My friend was very analytical in his arguments, cold and sarcastic about everything that was not an established fact; the only intellectual character in this novel, the commissar Kim, was intended to be a portrait of my friend; and something of our discussions in those days, particularly in the debate about why men who had no uniform or flag actually fought, must have survived in what I wrote, in Kim’s dialogue with the brigade commandant and in his soliloquies.
These discussions were the background to the novel, and even further back were all my own thoughts on violence, from the minute I had found myself armed. Before joining the partisans, I had been a young middle-class boy who had always lived with his parents; my armchair anti-fascism had consisted primarily in a rejection of its cult of military force, and was more a question of style, of my particular ‘sense of humour’; but suddenly to be consistent with these opinions meant I was thrust into the midst of partisan violence, and I had to measure myself on that scale. This was a real trauma for me, the first of many …
At the same time another element of the background to the book was a series of reflections on the moral judgments we should make about people and on the historical importance of the actions of each one of us. For many of my contemporaries it had been solely a question of luck which determined what side they should fight on; for many of them the sides suddenly changed over, so that soldiers of Mussolini’s Fascist Republic became partisans and vice versa; they shot or were shot at on either side; only death signalled an end to their choices. (It was Pavese, caught between remorse for not having fought and the urge to be sincere about the reasons for his refusal, who managed to write, in the closing pages of La casa in collina (The House on the Hill): ‘Every casualty resembles the survivor and demands to know the reason for his death from those who survive.’)
That’s it now: I know how I should set out this preface. For months after the end of the war I had tried recounting the partisan experience in the first person, or with a protagonist very similar to myself. Some short stories I had published, others I put in the bin; I was uncomfortable with this material; I never managed to stifle entirely the moral and emotional feelings it aroused in me; something that rang false always emerged sooner or later; my own personal experience seemed banal and petty; I was a mass of complexes and inhibitions when confronted with all that I most dearly wanted to say.
But when I started writing stories in which I played no part, then everything began to click: the language, the narrative rhythm, the edge were all exactly right, and functioned well; the more objective and anonymous I made the story the more satisfied I was with it. Not only was I more satisfied, but also the people who were experts and whom I had come to know in those early post-war years – Vittorini and Giansiro Ferrata in Milan, Natalia Ginzburg and Pavese in Turin – they now no longer found anything to criticize. I began to realize that the more a story was objective and anonymous, the more it was my own.
This facility for writing ‘objectively’ seemed to me the most natural thing in the world; I could never have imagined that I would lose it so quickly. Each story moved perfectly naturally in a world which I knew intimately: that was my experience, my experience multiplied by the experience of the others. And the sense of history, the moral edge, the emotional element, were present precisely because I left them implicit and hidden.
When I began to expand a story about a little boy partisan whom I had known in the partisan groups, I did not think that it would become more substantial than the other stories. Why did it turn into a novel? Because – I later realized – the identification between myself and the protagonist had developed into something more complex. The relationship between the character of the boy Pin and the partisan war corresponded symbolically with the relationship that I myself had eventually had with that war. Pin’s inferiority as a child facing the incomprehensible world of adults was the equivalent of the inferiority that I too felt in the same situation because of my middle-class upbringing. And Pin’s uninhibited nature, stemming from his origins in the world of petty crime – about which he boasts so much – and which makes him feel on a par with other outlaws and almost superior to them, corresponded to the ‘intellectual’’s way of coping coolly with any situation, of never showing surprise, of keeping emotions at bay … So, interpreted in this key of symbolic substitutions – though I should make it clear that this was only an interpretation a posteriori, something which helped me subsequently understand what I had written – this story from which my own personal viewpoint had been banished, somehow came back to being my own story …
My own story was that of someone whose adolescence had gone on too long, a young man who had seized on the war as an alibi, both in the literal sense of going somewhere else, and in its metaphorical sense. In the space of just a few years the alibi had become the here and now. It was too soon for me; or too late: I was too unprepared to live out the dreams I had dreamed for too long. First came the reversal of the war against the Allies, the transformation of those who had previously been shadowy and subversive figures into heroes and leaders. Then in peace time new energies bubbled up which galvanized relationships and pervaded all the organs of public life, and suddenly even the distant castle of literature opened its gates like a safe and nearby haven, ready to welcome with flags and fanfares the young man from the provinces. And there was also an erotic charge which electrified the air and brightened the eyes of the girls whom the war and the peace had restored and brought closer to us: they were now truly of an age with us, our comrades, in a new rapport which was the fresh gift of those early months of peace, and which filled the warm evenings with conversation and laughter in an Italy reborn.
But in the face of all these possibilities which opened up for me, I never managed to become what I had dreamed I would be before I was put to the test: I had been the most insignificant of partisans; I was an uncertain, unsatisfied and inept lover; the world of literature did not open up for me like a straightforward and objective apprenticeship, but was more like a journey which I did not know how to start. Full of these youthful ambitions and anxieties, I lacked the spontaneous grace of youth. The rapid maturing of the times I lived in had only served to accentuate my own immaturity.
