Buzzati and Nabokov: It is not about desire

Lolita has been studied as a courtly romance about ill-fated passions, relatable to a Freudian puzzle. LR Hiatt, writing in American Imago, proposes that “Humbert's obsession with nymphets in general, and Lolita in particular, is an attempt to re-experience the fresh, unspoiled love of his mother during infancy” (Hiatt, 1967: 361). John M Ingham openly defines Humbert as “a middle-aged pedophile with a fancy prose style” (Ingham, 2002: 27). Somewhere along the line, Brandon S Centerwall remarks Nabokov's conduct toward children as a “personal torment” by writing: “If we come to grant that Lolita embodies the author's hopeless desire for forbidden fruit, the text will be invested with its true tragic” (Centerwall, 1990: 468). Not every scholar agrees. As Alfred J Appel, editor of The Annotated Lolita and Lolita's most prolific critic, puts it, “Lolita is not merely about sexual perversion, but rather about love and the search for ineffable beauty, and as such … ultimately ‘about’ its own creation” (Appel, 1967: 111). Surely Humbert, Lolita's lover, would reject the accusation of pedophilia: “After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen (…) and when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve, running in the wind” (Nabokov, 2000: 12). It is unfortunate that Humbert fails to mention that Dante and Petrarch were the same age as their loved ones. When Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) wrote Lolita (1955), Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) was already an established Italian writer, essayist, and journalist. Yet while research by Italian scholars is in abundance, very few English counterparts seem aware of his oeuvre. This is perhaps the reason why one of his last texts, Un Amore (1963), remains unknown to the international audience. If Lolita was accused of pedophilia, Un Amore (English: A Love Affair) was accused of being an expression of cold eroticism and arid intellectualism devoid of passion; accused of speculating on the phenomenon of “lolitism,” and Milanese boredom. A novel too anchored to reality, which, due to “a moment of creative fatigue” (Stefanile, 1963), turned the author away from the magic of his best narrative, allegedly The Tartar Steppe. While it is safe to say that Buzzati's text comes with shades of “lolitism,” both artistic attempts are far from enacting pedophilia (Lolita) and sterile eroticism (Un Amore); the story of a modern urban man yearning for adventure and the story of a middle-class attitude toward a prostitute is no more than a 20th-century stereotype. Instead, I suggest we should read the two novels as a tale in which love is a metaphor that speaks of contemporary alienation, and simultaneously of salvation.

Only a few know what love is. This is the statement used by Dino Buzzati to explain that Un Amore was not some sort of Italian version of Lolita. ¹ Far from being evidence of plagiarism, the text is genuine and imbued with humanity. In the introduction of the Mondadori edition (1965), Alberico Sala defended the author by writing that Buzzati “had never been so sincere, alive and restless” (Buzzati, 1965: 7). In the same vein, Carlo Bo has to write of “a courageous book, in its own way a confession […]: a man, a courageous writer is not found so often” (Buzzati, 1965: 9). But it is Eugenio Montale who confesses the un-confessable:

With the new novel, A love, we are in the heart of realism and psychologism, in the dissection almost anatomical of an amorous sentiment that many will say pathological, but in reality, all men who do not have the eyes and the heart lined with a rind of bacon have virtually at least tried. ²

If the experience of Antonio Dorigo is not pathological and if Montale is correct, then the significance of Dorigo's and Humbert's obsessions lies somewhere else. Hence, in this article, I will advance an alternative reading. I will not work through an additional proof of Humbert's attempt to recover the “unsullied” relationship with the mother through pedophilia. Nor will I discuss the erotic theme of the tempting woman and the obsession with a wrong love. Scholarship has lingered long enough on it. I will leave aside the question of immorality which clearly still hovers about the novels and I will approach the texts through decadent Wilde-like lenses: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Wilde, 2006: 3). ³ My intention is to explore specific images in Lolita and Un Amore so to place the novels into relationship with the canon of beauty and youth and into the great tradition of novels of time and memory that had begun with Proust and Woolf. ⁴ Which is not to separate the transcendental synthesis between beauty and virtue, but to rightly connect beauty to another dimension equally aphoristic, youth indeed. Hence, once more to place art beyond morality.

