He seems to have a butterfly trapped in his eyeball, its fluttering a torment to him. He sees something like a fern, obscuring his vision. Gradually the fern becomes a black spider squatting on his eye, blocking out the world.
Renata wipes his face, and murmurs an endearment. His daughter is acting as his mother. He feels himself the dead Christ of a Pietà.
Sightless, d’Annunzio is even more than usually sensitive to sound and scent. A dripping tap maddens him. The scent of hyacinths overpowers him. Music is consolation. He is listening to a Trio by Beethoven, whom he describes as “Flemish.” This is not the time for professing an admiration for a German composer. The music moves him to tears.
These recitals are frequent. D’Annunzio has what he calls his “Wartime Quintet,” peacetime musicians now turned soldiers and stationed at the gun batteries on the Lido. Their commanding officers are lenient in granting them time off to soothe the wounded hero. With one in particular, a cellist, d’Annunzio likes to discuss the manufacture of fine instruments. He dwells on the piquancy of a man’s working half the day with heavy guns, instruments of destruction, and half the day with an equally cumbersome but fragile contraption designed only to create beauty. While he lies in the dark, the musicians play in the next room, their audience of one (plus Renata and occasional privileged guests) is invisible to them, as they are to him.
The pianist Giorgio Levi comes to play Frescobaldi for him. D’Annunzio’s taste is catholic. He loves, as he always has done, Renaissance and baroque music. But since his sojourn in Paris he is interested too in modern experimental work. He listens to Debussy and to Scriabin.
Like Scriabin, and like Baudelaire before them, d’Annunzio is interested in correspondences between different sensory pleasures. At the Capponcina he used to scent his rooms with perfumes appropriate to the music he was listening to. Scriabin drew up a table of equivalences between musical notes and the colours he thought had affinities with them. As d’Annunzio listens blindly, the coloration of his visions changes periodically. The world he sees behind his closed eyelids is suffused with violet and purple. He sees a forest of amethyst trees. Flocks of birds swoop between them and perch on their branches. Now everything turns yellow, and all the birds are suddenly canaries.
By day Venice is silent, as lifeless, thinks d’Annunzio, as Angkor Wat. But at night come the sirens and the thunder of anti-aircraft guns.
As spring began, soldiers picked flowers on the killing fields of the Carso, dried them and sent them to d’Annunzio. Peasant women from the Abruzzi posted him packets of medicinal herbs and jars of ointment. Magical objects—talismans hallowed in some cases by a priest, in others by sorcery—accumulated in his dainty house with its décor dating from the age of enlightenment.
Fruit, sweets and other delicacies arrived in such quantities that d’Annunzio arranged for the surplus to be taken to the military hospital and given to the wounded. When his generosity became known, as it quickly did, even more gifts began to arrive.
On 2 April, by which time d’Annunzio had been laid up for five weeks, two of his young aviator friends came to visit him. On the following day they were to test a new aircraft that one of them, Luigi Bresciani, had designed himself. It would have a longer range than any currently in use. With d’Annunzio they talked excitedly about where they might go in it, what Austrian bases they could bomb. Bresciani was pale and slight, with long side-whiskers and thin lips. D’Annunzio thought he looked “like a little English officer of the time of Horatio Nelson.” Nelson, small, one-eyed, valiant, was someone about whom d’Annunzio liked to think.
Bresciani’s plane failed, and dropped into the sea. Both men were killed. Bresciani’s body was brought back to Venice. The other, Robert Prunas, was drowned, his body lost. Afterwards, as d’Annunzio dozed and dreamed, it seemed to him that the coffins of Miraglia and Bresciani were close on either side of him, walling him in. At high water d’Annunzio would hear the boats in the canal beneath his window jostling and thudding against the steps. Now the insistent dull thump became Prunas’s corpse, battering against the walls of his room as though begging to be taken in.
