At eleven thirty I must go and pick up Elsa Morante and Moravia; we are driving to the Castelli.118
Meanwhile, I have an hour to myself. I don’t feel like working on my translation of Antigone, which is sitting on my desk, nor on anything else. So, instead, finally, I look after my own affairs.
I am in a period where everything has suddenly fallen into place, as if by some kind of plan; but surprises are always possible, and so are panic attacks. But I must say that all in all, the next two months, December and January, lie ahead of me without urgent deadlines; I can dedicate my time to marginal, pleasurable projects. I’ll go for a drive in the South, and then maybe take a trip abroad, and meanwhile I’ll finish Antigone and clean up the volume of poems La religione del mio tempo,119 which should come out this spring.
I am to begin filming Accattone the first days of February. With these projects ahead of me I can finally enjoy these days without deadlines. Yesterday, for example, I didn’t have a single appointment. And I came home very late, after a wonderful drive down the Via Aurelia, lost in an intensely humid, refreshing, cool night—one of those nights when sensuality dries on the skin, and the youths who are still out and about at night in the towns lost in the darkness, show no sentimentality and are cruel, compact, drained by their own avid youth—and perhaps it is for this reason that this morning I am so rested and lucid. I even have the strength to call the person who, intermittently, looks after my financial affairs. I have been meaning to do this for months, but never have the energy to do it, because I am so resigned to the destiny of being swindled and mistreated.
And as a matter of fact, this call simply confirms this notion.
P. C.120—the famous man who appears in all the newspapers—recently spent, as everyone knows, and rightly so, untold millions of lire on a villa which he will offer as a present to his stupendous physiological monstrum, she of the cartilaginous, kind soul. Well, he too owes me money, and the matter is already in the hands of a lawyer. It is but the distraction of a rich man who forgets what a million means to a writer. The matter has dragged on for two years. P. C. had asked me, through one of his people (he had just left for America) to co-write a screenplay with De Concini, based on Giovanni Piovene’s Letters of a Novice.
I wasted an entire summer on the script. Summer, the only period when I truly live. When I say “live,” I mean a matter of life or death. In this season, I thrust myself into life with an unreasonable fear of losing it. I threw away days and days full of joy and sunlight, purity, as I wasted away like a consumptive in De Concini’s office, which, with its shiny furniture and closeness, became a representation of hell.
It seems mad to insert Professor S., President of the Instituto Nazionale di Dramma Antico, in the same list with N. S. and C. P., but….
Professor S. is a scholar, a professor at the University of Urbino, a humanist. A large man with powerfully wrinkled skin like a rhinoceros, somewhat weakened by the softening of his hard edges due to good manners, and emptied out by his ancient Sicilian indolence, he appears to be a man of absolute integrity. But even he—not out of personal interest, of course—has, shall we say, “buggered” me. We had agreed on a figure for the translation of the Oresteia; the first half would be paid in three parts, upon handing in the three parts of the trilogy. The second part would be paid out after the opening performance in Syracuse.
But, to be blunt, I haven’t seen a bloody dime of this second payment. And what is the excuse? Einaudi published—at the same time as the Instituto Nazionale di Dramma Antico—my translation in a volume edited by Gassman’s Teatro Popolare Italiano. This publication competed with the first, and so the Institute, and specifically Professor S., refuses to pay me. I should mention, of course, that I had only given a vague permission to Einaudi’s publication, through the director Luciano Lucignani, but did not sign any contract with Einaudi, and I did not receive a penny from them, and was not even given the opportunity to check the galleys (in fact, the Einaudi edition contains errors). Only I can know what this Oresteia has cost me in heartache, effort, even despair.
I also wrote a screenplay of Girl in the Window for Luciano Emmer two years ago. A clause in the contract with E. C.121 stated that I would be paid a third right away, and would receive the other two thirds when the film was made. I am completely mad. And of course, I haven’t seen the other two thirds of my fee, and E. C. pretends to know nothing about it.
Let us proceed, in order.
In the past few days, I’ve spoken with a lawyer about obtaining another “second payment.” The person in question is also from Milan, the third in a row, a certain T., from a wealthy, famous family, like a Gadda character. Last winter, he came to me bewitched, I deduce, by two inspired directors whose names I can’t now recall, with a guilty look in his eye, along with the two dreamers, an Istrian and a Sicilian, and asked me to write a screenplay for him about Milanese teddy-boys. I admit, I was truly a fool; this time, I really didn’t see it coming. I intuited a deep honesty in T.; he seemed to me almost like a young girl…the colorless hair, the moist, lost eyes….
