Ernesto Read online

  It is this unity between self and written word, for which Saba strived, that I believe affected his ability to complete Ernesto. Saba had elaborated these views in a 1911 essay titled “Quello che resta da fare ai poeti” (“What Poets Have Yet to Do”), which remained unpublished until after his death.

  What Saba thought poets had yet to do was to write honest poetry. His lodestone for honest poetry was Count Alessandro Manzoni (best known for his novel I Promessi sposi [The Betrothed]), who in Saba’s words used “rare and constant care not to say even one word that does not perfectly correspond to his vision.” At the opposite pole he placed the flamboyant Gabriele D’Annunzio, who “exaggerates or even pretends passions and admirations that were never in his temperament.” There is a spiritual dimension to Saba’s concept. It is an “unpardonable sin against the spirit,” he wrote, “just to write a flashier stanza, a more clamorous line.” Honesty, he thought, was possible only in a poet “who has the religion of art, and loves it for itself and not for the hope of glory. . . greed, or applause.” Manzoni’s honesty, Saba writes, “was fostered by religion, for certainly he believed that God who had given him the talent would require an accounting of every word, I would almost say of every punctuation mark.”

  Answering to God for every comma! Rigid standards indeed, and not easily met, but a reflection of Saba’s own demands of himself and of an earlier plan for Ernesto. “You know there was a time,” he wrote to Linuccia, “I even considered calling the book The Betrothed instead of Ernesto, in which case, it would concentrate on the love affair between Ilio and that woman. . . . But . . . it would seem irreverent.” Perhaps irreverent because Ugo Chiesa (Ilio) had died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight. Nevertheless, Saba’s correspondence with his friend Nora Baldi confirms his early enthusiastic plans for completing Ernesto: “I can hardly wait to write about [Chiesa’s] death. . . . I want to create a monument to him.” And later, “Everything will be explained and accounted for with the death of Ilio and the revelation of Ernesto’s vocation.” But there is neither monument nor revelation in Ernesto. In Linuccia’s last letter to Levi on the subject, she despaired: “Papà doesn’t want to go on with the book; he says that he can’t do it, that he can’t speak about Ilio and wants to cut it short.”

  Perhaps at this turbulent last stage of his life, Saba couldn’t write about his relationship with Ilio with the honesty he revered. There is a stiffness in Ernesto’s encounters with Ilio. He does not speak to him when he sees him for the first time. And when they finally meet, although Ernesto’s palpitating heart is almost audible as he awaits answers to the questions he puts to the boy, Ilio’s responses are measured and brief. When they part at that meeting, their relationship is all potential. Ilio has promised Ernesto that he will play a Chopin nocturne for him and walk with him the following Sunday. But what followed that first encounter, which Saba termed a “rare event—the kind that can only occur once, if that, in any one century, in any one place,” which will have “far-reaching consequences,” the reader will never know.

  In Ernesto, Saba created an attractive, isolated boy almost wholly attuned to his own heart and mind, whose desires and urges find easy and innocent acceptance from himself. For all young Ernesto’s loneliness and discontents, he is aware that he is loved by those close to him: his nursemaid, his mother, his aunt. Even the guardian uncle who slaps him also slips him money. He is loved by “the man” and by his childless boss. The prostitute invites him back even if he doesn’t have money. He does whatever he wants, says whatever he wants, feels free to be himself with these people without concern for losing their love. He teases his suffering mother about his paternity and tricks the boss who has given him gifts into frenzies of rage. One can’t be sure whether young Umberto himself was the model for this behavior, but it seems clear from others’ accounts that Saba remained childishly and annoyingly insensitive all his life. He had a way of dropping in on his close friend Giacomo Debenedetti’s family in Rome and staying on for weeks. Once, after wearing the same pullover every day and asked by Signora Debenedetti why he didn’t change, he smiled beatifically and replied, “Why should I? My skin is very clean—so clean that I don’t have to change.”

  With the passing of time and the change in social mores Ernesto has become a landmark in Italian and international homosexual literature. The GLBTQ Encyclopedia notes that Saba, whom they rank “alongside the greatest of modern Italian poets . . . should also be included in the canon of significant gay writers of the modernist period.”

  Beyond its importance as an early, bold work on homosexuality, Ernesto’s nuanced voicing adds layers of intensity to this classic story. In a tightly compressed style animated with flashes of poetic insight, Saba’s prose achieves the directness, clarity, and honesty that characterize his poetry. Every one of the boy’s desired adventures is experienced without shame or guilt. Saba’s delicately detailed description of the young boy’s first sexual experiences, whether he is naked before the prostitute or undressing along with the man, transmits the youth’s sense of wonder and appreciation for the acts themselves. For all that Umberto Saba knew that the world would consider his novel’s explicit homosexuality obscene, he considered Ernesto a chaste work, but “of a chastity that people would not understand.”

