Woman of Rome

by Lily Tuck

  People, Elsa Morante always claimed, were essentially divided into three categories: there was Achilles, the man who lived out his passions; there was Don Quixote, the man who lived out his dreams; and, finally, there was Hamlet, the man who questioned everything. Moravia, in her opinion, was part Hamlet and part Achilles; she herself was all Don Quixote. In addition, she complained of Moravia’s “incurable detachment.”17

  Although he had declared himself an anti-Fascist as early as 1935 and stated that his sympathies lay with the Communist Party, Moravia did not actively participate in the war effort. Certainly his pronounced limp—Moravia had had coxitis (tuberculosis of the bone) as a child, which left him with one leg several inches shorter than the other—rendered him unfit for active service. Another reason was his detached temperament. Nevertheless, he has been criticized for pursuing his literary career and writing fiction on the island of Capri during the early years of the conflict.

  One other factor that should be noted—although in no way offered as an excuse—is that the position of the majority of Italians evolved during the course of the war: in 1939, as World War II broke out in Europe, most Italians did not want to take part in the war; in 1941, most Italians hoped they would win; by 1942, they hoped the Germans would win; by 1943, most Italians hoped they would get out of the war without too much injury; and, by 1944, they hoped the Allies would win. Moravia’s attitude, which was shared by many of his compatriots, is reflected in his statement “Everyone thought that Fascism could, and should, collapse, but since the outcome of the war was uncertain almost to the end, its fall wasn’t a certainty; depending on the person, it was a hope or a fear. The anti-Fascists, of course, hoped; but those who feared weren’t only the Fascists but also a part of the population who had got used to Fascism. In any case, everyone was waiting.”18 This wait-and-see attitude, however, would change for Alberto Moravia, as well as for Elsa Morante.

  In July 1943, Benito Mussolini was arrested and Pietro Badoglio became prime minister. The uneasy period that followed, known as the Forty-Five Days, ended on September 3 with the signing of a secret treaty between Italy and the Allies calling for Italy’s unconditional surrender. Nevertheless, Badoglio’s evasiveness during this period resulted in still more confusion: Italy was cut in two between the north and the south, the Italian royal family fled, the Germans occupied Rome where the Fascists, wearing their black shirts, were back in full force, marching everywhere in the streets, armed, and waving banners that carried their slogan “Viva la morte!” (Long live death!)

  That summer instead of following the advice of his friend Curzio Malaparte to return to Capri, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante decided to stay in the capital. But not for long. Moravia learned he was on the wanted list of the Fascist police and that he would be arrested; in addition, Moravia was half Jewish.* He and Elsa went into hiding at the home of Moravia’s Swedish translator. After two days, realizing that they could not jeopardize him, they moved on to the house of Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, a friend of Elsa, for another two days. Moravia tried to seek refuge at the Belgian embassy and Elsa Morante appealed to Father Tacchi-Venturi, begging him to hide them in the vast cellars of his church, but both efforts proved futile. Packing a single suitcase with toilet articles and summer clothes—it was a warm September day and the British army, they assumed, would be arriving to liberate the city within the next ten days—they decided to take the train to Naples.

  Alberto Moravia remembered that he was wearing a light sharkskin suit and Elsa had on a flowered cretonne dress. He also remembered that the train did not go to Naples. All of a sudden it stopped at a deserted-looking station and the conductor told them to get off. There were no more train tracks. “We got off and found ourselves in the station parking lot, with the sun beating down, hot but beautiful, the Italian summer sun. The countryside was filled with the rasp of cicadas. An atmosphere of extreme peace, nothing to suggest war. We set off along a dusty road between hedges of blackberries.”19 Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante spent a few days in the village of Fondi, until the Germans began to round up people in the village and they had to leave.