To make a long story short, I go to Milan, spend twenty horrible days in a miserable little hotel working like a dog, and continue working for another horrible twenty days in Rome. I manage to pry the first payment out of them, but has anyone seen the second payment? The beautiful thing is that the two brilliant directors leaked photographic material from the film set to a gossip magazine showing some young men, whom I had just met, actual teddy-boys, prior offenders waiting for their sentence. One of them ended up in prison for previous crimes, and from the captions one can deduce that I am the one who set the two on the wrong path. In fact, I had been around the two young men for no more than four hours, to gather material for the screenplay.
Bitter, almost sick, I hang up on poor Onofri. And to think that last night I was so happy that I began to sing as I drove along in my car….
Now I am speeding down the Via Appia with Elsa and Alberto. He lives on the Via dell’Oca, and she lives on the Via del Babuino; I pick them up in my car, and we’re off. We thought—Moravia, as usual, a bit less—that we were unhappy and in bad moods, but in fact we are happy as children.
There is that humid air typical of Milan on rainy days, but which in Rome heats up and becomes a kind of double boiler that is good for the skin, moistening it, rendering it more elastic; the effect is not only felt on the external skin, but also inside, in the internal organs. It makes one hungry and awakens the desire for adventures.
It was raining, but it was the kind of rain that seems like a heavenly event by which water falls from the sky and the water, light as air, renders everything gray, splendidly flecked with silver, or white…there is a pool-like warmth, a taste of growth.
We are going on a pleasure drive down to the Castelli Romani. On the road we talked and talked. Finally, we could discuss freely, without arguing, more clearly and innocently than in all the literary reviews we had been asked to write in the recent months, with the joyfulness of helping each other to understand. And it was as if our respective experiences contained the same magic as the rain. We extracted from each thing everything that it had to offer, coloring it intensely—as the humidity colors things—and at the same time softening it, immersing everything in the relaxing rigor of tonal painting.
We cruise down the Appia, and we are already at Albano, where we will later return. We fly down toward Ariccia, clasped to its vertiginous bridge over the empty crater of a defunct volcano, later a defunct lake, and now a fertile funerary valley, gently opened to the sea. We reach Genzano, our feasting grounds. In Genzano there is a place where Gadda could not accuse me of lacking an “epicurean side”; here, I become a real gourmand and gourmet. Perhaps it is because the food is stylistically rigorous; the linguistically rigorous menu reads almost like poetry. Just as Elsa, Alberto, and I were saying a short while ago about the censoring of “good old swear words,” as Belli calls them. Every text is a linguistic system, a selection, and for this reason certain words fit and others do not. Petrarch uses only a few hundred carefully chosen, “universal” worlds, and so even the word “leg” seems coarse. In Dante and Boccaccio, and also in Belli, any word is allowed and fits perfectly. In fact, it would be a stylistic error to banish any word. So, it is monstrous that it should be the censors who ban words. Beccafico, butterfly pasta with rabbit and thrush, boar sausage and prosciutto, roast venison and beccafico. Are these not perfect stylistic flourishes?
We eat with student-like hunger, and, for the first time since we’ve known each other, we don’t mind when the guitarist plays and sings a couple of songs for us. Even Elsa, who is merciless on this point, gives in, smiling like a cat. He sings “Spingola Francese”122 for her; for me and Alberto, he sings that song from Maledetto Imbroglio:123
“Amore, amore, amore, amore mio…”
Then we return to Albano and take the road to Anzio. The houses along the road are old, of that wet cardboard color typical of papal spots.124 They are stuck to each other with saltpeter and misery, but they are beautiful, with tufts of green peeking out between the walls.
Just beyond, on the left, appears the valley below Ariccia (there below is the bridge with its three rows of arches). It is a strangely flat valley, and it looks as if it had been created by a clock-maker, with thousands of tiny fields, orchards, vineyards, ditches, straight lines of olive trees, golden-brown thickets, sheds in the place of parts. The place we are looking for is at the end of the valley, before Cecchina. We can make it out, under the messy clouds, like a line of white gold: it is the line of the sea.
