Everything conspired. On my return to Italy, having landed in Milan and gone directly to the university to teach, I opened an e-mail inviting me to write a preface to a new English edition of Vitaliano Brancati’s novel Il bell’Antonio. I should have turned this work down. Between writing and going back and forth from Verona to Milan, not only to teach but to run the whole degree course, I was doing too much. I wondered at what point, with this intensifying condition, something would finally give: I would miss an important deadline, start forgetting appointments, take to my bed like Hardy, writhe on the floor like Benito. Instead, I accepted at once. I love these commissions. They allow me to extend my knowledge of matters Italian while making some extra money. I was aware that Il bell’Antonio was considered a masterpiece. I knew the film had starred Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, but I had no idea what it was about.
Impotence.
Who would have thought there was an Italian novel about impotence?
With a mixture of amusement and dismay, I read the book over the following week on the train back and forth to Milan. Sicilian Antonio is gorgeous. Sent by his parents to make his fortune in Mussolini’s Rome, he finds men and women flocking to him; the women to drool, the men to be near the drooling women. Everybody assumes Antonio is enjoying a hectic sex life and that this explains his failure to make a career for himself in the Fascist bureaucracy. Eventually, his parents recall him to Catania; they have found a girl for him to marry. Antonio isn’t happy, he had wanted to choose his own bride. But Barbara is ravishing and he falls in love. To the chagrin of other hopefuls, the couple marry and go off to live together in the country.
Brought up by nuns, Barbara is as innocent as she is irresistible. It is a year before she realizes why the babies aren’t arriving. At last the scandal hits town: Antonio can’t get it up. The bride’s parents are outraged and demand an annulment. Antonio’s father is so ashamed he makes well-advertised visits to prostitutes to ‘save the family’s honor.’ The book is a brilliant comedy and, for any man, a disquieting reminder of just how much hangs on your sexual potency. Once the truth is out, Antonio can forget a political career. ‘He never had the stuff of a real Fascist,’ comments a local official. ‘My son is dead,’ his father declares.
But why does Antonio have this problem? It’s not that he has never had sex. There’s nothing physically wrong with him. Is it because the women who chase him are so predatory and demanding, his parents and in-laws so pushy, or because Sicilian culture is drenched in a crass male pride? ‘My son’s got a planting stick that could punch holes in rocks!’ Antonio’s father raves in the presence of his embarrassed wife; ‘I support the regime because it’s led by a man with a real cock,’ says one of his friends. Is it, then, that Antonio’s beautiful body (and beautiful mind) refuses to participate in this ugliness? Or is the Church with its insistence on purity and virginity partly to blame? When the still adolescent Antonio turns all the ladies’ heads at Mass, the priest invites his worried mother to pray that God may ‘call the boy back to Himself as soon as possible.’ He’ll cause havoc.
Brancati doesn’t spoil the novel with easy answers. When Antonio emerges from shamed withdrawal to explain himself to his dying uncle, it is not a criticism of this or that aspect of society he offers, but a long, complex, highly personal story, full of odd incidents and relationships. He describes a moment when he had begun to make love to a beautiful German woman who had at last decided to betray her fiancé with him.
We said nothing more, turned out the light and embraced. A little later, she almost fainted from happiness, opening slowly like a rose in the sunshine. Nearly out of my mind with an even greater joy than hers, I just was telling myself to tone down the cry about to explode from my throat, when . . . when a sudden dread chill crept into my flesh, starting right where I’d least have wanted it . . .
This really wasn’t a good moment for me to be reading Il bell’Antonio; the descriptions of lost libido discouraged me even from trying to make love. I couldn’t stop thinking about Antonio. What was Brancati saying? Perhaps that when a sufferer’s complaint is one with his psychology, you can never say that the cause is just this or just that, as you might with a virus or an infection: you can’t say, oh, it’s the overwork, or the long-term cross-cultural tension, or some trauma from his childhood, or this or that difficult relationship. No, a condition like this is a unique amalgam with a history all its own; it’s an enigma to pore over, and so, in a way, not unlike a work of art. Something to contemplate, over time. A puzzle without a solution. The waterseller of Seville.
The idea of an illness being a work of art was immediately fascinating to me. Wasn’t Kafka’s Metamorphosis a case of sickness and aesthetic superimposed? The same was true of a hundred tales of Gothic decline. Don’t many novels feed on a hero with a mystery malady that in a certain sense is the book? I had perhaps created my chronic condition over the years, the way I had written my novels, or become part of a family, or changed my home and language and culture.
