*
Seán and Silone seemed to enjoy each other’s company. I remember several visits by Darina and Ignazio to Knockaderry, and there may well have been others. Seán’s bleak memories of the Irish Civil War may have helped him understand – or come as close as anyone could to understanding – the hurts which had soured Silone, and he would, like everyone else, have been charmed by Darina.
I, though, who was soon to start spending less time in Ireland, lost touch with both. Indeed it was only in the late Nineties that I was reminded of them. I was writing a novel about another Italian Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, when my husband’s friend, the historian and ex-Communist senator, Rosario Villari, asked me if I had heard the recent rumours about Silone who had died in 1978.
I hadn’t, so Rosario filled me in. Left-wing Italy, I learned, had been rocked by controversy when letters found in Rome’s State Archives revealed that from 1919 to 1930 Ignazio, internationally respected writer and moralist though he was, had been sending reports, first about fellow socialists, and later about Communists, to the Italian secret police.
The most striking of these, written in April 1930, was addressed to the sister of his controller, Guido Bellone, the former Inspector General for Public Security, with whom Silone had apparently had an oddly close relationship. It was signed ‘Silvestri’, which was his pseudonym with OVRA (the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism) and reads more like a letter to a father confessor than one to a man who, for the previous eleven years, had been paying him to be an informer. The letter says:
I am living through a painful moment. My moral sense, which has always been strong, now dominates me completely; it won’t let me eat, sleep or rest. I am in a crisis allowing only one way out: to renounce militant activity. (I’ll find some sort of intellectual work.) The only other solution would be death. To go on living in duplicity was impossible … I don’t think I did any great harm to my friends or my country. In so far as I could, I always made sure to avoid that. I must tell you that you, given your position, always behaved decently. That is why I am writing this last letter, so that you may leave me free to carry out my plan, which has two parts: first to rid my life of all falsehood, double-dealing, shadiness and secrecy; secondly to start a new life, on a new basis, to make up for the harm I did, to redeem myself, to help the workers and peasants (to whom I am bound by every fibre of my heart) and my country … I must add that I feel strongly drawn back towards religion (if not to the Church) and that my new way of thinking is facilitated by the cretinous and criminal position being adopted by the Communist Party. My only regret in leaving it is that it is a persecuted party in which, leaving aside the leaders, there are thousands of honest working people.
Silone himself, the letter goes on to say, is waiting for the right moment to break with the Party.
An astonishing document!
It is, says a final flourish, a declaration of esteem for Bellone, whom Silone asks to pray for him if he is a believer. He signs off with his OVRA pseudonym: ‘Your Silvestri.’
When evidence of what Silone called his duplicity was made public, many people tried to deny it. They talked of forgeries, reached for innocent explanations and invented versions of his story in which a hope of saving his youngest brother, who had been jailed in 1928, was the only reason for his connection with the OVRA. But the dates don’t support this. Indeed they are as puzzling for those who believe in Silone’s innocence as for those who don’t. He seems to have begun to sell information to the police even before both the rise of Mussolini and the founding of the PCI (1921). When he first became an informer (1919), he was a socialist. An odd, sad, self-contradicting man! Darina, when asked, before she died in 2003, if she thought he might have really been a spy and a traitor, apparently said that anything was possible, and that the evidence deserved a thorough examination.
She must have sensed many contradictions in his thinking, if he could write a letter like the one quoted without noticing that he was claiming to have done little harm, but needed to make up for the harm he had done.
He wrote movingly in The God That Failed about the hard choices he and other Communists were obliged to make after the Fascist takeover of Italy:
One had to change one’s name, abandon every link with family and friends, and live a false life to remove any suspicion of conspiratorial activity. The Party became family, school, church, barracks … Every sacrifice was welcomed as a personal contribution to the ‘price of collective redemption’; and it should be emphasised that the links which bound us to the Party grew steadily firmer, not in spite of the dangers and sacrifices … but because of them.
Mmm! Noble? Regretful – or a case of split personality?
Yet he published this text thirty years after he first began to bargain with his paymasters for money to betray first the socialists and then the PCI.
On the other hand, how could one presume to judge a man so patently desperate to help combat the horrors around him? While Silone wrestled with these, the French author, Bernanos, had published his searingly strange novel, Under the Sun of Satan (1926). This describes a saint resisting the temptation to let Satan help him save a child from dying of meningitis. It was a time of delusions and coat-turning. Some writers who had flirted with Fascism early on, Bernanos among them, turned their backs on it. Others made the reverse move.
Darina, when asked about Silone’s past activities, was reported to have said that she knew nothing about them – which was probably true. They were over when she and he first met in Switzerland. Nonetheless she may have sensed Bluebeard secrets, for the historians who looked into his case in the Nineties discovered that he had, as spies do, given away the addresses, plans, itineraries, photographs, false names and locations of secret printing presses belonging to fellow militants. No wonder that, when he broke with the Party, he felt a need to renew and redeem himself by going into analysis with Carl Jung. Identity, or his sense of it, may have been a problem, for he had had many names: Secondino Tranquilli was his birth name, Ignazio Silone his pen name, Pasquini his name for the Party, Silvestri for the OVRA and, when he worked with Dulles as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he became Len.