  So one fine morning, I in my gray double-breasted suit, Elsa in her flowered cretonne, we loaded the suitcase on a donkey and began to climb…. We climbed and climbed, and finally we arrived at a little house. Nearby we saw a peasant who was working his field. His name was Davide Marrocco; he was young, but he had one walleye, and this had saved him from the draft. The other men of the area had been sent to Russia, where they all died. So I had happened onto a community all of women…. These were mountain peasants, very poor, absolutely without anything. They tilled the slopes with a system of terraces and steps…patches of arable land, sustained by little walls of stone, homemade: the women bring the stones in baskets, and the men lay them. On these…they grow everything: wheat, flax, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and so on. Not only what they need for food, but also for their clothes, because with the flax and the wool they weave their own cloth. It was a ciociaro community, or rather, since the men were absent, ciociara.”*20

  As a political prisoner, Carlo Levi was another Italian writer who was forced to live in a remote hill village during the Ethiopian war. About his time there, he wrote: “Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor did the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason, nor history. Christ never came.”21

  And although Levi described the people in the village as decent, he also said how “their life was a continuous renewal of old resentments,” how they had been “held back by ineptness or poverty or premature marriage or family interests or some other fateful necessity from emigrating” and how “they had funneled their disappointment and their mortal boredom into a generic rage, a ceaseless hate.”22 Nonetheless, the villagers accepted their fate with patience and in silence. “Of what use are words?” Levi asked. “And what can a man do? Nothing.”23

  It was not so surprising then that when Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante arrived at the village of Sant’Agata, the people there were hardly curious about them. For the villagers, Moravia and Morante’s presence reinforced the notion that they, like everyone else, were the victims of fate. And nothing could be done about that or—for that matter—done for them.

  Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante lived for nine months in a one-room hut built against the side of a rock. The hut had a metal roof and was furnished with a bed and a loom (a woman sat at the loom all day weaving and making a deafening racket). The bed was a plank with a sack of corn husks for a mattress, rough linen sheets and no blankets (since the room was so small, however, Moravia claimed that they were never cold); the floor of the room was packed earth and when it rained heavily, they had to stand ankle-deep in water. There were no pens or paper; the only books they had brought along were the Bible and The Brothers Karamazov (the pages of the latter were used for toilet paper). They got water to wash from a well and shared one meal a day with the peasants—bread, beans, a glass of acidic local wine—inside a smoke-filled hut that was reserved for meals. Each day, however, the food got scarcer (by springtime, they were reduced to looking for any kind of edible herbs).

  They did nothing during those nine months. They stared at the rocky landscape and waited for the Allies to come. From time to time they could hear bombs dropping in Fondi and they watched dogfights between the German and British up in the sky. Twice Moravia and Morante were targets of an attack and strafed by planes while they were out walking: once by an English Spitfire, the other by a squadron of American Flying Fortresses. Each time they managed to save themselves by throwing themselves into a nearby ditch.

  As Moravia pointed out in his autobiography, he was the one wanted by the police and Elsa chose to stay with him out of her own free will. She suffered all the discomforts and privations, never once complaining. Also, she did a courageous thing. In October, when it began to get cold, Elsa Morante went back to Rome alone to get some warm clothes. She went to their apartment, packed a suitcase�
��ironically enough, a German soldier helped her carry the heavy suitcase at the train station—and she returned to Sant’Agata. She also had a chance to stop and check on the manuscript of House of Liars, which she had left behind with Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia. It was safe. That and Moravia were all she cared about.24

  Forty years later, Moravia went back to visit the village; the hut where he and Elsa had stayed remained unchanged. Davide Marrocco, the walleyed peasant who had given them shelter, was living there still and was very pleased to see Moravia again. He kissed him and recalled how he used to call Moravia “Albé.” Marrocco also remembered how they had to hide in the mountains to avoid the Germans, how they all ate their meals together and how his mother and his wife, in the dead of winter, drew cold water from the well so that Elsa could bathe.25

