“How marvelous! Will you take me? I’ll just run and put on an evening dress!”
I’m not the sort who goes to balls and I felt ill at ease.
“But we don’t have an invitation... and I’m wearing a brown suit...”
“I never need an invitation... and you’re my escort.”
She ran up to change. I didn’t know where to turn. The place was full of girls wearing their first evening dress, powdering their faces before going into the ballroom, exchanging excited whispers. I stood in a comer, trying to imagine I was a shop clerk who had come there to deliver a package.
The elevator door opened. Claudia stepped out, in a sweeping skirt, pearls on a pink bodice, a little diamond-studded mask. I couldn’t play the role of clerk any more. I went over to her.
We went in. All eyes were on her. I found a mask to put on, a kind of clown’s face with a long nose. We started dancing. When Claudia twirled around, the other couples stepped back to watch her; as I’m a very bad dancer, I wanted to stay in the midst of the crowd, so there was a kind of hide-and-seek. Claudia complained that I wasn’t the least bit jolly, that I didn’t know how to enjoy myself.
At the end of one dance, as we were going back to our table, we passed a group of ladies and gentlemen, standing on the dance floor. “Oh!” There I was, face to face with Commendatore Cordà. He was in full dress, with a little orange paper hat on his head. I had to stop and say hello to him. “Why, it is you, then! I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” he said, but he was looking at Claudia, and I realized he meant he would never have expected to see me with a woman like her, I looking the same as usual, in the suit I wore to the office.
I had to make the introductions; Cordà kissed Claudia’s hand, introduced her to the other older men who were with him, and Claudia, absent as always and superior, paid no attention to the names (as I was saying to myself: “My God! Is that who he is?” because they were all big shots in industry). Then Cordà introduced me: “And this is the managing editor of our periodical, you know, Purification, the paper I put out....” I realized they were all a bit intimidated by Claudia, and they were talking nonsense. So then I felt less timid myself.
I also realized something else was about to happen, namely that Cordà could hardly wait to ask Claudia to dance. I said: “Well then, we’ll see you later....” I waved expansive good-bys and led Claudia back to the dance floor, as she said: “Wait a minute, you don’t know how to dance to this, can’t you hear the music?”
All I could hear or feel was that, in some way not yet clear even to those men, I had spoiled their evening when I appeared at Claudia’s side, and this was the only satisfaction I could derive from the ball. “Cha cha cha...” I sang softly, pretending to dance with steps I didn’t know how to make, holding Claudia only lightly by the hand so that she could move on her own.
It was carnival time; why shouldn’t I have some fun? The little toy trumpets blared, fluttering their long fringes, handfuls of confetti pattered like crumbling mortar on the backs of the tailcoats and on the bare shoulders of the women, it slipped inside the low-cut gowns and the men’s collars; and from chandelier to floor, where they collected in limp piles pushed about by the shuffling of the dancers, streamers unrolled like strips of bare fibers or like wires left hanging among collapsed walls in a general destruction.
“YOU CAN accept the ugly world the way it is, because you know you have to destroy it,” I said to Omar Basaluzzi. I spoke partly to provoke him, otherwise it was no fun.
“Just a moment,” Omar said, setting down the little cup of coffee he had been raising to his lips. “We never say: It has to get worse before it can get better. We want to improve things.... No reformism, and no extremism. We...”
I was following my train of thought; he, his. Ever since that time in the park with Claudia, I had been looking for a new image of the world which would give a meaning to our grayness, which would compensate for all the beauty that we were losing, or would save it.... “A new face for the world.”
The worker unzipped a black leather briefcase and took out an illustrated weekly. “You see?” There was a series of photographs. An Asiatic race, with fur caps and boots, blissfully going to fish in a river. In another photograph there was that same race, going to school; a teacher was pointing out, on a sheet, the letters of an incomprehensible alphabet. Another illustration showed a feast day and they all wore dragon heads, and in the middle, among the dragons, a tractor was advancing with a man’s portrait over it. At the end there were two men, still in fur caps, operating a power lathe.
“You see? This is it,” he said, “the other face of the world.”
I looked at Basaluzzi. “You people don’t wear fur caps, you don’t fish for sturgeon, you don’t play with dragons.”
“What of it?”
“So your group doesn’t resemble those people in any way, except for this...” and I pointed to the lathe, “which you already have.”
“No, no, it’ll be the same here as there, because it’s man’s conscience that will change, for us as it has for them, we’ll be new inside ourselves, even before we are new outside...” Basaluzzi said, and he went on leafing through the magazine. On another page there were photographs of blast furnaces and of workers with goggles over their eyes and fierce expressions. “Oh, there’ll be problems then, too, you mustn’t think that overnight...” he said. “For quite a while it’ll be hard: production... But a big step forward will have been made.... Certain things won’t happen, as they do now...” and he started speaking of the same things he always talked about, the problems that concerned him, day in and day out.
I realized that, for him, whether or not that new dawn ever came mattered less than one might think, because what counted for him was the line of his life, which was not to change.
“There’ll always be trouble, of course.... It won’t be an earthly paradise.... We’re not saints, after all...”
