The year of Elsa Morante’s birth is well known. But, as a favor, in an autobiographical piece she wrote in 1960, she has asked that her biographer not mention the date—not because she is vain but because, for her, one year is as good as the next and she would prefer to remain ageless.1 It is the same year that the Titanic set out on its doomed maiden voyage with 2,224 passengers and crew members on board; the same year that Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy renewed the Triple Alliance; the year of the outbreak of the Balkan War, which set the stage for World War I; the year the Olympic games were held in Stockholm and the twenty-four-year-old Native American Jim Thorpe won both the pentathlon and decathlon (he was later stripped of his medals when it was learned that he had played semiprofessional baseball); in the United States, the year that New Mexico and Arizona became states; the year that the German geologist and meteorologist Alfred Lothar Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift, arguing that the earth’s continents had once been a single large landmass and were still in the process of change; and, finally, in Rome, the year that the first activities of the Italian Boy Scouts, founded by Carlo Colombo and known as Giovani Esploratori Italiani, took place.
In a poem Elsa Morante wrote many years later, she claimed to have been born of a “difficult love” at that “bitter hour at midday / under the sign of Leo / on a Christian feast day.”2 She also claimed in “Our Brother Antonio,” a newspaper piece she published in 1939, that from the very day of their birth, she and her brothers all showed themselves to be extraordinary paragons of virtue. She for example was born with a crown of gold hair so thick and so long that, immediately, the attending nurse who delivered her had to braid and tie it with a blue ribbon.3 (Photos, however, always show Elsa with short, dark hair—so what, one wonders, could she have been thinking of? And what, one also wonders, is true?) At the time of Elsa’s birth, the Morante family lived at via Anicia 7 but, soon after, they moved to a small, squalid apartment on via Amerigo Vespucci 42, located in the Testaccio, which was then a working-class district of Rome. Later, Elsa Morante said she grew up in the company of both poor and rich children (the latter no doubt the children of the friends of Elsa’s rich godmother, Donna Gonzaga) and thus she learned not to judge anyone by social class but by his or her kindness instead. In fact, the cruelest child she ever met, who made her drink gasoline, was the son of a butler while the nicest was a young patient at Gabelli (a famous Roman hospital which treated only venereal diseases), which, in retrospect, made her wonder what sort of pervert he may have been. Elsa learned the alphabet and learned to write at the same time. She claimed to have composed her first poem when she was two and a half years old:
Un povero galletto
che stava alla finestra
gli casca giù la testa
e va e va e va.
Un gallo piccolino
che stava alla finestra
gli casca giù la testa
e non vede più e più
A little rooster
who was at the window
fell down on his head
and went and went and went.
A small little rooster
who was at the window
fell down on his head
and he nothing nothing sees.
Not only was Elsa Morante a self-taught prodigy, she invented herself. At an early age, too, Elsa Morante imagined herself as other, as a boy. A boy, she thought, could be heroic; a girl could not.
Elsa Morante was the oldest of four surviving children. An older brother, Mario, whom Elsa always inexplicably referred to as Antonio and to whom, later, she addressed her diary, died shortly after he was born. According to Elsa, this Mario/Antonio opened his eyes and saw the light and was so disgusted that he quickly closed them again. According to Elsa’s mother, who spoke of him often, comparing him to a famous king, had Mario/ Antonio lived, he would most certainly have become a prophet or a genius and brought honor to the family.4 Elsa described her brother Aldo, who was two years younger, as lively and rebellious; she also said that Aldo had a large black birthmark on his forehead (but there is no sign of the birthmark on any of the photographs of him nor does Aldo’s son, Paolo Morante, recall seeing a birthmark on his father’s forehead5). Marcello, the younger brother, was timid and shy and, early on, according still to Elsa, was prone to amorous attachments; five or six minutes after he was born he developed one for the nurse who delivered him, grasping her finger and not letting go. Finally, there was Maria, the youngest child—younger than Elsa by ten years.
