Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  The exchange among us all during those after-dinner groupings over coffee in the salotto made hours race past till bedtime. I think of the conversation as moving like a loom, with threads feeding easily into place, warp and weft interlacing.

  Of course, we drank too much at times, but there was much shared affection and high spirits untouched by meanness, and the days flew. Working through the mornings in my narrow monk’s cell (the Mattinglys had a whole apartment, but most rooms were simply former cells), I began to see my novel take shape and march along.

  One day a strange thing occurred. I was sitting alone in the late afternoon, writing a letter in one of the two salotti, when through the door came a robed man with a black beard. He walked uncertainly toward me and sat down. He asked in very limited English what I was doing. I said I was writing a letter. He seized my hand. “I luff you,” he said, several times over. I extracted my hand with difficulty. He asked to go to my room. I said I had a letter to write. Presently, he got up and wandered away.

  I guessed that he was one of the Lebanese monks from whom Madame Dinesen leased the hotel. But I had altogether forgotten the incident until, at dinner, where we were all busily eating, the door burst open and here came the monk. He was walking even more uncertainly and began to wander about the dining hall.

  A lady staying there was the daughter of a New England Congregationalist minister. Her name was Alice Carter-Foy and she had a character to go with her snow-white hair and gentle smile. The monk approached her. She leaned forward graciously ready to attend to his every need. He grasped her hand. Within seconds Mrs. Carter-Foy had recoiled with a crimson face, there was general consternation, and the dining-room steward was summoning the manager. My guess was that he had announced he luffed her, too.

  When I think of him I recall Chekhov’s story “The Black Monk,” for certainly there was something Russian-looking about him, an exotic step beyond the many robed figures we saw daily around the city.

  One morning I received a call from Peggy Erskine. A friend of hers, an Irishman named Harry Craig, had been one of those at her apartment the night before. We had had a good conversation and gone out to dinner. I had been presented to Alberto Moravia, the Italian novelist, at Peggy’s, and I believe he was part of the group.

  Peggy told me that she, Harry, and Moravia wished to take a trip across Italy to the eastern coast. There was a phenomenon one could visit there, then being talked about all over Italy. An Italian priest, Padre Pio, had received the stigmata, and going to a daily mass to see him and view his visible, though bandaged hands, stained with blood, was the goal of the trip. Their motive, I did not have to be told, was curiosity rather than piety. We would drive through the Abruzzi to the Adriatic, down through Puglia, returning by way of Naples.

  I was still not entirely well. I could not walk for any distance, or eat as much as I would like. A return to normal was occurring, but the pace was slow. Yet it did seem a wonderful offer, a grand opportunity to spend time in company with Italy’s most celebrated novelist and to rove freely among remote places. Peggy’s interest was in art history, which she was then studying in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship. She later became a lecturer in art at an American school in Rome. She would be certain to seek out places of artistic interest and know what to make of them. I took a deep breath and said I would go.

  We set out eastward on a crisp autumn morning, traveling first toward Tivoli and along the Aniene, but soon passing out of a well-traveled area into the Abruzzi. The sophisticated atmosphere of Rome and its environs, along with aqueducts, ruins of imperial palaces, monastery gardens, and country villas, dropped quickly away. Here were no amiable crowds meeting, no elegance, neither sightseers nor sights to see.

  Instead we drove through dry hills with olive groves, stretches of fields planted in wheat, a few vineyards. There were little villages perched high on hilltops. Roads wound tediously up to them. We found simple places to eat, while everybody stared at us.

  From the villages the people descended every day to work in wheatfields, gather the olive harvest, tend sheep, plow oxen. The oxen in fact were the sights to see—large white and dun-colored farm beasts with their marvelously wide spread of horns, unknown in our country. There were donkeys as well, all working animals. The farm carts were impressive, with wheels higher than their beds. Harnesses for working animals were embossed with designs in silver, sometimes hung with bells. The donkeys took fine regalia as their due: enormous ears and eyes said so. This was a farming world.