  The pleasure of reading Ernesto—as with most of Saba’s writings, whether prose or poetry—lies in its integrity. Umberto Saba wanted his readers to understand the intimacies troubling his soul at the moment he was writing. Rhythm, rhyme, every turn of phrase in his everyday vocabulary is intended not merely to have his meaning and emotions understood but to have them echo in his reader’s heart.

  —ESTELLE GILSON

  ERNESTO

  Now that I am old I would like to write calmly and openly about the wondrous world.

  “The Immaculate Man,” The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba

  FIRST EPISODE

  “WHAT’S with you? Tired?”

  “Pissed.”

  “About what?”

  “The boss! Dirty bloodsucker—a florin and a half to load and unload two carts.”

  “Can’t say as I blame you.”

  The above conversation (which was spoken, like those following it, in a dialect I’ve altered and modified as best I could, so that readers, if this story ever has any readers, would understand them) took place in Trieste in the last years of the nineteenth century. The speakers were a man (a day laborer) and a boy. The man was sitting on a pile of flour sacks in a warehouse on via ——. He was wearing a large red kerchief around his head, which hung below his shoulders (to protect his neck from the chafing fabric of the sacks). Though he seemed tired to Ernesto, he was a young man with a Gypsyish look about him—though an attenuated, tame kind of Gypsyness. Ernesto was sixteen and an apprentice at a company that bought flour from large Hungarian mills and sold it to the city’s bakeries. He had soft, curly chestnut hair and hazel eyes (like some poodles). Somewhat gangly, he moved with adolescent grace, as though he felt awkward and was afraid of being ridiculed. At the moment, he was leaning against the open door of the warehouse awaiting a cart due momentarily with the last load of the day. Although he knew the man well—he had been talking to him for months because they worked together and because he rather liked him—he was staring at him now, as if he were seeing him for the first time. Sitting there with his head cupped between his hands, the man looked exhausted to Ernesto. But the man said he was angry.

  “Can’t say I blame you,” Ernesto repeated. “He’s a bloodsucker, the boss. I hate him too.” (But just one look at the boy made it seem unlikely that he really hated anyone.) “It makes me sick when he sends me out to the piazza to get a man to help, and he tells me what he’s going to pay. I get you all the time, but I’m always ashamed the money’s so little. I hate doing that.”

  The man relaxed his tense posture and looked tenderly at Ernesto. “I know you’re okay,” he said. “If you ever get to be a boss, like I hope you do, there’s no
way you’ll treat your workers the way this guy treats me. A florin and a half for three loads,” he said again, “and for two men. The crook gets away with murder. He’s got no idea what it means to work till you’re nearly dead, specially now that it’s getting hot. Even two florins a man wouldn’t be overpaying. If you weren’t here and I didn’t like talking to you, I wouldn’t be waiting for the cart. I’d be out of here in a flash and home in bed.”

  It was a late-spring day and the street was filled with sunshine. But inside the warehouse the air was cool—cool and damp and smelling of flour.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” the man asked after a brief silence. “Over here.” (He pointed to a spot close to himself.) “If you’re worried about getting dirty, you can sit on my jacket.” And he got up to get the jacket, which he had removed while awaiting the cart.

  “I don’t need it,” Ernesto answered. “Flour doesn’t leave a mess. You just dust it off and it’s gone. And I don’t care if anyone sees it or not.” He stopped the man from spreading the jacket, and smiling, sat down beside him. The man was smiling too. He no longer looked tired or angry.

  “If you want,” he said, “I’ll dust you off afterward.”

  They sat in silence for a while, just looking at each other.

  “You’re okay, kid,” the man said again, “and good-looking—really good-looking, easy on the eyes.”

  “Me, good-looking?” Ernesto laughed. “No one’s ever said that to me.”

  “Not even your mother?”

  “Her least of all. I don’t remember her kissing me, or even hugging me. She always said you shouldn’t spoil children. Still says it.”

  “You’d have liked your mother to kiss you?”

  “Sure, when I was little. Now it doesn’t make any difference. I’d like it if she’d at least say something nice about me once in a while.”

  “She doesn’t do that either?”

  “Never,” Ernesto answered, “or hardly.”

  “It’s too bad I haven’t got any money or decent clothes,” the man said.

  “Why?”

  “If I did, it would be nice to be your friend—for us to go walking together some Sunday.”

  “Well, I’m not rich, either,” Ernesto said. “Do you know how much I make?”

  “No, but you’ve got parents, and they must have money. How much do you make?”

  “Thirty crowns a month and I give twenty of them to my mother. She buys my clothes.” (Ernesto wore ready-made clothes, and though he didn’t like admitting it, he would have liked to dress well—as some of his old school friends had.) “So there’s not much left for me.”

  “But you’re learning a business in the meantime.”

  “I don’t like working for anyone,” Ernesto replied. “I’d like doing something completely different.”

  “Like what?”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “So how do you spend the ten crowns you got left? On women?” (These last words were spoken as if the man feared an affirmative response.)

