VIII. PIA

All of a sudden Pia is there again, the memory of Pia Carena. She has curly hair and is sitting behind a typewriter. She believes in the southern Italian farmers and the power of journalistic style to persuade. She is the editor of Avanti! and has been since December 1917. She’d been there a little earlier, but that is of no consequence, for what could she have been? A woman who knew how to type and to edit—in Turin, women who knew how to type and to edit could be found on every street corner, and even smart women, political and determined ones, they could be found too. But something special, that she’ll only become in Gramsci’s eyes.

He’d had no previous love life to speak of, if what he had allowed himself could even be called life. His suit is so threadbare that for a long time he does not dare to leave his room, and the money for a tailor he’s urgently begged his father for over and over again sometimes arrives, sometimes does not. The family has money problems and, so far away from Turin, on the island, in another world, by the time Gramsci’s plight arrives to them it is only a faded note. During his studies, he only has 70 lire from a royal scholarship, which, in the end, doesn’t feel too royal at all. The little he takes he spends on books, rolls are the only food he permits himself, 50 grams, 10 centesimi, and at night he hallucinates from hunger. In Sardinia, the most he could do was look at women. Don’t you dare look at me, not even in my imagination would I allow a cripple to touch me, one said to him once and laughed. Some women seemed to enjoy insulting him.

In Turin, since the early summer of 1919, he’d received an income as the editor of Ordine Nuovo, there were colleagues who believed in Gramsci like devotees, there was the radical movement and there were the case chiuse. Sometimes they are long hallways in the back of guesthouses flanked by single, sparsely lit rooms. Sometimes they are basement flats. Sometimes they unashamedly call themselves brothels. The women come from the countryside to seek work in the city but find only derision. They have been abandoned by their men or taken flight themselves, some still share a narrow, run-down flat with them at the city’s edge, but the money they earn is rarely enough to pacify them, one can see the mark of leather belts on their backs. With Gramsci they are either affectionate or rough, they allow him to penetrate them without making fun of him or asking for anything more than a few lire. Some of the women send him away immediately, they don’t want to know who this man is, they don’t want to know about any of them. Some of them talk with him as they clean themselves over a washbowl in the corner. He wants to hear their thoughts about the Turin radicals, the general strikes and the liberation of the worker. ‘We should go on strike now and again here too, then you’d all look pretty old,’ one of them says.

One day, his lust is greater than what’s leftover from his salary. Like a schoolboy he sits on a stool in front of the room, someone’s called his friend Leo Galetto to come and cover him. The women streak past. Two stop, size him up from head to toe, then break into clear, high-pitched giggles.

‘It’s like you haven’t eaten in ten years!’ Galetto says by the time he’s finally standing in front of him.

‘Let’s take it as a sign of being healthy,’ he says, pays the girl, pushes Gramsci down the hall and back outside.

And then, at some point, there is Pia Carena. Attilio, her brother, one of Gramsci’s co-workers, introduced the two of them. After an exhausting meeting spent talking about the Brigata Sassari and the possibilities of initiating strikes at the Fiat-Brevetti factories, he’d grabbed hold of Gramsci’s arm and taken him home. A massive solidarity strike against the counter-revolutionary moves of the Entente is planned for July, but how will this starved man, who constantly runs off to meet the radicals at the factory in order to take part in discussions, make it till then? Gramsci has always seemed too skinny to Attilio, his work seems to steal the very marrow from his bones.

Attilio’s sister is standing in the kitchen preparing fish with fennel for dinner and browsing through a book, as if she were reading a recipe, by Ugo Foscolo, which is lying on the windowsill. Then, at the table, she laughs a lot watching the new guest picking the bones out of his fish as carefully as he can. Pia is interested in the idea of workers’ democracy, in the factory councils that were to take the capitalists’ place instead of negotiating with them and in marriage (which she wants to enter into as a virgin). She loves rainy afternoons and perhaps, but here she’s not entirely sure, a young Italian man.

‘A strike cannot paralyse operations. The workers must be responsible for continuing to produce,’ Gramsci explains and lays a bone on the side of his plate with his fork. ‘It has to do with self-empowerment. Trade unions keep the workers dependent. Better conditions within dependency, that is all they are fighting for.’ Attilio nods and Pia looks at him thoughtfully. When she begins to clear the table, it is already around ten. She presses her arm close to Gramsci’s body, a clear move he cannot fail to recognize.

They say goodbye in such a familiar way, it is as if they have known each other for years, and he soon returns to them, to a house with bright stone tiles which seem to be warmer than the tiles in the other houses in Turin. After two weeks, he begins to visit Attilio, Pia and their books on the windowsill regularly. Here he relaxes from all the spiders on his ceiling, from hunger and from his ascetic student years, his self-imposed confinement. At one point he places The Kreutzer Sonata on the sill, which by his next visit already seems to have been read; yet another time he ties her apron for her, his fingers gliding across her waist. She feels different from the women in the closed houses, warmer, fuller, as if she were truly filled with life and not simply liveliness.

Together with Attilio they found the ‘Club of Moral Life’, a debate club where young people can meet, talk about workers’ self-determination in all production processes, about the radical movement in Turin, which could spread, that would spread, about how the Revolution could not begin in a Party office but in the factory, at the place of production. How calmly and yet determinedly Pia speaks in front of everyone. Gramsci leans forward in his chair, observes the curls falling across her cheeks, her straight posture. With a quick movement she draws a line through the air: that’s how it is!

Indeed, Gramsci thinks, that’s how it is.

When she stops speaking and looks into the faces of the audience, he nods at her. Pia looks at the floor, runs her fingers through her hair and then Gramsci sees that she is smiling. The smile of a child.

