Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante Page 10

  Also, and without actually laying the blame on Elsa, Moravia began to complain of various inexplicable and often very strange ailments. He could not move his arm to the right for a while. Stranger still, one day he wanted to walk to the right but instead his legs took him left. The worst was another terrifying time when he felt as if his legs were being attracted toward the ceiling by some dire magnet. (These were all symptoms of a neurological disorder known as locomotor ataxia, which is associated with syphilitic spinal sclerosis.) On several occasions, he developed the skin infection impetigo—no doubt for psychosomatic reasons. In sum, Moravia was always sick with illnesses that came and went for no evident organic cause. Finally, since Moravia also suffered from all sorts of allergies (including one to cat hairs), he did nothing, he said, but sneeze and weep.28

  Beginning in 1957, Adriana Asti, whose bright eyes and expressive smile have not changed much over the years, saw Elsa Morante every day—she and her first husband lived in the same building as Elsa and Alberto Moravia. At first, Adriana told me, she was more a friend of Alberto and she remembered how he used to say to her about Elsa, “Look at what small hands she has—people who have small hands are very choleric.” This was true, Adriana said, laughing. They were always arguing but it was also part of their charm. Adriana and I were having lunch at the Hotel Excelsior in Naples, the sort of quietly elegant hotel I am sure Elsa Morante would have loved, on a very stormy day. From where I sat, I could look out at the bay and at a tumultuous sea of crashing waves and white caps. At one point, it even began to hail. Adriana went on to say how Elsa could be harsh at times but that she had very good instincts. She was always ahead of her time and was the first to speak to Adriana about eastern religions. Adriana also recalled how she and Elsa were always classifying everything: “the most delicious fruit, the most wonderful painting,” and so on; once, Elsa inscribed a book of poetry to Adriana: “To one of the most beautiful women in the world.” Elsa encouraged Adriana in her acting career and told her how talented she was, but when Adriana asked Elsa to write something for her in the theater, she refused. She hated the petit bourgeois side of the Italian theater, she hated Pirandello. Instead Natalia Ginzburg wrote a play for Adriana Asti called I Married You for Happiness (Ti ho sposato per allegria). While the play was a great success, Elsa criticized it, saying it was dreadful. Only, Adriana said, Elsa did not say this out of jealousy because Elsa was not someone who was ever envious. If she criticized you at all, she criticized you for your soul. Another thing that Adriana remembered was how when Elsa telephoned her, instead of speaking right away into the receiver, she would play music. Mozart. Adriana was living with Bertolucci then and, together, they had dinner with Elsa and Alberto and Pier Paolo Pasolini nearly every night. Adriana also recalled that Elsa had a little car, a yellow Morris Minor, that she loved. Only she drove very badly and, to make matters worse, Elsa did not see well. Again, Adriana began to laugh, an infectious laugh of pure pleasure at the memory of Elsa and at perhaps the power of recollection.29

  seven

  ARTURO’S ISLAND

  Arturo, c’est moi!” Elsa Morante told Jean-Noël Schifano, her French translator, echoing Flaubert’s famous remark about Madame Bovary in an interview in November 1984, a year before her death. Arturo, the young protagonist of her novel Arturo’s Island (L’isola di Arturo), was so much her that she quickly added, “I, who prefer cats, once I began writing this book, began then to love dogs!”1 Elsa Morante’s identification with Arturo also stemmed from a feeling—more like an instinct—that, perhaps in a previous life, she had been a boy. She felt that she had to tell the story of what she recalled of her past as that boy, a boy who still expected much out of life and looked at the world with innocence before he suffered the hardships of maturity and before she, Elsa Morante, suffered the aridity of old age.2 In the same interview (a revealing one, since Elsa Morante was already gravely ill and rarely granted interviews), she also talked about her love of children, of babies, and her love of mothers: simple mothers, real mothers (mothers like Nunziatella, Arturo’s stepmother in Arturo’s Island), not feminists or intellectuals or society women. She even spoke of how she too had wanted to be a mother—only illness and the war had prevented her.3

