The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  “You see, Togliatti, in France, a harshly capitalist country as you know, the Bureau pour la Sûreté du Travail sends out a complete list of industrial accidents to the newspapers twice a month. And here? The Automobile Club prints up statistics of road accidents. The obligation to post notice boards outside building sites to report casualties for which employers are responsible (today effectively the norm) you found in Spain twenty years ago under the Republic. Comrade Togliatti, pardon me if I address you so heatedly. But you know, when I think of the workers who every hour of the day are victims of the careless Italian state, not just the bosses’ egoism, I have a bad conscience about sitting here so comfortably, in such safety, my chest pressed to the desk.”

  He stopped; he was repeating the words of a letter from Marx to Lafargue. A letter about the textile workers of Manchester. Well, so what? Even a century later a socialist could feel the same dismay, the same contempt the Prophet felt. It was a sign that socialism was as timely today as always. A sign there was always something to do, to struggle against.

  “Ferranini. . . .” The soft voice at his side was softened further by a head cold.

  Giordano, the cabinetmaker in the courtyard who served as doorman, spared himself the many stairs by sending his little girl to bring messages or the post.

  “There’s a lady downstairs. She wants to come up.”

  Nuccia. They were supposed to meet in the trattoria, weren’t they? It was half past four. This was a breach of their accord.

  “Tell her to come up.”

  The door opened a few minutes later and a long, mannish figure came in, wrapped up in a raincoat over a dark pullover. Came in and sat down, no bones about it. Self-assured, and apparently young.

  “I come from Reggio, sent by Dottor Viscardi. I’m Ilde ——.” Here the girl said a name that Ferranini didn’t catch. She went on, calmly freshening up her hair: “I’m from the Press Office of the PCI Federation. Dottor Viscardi wanted you to know something confidential. But first, if I may, I’d like to speak to you about a small matter that means a lot to me. Something personal. Will you hear me out? May I speak?”

  He adjusted the papers on his table. He’d never been introduced to or even seen her before.

  “Go ahead,” he said without lifting his eyes from the table.

  “I write,” the girl said, her voice shrill. “I have an article in Poetry and Industry. I’m writing one on structuralism. I contribute to Menabò. Do you like Menabò?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, now,” the girl went on unperturbed, “I’d like to get Carlo Levi to look at something of mine, now that I’m already in Rome. I’d like to see him tomorrow. I wanted to ask you to give me an introduction to Carlo Levi.”

  “No idea who he is,” said Ferranini. He went on: “I’m a former worker, you know, not an intellectual.”

  Meanwhile he was thinking: “Oh, great; our people in Reggio are taking on people like this, so the workers’ cause is in good hands. Delighted about that.” Ferranini was one of those men who lacked a sense of humor even when it was most called for. His thoughts grew darker; the way this stranger had slunk into the Federation suddenly seemed to speak of decadence, betrayal. The fifth column of fool intellectuals in northern sections, something he’d already noticed.

  “Oh what a shame you don’t know Carlo Levi!” the girl went on. “I can hardly believe it.”

  “Would you mind telling me what this chatter of yours has to do with the Federation?”

  “Sure, right away. Well, Viscardi is only interim director. That you already know. They’re making his life difficult. He wants you to intervene and back him. He asked me to remind you of the support he gave you last May.”

  “In the elections, you mean. Well then,” Ferranini replied with considerable composure, “you remind Viscardi that I earned my voters all by myself. It was the workers of Reggio who elected me to parliament. The seven thousand voters who wrote my name on the ballot were seven thousand workers who trusted me.”

  “Oh sorry, I didn’t explain myself well. Viscardi appeals to the friendship between you. Some people in Reggio are going after him, you know, smearing him. There’s Caprari of the Porta Castello section who’s spreading slander. They’re saying Viscardi bought himself a Giulietta sports car when in fact it was just luck, he won it as a prize last year with one of those boxes of bottles they give out for Christmas. It’s Caprari who had better look out. Everyone in Reggio knows that Caprari went to Campione d’Italia this summer to gamble. At the Casinò.”