He wrote a poem, a variation on his favourite Icarus theme. Fifty winged youths have been confined to a quarry: the word d’Annunzio uses is an archaic one recalling the infamous quarries of ancient Syracuse where, according to Thucydides, prisoners taken during the Peloponnesian war were kept so tightly penned that the dead remained wedged upright among the living. D’Annunzio’s imagined boys are unable to fly, their wings (not made of wax like Icarus’s, but real and sentient) are painfully crushed—there is no space for them to be spread. The “enemy” appears, darkening the sky, wielding a great axe. He begins to lay about him, hacking off the beautiful tremulous wings. Blood spurts. Feathers are spoiled by gore, the boys are bleeding to death. As they drop, a space is cleared. One of them, stepping up on the mutilated bodies of his brothers, opens his wings, and flies up. “And all our eyes were full of sky,/As we lay supine on the feathers/And our race, unvanquished, took flight.”
Mass slaughter clears the space from which the superman can soar. D’Annunzio mourned the flyers, his friends, but he did not regret their deaths.
At night comes the sound of male voices singing. Three barges tugged by a motor boat are passing up the Grand Canal, full of new recruits on their way to the front. D’Annunzio is moved. The boatloads of fruit that arrive at the Rialto market are beautiful, but this “cargo of the fatherland”—flesh to be sacrificed—is more beautiful still.
D’Annunzio is recovering. He sleeps better, and has happier dreams. His subconscious (a term fast gaining currency) is as literary as his waking mind. He dreams he is in Scotland, or rather in the land of Walter Scott—his oneiric Scottish castle is a great deal better upholstered than the real thing would be. “Velvets in emerald green, straw-yellow, crimson, crow-black, and a dark green shot with gold.” D’Annunzio is pleased by the sofas (such comfortable items of furniture are rare in Italy) and by the rosy-cheeked ladies and little spaniels as lovely as those painted by Gainsborough and Reynolds. He wakes back into reality with regret.
He is allowed to remove his bandage for short periods. He gets up and walks across the room for the first time. He holds his head back, and keeps it as steady as possible. He thinks of paintings of the martyr St. Lucy, regularly depicted carrying her gouged-out eyes on a platter.
Easter is come round again. A year ago d’Annunzio buried his dog on Good Friday. Now he invokes the Christian rituals of sacrifice and mourning in describing his own “Passion.” The purple mist over his damaged eye is like the purple cloth which hides the altar during Passion Week. His confinement to bed has been like being nailed to a cross.
At last he is allowed to go outside. He insists on dressing in his uniform and notices with annoyance that the breeches, previously a perfect fit, pucker inelegantly around his shrunken knees. He wears a black silk bandage, a blackout against the daylight. Slowly, slowly. Down the stairs. Out into the garden. Instead of illusory flashes of amethyst and violet, he sees (through one carefully shaded eye) the real mauve of wisteria. He can take in the sweep of the Grand Canal, from the Palazzo Dario to the Salute. He is seeing again. Never one to balk at hubris, or at blasphemy, he makes the obvious connection. “It is Easter.” (Actually it’s the week after.) “It is the Resurrection.”
While d’Annunzio lay in his imagined tomb, the slaughter on the Italian Front went on, men dying in their tens of thousands while the line barely shifted.
D’Annunzio’s Easter rising was premature. Throughout the early summer of 1916 he was still convalescent, but able now to work, writing the autobiographical Licenza before the end of June. While he wrote, General Cadorna successfully resisted an attempt by Prime Minister Salandra to remove him from his command. Backed by the King, who was now spending more time in Cadorna’s base in Udine than he was in Rome, and by the press, the general held on to power, and Salandra lost it. Italy’s parliamentary democracy,
never strong, was being catastrophically weakened by the war. People began to refer to Cadorna’s headquarters as the “second government.” Employing an ancient Roman title which had been revived and popularised by Garibaldi, his supporters called him Il Duce. The word means guide as well as commander, and it conveys profound respect.
In August, Cadorna launched a series of attacks, and succeeded in driving the Austrian army back beyond Gorizia, gaining control of the right bank of the River Isonzo and the western Carso. Over 150,000 men (two-thirds of them Italian) were killed in eleven days. A strip of land between four and six kilometres wide changed hands. Italian troops arriving at last on Monte San Michele, the hill over which the two armies had been fighting for a year, wandered dazed among the blackened boots, spent cartridges and empty knapsacks. One officer recorded his disgust at the maggots which seemed not only to infest the unburied bodies, but to sprout out of the ground, so numerous and revolting were they. For those on the spot victory felt bathetic, its cost grotesque; but d’Annunzio, still in his dainty floral-sprigged refuge, was jubilant. He celebrated what he called “the sacred days of Gorizia” with a poem:
Swift as the wing that stoops in a streak,
The first shout rang out from victory’s peak.
