Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante

by Lily Tuck

  Della mia Elsuccia

  roseo è il colore

  Marcello è un angelo

  Aldo è un amore.

  Of my little Elsa

  pink is the color

  Marcello is an angel

  Aldo is a darling 9

  Yet according to “the angel,” Marcello, who wrote a family memoir, Maledetta benedetta (Accursed and Blessed), which was published in 1986,* Irma was a shouter. She had violent, loud arguments with the children, with Aldo in particular. She made Aldo clean the rooms and do the heavy housework and not only did Aldo resent this but, suspecting that his mother thought him less intelligent than Elsa and Marcello, he was jealous. According to Marcello, the walls of the Monteverde house never ceased to reverberate with screams, insults and threats. Often, Irma and Aldo did not speak to each other for days, which resulted in Irma having to say something like “Elsa, can you tell Aldo that he must…” Or they left angry notes for each other on the kitchen table.† By most accounts, Irma’s strategy was to make the children feel guilty by telling them all she was sacrificing for their sake; then, when they still appeared ungrateful, she would grow belligerent, even hysterical. The older she got, the worse her rages became. Often she was the one who threatened suicide. After a particularly violent outburst, Marcello recalled how he chased upstairs after his mother to her room, where he found her with a mouth full of pills.10

  Aldo and Marcello had their fights too. One time, according to Marcello, Aldo kept his head painfully pressed to a step on the stairs for an entire afternoon. Elsa tried to protect Marcello, who was four years younger and timid. She included him in a club she had founded for her classmates, Club della Primavera, and took him on early morning walks while he admired and daydreamed about her. Later, Marcello admitted to being in love with Elsa as a child and fantasizing about her. For a long time, he hoped that Elsa reciprocated his feelings and it was not until one day when, sitting next to her on a bus, his body pressed up against hers, he finally understood that Elsa’s affection for him was only sisterly.11

  Elsa remained more or less immune to family quarrels and jealousies. For one thing, she had her own room. No one was supposed to enter her room, which was always very untidy. Elsa never bothered to make her bed, she left her clothes scattered on the floor. Irma protected her. She was proud of her daughter’s precocity and was always pushing her forward and had gone as far as to seek the patronage of a wealthy aristocrat named Donna Maria Guerrieri Gonzaga.* Elsa went to live with Donna Gonzaga for months at a time in her villa in the elegant Roman district of Nomentano; in addition to a beautiful villa, Donna Gonzaga had an expensive car, a chauffeur, several servants and a pedigreed dog.12 It seems she had taken a fancy to the child, whom Irma was determined to raise above her social station and determined to turn into someone special.

  But talk of any kind of happy childhood for the three older Morante children seems almost incidental—for Marcello, especially, who remembered his childhood as a time filled with gloom and unhappiness, which marred the rest of his life.13

  In 1922 the family moved to Monteverde, to via Camillo de Lellis 10. Situated in the middle of a block in what now looks to be a relatively poor neighborhood that is dominated by a large municipal hospital complex, the Morante family house is a three-story, orange stucco building surrounded by a high wall. The house looks shabby and neglected and it has been divided up into four apartments. Peering through the gate, one can see a small garden shaded by a very tall palm tree, the sole distinctive and decorative sight on the street. But when the Morante family lived there, according to Elsa’s sister, Maria, the house had a large garden and was surrounded by fields. Maria Morante also recalled how Elsa would often take her on walks through those fields and, to keep her from flagging or complaining—Maria was only four or five years old at the time—Elsa would tell her stories. Maria remembered one story in particular, since she was its inspiration. The story was about how babies, before they are born, have no hearts and live on stars—except for one particular baby who got a heart from a nightingale, just before the bird died. It began: “This story was told to me by Mariolina” (Mariolina was Elsa’s nickname for her sister). In addition, Maria Morante remembers how, when the story was published, Elsa, who had already left home and was living alone in a small room, supporting herself, spent the 1000 lire—a substantial amount at the time—she was paid for the story on a huge Christmas tree, which was so tall the top had to be chopped off so that it could fit inside the Monteverde house, and on presents for everyone in the family, as well as for all of Maria’s friends.14

  During our visit, Maria Morante showed me a photo that dates from around that period. Maria Morante, aged four or five, sits on Elsa’s lap; their two brothers stand on either side of them, and over a dozen children, probably the rest of Maria’s school class, are seated all around them. One cannot make out Elsa Morante’s face, as Elsa has scratched it out—no doubt it was not a flattering photograph.

