by Lily Tuck
In the introduction to an American limited edition for the members of the First Edition Society, in 1977, she outlined her goals, which daily become more relevant and urgent:
In this book, I—who was born at such a horrible time in the twentieth century—wanted to leave behind a testimony that described my actual experience of the Second World War, one that would expose it as the ultimate and bloodiest example of man’s inhumanity to man in the history of the past thousand years. Thus, here is History for you, just as it is and just as we all contributed to making it.
She went on to say,
Since I am by nature a poet, I could not do anything else but a work of poetry. And in view of this, experience has taught me that, unfortunately, for many, even poetry can be used as an alibi. As if poetry should content itself with its own beauty, as if it were only an elegant arabesque designed on paper.
So I must warn you that this book, before it is a work of poetry, first, must be an act of accusation and a prayer.38
A courageous prayer.
twelve
ARACOELI
In 1976, during the Christmas holidays, Elsa Morante and Carlo Cecchi went to Spain together. Elsa was looking for a setting for Aracoeli, the novel she had begun work on—specifically, for a little village she would make the home of her eponymous character. At Elsa’s insistence, Carlo Cecchi had randomly put his finger on the map and it fell on the province of Almería. From the airport, they took a taxi and the driver, as luck would have it, spoke Italian. His name was Angel and he truly was “an angel,” Elsa Morante said, because after explaining to him what they were looking for, he took them to a village called El Almendral, which was exactly how she had imagined it should be.
The actual inspiration for Morante’s last novel may well have been something that had occurred when she met Cecchi years earlier in Venice. Together they had gone to the Accademia d’Arte to look at two paintings; a Madonna and child by Giovanni Bellini and The Tempest by Giorgione. Somehow, standing in front of those paintings, Elsa felt as if she could traverse time and see the young girl who had posed for the Madonna in the Bellini painting as well as the girl who had posed for the woman nursing the baby in the Giorgione painting, and both would become the inspiration for the character Aracoeli. It was a moment that, later, she could see contained everything that would be important in the novel.1 It was also a recurring theme in her life: this sense of having been someplace before, of having lived another, earlier life, combined with the often obsessive pull and inexplicable significance of certain scenes and objects.
Earlier on the same trip to Spain, Elsa and Carlo Cecchi had gone on a tour of Andalucía. Cecchi said he was always amazed at how energetic Elsa was and how she wanted to go everywhere and see everything. One night in Granada, they were sitting in a popular café when a very poor family arrived. The wife was quite short and she had a girl of about ten and a little boy of four; they were waiting for the father whose job was to guard a car park. Elsa began talking to them, half in Spanish, half in Italian. She may have found something of Useppe’s innocence in the little boy, whose name was Casper Muñoz, because she took down their address. The next day she and Carlo went to find them in a very poor section of the city, bringing a number of presents, including a toy piano for the little boy. They went inside the family’s house, which was very simple but clean. They sat together at the table and Elsa talked to them as if she were an old friend and had known them for a long time.2
Elsa Morante was like that—impetuous and generous. The same sort of thing happened with Tonino Ricchezza, a boy from Naples whom she befriended. He too was from a poor family, he worked cleaning streets, but he was intelligent and Elsa wanted to help him, which she did.3 He, in turn, viewed Elsa as a kind of fairy godmother—a lady who was part ugly old woman and part beautiful young one—who, according to a dream he had when he was a boy in school, would come and rescue him from his hard life. Elsa and Tonino met in the 1970s and spent time together—first on the island of Procida, then Tonino came to stay with Elsa in Rome, where she took him to visit museums, to the Villa Borghese and to all the places in History where Useppe had lived. According to Tonino, Elsa Morante looked after him because she understood that life had not offered him much thus far. In a short paean to her, he touchingly described their time together and their friendship, ending it with “the fairy tale continued for several years then, as the saying goes, the best things always have to come to an end.”4
