Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  It is necessary to declare the imprudence of issuing hasty moral judgments on such human cases. Certainly the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of the individual big and small collaborators . . . is always difficult to evaluate.

  Was Silone so wracked by guilt that he scripted the minor figure of Luigi Murica as a form of confession? The historian Mimmo Franzinelli, in his monumental study of the Fascist secret police, describes Silone as “a polyhedral personality and difficult to decipher” (una personalitá poliedrica e di ardua decifrazione) and the caso Silone as “incredibly complex, thick with psychological, familial, and political implications, ultimately entangled with the arrest of Romolo.” Franzinelli argues that Silone was indeed the author of the letters to Bellone, but that those letters were drafted only after Romolo’s arrest in 1928, and concludes that the episode must be seen in the context of the author’s anti-Fascist novels, “an effective denunciation of the intrinsically tyrannical characteristics of the Mussolini regime.” Silone’s “posthumous misfortune has been the excessive hagiographers or detractors compared to the scholars interested in understanding his complex existential itinerary.”

  Writing to an aspiring writer and poet who had sent him some verses in 1938, Silone defended his coldness on their initial meeting. “Among the illnesses fascism has inflicted upon us, this is not the smallest: not being able to distinguish with certainty between friend and enemy.” In his famous autobiographical essay “Emergency Exit,” Silone, referring to the crisis that led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and his subsequent recounting of it, made a distinction between “disciplined, bureaucratic confessions which are imposed by orthodoxy” (surely thinking of the notorious Stalin show trials) and his own idealized “free” confession, made by one who has conquered his own fear. More ambiguously, he argued that “in determining the origins and development of questions of conscience the chronology of memory is more dependable than the chronology of archives.”

  The writer and critic Luce d’Eramo, who came to know Silone well at the end of his life and who had a murky Fascist past herself, wrote in her autobiography that one of our most tenacious and varied aspirations was “the eternal human dream of correcting the past.” Silone’s lifelong guilt over his relationship with Bellone was responsible for some of the most poignant and powerful fiction of the twentieth century.

  Late in life, Silone intriguingly revealed in an interview that “there is a secret in my life; it is written between the lines of my novels.” Was he referring to his relationship with Bellone or something else entirely? With most of the protagonists in this most recent controversy long dead, we may never really untangle the mystery of whether and why Silone may have spent as much as a decade (or as little as two years) writing to Bellone. The answer—if there is one—lies, like Silone, somewhere in the no-man’s-land between hagiography and the archives.

  EPILOGUE

  THAT WHICH REMAINS

  Tormented olive trees on the tufa outcroppings of Matera Oh the bitter poems of dead seasons!

  —ROCCO SCOTELLARO, “The Cavalcade of the Bruna”

  In February 1970, the religious writer Sergio Quinzio, who had contributed to Tempo Presente for a decade and whose young wife, Stefania, had just died, was surprised by an unannounced condolence call from Silone. Old, tired, finding it physically difficult to navigate the increasingly chaotic streets of Rome, Silone still felt it necessary to pay his respects to a colleague. Although clearly moved by the writer’s gesture, Quinzio was not susceptible to the hagiography that was to surround Silone after his death eight years later. In an essay recalling their collaboration on Tempo Presente, Quinzio asked some pointed questions concerning Silone’s insistence that socialism could inspire hope, even after the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century. Silone’s sentiments were, according to Quinzio, “noble, but weak.” By the late twentieth century—faced with the “continuous defeat of hope suffocated within the coils of power”—was it still possible or ethical to insist on hope? Could the peasants and workers of the past and the present, having lost all ingenuity in waiting for the final, always imminent yet never-quite-arriving triumph, accept the idea of a hope that was destined always to fail? This was the tragic absurdity that Silone has asked us to accept and even embrace. Our only true dignity is our ability to fight against insurmountable odds, to move from hatred to indifference through tolerance to compassion and friendship to love. “Amo ergo sum,” says Rocco De Donatis with an innocent smile to Stella. “It’s the surest proof of all.”

  Silone has left us on a threshold, asking us to pursue an ideal of justice that may be illusory. Our only salvation is in a compassionate encounter with human beings who suffer and struggle against a common fate. “There can be nothing inevitable,” Silone wrote in 1965, “about matters involving the human mind and heart.” His socialism was tinged with irony and his fervent religiosity was tempered with skepticism. In March 1969, on receiving the Jerusalem Prize for literature, he concluded his acceptance speech with an impromptu quote from the founder of the mystical Hasidic movement, the Baal Shem Tov, which he had just read at Yad Vashem: “Forgetfulness leads to exile; remembrance is the secret to redemption.” Simone Weil had taught him that those who seek justice cannot find it in the camp of the conquerors. But as Severina lies dying, her friend from the convent, Sister Gemma, desperately asks her if she still believes. Severina’s last words are ambiguous: “I hope, Sister Gemma, I hope. What remains is hope.”