First, we visit the villa on our own, entering by the aristocratic lane, among metallic-colored vines, softened and polished by the rain. Elsa must see it as she would if she lived there, without the aid of demiurges. The little villa stands silently under the light rain, empty and filled with scornful, melancholy silence, gathering together a sweet space of emptiness between its three sections. The central section is in the style of a log cabin. The one on the right, which has a garage, is in the style of a Canadian cottage, and the one on the left is humbly Southern in style.
Behind them lies the paradisiacal slope. At the bottom, behind a field that disappears in a brownish mist, shimmers the sea, yellow and bright.
On the right, peeking through dark, contorted fig trees, above the parallel gold of the lines of trees, one can catch a glimpse of the peasant house that I might acquire for myself. What a dream! It would be a kind of Chekhovian community in the Alban hills, pagan to their roots. A little house in all that golden countryside, contiguous neighbors…it’s like a children’s game! And peace, finally! Work in the eighteenth-century style, hermit-like, far from the city, in this golden bed of cotton-wool! All the work that can no longer be completed in this hellish, mean world. It is so pleasant to imagine fictitious lives. It is almost as if we ourselves become characters and our setting becomes an absolute setting, as in landscapes by the most moving Classical artists, or the calmest Romantics.
Then we go to meet the owner of the land and the houses, for the official visit.
Gildo Cicognani is from the Roman countryside, a nobleman with newfound wealth (he was in shipping, and now he is the president of a film distribution company, Euro). His age and physiognomy are difficult to define. He speaks with a nasal, grating voice. In him, the Roman accent is like a cold. As is often the case of nobles in agrarian societies, he closely resembles his peasants. He seems as clever as a peasant, but simultaneously vulnerable, and somehow worn down in some part of himself, by the decrepitude of a social condition which acquires energy only through refinement.
His wife is a Volkonsky: Yes, Tolstoy’s family, the very same. She is a large-framed woman with an extremely delicate soul, fragile, which seems like it could crumble at any moment, or fade away completely, beginning with the too-feeble blue of her eyes.
They receive us in their country house, which was once a roadhouse and a tavern, now completely transformed, renovated to a feverish pitch, an excessive peacefulness, shiny floors, furniture all built out of extremely solid walnut or some other expensive wood, decorations light and serious as is fitting for people of a solid economic position and taste that is meant to last through the ages.
Then we pay an orderly visit to the property. First, the little villa that Moravia is thinking of buying, with a wide field in front, green to the absolute limit of greenness, and sprayed with rust, gold, and blood, then the smaller property which I am to buy, with a peasant house, still inhabited by a family from the Le Marche region, humble and warmhearted, and finally, further away, beyond a daunting carpet of wet grass and contorted, temple-like fig trees, Elsa’s parcel. She wants to live on her own, perhaps in a chalet.
It is a little adventure; the rain comes down more and more heavily, and amidst the green and the gold, one can see lovely, fatty, oozing mud. Stepping in that grass is like stepping in the basin of a fountain.
The scene: The smell of wet upholstery, double-breasted suits, freshly graduated students, women past their prime, men puffed up with petit bourgeois dignity, bearing the expressions of journalistic augurs…and, like two little mice gone wild, two young journalists, Adele Cambria and Berenice, looking for impressions. Berenice is merciless, Cambria (who will play “Nannina La Napoletana” in Accatone), is sweet and contemplative.
Everyone is there: Augusto Frassineti, who has become almost his own archetype, with drooping whiskers full of innocent, fearful, civic irony and Felice Chilanti, with equally desperate whiskers. Giacomo De Benedetti, “the great connoisseur of sins,” palpitating and sharp, and Venturoli, looking like an explorer, a giant Renato Rascel, and Arnaldo Frateili, whose head looks like a snail out of its shell, blinking in the dusty light of the Ridotto Theatre.
Behind them stand rows and rows of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. I cannot see them all because they are already a crowd, timid and demanding. The two directors of the newspaper, Melloni and Coen, greet the guests, a look of quotidian exhaustion on their faces. Moravia enters, followed by me. He is fixated with the idea of leaving as quickly as possible, and so he arrives early, shakes hands quickly, and soon takes a seat, which, of course, is uncomfortable. I sit behind him, between Elsa de’ Giorgio and G. B. Angioletti, immersed in the warmth of his large baroque-Lombard body. Then Levi enters, late as usual, hovering over the seats like an angel with a frontal eye, like the figures at Knossos.
