Barbara Leoni
Wise.
Elsa Morante: Aracoeli, the novel of the lost grace
"So lost among the reeds and mats
dripping, you rush the roots
drags with him, slimy, never
slender, trembling with life, and you reaching out to a
vacuum resonant groans
suffocated, the tense you ringhiotte
wave old you turns, and takes you all over again
street wall mirrors you Figge
porch in one
ice multitude of deaths, and if a gesture you
touches, a word
you next fall, what is it, Arsenio,
hour that melts, the sign of a strangled
life for you whatsoever, and the wind
the door with the ashes of the stars. "
E. Montale, arsenic, Ossi di sepia. Last
novel by Elsa Morante, Aracoeli, published by Einaudi in 1982, is the story of Manuel, a man forty years old, children and old, gay and misanthrope, reminiscent of his childhood and his morbid attachment to the mother figure. Love that will make him an outcast, a failure: his only desire is always to be loved, and exclusivity of maternal love, first bestowed and commitment, then denied, he will be d 'obstacle in her life in relationship with others, by which eschews commiserating their nature unhappy.
"Like any other ancient tale, perhaps even this communicates something true. And this case to inform me that I, of course, not a miraculous body. If I had a suitable probe, could move up in the bottom of my distant past the date of that night that I visited the tailor's immortal. Since then arose between the indelible story of my future, now sewn inside my flesh, the first said: No more
you'll be a love object for no
you will never ever
an object of love.
But my fate decreed I have learned much later " [1] .
"Since I lost my first love Aracoeli, I was never given a kiss of love" [2] .
Employee casual in a small publishing company, decided to leave Milan, to get on the trail of Aracoeli mother, long dead, returning to his birthplace in Andalusia.
"And now, here in Al, as in Milan and everywhere else, it would be insane to expect anything but out of time and indifference, for me, part of the living, nor do I want anything else. Indeed, I myself am among them, like a shadow insensitive. On the bus leaving from the small airport to Almeria city, I sat, as the plane, only one side to the bottom. I never want to hear no dialogue popping loving kisses, and I put the glasses in his jacket pocket, so that other passengers of the bus is reduced to a shell tell me. Across the rain-streaked glass me a glimpse, at times, arms outstretched like a tree and beaten by the wind, the sides of a ring, perhaps setting, illuminated only by the headlights of the bus " [3] .
The narrative develops with ups and downs in a steady ebb of memory, the journey to the lands in this Hispanic, returns to the desolate ravines of the past. Manuel tells of his childhood memories, but his memories are far from 'great airiness of Arthur, to which we Morante had weaned a long time ago.
You could probably say "once upon a time" Morante knew that a "beautiful fairy tales with consular night," when she wrote, "It is my honor, but the sky / I had fantastic / if I am worthy of grace" [4] . The drafting of
Aracoeli began in 1976 and was continued for five years, and remembers how Garboli [5] , it was no longer Morante's playful, wild, enthusiastic and capricious, but now she felt deprived of the gift of grace and was accused of a "heinous fault, in which, as a base, encompassing all the others who felt, or knew that it had reprimanded - pedantry, despotism, the inability to forget and forget the need to give more lessons, a mania for putting the dots on the i to be the gendarme of their own ideas and those of others " [6] . Without wishing to reduce the work morantiana mere authorial psychology, but we can put in this womb Aracoeli tired, like a painful gestation.
seems that the pages the old levity is now impossible, and perhaps we could speak of Aracoeli as the novel of grace lost. Completely lacking the south of the writing of Elsa, the energy of the beloved south, the sunshine and the flood of words. Rose commented about the language: "The tension from the outset that transfiguring connotes writing morantiana assumes Aracoeli, for the first time, the forms and expressionistic forms of deformation: the failed "sympathy with reality", the source of authentic realism (the novel), the individual elements of the scene will be altered and the literary language undertakes to describe the most distressing " [7] . It is a weighted Morante and the same reading sometimes becomes difficult. The language seems neurotic, and Polyphonic prey to fluctuations of the self narrative, lyric between peaks and falls under the term vulgar, vulgar. The sight affected by myopia distorts the perception of Manuel, bringing back images distorted:
"For one of its usual effects weird, my view ill, impoverished and fades when I open world, is able to stir, eyes closed, lights and special events " [8] .
the lively chorus of sounds and colors of the island, nearly vibrates the page of its splendor, is opposed to the oppressive sense of silence and the echo of voices funeral as a backdrop to the story of Manuel. It 's a disillusioned writing, without the morantiana theatricality that characterizes the other novels: it is not the time of the tragedy, now the word you farewell lament. Rare or no is the game of fantasy, there is never frivolous, silly giggle Useppe is canceled, Morante and is stripped of "fatuous as the Fiction" [9] . The successful self-deception of the characters morantiani (Elisa, Arturo, Useppe) who, through writing ol'incantamento with the world, were protected and rescued from Ugly [10] , forever anchored to the chimera of their visions, (where "the sign not fearful ever will cross the threshold of that 'blue island" and "will never be stolen this' only treasure") [11] , there seems to surrender. All has been revealed, said, remains the feeling of pity for the writer. Salvation is not possible. For Morante, as for Manuel, the foundation of life experiences a harrowing principle: "to live is the experience of separation," the disastrous defeat was played. The story was dropped. "The island was no longer visible."
not only the language but also the structure of the novel is serious, insists, the narrative proceeds in fact not following a chronological path, and find a solution in a confused amalgam of anecdotes that come to mind of the narrator, as if it were caught in the grip the delirium of sleep disturbers. The narrator tells
in medias res chronicle of the trip, unlike the writings of Elisabeth and gold woven by time, or the memories of Arthur, and even further by unanimous voice of History.
The space has changed, and the lands of southern Italy, we went to the North: The protagonist lives in a filthy hotel rooms in Milan gray and suffocating, which contributes to a sense of sickness, and even the Rome of the child appeared to lost its membership with the reality that it becomes the place of the mind and the distorted vision of the child Manuel. This is a very different strain from that produced by Arturo Useppe: as already mentioned, there is no room for childish frivolity, and that's fantastic to give names to things no longer holds. Manuel cuts as the only happy space in the home of "Totetaco," his illegal residence in Monte Sacro where he lived the first years in the mystery of the loving mother Aracoeli. Only there is sympathy with the universe intact. Remember Manuel:
"In the house of illegal Totetaco there are only two of us: and I Aracoeli. Conjunction and inseparable nature of which it seemed natural to me even eternity (...) Our Totetaco days in 1400 are all a fantastic dance hall, where day and night repeated their speed connections and chasing each other in a pair ballerina " [12] .
"For some time now I know that in the district of Monte Sacro in Rome would be useless to look for it. Our happy 1400 days were kicked out of there. Our Totetaco - and my Aracoeli - emigrated in the small town of Sierra where she, in my last nights in Milan, already called me - and now I recall - and where I expected today for the appointment promised " [13] .
"The body of which I am ashamed to fall for me off like a comedy of disguise, and in me, laughing, she recognizes the infant Totetaco. Alike you and I, back peers. Child? child? Certain data, there did not run. Male or female does not mean anything. There, you do not grow " [14] .
Totetaco is the island of Manuel, but unlike Arturo, he soon learns the law unknown to the child Procida Elsa and that "broke my heart: / out of limbo there is elided" [15] . Already in its new home in The Heights, Manuel child differs completely from Arturo and Useppe: the reflexive attitude, the lack liveliness typical playful child, and the clarity of his perception characterize it as an early disillusioned by the reality. Using the triad of typical characters theorized by Morante, you could probably say that what Arthur and Useppe are respectively the Achilles and the Don Quichotte, Manuel corresponds to Hamlet, the most modern, after the time of classical tragedy and the romantic hero, although in hindsight all three heroes are the second moments and weights, of our own characters. If Arturo itself as the hero, former captain and undisputed master of his enchanted island, Manuel is the prototype dell'Antieroe: It is never a prey to the troubles raging, the sudden whims, and adult narrator, surrenders himself to the dirge, waiting for the cancellation, in an alternate narcotic sleep to wakefulness and nauseated by the painful reality.
"It only remains, then, that take refuge in a hurry in the bed. And here, withdrew the drawbridge between myself and my presence, I feel almost safe, disappeared until tomorrow. Huddled in the dark under the sheets, then you are at large, in anarchy no forms, no history or identity. And you can pretend others as you want: beautiful, fresh, and children " [16] .
Excluded from others, unlike the other characters morantiani, Manuel is also excluded from itself: it rejects the first to test his disgust for the body, is a former Narciso and is not a sympathetic character, his apology is sliced, ugly, sick, is a pariah, a wrong, rejected by society, and falls into a concentric-pity, begging for love. Far
also by history, by the turn of events, Manuel, myopic, opposes foreign-childhood outside the gesture of removing his glasses, and folds back on itself. Like the blind Oedipus at Colonus Evening [17] is visionary, crazy, schizophrenic.
insulation also contributes to this background of political and socio-cultural time by his father Manuel coming from the company well in Turin, (perfectly portrayed towards the end of the narrative in "Double talking statues" of his paternal grandparents), a middle class suffers from hypocritical respectability and class, monolithic in its positions fossilized and blind to the dramatic rush of major events on the European scene [18] : politics enters into the living room, dressed from "Great Speech", but revealed in the talk of Aunt Monda, all the superficiality and lack of analysis, the conventional stereotype that reduces it to the sophistication of that "you know, you must speak." The shame of belonging to this type of bourgeois power in Manuel's guilt. On the horizon mother, subject to the plots of the enchanting myth, stands the figure of his uncle Manuel, fought in the English Civil War against the "Enemy Franco." Manuel in his heart he never confided to anyone, not even to Aracoeli, his fondness for his uncle ever known.
The closure of the domestic space affects the already introverted character of Manuel, and adult, the dramatic vitality of Arturo, who is now desperate, and now rejoices, replaces apathy sleepy under the influence of drugs.
the curiosity of the world, opening into the unknown, Manuel is touched by the immobility of spirit, a reverse process of initiation. If Aracoeli is the only novel by Elsa Morante where the elusive Foreign actually reached here that this turns out to be a barren, dry stony desolate lands of Andalusia create a landscape of nightmare, left, gray, and unoccupied .
"Now, I is manifested, above, a low sky, covered by a flat striated clouds, which does not appear to watery, resembling, rather, to a blanket of waste burned, brought over here by the African puff " [19] . If
Manuel feels called to start the meeting with the siren Aracoeli
"And so now (the time is about eleven o'clock in the morning) I sat on the road, leaving from Milan to seek out Aracoeli my mother in the past two directions and space. (...) Among the few reports that possessed her, were his main biographical data: that is, apart from its twin girl's last name, place of birth, I knew within the territory of Almeria, and was called El Almendral . (...) Instead, El Almendral I did not find him on any paper. But meanwhile the minimum peripheral point, ignored by geography, recently became the only ground station that indicates a direction to my body disoriented. His was a call without any promise or hope. I knew, beyond any doubt that it came to me not by reason but by a longing of the senses that even the certainty of his existence I was not a necessary condition " [20] .
And again
"For me, I press on toward El Almendral times are reduced to one point sparkling: a mirror, into which fall all the suns and moons. And beyond that point adjourned, but also in the air motionless before me rolling my encantador " [21] .
Here already waiting at the airport in Madrid in its evidence reveals the futility of the trip, extreme mockery of Aracoeli [22] :
"This that I am, therefore, landed at the first stage of my mother's legendary ABROAD: none 'more than a lost tourist off-season [23] .
