The Campaigner

particularly with women, in his infancy. His mother
related to him through her recognition of his suffering,
but also through her own active suffering in response to
him. By rushing out to buy a coffin and funeral apparel
for the child in a space of a three days' illness, the
mother eloquently expressed her readiness to pronounce
the death sentence on her child and her willingness to
wrap herself in mourning weeds.
It was the aunt, the mother surrogate, who snatched
Antonio from death, resorting to a magical procedure
involving the child's body and, significantly, enlisting the
aid of still another woman, the super-sadistic Holy
Virgin.
Antonio was thus plunged into death by one mother
and plucked out by two others; and to all three he was
supposed to offer thanks for having saved him! Then he
was again relinquished to his fate -- again by a mothersurrogate
(the maid), and he was mourned throughout
his lifetime by his mother, and later by his wife and
morning he found preserved in the house, served as re- sister-in-law, whose suffering he was convinced he had
minders of his own death. Then the evil powers, not caused.[104]
satisfied with his quick recovery, decided to subject him Even as a child, Antonio had some conscious
to a longer, more certain dying process, which was to be awareness of these terrifying feelings. "For many years,"
his life as a hunchback. That the deformity developed as he wrote later, "I have been accustomed to thinking that
a result of a fall (at least as far as Antonio knew) was it is absolutely impossible, almost by fate, for me to be
crucial to his feeling unloved, and to his understanding loved. As a boy of ten, I began to think this of my
of love relations in general. In letting him fall from her parents. I was forced to make too many sacrifices and my
embrace, the maid mother-image had violently rejected health was so weak that I was convinced I was simply
contact with the child, abandoned him, thrown him tolerated, an intruder in my own family. These are things
away. that are not easily forgotten, and leave much deeper
Furthermore, this consummate act of non-love left scars than one might imagine." [105]
Gramsci with a permanent scar, a growing deformity, In all the tortures inflicted on Antonio by mother
singling him out as a disgraziato ("wretch," but literally surrogates, the father-figure remains an impotent
"out of grace"). Non-love was thus also a devastating nothing removed into the background.
expression of sadism, manifest physically and This emotional absence of the father, which left the
psychologically in the child's identity, child totally at the mercy of his gaggle of mothers, soon
As a grotesque answer to Antonio's "fall from grace" turned into real, physical absence, when Signor Gramsci
or from love, the therapeutic magic of the ceiling was sent to prison.
apparatus intensified the humiliation and terror. To Here again the event was enveloped in mystery and
hang from the ceiling a child who had suffered a magic, as no one said anything to make this child's
traumatic tall was to recall the terror in regular, inferno a rational world. Antonio's mother suffered in
prolonged, intervals; this time, though he was not held, loud silence, scurrying off to cry in church, sacrificing
but hung up like a coat or a salami, a thing dangling in herself to support the children, etc. Already wellthe
air for all the human beings to stare at from a educated in the art of suffering, Antonio respected his
distance. And this, they told him, would "mat_e him mother's martyrdom, hiding his own pain, his own
better." The child's self-conception from the beginning knowledge by inference of where his father was, so as not
was informed by suffering and pain, whose remedy, he to hurt her. "If my mother knew that I know all that I
learned, was more suffering, more pain. know and that those events left their marks on me, I
Gramsci did not solely identify with his own suffering would be poisoning these years of her life."[106]
as a thing-in-itself. His identity, based on the It is no wonder that theyoung Gramsci was described
internalization of the social relations developing him, by those who knew him as melancholy, withdrawn,
emerged from the pattern of relationships established, unlike a child; one acquaintance said of him that he