  To the director of the Soviet state publishing house, Silone once argued that “freedom is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of trying, of experimenting, of saying no to any authority, literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, or political.” She responded that there was no need for such freedoms when the state had sanatoriums instead. Reflecting on the absurd exchange, Silone could only conclude that “there is no worse slavery than the one of which you are unaware.” While communism was a finite, historical experiment (four decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Silone had argued that “the experience of Communism itself would kill Communism”), socialism was an eternal longing embedded in the nature of human beings striving to be free, a “permanent aspiration of the human spirit, which thirsts after social justice.” He called them “insane truths” (verità pazze):

  It is in essence an extension of the moral criteria of private life to all social life. It is an ideal for the further humanization of our earthly existence by bringing under man’s domination the economic forces which tend to oppress him.

  Added to these “insane truths” later in life was a reverence for “that which incessantly drives mankind to surpass itself and that which is at the root of his unallayable anxiety” (inappagabile inquietudine).

  Decades of clandestine political life underground had been a long and sad adventure that had left him with “the ashen taste of a wasted youth.” He recognized the essentially tragic nature of his fate: “a revolt inspired by the desire for freedom can be a trap,” but even this was better than “supine acceptance of one’s fate.” Whenever he reflected on these “misfortunes,” Silone felt rise within him “an unhappy bitterness which might have been impossible for me to escape.” To those who accused him of writing the same book over and over again, Silone pleaded guilty but insisted that “if a writer puts all of himself in his writing (and what else can he put into it?), his work inevitably forms a single book.” More ambiguously he claimed that “one who returns having made the journey is no longer the same.” Carlo Levi recognized what Silone had discerned in the Mezzogiorno when, in his classic of empathetic ethnography, Christ Stopped at Eboli, he noted that “the greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption.”

  _____

  Although Silone had left Pescina a
t fifteen, Pescina never left him. “Had I ever forgotten these people or this land? Had I ever imagined anything which did not have its beginning and its end in this place?” Once, when he was traveling on foot to a nearby town, he paused at the entrance to the village, stricken with an inexplicable fear. He wanted to turn and run away, “but in that village the bread must have been coming out of the ovens just at that moment,” and perhaps he recalled an ancient memory of his grandmother plaintively asking him as he left Pescina about who would bake his daily bread. Rooted to the spot, “a gust of wind brought me the good smell of fresh bread, which moved and reassured me.” Fifty years after the earthquake, he would still describe Pescina as a place “where the poor who had escaped from their ruined huts were living in the mud, in caves, and in barracks, and had to keep fires burning at night to frighten the wolves away.”

  Late in life and feeling the passing of time, Silone made a surreptitious visit back to Pescina for the purpose of choosing a site for his final resting place. He recounted the episode in the short story “At the Foot of an Almond Tree”:

  What is the particular sadness felt by anyone who attempts, after years of absence from a region where he once lived for a long time, who stops to observe, without being seen or recognized, the ordinary unwinding of life? I am trying to understand it, while from the top of this hill I contemplate the heap of gray and black houses of my native town.

  I got off the train a little while ago and, not having any luggage, I was able to leave the station quickly. On arrival there were few people and nobody noticed me. So much the better. I hadn’t told anyone of my return; even in town nobody was expecting me. Quickly I took the shortcut between the hedges of brambles and the vineyards, but on the slope I became short of breath. Eh, I’m not a kid anymore. In my memory this path was less steep and longer. Instead, as soon as I surmount the small hill, there it is already, in front of me, the town.

  It appears unexpectedly, in its ancient and dark abyss. At the sight of it, I don’t know why, I lost my breath and I slowed my step. I looked around, searching for a stone or some grass on which to rest. I am not in a hurry, since no one awaits me.

  Now I find myself at the foot of an almond tree, a little distant from the path. A few steps below, at a bend in the main road, rises a cross that the Passionist fathers erected many years ago, at the end of a Lenten sermon.

  From here I can observe the most ancient part of the inhabited area. It is the first hour of the evening; the Ave Maria must have just sounded. A light purplish fog, formed from the damp and from the smoke of the fireplaces, flutters on the ditch of the river and disguises, between the houses and the stalls, the voids left, around half a century ago, by the earthquake. I see a long line of wagons, returning from the countryside, rising up along the road close to the river and scattering between the houses. A few women and children leave the church: some novena must be in progress. I see a quiet man leaning at the door of an inn, with his shoulder resting against the doorjamb. However, no voice reaches me, not even the slightest sound, perhaps because the wind blows in the opposite direction. It’s as if I were present at the projection of an old silent film, dark and slightly worn-out.

  In other times I knew every alley of this confined place, every house, every fountain, and which young girl, at what times, drew water from the fountain; I knew every door, every window, and who leaned out facing you, at what time. For fifteen years this was the closed perimeter of my adolescence, the known world and its frontiers, the prefabricated scenery of my secret anguishes. But—now I realize—the feeling that just before stopped my steps is not the common anxiety of emigrants, nor the anguish or terror of certain elderly men before the inevitable flowing of time, but rather something else.

  I try to understand. This reality that is now before me I have carried around with me for many years, it is an integral, indeed a central part of myself, and I felt myself in it; certainly not at its center, yet nonetheless an integral part of it. Instead, now that I have it before me, it reveals itself to me for what it is, an extraneous world that continues to live of its own account, even without me, in the manner that is proper to it, with naturalness and indifference. In other words, not unlike how an anthill would appear to me. This is the way, I think, that the final unwinding of a human life will be seen by a dead man, if, after a certain number of years, he is able to see.