"And now, where are you taking me? Perhaps El Amendral does not exist. One of the tricks that you invent false trails to hunt on, after having already cheated child [24] .
The trip from London to Madrid, from Madrid to Almeria, the stage in a crumbling hotel room, the endless bus ride from Almeria to Gergal arriving at El Almendral, are marked by confused crowd of childhood memories in the mind of the narrator, who now runs them with clarity, must now be merged with his visions and invective. The Iberian
litanies and chants that sudden burst of memories and the accompanying travel formulas seem to be more of a curse uttered by Morgan, and have nothing to do with the protective and maternal dedication that opens Arturo's Island.
"Anda Anda
niño que Dios te sends" [25] .
"Esto No tiene niño Chiquito
mother. The Parian
a gypsy
The echo en la calle " [26] .
"Duerme niño que is my
EL COCO
if y llevar a los niños que
duermen little" [27] .
Manuel is not touched by any angelic grace unlike Useppe, who, more heavenly creature that child is related to a heavenly world and is destined to leave this world soon unintelligible to him. In his "sin?" There is no answer that explains the brutality: this is not made for him and where he meets refuses to accept it. Manuel lives since childhood mediocrity, if an exception is made for the period of sporadic Totetaco and other happy moments. The exceptional non- holds its businesses and the Veil of Maya [28] falls and bares the Sacred, the divest of its "storied tent." The aura that adorns the children is deteriorating, and the same objects in Morante, to quote Garboli, "control destiny, fate spin, focus on their existing property, the mystery of things that apparently take place in time" [ 29] here in Aracoeli, betrayers and betrayed, fetishes of derision, they are renegades, the "star signs" that accompany the journey towards the goal (MAS LIGHT, El Tio resembling Ballet, the resumption of relations with the English language and last and most important the reappearance iconography of the talisman of Aracoeli) mock Manuel and captivate the appointment and promised extreme. Same talisman that in childhood, he had been given as a gift from Aracoeli after the prophecy of the Gypsy, Manuel if he was released with the offense to throw it away in the garbage cart, and now here it is recalled that this was like the sound of a magic flute:
"One might also suppose that the power of a magic item soak not only the tangible object, but also his shadow or his fingerprint [30] .
"For me, the reappearance of the talisman material today, Gergal (...) is explained as just another message Aracoeli. Maybe his gift of the talisman should be understood as a date since then, "I look in your old age, in El Almendral (...)" " [31] . For Manuel
there will never be deeds to do, and will be the pathetic "comic company partisan" [32] when fooled by a stupid joke of two homosexuals, the illusion of heroism will fall into a theater of absurd road. Only the native origins
Aracoeli seem still surrounded by the mystery of the simulacrum: a high Hispanic Queen of the feuds, the mother of Manuel's boasts its ancient lineage in the stories of Patufe cat, goat Abuelita, and old Tia name sponsorship, but only his brother Manuel, and Manuel also said Manolo, shines and stands on the shapes Iberian. Minor, boundless love of Aracoeli, this looms for measuring value and virtues of manhood, taking into account the "Great Leader", "between the first and perhaps the Sierra in Andalusia, and reverb, the striking figure of the uncle will always be the only possible hero in the eyes of Manuel.
But the stories are stored maternal and kept tightly in the frame of Totetaco home, where it seals the mother-child love, absolute and unique. Here is the source, the gravitational center of the universe, where can a language prehistoric, ancient and primordial: the "language bridal Aracoeli [33] . It's the same language of children and animals, wise and stupid code, which covers areas of the unspeakable, carved in hieroglyphic world, reminiscent of the language and Iduzza Useppe, Bella and Useppe, or the same poems Useppe " who speak of God "in The History, where, as Rosa says," against the statement 'unreal' that takes place at the place and time in history, based on codes of referentiality opaque 'one-dimensional, "the narrative celebrates a more real confidence, the only one that allows the ego to enter into communion authentic with each other. (...) Throughout the novel, authentic dialogues do not rely on words but never prefer an intensity of gaze. (...) But beyond the expressive eyes, the dumb dialogue detectors, chirping songbirds that sing the "joke" of life, what needs to be emphasized, is always the privilege granted by the narrative voice communication prelogical, hidden intuition the painful truth, the many shorts that go beyond the threshold of expression of referential word " [34] .
Aracoeli's love for her child in the early years of Totetaco overflows and returns to the memory of Manuel stupid pictures of joy and love feast:
"And I just close my eyes because the ride would begin to turn in a summer afternoon where the shadows of foliage and aerial lights chase each other like wings flapping mottled. I have maybe four years or five, and travel on the carousel of Villa Borghese in Rome. According to my usual preference to motor vehicles or wheeled, when I chose a horse and when a swan, animal fraternal, and prone to madness routes. The tournament runs playing a song at a pace almost as fast as the rotation of the earth, radiant ride, delight and fear, under the threat of secret do not stop. At every turn builds around the world, going into a sprint all the points of the equator. And somewhere there is always a waiting me, just me and no one else to all the traveling. Aracoeli! She recognizes me from a distance, to his great surprise, and I celebrated in his springing flowered skirt waving her hand: "Adiós! Goodbye! Farewell, "Proud of my business world, I, as involved in keeping me on my back, I greet you with a smile tripudiante. When I answered the same blaze of his laughter. And our laughter together two jumped from a rope to another vibrating in invisible sound boxes along a flight infinite touched my station until the evening of Almeria [35] .
of this "excessive false love," as an incurable defect which made him addicted, now alleges that Manuel's mother, and accused her of his homosexuality, having removed out of jealousy from the girls' fresh and beautiful, "rails against her
" At this hour (forty ago) for a couple of hours you sleep with your niño, like every morning, happy, dopi the kisses goodnight. But what did you do that niño, Aracoeli? Delivered to your bedtime, you kept it, silly, for the nights of COCO.
And let's here tonight, the Malanotte. Malanotte Aracoeli to you, you got the seed of me as a grace, warmth and broke it hatched in your belly like a treasure, and then you've given birth, to hand me with joy, bare your assassins. (...) You did not know anything about anything, but I knew, however, that this torture of my body, thou didst give it to you as a gift to yourself, like a toy. In reality, little beggar, you'd feel like a doll. A muñeca! (...) But a toy, after having played their fill, one day is left aside, being reduced to scrap " [36] .
Love for Morante and her characters (think of people with lies and sorcery) love is a tyrannical, evil and wicked. Exceeds its healthy form, destroys, cancels. Sgorlon notes that "in this writer who likes to do it in ways that seem so insatiable desire to suck like a vampire, every ounce of capacity in the loving person you love, to make him a shell devoid of any substance " [37] . The veneration Aracoeli once again moves away from the worship of Arturo parallel to the mother figure ever known: this, like a vestal virgin, protect her boyfriend, beyond the sky, and looks more like a sacred symbol, an alphabet, a religion pantheistic nature in which the entire island participates and shines. For iridescent that seem to explode on the island of beauty, once again Manuel answers with knowledge of its ugliness. For Morante ugliness is the sign of the conviction of destiny. Here the cult of beauty is not permissible even in childhood. The "story mama" times Totetaco is stale. Only one area was inhabited by the beauty that drank the other one:
"There was once a mirror where I mirandomi, I could fall in love with myself, were your eyes, Aracoeli, king of beauty in that m'incoronavano their small pools enchanted. And this was the mirage that you give me fabbricasti origin, projecting on all my future Sahara, beyond the horrors and your on your death. (...) While I survive, that hoary Narciso not crack, diverted from your morgane " [38] .
"At all times, always something happened to the beauty of way, by gazing. But the most beautiful sights, who held them? I! From the nose to the ears culillo to toe, there was no place of my body that she did not judge perfect. And she liked me so much that at times between his kisses made me popping terminal harmless, saying that I ate, and praised my various flavors. Cheeks: manzana. Thighs: fresh bread. Hair: bunches de uvas. A look at my eyes, then, s'insuperbiva, as a sign of his great joyous wedding exotic:
los ojos azules
dear moraine.
I had no doubt of being beautiful " [39] .
At the end of this period
Manuel puts a date: the first is when he is forced to wear glasses that he begins to like the least, taking in protest of the mother, in front of the imposture of the lenses, that spoil the little face of her child, a ferocity out of his will, which betrays the surprise and disappointment, and for the first time she sees him ugly. At the sudden gesture of removing his glasses the remedy is no longer possible: Aracoeli responds with a smile that he knows of the forcing. " The white fire that surprises Manuel, in the swirling spectacle of horror and dizziness caused by the novelty of the lenses, outlines the separation is inevitable that to interpose between the self and the world by deciphering its natural and happy, which is believed by the inseparable union with Aracoeli. Now Manuel adult undressing in front of the mirror, sees his nakedness as an "aberrant formation, connate for witchcraft," the question and "know me, Aracoeli? Still you like me? I see beautiful? "You answered him:
" Now you've vanished like a thief, while I find myself here, alone and naked in front of this Ropero de luz - espejo de cuerpo entero, which throws me in the face , without further ado, my real shape. And who is not disgusted by this monkey, I myself when I suck?
Every creature on earth is offered. Pathetic, naive, offers: "I was born! Here I am, with this face, this body and this smell. Do you like me? I want to? "(...) This is actually the only perpetual demand of every living thing to other living beings," you two good? I do that to her I looked like the best? "(...) Accustomed to a charming cast, believed to be eternal, and certainly a joyful thanksgiving for their naive offer, the beginner will pale stunned to encounter the land alienation and indifference" [40] . The
Aracoeli Totetaco of the mother in front of which do not need decorations to please, it's a girl-woman, mentioned by Manuel Whether in feral and wild, its dell'animaletto ignores everything and is forced to captivity. His physical appearance still bitter does not seem to be suitable for motherhood, puberty, and this is more a game for its coveted "canciones de cuna," devoid of any erotic temptation, without languor or flirting: signs of clumsiness child does not exclude the his natural need for a "real live cupid", instinct, and choral prayer, carved in the law required of all mothers. Aracoeli, unlike its peers, not a great idea can never marry, having fear of men increased value, but is fascinated by the fancy of becoming a nun, promise of "songs, visions, burning candles, sweets and cakes festooned with colorful flowers." Thinking maybe a "fertilization" without sin "such as the Virgean, pregnancy is seen as a machine unaware of its workings, with only wonder at the miracle. Childhood el'adolecenza Aracoeli are dotted with a dense texture of popular beliefs and superstitions, that the mystery of the Virgin and the Trinity lead back from any cause. This inseparable fusion of earthly life and heavenly mystery, linked to the Catholic tradition rooted Iberian becomes part of everyday life of Manuel, contributing to 'sacral radiation that, in his eyes, wraps the mother figure:
"The mysterious obligation, which in our house required the confidentiality of my maternal ancestors, he offered me a child as a basis for possible flights to the nests legendary. (...) In those uncharted planets of my ignorance, my mother was descended from a long line of beggars or gypsies or fighters or bandits or Great hidalgos (perhaps, has had a stay in a castle inaccessible? Maybe in some alhambra or alcázar ?) And all of these possible fates - although balenanti of escape in my thoughts - it was a sunburst and numerous variant that branched off from her as a luminous body " [41] .
"Please, disguises herself with all the costumes conventional and always return, they dream of the hairless (like the puppet theaters in accordance with the street children are applauding). Pastora. Gentleman. Santa. Harlot. Dead. Immortal. Victim. Tyrant. Doll. Dea. Slave. Mother. Daughter. Ballerina " [42] .
