The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  “Have no fear,” said Bignami, “that’s finished. When Communists replace reformers, the atmosphere changes.”

  “Are you sure?” said Ferranini. He laughed, but without bitterness.

  They were met by the mayor and other local notables, including the priest. A worker’s association, one of the oldest in the province, was observing its sixtieth anniversary and the town was celebrating. They visited a brickworks, a furniture factory, and several newly built livestock barns. All were cooperatives. After lunch there were refreshments at the Casa del Popolo. Ferranini had no desire to speak. He was hoping to get by with a few remarks in dialect, but then he remembered what he’d discovered before: the men younger than he, workers and farmers, shunned dialect and that way of speaking, even among themselves. They saw it as a mark of backwardness, of a segregation they wanted to be done with, like bicycles and those old cloaks with the rabbit-fur collars. When Mingoni, a young man in his thirties he’d known as a kid who was now a union rep and the manager of the Casa del Popolo, came forward, his manner of speaking was simple, friendly, appropriate.

  “Don’t feel you have to give a speech, Ferranini. Anyway, your ideas are the same ones we hold. It’s enough for us to see that you still remember us now that you’ve gone off to Rome. And we thank you. Sincerely.”

  “Do you know, boys,” said Ferranini taking Mingoni by the arm, “what I was thinking? That now all of you around here speak Italian, and that’s a good thing. Because, proletarians of the world, unite—and to unite you must understand one another, at least at the level of the national language, and so forget about speaking Reggiano, or Modenese, or Piedmontese. It is bourgeois thought, in the guise of left-wing rhetoric, maybe, that portrays the world of labor as picturesque, that confines it to the picturesque, to dialect or slang. Therefore, no remarks in dialect, and no speeches about high politics from me. I’ll just say this: If we of the cooperatives want to resist the private companies, we must do two things—”

  “Ferranini,” a voice interrupted, “you know we still have the portrait of Comrade Stalin hanging in the party section.”

  “And if you’re waiting for me to tell you to take it down, you’ll be waiting for a while. So, there are two things we must do. One: educate ourselves, avoid positivism and improvisation. Two: remain united, avoid rivalry on our own side. And there’s another thing to guard against: being mere administrators, aping the idolatry of profit and property that are typical of capitalism. We must care about one another and avoid getting too attached to things, to money. That’s the main thing. Conserve the proletarian spirit of your organizations; they must remain proletarian at the top as well as at the bottom, in purpose as well as in appearance, and the party will help you, and I, for what I can do, will help you.”

  One of those present, there were hundreds of them, raised his hand: a young man in overalls, with a southern accent.

  “We’re not all party members here. I’m not a Socialist and I’m not a Communist either.”

  “Are you a worker?” Ferranini shot back. “Fine, that’s enough. Work and the worker come first, then the party. Listen: Camillo Prampolini was born near Favellara, a name you’ve at least heard. A socialist, someone who you might think was old-fashioned, but an honest, sincere man. Prampolini once said, ‘If I had to choose between political coherence and the well-being of the workers, I would choose the good of the workers.’ For the theoreticians, that’s heresy, because socialism and the well-being of the proletariat must coincide. I guarantee you, though, only one thing matters: Act so that the workers suffer a bit less than they have always suffered ever since collective humanity existed. All workers have a right to this, even if they don’t think the way we do.”

  Applause. More glasses raised. Bignami appeared and introduced Ferranini to a man of about fifty, big, well-dressed.

  “It’s Sigfrido Minelli, my friend and yours. Recognize him?”

  He barely did.

  “Spain, Paris, and America together. And now you snub me, Ferranini?”

  It was true; for nearly two years Sigfrido Minelli, a onetime schoolteacher from Favellara, had shared his fate in Spain, in Passy, and finally in America. When Ferranini married Nancy, Minelli had been his witness. No, he didn’t mean to snub him. They went to his sister’s house, where he was staying, having arrived a few days earlier from New York with a wife and a U.S. passport.

