Mario Soldati

Mario Soldati was defined as “the first, great media-man of Italian culture” (Aldo Grasso in *Corriere della Sera*, 2016). Indeed, he was a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, film director, and television author. His numerous novels (reviews can be read on this site: *A cena con il Commendatore*, *Lo smeraldo*, and *El Paseo dei Gracia*) reflect his vast experience as a cinematic author, both in style and in narrative content. For Soldati, each of us wears a mask, even without realizing it, because the disguise is part of our deepest consciousness; consequently, our relationships with others are ambiguous, often full of futile deceptions; we like to live as if in a dream, as though we were in a soap opera. In short, we live in a bubble. Unlike his other tales, this novel stems from an episode in the writer’s life that could well be real. Soldati, the narrator, meets an old friend, a modest actor whom he has not seen for many years. Enzo is in dire financial straits because his wife continues to lose substantial sums at the casino: he asks Soldati for work. Our writer attempts to find him a role in a television series, though the moment is hardly favorable as new executives have replaced the old ones with whom Soldati enjoyed an excellent rapport. To inform his friend of what he is doing, he travels to Bordighera, where Enzo lives with his wife. In doing so, Soldati finds himself ensnared in an intricate and ambiguous family dynamic: Enzo’s wife, once a beautiful woman, now obese and infirm, is jealous of her husband, whom she suspects of cheating on her with their maid; Giovanna, the maid, dominates both Enzo and his wife through her mysterious, seductive allure; and finally Enzo, who convincingly claims to love his wife yet plays the role of the unfaithful husband, blatantly attempting to conquer the elusive Giovanna, thereby exasperating his wife and driving her toward killing the maid. Why does Enzo pretend to betray his wife with Giovanna? And why do the others play along with the roles Enzo assigns them, as if on a theatrical stage, never interrupting this cruel and false soap opera? > Every man is, always, a bit of an actor,. (...) every human being must, sometimes, to feel alive, be able to imagine themselves a little . This novel met with great success upon its publication in 1970 and won the Premio Campiello that same year. In truth, the story is dull and trite; especially if approached from a psychological standpoint: the quality of the narrative falls far below that of Soldati’s other novels. What remain are the splendid descriptions, cinematic in their detail and colors. An example: > Giovanna is small, slender, sturdy, dark-haired. A strange, narrow face: dark, close-set eyes, thin and unpainted lips: a face with a closed, motionless, unfeeling expression, as if carved of stone. (...) She wore an amaranth velvet suit, rather vulgar in its elegance, and very loud. (...) She gazed at herself for a long time, admiring her reflection, pacing back and forth like a model, pulling and smoothing the jacket of the suit over her buttocks, turning once more to glance back over her shoulder. Why not read it? It pains one to say it: it is boring.

In New York, the author meets a strange character, a gemstone expert or perhaps a magician, who convinces him to go to a French village, where he will find an emerald that will reveal his future. The author is persuaded, partly intrigued by what this strange character tells him, partly because he hopes to track down an old flame, Mariolina, and present himself with a jewel of great value. Arriving in the French village, he takes lodging in an old hotel, where he falls asleep and seems to enter a strange dream. He sees the village where he lives, Tellaro, near La Spezia, vastly different from what he remembers, and he no longer recognizes the people: > it is as if they were all new: others. And it is as if I myself were someone else . In the dream he is actually a painter named Andrea Tellarini, living in an isolated house with a dog. A visitor brings him word that in a French village (the very one where he is actually staying), he has received an inheritance and must therefore go there. He becomes increasingly aware that he lives in an uncanny world, where, following the Third World War, the globe is divided into two confederations: that of the North, dominated by the Russians, technological and technocratic, and that of the South, dominated by the Arabs and the Chinese, Levantine and agrarian. Both confederations are dictatorships, two police states dominated by military forces and the secret services. Between the two confederations runs a Line, roughly traversing Southern Tuscany and Rome, which cannot be crossed because it is contaminated and therefore lethal. The painter lives in the North within a dictatorial state, where everyone is on the state payroll, travel is forbidden, and cinema no longer exists. He obtains permission to go to the French village, where he inherits a large emerald, which he resolves to