FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL
as
if
they had been trod over by millions of feet in the long procession
of Christendom, churches where the gilt and coiled pillars writhe and
mount in irreversible dreams of splendor, in a style that summons back
the death agony of empires-all, seen week after week, take on an im–
possible unity of experience. Returning late last night along the Via del
Babbuino, I noticed in the corridor of a small house a wall decorated
with shards off some Roman wall, and had this strange picture in my
mind of Rome today wearing its own past as slyly as a savage decked
out in the glass beads and metal crucifixes donated by missionaries.
Nov. 8-E. T., whom I used to see in that 23rd Street cafeteria
scribbling away at his anti-Fascist novels, and was almost the type of
the Italian anarchist, with his unworldliness, his ungovernable
brio,
his
fifteen or seventeen years of prison under Mussolini, and his fierce dis–
like of Communist totalitarians (he even spent some weeks on Riker's
Island for beating one up), has since his deportation suddenly blos–
somed out as the C.P.'s anti-American expert. I have been reading in
L'Unita
an article by him which announces the following facts to the
Italian proletariat: ( 1) Truman is a gangster; (2) This is so because
he got his political start from the Pendergast gang in Kansas City;
(3) There used to be a Capone gang in Chicago, and Chicago is very
near Kansas City; (4) There is also a Tammany gang in New York,
which is connected with political gangs in Washington and Chicago;
(5) Q.E.D., America is dominated by gangsters.
Nov. 15-0ur "landlord," Prince L., has gone off for a few days and
there is a meek little retired sea captain in his studio who is elaborately
deferent to us on all occasions. Came over to my window this morning and
asked me to have a coffee with him, to discuss the writer's problems.
He is doing a fantasy on the Third World War, the point of which is
that America will assuredly lose it. Not a Communist but an old-fashioned
liberal-"my only politics is Italy." But he has soaked up the C.P. line
with such thoroughness that I can spare myself much study by listening
to him. All strikes are forbidden in America; Lewis was put in jail for
starting one; Negroes are lynched weekly in New York and Chicago;
the ruling class is itching to use the atom bomb on Russia, and will
drop some on Italy
if
the workers seize power. Russia? He shrugs: a
far-off country, run by Oriental despots; it does not interest him; he
is
not
a Communist. But America has all the wealth and all the ships
and all the bombs and is mad to rule the world. "You may be amiable,
but you have everything and we have nothing.''
Dec. !-Dinner with Silone and Carlo Levi in a sweltering mob
at the pizzeria
Re degli
Amici-accordion players, Neapolitan blues
565
