Christ Stopped at Eboli [First Thus ed.] 0374530092, 9780374530099

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CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI The Story of a Year

by CARLO LEVI

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY FRANCES FRENAYE

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Time Reading Program Special Edition TIME INCORPORATED • NEW YORK

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TIME INC. BOOK DIVISION editor Norman P. Ross copy director William Jay Gold art director Edward A. Hamilton chief of research Beatrice T. Dobie

EDITOR, TIME READING PROGRAM Max GiSSert ASSISTANT EDITOR Jerry Korn researcher Ann S. Lang designer Lore Levcnberg

Jerome S Hardy GENERAL MANAGER John A. Watters publisher

TIME MAGAZINE editor Roy Alexander managing editor Otto Fuerbringer publisher Bernhard M. Auer

cover

DESIGN A nt hony Saris

Copyright 1947, by Farrar, Straus and Company, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Company, Inc. Editors’ Preface and cover design © 1964 Time Incorporated. All rights reserved.

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Editors’ Preface

X| v'x'/Aq/HE MOST FASCINATING WORK

of literature to come out of Italy in the years following World War II was created by a man who was then unknown as a writer and, indeed, did not view himself as a literary person. Carlo Levi, the author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, had been trained in medicine and had won considerable acclaim as a painter. But up to the time this extraordinary book appeared, his only published works had been some newspaper and maga­ zine articles, mostly polemics against Italy’s Fascist regime. Christ Stopped at Eboli brought him swift acclaim. He was hailed as one of the great literary stylists of the era, and the book was immediately established as one of the classics of modem Italian literature. To anyone who has read Christ Stopped at Eboli, this en­ thusiasm is not hard to understand, but it caused some con­ fusion at the time. The book was modest in scope, and the

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reviewers had some difficulty conveying the nature of its special qualities. They even had some difficulty classifying the book: it was called a novel, a memoir, an album of sketches, a study in sociolog)'. It is all of these in some degree. Ostensibly, it is simply a true account of a year that the author spent in a back­ ward, malaria-ridden southern Italian village, Gagliano, in the province of Lucania. Levi had been exiled there in 1935, after a period of imprisonment for opposing the Mussolini dictator­ ship. The book ends with the author’s return to northern Italy in 1936, after he was freed in a political amnesty. Levi’s stay in Gagliano was not, on the face of it, especially eventful. The tales of brutality or persecution that we might anticipate from an oppositionist apprehended by the police in a modem totalitarian state are entirely lacking in this account. Most American readers will, in fact, be surprised at the relaxed and easygoing treatment the regime accorded one of its most uncompromising critics. Levi was obliged to stay within fairly narrow geographical limits while he was in Gagliano, but otherwise there were scarcely any restrictions on him, and the peasants, the townspeople and even the local officials and Fascist party leaders were friendly to him. Indeed, Fascism was not much of an issue in the town. What really set Levi apart b from Gagliano’s people was not so much his anti-Fascist views as the fact that he had any views at all, that he was a man of some culture, with an interest in the affairs of the 20th Cen­ tury. The men and women around him, by contrast, had a mode of thinking and a style of life not much different from what it had been a hundred—or for that matter, 300—years earlier. Levi’s portraits of these simple souls constitute the main ingredient of his book. Why should anyone care about the people who lived in Gagliano in 1935? One might answer plausibly that the exist-

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ence of such poverty, illiteracy and superstition in that year was a compelling indictment of the Fascist regime and that the book is an effective answer to the neo-Fascist ideologies trying to envelop the Mussolini years in a legend of national grandeur. Levi’s testimony on the “grandeur” of those years is certainly devastating. The people of Gagliano were utterly in­ different to the appeals of Fascism, stone deaf to the bombast of their local leaders, unconcerned about the success of Italy’s . attack on Ethiopia that year. But Levi is not primarily interested in proving again the phoniness of Fascist claims, and he makes it clear that the peasants would have felt pretty much the same about any kind of rule from Rome. Any government would have seemed alien to their own interests and preoccupations; they viewed the state itself as a kind of scourge, like malaria. As Levi says: For this reason, quite naturally, they have no conception of a political struggle; they think of it as a personal quarrel among the “fellows in Rome.” They were not concerned with the views of the political prisoners who were in com­ pulsory residence among them, or with the motives for their coming. They looked at them kindly and treated them like brothers because they too, for some inexplicable reason, were victims of fate. During the first days of my stay whenever I happened to meet along one of the paths outside the village an old peasant who did not know me, he would stop his donkey to greet me and ask in dialect: “Who are you? Where are you going?” “Just for a walk; I’m a political prisoner,” I would answer. “An exile? (They always said exile instead of prisoner.) Too bad! Someone in Rome must have had it in for you.” And he would say no more, but smile at me in a brotherly fashion as he prodded his mount into motion.

