Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Trapped for days beneath the rubble, Romolo had suffered a broken shoulder; Silone saved himself by standing in the architrave of the seminary in Pescina where he was studying.

  With his father dead four years, five of his six siblings dead in childhood, and now the death of his mother, Silone found himself alone in the village with eleven-year-old Romolo. Their maternal grandmother, Vincenza Delli Quadri, took them in and somehow managed to secure the patronage of Queen Elena of Italy for the boys. In the aftermath of the earthquake, Silone came to a bitter realization: Although the Italians had had more than their share of foreign invasions, wars, and natural calamities in more than two millennia of existence, the country would be destroyed not in war or earthquake but in the aftermath of catastrophe. That’s when envy, jealousy, deceit, and greed—often just barely kept in check by society’s forces of order in the form of the law and the church—came boiling to the surface. Surely the Italians would destroy themselves when foreigners failed. A pathetic letter to Romolo several months later, just days after Italy entered World War I, reveals the depths of Silone’s despair.

  Pescina 25 May 1915

  Dearest brother,

  Every misfortune is followed by misfortunes! After the earthquake came the war and after the war will come . . . who knows what will come after the war? Because of the war I had to return to Pescina since the seminary of Chieti was requisitioned by the government as a military hospital. Alas! I have returned to Pescina. I have seen again with tears in my eyes the horrible ruins. I have returned to the wretched hovels, some covered by a few rags as in the first days, where the people live with a horrible disregard of gender, age, or condition. I have seen again our house where I witnessed, with eyes exhausted from tears, our pale, ravaged mother pulled from the ruins. Now her body is buried and yet it seemed to me that her voice calls out. Perhaps the ghost of our mother now inhabits those ruins unconscious of our fate; it seems as though it calls us to be embraced in her bosom.

  I saw the place where you fortunately were unearthed. I have seen everything again . . . And now? . . . Now what will I do? I cannot take the exams because I would have to go to some city and that would cost money that can’t be found.

  But then, then where will I go? How uncertain and perhaps terrible is my future. I see myself with studies interrupted, without any material or moral aid, yes even moral! But a glimmer of hope has appeared to me: While I was at Chieti a lady from the Royal Court of Her Majesty Queen Elena came to see me and promised to look after me. The lady was part of the charitable foundation of Queen Elena for orphans and she told me that she had already been to visit you at Sacro Cuore. I don’t know the name of the lady, or else I would write it to you; if you find out, write to me immediately. I don’t know what to do, I try to hope still, then . . . whatever happens happens, I will accept it. If you only knew how one suffers here! . . . If you can do something for me, please do it. Recommend me to some lady who comes to visit you; consult with the superior, to whom I send my most humble greetings.

  Affectionate kisses,

  Secondo

  Romolo was treated for his broken shoulder in a hospital and, under the patronage of Queen Elena, sent to a school in Rome. With the collapse of the family home, Silone lived in the poorest and “least respectable” part of town, which consisted of one-story huts lacking running water or electricity. To reach this part of town, one had to cross a ditch that the local authorities had dubbed the Tagliamento after the river that acted as the front line between the warring Italian and Austrian armies in the north. In short, it was “enemy territory.” In some strange way, the inhabitants liked this nickname and they soon took measures appropriate to a war zone. Street lamps were smashed, plunging the neighborhood into perpetual darkness and making it dangerous for the police—or anyone else—to enter at night. “Any unlucky person,” Silone recalled mischievously, “was welcomed by a volley of stones from unknown provenance.”

  What surprised the young boy most was the matter-of-factness with which the townspeople seemed to accept the catastrophe. It was this eternal resignation that he could not countenance. In a world where injustice was so infrequently punished, earthquakes were simply accepted as plausible devices in a dramaturgical setting. If anything, the peasants were surprised that earthquakes did not occur more frequently. “In an earthquake,” Silone wrote a half century later, “everyone dies: rich and poor, learned and illiterate, authorities and the people. An earthquake accomplishes what words and laws promise and never achieve: the equality of all. An ephemeral equality, for when fear had died down, collective misfortune became the opportunity for even greater injustices.”

  The injustices included massive corruption in the distribution of funds to alleviate the suffering of the earthquake’s victims and to begin the process of reconstruction. Silone’s first published essays were a young man’s j’accuse against the local authorities for this breach of the public’s trust. Two were published in the Socialist daily newspaper Avanti! The third essay was killed when a prominent Socialist lawyer intervened with the paper’s editorial board. Silone soon discerned that the system of deception and fraud oppressing the people was vaster than he had imagined and had invisible ramifications.

  In the aftermath of the earthquake, relief workers from the north appeared in Pescina. The people of Pescina were shocked: a millennial insularity had decreed that one simply buried the dead and attempted to take up the thread of life after a natural calamity; there had never been a tradition of mutual assistance. Now, the peasants of the Marsica region were inundated with well-intentioned volunteers and paid workers from the state and they were simply amazed. An anecdote reveals the wide gulf separating the victims from their benefactors.