Bellone, whom Silone claimed to consider a galantuomo, seems to have died in a lunatic asylum in 1948. Well, that was the year when the PCI looked for a while set to win a national election, and the prospect can’t have cheered the former Inspector General for Security. Perhaps he would have been comforted had he known that not only was Catholic Europe praying hard against such an outcome, but also, as would later emerge, that the Soviets, from whom the PCI took its orders, didn’t want it to take power.
*
My time in Rome was more light-hearted than might be suggested by thoughts of poor Silone, and even of Darina, who had gone there before the war, thanks to the same National University of Ireland studentship for which I planned to compete. MacWhite, who had been our ambassador there in her day, was now living in Killiney, and had dropped into Knockaderry several times to warn me not to fall into the clutches of dodgy Italians.
Darina, he told us, had been a thorn in his side in the late Thirties. She wouldn’t leave when advised to, did leave for Switzerland at the very last safe moment, and even there took up with the wrong sort of man. His warnings so alarmed my mother that I had trouble calming her. So when one of the surprise-party regulars, an affable man called Beppo Florio, began to court me, I agreed to a low-key relationship which suited us both. I enjoyed whizzing around Rome on the pillion of his Lambretta or Vespa – I forget which he had, but remember with delight the sunshot lime-leaf-filtered air which began to bathe the city with the coming of spring, and the pleasure of moving from one theatrical setting to another: the Forum, the Colosseum, piazza del Popolo, piazza Navona, via Veneto, the hills …
Just as pleasurable was strolling alone along smart streets such as the via Condotti, then up the Spanish steps to the via Sistina which, to my mind, had the b
est window-shopping in the city. Once a talent scout spotted me and raised my hopes of appearing in a film. Tests were done and I forget how far I got, but the plan foundered.
Garret FitzGerald’s brother Fergus, who was with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and his wife sometimes invited me for a meal. Her name was Una which made Italians chortle. ‘One what?’ they teased. ‘Una che?’ The query was as predictable as a bird call.
I was invited, too, by Beppo’s mother who, I began to suspect, was sizing me up to see if I would do as a daughter-in-law. His father was or had been a cavalry officer, and may have had access to good seats when the show jumping came to the Borghese Gardens. Either that, or Beppo himself splashed out generously. Those were the years when the d’Inzeo brothers, one in military, the other in police uniform, were winning trophies for Italy, and d’Oriola, a lean, brilliant civilian competitor, was doing so for France. There was also a German called Schockemöhle, but I can’t remember any Irish or English names at all, so the winners that year must have all been Continentals.
Everything about the city was thrilling: the shop windows, the shapely women wearing tight emerald green silk when it was warm and – this surprised me – Donegal tweed when cold. Green was fashionable that year, and so was Donegal tweed. This was lucky, for I had had a coat beautifully cut by my father’s Dublin tailor in that very fabric. I didn’t, however, have the Roman women’s swaying walk – their buttocks oscillated like pendulums – and neither, it seems to me now, do today’s Italians.
‘Whenever we go out together,’ Beppo told me, ‘I want you to wear that coat.’
I acquiesced. Show mattered. I had learned that on my first trip to Perugia, where the girl with whom I exchanged English conversation for Italian – her name comes back to me, Norma – owned only one dress. It was a nice one, though, and every afternoon at 6 p.m. it would appear freshly washed, ironed and ready for flaunting up and down the corso. Maybe going home at nine wasn’t only done for propriety? It gave you time to do your laundry as well!
Living in the Prati, I began to see how the less well off lived. I took mezza pensione, half-board, which provided fare that was next to inedible. The coffee was made with toasted barley, the bread was grey and the pasta sauce had a definite taste of cleaning fluid. Downstairs from the pensione, though, was a small shop which sold tasty take-away dishes which I would later search for in vain when staying in Venice or Florence. Italian recipes are regional, and my favourite Roman specialities, like supplì and carciofi alla romana rarely turned up in those cities.
*
On the eve of St Patrick’s Day in 1953 an article by Seán appeared in Life Magazine and vastly amused the surprise-party regulars. Entitled Love Among the Irish, its contention was that puritanism, plus poverty, misogyny and a lack of contraceptives, were on the point of snuffing out Irish sexuality and leading, especially in rural backwaters, to late or no marriage. The article had been written originally for a US anthology called The Vanishing Irish, which came out in 1954. The surprise-party guests nodded wisely. Edward, they had noticed, didn’t flirt much with girls. A second Irish male student was subjected to close scrutiny, and my standing with Beppo’s rather imperious mother may actually have been improved. Undersexed girls, she probably felt, could be easily handled.
Meanwhile, the second Irishman took it upon himself to inform me that Beppo would not be a good bet as a husband, because he had proposed that they share a garçonnière. Possibly to protect my good name, Beppo had made it clear that he planned to use the place not with me but with more wanton young women.
‘If he’s up to that now,’ said my compatriot, ‘think how it would be later.’