Elsa’s mother, Irma Poggibonsi,* came from the town of Modena in northern Italy; she was a schoolteacher and had literary aspirations. She was also Jewish and since she was terrified of being discovered to be Jewish, she made sure her children got a Catholic education. (When World War II broke out, she changed her name to Bisi and went into hiding in Padua, taking the youngest, Maria, with her. Marcello was sent to Tuscany: Aldo was interned in a concentration camp; Elsa, by then, was living on her own in Rome.) Little is known of Irma’s family. Her father was a hunchback whom everyone in the family was deeply ashamed of; Irma’s mother had repeated breakdowns that manifested themselves in various ways: locking herself up in the bedroom and running back and forth, battering her head against the walls until either her head cracked open or she was knocked unconscious.
Irma’s husband, Augusto Morante, was a Sicilian and the children’s legal father. He worked as a probation officer at Aristide Gabelli, a boys’ reform school located at Porta Portese, in Trastevere. Augusto Morante was deeply in love with Irma Poggibonsi and while he was courting her, he wrote her a little love song:
Irmina mia bella Irmina
Irmina mia bella Irmina
innamorato io son di te
Unfortunately, in bed, he proved to be impotent. On their wedding night and on many of the subsequent nights, poor Augusto tried all sorts of positions, all kinds of arrangements, turning Irma this way and that. All to no avail. Irma made him pay dearly for this. (Asked later why she did not leave him, Irma answered that if she had, Augusto would have killed himself.) Not only did Irma treat Augusto with contempt, she humiliated him: making him sleep alone in a small room in the basement of the house and making him eat his meals separately from the rest of the family (Augusto ate lunch at eleven and dinner at five, the rest of the family ate lunch at one and dinner at eight). He was excluded from all family functions and social gatherings and holidays; his attempts to become part of the family were mocked and considered inappropriate. As a result, he grew more and more silent and solitary, his appearance grew shabbier and shabbier, and his body gave off a bad odor. Augusto’s only pleasure (except the one Irma always accused him of and the reason, she also claimed, he was so hunched over) was cultivating the little land around the house and growing vegetables and flowers.
The origins of Elsa Morante’s real father can only be guessed at.
But growing up, the Morante children had two uncles, both of whom were called Ciccio, the nickname for Francesco. The two uncle Ciccios were easy to tell apart. One Ciccio was tall, handsome and elegant, with bright blue eyes, and spoke in a musical baritone; the other Ciccio was ugly and had a large nose that dripped. The ugly Ciccio was a police officer and Augusto’s brother, and he was known as the “true” uncle. The handsome Ciccio was not a relative but a family friend; he was known as the “false” uncle.
Of course, the “false” uncle turned out to be the children’s real father.
The family secret—and the one she never admitted to—was that Irma fell in love with the handsome, “false” uncle. Difficult to resist him—his good looks, his sense of humor. And when he came to visit, usually once a month—sometimes, he even spent the night on the living room sofa—Ciccio brought the family expensive biscuits and sang them songs, genuine songs, not silly made-up ones, in his lovely baritone voice. Years later, after her husband, Augusto, had died, Irma tried to force Ciccio to come back to her but she only succeeded in blackmailing him into giving Aldo and Marcello money. The two boys remembered meeting Ciccio for coffee on Piazza della Rotonda. Eventually, Irma was told that Ciccio had committed suicide (this may or may not have been a ruse on his part to stop her from pursuing him).
The “false” uncle was Sicilian and his real name was Francesco Lo Monaco. Long before Irma confessed to the children, Elsa had guessed that he was her father. In any event, years before she learned the truth, Elsa, half joking, half serious, told everyone that she knew who her real father was—he was the Duke of Aosta.7*
Save for her large, dark, luminous eyes, Irma was not especially good-looking. She had short legs and a protruding stomach; worse, as she grew older, her face was covered with facial hair. More than anything, however, Irma had wanted a secure, settled life, a nice family and children. When this proved to be impossible with her husband, she agreed to take on a surrogate partner, even though she claimed that the sexual act filled her with nausea. In fact, Irma forbade any reference to sex or to bodily functions in the family. She herself would go to the toilet only in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, so that no one would hear her pee.
