XXXIV. TANIA

In the morning it’s 36.2°, at eleven o’clock 36.9°, at two o’clock 37.2°, two hours later still only 36.9°, at six o’clock 36.8° or 36.7°.

This is Antonio Gramsci at the beginning of the ’30s. He subsists on milk, yoghurt bacteria, grapes, three capsules of Sedobrol at seven-thirty in the evening and the tenth Canto of Dante’s Inferno. In Ivanovo, Giulia is celebrating her thirty-fourth birthday and going out with her father and the children to collect mushrooms. Gramsci is suffering from the scirocco and the summer heat, and, when he tries to eat some bread, his temperature immediately rises, and, as his digestion troubles wear him out more than his malnourishment, he tries to postpone eating for as long as possible. He writes to his brother Carlo: ‘My general impression is that I am definitely getting better.’ He has headaches and arguments with his sister-in-law Tania who he thinks views prison as a kind of boarding school for girls. Standing at a tobacco shop she writes him a postcard, in pen, because the feather isn’t worth a thing, while Gramsci has pain in his respiratory organs, which he combats with turpentine inhalations. He still has two teeth in his mouth and a useless sweater in his prison wardrobe, infested by moths with their quiet, lead-like existence until he sticks his hand into its darkness and tries to swat them. They flutter upwards and escape.

A new prison ordinance in Turi allows him to receive letters once a week. He lives in a single cell which makes working easier as well as the concentrated reading of those books Piero Sraffa has sent him with the plea: ‘Tell me what you think, write me a review,’ in order to keep the ailing prisoner thinking and alive and to press page after page out of him. Gramsci will not survive his imprisonment. He suspects as much, and he knows that the others know it too, nevertheless he hesitates to beg for an adjustment of his penalty or even a reprieve, as, in his eyes, it would amount to political and moral suicide. He would have to kneel before Mussolini personally, for the latter has made Gramsci’s case personal so that he can control, if not his thoughts, than at least his life.

During the day, Gramsci paces back and forth, it is as if he no longer only thinks with his body but with his movement. As soon as he has fixed a thought in a sentence he hurries to the table, leans his knee against the stool and, as if the sentence might escape again like a butterfly caught in his hand, stabs into the paper. He writes about the practical origins of every seemingly absolute truth, he writes about the cheap polemicists who make money off of them, he writes about the dramas of conscience they incite among the working class and he warns that Marxism itself ‘tends to become ideology in the negative sense, that is, to a dogmatic system of absolute and eternal truth.’

Despite the little amount of available surface his body offers, the sweats continue; water, and with it salt, drains out of every pore. He must eat more but he can’t, his stomach refuses to work. He relates the story of a shipwreck where a few people have made it onto a lifeboat and are then subjected to the sea, the heat, and, once the last rations have been finished, hunger. ‘Before the shipwreck, as is quite natural, not one of the future victims thought he would become the victim of a shipwreck,’ he writes, ‘even less so cannibalistic. But are they in reality the same people? Only from the point of view of the law can one say that they are the same people.’

Gramsci’s cell is on the first floor, and day and night guards, doctors and men of unclear authority, perhaps members of OVRA, the fascist secret police, stomp up and down the hall in heavy boots. A bed is rolled by, his room is on the way to the infirmary, in reality, his room is on the way to every other ward, no spot in the building is loved as much as this one and Gramsci wanders back and forth in his cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die. Its memory evaporated.

On 3 August 1931, in spite of the heat and the noise, he falls asleep around midnight but wakes up an hour later and feels a gurgling when he breathes. Like with a bit of catarrh, he thinks. He sits up and coughs, once, twice nothing heavy or strong but as if he had something in his throat, three times, four, a cough without any climax. He tastes something metallically sweet on his tongue. He spits and sees blood in his handkerchief. His whole mouth is full of blood. Another cough. And another. As nothing else is available, he spits into his bedpan, spits and coughs and sweats and feels like all of his remaining strength is leaving him.

By four in the morning, he has expelled more than half a pound of blood. It feels like someone has squeezed his head like a sponge. He continues to wheeze but only manages to spit out a bit of blood-stained sputum.

