The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  “I learned about it from Deputy Amoruso.”

  “Amoruso knows about you?”

  Nuccia burst out laughing. “I’m not a germ! He came into the bookstore.”

  “And so Amoruso knows that you and I—”

  “Well, if he doesn’t know, he can imagine. Does that worry you so much?”

  Ferranini was holding his head between his hands.

  “The train to Rome comes through here at ten forty tonight, “he said. “We can still make it.”

  “You want to leave now?” Nuccia sounded wretched. “We’re going tomorrow.”

  “We have to be very cautious. This town is a hotbed of gossip. Tomorrow people will be saying that I invited my mistress for the night.”

  But he backed down. In any case, why get excited? To set himself up for another disappointment? If they were looking for him, it was just for a chamber group meeting. Or some similar foolishness.

  They had supper early, in the hotel, and then Ferranini went to his room because (he didn’t say so) he was beginning to feel tired. After taking a room herself, Nuccia came up to his, where he’d just undressed. He was getting into bed, and he pointed at the settee under the window.

  “No intention of crawling under the covers with you, don’t worry!”

  “Come on, Nuccia, none of your silliness. It’s one of those days.”

  “And none of your playing, Comrade Ferranini. You’re wearing pajamas, a bourgeois invention.”

  Obedient, however, she took her place on the settee, thinking she would leave in a few minutes and let him sleep. She and Amoruso hadn’t just talked politics. From some symptoms, some involuntary hints Ferranini had let drop, the doctor had guessed that his colleague had a heart ailment (of nervous origin, he thought) and he meant to find out more if Ferranini consulted him. Meanwhile, though, it was advisable to keep a cautious eye on him. Upset, she wanted to know more, but Amoruso simply held up his open hands, an eloquent gesture. (The doctor was from Foggia, but had lived in Naples.)

  “Signora. What more can I say? I would need to examine him. I suspect our friend is a chronic cardiopath, perhaps not serious. But I may be mistaken, both in under- or in over-estimation.”

  “Do an electrocardiogram,” she said.

  “As if electrocardiograms can’t be mistaken too! Anyway, if he’s the nervous sort, exams and worrying may just make the situation worse.”

  And so she had decided to join Ferranini; she had to see him right away. On the way, in the train, she continued to think about him. And by unconscious transposition (better that than unreasonable jealousy) her friend’s heart problem (now she was certain of it) got mixed up with a quite different heart problem. Walter is fond of me, but that’s all. I’m valued, but superfluous to his life. He’s still suffering over his ex-wife. Suffering, and silent about it.

  Ferranini studied her, his hands clasped behind his neck.

  “Walter, it would do you good to be honest, to talk a little. What were you thinking about when I came up here? Your wife, right?”

  “You want to know what I was thinking? About America, about the disaster those last four years in America were for me.”

  “Only America?”

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll be skipping a meeting with a certain Minelli, a guy who was there with me. Sigfrido Minelli. He was the one who introduced me to Roger Demarr, the firm I worked for. When I came to the United States, I was a free man, alive, but once I joined Demarr, I began to flounder. I sank into a reified, dispossessed world that completely transformed me. It was the great crisis of my life. You know about that. A betrayal.”

  “You were betrayed, poor thing,” she said.

  “I mean that I betrayed my faith. Don’t you see? The young socialist caught in the cogs of the wheel, become a wheel myself.”

  Nuccia’s thought was: First comes the ideological preamble, then he’ll move on to his wife, Nancy. But Ferranini wasn’t pursuing that train of thought.

  Roger Demarr (on the birth register as Ruggero De Marco, born in Altamura in the province of Bari) had been, was until a few years ago, the owner of a grocery business in Camden. Just across the river from Philadelphia. He already had too many Italians around the shop and didn’t want any more. When Ferranini showed up, he only made an exception because the job-seeker came from Alta Italia, the north, and couldn’t speak much Americano so would not waste his time on chatter. He hired him as a second clerk to supervise the itinerant sales vans that went out to sell sugar and coffee, chocolate and soap door to door. In six months Ferranini had become a confidential clerk responsible for dealing with the suppliers and receiving important clients.