Yet the mysterious aura that surrounds the origins of Aracoeli, is in the house of Manuel "skeleton in the closet," which implies a difference in class' s membership of the two spouses. So it is that Aunt Monda undertakes the arduous task of training the daughter to learn it good manners to Madam, ed'altraparte Aracoeli first is willing and eager of adapting to and ennobled the family of the beloved. Monda aunt, an emblem of elegant composure, leads in fact a serious and sober life, according to family traditions, and brings his virginal celibacy outside end with honor, allowing himself only the luxury and pride of their clothing, too sober and devoid of any conspicuousness eccentric. The yearning of "Prince Charming", he devoted himself to love for Mussolini and Generalissimo Franco.
The arrival in The Heights for Aracoeli means and the entrance into society Manuele, anointed by the legitimacy of marriage, after the happy times of illegal Totetaco. The news that the new residence involves the knowledge the neighborhood and the hierarchical rules of the house, all to gain familiarity with the urban space, and Manuel Aracoeli as frightened notched a pair of side streets or sudden stop with the heartbeat of the city crowds.
The prejudices of that little world is well identified in the application of Aunt world that, every new acquaintance, asks "How did?". According to this code, the more respected for the value it acquires in the maritime military caste belongs to her husband, Aracoeli "not born", that is not a blood with which we can boast in official circles. Yet the silence that hangs in Roman society, does not prevent Aracoeli is treated by everyone with kindness and indulgence, according to the dictates of the refinement of class, perhaps due to more than brought to the position of respect embodied by the father of Manuel. Eugene Otto
Amedeo, Journal of the Royal Navy Lieutenant and looking that "made light" and how "worthy of a Prince," dedicated his life to the worship of the king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele Third, worship can also be explained by the origins of Turin, which is strongly rooted in the firm devotion to the effigy of the House of Savoy.
The figure of Eugenio Arturo recalls the myth that makes the father Wilhelm: too far, the sacred aura of Eugene, however, is confirmed unanimous respect and devotion of all. The mean figure of Wilhelm, Eugene opposes a real nobility of spirit, worthy of a god. In his somatic resemblance with his sister, those traits in him misplaced agree, giving an effect of masculine prowess and a kind of adolescent freshness [43] . The characters in his sister were clumsy and dull, the considerable height or light-colored hair and eyes, stand him in a blaze of sunlight and healthy. The stiffness of gesture is to understand the resolve and the elegant and composed character discipline. The religious worship of Raymond for his brother, before which, without envy and with complete humility, I feel ashamed be the copy of botched recalls the scion of the house and lie in Cerentano spell, who enjoyed the same veneration by his mother and sister. Just
statuary and unattainable official of his father, Eugene does not allow to approach the warm simplicity of the paternal role, which is nourished by the everyday and familiar. Manuel did not call him "dad", just as almost everyone calls him "Captain." Again Morante in the figure of the father is distant, and this distance is an inevitable imbalance in the delicate form of child Manuele. The lack of male model, Manuel makes up cutting a space for women and maternal where masculinity has no access and it seems unattainable, with inevitable consequences on her sexual growth.
times Totetaco are scanned between games and raids home of mother and child, and expectations of Aracoeli, in flickering, sudden and brief visits to Eugene.
Parental love, almost adolescent and immature in his impetuous sweetness, excludes from the Manuel family triangle, or rather it seems that the unity of this is only possible to track links that now bind Aracoeli in Eugene, now Manuele her:
"So far as I knew, I had no father. Or designed, moreover, that the fathers on the ground were necessary and inevitable. It is very likely that, in its license, my father - in disguise - ascended to Totetaco (...) And yet his visits my memory does not keep any trace. (...) The first actual pictures of my father (...) I will have in the house in The Heights " [44] .
"Now in a run behind my mother, I am also following him, puzzled and curious, but with extreme concern. In fact, on the eve of our first meeting, Aracoeli I had magnified his person with such items, as I stood there planted to contemplate, as was another Macarena. Theophany new and unknown - but certainly benign - downhill - or uphill - Here, a big boost for air. (...) No threat to me, from him. Too many were our two measures to adapt to a confrontation, or even less, to a competition. Indeed, his body of myth, that he lent Aracoeli extended to me his great dignity.
To me, up from the beginning, his manner accused, along with his comic misuse of the profession of his father, also a description hesitant and confused, as if afraid of his power to force myself, in any aspect. (...) Between me and him, ran at once - in a carnal affection - a silent agreement, perhaps even because of our shared passion for Aracoeli. It is certain that our great love, exclusive for the same woman was between us cause for gratitude, rather than contention. (...) In fact, the pleasure of seeing me there was a resemblance to him, especially since my Aracoeli " [45] .
"With the passage of childhood, more and more of the groom Aracoeli instead to embody, for me, especially the father, I was a cult. Since its birth but, for me it meant paternity absence; (...) In my religion (almost abstract) consecrated the Aracoeli faith and adoration, and he honored me by the husband of Aracoeli, not the father of my flesh " [46] .
The keystone in the delicate balance of love that bind the characters comes with the expectation of the second-Encarnación, called Carina. The Heights is home to decorate "the Royal Court pending the Infanta," but his untimely death shortly after birth, leads to irreparable rift in the life of the entire family, and in particular becomes the vanishing point to which precipitated the mental and physical health of Aracoeli fatal moment perceived and understood by Manuel:
"And at that point, the time has stopped, making me an indescribable feeling, unique and total, which now I could give a name ETERNITY. (It is strange how the Lord let you capture a segment rather ephemeral in continuity extended. But the body does not support the test and return to disorder) " [47] .
From this moment on, the mother-son relationship begins to deteriorate to the total neglect and indifference that Aracoeli prove to Manuel, who became, like an ornament, an object of little importance, more than anything else out of trouble. The rift is the day when Manuel, already quite big, in front of the nakedness of Aracoeli, always kept hidden, like a baby clings to its mother's womb, perhaps nostalgia for the days of Totetaco, when it was still a victim of maternal neglect . In that gesture, instinctive and thoughtful, Manuel swears his love to mother, and tries to console her childish desperation, almost as if wanting to say "I'm here, Manuelino! Sleep sleep: Carina if not, here's Manuelino. " The expulsion by sudden and furious Aracoeli, here is instill in the seed of resentment Manuel, where love is extreme is mixed in an inseparable way that weaves a silent reticence to poison their marriage. For the timid attempts at rapprochement Aracoeli, Manuel responded with a seriousness that disarm the shadowy mother will faint.
begins in this period of metamorphosis Aracoeli an evil hidden deep inside the besieged worn and marred, resulting in increasingly bizarre behavior to her, in which the splitting of the two Aracoeli, that of a time and that now, is apparent: at home and genuine vitality Nunziatina, stepmother of Arthur, who also lives in the understanding of the popular myths and resembles a small animal, and that with total confidence places in religious beliefs and superstitious the great mysteries, which in some ways resembles the first Aracoeli controaltare ago by now sick of that other feral forasticità, prey to a brutal torture. The first signs of this change in the physical appearance of Manuel notice them Aracoeli a time when the gaze of men in the street and taunted fled in terror, with the timidity and ignorance of each angular erotic sensuality typical morantiane female figures, such other Aracoeli, almost to obey a command poignant and despotic ", which she ignored, she discovers the temptation of sexual attraction, through the flaunting of his body, which is now offered to the passer, and a new languor pervades and gives his forms a soft sweetness that is a prelude to early blight sick and ugly:
"Your hand waving, the curves of her body is proposed, naive and bold, all eager to dissolve in final obedience prohibited. And the voices of praise for her beauty, expressive eyes, seemed to physically touch his skin, like tongues or fingers, or bite your skin up to the deeper layers, making her wince. From time to time, took place in a cafe, where you (for a drive recklessly, representing innocence) was left in poses that once would have shame. There was a tendency on the bust, thrusting her small breasts, in that act, it seemed swelling. Cross your legs with an incurable vulgar, so that her skirt went up to the thigh. And if a man took a table next to fix it - even if it were bad, mean, old - it shall suffered anxious emotion, audible and visible in her breathing. Between the lid ajar, and the white of the eye, past a flickering of languor, like a liquid in svaporante purple smoke " [48] \u200b\u200b.
"my mother's voice had changed. His well-known taste familiar to me always (soaked in honey and saliva) the merged now, from the throat in a dense dough, sticky and almost dirty [49] .
Sola, strip the home torn apart by sexual desire, and also to her husband, Aracoeli urgent desire manifests itself, discovering for the first time the carnality of the relationship of love, which found an outlet in the "angelic dance" rhythm and melody etched on a staff forbidden to Manuel:
"The body of him, this time, more than a shelter, served as a tool (its the only legitimate) to finally meet her Arsione unfulfilled. As if the house was deserted and the neighborhood in dust, up from the doorway she clung to the body, touching him with eager fingers and tongue, and biting his lips and ears, and to open his jacket to look for it with his hands under his shirt, "Beautiful beautiful querido hermoso" gave himself to repeat it " [50] .
In moments of respite that still remember the first Aracoeli, replacing more often these fires sudden, that the path of adultery, the turmoil will lead to the final last summer, where as visions crowd the image of Man cat, the Consul of the Militia of the lift crazy, Women-camel, and the scenarios of the Church and Fifth. Increasingly unfriendly towards the child, seems to obey a law Aracoeli its mysterious, and named after the sea is called the moon creating tides, modular and arbitrary changes that deform the coast according to a rule in heaven. The writing itself
morantiana follows the pangs of deformation, reaching an expressionistic lyricism that perfectly captures in 'episode of the Man-cat
"And his whole body, gilded by the sun, is covered with a fluffy warm and bright, the same color of his red-blond hair and live: that immediately to see him, it is akin to race with the race of red cats. His eyes do not look Aracoeli auburn, but he seems to like her, see her any other way than that of the eyes, perhaps through the skin, or through the hair, which move in step like whiskers. He dives and resurfaces brighter because his red hair on the water posed a lot of transparent beads. His body plays a few meters from the shore, disappearing and reappearing under water, with its long, sinuous movements of the cat. (...) I see the space marine in a yawn excessively greedy, blurred and glowing. All the light of the universe, from galaxies to the gold mines, spills melted in this complete monster. We get tangled streamers, worms snakes and glow of fire, and if they were floating eyes of drowned, rotting and iridescent scales of fish between teams such as needles for cannibals " [51] .
Manuel before the sea trial fear and marina view, which takes great character, (however, due to its lack of short-sightedness), beware of those reflections Procida, mindful perhaps of the board of Wilhelm and Arthur, but lost the sunshine and fresh Mona Lisa, it remains the eager light of noon, accentuated by the charge and aberrant expressionistic force to which they are addicted and painful subject actors and spectators.
One after another following the story of adulterous Aracoeli-appearance to any male nymphomaniac who now responds with a groan beastly, and his body undergoes a rapid degradation that increasingly consumes up to deliver it in the hands of the camel-woman in the domains of the Fifth. In the nightmare
heartbreaking when Manuel was forced to live, it opens for him a glimmer of joy a child, perhaps the last, with the possible entry into the house dell'attendente Daniel, a brief interlude of the season, which is apparent the airy clarity of the Isle of Arturo. Happy birth morantiana of writing, the student Daniele murky gloom with which the disease infects Aracoeli everything. According to Rosa "in outlining a portrait of Daniel, the narrator abandons the tone for adult dell'acredine riattingere cadences transfiguring of the story away: full membership optics child projects onto the young sailor mythical aura that befits a great warrior, part of the "noble lineage or Danielidi Danieli," but does not erase the feeling to "Pazzariello 'to populate illiterate. In that work, as always, focuses on narration than dialogue, the conversations between the two boys have a crisp lightness, a happy tone, which acts as counterpoint to the relentless rate comparisons drawn from the semantic fields of everyday girl " [ 52] :
"The orderly Daniel was a sailor of the first lever, which, on the face, looked younger than his age (twenty years). His skin was smooth, yet cool in childhood, just a brown mixed with pink. Big eyes, a violet blue that seemed a little wet with milk, watching everyone with a trusting and naive astonishment. It also gave him reason to feel resentful, his answer was always a smile of gentleness clear: as if all the inhabitants of the earth he did not see that justice and benevolence " [53] .