  Now in her mideighties, Maria Morante lives alone in a modest apartment in the Monte Sacro district of Rome. When she opened the door, I was immediately struck by her physical resemblance to Elsa—the broad shape of her face and wide mouth. Although seemingly still robust, quite garrulous and disposed to be hospitable, she was not very forthcoming about her sister. Her remarks were cautious and protective. She did, however, praise Elsa’s enormous capacity for generosity and spoke of how Elsa was able to observe and describe children and how, although childless herself, she understood their most intimate thoughts. Maria said her own son, Luca, three years old at the time, was the model for Giuseppe in Elsa’s novel History, recalling the way he spoke baby talk and the peculiar way he waved his arms to say hello.

  Irma, Maria maintained, was a serious, dedicated mother and teacher. She was a good friend of Maria Montessori and taught her methods in school (to this day, apparently, Irma’s pupils still telephone Maria to tell her how fondly they remember her mother as a teacher). The fact that Irma had a full-time job, four children and little household help meant that she was not able to pursue her own career of choice, which was that of a journalist. But more important, she loved her children and if she could be faulted at all it would be that she loved Elsa and Aldo more than she loved Marcello and Maria—the two younger children were relegated to a second tier. And only at the end of our interview together did Maria Morante allow how as a family things changed for them as they grew older. Although they continued to love one another as brothers and sisters, they each led separate lives and no strong bond existed to keep them together.15

  As for Elsa’s brother Marcello, his eldest son, Daniele, remembered how Elsa used to bring gifts for everyone at Christmas until one year she suddenly stopped coming. The reason, Daniele Morante guesses, was that she realized that Marcello had literary ambitions—he was a writer and he wrote several plays, which were actually well received and won prizes—and he was very competitive. Although not jealous or threatened by him, Elsa sensed that Marcello was in competition with her and this more than anything deeply disturbed her. Also, it did not correspond to the image she had of him as a younger brother. However, when in 1973 Marcello traveled from his home in Tuscany to undergo major surgery, Elsa was very attentive. Nevertheless, they soon fell out once again when Marcello wanted to introduce Elsa to a painter friend and, misconstruing this, Elsa accused Marcello of trying to take advantage of her and her artist friends. As a result, they did not see each other often. Despite the ups and downs, Daniele Morante was Elsa Morante’s favorite nephew and one can see why. He is a gentle and mild-mannered man who is also very soft-spoken—so soft, in fact, that later I had trouble hearing him on my tape recorder.16

  Although accounts vary on how affected or preoccupied she was by it, Elsa Morante’s attitude toward her family throughout her life seems to have remained conflicted—especially, not surprisingly, her attitude to her mother. Apparently Elsa often spoke about her mother and yet it is clear from what she said that she wa
nted her mother to be different. She wanted her mother to be more refined in her bearing as well as her appearance, which was shabby and ordinary. Elsa had an expectation that was not fulfilled by the reality and this made for a complicated relationship. In addition, Elsa was afraid of her mother because she felt Irma’s envy, which manifested itself as an ambivalence that Elsa could not bear—a feeling of both love and hate that today would be called passive-aggressive. No doubt, Marcello, especially, and Maria as well shared these ambivalent feelings toward their more well-known sister. Always Elsa maintained that she would have preferred to be either loved or hated and that uncertainty troubled her. She could not stand people who were falsely humble or felt disappointed in their lives. That was the reason probably she always loved her brother Aldo—not because he was successful but because he was satisfied with his life and was not jealous of hers. In other words, she wanted to have a different sort of family, a magnificent and happy family.17