  Ferranini’s was no mere belated ingratitude. The truth was that in those six months the young socialist, the last living worshipper of the tombs of Sacco and Vanzetti, had become a diligent (if at times somewhat distracted, slightly surly) employee of Demarr, an affable family-owned company that, however, boasted sales of $500,000 per year. In those first days, Ferranini was busy keeping afloat. Too plainspoken a man to go about things in secret, he obtained permission to leave Camden on Saturday afternoon and Sunday to seek out Italian immigrants of his faith, get them together with Minelli’s help, hold lessons in anti-Fascism and elementary Marxism, give them courage and take heart himself. He began to think about contacting the local trade unions. Here Minelli, better informed and cannier, advised him not to: the unions in the East were even worse than in Chicago; they knew nothing and wished to know nothing about socialism as we understand it. But the lessons he was giving to his compatriots, all of them southerners, did not satisfy him as he’d hoped. Rather than the preacher that Ferranini aspired to be, they wanted a helper, an employment agency, and when they didn’t sense that was Ferranini’s strength, they took part in the theoretical discussions only listlessly or not at all, until finally they stopped coming.

  And what was more, liberty, which the famous statue at the entryway to the continent had promised him as well as millions of other fugitives, did not reveal itself to be all that abundant. One Sunday afternoon in a small town in Massachusetts (all night on the train to get there) he was speaking to a small group of Sicilians—cobblers, tailors, and barbers—and one of them got up to inquire (in excellent Americano) whether anyone not backward still read the Bible. Ferranini had been talking about the Marxist concept of superstructure, and thought the question so posed allowed him to speak clearly. He replied that an intelligent person could at the most tell those stories to children. Was the Sicilian an agent provocateur? A police warning from that town was sent to Camden. Ferranini was ordered “not to occupy himself with the Christian religion using disrespectful language and intent, in a Christian state and a Christian nation” if he wished to avoid criminal sanctions, including imprisonment, imposed by anti-blasphemy laws.

  Ferranini was speaking in a soft voice; the hotel room was dreary and the heating low. A single lightbulb over the sink left both of them in the shadows.

  “You can’t imagine how gloomy I’m beginning to feel,” said Nuccia, huddled up on her settee.

  “So go to bed. I’m only talking about these things because you brought them up.”

  As often with men unused to talking about themselves, Ferranini was less concerned to make himself understood than he was to be consistent. In that unplowed field that was his memory of those years, he cut a long, straight furrow without paying attention to all that went unexplored at the edges.

  “If I may advise,” he said to her, “the empirical individual is of no importance in what I’ve been telling you. Only one thing is of interest: the degeneration of a consciousness.”

  Nuccia laughed. “Well, I’m interested in the empirical individual, yes I am! You can’t imagine the goodwill a woman needs to put up with one of you, however mediocre.”

  Ferranini, recalling those years, felt less than mediocre. But she had been right: to reveal himself had made him feel better and was the right thing to do, however much there was to
pay in shame and discretion.

  Because there was reason to be ashamed.

  It was during the first months of 1940. He had held a few more lessons, three or four, and then quit. He gave up.

  It wasn’t fear of police violence that dampened his enthusiasm, nor did he feel slighted as his audiences melted away. Worse. Other interests were worming their way into him, regressive interests; he was being assimilated by his environment and estranged from himself. Bourgeois society’s powerful digestive system.

  In just less than a year since he’d been hired by the Camden firm, he’d had a raise three times without asking. Three. Now it wasn’t enough to go to the public library in Philadelphia and borrow books; he began to buy them. It was the illusion of appropriation, alienation in practice: the books had to be his. Weary of his rented room and meals in the house of an Italian on Edgeware Road across from where he worked, he found a small apartment for sale at the end of the road and moved in, paying the first two installments with nonchalance. America the leveler—the appealing prosperity of its way of life—flattened the aspirations of the young socialist until his aims seemed distant and worthless to him. Sacco and Vanzetti, class doctrine, atheism, and the unpleasant surprise of the anti-blasphemy laws all sank into the silt of disagreeable memories. In early spring came the inevitable purchase of an automobile: a modest Chevy, secondhand.

