster fell to the ground. In the middle of the fog one could see children who, without saying a word, moved toward the windows. All this happened in twenty seconds, at most thirty seconds. When the haze of dust dissipated, there was a new world before us. Buildings that didn’t exist anymore, streets that had disappeared, the town leveled . . . There were ghostlike figures among the ruins . . . An old miser, the village moneylender, was seated on a rock, wrapped in a sheet as though in a sauna. The earthquake had surprised him in bed, as so many others. His teeth were chattering from the cold. He asked for food. No one helped him. They said to him: “Eat your IOUs.” He died like that . . . We witnessed scenes that overthrew every element of the human condition. Large families of which only an idiot child survived . . . the rich man who had not even a wool undershirt to defend him from the cold . . . After five days I found my mother. She was stretched out near the fireplace, without any evident injuries. She was dead. I am very sensitive, yet I didn’t shed any tears. Some felt I didn’t have a heart. But when suffering overwhelms everything, tears are stupid . . . My brother was found during another search. Because he had been shouting, his mouth was full of dust.
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