Salvation through youth

Despite being forged with different narrative plots, Lolita and Un Amore are undeniably constructed on similarities. Novels of strong linguistic experimentalism, somewhat a postmodern reinterpretation of the Joycean consciousness, the texts become a stream of consciousness without commas, dots, or ending. Syntax repeatedly shatters, punctuation dissolves, time expands disproportionately, and the language welcomes a wide range of slang expressions. Yet, perhaps the most striking parallelism is in the 30-year age gap between the partners: Lolita-Humbert (12–42) and Laide-Antonio (20–50). ⁵ Allegedly, Lolita is the distorted story of a nymphet, a sexually precocious girl, and a middle-aged man. A fictional psychologist named John Ray Jr introduces the novel, presenting it as a case study in abnormal psychology that will become “a classic in psychiatric circles” (Nabokov, 2000: 4). He explains that it was written as a literary confession by a “shining example of moral leprosy” (Nabokov, 2000: 4) who refers to himself in the manuscript as Humbert Humbert. Humbert, a middle-age European professor, falls (or lusts obsessively) for the 12-year-old nymphet Lolita (real name, Dolores Haze), whom he has abducted after her mother's death. When Lolita eloped with the mysterious Clare Quilty, playwright and pornographer, Humbert, in a parodistic manner, murders him, and finally recounts the whole affair. When the text is ready for publication both the author and Lolita are dead. Humbert died of a heart attack while awaiting trial in prison, and the latter died in childbirth on Christmas Day. Somewhere along the line, Un Amore is also a more or less autobiographic story. ⁶ Antonio Dorigo, an ordinary man, 50-year-old Milanese architect, bachelor, and frequenter of brothels, is involved in a painful affair with an unremarkable call girl, also a part-time young ballerina at La Scala, Laide. While Nabokov set his tale on the road, Buzzati places his protagonists against the backdrop of Milan in the 1960s, a portrait of the metropolis and a symbol of Babel of all times. The center of the Italian economic boom is a Dantesque hell but also a place of magic:

[Milan is] tiny and winding in the popular and silent neighborhoods, in which an enigmatic, almost dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish humanity wanders; it also has vertical structures, walls that rise high and limiting, or lines that outline metamorphic forms that change and dissolve, and you never know well enough what the shape of reality really is. (Zambon, 2019: 142)

Well-blended in it is Laide. She is bold, mischievous, flirtatious, popular, and confident; he is a bourgeois of conventional morality. As they take to dating also privately, but without dissolving their economic constraint, she becomes his lover; yet despite being him to pay her, the whimsical Laide with her beauty and youth leads the game of a relationship made, for Antonio, of humiliations and false expectations. Life becomes a hell of jealousy: the thought of her haunts him in every moment, the doubts of her whereabouts are twisted with the agony, the anguish, the anxiety, the humiliation of his desire. Anna Pozzi made of Un Amore a tragedy of love, a “detailed and unreserved description of the intimate fragility of the man, better said, of the successful male, now mature for years, but immature in [his] soul” (Pozzi, 2012: 190). Scholarship has focused on the discourse of desire: “Antonio Dorigo waits and, waiting for the paradoxical object of his desire, the prostitute Laide, in herself insignificant, burns at her absence” (Salvioli, in Borelli, 2014: 21). It is the very same Buzzati who wants us to believe that Un Amore is about unfulfilled desire: “What is that you desire? You desire what you do not have, and what you do not know. When you have something and you know it perfectly, the desire decreases automatically” (Panafieu, 1973: 86). While the references to unrequited love and desire are both suggestive and evident, neither is decisive to explain Antonio's obsession. After all, as Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay, “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946: 468). In Humbert's and Antonio's universe, love and the sexual act are but the peripherical side effects and not the core of similar fascinations. Otherwise stated, it would be misleading to accept eroticism as the motif beneath Nabokov's and Buzzati's intentions.

Lust, which fills both texts, must not be understood as the central quality of the relationships. It is more of a fascination. Dorigo would gladly eliminate completely the sexual aspect of it: “To Antonio the physical possession mattered relatively, if not very little” (Buzzati, 1965: 64). If Laide, for any reason, had been incapacitated from having sexual intercourse, it would have been altogether better: “This is perhaps the only chance that Laide, if only out of gratitude, would begin to love him” (Buzzati, 1965: 65). By the same token, Humbert disclaims the relevance of erotic feelings to his story: “I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets” (Nabokov, 2000: 89). The allegedly pornographic story is thus an artistic attempt to escape the inevitable decadence of the body. “Sex is the ancilla of art” (Nabokov, 2000: 172) is Humbert's final admission, for Nabokov wants to confirm that sexual desire was not the trigger of his anti-hero's passion. And the argument is, of course, valid for Buzzati as well. To fix youth into a shape, not by sexually possessing the object of desire, but by pinning childish innocence to the definition of a craving beauty, is the un-decoded textual pattern. The female aesthetic object which becomes attainable, and the male unrestrained emotional life drifting in and off between despairing love, lust, and yearning, makes it possible for some sort of magic that needs to be captured. ⁷