D’Annunzio was awarded another silver medal for valour. The presentation was made before assembled crowds in St. Mark’s Square by the naval commander-in-chief. D’Annunzio, appearing in public for the first time since his crash, was heavily bandaged, but fit enough to make a stirring speech.
Temporarily out of action, he could still put his image to use. Romaine Brooks completed the portrait for which he had been sitting when he heard of Miraglia’s death. Convalescent, he sat for another one, by Ercole Sibellato, showing him as the wounded champion, with bent head and bandaged eye. He saw to it that a lithograph of Sibellato’s picture was made, and that hundreds of copies were distributed. He wrote to Antongini: “I perform the function of a mascot.”
He was called upon to endorse the newfangled “war bread.” Proper bread was virtually unobtainable. Now d’Annunzio declared the almost uneatable ersatz version the “bread of communion where the entire fatherland lives transubstantiated.” His vocabulary and syntax were becoming ever more liturgical. When America at last entered the war it was d’Annunzio who took it upon himself to welcome the new allies with an article syndicated all over the United States. “You were an enormous dull mass of wealth and power. And now behold how you have been transfigured into ardent, active spirit.” (Members of the “dull mass” were tolerant of being so described: d’Annunzio was a popular contributor to Hearst’s publications, his articles being telegraphed to Paris, where Antongini, whose English was passable, translated them and telegraphed them on.)
He was receiving visitors. Ojetti came and d’Annunzio received him “like a king.” His French friends, Susanne Boulanger and Madame Hubin, came in May. (Following page, with Aélis on left.) He escorted them around his favourite places in Venice. Maurice Barrès arrived. D’Annunzio entertained him to a soirée musicale à la Française, ordering his quartet to play Franck, Ravel and Scriabin. “He is true to his nature,” wrote Barrès afterwards, still “immersing himself in an atmosphere of the precious and the rare.”
On 13 September 1916, against medical advice, d’Annunzio flew again. Bologna was his pilot. Their plane was one of a squadron of bombers making a raid on Parenzo. D’Annunzio, his head still heavily bandaged, had four bombs tucked into the cockpit alongside his legs. The doctors had warned him that the fluctuating pressure at high altitude could blind him permanently and completely. As the plane rose, he alternately checked his eyesight, and released a smoke signal designed to help the squadron keep together. The notes passed between him and Bologna (Bologna’s in italic here) have survived:
2,200?
I can see.
2,600?
I can see, I can see.
3,000?
I can still see—climb, climb.
3,400?
I can see. Climb.
We’re coming down to 1,600.
Over the piazza. All four ready to hand.
They were right above the batteries. Bologna ducked and weaved between the trajectories of the shells. D’Annunzio pulled the pins from the bombs and lobbed them over the side.
Returned to base, d’Annunzio was helped from the cockpit by a crowd of young aviators who carried him shoulder high, celebrating his “rebirth.”
D’Annunzio dropped pamphlets, but he also dropped bombs. The machine gun that had blinded him was there so that he could kill people with it. He never mentions it, either in his public speeches or his private writings, but he must have been responsible for many deaths.
Kafka, watching aeroplanes fly at Brescia in 1909, wrote afterward of a troubling thought that had come to him: that to the pilots in the air, the great crowd of people of which he had been part must have melted into the plain, so that the people of which it was composed were no more human-seeming to the pilot than the guideposts or signalling masts. Though Kafka didn’t pursue the idea further, its psychological implications are clear. To the eye of the pilot—literally an Übermensch, an “above-person”—cities are no more than geometrical arrangements, and human beings mere sludge.
