303
ROME LETTER
Italy is crowded with
bmve persone.
The expression has a
meaning much vaguer than the English "good man" or the French
brave homme.
It
indicates somebody who in some respect is not bad, or
who at some moment has been capable of behaving decently. Ultimately,
it may designate a person who has done you a favor. The notion
descends, of course, in a straight line from that of the sinner who on
the day of Judgment will be saved by a single good deed or instant
of atonement.
If
God the Father is willing to cancel at a glance a whole
life of iniquity, we men can live together only by being each other's
accomplices in indulgence and forgetfulness, all sinners and all
brave
persone.
It
is as useless to ask of a man that he be more than a
brava
persona
as to demand of a society that it be more than a quiet con–
vention.
It
has been said that
avec les bons sentiments on fait les mauvais
romans.
In
the same way, too many
brave persone
make for a bad society.
Too much truth has to be repressed until scandal breaks out.
From the point of view of Italian conformism, war and the end
of fascism were huge scandals which ruined the reputation of many
bTQJve persone
(from middle class girls to generals and kings), and from
which a lot became known about Italy that had been successfully kept
hidden before. An unseemly situation, which a good society cannot tol–
erate for long. National continuity in Italy is largely entrusted to the
ability of prominent people to patch up an official version of past events
and hush up scandals. Ordinary people collaborate as best they can,
that is in direct proportion to the family income.
Where are, for example, the
signorine,
the flocks of middle class
girls who used to go out with Allied soldiers? They have by no means
become all whores, as an American Nekhliudov might fancy. Most of
them are happily married and have been received with full rights into
the vast congregation of the
brave persone.
The middle class ones,
that is. For those of the lower classes there are the reformatories. As
for the "shoe shines," their unsightly problem has been liquidated by
locking them up. Conditions in State reformatories are described in
