In March 1922, Silone was passing through Berlin on his way to Moscow. On his return to Rome, Seidenfeld joined him in the Eternal City. Later that year when Silone was appointed editor of Il Lavoratore, Seidenfeld accompanied him to Trieste, where he was arrested for the first time in December. Seidenfeld wrote of their life together there:
It was a very agitated time; we were constantly attacked and molested by the Fascists and police. Once they searched everyone who was leaving the office of Il Lavoratore. Vanni Buscemi, at that time a great friend and in Trieste, was already walking down the stairs. He told me he had a knife in his pocket and didn’t know how to exit the building. We hid the knife in my thick hairdo and everything turned out well. When the Fascists stabbed the Hon. Gnudi, and we wanted to visit him in the hospital, we had to inoculate ourselves against smallpox. Gnudi was very happy to see us, but in the days following, many of us had to stay at home in bed with fever.
From Trieste, Sereno and Serena traveled to Berlin, where Silone worked with Münzenberg to send aid to comrades in Spain. In Madrid, the couple met many of the left-wing protagonists who would later play such an important role in the Spanish Civil War. Silone himself went to Spain disguised as a businessman and started writing for L’Humanité and La Batalla. With the coup d’état of Primo de Rivera in 1923, Silone was arrested. Put on a train to Barcelona and prison, Seidenfeld took a faster train, got off at a station ahead of him, and met Silone on his train, chained by his feet to an anarchist whom she described as “molto simpatico.” After leaving him with a package of woolen clothing, Seidenfeld got off at the next stop, where, when she told the railway workers that she was the “esposa” of a political detainee, they took care of her. But on boarding a train back to Madrid, she was arrested by two police officers and, in possession of no official documents, sent to a women’s prison. Since her companions in prison were for the most part prostitutes and petty criminals as well as illiterate, Seidenfeld soon became the prison’s unofficial letter writer, of letters whose chief characteristic was their “unrepeatable contents.” Three months later, she was released and expelled from Spain. On leaving the prison, she made her way to Paris and the only address she knew there: that of the Soccorso Rosso, the Communist Party’s “Red Cross.” As she was entering, Silone was just making his way out. So began their Parisian soggiorno, living in squalid hotels and eating at a “more than modest” restaurant in the Place de la Nation frequented by rowdy anarchists. When they could not rent rooms at a hotel because of a lack of money or proper documents, they were taken in by the daughter of an old Communard, Mini Devoyon on the rue Duris.
Improbable as it may seem, Silone first came across the writings of Dostoevsky only in 1923. Appropriately enough, he found himself at the time in a Spanish prison. The Communist International sent Silone to Madrid and Barcelona, where he became acquainted with the prisons in both cities. He once remarked that it was one of the happiest times of his life. When asked why, he responded, “because of the company.” That company included a young Spanish nun in the infirmary of the Madrid prison. She lent him devotional books and listened—surely with trepidation for his eternal soul—to his Marxist ideas. When she discovered that the young, ill Italian was to be extradited to Barcelona and back to Italy, where he might perish in a Fascist prison, she delayed his departure long enough so that he missed the train for Barcelona. The military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera had imprisoned Silone, thinking him exceedingly dangerous. “My presence [in Spain] was, in fact, not motivated by tourism,” Silone confessed thirty-three years later. The Cárcel Modelo di Barcelona (which was truly a model prison, Silone quipped) incarcerated a broad spectrum from the Spanish left: Communists, Socialists, syndicalists, separatists, and anarchists. “What magnificent men,” Silone recalled. “In no other country of the world have I ever known men so admirable as the Spanish subversives.” In Barcelona, Silone befriended an imprisoned doctor. Seeing an opportunity to economize, prison authorities dismissed the “official” doctor and permitted the “criminal” doctor to tend to the prison population. The good doctor decreed that for reasons of health, Silone had to spend mornings in the infirmary. There, Silone could read the many books and journals brought to him by his sympathetic friend. And there is where Silone first encountered The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. Those hours passed with the Russian writer were a form of liberation: “The narrow walls of the cell disappeared and I found myself thousands of miles from there, in an atmosphere that filled me with an anxiety never felt before.” And there in the prison was where Silone encountered the Dostoevskian figure of a very young Spanish anarchist condemned to death, passing his time drawing caricatures of the Spanish generals. Complicating matters was an illustrious Catholic jurist who inconveniently pointed out to the authorities that minors could not be put to death under the Spanish legal code. During 1923, as controversy swirled around this young man and his fate, Silone befriended both doctor and anarchist. “Every morning, meeting that young man condemned to death in the doctor’s office, what else could I speak of? Even thinking about it many years later, what wonderful days they were; certainly among the most beautiful of my life.” Silone revealed the fate of the condemned man by acidly noting that the juridical dilemma was solved by deciding “to respect the law and wait until he reached the age of adulthood before hanging the boy.”