To my surprise, I felt relief on realising, as I hadn’t till then, that I had been feeling obligated to Beppo’s family because of their invitations to so many Sunday lunches. Now, released from this scruple, I celebrated by spending time with Edward, who, after some months’ absence, was back in Rome. He had gone home for Christmas, then, when his mother unexpectedly died, prolonged his stay. Her loss had hit him hard, and his rage with the world was on a hair-trigger. Curiously this, which might have been hard to deal with in Dublin, looked here like an effective way of dealing with the nets and snares of a tightly controlled, Lilliputian world.
Perhaps because he was busy in his bachelor pad, Beppo seemed unfazed by my taking drives with Edward. So we kept going on them, and only gave up when his car fell off the via Appia Antica, leaving us both upside down like capsized beetles inside an equally capsized vehicle. We had been visiting the glass tomb of Santa Maria Goretti, an eleven-year-old who had been canonised two years before for choosing death over the fate worse than death. Edward’s irritation at this choice of Catholic role model may have caused the accident.
*
Back in Dublin, to get in some intensive cramming for the studentship exam, I lay on the flat roof of Seán’s new study, wrapped in a rug which could be twitched off if the weak Irish sun came out for even a minute. I was trying for a tan while learning how late Latin developed into Old French. From time to time Eileen, eager to keep my brain fed, passed milk and sandwiches out through an upstairs window.
Getting me to France was as much her project as mine. Indeed her commitment to it was so keen that I wondered how she would cope if I were to succeed and leave her with no fresh challenges.
This guilt was joined by another, when a telegram came from Beppo announcing that he was coming to Dublin to talk to my father about our getting married. With speed and some shame, I sent a reply saying, ‘Please don’t come.’ Marriage, which I couldn’t remember either of us mentioning until now, was not on my agenda, and Paris was definitely where I wanted to go next. All six Morandy girls had dreamed of it, and I had appropriated their dream.
‘There are’, ran a saying which sounds less plausible than it once did, ‘more fish in the sea than ever came out of it.’ This to my mind applied to men but not to studentships. The one I was angling for only came around every four years, so had to be resolutely landed.
*
Having got it, though, I found that Paris was furred with grime and as dark as a Gustave Doré engraving. It would be a few years before André Malraux arranged for its house fronts to be cleaned. People were tired, snappish and xenophobic, and aid from the Marshall Plan, which had cheered up Rome, seemed to have made little impact here. There was less elegance in the streets; Sorbonne classes were overcrowded; latecomers were regularly obliged to sit on the floor, and readers to queue for seats in libraries. There were queues for everything, including the one for a student card without which you couldn’t queue for anything else, just as you couldn’t open a bank account without having an address, nor get an address without a bank account. In the end a letter from the Irish embassy sorted some of that out for me, but I still had to spend hours in the slowest queue of all, which was the nocturnal one outside the Students’ Lodging Bureau. Usually you only got one address at a time and, since many landladies stipulated that their tenants must be ‘metropolitains’ (code for ‘not coloured’), I failed at first to understand this and did not apply.
*
For a while I stayed in the Foyer International de la Jeune Fille on the boulevard Saint Michel, where my father, true to form, had pulled some American string. But this, like the convent in Rome, shut its doors early. And, as I was planning a thesis on French theatre and seeing all the plays I could, leaving before the final curtain was not an option. When expelled from the Foyer for trying to bribe its doorkeeper, I took refuge with three Dublin girls who had rented an O’Casey-style slum in an attic on the rue St Louis en Île, a dark and, at that time, unsavoury street which ran down the island’s middle like an intestine in a prawn.
Their attic was crammed with bedsteads and dominated by an ancient gas stove which looked, in the smeary gleam from lamps in the street below, like a bull rearing to charge.
Two of the girls, Katherine and Therese, later married the Iris
h poets Patrick Kavanagh and Tony Cronin. The third, Deirdre, had, like Therese, been an air hostess, and both, as was then expected of air hostesses, were pretty.
Katherine, though not pretty, was passionate and whenever we paused in a local café liked to sing a song about her uncle, who had been hanged by the English thirty-three years before. The waiters, who had no doubt heard generations of immigrants sing about their pride and woes, were tolerant. She sang so often that her song stuck in my memory and here is how it starts:
In Mountjoy Gaol one Monday morning,
High upon the gallows tree,
Kevin Barry gave his young life
In the cause of liberty.
Another martyr for old Ireland,
Another murder for the crown …
There were several more verses. In the wake of their own poor wartime record, many French people resented the English, and, if they had heard of Ireland at all, liked to think we did too. Katherine was happy to satisfy their expectations.
It was in that same workers’ café that Therese, back from a trip to Dublin, told us that she had had offers of marriage from two men we knew slightly and asked which we thought she should accept. I forget whether the others said anything, but I, foolishly, did. If she could really not decide, I suggested she marry the reliable one who might yet become a senator – as in time, one of her suitors actually did. The other, Cronin, was reputed to be a touch too fond of the drink.
‘Read his poems but don’t marry him,’ I no doubt advised, then forgot all about it.
What I failed to predict was that Therese, proud of turning down the high-flyer and revelling in her spotlit moment, would report what I’d said to Cronin.
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