The Secrets of Italy Page 5
In a newspaper article a few years later, in 1893, D’Annunzio reminisced about the atmosphere of Rome back in the early 1880s:
It was a time in which the industriousness of wrecking crews and building crews was in full swing. Along with the clouds of dust came a kind of building frenzy, a sudden, spreading whirlwind … There it was, everywhere, like a vulgar contagion. Amid the incessant business disputes, the almost ferocious flurry of appetites and passions, and the unorganized and exclusive manner in which useful activities were done, all aesthetic sense was lost, all respect for the past was forgotten.15
That’s what the capital of the Kingdom of Italy looked like to young D’Annunzio when he left his provincial hometown to live in the big city. The scene struck the writer with such intensity that he was enthralled by it. You might say the city made an impression in his very flesh, and with his writing he managed to give it back to the reader as a transfigured city, a combination of things he’d seen, things he’d imagined, and things that had never really happened outside of his own head. He wrote about the noble classes and the commoners, fashion and architecture, with scenes and figures taken partly from reality, or completely made up, but somehow linked to things he saw in the teeming city all around him. His is a dreamed-up realism, a painting with veiled contours, distorted by a perturbing ideal, yet nevertheless recognizable.
D’Annunzio arrived in Rome when he was just eighteen. He had recently finished high school in Prato, having earned top grades and sparked a few scandals during his time at the Liceo Cicognini. The city attracted him or, better yet, ensnared him. Looking around each day as he exited his modest lodging at 12 Via Borgognona, everything seemed worth writing about. He enrolled at the university’s literature department, which was why his family had sent him to Rome in the first place, but rarely attended class. He made up for it by becoming a regular on the editorial teams of several journals, where his reputation had preceded him thanks to a collection of poems (Primo vere, 1879) published while he was still in high school. He showed up “all curls and smiles,” and received a warm welcome. Fellow writer Edoardo Scarfoglio vividly remembered his arrival at the offices of the literary and satirical journal Capitan Fracassa: “I recall it perfectly—I was reclining on a bench … and yawning amid a bunch of people bantering. As soon as I saw this little man with curly hair and sweetly feminine eyes approaching, saying my name and introducing himself to me in an equally womanly tone, I started and jumped up, strangely struck. He had the same effect on everyone who saw him. We led him into the lounge, and everyone gathered around him. Never—even in that office, where any and everything new easily triggered intense admiration and curiosity—had a triumphant humorist received such a festive welcome.”16
The luxurious abodes and villas, the city’s surroundings, the carriages, the evenings out in high society, the people, everything drew him in—above all, he was captivated by the women, who sparked his imagination and sensuous temperament. In one of the poems collected in Intermezzo di rime (1884), which caused great scandal, he wrote with no hesitation whatsoever: “My barbarous, strong youth / killed itself in the arms of many women.”17
His first noteworthy affair in Rome was with Maria Hardouin di Gallese, whom he met in February 1883. In April he wrote to his friend Enrico Nencioni: “I go riding a lot, by myself, in search of an Amazon I rarely meet … I love, my dear Enrico, finally I love with full abandon, utterly losing myself.” That love, complete with its sense of abandon, was fully requited. One May evening Maria gave in, and Gabriele rushed to make it known in one of the poems later included in Intermezzo di rime. The entire sequence of events, culminating in an intimate encounter on a lawn in Villa Borghese, is retold with brazen tactlessness. The composition, titled “Il peccato di maggio” (“Sin in May”), sounds more like a radio newscast than a short poem:
Her head
fell back, and suddenly she lost it. Her locks
spread out, forming a bed where she, as if
about to die, reclined. She stiffened,
as if frozen by death. Fear
filled me …
But death
didn’t last. Life returned in a wave of pleasure.
I bent my entire body over her mouth, as if drinking
from a chalice; quivering at this conquest, I felt
her breasts and nipples rise to the lascivious
touch of my fingers, those fleshy flowers …18
And so on and so forth.
The consequences of that “Sin in May” forced the two into a hasty marriage.