Alfonso Berardinelli was another young man who was grateful to Elsa and regarded her as his teacher. To talk to her was a form of therapy as well as an antidote to a culture that, he felt, was becoming more and more alien. Elsa, Berardinelli said, lived between heaven and hell. Sometimes her face had a look of tragedy as if she was condemned to see nothing but darkness but then she would suddenly laugh. She could see the comedy beneath the tragedy. Being with Elsa always gave Alfonso the impression that ancient Greece, Italy of the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Mozart, the Mayan civilization, India, Naples, Paris, London and the Yucatán were right there all around them as they were sitting outdoors having coffee and talking. Elsa could remove herself from the world, she could be elsewhere. In one of the books she inscribed to him, she wrote, “To Alfonso, who knows from where.”5
Nonetheless, the mid-1970s was a time when Elsa Morante became more and more reclusive. She broke off with some of her friends and did not want to bother with casual relationships. She let her hair go white. When asked in a questionnaire what she considered to be the pinnacle of happiness, Elsa answered “solitude”; when asked what she considered to be the pinnacle of unhappiness, Elsa answered the same thing, “solitude.” The questionnaire also asked what she loved best in the world and Elsa replied the three Ms—in Italian, Mozart, mare, gelato al mandarino—“Mozart, the sea and tangerine ice cream.”6
Morante began writing Aracoeli in 1977, when she was reading Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Michel Tournier and Salvatore Satta, a Sardinian writer. She also turned to the letters between Baudelaire and his mother for inspiration about the character of Aracoeli.7 Although she rarely spoke about what she was working on, she did tell her friends that she thought it was strange that for the first time in her life she was writing about a character, Manuel, who was so ugly and unhappy. Up until then all her characters had been young and beautiful—she was speaking about her male characters—or if they were not handsome, at least they were charming and fascinating. It was as if the character Manuel needed to have his story told, she said.8
On March 16, 1978, however, her work was interrupted by an event that would prove to be a severe blow to Italy’s government and its people. Aldo Moro, the former prime minister and the head of the Christian Democratic Party, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. The kidnappers demanded the release of thirteen Red Brigade members who were on trial in Turin but Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti refused to negotiate. On May 9, the kidnappers shot and killed Aldo Moro. Moro had worked hard with Enrico Berlinguer to implement the “historic compromise,” which, for the first time, would have brought together the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats. With his death, all attempts to achieve solidarity between the two parties ended.
Meanwhile, two days after Aldo Moro was kidnapped, Elsa drafted a letter to the Red Brigades.
I know very well that this letter, by the standards of today’s objective judgments, may seem pointless, ridiculous, idiotic and scandalous. But these are extreme times when intelligence is no longer of use and all that can be done is to follow the dictates of one’s despairing conscience…even though one is aware of how futile that is.
In addressing myself to you, members of the Red Brigades…I will try, at least, not to doubt that you are convinced in good faith by the motives that you promote by your acts; that is to say that you are truly, in your own eyes, revolutionaries. I admit that it repels me to repeat…that word—revolution—when I think of the use it has been put to—up to this p
resent day—in history. Nonetheless, this word…still has a primary and authentic significance: that of a great popular action whose goal is to install a more worthy society. Now, too many equivocal flags have been waved over this definition which nevertheless is clear.
And the first equivocation was to write on this flag the national slogan: the end justifies the means.
This principle (which Benito Mussolini and his cohorts also espoused for their “revolutions”) is a false sign which one recognizes without even firing a shot. For contrarily, it is in its opposite that one finds the truth: the means betray the end. And, the means you are actually pursuing…is founded on a single, basic fact: the total contempt for human beings.
A society based on the total contempt for a human being, no matter what name it gives itself, can only be an obscene Fascist society.
Because of your youth, you have not physically experienced the history of this century. Perhaps you have not even studied it enough….
But whatever judgment one may make on our actual inept and corrupt societies, I hope I will not live long enough to participate in a new totalitarianism.9
In the end, Elsa Morante neither finished nor sent the letter because, as she confided to a friend, she knew that it would not be understood. Nevertheless, the letter was a beautiful declaration of her principles, principles that were neglected and ignored to the great and tragic detriment of the Communist Party movement. The subsequent murder of Moro contributed to Italy’s so-called Years of Lead, which were dominated by both the threat and fear of terrorism.
