Narrative Economy/2 - From the Torlonia hierarchy to the message of Berardo, who dies a martyr's death to defeat his fate
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 20/10/2024
“Under the paper I laboriously drafted, your mother signed with a sign of the cross. I already knew that this was the usual signature of illiterate people; but, even if this were not the case, how could one have imagined a more fitting signature for your mother? A small cross. A more personal signature than that? I remember, the following year, at the catechism exam Don Serafino asked me to explain to him the sign of the cross. “It reminds us of the passion of our Lord,” I replied, ”and it is also the way of signing of the unfortunate".
Ignazio Silone, Il segreto di Luca
The social scale of Fontamara gives us a reflection on human comedy, the poor and Christianity, culminating in the conclusion of the story of Berardo, who dies, a martyr, to defeat his fate.
“And Michele patiently explained to him our idea: -In chief of all is God, master of heaven. This everyone knows. Then comes Prince Torlonia, master of the earth. Then come the guards of Prince Torlonia. Then come the dogs of Prince Torlonia's guards. Then nothing. Then, still nothing. Then, still nothing. Then the cafoni come. And it's over.” (1947, p. 34). This is perhaps the best known passage from Ignazio Silone's Fontamara because it is the synthesis of his spirit and possesses an extraordinary lyrical and ethical force..
That God imagined a step above the Torlonia's ended up, in spite of himself, legitimizing and sacralizing that tremendous hierarchy, placing his stool at the top of a pyramid higher and wrong than that of the pharaohs, without even being able to say, 'not in my name.' Christianity had been coming to earth for nineteen centuries, but it had stopped at Eboli or Avezzano, without reaching the mountains, the countryside, the poor, the cafoni who did not know that the God of Jesus was not sitting on the same ladder as the Torlonia. The cafoni did not know the different God of the gospel, because he was too veiled and hidden by the theologies of the Counter-Reformation and the Latinorum of the priests. Yet sometimes they encountered him, especially in the depths of their sorrows, where, in the guise of Our Lady, angels or saints he had visited, touched and consoled them-not only the Spirit but the whole Trinity is the 'father of the poor,' for if it were not so even the Christian God would be only one of many idols devouring the wretched.
Religion is a major theme of the novel. In the first chapter, Michele Zompa tells a dream of his to Marietta and 'the stranger': “I saw the pope arguing with [Jesus] Crucified. The Crucified One was saying: to celebrate this peace [the Lateran Pacts] it would be good to distribute the land of Fucino to the cafoni who cultivate it and also to the poor cafoni of Fontamara... And the pope replied: - Sir, Prince Torlonia will not want to. And the prince is a good Christian. The Crucifix said: - To celebrate this peace it would be good to dispense the cafoni from paying taxes. And the pope replied: - Sir, the government will not want to. And the rulers are also good Christians... Then the pope proposed to him: - Sir, let us go to the place. Perhaps it will be possible to do something for the cafoni that will displease neither Prince Torlonia, nor the government, nor the rich.” So the two set off for Marsica, and “the pope felt afflicted in the depths of his heart, took from his saddlebag a cloud of lice and threw them on the houses of the poor, saying: - Take, O beloved children, take and scratch yourselves” (pp. 31-32). The parish priest forbade Michael from telling his dream. The Catholic world should soon begin a journey of purification of memory, for while it is true that in its social charisms it has done so much to alleviate the lot of the victims and the poor, it is equally true that in order not to displease 'neither Prince Torlonia, nor the government, nor the rich' too often the church has associated the face of its God with that of power and the strong, perhaps asking them to help the poor. Christianity, moribund in the West, will still be able to hope for a springtime if it is able to turn Silone's scale upside down, and proclaim a Christ who stands below the cafoni and from there disrupts the plans of the strong and the great every day - 'He has overthrown the mighty from their thrones, He has raised up the lowly.