  “I don’t go with women yet. I decided to keep away till I’m eighteen or nineteen.” (Perhaps he had forgotten that, two years earlier, his mother had had to fire a young kitchen maid, whom he was continually harassing. After that episode the poor woman had, as a precaution, hired only old misshapen or deformed women. She’d put together a real collection of gorgons. Even so, they didn’t last long. After a month or two, they quit or were fired.)

  “And you?” Ernesto asked. “You married?”

  The man laughed. “Nah! Still single. I don’t go for girls.”

  “How old are you?” Ernesto asked.

  “Twenty-eight. I look older, right?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy answered. “I’m sixteen. Nearly seventeen—in less than a month.”

  “You don’t want to tell me what you do with the ten crowns you’ve got left,” the man said.

  “You’re pretty nosy.” Ernesto laughed. “It spends real fast. Some on food, some on the theater. I go to shows almost every Sunday afternoon. I like tragedies best. You ever go to the theater?”

  “What would I be doing in a theater? I’m a dumb bastard! Really dumb. I can hardly read or write my own name.”

  Ernesto, who like all of the world’s youngsters (and not only youngsters) was more concerned with himself than with others, went on. “I really love it,” he said. “Sunday I saw The Robbers by Schiller. It was great.”

  “Made you laugh?” the man asked distractedly.

  “Cry! I was so upset when I got home, my mother said that she’ll never let me go to the theater again. It’s throwing out money, she says, if I always come home feeling miserable.”

  “And you don’t have a father?” the man asked.

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, you only talk about your mother.” The man sounded almost apologetic.

  “I never saw my father,” Ernesto said.

  “He’s dead?” The man whispered the question.

  “No, he and my mother are legally separated. They separated six months before I was born.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t get along. That’s why I’ve never seen him. He lives in another city. I think he’s not even allowed to come back to Trieste. But it doesn’t matter to me if I see him or not. For all I care, he can stay wherever he is.”

  “So you live alone with your mother?”

  “My mother and a really old aunt. She’s the one with the money, and she hangs on to it. And I’ve got an uncle, he’s my legal guardian. But he’s married and doesn’t live with us. He only comes for dinner Sundays. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s too often. He’s crazy.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Totally nuts! A few days ago he tried to smack me as if I were a ten-year-old kid.” (Saying this, Ernesto skimmed the back of his hand along his cheek, making it clear that the threat had actually been carried out, though he was too ashamed to admit it.)

  “For what?”

  “For nothing. We were talking politics after lunch. I’m for the Socialists. You?”

  “I told you, I’m dumb. I don’t get mixed up with politics. But why’s it so important for you to be for the Socialists?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Because kids like you, they mostly take the boss’s side.”

  “Well, I don’t. I can’t stand it when one man profits off another man’s work.”

  “You said that to your uncle?”

  “Yeah, and a lot more. He may be crazy, but he’s not really mean. After he hit me, he gave me a florin. Three years now, he’s been giving me a florin every week. This Sunday, he gave me two instead of one. Maybe he felt sorry. Like I said, he’s more crazy than mean.”

  “Looks like it could be a good deal arguing with him every week.” The man laughed.

  “I don’t like arguing. Not that I give a hoot about him, but on account of my mother. It always upsets her. He’s her brother and she really loves him.”

  “She loves you, too—more than you think. How could she live with you and not love you?”

  “Why are you telling me stuff like that?”

  The man put his hand on the boy’s, which lay palm down on the sack. He looked nervous. “It’s really too bad,” he said, surprised and pleased that the boy hadn’t withdrawn his own.

  “What’s too bad?”

  “What I said before. That we can’t be friends, and go walking together.”

  “Because of the difference in our ages?”

  “Not that.”

  “Because you’re not dressed well enough? I already told you, things like that don’t make a bit of difference to me. So. . . .”

  The man was silent for a long time. He seemed to be uncertain of himself, as though he wanted to say something and yet not say it. Ernesto felt the hand resting on his own trembling. Then the man stared directly into the boy’s eyes, and as though taking a desperate risk, suddenly blurted in a stra
nge voice, “Do you know what it means for a boy like you to be friends with a man like me? Because if you don’t know yet, I’m not going to be the one to tell you.” He was silent again for a moment. Then realizing that the boy was blushing and had lowered his head, but had not withdrawn his hand, he added almost belligerently, “Do you know?”

  Ernesto withdrew his now damp and sweaty hand from the grasp, which had become tighter, and placed it timidly on the man’s leg. He moved it slowly up his leg until, as though by accident, it brushed lightly against his genitals. Then he raised his head, and smiling brilliantly, stared boldly into the man’s face.

  The man was consternated. His saliva dried in his mouth, his heart beat so quickly that he felt sick. All he could manage to say was “You understood?” which seemed more addressed to himself than to the boy.

  There was a long silence that Ernesto was the first to break. “I understood,” he said, “but where?”

  “What do you mean, where?” the man answered as though in a fog. Ernesto appeared more at ease than he.

  “To do that stuff that you shouldn’t be doing, don’t we have to be alone?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” the man replied.