In terms of content, both are stories in which nothing happens, or in which the same things happen over and over. Both stories are told from the male perspective, the middle-aged, timid, and bored anti-hero. Mature professionals, two intellectuals, professors, ostensibly deeply in love with a very young woman; but they are also men who have waited too long, who have remained in adolescence and believe that the feeling of love can work miracles. Dorigo's intelligence breaks before a woman: “In front of a woman he was no longer the almost famous artist (…) with women everything was different, he became an ordinary, unstable personality” (Buzzati, 1965: 3); Humbert is simply incapable of dealing with women, thus his attraction for “nymphets,” young girls mostly working in the entertainment industry. Their appreciation is that of a hedonist; it is immortal beauty that they are after, not sexual gratification. Even so, they are moved by dominating tendencies, obsessive thoughts, and pathological jealousy versus an invisible enemy. Humbert is threatened by youth, for he attributes to it a power he no longer has: “But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster” (Nabokov, 2000: 222). It is the word “regime” that informs of the repressive nature of their relationships and the crash in their dignity. Fearing that Lolita is secretly meeting someone else, Humbert drives her away on a second cross-country tour. By this time, his paranoid suspicions have so escalated that he takes a gun with him, “in order to break some pattern of fate” (Nabokov, 2000: 142) in which he was unconsciously netted. The image of Lolita giving herself to another man triggers his animal instinct:

I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her. I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman's fancy. (Nabokov, 2000: 142)

Likewise, Buzzati designs a pattern in which Laide repeatedly deceives Antonio, forcing him to petty humiliations, such as making him play the part of an unlikely uncle. For his part, Antonio builds a dense network of self-deception to keep himself alive. Only at times does he seem to realize that he has lost his mind for a girl who does not deserve his misery. But immediately his obsession takes over logic, and his present time becomes once more “the scattered shreds of a portrait that Antonio could not decipher” (Buzzati, 1965: 119). On the other hand, women too young are already charged with cynical impudence. Perhaps as a form of nemesis they are scrutinized as aesthetic objects; the door of their consciousness is never opened to us. We always view Lolita and Laide from the outside without acknowledging the personality behind Lolita and Laide; we observe Laide undressing but we do not know what she wants. We are told about Lolita seducing Humbert at first, but we ignore the reason why she does it. However, Laide is not Lolita. Montale marks a radical difference: “Laide is not Lolita, because Lolita stands before the vice, she is touched but not properly involved while Laide is kneaded and troubled while saving something of herself (her whim)” (Buzzati, 1965: 119). Of opposite view is the judgment of Pietro Citati on the comparison with the character of Nabokov:

The young Laide, the beloved, inverecond, plebeian milanese “Lolita” has nothing in common with the gorgeous model she would like to look like. It does not sow around itself, like Humbert Humbert's grand péché radieux, triumphant waves of life. This long love ignores sensual passion: grey, dull, sleazy, it never arouses that warm, irrational surge of vitality in which even the darkest loving feeling fascinates itself. Laide is the center of a pure psychological mechanics; and it is content to produce atony, depression, turpitude with a rhythm so frantic as to simulate the presence of life. (De Petrillo, 2013: 17)

