Why Read the Classics? (30 page)

The
Pasticciaccio
tells of a double police investigation into two crimes, one trivial, the other horrific, which took place in the same building in the centre of Rome: a widow looking for some consolation is robbed of her jewels, and a married woman, who is inconsolable because she cannot have children, is stabbed to death. This obsession with failed maternity is very important in the novel: Signora Liliana Balducci surrounded herself with girls whom she considered her adopted daughters until for one reason or another she would leave them. The figure of Liliana, who dominates even as a victim, and the atmosphere of the gynoecium which she spreads around her opens up a shadowy perspective on femininity, that mysterious force of nature before which Gadda expresses his confusion in pages in which considerations of female physiology are combined with geographical and genetic metaphors and with the legend of the origins of Rome, which guaranteed its continuity through the rape of the Sabine women. Traditional anti-feminism which reduces the woman solely to her procreative function is expressed here in very crude terms: is this to ape
Flaubert’s dictionary of ‘idées reçues’, or because the author shares these views? In order to define the problem more precisely we have to bear in mind two circumstances, one historical, the other relating to the author’s psychology. When Mussolini was in power, the Italians’ main duty, hammered home by the insistent official propaganda, was to have children for the fatherland; only the mothers and fathers of many children were considered worthy of respect. This apotheosis of procreation made Gadda, a bachelor oppressed by a paralysing shyness at any female presence, suffer and feel excluded, and left him hovering between attraction and repulsion.

Attraction and repulsion inform the description of the female corpse with its throat horrifically cut, in one of the virtuoso passages of the book, like a Baroque painting of the martyrdom of some saint. The police commissioner, Francesco Ingravallo, invests a particular interest in the enquiry into the crime, for two reasons: first, because he knew (and desired) the woman; and second, because he is a Southerner brought up on philosophy and driven by a passion for science as well as sensitivity for everything that is human. It is he who theorises about the multiplicity of causes which go to determine an effect, and amongst these causes (since his reading apparently also includes Freud) he always includes sex, in some form or other.

If Inspector Ingravallo is the author’s philosophical spokesman, there is also another character with whom Gadda identifies at a psychological and poetic level: one of the tenants, the retired civil servant Angeloni, who because of the awkwardness with which he replies to questioning instantly becomes a suspect, even though he is the most harmless person in the world. Angeloni, an introverted, melancholy bachelor, who takes lonely walks through the streets of ancient Rome, is prone only to temptations of gluttony, or perhaps of one other vice: he is in the habit of ordering prosciutto and cheese from delicatessens which are delivered to his door by boys in short trousers. The police are looking for one of these boys, who is probably an accomplice in the robbery and perhaps also in the murder. Angeloni, who clearly lives in fear of being accused of homosexual proclivities, jealous as he is of his respectability and privacy, stumbles under questioning with his omissions and contradictions and ends up by being arrested.

More serious suspicions fall on a nephew of the murdered woman, who has to explain how he comes to possess a gold pendant containing a precious stone, a jasper which has replaced an opal, though this seems very
much a red herring. The enquiries into the robbery, on the other hand, seem to gather more promising clues, moving from the capital to the villages on the Alban hills (consequently becoming the domain of the carabinieri rather than the city police) in the search for a gigolo electrician, Diomede Lanciani, who used to visit the obsessive widow of the many jewels. In this village world we pick up the traces of various girls on whom Signora Liliana lavished her maternal care. And it is there that the carabinieri find, hidden in a bed-pan, the widow’s stolen jewels as well as another jewel which had belonged to the murdered woman. The descriptions of the jewels (as with the previous description of the pendant with its opal or jasper) are not only virtuoso performances by a master of style but they add another level to the reality portrayed: besides the linguistic, phonetic, psychological, physiological, historical, mythical, gastronomic levels, we have this mineral, underworld level, about hidden treasures, involving geological history and the powers of inanimate matter in the squalid business of a crime. And it is around the possession of jewels that Gadda tightens the knots of the psychology and psycho-pathology of his characters: the violent envy of the poor along with what Gadda defines as ‘the typical psychosis of frustrated women’ which leads the unfortunate Liliana to load her ‘children’ with jewels.

