Woman of Rome

by Lily Tuck

  Elsa then suggested we get some fresh air and move to the bar in the garden. I realized that she had decided to ignore my nonsense. I was filled with shame. We got up and went to the bar. I was grateful that she had changed the subject. I ordered a yogurt. Then she told me that I had never read The World Saved by Children and it was useless for me to lie and say the contrary. It was clear that I had a complex about that book…. It was true. I had read The World Saved by Children quickly and poorly.

  I forget how the evening ended. Elsa returned to our argument (she always had the last word), but only for an instant. “Let’s be clear,” she concluded, “I already know what I will do when I die. You will find a note in an envelope on which there will be written: ‘torno subito’ (‘I will be right back’).” Then, tilting her head back and lifting her chin in a childish gesture of defiance, she looked at me fiercely as if checking to see the effect she was producing. She anticipated me by only a fraction of a second with a burst of hilarity which echoed like applause amongst the empty tables, before we found ourselves laughing together.31

  eleven

  HISTORY

  I should be grateful to Mussolini,” Elsa once said. “By introducing the racist laws in 1938, he made me realize that I myself was a Jew; my mother was Jewish, but the thought had never crossed my mind that there was something peculiar about having a mother whose father and mother used to pray in a synagogue. At first, the Fascists were very loose in the enforcement of discrimination. But when the Germans took over Rome in 1943, I learned a great lesson, I learned terror. I was afraid for myself, but even more for Moravia. His father was Jewish. Actually, I was the real Jew, because you inherit from your mother’s side. But the Fascists were so illiterate that they did not know, and then Jewishness to them was a race, a breed; they explained it through the barbaric, regressive imagery of ‘blood.’ And all this went through my mind, over and over. We escaped, Moravia and I, to the mountains of Ciociaria. On the way, the people we had to be afraid of were the middle classes, teachers, civil servants—the prejudice was with them, they would have reported us to the Gestapo. We were finally given shelter by a peasant family. To them, Jewish or non-Jewish, we were all cristiani.* I learnt a lot from terror.”1

  In the early 1970s, while she was working on her novel History: A Novel (La storia), Elsa Morante took many long walks through the old Roman Ghetto, the Testaccio and San Lorenzo districts, entering buildings, inspecting rooms, peering closely at objects (after all, she was very nearsighted). She took copious notes and Luca Fontana, a friend who often accompanied her on these walks, found this very uncharacteristic. One day, although he knew he was transgressing the writer’s code as Elsa never spoke about the specifics of a novel she was working on, he could not resist asking, “What sort of book are you writing?” Elsa’s reply was cryptic: “I’m writing a book for the illiterate.”2 And in fact, the epigraph for History, Elsa Morante’s best-known novel, is a line from the militant Peruvian poet César Vallejo: “Por el analfabeto a quien escribo” (“To the illiterate for whom I write”).

  Above all, Elsa Morante wanted the book to reach beyond the small circle of literary readers and be accessible to and read by the general public—the poor general public. When the book was published in 1974, she insisted that her publisher, Einaudi, bring it out in paperback right away, and she herself fixed the price at 2000 lire (then equivalent to about five dollars), thus giving up a large portion of the royalties she could have earned. For the cover, Morante had originally thought to use a painting by Bill Morrow but, instead, decided on a Robert Capa photograph that had a more dramatic effect. The Fallen Partisan, which Capa took during the Spanish Civil War, turned out not to be an actual photograph but a photomontage. Colored red, it showed a young man, presumably dead, lying in an almost Christ-like position on top of a pile of rubble. A tagline underneath the photograph sent out a fiery message: “A scandal that has lasted ten thousand years.” (On the cover of the most recent edition of the novel, published by Einaudi in 1995, a little boy sits forlornly on a pile of rubble. Although poignant, this photograph is more sentimental than Capa’s. The price of this later edition is thirteen euros, approximately nineteen dollars.) In any event, Elsa Morante got her wish: within a year of the publication, History had sold 800,000 copies.

  In a letter dated November 1, 1974, to Bill Koshland, who was now Elsa’s editor at Knopf, her literary agent described how well the book was doing. Erich Linder had sold the foreign rights to several countries, including Spain, “with an advance of $15,000, which, I believe, is almost unheard of from Spain—and certainly unheard of for an Italian novel.” In addition, the novel was still on top of the best-seller list in Italy and was selling at the rate of several thousand copies a week. Linder continued, “We no longer know who still buys the book, since there appear to be copies in every Italian household by now…”3 That same year, Paul Hofmann, writing an “Arts Abroad” dispatch from Rome to The New York Times, reported, “For the first time since anyone can remember, people in railroad compartments and espresso bars discuss a book—the Morante novel—rather than the soccer championship or latest scandal. The critics write endlessly about the meaning of La storia and the reasons for the exceptional stir it is causing.”4