  Two hours, and for Ferranini a forced immersion in troubled waters. Minelli stirred them up without mercy, with the foolish pleasure of a man who’s extremely pleased about his past (yessiree! among other things he’d become rich). “Remember where I lived in Queens?” “Remember that Italian place in Camden where we went for Easter?” It was destiny, it seemed: yesterday, via Vignanella; today, his companion in exile. It was to cost him, this return to Reggio.

  And of course he wouldn’t be free of these memories anytime soon.

  Bignami left him at the hotel, with the understanding he would take him to Vimondino the following day, and Ferranini went up to his room with a bunch of newspapers. He hadn’t read them yet. But he put them aside. His weary mind spooled out people, places, things, seeking some sense, some order. An up and down of slumps preceded, however, if that was a consolation, by hopeful ascents. His was a history (so said Ferranini) without a dialectic, without forward motion. Without progress, just a cycle of pointless repetition. It began, or began again, with Spain. The summer of ’38 was at its height, that furious summer of ’38 so hostile to the hemp pits of Vimondino, when he decided he must go and fight for socialism. Desert the entrenched battlefield that was Italy, no small task for a man of twenty-three who had eluded military service but was in the police records as a subversive. He spent months thinking, researching how to proceed. Until finally he decided he had found the way. And in fact it was the path other comrades would follow after him, like the Bignami cousins themselves.

  One October Sunday in Milan, he joined a crowd of Borletti workers boarding a People’s Train for an outing to Lugano. He wore a jacket, no hat, and had three hundred lire in his pocket.

  From Switzerland, he was soon in France: from Geneva to Marseille to Toulouse, he followed the chain of clandestine recruitment points for the International Brigades, all of them ill-supplied, poor in everything except enthusiasm and confusion. He wandered from one to another, wasted time, found himself penniless, and was forced to stay over in Marseille, where he worked in a shipyard to put together the hundreds of francs needed to travel onward to Irún. And beyond—for once across the Spanish border he found there was no way to enlist and he had to proceed toward Madrid unaided and on his own steam, undetected in the midst of great confusion. (The whole north of the country was a huge, roiling supply chain for the front.) At Segovia, not far from Madrid, he was finally taken on by the Thaelmann Battalion and there he met Minelli, the teacher from the next town over to his. The city government was evacuating artworks from the Prado, and he and Minelli and some other Italians were attached to the soldiers carrying out this operation. (It took many weeks; his comrades nicknamed him El Letrero because on his back he had sewed a piece of cloth on which he’d written: “When the owners die, the workers live.”) Then he fell ill. The pneumonia he’d come down with, spending his nights in the back of the truck under the rain, put him in the hospital at Burgos until January, and because he had a constant high fever, they moved him from Burgos to San Sebastián. Once out of the hospital, he waited for a train at the station for almost a week, until he fainted. A heart condition, as it turned out. This time they took him to a villa that had been requisitioned in Santona, where dozens of sick or wounded foreign volunteers were recovering (one of them was Palmiro Togliatti, then going by the nom de guerre Mario Ercoli), and they held him there by force. By the time they let him go back to the front, it was the end of February. He caught up with Minelli in Madrid, in time to see the Republicans fall, after a day and two nights barricaded with a bunch of others in the carcass of a German truck, and
then in a cellar. A euphoric interlude, quickly deflated. They had to get out. After a desperate march to a snowbound León and Asturias, the men of the Thaelmann, nearly all foreigners, made it to the coast. They boarded a ship at Santander, among them the Bignami cousins, Minelli, and himself, Ferranini, returning inglorious (in his view), skin and bones (down to forty-seven kilograms), embittered, and dazed.

