Wandering Orthese

There are many ways to travel, but there is one that is truly unique: Anna Maria Ortese’s.

She was capable of taking a ferry to Dover, marvelling at the clouds swept by the wind across the English Channel, and, once she’d disembarked on the island, stepping into a long, low ‘travelling home’ with cosy, well-furnished little rooms – that’s how it seemed to her; she’d never seen any trains in England. She would then be served tea and honey scones in the company of elderly ladies who were crocheting, with a photograph of their grandson on the travel table—just like at home. Once in London, she would think: what a civilised place; how gladly I would live here! Later, from the window of her hotel room, she would spot a cat on the other side of the street and quietly pose a question as if addressing a minor deity. ‘What do you say, cat, shall I stay?’ If the cat appeared to suggest ‘no’ and scurried away, she would pack her bags in haste and depart at once, as though confronting an ominous sign.

This lunar report, written in the style of a fairy tale, was published by Il Mondo in 1959 under the title “Il gatto con le antenne”. It forms part of a collection of travel correspondence, La lente scura, edited by Luca Clerici – a friend, editor and biographer of Ortese. The anthology, published by Adelphi and back on the shelves this summer, conveys just how chaotic the world was even then, spanning the period from 1947 to 1961. It also underscores the revelatory, prophetic, and almost miraculous quality of Ortese’s visions. The volume deserves a wider audience. One wonders what she might have observed along Viale Quattro Venti while having lunch at Lavitola’s Cefalù Bistrò; certainly something that has escaped our notice.

Giuseppe Montesano wrote that, like the mystics, she had a third eye. The dark lens allowed her to see, beneath the surface of reality, what remains hidden from others. It is extremely difficult, futile, perhaps even misleading, to try to decipher that gaze, which at times recalls Leopardi’s pessimism or Kafka’s absurdity. Beneath the false and sugar-coated representation of reality, behind the scene crumbling before her, she saw the raw violence of things; but with one enormous difference compared to the great pessimists: she could empathise with simple creatures, with the animals she called ‘little people’, with the cosmos to which she belonged. In a sense, the cat was her, and it was humans who frightened her.

A nomad is not a traveller; travellers return home and have a settled place of origin from which they set out to discover the world. Nomads, on the other hand, live on the move, sometimes without a destination; they have no permanent home and, if they do, it is temporary, seasonal or precarious. They move out of necessity, to escape persecution, for cultural reasons, or simply because that is how their people have lived for generations. During her lifetime, Ortese lived in 29 homes and ten different cities; she was extremely poor and restless, and for a time literally lived on trains; she scraped by on her earnings from newspapers. A reporter, correspondent, feature writer and proofreader at Il Gazzettino in Venice, she wrote for Il Mattino and Il Corriere in Naples, for L’Unità and Noi donne, for Il Mondo, L’Europeo and other publications. She wanted to tell stories in her own way—exploring through her imagination—but she needed money and had to strike a balance between what she saw through her dark-tinted lens and what the newspapers wanted. Here, in her preface, she distinguishes between the demands of two main ‘tribes’ of Believers (as she calls them): those on the right, who were not concerned with ‘class segregation’ and indeed regarded it as entirely natural and necessary; and those on the left, who could not forgive her for what she had witnessed in Russia: obedience and suffering.

The story of the cold, dirty Russian train, racing along and sending sparks flying across the black countryside whilst the radio plays patriotic songs, is perhaps her most famous report. She was seeking an apolitical perspective, direct contact with the melancholy and gentleness of the people, but she joined a women’s delegation invited to the USSR, visited the Kremlin and was horrified. She was fascinated by ordinary people and did not see eye to eye with the delegation of women, almost all of whom were Communists, with whom she was travelling. She saw beauty imprisoned by a grey and cold ideology and recounted it in three unsettling articles, published in L’Europeo in 1954.

The compilation of this anthology has had a rather turbulent history, much like that of most of Ortese’s works. Perhaps even more so. I shall leave that to the philologists and content myself with saying that the first part of "La lente scura" is a selection of correspondence made by the author according to a compositional criterion; the second part was added for a 1991 edition which already bore this same title; the third is a posthumous collection of scattered texts. The volume totals five hundred pages written between 1947 and 1961, though they are not arranged in chronological order.

The places Ortese takes us to are for the most part extremely well-known and yet tremendously exotic, as if opening a door to discover another dimension within the time and space we inhabit. He wrote brilliantly, and his columns were published by newspapers, perhaps not always with full awareness of their devastating power; Ortese said what could not be said by projecting it into a surreal, fairy-tale dimension.

Let’s take the capital, a place that was familiar to her and yet deeply unsettled her. Perhaps she would visit in the height of summer because it’s lovely to be in cities emptied by the heat, but you don’t go on holiday where you live; you have to move to another city, perhaps a posh neighbourhood. And at one point she was living in Milan and loved it; once she arrived in Rome, all she kept saying was that she wanted to cross the Po again. Although she had been born in Rome by chance, due to her wandering family, which had nothing Roman about it. Her father was a prefectural official of Catalan origin – Ortese stands for Ortez – her mother was half-Neapolitan, a fallen member of the wealthy class, the daughter of a sculptor from Carrara who had gone mad following the death of his infant son. So what of the Rome that Ortez saw, a city she visited on several occasions and lived in for a while, staying as a lodger in rented rooms or in flats temporarily sublet by tenants who’d gone on holiday, leaving her without electricity, equipped with bags of tokens to ring all her acquaintances in the middle of August from the post office in Piazza San Silvestro, with her suitcase at her feet?