Would the saints change their lives, if they knew heaven didn’t exist?
“They fired me last week,” Omar Basaluzzi said.
“And now what?”
“I’m doing union work. Maybe next autumn one of the bosses will retire.”
He was on his way to the Wafd, where there had been a violent demonstration that morning. “Want to come with me?”
“Eh! That’s the one place I mustn’t be seen. You understand why.”
“I mustn’t be seen there either. I’d get the comrades in trouble. We’ll watch from a café nearby.”
I went with him. Through the windows of a little café we saw the workers coming off their shift walk through the gates, wheeling their bicycles, or crowding toward the streetcars, their faces already prepared for sleep. Some of them, obviously forewarned, came into the café and went at once to Omar; and so a little group was formed, which went off to one side to talk.
I understood nothing of their grievances and I was trying to discover what was different between the faces of the countless men who swarmed through the gates surely thinking of nothing but their family and Sunday, and these others who had stopped with Omar, the stubborn ones, the tough ones. And I could find no mark that distinguished them: the same aged or prematurely old faces, product of the same life: the difference was inside.
And then I studied the faces and the words of the latter group, to see if I could distinguish the ones whose actions were based on the thought “The day will come...” and those for whom, as for Omar, whether the day really came or not didn’t matter. And I saw they couldn’t be distinguished, because perhaps they all belonged to the second category, even those few whose impatience or ready speech might make them seem to be in the first category.
And then I didn’t know what to look at so I looked at the sky. It was an early spring day and over the houses of the outskirts the sky was luminous, blue, clear; however, if I looked at it carefully, I could see a kind of shadow, a smudge, as if on an old, yellowed snapshot, like the marks you see through a spectros
cope. Not even the fine season would cleanse the sky.
Omar Basaluzzi had put on a pair of dark glasses with thick frames and he continued talking in the midst of those men, precise, expert, proud, a bit nasal.
IN Purification I published a news item I had found in a foreign paper concerning pollution of the air by atomic radiation. It was in small type and Commendatore Cordà didn’t notice it in the galleys, but he read it when the paper was printed and he then sent for me.
“My God, I have to keep an eye on every little thing; I ought to have a hundred eyes, not two!” he said. “What came over you? What made you publish that piece? This isn’t the sort of thing our Institute should bother with. Not by a long shot! And then, without a word to me! On such a delicate question! Now they’ll say we’ve started printing propaganda!”
I answered with a few words of defense: “Well, sir, since it was a question of air pollution... I’m sorry, I thought...”
I had already taken my leave when Cordà called me back. “See here, do you really believe in this danger of radioactivity? I mean, do you really think it’s so serious?”
I remembered certain data from a scientific congress, and I repeated the information to him. Cordà listened to me, nodding, but irked.
“Hmph, what awful times we have to live in, my friend!” he blurted out at one point, and he was again the Cordà I knew so well. “It’s the risk we have to run. There’s no turning back the clock, because big things are at stake, my boy, big things!”
He bowed his head for a few moments. “We, in our field,” he went on, “not wanting to overestimate the role we play, of course, still... we make our contribution, we’re equal to the situation.”
“That’s certain, sir. I’m absolutely convinced of that.” We looked at each other, a bit embarrassed, a bit hypocritical. The cloud of smog now seemed to have grown smaller, a tiny little puff, a cirrus, compared to the looming atomic mushroom.
I left Commendatore Cordà after a few more vague, affirmative words, and once again it wasn’t clear whether his real battle was fought for or against the cloud.
After that, I avoided any mention of atomic explosions or radioactivity in the headlines, but in each number I tried to slip some information on the subject into the columns devoted to technical news, and even into certain articles; in the midst of the data on the percentages of coal or fuel oil in the urban atmosphere and their physiological consequences, I added analogous data and examples drawn from zones affected by atomic fallout. Neither Cordà nor anyone else mentioned these to me again, but this silence, rather than please me, confirmed my suspicion that absolutely nobody read Purification.
I had a file where I kept all the material concerning nuclear radiation, because as I read through the papers with an eye trained to select usable news items and articles, I always found something on that subject and I saved it. A clipping service, too, to which the Institute had subscribed, sent us more and more clippings about atomic bombs, while those about smog grew fewer all the time.
So every day my eye fell upon statistics of terrible diseases, stories about fishermen overtaken in the middle of the ocean by lethal clouds, guinea pigs born with two heads after some experiments with uranium. I raised my eyes to the window. It was late June, but summer hadn’t yet begun: the weather was oppressive, the days were smothered in a gloomy haze, during the afternoon hours the city was immersed in a light like the end of the world, and the passers-by seemed shadows photographed on the ground after the body had flown away.
The normal order of the seasons seemed changed, intense cyclones coursed over Europe, the beginning of summer was marked by days heavily charged with electricity, then by weeks of rain, by sudden heat waves and sudden resurgences of March-like cold. The papers denied that these atmospheric disorders could be in any way connected with the effects of the bombs; only a few solitary scientists seemed to sustain this notion (and, for that matter, it was hard to discover if they were trustworthy) and, with them, the anonymous voice of the man in the street, always ready, of course, to give credence to the most disparate ideas.