‘A bronchial infection,’ the doctor says and orders him calcium chloride with a thousandth of adrenaline.

‘Likely tuberculosis,’ Tania writes and sends Gramsci more Sedobrol. Five capsules over the course of the day, she says, three in the evening are too many, you hear! She suggests Forgenia, two shots at a time, and that he thicken his milk with a piece of bread, produce some yoghurt, bacteria for his intestinal flora, just like Metchnikov has recommended. After all, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology.

‘That is simply female-empiricism and not science,’ Gramsci accuses her. They argue evermore frequently but she is the only one he still can reach. She comes to visit him, she lives her life along the route of his prisons, and perhaps that is what makes him so angry: even the last person fails to understand him any longer. When Tania was with him, he had tried again to explain that she could only send him what he asked for. The prison authorities do not allow more. She needs to once and for all stop thinking according to the logic of everyday life. She had stood before him without moving at all, looked at him and all of a sudden begun to tremble.

‘What is it, Tanicka?’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

She is standing in front of him, her body is older than Giulia’s but it resembles hers. Tania’s hands are too soft for all that he has got to know here in prison. Her breath streams across his cheeks when she crouches to bend over him in his bed. He faintly feels the desire to come back to life. But he knows that his life counts for nothing now.

‘You should go to Moscow. One of us sitting here is more than enough,’ he says.

‘I refuse to leave Italy as long as you’re here.’

‘You must rest, Tania.’

‘I will never leave you on your own. And do not force me to.’

She runs a finger over his hand. Up his arm. He smells her skin. It’s like Giulia’s, only a bit more pale. Schrader comes to his mind again, the joyless ghost Tania had lived with in Rome. How little he knows about Tania’s love life. She caresses his face, his cheeks, his forehead, she places her head very close to his, he can feel her breath on his lips.

‘What happens between Giulia and I will not happen with anyone else,’ he whispers.

‘I hope that you two see each other again.’

‘We both know that that is not very likely. You’d better go now, Tania.’

 

It is one of the first days of November. Hardly any light reaches his cell. As usual, Gramsci is sitting at his table and spooning up some broth which was already just about cold when they brought it. In the meanwhile he has lost his last two teeth, they got lost in March, two pieces of dirty white spit in to the palm of his hand. He was familiar with the feeling of shock when a piece of his body broke off, and even though it was the thirty-second time, it still caused him to catch his breath. His last two teeth. Now his mouth is naked. Now and forever more there shall only be milk, broth and fresh juice which he usually cannot tolerate.

A key turns in the lock of his cell. They have never cleared away his food this early before. He tries to eat more quickly but his stomach turns against the food once again.

‘It’s an early Christmas!’

Gramsci, who had put his hand defensively around his bowl, looks at the guard uncomprehendingly.

‘A telegram. From your brother,’ he explains, lays a piece of paper on the table and stomps back off with his heavy steps. Only once the door has slammed shut and Gramsci hears the turn of the keys again does he bend over his message.

‘Have learnt of decree on pardon,’ his brother writes, ‘I’m with you please telegraph necessity of my presence or otherwise.’

Pardon? Could that be possible? Could everything he’d prepared for internally—now when he hardly allows anything that once triggered his emotions to penetrate his defences—just stop all of a sudden? The table, the stool, the paper with its message: all that is real. He feels his heart beating, his organs beginning to work again as if salvation were right there, then his mind yields and then his emotions. Well, why not? Perhaps what he has just read is true. It’s possible. It could indeed be possible. That in spite of everything, they managed to do something. But who? The Party leaders in Moscow? The Comintern? The Red Aid? The Soviet diplomats Keržencev and Makar? Tania? His friend Sraffa who works so closely with the Party that any of his acts become the acts of the Party? Giulia?

No, Giulia was not strong enough. Well, whoever it was—and perhaps they had all had a hand in it, perhaps Stalin himself had got involved—they hadn’t forgotten him, as he’d believed. Some-one had been able to convince them that he was not a Trotskyist, as he’d been accused, that they wanted to bring him back, that they needed him in the Party. What he had not counted on, what seems to go against his own power of logic, is that his story would have a happy ending.

