Luciano Bianciardi

1922–71

In 1949, Bianciardi, a recent graduate from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa who had written a thesis on John Dewey and was teaching in a high school, launched something called a ‘Bibliobus’: a library on wheels. It was an act of cultural reconstruction and unification that promoted literature as a vehicle for social change, at a time when illiteracy rates in Italy were still remarkably high. Bianciardi didn’t have a licence, so the bus was driven by his friend Cassola who, like Bianciardi, was raised in the Maremma. Among the circulating volumes were works by Shakespeare, Conrad, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, Moravia and Hemingway (the latter two were the bestselling authors at that time). The Bible, the Koran and various agricultural manuals were also available. Bianciardi, a translator of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, remained an activist-intellectual throughout his life. He was wary of cities, opposed to industrialization and consumer culture. In 1954 he moved to Milan to work as an editor at Feltrinelli. The experience alienated him utterly but inspired his most successful work, a novel called La vita agra (published in English as It’s a Hard Life). It is a bilious portrait of that city’s bohemian intelligentsia. The original title of ‘The Streetwalker’, also set in Milan, is ‘Il Peripatetico’, the title story of a posthumous 1976 collection that gathered together, for the first time, various short stories previously published in newspapers, magazines and assorted anthologies. The title alludes to the Ancient Greek school of philosophy, but the title in Italian has a double meaning: a ‘peripatetica’ is also a term for a prostitute. One key to appreciating the story is knowing about the Merlin Law of 1958, which made brothels illegal in Italy. Bianciardi died of complications from alcohol. His final novel, Garibaldi – a fictional portrait intended to render Italy’s legendary general more ‘human’ – was published a year after his death.

The Streetwalker

Translated by Ann Goldstein

When I can, I make a small financial contribution to the friends of family planning. It’s unsung, deserving work, which should be encouraged. Dr Trabattoni and the others have nothing to gain, in a country like ours, and everything to lose. And yet there they are, and for a laughable fee one can always simply walk into their clinics, where they give advice and medical assistance. Of course, you’d need very different means, and very different advertising, to properly solve the problem of birth control.

In Italy today – or, rather, in that tiny fraction of Italy that knows about and practises birth control – there are basically three methods of contraception. The physiological method, also called the rhythm method, or, popularly, the Ogino-Knaus rule (from the names of the two scientists, a Japanese and a German, who discovered it). Once you’ve established that the woman has phases of fertility and phases of sterility every month, you try to distinguish the cyclical start of the former and abstain from sexual relations until it’s over.

It’s a method that even the ecclesiastical authorities tolerate (without, naturally, wanting excessive publicity about it), and it’s also, in theory, the healthiest. In theory: in practice, ovulation (as in fact the ‘fertile period’ is called) varies greatly from person to person and is influenced by both external and internal factors – for example, by the change of seasons, body temperature, even mood – and nothing prohibits it from occurring not once, but twice in the same month.