  •

  Here, Ferranini lost his patience. Attacks on him as a private person (if there were any) slid right off, that cost him little, but this gossipy muck infuriated him; it was a stain, a threat, to an organization dear to him, in which he’d come of age and spent his years, and he was offended to see how coarse, how foul, were the men preparing to replace him in his work. The girl saw him glower, the muscles in his face twitching, and understood she’d approached him the wrong way. She tried to repair the situation.

  “You know how things work. Caprari is ambitious, he’d like to run the Federation. And Viscardi is pro tempore, to boot.”

  Ferranini exploded: he was choking with rage, and he had to loosen the knot on his tie to speak. He leaned over the table.

  “Ambition, you say! That’s the game of politics! The dialectic produces the best. Viscardi is ambitious, Togliatti the chief is ambitious, I’m ambitious. But sports cars, gambling dens, filthy stuff, that is not ambition. It is squalid, sordid.”

  “Please, calm down, I’m sorry.”

  “Let me speak! These things are concessions to bourgeois customs; we turn our backs on the workers we’re bound to defend, and who drop dead—do you follow me, they die—while we sport the symbols of a rotten class and rot in turn because they’re corrupting us. And now get out of here, fast. Out, out, out!”

  It wasn’t easy to regain control. He was rattled, upset, mostly physically, as happened with him.

  That he had a reflective bent helped. He began to rethink what he had said. He ran his eyes over the notes for his draft bill, but a different and more difficult problem came to mind. This justifying, this lionizing of others’ ambitions, of his own. What gave him the right? Yes, ambition was a necessary ingredient in the political struggle, but it also opened the door to petty rivalries, individualism. And the dialectic of ambition, assuming ambition had a dialectic, was rife in bourgeois parties, too. The Communist Party, however, was only formally a party; in reality it was a church called to found the reign of collectivism. Could this task be performed by men whose prime motive was to stand out, to set themselves apart from others?

  He wasn’t at all sure that you could collectivize a system by doing away with equal footing for all. In the USSR they had understood that when people built cults of personality around their leaders, it thwarted the free growth of collectivism. The problem, thought Ferranini, was that the leaders themselves risked developing cults of personality; the leaders or those who aspired to be leaders, who sought and took on the responsibility of power. Yet let’s be honest, people would never aspire to leadership if they were free of any tendential cult of personality. Lacking that, you might keep the faith, and maybe even be a genius, but you would always remain in the ranks. While up above where leaders were needed, the “personalities,” the guides and the bosses, would be in short supply. To have leaders, you had to accept ambition, but ambition negated the spirit of collectivism.

  Perhaps there was some simple way out of this logical impasse. But Ferranini could not see it. These thoughts thrashed about in him for a long while, querulous and contradictory, while he studied the two goldfinches, now awake and scuffling in a cage that was too small.

  Still in turmoil, he left the house and was irritated not to find Nuccia waiting for him in via dell’Orso. She showed up late. They went off to eat.

  At least he wasn’t a man of petty vanity. The lavish welcome he received from the owner
of the humble eating place where he took his meals annoyed him, the way the man showed him off to other customers (this way, Deputy; pleasure, Deputy), so as always he went around to the back door off the courtyard. Across the way stood the San Salvatore Cooperative Printshop, and often, before he ate, he stopped by to talk to the typesetters (there were twenty of them, and they owned the business together); he loved newsprint and watching them work. Though it was Sunday, the shop was lit up and they were working. Ecclesiastical dispensation, said Gennaro, laughing, who served as a sort of boss. Although he was indistinguishable from the others in his dress and his duties.

  “The priest came over to bring us the galleys of the bulletins for this parish and five or six others. He edits them for his colleagues. And they have to be ready by tomorrow.”

  Gennaro, in his thirties, fleshy, pale, intelligent, had been born and brought up in Brooklyn by Roman parents from Trastevere. The fact increased Ferranini’s interest in him.

  “Would you go back, Ferranini? Go back to America?”

  “No. What I have to do is here.”

