Alberto Moravia's 'Roman Tales' 1954

 

Penguin Books first edition - 1959

It's been some time since I read an Alberto Moravia novel (in the English translation, of course). I see one of my first Blogs - on 4th March 2020 - was to praise his most famous work, The Woman of Rome. I bought this well-preserved Penguin on a day trip to the lovely Leicestershire town of Market Harborough (only my second visit ever and done due to my writing Blogs on 8th June earlier this year, on the excellent two-volume History of the town), where there are two good second-hand bookshops - I bought this in the Oxfam one.

Moravia's novels and short stories are, possibly, an acquired taste (like Camus or Gide). Usually devoid of any humour (even levity?), they deal with undoubtedly realistic, but often rather grim, daily lives and characters. Social alienation figures highly, as does (non romantic) sexuality. I read somewhere that his writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie. Spot on. It comes as no surprise that he was an atheist, with little time for any 'comforts' supposedly provided by religion. Moravia was, in fact, a pseudonym; his real surname being Pincherle. Born in November 1907, to a wealthy middle-class family, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone and had to spend five years more or less bed-ridden. He used the time to read voraciously - Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Gogol, Molière and Mallarmé... Totally out of sympathy with Mussolini's Fascist rule, some of his writings were banned and not until May 1944, after the liberation of Rome, did Moravia return to the city. The 1940s to the 1960s were the years of his greatest successes, with works such as The Woman of Rome (1947), The Conformist (1951), Two Women (1957), and The Empty Canvas (1960).  Between 1984 and 1988, Moravia served in the European Parliament as a member of the Italian Communist Party. In September 1990, he was found dead in the bathroom of his Roman apartment.

There are twenty-seven stories making up Roman Tales (I Racconti Romani in their Italian original), all based in or around Rome and dealing with the lower bourgeoisie - shopkeepers, washerwomen, spivs, thieves and prostitutes. Some I enjoyed more than others and, towards the end, I began to cry out for just one beautiful  woman and genuinely honest man! The first person narrative, employed in all the stories, certainly gave the sense of immediacy and, usually, authenticity that particularly fits the genre. Of the 27 tales, I picked out half a dozen that I elevated above the others. The Lorry-Driver does have a touch of wry - even bitter - humour to it. The narrator - I am lean and nervous, with thin arms and long legs, and my belly is so flat that my trousers keep slipping down: in  fact I am exactly the opposite of what is required to make a good lorry-driver - shares the long-distance driving with Palombi, a real lout...he had the good fortune to be stupid, so that he formed one single piece with his lorry. The two make regular trips from Rome to Naples and back. At Terracina, they are asked by Italia - a provoking girl [who] had a long neck, a small brown head and two large green eyes. In contrast to her very long body, her legs were short and rather crooked, so that she gave the impression of walking with her knees bent to give her a lift. From then on, regularly once or even twice a week, Italia gets the drivers to take her from Rome to Terracina and back. This goes on for over two months. The narrator thinks he is making headway with her, even writing in white letters on the windscreen: 'Viva l'Italia' - other lorry drivers ask why has he turned so patriotic! Unknown to the narrator, Palombi has also been flirting with the girl. Both are aghast and then bitter, when they see her in an Inn at Terracina, clearly working as a waitress and linked to the hunchback owner. They had been hoodwinked into giving her free lifts all that time!

The Baby relates the story of a couple with six children - they explain to the lady from the Infant Welfare Society that 'If we could afford it, we should go to the pictures in the evening...As it is, since we haven't got the money, we go to bed, and so the children get born'. They live in a room has nothing in it but a lot of mattresses spread on the floor, and, when it rains, the water pours down on us... So, on a seventh pregnancy, they decide to leave the new baby in a church.  Several churches later, having failed to deposit the infant in any of them,  they pop it in the back seat of a car and quickly depart. However, the wife has second thoughts - there is something missing here - and they return to recover the baby. Just then, a short middle-aged man, with a look of authority about him goes to his car. The wife grabs her baby, 'You and your wife couldn't ever have a child as fine as this one...' and struts off, leaving the man standing there red in the face and open-mouthed, almost having a fit. 

The Perfect Crime is attempted by a bartender against his colleague whom he has grown to dislike intensely -  I hated his sturdy, stupid face, with its low forehead, and small eyes, its big, hooked nose, its full lips and slight moustache. Why? because this Rigamonti always lured away any girl the narrator linked up with. He plans to shoot him by a railway, just as a train goes by, thus disguising  the shot. He says a pretty girl will be waiting for him there. Rigamonti, ever eager, goes to the spot. A black figure of a woman nears. ...she frightened me. She must have been at least sixty, and she had strange mad-looking eyes painted with great black circles, a heavily powdered face and a crimson mouth... The narrator had not known it was a place to pick up prostitutes! His perfect crime had evaporated.

I liked The Girl from Ciociaria because it dealt with a Professor, an old man, with a white pointed beard and moustaches who is desperate for a maid from the narrator's native village. The story is a satisfying  one, but I was particularly drawn to the description of the Professor's home where books were piled up as in a bookshop: they began at the front door, where there were quantities of them hidden behind some green curtains, and went right through the house, in every passage and room and recess: they were everywhere except in the bathroom and the kitchen. His books were as precious to him as the smell of a rose, and woe betide anyone who touched them; and there were so many of them that it seemed impossible he could have read them all. Elysium! I am reading of a doppelgänger!

Silly Old Fool appealed to me because of its first paragraph. If you are in the habit of flirting with women, it is difficult to realize when the time for that is past and women begin to look upon you as a father or - even worse - a grandfather. It is especially difficult because every middle-aged man has, inside his head, another head: his outer head has wrinkles, grey hair, decayed teeth, lustreless eyes; his inner head, on the other hand, has remained just the same as when he was young, with thick black hair, a smooth face, white teeth, and bright eyes. It is the inner head that looks longingly at women, imagining itself to be visible to them. But of course women see the outer head, and say: 'What does he want, the old scarecrow? Can't he see he's old enough to be my grandfather?'  Mmm. Ouch! I have great empathy with the narrator, a barber of some thirty years' standing.

The final story, The Nose, has a wonderful description of the narrator's friend, Silvano, one of the most luckless creatures I knew. Adversity was written on his brow...by his nose, especially, you could see that he was doomed to bad luck - a nose like the clapper of a bell, crooked, livid, with a lump at the end surmounted by an ugly brown mole. It was a nose that made you feel depressed, even to look at it; imagine what it must have been like to wear it! And, sure enough, when the two enter a house and attempt to steal a ring off a dead man's finger, they are caught by the police. At the moment all I did was to look at Silvano and shake my head in concentrated rage. With a nose like his there was nothing to be done; the fault was entirely on my side, for not having realised that before.