  Monteverde, where the Morante family lived, is located on the west bank of the Tiber River and remains much the same as it was in Elsa’s childhood, except that it is more built up and populated. The nondescript apartment houses are, for the most part, cheaply built; the few older stucco-walled villas and their gardens are protected by high cement walls and imposing iron gates, but a lot of them, like the Morante house, are now divided into apartments. The more affluent-looking streets are lined with oleander trees and the general feeling one gets from Monteverde is middle-class respectability. A few minutes’ walk away, through Porta San Pancrazio, stands the Gianicolo or Janiculum Hill, a favorite destination for both visitors and locals. Here are embassies, diplomatic residences, academies and large romantic-looking villas that can be glimpsed behind high walls and perfectly trimmed hedges. Surely, on warm spring Sunday afternoons when the Roman sky was a cloudless Canaletto blue, poor Augusto, in one of his many awkward attempts to establish an affectionate relationship, took the children for a walk along the Aurelian Wall and down the Passagio del Gianicolo to show them the imposing equestrian monument of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero (along with Cavour and Mazzini) of the Italian unification known as the Risorgimento. (The monument to his wife, Anita, who fought bravely by his side, also depicted on horseback and set a few yards below him, would not be erected for several more years.) Standing there on the large open piazza, they would have had a splendid view of the city spread out below them—from Castel Sant’Angelo, to the great white mass of the newly built Law Courts, to the dome of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the two belfries of the Trinità dei Monti, the Quirinal Place behind the dome of the Pantheon all the way to the church of San Pietro in Montorio. The children would probably have gotten a treat, as well, a gelato. For them, no doubt, like for Manuel, the protagonist in Elsa Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli, the appearance of the ice cream wagon was “hailed with acclaim and rejoicing, almost as if an altar on four wheels were presented before us.” The ice cream vendor, too, was described as a poet and he expressed himself with this rhyme:

  Qui c’è il Regno del Gelo zuccherato!

  Tutto crema e cioccolato!

  Chi vuole il Cono!

  Corri ch’è buono!

  This is the kingdom of sugar and ice,

  Vanilla and chocolate and everything nice!

  Romans, fulfill your dream

  With a cone of Norge ice cream!18

  From there, Augusto and the Morante children must have walked back past the Villa Doria Pamphili, now a vast park, and continued around the corner where the road opens onto a wide crossing and where Porta Aurelia, which marked the beginning of the Aurelian Way, once stood. Porta Aurelia was rebuilt and renamed Porta San Pancrazio in 1854 (after the nearby church of St. Pancras) and was the site of the 1849 battle between Garibaldi and his Roman troops against the French as they attempted to defend the short-lived Roman Republic. When the time came to go home, Augusto was pleased and proud to make use of the single name he had invented to call the three children: “Marcelsado! Marcelsado!”19

  Augusto would die shortly after the Second World War. During his final illness, Irma, his wife, allowed him to move upstairs and sleep on the living room sofa, where he breathed his last. The children rarely came to visit him—for instance, Elsa did just once. After his death, Irma sold the Monteverde house and moved into an apartment in the same building where Maria and her husband resided. Irma lived to be nearly eighty-three and died, probably of stomach cancer, in a nursing home in Viterbo, in 1963. Again, the children—all but Maria—hardly ever went to visit her there. During one of Elsa’s rare visits, a nun at the clinic complained to Elsa about her “indecent” clothes (Elsa was wearing trousers). After her mother died, Elsa organized a very elaborate and expensive funeral, using up much of her mother’s money and justifying it by saying that that was what Irma would have wanted.

  Aldo married twice and was a successful economist and banker. He spent many years living and working abroad: first in Mexico, then in Venezuela, where he opened a branch of the Banca Commerciale Italiana; and finally opening another branch in Beijing (apparently he lived in an apartment right off Tiananmen Square and witnessed the shootings in 1989; some of the bullets went through his windows). According to his son, Paolo, Aldo had an almost photographic memory and he could recite The Divine Comedy by heart; he also always maintained a very cordial relation with Elsa.20 Marcello took up several professions, including the law, journalism, politics and the theater; he had ten children (one of whom is the actor Laura Morante). Maria married and divorced and had one child, Luca. She is a member of the Communist Party and until recently was an active union leader.