Frateili talks about the publication of the literary supplement “Libri-Paese Sera,” mildly and colloquially delineating the sad state of the Italian publishing industry. Then Valentino Bompiani speaks. He speaks “well,” as always. The panorama becomes even more alarming. About 30 million people in Italy are illiterate or semi-illiterate. But it appears that the middle class is starting to read, and for the past few years more and better editions have been published (the struggle has not been in vain).
Other publishers speak, and then, silence. Desperate appeals are made from the podium, which is vertiginously high up on the stage. Professor Russo asks for comments from Moravia…nothing. Levi…nothing. Ungaretti…(applause for the elderly, beloved poet)…nothing. Pasolini…nothing. The situation is somewhat harrowing, and, above all, unexpected. We had all come thinking that it was simply a cocktail party…I can’t bear the embarrassment of the moment, and, it turns out, I do have something to say. I get up and walk to the microphone and quickly put together some comments. Then there is the quick, somewhat glacial, cocktail party and buffet; all the faces rotate around us, glasses in hand, bits of hors-d’oeuvres in their mouths. How I envy Moravia, who floats, untouched, here and there, in the fatuous waves of sugary, timid conversation, the exaggerated smiles of submissive admiration, the ostentatious cold glances…I talk to Pia D’Alessandria, and with Dallamano, who tells me of the terror he felt when I got up to speak. “Here we go,” he confesses having thought to himself, “now he’s going to say everything that’s on his mind…” But Moravia tears me away: “Let’s get out of here,” he says, “I’m in a hurry. I have to go to the optician…” Patiently, I follow him out, forgetting to put down my glass.
First we go to his house to pick up the frames, which he is quite proud of. They are expensive, and they suit him. He is happy that I noticed that they partially obscure his diabolical, primordial eyebrows, softening his features. He is also happy that the optician, exhibiting a son-in-law-like sloth and rich sense of death typical of one of Belli’s characters, recognizes him and exclaims: “I see our eyesight is getting worse!”
Once finished at the optician’s, we go to Via Gaeta, to the Soviet Embassy.
I can’t bear it anymore. Little by little an anxiety, which feels as if it were made of flesh, has attached itself in my rib cage and stomach. Everything looks dark, and I can understand why people punch through glass doors. A day completely devoted to social duties, even if it is within the more “lively” strata of the dead; I am suffering from symptoms of nervous anxiety, and a frightening darkness fills my world.
The Soviet Ambassador, with his vaporous wife, greets us at the end of a long red carpet, and next to him stands the new cultural attaché, in whose honor the embassy is holding this party. He is slightly plump and balding, and looks a little bit like Malenkov. His shyness renders him difficult to read; I hope he represents the new wave in Russian culture, which has recently revealed the desire to awaken from its fatal Stalinist torpor.
With his habitual haste, Moravia throws himself into the throng of diplomats and guests, amassed around a table as long as the hall.
As we look around us, we see only the cosmopolitan, homely faces of diplomatic wives and the soft, generous faces of men for whom irreproachability is a rule of life, and the bodies of women wrapped in clothes that are out of style and slightly gypsy-like.
Here is the face of an extremely amiable Russian, whose difficult last name I cannot remember. He is there with his rosy, sharp, eighteenth-century wife. They walk toward us, and, with extreme courtesy, welcome us. Immediately, we drink three vodkas in a row.
The correspondent of Pravda also approaches us. He is small and lively, a bit of a hooligan, with the look of a sailor on the Potemkin. Angioletti also comes over, with his wife and daughter. We propose a toast, on the initiative of the short Soviet journalist, to the ideological disagreement and personal friendship that ties Angioletti and myself together.
Then the journalist takes me aside and talks to me. I am very interested in what he has to say. Obviously his perspective cannot but interest me. He commends me sincerely, in the Russian style, for the few words I mumbled earlier at the Ridotto. I’m happy with what I said there, but it seemed quite obvious. I said that “Paese Sera” should not have a literary supplement like all the other culture pages, which have by now become the symbol of provincial taste and ideology and petit bourgeois sensibilities. At the same time, it should not to be too objective, in the sense of limiting itself to information that is generous and engaged. It should keep in mind that the lack of culture in Italy has a structural origin, and if on the one hand it is represented by the masses of illiterate and semi-literate people (thus limiting readership, as the Espresso once claimed, to the odd Belgian traveler), on the other hand it also produces indifferent, mystifying authors (when they are not explicitly slaves or accomplices of reactionary forces) who, out of a purely classist presumption, tend to forget their readers, closing themselves in their own, exquisite internal, “artistic” experiences, mistaking their literary products for a need for connivance and allusion….
