Woman of Rome

by Lily Tuck

  “Il gioco secreto” (“The Secret Game”), written by Elsa in 1941, appears to illustrate this. In the story, three aristocratic children named Antonietta, Pietro and Giovanni (who are the same number of years apart as were Elsa, Aldo and Marcello) invent a parallel life. The game is played at night in secret and when, too excited, the children cannot sleep. During one particularly sleepless night, Antonietta and Giovanni kiss and are transformed: Antonietta’s dark hair turns into beautiful blond tresses, her shabby nightgown becomes a sumptuous robe, her purse is transformed into gold, while Giovanni is grown tall, his pallid, sickly cheeks are a rosy, healthy pink. But all of sudden the mother walks into the room and discovers them; the game is over and all that is left is ordinary reality: “three ugly children.”

  Growing up, Elsa always maintained that she would have preferred to have been born a boy. The reason, too, she gave much later in a 1957 letter to a friend (at the same time that she warned him “not to laugh”), for writing her novel Arturo’s Island was her “old, incurable desire to be a boy…and to return to the condition I once had loved and lost and which I seem to remember.”4 A boy, according to Elsa Morante—and no doubt at the time she was right—had a greater spirit of adventure and a greater opportunity to be heroic. She preferred the company of boys to that of girls, although this did not mean that she felt more solidarity with one over the other. Her feeling of solidarity, she claimed, encompassed all humans worthy of respect without having to distinguish their gender. Also, she was aware that there existed a kind of sexism toward women. In France and the United States, for example, women, she pointed out, not only give up their last names but are known by the name of their husbands: Mrs. Robert Smith. In Switzerland, women still did not have the vote. Another distinction she strongly disapproved of was that between scrittori and scrittici; why then, she asked, were there not other categories like: blond and brunette writers, fat and thin ones?5

  Until she was fifteen, Elsa Morante wrote poems and stories for children, which she illustrated and which were later collected and published under the title Le bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla trecciolina e altre storie (The Marvelous Adventures of Cathy with the Long Tresses and Other Stories). Her favorite poet then was Baudelaire and to read his poems, she taught herself French. She attended the prestigious, avant-garde high school Visconti e Mamiani in the city center, where she received an excellent classical education and learned, along with other subjects, how to read both ancient Greek and Latin. During that time, she was often sent away from home for months at a time to stay with her rich godmother, Donna Gonzaga, in her elegant Nomentano villa. However if, on some occasions, Donna Gonzaga appeared derelict in her duties or if she momentarily forgot about Elsa, Elsa’s mother was quick to remind her and quick also to solicit financial support from her. First Irma would write Donna Gonzaga a warm letter filled with expressions of trust, which ended with a request for money. If no answer or money seemed to be forthcoming, Irma would write a second letter describing her poverty and Elsa’s poor health. Finally, as a last resort, Irma would write angrily and threateningly, reminding Donna Gonzaga of her duty as a Christian and as Elsa’s godmother (perhaps she even threatened to spread malicious gossip about her) so that, in the end, Donna Gonzaga always had to give in.6 Poor Donna Gonzaga. Except for a dream in which Donna Gonzaga seems to be testing Elsa to see if she has stolen one of her rings, she is rarely ever mentioned or acknowledged during Elsa Morante’s adult life. It is as if the woman or her kindnesses had never existed.

  As an adolescent, Elsa spent her summers at various seaside resorts. Each year the resorts grew more luxurious, thanks to Irma’s frantic efforts (and to Donna Gonzaga’s generosity) to try to organize a pleasant environment for children who were bored and frustrated and did not want to participate in any of the summer activities. Elsa always loved the sea although she never learned to swim. She loved to sunbathe and later in life, on various trips to the islands of Ponza and Procida, she often hired a boat to take her to a deserted beach so that she could sunbathe nude in privacy. On the cover of Marcello Morante’s memoir, Maledetta benedetta, there is a photograph showing the four children in their bathing suits. Elsa looks to be fifteen or sixteen; she wears a woolen maillot and has a long strand of pearls around her neck. With one hand she is coquettishly holding her hat, she is smiling and seems to be clowning for the photographer. Marcello has his arms folded over his bare chest and is looking down, a half smile on his face. Maria stands between Elsa and Marcello, looking small and childish, her arms behind her back, her face solemn, nearly expressionless (for some reason, she has pulled down the top of her bathing suit so that she too is bare chested and could be mistaken for a little boy). Finally, there is Aldo, who sits on the ground at the others’ feet, looking stern and handsome (there is no sign of the black birthmark on his forehead).