  There were few trees. An occasional villa, having seen better days, would rise up lonely on a barren hillside.

  Peggy’s car was a Volkswagen, sturdy but scarcely comfortable. We were somewhat crowded, bags stashed under the hood, motor toiling in the rear.

  Throughout the trip what I listened for most was Moravia’s voice. His opinions and reminiscences were free-flowing and moved by association and memory from one topic to another. He did not exactly converse but seemed conversant constantly with his own mind. He held opinions but did not insist on agreement. I found him rather fascinating. He could not understand my accent—he was slightly deaf, his English was not so good, and my accent was strange to him. I was content to listen.

  He was not very tall, but above the Italian average. His hair in those days was dark, sprinkled with white. He had beautiful eyes—large, intelligent, gray—with thick brows and lashes. One could scarcely call him handsome, but the face was arresting. He did not seem very much attached to his own ego. He was intensely curious about the sexuality of everyone mentioned.

  It was habitual in those days, to an extent that seems at present much reduced, to have to know immediately about anyone’s sexual preferences. Homosexuality in the United States was still something of a “closet” matter, though perhaps not so in larger cities. In what was often called the Age of Anxiety, the macho extreme was evident everywhere. Was someone or wasn’t he … ? What was a woman doing even talking with a man thought to be “queer”? Someone was always waiting and spying, armed with suspicion like a branding iron. Some have called it the sexual witch-hunt, implying a resemblance to McCarthy-ism and the Red scare.

  Moravia’s prying, however, was not offensive. His attitude seemed to be that sexuality was so important that knowing anything at all about a person naturally involved a question of sex. He had tolerance for most anything human, disliking, so far as I could tell, only people who did nothing, especially wealthy people who seemed to be without purpose in life. He held interesting viewpoints on Mussolini. To him, the good of Mussolini was in his having sprung from the Italian peasantry. His roots in “il popolo” had made him popular in Italy. But this was only in the beginning. Later, the Fascist element took over, which led to the grievous end.

  To support himself Moravia had often worked writing dialogue in Italian to be dubbed into American films. Several of his own books had been made into films, notably La Ciocciara, which was released in English as Two Women. Sophia Loren took the part of a strong peasant woman who had to see her daughter raped before her eyes.

  He related being at lunch with Anna Magnani and Roberto Rossellini, Magnani’s lover at that time. Rossellini had just received a letter from the actress Ingrid Bergman. (Later, the two became involved in an affair that made worldwide headlines.) Alberto recalled that Rossellini read aloud from the letter: “I am just a little Swedish girl who admires you so much and wants to act in a film of yours.” Magnani took up a plate of spaghetti and threw it in Rossellini’s face.

  Peggy’s friend Harry Craig was Irish to the point of obsession, and quoted long stretches from Yeats’s poetry. Alberto inquired if Yeats was homosexual. “Heavens, no!” Harry all but shouted.

  Moravia had odd opinions on American literature. He did not care for Faulkner except for Sanctuary, the most sexually shocking of Faulkner’s works. He thought Carson McCullers, who deals notably with characters outside the norm, was the best American writer.

  He would often smile indulgentl
y at us when relating some event. It was a moment of outcries and even riots in Italy against the British. Only days before our trip a British commanding officer in Trieste had ordered soldiers to fire on a crowd of demonstrators, and six Italians had been killed. A free city at that time, Trieste was the cause of intense disputes between Yugoslavia and Italy. Later the same day, the commander was photographed at a cocktail party. Italians were outraged and demonstrations flared up everywhere.

  The car we traveled in had a British license. Harry Craig kept identifying himself as “Irlandese,” but the distinction was a rather fine one for the average Italian in some country village. Several times we received poisonous stares and shouts, and once found a hostile group of young men encircling our car when we came from eating lunch. Moravia was immensely helpful. His fluent colloquial Italian kept trouble at bay. Peggy and I were “donne americane studiose, simpatiche” … Harry was “uno scrittore ben conosciuto.” We were going to find Padre Pio, “vedere un miracolo italiano."

