by Lily Tuck
As a writer Elsa Morante always focused on the traumas of despotic, egotistical and narcissistic love. And it is difficult to resist the temptation of looking for biography in her work and making certain connections, especially in Aracoeli—her last and by far darkest novel. Conjectures begin with the already mentioned fact that the date that marks the start of Manuel’s journey coincides with that of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder, which raises the possibility that Manuel is, in part, a portrait of Pasolini and the novel a way for Morante to interpret his death and console herself. When Manuel speaks of his homosexual love affairs the description of his lovers bring to mind exactly Pasolini’s ragazzi di vita: “Assuming various names or nicknames: Antonello, Cherubino, Tiger, Rock: sounds that, by themselves, could arouse tumult and clangor in the blood, like supreme formulas…. Doubles of real existences [sic]; and their living doubles roamed around in the city, among bars, work sites, dance halls, the river front. They were all adolescent and, for the most part, lovers of women. And in my films our encounters, all of them following custom, culminated in my murder.”20 In addition, some of Manuel’s insights about himself are said to belong to Pasolini as when, for example, at the end of the novel, Manuel, in a complete reversal, discovers that he loved his father more than he loved his mother.21
The pages of Aracoeli are filled with dreams, each dream aptly described as one that, in the words of a critic, “grips and throbs like a late van Gogh painting, all magic and menace,”22 which also brings to mind Elsa Morante’s Diario 1938. Manuel echoes Elsa when he says, “I have always been an enormous factory of dreams.”23 And many of those dreams resemble hers, referring as they do to her contradictory feelings for her mother, Irma. Another recurrent theme has to do with the absent or missing father; this, of course, can be attributed to Morante’s own singular family history.
What also strikes the reader in Aracoeli is Morante’s unflinching brutal descriptions of the deterioration of the body and the decrepitude of old age. Here Manuel is looking at himself:
Of average stature, my legs too short for my trunk, my appearance is an unhappy combination of fragility and corpulence. Below the chest with its thick black pelt, the stomach and abdomen with their sedentary bloat protrude over the skinny legs and overhang the genital parts (the “virile attributes”) from which I immediately shift my humiliated gaze. The feet, quite dirty, are broad, with misshapen toes. The somewhat large head with its curly hair is crudely joined to the short, thick neck, all of a piece with the bovine nape. The shoulders are broad but weak and sloping. And the arms, thin and poorly muscled, turn downright scrawny between elbow and wrist. I become almost spellbound staring.24
Nor are her descriptions of female body parts for the faint of heart: “she widened her legs and pulled the short slip up over her naked sex…. I had never seen, exposed so closely to my eyes, a woman’s sex; and this, revealed to me today, appeared to me an object of massacre and horrendous suffering, like the mouth of a slaughtered animal. I could just glimpse, between two patches of poor flabby flesh, bare and grayish (so it seemed to me), a kind of bloody wound, darker at the edges; and my stomach twisted with revulsion, so I turned my gaze away.”25
These graphic descriptions may well suggest Morante’s own extreme fear and loathing at growing old, her inability to reconcile herself with her aging body and her appearance. She herself was the first to admit that the coming of old age affected her more deeply than it did other people. “It altered her body and left it occupied by a person Elsa did not recognize as herself. Above all, it left a person Elsa did not love.”26 Manuel’s nearsightedness, too, which signals the onset of his adolescence and his ugliness and results in the loss of his mother’s love, can be compared with Elsa’s own nearsightedness, always a source of worry for her since she feared going blind.
The first time I read Aracoeli, I found it almost pointlessly disturbing and shocking. On rereading it, I still found it disturbing and shocking, but I have also grown to admire it—perhaps because it is so dark and resists any attempt to classify it. In writing this novel, Morante may have knowingly sacrificed clarity and logic in order to express her vision of a chaotic world. Manuel’s bitter, self-revelatory journey into memory seems almost unjustifiably painful and unnecessary, as does Aracoeli’s transformation from virginal beauty to voracious sexual predator. Yet, at the same time, there is something almost inevitable if one regards Manuel as the last progression in a long chain of lost boys beginning with Arturo and continuing with Useppe. These are the boys who once, according to Morante, could save the world but now no longer can. The themes of maternity and identity too are rejected and abandoned, and at the novel’s end—never mind that one may not understand Aracoeli’s experience, her degradation and illness—one is left with the terrifying awareness that nothing matters any longer for the protagonist or, perhaps, for the writer as well. Old age and the decay of the body have taken their toll and the impossibility of achieving any kind of redeeming love has been proved. Only death remains.
