‘La cerbiatta’

Part of the collection Chiaroscuro (Treves, 1912).

Alba De Céspedes

1911–97

De Céspedes is a wonder: a Cuban citizen who married at fifteen to become Italian, sought Mussolini’s help to get an annulment and later became a friend of Fidel Castro. Her first novel, Nessuno torna indietro (published in English with the title There’s No Turning Back), sold five thousand copies in three days and was made into a film. Her work was translated into nearly thirty languages before being almost entirely forgotten. Daughter of a man who was briefly president of the Republic of Cuba, she was raised in Europe in the homes of relatives while her father and Italian mother lived in America. In 1943 she left Rome, where she was born, and went to Abruzzo and to Puglia where, under the name Clorinda, she broadcast passionate Resistance messages for Radio Bari. When she returned to a liberated Rome the following year she founded the influential journal Mercurio, dedicated to art and politics. It lasted only four years, but published the most important writers of the time, including Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Corrado Alvaro and Giuseppe Ungaretti. And yet, pigeon-holed as a ‘woman writer’, seeking perhaps to redefine herself, perhaps to maintain a distance from her Italian public, she began basing herself partly in Paris. She ended up living there, writing in French, and dying there. She published her first novel in French in 1973, and translated it herself back into Italian. She spent the last ten years of her life working on an ambitious autobiographical novel, also written in French, about her Cuban family. She was a close friend of the writer Paola Masino, who was the companion of Bontempelli; both women wrote critically about marriage and motherhood, institutions idealized by Fascism in order to promote nationhood. This story, with its brief temporal arc, encapsulates an entire period of history. Set in the home of a bourgeois Roman family, it highlights the difference between how Italy was perceived after the Second World War, and how it perceived itself.

Invitation to Dinner

Translated by Michael F. Moore

The story I am about to tell concerns an event that is not very important in itself. Nowadays, however, our lives are filled with events like this that burden our days.

It was a few nights ago. We had invited a British officer to dinner who had helped my brother-in-law Lello to come to Rome immediately after the north had been liberated. We had been very worried about Lello. We considered him a quick, intelligent boy, who could always get himself out of a jam, but we hadn’t heard anything from him for twenty months. That’s why my husband and I were unable to fully enjoy the pleasant spring evenings or the thrill of being back home, finally, and able to start work again, and to relax together, reading, by the window. We were always oppressed by an anxiety that kept us in a state of discontent, of agitation. So we said to each other, ‘We won’t be happy until we find out what happened to Lello.’