“What was that, comrade?”
“Nothing. And who is this subgroup leader? He wouldn’t be a certain Ivan Zamboni?”
“Yes, Ivan Zamboni. He’s on sick leave now. A slacker. Do you know him?”
“I’ve been told about him.”
“You see? He’s got people talking about him, when even the names of the individuals involved and everything else is supposed to be top secret! You see what I mean?”
“Yes, yes, I see,” said Ferranini, getting up. “And I can’t wait to get out of here. What time is the train for Rome?”
“At nine forty-five,” said Paciroli, surprised. “But tell me, comrade, was there something you needed when you came over here?”
“Yes there was. I wanted to know when the next train for Rome left. Goodbye.”
They departed, finally, and Ferranini sat in silence until the train, shooting through the fog, reached the great Apennine tunnel and passed through. When they emerged into the sun on the other side, Ferranini, too, brightened up, and he put the window down to let in some fresh air.
“Well,” he said to Nuccia, summing up his private thoughts, “it was worth it in the end to meet Zamboni, the father. You know what he had to say, Zamboni? ‘You promise to free us from capital, and that’s a good thing, but it would be even better if you could free us from labor.’ ”
“From labor? And how would you do that? Isn’t that just rubbish?”
“No, it’s not rubbish; as a matter of fact the classics say labor will be reduced to a minimum once communism is established. But the way I see it, labor cannot be reduced, and certainly not abolished. There’s a law, not a law of economics but a biological law, or perhaps simply a physical one.”
There was a universal law, he told her, an eternal law known as evolution. To speak of evolution was to speak of the struggle for life, which manifested itself in two ways: in war (with one’s fellow human beings) and in labor. Labor was also a war, against the world around us, against nature. Men might abolish war. Labor, no: they would never be able to abolish it.
“You’re a politician,” said Nuccia.
“Me? No, PCI activist, nothing more. And I’m proud of it.”
“All the more reason: why not leave theory to the theorists? Forgive me if I say this, but what I mean is, isn’t it better not to go beyond faith in God the Father, the catechism they teach at the Federation? Which you’re supposed to teach your base.”
She thought his tendency to take big questions to heart, questions that were bigger than he was (and he did, he did), was not at all good for his equilibrium. No peace would come of the autodidact’s somewhat tedious enthusiasms (and his surly prickliness, easy enough for her to glimpse under the autodidact’s intransigence). Nuccia had studied philology at university to a highly specialized level, but she liked to dismiss it all, she gave it no importance in her life. The main benefit of knowledge, she believed, was to instill a certain skeptical detachment, especially from worship of knowledge. Here, she and Ferranini were in opposite camps. She found herself thinking that there were two things that stood between Walter and herself: his wife and night school.
But she had set out their lunch on the tray before them (he’d turned down her proposal they go to the restaurant car), and Walter tucked into his food. Only the plentiful noise of his satisfied chewing was to be heard. Serious. From time to time he looked around as if someone might be out to grab his meal. Meanwhile he ate and his mood changed, for the better. When he’d finished he even pulled her close to him, as they were alone in the carriage, and put his arm around her hips, pressing his elbow where he knew she liked it.
“Tell me you’re happy to return to Rome.”
She wished that Walter were attached to Rome, the birthplace of their love, as she had once or twice dared to call it.
“I certainly don’t spend time in Reggio willingly. Whether that means I like Rome, that’s something else.”
“America, then? Your America?”
Their conversations, evening and morning, should have granted her more than that modest irony, and Nuccia was not a little jealous. She took care to conceal it, and it helped that she knew how capricious masculine affection could be, and she wasn’t entirely wrong about that. The beautiful Nancy was far away, and not just in time.
“So, would you go back to America?”
“You must be kidding. Comrade Ferranini has but one ideal.”
“Paradise, on earth,” she said.
He laughed. “The USSR, obviously.”
“And yet,” Nuccia observed, “America made you forget the news I came with. One of the chiefs wants to meet with you.”
“Maybe I didn’t forget. I’ve got compartments, like this railroad car.”
“Some of those compartments are pitch dark, eh? A Communist MP can’t hide behind the unconscious, you know. The classics don’t permit it.”
The conversation was veering unusually close to the profane. Ferranini needed to get control.
“The truth is this,” he said, putting Nuccia in her place, “socialism is a difficult thing. In some ways, it’s better that many people don’t know that.”
When they got down from the train in Rome, Nuccia pointed out that there was time to go by Botteghe Oscure. To the head office of the party.