This made a kind of sense and everything seemed more interesting.
Then I was furious. What was the point, what on earth was the point, of congratulating oneself on such a sick combination of navel gazing and literary reflection? There was, I realize now, at this worst moment of the story, a strong temptation to give up. Accept it. Aestheticize it. This is you. Your life will always be like this. The interrupted nights. The constant abdominal pains. Stop looking for a cure and get on with it. Then if it helps to pretend it’s something fascinating, go ahead.
Behind this there was also a curious fusion—confusion—of complacency and guilt: you deserve it.
Why?
I would reach a state of resignation, queerly gilded with self-importance, then suddenly jump to my feet, kick the wall and shout No! No no no! An illness is not a puzzle to contemplate in eternity. I want to get better. I WANT TO MOVE ON! I want a sex life, for Christ’s sake. You have none of Antonio’s excuses for impotence, I told myself on putting the novel down: you have neither the stunning looks nor the women constantly throwing themselves at your feet, neither the crass Sicilian father boasting about his sexual prowess nor a mother and wife in adoration of the Virgin. Why should this chill have entered my flesh?
Antonio’s friends love to give him advice. Remember, they tell him, the days when you did make love and try to picture how it was. To give yourself confidence. The healing powers of positive visualization. Returning in my frustration to the Net, I found people online offering very similar solutions for pelvic pain:
Hi Everyone,
Here’s a common male problem that’s relieved easily with EFT! No drugs or surgery involved.
EFT? Electronic funds transfer? Surely not.
‘Emotionally focused therapy,’ Wikipedia told me, ‘proposes that emotions themselves have an innately adaptive potential that, if activated, can help clients change problematic emotional states or unwanted self-experiences.’
‘Clients’ sounded ominous. All the same, I thought there might be something in this. The Internet posting went on to offer an anecdote.
My husband and I recently visited some old friends of his and stayed over. ‘David’ (who is 59) went to bed early because he was having pain from his prostate problem.
Concerned, the narrator ‘works’ with David to construct a series of encouraging formulas he can repeat to himself when things are bad. Standing balefully over the loo, for example, he must say:
Even though my pee might come out slowly, I deeply and completely love and accept myself and my penis. I forgive myself and my penis for anything that I may have done.
There was something very funny about this. I have never thought of my penis as a separate entity to be loved or forgiven. But was I in a position to be ironic? I read on.
Reminder phrases (I had David alternate these phrases while imagining positive images):
Even though it may come out in a dribble
And then again it may come out like a race horse
And sometimes just a dribble
I relax and let it flow like Niagara Falls
And sometimes it’s slow and I relax
And let it flow like a fire hydrant
I just let it flow and go easy on myself
If I feel angry because it isn’t flowing, I just let the anger flow
easily out of my penis
After a week or so, David gets huge benefits from this rigmarole. His pain declines, his urinary flow improves, he feels altogether better about himself, reactions compatible with the short-term improvements frequently described when administering placebos to prostate pain sufferers. Absolutely against the grain, I decided to take the approach seriously. Or at least to try to. It’s an easier route than faith healing, I thought. David is encouraged to open up the bathroom faucets full blast, the better to visualize a rambunctious pee. Despite all my skepticism, not to mention the fiasco during the urogram, I opened up the faucet. Rather than Niagara (which for me evokes images of kayaking catastrophe), I remembered the happy splash of my son peeing that morning before we set off on vacation together. And I invented a few determinedly optimistic formulas to repeat . . .
I shall spare you the formulas. All I can say is that doing all this stuff at two in the morning and at three and again at four and certainly at five is no joke. You have to feel gung ho. To keep at it you’d need to get quick results. Unfortunately, the only effect it had on me was to wake me up to the point that I couldn’t easily get back to sleep. Lying in bed, I wondered whether David hadn’t exaggerated the positive effects of EFT because he liked having his friend’s wife hanging out in the bathroom with him, the sound of those faucets covering any hanky-panky they might have got up to. Impotence was not among David’s listed symptoms.
On the last pages of Il bell’Antonio, after Catania has been bombed and Fascism overthrown, Antonio gets his libido back. Sort of. Outraged by the news that Barbara has married an aging but wealthy rake, he imagines giving her a good thrashing. And finally something stirs. But I had no such violent feelings to turn me on. Nor wanted them. Who did I have to be angry with? Why does one have to be angry to have sex? The truth is that after all this time, all these doctors, all this research, I hadn’t the slightest idea what was happening to me.