Romano Bilenchi

1909–89

Bilenchi, from Florence, is an elusive figure, and an interesting study in extremes. He was known for obsessive revising and rewriting, admired for his unconventional and abstract coming-of-age tales. And yet he has slipped, somehow, through the literary cracks, still without a volume in Mondadori’s Meridiani series to his name. Fascist as a youth, he broke with the regime, disillusioned, and became a Communist, but given that he did not fully support Soviet policy, eventually left the party. He started publishing in his early twenties and wrote several collections of short stories and novels, including the celebrated long story ‘La siccità’ (‘The Drought’) set in a deliberately unidentified place. Composed in 1940, it became part of a volume of three limpid, chiselled stories called Gli anni impossibili (The Impossible Years). He funnelled his energy into journalism after the Second World War, helping to found the magazine Il contemporaneo and serving as editor of the Nuovo Corriere of Florence, an influential left-wing newspaper of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1958, about midway through his so-called ‘silent’ phase, Bilenchi decided to publish a rigorously revised volume of his short stories. His objective was to prune his language to its essentials; his labours were rewarded by the Premio Bagutta ‘vent’anni dopo’ (a prize to recognize work in retrospect; in this case, twenty years later), proof that his silence had been in fact an exceptionally productive one. In 1972 after the release of a novel called Il bottone di Stalingrado (The Button of Stalingrad), he won the Viareggio Prize. This story, from the collection Anna e Bruno, concerns a young boy’s growing frustration with being misnamed, misconstrued and misunderstood. But its central theme – the inexorable specificity of place, and its correlation with identity – illuminates the intensely regional nature of Italy, even today.

A Geographical Error

Translated by Lawrence Venuti

The inhabitants of the city of F. don’t know the geography of their country, of their own home. When I left G. to study at F., I immediately noticed that these people had a mistaken idea of the location of my native town. As soon as I mentioned G., they told me, ‘Oh, you’re from the Maremma.’

One day, then, while the professor of Italian was explaining the work of some ancient Italian writer I no longer recall, he began to speak of certain shepherds who in the windows of their huts hung sheepskin tanned very finely instead of glass. For some reason I stood up from the last desk, where I was sitting, and said, ‘Yes, it’s true: among us as well farm workers attach the skins of rabbits or sheep to their cabin windows in place of glass, so great is their poverty.’ For some reason I stood up and said this. Perhaps I wanted to make myself seem clever to the professor; perhaps I was driven by a humanitarian impulse on behalf of poor people and I wanted to testify to my classmates, all of them city dwellers, that the professor had said something right, that such poverty really existed in the world. Apart from the poverty, however, the affirmation was a product of my imagination. In my life – God knows whether I had ever wandered around the countryside – only once did I happen to see a windowpane patched with a piece of paper; and the farmer’s wife, moreover, had practically apologized, saying that as soon as someone from the family could go to the city, they would buy a brand-new windowpane. No sooner was I standing before the class than I felt every impulse checked, and I realized that I had said something very stupid. I hoped that the professor might not be familiar with the customs of my region, but at my outburst, he raised his head from his book and said, ‘Don’t talk nonsense.’ After a moment, he laughed and everybody followed suit, if only to please him. ‘But wait a minute,’ he then said. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Your town, G., isn’t it in the Maremma? In the Maremma they probably still dress in sheepskin.’