XVIII. VIENNA

On 3 December 1923, Gramsci arrives in Vienna, sent by the supreme authority of the Comintern. Giulia has stayed behind in Russia. After a year in which they had become so close that neither of them could any longer say whether they had truly grown up without the other, he is again alone for an indefinite period of time.

If only he’d been separated from her in Rome. But in Rome Mussolini’s squadristi are securing the streets, not only the socialist Serrati but almost all the leading communists in the country have been arrested, all of those who could not take off or go underground quickly enough. And after the communists it was the turn of all the others who’d opposed the fascists and therefore been made to disappear. Mussolini is rearranging the republic according to his own standards. He is weeding out, locking up, allowing anything that could be dangerous to him to be removed, and Gramsci wants to get back to Italy as soon as possible. He wants to see what is happening in the flesh, he wants to negotiate. Now it is more important than ever.

‘You cannot be closer to Italy,’ they said when choosing Gramsci, ‘than Vienna, but you cannot be any further away either.’ From here he is to peek into the neighbouring country, push ahead with the founding of the Party newspaper L’Unità and snap up the few bits of news that come up through the Tyrol, report on an unsuccessful strike in Milan or those former comrades in Trieste who moved over to the fascists or a burglary in Naples where a printing press was destroyed. His comrades never deliver any good news, nor is it ever precise. Often what they know is second-hand or long obsolete. Gramsci doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing. In the meantime, the authorities are already pestering him, fussy Viennese clerks who moisten the tips of their pens with saliva in order to penalize anything that does not fit into their worldview in an embarrassingly precise way.

Gramsci is living in a room on the outskirts, he can reach Schönbrunn Palace on foot, the city is far away. The flat is cold, Vienna is cold, and though he cannot say where the city begins, once he stepped onto the wrong tram and ended up in an area with a desolate wine tavern out of which the first drunks were already tumbling into the early evening and the white hills around reminded him of the Saline hills in Cagliari and the countless emaciated convicts working there.

‘Still better than Schönbrunn,’ he thinks.

Josef Frey, his host and general secretary of the Austrian Communist Party, is a melancholic, and the grey of the clouds which hang over the city have made its way into the colour of his eyes. His wife looks at Gramsci sullenly. And he understands her: as if her husband weren’t a terrible-enough fate, the Party has forced her to take a dubious lodger who might cause her to have problems with the authorities.

But Frau Frey is an upstanding person. A bit mercurial perhaps, but upstanding. Years earlier she’d given up her Jewish faith in order to become a Catholic with heart and soul. The liaison, though, did not last too long, for her heart soon wearied of the host and genuflexion, and because comrade Josef Frey set to wooing her with puffy charm and a few flowers now and again. She did not hesitate, but converted to the communistic faith in order to bind Frey-Josef to herself in accordance with the provisos of the councils and five-year plan. But as soon as he was legally married, he began to overlook the flower shop, remembered a flattering turn of phrase very infrequently indeed and went to meetings every evening, soon he even began to go in the afternoons and mornings and Frau Frey for her part grew lonely with communism. She missed the faces of the saints covered in oil. Here there are only fur caps, Lenin and his goatee, and Engelsmarx. In the long run, who can take all of that? On top of it, people have been putting their noses into their business, and Frau Frey has never liked being a stumbling block. She is an upstanding person. Upstanding through and through. Secretly, she begins to practice her Catholic magic again, buries herself defiantly in her Ave Marias and longs for the return of the kaiser.

Gramsci would like to get moving again. Everything he sees in Vienna displeases him, the last remnants of the bourgeois epoch punting out of a drift of snow. The streets seem sombre and pretentious, people wear their noblesse like a death mask and the Hotel Sacher is sinking into upper-class decadence. He thinks about the hunger of his childhood, which almost killed him, about how the Sardinian spring hangs mild and placid over the land and knows nothing about the ecstasy a piece of cake can trigger when it runs from the tongue into all of one’s senses. Outside, all that awaits him is a rough tongue, passers-by ducking dejectedly into the snow-rain and horses trotting in three-four time in front of their Fiaker carriages. In Vienna, he thinks, the people creep into your soul because, otherwise, you simply could not handle the city.

What is Moscow in comparison? Snow-white and happy, sleds and laughing people with frozen red faces. And even though he has never been on one of those sleds, and even if not a single one of those faces really laughs, and even if Moscow is generally anything but happy but, rather, a collection of overstrained revolutionaries, penny pinchers, starved schoolchildren and an upper class still clinging to its privileges, Gramsci can only remember it in the most beautiful of colours there in his room in Vienna, there in that way station from which he can neither return to fascistic Italy where Mussolini’s faithful would continuously arrest him nor to far-away Russia where Giulia is waiting. Or is not. But that is something he cannot think about at all.

Two thousand kilometres from Vienna to Moscow. Two thousand kilometres are too far for anything, and now he is stuck with Frau Frey bringing him slippers. What about the neighbours! The good parquet! What a life, where people just want to have everything ordered and not stick out in any way. He is standing in his room, looking at the picture of Saint Agnes. When it’s six degrees, he lies down in a very hard and very uncomfortable German bed. He hardly sleeps and feels as lost as he did when he first arrived in Turin. So there he is again, back in the past, as if nothing had happened, as if he had never got free of the monotony of his life. His room smells like the sweaty cheese he’d kept for too long in Turin because he hadn’t dared to touch the little he had, there is a draught from the window, his suit is too thin, he doesn’t want to think about it, he doesn’t want to go back there, to Turin, to those years in which he was so unconscious, and he presses his face into the pillow Frau Frey has made extra-hard, tries to concentrate on the good moments: when he used to play harmonica for his guests squeezed together on his bed and on the floor, there were so many of them and his room was so small. When his first article appeared. When he saw Ibsen’s Doll’s House and got angry about the how the audience found the third act, Nora’s going away, offensive as they could not understand how deeply moral Nora’s compliance with her duty was, the duty everyone had to themselves and only then to others, namely, to create a world for oneself in which one can be human.

Giulia sends a letter from Russia where visitors to the Kremlin are now making their way through a new mausoleum in which the dead Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is lying in state. He died on 21 January. Frau Frey had brought the letter to him with an inquisitive air. She remains standing next to him, stares at his finger that’s supposed to tear open the envelope, and only when she finally leaves does Gramsci carefully open the envelope and pull out the piece of paper, has to read the lines twice in order to understand, or at least have an idea, of what Giulia wants to tell him. He is dizzy, had he eaten anything today? Agnes smiles at him sanctimoniously from the oil painting. ‘What do you know about it?’ he hisses at her. In Moscow, Zinoyev has positioned himself, Stalin is still keeping his plans secret but he’s long had something in mind that is stronger than Lenin’s postscript, but that is all nothing compared to what Giulia has written him. ‘What do you know,’ he hisses up to Agnes, ‘about the fact that Giulia is probably awaiting a child?’

He must answer her, he must have her close to him right now, not this insufferable and sacrosanct Agnes, he wants to take Giulia by the arm, but how do you write about something like that from 2,000 kilometres away? ‘I’m going to make clocks out of cork,’ he writes, ‘and papier-mâché violins and wax lizards with two tails. I am going to recite poems from my childhood which was a bit wild and primitive—very different than yours.’