The symbolic protagonist of my novel was therefore an image of regression: a child. To the childish and jealous eyes of Pin, weapons and women seemed distant and incomprehensible; similarly what my philosophy wanted to exalt, my poetics transformed into hostile images, and my excessive love tinged with infernal despair.
When writing the book, my stylistic need was to write at a level below the events narrated: the kind of Italian I liked was that spoken by someone who ‘doesn’t speak proper Italian at home’: I tried to write the way a hypothetical autodidact version of myself would have written.
The Path to the Spiders’ Nests was born of this sense of total alienation, half suffered by me as a genuine torment, half imagined and vaunted. If I recognize any value in the book now it is in this: the image of a vital, but as yet hidden, strength in which the inadequacy felt by someone who was ‘too young’ bonded with the deprivations of society’s exiles and rejects.
If I say that in those days we made literature out of our condition of poverty, I am not really talking about some ideological programme, but rather about something far more profound that was inside all of us.
Nowadays writing is a regularized profession and the novel is a ‘product’, with its own ‘market’, its own ‘supply’ and ‘demand’, with its launch campaigns, its successes and bouts of routine, and Italian novels are now all ‘of good average quality’ and form part of the surplus goods of a society which is all too easily satisfied. This makes it difficult to keep in mind the spirit which animated our attempts to establish a new tradition of fiction which had to be built entirely from scratch.
I am continuing to use the plural, but I have already explained that I am talking about something that was dispersed, not agreed upon, that emerged from remote corners of very
different provinces, without any explicitly stated common motives other than those that were partial and temporary. More than anything else it was, so to speak, a potential that was in the air. A potential that was quickly exhausted.
By the 1950s the picture had already altered, starting with the major writers: Pavese was dead, Vittorini had retreated into an antagonistic silence, Moravia working in a different context was acquiring a different meaning (no longer an existentialist, but rather a naturalist), and the Italian novel followed its course of moderate, elegiac, sociological analysis, in which we all in the end managed to carve ourselves a more or less comfortable niche (or found our escape route).
However, there were some who continued along the road of those early fragmentary epics: in general it was the most isolated writers, those who were least felt to ‘belong’, who retained that strength. And it was the most isolated of all of us who managed to write the novel that we had all dreamed of, when no one expected it any more, Beppe Fenoglio. He managed to write Una questione privata (A Private Matter) but not complete it, and he died in his mid-forties before seeing it published, The book that all our generation wanted to write now exists: our work has finally reached fulfilment and been given a sense of purpose, and only now, thanks to Fenoglio, can we say that a cycle is complete, only now can we be certain that such a cycle really existed, the cycle that goes from The Path to the Spiders’ Nests to Una questione private.
Una questione private (which is now available in the posthumous volume Un giorno di fuoco (A Day of Gunfire)) is constructed with the kind of geometric tension found in romance epics about mad passions and knightly pursuits, such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso; yet at the same time it is about the Resistance exactly as it was, inside and out, a more authentic portrayal of the Resistance than has ever been in print, preserved with great clarity over many years by a faithful memory, and retaining all its moral values (which are all the stronger for being understated), as well as all its emotions and frenzies. It is also a book of landscapes, of rapidly sketched but vibrant figures, a book of words both precise and true. It is also an absurd, mysterious book, in which the object of pursuit is only pursued in order to pursue something else, and this something else is in turn pursued for the sake of something else again, and we never reach the ultimate goal. It was the preface to Fenoglio’s book, not to my own that I really wanted to write.
This is the first novel I wrote, almost my very first piece of writing. What can I say about it today? I will say this: it would be better never to have written your first novel.
Before you write your first book, you possess that freedom to begin writing that can be used only once in your life. The first book already defines you while you are in fact still far from being defined. And after that you have to carry this definition around with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or develop it or modify it or even deny it, but no longer ever able to be without it.
There is another point: for those who start writing after one of those experiences that leave you with ‘so many things to say’ (the war in this, and in so many other cases), the first book instantly becomes a barrier between you and that experience, it severs the links that bind you to those facts, destroys your precious hoard of memories – a hoard in the sense that it would have become a reserve on which to draw permanently if you had been patient enough to husband it, if you had not been in such a hurry to spend it, to squander it, to impose an arbitrary hierarchy on the images that you had kept stored there, to separate the privileged images, which you believed contained a genuinely poetic emotion, from the others, those which seemed to concern you too closely or too little for you to be able to portray them; in short to set up in your arrogance a different memory, one that has been given another shape instead of your whole memory with its blurred outlines and its infinite capacity for retrieval … Your memory will never again recover from this violence that you have done to it by writing your book. The privileged images will be spent because of their premature promotion to the level of literary themes, while the images that you wanted to keep in reserve, possibly with the intention of drawing on them in future works, will wither away because they are cut off from the organic wholeness of your fluid living memory. The habit of projecting things on to a literary plane where everything is solid and fixed once and for all, has now taken root, and has faded and crushed the crop of memories in which the life of the tree and of the blade of grass mutually nourish each other. Memory, or rather experience – which is the memory of the event plus the wound it has inflicted on you, plus the change which it has wrought in you and which has made you different – experience is the basic nutrition also for a work of literature (but not only for that), the true source of wealth for every writer (but not only for the writer), and yet the minute it gives shape to a work of literature it withers and dies. The writer, after writing, finds that he is the poorest of men.