We could have been helped some way towards the solution of the mystery by a chapter which was chapter 4 in the first version of the novel (published in instalments in the monthly Florentine review
Letteratura
, in 1946), if the author had not eliminated it when he published it as a book (with Garzanti in 1957) precisely because he did not want to reveal his hand too early. In it the inspector interrogated Liliana’s husband about the relationship which he had had with Virginia, one of their ambitious adopted children, whose character was marked by lesbian tendencies (the Sapphic atmosphere around Signora Liliana and her gynecium was stressed), by a lack of morality, greed for money and social ambitions (she had become her adoptive father’s lover only to blackmail him), and by violent fits of hatred (she would utter dark threats while slicing the roast meat with the kitchen knife).

Is Virginia the murderer, then? Any doubt we might have had is eliminated if one reads an unpublished document which was discovered and published recently
(Il palazzo degli ori (The Apartment Building of Riches)
, Turin: Einaudi, 1983). This is a film script which Gadda wrote at the same time as the first draft of the novel: either shortly before it, or shortly
afterwards, apparently. In it the whole plot is developed and clarified in every particular. (We also learn that the robbery was committed not by Diomede Lanciani but by Enea Retalli, who in order to avoid arrest opens fire on the carabinieri and is shot dead.) The script (which bears no relation to the film which Pie tro Germi made from the novel in 1959 and in which Gadda had no part) was never taken up by producers or directors, and no wonder: Gadda had a rather naïve idea of writing for cinema, based on continual fade-outs to reveal characters’ thoughts and background detail. For us it makes very interesting reading as a rough sketch for the novel, but it fails to generate any real tension either in its action or its psychology.

In brief, the problem is not ‘Who dunnit?’, for already in the novel’s opening pages we are told that what causes the crime is the whole ‘force-field’ which establishes itself around the victim; it is the ‘compulsion on destiny’ emanating from the victim, her circumstances in relation to others’ circumstances, that spins the web of events: ‘that system of forces and probabilities which surrounds every human being and which is usually called destiny.’

[1984]

When I was young I used to enjoy learning poetry off by heart. We studied many poems at school—and today I wish we had studied many more — which have subsequently stayed with me all my life, in a kind of unconscious, mental recital of them which resurfaces many years later. After secondary school, I continued learning some on my own for a few years: poets who were at that time not included in school syllabuses. Those were the years when
Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones)
and
Le occasioni (The Occasions)
began to circulate in Italy in the grey covers of Einaudi’s books. So, around the age of eighteen, I learnt several of Montale’s poems by heart: some of them I have now forgotten, others I have continued to carry with me to this day.

Rereading Montale today naturally takes me back to that repertoire of poems deep in my memory (‘che si sfolla’ (which empties)). An analysis of what has remained and what has been cancelled (or ‘scancellato’, to use the local form of ‘cancellato’ retained by Móntale), and a study of how my memory has varied or even deformed the verses, would lead me to an in-depth exploration of those poems and of the relationship that I have established with them over the years.

But I would like to choose a poem, which though it has long stayed in my memory and bears the scars of that stay, lends itself better to a totally contemporary, objective reading rather than leading to a search for the conscious or unconscious autobiographical echoes that Montale’s poems, particularly the early ones, arouse in me. I am going to choose, therefore, ‘Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro’ (‘Perhaps One Morning Walking in an Air of Glass’), one of the poems that has continued to go
round more than most on my mental turntable, and which comes back to me every time without any tremor of nostalgia, as though I were reading it for the first time.

‘Forse un mattino’ is an ‘osso di seppia’ (cuttlefish-bone) which stands out from the others not so much because it is a narrative’ poem (the typical narrative poem by Montale is ‘La folata che alzò l’amara aroma’ (‘The Gust that Stirred the Bitter Aroma’), where the subject of the action is a gust of wind and the action itself is simply the realisation of the absence of a person, so the narrative movement resides in contrasting an inanimate subject which is present with a human object who is absent), but because it is without objects, natural symbols, or a particular landscape, it is a poem of abstract imagination and thought of a kind that is rare in Montale.

But I notice that (and this distances it even more from the others) my memory had corrected a bit of the poem: as far as I am concerned the sixth line begins ‘alberi case strade’ (trees houses streets) or Domini case strade’ (men houses streets) not ‘alberi case colli’ (trees houses hills), which only now rereading the text after 35 years do I see is the right reading. That means that by substituting ‘strade’ (streets) for ‘colli’ (hills), I am setting the action very much in a city landscape, perhaps because the word ‘colli’ sounds too vague for me, or because the presence in the poem of ‘uomini che non si voltano’ (men who don’t turn round) suggests the rush of passers-by. In short, I see the disappearance of the world as the disappearance of the city rather than of nature. (I now notice that my memory was only grafting on to this poem the image of the verse ‘Ciò non vede la gente nell’affollato corso’ (the people on the crowded street do not see this), which appears four pages before this, in a companion piece to this poem.)