She witnessed a magnificent spectacle. To Ortese, Rome was an insensitive and euphoric city that seemed almost unreal, with waves of flesh filling the streets with grimacing, cruel faces. Its spirit seemed to her to be in a perpetual state of ‘sensual ecstasy’. ‘If you want to see the death of Christianity,’ she wrote, ‘you must go to Rome, a city never purified by the Protestant Reformation.’ Here, the middle class is neither likeable nor unlikeable, good nor bad; it simply does not exist – ‘it is merely a clump of affluent blood’. In essence, Ortese detested Rome; she shows us the city of the 1950s, the one with the taverns of Trastevere overflowing with families, where everything is out in the open and devoid of privacy. Or she uncovers seemingly marginal vantage points: the exiles like herself, whom the city harbours in the heart of the historic centre, in flats behind the Spanish Steps where they keep hens; or the world of the film-makers, handsome and daring, who might perhaps give her work, but who travel in stolen cars and are, in essence, wolf-like, pure darkness. At an artists’ party in Via Margutta, they explain to her that Rome is no more; it left long ago and has lost its soul. After all, Paris, too, had emigrated to New York, and Shanghai had moved to Naples. Maria Bellonci’s salon was, of course, a must, with Elsa De Giorgi—a bird with red feathers—the bustling Alba De Cespedes and the legendary Aleramo, but the one who stood out amongst them all was Moravia ‘with his sad majesty’.

Whenever the wanderer found refuge, some magical, meteorological or emotional event would prompt her to flee. In Rome, whilst staying with a young married couple, it was a cloud of heat and dust from Africa that blanketed the city. The truth is that, as a true nomad, she had to leave. Perhaps it was no coincidence that two of her brothers became sailors: the eldest died at sea, the youngest met a violent death – he was Anna Maria’s twin. It remains uncertain what the African dust evoked in her: the family had lived in Libya; they left when she was eleven, staying there from 1925 to 1928; they tried to build a house on the edge of the desert, which was never completed; they returned without regrets.

Ortese did, however, have a favourite place, though he had to leave it because of his dark glasses. It was Naples. From its magical ‘blue desert’, where the Ortese family settled after Libya and stayed longer than anywhere else; from the city where Anna Maria tried to catch up with her schooling but failed and remained a magnificent self-taught scholar – this book contains many such references. There is a scathing portrait of the journalists who gravitated towards the Angiporto Galleria. With the editor of Il Risorgimento Laurino shouting at the demonstrators: ‘God exists!’; and with the editorial office of La Voce, where the most disillusioned young people gathered and where the neurasthenic Mario Alicata reigned alongside the gentler, more sombre Paolo Ricci. One must not miss the lavish wedding of Lauro’s daughter, the new princess of Naples, who will spend her honeymoon in Capri, the neighbouring island and, in reality, the jet set’s far-off destination. There, the lads from the alleyways – those who first discover the sea at the age of fifteen – may go once in a lifetime, or perhaps never at all. Naples appears as the city of the ‘naivety of evil’ and the ‘treachery of good’. It is well known that she had to leave, after penning a scathing portrait of the group at Sud, the magazine run by Pasquale Prunas that had welcomed her; it was published amongst the stories in the famous Il mare non bagna Napoli, which won the Viareggio Prize in 1953 to great fanfare.

With Milan, a city dear to her heart and where she lived in the 1960s in a sort of commune of young artists, aspiring writers and journalists, whilst loving the most important man in her life – Marcello Venturi – Ortese is more forgiving. Of Milan – where the novels that made her famous were born: Poveri e semplici, winner of the 1967 Strega Prize, and Il cappello piumato – here lies the waterfront at the Idroloscalo, where, if you cannot reach the salt water on a Sunday, you go to have your photograph taken by the still water. Yet everything speaks to her of human life, solidarity and struggle; deep within herself she repeats: ‘Milan, Milan’. When she goes to the extremely elegant Caffè Cova near La Scala – a place that lies ‘between the academy and the drawing room’ and where the sixth table is always occupied by the writer Massimo Lelj, surrounded by friends such as the sculptor Lorenzo Pepe and other charming, unnamed illustrators – the crowd emerging from the concert bursts in, and amongst them is Salvatore Quasimodo, perpetually bored. Everything always remains within the bounds of Milanese cordiality, unless – horror of horrors – a Neapolitan, Roman or Sardinian accent emerges from the depths of the conversation, at which point the whole atmosphere suddenly turns icy.

In 1955, Anna Maria Ortese was even sent by L’Europeo to cover the Giro d’Italia and to Montelepre, the birthplace of the bandit Giuliano. These were significant trips, yet distinct from the wanderings of her existential nomadism, which, as is well known, eventually led her to Liguria. She lived in Rapallo from 1975 with her sister Maria; that year saw the publication of her autobiographical novel "Il porto di Toledo". Always extremely poor (she received the allowance provided for under the Bacchelli Law on the initiative of Adele Cabria and Dario Bellezza), in the 1980s – thanks to her meeting with Roberto Calasso – she had her entire body of work republished by Adelphi, where she also published her final books.

In "La lente scura", Liguria appears on the horizon in the 1960s; even then, Ortese was already thinking of moving to Genoa and staying there for at least a few years. She recounts that she went there with a small suitcase full of thoughts and auspicious images and, during a sleepless night, set about exploring the corridors of her hotel. It was there, standing before a balcony overlooking the lights of the harbour, that she realised she was at a staggering height above the sea and, in the absolute silence, she had a vision: she saw herself as a young girl at school in that city, or as a sailor like those down there, ready to set sail in high spirits because they know they have a homeland. Had she found her own? The following day she found herself beneath the Sottoripa arcades, a setting that evoked Naples but under a northern sky, “silver and steel fused together,” and among warm yet serious people who know how to keep their madness in check. It proved to be the final stop: Anna Maria Ortese died in Rapallo and wished to be buried in Genoa.