What the artist saw and recorded occurred at Miglianico during the feast of Saint Pantaleone, in the suffocating sultry heat of summer, there within the church while [he sketched] surrounded by the fetid, bestial odour exhaling from that mass of bodies packed densely together in the half-light. They stood thus in a vast herd, an enormous gathering of males, women, minors, a multitude that had forced its presence inside to see the Saint, to pray to the great silver Saint, to assist at the passion of those of their breed who were even more fervently zealous than themselves. The gathering sweated in the heavy air, panted like a single great animal extended in suffering upon the floor, its faint, deep-throated moan passing and returning through the length of the nave, through the rising, diffusing emissions of the censers. Swells of incense smoke drifted over those thousand bowed heads, over those faces inclined to the floor, waves of harsh sounds thrilled and filled with echoes the empty concavity above, candle flames wavered yellow and died in the dusk. And there, along a lane left free in that compacted humanity, between two living walls, some three or four or five fanatics slithered forward on their bellies, painting with their tongues a line through the dust on the pavement bricks, each rigid body sustained horizontally above the floor on down-pointed bare toes. Reptiles! The muscles stood in relief under the skin of their sun-darkened legs, hairy and laved with perspiration, on their arms, where the veins swelled with a greenish lividness as if filled almost to erupting with some poisonous humour, and with each spasmodic thrusting back and reaching forward of those members it seemed that they must imminently break. Between the fingers of hands, from under the nails of toes the blood had even now burst through and spread into visible stains on the floor, and the mouth was bloodied by that ferocious abrasion over the pavement and by the passage of the arid tongue of one fanatic overtaking the gory dashes left by another fanatic. And thus they advanced in reptilian progression, a dark, obscure superstition blinding them, that oppressive heat, that stagnant air, the bellows of the organ and the odour of incense and the tremor of the flamelets and the ardent exhalations vented by the human walls reducing those on the pavement to some sacred imbecility, dazzling them into a state of mystical hallucination, exalting them in their pain. They slithered onwards in that manner, towards the mute, white, metallic statue of the Saint, who appeared to draw them to him by the fixed intense stare of his empty sockets. And arriving, and lunging headlong desperately in what seemed like an attack motivated by hate, they twined their arms about his neck, and they sought with torn lips the cold, silver mouth, and smeared with bloody kisses his face, and prolonged the kiss with a kind of convulsed ecstasy as if to feel the cool relief of metal on the lacerated tongue, to feel at least that one response to their kiss. Thus each continued, twisted about the statue, besprinkled with holy water and attended by the murmured benediction of the priest; until, below, the skull of an overtaking companion butted the heels of the present possessor. And so in turn they detached themselves, displaying now a clearer manifestation of their dolour, head hanging loosely from the neck, and so each dragged himself away, staggering down the little steps beneath the church, collapsing upon the stones as in some sudden swoon; and, as they did, their contused faces seemed those of animals undergoing inexpert butchering, the naked flesh of their backs, their legs, their arms displaying here and there a livid inflammation like some gangrenous stain. They left above them the Saint, a mute presence, with those two terrible black holes beneath an overhanging brow, the bloody imprint of their kisses on his face, left him immobile, distinct in his own pitiless metallic light.
The degree of sociological and ethnographic transference in D’Annunzio’s fiction can be gauged in the following passage taken from Ad altare Dei (‘To the Tabernacle’) a story external to the present collection but reflecting with emotional fidelity the author’s encounter with the above obsessiveness and passion:
The mass of devotees stood waiting. Almost every woman had her palms crossed over her abdomen, an expression of spent stupefaction in her eyes; the men looked towards the church door and murmured together. On the pavement, along a narrow space left free of feet, a dark and undefined mound of rags began to move, to slowly snake towards the altar. [. . .] Protruding from those rags a human head of some denatured greenish pallor swayed like that of a tortoise above its shell. It was the ailing beggar [. . .] displaying a deformed cranium covered in rosy stains like those on an exhumed skull that still retains some tufts of greyish hair and remnants of skin. [. . .] The beggar had gathered all her strength to move her body forward, prostrated rigid and advancing by short convulsive lunges balanced at the rear on down-pointed bare toes, all the while at the front making rapid crosses with her tongue upon the pavement bricks. All that in submission to the glory of Mary [. . .]. From both sides of her the people watched with the indifference of those habituated to spectacles of horror.
In the present stories, such collective representations divide into the bizarreries of individuals. More than once, the reader will have noted, D’Annunzio interposes in his eccentric little dramas an authorial observation on what might be called the archaic state of mind of one or another of his subjects: ‘And from the depths of [Anna’s] ignorance and simplicity sprang forth the instinct to idolatry.’ ‘Peppe’s eyes shone with cupidity, such talk of spells and invocations having aroused in him his native superstition.’ Particular examples of naïve credulity and suspicion abound in ‘The War of the Bridge’, interspersed among cameos comic and grotesque; ‘Amalfi’ we read with indulgence for the amusement it provides in its successive outbursts of convulsive excitement just this side of the manic; the agonies and ecstasies of religion-intoxicated females are dissected and analysed at exceptional length in the two ‘Virgins’ (understandably so, of course, for ‘women are a science not a pleasure’, said the maestro once). Nevertheless, the realism is such that, for all the social parody and caricatures, one feels sure there must have been suggestive prototypes behind those fictional individuals; and for the rest, D’Annunzio was himself a native and in his own lifetime a resource from which a variety of such ‘inventions’ could have been extrapolated. Detached observer that he could be, his own nature was, frenzied and fanciful, shaped by a wry imagination, a sensuality of refined rawness and by ‘his instincts’ – all the qualities of a goat-footed satyr, it might be remarked, and no less so when taken together with his famed libidinousness. If God had died, well, D’Annunzio’s response to evolved Europe was ‘But Pan lives on!’ at least in the Abruzzo of his day. And when one takes into account his paeans to an Odyssean ideal, the fabulous epic he made of his own life, and then its empetrification in the great mausoleum overlooking Lake Garda, erected to himself and his ‘cult of memories’, one wonders whether that retort to the Nietzscheans might have been not just reactive puckishness but revealed in fact a deep juvenile or inborn paganism that never left him.