Laide might not have Lolita's vitality but that is because she is beyond enchantment. She accepts Dorigo's money and offers him in return only a passive body and a minimal amount of her time. As his passion for her gets out of control, she becomes cruelly opportunistic, humiliating, and patronizing. And if Lolita never reaches the same degree of deception that is because magic is still possible in her childish world. Undeniably, Lolita and Laide both consider their men as no more than a tedious duty. It is perhaps Nabokov that gives the most fitting definition: “a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come” (Nabokov, 2000: 332). Buy neither Antonio nor Humbert are dull in their defining moments. Recently, Maud Chia-Rousseau made of Humbert a romantic vaniteux: “The romantic vaniteux is the individual who believes in the absolute authenticity of his desires, although he systematically borrows them from others” (Chia-Rousseau, 2016: 138). Hence, Humbert becomes a poet who captures beauty within youth. At first, it was Annabel Leigh, Lolita's predecessor, a girl he loved “in a princedom by the sea” (Nabokov, 2000: 5), with a clear allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's poem Annabel Lee which ends with the girl's death “in the kingdom by the sea” (Poe, n.d.). Following his confidence about an initial child-girlfriend, Humbert narrates his meeting with Annabel Leigh. Poe's line “Many a year ago” resonates with “about as many years” (Nabokov, 2000: 5); the “winged seraphs of heaven” become in Humbert's memory “noble-winged seraphs” (Nabokov, 2000: 5), an expression that Humbert uses to address the reader, hence the jury. And Poe's line “my darling—my darling—my life and my bride” is a diction that Humbert also uses to refer to Lolita (Nabokov, 2000: 30). The choice of Poe is significant, for he married his cousin when she was 13, the same age as Lolita during their elopement; subsequently, Annabel Leigh appears to be molded in accordance with Annabel Lee (they both die of illness at the age of 13) as much as Lolita is modeled on Annabel Leigh. But in the last analysis “Annabel Lee” is the ghost behind Humbert's desire for Lolita. Humbert, in Proustian mood, searching for the lost time in the present, and needing “to control time beyond the limitations of human mortality” (Anderson, 1980: 369), resuscitates Annabel (Leigh) in Lolita to whom he refers as Lenore (Nabokov, 2000: 136), again with clear reference to Poe's most famous poem The Raven. The fact that Lolita is some sort of projection of his fantasy is evident in the passage in which Humbert describes his first reaction to seeing Lolita in the backyard of her mother's home:

I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery (…) from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. It was the same child. … (Nabokov, 2000: 25)

In this sense, Humbert loves Lolita only as a rediscovery of Annabel. He is projecting Annabel's image, her memory frozen at the time of her death, onto any girl of the same age and later specifically onto Lolita. Surprisingly, he seems to be aware of it: “What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita perhaps more real than Lolita (…) and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own” (Nabokov, 2000: 41). If we believe that Humbert genuinely loves Lolita, we should consider that Lolita is a mental projection of Annabel, and the two of them, Annabel and Lolita, are not the object of an erotic quest, but the core of Humbert's search for youth. Alongside this reading, it is engaging to notice that Annabel (année belle) means in French “good year,” less literally “the Year of Beauty,” while Lolita's real name is Dolores which in Spanish means “pain.” Annabel was the time of beauty because so was youth with its perfection; Lolita comes with pain, for Humbert slowly realizes that perfection was no more than a temporary illusion. William Anderson noticed that there is a span of 24 years between Annabel and Lolita, which recalls Marlowe's Dr Faustus who bargains with the Devil to surrender “up to him his soul So he will spare him four and twenty years. /Letting him live in all voluptuousness. …” (Marlowe, 1969: I, iii, 11. 89–91). Faust and Humbert devotedly trade grace for an empty reward. Anderson expresses the matter well as follows: “The twenty-four years of Humbert's search for nymphet magic correspond to the twenty-four years of Faustus’ false and self-condemning quest for the power of necromancy” (Anderson, 1980: 374). Needless to say that Faust, incapable of repentance, will be damned at last. In a similar fashion, Humbert is figuratively damned to defeat for having attempted to refrain from aging. Before meeting Annabel and Lolita, both nicknamed with mythological aliases, respectively “elf” and “nymphet,” Humber writes an academic essay titled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin” which clearly triggers an allusion to “A la recherche du temps perdu” and “Ode on a Grecian urn.” Specifically, Keats’ poem is famous for its equation of beauty with truth. The urn stands for a timeless object of art, but timeless is also its representation, the bucolic scene of two lovers running after each other longing for a kiss that will never happen. All the same, beauty and youth shall remain: “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair” (Keats, n.d.). The frozen image is of “All breathing human passion far above,” for it is immortal; in other words, immortality has been frozen into an image. Humbert is after the same magic spell—to perpetuate life in frozen urn-time—and to do so he envisions his desire in Lolita. Lolita is to Humbert what the urn was to Keats: the vision of immortality. Or the appearance of it. Lolita's youth is an age of perfection, for it is a moment of anticipation where virtually anything is possible and Humbert knows this very well for he has to confess that the attraction lies in “a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had” (Nabokov, 2000: 175). In this vein, Humbert's melancholic yearning for youth finds its natural solution in Lolita's infantile beauty, her body being the prototype of youth. By having a relationship with an adolescent, Nabokov allows Humbert to escape, to some degree, the progression of time and embrace the power to control time beyond the limitations of human mortality. Hence, it is after Humbert and Lolita have sex for the first time at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel that Humbert plainly writes that he was not interested in sex as such but wanted “to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets” (Nabokov, 2000: 89). Here perhaps is the core of Humbert's love. To “fix” the nymphet suggests his desire to fix youth in a form, seemingly frozen in Lolita's 12-year-old beauty. Brenda Megerle expressed the matter well as follows: “Part I of Lolita seems to be a story about a desire that can be consummated, while Part II is more clearly about a desire that cannot be” (Megerle, 1979: 342). In fact, it is the very same fugacity of the sexual act to play out as a metaphor for the obvious grand finale: the enchantment of youth is unattainable for those no longer young. At last, Lolita escapes from Humbert, on July 4; by freeing herself from her immortal frozen image, Lolita celebrates her Independence Day. The next and last time we see her she is “pale and polluted, and big with another's child” (Nabokov, 2000: 185).