use in order to search for Mariolina. She, however, lives in the South, and so he must cross the Line. He sets out on the journey together with his son (in the dream, he discovered he had a son). The Line is no longer contaminated, and in Rome he encounters some gypsies who salvage treasures from the abandoned city and sell them to a truck driver (in reality, a spy), who transports them South, to Naples. The painter manages to reach Naples with the truck driver, with whom he is enticed into a homosexual encounter. In Naples, he meets Mariolina again, but also discovers that the emerald is fake. His scheme of growing rich and winning back Mariolina has failed; instead, he is dragged into a power struggle between Mariolina's allies and her enemies, for whom the truck driver is a spy. Mariolina herself proves to be an avaricious woman, thirsting for power. Captured by Mariolina's enemies, he is brought to Rome and gets caught in a firefight with the gypsies: the dream breaks off abruptly as his wife, summoned by the innkeeper, wakes him. In fact, he had allegedly not been sleeping and dreaming, but had been writing the dream down for fifteen days without sleep and without food. It is a fantastic novel, built entirely around the device of the dream as an occasion for an unleashing of nightmares, desires, and fears regarding the future. > I was constructing this dream, complicating it, entangling it, splitting it: a captious, adventurous, fantastic, faerie dream: I was dreaming this dream solely to touch a fragment of my petty reality, of my little self. Who knows, perhaps it was not even a dream: but a delirium fraught with insurmountable and agonizing contradictions . The dream was, in any case, the discovery of a boiling life. > In my dream of discovery I did not wish to go any further. Better to stop here, I told myself. Better to wake in time and sleep again, afterwards, dreamless or with bland dreams that are forgotten and not worth remembering . Several themes run through the novel: a cruel future, dominated by military or bandit dictatorships: technology has ultimately led to the destruction of the Western political system and its collapse into states lacking the rule of law. This upheaval may herald the beginning of a new renaissance, precisely because it has destroyed a culture that was already decaying. In this regard, the reflections on cinema are illuminating. > All that layering of techniques, that paste, that elaborate concoction of acting, dance, drama, scenography, lights, colors, moans: that colossal manneristic, advertising, vulgarly scientific swindle has revealed itself today as a typical—indeed emblematic and exclusive—product of the defunct industrial and consumerist society . > If there is any hope of peace and brotherhood with the South, that hope lies in our reborn and unwitting sense of art ; the recovery of a primitive and simple world, namely that of the gypsies. It is no coincidence that they inhabit a Rome that is ghostly yet alive. > I stopped on the edge and looked all around, near and far, at other valleys and other hills; I contemplated, frightened and fascinated, those horrible alps with their riddled walls, that strange nature, and that matter... They were shells of old mollusks, empty eye-sockets of skulls from which the softness, mobility, and intelligence of life had withdrawn forever. And suddenly I understood. They were the hollows where the desire for life entered and from which life itself emerged: dead, however, now, dead; material images of a final sarcasm . In a D'Annunzian style, the author reflects upon the transformation of life, finding in nature's destruction of the city, in its abandonment, the starting points for rebirth. Yet it is not society that will revive it, but that of simple men, of a people—the gypsies—who have rejected industrial and consumerist society; the diverse dimensions of life. In reality, the author is inhabiting another dimension—not so much what he would have wished to be, but the reality and the persona he could have been. Does the possibility of another life exist? Are there other worlds within us, where nightmares but also aspirations might be realized? The author's dream is the construction of that other world, of the other life the author could have lived. The dream broke off precisely > so as to see no more, so as not to know what lay at the bottom of my whole story . For Paolo Pasolini, Soldati's writing > is devoid of all viscosity, which is to say, of clinging to the reader, of possessing him, of exerting an unacknowledged authority over him . Pasolini speaks of lightness and a relentless reference to something else, to an alternative. The dream device allows the author to play without explaining: for example, what did the emerald signify? What purpose did the entire affair serve in relation to the opening of the tale? As his friend Enzo Giachino wrote in a letter to Soldati, > I am convinced that a more cultured and subtle reader would be able to unravel the hidden meaning of so many episodes, which eludes me .