  “See,” said Gennaro, “here maybe something will change. There, nothing’s going to change.”

  He was right.

  “I meant to ask, Gennaro. Pella, Gonella, Togni, and company—they still giving you work?”

  The printshop produced press material for some of the various factions of the Christian Democratic Party, an awful task, Gennaro had confided. There were nights when they had to set the type three times. Second thoughts, rectifications, about-faces, nervous, furious telephone calls, messengers from party headquarters, the Ministry of the Interior, parliament.

  “We’re buying a third linotype,” said Gennaro, sounding cheerful, hoisting himself up on the stock to rest for a moment. “You’re the one, Ferranini, who doesn’t give us enough work. Don’t you have factions in that party of yours?”

  “We’re all in accord,” said Ferranini, bitter.

  When they sat down at the table, Nuccia looked hard at him.

  “Walter, you would go back to America, wouldn’t you? Tell the truth.” To tell the truth, he was absorbed in other thoughts.

  “Look, I’m a deputy for the third-largest Communist Party in the world. But when I want to have even the least contact with proletarian life, I have to go and bother the boys at the printshop. All the PCI deputies I know are bourgeois; they’re muck-a-mucks, not workers. Amoruso is a doctor. Boatta is a teacher. Reparatore used to be a notary. Which is why I feel so uneasy about staying in Rome.”

  “What did you do today?” Nuccia thought his face looked gray and drawn. “Don’t you feel well?”

  “I studied.”

  “Why do you have to slave over the books half the day? You don’t need to study so much just to keep in touch with the workers.”

  Silence. Ferranini “strolled” around his plate, as they say: a piece of bread on his fork, he pushed it around and around cleaning up the sauce, having finished his portion (the first, because he always ordered the same dish a second time) of the baccalà alla veneta they made for him every Sunday.

  “You know,” Nuccia said after a while, “you’re not in the chamber. There’s no need to be so silent.”

  “When you’re eating, you are keeping death at bay. Not to mention that we’re keeping death at bay from the moment we enter this world. Sorry if that isn’t a cheerful thought.”

  He attempted a laugh and Nuccia was sorry she’d been impatient. She couldn’t say she knew her friend terribly well; they had been together some thirty times, maybe not even. But right from the start she’d had a sort of intuition about him, like the dream where you’re able to recognize and read a person’s mood without even being able to see his face clearly. Just now she thought she’d grasped a fundamental insight, a confession of some deep, irremovable frailty.

  “What’s the matter, Walter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ve never seen you so down. You’re not well, why let them bring you more food?”

  “Let me eat. I got rattled today, that’s all. A girl from the Reggio Federation came to see me.” He told her about the visit, leaving out the worst gossip.

  “Brazen hussy,” said Nuccia. “And quite capable of coming back.”

  “No, she’s just one of those who want to call attention to themselves. One of us. All of us in politics (or at the margins) go a little too far in that direction. It’s already a lot if we’re not corrupt. Is Ferranini different? What do you think? I ask, but it’s just a formal question, because I can judge myself, I don’t need your opinion.”

  “And you’re wrong about that. You need my opinion. I know how different you really are.”

  “I can judge myself,” he said firmly, digging into his second serving of polenta, deep in steaming sauce glossy with fat. “Those people are my comrades. Nobody forced me to come to Rome.”

  “Well if you were ambitious you could have come here ten years ago. But listen, Walter, remember when you went to Marcinelle, to the mines in Belgium? Did somebody call you, send you? You were just an obscure activist deep in the provinces. You went hoping (I imagine) to give a hand to poor people in trouble. You set out from one minute to the next, without even a suitcase.”

  It was true: he hadn’t taken so much as a razor or a change of collars. He had stayed three days. First at the mouth of the number 6 mine shaft, where the fire was worst. Then at the home of a miner from Calabria, where he waited with the man’s wife and her mother-in-law until the fellow returned.

  “And do you remember how I learned you were there? I read it in l’Unità.” The party paper.