  La ciociara (Two Women), considered by some Moravia’s masterpiece, was, as he described in a letter to his publisher, his “war novel,” written “ten years later, with sufficient perspective to mix fantasy with reality and not find myself too close to the events.”26 When Elsa Morante read Two Women, she told Moravia that of all the books she had read about the war, it was the one that held up best.27 It has also been said that of all of Moravia’s novels, Two Women is the most elemental: the protagonist, Cesira is Moravia.28

  The novel begins with two women, Cesira and her daughter, Rosetta, leaving Rome in September 1943; food has become scarce and the atmosphere dangerous, and they head back to the village where Cesira is originally from. Since it is still warm, they pack two small suitcases with only summer clothes. They plan to take the train to Fondi but are forced to get off before they reach their destination because the train line has been cut. “There was no one on the station platform. We went through the waiting room: no one there; and out into the open space outside; no one there either. A straight road lay in front of us, a real country road, white, covered with fine dust, blinding in the sunlight between hedges veiled in dust and a few dusty trees.”29 The two women start to climb, following a mule track, and when they finally reach the little village of Sant’Eufemia, they are shown to a hut that Moravia, in the novel, describes almost exactly like the hut he and Morante had lived in: the noisy, wooden loom occupying most of the room, the bed made out of a plank resting on two iron trestles with a sack filled with corn husks for a mattress and the bare-packed earth floor.

  Moravia was able to write convincingly about the makeshift, arduous lives of the peasants barely surviving in their rude stone huts, the scarcity of food, water, clothing, and their ruthless and often savage behavior, prey as they were to the constant menacing and outlaw presence of German and former Fascist soldiers. The women’s story, too, is a bleak allegory of the cost of historical consciousness: war, suffering, sacrifice and deprivation—the women are raped by Moroccan soldiers (part of the Free French Forces).

  One of Elsa Morante’s stories, “The Sicilian Soldier” (“Il soldato siciliano”), written in 1946 and later a part of her collection Lo scialle andaluso (The Andalusian Shawl), was also influenced by the nine months she and Moravia spent in the mountains. A haunting tale about a soldier who wanders the countryside with a miner’s lamp on his head looking for death, it begins, “At the time when the Allied armies blocked by the winter were forced to halt at the Garigliano River, I was living as a refugee in the mountains on the other side of that river. One day, for the sake of the safety of the people whom I loved, I was obliged to make a quick trip to Rome. The trip filled me with bitterness because Rome, the city where I was born and where I have always lived, was for me, at that time, an enemy city.”30

  This passage recalls Elsa Morante’s brave journey back to Rome to check on her manuscript and to fill a suitcase with winter clothes, which took place soon after Italy’s surrender to the Allied forces. The surrender was followed by Pietro Badoglio and Pope Pius XII’s futile attempt to try to keep the city safe from destruction by calling Rome an “open city.” Instead of being “open,” however, Rome remained brutally besieged by the ferocious and hated German occupying forces while the Allied attempts to capture the city proved in vain (their repeated bombing made them almost equally unpopular). To make matters worse, the Vatican and Pope Pius XII maintained a rigid and un-Christian-like neutrality (their excuse was to save the world from communism and the city from ruin) at the same time that small courageous bands of partisans were desperately trying to salvage Italy’s reputation and honor (and, in the process, harass and obstruct the occupying forces)31 often with tragic consequences and horrendous reprisals. The most gruesome of these was the execution of 320 innocent men by the Germans in Rome’s Ardeatine Caves. Meanwhile the population of the city was slowly starving to death.