"It was, in fact, an unexpected event for me that a sailor would make me a mother. He had, indeed, of the maternal qualities: with the addition of certain unintentional roughness that I attest to his greatness of manhood, and luck to have friends, I like a little spider.
(Oh Daniel! Ears
pèttinami Wash your hair even if a little 'me you pull.
Carezzami by mistake or Danieluccio
of Danielidi) " [54] .
Edenic But the season of Arcturus is also intended to fall sucked from the curse of Aracoeli, when the crew will transfer to her appeal Maliosa. The greatest tragedy is worn under the eyes of Manuel, whom all salvation has now been taken away, throwing it into a furious hatred and damned for Aracoeli and Daniel. Fully weaned to the brutality, the reverse process of initiation has its beginning here, (if so far for Manuele had survived a surprise even possible), orchestrated by the precipitous downfall of relentless succession of events, from the days of extreme transgression during the religious service in the Church, the desolate landscape of the Fifth, in a last great illusion, more than notional and consoling Authentic, Manuel projected in its latest reverie, wondering
"What sort of patrician Señoras these beautiful could be the Fifth? Princesses? Sisters of fashion? Dancers fashion models? Dive of the magazines? Fate? " [55] .
began the era of the joints for Manuel, near Fifth, and later, after living in grandparents' house in Turin, and after the death of Aracoeli, from college to being awarded at the end of the war. The death of
Aracoeli decreed the beginning of the visionary delirium of Manuel:
"So began the revenge of Aracoeli. Dead, now, it only made me fear, and almost horror. (...) I preferred not to know what faults m 'accused, and then in the end, I knew. I had already begun, in fact, until I returned from Piemonte, to defend myself from his death disfiguring and destroying our love " [56] .
"At the time I was niño, by way of a joke when I said:" Duerme el que is COCO 'Aracoeli did not foresee that in future I would see my stars escape from the COCO to another on this planet. Where a fifth, a palace, a cemetery, a cabin, a presence as a lack a word I would assume a shape the body of the giant hairy, reaching the enemy in a row, to lay siege. And too, later on, I tried to sleep, my only refuge from COCO " [57] .
In his second escape, Manuel returns for the last time in Rome: there, Aunt Monda meet again, reduced to a ridiculous caricature of a class in gangrene, Manuel decides to visit his father, who retired from the career , has become a puppet in hands of alcohol. In front of the faded outline of Eugene, Manuele test disgust and helpless in a plaster cast, which awkwardly tries to hide the decay. After leaving the den father, that's the curtain falls on the eyelids of Manuel, catching him in a sudden cry. A cry of love and eternal separation, lack, which mature in the words of the narrator finds expression:
"I have always been a huge factory of dreams. If it is true that our time is actually linear over the illusion of a curve fragment already concluded: where ever you turn on the same circle, without duration or starting point or direction, and if they really all our experience, minimum or maximum, and the press on that roll of film already filmed and always in continuous projection, then I wonder if the dreams are part of that account. And if my roll, taken all together, it would be a horror movie or a comic. I, however, in any case, I could only cry, to see him, they really could return to shoot it - Mercy (...) " [58] .
Before the death of his father years later, Manuel will not cry anymore, and will then give an explanation to that cry loud and childish that surprised him one day far in the district of San Lorenzo:
"certain individuals are more likely to cry for love, and death " [59] .
When the end of his trip to El Almendral, Manuel is not waiting for anything, just indifferent to any point on earth, and its extreme application, an old man replied:
"" That's El Almendral ". Also insists on gestures, to know where they extend the village. And the old man does not take long at all to understand. "But this is, El Almendral" he repeats. It stretches his lips into a form of ironic smile among tolerant, while again turning his arm to the air around, meaning "It's all here," [60] .
If Aracoeli is the other face of the island of Arthur, it is true that his story is perhaps less painful. Right now we're used to a disillusioned narrator and, honestly, despite his obsessive repetition, reading takes us where everything is already said. Arthurian memories, in the voice of a narrator who is cheating and who is still in love, are all the more so in the most harrowing time of their disenchantment. The frame Procida, on the one hand supports the joyful laughter of writing romance, then, is finally just a mask, or better, a distant mirage closed in childhood. And if Morante more than twenty years before he wrote of Procida:
"That you thought that a small spot of land,
was all, "
Aracoeli seals with his last words:
El Almendral
" It's all here. "
Publications Bibliography of Elsa Morante: stories, novels, essays, poems
Alibi, Milan, Longanesi, 1958.
Aracoeli, Torino, Einaudi, 1982.
Diary 1938, edited by A. Andreini, Torino, Einaudi, 1989.
The secret game, Milan, Garzanti, 1941.
The world saved by children, Torino, Einaudi, 1968.
History, Torino, Einaudi 1974.
The wonderful adventures of the braids Cater, Torino, Einaudi, 1942.
shawl Andalusian, Torino, Einaudi, 1963.
Arturo's Island, Torino, Einaudi, 1957.
Lie and sorcery, Torino, Einaudi, 1948.
Works, 2 vols., Edited by C. Cecchi and C. Garboli, Mondadori, Milano 1988.
or against the atomic bomb and other writings, Milano, Adelphi, 1987.
Lyrics:
C. Cazale Bérard, Morante, Weil: the choice of attention and the truth of the tale, Web Address: http://www.testoesenso.it/studiEsaggi/Morante_Weil.htm
M. Bardini, Elsa Morante. Italian. By profession, poet, Pisa, Nistri-Lischi, 1999.
G. Massari, L 'Isle of Elsa in "The World", March 19, 1957.
G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, Milan, Basic Books, 1995.
C. Sgorlon, Invitation to the reading of Elsa Morante, Milan, Murcia, 1988.
S. Weil, Save Venice, Milan, Adelphi, 1987.
Aa. Vv. c. AM Crispino, Oltrecanone for a mapping of women's writing, Rome, manifestolibri, 2003.
[1] E. Morante, Aracoeli, Torino, Einaudi, 1982, p. 46.
[2] Ibid, p. 47.
[3] Ibid, p. 52.
[4] E. Morante, Scheherazade, in Alibi, Milan, Longanesi, 1958.
[5] Della "pesanteur" speaks in the preface to Caesar Garboli E. Morante, For or against the atomic bomb and other writings, Milano, Adelphi, 1987. "One afternoon many years ago, I forget for what turn of the conversation (we were just sitting at a cafe) Elsa Morante sighed: 'Do you want to know what my real drawback? Just what nobody thinks that. But I know very well what it is ... It 's the pesanteur' "(p. XI).
[6] Ibid, p. XII.
[7] G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, Milan, Basic Books, 1995, p. 316.
[8] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P.110.
[9] See E. Morante, the fable, a lie, and spells, Torino, Einaudi, 1948.
[10] See the writings of Simone Weil known to Morante: Attention, bearer of the look angelic grace, removed from the brutality. See also S. Weil, Save Venice, Milan, Adelphi, 1987.
[11] E. Morante, Dedication, in The Island of Arturo, Torino, Einaudi, 1957.
[12] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., Pp. 120-121.
[13] Ibid, p. 123.
[14] Ibid, p. 124.
[15] E. Morante, Dedication, in The Island of Arthur cit. The complex and intricate arabesque of intertextual references morantiani gravity creates a whirlpool around the landing of salvation: "That little point of land was everything," Dedication, in The world saved by children in the opera becomes Goodbye: "The only chance of meeting point was this poor land."
[16] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 109.
[17] E. Morante, the world saved by children, Torino, Einaudi, 1968.
[18] "I remember that until a certain age (...) I kept vague idea that Mussolini was a common noun plural, which was to indicate the general head of government: figures that each country had its own muslin, the same way it had to have a king, a queen, or maybe even a pope. " E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 36.
[19] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 129.
[20] Ibid, p. 9.
[21] Ibid, p. 22.
[22] "So, in a resurgence, comes to my throat and into my head, my wretched illness ordinary, unknown to me too. I see myself here, to run on a track drawn in a desert, between mirages absurd, false signals and empty scenery, and once again I repeat that the calls were Aracoeli, which were themselves, a false signal, and my poor, latest novel Andalusian factory shadow equivocal, for amusement of my days in vain. From the world, in which claims to meet Aracoeli, I only go up the usual response, "What you're looking for, and who?! there is none. And that you might as well take off his glasses. There's nothing to see. "Ibid, p. 129-130.
[23] Ibid .
[24] Ibid, p. 107.
[25] Ibid, p. 9.
[26] Ibid .
[27] Ibid, p. 50.
[28] See G. Massari, L 'Isle of Elsa in "The World", March 19, 1957.
[29] C. Garboli, Introduction, in E. Morante, Arturo's Island, cit., P. XVII.
[30] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 171.
[31] Ibid .
[32] The two then reveal their identities with malicious mischief, "We are not subject to guerrilla / we are the offspring of good family / I Viscount / Count him / and we do not go to the front. / He alienated I alienate, and therefore understand each other at first sight / and together we fix it and to the Christian love. / Do not worry! Do not hurt! / We are not Tiger, but we are SLUTS. " Ibid, p. 163.
[33] See C. Cazale Bérard, Morante, Weil: the choice of attention and the truth of the tale: "There is no doubt in Elsa Morante's novels a" tongue wedding ": is that of the child with his mother. Manuel speaks explicitly of the language of Monte Sacro (...) or better Totetaco, according to the secret language of love that unites again to his mother (...) a language that reappears briefly, for a fragile miracle, after the death broke nest in a protective family, "often held me and kissed me, fondled her with a divine language, of mixed Italian and English, and that we could not hear us anymore, since the time of Totetaco. But the "Bridal language" will remain as already dead and obsolete trace of a lost paradise. " Florence-Paris 2002-2003.
Web Address: http://www.testoesenso.it/studiEsaggi/Morante_Weil.htm
[34] G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, cit., Pp. 244-245.
[35] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., Pp. 97-98.
[36] Ibid, pp. 100-105.
[37] C. Sgorlon, Invitation to the reading of Elsa Morante, Milan, Murcia, 1988.
[38] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 107.
[39] Ibid, p. 121.
[40] Ibid, pp. 107-108.
[41] Ibid, pp. 25-26.
[42] Ibid, p. 124.
[43] "I'm still watching a great ship decked with flags, where my father, beaming, in full uniform summer white and gold, makes us the honors, from the mouths of cannon, metal and glazed white paint wonderfully. " Ibid, p. 39.
[44] Ibid, p. 120.
[45] Ibid, p. 134.
[46] Ibid, p. 183.
[47] Ibid, p. 202.
[48] Ibid, p. 236.
[49] Ibid, p. 239.
[50] Ibid, p. 238.
[51] Ibid, pp. 243-244.
[52] G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, cit., P. 336.
[53] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 218.
[54] Ibid, p. 225.
[55] Ibid, p. 281.
[56] Ibid, p. 300.
[57] Ibid, p. 326.
[58] Ibid, p. 291.
[59] Ibid, p. 328.
[60] Ibid, p. 309.
Wise.