  War had set fire to the world, and millions of men like him were being consumed by it. While he was peacefully scraping by and looking after his career. One of the Demarr clerks, a German, had been interned in a camp. He wrote to them to say they were treating him handsomely, and thanked this great nation, generous even with the children of the enemy. Ferranini was forced to agree, and admire, but he foresaw that Italy would ally with the enemy and feared the time would come when he would be sent to keep the German company. Instead, even after Italy declared war, Ferranini and most of his fellow Italians weren’t harassed at all. He went on living as before, and no one bothered to restrict his movements. Minelli lived in New York and was friends with a girl who worked at the Italian consulate; he came to visit Ferranini and told him that the consulate was shutting down. “Now they’re going to round us up, you’ll see.” But Demarr reassured them, said he knew better. “Relax, guys. Look after your health!”

  “In other words,” Nuccia tried to interject, “Demarr did care about you.”

  “Did I say he didn’t? Meanwhile, though, he got me to disavow my past. He set the machinery in motion. Not that I wasn’t aware; I kept saying to myself, ‘Walter, watch out, you’re losing your way, you’re lost.’ ”

  Demarr. A skin-deep American in the way he held his cigar and even to the extent of decorating his office with a portrait of the Quaker William Penn (next to that of Pius XII). With an Irish American bride fifteen years younger than he, past fifty-five now and an unhappy husband and father. He was convinced his wife and the two older children (there were four in all) barely tolerated him, and sought to even the score outside the family. As his business flourished he had acquired various titles in the parish and around town. These seemed too little to him. “Wholesale grocer,” the title with which he figured in the Camden chamber of commerce yearbook, didn’t gratify him either. He liked to call himself a “landowner” and he had the right to do so ever since he had acquired a nice piece of land during a bankruptcy liquidation, land he measured out in his own way, not in acres but in tòmoli, the southern Italian unit of measure for farmland. He had two farmhouses, two barns, and a small sawmill powered by a waterwheel. Thousands of trees, pasture as far as the eye could see. Each summer he spent a couple of weeks there. And then he could no longer go there; the distance was too great, he was obese, suffered from emphysema, and automobile travel was too much for him. When he learned that Ferranini was a country boy and knew something about agricultural work, he began to send him in his place. Those expeditions, which Ferranini adored (too much!), tranquilized his boss. Old Laurel Farm, as it had been called since Civil War days, stopped losing money. Oats and potatoes were planted, the hay was harvested and sold. Even the maple and oak woods, thick and untended, began to earn money. Here Ferranini’s tale grew elaborate, impassioned.

  “Saturday before dawn I would leave Camden, and it was four hours before I could see the lake. Lake Erie, as big as a sea. When I arrived I would walk out into the fields. Do the accounts with the men. I had hired two on salary and took on two jobbers to bring in the hay in season. I would spend hours in the barns. At midday I’d lie on the grass in front of the empty, closed-up house. And I’d stay there for hours, sprawled out looking at the fields of ‘my’ estate, the meadows that extended right down to the shore of the lake. There were no houses in sight. Far away, a rail line with a single track cut across the landscape, the rare train heading past with its plume of smoke.”

  Nuccia had never known Walter to show interest in the landscape. His quite lyrical description astonished her.

  “I had what they call un’infognatura. A fixation, a crush. I would hurry to Old Laurel as if I were going out with a girl. I lived for that. I had forgotten I was a man for that.”

  “And you were happy?”

  “I was driven by remorse.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  In Lenin’s Sočinenija, his Works, it is written that music is sweet, pleasant, and dangerous. Like all things that distract from reality.

  “I believe,” Ferranini went on, “that nature is an enemy reality I must struggle against (and labor is this struggle) to keep it from prevailing, from subjugating us. At times nature can take on a sweet and attractive appearance, like music as Lenin speaks of it, and I would abandon myself, allow myself to be enchanted. And then at Old Laurel there was something else, something worse: the countryside, the sly weapon of a bourgeois world intent on dominating me. Why is it that in America they give so much importance to the landscape, to wildlife reserves, national parks, the wilderness? To make people forget the true conditions of society. When you demystify the cult of nature and the propaganda around it, you find it is one of the various social narcotics, like sport and cinema.