  The idea for History came to Elsa Morante from her reading of the Greek classics—she wanted the novel to be a kind of “modern-day Iliad”5—and from her reading of Simone Weil’s “The Iliad or The Poem of Force.” (Elsa Morante’s statement about being grateful to Mussolini for teaching her “terror” echoes Simone Weil’s own famous perversely logical one when the German troops occupied Paris: “This is a great day for Indo-China.”) Weil’s essay, which first appeared in the December 1940 and January 1941 issue of Cahiers du Sud, and was published under the near acrostical pseudonym Emile Novis (the essay was later translated by Mary McCarthy and appeared in November 1945 in Politics, which was edited by Dwight Macdonald), is a powerful meditation on the uses of power in history and it corresponded with Elsa Morante’s own views on the subject. It begins:

  The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.6

  In the Iliad, according to Simone Weil, the distress and misery caused by force never ceases and each side is made to suffer in turn like “a continual game of seesaw.” The death of Hector, for instance, “would be but a brief joy for Achilles” and likewise “the death of Achilles but a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans.”7 (The critic George Steiner’s response was to complain that Weil’s reading of the Iliad as a poem of suffering was a “bizarre interpretation” and that she was “blind to the wild joy and ferocity of archaic warfare which makes the epic blaze.”8) But man’s suffering and man’s fate are of little importance to Simone Weil: either way man will be destroyed—by his own self-destructive power or by that of others. “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.” And again: “Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem just as external to its employer as to its victim.”9 For Simone Weil, force is equally harmful to those who inflict it and to those who bear it.

  Elsa Morante held Simone Weil in great esteem. She admired her pure mind, which, as she put it, was the mind of a great contemplator of truth while her own mind, she complained, was in a state of continual m
etamorphosis.10 She must also have been attracted by Simone Weil’s determination to live out her “truths,” first by enlisting in the Spanish Civil War, then working in a Renault factory assembly line so that she could write a firsthand account about working-class conditions. Less appealing to Morante, probably, were Weil’s highly charged sense of personal accountability for the world’s suffering, her self-loathing, her eccentricities, her untimely rejection of Judaism and her enforced starvation—what George Steiner called her “mystical anorexia”11—which eventually led to her death.

  Although no ascetic, Morante, at the time she was writing History, made the conscious decision to grow old. She had turned sixty and she deliberately put on the mask of an old lady by dressing like one and wearing a scarf over her head. Also she gave up on love. Claiming that she had been young for a long time, she said, “Enough. Enough of youth; the others are young but I am not.”12 According to Cesare Garboli, the appearance of old age for Elsa was terrible and traumatic; “like the explosion of a hurricane.”13 It affected her in such a way that she could not reconcile herself to the transformation it produced on her physically. She could no longer recognize or love herself in her own body. In addition, Garboli proposed his male-centric theory about how her body grown old and altered came also to signify for Elsa its failure to create, its unfulfilled and denied maternity.

  Old or not, Elsa Morante still needed and craved life, and, for her, life mostly took place in restaurants. She enjoyed eating well (apparently, she never ate at home and although she had a large, well-appointed kitchen, she never used it); she particularly liked seafood and rarely ate meat, only chicken. According to her friend Patrizia Cavalli, Elsa’s day would begin around ten or eleven in the morning, when she would start telephoning friends to set up an appointment for lunch (she never made arrangements the day before) and she would go about putting people together—she hated it when people did not get along. There were always at least five or six people at table in the restaurant; all were young, poor and worshiped Elsa. Carlo Cecchi remembers how she used to quote Plato and say, “Those who love are close to God, those who are loved are far from God,” and then laugh. (Elsa had a very infectious laugh but since she did not take care of her teeth, they had turned brown and she usually covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed.) During lunch, she advised and encouraged her friends in their work. And, always generous, Elsa paid for everyone. She herself ate a lot, and afterward she took a pill, probably benzadrine, which helped her stay awake. Then she went home, turned off her phone and wrote all afternoon and most of the night.14

  History is divided into nine chronological sections marked by years (“19**,” 1941, 1942 and so on through 1947, followed by a last “19**”). Each begins with a flat, uninflected summary of the important events of that year, which constitutes the official History, history with a capital H; but it is the commonplace events that follow, the stories of ordinary people, which of course constitute the real history, albeit history with a small h. Along with these two disparate narratives, Morante included snatches of songs, verse, diary entries (cited as anonymous but in fact taken from Gramsci’s well-known prison letters), all of which combine to create a “newsreel” effect reminiscent of John Dos Passos’s technique in U.S.A., his collective portrait of America. And, unlike her other novels, History is narrated by the author herself, in the tone and timbre of her own voice, which gives it the form of a neighborhood chronicle. The narrator is gathering information about actual events that occurred in the Testaccio and San Lorenzo districts of Rome; in some instances, she appears to be an eyewitness. Her reporting on actions and motivation is detailed, meticulous and for the most part dispassionate. It is a neutral voice that has abandoned the musical quality of House of Liars and the fablelike echoes of Arturo’s Island; instead, Morante writes from that distant place that she claimed renders the dead and the living equal.15

