The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  Brave Morselli. While working on The Communist, he wrote to Alberto Moravia. Did he mind being mentioned in the novel Morselli was working on? Moravia’s brief reply was hardly encouraging, and epically condescending. No, he didn’t mind, he wrote, but: “It’s usually difficult to introduce living persons in a work of the imagination.”

  Morselli paid him no heed, introducing not only Moravia but Togliatti and several other grandees of the Italian political landscape.

  •

  In 1973, shortly after finishing the novel Dissipatio H.G., in which the protagonist spends Italian Republic Day in a cave pondering suicide only to emerge and find a world destroyed and empty of human beings, Morselli shot himself in the family house in Varese. He left a simple note: Non ho rancori. (I bear no grudges.) A folder full of rejection letters was found on his desk, a flask drawn on the cover. Un fiasco—a symbol of failure.

  With ironic inevitability it was only now that this neglected writer’s compositions were at last found to be stunning, varied, brilliant. Morselli was said to have been ahead of his time, a genius, and the publisher Adelphi brought out his novels, one after another, in the course of the 1970s. Several were translated into foreign languages. Pierre Ysmal, reviewing the French translation of The Communist, went so far as to say that Morselli’s “rigor and probity better explain Communism than all the books written by ‘exes’ who too often attempt to even the score. With this book Morselli joins the ranks of the rare great writers of the Communist world.”

  In After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth-Century Italy, Elizabeth Leake discusses how Morselli’s suicide has shaped interpretations of his work, and how his failure to publish any of his novels came to shape their making. For instance, Past Conditional, an ingenious alternate history of post–World War I Europe, is interrupted by a lone chapter titled “Critical Intermission—Conversations Between the Publisher and the Author.” It’s an eight-page self-immolation. The “publisher” demands: “Do you honestly claim that this blatantly apocryphal version of contemporary history which you have submitted, so full of questionable theses and so short on appeal from every angle, can go by the name of a novel?”

  Morselli may have had the most bourgeois of upbringings, but he and Walter Ferranini have a good deal in common. Walter Ferranini is a martyr to Communism. Guido Morselli was a martyr to art. The Communist is, among other things, an exercise in self-portraiture.

  •

  I’d like to recognize Frederika Randall’s graceful and nuanced work on this novel’s behalf—a literary feat in its own right. No matter how great Morselli’s novel, it takes a master translator to cast the spell afresh.

  For the English-reading public, there’s still a great deal more to know about Morselli. There are novels yet to be translated and the soulful diary he kept for decades. Once you have read this novel, you are likely to care much more about this. You might even decide to visit Morselli’s haunts, such as the property he left to the city of Gavirate, where to this day one can visit Parco Morselli. By the fields and forests through which he walked and spent his days, looking over Lago di Varese and beyond to the foothills of the Alps, the house still stands where Morselli wrote this profound, restless work.

  —ELIZABETH MCKENZIE

  THE COMMUNIST

  1

  DEBATE (repose) in parliament. It was question time and the conditions, dreadful, of the State Railways were the subject at hand. The chamber’s population, already sparse, had shrunk further as always happened when technical matters were being discussed—all but on the left-wing benches, where the questioner sat. Despite the back and forth between questioner and minister (Angelini) the atmosphere was drowsy, and a weak polemical note introduced by the far right brought only a flicker of mirth and annoyance. The interruption came from the neo-Fascist benches; the voice, with its stout Sicilian cadences, strove for irony.

  “You complain that the trains arrive late. You understand, Honorable Boatta, do you not, that your criticism necessarily takes us back to those days when there was one man above all who could make Italian trains run on time?”

  “And it cost us dearly,” was Comrade Boatta’s swift reply.

  But the other man persisted. “Not only the trains ran in those days. Sad to say, this pusillanimous Italia of ours—”

  Here Boatta lost his patience. “Learn to speak Italian, Fascist! In Italian, we do not say Itahl-yah.”

  “Right, I should learn from you. You, who say Itaglia, with the g. Peasant.”

