Aldo Palazzeschi

1885–1974

The Futurist movement, founded by the poet F. T. Marinetti in 1909, sought to break with the past by dismantling syntax, grammar and punctuation and by setting words free. It embraced speed, immediacy, a spirit of aggression, military strength and war. It was thus bound up with the Fascist vision also gathering force in those years; the two movements, one cultural, the other political, were to be strange bedfellows. Palazzeschi, born Aldo Giurlani in Florence, adopted his grandmother’s surname, began publishing in Marinetti’s magazine, Poesia, and went on to become one of Futurism’s foremost literary protagonists. But he subsequently broke with that movement and all others; during his long and prolific writing life, he avoided any one style or trend. His earliest poetry was considered ‘crepuscolare’ (derived from the word ‘crepusculo’, which means ‘sunset’ in Italian) – a poetic school in turn-of-the-century Italy that celebrated free verse and eschewed sentimentality. Palazzeschi embraced freedom and avoided sentimentality in all his work, which consists of two stylistically distant poles, shifting from poetry to prose, from avant-garde writing to more traditional narrative forms, though always steeped in ambiguity and enigma. He divided his time between two cities, shuttling for decades between Venice and Rome. Always contradicting himself, Palazzeschi, whose homosexuality was an open secret, maintained a playful distance even from himself; in his poem ‘Chi sono?’ (‘Who am I?’) he describes himself as ‘il saltimbanco dell’anima mia’ (‘the acrobat of my soul’). He wrote shrewdly about isolated figures – often widows, bachelors and spinsters – perhaps most memorably in Sorelle Materassi (The Sisters Materassi), published in 1934 but significantly revised and re-released, in its definitive version, in 1960. This story, from his later phase, is novelistic in scope, with the theme of communication – or rather, the emphatic lack of it – at its centre. It is the tale of an unconventional coupling that transmits, elegantly and harrowingly, an ineluctable state of solitude.

Silence

Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

Benedetto Vai, who for more than twenty years had been living with his housekeeper, Leonia, was reputed to be a man of many faults and of unsound mind: selfish, lazy, stingy, arrogant; prone to mischief and eccentric to the nth degree: unique. In reality he had only one defect: he was misanthropic and in full possession of his mental faculties. Instead of trying to mitigate, or at least to conceal his supposed shortcoming, as is usual in such cases, he had chosen to bravely embrace it – and to do so, perhaps, with a pleasure as acute as his blameworthiness was deep, pushing him to the most extreme of consequences as if it were the achievement of an ideal, or the fulfilment of a dream. Following a long and arduous process, an immeasurably harsh one requiring constant, lifelong effort, he had managed to establish complete silence in his home, and while outside it to utter never a word to anyone.

It is worth emphasizing the fact that Benedetto Vai, who was well-to-do by birth, lived with Leonia: it would have been impossible for him to cope with the practicalities of everyday life by himself.