Early on, Manuel tells us, “As a boy I was in doubt, on certain nights, about the real existence of the myriad of stars that appear to us in the sky. In my opinion, there existed perhaps only a single star, created in the beginning, then multiplied to infinity by an illusory game of mirrors. Today, I am offered an autobiographical variant of this childhood cosmogony.”27
In March 1980, while Elsa Morante was with her friend Tonino Ricchezza and two other young men, she missed a step—no doubt because she was so nearsighted—going from one room to another in Portico di Ottavia, a restaurant in the Ghetto. She broke her femur. (In Elsa’s version, the accident took place on her way out of a movie theater after seeing a Woody Allen film.28) She was operated on and spent several weeks in the hospital. The next month, while she was recuperating at home, Ginevra Bompiani and Giorgio Agamben went to visit, hoping to cheer her up. Elsa, Ginevra remembered, was lying in bed in beautiful, clean sheets, and Caruso, her cat, was lying next to her. Joking, Giorgio Agamben remarked how the cat looked just like the comic actor, Eduardo De Filippo. Since, according still to Ginevra, Caruso, of course, must have understood what Giorgio had said, he got up and peed on the bed. The beautiful, clean sheets had to be changed and Elsa, Ginevra said, was furious at them.29
A year and a half later, in December 1981, the entire manuscript of Aracoeli was sent to a typist; for Elsa Morante, this signified that it was the finished draft. Right after that, she suffered terrible pains in her legs, which forced her back to bed, where she remained for months, almost unable to move. By then, too, Elsa had undergone an enormous change. Carlo Cecchi, who saw her frequently, later described this change as something between madness and despair. She became exceedingly combative and went from being gentle one minute to being extremely violent the next. She would no longer listen to reason and everything turned into a conflict. One day when Cecchi ran into Elsa in the street, he barely recognized her. Elsa was walking with a cane and looked like someone out of a Goya painting—either mad or homeless. Seeing him, Elsa said, “Carlo, you look surprised but you have just met my soul.” It was a strange and troubling exchange. However, after Morante finished writing Aracoeli, Cecchi had known something would happen—it was almost as if through her book, she felt the menace—and her brain, he thought, must already have been affected. He had a terrible premonition.30
Aracoeli was published in 1982.* That same year her beloved Caruso died. Erich Linder, her good friend and agent, died the following year. In 1984, the year before Elsa’s own death, Aracoeli won the prestigious French prize Prix Médicis Etranger.
thirteen
ELSA’S DEATH
On April 6, 1983, five months after the publication of Aracoeli, Elsa Morante tried to commit suicide. She swallowed three different kinds of sleeping pills, then shut all the windows of her apartment and turned on the gas. Her maid found her just in time. Lucia had worked for Elsa for over thirty years, and her only defect was that she was always late for work. A so
rt of miraculous instinct, Elsa later told a friend, must have propelled Lucia to arrive at via dell’Oca much earlier than usual that day.1 Elsa Morante had really wanted to die, she said; she was sick, she was unhappy, she was desperate.