  By the time the last family summer holiday was spent on the Argentario peninsula at elegant Porto Santo Stefano, both Elsa and Aldo had become very independent; they came and went whenever and at whatever time they liked. Elsa was seeing a wealthy, well-born boy and when, later that year, he came to visit her in the house in Monteverde, Marcello was proud to be made the lookout and an accomplice to her illicit affair.7 Also, during that last holiday, Irma managed to introduce Elsa to a man named Guelfo Civinini who was an editor at the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Later, however, when Civinini lost interest in Elsa for reasons that are unclear, Irma, who was always determined to play a role in Elsa’s career as well as earn her daughter’s gratitude, threatened to blackmail him by accusing him of sleeping with Elsa. Thanks to him, however, Elsa was able to publish her first piece, “Story of Children and of Stars,” in an important paper. She was eighteen at the time.

  By then, too, Elsa Morante had begun to distance herself from her mother while her mother, no doubt aware that she was losing control over her precocious daughter, became even more tenacious. In an attempt perhaps to compete with Elsa, Irma wrote a story called “Sogna e Vita” (“Dream and Life”) that was published in a magazine called La Scuola (The School). Irma, clearly, wanted to live through her daughter although at the same time her envy may have taken the form of wanting Elsa to live primarily for her. Meanwhile, feeling more and more oppressed by her mother’s constant interference, Elsa stayed away from home as often as she could. One night Elsa did not come home at all and her mother, in a panic, telephoned a friend to find out where Elsa was—although Elsa had expressly forbidden her to do so. This precipitated a terrible scene between the two women. When Irma had finally gone to bed, still angry, Elsa wrote the word maledetta (accursed) on a piece of paper and slipped it under her mother’s door; a few hours later, she must have had a change of heart, for she wrote benedetta (blessed) on another piece of paper, which she also slipped under her mother’s door. These two words were to become the title of Marcello Morante’s memoir and also, no doubt, were apt indications of Elsa’s complicated feelings toward her mother, a subject she would often return to in her fiction.

  At eighteen, without ever attending university, Elsa left home for good. She rented a furnished room near Piazza Venezia, in corso Umberto. Carlo Levi, the author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, visited her there once after Elsa had published two stories in the newspaper Meridiano di Roma. He described her room as being very small and her bed enormous. As for Elsa, he said that she was not yet a woman: “what with her violet eyes, her small, wide face, her timid smile which uncovered her tiny gapped teeth, and her gray hair, ruffled and disorderly.”8 Alberto Moravia, her future husband, who met Elsa soon thereafter, described her in similar terms—“She had had white hair since adolescence, a big mushroom of hair above her round face”—and since all the photos of Elsa, except those taken in the last years of her life, show her with very dark hair, she must have begun dyeing her hair when she was very young. Italo Calvino, in fact, used to joke that he knew Elsa when she still had white hair. “She was very near-sighted,” Moravia continued; “she had be
autiful eyes with the dreamy gaze of the near-sighted. She had a little nose, and a big willful mouth. A rather childish face.”9 On another occasion Moravia compared Elsa Morante’s face to an apple.

