The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  “So you don’t want to. Oh, Walter.”

  Ferranini looked around to be sure the phone closet was tightly closed. “That stuff is for the luxury-lovers. Too refined for me.”

  “What kind of vows did you take to get into the PCI?”

  Silence.

  “Watch out, Walter, you’ll lose me.”

  He laughed, finally. “No, I won’t lose you. Sunday morning I’ll be at the station to meet you, and we’ll go home right away. We’ll take a taxi.”

  “Well, good thing you’re not proposing to take the bus,” she said, knowing he was not only austere but a bit stingy.

  “Ciao. Think about your daughter.”

  It was the longest phone conversation they’d ever had. He put the phone down with a sigh and, relieved, went back to the Bignami cousins.

  2

  FERRANINI, a nature uncorrupted by (bourgeois) culture and even (measured by some standards) virginal. That Saturday afternoon at the home of his friend and colleague Reparatore, he’d heard the soprano Renata Tebaldi on the record player aching with love for Alfredo. He knew opera and opera singers, and yet, as if for the first time, love croce e delizia al cor warmed his blood, and as he left he thought of his lady friend and felt sorry to disappoint her. He made up his mind; she lived on via Ovidio behind the Palazzaccio, the big, heavy palazzo that housed the high court. He went there on a scouting expedition (it was after all a building full of magistrates, and the two of them were illicit lovers), and found a pretext to look at the concierge’s lodge and see what sort of person she was. He returned that evening, pajamas and slippers wrapped up in paper, and told her that Signora Corsi was expected after midnight and that he would wait for her upstairs. It was a stratagem dictated by the clandestine nature of their affair, and even more by his shyness, which lay beneath his skin like a second nervous system. (The simile, which irritated him, was Nuccia’s. While she loved him even for this, and protectively, vigilantly.)

  There was that convoluted side of Ferranini, so forthright and sincere in practical matters. Once inside, the door closed and locked (two small furnished rooms, so furnished you could hardly move), he left the light off and removed his shoes, so that others in the building wouldn’t notice his presence. With all this, his heart was at peace and he slept no worse, despite the radiators, than in his chilly room on vicolo del Leonetto.

  Sunday, Nuccia was right on time; when she didn’t see him at the station she ran up the three flights of stairs, breathless, hoping she would find him there.

  “My Walter, man of my life.”

  “What about the child?”

  “She had a fever yesterday too, but it’s the flu.”

  “What if you had stayed there today?” he said while Nuccia opened her bag.

  “No, there was no need. It’s just the flu, and there are her grandparents. I wasn’t worried. Listen, do you think I’m attached to my daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. But I don’t want to hear about it now. Right now I’m focused on what I’m getting ready to do.”

  Five minutes later, emerging from the toilet after splashing and flushing, she was still wearing her suit. Walter, back on the bed, was quizzical.“

  You’re not taking off your clothes?”

  “Yes, here, in front of you. What, you don’t want me to, you don’t like it?”

  “An appetizer, you mean? I don’t need it.”

  He never managed that kind of talk very elegantly, and it made Nuccia unhappy. But he did make up for it with genuine hunger, that he did. After the “revival” (her word), Nuccia started talking, grown expansive and clearheaded with that special gratefulness that opens a woman’s mind while it numbs a man’s. Sitting on her knees on the bed in the faint light of the bedroom they’d helped to over-heat, she looked thinner to him, there was something infantile and at the same time tense about her, something unpleasant. Nuccia, who’d suffered in life, looked every one of her thirty-eight years. Fèimna magra, fèimna agra, Ferranini thought distractedly. Skinny woman, sour woman: a saying he’d heard from his father.