  two

  SECRET GAMES

  At the age of five, Elsa Morante wrote out her poems in a little blue-lined school notebook. Her handwriting is sure and tidy, her letters are perfectly formed. Never once does she deviate from the lines on the page that indicate the height of the capitals or of the lowercase letters, no errors or erasures can be seen. Verses like:

  Senti mamina

  Disse Celestina

  quanto torna del lavoro

  portami un bel drappo d’oro

  Listen mother dear

  Said Celestina

  when you return from work

  bring me a beautiful cloth of gold

  scan and rhyme perfectly and are illustrated with colorful and intricately drawn little figures of people and animals. In addition, Elsa—no fool—indicated the price for her book on its cover: 3.5 lire. The notebook is an exquisite piece of childish art and it is also surprisingly sophisticated. Turning the pages, it is hard to believe that it is the work of such a young child and right away, too, one is struck by both Elsa Morante’s imagination and her thoroughness. Even more surprising is the fact that the child was completely self-taught—she did not attend elementary school. Her intention, she said, to become a writer originated with her birth. Later, she confessed that she also had once dreamt of being a dancer, a ballerina. A dream, she said, she never told anyone about as, her whole life, she was a terrible dancer.1

  After the Morante family moved to Monteverde in 1922, Elsa was enrolled in the local middle school, where she wrote a musical play. When the headmistress introduced the play, she was so filled with emotion she could hardly speak. The headmistress did, however, manage to say how the words the audience members were about to hear were written by a child who was in the room and that they, the audience, were in the presence of a genius.2 Marcello, Elsa’s youngest brother, was supposed to have a part in the play, but at the last moment he got stage fright and wet his pants.

  Elsa Morante was always first in her class and the other children gave her presents, sweets and bits of chocolate, so that they could copy her work. In spite of all the attention, Elsa was never quite satisfied. She considered herself awkward, ugly and too thin. She was in fact anemic. She described her face as being as pale as a washed-out doll’s and the curly hair that framed it as being as black as a crow’s wing. Her blue eyes too were always
ringed with dark circles. At school, she was jealous of one girl in particular, a wealthy classmate named Giacinta. Giacinta was not very smart but she was very pretty and athletic. She also had a closet full of clothes, while Elsa’s own clothes were always in disarray, missing a button or the hem of her dress was falling down. But since, as Elsa would explain later, she had a hypocritical and devious heart, she pretended to like Giacinta—to her face she was nice to Giacinta but behind her back she made fun of her. One time, for example, Elsa forced poor Giacinta to play a game in which she had to extract herself from hell, go to purgatory, then on to paradise by obeying Elsa’s arbitrary commands, which consisted of repeating the word misericordia three hundred times. This and other bits of childish cruelty would prompt the adult Elsa to write, “Still today, if I think of my poor victim, who, like a meek and gentle lamb, had to endure torture, I am overcome by remorse. Forgive me, Giacinta.”3

  Games played an important role in Elsa Morante’s early life. At home, with Aldo and Marcello, she invented the “Game of Gentlemen.” The three children swore one another to secrecy and to tell no one—not even their mother. Elsa assigned each of them a role: Elsa played the leading character, a noble, handsome count named Villa Guidicini; Aldo played a gentleman and Marcello played a servant or the cook. Fascinated by the traditions of old aristocratic families, their mansions, their antiques and their silver, Elsa made up the episodes along those themes. She wrote and directed a draft each day, like a soap opera, and the children would then improvise. The game included a newspaper in which Elsa published poems and in which Marcello, the cook, published recipes. For a time, Aldo and Marcello obeyed her completely. After two years, however, Aldo grew bored and began a parallel game of his own, without Elsa. Lying in bed at night, he and Marcello fantasized about women. According to Marcello, Aldo got all the beautiful ones and he, Marcello, got the ugly ones; in one game, a woman named Ileana was so beautiful that Marcello was not even allowed to speak to her. In view of the contentious atmosphere in the Morante household, it is not difficult to imagine how these games may have provided the means for the three Morante children to explore forbidden subjects.