The author imagines a retired opera impresario deciding to set pen to paper so that it might be known who he truly was: > curious about the travails of others... a marmoreal commendatore of an era now bygone . Before his passing, the *commendatore* supposedly managed to compose three stories, which recount actual episodes from his life. In *The Green Jacket*, the impresario has engaged a brilliant conductor for Verdi’s *Otello*. > a man of genius (but) so vain that he is constantly preoccupied with the impression, indeed the effect, he produces on anyone who approaches him . During rehearsals, everything went smoothly until the timpani entrance, when the conductor suddenly asked to halt the performance, pleading a sudden indisposition. The impresario nevertheless managed to draw from him a confession of the true reasons behind the interruption, as well as the musician's decision to break his contract. During the Second World War, the conductor—then young and not yet famous—had taken refuge in a mountain village in Central Italy, where he had befriended the orchestra's timpanist: “a modest, quiet, middle-aged little man with dull eyes,” who had, however, passed himself off as a renowned maestro, earning the esteem and admiration of the local villagers. Yet the young conductor, far more gifted and accomplished than the poor orchestral player, had not disclosed his true identity, presenting himself instead as a humble bank clerk. But why dissemble? > Lightheartedly, out of curiosity, out of habit, I had strayed down the hazy path of jesting.... and seeing that plump little man, with his comical green jacket and skipping gait, coming toward me in the refectory, I had looked above all at the jacket and not at the man . Yet it was not merely shallowness that led him to this futile deception; there was also “an exquisitely subtle, heightened pleasure in no longer being myself.” But in doing so, he had betrayed friendship—the sincere bond between two men brought together at a difficult juncture in their lives. And now the conductor, celebrated yet conceited, prefers flight to confronting the poor player, who remains, conversely, steadfast in his role and his dignity, a modest artisan of music. In the second story, *The Father of the Orphans*, the impresario pays a visit to a former colleague who had abruptly abandoned the business to run an orphanage. When asked the reasons for such a drastic decision, the colleague tells him a moving story: he had met a sick child on a train and had been deeply affected; yet, out of indolence or the press of work, he had delayed offering help, and by the time he finally resolved to do so, he discovered that the child had died because the family had been unable to afford the necessary medicine. A beautiful tale, were it not for the fact that the impresario accidentally uncovers the true story: the colleague had been involved in a homosexual relationship with a young man, who in turn had fathered a child with a ballerina. Though pleaded with for help, the colleague had refused and had, moreover, cast the young man aside out of fear that his irreproachable bourgeois life might be shattered by scandal. > He had repented of many sins, but not of the single mortal one he had committed. He had made a thousand sacrifices, but not that one without which all the others were worthless: the sacrifice of his own vanity to love . The impresario wishes to force him to acknowledge his abjection, but is ultimately overcome by distaste for a hysterical scene, by the weariness of stripping a man of his mask. In the third story, *The Window*, the impresario goes to visit an old English friend with whom he has long been in love. He hopes they might spend the years of their old age together, only to discover that the woman has always loved a scoundrel, a good-for-nothing who deserted her many years ago. The impresario manages to expose the true character of this dandy, but to no avail. Even when confronted with the most glaring evidence, the woman reaffirms her love. For the impresario, it marks the disillusionment of a myth, of a lifelong dream: > when I thought of Twinkle as I had left her twenty years before and as I had always remembered her—forthright, witty, and of tastes so simply noble.... looking around me, I could hardly believe my eyes. And yet, her long solitude, teeming with fantasies and remorse, explained even this corruption to me . With his simple, elegant, and witty style, Soldati confronts the complexities of the human soul, tracing them back to everything within us that is ambiguous and uncertain. The mask behind which we hide is not an artifice, but an intrinsic part of our consciousness. The stories are compact and lean, sustained by a deft, swift narrative structure. The protagonists and settings are sketched with a few vivid strokes, attentive to detail (the hands, the attire, the decor), so as to recall, with delightful surprise, the nineteenth-century novel. Why read it? These are magnificent stories, written with grace and fluidity.