  Elsa Morante began Arturo’s Island in the spring of 1952. At first she thought to publish two novellas and call them Due amori impossibili (Two Impossible Loves). She described one as the story of a young man in prison in Africa who recalls his home on the beautiful island of Procida and the impossible love he had there; the other, a fable titled Nerida, was to be about the daughter of a miner who passionately loves to dance and dies trying to realize her dream. Early that summer, ostensibly in order to write, she went to Sils Maria in the Engadine. Sils Maria is where Nietzsche spent his summers and, thanks to the cautious ministrations of the tourist office, the Swiss village has not changed much since his day, nor have the surrounding mountains and lakes for which Sils is famous. Famous, too, is the wind around these lakes, which comes up suddenly and unpredictably and is strong and dangerous. It may have acted as a reminder for Nietzsche of man’s place in the universe in relation to the force of nature.4

  Whether this was true or not for Elsa Morante is unclear. In a new diary that she began on August 6—she had just destroyed an old one, which she felt was too passionate and subjective—she sounded disgruntled and unhappy. She wrote that since she disliked planning far ahead, all the places she tried to go to for the summer were booked up and she had no choice but to return to the mountains. She also complained that since she was staying at the same hotel and in the same room where she had stayed the summer before, she was beginning to feel like the ghost of herself. The table she wrote on was too low, the chair she sat in too high and she no longer much liked the shape of the trees outside. She blamed the weather: it rained a great deal and she could not go out and sunbathe. The electricity was out that day—due probably to the dangerous winds—and as she sat writing in the dark, she did some soul-searching. Was her desire to lie in the sun and show off her body a sign of narcissism? She had always, she wrote, cared tremendously about her body, its youth and perfection. At first she thought the reason for this was that she was waiting for love but now she realized that no one could truly love her. Her body’s decline and aging (she would turn forty in twelve days) and the loss of her beauty made her sadder, she wrote, than even the thought of her own death. Then trying to cheer herself up, she asked: Was Elsa Morante ever really beautiful anyway? No, never. Her teeth were set too far apart; her forehead was too high; her nails were not perfectly shaped. In addition, she wanted to be a great poet. And what for? To be loved. But no one had ever loved her. And even if she was not a great poet, was she a poet at all? She doubted it. The electricity came back on then, but it continued to rain. Enough for today, she wrote.5

  Elsa Morante spent the rest of the summer on the island of Procida—which was smaller than she remembered but no less beautiful and where, from afar, the fishermen called out to her playfully, Maria? Antonia? Concertina? and laughed at her reserve—and then in Capri, where her room was like an aviary, suspended over the sea. Despite scornfully referring to Canzone del Mare, the popular swimming club owned by the comedienne Gracie Fields, as an “odious” and “bourgeois” establishment, she nevertheless joined the other women who, as she put it, “flaunted themselves” and sunbathed with them. She loved the sea but was afraid of it and if only she could swim, she noted in her diary, her fear might disappear. She appreciated the happiness and goodness of A. (Alberto Moravia), the delicious simple seaside meals of fish soup and baby octopus and that a friend said to her, “Oh, but how beautiful you are!”6

  And she was beautiful, as photographs of that time show. In one taken presumably in Capri, she is standing in the street, wearing a long striped summer skirt, sandals and a little cotton top knotted under her bosom that shows off her flat midriff. Under one arm she holds a large straw hat. She is frowning ever so slightly—perhaps at the photogr
apher or at having her picture taken—but one can see her finely molded features: her straight nose, small chin, straight, thick eyebrows and full, curly hair. She also appeared to have had several romances or flirtations that summer—with M., for instance, who was “young and handsome” and who took a boyish pride in protecting her while she, in turn, helped get his poetry published. She also mentioned L. (no doubt Luchino Visconti), whom she referred to as her last and impossible love to whom she had to say good-bye—and say good-bye to her youth as well.