  There was a titter from the center benches. Dini, the deputy from Lucca, growled, “Oh, come on, you think we haven’t noticed you don’t even know how to say Italy?”

  From his high seat as president of the chamber, Leone leaned forward to make his presence felt and (a stab at wit) said that “from regionalisms” it was time to move on to “rails.” Comrade Boatta raised his clipped gray beard once again, and observed that there was nothing in the least bourgeois about wanting trains that respected timetables, railcars that were modern, conductors dressed in decent cloth and not some shabby worsted.

  “It is not only the bourgeoisie that uses trains but above all the workers, just as it is workers who make them run. With toil and sacrifices, as Ferranini, here next to me, can tell you, being the son of a railwayman who died on the job, and a railwayman himself.

  “Furthermore,” the elderly Boatta plowed on, to the revived indifference of his colleagues, “beyond the railroads we have other public services that are backward and badly organized. Is the telephone system, so important for production and by extension for the workers, at all satisfactory? The Italian postal service is the slowest in Europe. This morning I received a letter here in Rome. My niece mailed it two days ago in Turin.”

  Now Leone intervened. “You asked to question the transport minister,” he croaked, “not the minister of posts. And spare us your personal correspondence, it is of no interest!”

  Comrade Ferranini, who was just barely listening, smiled, feeling pleasantly lethargic. Sitting at his bench and resting his elbows on his desktop, he ran his hands though his graying hair. He was taking his repose and he didn’t even need to reproach himself: how pleasant. When Comrade Boatta had said his name, he had for one incongruous moment been afraid he would be called on to speak; he, who in five months of parliamentary session had never even spoken once. He had been assigned to a committee that met rarely, the most pacific and least-industrious committee in parliament, in which his silence was no more remarked upon than it was in the chamber. The party, too, asked little of him, perhaps because in Rome, where he had never set foot at party headquarters before his recent election, nobody knew him. Apart from a few inspections on behalf of the administrative offices, he had no duties at all. On Sundays, there were the rallies assigned to members of parliament on a rotating basis; so far, he had led no more than three or four.

  Ferranini, Walter. From Reggio Emilia. The last to know that “Italy’s Kiev” was well represented by him. Both the shortcomings and the merits.

  A real man of the base, accustomed to the base’s lively, immediate, human political contact. By no means free of any personal ambitions, Ferranini had always confined them to his home territory and satisfied them there. When he had agreed to stand for parliament it had cost him some considerable regret, a fear of betraying his real calling, an unease from which he was just beginning to recover. To his comrades in Reggio who had put him on the list, he said, “So, you are sending me into retirement.” And in some ways, he did feel he had been set aside. He could not pretend, in those intervals he spent back home, to recover that connection between himself and his people that had been interrupted, nor could he resume his previous responsibilities. In Rome (and this he had predicted) no opportunities presented themselves in the party hierarchy, and quite honestly, he recognized he was neither prepared nor keen to take on such a role. The twelve years of work behind him were not relevant, and his experience organizing was too specialized to employ
in a much larger sphere, far from the situations and the men familiar to him.

  In other ways, he hadn’t been unhappy in Rome, and he had ended up settling there. When he returned to Reggio or to his native Vimondino, some twenty kilometers from Reggio, he stayed one day at most. He didn’t mind the parliamentary routine, the way that deputies in a great party clung together (“Here, we are choristers with our mouths shut,” he wrote to the faithful Oscar Fubini). There were no decisions to make, no initiatives; however, he told Fubini, there was much to learn and much to understand. He had come to terms with parliamentarianism. He no longer thought of how, during the electoral campaign of ’53 in the days of the legge-truffa, the fraudulent new voting law, he had called parliament (employing a certain scientific slant that ran through his speeches) the “locus of points” of phony formal democracy. Study had always been a passion, and he had nearly always had too little time for it. Now, with many free hours a day, he was able to satisfy that desire. His knowledge of Marxism, although it was firsthand, was disorganized, inconsistent. He applied himself to perfecting it, tenaciously, scrupulously; it seemed to him a way to resist inertia and conformity; it was what a good socialist would do. Those few who tried to flush him out at his lodgings on vicolo del Leonetto, lodgings that were not very inviting, and he even less so, found him taking notes on the classics, intense and ruffled, in shirtsleeves, like a student preparing for his exams. A thermos full of coffee and—that final touch that completed the modest genre painting—a birdcage on the windowsill. He was growing lazy; it annoyed him to have to drag himself out to Civitavecchia or Rieti for the Saturday or Sunday rally, he who back in Reggio would travel the length and breadth of the province all week, running automobiles into the ground, and coming back at night hoarse and exhausted.