  A week or two after the earthquake, supplies began to arrive from Milan. Besides clothing and food, there were prefabricated houses. But the architects of the north had built these houses with a mistaken premise: The kitchen in modern times was to be used only for the preparation of food, while the actual consumption of food was to take place in a “dining” room. Supplies were to be stored in the cellar. The family was to spend most of its time in the “living” room. When the people of Pescina took possession of these houses, the first thing they did was take an ax and hammer and destroy the internal layout. Not the exterior, for they did not want to hurt the feelings of the kind people from Milan, but the interiors were totally reconfigured. The typical peasant family in Pescina, in Abruzzo, and in the Mezzogiorno spent most of the day in the kitchen (often the only room with heat). The prefabricated houses, built to be used for a period of six months, were still in use a half century later.

  Now officially orphans, Silone and Romolo were charges of the state. In the autumn of 1915, Silone was sent to a school in Rome, but the experience proved disastrous. The school, named after the severe pope and saint Pius X, was run by a recently organized order of religious zealots and was built near the Campo Verano cemetery. The dismal architecture was compounded by the character of the neighborhood. The local shops were tied to the funeral business and sold tombstones. “In those days,” Silone recalled, “the vehicles most frequently seen on the street were hearses.” The gloom of the surroundings was matched by that of the headmaster and preceptor of the school. The other children were from Rome and sons of the petite bourgeoisie. Silone immediately felt the onus of being the outcast. To the other boys, he was a cafone, a rube, a hick, a simpleton from the countryside. Compounding the frustration was the fact that Silone was immediately recognized by his teachers as the brightest student of the lot and often held up as an example to the others. This, of course, did nothing to endear him to his classmates.

  So it seemed almost preordained that one day, just before Christmas, Silone would flee school. It was simple enough: a coal truck making a delivery, the gate to the courtyard wide open, a few steps, and he was on the “outside.” Wandering through the dismal streets, he didn’t realize the impact of his gesture until he passed a police station.
Then the magnitude of his “crime” became apparent. But the most disturbing aspect was that there was no explanation that he could offer his superiors upon his return three days later. The headmaster was understandably furious but also baffled. When interrogated, the young boy could offer no reason for his insubordination. The headmaster “must have been surprised at my apathy, in strange contrast with my recent rebellion. Maybe he sensed the presence in me of something he could not understand.” Silone was expelled.

  Between Hope and Despair: Don Luigi Orione

  At a certain point in his young adulthood, Silone abandoned the church. His departure was anything but unusual. In 1917, at the age of seventeen, when the country was in the midst of a world war and experiencing a profound political and moral crisis, Silone was astonished and dismayed that the Roman Curia could bring itself out of its lethargy only to condemn “women’s immodest dress, promiscuous bathing on the beaches, new dances of exotic origin, and traditional bad language.” He could no longer accept the “backwardness, the passivity, the conformist behavior of the clergy” in the face of such monumental questions as the war, the Russian Revolution, or the rise of fascism. More than half a century after the events, Silone still recalled the formation of the first peasant agrarian leagues and the response of the local curia: Private property was a divinely sanctioned institution and the very idea of organizing the peasants and workers anathema to God’s law. The church was even against the much more modest and conservative demands of the new secular state. In the seminary schools, Silone was encouraged to read the works of Antonio Bresciani (1798–1862), a Jesuit priest. One passage in particular struck the young boy: In a fictional scene, the idealist hero of the Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, exiled in London, is giving advice to a young Italian patriot: “Try to encourage vice,” Bresciani depicts Mazzini as saying, “because only from vice can the sentiment for freedom be born.” Silone would later plaintively ask: “How could one remain in such a Church?”

  Yet there are indications from his autobiographical writings and the alter ego protagonists of his novels that he felt a great attraction to the vocation of religious life. In the first novel he wrote after his return to Italy after exile, a priest states that Rocco De Donatis “was the object of the clearest call from God that I have ever witnessed. That he did not follow it is one of those mysteries that only God can explain and judge. But although he did not obey his vocation he has constantly demanded from secular life the absolute quality that he could have found only in a monastery. For this reason he is in a tragic, absurd situation.”

  Yet an episode a day or two after the earthquake had planted a seed of hope in Silone’s mind, a seed of hope that until his death never died yet never burst forth in full plenitude. While the survivors were digging through the rubble, still searching for the living and the dead, a slightly built priest arrived from Rome. In a torn, dirty cassock and a beard of several days’ growth, Don Luigi Orione had collected a flock of forlorn children orphaned by the quake. Silone was among them. In the confusion, a spectacle never before seen in those parts unfolded before their eyes. King Vittorio Emanuele III and his entourage, in a public display of noblesse oblige and empathy, had arrived from Rome to inspect the damage. Don Luigi, sensing divine intervention, immediately attempted to commandeer one of the entourage’s vehicles to take the orphans to Rome. (The rail lines had been broken by the earthquake.) The carabinieri (military police) guarding the car naturally protested. Don Luigi insisted to the point of almost coming to blows with them. The king, noticing the commotion, demanded to know what was happening. Without the slightest sense of intimidation, and fully aware of Vittorio Emanuele’s rabid anticlericalism, Don Luigi calmly explained why he needed the vehicle in question. Under the circumstances, the monarch could hardly refuse. Silone witnessed this episode with amazement and admiration. Little did he know at the time that the “strange priest,” Don Luigi Orione, would prove to be a decisive figure in his life. Of the three great traumas in Silone’s life (the other being his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1931), Don Orione was a critical protagonist in two: the earthquake that killed Silone’s mother and the arrest, imprisonment, torture, and death of his brother Romolo.