  “So the train begins to move and I go to my compartment and lie down to sleep on the top berth. Down below is a woman in her thirties, fat, working on a portable typewriter. Business correspondence. She apologizes, says, ‘The commendatore’—she called him by his honorific—‘is traveling to Milan with me,’ and goes on typing. Meanwhile I’m trying to sleep. Then a fellow comes in, little guy, I can barely see him from where I am, he takes the letters, they talk, he signs them one by one. Now he’s going to leave, I say to myself, it’s midnight. But no. Now that the work’s done, it’s time for recreation. She’s lying on the bunk, and he, I suppose, is groping her. Like in their own house. Wait, Walter, listen to this. She’s playing hard to get. Snuggling, yes; grabbing, no. Snuggling, get it? I’m about to explode. The man, who’s standing, is supporting himself with one hand on the edge of my bunk. I turn on the light behind me and look at his hand. I know that hand! Can you believe it? I recognize the gold signet ring. You know who the commendatore was? It was Cesare.”

  “Who’s Cesare?”

  “What do you mean who is he? Cesare Lonati!”

  “Your husband.”

  “Right. I should have beat him on the head, there on the spot. But instead, listen to this, I got the giggles, coughed hard, and not too long after that he left. In the morning when we got to Milan luck was with me and I didn’t run in to him. Now can I open the shutters?”

  “Yes, but put on a bathrobe!” he barked. “This Lonati of yours,” he went on pensively, “someone mentioned him. In the party here in Rome, it seems they think highly of him.”

  “You know when he joined? Before we got married, in ’48, the era of the Great Fear. The PCI was taking in industrialists by the dozen, people getting their party card as insurance. And you know why they think highly of him? Because he contributes. Every year he buys eighty, a hundred memberships. And that’s not all; he’s in the ink business, supplies the party paper l’Unità, and in December he sends them the bill with, written in own hand: ‘Void. Best wishes from Comrade Cesare Lonati.’ ”

  “I’d like to know why you married him.”

  She pressed the backs of her hands against her eyes. “I really can’t say, Walter. And to think I was already twenty-eight at the time! He persisted; he had a good position (I have to confess). I didn’t get along with my mother. And I was already in love with you, as you know. I would look at you, back in those days at the prefecture, and the more I looked at you, skinny as you were (and are), the more I liked you. I told Cesare when we separated: I know a guy named Ferranini, I love him, he’s the man for me. You remember that day in December ’47 at the prefecture in via Monforte. Those were great times. A year later things were already slack, deflated. And I was slack too. I let myself get married, went back to being the bourgeois I was born. Now I’m paying for it.”

  Like her father, the mayor of Monticello, Nuccia Corsi had been a partisan in the north: the Brianza and Val d’Ossola. After the war, slogging away at some job “to bring home a university degree,” she became active in the communist movement without ever joining the party, and in 1947 she ended up with the bands that occupied Milan city hall, staying to the bitter end, in what would be the extreme last action of the Resistance. From all across the Po valley members hurried to Milan in aid of those bold comrades, and among them Ferranini, at the time the PCI section head for Porta Castello, in the city of Reggio Emilia.

  Instinctively he distrusted and felt annoyed by her nostalgic tone, most likely because, unknown to himself, he was even more susceptible to feverish recollections than she was. He straightened out on the bed, stretched, and said, “Better to change the subject. Come over here.”

  By noon he was home, where he opened some canned meat before getting down to work, and ate it sitting on the windowsill, a thin stick of bread on his knees and his feet aimed toward the table covered with books and newspapers. Comrade
Ferranini’s tastes were simple, those of a worker, slightly bohemian, like a student of once upon a time. Nuccia had been upset when she saw him getting dressed to leave.“

  Why don’t you relax? And you call yourself lazy. Let’s spend the day together.”

  “Lazy? That’s the least of it, and why I have to keep busy. I spend my life trying to be just the opposite of what I am.”

  Or doing the opposite of what he liked.

  He had always liked study, though, and given the opportunity here in Rome, he indulged. There was plenty of time, no shortage of subjects, and that old room on vicolo del Leonetto overflowed with silence. I had to wait for my hair to turn gray in order to sgurèr, he thought, sitting down at the table. (Sgurèr: In the dialect of Vimondino and the Bassa it meant “to polish up, become less rough.”)