In his own way D’Annunzio did love his wife—in his own way meaning he turned their marriage into a union of convenience, clearly separated from his activities as an artist and his liaisons with other women. One of these other women, Olga Ossani, was a key model for one of the characters in The Child of Pleasure. Ossani, a Neapolitan journalist who published under the pseudonym Febea, was a few years older than D’Annunzio (he was twenty-one when he met her), and was known for her beauty—in particular, for the fact that she had completely white hair by the time she was twenty, which sharply contrasted with her fresh, young body and lively gaze. Their love affair was intense and brief, and ended on March 25, 1885, just four months after it had begun. Ossani had a strong personality and clear ideas about what she wanted. Four months were enough for her to know that she’d never be able to put up with the subterfuge a clandestine affair would’ve required.
Whereas De Amicis drew on the world of school to turn experience into literature, D’Annunzio drew on women. The third affair we should examine is the one he had with Elvira Natalia Fraternali, whom he met on April 2, 1887, at a concert on Via Margutta. Elvira was a pianist and a sophisticate, and her intellect also made an impression on the poet. But their cultural interests weren’t what set their relationship apart; rather, it was that they were a perfect match on a sensual level. Elvira, nicknamed Barbara and sometimes Barbarella, was certainly the woman D’Annunzio loved, or desired, more than any other among the many he had throughout his life. She might also have satisfied his predilections in ways no one else managed to, as seems to be the case judging from the incessant correspondence (over a thousand letters) the two exchanged. Born in 1862, she was a year older than Gabriele. Three years before she met the poet she’d married Ercole Leoni, a count of dubious lineage from Bologna, but the two soon separated after her husband gave her a rather unpleasant venereal disease.
As the affair between Leoni and D’Annunzio brought them public notoriety the count began to go crazy, perhaps more out of a wounded sense of pride than out of real jealousy. He then tried to get his wife back and even forced her, despite the public humiliation it cost him, to have conjugal relations with him. There are clear traces of this tie, split between opposing tensions and pressures, in The Child of Pleasure.
Between April and June 1887 the lovers met up on an almost daily basis. Their encounters took place in the studios of two of D’Annunzio’s friends: the artist Guido Boggiani’s place on Via san Nicola da Tolentino; and the composer Francesco Paolo Tosti’s place on Via de’ Prefetti. At least three of the author’s works reflect the impact of this relationship. She shows up in his work as early as the first poem in his book Elegie Romane, “Il Vespro”:
When (my veins tremble with sweetness at the very thought)
I left, as if inebriated, the beloved house;
and strolled the streets still abuzz with the sound of the day’s
labors, the click and clack of carts, gruff shouts,
I felt my whole soul rise up from that secret heart
lustfully …
His cheeks flush and large, the Triton blew not fire
but water, which fanned out like foliage.
