Senso (And Other Stories) Read online

  Contents

  TITLE

  INTRODUCTION

  SENSO

  A BODY

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  VADE RETRO, SATANA

  THE GREY BLOTCH

  BUDDHA’S COLLAR

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  by Roderick Conway Morris

  I

  ‘I have often been spoken of as decadent,’ said Luchino Visconti. ‘But I have a very high opinion of decadence, just as Thomas Mann did, for example. I am imbued with its spirit … What has always interested me is to analyse a sick society.’

  Hardly surprising, therefore, that Visconti should have fallen under the spell of the Contessa Livia, the literal femme fatale of Camillo Boito’s ‘Senso’, that paradigm of cruel voluptuousness, self-absorption and wanton depravity, who, by the end of the story has coolly engineered the destruction of five men (four of whom she has never even met) purely to assuage her slighted amour propre – emerging ‘serene in the self-respect that came from having fulfilled a difficult duty.’

  But then Livia’s amour propre is not so much a character defect as the driving force behind her entire personality. Like Conrad’s Nostromo, Livia is the possessor of ‘enormous vanity, that finest form of egoism which can take on the aspect of every virtue’, and like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the flawless exterior hides a dismal sump of internal baseness. Her vanity is indeed a source of almost onanistic pleasure:

  ‘In Venice, I was reborn. My beauty came into full bloom. Men’s eyes would light up with a gleam of desire whenever they looked at me. Even without seeing them looking, I could feel their burning gaze on my body. The women, too, would openly stare at me, then admiringly examine me from head to toe. I would smile like a queen, like a goddess. In the gratification of my vanity, I became kind, indulgent, natural, carefree, witty: the greatness of my triumph made me appear almost modest.’

  Visconti’s ‘Senso’ was released in 1954, won no prizes at the Venice Film Festival (possibly because of pressure from Italy’s Christian Democrat government, which found the film unpatriotic), was a considerable success with the public, and, in due course, was followed by two other captivating depictions of 19th-century Italy – based on Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (1961) and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s L’Innocente (1975).

  Visconti considered changing the name ‘Senso’ – which embraces implications of sense, sensation and sensuality – but finally stuck to Boito’s original title. The director’s first choices for the Contessa Livia and the handsome, cowardly and degenerate Austrian officer she takes as a lover whilst on her honeymoon in Venice were Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando. Bergman declined and Brando was rejected by the producers after a screen test in Rome. Farley Granger was then cast as the lover, and brought a suitably creepy pusillanimity to the part. The Italian actress Alida Valli played the Contessa with verve, style and subtlety. And yet, though this is one of a great director’s greatest films, which explores facets of Boito’s story only touched upon in the original text, there is a dimension missing that ultimately confirms the masterly quality of Boito’s first-person narrative on the page. For in the celluloid version we are deprived of the singular experience of seeing events as they unfold through Livia’s own eyes, and are denied entry to the narcissistic, hair-raising hall of mirrors that is her mind – as readers of this extraordinary tour de force will discover for themselves.

  II

  Camillo Boito was born on 30 October 1836. His mother was a Polish countess, Giuseppina Radolinska, his father Silvestro an adept but never outstandingly successful painter of portraits and miniatures. Silvestro came from Polpet, a mountain village near Belluno, in the Dolomites to the north of Venice, on the banks of the river Piave. At the time, indeed until the 1930s, when the Piave’s course was interrupted by dams for irrigation and hydro-electricity, the principal occupation of the riverside villages in this area was the felling and cutting of timber, built into rafts to convey the wood to Venice for the construction of buildings, ships and boats. Hundreds of rafts made the journey every year, and guiding them through the river’s shifting shoals and rapids was a skilful and perilous task. The immediacy with which Boito wrote about the hardships of life and evoked the majestic beauty of mountain landscapes is reflected in two of the stories translated here. ‘Vade Retro, Satana’ is set in a poor village in the Trentino, and opens with a wonderfully observed description of a spectacular storm boiling in the valley below. ‘The Grey Blotch’ takes place among the peaks to the west of Lake Garda, and contains a daring extended description of a rushing river – in which it may not be fanciful to detect an echo of that centuries-old battle the rafters of his grandparents’ village fought with the treacherous waters of the Piave to wrest a livelihood from the river.