  Just recently he’d been told by D’Aiuto from the Rome Federation that they were looking for an MP to give lessons on the relationship between Marx and Mazzini. Maybe he could do it? Ferranini replied that the theme was interesting (and an issue for bourgeois propaganda as well) and that he’d be delighted to hear someone lecture on it. In short, he was there to learn, not to teach. Sincere modesty. And not excessive either, he was an autodidact. But not, mind you, superficial, not a dilettante, anything but. His knowledge was profound, maybe even excessively ruminated on, made his own. Ever since ’46 Ferranini had spent most of his few hours of leisure in the public library of Reggio trying to measure up to the classics, at first in old editions of the Socialist paper Avanti!, large, yellow, and fragile like some ancient tome. All that fragmentary, somewhat erratic, and aggressive reading had not brought him erudition. But the Marxist picture of reality that remained an extrinsic concept for many had become vision, an optic, a natural way of seeing.

  Ferranini didn’t have to translate events into historical materialism. They simply presented themselves to him in that light.

  On the other hand, he had to align that perspective with another that was no less natural and necessary to him but unfortunately not always congruent, although it seemed to him as rigorous: biology, vital knowledge for him in all senses. And then (it pained him although it wasn’t very clear to him) there was the further problem of reconciling those two perspectives with an abnormal, furtive ambition to build abstractions that led to imaginative syllogizing above and beyond his premises and data. An aberrant instinct, somehow congenital. Which was oddly rooted in this man, if you considered the rough, practical realities he’d struggled with from birth.

  After settling in Rome, Ferranini had decided (a planner, like all impulsive people with a will) to reread Marx and Engels line by line—the longest and most difficult course available to any intellectual of the last hundred years. He began with the correspondence and works after Kapital (paying particular attention to Engels’s naturalistic-scientific treatises), taking the trouble to calculate a course of study that would last through the legislative session, and he’d been at it for four months. He’d also added Marx’s just-discovered juvenile writings, a recent acquisition for all Italians. Meticulous, he always wrote a summary of what he’d studied to review the morning after, his notebook on the sink while he shaved.

  He measured Engels against Cope, de Vries, Mark Baldwin. Authors equally eminent in his eyes.

  He was in fact rereading a chapter of Baldwin, the positives and negatives of that definitive discovery (as he saw it), the doctrine of evolution, easily comparable to that of Marx. He was coming back to it for the second day in a row. (In the pages of Baldwin, beside the roughness of the text, there was a snare that wasn’t exactly theoretical, a memory that sank into him bringing other memories, more bitter than sweet. It was the Camden, New Jersey, library, and he was young. He ordered up the book and went to read it lying on the lawn in front of the library. Now, at a distance of five thousand kilometers and thirteen years, he had to be careful to chase away the smell of that grass, the glimmer of that sky layered with white and green, white and gray clouds, never seen again.)

  His juvenile crush on the life sciences had matured into a belief that science was honest, valid. Keeping close track of their results helped develop Marxist consciousness; it wasn’t mere intellectual curiosity. He exacted an accord between the two poles of his interests: truth could not be sharecropped; it was inadmissible to owe one truth to Engels and another to Darwin. In his somewhat scholastic, somewhat rigid way of thinking, the numbers must add up on both sides, except when he took off on one of his chaste flights of speculation. In judging reality there were different languages, of course, different orientations. But they must all be interconnected. The reward and comfort of the scholar who bothered to get to the bottom of things was that language and orientation must finally be in accord, must merge. Without this assurance, he was unable to make peace with the apostles, the commentators, the critics. He ventured diffidently into the immense underbrush of Marxist literature, convinced, above all, that the only way to get the wider view was to perch on a treetop, zum Wipfel stehen: the phrase had struck him while reading Marx.

