Midnight In Sicily by Peter Robb

Author:Peter Robb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber

VII

A REALIST IN ROME

RED BANNERS waved in the winter air outside the Pantheon. A band played the Internationale. The party leader wept. The coffin arrived from the senate where it had lain in state for days while the president and the former president and the prime minister and former prime ministers and the whole nomenklatura and thousands of nameless admirers filed past and paid tearful homage.

Renato Guttuso’s in 1987 was Italy’s last great communist funeral. Berlinguer’s had been vastly bigger, had stopped Rome and the nation. But Berlinguer’s had been a political funeral, and the million mourners on the streets had then produced the party’s greatest and most evanescent triumph, the dreamt-of sorpasso when the communists for the first and last time in history overtook the demochristians and won the largest vote of any party in national elections. Guttuso’s, on a wintry day in January a couple of years later, was a funeral for the past, for the people of the left, for the memory of years of struggle, for commitment, passion and death. It was the funeral of a man who’d matured as an artist and militant when he was a resistance leader against the nazis, military commander for central Rome until the liberation, as I read on a yellowing central committee document among his papers, and author of a savage series of ink drawings done in hiding on butcher’s paper, the Gott Mit Uns, Guttuso’s horrors of war.

A little embarrassment was unavoidable in 1987. The party was hurtling down that trajectory from the illusory sorpasso of 1984 to its autodestruction in the post-wall panic of 1990, and its great artist, painter of the epic canvases of its years of struggle, had too devotedly followed its every twist and turn not to reflect in his expiry something of the current state of play. Unlike all the other artists and intellectuals, Guttuso hadn’t left the party in 1956 or 1968 or in any of the other long years of attrition. He’d stayed and he’d been rewarded. He’d served two terms as a communist senator, been hymned by Pablo Neruda and when in the eighties he’d been challenged by his old friend the writer Leonardo Sciascia to choose between Sciascia and Berlinguer on the substance of a conversation among the three on the origins of terrorism in Italy, Guttuso had chosen Berlinguer and the Party and Sciascia had broken with him. But when Guttuso died Sciascia wept and said I never stopped loving him.

The real embarrassment to the memory of communist austerity and struggle was Guttuso’s vast wealth, his twenty-year affair with the flamboyant countess Marzotto and some of the friends who’d gathered around him in the wake of Berlinguer’s disastrous historic compromise with the right. One of these friends was monsignor Angelini, a sleek and worldly cleric, an intimate of His Holiness and shortly to be raised to the purple. Another was the past and future prime minister Giulio Andreotti. For all these reasons, probably, Alberto Moravia kept his eulogy

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