  After leaving Polpet at the age of eighteen to seek his fortune as a painter, Silvestro embarked on a peripatetic life in search of commissions, spending time in Padua, Venice, and Vienna, wandering as far as St Petersburg. On one of these journeys he met Giuseppina Radolinska. Not least of her attractions was her fairly substantial means, and the formalization of their relationship was no doubt hastened by her pregnancy – Camillo being born in Rome less than five months after the couple’s marriage in Florence.

  After some success at winning the patronage of Pope Gregory XVI, who also came from the Belluno region and whose portrait Silvestro painted more than once, the Boito couple resumed their travels. Camillo’s younger brother Arrigo was born in Padua in February 1842.

  The family then settled in Venice, where in 1848–9, during the short-lived revival of the Venetian Republic, Silvestro fought alongside the revolutionaries. By 1851 Giuseppina’s fortune had been exhausted, the marriage had broken down, and she had gone back to Poland. Silvestro, who lived apart from his sons after this, died in 1856, leaving the family more or less destitute. Meanwhile, Giuseppina returned to Milan to be with Arrigo, before dying in 1859.

  Despite the vicissitudes of their early life, both Camillo and Arrigo received a good education, the lack of a stable domestic background being compensated for by the interest shown in them by family friends, who did much to nurture their clearly exceptional intellectual and artistic talents. Camillo found a dedicated mentor in the art historian Pietro Selvatico. After studying under him at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Camillo succeeded Selvatico as Professor of Architecture at the Accademia at the remarkable age of nineteen. Arrigo went to study violin, piano and composition at the Conservatory in Milan. In 1860 Camillo joined his brother in Lombardy, having been appointed Professor of Architecture at Milan’s Accademia di Brera, a prestigious post he was to occupy continuously until 1909. The move was a timely one, since by then Camillo was under imminent threat of arrest by the Austrians, who ruled Venice until 1866.

  When Camillo arrived in Milan, Arrigo’s studies were drawing to a close and he was preparing to launch himself on his career as a poet and composer, which would eventually lead to the collaboration with Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) as the librettist of Otello and Falstaff that won him lasting fame.

  The Boito brothers remained intellectually and emotionally close throughout their lives, and shared the same house in Milan after Camillo’s second wife died, until his own death on 28 June 1914. The tenderness of this fraternal bond, strengthened no doubt by the travails of their younger days, is well caught in a letter by Camillo to Arrigo, written in April 1862: ‘You know how much I love you, and how every honour and every eulogy you receive brings me greater comfort, greater indeed than if I were receiving them myself.’

  Camillo Boito’s professional life was devoted almost entirely to the practice and teaching of architecture and the study of architectural hi
story. His first major · commission on reaching Milan was the restoration of the city’s 12th-century Porta Ticinese. Numerous other works of restoration followed on palazzi and churches in Milan, Padua and Venice. He became a noted theorist on the principals of restoration, and was one of the first to advocate more sensitive and less interventionist approaches (though he seems not always to have put his own arguments into practice). His original designs included schools, hospitals, the Verdi Musicians’ Home in Milan, sepulchral monuments and the bronze doors of the Basilica of St Antony in Padua. His writings on Italian medieval architecture – out of which he sought to create a new style for modern Italy – were particularly influential. He was also one of the first Italian scholars to take a special interest in minor and applied arts and industrial architecture.

  III

  It may seem surprising that such a mainstream academic figure as Boito should have taken to writing fantastic, bizarre and often risqué tales peopled by an assortment of odd-balls, misfits and perverts. But Boito, having grown up during the Risorgimento – Italy’s forty-year-long struggle for unification and self-determination, with its countless setbacks and disappointments – was perhaps not unlike many of his contemporaries who felt a strong sense of disillusionment at its outcome and continued to dream of a more radical transformation of Italian art and society.

