This is my first novel, and I wrote it quickly, in a few months,
working on it nights and Sundays. Every Sunday at dawn, rain or shine, my
wife would go out of the house - a small apartment in a small city at the
gates of Venice - taking with her our two very young children, so that
from eight a.m. until noon I would be able to make headway on the book.
It was to be the justification not of my own life but of all my peasant
people, the fifth estate, which itself had never told its story, one of
enormous heroism and age-old resignation. Italian culture at the time was
concentrated entirely on the world of the workers, the city and the
factory: Calvino wrote for the intellectuals; Sciascia pursued the
vicissitudes of the Mafia, and the Mafia became for him a formula capable
of explaining the whole world, which appeared to him as a struggle
between rival clans; Moravia observed the idle and debauched Roman
bourgeoisie, a human type to whom sex is everything and occupies head and
heart. No one took any interest in the peasant world, this very vast
segment of Italy and Europe. In order to write this novel I had to
imagine a few ideal readers: Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy, Jean-Paul
Sartre in France. I must say that both of them proved to be highly
sensitive: Pasolini wanted to write the preface to the Italian edition,
and Sartre had the book translated immediately into French. Then there
was a Soviet intellectual named Breitburd, who often came to Italy for
congresses and discussions and was astonished that Italian literature
never spoke of the peasants. He personally translated The Fifth Estate
into Russian. He also wanted to translate the next book, Life
Everlasting,
and for this purpose moved into a dacha outside Moscow, but he died of a
heart attack halfway through the work, which was then completed by others.
"When I took a train across the broadest Italian plain,"
Breitburd wrote me, "from the most beautiful city, Venice, to the
richest one, Milan, I kept wondering what lay beyond the rivers and
levees I saw from the window ." What indeed lay there? It was the
"fifth estate." A humanity fettered for centuries, untouched by
the profound changes that have revolutionized the rest of Europe. A
"Third World" oasis, immobile and backward, in the heart of one
of the European nations undergoing the most dizzying transformations. A
segment of the population that did not even know the language of its own
nation, whether spoken or written. Mired in centuries-old beliefs: the
cult of the dead, departed spirits, fetishism, the presence of devils, a
Catholicism that flowed into paganism, a host of taboos, the absence of a
written tradition, the substitution of legends for history . A people
from whom everyone fled, intellectuals first of all. Sunk in oblivion,
this people had only one wish: to vanish, to be extinguished, without
anyone's knowledge.
Having been born in its midst, I was soaked through with its grandiose
and wretched, heroic and humiliating myths, like a sponge in a pail of
water. These myths, cruel and of the gentlest, hurt me like a tumor: I
had to detach them from myself and store them up. This was how the novel
The Fifth Estate was born. It is thus a testimony from within. I am well
aware that the reader-the European reader, but especially the American
one-will find every line incredible, but everything that is told here is
strictly true. A people that did not want to be known here finds itself
revealed to the reader (the enemy) by one of its sons: in a word,
betrayed. From that point on, writing has always been marked for me by
these two characteristics: it is a work of liberation, it is a work of
betrayal. I did not betray a man, because I did not tell of an individual
hero; I told of a community, I constructed a choral novel, whose
protagonist is a multitude: my people. The betrayal perpetrated by my
writing was thus directed against my roots, against myself. I believe
that therein lies the neurotic core of my writing: I write for others,
and against myself. In my own mind, I call The Fifth Estate the "geography"
of the peasant people. The next novel, Life Everlasting, I call the
"history." The first tries to tell the story of an archaic
community and "the way it works" through a myriad of
figures-persons, angels, devils, animals-and a mist of legends; the
second isolates, within this galaxy, the bright star of the Peasant
Resistance: a barbaric and visceral struggle with neither ideology nor
program. The peasant people on that occasion endured massacres and
reprisals that no one will ever recount, because history keeps its eyes
elsewhere. In Life Everlasting I tried as best I could to tell a portion
of this saga. In it there is a negative hero, of bestial ferocity. I left
him the name he had in reality. He was a colonel in the S.S., a certain
Lembke. I did not know that Lembke was still alive. The book, after a
series of translations-French, Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian,
Rumanian-was finally published in German as well, first in the Democratic
Republic, then in the Federal. There it became a best seller, with this
singular fate: Lembke was discovered, and preparations were made to bring
him to trial. On the eve of the trial, he died of a heart attack. Since
then I find myself thinking of Life Everlasting as a rifle shot,
fired from Italy at Germany, to strike the heart of an enemy of my
people. Thus between vengeance, betrayal, liberation, and condemnation,
writing strenuously consumes me, trapping me in a vicious circle from
which I see no escape.
Ferdinando Camon
Padua, 1987