Hermit in Paris (12 page)

I. A Childhood under Fascism

1) I was sixteen in 1939, so in replying to the question about the ideas I grew up with before the war, I have to beware of generic approximations, I have to try to reconstruct a network of images and emotions rather than ideas.

The danger for those writing autobiographical memoirs in a political key is that excessive weight is given to politics compared to the weight it really has in childhood and adolescence. I could begin by saying that the first memory of my life is that of a socialist being beaten up by Fascist lynch-squads, something which I think few among those born in 1923 can manage to remember; and indeed it is a memory which must probably refer to the last time Fascist squads used coshes, in 1926, after an attempt on Mussolini. The person attacked was Professor Gaspare Amoretti, an old Latin teacher (father of a Communist from the
Ordine
Nuovo
group who later fell in Japan on a mission for the Third International), who at that time was living in the annexe of our villa at San Remo. I remember clearly that we were at dinner when the old professor came in with his face beaten up and bleeding, his bowtie all torn, asking for help.

But to make everything that you will see and hear in your life stem from your first childhood memory is a literary temptation. One’s perspectives in childhood and adolescence are different; disparate impressions and judgments are placed alongside each other without any logic; even for those who grow up in an environment which is open to opinion and information a line of judgment is formed only with the passage of time.

As a child listening to the adults’ discussions in our house, I always felt that it was taken for granted that in Italy everything was going wrong. And during adolescence I and my companions at school were almost all hostile to Fascism. But it is not at all inevitable that just because of this my road towards anti-Fascism was already marked out. At that time I was very far from seeing the situation in political terms, as a struggle of one ideology against another, and from working out perspectives towards a solution for the future. Seeing that politics is an object of contempt and obloquy in the eyes of the best people, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to think that it is an area that is irredeemably corrupt, and that one has to look for other values in life. The distance between judging Fascism negatively and having a political commitment to anti-Fascism was so great it could not be conceived of today.

However, now I have to beware of another error or habit typical of those who write autobiographical memoirs: that of tending to configure your own experience as the ‘typical’ experience of a particular generation and ambience, emphasizing the more common aspects and ignoring the more particular and personal ones. Unlike what I have done at other times, I would now like to turn the spotlight on those aspects which most depart from the ‘typical’ Italian experience, because I am convinced that one can gain more truth from the exception than from the rule.

I grew up in a little town which was rather different from the rest of Italy when I was a child: San Remo, which was at that time still populated by elderly English people, Russian grand dukes, eccentric and cosmopolitan types. And my own family was rather unusual both for San Remo and for the Italy of that time: my parents were no longer young, both scientists, lovers of nature, freethinkers, very different in personality from one another, and both opposed to the political climate of the country. My father, who was from San Remo, from a family that supported Mazzini and republican, anticlerical and masonic ideas, had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist; he had lived in Latin America for many years and had not been through the experience of the First World War; my mother, who was from Sardinia, from a secular family, had grown up in the religion of civic duty and science, had been a socialist in favour of intervention in the war in 1915 but with a tenacious faith in pacifism. When they came back to Italy after years overseas they found Fascism establishing its power and an Italy that was totally different and difficult to understand. My father tried in vain to put his skills and honesty at the service of the country, and to consider Fascism along the same lines as the Mexican revolutions he had lived through and with the accommodating, practical spirit of the old Ligurian reformist that he was; my mother, whose brother was one of the university professors who had signed Croce’s manifesto,
⁵⁰
was intransigent in her anti-Fascism. Both were cosmopolitan by vocation and experience and both had grown up under the general urge towards renovation of prewar socialism, and their sympathies were not so much with liberal democracy as with all the progressive movements that were out of the ordinary: Kemal Atatürk, Gandhi, the Russian Bolsheviks. Fascism fitted into this picture as one route among many, but a wrong route, led by ignorant and dishonest people. The critique of Fascism in my family, apart from attacking its violence, incompetence, greed, suppression of freedom of speech and aggression in foreign policy, was directed above all at its two cardinal sins: the alliance with the monarchy and the reconciliation with the Vatican.

Young children are instinctively conformist, so realizing that I belonged to a family that was unusual created a state of psychological tension with the prevailing environment. The thing which most distinguished my parents’ anti-conformism was their intransigence on the question of religion. At school they asked that I be excused from religious instruction and not ever have to attend Mass or other religious services. While I was at a Waldensian primary school or attending an English college as an external pupil, this fact did not cause me any problems: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Russian Orthodox pupils were all mixed up together in varying proportions. At that time San Remo was a city with churches and priests of all denominations, as well as strange sects that were then fashionable such as Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophists, and I considered my family’s attitude as one of the many gradations of religious opinion I saw represented around me. However, when I went to the state high school, being exempt from religious classes in this climate of general conformism (Fascism was already in its second decade of power) exposed me to a situation of isolation and forced me at times to shut myself off in a kind of silent passive resistance towards my teachers and fellow-pupils. Sometimes the religious lesson was in between two other classes and I would wait in the corridor, causing misunderstandings with teachers and janitors passing by who thought I had been sent out as a punishment. What happened with new pupils was that they always thought I was Protestant because of my surname; I would deny this but was unable to reply to the next question: ‘So what are you then?’ The expression ‘freethinker’, said by a schoolboy, would make people laugh; ‘atheist’ was too strong a word for that age; so I refused to answer.