  Following this reflection, I feel the earlier, confused apprehension clarify into a humble and desolate state of mind: that of the irremediable loneliness and precariousness of individual existence. I wonder why I have returned and I think of leaving immediately. But the sound of footsteps drawing near holds me back. It is an old woman, dressed—as the poor do—in black, carrying a heavy bundle of dry branches on her back, a sight that is certainly not novel in our part of the world, halfway between the plain and the mountain. Careful about where to place her feet, she is not aware of my presence. It is I who recognize her. She is a neighbor of ours. One of her sons, in elementary school, was my friend and classmate. What misfortunes could have reduced her to such a state? Her husband, her children are no longer alive. I get up to join her. Perhaps she will accept some help carrying the firewood.

  Today, the significance of the almond tree is regrettably lost; even Silone’s contemporaries had forgotten it. Once, while driving with a friend through the Abruzzo in early March, the two came upon an almond tree that was in full bloom in the midst of a barren field. “It’s a miracle,” the driver exclaimed. “It is,” Silone remarked. “Don’t you know the explanation in Abruzzo for the early blooming of the almond tree?” The Holy Family, persecuted by the thugs of Herod, fled to Egypt with the Madonna and Child atop a donkey and St. Joseph leading them on foot. When Herod’s assassins approached, Madonna and Child climbed into its branches while St. Joseph pretended to sleep at the foot of the almond tree. “Why an almond tree?” asked the friend. “Because it is the tree with the hardest wood in the Mediterranean,” answered Silone “and has a configuration of branches that is easiest to climb.” When the tree felt mother and child seek refuge in its branches, it immediately burst into a profusion of flowers to hide them both. “Unfortunately, it is a risky precociousness,” Silone darkly warned his friend, “if, because of the season, there comes a frost.” Life is precocious and precarious, as is love. “All real love,” Silone wrote in 1965, “is inevitably tinged with a tragic sense of precariousness.”

  In life, Silone could not return to Pescina, as he could not return to the church, but in death he found his final resting place overlooking the place—the paese dell’anima—that he carried within him in exile and in Rome. “The olive oil” of the town, he once wrote, “had a slightly bitter flavor; incidentally just like the milk, the water, the wine, the fruit, the bread, and the whole rest of the region . . . To appreciate it you must not have a depraved heart.”

  On my last visit to Pescina, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to the cross mentioned by Silone in his short story. I tried climbing the mountainside but could not reach the summit. So I returned to Silone’s tomb and from there spied a dirt path that led to a paved road and I reached the cross by a more roundabout route, passing an old shepherd tending his sheep who pointed out the way to me. There it stands, an iron cross, vigilant over the town, a symbol for Silone not of the promise of the Easter Resurrection but of an eternal Good Friday. The almond tree proved more elusive. After forty years could it have still been standing? I wondered whether I was searching for something that had been lost or something that had never really existed. Disappointed at not finding the tree, I turned to make my way back to the town with a melancholy heart. But there, by the side of the road, was a wizened old almond tree that I imagined as “Silone’s” tree, still with some fruit despite the late season. I plucked a handful of almonds. Their milk had dried and they were bitter, reminding me of the line from García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequ
ited love.” It also called to mind a passage from Silone: “Giuditta . . . brought a basket of almonds to the table—the only fruit that is grown in the valley. They are very small, very hard almonds; one has to use force to crack them open, and they are often very bitter.” As the hillside was strewn with garbage, there was no place to sit and rest. I remembered Don Benedetto’s remark in Bread and Wine: “Perhaps,” he cautioned his students, “the truth is sad.”

  Ignazio Silone struggled all his life—in politics and in literature—to bring dignity and humanity to those whose lives were often sacrificed to greed and power. His own internal struggle was no less titanic: an anguished entanglement with both the secular promise of socialism and the transcendent vision of Christianity. Unlike the biblical Jacob, Silone wrestled with two angels and both failed him. He was forced to realize that he had sought in politics that which politics could not grant him. And through Don Orione, Silone was left with the profound sadness that “Christianity’s place in modern society was more tragic and contradictory” than the church would have us believe. Reading aloud Tolstoy’s story “Polikushka” to a group of peasants in Pescina at age fifteen, Silone had come to the conclusion that divine compassion “does not relieve a creature of his pain, yet on the other hand does not abandon him but helps him to the end, without ever revealing itself.”

  In the darkest days of World War II, a German Communist Silone had known immediately after World War I came to see him. The man was now gray and had suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis. In a voice filled with both hope and trepidation, he told Silone that he had come upon a great and new revelation: “We ought to treat other men the way we would like to be treated ourselves!” Silone could only smile with melancholy and did not dare to remind the man that this truth was already very old. But what did it matter? The man had come to the truth by his own path. “In the saddest trials of our lives,” Silone concluded, “we save ourselves by having stubbornly preserved in our souls the seed of some incorruptible certainty.”