Elsa Morante: Aracoeli, the novel of the lost grace
"So lost among the reeds and mats
dripping, you rush the roots
drags with him, slimy, never
slender, trembling with life, and you reaching out to a
vacuum resonant groans
suffocated, the tense you ringhiotte
wave old you turns, and takes you all over again
street wall mirrors you Figge
porch in one
ice multitude of deaths, and if a gesture you
touches, a word
you next fall, what is it, Arsenio,
hour that melts, the sign of a strangled
life for you whatsoever, and the wind
the door with the ashes of the stars. "
E. Montale, arsenic, Ossi di sepia. Last
novel by Elsa Morante, Aracoeli, published by Einaudi in 1982, is the story of Manuel, a man forty years old, children and old, gay and misanthrope, reminiscent of his childhood and his morbid attachment to the mother figure. Love that will make him an outcast, a failure: his only desire is always to be loved, and exclusivity of maternal love, first bestowed and commitment, then denied, he will be d 'obstacle in her life in relationship with others, by which eschews commiserating their nature unhappy.
"Like any other ancient tale, perhaps even this communicates something true. And this case to inform me that I, of course, not a miraculous body. If I had a suitable probe, could move up in the bottom of my distant past the date of that night that I visited the tailor's immortal. Since then arose between the indelible story of my future, now sewn inside my flesh, the first said: No more
you'll be a love object for no
you will never ever
an object of love.
But my fate decreed I have learned much later " [1] .
"Since I lost my first love Aracoeli, I was never given a kiss of love" [2] .
Employee casual in a small publishing company, decided to leave Milan, to get on the trail of Aracoeli mother, long dead, returning to his birthplace in Andalusia.
"And now, here in Al, as in Milan and everywhere else, it would be insane to expect anything but out of time and indifference, for me, part of the living, nor do I want anything else. Indeed, I myself am among them, like a shadow insensitive. On the bus leaving from the small airport to Almeria city, I sat, as the plane, only one side to the bottom. I never want to hear no dialogue popping loving kisses, and I put the glasses in his jacket pocket, so that other passengers of the bus is reduced to a shell tell me. Across the rain-streaked glass me a glimpse, at times, arms outstretched like a tree and beaten by the wind, the sides of a ring, perhaps setting, illuminated only by the headlights of the bus " [3] .
The narrative develops with ups and downs in a steady ebb of memory, the journey to the lands in this Hispanic, returns to the desolate ravines of the past. Manuel tells of his childhood memories, but his memories are far from 'great airiness of Arthur, to which we Morante had weaned a long time ago.
You could probably say "once upon a time" Morante knew that a "beautiful fairy tales with consular night," when she wrote, "It is my honor, but the sky / I had fantastic / if I am worthy of grace" [4] . The drafting of
Aracoeli began in 1976 and was continued for five years, and remembers how Garboli [5] , it was no longer Morante's playful, wild, enthusiastic and capricious, but now she felt deprived of the gift of grace and was accused of a "heinous fault, in which, as a base, encompassing all the others who felt, or knew that it had reprimanded - pedantry, despotism, the inability to forget and forget the need to give more lessons, a mania for putting the dots on the i to be the gendarme of their own ideas and those of others " [6] . Without wishing to reduce the work morantiana mere authorial psychology, but we can put in this womb Aracoeli tired, like a painful gestation.
seems that the pages the old levity is now impossible, and perhaps we could speak of Aracoeli as the novel of grace lost. Completely lacking the south of the writing of Elsa, the energy of the beloved south, the sunshine and the flood of words. Rose commented about the language: "The tension from the outset that transfiguring connotes writing morantiana assumes Aracoeli, for the first time, the forms and expressionistic forms of deformation: the failed "sympathy with reality", the source of authentic realism (the novel), the individual elements of the scene will be altered and the literary language undertakes to describe the most distressing " [7] . It is a weighted Morante and the same reading sometimes becomes difficult. The language seems neurotic, and Polyphonic prey to fluctuations of the self narrative, lyric between peaks and falls under the term vulgar, vulgar. The sight affected by myopia distorts the perception of Manuel, bringing back images distorted:
"For one of its usual effects weird, my view ill, impoverished and fades when I open world, is able to stir, eyes closed, lights and special events " [8] .
the lively chorus of sounds and colors of the island, nearly vibrates the page of its splendor, is opposed to the oppressive sense of silence and the echo of voices funeral as a backdrop to the story of Manuel. It 's a disillusioned writing, without the morantiana theatricality that characterizes the other novels: it is not the time of the tragedy, now the word you farewell lament. Rare or no is the game of fantasy, there is never frivolous, silly giggle Useppe is canceled, Morante and is stripped of "fatuous as the Fiction" [9] . The successful self-deception of the characters morantiani (Elisa, Arturo, Useppe) who, through writing ol'incantamento with the world, were protected and rescued from Ugly [10] , forever anchored to the chimera of their visions, (where "the sign not fearful ever will cross the threshold of that 'blue island" and "will never be stolen this' only treasure") [11] , there seems to surrender. All has been revealed, said, remains the feeling of pity for the writer. Salvation is not possible. For Morante, as for Manuel, the foundation of life experiences a harrowing principle: "to live is the experience of separation," the disastrous defeat was played. The story was dropped. "The island was no longer visible."
not only the language but also the structure of the novel is serious, insists, the narrative proceeds in fact not following a chronological path, and find a solution in a confused amalgam of anecdotes that come to mind of the narrator, as if it were caught in the grip the delirium of sleep disturbers. The narrator tells
in medias res chronicle of the trip, unlike the writings of Elisabeth and gold woven by time, or the memories of Arthur, and even further by unanimous voice of History.
The space has changed, and the lands of southern Italy, we went to the North: The protagonist lives in a filthy hotel rooms in Milan gray and suffocating, which contributes to a sense of sickness, and even the Rome of the child appeared to lost its membership with the reality that it becomes the place of the mind and the distorted vision of the child Manuel. This is a very different strain from that produced by Arturo Useppe: as already mentioned, there is no room for childish frivolity, and that's fantastic to give names to things no longer holds. Manuel cuts as the only happy space in the home of "Totetaco," his illegal residence in Monte Sacro where he lived the first years in the mystery of the loving mother Aracoeli. Only there is sympathy with the universe intact. Remember Manuel:
"In the house of illegal Totetaco there are only two of us: and I Aracoeli. Conjunction and inseparable nature of which it seemed natural to me even eternity (...) Our Totetaco days in 1400 are all a fantastic dance hall, where day and night repeated their speed connections and chasing each other in a pair ballerina " [12] .
"For some time now I know that in the district of Monte Sacro in Rome would be useless to look for it. Our happy 1400 days were kicked out of there. Our Totetaco - and my Aracoeli - emigrated in the small town of Sierra where she, in my last nights in Milan, already called me - and now I recall - and where I expected today for the appointment promised " [13] .
"The body of which I am ashamed to fall for me off like a comedy of disguise, and in me, laughing, she recognizes the infant Totetaco. Alike you and I, back peers. Child? child? Certain data, there did not run. Male or female does not mean anything. There, you do not grow " [14] .
Totetaco is the island of Manuel, but unlike Arturo, he soon learns the law unknown to the child Procida Elsa and that "broke my heart: / out of limbo there is elided" [15] . Already in its new home in The Heights, Manuel child differs completely from Arturo and Useppe: the reflexive attitude, the lack liveliness typical playful child, and the clarity of his perception characterize it as an early disillusioned by the reality. Using the triad of typical characters theorized by Morante, you could probably say that what Arthur and Useppe are respectively the Achilles and the Don Quichotte, Manuel corresponds to Hamlet, the most modern, after the time of classical tragedy and the romantic hero, although in hindsight all three heroes are the second moments and weights, of our own characters. If Arturo itself as the hero, former captain and undisputed master of his enchanted island, Manuel is the prototype dell'Antieroe: It is never a prey to the troubles raging, the sudden whims, and adult narrator, surrenders himself to the dirge, waiting for the cancellation, in an alternate narcotic sleep to wakefulness and nauseated by the painful reality.
"It only remains, then, that take refuge in a hurry in the bed. And here, withdrew the drawbridge between myself and my presence, I feel almost safe, disappeared until tomorrow. Huddled in the dark under the sheets, then you are at large, in anarchy no forms, no history or identity. And you can pretend others as you want: beautiful, fresh, and children " [16] .
Excluded from others, unlike the other characters morantiani, Manuel is also excluded from itself: it rejects the first to test his disgust for the body, is a former Narciso and is not a sympathetic character, his apology is sliced, ugly, sick, is a pariah, a wrong, rejected by society, and falls into a concentric-pity, begging for love. Far
also by history, by the turn of events, Manuel, myopic, opposes foreign-childhood outside the gesture of removing his glasses, and folds back on itself. Like the blind Oedipus at Colonus Evening [17] is visionary, crazy, schizophrenic.
insulation also contributes to this background of political and socio-cultural time by his father Manuel coming from the company well in Turin, (perfectly portrayed towards the end of the narrative in "Double talking statues" of his paternal grandparents), a middle class suffers from hypocritical respectability and class, monolithic in its positions fossilized and blind to the dramatic rush of major events on the European scene [18] : politics enters into the living room, dressed from "Great Speech", but revealed in the talk of Aunt Monda, all the superficiality and lack of analysis, the conventional stereotype that reduces it to the sophistication of that "you know, you must speak." The shame of belonging to this type of bourgeois power in Manuel's guilt. On the horizon mother, subject to the plots of the enchanting myth, stands the figure of his uncle Manuel, fought in the English Civil War against the "Enemy Franco." Manuel in his heart he never confided to anyone, not even to Aracoeli, his fondness for his uncle ever known.
The closure of the domestic space affects the already introverted character of Manuel, and adult, the dramatic vitality of Arturo, who is now desperate, and now rejoices, replaces apathy sleepy under the influence of drugs.
the curiosity of the world, opening into the unknown, Manuel is touched by the immobility of spirit, a reverse process of initiation. If Aracoeli is the only novel by Elsa Morante where the elusive Foreign actually reached here that this turns out to be a barren, dry stony desolate lands of Andalusia create a landscape of nightmare, left, gray, and unoccupied .
"Now, I is manifested, above, a low sky, covered by a flat striated clouds, which does not appear to watery, resembling, rather, to a blanket of waste burned, brought over here by the African puff " [19] . If
Manuel feels called to start the meeting with the siren Aracoeli
"And so now (the time is about eleven o'clock in the morning) I sat on the road, leaving from Milan to seek out Aracoeli my mother in the past two directions and space. (...) Among the few reports that possessed her, were his main biographical data: that is, apart from its twin girl's last name, place of birth, I knew within the territory of Almeria, and was called El Almendral . (...) Instead, El Almendral I did not find him on any paper. But meanwhile the minimum peripheral point, ignored by geography, recently became the only ground station that indicates a direction to my body disoriented. His was a call without any promise or hope. I knew, beyond any doubt that it came to me not by reason but by a longing of the senses that even the certainty of his existence I was not a necessary condition " [20] .
And again
"For me, I press on toward El Almendral times are reduced to one point sparkling: a mirror, into which fall all the suns and moons. And beyond that point adjourned, but also in the air motionless before me rolling my encantador " [21] .
Here already waiting at the airport in Madrid in its evidence reveals the futility of the trip, extreme mockery of Aracoeli [22] :
"This that I am, therefore, landed at the first stage of my mother's legendary ABROAD: none 'more than a lost tourist off-season [23] .
"And now, where are you taking me? Perhaps El Amendral does not exist. One of the tricks that you invent false trails to hunt on, after having already cheated child [24] .