Silone eventually was expelled from Spain, not to Italy but to Marseilles and from there eventually to Ventimiglia. He managed to recross the border into France, finally making his way to Paris again. The inexorable round of arrests, trials, deportations continued. When Silone was arrested in Paris, he was escorted to the Conciergerie, the same prison that had housed Marie Antoinette in 1792. After Silone was sentenced, his lawyer Berton confided to Seidenfeld: “Tranquilli should call himself Terribili; he was always interrupting me [in court] to say the most radical things.”
Expelled from France, Silone and Seidenfeld made their way to the train station, where they were carefully watched by the police. They could not contain themselves and goaded the police: “You’ll see,” they said, “what will happen to you when we come to power!” “That day, Mesdames,” replied one of the policemen, “we’ll be with you!”
One day later, Silone and Seidenfeld were back in Paris, having again recrossed the border illegally. Their life was not without moments of absurdist comedy. To celebrate their return, Vanni Buscemi organized a meeting at the union hall in rue de la Grange aux Belles. To avoid detection and arrest, Silone had dyed his hair blond and purchased a blond mustache. During his impassioned speech against the bourgeoisie, the mustache threatened to fall off and Silone was forced to make his speech with one hand to his upper lip.
But more often, Silone and Seidenfeld found themselves at the juncture of history and contemporary politics. To commemorate the uprising of the Commune, they joined a crowd marching from the Place de la République to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, singing all the way. At the cemetery, they placed red carnations, the symbol of the left, at the wall where the Communards had been executed. In Paris, Silone and Seidenfeld often worked at the offices of the French Communist Party’s newspaper, Humanité. Already, he sensed a conflict between his political career and his literary aspirations. In a letter to Seidenfeld, Silone wrote, “What I want is to go plumb my fate [andare fin in fondo al mio destino], to write and tell stories; I have no other ambition.”
In 1925, the PCI recalled Silone to Italy, where Gramsci charged him with the direction of the press office of the party. Seidenfeld soon followed him to Rome, where they took up residence in the Celio quarter of the city, not far from Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini would give his bombastic speeches from the balcony to wildly adoring crowds below. Seidenfeld and Silone were given the responsibility for “agitation and propaganda.” But with the promulgation of the exceptional decrees of 1926, they were forced to move once again, this time to Genoa. Outside the port city, in the small town of Sturla, Camilla Ravera had organized
a small hotel, the Albergo dei Poveri (Hotel of the Poor). Here Ravera and the others struggled to reestablish the Segreteria of the Centro Interno of the party. They had, though, an unwelcome guest: OVRA, the Fascist secret police, had managed to infiltrate the Albergo dei Poveri with a spy. Eros Vecchi, a spy code-named “Leo,” betrayed Ravera and others to the Fascists; Silone managed to avoid arrest.
While Silone wrote articles for the party press, Seidenfeld and her sister (code-named “Nuvola”) were responsible for maintaining contacts with party cells in Milan and Turin. Accordingly, “Nuvola” would leave each morning weighted down with newspapers, party memos, and directives, returning in the evening or early the next day. The work was dangerous, especially after the imposition of full dictatorship in 1926. Most damaging was the infiltration of police spies: The Albergo dei Poveri was quickly abandoned when a functionary of the Soccorso Rosso, Guglielmo Jonna, revealed its existence to the Fascist police after his arrest in October 1927.