However, as a teacher, Irma had the reputation of being both dedicated and compassionate. She made a point of helping failing students and, when necessary, gave private lessons after school at no cost. At home, she did almost everything herself: cooking, cleaning, ironing. (For short periods of time, she hired servant girls but soon found fault with them and fired them.) As a result, Marcello, the youngest son, complained that the house was always dusty, dirty even, the clothes and linen never properly ironed. Irma’s best efforts were reserved for her cooking.8 When she was in a good mood, she liked to make up songs: one of them was about her children (Maria was not yet born); it began:
Della mia Elsuccia
roseo è il colore
Marcello è un angelo
Aldo è un amore.
Yet according to “the angel,” Marcello, who wrote a family memoir, Maledetta benedetta (Accursed and Blessed), which was published in 1986,* Irma was a shouter. She had violent, loud arguments with the children, with Aldo in particular. She made Aldo clean the rooms and do the heavy housework and not only did Aldo resent this but, suspecting that his mother thought him less intelligent than Elsa and Marcello, he was jealous. According to Marcello, the walls of the Monteverde house never ceased to reverberate with screams, insults and threats. Often, Irma and Aldo did not speak to each other for days, which resulted in Irma having to say something like “Elsa, can you tell Aldo that he must…” Or they left angry notes for each other on the kitchen table.† By most accounts, Irma’s strategy was to make the children feel guilty by telling them all she was sacrificing for their sake; then, when they still appeared ungrateful, she would grow belligerent, even hysterical. The older she got, the worse her rages became. Often she was the one who threatened suicide. After a particularly violent outburst, Marcello recalled how he chased upstairs after his mother to her room, where he found her with a mouth full of pills.10
Aldo and Marcello had their fights too. One time, according to Marcello, Aldo kept his head painfully pressed to a step on the stairs for an entire afternoon. Elsa tried to protect Marcello, who was four years younger and timid. She included him in a club she had founded for her classmates, Club della Primavera, and took him on early morning walks while he admired and daydreamed about her. Later, Marcello admitted to being in love with Elsa as a child and fantasizing about her. For a long time, he hoped that Elsa reciprocated his feelings and it was not until one day when, sitting next to her on a bus, his body pressed up against hers, he finally understood that Elsa’s affection for him was only sisterly.11
Elsa remained more or less immune to family quarrels and jealousies. For one thing, she had her own room. No one was supposed to enter her room, which was always very untidy. Elsa never bothered to make her bed, she left her clothes scattered on the floor. Irma protected her. She was proud of her daughter’s precocity and was always pushing her forward and had gone as far as to seek the patronage of a wealthy aristocrat named Donna Maria Guerrieri Gonzaga.* Elsa went to live with Donna Gonzaga for months at a time in her villa in the elegant Roman district of Nomentano; in addition to a beautiful villa, Donna Gonzaga had an expensive car, a chauffeur, several servants and a pedigreed dog.12 It seems she had taken a fancy to the child, whom Irma was determined to raise above her social station and determined to turn into someone special.
But talk of any kind of happy childhood for the three older Morante children seems almost incidental—for Marcello, especially, who remembered his childhood as a time filled with gloom and unhappiness, which marred the rest of his life.13
In 1922 the family moved to Monteverde, to via Camillo de Lellis 10. Situated in the middle of a block in what now looks to be a relatively poor neighborhood that is dominated by a large municipal hospital complex, the Morante family house is a three-story, orange stucco building surrounded by a high wall. The house looks shabby and neglected and it has been divided up into four apartments. Peering through the gate, one can see a small garden shaded by a very tall palm tree, the sole distinctive and decorative sight on the street. But when the Morante family lived there, according to Elsa’s sister, Maria, the house had a large garden and was surrounded by fields. Maria Morante also recalled how Elsa would often take her on walks through those fields and, to keep her from flagging or complaining—Maria was only four or five years old at the time—Elsa would tell her stories. Maria remembered one story in particular, since she was its inspiration. The story was about how babies, before they are born, have no hearts and live on stars—except for one particular baby who got a heart from a nightingale, just before the bird died. It began: “This story was told to me by Mariolina” (Mariolina was Elsa’s nickname for her sister). In addition, Maria Morante remembers how, when the story was published, Elsa, who had already left home and was living alone in a small room, supporting herself, spent the 1000 lire—a substantial amount at the time—she was paid for the story on a huge Christmas tree, which was so tall the top had to be chopped off so that it could fit inside the Monteverde house, and on presents for everyone in the family, as well as for all of Maria’s friends.14
During our visit, Maria Morante showed me a photo that dates from around that period. Maria Morante, aged four or five, sits on Elsa’s lap; their two brothers stand on either side of them, and over a dozen children, probably the rest of Maria’s school class, are seated all around them. One cannot make out Elsa Morante’s face, as Elsa has scratched it out—no doubt it was not a flattering photograph.