Aracoeli,* the beautiful name Elsa Morante gave her character, is the Latin word for “altar of heaven.” It was the name of one of Morante’s Spanish acquaintances, Aracoeli Zambrano, whose sister was the Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano. Muñoz, Aracoeli’s last name, Elsa borrowed from the poor Spanish family she befriended in Granada and she used it twice: “It so happened that both her father and mother were born with the same surname: Muñoz. And so, following the Spanish usage, she bore the double family name Muñoz Muñoz.” About his mother’s name, Manuel, who is both the narrator and protagonist, says: “I learned later that in Spain it is common to baptize girls with such names, even Latin ones…. Nevertheless, gradually, as I grew up, that name Aracoeli became stamped in my memory as a sign of distinction, a unique title in which my mother remains separate and enclosed, as in a heavy tortile [sic] frame painted with gold.”10
Aracoeli is written in the form of one long and emotional quest, which also doubles as a memoir, and, except for a few space breaks, no chapters or divisions mark or separate its pages. At the start, Manuel is a forty-three-year-old ineffectual homosexual and recovered drug addict who is filled with self-loathing; he works as a reader in a small, dull publishing house, work that he also loathes. On an impulse, he decides to set out for the village of El Almendral, in Spain, and visit his mother’s birthplace to “look for her”—by which he means not merely to evoke her as a memory but to resurrect her “carnally” from the dead. The date he gives at the start of his journey is All Saints’ Day 1975. (The day and year are mentioned quite specifically and it has been pointed out that this date corresponds exactly to that of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s gruesome murder on the beach in Ostia.) A small portion of the novel is devoted to Manuel’s actual journey; the rest and greater part is written in the form of flashbacks to his childhood and to his mother’s life and death.
His mother, Aracoeli, is a beautiful, illiterate, young Spanish girl who, like Nunziata in Arturo’s Island, epitomizes the primitive, natural woman: “[I]t would be difficult for nature, with all its variety, to produce a more beautiful face. And yet…there are certain irregularities and flaws in that face…. And similarly, of her body…a certain asymmetry, or clumsiness,…the stocky, rural legs, with their overdeveloped calves…, in contrast with the still-frail arms and body; a certain awkwardness in her walk…the short, broad feet, the toes uneven and a bit twisted, the toenails ill-formed.”11 Often, and especially when she is pregnant, Aracoeli is compared to an animal.
Eugenio, Manuel’s father, is a handsome, blond navy ensign who, in spite of the disapproval of his bourgeois northern Italian parents, falls in love with and marries Aracoeli. Right away, they have a son. Manuel’s early years are idyllic. His father is away a great deal, his young mother dotes on him, sings to him, kisses him, kisses that remind the reader of the ones Arturo longed for, and that “snapped like little pennons [sic] or minuscule castanets, and they left a tiny furrow moist with saliva, which she wiped away, caressing me with one finger. It was as prompt as a gesture of healing, that caress of hers, and yet as silly as a joke, and in fact we laughed at it together.”12
Until the age of four, Manuel has his mother to himself. He does not distinguish himself from her or that he is male; he has no memory of his father. He and Aracoeli live in the still rural Monte Sacro section of Rome, their house surrounded by fields. They play games, together they learn to read and write. The mother is chaste and modest—once, when she leaves menstrual blood on the sheet, she tells Manuel she has had a nosebleed. He never sees her naked and she hides all her bodily functions from him.