  Back in Rome, after what, she described, had turned out to be an “idle summer,” she again wrote in her diary about how she felt torn by conflicting sentiments. On the one hand, she felt that she must love everyone and how words like “condemn,” “scorn” and “forgive” seemed more and more presumptuous; on the other hand, she was aware that apathy had become part of her nature, as had an increasing intolerance for other people. This was not a moral judgment and not the fault of others but hers alone. She found it increasingly difficult to communicate; in certain cases it had even become physically impossible. Most people hurt her feelings and it was she who was vulnerable. It was her fault, too, that she had never been loved, that she had no friends and that she was not happy. All this she wrote from her studio on via Archimede, with only her kitten Useppe Mandulino for company. Useppe Mandulino was the last offspring of her beloved Giuseppe, a cat who she claimed was the other half of her soul as, not long before, she had come to understand this one absolute truth: “animals are angels and Siamese cats are archangels.” It was also time, Elsa Morante wrote in her diary, for her to start work again on Arturo’s Island; and who knew, she asked herself, if she could recover that youthful passion she had had for writing it when she had left off.7

  A few months later, Elsa described a wonderful dream:

  I was in a sort of vast, green hollow, between the sea and high hills; on the summit there was a small fort like the one on the island of Procida. I was in the company of someone dear but I could not say precisely who it was. It was the day of my birthday and I was feeling sad because no one present remembered it and no one was wishing me well. At that very moment, mysteriously, from high up, two pink roses fell into my lap….

  I have noted that in the last fifteen years or so, every time I dream about pink roses, a confused and gloomy period of my life will come to an end and a new one will begin.8

  Morante always wrote in longhand in large, black, unlined notebooks that she bought at Zampini, a stationer on via Frattina not far from her apartment. She wrote on every other page, leaving the intervening pages blank for notes and corrections. The notes she wrote to herself remain as guidelines to how she worked and many of her edits show that she was striving to achieve more simplicity in the text: “Important! Get rid of these expressed sentiments and thoughts, let the facts speak for themselves.” Several of the pages have large passages crosshatched and crossed out. She used different colored pens and she often doodled or drew pictures of cats and stars on the side of the page.

  Her handwriting is functional and spontaneous—a sign, according to a graphologist who analyzed it, that the writer presents herself to the world without pretension or embellishments. At first glance, it was difficult for the graphologist to tell whether the handwriting was that of a man or a woman. However, it was clearly the handwriting of someone whose intellect transcended gender and background. It was also the handwriting of someone with a sharp and sensitive mind and of concentrated purpose who was not easily distracted from her task. The writer was able to form her own opinions, independent of public trends and conventions. While she was an extroverted thinker, she was a private person in other ways as well, and it was through her imagination that she could best express her true self. The graphologist also noted that Elsa Morante was too independent to be accommodating and that she must have been a difficult person to understand. Her high standards, her personal sensitivity, combined with an often intolerant attitude to others, could have created friction and irritation. In addition, her response was not always predictable. Her imagination and her wit, nonetheless, made her a stimulating person to be with. Finally, it was Elsa Morante’s signature, the graphologist said, that most revealed her feminine sensibility as well as her emotional insecurity.9

  Procida is a volcanic island in the warm, blue waters of the Bay of Naples. Its beauty has been much extolled and admired and Elsa Morante’s protagonist, Arturo Gerace, describes it thus: “On my particular island, up on the hills outside the town, there are small lonely roads shut in between old walls, and beyond them orchards and vineyards that look like imperial gardens. There are beaches of fine white sand, and smaller beaches covered with pebbles and shells, hidden between great cliffs that overhang the water. Seagulls nest in the rocks there, and wild tortoises, and in the early morning you can hear the birds’ cries, sometimes gloomy, sometimes gay. On calm days the sea there is gentle and cool and touches the shore like dew.”10 Much smaller—the island is one and a half miles square—than either Ischia or Capri, Procida was never a popular tourist resort. The main reason for this was that until 1988 it was home to a national prison. The prison was situated on the highest and most scenic promontory of the island, which was also the site of the original sixteenth-century walled town known as the Terra Murata.

