34
PARTISAN REVIEW
touch with one another. Pietro Spina has been most anxious to work
among the peasants of the Abruzzi villages, the
cafoni
who till the
land of Prince Torlonia. He is overwhelmed by their submissiveness
and total incomprehension of revolutionary ideas. These are not the
rebellious peasants of
Fontamara.
The armed bands of blackshirts
have conquered. Fascism is now a "fact" and as the peasant Magascia
says, it makes little difference whether one agrees or disagrees with
what continues just the same to be a "fact." For the intellectuals too,
fascism is a fact about which it is impossible to argue. Argue? Impos-
sible even to call it by name. It is etcetera, etcetera, the thing which
named may bring one bad luck. Men like the doctor Nunzio Sacca
hate the regime and support it. Everyone supports it from self-interest,
cynicism and fear. The climax of Spina's mounting bitterness comes
when he witnesses the hysterical demonstration attending Mussolini's
radio speech announcing war against Ethiopia. He hears the crowds
massed around the loud speaker, drowning the speech broadcast from
Rome, "intoning the magic invocation, calling on the Great Chief,
the Witch Doctor, the Thaumaturge, who disposed of their blood and
future." Italy has been transformed into the Land of Propaganda,
the poison of servility flows in everyone's blood. To raise oue's head
in struggle against the regime, Spina asks, must one have something
of the moral perfection of a Christian saint?
Spina thinks of the poetical and ennobling feelings distilled by
Christian ideology in the beautiful and aristocratic girl Cristina, and
he wonders whether these feelings cannot be directed to the prole-
tariat. In any case he questions whether it is right that they should
be stifled: "Is it right that they should be combated? Is a true and
lasting revolution possible without them?" He wonders whether these
feelings are not as necessary to a revolutionary as theoretical under-
standing of the structure of society. For what do men like the doctor
Nunzio Sacca lack? Not understanding but courage, that moral
strength ,to endure suffering which Cristina, who cannot accept revo-
lutionary ideas, has. Spina is again confronted with the moral force
of deep religiousness when he visits the priest Don Benedetto, his
former schoolmaster, and finds the old man a resolute opponent of the
dictatorship, a man whom everybody admires and to whom most
people are afraid to speak. I must remark in passing that the meeting
of the priest and his pupil is the mo~t dramatic and moving scene in
the novel. Don Benedetto describes how he was summoned to Rome,
reproved and threatened for his attitude of opposition to the govern-
ment. "The church," he says, "has made religion a drug for the poor
people....
The spirit of the Lord has abandoned the church which
has become a formal, conventional, materialistic institution obsessed
by worldly and caste worries." And the old priest calls his life a
