Luce D’eramo

1925–2001

She is buried in Rome, along with John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Antonio Gramsci, in the non-Catholic cemetery. She was born Lucette Mangione in Reims, raised in a Fascist family living in Paris and moved to Rome to attend high school. At nineteen, against her family’s wishes, determined to learn the truth about the Second World War, she volunteered to work in a German labour camp, and became an active member of the Resistance. Shirking family connections when she was arrested, she ended up imprisoned in Dachau. She escaped and got as far as the city of Mainz, Germany, where, in the act of rescuing victims of a bombing, a wall fell on to her legs, partially paralysing her for the rest of her life. Upon return to Rome, she met writers like Moravia and Morante, began publishing in Nuovi Argomenti, and became a close friend of Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet whose life spanned Italy, France, Switzerland, England and the United States. D’Eramo’s best-known work is an autobiographical novel, Deviazione (Deviation), published in 1979 and made into a film in Germany. She wrote frequently about foreigners, about those displaced by the Second World War and its aftermath; Io sono un’aliena (I Am an Alien), the title of one of her collections of essays, is the thematic underpinning of all her work. The author of three story collections, D’Eramo’s writing is impeccably clean, stripped down to its essentials. ‘Vivere in due’ is a tight shot of a literary couple, a masterful monologue that is also in some sense a dialogue. It opens slowly, lingering on the particulars and rhythms of a shared domestic interior, then shifts register, incorporating Rome, a sense of history and what lies beyond this mortal coil.

Life as a Couple

Translated by Howard Curtis

He’ll be back at one again tonight, or two, or maybe even three. And I daren’t even tell him he’s wasting his time with all those meetings and discussions, because he gets so annoyed …

Who said anything about being a hermit? It’s precisely because I have a social sense that I tell him to ease off if he doesn’t want his talking to get in the way of his doing. And what’s it got to do with being superior? There’s no way he can say that, he knows perfectly well it’s all about restraint.

This world of couples. You end up by closing in on the person you’re talking to, from both sides. And at home? At home it’s different: we receive visitors together, but we have distinct roles; when we go out to see friends we go together, but as individuals, and once there we lose sight of each other, then bump into each other by chance. But when a discussion starts up, you just have to join in, you get heated, and then it’s hard to avoid ending up shoulder to shoulder, presenting a united front, which isn’t very nice. Or else you get into an argument you might as well be having in private.