The trip from London to Madrid, from Madrid to Almeria, the stage in a crumbling hotel room, the endless bus ride from Almeria to Gergal arriving at El Almendral, are marked by confused crowd of childhood memories in the mind of the narrator, who now runs them with clarity, must now be merged with his visions and invective. The Iberian
litanies and chants that sudden burst of memories and the accompanying travel formulas seem to be more of a curse uttered by Morgan, and have nothing to do with the protective and maternal dedication that opens Arturo's Island.
"Anda Anda
niño que Dios te sends" [25] .
"Esto No tiene niño Chiquito
mother. The Parian
a gypsy
The echo en la calle " [26] .
"Duerme niño que is my
EL COCO
if y llevar a los niños que
duermen little" [27] .
Manuel is not touched by any angelic grace unlike Useppe, who, more heavenly creature that child is related to a heavenly world and is destined to leave this world soon unintelligible to him. In his "sin?" There is no answer that explains the brutality: this is not made for him and where he meets refuses to accept it. Manuel lives since childhood mediocrity, if an exception is made for the period of sporadic Totetaco and other happy moments. The exceptional non- holds its businesses and the Veil of Maya [28] falls and bares the Sacred, the divest of its "storied tent." The aura that adorns the children is deteriorating, and the same objects in Morante, to quote Garboli, "control destiny, fate spin, focus on their existing property, the mystery of things that apparently take place in time" [ 29] here in Aracoeli, betrayers and betrayed, fetishes of derision, they are renegades, the "star signs" that accompany the journey towards the goal (MAS LIGHT, El Tio resembling Ballet, the resumption of relations with the English language and last and most important the reappearance iconography of the talisman of Aracoeli) mock Manuel and captivate the appointment and promised extreme. Same talisman that in childhood, he had been given as a gift from Aracoeli after the prophecy of the Gypsy, Manuel if he was released with the offense to throw it away in the garbage cart, and now here it is recalled that this was like the sound of a magic flute:
"One might also suppose that the power of a magic item soak not only the tangible object, but also his shadow or his fingerprint [30] .
"For me, the reappearance of the talisman material today, Gergal (...) is explained as just another message Aracoeli. Maybe his gift of the talisman should be understood as a date since then, "I look in your old age, in El Almendral (...)" " [31] . For Manuel
there will never be deeds to do, and will be the pathetic "comic company partisan" [32] when fooled by a stupid joke of two homosexuals, the illusion of heroism will fall into a theater of absurd road. Only the native origins
Aracoeli seem still surrounded by the mystery of the simulacrum: a high Hispanic Queen of the feuds, the mother of Manuel's boasts its ancient lineage in the stories of Patufe cat, goat Abuelita, and old Tia name sponsorship, but only his brother Manuel, and Manuel also said Manolo, shines and stands on the shapes Iberian. Minor, boundless love of Aracoeli, this looms for measuring value and virtues of manhood, taking into account the "Great Leader", "between the first and perhaps the Sierra in Andalusia, and reverb, the striking figure of the uncle will always be the only possible hero in the eyes of Manuel.
But the stories are stored maternal and kept tightly in the frame of Totetaco home, where it seals the mother-child love, absolute and unique. Here is the source, the gravitational center of the universe, where can a language prehistoric, ancient and primordial: the "language bridal Aracoeli [33] . It's the same language of children and animals, wise and stupid code, which covers areas of the unspeakable, carved in hieroglyphic world, reminiscent of the language and Iduzza Useppe, Bella and Useppe, or the same poems Useppe " who speak of God "in The History, where, as Rosa says," against the statement 'unreal' that takes place at the place and time in history, based on codes of referentiality opaque 'one-dimensional, "the narrative celebrates a more real confidence, the only one that allows the ego to enter into communion authentic with each other. (...) Throughout the novel, authentic dialogues do not rely on words but never prefer an intensity of gaze. (...) But beyond the expressive eyes, the dumb dialogue detectors, chirping songbirds that sing the "joke" of life, what needs to be emphasized, is always the privilege granted by the narrative voice communication prelogical, hidden intuition the painful truth, the many shorts that go beyond the threshold of expression of referential word " [34] .
Aracoeli's love for her child in the early years of Totetaco overflows and returns to the memory of Manuel stupid pictures of joy and love feast:
"And I just close my eyes because the ride would begin to turn in a summer afternoon where the shadows of foliage and aerial lights chase each other like wings flapping mottled. I have maybe four years or five, and travel on the carousel of Villa Borghese in Rome. According to my usual preference to motor vehicles or wheeled, when I chose a horse and when a swan, animal fraternal, and prone to madness routes. The tournament runs playing a song at a pace almost as fast as the rotation of the earth, radiant ride, delight and fear, under the threat of secret do not stop. At every turn builds around the world, going into a sprint all the points of the equator. And somewhere there is always a waiting me, just me and no one else to all the traveling. Aracoeli! She recognizes me from a distance, to his great surprise, and I celebrated in his springing flowered skirt waving her hand: "Adiós! Goodbye! Farewell, "Proud of my business world, I, as involved in keeping me on my back, I greet you with a smile tripudiante. When I answered the same blaze of his laughter. And our laughter together two jumped from a rope to another vibrating in invisible sound boxes along a flight infinite touched my station until the evening of Almeria [35] .
of this "excessive false love," as an incurable defect which made him addicted, now alleges that Manuel's mother, and accused her of his homosexuality, having removed out of jealousy from the girls' fresh and beautiful, "rails against her
" At this hour (forty ago) for a couple of hours you sleep with your niño, like every morning, happy, dopi the kisses goodnight. But what did you do that niño, Aracoeli? Delivered to your bedtime, you kept it, silly, for the nights of COCO.
And let's here tonight, the Malanotte. Malanotte Aracoeli to you, you got the seed of me as a grace, warmth and broke it hatched in your belly like a treasure, and then you've given birth, to hand me with joy, bare your assassins. (...) You did not know anything about anything, but I knew, however, that this torture of my body, thou didst give it to you as a gift to yourself, like a toy. In reality, little beggar, you'd feel like a doll. A muñeca! (...) But a toy, after having played their fill, one day is left aside, being reduced to scrap " [36] .
Love for Morante and her characters (think of people with lies and sorcery) love is a tyrannical, evil and wicked. Exceeds its healthy form, destroys, cancels. Sgorlon notes that "in this writer who likes to do it in ways that seem so insatiable desire to suck like a vampire, every ounce of capacity in the loving person you love, to make him a shell devoid of any substance " [37] . The veneration Aracoeli once again moves away from the worship of Arturo parallel to the mother figure ever known: this, like a vestal virgin, protect her boyfriend, beyond the sky, and looks more like a sacred symbol, an alphabet, a religion pantheistic nature in which the entire island participates and shines. For iridescent that seem to explode on the island of beauty, once again Manuel answers with knowledge of its ugliness. For Morante ugliness is the sign of the conviction of destiny. Here the cult of beauty is not permissible even in childhood. The "story mama" times Totetaco is stale. Only one area was inhabited by the beauty that drank the other one:
"There was once a mirror where I mirandomi, I could fall in love with myself, were your eyes, Aracoeli, king of beauty in that m'incoronavano their small pools enchanted. And this was the mirage that you give me fabbricasti origin, projecting on all my future Sahara, beyond the horrors and your on your death. (...) While I survive, that hoary Narciso not crack, diverted from your morgane " [38] .
"At all times, always something happened to the beauty of way, by gazing. But the most beautiful sights, who held them? I! From the nose to the ears culillo to toe, there was no place of my body that she did not judge perfect. And she liked me so much that at times between his kisses made me popping terminal harmless, saying that I ate, and praised my various flavors. Cheeks: manzana. Thighs: fresh bread. Hair: bunches de uvas. A look at my eyes, then, s'insuperbiva, as a sign of his great joyous wedding exotic:
los ojos azules
dear moraine.
I had no doubt of being beautiful " [39] .
At the end of this period
Manuel puts a date: the first is when he is forced to wear glasses that he begins to like the least, taking in protest of the mother, in front of the imposture of the lenses, that spoil the little face of her child, a ferocity out of his will, which betrays the surprise and disappointment, and for the first time she sees him ugly. At the sudden gesture of removing his glasses the remedy is no longer possible: Aracoeli responds with a smile that he knows of the forcing. " The white fire that surprises Manuel, in the swirling spectacle of horror and dizziness caused by the novelty of the lenses, outlines the separation is inevitable that to interpose between the self and the world by deciphering its natural and happy, which is believed by the inseparable union with Aracoeli. Now Manuel adult undressing in front of the mirror, sees his nakedness as an "aberrant formation, connate for witchcraft," the question and "know me, Aracoeli? Still you like me? I see beautiful? "You answered him:
" Now you've vanished like a thief, while I find myself here, alone and naked in front of this Ropero de luz - espejo de cuerpo entero, which throws me in the face , without further ado, my real shape. And who is not disgusted by this monkey, I myself when I suck?
Every creature on earth is offered. Pathetic, naive, offers: "I was born! Here I am, with this face, this body and this smell. Do you like me? I want to? "(...) This is actually the only perpetual demand of every living thing to other living beings," you two good? I do that to her I looked like the best? "(...) Accustomed to a charming cast, believed to be eternal, and certainly a joyful thanksgiving for their naive offer, the beginner will pale stunned to encounter the land alienation and indifference" [40] . The
Aracoeli Totetaco of the mother in front of which do not need decorations to please, it's a girl-woman, mentioned by Manuel Whether in feral and wild, its dell'animaletto ignores everything and is forced to captivity. His physical appearance still bitter does not seem to be suitable for motherhood, puberty, and this is more a game for its coveted "canciones de cuna," devoid of any erotic temptation, without languor or flirting: signs of clumsiness child does not exclude the his natural need for a "real live cupid", instinct, and choral prayer, carved in the law required of all mothers. Aracoeli, unlike its peers, not a great idea can never marry, having fear of men increased value, but is fascinated by the fancy of becoming a nun, promise of "songs, visions, burning candles, sweets and cakes festooned with colorful flowers." Thinking maybe a "fertilization" without sin "such as the Virgean, pregnancy is seen as a machine unaware of its workings, with only wonder at the miracle. Childhood el'adolecenza Aracoeli are dotted with a dense texture of popular beliefs and superstitions, that the mystery of the Virgin and the Trinity lead back from any cause. This inseparable fusion of earthly life and heavenly mystery, linked to the Catholic tradition rooted Iberian becomes part of everyday life of Manuel, contributing to 'sacral radiation that, in his eyes, wraps the mother figure:
"The mysterious obligation, which in our house required the confidentiality of my maternal ancestors, he offered me a child as a basis for possible flights to the nests legendary. (...) In those uncharted planets of my ignorance, my mother was descended from a long line of beggars or gypsies or fighters or bandits or Great hidalgos (perhaps, has had a stay in a castle inaccessible? Maybe in some alhambra or alcázar ?) And all of these possible fates - although balenanti of escape in my thoughts - it was a sunburst and numerous variant that branched off from her as a luminous body " [41] .
"Please, disguises herself with all the costumes conventional and always return, they dream of the hairless (like the puppet theaters in accordance with the street children are applauding). Pastora. Gentleman. Santa. Harlot. Dead. Immortal. Victim. Tyrant. Doll. Dea. Slave. Mother. Daughter. Ballerina " [42] .