  The next ten years were not an easy time for Elsa Morante. In fact, it is hard to imagine how she was able to survive at all on her own in a Catholic country where extremely conservative values were still the norm. Young Italian middle-class women lived at home with their parents and not in apartments alone, they waited to get married and did not try to pursue a career on their own. Their lives were defined by their family, and especially by their father (or a male who assumed the role of patriarch) who ruled absolutely at the same time that he protected his wife and children. Who, one wonders, protected Elsa Morante during that time? Even in the early fifties when I first spent time in Rome, a young woman could not walk down the street, ride a bus, without some predatory man following and accosting her. One cannot help but imagine how Elsa, a teenager still, living alone and nearly penniless, must have fallen prey to all kinds of unsavory and opportunistic characters and disagreeable situations. And who, one also wonders, were the models she turned to for guidance? It would appear that during this period she relied almost entirely on literature for her ideas and for the life she was struggling to create for herself.

  To make matters more difficult, Italy was suffering the effects of the Great Depression, which included a recession and inflation due in part to Italy’s lack of industry. The political climate in the 1930s was volatile, as well as increasingly repressive. Fascism had taken root—particularly after the Italian victory over Ethiopia—and Fascist customs and Fascist language were being enforced: a salute replaced a handshake, the familiar tu replaced the more formal lei; bands of Blackshirts prowled the city, marching with the exaggerated high step they called passo romano (not unlike the German goose step). The diplomatic relationship between Italy, Britain and France deteriorated while the relationship between Mussolini and Hitler solidified into a military alliance, primarily to ensure Franco’s victory in Spain as well as to guarantee territorial concessions from France and Britain in the Mediterranean and in North Africa. And, finally, in 1938, there was the enactment of the racial laws in Italy that forbade racial intermarriage and excluded Jews from government offices and certain professions.

  A diary Elsa Morante kept at that time recorded her dreams. Although the entries are intermittent, they illustrate how socially vulnerable and inadequate she felt and how lonely—so lonely, in fact, that she claimed she had to resort to telephoning the number that gives the correct time in order to hear the sound of a human voice. She did, however, have many love affairs. She identifies her lovers in her diary only by their initials and very few of them seemed to have brought her any pleasure or satisfaction. One man is identified: blond Willy Coppens, who may have been the father of a child Elsa had to abort. This unfortunate experience has never been confirmed nor have more details emerged; the only thing certain on the subject is that all her life Elsa Morante either claimed she regretted not having had children or said she could not have any (again, perhaps, the result of a botched abortion).

  Mostly she was very poor and often went hungry. To help support herself, she gave Latin and Italian lessons. Later, Morante also acknowledged quite openly—without shame or remorse and only to describe the dire necessity of it—having occasionally resorted to prostitution for money. She felt neither sullied nor emotionally scarred by this experience. Nevertheless, it must have played an important role in how Morante understood the lives of the poor, the underprivileged and the powerless.

  Remarkably, she also managed to write stories that appeared regularly in such popular magazines and weekly newspapers as Corriere dei Piccoli, Oggi and Meridiano di Roma. Most of these stories—about 120 in all—are no longer than a page or two and must have been written for immediate publication; in fact, many read like essays, particularly those written under her pseudonym, Antonio Carrera. In “I fidanzati” (“The Betrothed”), for instance, she describes different types of engaged couples, among whom the male is known in some circles as a scalasedia or “seat warmer,” as his role is to sit quietly and patiently and wait for the girl to come and sit next to him. Another short piece, “Parenti serpenti” (“Snake Relatives”), describes the author’s ambivalent feelings toward his numerous, disparate relatives, saying, for instance, that his great-aunt Stefania’s dyed black hair, small face and tiny eyes remind him of a fly.