Silone and Seidenfeld were then sent to Basel, Switzerland, with much of the Centro Interno. Expelled once again, they made their way over the French border to Vaucresson, near Paris, where they rented quarters from an elderly Madame Carpentier, who still dressed in the Empire style and often spoke of having witnessed the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.
Early in 1928, Silone, again separated from Gabriella because of his work for the party, wrote her an emotional letter:
I’ve just realized that today is January 13, the anniversary of the greatest misfortune of my life [the earthquake in which his mother perished] . . . I’m so sorry that I didn’t know you before that January 13; you would have come to Pescina and we would have been truly happy. You would have met my mother and become friends with her and Grandmother. Thinking back on those times, I seem to be dreaming of things a thousand years ago. Little by little the memories become more confused. Fortunately I later met you, and it seems almost as though my mother has returned from the dead so as not to leave me alone in the world.
Seidenfeld’s sister Barbara (code-named “Ghita”) had married Pietro Tresso (“Blasco”). Originally an ally of Bordiga’s, Tresso had the opportunity for long discussions with Gramsci during their stay in Moscow in 1922 and 1923 and eventually sided with the latter in the internal disputes of the PCI.
Tresso’s and Silone’s fates would cross in their eventual expulsion from the Communist Party. When Tresso was expelled, party bureaucrats emptied his home of documents, letters, false papers; Barbara Seidenfeld and Tresso were left with nothing more than a typewriter. Tresso returned to his trade as a tailor, but for Barbara, a “rivoluzionaria per professione,” the expulsion from the party was traumatic. As a rapidly rising party functionary told her in words similar to those expressed later to Silone, “In the party you are everything; outside the party you are nothing.” In their humble house on the rue Pierre Bayle in Paris, Tresso and Barbara Seidenfeld were visited by Trotsky’s son, Lev, later assassinated in Paris in 1938. Silone, increasingly sick, requested and received a leave from the PCI in October 1929 and was ordered to recover in a Swiss sanatorium.
In 1949, Silone recalled an evening twenty-three years earlier spent with comrades hiding from the Fascist secret police in a small villa on the outskirts of Milan. Communist Party leaders and members had come to the inevitable conclusion that, with the passage of the so-called Special Laws, there was “no doubt about the intention of the dictatorship to exterminate every trace of resistance.” Warned not to return home that evening, Silone found himself in the sparsely furnished villa with a half dozen colleagues. As there was only one bed, they pulled up chairs and, in the manner of Boccaccio’s Decameron, agreed to tell each other their stories to pass the night away. It was a dark night of the soul for each of them, forced to examine their assumptions and conceptions of the revolutionary struggle. Realizing the danger, one warned the group, “It may be dangerous for any of us, including myself, while we’re in the midst of the struggle, to examine the how and the why, to look back. At a certain moment the die is cast.” But look back they did. One recounted how, that very day, he had walked by the famed La Scala opera house as patrons were waiting on line to purchase tickets, and, considering the current political developments, had “a strong impression of being in a group of madmen.” A colleague, noting their own precarious situation having abandoned family and friends for a political ideal, responded, “It’s not easy to know who the really crazy people are. Perhaps it’s one of the hardest of all things to determine.” One comrade who refused to relinquish his critical faculties in the face of ideology insisted that while committed to the revolutionary struggle, “I’d like to continue seeing things with my own eyes.”
Silone, as usual, was quiet until they turned to him for his story. “That would be a long story,” he demurred. Thinking of his vastly different background from the cosmopolitan intellectuals he was with, he protested that “some things, frankly, you just wouldn’t understand.” A German woman teased him: “Tell us your long, incomprehensible story,” she said “Even if we don’t understand, it won’t matter. The most beautiful stories aren’t always understandable.”