Even I became irritated when I heard Signorina Margariti talking foolishly about the atomic bomb, warning me to take my umbrella to the office that morning. But to be sure, when I opened the blinds, at the livid sight of the courtyard, which in that false luminosity seemed a network of stripes and spots, I was tempted to draw back, as if a discharge of invisible particles were being released from the sky at that very moment.
This burden of unsaid things transformed them into superstition, influenced the banal talk about the weather, once considered the most harmless subject of conversation. Now people avoided mentioning the weather, or if they had to say it was raining or it had cleared they were filled with a kind of shame, as if some obscure responsibility of ours were being kept quiet. Signor Avandero, who lived through the weekdays in preparation for his Sunday excursion, had assumed a false indifference toward the weather; it seemed totally hypocritical to me, and servile.
I put out a number of Purification in which there wasn’t one article that didn’t speak of radioactivity. Even this time I had no trouble. It wasn’t true, however, that nobody read the paper; people read it, all right, but by now they had become inured to such things, and even if you wrote that the end of the human race was at hand nobody paid any attention.
The big weeklies also published reports that should have made you shudder, but people now seemed to believe only in the colored photographs of smiling girls on the cover. One of these weeklies came out with a photograph of Claudia on its cover; she was wearing a bathing suit, and was making a turn on water skis. With four thumbtacks, I pinned it on the wall of my furnished room.
EVERY MORNING and every afternoon I continued to go to that neighborhood of quiet avenues where my office was located, and sometimes I recalled the autumn day when I had gone there for the first time, when in everything I saw I had looked for a sign, and nothing had seemed sufficiently gray and squalid to suit the way I felt. Even now my gaze looked only for signs; I had never been able to see anything else. Signs of what? Signs that referred one to the other, into infinity.
At times I happened to encounter a mule-drawn cart: a two-wheeled cart going down an avenue, laden with sacks. Or else I found it waiting outside the door of a building, the mule between the shafts, his head low, and on top of the pile of sacks, a little girl.
Then I realized there wasn’t only one of these carts going around that section; there were several of them. I couldn’t say just when I began to notice this; you see so many things without paying attention to them; maybe these things you see have an effect on you but you aren’t aware of it; and then you begin to connect one thing with the other and suddenly it all takes on meaning. The sight of those carts, without my consciously thinking of them, had a soothing effect on me, because an unusual encounter, as with a rustic cart in the midst of a city that is all automobiles, is enough to remind you that the world is never all one thing.
And so I began to pay attention to them: a little girl with pigtails sat on top of the white mountain of sacks reading a comic book, then a heavy man came from the door of the building with a couple of sacks and put those, too, on the cart, turned the handle of the brake and said “Gee” to the mule, and they went off, the little girl still up there, still reading. And then they stopped at another doorway; the man unloaded some sacks from the cart and carried them inside.
Farther ahead, in the opposite lane of the avenue, there was another cart, with an old man at the reins, and a woman who went up and down the front steps of the buildings with huge bundles on her head.
I began to notice that on the days when I saw the carts I was happier, more confident, and those days were always Mondays: so I learned that Monday is the day when the laundrymen go through the city with their carts, bringing back the clean laundry and taking away the dirty.
Now that I knew about it, the sight of the laundry carts no longer escaped me: all I had to do was
see one as I went to work in the morning, and I would say to myself: “Why, of course, it’s Monday!” and immediately afterward another would appear, following a different route, with a dog barking after it, and then another going off in the distance so I could see only its load from behind, the sacks with yellow and white stripes.
Coming home from the office I took the streetcar, through other streets, noisier and more crowded, but even there the traffic had to stop at a crossing as the long-spoked wheels of a laundry cart rolled by. I glanced into a side street, and by the sidewalk I saw the mule with bundles of laundry that a man in a straw hat was unloading.
That day I took a much longer route than usual to come home, still encountering the laundrymen. I realized that for the city this was a kind of feast day, because everyone was happy to give away the clothes soiled by the smoke and to wear again the whiteness of fresh linen, even if only for a short while.
The following Monday I decided to follow the laundry carts to see where they went afterward, once they had made their deliveries and picked up their work. I walked for a while at random, because I first followed one cart, then another, until at a certain point I realized that they were all finally going in the same direction, there were certain streets where they all passed eventually, and when they met or lined up one after the other they hailed one another with calm greetings and jokes. And so I went on following them, losing them, over a long stretch, until I was tired, but before leaving them I had learned that there was a village of laundries: the men were all from an outlying town called Barca Bertulla.
One day, in the afternoon, I went there. I crossed a bridge over a river, and was virtually in the country, the highways were flanked still by a row of houses, but immediately behind them all was green. You couldn’t see the laundries. Shady pergolas surrounded the wineshops, along the canals interrupted by locks. I went on, casting my gaze beyond each farmyard gate and along each path. Little by little I left the built-up area behind, and now rows of poplars grew along the road, marking the banks of the frequent canals. And there in the background, beyond the poplars, I saw a meadow of white sails: laundry hung out to dry.
The Watcher and Other Stories Page 12