  All too aware of his inertia, and perhaps the only one there who didn’t attribute his idleness to the sirocco or Roman ways, he wondered if it wasn’t a symptom of premature aging. Or worse, far worse, the first sign of petit bourgeois regression. One night he rose from his bed and paged uneasily through his texts to see whether sloth was not one of the symptoms by which one could recognize those whom Marx called “vacillators.” Luck was with him and he found the passage right away (“The vacillators are the weak, half-hearted, and irresolute”) and went back to sleep peacefully.

  It was his enduring good fortune that he paid only moderate attention to his own private ego. Soul-searching and inner dialogues were neither lengthy nor frequent with him; it was just that after forty-four good years, the fatigue had become too much. He had played out his role. Started out as a kid slaving and toiling away; never enjoyed even a bit of the good life; well, now he felt the need to take it easy instead. A man past his prime, no; now that he’d been in Rome for a while things were improving, although a few little troubles remained: that ache at the base of his neck, a few signs of hypertension, some shortness of breath, a bit of arrhythmia, which one of his parliamentary colleagues, Comrade Amoruso, an internist, had diagnosed (informally, without having examined him because Ferranini preferred not) as chronic fatigue accompanied by mild functional heart disease, in part psychogenic. The party, by bringing him to Rome to rest, had shown him its providential participation in the life of the individual, and so he would use the leisure to fully restore his health. A new call to action might come at any moment, and in the meantime, to sit there in the chamber with his comrades and his superiors was not to do nothing. Even there, one served. There was certainly nothing wrong with that. If anything, he thought (but not sanctimoniously, that wasn’t his way) it was a privilege he didn’t deserve.

  Boatta had finished. He stated that Angelini’s reply was unsatisfactory, and in fact it was not very satisfactory, and then other questions were raised, now by the Christian Democratic side, in collusion with the government. Sham, of no interest. Ferranini sat back more comfortably in his seat and gave up looking through the newspapers he’d brought with him. Two rows below him, Palmiro Togliatti was going through his mail, writing undisturbed; there was a little pile of books on his desk and Ferranini was able to make out the title of the one on top: Montaigne, Essais. For a long time he gazed respectfully at what he could see of the person of his leader. The thick, still-dark hair on his head; the motionless, firm shoulders and forearms, which bespoke a serenity and a force that seemed to him majestic, uniting ideas and action. Then he gave a start: Togliatti had stopped writing, turned halfway around, and was staring at him through thick lenses. But he didn’t recognize him. He was famous for not recognizing faces, and they had only had the briefest of contacts. No matter: Ferranini savored the composite pleasure of trust and subordination; he felt happy that he somehow belonged to this man.

  Among the newspapers on his desk he picked out a telegram that had been delivered to him at the beginning of the session. It came from Reggio, from home, in short, the only (large!) family he had. It informed him that two friends were coming to Rome, leaders of the Farmers’ Cooperative of Guastalla, and he had to smile because the two had signed themselves “Amos and Vittorio Bignami, directing Italy’s first kolkhoz.” What did you want to bet they had already arrived and were there in the chamber? He looked up, and there they were, in fact, the very same. The sole spectators to that colorless assembly, fists up to salute him, two scrappy cousins with red carnations in their buttonholes sitting in the public gallery. He signaled them to remain calm; they were capable of shouting out loud and making themselves obvious, and Togliatti wouldn’t like that. He waited, leafing through the newspapers, until the other man moved. Togliatti continued writing, sitting at his place for another half hour, until eight o’clock, and meanwhile those two up there could be seen talking back and forth and pointing out the various party benches in the chamber.

