Mario Tobino

In the Resistance (the war of liberation between 1943 and 1945), the decision to take up arms against Nazi-Fascism rarely arose from a deliberate, mature reflection; more often than not, it was an act of unconscious bravado, oblivious to the risks being run. As Luigi Meneghello wrote in *I piccoli maestri*, it was > a cry, (...) a collective (...) intoxicating feeling: one sensed the overwhelming power of things that rise from below, spontaneous things . Mario Tobino, too, explores the choice of the partisan struggle in depth, doing so in his signature style, that of one who "studies men and loves them." Anselmo is a young medical officer, recently returned from Libya. > He was still dazed by the war, the soldiers’ groans still in his ears, having been a spectator to cruel deeds. Like the protagonist of Cesare Pavese’s novel (*La casa in collina*), he yearns for "a lethargy, an anesthetic," in order to > rediscover the goodness, the tenderness that, beyond all ugly violence, must still exist in the world . One day, after September 8, a woman stops him in the street. > I was waiting for you, I wanted to ask you, since you fought in the war. (...) Who did this? Who are we with now? What did they make us believe? Whose fault is it? And all those who died, poor souls? (...) I saw them die, it was all for nothing... replies Anselmo, and "felt he was stupidly on the verge of tears." For the young man it is a jolt, an awakening; he must shake off his torpor, spring into action. In his hometown, Viareggio (called Medusa in the novel), a group of youths has established an underground organization: they style themselves Marxist-Leninists, profess to be communists, even though they have never read Marx or Lenin and have not yet had any contact with the resurrected Communist Party (though they yearn for it ardently). Then there is an old admiral who longs to act; he was retired by the Regia Marina for his anti-fascist stance. yet he is fueled by a boyish urge to fight, to show the Fascists and the Germans what he is made of. Anselmo soon becomes the liaison officer between "the clandestines" and the admiral; he is entrusted with delicate and difficult missions, which he always manages to carry out exceedingly well, thanks to his poise and his gift as a subtle weaver of human relationships. Tobino guides us through the early steps of the partisan struggle as though it were an escapist novel; perilous situations, recounted nonetheless in an exhilarating, ironic vein, intertwine with the depiction of the growing bond forged among the young conspirators—youths not yet adults, of profoundly different temperaments, varying social backgrounds, and unequal levels of education, yet forever animated by a zest for life and a mutual understanding that transcends their shortcomings and divergent dispositions: action leads to friendship, and friendship to unity. The clandestines, just like the admiral, live on the brink of the abyss as though it were a game—risky, certainly, but undoubtedly bound for a happy ending. The cruel face of war emerges, belying our wish for a serene adventure: this is not the cinema, as one of the book’s protagonists daydreams! Searches, roundups, and arrests begin. Anselmo takes part in the killing of a Fascist in La Spezia; he himself kills a squadrista who had brutally murdered the admiral. They must leave Viareggio and head into the mountains to fight the partisan war, where Anselmo will meet his death. > He closed his eyes (...) and at once dreamed he was in a wood dense with foliage; he lay stretched out, fledgling birds flew around him, brought their beaks close, opening them as if laughing, like children content after a meal . Anyone expecting Fenoglio’s *Il partigiano Johnny* cannot help but be disappointed: here there are no solitary heroes. The novel is constructed linearly, without bombast, an open chronicle rich in endless possibilities, capable of humor because it is lucid, transparent, and yet affectionate toward its characters—even toward the Fascists. > But why do the Fascists do this? Anselmo asked himself in a murmur . The resolve of the "clandestines" takes shape from events; it is events that make them adults, mature them politically, turn them into fighters, convinced all the same that, just as ships can sail through calm waters as well as rough seas, even among the trees, where > death whined, (...) there was nevertheless happiness, gladness, in the face of the present solitude . Why read it? A splendid book by a regrettably forgotten author.

