The Comrade from Milan by Rossana Rossanda

Author:Rossana Rossanda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Chapter 12

A lot of things changed after the death of my mother. She had never sought to influence any of our decisions, but when the person who brought you into the world says, ‘Off you go, be independent’, you still feel her anxiously watching over you. And then Mother herself was like a girl who needed protecting. I was married, but my sister still lived with her, first as a brilliant student and then as a brilliant doctor, so we were all right; Mother was fine and she had to stay that way. It was understood that we would not offload our respective worries onto each other. When I was around thirty I’d realized, unlike my beloved Hedda Gabler, that a measure of noncommunication is the cement that binds loved ones together. Each time that I have told all, someone has got very badly hurt.

But, with her death, I stopped feeling her tender yet demanding eyes watching me. There was no one looking out for me – no one to call with all my troubles: ‘Oh, Mamma.’ This was also a time when my sister and I were less close; we were following different paths and we each had to keep our worries to ourselves. Every time I thought of sharing some sadness or other with my companion, he reminded me to think about what was objectively necessary, and I had convinced myself that he was right. But even we were wearing each other out with our indefatigable friendship; that friendship would never end, but it caused us unspoken sadness, and first we began to spend our days apart, then to live apart, and finally we severed the legal ties to which we had never attached any importance. I began to wonder whether being the woman that I had wanted to be meant that I had lost out somewhere. And then came other doubts. A lot of doubts, as numerous as the changes in the environment around us.

Doubts about what we in the PCI were doing. I had none about socialism, and none about the USSR, with which I was already disenchanted. But even in 1956 I was thinking over what my party was, and certain paradigms intrinsic to it that still seemed valid, more important than what was happening elsewhere. The break with China in 1960 was a blow, but it didn’t make me change my opinions. Of course the USSR was wrong, but the accusations that the Chinese were throwing at us were trite, and these countries were a long way from Italy. The unity of the international communist movement was fractured, but that wasn’t necessarily a disaster for us, as we weren’t faced with the problem of how to exercise power – far from it. Instead, our problem was how to conduct an intelligent battle against the ruling class and the Cold War, and what a battle that was. The doubts all came from within our own ambit. And for many years, they weren’t the kind that depress you (I felt no need to venerate authority) but instead actually get your brain into gear.

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