‘If we are unsuccessful at taking power,’ he explains to her later while Attilio says goodbye to their guests at the door, ‘then others will. And they will be the dregs of the bourgeoisie. Grimaces only, no more faces.’

‘Sometimes you frighten me,’ Pia says, who has sat down on the windowsill and is looking into the darkness.

‘You believe so strongly in our will, but what is that? Have you ever asked yourself who still has the strength for that? We’re tired, Antonio, most of us are tired.’

‘But not you, Pia.’

‘On the contrary. I am too.’

‘You are ten times stronger than I. You are the strongest of us all.’

She gives a start when he caresses her back, and sits up straighter.

‘You should go now,’ she says quietly.

After that evening, they do not see each other for a while. On 20 July, Gramsci is arrested. Wearing a dark suit, he is sitting in a cell on a plank bed covered with straw, he brushes a bunch of stalks with his fingernails and lets the other prisoners stare.

‘You can’t be Antonio Gramsci,’ one of the men finally lets slip. ‘Gramsci is a giant!’

‘That’s what I always thought too,’ Gramsci replies. ‘But do you know what? It’s not true, I checked.’

Gramsci plays melodies on the clipped reeds for his fellow prisoners to guess, he jokes with the warder who brings them thin soup and a crust of bread, and out of a little piece of dough makes a tiny game of boule which entertains them all until evening. The next day Gramsci is the prison’s favourite, he speaks Sardinian though he is the only one, he laughs a lot and off the top of his head tells them what they could be if they just refused to hide behind their humiliating roles. Accompanied by a troop of young warders he leaves the prison, they wave after him, they would have loved to have kept him for themselves. By evening, he is standing outside the Carenas’.

‘You see the point,’ Attilio greets him. ‘In order to judge a state, you have to see its prisons from the inside, but in order to understand its power, you have to try the beef tenderloin. For weeks we’ve only eaten pasta, and hardly do we have a piece of meat in the pan, there’s Sig. Gramsci in front of the door.’ And he calls back into the hall: ‘Pia, guess who’s joining us for dinner tonight?’

Pia only casts him a quick glance as he walks into the kitchen, then bends back over the pots. He tries to make her laugh by telling jokes, but she just wrinkles her brow and counts cloves. He sits next to her at the table, but she has forgotten something in the other room; and when she returns, she stays on the other side. Attilio gets worked up about Bordiga’s ideas of avoiding the vote. ‘What do you think, Antonio?’ he asks and plunks the wine glass onto the table. Gramsci murmurs single syllables and cuts his meat. Attilio jokes a little more about the king who no doubt will have his own ballot box placed in the palace but then he too grows quiet and looks at his two silent comrades. In their mouths, the tenderloin grows tougher and tougher.

Attilio excuses himself early, he still has to take care of a few things. ‘Wouldn’t you like to come, Antonio?’ but Gramsci shakes his head. Pia begins the washing up in the kitchen and stares at the soapy water. When Gramsci comes up behind her, she drops the dishrag and rushes into the living room where she says she’s forgotten something but doesn’t find anything and remains standing indecisively in the middle of the room. Isn’t it a bit too sticky in the flat? The two of them should go for a walk. A bit of fresh air, she says, just a bit of fresh air. She walks close to Gramsci through the Piazza Solferino, past the Alfieri Theatre, they walk past the train station and jump back from a tram bending around a corner. By the time it begins to rain, they are close to Gramsci’s room. For a while they stand next to each other in silence beneath the porticoes. Then they rush across the wet cobblestones, dodging the puddles. Only because she doesn’t want to catch a cold, really that’s the only reason, she says, Pia accompanies him up to his room. They sit down on the bed; there is neither chair nor stool. It is quiet. Above them someone is walking heavily across the room. Outside it continues to rain. Pia crosses her arms over her chest in a protective manner when Gramsci moves closer.

‘You know what I think about all this,’ she says.

‘About what?’ Gramsci teases while running his hand over her shoulder.

‘I don’t want it this way.’

‘Oh, right, once again that strange idea of yours about marriage.’

‘It’s not strange.’

‘Of course not! Because everyone thinks the same way. Because everyone should think that way. Because it just makes us more efficient. We’ll be able to concentrate in the factory thanks to our stable relationships. And you will fit in to the production process perfectly to the degree you serve your husband as a plaything and bearer of his children. Is that what you want? Nothing more?’

‘You don’t know what I want, you don’t have the faintest idea. And I don’t want you to speak to me this way.’

‘You are downright exemplary in your self-discipline. You know how to control yourself. You are repressing your desires.’

‘And how should it be, thank you very much? Should I cast myself at every man?’

‘Why not? Monogamy is an invention of industrialism. They want to conserve the workers’ strength, so that they can function at the conveyer belt according to the specified tempo.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Pia asks.

‘And you, do you only think about your precepts?’ he replies. ‘Or can you still feel something too?’

‘It’s ridiculous to be keeping score.’

‘You think I’m keeping score between us?’ Gramsci asks, but Pia doesn’t answer. For a while they only listen to the sound of their breath, the longer they remain silent the more intimate, almost obscene, it sounds.

When Pia leaves his room the next morning, the sun is hanging dimly behind the clouds but the pavement is dry and the puddles only hazy spots.

 

She continues to write to him at his address in Moscow, everything reminds her of him, she writes, nothing is as beautiful as it was just a few weeks ago, and do you know what? The second meeting of our club? She writes to him again and again, steadily grows more timid and more objective. The last issue of Avanti! cost her a lot of strength. Was the work on the committee coming along well? One letter manages to reach him in Silver Wood. Gramsci does not even answer with a postcard.