He was reluctant. That door, those hallways and offices seemed both too narrow and too grand. They disappointed, and they intimidated. Inside, Italian Communism was all too Roman. A chance meeting with Comrade Togliatti was the one thing that might tempt him to go in, but that morning he had read in l’Unità that Togliatti was away from Rome.
“It’s late,” he said.
“Here things are just waking up, you know that.” She pushed him into a taxi. “Good luck, Walter.”
“What good luck? I’m getting my marching orders, that’s all.”
If only there had been marching orders. Nobody had any. Nobody noticed him or even recognized him.
His prickliness was roused. “I’m not known here,” he thought, “I’m just a gate-crasher.” He went into three or four brightly lit offices. No one looked up. In the halls he wandered past hurried underlings (the party leadership was meeting with Deputy Secretary Longo). The place rebuffed him as usual, and he said to himself: “It’s normal, it’s the typical relationship with the base. I’m just the base in here.”
The one friendly face he saw was the smooth, austere countenance of D’Aiuto. A functionary—just a few days ago he’d been working at the Federation here in Rome—a man of the base like himself.
“No one was looking for you as far as I know,” said D’Aiuto. “In case it was Amoruso, let’s just call him.”
Right, call Amoruso. They called his hotel, they called the chamber. No trace of Amoruso.
“Damn Neapolitan, he’s always out and about, probably at Caffè Rosati,” Ferranini decided. He turned away from D’Aiuto and made to leave. In the entry hall he saw a guard. He had the bad idea of stopping him.
“Tell me, is it true that Comrade Togliatti is abroad?”
The man raised one corner of his mouth and glared severely at the tips of Ferranini’s shoes.
“I’m sorry, I’m not authorized to tell you that.”
“Hey,” said Ferranini, “I’m not a spy or something. I’m Ferranini, from Reggio.”
Later, ruefully going over that moment, there were two things that didn’t make sense: he’d snapped back in dialect, which he never spoke; and somehow, just as he grabbed the fellow, a button had flown off the man’s jacket.
Deputy Boatta now appeared. He saw his colleague shaking the guard, both hands gripping his lapels. Boatta grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the elevator. He understood everything right away, and since he was fond of Ferranini, he softened his tone.
“What do you expect? You never come here, so of course they don’t know you. You must show up more often. What was it you wanted to know? Where Togliatti is? Well, he was in Prague, and right now do you know where he is
and what he’s doing? He’s down in Mondragone, where his niece lives, the married one. He’s probably playing puppet theater with his niece’s kids. He adores them. His niece’s husband is a devout Catholic and the kids are preparing to take Communion. The priest comes by to instruct them, and they say Togliatti has friendly conversations with the man.”
“You know what, Boatta? This sort of chitchat annoys me; I’m not interested in Togliatti as a private person. In fact, I refuse to let him to be a private person. I don’t know if you get my drift.”
Intransigent.
Freeing himself from Boatta he headed along Palazzo Bolognetti toward Piazza del Gesù. Behind him, a taxi stopped. Nuccia got out.
“I’ve finished, I went to the store and now I’m back, tell me.”
She listened, disapproved, and decided he must next go to the chamber.
“There’s no session tomorrow.”
“Go there anyway. You may find Amoruso.”
Next morning he went. None of his colleagues were there; altogether, he saw no more than a dozen deputies. Empty, the room reserved for his party; half empty, the corridors and even the bar. His committee would resume work only on Monday. After an hour spent reading the newspapers, he walked around again, downed two coffees, looked enviously at the smokers. A deputy without a crew of hangers-on, with scarcely any ties to his colleagues, he’d been bored since the day he began to haunt these halls. “Money spent badly” was his succinct judgment on the bombastic spaces, the superfluous consumption of beverages, the time wasted in chatter, and the overpowering smell of floor wax (it stuck in the nose, annoying and emblematic). He finally decided to leave. But first he had to pass by the internal post office. Before the window, a gray, bent, heavy back, and a rotund voice that was saying to the clerk, “Printed matter, sotto fazia.” Bulk rate. Fazia, meaning fascia: category, bracket.
Ferranini could think of just two politicians from Romagna who had never overcome the region’s incapacity to pronounce the sc. As in fascist. There was Mussolini himself, who personally invented the doctrine yet was never able to call it anything but fazismo. And there was the distinguished member of parliament who was mailing the parcel. The man nodded at him in return, and then noting the copy of Izvestia sticking out of his pocket, said, “Am I indiscreet if I ask to look at your paper for a moment?”
It was a week old and carried an article (great pomp, little substance) about the prevention of industrial accidents in capitalist Europe. Now, as the other man scanned the paper, Ferranini decided he had not wasted the morning. He had been wanting to introduce himself for months.
