Leo Ferrero, the figure of anti-fascist theater rescued by a Spanish researcher

The Italian playwright Leo Ferrero.

What a hero, Orlando.

So full of courage, thirsty for justice.

Willing to challenge even the regent himself, the highest authority, to defend the young woman that the boss intends to rape.

And, above all, to protect the law and freedom.

What a fool, Orlando.

Convinced that another world is possible, that the people would rise up with it.

That the enlightened bourgeoisie would be at the height of history.

As if the flock did not prefer the comfortable defense of the

status quo

to revolution.

It is normal that the rebel ends up alone.

Or worse.

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The allusions in

Angelica

, the masterpiece of Leo Ferrero (1903-1933), were so evident in fascist Italy in the 1930s that the author wrote it during his exile in France.

It was performed there in 1936, although the writer was not able to see it: he had already died, at just 29 years old.

Another decade had to pass before the text could be disseminated in his country.

And now, after almost a century of silence, Orlando's failed struggle also reaches Spain.

The Renacimiento publishing house has published the tumultuous translation carried out in 1937 by Cipriano Rivas Cherif, playwright, ambassador of the Republic in Switzerland and brother-in-law of Manuel Azaña, recovered thanks to the almost detective work of a philologist and which remained unpublished until today.

Even the right to stay does not seem so remote, at least judging by the recent statements of the mayor of Terni, Stefano Bandecchi, in full municipal assembly, which pushed the opposition to leave the municipal assembly of the Italian city: “A man Normally he looks at another woman's pretty ass and maybe tries to pick her up.

And, if he gets it, he fucks her.”

Although for Paolo Puppa, Ferrero scholar and head of the Italian edition of

Angélica

(Metauro), there are many reasons that make it contemporary: “The petite bourgeoisie that jumps on the winning bandwagon, the lack of a serious elite in power, the leader-mass axis, the irrational and regressive use of concepts such as the enemy, identity or the nation: it is all very contemporary.

With the extreme right in the Italian Government and many no longer knowing the past, the need to rediscover it is more justified than ever.”

“The danger of totalitarianism is always around the corner.

"He is a timeless author," adds María Belén Hernández González, professor of Italian Philology at the University of Murcia, who searched among Cherif's papers for that old lost translation, unknown even to the son of the politician and writer, and who has been in charge of the Spanish edition.

In reality, very little is known about Ferrero himself.

So much so that both experts answer the question identically:

—How many citizens do you think this author is familiar with?

-To nobody.

Precisely for this reason, the two have taken on the mission of rescuing him.

And for the enormous literary, theatrical, political and social value that they find in their most successful work.

Symbol and summary, at the same time, of the life and beliefs of its unfortunate creator.

Son of the historian Guglielmo and the doctor and humanist Gina, Ferrero (1903-1933) was the grandson of the anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, still famous today for his theories on the physiognomy of the criminal and the prostitute.

He grew up, then, in an intellectual environment.

First point against the coming fascist regime.

To which the Ferrero Lombroso family added two others: Hebrews and liberals.

Leo himself was very soon linked to the magazine

Solaria

, an oven where thoughts that were too modern for the dictatorship were cooked, and to the Teatro D'Arte, a company eager for independence and renewal led by Luigi Pirandello.

That is to say, seen in another way, Ferrero accumulated enough sins to join, at a very young age, the list of purged and enemies of the regime.

A voice that claimed “the strong social and moral commitment of Italian literature” could not please the

Duce

's ears at all .

On the contrary, she had to be silenced.

In the late 1920s, political harassment of the Ferrero Lombroso family thus turned into house arrest, in their home on the outskirts of Florence.

No publishing, of course, or any other cultural activity.

Ferrero narrated it in his

Diary of a Privileged Under Fascism

.

And when he got a passport he fled to Paris, where he embraced the language and local life.

He “he felt guilty for leaving.

He was rich, he played the dandy, he loved conversations in literary salons and he swept even the older ladies.

At the same time, he suffered from terrible depression.

'Today I made a tremendous effort not to hang myself,' he wrote to a friend,” Puppa compiles.

In this context, in a few weeks, Ferrero wrote a very modern comedy of masks, centered on a paladin who stands up to the master who demands the right to stay over a girl.

In

Angélica

, the author expressed his talent, his complaints and even some of his personal traits.

“Orlando represents the intellectual committed to society and who society does not understand.

He did not want to identify the dictator with a person of flesh and blood, but with an absolute power that has its hands free and is surprised that the people are so easy to manipulate and are so afraid of freedom,” reflects Hernández González.

“Men do not like true heroes, they detest martyrs.

“They only want the selfish,” the regent states in the text.

“I have trampled them and they have cheered me.

I have stripped them and they have smiled at me,” he adds.

“Artists are, naturally, friends of kings.

Without them, where can you find work?” also reads in

Angélica

.

Dozens of similar phrases dot the 80 pages of the work.

Although, shortly after, Ferrero also left behind his latest creation and his second home.

A new concern, and a scholarship from Yale, took him to New Mexico for anthropological research.

He found, however, his death in 1933 in a traffic accident, just one of the greatest fears of his father, Guglielmo.

“There were no epitaphs.

Nello Rosselli [another retaliated anti-fascist intellectual and friend of the Ferreros] said that the greatest tribute, at a time of such barbarism in Italy, was precisely that no one remembered him,” Puppa points out.

His parents, on the other hand, found the text in 1934 and promoted its representation in France by the prestigious company of Georges Pitoëff.

But another death, of Luigi Pirandello, overshadowed Ferrero and the plans to continue staging his work, according to Puppa.

In Italy, years later, he only enjoyed a few performances.

In the fifties, amid desires to no longer look into the dark fascist past, the work was classified as “outdated.”

And forgotten.

Meanwhile, yes, it had been staged in Poland or Uruguay.

Not in Spain, of course.

“The situation those years was what it was,” summarizes Hernández González.

In Argentina, the theatrical premiere of

Angélica

was such a success that it was decided to publish it, as the Spanish publisher reconstructs.

But, between misunderstandings and poorly measured times, two translations had been launched at the same time: by the journalist José Blanco and by Cherif, who had met Ferrero's parents in Switzerland and had been fascinated by the work.

Although, finally, in another convulsive paradox, neither of them came out ahead.

That of the Spanish politician ended up in a drawer, from which it did not come out until now.

Almost a century late.

And, at the same time, just in time.

Orlando, however, may end up disappointed again: the world hasn't changed that much either.

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