ROME LETTER
459
scum of Roman society. Or the florid faces of the Roman priests, who,
in the midst of a tremendous shortage of soap and razor blades,
1
always
went about with the rosy, well-tonsured ecclesiastical skin. In Rome one
very quickly gets a sixth sense for the social meaning of this institution
which has weighed on the back of the Italian people for centuries.
The corruption went down through the whole society to the very
young, whom it probably struck the worst. The prostitution of the city
was divided into respective American and British spheres of influence,
the decisive factor being always the greater spending power of the Amer–
icans. Stcange cases, rarer among the Italians than with us, began to
appear: after arresting a
15
year old boy dressed as a girl, who had been
following the British troops, the following week the Military Police had
to
arrest a girl of the same age dressed as a boy. (Her name, appropriate–
ly~,
Albertina.) The ragged kids in the street became the delegated agents
of the black market, organized throughout the whole city like something
out of Gide's
Counterfeiters,
following the soldiers to buy up cigarettes,
candy, jackets or whatever the soldier had to sell in order to raise some
money for his last drunk on leave. There is the story of two of these kids
who actually bought a drunken Negro soldier from his friend for
1200
Lire (
12
dollars), then took him out, still . drunk and amiable, to the
Palatine, stripped him of his clothes, and left him there. The stories, in
fact, are almost endless.
Such was the real accompaniment, the social ground-base, to the
comic political aria of the
Bonomi
government. Now
in
retrospect that
government seems to have been even too trivial for opera buffa.
At the moment of writing, the political "crisis", which began with
1he liberation of the North, seems to be resolved by the formation of a
new government. I speak of "crisis" with tongue in cheek because so long
as the Allies are here
in
anything like their present force, it's difficult not
to think of the political actions of the Italians as trivial. Up to now, and
especially as long as the War went on, the politics of Italy was bound
captive to the triumphal chariot of war of the Allies, while from now on
on the economy will be tied even more drastically to the strings of Amer–
ican finance capital. I have lately, in fact, been in a rather favored posi–
tion for observing this latter process. Italian capitalists who are begin–
ning to reconstruct their plants would like to incorporate themselves in
some way under American firms: in exchange for the latest patents and
equipment from Dupont, the chemical firm of Montecatini (I choose,
naturally, two perfectly arbitrary examples) repays with a certain amount
of stock and at the same time secures military protection against any
possible depredations of revolution upon American property. The indus–
trialists of Milan have already expressed their wish to certain Allied
officials that the occupying troops continue here for another two years.
Probably no condition could be less auspicious for revolution than one