We should read Buzzati's novel in a similar manner. One of Buzzati's main critics, Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti, evaluates the ending in negative terms: “On this episode [Ch. XXXII] Buzzati's novel ends as a work of creation and research. What follows is truly the appendix of a bad entertainment novel, which even falls into pathetic” (Squarotti Bàrberi, 1992: 171). Instead, it is the very last chapter to enlighten the novel with an allegorical, and perhaps alternative, meaning. In 1958, a few years before the release of Un amore, the Merlin law had come into force in Italy, de facto abolishing state-regulated prostitution. ⁸ The bill had caused a rift in Parliament and society and Dino Buzzati had sided with those opposed to the closure of prostitution houses, claiming their dignity and viewing the law as the destruction of an essential cultural institution. Given that, the novel embodies the author's institutional view. However, despite its success, with Un Amore Buzzati is reproached by many for the loss of that something that has made him distinguishable in the contemporary literary panorama; his is a “conversion from metaphysical and symbolic stories and satirical-humorous stories to the most vivid realism of a tormented love story” (Pedullà, 1963). As for Lolita, associating an ancient topic, such as love or sexual desire, to Un Amore would be at least incomplete. On the surface, Buzzati proposes again the single, all-inclusive theme of man's need to find meaning. As Marilyn Schneider (1969) has already observed, in the Tartar Steppe Giovanni Drogo was searching for glory by waiting for an invisible enemy, and in Un Amore Antonio is after an impossible love. Both love and glory remain unattainable goals. But this is not what the novel is about. Was love what he gave and received, with 50,000 lire a month? ⁹ Can love prostitute itself?

As Laide is not Lolita, Dorigo is not Humbert. Whereas Humbert is remarkably charming, sarcastic, and seductive, Dorigo is awkward and rigidly shy. Whereas Humbert is selfish and narcissistic, Dorigo is prone to humiliation. Humbert is ironic, Dorigo pathetic in his weakness of character. Above all, Dorigo is much more European than Humbert will ever be. In fact, Dorigo was a bourgeois, “intelligent, corrupt, rich and lucky” (Buzzati, 1965: 5), but also “with a head full of bourgeois prejudice, proud of bourgeois respectability” (Buzzati, 1965: 202). He is a victim of the Catholic education he received, “severely opposed to sexual acts” (Buzzati, 1965: 7), hence, sexuality, even more when displayed through prostitution, weighs on his morality as guilt. Not surprisingly, his relations with women had always been troublesome; “there had always been a barrier, and women were something illicit and the carnal act a kind of myth” (Buzzati, 1965: 7). It is only when he is about to face the younger body of a prostitute that the act “seemed to him an almost far-fetched fact, gorgeous, comparable to a fairy tale” (Buzzati, 1965: 8). Buzzati wants us to believe that Dorigo has finally found love, “it's a curse that comes upon us, and resisting it is impossible” (Buzzati, 1965: 117), that shortens life, “It is life, he does not realize it yet, never in such short hours has he lived so much” (Buzzati, 1965: 192) and outdoes in significance all the rest: “He was a merry-go-round horse and all of a sudden the merry-go-round had started to spin madly faster and faster and to make it spin like it was her, Laide, she was autumn, despair, love” (Buzzati, 1965: 213). In his critical conversation with Yves Panafieu, Buzzati, discussing Un Amore, accepts the fact that love can be a disease: “Falling in love (…) it is a real mental illness, which has been codified by a number of distinguished literary works, from Manon Lescaut to Anna Karenina, from Madame Bovary to Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage or Nana” (Panafieu, 1973: 135). But the reader knows better. As for Humbert, it is neither physical satisfaction nor love that Antonio is experiencing. It is the aesthetic of the forbidden. Maddened at Laide's lack of loyalty to him, he is chastised by her friend Piera for expecting honest affection from a girl he would never consider marrying or even introduce to his mother: “She sold you the body, you demanded the soul” (Buzzati, 1965: 205). As Kenneth Atchity inspiringly noticed, “the didacticism of Piera's sermon [Chapter XXXIV] brings to the surface a barely suppressed moralism against the bourgeois attitude toward prostitution which is anything but mysterious” (Atchity, 1978: 12). Therefore, what Buzzati is actually doing through Dorigo's intense fascination is to bring down taboos. He exposes bourgeois and intellectual hypocrisy, the weaknesses of the man of the good social class attached more than ever to carnality, men that exploit the body of young women on which even the priests' glance would stay. And Montale writes well when he defines Un Amore:

One of the books of today that best breaks the crust of hypocrisy: a crust that everyone carries on from birth and perhaps is necessary so that the world does not become even more monstrous. But hypocrisy is still an evil that must be recognized, analyzed and represented. Overturning the glove of his respectability (his and the character), Buzzati imposed on everyone an examination of conscience. I am sure that many, most of his readers, will be grateful. (De Petrillo, 2013: 11)

Understood in these terms then, Dorigo's passion is not an obsessive sexual craving for a 30 years younger woman, but an obsessive, more universal desire to unchain himself from a bourgeois life. Laide's wrong but intense appeal for Antonio lies basically in her non-bourgeois existence. Giovanna Ioli notes that the name “Laide” has a moral connotation: “the adjective ‘laida’ fits well with the attitude of frivolity of a young city woman, lost in the elegant sophistry of easy pleasures” (Ioli, 1974: 282). ¹⁰ Indeed, she is the symbol of a plebeian, nocturnal, cheerful, viciously intrepid, and self-confident world that fermented with insatiable life around the boredom and respectability of the Italian high middle-class in the 1960s. She lives beyond the bounds of his bourgeois milieu; her realm is the unknown to him, it is adventure, flowerpots blooming in May in the old city, panties hanging in the courtyard of an old house, the tram squeaking at the bend, the gramophone on the seventh floor, the carousel of memories, legends, miseries, sins, shadows, and the secrets of Milan. Given this description, Antonio Dorigo as a fictional character has somewhat escaped the narrative frame into which Buzzati had planned to cage him and has assumed a life of his own. In this sense, his fascination is not consistent with love or anti-bourgeois morality, but with her youth. It is a rhetorical question to disclose the nature of his obsession: “What was Laide if not the concentration in one person of desires grown and fermented for so many years and never fulfilled?” (Buzzati, 1965: 211). Antonio, as much as Humbert, needs to fill the gap of all his “never-had,” and, as much as Humbert, he discovers in a woman 30 years younger the scent of his missing days. He loves Laide, for she escapes him, for she has what he no longer has: freshness, youth, whim, mischief, boldness, and cunning. And the more he loves her, the more he becomes aware of his inferiority as a man with intellectual baggage compared to those who truly know how to live: “Antonio stares at her in adoration, intimidated by so much instinctive wisdom, he with all his ridiculous literary paraphernalia in his mind” (Buzzati, 1965: 61). Not surprisingly, Laide becomes to him an aesthetic experience. The desire to possess her is the desire to possess his youth again; the reader cannot say yet whether in his attempt there is a tone of regret or rather nostalgia. Surely, Laide is a secret nightmare. She is man's oldest vice. Antonio's tale comes with a real sense of fear, anxiety, and insecurity. There is a daily humiliation in exchange for a few hours of lies, and a self-defeating attitude to avoid seeing the painful truth. “Where is Laide now?” is the doubt cursing his mental jealousy. When she is late, he has to fend off a feeling that is “a restlessness that enters every part of his body, a breath that rises, rises” (Buzzati, 1965: 125). She might not come, she might be with someone else, she is indispensable to him yet the thought of her is “torment, restlessness, anguish, total unhappiness” (Buzzati, 1965: 109) without end. Notwithstanding reason and common sense, Antonio cannot refrain from entering the labyrinth of her universe. He loves her for herself, for what she represents as a female, a whim, a youth, people's genuineness, malice, impertinence, a moment of freedom, a mystery. Above all, Antonio is aware that the sensual magnetism of his mercantile relation is not single-ended: as long as he contemplates the mystery of her youth, he can fend off the certainty of death. This is the moment Laide becomes to Antonio what Lolita was to Humbert, much more than a character in a book: she is an aesthetic phenomenon. As Antonio renounces the last bit of dignity left, it becomes clear to the reader as well that Laide stands as the ultimate memory of his youthful adventures: “Is not the naked and sad truth that he is now becoming old and clings to Laide as the last possible opportunity of his lost youth?” (Buzzati, 1965: 122). Salvation, spiritual and physical, is at stake; it hangs on a fragile equilibrium between lies and acceptancy. The reader cannot but wonder whether it is even worth it. It is with a final metaphor that Buzzati finally sets the tone of the whole narration and genuinely offers his audience a key to understanding. Antonio is:

