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Woman of Rome
A Life of Elsa Morante
Chapter One
Two Uncles
The year of Elsa Morante's birth is well known. But, as a favor, in an autobiographical piece she wrote in 1960, she has asked that her biographer not mention the date—not because she is vain but because, for her, one year is as good as the next and she would prefer to remain ageless.1 It is the same year that the Titanic set out on its doomed maiden voyage with 2,224 passengers and crew members on board; the same year that Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy renewed the Triple Alliance; the year of the outbreak of the Balkan War, which set the stage for World War I; the year the Olympic games were held in Stockholm and the twenty-four-year-old Native American Jim Thorpe won both the pentathlon and decathlon (he was later stripped of his medals when it was learned that he had played semiprofessional baseball); in the United States, the year that New Mexico and Arizona became states; the year that the German geologist and meteorologist Alfred Lothar Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift, arguing that the earth's continents had once been a single large landmass and were still in the process of change; and, finally, in Rome, the year that the first activities of the Italian Boy Scouts, founded by Carlo Colombo and known as Giovani Esploratori Italiani, took place.
In a poem Elsa Morante wrote many years later, she claimed to have been born of a "difficult love" at that "bitter hour at midday / under the sign of Leo / on a Christian feast day."2 She also claimed in "Our Brother Antonio," anewspaper piece she published in 1939, that from the very day of their birth, she and her brothers all showed themselves to be extraordinary paragons of virtue. She for example was born with a crown of gold hair so thick and so long that, immediately, the attending nurse who delivered her had to braid and tie it with a blue ribbon.3 (Photos, however, always show Elsa with short, dark hair—so what, one wonders, could she have been thinking of? And what, one also wonders, is true?) At the time of Elsa's birth, the Morante family lived at via Anicia 7 but, soon after, they moved to a small, squalid apartment on via Amerigo Vespucci 42, located in the Testaccio, which was then a working-class district of Rome. Later, Elsa Morante said she grew up in the company of both poor and rich children (the latter no doubt the children of the friends of Elsa's rich godmother, Donna Gonzaga) and thus she learned not to judge anyone by social class but by his or her kindness instead. In fact, the cruelest child she ever met, who made her drink gasoline, was the son of a butler while the nicest was a young patient at Gabelli (a famous Roman hospital which treated only venereal diseases), which, in retrospect, made her wonder what sort of pervert he may have been. Elsa learned the alphabet and learned to write at the same time. She claimed to have composed her first poem when she was two and a half years old:
Un povero galletto
che stava alla finestra
gli casca giù la testa
e va e va e va.
Un gallo piccolino
che stava alla finestra
gli casca giù la testa
e non vede più e più
A little rooster
who was at the window
fell down on his head
and went and went and went.
A small little rooster
who was at the window
fell down on his head
and he nothing nothing sees.
Not only was Elsa Morante a self-taught prodigy, she invented herself. At an early age, too, Elsa Morante imagined herself as other, as a boy. A boy, she thought, could be heroic; a girl could not.
Elsa Morante was the oldest of four surviving children. An older brother, Mario, whom Elsa always inexplicably referred to as Antonio and to whom, later, she addressed her diary, died shortly after he was born. According to Elsa, this Mario/Antonio opened his eyes and saw the light and was so disgusted that he quickly closed them again. According to Elsa's mother, who spoke of him often, comparing him to a famous king, had Mario/Antonio lived, he would most certainly have become a prophet or a genius and brought honor to the family.4 Elsa described her brother Aldo, who was two years younger, as lively and rebellious; she also said that Aldo had a large black birthmark on his forehead (but there is no sign of the birthmark on any of the photographs of him nor does Aldo's son, Paolo Morante, recall seeing a birthmark on his father's forehead5). Marcello, the younger brother, was timid and shy and, early on, according still to Elsa, was prone to amorous attachments; five or six minutes after he was born he developed one for the nurse who delivered him, grasping her finger and not letting go. Finally, there was Maria, the youngest child—younger than Elsa by ten years.
Elsa's mother, Irma Poggibonsi,* came from the town of Modena in northern Italy; she was a schoolteacher and had literary aspirations. She was also Jewish and since she was terrified of being discovered to be Jewish, she made sure her children got a Catholic education. (When World War II broke out, she changed her name to Bisi and went into hiding in Padua, taking the youngest, Maria, with her. Marcello was sent to Tuscany: Aldo was interned in a concentration camp; Elsa, by then, was living on her own in Rome.) Little is known of Irma's family. Her father was a hunchback whom everyone in the family was deeply ashamed of; Irma's mother had repeated breakdowns that manifested themselves in various ways: locking herself up in the bedroom and running back and forth, battering her head against the walls until either her head cracked open or she was knocked unconscious.
Woman of Rome
A Life of Elsa Morante. Copyright © by Lily Tuck. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.