Elsa Morante was brought unconscious to San Giacomo Hospital. While undergoing treatment there, she was also diagnosed with hydroencephalitis, or water on the brain. The pressure of this buildup of the cerebrospinal fluid, if not treated, can cause brain damage, and an operation with its attendant risks was discussed. Alberto Moravia and Maria Morante, Elsa’s sister, were in favor of the operation while Elsa’s friends, familiar with her wishes and her fear of becoming an invalid or of having anyone tamper with her brain, were opposed to it. Moravia and Maria Morante overruled the others and the operation took place at the Villa Margherita clinic; it was not considered a success. Her friends Ginevra Bompiani, Goffredo Fofi, Alfonso Berardinelli and Patrizia Cavalli, as well as Moravia, who were all waiting for her to emerge from the surgery, were deeply shocked when they finally saw her—shocked, too, that life should so cruelly imitate art (with her head bandaged, Elsa looked exactly like Aracoeli).2
Elsa Morante lived for another two and a half years. During this time she rarely left the clinic or her bed, except to be wheeled down the corridor to look out at the trees in the garden. For a long time, too, she remained comatose. To make matters worse, her medical expenses had become so burdensome that Moravia—who, as her husband, was ultimately responsible for them—worried that if Elsa remained unconscious for a long time her own funds would run out and he might not have enough money to pay the clinic. Since there is a law in Italy, the Legge Bacchelli, to help artists in need, Moravia decided to solicit the help of President Alessandro Pertini to obtain money for Elsa. Again, all of Morante’s friends objected and they tried to persuade Moravia not to proceed, as news of Elsa’s deteriorating condition and depleted finances would inevitably get into the newspapers. Fortunately, Elsa Morante regained consciousness just in time and was able to resolve her financial problems herself by putting her affairs in order and by selling the rights to History to television.*
While Elsa was in the clinic, she was not always lucid but when she was, she appeared to be quite calm. She sat with a book, Dante’s Inferno, in her lap, which she read and reread; she spoke only when spoken to. Her hair, which had been cut for the surgery, was short. When asked by a friend if she planned to ever write again, Elsa Morante answered, “To write, I have to be able to walk. If I stay here, I will die.”3 Moravia, no doubt suffering from remorse, went to see her often; he sat quietly in the room next to her bed. One time when both he and Ginevra Bompiani were visiting, Elsa started to say, “To think that—” and Ginevra right away understood that Elsa was referring to her having to go through all of this suffering for Moravia to come and spend time with her. Moravia, however, did not understand.4
Many of Elsa’s friends visited her in the clinic. Certain ones, however, did not. Daniele Morante, her favorite nephew, later told me how he deeply regretted that he had not gone to see her more often but he could not bear to see Elsa suffering and so diminished. Another great friend, Alfonso Berardinelli, also said how he felt guilty and he tried to justify himself by saying that he thought of life as a great gift that should not be destroyed by the presence of death.5
A happier note about visiting Elsa in the clinic was struck by Dacia Maraini, the woman Alberto Moravia left Elsa for and who always, she said, maintained a friendly relationship with Elsa. At the time of Dacia’s visit, Elsa was lying in bed, hardly able to move or speak. Nonetheless, the moment she saw Dacia, Elsa asked, “Shall we play the guess-who game?” Carlo Cecchi was also in the room. Dacia Maraini said, “We both tried to guess who the person Elsa was thinking of through analogies and by asking: ‘If he or she was a piece of music what sort of music would he or she be?’ Elsa would reply ‘A Bach fugue.’ ‘If he or she was something to eat?’ Elsa would say, ‘Goat cheese from the mountains,’ and so on. Neither Carlo nor I were able to guess and, each time, Elsa would burst out laughing. Then, after a good fifteen minutes, we both gave up and Elsa told us the person was Pier Paolo Pasolini. That was the last time I saw Elsa and that is the last memory I have of her.”6
Carlo Cecchi remembered other visits to Elsa during her last two years. Lucia, Elsa’s loyal maid, was always there. Lucia lived in the clinic, never once leaving and sleeping in Elsa’s room, on a sofa that every night she made up into a bed. According to Cecchi, Elsa was sedated much of the time, thus she appeared remote and detached. Together, they would sit in the lounge in front of the garden or in good weather, outside in the garden, Elsa in the wheelchair. A few times they managed to go to a nearby café. In the lounge, they were allowed to smoke and Elsa had started smoking again. But mainly she seemed to be in a kind of limbo. She tired easily and wanted to go back to her room.