like someone who passes in front of a wonderful window without caring and only when he is already far away he understands how many beautiful things were there and goes back in a hurry but when he arrives they turn off the lights and pull down the shutters. (Buzzati, 1965: 213)

The shutters being pulled down clearly recalls the image of Antonio being late, hence his need to enact his youth once more, and his addiction for Laide, is the regretful acknowledgement of his wasted years. And when Laide, in a Lolita-like moment, perhaps not even accidentally, reveals her pregnancy, the magic spell immediately breaks. Life was “fury rage frenzy galloping flame” (Buzzati, 1965: 211) when attached to the irresponsibility of Laide's youth. But the moment she spoke, and the image of a pregnant Laide materializes in Antonio's fancy, time begins once more to flow: “She came out of sleep for a moment to speak, in the precise moment youth ended” (Buzzati, 1965: 211). And Dorigo, sitting by the side of a sleeping Laide, is now 50 years old.

Art after youth

The regular and solitary life of two ordinary scholars seems to proceed smoothly toward its natural ending. However, over time Humbert and Dorigo develop an affinity with Gustave Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice in which the middle-aged writer Aschenbach becomes erotically obsessed with the idealized beauty of the androgyne adolescent figure of Tadzio. There is perhaps in Antonio Dorigo a gloomy touch that Humbert is lacking; more broadly Un amore comes with an existentialist overtone that is not in Lolita, that is the loneliness of individuals and situations that arise in a mysterious key. Carla Gaiba marks this aspect in Buzzati's writing: “time seen as gradual deterioration, the unstoppable rust of existence, the sense of an expectation as useless as it is inescapable, the desperate cruelty of solitude […] the nostalgia of a lost existential fullness” (Gaiba, 2001: 348). In connection with the meaningless of a world without a Master, Laide never conforms to Antonio's ideal. She manipulates the monetary relationship so to keep alive the ambiguity and therefore the desire. “The female figure appears characterized by a tendency to deprivation: it deprives man of her image and this prompts the development of a form of need, of obsessive search, of dependence” (De Rosa, 2022: 77). Alessandro Scarsella refers to a “dark force” that imprisons the protagonist by tying him to Laide; Giovanna Finocchiaro Chimirri recalls “the typical mysterious element and that sense of expectation” (cited in Zambon, 1995: 178). However, more than Lacanian desire, the crucial locus of debate is perhaps to be found in its inherent existentialist tone. Seemingly the story of an obsession, the demand for possession becomes in time the need for closeness of soul and feelings, for love; in Squarotti's words, “the haunting and distressing subjectivity of every point of view in relation to every situation” (Squarotti Bàrberi, 1992: 152). In essence, it is the impossibility for Dorigo to know who Laide truly is. She disappears, escapes him often physically, always in significance. Is she lying or not? Most likely she does each time she quietens him for her absences. Yet at stake here is not a moral judgment over her conduct, but Antonio's sense of reality. Thus, his wait is made of torment and anguished fantasies that he inflicts on himself because, in his existentialist-atheist universe, nothing guarantees the validity of the choices he makes. It is simply impossible to know. “Not only can appearance be infinitely different from being, but neither can one be certain of what one sees” (Squarotti Bàrberi, 1992: 170). Incapable of bearing the anguish of his reality, what Sartre termed “the burden of freedom,” Antonio creates an alternative universe of illusions in which Laide might possibly one day love him back:

It would be enough for him—he thought—that Laide became a little his own [love], lived a little for him, the idea of being able to enter as a character in the existence of that girl and to become important for her, even if not the most important, this is his obsession. (Buzzati, 1965: 65)

