Homecoming

“Dear Mariassa, after your postcard from Rome I was expecting a telegram,” he wrote on 7 June 1934, “that would have announced the triumph of our girls, classified, examined, sounded out, complimented and asked for in marriage by the members of the commission. I take this opportunity to inform you that I feel no worse and that my soul is no more in peril than usual. Appetite, nutrition, replacement parts, hormonal circulation normal, at least for me. Conquests are also stable. I hope that this good news will come to comfort you in my absence, which is destined to be prolonged. Our ineffable Minister, so worthy of those who command (and those who command him), has exempted us in some way from the lessons, as long as our presence ensures the continuity of ‘academic life’. And so, among the ministerial circulars, the redoubled zeal of our vacillating Rector, the fezzes (no pun intended) of the Academic Senate, the GUF, the Fascist University Groups, sitting in the great hall and the balilla who pis... in the courtyard, the university has become an authentic barracks worthy of Courteline (an allusion to Lo squadrone si diverte by Georges Courteline, author’s note), [...] and yet there isn’t too much to complain about... When I return permanently to Naples I will feel as if discharged, and I will send you one of those beautiful postcards in superimposed colour, which can be admired in the tobacconists’ displays. In the meantime, I’m going back and forth to Venice where the Biennale offers new and interesting documentation of that universal mediocrity which has been euphemistically called ‘clarification’. Let me have your news and that of the jeunes filles en fleurs.”