An impressive literature has grown up around Italy’s
partisans, those resistants who, particularly after the September 1943
ascension of Marshal Badoglio in Rome and the flight of Mussolini’s government
to the town of Salò in the north, took to the hills to fight against Germany’s
ferocious response to these events and against the Fascists who helped the
Nazis along. Warfare under these circumstances became largely a series of
attacks, raids and brutal reprisals against civilians, a civil war within the
larger conflagration engulfing Europe.
Laudomia Bonanni’s short novel The Reprisal (La
Rappresaglia) is as direct an approach to this subject as its title suggests.
Bonanni, who grew up in the mountainous Abuzzo region where she sets her novel,
goes for a particularly harrowing example of the types of reprisals that took place
during the winter of 1943-44. A woman carrying hidden arms is seized by a small
group of Fascist men and an adolescent boy hiding out in an abandoned monastery
near the end of the war; discovering that she is in the late stages of
pregnancy, they elect to delay her execution until she can deliver the child.
This is not a new literary topic, the examination of emotions
and moral questions transpiring between the condemned and their accusers, but
Bonanni’s choice of protagonist allows her to explore a range of issues around
female independence and assertiveness; male attitudes towards women, sexuality
and maternity; the complicity of the Catholic Church in the conflict; and above
all the struggle to find dignity and meaning in a world ripped apart by war
pitting neighbor against neighbor. In addition, The Reprisal is a rare
work that attempts, albeit over only a few of its 140 pages, to deal with the
suspicion-filled postwar co-existence of persons so recently committed to
killing one another. Bonanni also cleverly evokes an image of the Holy Family, sans
Joseph, the woman’s bare monastery cell echoing the simple manger where the
Christ child was born, a fixed point to which other visitors are drawn: the
monastery’s priest, a couple of wandering shepherds, two passing German
soldiers, and two of the Fascists’ wives, who arrive with supplies. These last,
complicit but at the same time aware enough to know that their husbands’
decision will haunt them the rest of their lives, serve to underscore Bonanni’s
themes of an endless cycle of reprisals, the participants inescapably linked
“by a chain,” and of the potential of women to break the cycle and chain.
Bonanni’s story makes for a close and intense reading
experience. Her characters stand out starkly, as though conceived for the
stage. Most memorable, certainly, is the woman herself, La Rossa, a paragon of
fierce defiance who, by driving a wedge directly between her male captives’
divergent views of women as sexual objects and as revered mothers, exposes
their weaknesses. Through caustic, pointed barbs and lengthy remonstrations, she
strips the men of their pretentions to morality and compassion, leaving their
violence and inadequacy raw and exposed. And yet Bonanni never allows La Rossa
to become a caricature; her own weaknesses and vulnerabilities are on full
display. When the oldest among her captives, Babaro, refuses to hand her over
to the Germans because of the deal they have all made to spare her child, La
Rossa responds with a searing mixture of contempt, sarcasm and palpable
desperation:
“The child, eh, they pass the buck.
Your good conscience is anxious for the innocent. You have captured me, kill me
then. Go ahead, hand me over to eh Germans. They do not make a fuss, those
people. They kill quickly. I want you to hurry up.” She was shouting now.
“C’mon, riddle me right away. You have to shoot here, make a sieve of this
whore’s belly with everything that’s inside it. Man’s semen, ha-ha. I’d like to
use my nails to tear out the fruit of your filthy race of male hypocrites.” She
was crumpling her skirt, panting as if her belly were fatally weighing her
down.
Bonanni reveals this male hypocrisy again and again, for
example through the Fascists’ risible attempt at a Christmas celebration and
the priest’s insistence on ritual and absolution while the sentence against the
woman hovers above all their futile attempts to live beyond the length of the
chain that binds them. As the birth approaches, one of the men, Annaloro,
anxiously exclaims, “We need boiling water. When my wife is giving birth, I am
always given the job of boiling water.”
“Just to get you out of the way,” La
Rossa teased, recovering in a moment of temporary relief. “Are you afraid I
might get an infection in the next world?”
The adolescent boy, himself a victim of the war, his legs
burned by a fire set by partisans, serves as foil and contrast to the older men
around him, poignantly and painfully taking on their worst excesses yet
retaining the emotional immaturity of a child. At once the most vicious and
vulnerable of the males in the story, he plays a critical role in developing
Bonanni’s themes regarding innocence and the responsibility of the world towards
children.
What distinguishes The Reprisal from many other
stories of partisan warfare is not only its focus on female experience, but
also its employment of a highly imaginative narrative strategy. First Bonanni
offers the conceit of a hidden story, proclaimed in the novel’s first lines:
“These facts have never been revealed. No one has ever breathed a word. Everything
buried. Soon the last shovelful of dirt will drop, so to speak, since I, the
last, am old.” She also parcels out her difficult tale in small chunks, ten
chapters divided into six numbered sections each that the translators, in their
introduction, liken to cantos. Given the intensity of the story, one is
grateful for this manner of structuring that, akin to the Kaddish in Jewish
liturgy, provides an almost ritualistic and rhythmic quality for sustaining one’s
engagement with difficult subject matter.
The most striking feature of the novel, though, one which
only gradually reveals itself, is Bonanni’s unusual use of first person
narration. Her narrator, already in the first lines announcing his role, slips
in and out of the story. Sometimes he is present and referred to by the other
characters – chastised at times by the woman, for example, and explicitly
called by her “a witness here, our assiduous schoolteacher.” At other times he
appears so detached an observer that one questions his existance as a living
being, as he does himself: “But was I there? Maybe I wasn’t.” All we know for
sure is that he is described as a teacher who has accompanied the Fascists to
the monastery, “assigned to surveillance…alone and suspect” and “the only one
who had refused a weapon.” He also clearly operates as an explicit literary
invention of the author, serving as witness not simply to observe events but
also as a literary vehicle for the telling of the tale, in this latter role
functioning as a locus for the novel’s overarching theme concerning the
responsibility implicit in the act of witnessing. Through this alternating
presence and ineffability - and especially through the narrator’s behavior at a
critical moment - Bonanni brilliantly entwines the reader in her witness’
responsibility, forces the reader’s own moral self-examination. Not content
merely to tell a riveting war story, Bonanni never loses sight of her narrative
as an explicitly literary enterprise that calls attention to how a tale is told
and to the responsibilities involved in telling it. Adding additional
complexity to these themes, Bonanni alludes to a notebook La Rossa has kept to recount
her own story, a missing text with which the witness - and the reader - must reckon.
Bonanni, who published her first stories in 1927
and rose to fame due to winning a writing contest and to having been cheered
along by poet Eugenio Montale, did not live to see The Reprisal
published. Rejected when submitted for publication in 1985, the novel did not
appear in Italian until 2003, nearly 20 years later, and evidence exists that
Bonanni had worked on the manuscript since the end of the war – a span of some
forty years. 70 years later, readers of English can be grateful to have access
to a classic of World War II literature.