  Not so long ago, on a warm, sunny day in April, I took the boat from Naples and spent a day on Procida. In the harbor, I hired a taxi and, after I explained the reason for my visit, the driver was most solicitous and helpful. First we went up to Terra Murata and walked around the old town, where a jumble of pink, blue and white houses had been built in such a way as to form a defensive block against the invasion of the Saracens in the Middle Ages. Then we visited the eleventh-century Abbey of the Archangel Michael, the patron saint of Procida. There, according to the story I was told, one of the paintings of Saint Michael was restored by a prison inmate who, in his zeal, substituted his own face for the one in the portrait. From the church terrace, there is a splendid view of the rest of the island as well as of the Bay of Naples.

  Close by, one can also see the grim four-story façade of the abandoned prison, dotted with small, barred windows that offered the prisoners a spectacular view of the sea and of tantalizing but unattainable freedom. Apparently the prisoners were housed according to the gravity of their crime: the worst criminals, the murderers and assassins, were put on the lowest floor where the cells were the dampest and narrowest. From the Terra Murata, we drove down to a black, volcanic sand beach (the setting for a scene in Il Postino in which the movie’s Pablo Neruda explains what a metaphor is), then down narrow, winding roads past pretty villas. A particularly pretty one, where Elsa was said to have stayed, is named in her honor. The trees in the garden were loaded down with lemons—twenty or thirty to a branch—and my driver picked a few. Before catching the boat back to Naples, I had lunch in a small trattoria on the harbor. Off season, although it was warm enough to eat outside, the trattoria was nearly empty—at the only other occupied table, a few locals were drinking coffee. Along with my meal of spaghetti con vongole, a veal cutlet, salad and cheese, I ordered a half liter of the local white wine known as Falanghina. For once, I did not mind eating in a restaurant alone. The island felt peaceful and quiet and it was easy to imagine Arturo there and how Procida must have seemed like his own private paradise.

  “First of all, I was proud of my name” is how Arturo’s Island begins. (The name Arturo is an homage to Elsa Morante’s favorite poet, Arthur Rimbaud—Jean-Noël Schifano recalled seeing a portrait of Rimbaud on the wall of Elsa Morante’s studio and how, with her usual offbeat sense of fun, she had written on it, “To Elsa, Arthur.”11) “I’d found out early on…that Arturo is the name of a star—the fastest and brightest in the figure of the herdsman, in the northern sky. And ages ago there was some king called Arturo as well, who had a group of loyal followers; and, as they were all heroes like himself, he treated them as brothers and equals. The pity of it was, as I later dis
covered, this famous old king of Britain wasn’t proper history, at all, but just a legend,”12 which leads the reader to wonder about Arturo’s own destiny. Will it be predicted by the stars or will it follow the course of a heroic tale?13

  Ostensibly, Arturo’s Island is the first-person story of a motherless young boy, who grows up feral and free on the island of Procida:

  Although we were fairly well off, we lived like savages. When I was two months old my father left the island and was away for nearly six months; and he left me in the care of our first boy servant who…brought me up on goat’s milk. It was he who taught me to talk, and to read and write, and afterward I taught myself, out of books I found in the house. My father never bothered to send me to school; I was always on holiday, and my vagabond days, especially when he was away, had no rules or fixed hours at all. When I was hungry or sleepy I knew it was time to go home. No one ever thought of giving me money, and I never asked for it; anyway I didn’t need it. I don’t remember ever possessing a penny during my whole childhood.14

  Arturo’s only companion, who also doubles as a kind of nurse-maid, is his beloved dog, Immacolatella, whom he describes thus:

  What a lot of fuss about a dog, you’ll say. But when I was a boy I’d no other friend, and you can’t deny she was extraordinary. We’d invented a kind of deaf-and-dumb language between us: tail, eyes, movements, the pitch of her voice—all of them told me every thought of hers, and I understood. Although she was female, she loved daring and adventure. She’d go swimming with me, and act as my pilot in the boat, barking when some obstacle loomed up. As I wandered about the island, she’d always follow me; and every day, as we came back through the alleys we’d used and the fields we’d crossed a hundred times, she’d get as excited as if we were two explorers in uncharted country.15