  They landed near Arcachon west of Bordeaux, and passed through the countryside, where they could have found work if they’d been willing to take jobs as farmhands, for the region was quite short of labor. But the little group (Italians, Poles, some Rhineland Germans) had decided on Paris, and they proceeded on foot, stubborn, starving. At Passy began days of demoralizing inertia inside a sheet-metal hut for Ferranini, the Pole Weiss, Minelli, the Passarin brothers from Bosco Chiesanuova, and the younger Bignami. Each day one of them in turn went to offer their services at building sites or Les Halles. Weiss was the luckiest; a mechanic, he was taken on by a compatriot in a garage. By the end of the month the two Passarin brothers and Bignami were working as dockers at a river port on the Seine. In those days Walter was not strong enough for heavy jobs, as anyone could see right off when he showed up for work. And worse, he was starving. There were times that winter when five or six days went by and he and Minelli had nothing to eat but onions and a few ounces of bread. Salvation came in the person of a certain Brighenti from Modena, who had a shop and traded in wine from Barletta, Trani, and Squinzano, which he imported and used to cut better French wines. Brighenti had a brother in North America, in Chicago, where he produced canned meats, who had long been looking for northern Italians, if possible from Emilia, to work in the warehouse and as guards. Returning to Italy was out of the question. Ferranini and Minelli got written offers, and accepted. Ferranini hadn’t forgotten Sacco and Vanzetti. The trip cost two thousand francs; they earned half working behind the counter at the shop, and Brighenti loaned them the rest, his guarantee the future wages his brother would pay.

  It was the great holiday of the French people, July 14th, when they sailed from Le Havre, and Ferranini sent a postcard to a friend in Vimondino, with the words: “Back soon, give my regards to Nella.” Before he came back with regards for Nella (at the cemetery, for she had meanwhile been mowed down by machine-gun fire on via Emilia) seven years had gone by. And he would be old when he returned, his heart damaged in every possible way. Lying on the bed, his newspapers still folded up, Ferranini remembered and grew irritated. He was irritated with himself and by himself, even as he paid involuntary homage to two impersonal and opposite abstractions: chance and inevitability. As he reviewed his own history, what he’d already understood for some time seemed confirmed. A monotonous adverse pattern ruled his life. Superficial variety concealed a rigid geometry, and the first time he’d made love to Nuccia (they were in the bedroom, just getting up from their labors), to her amused astonishment he’d told her: “The worse for you that you’ve attached yourself to a man who’s parabolic.” Okay, you could laugh, but wasn’t it true that his life looked like a parabola: a sharp uptick loaded with hope and initiative, then the inevitable plunge? The downstroke of the parabola went deep into despair, but then came charging out for another ascent, in turn condemned to reverse into another dive.

  No trace of any dialectical progress. Nothing but repetition in his life. As a boy, the prospect—he had sweated to create it—of study, the university, libraries, laboratories. In just four weeks, he went from sitting at a school desk to loading cars in a railway station. Spain. Sacrifice, a cause to defend, a hopeless but noble war, and a lot of high-sounding talk. Though for him Spain would come down to various hospitalizations and a desperate flight to the absolute misery of life in Passy.

  Then—America. Boston, where he arrived at the place he idealized, the prison yard at Charlestown, the goal toward which until then everything had seemed to be arching, never mind the fatigue and isolation. Under the patient gaze of a guard he had meditated at length on the tombs (empty) of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The patient, maybe ironic guard had not told him that the two men had been cremated.

  After which—the collapse.

  He landed on July 19th; Minelli remained in New York, but Ferranini kept going all the way to Stickney, near Chicago. Brother Brighenti was happy to see him and set him to work packaging. Hard work, no fixed hours, but he was happy, a worker among other workers, and soon he had won them over, although they were of two races and three or four nationalities. Brighenti, who was stubborn and rough, didn’t share some of his Passy brother’s Socialist ideas. Employees, be they white or black, were there to be exploited. Ferranini knew that the most vigorous capitalist is the one from proletarian origins. And yet, the man had a certain instinctive sense of justice; he paid his workers well and on time. It came as a shock to all when, at the end of ’39, Brighenti died of pneumonia.

