From the Capitals of Europe
ROME LETTER
P
EOPLE HERE
are incurable optimists in believing they personally will
be able to escape the next war, that it will strike the following genera–
tion maybe, but that "we" will get off. Like conversation about funerals,
this chatter about "the next war" really masks another and much more
indefinite uneasiness-an uneasiness which most of the people who do
the talking are not able to define precisely for themselves. It's the sense
that the end of the War has not brought Europe one step further towards
the solution of its problems. And now beside all the repressions, inertias
and contradictions of centuries that projected these peoples, already de–
feated, into war, and made the War itself a struggle between anachron–
isms, the politics of Europe will be further chained to the conditions of
universal destitution and want the bomber and the cannon have left
behind them. "On the basis of need," Marx says, "all the old crap re–
vives;" and in this case the old crap can also count on the shelter and
blessing of the Allies.
This disappointment and emptiness after the German surrender per–
haps came out of the suffering and tenseness of last winter and spring.
During the eleven months between the Allied entry into Rome and the
final liberation of the North, and especially during last winter, the prices
of food for Italians began to mean starvation, fuel was non-existent, the
black market was in full swing, and the troops returning from the front
on leave brought the habits of the front-line back into the city with
them. Walking about at night, even when you didn't leave the main
streets, you had to keep stepping over the long ribbons of piss on the
sidewalks. Gradually one's nostrils got used to it: it was the right smell
for this War. Meanwhile, war refugees were almost doubling the popula–
tion of the city, housing was scarce, and people were camping- out in the
ruins of the Forum. The juxtapositions of poverty and riches were like
cross-cuttings out of the early Russian films: during the coldest weather
barefooted children stood whimpering outside the Grand Hotel, while
inside in a silk-lined room the Italian rentiers ate their simple meals for
about ten dollars a person. Gradually one learned to distinguish the
classes of well-fed faces. The seamy and seedy faces of the "P.rinces of
the Black Market," the new class of millionaires riding to the top on the
inflation and the skyrocketing prices, at table in certain nightspots, hor–
ribly overstuffing, really looking their rapacious roles as the adventurous