The lousy sex between a mature man who falls in love with a young girl and almost inevitably loses balance, dignity, and a sense of reality in the face of her youth and indifference is a literary container for more complex and existential investigation. In spite of different layers of desolation, Dorigo's demand for Laide, a young prostitute, and Humbert's hunger for a not-quite woman, rests on the promise of future fulfillment. Buzzati ends Un Amore with an open conclusion, almost swinging between significance and nothingness. Antonio knows nothing, he has lost all certainties, she suddenly sleeps, without enigma, without mystery. Witnessed by a still and silent Milan, they are both “condemned to fall into the abyss of an empty love, in which rumbles the echo of what was and what no longer is” (De Rosa, 2022: 80). I agree with Brenda Megerle when she writes that ““Humbert represents the artist whose creative imagination fills in ‘the gap between the little given and the great promised-the great rosegray never-to-be-had’” (Megerle, 1979: 343). In both cases, it is their imagination that fills in the gap between a promise and its fulfillment. Quite naturally, they project false recognition onto a young girl. Humbert recreates Annabel, “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita” (Nabokov, 2000: 72), while Dorigo has to coexist with “that feeling of having entered into a wrong dream and not suitable for him” (Buzzati, 1965: 181). The sexual satisfaction they receive has to be interpreted as a side effect; the whole textual eroticism, which indeed is perceptible, is no more than a tool to deflect an aging youth. Inevitably, and quite melancholically, Humbert and Antonio are condemned to frustration and pain, for life cannot be captured. Lolita, Laide, and their breathing youth remain an unattainable desire.

On the whole, the texts carry a pessimistic view of mankind, by portraying men as lonely, unfulfilled creatures, destined to wander off in lies as in a labyrinth. The totalizing feeling takes on the contours of a disease and leads them on a delusional journey, prisoners of a false and wrong love that alienates them from affections, work, and friendships. Perhaps ironically, from the protagonists’ perspective the moment of truth never corresponds to that of salvation. In the conclusive scene of their decisive meeting, both men are left with the pitiful wisdom that the women they love will never be theirs. Humbert leaves Lolita with the tragic knowledge that she will never be his. If his final tears could talk to her, they would say that her nymphet self is long buried, replaced by a hugely pregnant and myopic housewife. Antonio Dorigo is doomed to remain as lonely and unloved as all of Buzzati's creatures. Specifically, Buzzati brings to the page the inner world, fragile and complex, of a man who clashes with a reality that wants him to live up to his social role. As the novel ends, a sweeter Laide will become a mother. The emotions of the protagonists calm down, the souls pacify too. But there can be no happy ending, for the time of love, and youth has long gone: “Here is the explanation, the breathlessness the jealousy the despair are finished but together also the storm is exhausted” (Buzzati, 1965: 211). The storm of youth is inevitably over; as the nymphets trespass into the realm of womanhood, here symbolized by their pregnancy, the fire of a consuming passion burns itself out. The music has reached the last note; this is Dorigo's ultimate thought, and afterward other notes will not come.

On the other hand, we need to grasp Lolita, Laide, and the lust they inspire with allegorical significance: eroticism is one way the writers ensure the reader's direct emotional involvement with the novel. Simultaneously, the young age of the female protagonists evokes in the male characters the matrix of life and within the polarities that their relationships embody, pleasure and pain, the spiritual and the physical, they are able to defeat the eternity of death. However, as the nature of the relationship is anchored to coercion rather than mutuality, and the essence of youth is its evanescence, the disturbing specter of death, which had long accompanied Antonio and Humbert before knowing love, returns to visit them, and this time they will only succumb. This is the moment life becomes art. Literature is not a reproduction of reality; it is reality transposed and heightened. Therefore, Nabokov/Humbert and Buzzati/Dorigo do not write driven by perverse desires but by an artistic necessity, which is to immortalize what can be immortalized. Humbert becomes a writer who creates a new synthesis out of the transience of his own memory in the writing of his tribute to Lolita. After all, she appeals to the popular imagination as a monument of everlasting adolescence up to Keats’ command “Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” Equally, Buzzati, referring to his private and tormented love story, straightforwardly recognizes that: “The only way to save me is to write. To tell everything, to make clear the ultimate dream of man at the door of old age” (De Petrillo, 2013: 5). Youth is but an illusion; this is perhaps the reason why in Humbert's and Antonio's actions and questionable choices there is more longing than yearning. Even so, Lolita and Laide are an exception. Had it been commonplace, it would not have been worth writing down. The novels have survived as an unravaged bride of time because they replay throughout the world wherever there are souls of outcasts redeemed by any possible love. And when life becomes literature, Humbert did not hesitate to confess that “this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita” (Nabokov, 2000: 379).