This is, then, how I look back at that period which seemed at the time to be burgeoning with images and meanings: the partisan war, the months which had counted for years in my life, and from which one ought to be able indefinitely to conjure up faces and messages and landscapes and thoughts and episodes and words and emotions. But everything is distant and misty, while the pages stand there in their impudent permanence which I know to be deceptive, pages which even then were at variance with a memory which was still a living presence, something solid, apparently stable and permanent, an experience – and those pages are no use to me, I really would need all the other things, everything in fact that is not written down in those pages. A completed book will never compensate me for what I destroyed in writing it: namely that experience which if preserved throughout the years of my life might have helped to compose my last book, and which in fact was sufficient only to write the first.
I. C.
June 1964
Chapter One
To reach the depths of the alley, the sun’s rays have to plunge down vertically, grazing the cold walls which are kept apart by stone arches emning the strip of deep blue sky.
Down they plunge, the sun’s rays, past windows dotted at random over the walls, and plants of basil and oregano in cooking-pots on the sills, and underwear hung out to dry; right down they go until they reach the cobbled, stepped alleyway with its gutter in the middle for the mules’ urine.
Pin, standing on the doorstep of the cobbler’s shop, with his nose in the air, just has to give a cry from his throat – a cry to start off a song, or a yell just before the hand of Pietromagro the cobbler lands on the back of his neck to strike him – and a chorus of shouts and insults pours from every window.
‘Pin! At it already, making our lives a misery! Sing us one of your songs, Pin! Pin, you little hooligan, what’s he doing to you? Pin, you little monkey-face! Why don’t you just wrap up? You and that chicken-thief of a master of yours! You and that mattress of a sister of yours!’
But by now, Pin is standing in the middle of the alley, with his hands in the pockets of a jacket that is too big for him, looking up at them one by one with an unsmiling face: ‘Hey, Celestino, you’d better keep quiet, wearing that fine new suit. They haven’t found out yet who stole that stuff from the New Harbour, have they? Of course, there’s no connection between the two. Oh hi, Carolina, you were lucky that time. Yes. Lucky your husband didn’t look under the bed, remember? You as well, Pasquale. They told me what actually happened in your village: you know, that when Garibaldi finally brought you soap your fellow-villagers thought it was for eating. Soapeaters, Pasquale! For God’s sake, have you any idea how much soap costs?’
Pin has the hoarse voice of a much older boy; he shouts out his jeers in deep, serious tones, then suddenly breaks into a laugh with a note as high and sharp as a whistle, while ginger and brown freckles cluster up round his eyes like a swarm of wasps.
Insulting Pin is always risky; he knows all the inside gossip of the alley and one can never tell what he’ll come out with. From morning till night he’s out th
ere under the windows singing and shouting at the top of his voice, while in Pietromagro’s shop the pile of unmended shoes almost buries the cobbler’s bench and spills out into the street.
‘Pin, you little monkey! You little horror!’ a woman shouts at him. ‘Resole those slippers for me instead of standing there making a nuisance of yourself all day! They’ve been in that pile a month. I’ll have something to say to your boss when they let him out!’
Pietromagro spends half his life in prison, for he was born unlucky, and whenever there’s a theft in the neighbourhood he’s always the one to be put inside eventually. He gets out to find that great pile of unmended shoes in an empty shop. Then he sits down at his cobbler’s bench, takes up a shoe, turns it over once or twice, throws it back into the heap, and finally puts his hairy face into his bony hands and begins swearing. When Pin, completely unaware, comes in whistling, he is suddenly confronted by Pietromagro, with a face covered in short black hair like dog’s fur, eyes ringed with yellow round the pupils, and hand upraised. Pin screams, but Pietromagro has already caught him and does not let go. When Pietromagro is tired of hitting Pin he leaves him in the shop and makes for the tavern. No one sees any more of him that day.
On alternate evenings, Pin’s sister is visited by a German sailor. Every time the man makes his way up the alley, Pin waits for him to ask for a cigarette. The sailor was generous at first and even gave him three or four at a time. It’s easy for Pin to make fun of the German, who can’t understand what he says and looks at him from a shapeless congealed-looking face, shaven to the temples. Then, when the sailor’s back is turned, Pin can shout insults after him, certain he won’t turn round. Seen from behind the sailor looks ridiculous, with those two black ribbons hanging down from his little cap over his short tunic to his bare-looking bottom; a fleshy bottom, like a woman’s, with a big German pistol dangling over it.