'Deviazione'

Author: Luce d'Eramo

Publisher: Oscar Mondadori / 1979

Pages: 363

 

A woman, emaciated and filthy, worms her way beneath barbed wire that may be electrified.

We know this scene: we've watched or read it scores of times.

In Luce d'Eramo's variation, the woman beneath the fence is not trying to escape from a Nazi prison camp. She is trying to get in.

Luce d'Eramo, born Lucetta Mangione, was born in 1925 in Reims, France to Italian parents.

Her father, an illustrator and painter, lived in Paris from 1912 to 1915 and went back to Italy to fight in the Italian army during the First World War as a military airplane pilot. After the war he got married and the couple moved back to France where he started a building company.

Luce was the youngest of three daughters. The oldest died in infancy. Her mother served as a voluntary secretary of the Italian Fascio in Paris, assisting immigrant workers.

In 1938 Luce and her family returned to Italy and stayed at her maternal grandmother's house in Alatri, near Rome. There Luce attended a liceo classico (high school).

The change of scene proved to be a social and cultural shock as Luce tried to adjust to her new life in the deeply Fascist Italy.

The Parisian reality with its modern values and diverse political movements (in 1936 the members of the Front Populaire held demonstrations directly in front of their house) was in sharp contrast to the backward reality of the rural areas of Lazio where processions of barefoot pilgrims walked to the Sanctuary of the Certosa of Trisulti singing at the top of their voices. Priests and monks were everywhere because their convent was just behind Luce's grandmother's garden.

In her autobiographical Io sono un aliena, Luce recalled how children in France nicknamed her as the petite maccaroni while her Italian classmates at the Conti Gentili liceo called her la francesina.

The sense of separateness, of being an outsider without any permanent roots contributed to d'Eramo's deep sensitivity to the plight of "the other".

When World War II broke out, her father joined the military service as a pilot and later started working at the news office of the Air Force. The family moved to Rome where Lucetta (as the family now called her) did her last year at the liceo classico.

After graduation she enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Rome and became a member of GUF (Association of Fascist Students), a natural choice for a girl brought up in a Fascist family.

After the fall of Fascism, on 25 July 1943, Luce followed her family to Bassano del Grappa in northern Italy, where her father was appointed Under Secretary of the Air Force in the Republic of Salo', the puppet state created by Mussolini and supported by Nazi Germany and Italian Fascist loyalists.

It was while she was in Bassano that Luce began hearing disturbing news about mass deportations and atrocities committed in Nazi Germany.

Torn between the idealistic loyalty to Fascism and her own ever-growing doubts, and determined to prove these were just false rumours and negative propaganda, on 7 February 1944, she decided to find out the truth.

She left her family and took on a job as a factory worker in Germany. She was sent to a labour camp at the Siemens plant and later to the IG Farben plant in Frankfurt.

The brutal awakening to the cruel reality of oppression and exploitation carried on in the camps pushed her to take an active part in the resistance against the Nazis.

She supported the Russian prisoners in solidarity with their plight and she also participated in a strike organised by the French Resistance.

After being imprisoned she tried to commit suicide. Because of her family's political connections she was released and sent back to Italy.

But on her way back home, passing through Verona, she saw a group of detainees being herded towards the station by SS guards and realized she could not return to her former life.

She threw away her documents and joined a group of deportees being sent to Germany and ended up at the Dachau concentration camp. There she was assigned to a work party clearing the sewers of nearby Munich.

She escaped from the camp during an air raid and began a nomadic life of a clandestine vagrant, taking on the most menial jobs to survive in a Germany plagued by relentless air raids by the Allied Forces.

She sought refuge first in a labour bureau and then in a transit camp only a few metres from Dachau. With the help of a Polish prisoner who loved her, she found work under an assumed name.

On 27 February 1945, in Mainz, while helping to rescue some wounded buried under the rubble of a bombed building a wall collapsed on top of her. She sustained a severe spinal injury and this caused permanent paralysis to both legs, a handicap that would impact the rest of her life. She had repeated surgery, becoming addicted to morphine as a result.

She became an author and an academic, making money from writing other people's dissertations, a fraudulent practice that chimes well with the chameleon nature of this book, with its unstable viewpoints, evasive narrator and gradual uncovering of one misrepresentation after another.

She can be brutal with herself as she tells of creeping down a corridor in her wheelchair, stupefied by pain and drugs and raging with jealousy, to listen at the door of the room where her husband was making love to his research assistant.

After the war Luce retired to Italy and spent some time in Bologna as a patient at the Rizzoli Clinic where she met Pacifico d'Eramo, a survivor of the Russian campaign who, like her, was recovering from injuries he had sustained.

They got married and moved to Rome where Pacifico became a professor of philosophy. In 1947 they had a son, Marco. The marriage was an unhappy one and ended in separation. Luce however continued to use her married surname even after the divorce.

She resumed her studies and earned degrees in literature in 1951 with a thesis on the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi and in philosophy with a thesis on Kant's Critique of Judgement in 1954.

After the publication of her first book, Idilli in Coro in 1951, she met Alberto Moravia who admired her as a writer and who accepted her short story, Thomasbrau, which was later included in Deviazione. Next came a highly original essay Raskolnikov and Marxism, 1960, a discussion on the Soviet Union.

In Finche la testa vive, 1963, a short novel, later also included in Deviazione, she described the trauma of being confined to a wheelchair when only 19.

In 1966 she was profoundly affected by an encounter with Ignazio Silone who became her lifelong friend and the subject of an acute critical study, a book of meticulous research and original insight.

There followed the years of the so-called Strategy of Tension when d'Eramo's friend, Camilla Cederna, drew her attention to the case of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the famous publisher who, according to the police was blown up while placing an explosive next to a high-voltage pylon. D'Eramo wrote an essay, a penetrating analysis of how the Italian press handled this case.

D'Eramo rose to national and international fame with the novel Deviazione, begun a few years after her return to Italy and then finished and published over 30 years later, in 1979.

Deviazione is an autobiographical novel that recounts the dramatic events she experienced in her youth, the memory of a deeply wounded woman who had to contend with the difficulty of recovering the true meaning of her war experience in the post-war context and of returning to the social sphere she had so struggled to escape from.

The book came together by fits and starts. Two sections were written in the early 1950s as autonomous stories. Twenty years later d'Eramo added two more, in a more distanced tone. In her triple role as author, narrator and protagonist, she is repeatedly at odds with herself. She adopts the third person. She gives herself different names - Lucia, Luzi, Lulu or just L'Italiana. Repeatedly she questions her own integrity. In the fourth section, written in 1977, she performs a kind of autopsy on her own text, laying open not only its untrustworthy content, but also the circumstances in which it was written.

Deviazione was a massive success, with 200,000 copies sold in Italy and translated in many languages.

She died in Rome on 6 March 2001 and was buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome along with John Keats, P. B. Shelley and Antonio Gramsci.