  Alberto told us of an incident during the recent demonstrations in Rome. A crowd marching down the Via Veneto had remarked Allen Tate, also driving with a British license, and had set upon his car with clubs and fists. Allen sat at the wheel with his hands over his English-looking face, shouting “Sono ameri-canol Sono americano!” “He was mob-bed,” Moravia drily remarked with his characteristic laugh.

  He was extremely intelligent in his appraisal of the Italian Communists. He himself had flirted with Communism at one time, enough to learn, with a novelist’s typical curiosity, how party cells worked, what methods of inquiry they used, how they impressed guilt, confession, and belief on the individual spirit. He claimed to have been refused a visa to visit the United States, though I was told by someone at the embassy that this had been a temporary ruling in his case, and was later cleared.

  On we drove through open country increasingly dry and barren. “Sheeps,” Moravia used to remark. And of a village, “Ecco so-and-so. You like it? You want to live here?” He used to say that there would be no cultural interest in such a village. Who did one talk to? The doctor might walk in the afternoons with the priest. The druggist might play cards with both. It would be a monotonous life. Yet always I felt that his true interest in Italy was with il popolo, the common people. He showed little interest in art galleries, cathedrals, and palaces. He spoke of poverty and a stubborn love of living. He seemed to know what it was like.

  Moravia also confided that his enemy was boredom. He often traveled to keep up an interest in life. When he traveled he was less bored. He walked with a slight limp, and told how as a young man he had spent time in a sanatorium for tuberculosis. He asked me if I saw his books anywhere in America. I told him many were out in paperback and could be seen on shelves for sale even in drugstores. He smiled. “It is hard to believe,” he said.

  When night came on in this country, a good hotel was an idea to give up right away. We had to put up in a sort of inn, two rooms available with curtains strung out between beds and a single toilet down the hall. It was cold. It still seemed around midnight when someone shouted what sounded like “Radio!” but I later learned was “Sveglia!”—“Time to get up.” We took a sleepy cup of caffelatte and some hard rolls for the road. Workers were descending to the fields in the early light. Our car threaded among them, the donkeys and horses in their proud harnesses, the wagons drawn by the oxen, women and children riding to work with the men, all moving among the beasts with the same rhythm. The village was emptying, would stand like a ghost town until evening. A kind of dusty mist was rising from the fields below.

  Foggia, a fairly large town on the Adriatic, was our goal, for near there lay San Giovanni Rotondo, the town of Padre Pio. If San Giovanni had once been only another country village, that was true no longer. Splashy new villas stood along the outskirts in rows, each with a garden, a driveway, ornamental sculpture. Shiny cars were running about. There were a huge new hospital and new hotels. Padre Pio’s stigmata had brought prosperity. The contrast to the villages we had seen along the way was almost ludicrous.

  The truth was, I had very little interest in Padre Pio. I don’t doubt miracles—why should we doubt them? Things seem to be one way; then something happens that is not to be explained rationally, and they change. The hands of a priest in a remote village begin to ooze blood, and his feet and side do the same. The wounds of Christ crucified appear on his own person. People flock in to see. He holds a daily mass.

  We had all decided to rise early and go to the mass. I slept badly. The hotel was new and had evidently been put up hastily, with flimsy materials, for I could hear doors close, people speaking, water running, and toilets flushing from floors above and below. The sleep I finally fell into was from exhaustion, and continued with contentment long past the time of the service.

  The accounts I heard were of some interest. Crowds of elderly women had been the main part of the congregation. According to Moravia, “The smell of piety was strong.” The padre wore his hands bandaged and covered with gloves, but pictures of him holding up his palms for all to view were available on postcards. There were also booklets on sale, detailing the miracle.