Just take a deep breath, gather up strength. He can already smell the air beneath the cherry trees on Via Carlo Fea, his body will be able to move again, will finally be allowed to collapse, and someone, wanting the best for him, will bring him over to the bed which is covered with a white blanket and crackling with starch. Someone will bring him hot soup. Someone will hold his hand. His nerves will again grow strong in that body which seems to have grown necrotic in prison. His teeth will not grow back, but that is not important.

In the afternoon he is handed the decree that Carlo had celebrated, but his hope fades within the bureaucratic language. He hardly recognizes a thing yet also so much: there will be no release. Perhaps they will ease the conditions of his imprisonment, but he knows that his body does not have much strength left. Easing the conditions will not be enough. Every day can be one too many. He may indeed come to freedom a bit earlier, but dead.

For one whole day he wants to push everything away, he wants to curse his brother who, by promising such false excitement, demanded the energy he no longer possesses, his last reserves of peace and strength. His nerves are on edge and he already has enough to fight in order not to be overwhelmed by the weight of his reality. Everything must be cast off. Even what is closest, what is the most, what is the only: Giulia.

He has heard of husbands sitting in prison with long sentences allowing themselves to be separated from their wives in order to allow them the chance to establish new lives. He has heard of these women, has imagined how they, strong, emotional, split apart the moral bonds and forgot, or pretended to forget, their men. And isn’t there something reasonable about it? Gramsci wonders. Why should a living creature be tied to another who is dead or as good as dead? ‘The pain cannot be avoided, but it can be limited,’ he writes to his sister-in-law Tania and begs her to suggest it to Giulia.

By now he is suffering from what he calls ‘prison illness’—a deadening of feeling, a loss of sensibility—and one year from now he will possibly only be vegetating in a kind of animalistic ego-centrism. He will endure, he will grow used to Giulia leaving him. He promises his sister-in-law. To retreat into his Sardinian shell and become more emotionless every day, that is what he imagines.

‘Impressive in its abstruseness!’ Sraffa, who has been forwarded the letter from Tania, finds. She has no idea how in the world she is to respond to such an offer. ‘This is not a truly serious plea, Tania. This is not even a proper letter. This, if you would like to know, is only the testimonial of a sick man. We are losing Gramsci to the prison. But that was foreseeable, sooner or later it had to happen.’

Sometimes Tania is frightened by how Sraffa tidies up other people’s emotional turmoil until it is lying before him as clearly as the gross domestic product of their soul.

‘You should send it to Giulia,’ Sraffa says. ‘Perhaps she will then understand how sick he is. Perhaps she will finally come to Italy. If she continues to stay so far away, she will cut the last thread holding him to life. And then he will die,’ Sraffa adds, and Tania asks herself whether in the end it might not be better for Gramsci not to have to endure a lover who is only a hastily scrawled signature on a censored piece of paper, whether Giulia could get well if she were free of the gloom of the prison. And Tania has little idea of whether Sraffa truly wants the best for his friend or whether he just wants to goad Gramsci’s genius on, page after page, before that irreplaceable mind ceases working completely.

Giulia is unsettled by what her sister writes her, and once more Italy is too far away to really grasp what is happening, but to leave Moscow, no, that she cannot do, not now, maybe later, once she has recovered from her crisis. ‘You will never recover from your crisis so long as you stay where you are,’ Tania writes her sister, but, instead of sending the letter, tears it apart. Gramsci in the meantime has again fallen into hope and is no longer thinking of being separated. He knows the decree by heart, without really understanding it, like a child singing a song in a foreign language.

Art. 79, 135 (repealed) with reference to Art. 118, Nr. 3 and 120 of the penal code (repealed)

Art. 79, 247 of the penal code (a) with reference to Art. 1, Law of 19.VII.1894, Nr. 135.

