Red Rose with Thorns

For many happy years, Italy's No. 2 Communist, Luigi Longo, could sing with Poet Burns: "My love is like a red, red rose." His idyll began back in the 1920s when Communist Longo, then as now a better organizer than speechmaker, got trapped in dialectic during an argument at a trade-union meeting. With a naturally glib tongue sharpened in many a workers' demonstration, a young woman Communist and ex-sewing-machine girl named Teresa Noce rushed into the breach and with crushing Marxist logic silenced Longo's opposition. Gratitude and love mingled in Longo's heart, and soon afterward the two were married.

In the years that followed, Teresa proved herself a staunch and loyal helpmate to both Luigi and the party, as he became the Communists' chief organizer and disciplinarian. She helped organize strikes. Whenever Luigi was carted off to a Mussolini jail, Teresa uncomplainingly took over his party chores. She fled with him to France and to Russia, fought by his side in the Spanish Civil War. In underground papers she edited, Teresa laid down the party line, and she also wrote three proletarian novels. No one ever questioned her ardor or orthodoxy. Presumably no more congenial pair existed in all the party. Luigi sometimes dallied with younger and comelier Communists (for Teresa was never pretty), but he always went back to his wife, leaving his girl friends to nurse their broken hearts in high positions he created for them in the Communist-run Union of Italian Women.

Helping Hand. Two years ago, however, Longo took up with a chic party member who was not so easily palmed off--young, slender Bruna Conti. Soon after she bore him a child, Bruna began insisting that Longo marry her. Last fall the nearby Communist-dominated little Republic of San Marino, which is always ready to give Italy's Reds a helping hand, announced that it had granted Luigi Longo a divorce.

At the news, the once faithful Communist Teresa took a step unprecedented in scorned fury--she wrote a letter to the editor of the capitalist Corriere delta Sera: "Please print my categorical denial that the Honorable Longo has got a divorce from me." Throwing caution to the winds, the outraged Teresa went on to point out that divorce is forbidden by Italian Communist doctrine: "Communists, in fact, cannot have two policies, one public and the other personal." This amounted to a charge of deviationism, not only against Longo, but against Red Boss Palmiro Togliatti himself (who divorced his wife in Russia to take up with his buxom secretary, after first obligingly getting his wife elected to the Senate).

Huge Following. Haled to Communist headquarters in the Street of the Dark Shops to explain her charges, Teresa failed to show up. Ever since then, she has scrupulously avoided all Communist get-togethers. But Teresa Longo at 53 is no clinging vine destined to droop forlornly for lack of attention. No one can tell her plans for the future, but she has a big following of her own among Italy's Communist women, most of whom, like herself, are against divorce. As one observer put it last week: "It would have been far better for Longo to have Teresa as a wife than as an enemy."

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