My mother delayed my enrolment in the Fascist scouts, the
Balilla
, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts’ chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church.

In short, I often found myself in situations different from the others, looked on as though I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one’s habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. But above all I grew up tolerant of others’ opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority’s beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anti-clericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by priests.

I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that now many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education ‘so as not to give them complexes’, ‘so that they don’t feel different from the others’. I believe that this behaviour displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one’s own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.

Of course I must not make things out to be more exciting than they were. My childhood experiences had nothing dramatic about them, I lived in a comfortable, serene world, I had an image of the world that was varied and rich in contrasting nuances, but no awareness of all-out conflicts. I had no notion of poverty; the only social problem I ever heard mentioned was that of the Ligurian smallholders, on whose behalf my father campaigned, those owners of minuscule pieces of land, tormented by taxes, by the price of chemical products, and the lack of roads. There were of course the poverty-stricken masses from other regions of Italy who were beginning to emigrate to the Riviera: the wage-earners who worked on our land and filed into my father’s study to be paid every Saturday for the week’s work were from the Abruzzi or the Veneto. But these were people from distant lands, and I could not imagine what poverty really meant. I did not find it easy to relate to working people; the familiarity and friendliness that my parents showed towards the poor always made me feel ill at ease.

The ideas regarding the political struggle already taking place in the world did not reach me, only its external images, which simply lay beside one another as in a mosaic. The most read papers in San Remo were from Nice, not Genoa or Milan. During the Spanish Civil War L’Eclaireur supported Franco; Le Petit Niçois was for the Republicans, and at a certain point it was banned. In our house we read
Il Lavoro
, a Genoa paper, as long as it remained – as it did well into the Fascist period – the only paper whose editor was an old socialist, Giuseppe Canepa. Canepa was an old friend of my father’s, who I remember sometimes coming to lunch at our house. But this must have been around 1933, since my parents enjoyed enormously its anti-Hitler column signed by ‘Stella Nera’, who was Giovanni Ansaldo.
⁵¹
Once a Zeppelin passed overhead, full of Nazi brownshirts, and the boy next to me, Emanuel Rospicicz, who was a Polish Jew, said: ‘If only it would crash and kill them all.’ I was in the fourth year of primary school, at the Waldensian School: it must have been 1933. In my house there were always comings and goings of young people from all over – Turks, Dutch, Indians – who had grants to attend the institute that my father directed; once a heated argument arose between two Germans, a Nazi and a Jew. My mother’s best friend, from Switzerland, often went to France and attended the international peace and anti-Fascist demonstrations at the Salle Pleyel: she did not tell us, but (we later found out) she secretly tested their passwords on us. At the time of the Popular Front in France, at afternoon snack-time our mother would make us stand to attention facing east and say: ‘
Pour le pain, pour la paix, pour la
liberté
.’

At the same time, of course, I attended the assemblies and parades of the Fascist armed scouts, the
Balilla Moschettieri
, and later of the
Avanguardisti
. The pleasure in missing these, of being suspended from school for not attending an assembly or not putting on your uniform on call-up days, became more intense around the time of going to high school, though even then more than anything else this was simply a bravado display of student disobedience. But what it was like living through this period of Fascist demonstrations I have already tried to represent in three stories which are set in the summer of 1940; there is no point in going back over that here.

In short, until the Second World War broke out, the world seemed to me to have a range of different gradations of morality and behaviour, not opposites but placed alongside each other. At one extreme was the stern anti-Fascist or even pre-Fascist rigour which was incarnated by my mother with her moralistic, secular, scientific, humanitarian, pacifist, animal-loving austerity (my father was another response on his own: a solitary walker, he lived more in the woods with his dogs than among other humans: hunting in season, and looking for mushrooms or snails in the other months). After that one gradually moved through various levels of indulgence towards human weakness, approximation and corruption which became more and more marked and cloying as one went through the Catholic, military, conformist and bourgeois vanity fairs, until you reached the opposite extreme of total vulgarity, ignorance and bluster which was Fascism in its smug sense of triumph, devoid of scruples and sure of itself.

This kind of picture actually did not impose on us categorical decisions, though it might seem like that today; a boy then saw open to him various options, including that of rejecting his parents’ world as a nineteenth-century sarcophagus out of touch with reality, and of choosing Fascism which seemed much more solid and vital; in fact my (younger) brother, from the age of thirteen to sixteen, called himself a Fascist just to rebel against our family (but as soon as the German occupation began the rebellion stopped and the family was united in support of the partisan struggle). I at that same age – the time of the Spanish Civil War, which seemed a clear sign of the defeat of the values my parents believed in – accepted their world of values as a tradition and defence against Fascist vulgarity, but I was heading down the road of pessimism, an ironic and detached commentator, someone who wanted to keep himself aloof: any progress was an illusion, things could not be worse in the world.