A flickering of flashes, tinged purple atop,
free up in the sky, the grand home of the Barberini
looked to me like the perfect palace I’d have chosen for our
lovemaking; and desire made me fantasize of superb lo
ves yonder:
radiant loves and admirable luxuries and deep leisure;
a wider strength, a warmer life.19
Palazzo Barberini is mentioned here, and it’s also where the first amorous encounter takes place between Andrea Sperelli and Elena Muti, the lead characters of The Child of Pleasure. Both Leoni and Ossani influenced the writer’s construction of Elena. In a letter to Leoni, D’Annunzio wrote:
When I think back on the kisses I gave you all over your body—on your small, perky breasts, on your stomach as perfect as a sculpted virgin’s, on the warm, living, soft rose between your lips, and on your mouth, on your thighs as soft as velvet and as flavorful as a succulent fruit, on your knees, which you denied me in vain, laughing and twisting away, and on the back of your knees, so fresh and delicate and childlike, and on your back, all golden and dotted with gold beads, with the groove where my wet tongue ran swiftly up and down, caressing you, and on your loins, and on your marvelously beautiful hips, and on the nape of your neck amid your hair, and on your long, beating eyelashes, and on your throat—when I think back on that wave of sheer joy that coursed through my veins even when I just looked at you nude, I quiver and tremble and am set ablaze.20
In the novel, one of the first encounters between Andrea and Elena has a similar tone:
“Afterwards, you remember on the sofa—I smothered you in flowers—your face, your bosom, your shoulders, and you raised yourself out of them every moment to offer me your lips, your throat, your half closed lids. And between your skin and my lips I felt the rose leaves soft and cool. I kissed your throat and a shiver ran through you … nothing in this world could be so dear and sweet.…”21
The lead character of The Child of Pleasure is Count Andrea Sperelli Fieschi D’Ugenta, a highly sensitive poet and etcher; he’s also possessed by a “sensual selfishness,” and is aware of his own moral impotence. Abandoned by his lover, Elena Muti, at the height of their passionate affair, Andrea tries in vain to forget her by pursuing other women. Elena has left him to marry into wealth, in order to restore her family’s shaky finances. One of Andrea’s many affairs forces him into a duel, which leaves him wounded. During his convalescence in the countryside at Villa Schifanoja, he reflects on his own past and repudiates its squalor, dreaming of a redemption of sorts through a renewed dedication to his art practice.
At the villa he meets young Maria Ferres, a married woman and “nobly spiritual creature,” and becomes her lover. Sperelli’s full recovery and return to Rome lead him right back into his previous lifestyle. What’s more, when he runs into Elena by chance one day he realizes not only that he loves her with the same fierce passion he used to, but that his feeling for her fuses with his new feelings toward Maria, such that the two women meld into one in his mind, creating a single, ambiguous tangle of desire. Andrea basically uses Maria as a substitute for Elena, who now rejects him. This strange relationship goes on for some time, coasting on an unstable equilibrium—but then, just as Maria’s family falls into hardship and she needs her lover’s support and understanding more than ever, in a moment of unchecked passion Andrea mistakenly utters Elena’s name. Maria gets the turbid mind game Andrea is playing, and flees. It’s the same day that everything in Maria’s apartment is being auctioned off to repay her husband’s gambling debts; he’d been caught cheating, and has lost all social standing. The novel comes to a close with a scene of utter desolation and abandonment, with porters carrying off the last few furnishings and tapestries, a transparent symbol of a much more deeply rooted failure.
Reduced to its core plot, The Child of Pleasure sounds like something straight out of a popular newspaper serial. Indeed, its “modernity” lies not in its storyline, but rather in the psychological tangles connecting the characters, as well as Andrea’s introspective realizations. But the book’s real power might lie elsewhere still—many other writers, from Dostoyevsky to Proust, had already dealt with their characters’ psychological sides, or were about to. Its real strength just might be how well it evokes Rome and Roman society in that era. Between the lines of his story D’Annunzio hid some precise references to the period. We know that The Child of Pleasure begins at 3:25 P.M. on December 31, 1886 (a date revealed by the famous incipit of the Italian edition: “L’anno moriva, assai dolcemente”—“The year was dying, quite sweetly”); it ends just after sundown on Monday, June 20, 1887. From a strictly chronological point of view, the story itself (just like its composition) unfolds over a six-month period. But the psychological vicissitudes it covers are much more vast, since the relationship between Elena and Andrea is already over when the book begins, and the reader learns of it only through Andrea’s reminiscences.