Yet the mysterious aura that surrounds the origins of Aracoeli, is in the house of Manuel "skeleton in the closet," which implies a difference in class' s membership of the two spouses. So it is that Aunt Monda undertakes the arduous task of training the daughter to learn it good manners to Madam, ed'altraparte Aracoeli first is willing and eager of adapting to and ennobled the family of the beloved. Monda aunt, an emblem of elegant composure, leads in fact a serious and sober life, according to family traditions, and brings his virginal celibacy outside end with honor, allowing himself only the luxury and pride of their clothing, too sober and devoid of any conspicuousness eccentric. The yearning of "Prince Charming", he devoted himself to love for Mussolini and Generalissimo Franco.
The arrival in The Heights for Aracoeli means and the entrance into society Manuele, anointed by the legitimacy of marriage, after the happy times of illegal Totetaco. The news that the new residence involves the knowledge the neighborhood and the hierarchical rules of the house, all to gain familiarity with the urban space, and Manuel Aracoeli as frightened notched a pair of side streets or sudden stop with the heartbeat of the city crowds.
The prejudices of that little world is well identified in the application of Aunt world that, every new acquaintance, asks "How did?". According to this code, the more respected for the value it acquires in the maritime military caste belongs to her husband, Aracoeli "not born", that is not a blood with which we can boast in official circles. Yet the silence that hangs in Roman society, does not prevent Aracoeli is treated by everyone with kindness and indulgence, according to the dictates of the refinement of class, perhaps due to more than brought to the position of respect embodied by the father of Manuel. Eugene Otto
Amedeo, Journal of the Royal Navy Lieutenant and looking that "made light" and how "worthy of a Prince," dedicated his life to the worship of the king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele Third, worship can also be explained by the origins of Turin, which is strongly rooted in the firm devotion to the effigy of the House of Savoy.
The figure of Eugenio Arturo recalls the myth that makes the father Wilhelm: too far, the sacred aura of Eugene, however, is confirmed unanimous respect and devotion of all. The mean figure of Wilhelm, Eugene opposes a real nobility of spirit, worthy of a god. In his somatic resemblance with his sister, those traits in him misplaced agree, giving an effect of masculine prowess and a kind of adolescent freshness [43] . The characters in his sister were clumsy and dull, the considerable height or light-colored hair and eyes, stand him in a blaze of sunlight and healthy. The stiffness of gesture is to understand the resolve and the elegant and composed character discipline. The religious worship of Raymond for his brother, before which, without envy and with complete humility, I feel ashamed be the copy of botched recalls the scion of the house and lie in Cerentano spell, who enjoyed the same veneration by his mother and sister. Just
statuary and unattainable official of his father, Eugene does not allow to approach the warm simplicity of the paternal role, which is nourished by the everyday and familiar. Manuel did not call him "dad", just as almost everyone calls him "Captain." Again Morante in the figure of the father is distant, and this distance is an inevitable imbalance in the delicate form of child Manuele. The lack of male model, Manuel makes up cutting a space for women and maternal where masculinity has no access and it seems unattainable, with inevitable consequences on her sexual growth.
times Totetaco are scanned between games and raids home of mother and child, and expectations of Aracoeli, in flickering, sudden and brief visits to Eugene.
Parental love, almost adolescent and immature in his impetuous sweetness, excludes from the Manuel family triangle, or rather it seems that the unity of this is only possible to track links that now bind Aracoeli in Eugene, now Manuele her:
"So far as I knew, I had no father. Or designed, moreover, that the fathers on the ground were necessary and inevitable. It is very likely that, in its license, my father - in disguise - ascended to Totetaco (...) And yet his visits my memory does not keep any trace. (...) The first actual pictures of my father (...) I will have in the house in The Heights " [44] .
"Now in a run behind my mother, I am also following him, puzzled and curious, but with extreme concern. In fact, on the eve of our first meeting, Aracoeli I had magnified his person with such items, as I stood there planted to contemplate, as was another Macarena. Theophany new and unknown - but certainly benign - downhill - or uphill - Here, a big boost for air. (...) No threat to me, from him. Too many were our two measures to adapt to a confrontation, or even less, to a competition. Indeed, his body of myth, that he lent Aracoeli extended to me his great dignity.
To me, up from the beginning, his manner accused, along with his comic misuse of the profession of his father, also a description hesitant and confused, as if afraid of his power to force myself, in any aspect. (...) Between me and him, ran at once - in a carnal affection - a silent agreement, perhaps even because of our shared passion for Aracoeli. It is certain that our great love, exclusive for the same woman was between us cause for gratitude, rather than contention. (...) In fact, the pleasure of seeing me there was a resemblance to him, especially since my Aracoeli " [45] .
"With the passage of childhood, more and more of the groom Aracoeli instead to embody, for me, especially the father, I was a cult. Since its birth but, for me it meant paternity absence; (...) In my religion (almost abstract) consecrated the Aracoeli faith and adoration, and he honored me by the husband of Aracoeli, not the father of my flesh " [46] .
The keystone in the delicate balance of love that bind the characters comes with the expectation of the second-Encarnación, called Carina. The Heights is home to decorate "the Royal Court pending the Infanta," but his untimely death shortly after birth, leads to irreparable rift in the life of the entire family, and in particular becomes the vanishing point to which precipitated the mental and physical health of Aracoeli fatal moment perceived and understood by Manuel:
"And at that point, the time has stopped, making me an indescribable feeling, unique and total, which now I could give a name ETERNITY. (It is strange how the Lord let you capture a segment rather ephemeral in continuity extended. But the body does not support the test and return to disorder) " [47] .
From this moment on, the mother-son relationship begins to deteriorate to the total neglect and indifference that Aracoeli prove to Manuel, who became, like an ornament, an object of little importance, more than anything else out of trouble. The rift is the day when Manuel, already quite big, in front of the nakedness of Aracoeli, always kept hidden, like a baby clings to its mother's womb, perhaps nostalgia for the days of Totetaco, when it was still a victim of maternal neglect . In that gesture, instinctive and thoughtful, Manuel swears his love to mother, and tries to console her childish desperation, almost as if wanting to say "I'm here, Manuelino! Sleep sleep: Carina if not, here's Manuelino. " The expulsion by sudden and furious Aracoeli, here is instill in the seed of resentment Manuel, where love is extreme is mixed in an inseparable way that weaves a silent reticence to poison their marriage. For the timid attempts at rapprochement Aracoeli, Manuel responded with a seriousness that disarm the shadowy mother will faint.
begins in this period of metamorphosis Aracoeli an evil hidden deep inside the besieged worn and marred, resulting in increasingly bizarre behavior to her, in which the splitting of the two Aracoeli, that of a time and that now, is apparent: at home and genuine vitality Nunziatina, stepmother of Arthur, who also lives in the understanding of the popular myths and resembles a small animal, and that with total confidence places in religious beliefs and superstitious the great mysteries, which in some ways resembles the first Aracoeli controaltare ago by now sick of that other feral forasticità, prey to a brutal torture. The first signs of this change in the physical appearance of Manuel notice them Aracoeli a time when the gaze of men in the street and taunted fled in terror, with the timidity and ignorance of each angular erotic sensuality typical morantiane female figures, such other Aracoeli, almost to obey a command poignant and despotic ", which she ignored, she discovers the temptation of sexual attraction, through the flaunting of his body, which is now offered to the passer, and a new languor pervades and gives his forms a soft sweetness that is a prelude to early blight sick and ugly:
"Your hand waving, the curves of her body is proposed, naive and bold, all eager to dissolve in final obedience prohibited. And the voices of praise for her beauty, expressive eyes, seemed to physically touch his skin, like tongues or fingers, or bite your skin up to the deeper layers, making her wince. From time to time, took place in a cafe, where you (for a drive recklessly, representing innocence) was left in poses that once would have shame. There was a tendency on the bust, thrusting her small breasts, in that act, it seemed swelling. Cross your legs with an incurable vulgar, so that her skirt went up to the thigh. And if a man took a table next to fix it - even if it were bad, mean, old - it shall suffered anxious emotion, audible and visible in her breathing. Between the lid ajar, and the white of the eye, past a flickering of languor, like a liquid in svaporante purple smoke " [48] \u200b\u200b.
"my mother's voice had changed. His well-known taste familiar to me always (soaked in honey and saliva) the merged now, from the throat in a dense dough, sticky and almost dirty [49] .
Sola, strip the home torn apart by sexual desire, and also to her husband, Aracoeli urgent desire manifests itself, discovering for the first time the carnality of the relationship of love, which found an outlet in the "angelic dance" rhythm and melody etched on a staff forbidden to Manuel:
"The body of him, this time, more than a shelter, served as a tool (its the only legitimate) to finally meet her Arsione unfulfilled. As if the house was deserted and the neighborhood in dust, up from the doorway she clung to the body, touching him with eager fingers and tongue, and biting his lips and ears, and to open his jacket to look for it with his hands under his shirt, "Beautiful beautiful querido hermoso" gave himself to repeat it " [50] .
In moments of respite that still remember the first Aracoeli, replacing more often these fires sudden, that the path of adultery, the turmoil will lead to the final last summer, where as visions crowd the image of Man cat, the Consul of the Militia of the lift crazy, Women-camel, and the scenarios of the Church and Fifth. Increasingly unfriendly towards the child, seems to obey a law Aracoeli its mysterious, and named after the sea is called the moon creating tides, modular and arbitrary changes that deform the coast according to a rule in heaven. The writing itself
morantiana follows the pangs of deformation, reaching an expressionistic lyricism that perfectly captures in 'episode of the Man-cat
"And his whole body, gilded by the sun, is covered with a fluffy warm and bright, the same color of his red-blond hair and live: that immediately to see him, it is akin to race with the race of red cats. His eyes do not look Aracoeli auburn, but he seems to like her, see her any other way than that of the eyes, perhaps through the skin, or through the hair, which move in step like whiskers. He dives and resurfaces brighter because his red hair on the water posed a lot of transparent beads. His body plays a few meters from the shore, disappearing and reappearing under water, with its long, sinuous movements of the cat. (...) I see the space marine in a yawn excessively greedy, blurred and glowing. All the light of the universe, from galaxies to the gold mines, spills melted in this complete monster. We get tangled streamers, worms snakes and glow of fire, and if they were floating eyes of drowned, rotting and iridescent scales of fish between teams such as needles for cannibals " [51] .
Manuel before the sea trial fear and marina view, which takes great character, (however, due to its lack of short-sightedness), beware of those reflections Procida, mindful perhaps of the board of Wilhelm and Arthur, but lost the sunshine and fresh Mona Lisa, it remains the eager light of noon, accentuated by the charge and aberrant expressionistic force to which they are addicted and painful subject actors and spectators.
One after another following the story of adulterous Aracoeli-appearance to any male nymphomaniac who now responds with a groan beastly, and his body undergoes a rapid degradation that increasingly consumes up to deliver it in the hands of the camel-woman in the domains of the Fifth. In the nightmare
heartbreaking when Manuel was forced to live, it opens for him a glimmer of joy a child, perhaps the last, with the possible entry into the house dell'attendente Daniel, a brief interlude of the season, which is apparent the airy clarity of the Isle of Arturo. Happy birth morantiana of writing, the student Daniele murky gloom with which the disease infects Aracoeli everything. According to Rosa "in outlining a portrait of Daniel, the narrator abandons the tone for adult dell'acredine riattingere cadences transfiguring of the story away: full membership optics child projects onto the young sailor mythical aura that befits a great warrior, part of the "noble lineage or Danielidi Danieli," but does not erase the feeling to "Pazzariello 'to populate illiterate. In that work, as always, focuses on narration than dialogue, the conversations between the two boys have a crisp lightness, a happy tone, which acts as counterpoint to the relentless rate comparisons drawn from the semantic fields of everyday girl " [ 52] :
"The orderly Daniel was a sailor of the first lever, which, on the face, looked younger than his age (twenty years). His skin was smooth, yet cool in childhood, just a brown mixed with pink. Big eyes, a violet blue that seemed a little wet with milk, watching everyone with a trusting and naive astonishment. It also gave him reason to feel resentful, his answer was always a smile of gentleness clear: as if all the inhabitants of the earth he did not see that justice and benevolence " [53] .
