PROFESSOR SAUSAGE  BECOMES  COMMENDATORE

A while ago a friend of mine from Australia told me the story of how Professor Salsiccia [sausage] was given the title of Commendatore della Repubblica Italiana.[1] Earlier, he had received the title of cavaliere by the king during the Fascist regime. My friend thought I would get outraged, instead he only succeeded in making me laugh. I answered: “It fits perfectly.” “Why?” he asked. “Because when I was younger—I explained—the title of commendatore was used for mockery. And onorevole[2] was an outright expression of scorn. These titles have been given to so many less-than-respectable individuals that young people considered them terms of ridicule, not as rewards to be aspired to as achievements in their future lives.”

I met Professor Salsiccia the first time I was invited to teach a summer course at

S. University, in Australia. In the suburbs of that city there lives an enterprising Italian community with its fruit-and-vegetables and fish markets. They had raised money and were able to endow a chair in Italian. The majority of the community did not speak Italian but mostly some dialects and broken English. Yet, they vaguely understood that in this new country their origins in a land known for arts, sciences and letters still had some cachet. On the occasion of great banquets, they would trade in Italian celebrities with the same ability reserved for selling fish in the market or get the general contract for a real estate venture. With absolute ease they could mix together Dante, Verdi, Puccini[3] and Marconi regardless of who they were and what they had done. The students called him Salsiccia for the color of his skin, closer to the gray variety of Tuscan cacciatora than the pinkish luganega of Lombardy.  The name referred also to his body, swollen with fat and overflowing with human odor; a body that he moved with great pump down the streets, advancing with a majestic posture and always admiring his own self-importance. He believed that people who had arrived at his level in life behaved in that manner. He wasn’t smart about anything and his body represented his vision of the world. When I first arrived at the university he made sure I understood I owed my appointment to him and him alone, that he was an important person at the university and that the Italian consul trusted him. About himself, he would say: “I follow my bosses’ orders.” His bosses were top university administrators to whom he would try to kiss up with regular Christmas and New Year’s cards; with words of obsequy and servility, and with poorly chosen wine gifts.  An expert in the arte del porvenir,[4] he even gave one of his superiors a Borsalino[5] hat as a gift. Unfortunately the hat did not become the face of the person whom he regaled: nature gave him a penchant for kissing

up to his bosses but not the sharp eye of an artist.

From the very beginning of our conversation I was struck by the complete absence in him of taste and artistic sensibility, of subtlety and critical ability. He was a teacher of Italian but he could not tell the difference in the sound of a verse by Petrarch and one by Dante. His knowledge of the language was atonal. He had learned the words but the words had no cultural or emotional resonance for him. When he spoke, the words were like metal pieces in a linotype machine, all melting at the same temperature. When I talked to his colleagues, they said the way to evaluate him was not by his intelligence or acuity, but by simple grammar and syntax. I happened to replace him once in a language class and I noticed he was using a twenty-year-old book. If anybody mentioned that the book was deficient in many ways, he would look at them askance, as if that were a personal insult. He had a total phobia of learning and changing what he had learned. Just the idea of changing the textbook to him felt like a criticism to his doctrine. Later, I also realized that he had no interest whatsoever in Australian literature. Whenever a contemporary author was mentioned, he would prick up his ears as if he smelled a trap and would only mumble some previously memorized trite clichés. Textbooks were the only source of his culture. His knowledge was based on anthologies; memorized passages; and critical essays published in some abridged version of a survey of Italian literature published for middle-school children. He never had a personal opinion and always found shelter behind somebody else’s critical assessment. His publications were dry, bookish and boring. In general, they consisted of collections of documents bunched together without any critical consideration. Complex and intricate points were always left without footnotes or, at most, were basic repetitions of information found in encyclopedias or anthologies. Astounding was his inability to comprehend the value of different sources and their prestige. The Peretola Review[6] and the Nuova Antologia for him were at the same level.  The historical contingencies didn’t matter. Whether a particular statement was made during a banquet or in a private letter or published in a book, it was all the same to him. It was in the documents, thus, it was enough. The more pages he put together the greater his work appeared to him, because it seemed that his brain resided in his backside.[7] He called this: scholarship. The sense of humor that abounds among Anglo-Saxons was completely missing in his conversation. He would take everything seriously, even himself and his degrees. He had learned nothing from the country that adopted him except self-delusion. He would look at me with apprehension because I didn’t have a laurea.[8] Someone must have told him I had done a few decent things for Italian literature, otherwise I am sure I wouldn’t have been allowed to join other laureati [college graduates] like him. At the graduation ceremony at the end of the academic year he would wear his gown with great pride; careful that his mortarboard fit perfectly; with honor cords and tassel perfectly straight and aligned. He took his task as usher very seriously: he would stand by the door collecting invitation cards or he would lead the participants to their seats. His face and gestures showed a profound sense of self satisfaction. One could find him inevitably at every sermon, academic function and funeral. On some of these occasions I noticed that in the days when he could wear cap and gown he would swell up. I mean it in real, physical terms. He was born to be an officer good for parades, but instead he had become a professor. Yet, his real nature would come through in those functions. He liked to project a sense of authority. Whenever he could, his girth would inflate, his face would expand and his words would become even more pompous and bombastic. Clichés and common places would reach incommensurable proportions. This was the moment when his only real passion revealed itself. This peculiar individual, insensitive to art; ignorant of philosophy; for whom religion meant only participation in Sunday social functions; would be moved to tears—literally—in front of the idea of power signified by a uniform, a beret, a cord or a little star. He would have done god-knows-what for an extra bar on the epaulets of the prison-guard uniform he was mentally wearing. I understood all this when I heard him deal with students who were taking one of his courses. He would literally sweat from the pleasure of having people under his power, people who, if they passed his course, one day would look back and know they owed to him the glory of wearing a mortarboard and golden honor cords.

