Arrivederci, Roma

By R.Z. Sheppard

TIME OF DESECRATION by Alberto Moravia; Translated by Angus Davidson Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 376 pages; $12.95

Ancient Rome bestowed laws, roads, imperial machismo, crucifixions, la dolce vita and the drama of decline and fall, the longest-running show in Western history. The city continues to give the impression of crumbling into its own ruins, its reputation as decadence central cheered on by Fellini and Gore Vidal. But like a Verdi heroine dying with a knife in her breast, Rome continues to sing impressively.

No modern Italian knows this role better than Alberto Moravia, who has been Italy's leading literary celebrity for half a century. His first novel, The Time of Indifference (1929), scrutinized the bourgeoisie and the coming of Mussolini. His antiFascism and pungent tales gained audiences throughout Europe and the U.S. Films were based on his work, notably Two Women, which established Sophia Loren as a serious actress. Today his own scripts, movie reviews and articles are as much a part of Roman life as the traffic. In addition, Moravia benefits from the special relationship European authors have with their readers. Strangers greet him on the street, and journalists constantly seek his opinions. At 72 he still considers himself one of Rome's foremost "emergency intellectuals," a cultural SWAT team always ready to sign a petition, write protest letters or give interviews for liberal causes.

Such combat has not hindered Moravia's career. His entwined political and sexual themes were assured attention by strictures from il Duce and the Vatican. His latest novel, La Vita Interiore (The Internal Life), was banned last year under Italy's broad obscenity laws. The old national debate over censorship was rekindled; Moravia's gray head bloomed once again on magazine covers, and brawls erupted at public meetings where sections of the novel were read aloud.

Translated into English as Time of Desecration, the book arrives like an immigrant with a pocketful of soft currency. It is difficult to imagine how an obscenity case about a piece of Italian fiction will cause a stir in the U.S., where hard-core pornography can be bought openly in Mom-and-Pop candy stores. Furthermore, as Moravia readers might suspect, there is nothing pornographic about the novel. It is, in fact, highly moral and antierotic. The author has always treated unaffectionate sex as symptomatic of public disintegration and spiritual malaise. The more convoluted the sex, the more disturbed the character or the society.

Still, it is easy to see why Italy's guardians of public morals are upset. The novel is a highly styled fictional essay that depicts the middle class as wallowing neurotically in money and flesh while young terrorists wait in the wings to put them out of their misery.

Viola is a rich American-born Italian who yearns to make love to her adopted teen-age daughter while being sodomized by the family business adviser. Translation: international capitalism and/or the bourgeoisie without social roots and responsibilities are oral and anal erotics seeking to relieve their anxieties with kinks and the false security of filthy lucre. When the psycho-symbolism hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's definitely not amore.

Daughter Desideria does not think so either. She is shocked out of an obese adolescence by her mother's goings-on.

As her name suggests, Desideria has obsessions and longings of her own. She is an arresting character whose heartless voice dominates the narrative, cleverly cast as an interview: Moravia asks the questions and then ventriloquizes Desideria's bizarre tale.

Desideria's natural mother was a prostitute who sold her to Viola, who fluctuates between being an overattentive parent and an insatiable bisexual. Left alone, Desideria fills her loneliness with autoeroticism and calories. Viola puts the girl on a diet and discovers a voluptuous beauty beneath the flab. Reborn, Desideria hears a voice that commands her to attack her mother's values and property and save her virginity for a militant radical. At first the rebellion is symbolic, a form of childish Dada ("Practically the whole of our life is a tissue of unreasoned respects, of unfounded taboos," says Desideria). But eventually the voice calls for and gets real blood.

Moravia has always been adept at manipulating literary conceits for startling effect. He once wrote a novel about a man who talked to his penis. An Italian Joan of Arc who hears the voice of nihilism calling her to action is a promising conception, and the author has not lost his admirable appetite for extremism in the defense of humanism.

But Time of Desecration is not extreme enough. Its materials call out for the purging effects of outrageous comedy. There is some bitter wit in Desideria's cold-eyed observations, but her force as a character is throttled by garrulous abstractions. She is convincing only when she is a sounding board for Moravia's feelings, most tellingly: "I had been bourgeois, I was bourgeois, I would remain bourgeois, forever. "

Excerpt

"I: I now know a good many things about Viola, but not what she was like. Tell me what she looked like, physically.

Desideria: She was... two-sided.

I:Two-sided?

Desideria: Yes, she was different when seen from the front or the back. If you looked at her from in front, you saw a mature woman with a wasted, deteriorated, worn-out body. Her neck looked decrepit, with two or three circles of wrinkles all round it; on her chest, her breasts hung down like two brown bags, deflated and flabby; her belly, possibly because of an interrupted pregnancy, was a regular network of thin folds. But if you told her to turn round, you then saw the back of a young woman, a woman of less than thirty. Her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, her thighs looked mysteriously yet eloquently -- graceful, sensual, provoking.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

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