  From San Giovanni, we drove down to Gorgona, in the province of Puglia. Gorgona juts out into the sea, a little hump on the Italian boot. Here to our surprise we found forests. I did not realize how much that dry, picked-over, impoverished country could affect my American spirit until I saw these trees—live oaks, beech, and cypress—some turning golden with autumn, damp from recent rain, their great strong trunks and soaring height showing what it should have been like everywhere in a denuded land. On a marble tablet we read a passage from Dante describing that locale. Moravia remarked that a poet was a great thing for a country.

  Our goal now was west to Benevento and beyond that Naples. It was an easier drive. Moravia loved Naples. He became excited when we drove into the city. “Naples is the sweetest town,” he kept saying. He liked its way with poverty, its frankness and combative spirit. Sightseeing again, we all drove out to Pompeii, and then for some harebrained reason decided to ascend Vesuvius.

  A long road led upward to a certain point, but the summit had to be gained by way of a ski lift. The volcano itself—its crater actively smoldering away, a raw inflamed throat, a giant’s Satanic yawn—opened below the footpath. There was no protective railing. Anyone who wanted to could have jumped right in. Dante must have seen this sight before he wrote his Inferno. The surrounding lava felt soft from the heat just below, but down the slopes it had hardened into grotesque black shapes, the last thing one would want to fall on. Falling seemed a real enough danger, for the ski lift had no support for our feet. I rode side by side with Moravia, holding on to a rather fragile bar and traveling at an angle I do not care to remember. That day we were the only visitors.

  Peggy and Harry left Naples to spend a few days in Procida, an island near Ischia, so Alberto and I took the train to Rome. Along the way he began to talk volubly, telling me how during the war he and his wife, the novelist Elsa Morante, had gone from Rome into the countryside to take refuge and to avoid capture by the Nazis.

  They had taken the train down from Rome to go toward Naples, but knowing themselves followed, had left the train at a small stop midway. From here they managed to mingle with crowds of fearful people, and to escape on foot into the mountains. Hiding out, they lived mainly on the countryside, but peasants brought food to them, and no one gave them away. His account of how they lived through this difficult time was swift and vivid. I felt I could have been reading one of his forceful stories. When I think of that train ride, his voice comes back, just as memories of that time and place were coming steadily back to him.

  People of great talent and value to a country can suffer more than any others when politics go against them. They are to be silenced, or driven out. That trip was an education.

  The fall of that same year was notable for William Faulkner’s visit to Rome. A Nobel laureate, he was being asked by the St
ate Department to go to various capitals and make himself available to all and sundry who wished to meet a famous American writer.

  I was more nervous about his visit than were people who knew nothing personal about him. I felt that the South, especially Mississippi, was on trial. I wanted him to be on good behavior. But I knew this was something no one could predict.

  Along with an impressive guest list I was invited to the cultural attache’s lovely apartment in the Renaissance quarter for a reception in his honor. The Tates, of course, were there. Faulkner seemed cordial, though reserved, saying very little to those who ventured to try talking with him. Just as he had at Ella Somerville’s reception in Oxford, he stood near one corner holding a glass but did not drink. There was some considerable muted excitement in the room.

  As we were leaving, Allen and Caroline asked me to join them and “Bill” for dinner at a nearby restaurant. I went along with the Tates by cab, but in a chauffeur-driven car a heavily made-up woman wearing some extraordinary burnoose-type headdress was bringing the guest of honor. “You great man, you!” she burbled to him, as the car arrived. She turned out to be Anya Seton, a popular novelist whose books had evidently made whatever money was needed for chauffeurs, burnooses, and so on.

  Allen was quite excited at the dinner and talked with considerable charm. Faulkner said little. Allen raised his glass and asked Bill to toast “the old South.” He complied. I recall that Faulkner did ask Caroline Gordon what had happened to Mr. Maury. He was referring to her splendid book, which he evidently admired, Aleck Maury, Sportsman. One could see his threshold for that approving query. His own hunting stories are among his best.