I kept wondering how a person with no literary interest could end up occupying a position that was so diametrically opposed to his nature. Finally, I found an answer. One should never believe that in social life there is such a thing as unexplainable and unreasonable fortune.  Those who climb high must have some kind of qualities. The only question is whether the qualities match the nature of their success. In his case, Professor Salsiccia advanced by providing services. First of all, he was a faithful executor. There are so many arrogant scholars who are too busy with supposedly serious work and would never lower themselves to taking care of administrative duties. Salsiccia was only too happy to comply. He kept a meticulous archive with a card for each student where he reported every grade with comments on their progress. He truly enjoyed this job. To him, teaching Italian meant to keep the archive up to date.  He was also performing the same kind of services for the Italian consul. The overworked consul didn’t have the time to take care of school diplomas for Italians or Australians. Whenever new immigrants arrived with school-related problems, he would ask Salsiccia to solve them, and he was as happy as a seal in a pool to show his worth. He would look at the new arrivals with condescension and with the promise that he would take care of the problem. At the end of the conversation he would dismiss them with a pat on the shoulder, the same pat he was glad to receive from the university’s higher-ups. That’s how such an egregious ignoramus managed to become someone in Australia and in Italy. Without any human interest and artistic taste, with no intellectual curiosity, he had plenty of the wisdom of the peasant who has to navigate between the avid landlord, the sly merchants and the stubborn animals. All his acumen was directed, day and night, at playing different human elements against each other. And he became very good at that. He convinced the consul that he was a powerful figure at the university, where his colleagues considered him a little more than a dunce. With the university administration, he looked like he was the representative of Italians in Australia, a group of people the administration wanted to tap for donations. The administration could not judge him as a teacher in a discipline of which they were ignorant. The consulate considered him an ignoramus but thought that if Australians were so dumb as to give him a professorial position there was no harm in maintaining the fiction. When he got any kind of recognition from the consulate, he would use it with the university with the result of added cachet and a small salary raise. When the consulate sent him to Italy, several Italian academics who were hoping to be invited to Australia welcomed him with open arms, befriended him and treated him with the same kind of flattery that he would use to endear himself to his superiors. These very academics are now trying to get him a chair in an Italian university after he retires from his position in Australia. In the meantime they gave him an honorary doctorate.

On some occasions, though, Professor Salsiccia got involved in situations that were beyond his abilities. In those cases, his retreats have become famous. When he hitched his cart to a powerful person and, as sometimes happens, this person didn’t come out on top, Professor Salsiccia felt guilty, but only because he didn’t play the right card. Then, he did an about face. And since he had no finesse; wisdom or cleverness; he did so in such a coarse and transparent way that he got caught. He had bet on Fascism. He associated himself with the regime because he was convinced it would last a long time and even published books with the support of pro-Fascist organizations active in Australia. When Australia entered WWII against Italy, he understood the game was over and the ground had shifted under his feet. Always accustomed to be on the side of the authorities—like a good, solid cop—he wrote a letter to the city’s newspaper denouncing Mussolini. The newspaper published it immediately as a sign of genuine conversion.

This is not to say that he was evil. To be evil, one has to have some inner strength, and Salsiccia has none of it. I saw him try to destroy harmless, defenseless people. But he didn’t do it out of evil. It was just due to his ambition and vanity, none of which was commensurate with his abilities and strengths. In one occasion, he wanted to tear down the dissertation of a poor devil, an Italian Australian who had slaved for years doing research and trying to collect hard-to-find sources. The candidate wasn’t particularly bright but he could interpret those materials as well as Salsiccia. He also didn’t speak very good English, but neither could Salsiccia. Salsiccia had the accent of the low class districts where he grew up. For instance, he would pronounce foist for first and similar amusing things. In any case, he took a position against the dissertation not out of meanness but because of his swollen ego and the need to exercise authority. I remember I defended the poor devil, that dissertation toiler: my argument was that at that same university there were several professors who wrote English as badly as the doctoral candidate. Also, since the university was forcing people to write a book, even those who never had any intention to write one; the university was bound to tolerate that its library shelves would fill up with such monstrosities. In conclusion, a bit deviously, I reminded him that the departments gave a hundred dollars to professors who needed an editor to improve their language. Why couldn’t something similar be done for a student as well? My subtle ironies, more than the objective value of the dissertation, carried the day. The dissertation was approved, contrary to the opinion expressed with a chuckling voice by Professor Salsiccia.

A few years after my Australian visit, I heard he had been invited to give lectures in Italian universities. I also heard about the mockery he drew behind his back. Once, he sent a circular letter to Italian professors to inform them that he had been charged with an important responsibility and he could offer teaching positions to Italian students in Australia. This was immediately after WWII when jobs in Italy were extremely scarce. The hope to go to Australia triggered a great competition. Some professors took him seriously and many students believed in the scam. It never happened. Australia didn’t need professors, and even less it needed students to teach Italian. Professor Salsiccia did these kinds of things out of sheer vanity. When I confronted him about it, I realized he had no idea how much hurt he had caused. His only motive was his desire to aggrandize himself.

To conclude: for all these reasons I believe it was a good idea to award to him the honor of commendatore of the Italian Republic. This shows that the times haven’t changed. In the eras of Prime Ministers Giolitti [1892-1921]; Mussolini [1922-1943]; and Scelba[9] [1954-1955]; the orchestra conductor has changed, but the music has stayed the same.

New York, May 27, 1955