In Silone's social scale there is then an essential detail. In all places and at all times there is no regular and direct transition from 'guard dogs' to 'boors'. No: there are three blanks in between. After the dogs there are three blank sheets - 'then nothing, then still nothing, then still nothing' -. In the staircase upward, after the ground where the boors are missing three steps, there is a hole three times as wide as the distance separating the guards from their dogs. Important and prophetic is the reference to the dogs, who today in the hierarchy of our perverted morality stand far above the migrants deported by our government to Albania. Over the decades the space between the dogs and the boors has grown a lot, the blank pages from three have become ten, a hundred, have multiplied and continue to multiply. In that Italy of Silone's, where popular piety was still alive and active, the boors lived in the same villages as everyone else, were visible, met in the streets, were part of the same people. From those still horizontal intersections of gazes could be born liberation movements, along with writers, artists and poets capable of giving voice to the 'not yet' of their time. Today we no longer see the boors, we deport them abroad, capitalism has hidden them from sight and heart; Christian pietas we have forgotten and ridiculed within a generation. The cafoni of the earth are more and more damned, they do not look at us and concern more in “our lukewarm homes” (Primo Levi)-where, if any, are the new Silone and Levi capable of singing the endless pain of the cafoni? That triple page turn marks the great gulf that separates those above from those below, for without that void those below would not truly be below and those above would not truly be above. That gap between the dogs and the boors then says that the abyss is insurmountable, that, for Silone now disillusioned even by communism, misery and power are forever: elites circulate, the merry-go-round of social classes turns, but between the boors and the Torlonia the furrow remains insurmountable. Until when? Or, to put it in Fontamara's last words, “After so many pains and so many griefs, so many tears and so many wounds, so much blood, so much hatred, so much injustice and so much despair: what to do?” (p. 250).
The epic of Fontamara reaches its dramatic climax in the sad and wonderful conclusion of the story of Berardo Viola. Berardo is a strong, generous, good young man with a strong sense of social justice; this is also why he is the hope of redemption for his countrymen. Grandson of the last brigand of Fontamara (murdered by the Piedmontese), Silone introduces him to us in this way: “He had good eyes, he had preserved as an adult the eyes he had as a boy” (p. 89), which is perhaps the most beautiful word that can be said of an adult, if it is true that the good toil of living is almost all in arriving at the end with something of the eyes with which we have come to it. Berardo had inherited a piece of land from his father, sold it to get the money to emigrate to America, “but before he embarked, a new law suspended all emigration.” So he remained in Fontamara, landless and “like a dog loosed from its chain that does not know what to do with freedom and wanders desperately around the lost property.” But, Silone adds, “how can a man of the land resign himself to the loss of the land?” (p. 84). For “between the land and the peasant it is a hard and serious affair ... It is a kind of sacrament.” He then adds words about land among the most beautiful in our literature, which only a peasant can still understand: “It is not enough to buy it, for a land to be yours. It becomes yours with years, with toil, with sweat, with tears, with sighs. If you have land, on bad weather nights you cannot sleep, because you do not know what is happening to your land” (p. 85). Berardo begs the buyer of his land, Don Circostanza, in vain to give it back to him. Finally, he manages to get a piece of land on the mountain, among the rocks, in the “contrada dei serpenti.” He works it hard-“Either the mountain kills me, or I kill the mountain” (p. 87)-he plants corn there. But there was a heavy flood, “the mountain came down,” and “an enormous flood of water carried away Berardo's little field” (p. 88). And Silone asks, “Can one win against fate?” (p. 89), a fate that is the novel's co-star. And to try to defy fate again, Berardo leaves for Rome in search of work.
Between employment offices, “by the seventh day that we were in Rome, we had no more than four liras left” (p. 216). After three days of fasting, Berardo and his friend (the narrator's voice) stopped leaving the room, stayed still from hunger, lying on the bed. Until they were arrested by the fascists for a mistake, mistaken for subversive troublemakers. They had come to work, ended up in a jail - yesterday, and today. But it is inside that wrong jail that Berardo experiences his resurrection. He says he is “the usual stranger,” a wanted man accused of spreading “the clandestine press,” inciting “the workers to strike, the peasants to disobey” (p. 223), and with a lie he tells the commissioner, “The usual stranger is me” (p. 231). In that prison Berardo manages to overcome his fate. With a vicarious act of sacrifice he takes on a guilt he does not have, and manages to make it to the end, not recanting despite harsh torture. Berardo escapes the fate imprinted on his life since the story of his grandfather, giving his life out of an uncanny loyalty to his ideals of justice. His secular martyrdom redeems Fontamara at the height of its defeat. And at the end of a book where fate itself had been the great victor, he tells us: we are greater than our fate.
Even if Silone does not explain why Berardo as an innocent man self-incriminated, it is not difficult to see in him an image of Christ and his passion: “What if I die? - I will be the first boor who does not die for himself, but for others.” His last words, “It will be something new. A new example. The beginning of something entirely new” (p. 238). That something new over time will mature in Silone, until it blossoms into his last masterpiece, L’avventura di un povero cristiano (from 1968).
Christ is rising again today in Libya, in Albania, on barges, in Gaza, in the Congo, in Sudan, in Lebanon. We don't know him, we don't see him, we don't recognize him, because we look for him in the empty tombs and not in the places of the crucified. 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” was the first cry of the Risen One.