Just like *Per le Antiche Scale*, the book is set in an asylum, and the protagonist, who is also the first-person narrator, is a psychiatrist. There is no plot; rather, it is a fragmented narrative composed of descriptions of individual figures—mostly women—within the institution: patients, nurses, nuns, and peasant women from the countryside surrounding the asylum. Some of them, such as Lella, play more than a fleeting role in the tale, yet generally they are all subsumed by madness, as though it were difficult to discern sanity from insanity. > With the mad who communicate their laws I easily settle in, we walk along the same track, and if a sudden onlooker were to judge on the spot which of the two is the sick one, he would find himself uncertain; and this exercise of mine, which on some days I repeat frequently, exhausts me and I return to my corridor in the mist of a vague anguish, almost a convalescent, as if those minutes I spent transferring into the mind of the madman, forsaking my own, were like going into hell, living in the circles, having crossed the cold waters of Hades, and returning to life with my soul still frozen by death . It is, therefore, a series of episodes which, despite their specificity and apparent disarray (almost diary-like), allow several narrative threads to be identified: the tenderness and wonder that emerge from the portraits. It is not the physician writing, nor is there any search for an ideological imprint; the individual characters are described with affection, at times with irony, but always with the acute awareness that there is no escape from madness. The theme of eroticism emerges, clearly revealing how loneliness often lies at the root of the path leading to madness; yet madness is also an inevitable fate, binding together both the poor and the rich. Emblematic is the figure of Lella, who seemed to have emerged from her illness, yet it takes merely another woman showing an interest in the object of her desire (a purely dreamed-of affection) to plunge her back into a depressive crisis and thus into madness once more. The balance is ever precarious. > The woman has a very beautiful face and, strangely, though she implores so, she seems on the verge of laughing, and at moments laughs as if in a blissful intoxication, as though touched in that instant by an amorous joy . Yet madness conceals itself. > Perhaps it was that woman, an ultra-flourishing blonde woman, exuberant and domineering; for several days she had been polite, sweetly accommodating in assisting with every service on the ward; indeed, like a sinless nun, she tended with all piety to another most petulant patient. And this morning I read a letter of hers addressed to her husband where the words declared her spirit lusting for violence and murder ; the serenity of the Tuscan landscape, almost in contrast to the violence and disorder of the asylum. > The plain of Lucca sparkles with harvests from the burst of spring until autumn; it rests in a deep ellipse surrounded by mountains silhouetted clearly against the sky. The Lucchese plain in summer is a shifting-swaying of laughing green, a witty conversation with every fruit and bud, and one’s sight varies and dances and is lost and is refreshed, and by no means do the mountains that distantly encircle it hinder that gladness ; the existential pain of the protagonist, whose anguish stems simultaneously from within himself and from the life of the asylum: the bond between his own existence and the fates of the mad seems the sole reason for overcoming an anguish that would otherwise prove unbearable. > My life is here, in the asylum of Lucca. Here my feelings unfold. Here I reveal myself honestly. Here I watch dawns and sunsets, and time passes beneath my watchful gaze. Inside a room of the asylum I study men and love them. Here I wait: glory and death. From here I depart for holidays. Here, until now, I have returned. And my desire is to make of every grain of this land a calm, orderly, universal speech . Yet there is hope, the love between creatures: all this allows the writer to say that there is, perhaps, a way out of madness and existential anguish. > And of little Lella I hope to say no more, for ample, if heaven has aided me, are the words I have spoken . The book, magnificent, is distinguished by an elegant style—imbued with a classical education—that admirably manages to evoke a dreamlike atmosphere, as though what is narrated were not real but rather the fruit of the author’s imagination and desire. The phrasing, the choice of adjectives, and the diction, often bearing a distinctly Tuscan stamp, make the reading pleasurable while highlighting the dramatic weight of the subject matter.

The book is set in an asylum, and the narrator (and protagonist) is a psychiatrist. In the first part of the book, the character of a former hospital physician is delineated—a commanding figure and a man of science. The close examination of his persona reveals a whole series of idiosyncrasies (he never leaves the asylum, fears thunderstorms, never touches the doors leading to the various wards, and so on) that expose a mind riddled with fears, yet driven by a delusion of omnipotence. In the second part, the novel consists of a series of portraits of the mentally ill, which foreground both the ineluctability of illness and the profound humanity of these individuals, who are likewise capable of giving and receiving love, and with whom dialogue can be established if one manages to understand their language. The true protagonist, however, remains the asylum itself, which seems to hold sway over both the sane and the sick. Its enclosed structure establishes impassable boundaries that are psychological before they are physical—so much so that the doctors themselves are often led to live within its walls. Is the asylum not the paradigm of modern life, which, while ostensibly so free and open, is in truth trapped within preconceived molds and a series of constraints? And does not the mentally ill patient, in their delusions and mental wanderings, in fact embody true—and singular—freedom? The style is lean, devoid of any rhetoric, unfolding in a clear, serene manner, marked by a subtle irony and touches of tenderness.