  A period of strikes followed. The Vogelers, two naturalized Germans who had bought the company from the widow, were high-handed with the blacks and the Italians, and when they cut the workforce, Walter was one of the first to go. He got a job with a hauling company, but with half of Chicago blocked by the strike, that shut down too. He went to a shipping company that moved grain across the Great Lakes, and they took him on as a casual worker, hiring anyone they could get to replace the strikers. But on the third day the dock was ringed with pickets, and he refused to cross the line. Ferranini the socialist was going to be a scab? The sad truth was, his meager savings were shrinking, and because he was an outsider he got no support from the unions. Everywhere he tried, the story was the same: the companies unaffected by the strike were still in trouble because the others were paralyzed; they were laying off. Where strikes had been called, companies were paying double, but you had to accept the status of scab and a police escort. In short, it wasn’t from a book that Ferranini learned about the material and psychological dynamics of the strike. He went back to the Vogelers and worked for several weeks as a janitor in the warehouses and offices. In the meantime public services had also become paralyzed: cold and inertia hung over the great city. He felt secure, though; he had expectations. The “ascendant curve” (of the usual parabola) was still on the rise. He felt his life was just now beginning and that difficulties only buoyed him: He learned something from each one of them, measuring his strength, sharpening the positive qualities he sensed were emerging. He weighed the value of the general strike as an instrument of worker action, but also as a symptom of the decadence inherent in the system.

  Solitary, without a friend or a woman, suffering from the cold (that winter the Hudson Bay sent blizzard after blizzard down onto the plains), he took comfort in the works of Lenin written during his hard, anxious years in Bern. He spent hours studying in the public library and he was happy. For three reasons: because he was spending his time with the father of the Revolution and the greatest thinker of modern times (after Marx); because he could improve his English by reading the texts in translation (know your adversary, know his language too); because it was a way to avenge himself for all the cold he’d endured outside. He made do with a meal and a half a day and was able to put some money aside, thanks to the stopgap jobs he found here and there: selling tickets in a cinema, working in a garage. He felt privileged; for the first time he was independent, without a boss. When he was ready to undertake the pilgrimage to Sacco and Vanzetti’s tomb, the decision to leave was made as a free individual; he didn’t have to demean himself by asking permission. He had money to travel and live for a few days. The Central Command of Capitalism, not just Chicago but America itself, had failed to tame him. Quite the contrary, he felt even more critical and antagonistic than before. He knew its instability, its innermost weakness.

  On the train east, he contemplated the rite he was carrying out without emotion. (He had set aside two dollars for a black tie and flowers to lay on the martyrs’ grave, poor thing.) Pious enthusiasm flushed with pride. In those plush newspapers of yours, O bourgeois, one
day you will read my name among the founders of socialism. Such were his thoughts.

  Ferranini got out of bed, listless. He opened the newspapers, the modest papers from Rome and Milan, his daily bread. They too had never had reason to mention him, not once.

  “Good times,” he thought aloud. “Good times, great foolishness.”

  4

  THE KID had been waiting at the door for a few minutes. Ferranini hadn’t noticed.

  “Signora Corsi has arrived.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “She asked for you. Shall I tell her to come up?”

  “Ah. Let her come up.”

  He greeted Nuccia with no sign of surprise at her unexpected arrival. “I almost think I like Rome better now” were his words, and Nuccia, fearing a different reception, was pleased. In truth he was very happy to see her, a spot of warmth in all that fog, her reassuring voice.

  The first thing Nuccia did was inspect the room. A diffident female gaze.

  “You’ve been lying in bed, you’re not well yet. I knew it, and so I came.”

  “I was just thinking. The usual sloth. What’s new?”

  “What’s new is that there’s something for you to be pleased about, and that’s another reason I’m here. Yesterday they were looking for you. The party.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone high up, it seems. Apparently someone very high up.”

  He was shaken. Togliatti? Well, why not? They might have told him about the project he was working on. After all, reforming the industrial safety law was important, urgent. Worthy of his attention. But hope faded quickly. None of his friends had access to the chief. And Togliatti had always ignored him. Come on! Impossible. Among other things he’d heard Togliatti was abroad at the moment.