Eugenio is a well-known Italian set and costume designer living in Los Angeles. A phone call from Italy takes him back to the origins of his career and to the figure of Olga. Many years earlier, when he was still in Italy, Eugenio had had an affair with a friend of his wife, namely Olga: > petite, pretty, dark-haired, with fringe and kiss curls à la Louise Brooks (...) she had an elusive, ambiguous gaze . Eugenio loved his wife, an intelligent, cultured, and refined woman, yet he was captivated by the repetitive cadence of the encounters with his mistress: a long period of indifference, a furtive, silent, violent, swift coupling, and then indifference once more, as if nothing had happened. What is the appeal of a betrayal so barren of eroticism and sentiment? > Eugenio felt superior to Olga, (...) to the point of taking pleasure only if he risked—oh, with impunity!—the charade of pretending to be inferior and worshipping her as though she were truly his superior (...) (yet) Eugenio always knew that Olga was a wretched slave . It was the pleasure of deceiving himself, even if only for five minutes (the duration of the coupling), that was the trigger of Eugenio’s desire; he who, in his selfishness, relished the thought that Olga deluded herself into believing she was the mistress, knowing all the while that it was merely a game. Naturally, this was not the case: the woman had no desire to be the futile occasion for the man’s outsized ego, for a "double lie" perpetually identical to itself. > Eugenio never noticed, and found it convenient not to notice, or even suspect, that she too might possess a soul, might even, in the long run, begin to care for him . Olga fled, vanishing without a trace, yet she lingered in Eugenio’s fantasy: the aspiration of a subject woman who becomes sovereign for a few minutes. The novel resumes "in the present." Eugenio has returned to Italy to shoot a film, but his stay in Europe is nothing other than a search for Olga. And when he must travel to Barcelona, where the woman is rumored to live, Eugenio repeatedly walks down El Paseo de Gracia in the hope of crossing paths with Olga, who, > strangely, miraculously, would appear to him identical to how she had been fifteen years before: with her sleek helmet of hair à la Louise Brooks, her silly yet sly little face, her pouty smile . And he would have said to her, > with the greatest possible composure: Of course it is all over. But... but perhaps, we could try once more... just once . The backdrop is the marvelous yet hollow world of cinema. The author also develops a series of intrigues, intended to impart at least some narrative pace to a plot composed essentially of sensations and reflections. A primary layer of meaning in the novel lies in the depiction of transgression, all the more captivating the further removed it is from ordinary life. As the author observes, > long periods of abstinence (...). Then, a sudden, subtle awakening of desire, but, for a few days, merely a distracted reminder, a seemingly harmless memento. Finally, all at once, a restlessness that gave him no peace (...) And everything repeated itself more or less as it had the time before . There exists, moreover, a deeper, existential and philosophical key to the text, aptly expressed by the passage on the obsession with tiles. Eugenio sees the same pattern continually repeated across the bathroom tiles, yet with endless subtle variations. Viewing the tiles from different vantage points, two recurring figures emerge: the Bravo, who could be recognized > always in profile, his coarse, heavy hooked nose immediately visible, his cruel mouth, the piercing eye of a stalking beast; and the Soubrette, a small and graceful little face (...) with her delicate little mouth smiling in turn . The Soubrette was the Bravo reversed: the dominator can become the dominated, the violent the docile, and so forth; in varying circumstances, we can all be both at the same time. Already in *Lo Smeraldo*, a visionary novel, Soldati explored the theme of the double by resorting to the device of the dream. Do other worlds exist within us? In the more traditional *A cena col commendatore*, he returns to the complexity of the human soul: the mask behind which we hide is not an artifice, but an intrinsic part of consciousness. In these two novels, the narrative is sustained by the prose; in the former, D’Annunzian and lavishly imaginative; in the latter, simple and reminiscent of the nineteenth century. In this book, by contrast, the style is fractured, laborious, verbose, poorly sustained by a slender and inconclusive plot. Why avoid it? It does not do justice to Soldati the writer. It marks a decline in quality.