  Many years later, in her third and most famous novel, History, Elsa Morante vividly captured that period of misery and desperation:

  During the last months of the German occupation, Rome took on the appearance of certain Indian metropolises where only the vultures get enough to eat and there is no census of the living and the dead. A multitude of beggars and refugees…camped on the steps of the churches or below the Pope’s palaces; and in the great public parks starving sheep and cows grazed, having escaped the bombs and the confiscations in the countryside. Despite the declaration of open city, the Germans were encamped around the inhabited areas…and the disastrous cloud of the air raids…spread over the city a great tarpaulin of pestilence and earthquake…. The populace had fallen silent. The daily news of roundups, torture, and slaughter circulated through the neighborhoods like death-rattle echoes without any possible response. It was known that just outside the city’s girdle of walls, ineptly buried in mined ditches and caves, numberless bodies were thrown to decompose…. And even the exalted mirage of the Liberation was being reduced to a fatuous dot, subject of sarcasm and mockery. For that matter, it was said that the Germans, before abandoning the city, would blow it up completely…. But finally, inside the isolated city, sacked and besieged, the true master was hunger.32

  On May 23, 1944, Alfred de Grazia, an American lieutenant, was trying to make his way to Rome from the battlefronts of Cassino and the Anzio beachhead in his jeep, with his driver, an Italian-American named Alfredo Segre, when he stumbled upon Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Apparently, Segre had heard a rumor about two writers hiding in the mountains and both he and de Grazia drove up to investigate. “We’re Americans,” Segre shouted in Italian, as he pounded on the hut door in an attempt to allay the couple’s fears while de Grazia, who was armed to the teeth, worried that the couple inside might be Fascist sympathizers. Once face-to-face the American soldiers studied Moravia and Morante carefully. Elsa, Alfred de Grazia later wrote, was “wearing a shapeless dress and old shoes; her hair was a curly light-brown, uncombed, with intimations of grey, though she was young. She had a smooth round sweet face, a soft buxom figure. Her smile, now that she smiled with even teeth that parted in the middle, could hardly convey but a mild and generous soul.” His impression of her husband, however, was quite different: “Alberto Moravia…was a head taller than she, well put together, save for a gimpy leg, a bit slumped of shoulder, of a satanic countenance that refused to transform itself pleasantly. His lips were tight, his jaw clenched, his attitude grim. When he smiled, he might be sincere, but you would never be sure. He appeared to be retaining secrets.”33 After Moravia and Morante were able to reassure Lieutenant de Grazia that they were not Fascist sympathizers, he wrote a letter authorizing them to travel on military conveyances to Naples, which they did, while he continued on his way to Rome.

  Although politics always took second place to literature for Elsa Morante, she, like Moravia, sympathized with the Communist Party and with the left. She was also not afraid to express her opinions or her outrage. On May 1, 1945, three days after Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were arrested and shot, their bodies strung upside down for all to see, Elsa Morante wrote a long piece in her diary excoriating Il Duce. Interestingly enough, she begins the piece by blam
ing the Italian people: “All of Mussolini’s faults were either tolerated or encouraged even, and applauded. Thus a people who tolerate the faults of their head of state are complicit with these faults. But if they encourage and applaud them as well, it is worse than being an accomplice, it makes them an accessory to these faults.” She describes Mussolini as a mediocre man, a crude man, a man outside the culture, a vulgarly eloquent man with a simple kind of effectiveness, which is the reason he appealed so well to the people. She called him “Venal,” “Corruptible,” a “Flatterer,” a “Catholic who did not believe in God,” a “Pervert,” “Conceited,” “Vain,” “Superficial,” and much more. She compared him to the cocotte who sells herself to the old lover then betrays him by speaking ill of him, and to the cocotte who deludes herself into thinking that she is loved by the younger lover who will soon abandon her when she is no longer useful to him. She also accused Mussolini of having vulgar taste: reading inferior books, listening to sentimental music (Puccini), not caring about poetry, moved as he was by the mediocre (Ada Negri). Furthermore, in Italy, she wrote angrily, it would be difficult to find a better or more perfect example of an Italian than Il Duce himself. The Italian people, in her opinion, were made in such a way that they would rather give their vote to the strong man than to the just man, and if they had to choose between their duty and their profit—even if they knew what their duty was—they would choose their profit.34