  The early stories written under Elsa Morante’s own name seem more like fables. However, unlike most fables, their moral is ambiguous. In the story, “Il soldato del re” (“The King’s Soldier”), neither the king nor his faithful soldier, who is sent to look for the perfect girl to be the king’s wife, ends up with the perfect girl (whom the soldier does, in fact, find). In “La vigna” (“The Vineyard”), events are again turned upside down: the baby named in honor of his uncle, the owner of the vineyard, does not inherit the vineyard as hoped—precisely because he was named after his uncle—and the vineyard is left abandoned and its sour grapes are harvested by the birds. Among these early stories, one in particular stands out: “Qualcuno bussa alla porta” (“Someone Is Knocking at the Door”), not only for its odd title (although with each new section, someone does come a-knocking) but also for its length (at 25,000 words, it was more like a novella). Published in installments in I Diritti della Scuola (The School Dues), this tale within a tale within another tale tells the story (among many others) of Michele Wogau, a handsome, reclusive aristocrat. Overly possessive and jealous of his beautiful young wife, he kills her, a deed for which he can never forgive himself. Meanwhile a young woman, Mirtilla, falls in love with a handsome ne’er-do-well and becomes pregnant; after the ne’er-do-well abandons her, she abandons the child. The child, Lucia, is adopted by Wogau and raised in virtual isolation in an elegant large house and garden; although Lucia does not love her foster reclusive father, she respects him. She falls in love with Franco, a poor young pianist, whom she marries. Their life together is difficult but in the end Franco composes a masterpiece. In the last installment, Lucia, on a feast day, is drawn almost magically to a beautiful island, leaving behind her husband and her newborn child (it is not clear whether she does so for good). On the island, she meets a gypsy who is singing and dancing in the village square—her mother, Mirtilla.

  The importance of this rather loose-ended, predictable but confused story lies in the many themes it introduces that will reappear in Elsa Morante’s novels: the abandoned children raised in isolation in semimagical places, the destructive power of possessive parental love and the not so redemptive quality of conjugal love. Her repeated use of certain settings, too, will become familiar: islands as paradise, beautiful gardens, the sea, certain animals who take on human traits (dogs and roosters in particular) and her attaching significance and making much of the contrast between dark and blue eyes, and black and blond hair.10

  Fifteen very, very short and slight stories (most of them autobiographical) appeared in the weekly newspaper Oggi and included “Prima della classe” (“First in Her Class”), an account of how although she was first in her class, none of the children really liked her except for one little boy whose name, coincidentally, was Amore and who loved Elsa not for her brain but for her beautiful curly hair. Another, “Lettere d’amore” (“A Love Letter”), is an amusing description of how she once wrote a letter to Charles Lindbergh, the aviator, that attempted to lure him with a promise of a trip, for just the two of them, to a deserted island where a house with a piano awaited, as well as a vegetable garden and some chickens. “Domestiche” (“The Servants”) is a candid and telling look at the Morante family’s servants and also corroborates Marcello Morante’s account of how inept and insensitive their mother, Irma, was in dealing with them: “Like noisy birds who land on the windowsill to pick up some crumbs and then after a flutter and a chirp vanish again into the horizon, so did our servants pass through our lives. Filled with the zest for l
ife, vivacious and plump, they presented themselves full of good intentions. We could hear them singing while they did the dishes…. After a week, all our maids had become thin, thin. Some would sob and beat their heads against the wall. One maid cried: Good-bye, youth, and fainted.”11

  In 1941, a collection of twenty stories by Elsa Morante, most of which had previously appeared in newspapers, was published by Garzanti under the title Il gioco segreto (The Secret Game). The stories are still slight but lengthier than her earliest ones; the subject matter is more fleshed out and certainly darker—old age, illness and death. What the characters in these stories all seem to have in common is their pathology; they all suffer or are ill in some perverse or sadistic way. Also, all are obsessed with family—questioning the institution and its social rituals: marriage, baptism and funeral rites. The women, too, have a hyperfeminine vision as they set out to explore the secrets of female vanity: jewelry, hair, clothes. In addition, since she was a great admirer of Kafka and influenced by him, Elsa Morante’s method of mixing the picturesque and the squalid with the fantastic and the magical was an effort at a kind of surrealism. It was also an effort to escape from the constraints of the literature of the Novecento (nineteenth century), which had become identified with verismo (the Italian school of naturalism) whose aesthetics, as stated by Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga, both well-known southern Italian writers, equated realism with truth and precluded any self-consciousness in favor of presenting the story in the most objective manner possible.