  “Well, l’Unità gave my name. So you see, I didn’t go there for nothing.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re strange. You had no way of knowing when you left home that the paper would mention you. Was it your fault that the reporter they sent came from your parts, from Modena?”

  “Okay,” he cut her short. “Let’s move on.”

  They were sitting in a side room where a table was reserved for Ferranini. Nuccia moved closer to him.

  “Take it easy; there’s nothing calculating about you. You’re true-blue, pure. Of a purity that’s theoretical, out of fashion, straight from a manual for young proletarians. All too pure for my purposes!”

  He laughed.

  “Fine, laugh. Are you ever going to say, I’m in love? I love you too? If I were to tell you, I’ve got a baby in the works, I’d like to see how that purity of yours would react. Would you say, I have to get permission from the party leadership?”

  Ferranini raised his eyes to study her.

  “Walter, now I can tell you: Last month I was worried for quite a few days. Or rather, not worried at all. I wouldn’t be afraid of having a child with you.”

  “This is 1958,” said a serious Walter, “and we are building socialism; the next generation will see communism arrive. My father used to say that socialism in those days, you could sum it up in bandiere, bande, e banchetti. Flags, feasts, and marching bands.”

  Nuccia, who really did love him, accepted him for what he was. She thought, “What matters is that he’s not ill.”

  But when he got home and into bed, Ferranini was ill. Very ill. So much so it was a wonder the “pump” was still working.

  3

  WORSE than the last time.

  When was the last time? March, or April. Always when the season changed. But worse this time, much worse, and those great, familiar Po valley oaths, porca vita, porca matina, did not come to his aid. At midafternoon his friend arrived (she’d been waiting for his usual phone call and was worried). He was in bed, his face had taken a sharp edge that made him look younger in a pitiful way. He lay on one side, the nape of his slender neck white under the bare lightbulb, and she nearly didn’t recognize him.

  “Walter, this is crazy, what’s going on?”

  The eyes that met hers wore an expression of fear and wonder. Nuccia would never forget it.


  He’d been afraid. The crushing sensation had gone on too long, it was really bad. Desolately alert, he anticipated and weighed every symptom: the pain from neck to shoulder he’d felt before (the warning, even before he’d gotten into bed), the collapsing blood pressure, the heaving and the squeezing of the “pump.” Breathlessness becoming suffocation. He’d been lucid, repeating the technical terms to himself: bradycardia, dyspnea. Desperate.

  He didn’t want to drop dead in that room. In the dark. Alone, without a helping hand: it was pure misery. The sound of his breathing did not seem to be him but a machine. He had sugared water and Coramine by his side. But he couldn’t even sit up to take them. Still, everything was sharp, clear; at midnight he heard the shutters banging downstairs, someone had come home.

  The dark tormented him; he was sure it was dark, unaware of the light on behind him. He listened attentively to the church bells marking the hours, heard them chime every quarter hour up to 1:00 a.m.; his sense of hearing was intact, acute: the drop of water that fell on the landing outside the front door; sometimes in hallucination, a voice that kept repeating words of reproach (he knew he shouldn’t take it seriously, that it was a dream), a voice he knew, it must be Nancy. What was she saying to him? Air, meanwhile. More air.

  After 1:00 a.m. the feeling that he was suffocating grew even worse. And, he saw, the muscular force of his breathing was slowly declining, the spasm that raised his chest. He thought: Now I’m at the end.

  He was sweating, his brow and chin. He passed a handkerchief across his face. And then he could no longer raise his arm. The damp handkerchief lay on his shoulder.

  •

  When morning came (no one having come to wake him or bring him coffee), he was asleep, slumped on the chair next to the table, his forehead pressed onto the table, his arms forlornly spread over his papers.

  He woke, and the surprise of finding himself there in that posture was greater than the terror he was coming out of. He was already forgetting. His breathing had returned to normal; there was only the weakness and a great chill. The pain in his neck was now just soreness. The crushing (the attack) had passed and Ferranini, a cardiopathic recidivist for the last quarter century, now had a good physical recovery, and a psychic rebound that was all too quick.