I accompany Moravia to the Via dell’Oca, and then I head home, exhausted. I have an absolute need to be alone. I dine quickly with my mother, and then I go out.
The night is a little bit like last night, except it is no longer raining. The clouds are like far-off walls, protecting the city, turning it into a kind of giant courtyard.
The humidity warms everything. What a magnificent thing these warm Roman winters are! And what immensity lies within this sense of protection! Our personal life is so limited that its never feels a sense of the infinite complexity of the other lives that surround it. It tends to simplify them, turn them into a backdrop. The humidity, the freshness of the air, tinted with warmth, encourage this laziness in the soul, this generosity which is merely poetic.
I drive around randomly for hours, in places that the authorities and Milanese moralists would prefer to believe do not exist. They do exist, and how! Between Porta San Sebastiano and the Via Cristoforo Colombo there is a growling mass of automobiles, motorcycles, and youths on foot. Every so often, a reddish police car, or the “hearse,” goes by quietly, but no one pays the slightest attention.
Then I drive through Centocelle. I get out of the car and walk. How much poverty there is in Rome. In the summer it is less noticeable, with the sun, the blue jeans….
As I walk, someone calls out to me. I turn around, in a bad mood, and see that four or five young men are walking toward me. I don’t know them. They are shy, almost afraid. For the first time I see Roman youths in a state of complete confusion. They have recognized me—it seems incredible—and want an autograph. They pull out old, faded photographs from their wallets and ask me to sign them. Meanwhile, one of them, with dark Arab features and childish eyes, the bravest of the lot, says: “Now you’re here, explain to my friend what you meant in your poem ‘Pianto della Scavatrice’125….We can’t seem to agree about what it means.”
I look at him, and then at his friend, a little blond kid who is trembling from shyness. They are both simple kids, sons of factory workers or small-time office workers. What can they have studied? They probably went to technical school. Part of me is angry: “What? I came out here to relax, to be left in peace, and now I have to start talking about poetry….”
Perhaps they have perceived my bad mood from the look on my face, and this is why they are so unnaturally shy. But my anger is unjustified, and these kids are right. I gather my energies, which are quite limited at this point, and begin to talk to them, about myself and about them.
I return home very late: there is almost no one out between Porta San Sebastiano and the Via Cristoforo Colombo. Just two prostitutes, the tips of their cigarettes burning, standing near the “hearse,” in the darkness under the massive walls.
The night, within the humid walls of clouds, protects us like a church. A desecrated, sacrilegious church full of sensual delights, vulgar and parched anxieties, and the pagan acts of the underworld, hidden, anonymous corruptions, ill-spent existences, poetic in their incurable misery, of egotistical hopes interrupted by nocturnal temptations, the humility of prostitution, the exhaustion of those who have spent the day working for a thousand lire and who, in the deep night, feel like they are reawakening.
The night, and life, are so precarious that a glimmer of moon behind the humid masses in the sky appears almost to be the dawn, and the dawn appears to be the glimmering of the next night’s moon. I rush home, feeling a mixture of a macabre discomfort and immense joy, almost autonomous from my own momentarily ecstatic experience.
“Amore, amore, amore, amore mio…”
Paese Sera, Rome. December 2–3, 1961.
The typescript (entitled “November 18th 1960”) is quite a bit longer than what appeared in the newspaper, and contains episodes that Pasolini later decided to eliminate. Once the cuts were made, the remaining sutures were visible. For example, on this page, we find “it seems mad to insert prof. S between N. S. and C. P.” N. S. was referred to in a previous passage, which was later cut.
118 The Castelli Romani is the hilly area around Rome.
119 “The Religion of My Time.”
120 Probably Carlo Ponti, a film producer.
121 Probably Emanuele Cassuto, producer of Girl in the Window.
122 An old Neapolitan song. The title means “French pin,” or safety pin.
123 A 1959 Pietro Germi film with Claudia Cardinale.
124 The pope’s summer residence at Castelgandolfo is on the shore of Lake Albano, in the Castelli Romani area.
125 “Cry of the Bulldozer.”