  “But meanwhile I was allowing myself to be ensnared and I knew that perfectly well; a day didn’t go by that I didn’t say to myself: Beast, you are a beast! I would dream of my father; he was taking me to task. Outwardly I was like a person who’d lost his memory, but inside I was constantly putting myself on trial. I went around divided in half, a schizophrenic. When I’d meet Minelli from time to time, he’d say, ‘Damn, you’re doing well for yourself, no worries’ (he was married and already had a little girl) ‘you ought to be croaking with good health, but you’re as scrawny and ugly as a bad debt.’ He didn’t understand that it was all a load of rubbish, all misery.”

  Nuccia was puzzled too. Among other things, wasn’t this just before he met the love of his life?

  “I was like a spectator watching myself. Watching myself degenerate. I realized I was imitating the way the boss Demarr talked, out of the side of his mouth. I figured that if Demarr was the paternalist, I would be the neo-capitalist. I had gotten into the habit of looking at the stock prices on the blackboard outside the Chase Bank branch where I’d put my savings. I walked by every morning on my way to work. Nobody was going to stop me buying a half-dozen shares of Rio Tinto, or some other little sliver of capitalism. And afterwards, I went even further, I began to eye the daughter of the owner, as you know. I wasn’t yet thirty years old; America had taken me in when I was naked as a worm, and I’d worked my way up. But then there was my fate. You know, first up, then down, and even the neo-capitalist was going to take a dive, if God willed it. You know what I mean. You know about these things, I’ve already told you.”

  Nuccia already knew, more or less, the rudiments of what had happened next, a not very happy tale: ordinary, frequent, and hopelessly bourgeois. She had spent some time putting it all together by herself.

  “What I don’t know is the most important thing. You’ve always
told me this story as you experience it today, as you interpret it now. I’d like to know how it felt then.”

  How it had been to be him.

  But that was asking too much. To go back and dig up his marriage, their courtship, to relive those events and feelings was to expose another person (his wife, his Nancy) to a judgment that would not be impartial. Someone Ferranini himself had never wanted to judge. No. Impossible.

  “It’s time to call it a night. Go sleep, it’s late.”

  •

  After all was said and done, Nancy typified perfectly the world she’d been born into and belonged to. As much as he might have suffered, that was her only fault.

  Meadville, with its elegant Catholic girls’ boarding school (Academy of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux), was the town closest to the pastures of Old Laurel. The Demarrs, husband and wife both devoted Catholics, if in different ways, had sent their eldest daughter there. Or rather, they let her stay, for at the respectable age of twenty-two she had preferred to stay on with the nuns (who practiced a not very ascetic way of life themselves), teaching physical education and calisthenics, rather than live at home in close proximity to her mother, whose nervous troubles and Irish accent she couldn’t bear. Sundays, Nancy would show up at Old Laurel with a noisy trail of friends or students, and when it wasn’t cold they would eat lunch outdoors. At some distance from him. He would meanwhile pace about the estate keeping busy, or pretending to; months would go by when there was nothing to do and he would simply walk around that exotic countryside.

  The countryside of Emilia, the one he was used to, was either inhabited or cultivated everywhere, while here Ferranini felt he was wandering about in a boundless public park without benches or guards and above all without a public that by its presence would justify all that beauty—although it would spoil it (hadn’t he become selfish now!). It was precisely that uselessness that he liked, that great, mellow spread of green, unused and without a purpose. A new individual, overbearing and deaf to the voice of social conscience, stopped instead to listen to the voice of the water as it ran over the sawmill waterwheel down in Blue Creek valley, a sawmill that hadn’t been working for seventy years, that was no good to anyone. That individual wished that Old Laurel belonged to him. It grieved him to see the house opened up in mid-July, and that proprietary tribe invading: Demarr, his wife, his children, the black maid, the delivery boy who served as chauffeur for the huge Graham-Paige, loaded up like a stagecoach. For three or four weeks, until Old Laurel returned to being his, Ferranini would look for pretexts to stay in Camden.