Men fighting on the ground could not escape from what was being done to them, and the more imaginative could hardly avoid making the small shift which allowed them to comprehend what they in turn were doing to their enemies. For the aviators it was different. The physical danger they faced was extreme, but they weren’t driven mad, as so many soldiers were, by the horror of mutual slaughter. Far enough up to be spared the sights and smells of battle, they never needed to know how many people they killed or mutilated, how many homes they destroyed. In the cleanliness of the upper air they could, like Miraglia, fly singing, pitiless and guiltless, in the sun.
An aesthete’s night out. D’Annunzio wanted to try out a famous echo purportedly to be heard in the Sacca della Misericordia, the enclosed harbour on the northern edge of Venice. Taking with him his “wartime quintet” and a celebrated soprano, d’Annunzio visited the place by gondola. The narrow craft was crowded. The cellist remained standing, with his cello upright beside him. He had swathed the instrument in his cloak and playfully stuck his hat on top of it. In the gloaming it looked like a human being, or like a ghost.
As they circled the Sacca, the singer cleared her throat and sang an aria. Then the gondoliers ceased to row and as they drifted silently she began trying single notes, first high, then low, pausing after each to listen for a response. Nothing. A fleeting echo. Again nothing. It was a breathlessly still night, with no stars. The hulking zattere, floating wooden quays, reminded d’Annunzio of rafts crowded with the shipwrecked, or with quarantined plague victims.
They were about to leave when, abruptly they heard a sombre, distant bellowing. D’Annunzio raised his hand (just visible as a pale shape) to still the rowers. His companion were all grey in the almost-darkness, as spectre-like as the weird cello man in their midst. Someone said: “It’s the guns on the Isonzo.”
D’Annunzio had a new lover, Olga Brünner Levi. She was in her thirties, a talented singer and pianist whose husband had one of the finest private music libraries in Italy. The couple lived in the splendid sixteenth-century Palazzo Vidal, a short walk from the Casetta Rossa. D’Annunzio was often there, alone or bringing along his dinner companions with the easy licence of an intimate friend of the family. Olga’s husband was complaisant. (Aélis, who was well informed about anything relating to her master’s intimate affairs, believed that the marriage was unconsummated.) Soon d’Annunzio had given Olga new names—Balkis, after the legendary Queen of Sheba, Vidalità, after her house, and Venturina, after the gold-spangled brown Murano glass which reminded him of her eyes—and was writing her the first of over a thousand letters.
Olga was from Trieste. Her father and other relatives were cut off in the “unredeemed” city: she shared d’A
nnunzio’s determination to see it annexed to Italy. They shared their politics, and their love of music. He called her “crazy little one,” and adored the way she lisped over her “s’s, but he wrote to her as to an equal and friend. His letters are full of riddles and coded jokes. He pours out his thoughts and feelings unselfconsciously, playfully tossing off obscene or satirical couplets, composing mock haiku and punning mottoes, all with an apparent confidence in Olga’s being able to follow his flow through Latin and Spanish, to appreciate his humour, to catch his allusions and sympathise with his sombre reflections on war and on Italy’s future.
He enjoyed watching her take off her long black stockings, enjoyed it so much that he seldom allowed her to finish. Stockings—newly on show as hemlines rose to several inches above the ankle—were much on his mind. There are a lot of mentions of them in his notebooks for this period: the way they at once hide and reveal the skin, the way downy hairs poke out through the weave, the way peeling them off Olga’s legs was like unsheathing a sword. Flying over Lake Garda he thought that the promontory of Sirmione was like a brown silk stocking into which a woman had thrust her arm in order to turn it inside out, an image which tells us more about his preoccupations than it does about topography. He added one of Olga’s stockings to the collection of magical objects he took in his pockets when making a dangerous flight.
Olga permitted him plenty of pleasures. “Pentella has never been so soft and hot and velvety as during those four orgasms [his emphasis] before Saturday lunch.” No more furtive sore-kneed fumbling in gondolas. She would come to his house and lie on his couch while he sniffed and licked every part of her, dwelling especially on the shadowy hollows of her body. His letters to her are full of sexual gusto. “Last night the taste and smell of you drove me crazy. You smile, because each time I say the same thing. But each time you please me more.” She gave him a kitten, whose playfulness and little pink nose delighted him in much the same way that his “brown tail-less Triestina” did.
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 40