  One of the primary manifestations of this unabated revolutionary tendency was beginning to flower in Milan at the very time that Boito arrived there from Venice. Dubbed the Scapigliatura (from scapigliato, meaning ‘dishevelled, unkempt, loose-living, profligate’), this was partly inspired by French bohemianism and earlier Romantic rebels. Its proponents were anti the bougeoisie, the Church, the Establishment, and tradition, and pro individualism, hedonism, sexual freedom, drunkenness and general degeneracy. They argued for the superiority of the unruly, unfettered artist over the wealthy, privileged and conventional. Among the principal scapigliati were the writers Carlo Righetti (who invented the term), Giuseppe Rovani, Igino Ugo Tarchetti, Carlo Dossi, and the poet-painters Emilio Praga and Giovanni Camerana. Praga and Tarchetti lived out the movement’s manifesto to the letter, dying prematurely of drink and syphilis, and Camerana killed himself.

  Arrigo Boito fully aligned himself with the Scapigliatura, and became one of its leading lights, writing poetry about ghosts, graveyards, ruined castles, a mummy waiting to burst out of a glass case, light and darkness, dualistic angst, and other subjects dear to the movement. In 1863 Arrigo published ‘All’ Arte Italiana’ (To Italian Art), subtitled ‘A Sapphic Ode with Glass in Hand’, in which he drinks to the health of Italian art, newly liberated from ‘the blindness of the old and the cretinous’, whom he excoriates for having besmirched the altar of art ‘like the wall of a brothel.’ Unhappily, Giuseppe Verdi interpreted the verses as including himself among the geriatric vandals, and subsequently resolutely refused to work with Arrigo – thus postponing for two decades what turned out to be such a fruitful partnership.

  It was against the backdrop of the Scapigliatura’s most active period that, in 1867, Camillo Boito began to write his novellas and short stories. Yet Boito never seems to have considered himself a card-carrying member of the movement, as it were, nor to have been thought of as such by his contemporaries, and to try to force his work into that mould would be to ignore its distinctive qualities.

  Three stories, nonetheless, included in this selection do have scapigliatura flavours. ‘Christmas Eve’ relates how a brother’s incestuous passion for his saintly dead twin sister leads to his infatuation with a coarse shop-girl who resembles her. ‘The Grey Blotch’ is about a man tormented by an inexplicable patch in his vision, after he has seduced and debauched a country girl, only to desert her, repelled by her voracious sexual appetite and feral physicality.

  The novella ‘A Body’, first published in a periodical in 1870, is especially interesting in that his brother, Arrigo, based a poem (written in 1865, but not published until 1874) on a similar scenario, and revolving around some of the same questions of the conflict between art and science. Arrigo’s ‘Lezione D’Anatomia’ (An Anatomy Lesson) is set in a chilly morgue, where the corpse of a consumptive young girl is to be dissected:

  Ed era giovane!

  Ed era bionda!

  Ed era bella!

  (And she was young!/And she was blonde!/And she was beautiful!)

  As the dissection proceeds the observer falls into a reverie as he imagines the girl in life, recoiling from the pathologist’s booming voice and brutal exposure of her internal organs.

  Scienza, vattene

  Co’ tuoi conforti!

  Ridammi i mondi

  Del sogno e l’anima!

  Sia pace ai morti

  E ai moribondi.

  (Science, be off/with your proofs!/Give back to me the world/of dreams, of the spirit!/Peace be to the dead,/and to the dying.)

  *

  Characteristically, the verses end with a twist, when the poet’s ‘pious, sweet, purest’ of virgins is revealed to have in her womb the month-old foetus of a child.

  Camillo Boito’s ‘The Body’ is a tale full of suspense set against the gay, heady bohemianism of Vienna’s pleasure gardens in spring. A brilliant new artist is engaged in immortalizing his exquisitely lovely and vivacious mistress on canvas, whilst the ambitious and sinister young anatomist Professor Gulz (whose limitless faith in the primacy of science chillingly presages the demonic monomania of Hitler’s medical establishment) shadows her, convinced that she will soon yield up the true mysteries of her beauty beneath his scalpel on the mortuary slab.

