PARTISAN REVIEW
of everyday life. When such a thing happens, it is really bad.
The Germans, the bombings, hunger, the battles, were bad enough.
But they were exceptions. The rule: normal life with its normal com–
ponents, from money-making to daydreaming, is never lost sight of,
and couldn't be, since it appears to be one with nature itself. (In
fact, to the Italian mind, war and the other man-made catastrophes
come not from the human world so much as from the realm of
nature: it is natural that, from time to time, man should lose control
of events.)
Battles had hardly died down in Centr.al Italy, when young and
old men took over, picked up wrecked trucks, tires, screws, and nails,
any piece of thing that could imaginably be put to use. During the last
weeks of the siege of Rome, while the city was actually starving, in
the poor sections people were feverishly busy repairing and improvis–
ing all kinds of contraptions for the expected black market boom:
only American supplies were needed to round off the job. One of
the leaders of the resistance in the North tells, quite incidentally, in
his memoirs how he took a few days off from the struggle to go to
Trieste to pick up
his
family and take them back to Milan, where he
had found an apartment: apartments were awfully scarce. And
family life surely has a priority in Italy. In the same book, the reader
is told that at one moment the commander in chief of the resistance,
Parri himself, grimly announced to the assembled Committee of
National Liberation that in case his wife were arrested he would give
himself up to the Germans. Hence from then on, the fate of the
resistance movement was dependent on, among other things, Parri's
family. The decision, Parri had added, was the outcome of an agon–
izing moral struggle. Which was certainly true, but it also meant that
in Italy not even the conditions created by the Nazis could persuade
a man, who otherwise accepted their chaiienge, to make his commit–
ment unconditional. Italy is no place for categorical imperatives.
While doing something, an Italian always keeps an eye on some–
thing else: sometimes it is a sentiment, sometimes a dream, often a
strictly personal interest. This makes people say that Italians are realists.
To be sure, Italians are a practical people, even if not exactly pragmatic,
or dedicated to efficiency. But they are realists also in another, more
maddening, sense. Their view of things can be desperately trite, tied
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