Now in her mideighties, Maria Morante lives alone in a modest apartment in the Monte Sacro district of Rome. When she opened the door, I was immediately struck by her physical resemblance to Elsa—the broad shape of her face and wide mouth. Although seemingly still robust, quite garrulous and disposed to be hospitable, she was not very forthcoming about her sister. Her remarks were cautious and protective. She did, however, praise Elsa’s enormous capacity for generosity and spoke of how Elsa was able to observe and describe children and how, although childless herself, she understood their most intimate thoughts. Maria said her own son, Luca, three years old at the time, was the model for Giuseppe in Elsa’s novel History, recalling the way he spoke baby talk and the peculiar way he waved his arms to say hello.
Irma, Maria maintained, was a serious, dedicated mother and teacher. She was a good friend of Maria Montessori and taught her methods in school (to this day, apparently, Irma’s pupils still telephone Maria to tell her how fondly they remember her mother as a teacher). The fact that Irma had a full-time job, four children and little household help meant that she was not able to pursue her own career of choice, which was that of a journalist. But more important, she loved her children and if she could be faulted at all it would be that she loved Elsa and Aldo more than she loved Marcello and Maria—the two younger children were relegated to a second tier. And only at the end of our interview together did Maria Morante allow how as a family things changed for them as they grew older. Although they continued to love one another as brothers and sisters, they each led separate lives and no strong bond existed to keep them together.15
As for Elsa’s brother Marcello, his eldest son, Daniele, remembered how Elsa used to bring gifts for everyone at Christmas until one year she suddenly stopped coming. The reason, Daniele Morante guesses, was that she realized that Marcello had literary ambitions—he was a writer and he wrote several plays, which were actually well received and won prizes—and he was very competitive. Although not jealous or threatened by him, Elsa sensed that Marcello was in competition with her and this more than anything deeply disturbed her. Also, it did not correspond to the image she had of him as a younger brother. However, when in 1973 Marcello traveled from his home in Tuscany to undergo major surgery, Elsa was very attentive. Nevertheless, they soon fell out once again when Marcello wanted to introduce Elsa to a painter friend and, misconstruing this, Elsa accused Marcello of trying to take advantage of her and her artist friends. As a result, they did not see each other often. Despite the ups and downs, Daniele Morante was Elsa Morante’s favorite nephew and one can see why. He is a gentle and mild-mannered man who is also very soft-spoken—so soft, in fact, that later I had trouble hearing him on my tape recorder.16
Although accounts vary on how affected or preoccupied she was by it, Elsa Morante’s attitude toward her family throughout her life seems to have remained conflicted—especially, not surprisingly, her attitude to her mother. Apparently Elsa often spoke about her mother and yet it is clear from what she said that she wanted her mother to be different. She wanted her mother to be more refined in her bearing as well as her appearance, which was shabby and ordinary. Elsa had an expectation that was not fulfilled by the reality and this made for a complicated relationship. In addition, Elsa was afraid of her mother because she felt Irma’s envy, which manifested itself as an ambivalence that Elsa could not bear—a feeling of both love and hate that today would be called passive-aggressive. No doubt, Marcello, especially, and Maria as well shared these ambivalent feelings toward their more well-known sister. Always Elsa maintained that she would have preferred to be either loved or hated and that uncertainty troubled her. She could not stand people who were falsely humble or felt disappointed in their lives. That was the reason probably she always loved her brother Aldo—not because he was successful but because he was satisfied with his life and was not jealous of hers. In other words, she wanted to have a different sort of family, a magnificent and happy family.17