  The medical profession appears again in ‘Buddha’s Collar’, the final story of the present selection. This macabre but comic tale is of a timid and naive Venetian bank clerk, who becomes entangled with a pretty young prostitute. After being bitten by the girl, he is consumed by the fear that he might contract rabies, and is unlucky to find himself the centre of an animated debate in the backroom of a pharmacy, where some off-duty medics are passing the time. The young man is far from comforted by the view of a senior practitioner, in whom long experience has bred a humane humility alien to the fanatical certainties of Professor Gulz: ‘The conclusion to be drawn is this,’ said the old doctor. ‘That we know nothing about it.’

  All of Boito’s seventeen novellas and stories were written between 1867 and 1895, and most were initially published in periodicals. When they appeared in book form, they were well received critically, the lucidity of the author’s style, the vividness of his descriptive powers and the liveliness of his imagination being generally praised. Boito also proved popular with the public. The first volume, Storielle Vane (Vain Tales), published in Milan in 1876, went through seven editions by 1895. The second, Senso: Nuove Storielle Vane (Senso: New Vain Tales), brought out in 1883, was reprinted five times by 1899.

  We may only regret, along with the critic Navarro della Miraglia reviewing Storielle Vane in the literary journal Fanfulla, that the author did not produce more of his strange and engaging tales: ‘I read them with eagerness and pleasure. I do not know why the author of this book writes so rarely and so little. He has all the qualities needed to be in the front rank of that little vanguard of our writers of fiction. He has the imagination, clarity, colour. He has the simplicity and truth of expression, those two supreme merits that bring things to life.’

  A Bibliographical Note

  ‘The Body’ (‘Il Corpo’) and ‘Christmas Eve’ (‘Notte di Natale’) are translated from Storielle Vane (Milan, 1913); ‘Senso’, ‘Vade Retro, Satana’, ‘The Grey Blotch’ (‘Macchia Grigia’) and ‘Buddha’s Collar’ (‘Il Collare di Budda’) from Senso: Nuove Storielle Vane (Milan, 1883). The most readily available Italian edition of the stories is presently Senso: Storielle Vane (edited with an introduction and bibliography by Raffaella Bertazzoli), published in paperback by Garzanti (Milan, 1990).

  SENSO

  FROM CONTESSA LIVIA’S SECRET NOTEBOOK

  Yesterday in my
yellow drawing-room, the young lawyer Gino, his voice thick with long-repressed passion, was whispering in my ear, ‘Contessa, take pity on me. Drive me away, instruct the servants not to let me in any more, but in God’s name release me from this deadly uncertainty. Tell me whether there’s any hope for me, or not …’ The poor boy threw himself at my feet, while I stood there, unperturbed, looking at myself in the mirror.

  I was examining my face in search of a wrinkle. My forehead, framed with pretty little curls, is smooth and clear as a baby’s. There is not a line to be seen on either side of my flared nostrils, or above my rather full, red lips. I have never found a single white strand in my long hair, which, when loose, falls in lovely glossy waves, blacker than ink, over my snow-white shoulders.

  Thirty-nine! I shudder as I write this horrible figure.

  I gave a light slap with my tapering fingers to the hot hand groping towards me, and was on my way out of the room. I do not know what prompted me – surely some laudable sense of compassion or friendship – but on the threshold I turned and whispered, I think, these words: ‘There’s hope …’

  I must curb my vanity. The anxiety that gnaws at my mind, leaving virtually no trace on my body, alternates with overconfidence in my beauty, leaving me no other comfort but this: my mirror.

  I hope to find further comfort in writing of what happened to me sixteen years ago, an experience I look back on with bitter delight. This notebook, which I keep triple-locked in my secret safe, away from all prying eyes, and as soon as I have reached the end of my story I shall throw it on the fire, dispersing the ashes, but confiding my old memories to paper should help to abate their persistently caustic edge. Every word and deed, and above all every humiliation, of that feverish period in my past remains etched in my mind. And I am always testing and probing the lesions of this unhealed wound, not really knowing whether what I feel is actually pain or an itch of pleasure.