Much has changed since those last decades of the 19th century, history has moved on, and as the Western ethnographer will no longer find the curiosities he was wont to meet in colonial times, by the same token ignorance and simplicity have immeasurably abated in Abruzzo. For instance, Chieti and Pescara now contain the two campuses of a university (not by chance called Universita degli Studi ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio’), and it may be difficult to believe that there was a time when tribal or individual inebriations could fire such ferocity or such self-abandonment as strike one in D’Annunzio’s tales. It may therefore be now asked, could even an exotic religion and pre-modern rationalizations about some celestial anomaly have once credibly combined to create such an abnegating chaos of mind that the other aspect of humanity, its living carnality, should be set so completely aside? In ‘The Idolaters’ and ‘The Hero’ so farfetched the depictions seem, even of what D’Annunzio himself referred to as the ‘more savage’ particularities of his Abruzzo homeland, that commentators have laboured to justify what incredulous readers might deem unrealistic, repulsively exaggerated blood-letting and trance; that justifica
tion running to the aesthetic necessity for such passages within their specific contexts, in a chain of incidents occurring in a purely imagined Abruzzo. The reader was expected to be drawn unquestioningly and almost hypnotically into the vortex of those events by the author’s renowned array of kaleidoscopic literary techniques (such as his rushes of consecutive annotations, repeated and worked-over and layered as so much brush painting), much as individuals and church congregations might fall into a paroxysm of devotion under the aggregated spell of lights and scintillations, sounds and fumes, into a predisposition towards involvement in a state of mind whose object’s existence would otherwise be questionable. Such a proposition assumes the implausibility of an independent existence for the described events, and necessarily doubts D’Annunzio’s commitment to the realistic aspect of the verismo that he in fact adhered to (at least at this stage of his career as a part-time journalist, if not to the same degree later, when he had dedicated himself to literature).
But would we need, anyway, to rely exclusively on the assumption that folk like the Miglianico devotees, capable of that reported catatonic abnegation and indifference to their surroundings, might in certain circumstances actually progress to visiting on others and invite on themselves such extremities of violence as we read in D’Annunzio’s fiction? On consideration, episodes of purposeful savagery – described unadorned by art as such: that is, as a ‘conventional’, procedural response during instances of perceived cosmic crisis, as tendentious products of sympathetic or infectious hypnosis, as the channelled upwelling of hysteria in a millenarian mindset – are neither difficult to credit in principle nor would they be unique to Abruzzo’s rustic sociography, folklore or history. Such behaviour may occur wherever and whenever social restraints are unleashed in conjunction with apocalyptic terrors (that additional disorder in the state of things then substantiating initial disquiet). If we search deeply enough into any culture we find religious murder, Bacchic-Dionysian paroxysms, fertility sacrifices, vendettas and honour killing, pandemics of attacks on ‘sorcerers’ and ‘witches’: in sum, reactive ritual violence. Greek and Roman mythology is replete with such mysteries, and a conventional classical education, the kind D’Annunzio’s generation received, introduces many instances. We may be too distant now from those prehistoric times to identify the specific crises motivating that ancient millenarianism, but Abruzzo’s relatively more recent past is well stocked with floods, earthquakes, episodes of dearth, epidemics, invasions by European neighbours, and the long threat posed by Mohammedanism. The prevalence into modern times of fortified hill-dwelling communities must surely intimate something of that unending sense of insecurity. And should the anxiety festering when one senses that one’s culture is being overtaken, not be added to that list – when what at that specific moment is called ‘modernity’ looms with its complexities?
But, moving from the past and potential to the contemporary and actual, opportunities to observe primitive religious psychology – with resulting insights by which we may more readily accept the verisimilitude of its catatonic or aggressive expression in D’Annunzio’s stories – are after all once again available to us, right now, quite mundanely and immediately, to us who live in a world and at a time replete with daily instances of sanctified atrocities committed by millenarian communities adhering to ideologies fermented in backward areas of the planet, areas often devolved from erstwhile centres of higher civilizations or peripheral to those, inhabited by intensely religious, conservative and apprehensive populations. For we live in a time of collective manifestations by, specifically, one such fervid eschatology, replete with its ecstatically-upborne symbol-flag under which human beings become both murderous and self-sacrificial. What cosmic disturbance, akin to the one which distracted the Radusans, serves now as an end-of-days trigger to touch off those desperate acts we currently read about in our newspapers? Perhaps the perception of uncontrollable environmental degradation on a vast scale; or the earth’s inadequacy in supporting growing populations, particularly in those depressed zones; or cyclic alarms over climatic events? Or, yes, the revolutionary threats of ‘modernity’? This is a field ripe for investigation by a social science evolved now from over a century of confronting such considerations.
In short, beyond adhering to the logic or psychology of fictional plots, the tales in this volume are also realistic sociology and anthropology, filtered of course through the sensibility of a writer of great virtuosity and intuitive depth: an artist and student of humanity; un studiosissimo artista, as D’Annunzio had no difficulty in styling himself.
V V Zh
Pescara Tales Page 31
