Cesare Pavese and America: Life, Love, and Literature

Three. Tina

THREE Tina R Battistina Pizzardo was first introduced to the literary world as a series of editorial asterisks in Pavese’s published letters and the early editions of his diary; then as “the woman with the hoarse voice” to readers of the earliest biography of Pavese.1 Pavese and all her other friends called her Tina.2 Like Pavese, she came from a middle-class family, hers strongly Catholic. Her mother died when Tina was nine and her father, employed in the Turin office of one of Italy’s large insurance companies, placed her in a strict, all-girls Catholic boarding school, which she attended for eight years. Then, after a year of private tutoring and preparatory courses, she matriculated at the University of Turin in 1920. Her father’s support for her university education was, at the time, as Giovanni De Luna comments, “unusual given their social position.”3 So was her choice to study mathematics and physics; it meant, among other things, that she went from a religious secondary school with only female teachers and students to a secular university department overwhelmingly male in both categories . She coped well, loved her years at the university, and remembered them as a time of cultural and social exploration, learning, and, above all, friendships formed. Also at the university she made her first contact with communists. She received her laurea in 1925 and in March 1926 went to Rome to take the written parts of two competitive examinations for public school teaching positions. [฀฀57 ] 58 ]฀CHAPTER THREE While there, she made contact with the local communist students’ cell and met one of its members, Altiero Spinelli, four years younger but already much more committed and politically active than Pizzardo. They began to spend time together. She found him interesting but notes in her memoirs that she was for him more an ideal than a love and claims she never truly fell in love with him. Nonetheless, in April 1927, while on a short break from her first teaching job, she spent two days with him in Milan, where they had, as she puts it, their “first intimacy .” It turned out to be their last because Spinelli was arrested on June 3, 1927, in Milan and not long afterward sentenced by the Fascist Tribunale Speciale to sixteen years and eight months in jail. He ended up spending ten years in various Italian prisons and then six years in confino.4 For Pizzardo, however, he figured for many years mostly as an obligation. She says that they eventually would have broken up because of their incompatible personalities, but with his imprisonment, and his refusal to petition for a pardon, she thought it her duty to maintain the fiction of their relationship. Spinelli’s mother managed to convince the authorities that her son and Pizzardo were officially engaged and thus Pizzardo was able to visit him from time to time and they could write each other, though knowing full well all their letters were being censored. For her first teaching job the Ministry of Education posted her to a liceo in Grosseto, a medium-sized city in southwest Tuscany, where she taught mathematics. She also became the secretary of the city’s small communist cell—five members in all—and weekly met with a messenger from the regional center in Ancona, across the Apennines on the Adriatic coast. As happened to virtually all inscribed communists in Fascist Italy, she was put under surveillance and eventually arrested. In the summer of 1928 she was sentenced to a year in jail, three years of special surveillance, and barred for life from any public position, which included teaching in public schools. Because she had already served over ten months in jail awaiting trial, she was set free a month and a half later and returned to Turin in September 1928. Pavese at this time was entering his third year at the university. In the five years before they met, while Pavese was writing his Whitman thesis and his first essays and doing his first translations, Pizzardo was trying to figure out how to make a living. She found temporary work in various offices and tutored privately before the influential TINA [฀59 mother of a friend from boarding school found her a permanent job in Igea Marina, a seaside town on the Adriatic seven miles north of Rimini. There, from 1929 to 1932, she managed the...