Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [208]
The occasion was surreal, though I unfortunately never saw the programme, thus missing the performance of the ‘Internationale’ by the celebrated classical avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian. Inside a vast RAI (Italian television) hangar an elaborate set had been constructed round a giant papier-mâché head of Karl Marx, the top of which was removable. From it the presenter, a well-known comedian, would from time to time withdraw large cards marked CLASS STRUGGLE, DIALECTICS and the like. Something looking like a dacha on some Chekhovian country estate had also been constructed, on whose veranda I sat with the late Lucio Colletti, a brilliant ex-communist academic, with whom I was supposed to expound THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE for not more than five minutes, when it emerged from Marx’s head. He subsequently supported Silvio Berlusconi, but even he could not yet have known or perhaps imagined this in 1983.
I do not know what happened on the rest of that Evening with Karl Marx, but I left to collect my fee, offered in cash, from a young representative of the Italian state’s public service. She gave me the following advice: ‘You know, you’re not supposed to take so much money out of the country. The best thing, I suggest, is that you pack it between the shirts in your suitcase. They’ll never bother to look.’
I should recall the 1990s with pleasure. Il Secolo Breve ( The Age of Extremes) was a considerable success in Italy. In its public mode the Italian people threw out the most corrupt regime in Europe, utterly destroying the parties of the Cold War Republic. We were in Italy ourselves at the time of the elections of 1994 which reduced those fighting it under the name Christian Democrats and Socialists to thirty-two and fifteen seats respectively in a Chamber of Deputies of 630, a triumph already tarnished by the victory, shaky as it then was, of Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition. And yet, what was particularly disappointing for its old admirers, though no longer unexpected, was the failure of what had once been the PCI. Finally in a position to take its place at the head of a progressive democratic government, it was unequal to the task. As Britain, France and Germany were ruled by governments of the left, Italy entered the new millennium by getting ready for the first government clearly of the right since the fall of fascism.
For most Italians life went on, probably more satisfactorily than ever after the most miraculous half-century of improvement in their history. And yet, would one guess so from what is (at least in my opinion) perhaps the greatest book produced by an Italian in my lifetime, Italo Calvino’s wonderful Invisible Cities? (I recall him still, shortly before his untimely death, on his green roof terrace above the Campo Marzio in Rome, with a sceptical half-smile on his dark face, full of wit and tactful learning.) It is about the stories told to Kublai Khan, the Emperor of China, of cities, real, imagined or both, encountered by Marco Polo on his travels. It is about Irene, the city which can be seen only from outside. What is it like seen from within? It does not matter. ‘Irene is the name of a distant city. Once you get closer, it is no longer the same.’ It is also about the promised but undiscovered cities whose names are already in Kubla’s atlas: Utopia, the City of the Sun. But we do not know how to reach or enter them. And what, asks the Emperor at the end, of the nightmare cities, whose names we also know?
Polo: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if it exists, it is already here, the hell of our daily life, formed by living together. There are two ways of enduring it. The first is what many find easy: accept hell and become part of it, until you no longer see that it is there. The second is risky and needs constant attention and learning: in the midst of hell to look for, and to know how to recognize what is not hell, to make it last, to give it space.
That was not the spirit in which my generation, including Calvino, saw the Italy