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Note
on
The Political Prisoner
Based
on the novel The Political Prisoner (1955) by Cesare Pavese, this
is about a communist exile in Calabria, the toe part of Italy.
The politics, a puritanical Leninism, is hinted at, but it could
be any kind. The loneliness
is suffered for a cause. The
country of exile seems to him to ‘shrink when it rains’.
He cannot hate it for that.
Even his attraction towards the girl is numb, emotionless.
He’d like to cut her from his brain and think of nothing.
Whether, as he sits taking coffee among the local bores, he
really lays his heart bare to them is doubtful.
His eyes latch onto single things and he’s fixated but
incurious,
blocking the gauche littoral with gauging thumb.
I wouldn’t generalise from this
single portrait, but I’d let the character in it do so:
All exile is voluntary, the world’s a cage.
Is it surprising that a type who thinks the world a cage should
aspire to leadership? He
has in childhood been a loner. That
might be disturbing. Some
sociopaths are loners. What
would this one be like as leader, between the ‘Heil!’ and the last
bunker?
The wide-hipped
girl, in her garden with its red geraniums, seems to live in a happier
state of mind, and retires to a house which the daylight pierces,
unlike:
... the grey room he inhabits, reads all day in,
...
tight the doors and windows, as if trapping a void.
His political friends in the North were ‘functional’; the
vacuum he lives in wouldn’t change if he were a leader in a palace.
His thought of the girl ‘liberates’ him from any desire for
her. It wouldn’t actually do to possess what the ‘village
brawn, the gobbing corner jacks’ all seem to have had.
He must keep pure for his cause:
One day he’ll leave and will have kept his faith,
no flower’s red to mind but the grey north then;
start a cell again; learn more about and extend
this coma that stings, the innerness of freedom.
To him freedom, for which he fights, presumably, is an inner
quality anyway, and one wonders if he hasn’t mistaken his vocation.
On balance, a chilling picture.
Alan
Marshfield
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