"It was, in fact, an unexpected event for me that a sailor would make me a mother. He had, indeed, of the maternal qualities: with the addition of certain unintentional roughness that I attest to his greatness of manhood, and luck to have friends, I like a little spider.
(Oh Daniel! Ears
pèttinami Wash your hair even if a little 'me you pull.
Carezzami by mistake or Danieluccio
of Danielidi) " [54] .
Edenic But the season of Arcturus is also intended to fall sucked from the curse of Aracoeli, when the crew will transfer to her appeal Maliosa. The greatest tragedy is worn under the eyes of Manuel, whom all salvation has now been taken away, throwing it into a furious hatred and damned for Aracoeli and Daniel. Fully weaned to the brutality, the reverse process of initiation has its beginning here, (if so far for Manuele had survived a surprise even possible), orchestrated by the precipitous downfall of relentless succession of events, from the days of extreme transgression during the religious service in the Church, the desolate landscape of the Fifth, in a last great illusion, more than notional and consoling Authentic, Manuel projected in its latest reverie, wondering
"What sort of patrician Señoras these beautiful could be the Fifth? Princesses? Sisters of fashion? Dancers fashion models? Dive of the magazines? Fate? " [55] .
began the era of the joints for Manuel, near Fifth, and later, after living in grandparents' house in Turin, and after the death of Aracoeli, from college to being awarded at the end of the war. The death of
Aracoeli decreed the beginning of the visionary delirium of Manuel:
"So began the revenge of Aracoeli. Dead, now, it only made me fear, and almost horror. (...) I preferred not to know what faults m 'accused, and then in the end, I knew. I had already begun, in fact, until I returned from Piemonte, to defend myself from his death disfiguring and destroying our love " [56] .
"At the time I was niño, by way of a joke when I said:" Duerme el que is COCO 'Aracoeli did not foresee that in future I would see my stars escape from the COCO to another on this planet. Where a fifth, a palace, a cemetery, a cabin, a presence as a lack a word I would assume a shape the body of the giant hairy, reaching the enemy in a row, to lay siege. And too, later on, I tried to sleep, my only refuge from COCO " [57] .
In his second escape, Manuel returns for the last time in Rome: there, Aunt Monda meet again, reduced to a ridiculous caricature of a class in gangrene, Manuel decides to visit his father, who retired from the career , has become a puppet in hands of alcohol. In front of the faded outline of Eugene, Manuele test disgust and helpless in a plaster cast, which awkwardly tries to hide the decay. After leaving the den father, that's the curtain falls on the eyelids of Manuel, catching him in a sudden cry. A cry of love and eternal separation, lack, which mature in the words of the narrator finds expression:
"I have always been a huge factory of dreams. If it is true that our time is actually linear over the illusion of a curve fragment already concluded: where ever you turn on the same circle, without duration or starting point or direction, and if they really all our experience, minimum or maximum, and the press on that roll of film already filmed and always in continuous projection, then I wonder if the dreams are part of that account. And if my roll, taken all together, it would be a horror movie or a comic. I, however, in any case, I could only cry, to see him, they really could return to shoot it - Mercy (...) " [58] .
Before the death of his father years later, Manuel will not cry anymore, and will then give an explanation to that cry loud and childish that surprised him one day far in the district of San Lorenzo:
"certain individuals are more likely to cry for love, and death " [59] .
When the end of his trip to El Almendral, Manuel is not waiting for anything, just indifferent to any point on earth, and its extreme application, an old man replied:
"" That's El Almendral ". Also insists on gestures, to know where they extend the village. And the old man does not take long at all to understand. "But this is, El Almendral" he repeats. It stretches his lips into a form of ironic smile among tolerant, while again turning his arm to the air around, meaning "It's all here," [60] .
If Aracoeli is the other face of the island of Arthur, it is true that his story is perhaps less painful. Right now we're used to a disillusioned narrator and, honestly, despite his obsessive repetition, reading takes us where everything is already said. Arthurian memories, in the voice of a narrator who is cheating and who is still in love, are all the more so in the most harrowing time of their disenchantment. The frame Procida, on the one hand supports the joyful laughter of writing romance, then, is finally just a mask, or better, a distant mirage closed in childhood. And if Morante more than twenty years before he wrote of Procida:
"That you thought that a small spot of land,
was all, "
Aracoeli seals with his last words:
El Almendral
" It's all here. "
Publications Bibliography of Elsa Morante: stories, novels, essays, poems
Alibi, Milan, Longanesi, 1958.
Aracoeli, Torino, Einaudi, 1982.
Diary 1938, edited by A. Andreini, Torino, Einaudi, 1989.
The secret game, Milan, Garzanti, 1941.
The world saved by children, Torino, Einaudi, 1968.
History, Torino, Einaudi 1974.
The wonderful adventures of the braids Cater, Torino, Einaudi, 1942.
shawl Andalusian, Torino, Einaudi, 1963.
Arturo's Island, Torino, Einaudi, 1957.
Lie and sorcery, Torino, Einaudi, 1948.
Works, 2 vols., Edited by C. Cecchi and C. Garboli, Mondadori, Milano 1988.
or against the atomic bomb and other writings, Milano, Adelphi, 1987.
Lyrics:
C. Cazale Bérard, Morante, Weil: the choice of attention and the truth of the tale, Web Address: http://www.testoesenso.it/studiEsaggi/Morante_Weil.htm
M. Bardini, Elsa Morante. Italian. By profession, poet, Pisa, Nistri-Lischi, 1999.
G. Massari, L 'Isle of Elsa in "The World", March 19, 1957.
G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, Milan, Basic Books, 1995.
C. Sgorlon, Invitation to the reading of Elsa Morante, Milan, Murcia, 1988.
S. Weil, Save Venice, Milan, Adelphi, 1987.
Aa. Vv. c. AM Crispino, Oltrecanone for a mapping of women's writing, Rome, manifestolibri, 2003.
[1] E. Morante, Aracoeli, Torino, Einaudi, 1982, p. 46.
[2] Ibid, p. 47.
[3] Ibid, p. 52.
[4] E. Morante, Scheherazade, in Alibi, Milan, Longanesi, 1958.
[5] Della "pesanteur" speaks in the preface to Caesar Garboli E. Morante, For or against the atomic bomb and other writings, Milano, Adelphi, 1987. "One afternoon many years ago, I forget for what turn of the conversation (we were just sitting at a cafe) Elsa Morante sighed: 'Do you want to know what my real drawback? Just what nobody thinks that. But I know very well what it is ... It 's the pesanteur' "(p. XI).
[6] Ibid, p. XII.
[7] G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, Milan, Basic Books, 1995, p. 316.
[8] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P.110.
[9] See E. Morante, the fable, a lie, and spells, Torino, Einaudi, 1948.
[10] See the writings of Simone Weil known to Morante: Attention, bearer of the look angelic grace, removed from the brutality. See also S. Weil, Save Venice, Milan, Adelphi, 1987.
[11] E. Morante, Dedication, in The Island of Arturo, Torino, Einaudi, 1957.
[12] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., Pp. 120-121.
[13] Ibid, p. 123.
[14] Ibid, p. 124.
[15] E. Morante, Dedication, in The Island of Arthur cit. The complex and intricate arabesque of intertextual references morantiani gravity creates a whirlpool around the landing of salvation: "That little point of land was everything," Dedication, in The world saved by children in the opera becomes Goodbye: "The only chance of meeting point was this poor land."
[16] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 109.
[17] E. Morante, the world saved by children, Torino, Einaudi, 1968.
[18] "I remember that until a certain age (...) I kept vague idea that Mussolini was a common noun plural, which was to indicate the general head of government: figures that each country had its own muslin, the same way it had to have a king, a queen, or maybe even a pope. " E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 36.
[19] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 129.
[20] Ibid, p. 9.
[21] Ibid, p. 22.
[22] "So, in a resurgence, comes to my throat and into my head, my wretched illness ordinary, unknown to me too. I see myself here, to run on a track drawn in a desert, between mirages absurd, false signals and empty scenery, and once again I repeat that the calls were Aracoeli, which were themselves, a false signal, and my poor, latest novel Andalusian factory shadow equivocal, for amusement of my days in vain. From the world, in which claims to meet Aracoeli, I only go up the usual response, "What you're looking for, and who?! there is none. And that you might as well take off his glasses. There's nothing to see. "Ibid, p. 129-130.
[23] Ibid .
[24] Ibid, p. 107.
[25] Ibid, p. 9.
[26] Ibid .
[27] Ibid, p. 50.
[28] See G. Massari, L 'Isle of Elsa in "The World", March 19, 1957.
[29] C. Garboli, Introduction, in E. Morante, Arturo's Island, cit., P. XVII.
[30] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 171.
[31] Ibid .
[32] The two then reveal their identities with malicious mischief, "We are not subject to guerrilla / we are the offspring of good family / I Viscount / Count him / and we do not go to the front. / He alienated I alienate, and therefore understand each other at first sight / and together we fix it and to the Christian love. / Do not worry! Do not hurt! / We are not Tiger, but we are SLUTS. " Ibid, p. 163.
[33] See C. Cazale Bérard, Morante, Weil: the choice of attention and the truth of the tale: "There is no doubt in Elsa Morante's novels a" tongue wedding ": is that of the child with his mother. Manuel speaks explicitly of the language of Monte Sacro (...) or better Totetaco, according to the secret language of love that unites again to his mother (...) a language that reappears briefly, for a fragile miracle, after the death broke nest in a protective family, "often held me and kissed me, fondled her with a divine language, of mixed Italian and English, and that we could not hear us anymore, since the time of Totetaco. But the "Bridal language" will remain as already dead and obsolete trace of a lost paradise. " Florence-Paris 2002-2003.
Web Address: http://www.testoesenso.it/studiEsaggi/Morante_Weil.htm
[34] G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, cit., Pp. 244-245.
[35] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., Pp. 97-98.
[36] Ibid, pp. 100-105.
[37] C. Sgorlon, Invitation to the reading of Elsa Morante, Milan, Murcia, 1988.
[38] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 107.
[39] Ibid, p. 121.
[40] Ibid, pp. 107-108.
[41] Ibid, pp. 25-26.
[42] Ibid, p. 124.
[43] "I'm still watching a great ship decked with flags, where my father, beaming, in full uniform summer white and gold, makes us the honors, from the mouths of cannon, metal and glazed white paint wonderfully. " Ibid, p. 39.
[44] Ibid, p. 120.
[45] Ibid, p. 134.
[46] Ibid, p. 183.
[47] Ibid, p. 202.
[48] Ibid, p. 236.
[49] Ibid, p. 239.
[50] Ibid, p. 238.
[51] Ibid, pp. 243-244.
[52] G. Rosa, Cathedrals of paper. Novelist Elsa Morante, cit., P. 336.
[53] E. Morante, Aracoeli cit., P. 218.
[54] Ibid, p. 225.
[55] Ibid, p. 281.
[56] Ibid, p. 300.
[57] Ibid, p. 326.
[58] Ibid, p. 291.
[59] Ibid, p. 328.
[60] Ibid, p. 309.