Art. 79 of the penal code (a) and 2 from the Law of 19.VII.1894, Nr. 135

Art. 251 of the penal code (a)

A.9, paragraph. Law from 25 December 1925, Nr. 2263

Art. 252 of the penal code (a)

Art. 134 Nr. 2 with reference to Art. 120 and 118 Nr. 3 and 78 of the penal code (a)

Over and over he recalculates what he does not understand, as if feverish. He has to be careful with his hope, for any disappointment could spell death. Of the six charges with which he was given six sentences, Gramsci thinks, four should be amnestied, and he calculates the gaps in the years that still lie ahead: fifteen years prison, ten years jail, minus five years for clemency, three years for clemency, one year for the preceding clemency. Twenty years, four months, five days plus a fine. The dates run together, the years remain merciless and the paragraphs too.

‘These are the charges,’ Tania answers in response to his plea for her to explain it all. ‘And I think,’ she adds, ‘not a single one has been dropped. Tomorrow, I will send you socks.’

 

‘If there were only fewer doctors and fewer diagnoses in the world,’ Giulia writes to her sister. It is January 1933. In Germany, Adolf Hitler has succeeded in coming to power. Of all places, Germany, the land of Marx, will be brought to heel by the National Socialists. Yet another revolution from the wrong side. ‘And yet I can be of only little help to myself,’ Gramsci writes Giulia on 30 January. ‘The more I realize that I’m going through bad moments, that I’m weak, that I see the difficulties become greater, the more I’m determined to stiffen all of my willpower. Your letter to Tania struck me as too melancholy and grim.’

In February, the Reichstag in Berlin burns. The communists are held responsible and now in Germany too they are hunted by the state. By March, Gramsci is close to dying. The prison authorities decide to put a fellow prisoner in his cell to keep an eye on him. A few political prisoners organize eight-hour shifts among themselves. They crouch next to Gramsci’s bed, who is too weak to lift himself up, they come in and out of his cell and do not know what to do about his decline. Getting a glimpse of Gramsci is depressing, he is so emaciated it is like having a elderly child before one’s eyes.

It is two in the morning when Gustavo Trombetti arrives. Gramsci appears to be sleeping, but his chest is still. Gustavo comes closer, attempts to check Gramsci’s breath by placing the back of his hand beneath his nose when all of a sudden his empty, watery eyes flash open and he looks at him without recognizing him. Then, as if all his strength had returned, all of a sudden he is determined, he reaches out his hand, he wants to hold Gustavo or to be held, but his voice is weak when he whispers: ‘You see what these scoundrels have managed to do to me?’ His head sags to the side and he dozes back off.

‘A severe case of kyphoscoliosis,’ the prison’s medical officer at last declares after Gramsci has been shuttled from one doctor to another, doctors bound more to fascism than Hippocrates. Pott’s Disease, tubercular lesions causing two discharges of blood, fainting spells, memory loss, early senility, arteriosclerosis with hypertension (190/100 mm Hg.). Over the last few months he has lost 7 kilos. ‘In closing, I believe that Gramsci, on the basis of these symptoms, will not survive long under the present conditions. In good faith. Umberto Arcangeli.’

In May, the medical report is published in the Party magazine Humanité. Gramsci is furious, despite how weak he is. As if he were an animal for slaughter, they just want to show him off, what do they think they will achieve with such indiscretion? His release? A bit of pity from people who do not know him and that he will never see? In the end, the publication only succeeds in causing everything that would be so necessary—his transfer to a hospital or at least to the infirmary of another prison—to be delayed. ‘Yet another bit of misfortune,’ Sraffa, who is no less angry than his friend, complains. His attempts to have Gramsci released are more destined to fail than ever.

Gramsci receives a pale photo of his wife and children. Giulia beams weakly. Day by day, his feelings grow weaker while the dulling of his senses grows stronger. He can barely smell, he tastes nothing, he feels only the failure of his organs. When awake he can think and even manage to write a little, but soon collapses again. He sees Giulia in the faded picture and it is as if she is pulling away from him, even on the paper. Like everything else. Like the world. Like all he loved within it. And it’s OK. In his current state, loving is too great a chore. He has no more strength to feel a thing. He still registers the dizziness and daze in his head, but does not venture anything else. The photograph did not turn out so well, he writes to his sister-in-law. That is all he wishes to share with Giulia.