  The plot of the novel is based on an event that was reported in a Roman newspaper in June 1947: a mother, her six-year-old boy and their maremmana (a big white sheepdog from the Maremma region of Italy) were discovered in an apartment in the Testaccio; the boy was dead, the mother insane with grief, the dog so aggressive in its attempt to protect its owners that it had to be killed in order for the authorities to gain entrance into the apartment. What, the writer of the newspaper piece asked, brought this poor little family to such a tragic end? In order to try to answer this question, Elsa Morante begins the novel proper in 1941, with a young German soldier named Gunther, on leave for the day, who wanders around San Lorenzo, drinks too much and rapes a young schoolteacher who is on her way home with her bag of groceries. Ida Mancuso (née Ramundo), the young teacher, is a timid widow who lives in fear of being discovered to be half Jewish. (The character has been compared to Elsa’s mother, Irma Poggibonsi, a schoolteacher who likewise was afraid of being discovered to be Jewish.) Ida is so afraid that she is relieved that instead of denouncing or deporting her, the soldier rapes her. The rape scene is depicted as a kind of an Annunciation: during it, Ida has an epileptic fit, which the soldier mistakes for orgasmic pleasure. He tells her that he comes from the town of Dachau and is an electrician. Before leaving, he repairs a light fixture in Ida’s apartment (thus, by impregnating Ida with the little boy Useppe, the German soldier has symbolically also brought her light). Gunther will then be killed on his way to Libya.

  Examining this rape scene in an essay that deals with how novels and short stories begin, the writer Amos Oz has astutely observed that right away there is a fundamental ideological paradox in History. The novel begins with a summary of political events that focuses on the struggle between the oppressed poor and the powerful masters; it posits the simple axiom that the rich are evil and the poor good. “And thus in a novel whose opening contract has insisted that the reader recognize the world’s evil as caused by the establishment in its various guises, and that the fount of grace and mercy is children, peasants, laborers, women, the simple folk, the plot actually results from a brutal act of rape committed by an innocent child, a simple fellow.” How could this be? Oz asks. How could one good, simple soul (Gunther) inflict pain on another good simple soul (Ida)? So where does evil come from? From the same source as good? The answer he suggests lies in the epigraph of the novel, which is taken from Luke 10:21: “[T] hou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes…for so it seemed good in thy sight.” Oz claims that this concept integrates Morante’s Christian sentiments with her leftist beliefs. Gunther may be a monster but he is a simple monster, not a political one, and thus he can be redeemed.16

  Ida, who already has a handsome but truant teenage son named Nino, gives birth to Giuseppe, known as Useppe (he cannot pronounce the G—like Elsa Morante’s little nephew, Luca). He, too, suffers from epilepsy or grand mal attacks. (A comparison has been made between the way Elsa Morante uses epilepsy or a grand mal attack for the physical consequences while Dostoevsky, in The Idiot specifically, uses it for its psychological ones. For Dostoevsky, epilepsy is a means of achieving Truth; it has the function of giving knowledge. In Morante, its function is destructive; epilepsy brings death.)17 Useppe is a child who is too strange, too ill equipped and too beautiful for this world. A natural poet, he observes the world with joy and wonderment and turns everything into a source of delight:

  A merrier baby than he had never been seen. Everything he glimpsed around him roused his interest and stirred him to joy. He looked with delight at the threads of rain outside the window, as if they were confetti and multicolored streamers….

  The color of a rag, of a scrap of paper, suggesting to him the resonance of all prisms and scales of light, was enough to transport him to awed laughter. One of the first words he learned was ttars [stars].

  Even the things that, in general, arouse aversion or repugnance, in him inspired only attention and transparent wonder, like the others. In his endless journeys of exploration, crawling on all fours around the Urals and the Amaz
on and the Australian archipelagoes which the furniture of the house was to him, sometimes he no longer knew where he was. And he would be found under the sink in the kitchen, ecstatically observing a patrol of cockroaches as if they were wild colts on the prairie. He even recognized a ttar in a gob of spit.18

  Useppe is the poet of joy and innocence. He is close to nature, to animals and birds. The novel is full of dogs and cats who have been anthropomorphized into compassionate companions and whom Useppe understands and can speak to. He recites his poems to Nino’s dog, Bella (a maremmana), and she answers him back.

  The war continues in History as it did in fact with its inevitable and disastrous consequences. By 1943, Ida’s modest apartment is bombed and destroyed, Nino has joined the Fascist Blackshirts (later Nino becomes a Communist partisan, then a black-market racketeer) and she and little Useppe are reduced to seeking refuge with other fugitive families in a dormitory set up for the homeless. “Almost all the people ahead of her or following her carried bundles or suitcases or household goods, but except for Useppe, she had absolutely nothing to carry. The only property left her was the shopping bag hanging from her arm…” The dormitory, a cement hovel, “consisted of a single ground-floor room, rather vast, with low grilled windows, and one exit which opened directly onto a ditch; but it boasted some conveniences truly rare those days in the outlying slums, namely a private latrine with cesspool, and a cistern feeding a water tank on the roof…. Now, however, at the end of summer, the cistern was dry.”19