PARTISAN REVIEW
singers, a grotesque one-man band loaded front and back with instru–
ments and beating time to the upward and downward surge of a rusty
black derby squeezed over his eyes, wandering beggars and nuns col–
lecting alms. Sociability unlimited, the cafe of all good Roman artists,
Socialists, and Actionists-the beautiful Italian bedlam and intellectual
merriment, people calling and flirting from table to table: all one great
family party. Always at such moments, as when walking the streets at
noon and feeling the relatedness of people to each other, the family
motif binding Italians together seems stronger than the personality of
each one. I keep thinking of a dance on the village green.
Even Silone looked almost gay tonight, though taking advantage
of Levi's valiant efforts to speak English, which he pretends not to under–
stand at all, he put his face in a great mass of fish, meat, and greens,
and remained dolorously alone with his own thoughts. Levi in his most
resplendent mood and most carefree costume, with a crazy fur cap given
him
by a Florentine carriage driver and a long checked overcoat
straight out of Harold Teen. Falstaff in a zoot suit, grinning from ear
to ear, the most pagan of all the Jews. He looks like a Roman senator
out on the street, and glad of it. Everything interests him, every strand
in Italian politics, art, and gossip runs through his hands as he talks.
As he sits there, papa at the head of the table, sighing one minute for
the New York girls, the other relating stories of Florence under the
occupation, imperturbably self-centered as a child but bringing up
light and gaiety on all possible subjects by his delight in his appetites and
his own mind, one thinks of Bacon's discovery that
the plant, man, grows
more vigorous in Italy.
Paints in the morning, writes in the afternoon,
rounds out his day with a cartoon for
Italia socialista,
and then makes his
grand entrance here, an old stogy in his mouth, amiable as a Congress–
man back home on Main Street-the pinnacle of Italian self-enjoyment.
Tells me with enormous relish that he did a cartoon satirizing Nenni
lost in the Communist jungle, and that Nenni, misunderstanding,
called up to congratulate him. Reports that the people he described in
Christ Stopped At Eboli,
which recounts his confinement for three
years under Fascism, have taken to wearing markers on their clothes
reading: "I am a character in Carlo Levi's
Christ Stopped At Eboli.'·'
What will you have? It is a marvelous people, the Italians! And he
sits there, roaring his head off, making eyes at every pretty girl who
passes. The years have hardly worn at him; he shares in everything and
belongs to no one-it has all gone into a
bouillabaisse
of experience–
the times in and out of prison, the period of exile in Lucania when, as
a political prisoner with no other way of reaching the people but his
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