  Outside, they embraced, and not long after, examining him by the light of a shopwindow on the street, Amos Bignami reassured him: “You haven’t changed.” Ferranini misunderstood.

  “Should I have changed? You mean parliament, maybe? Or Rome?”

  “No, no, don’t be silly. You’re still thin, sure; still have that look of a kid, or a poet. Our Ferranini, you are. Hey, we came here for you, you know, to tell you about Vimondino, that little town of yours half submerged by the river Po.”

  “Always under water in November, our hometown. Why don’t you ever come to ask for help against the Farm Owners Consortium instead?”

  “Well, so you know we’re fighting them, like mad. Como los moros. Kruger against Lopez, remember in Spain? Like that! We don’t have a choice, believe me. They’re going after us. There have been some changes in the Federation, but you know about that.”

  “And how are things going with Inter-Agraria?”

  “Not so smooth there, either. We’ll tell you about it.”

  He led the way to his trattoria on a side street near via dei Coronari, a place not haunted by his parliamentary colleagues and so to his liking. The two Bignamis, Amos more than Vittorio, reported at length, in that polite and deferential way of resourceful subordinates (Ferranini had never had to do much more than outline the political directives with them) and then went on to tell him the town news. They didn’t live there but each of them had a piece of land nearby, and they knew everyone and everything. They spoke at length, not eating much. Ferranini ate happily, as usual. Bent over his plate, his left hand pressing a napkin to his chest, with great concentration, although he listened and asked a question now and then. A frugal man—with a liking for simple things, that is—who enjoyed his food, in silence if possible, it seemed (and it wasn’t just semblance) that when he ate, he thought of nothing else. His lady friend Nuccia (or better, Annuccia) had decided that though there was no hint of sensuality to it, he was a “serious eater,” that is to say, profound, even in that, and scrupulous, while he pointed out to her that he came from a family that had suffered from pellagra—from hunger, in other words—right up into the twentieth century.

  Vittorio Bignami, abstemious although he had t
he purple cheeks of a wine drinker, had been Ferranini’s first aide back in ’46 when he began working in the cooperatives, and he wanted to know whether he was still dealing with the co-ops here in Rome, and if they’d given him duties in that regard, and what they were. He was astonished to hear they hadn’t.

  “Okay, but really, Ferranini, you have nothing to do with them? You, one of the greatest cooperativists of our times?”

  “Sure. And the Farmers’ Cooperative of Guastalla is a kolkhoz,” said Ferranini. He had finished eating and now resumed speaking.“

  They don’t appreciate you? What about Il Migliore, doesn’t he know you? You were sitting near each other.”

  “There are a hundred and forty of us in the lower house alone. But look, you ought to know that the base is one thing, the center is another—two worlds, like water and air, you might say, and the man who lives in one isn’t made to live in the other; he doesn’t have the organs.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “It’s perfectly right. I’m here to represent the base, not to advance it from above. Different functions, different capacities. I go to the head office a couple of times a month and I still haven’t learned how the departments are divided up. You have to understand that the party here is a huge, complex structure. But let’s talk about what we know, my friends. Vimondino. Honest territory, rich territory, but a bit dull, eh?”

  “Oh come on, Ferranin’! Dull. Dull!”

  It was a territory of landowning farmers, and not even such very small farmers; many of them had twenty, twenty-five biolche or more (1 biolca, about 3,000 square meters). The town was flanked by the railway that ran from Reggio north to the Po; around there they called it the land of priests and poplars, something of an exaggeration when it came to priests, of which there were only two—the parish priest and the chaplain of San Donato—but certainly it was a politically thankless place. Scarce in support for the progressive parties, more open to the Christian Democratic side, not without a putrid residue of Fascism, with 290 votes (out of 1,200) for the neo-Fascist party in the ’53 election. Landownership in Vimondino had begun in the twentieth century. That is, with the demise of the feudal lord, a certain Count Giarrentani for whom the Vimondinesi had worked as sharecroppers.