The idyll is shattered when they move to a more elegant and socially prominent neighborhood and Aracoeli has to learn the ways of the bourgeois world and act like a lady. She also becomes pregnant and gives birth to a longed-for little girl, Encarnación. Manuel’s feelings of displacement and jealousy are exacerbated by the fact that he is growing older and uglier; he now also has to wear glasses. “Undoubtedly [Aracoeli] had to realize then, invincibly, that her son, as he grew up, was becoming ugly; and that to blame only the eyeglasses would have been at least in part an alibi. To tell the truth: on the original mold of my face, which so inspired her love, that obscure and malignant thumb was already at work, to make it irreparably misshapen, to my eternal misfortune.”13
The world, too, no longer appears beautiful to Manuel. “But the worst was awaiting me outside the shop: where the crowded street, rutilant [sic] with neon and headlights, struck me with its never-before-seen spectacle of horror.”14
On each of his father’s brief visits home, Manuel feels alienated from him as well as jealous of his mother’s love for him. “I, on the contrary, was never the son of a father. When I was with him, I always avoided calling him Papà: the very sound of these two syllables gave me a sense of something ridiculous, almost indecorous. The two syllables Ma-ma, on the other hand, sounded very sweet and natural to me, like the very sounds of my own flesh.”15
Encarnación dies soon after she is born, and the heartbroken and grieving Aracoeli is sent away to recover. When she returns she is completely changed. From a lovely, chaste young woman she has inexplicably—the result of an unnamed illness, presumably syphilis—been transformed into a nymphomaniac. She has gained weight and is slovenly as well as sexually promiscuous. Manuel watches as Aracoeli obsessively masturbates and as she indiscriminately seduces men in the street. In one scene, Aracoeli makes love to a workman in the elevator of her building as it travels between floors. Her behavior becomes more and more aberrant and erratic; eventually she runs away from home, to a brothel, and Manuel is sent away to live with his strict, disapproving grandparents. He sees his mother one last time as she is dying in the hospital. An operation on her brain has left her semiconscious and horribly disfigured.
Her head was all wrapped in a thick gauze bandage. But at one point, between two strips of bandage, I thought I could glimpse, beneath, the scalp, naked, with a faint shadow of down, as if shaven. Moreover (or so it seemed to me), the gauze—along one strip between ear and the nape—was bloodstained.
And the face, framed by the bandages, seemed so diminished that it was almost unrecognizable. Thin, shrunken between the prominent cheekbones and the tiny chin, it resembled the triangular snout of a little animal. And like wild animals, when they fall ill, it seemed oblivious to the whole universe except for its illness. Between her teeth, the tip of her tongue protr
uded. The great, prominent eyes had sunk considerably into their sockets.16
This description of Aracoeli becomes more chilling still in the light of Ginevra Bompiani’s account of her visit to Elsa, a few years later, in the hospital: “I saw her exactly like Aracoeli when she came out of the operation.”17 And although it is difficult to believe that Morante could have been so prescient, many of those who knew her may think otherwise.
Thus, by the end of the novel, Aracoeli, the source of life for Manuel, has become the threat of death. On finally reaching El Almendral, Aracoeli’s birthplace, Manuel conjures her up for the very last time. However, she is no longer a woman, but a “kind of minuscule sack of shadow” that soon crumples and dissolves in the wind, and—as if to further emphasize the futility of his quest—laughs and tells him, “But niño chiquito, there’s nothing to be understood.” Manuel realizes that “after all, this encounter was an invention of mine. Mine and alcohol’s. Alcohol is a notorious pander; and Aracoeli is a wh—.”18
Manuel’s quest then is futile. “There is nothing to see” or find. Unlike Arturo in Arturo’s Island, who seeks to free himself from his island home and his family, Manuel seeks the very opposite. He can be said to be a travesty of a hero—and the novel a parody of the mother-son relationship. Instead of wanting freedom or any kind of personal autonomy, Manuel’s one desire is to return to his mother’s womb, a place of safety and happiness for him. Early in the novel, he declares that he was never happier in his whole life than when he was there. Forty-three years later, Manuel still regrets the day and the hour of his birth: “my first separation from her, when alien hands tear me from her vagina to expose me to insult…. I didn’t want to be separated from her. I must have already known that this first, bloodstained separation of ours would be followed by another, and another, until the last, the most bloody of all.”19