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z Levi himself has been described as an anarchist—from time c? to time he has engaged in the politics of the far Left—and his own hostility to the state certainly has some roots in his obser­ vations of life in Gagliano. But he is not telling us about its people just to argue the anarchist position. The people of Gagliano, he makes it clear, are a very special case, and he is writing about them precisely for that reason. They are, we quickly perceive, the forsaken of the earth. The -y title of the book refers to a saying among them, “Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli,” which means, in effect, that they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by his­ tory itself—that they have somehow been excluded from the human experience. To their hopeless lot they can bring only one of two attitudes. The usual one is a “gloomy resignation, alleviated by no hope of paradise, that bows their shoulders under the scourges of nature.” Alternating with this attitude is a furious defiance, manifesting itself historically in irrational (and hopeless) outbreaks of violence. The most recent erup­ tion of this sort had been some outbreaks of brigandage in the mid-19th Century; these outbreaks, directed against the Ital­ ian social order of that period, had been put down in 1865, but tales of the brigand days were still common among the peas­ ants. Levi actually met one survivor of that epoch, who told him proudly how the brigands had kidnaped a wealthy land­ owner and mailed one of his ears to his wife when she was slow paying the ransom. Such tales were the closest the peas­ ants came to having anything like a historical tradition of their own. Many of the men of Gagliano had fought, and some had died, in World War I, but Levi says he never heard tales of this experience; it was evidently viewed by the peasants as just an­ other of nature’s gratuitous insults. The extraordinary readability of the book stems from the fact that it introduces the reader to these bypassed people of

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Gagliano as individuals, with the introductions performed by a master of characterization. Levi’s gallery of portraits is a fantastic one. There is his maid, Giulia, matter-of-factly iden­ tified (by herself as well as by others) as a witch, able to cast spells and mix love philters, even to “bring about the death of anyone she chose by uttering terrible incantations.” There is a forlorn, drunken village priest, half-crazy with loneliness. There is Donna Caterina, wife of the local Fascist leader and sister of the mayor and, inevitably, a power in the village. Her­ self a mistress of intrigue, she is convinced that her husband has been bewitched and is the lover of the druggist’s daughter, a sinuous local beauty who, Donna Caterina is certain, plans to poison her.

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As to her husband, Donna Caterina knew how to handle him. There was to be no scandal, no one must have the slightest suspicion. In the privacy of their own four walls Donna Caterina accused him every day of adultery and murder, and forbade him access to her bed. The powerful and feared Party leader of Gagliano lost every bit of his arrogance as soon as he entered his own house, where in the darting black eyes of his wife he was a hopeless repro­ bate and unforgivable sinner, and he had to settle down to a solitary sleep on a couch in the drawing room. This sad life went on for six months until there appeared a last chance for redemption: the war with Abyssinia. The hu­ miliated sinner enrolled as a volunteer. . . .

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There are also several “Americans” in Gagliano—a barber, a tailor and others. These are men who have been to America and returned, usually planning to visit just for a while and then return to New York. But many of them have never gone back; they squandered their savings, settled back to life in Gagliano, and were soon indistinguishable from their neighbors. “Aloni'

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with poverty they regain their agelong patience and resigna­ tion and all their former peasant habits.” These “Americans” are in a way the sorriest of the lot, be­ cause they have had a vision of the promised land. There is no doubt about what that land is. For the people of Levi’s Ga­ gliano, Rome is a hostile and alien oppressor, but New York represents at least some faint distant vision of betterment, and to the extent that they are religious at all, America is a major ingredient of their faith. Levi describes a remarkable scene that he observed in just about every bedroom.

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On one side was the black, scowling face, with its large, inhuman eyes, of the Madonna of Viggiano; on the other a colored print of the sparkling eyes, behind gleaming glasses, and the hearty grin of President Roosevelt. I never saw other pictures or images than these: not the King nor the Duce, nor even Garibaldi; no famous Italian of any kind, nor any one of the appropriate saints; only Roosevelt and the Madonna of Viggiano never failed to be present. To see them there, one facing the other, in cheap prints, they seemed the two faces of the power that has divided the universe between them. But here their roles were, quite rightly, reversed. The Madonna appeared to be a fierce, pitiless, mysterious, ancient earth goddess, the Saturnian mistress of this world; the President a sort of all-powerful Zeus, the benevolent and smiling master of a higher sphere.

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Levi wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli some eight years after »y the events he described, in 1943-1944, when he was living in Florence as a hunted member of the Underground. Some AutLj/months later, in 1944-1945, he served as editor of a Resistance newspaper, La Nazione del Popolo. Early in 1945 he went to

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Rome and edited another Resistance newspaper there. Christ Stopped at Eboli was published that year. After the war years, Levi wrote several other books. All of them were well enough received to make it clear that his first was no fluke, but none had the success or the impact of Christ Stopped at Eboli. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this—including the inability of the author to find another cast of characters even remotely as interesting as the people of Ga­ gliano. But there is another reason that is probably more to the point: Christ Stopped at Eboli comes close to being a literary masterpiece; not many authors could produce two like it. —The Editors of Time

Chapter One