Monteverde, where the Morante family lived, is located on the west bank of the Tiber River and remains much the same as it was in Elsa’s childhood, except that it is more built up and populated. The nondescript apartment houses are, for the most part, cheaply built; the few older stucco-walled villas and their gardens are protected by high cement walls and imposing iron gates, but a lot of them, like the Morante house, are now divided into apartments. The more affluent-looking streets are lined with oleander trees and the general feeling one gets from Monteverde is middle-class respectability. A few minutes’ walk away, through Porta San Pancrazio, stands the Gianicolo or Janiculum Hill, a favorite destination for both visitors and locals. Here are embassies, diplomatic residences, academies and large romantic-looking villas that can be glimpsed behind high walls and perfectly trimmed hedges. Surely, on warm spring Sunday afternoons when the Roman sky was a cloudless Canaletto blue, poor Augusto, in one of his many awkward attempts to establish an affectionate relationship, took the children for a walk along the Aurelian Wall and down the Passagio del Gianicolo to show them the imposing equestrian monument of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero (along with Cavour and Mazzini) of the Italian unification known as the Risorgimento. (The monument to his wife, Anita, who fought bravely by his side, also depicted on horseback and set a few yards below him, would not be erected for several more years.) Standing there on the large open piazza, they would have had a splendid view of the city spread out below them—from Castel Sant’Angelo, to the great white mass of the newly built Law Courts, to the dome of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the two belfries of the Trinità dei Monti, the Quirinal Place behind the dome of the Pantheon all the way to the church of San Pietro in Montorio. The children would probably have gotten a treat, as well, a gelato. For them, no doubt, like for Manuel, the protagonist in Elsa Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli, the appearance of the ice cream wagon was “hailed with acclaim and rejoicing, almost as if an altar on four wheels were presented before us.” The ice cream vendor, too, was described as a poet and he expressed himself with this rhyme:
Qui c’è il Regno del Gelo zuccherato!
Tutto crema e cioccolato!
Chi vuole il Cono!
Corri ch’è buono!
This is the kingdom of sugar and ice,
Vanilla and chocolate and everything nice!
Romans, fulfill your dream
With a cone of Norge ice cream!18
From there, Augusto and the Morante children must have walked back past the Villa Doria Pamphili, now a vast park, and continued around the corner where the road opens onto a wide crossing and where Porta Aurelia, which marked the beginning of the Aurelian Way, once stood. Porta Aurelia was rebuilt and renamed Porta San Pancrazio in 1854 (after the nearby church of St. Pancras) and was the site of the 1849 battle between Garibaldi and his Roman troops against the French as they attempted to defend the short-lived Roman Republic. When the time came to go home, Augusto was pleased and proud to make use of the single name he had invented to call the three children: “Marcelsado! Marcelsado!”19
Augusto would die shortly after the Second World War. During his final illness, Irma, his wife, allowed him to move upstairs and sleep on the living room sofa, where he breathed his last. The children rarely came to visit him—for instance, Elsa did just once. After his death, Irma sold the Monteverde house and moved into an apartment in the same building where Maria and her husband resided. Irma lived to be nearly eighty-three and died, probably of stomach cancer, in a nursing home in Viterbo, in 1963. Again, the children—all but Maria—hardly ever went to visit her there. During one of Elsa’s rare visits, a nun at the clinic complained to Elsa about her “indecent” clothes (Elsa was wearing trousers). After her mother died, Elsa organized a very elaborate and expensive funeral, using up much of her mother’s money and justifying it by saying that that was what Irma would have wanted.
Aldo married twice and was a successful economist and banker. He spent many years living and working abroad: first in Mexico, then in Venezuela, where he opened a branch of the Banca Commerciale Italiana; and finally opening another branch in Beijing (apparently he lived in an apartment right off Tiananmen Square and witnessed the shootings in 1989; some of the bullets went through his windows). According to his son, Paolo, Aldo had an almost photographic memory and he could recite The Divine Comedy by heart; he also always maintained a very cordial relation with Elsa.20 Marcello took up several professions, including the law, journalism, politics and the theater; he had ten children (one of whom is the actor Laura Morante). Maria married and divorced and had one child, Luca. She is a member of the Communist Party and until recently was an active union leader.