In mid-1984, however, Elsa seemed to suddenly become more present and she started to entertain the hope that she would get better and go back to normal life. She worked with a physical therapist and managed to take a few steps. Carlo spent that Christmas with Elsa and she talked of going home (in anticipation, her friend Ida Einaudi repainted her apartment walls). She talked of starting a new novel—one about which she had been thinking. On New Year’s Day, 1985, she maintained her tradition of writing something at the beginning of each year: “Only today have I awakened to the memory of that enchantment which has in fact left a few signs on my life. Between then and now there has been an interval of darkness and total oblivion as if the River Lethe had completely swallowed me up.”7
It was the last thing she wrote. At the end of the month, she suddenly had to have emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer. This resulted in peritonitis and in her being catheterized. From then on, her physical condition worsened. She would not accept being a cripple. She barely answered when spoken to and withdrew to an inaccessible place. When her pain abated and she was not sleeping, she seemed quite absent. According to the doctors, this state of hers might last for a very long time.8
Alberto Moravia, although conflicted emotionally about Elsa Morante, was very astute about her character. Recalling her behavior during the war when they were in hiding together, he said, “She was a person who, so to speak, lived in the exceptional and not in the normal.” In fact, she was always someone who responded well to danger; ordinary and routine situations tended to make her impatient. He also remembered how she was always torn between her ideal of innocence and lightness and that aspect of her temperament she likened to Simone Weil’s—an aspect which she defined as “a heaviness.” Moravia compared this duality in her nature to “Ariel and Caliban…but an Ariel as incapable of ridding himself of Caliban as Caliban [is] of Ariel.”9
Describing how, in the early 1960s, they would both meet regularly for tea at Babington’s on the Piazza di Spagna, Cesare Garboli reinforced the notion of a duality in her nature: “Each time, our meetings were either a fight or a reconciliation. Elsa was a cannibal, waging war was her way of living; with her one had to attack or retreat, bite or be bitten.” According to Garboli, her moods would alternate quickly between being hurt or wanting to hurt, between being generous and kind and being cruel, but always, during this time, she laughed, she played.10 As time passed, however, and Elsa grew older and she was forced to live alone, she began to hate herself and she wanted to disappear. She felt she lacked a fundamental quality of the soul which again translated itself into “heaviness.” A little simplistically, Garboli again attributed this heaviness to Morante’s not having had any children. (Although Elsa always claimed to love children, to love their innocence and purity, it is difficult in retrospect to imagine how she would have pursued her career as a writer had she had children or, for that matter, difficult to imagine what sort of mother she might have been.)
The night of November 24, 1985, Elsa’s condition in the Villa Margherita clinic deteriorated. Her blood pressure fell to below 70, although she rallied and slept peaceful
ly through the night. For the last few days, Maria, her sister said, Elsa had no longer been able to recognize anyone—only Macalousse, a nine-year-old Libyan boy diagnosed with cancer who occupied the room next to hers. Over time together in the clinic, they had gotten to be friends; according to a nurse, Elsa helped Macalousse learn Italian and she gave him a copy of Peter Pan. “Come here, my little one,” she would say to him. “You are the only light in this dismal place.”
The following morning, however, Elsa was worse. She had trouble breathing and she was given oxygen. In the early afternoon, the doctor came to do an electrocardiogram and her visitors—Maria Morante, Carlo Cecchi and Stella Graziosi—were asked to leave the room. All but Lucia, who never left her side and who was like a shadow to her. After a few seconds, the doctor called everyone back in the room and told them, “It’s over. A heart attack. Her heart gave up.”
Elsa Morante died at 1:20 P.M. on November 25, 1985. Her head resting slightly to the left, a blue chiffon scarf tied under her chin, she lay in bed looking as if she were merely sleeping. Hanging from the headboard was an old-fashioned toy, a little wooden bear puppet; on her nightstand were three tangerines and a daisy inside a bottle of mineral water; piled up high on a bedside table, there were at least twenty unread books. The book on top of the pile was Moravia’s most recent novel, The Voyeur (L’uomo che guarda)—an apt title. Underneath it was her story collection The Andalusian Shawl in the German translation.