  •

  At four o’clock he changed the water for the two goldfinches, dozing puffed up with the November sun in the cage on the windowsill, and shuffled the papers on his table. (No better break than alternating tasks.) He stood by the window for a moment; from the facing window half a story up, the same two girls began their Sunday air raid on the birdcage with pellets of bread crumbs. “Good evening, professore!” they called out. When she was alone the eldest of the two would sometimes try out some tempting moves with her legs and skirt. On the street a noisy bunch of kids passed by with a flag, the banner of a football club. The pellets changed target, but the boys didn’t notice.

  “Hey, you fanatics!” the girls yelled.

  Right now he had to finish examining a small mountain of tracts and documents he had obtained after long insistence (he was an MP, yes, but a Communist) from the Institute of Statistics and the Labor and the Interior Ministries, and some gleaned with less trouble from France, Switzerland, or Belgium.

  Information, numbers, laws on industrial accidents. A subject he’d always been drawn to as part of the practical side of his work, but now he had to master the judicial and legislative aspects and develop a plan of action. He’d gotten to parliament and now he had a chance to act. “Accidents” (the term itself was ambiguous, unfair) were one of the most eloquent indexes of the way labor continued to be treated. And how the workers were treated exposed, with sinister clarity, the ills of the whole country: the shortage of modern equipment, confused and inconclusive guidelines, inability to predict needs, subservience to ruling-class interests. In short: Italy. Without a change in the present state of things (in the Marxist sense, without overthrowing the system), the workers would never achieve their right to be reasonably certain, when they entered the factory or the building yard, that they would come out in one piece at least physically, anatomically. To Ferranini, this was clear. In the meantime, something could be done—and must be done. He’d spoken to those party colleagues with whom he was on friendly terms. Reparatore and Amoruso. Amoruso urged him on, but he was just a doctor and saw the question strictly from a professional angle. Reparatore, who was a union leader, advised him not to entertain illusions.

  “A bill of this importance introduced by the Communists won’t pass. We’re the opposition. Are you joking?”

  “I don’t joke.”

  “Communists do not take part in the life of the parliament, they observe and remain outside! You know the principle, you even support it.”

  “And if the immediate interests of the workers are involved?”

  The worst came when he realized he would have little or no backing from the party. He had contacted the Research Department and received a pretty clear reply: “We’ve been looking into the question for some time and it’s unlikely there are any genuinely new proposals to be made. In any case we are overwhelmed with work now, so it’s a matter for later.” He turned to the Legisla
tive Department. The reply was much the same.

  It was a hard blow for Ferranini and for several days he was seen looking sour and gloomy. Or not seen at all. Whether or not he was contradicting his principles (anyway, the one Reparatore had reminded him of), he felt useless, and felt that the hundred and forty comrades in his group were useless and idle. “Ergo, we are only here to waste time.”

  Amos had just written to him; the Catholics and their workers’ association were raising their ugly heads around Reggio, and now a Bignami, that is, not a no one, had to compete with these Christian activists, loudspeakers on top of their cars and tons of paper to hand out. (Christian Democratic emissaries they were, from Verona, Brescia.) He decided it was reason enough to go up there, and only sent a telegram to justify his absence forty-eight hours later (“Chamber in session”).

  Back in Rome, he thought it over. Nothing, he decided, prevented him from dealing with the question of worker safety; he could study the material on his own. At some point, someone would probably even listen.

  He wrote up a draft bill. It seemed pretty thorough to him, divided into three sections, his bad handwriting filling ten pages of lined notebook, the kind used in school. One: institutional reform of the agencies concerned. Two: creation of a dedicated Labor Police; creation of local technical review boards to oversee and approve all plans to build new workshops and industrial plants. Three: improved policing, stiffening fines, and penal sanctions; creation of a “black book” of employers who repeatedly violated the laws in question; the requirement that employers post public notices, outside their plants and yards, of any and all transgressions committed. Ferranini read it aloud, one hand tapping on the written pages to establish the rhythm.

  Publicizing this ugly category of social crimes: would that not be the simplest and most direct way to win the battle? In his mind he saw himself speaking one on one with Togliatti (he always imagined his interlocutor was the party secretary), spelling out his ideas in detail.