As always, the answer was to be found in Pescina. Even as a young boy, Silone could neither understand nor abide the “grating, incomprehensible, almost absurd contrast between private family life—which at least appeared decent and honest—and social relations, which were very often hostile and deceitful.” And although Silone promised his comrades that he would tell his story “without recourse to parables,” he could not avoid relying upon such an anecdote.
He was only a child when he witnessed an event that revealed the heart of a savage society. One Sunday while in the piazza with his mother, the young Silone observed “a local young man of good family” let loose his vicious dog on a poor old woman leaving church. This “stupid and cruel spectacle” was not in retaliation for some real or imagined offense, but merely for the enjoyment of the young man. The woman was thrown to the ground and mauled, her clothes torn to shreds. The public humiliation was witnessed in silence by a good portion of the townspeople. While indignant, no one came to her aid, neither then nor later, when the woman foolishly decided to press charges and needed eyewitnesses to corroborate her ordeal. The young man, though, secured the services of a lawyer who bribed witnesses to testify that the old woman had provoked the dog. A judge acquitted the man and ordered the woman to pay the court’s expenses. Some months later, when the very same judge was in the Silone home, he attempted to defend his decision. His mother listened politely, but when he left, she turned to her son and admonished him, “When you grow up, be anything you want, but don’t be a judge.” And in words that are well known to any child born in the Mezzogiorno: “Mind your own business.” This warning was repeated to the young boy on every occasion: “Minding one’s own business was the fundamental condition of honest and peaceful living.”
It was not that the “sublime concepts of justice and truth” were unknown to the people. “Truth,” “Justice,” “Liberty” were often spoken of, and eloquently so, in public and on suitable occasions. But everyone, including children, was conscious of the fundamental deception. This state of affairs, Silone was careful to point out, did not rest on the ignorance or stupidity of the peasants. It was, instead, borne out by centuries of oppression and poverty (miseria). There was little to be done against such a “humiliating and primitive stagnation of the community’s social life.” A critical and perceptive mind “merely made it harder to bear.” For everything was arranged “so as to teach children to submit and to mind their own business.”
In the midst of Silone’s long and drawn-out struggle with the PCI came the last act of his family tragedy: the arrest, imprisonment, and death of his only surviving sibling, Romolo. By 1928, Romolo was working in the Tipografia Artigianelli in Venice and was required to present himself weekly at the local police station to “sign in,” enabling the police to keep track of the “subversive.” On March
18, 1928, Romolo made a surprise visit to Don Orione, who noted that the young man was excited and nervous. Romolo then disappeared for some days. On April 12, a bomb exploded in Piazza Giulio Cesare in Milan, killing eighteen and wounding several dozen innocent bystanders. The bomb had apparently been meant for King Vittorio Emanuele III, who was to pass that very spot on his way to the Milan Fair. The police immediately rounded up 560 Socialists, anarchists, and Communists. Romolo had been missing from Venice since April 1, his absence duly noted by the police. When he was spotted at the Hotel Bellavista in Brunate, near Como, by carabinieri who demanded to see his papers, Romolo told them the documents were in his hotel room. He fled from a window and a massive search immediately began. By the afternoon of the next day, he was found and arrested in a forest outside Montorfano. In his pockets, police found false identity papers and two sketches of a piazza that to the authorities seemed to be diagrams of Piazza Giulio Cesare. Romolo defiantly told the police that he had indeed been in Milan the previous day. This was enough for the police to declare that they had captured the “terrorist assassin.” La Stampa, one of Italy’s leading papers, headlined, “A Sensational Arrest in Como,” and went on to write about “a strange individual with a Communist party card, a mysterious map, and doses of poison. Flight from a window and dramatic chase. Murky circumstances, denials and contradictions in testimony.” A search of Romolo’s apartment turned up nothing incriminating, but his situation nevertheless seemed dire. While being interrogated, Romolo was beaten, resulting in pulmonary lesions and three broken ribs. “If I get twenty years in prison,” he said, “I’ll consider myself lucky.”
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