When Elena first appears, D’Annunzio describes only the way she’s dressed. The sole physical feature he refers to is her eyes:
She was standing in the middle of the room—a little undecided and ill at ease in spite of her rapid and lightly spoken words. A velvet coat with Empire sleeves, very full at the shoulders and buttoned closely at the wrists and with an immense collar of blue fox for sole trimming, covered her from head to foot, but without disguising the grace of her figure. She looked at Andrea with eyes in which a curious tremulous smile softened the flash and sparkle.22
Even when Andrea thinks back on the circumstances in which he met Elena, D’Annunzio only gives us a fleeting glimpse of her. Andrea remembers seeing her from behind as she ascended the grand staircase of Palazzo Roccagiovane:
She ascended in front of him with a slow and rhythmic movement; her cloak, lined with fur as white as swan’s-down, was unclasped at the throat, and slipping back, revealed her shoulders, pale as polished ivory, the shoulder-blades disappearing into the lace of the corsage with an indescribably soft and fleeting curve as of wings. The neck rose slender and round, and the hair, twisted into a great knot on the crown of her head, was held in place by jewelled pins.23
The third description of Elena is, once again, partial. We see her make a minor gesture, but it immediately lights up Andrea’s senses:
She made no reply, but she lifted the bunch of violets to her face, and inhaled the perfume. In so doing, the wide sleeve of her evening cloak slipped back over her arm beyond her elbow … [The sight of her lively flesh, emerging from amid the fur cloak like a bunch of white roses pushing through the snow] thrill[ed] the young man’s senses almost beyond control … [due to the singularly provocative power the nude female form acquires when exposed from behind a thick, heavy garment.] His lips trembled, and he with difficulty restrained the burning words that rose to them.24
It isn’t the first time such a “thick, heavy garment”—put more prosaically, a fur coat—inspires sensations of the sort in D’Annunzio. In a newspaper gossip column titled “Cronachetta delle pellicce” (“Little Column of the Fur Coats”), published in the December 1884 issue of La Tribuna under the pseudonym Happemouche, he writes:
Nothing is more nobly voluptuous than a well-worn fur-seal coat. Their skins agreeably conform to all the curves and folds of the female body—not with the light adherence of silk or satin, but with a certain gravity that isn’t without its own grace, the sweet kind of grace that animals with thick fur have as they furtively move about. There’s always a kind of lightning, a kind of quick, brilliant flash that precedes or accompanies their movement, or gives their movement a strange beauty.
Only upon her fourth appearance is Elena finally shown to Andrea in her full radiance. The scene takes place in the grand rooms of the French Embassy in Palazzo Farnese, around eleven at night. Andrea arrived early, anxiously consumed by the thought of once again seeing Elena, who hasn’t come yet. He already fears she’s decided not to show when:
She advanced along the frescoed gallery where the crowd was thinnest, her long white train rippling like a wave over the floor behind her. All white and simple, she passed slowly along, turning from side to side in answer to the numerous greetings, with an air of manifest fatigue and a somewhat strained smile which drew down the
corners of her mouth, while her eyes looked larger than ever under the low white brow, her extreme pallor imparting to her whole face a look so ethereal and delicate as to be almost ghostly … Her beauty at this moment was of ideal nobility, and shone with additional splendour among all these women heated with the dance, over-excited and restless in their manner.25
D’Annunzio was twenty-five when he wrote The Child of Pleasure, and it was his first novel. Yet the skillfully crafted crescendo with which he prepares the reader for Elena’s entrance is enough to prove his natural narrative instincts. Elena is gradually given to the reader, in stages. When the time is ripe, D’Annunzio introduces her with this slow, grandiose, solemn advance, which allows her pale, intense beauty to shine in contrast to that of the other women, who are “heated with the dance, over-excited and restless in their manner.”
Another majestic scene is the one in which the two lovers finally give themselves to one another. After an intense, prolonged preparation, the lightning-quick conclusion mimics what often happens in reality: “With a sudden movement she raised herself from the pillows, and taking Andrea’s head between her two hands, she drew him to her, [breathed her desire into his face,] and their lips met in a long and passionate kiss. Afterwards she fell back again … and [offered herself to him].”26
In his later book titled Libro segreto (“Secret Book”), D’Annunzio smugly describes an episode involving a similarly literary “atmosphere.” When he went to give one of the first printed copies to his fellow writer Jacob Moleschott, the old doctor’s face lit up “with a broad smile.” He then scanned the pages, sniffed them, and, great physiologist that he was, pronounced an instinctive judgment that in some way also sounded like a literary verdict: “It reeks of sperm.”