  Don Luigi Orione (1872–1940) was born in Pontecurone in the Piedmont region and studied with Giovanni Luigi Bosco, who inspired in the young boy a life dedicated to the service of others. Orione founded the Piccola Opera della Divina Provvidenza, which included priests, monks, nuns, hermits, and lay associations dedicated to both the active and the contemplative life. Their mission was devoted to education and pastoral care. Don Orione, through his indefatigable efforts and inspired resourcefulness, established dozens of schools along the Italian peninsula. In 1980, Pope John Paul II proclaimed him “blessed,” the penultimate stage before sainthood, and in May 2004, the same pope raised Orione to sainthood. The fact that Don Orione kept Silone’s letters, before the latter had become famous as a writer, is indicative of the weight he gave their relationship.

  The 1915 event was not Don Orione’s first brush with earthquakes—or with wolves: In 1908, he had rushed to the Mezzogiorno in the aftermath of an earthquake that killed nearly one hundred thousand people. In 1915, before departing for Pescina, Orione had outfitted three houses in Rome to receive children orphaned by the quake. On arriving in the ravaged mountain region, his car was attacked by wolves. With five terrified children in the car, Don Orione calmly remarked, “how fond these big dogs are of us.”

  In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Silone remained for some time in Pescina with his maternal grandmother while Romolo was sent to the Istituto San Filippo in Rome. Silone eventually joined him in Rome but at the Istituto Pio X. After Silone’s impetuous abandonment of the institute, Don Orione accompanied him to a new seminary, the San Romolo in San Remo (where Orione would die in March 1940). The train ride, taking an entire night, was recounted by Silone more than once. Accompanying them was another orphan from Pescina, Gaetano Piccinini, who had lost mother, father, and most of his extended family in the quake. (Piccinini would eventually join Orione’s order and corroborate the most important episodes concerning the strange priest and the strange Socialist.)

  After the debacle at the school in Rome, Silone had been sent back to Pescina. Propitiously, it was Silone’s grandmother who made arrangements for the young man to be placed under the care and tutelage of Don Orione. Silone would travel to Rome, where Don Orione would accompany him to a new school in San Remo on the Ligurian coast. The San Romolo school had in fact been established by Don Orione after the disastrous earthquake of 1908. Romolo, meanwhile, had been taken by Don Orione to a seminary school in Tortona. On arriving at the train station and not recognizing the priest, Silone was disappointed in thinking that the authorities had sent not Don Orione but a lowly subordinate. To make clear his hostility, Silone demanded that the priest carry his luggage and, when asked if he would like something to read from the newsstand, impertinently asked for Avanti! the Socialist (and rabidly anticlerical) Party newspaper. When, on the train, the misidentification was cleared up, Silone was acutely embarrassed and apologized for making the priest carry his bags. Don Orione engaged the boy with a particularly brilliant response: “My real vocation, a secret which I want to tell you, would be to live like a real donkey of God, a real donkey of Divine Providence.” This led to a spirited disquisition on the nature of donkeys. In the seminary, Orione had willingly shouldered the burdensome tasks avoided by the other boys, such as carrying heavy pails of water from the local well. Orione reveled in being the seminary’s “donkey.” Silone often returned to the icon of the donkey in his writings and his personal life. When Giuseppe Delogue, seeking to make fun of Silone’s appearance, called Silone a “cavallo di cartone” (a papier-mâché horse), Silone shot back with his customary ironic humor: “better an asino di cartone, but perhaps you Tuscans don’t have the same idea of the donkey as I do.”

  In Don Orione, Silone sensed “the goodn
ess and clear-sightedness which are sometimes found in certain old peasant women, in certain grandmothers, who have patiently endured all kinds of trouble and who therefore know and can guess at the most secret sufferings.” At times, Silone “had the impression that he saw me more clearly than I saw myself, but this was not an unpleasant impression.” That evening as the train made its way up the coast with the sound of the Tyrrhenian Sea outside the compartment’s windows, deeply engaged in conversation with Don Orione, the young boy sensed the beginning of a new life. “I seemed to be on my way to discovering the world.” When the two travelers arrived in San Remo at noon, Don Orione told Silone that he would have to depart that day. Silone, perhaps thinking of losing his father and mother so recently, was heartbroken. “I began to feel an entirely new pain taking shape in the depths of my being.”