If we look closely, we shall see that what sets off the ‘miracle’ is something natural or rather atmospheric, the dry, crystalline transparency of the winter air, which makes things so clear as to create an effect of unreality, almost as though the halo of haze which usually covers the landscape (here once again I am setting Montale ’s poetry, the early Montale ’s poetry, in the usual coastal landscape, assimilating it into the Ligurian landscape of my own memory) is identifiable with the density and weight of existence. No, that’s not quite it: it is the concreteness of this invisible air, which seems in fact like glass, with a self-sufficient solidity of its own, which in the end settles on the world and makes it vanish. The glass-air is the real element in this
poem, and the city in which I place it is a city of glass, which becomes more and more diaphanous until it eventually disappears. It is the definite nature of the air that leads to a sense of emptiness (whereas in Leopardi it is the indeterminacy which reaches the same effect). Or to be more precise, there is a sense of being suspended which is caused by that opening ‘Forse un mattino’ (Perhaps one morning), which is not so much indeterminacy as a careful equilibrium, ‘andando
in
un’aria di vetro’ (walking
in
an air of glass), as though we were walking in the air, in the fragile glass of air, in the cold light of morning, until we realise that we are suspended in the void.

The sense of suspension and at the same time of concreteness continues in the second line because of the oscillating rhythm, with that ‘compìrsi’ which the reader is continually tempted to pronounce ‘còmpiersi’, but notices each time that the whole line rests on that prosaic ‘compìrsi’ which dulls any emphatic overtone in stating the miracle. This is a line which my ear has always been fond of precisely because when you say it mentally it needs some help, it seems to have one foot too many, but it is not in fact one too many: often my memory tends to discard the odd syllable. The most vulnerable area of the line in terms of memory is that ‘rivolgendomi’ (turning round) which sometimes I abbreviate to ‘voltandomi’ (turning) or ‘girandomi’ (spinning), thus disrupting the rhythm of all the successive accents.

Of all the reasons that cause a poem to stick in the memory (first almost asking you to commit it to memory, then allowing itself to be memorised) metrical peculiarities play a decisive role. I have always been attracted by Montale’s use of rhyme: two-syllable words (‘parole piane’) rhyming with three-syllable ones (‘parole sdrucciole’), imperfect rhymes, rhymes in unusual positions like ‘Il saliscendi bianco e nero dei / [balestrucci dal palo]’ (the black and white rise and fall of the little swallows from the pole) where ‘dei’ rhymes with ‘dove piú non sei’ (where you are no more). The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

The ‘miracle’ is Montale’s first theme, which he never abandons: it is the ‘maglia rotta nella rete’ (broken skein in the net), ‘l’anello che non tiene’ (the link that does not hold) in the opening poem, but this poem is one of
the few occasions on which that
other
truth which the poet presents beyond the solid wall of the empirical world is revealed in a definable experience. We could say that it is about nothing more nor less than the unreality of the world, if that definition did not risk making hazy and generic something which is conveyed to us in precise terms. The unreality of the world is the basis particularly of Oriental philosophies, religions and literatures, but this poem moves in a different epistemological area, one of clarity and transparency, just as though it were a mental ‘aria di vetro’ (air of glass). Merleau-Ponty has many fine pages in his
Phenomenology of Perception
on cases in which the subjective experience of space separates from the objective experience of the world (at night in the dark, in dreams, under the influence of drugs, when suffering from schizophrenia etc.). This poem could be one of Merleau-Ponty’s examples: space separates from the world and presents itself to us as just space, empty and limitless. The poet greets this discovery favourably, as a ‘miracle’, as the acquisition of a truth as opposed to the ‘inganno consueto’ (usual illusion), but it also makes him suffer a terrifying vertigo: ‘con un terrore di ubriaco’ (with a drunk’s terror). Not even the ‘aria di vetro’ (air of glass) can support man’s footsteps any more: that balanced opening with ‘andando’ (going), after the sudden turning around, becomes a kind of staggering without anything to hold on to.