“Ferranini,” replied Nenni, so warmly that Walter blushed with gratitude. “But I know you. You are from Emilia, from the PCI.” Nenni invited him to sit beside him.
“We’ve met, I mean, eighteen years ago,” said Ferranini.
“Where, in Spain?”
No, they’d met in Paris, at an old restaurant on the rue des Petites Écuries near boulevard Poissonnière. Brighenti, the Passy wine merchant who would later get Ferranini his ill-fated passage to America, was not cut out for political exile but he had been a Socialist, a backer of Serrati and the hard-line wing of the party. He didn’t like to risk having close ties with the Italian exiles but he kept an eye on them, and he knew where to find people without endangering anyone. One evening Ferranini had walked all the way to the center of Paris. At the restaurant, along with other compatriots, was Nenni, the man who would be the leader of the Socialists after the war, then in his forties, myopic and slightly leaden-faced. Moderate in speech and appearance, lively in action, a sharp and cautious planner, he brought to his party (Ferranini sensed this even in those days) a persistent realism it had always been short of. The small main room, badly heated, gave onto a courtyard wreathed in fog. Nenni was finishing his meal, seated beside Albini from Ferrara, who helped him put out the party sheet in France, and Casiraghi from Lombardy, also a veteran of Spain, where he’d commanded a Lister Brigade, and who would be killed by the Germans five years later in Cuneo. Nenni ate very frugally; he said less. Under the navy blue beret he never took off, his brow was smooth and clear. Casiraghi and Albini began to argue about the different—opposite—prospects of the two Italian parties, Socialist and Communist. Nenni let them go on. Then he modestly observed, “Have you ever talked to a priest? A priest will tell you he’s Catholic, but if he thinks for a moment he’ll say he’s Christian above all. Well, we may be Serrati-followers or Stalinists or Trotskyists, but above all we are Marxists. Pirèin, what say?”
Pirèin, that was Piero Albini. Nenni had an inclination (so rare and so human, it must be said) for tolerance, or so it seemed to Ferranini. But in those days he was immature, too young to understand that tolerance does not mean accommodation, he didn’t really appreciate it. Those were the days in which rumors of an accord between Moscow and Berlin had just begun to float around. Casiraghi turned to him to ask, polemically, “You, as a Communist, how would you explain such a shift?”
Ferranini had a ready defense: “Stalin is pulling back so the Westerners will tear each other to pieces. Why should he pit himself against the Germans? Aren’t the French and the English and the Polish also capitalists?”
“Right,” said Nenni, peaceably, and Casiraghi did not persist.
But there was something else behind that broad face on which a pair of spectacles glinted, something well beyond easy bonhomie. Nenni had invited him to eat something with them (Ferranini was deeply, wretchedly hungry). He questioned the young man sympathetically, uncondescendingly, and when he left, Nenni was the only one to get up and shake his hand.
“A catastrophe is on the way,” he had told him. “After the war, socialism will prevail, and definitively. We will all be able to go back home, and yet what is coming is so terrible that I would rather continue this, this bitter life, if by doing so the worst could be avoided.”
Nenni didn’t recall the episode (why should he?) but he was interested.
“And what are you doing now, Ferranini, what’s your specialty? Seeing as we all have to be specialists now, they say!”
After Ferranini explained, Nenni observed, “The rightists accuse us of being profiteers, because those cooperatives of yours are so efficient. I mean, economically as well.”
Ferranini smiled. “When I was involved, up until less than a year ago, the rightists used to accuse us of putting PCI politics ahead of our members’ interests. Now it seems they consider us profiteers, ‘apes of capitalism.’ A good sign. It’s fine with me.”
“And how do you reply to the charges?”
“You know how our adversaries judge the way things are going in Russia? By the economy. If things are going badly, Communism is to blame. If they’re going well, they say Communism is contradictory, that it imitates capitalistic methods, and therefore it is the methods that make the difference. The same goes for the cooperatives of Emilia. Now that they’re prospering, the bourgeoisie complains we’re money-grubbers. My translation: We’re productivity-grubbers. To my comrades in Reggio Emilia I say, pursue productivity. We shouldn’t shun productivity but particularism, that is, interest construed not as collective benefit, organism, but as individual profit and recognition. Enemy number one, in cooperativism as in every aspect of socialism, is this: particularism, personalism.”
“Agreed, Ferranini. I preach the same thing.”
He rose. Unconsciously, Ferranini held him back, carried away.
“But comrade, as I’m sure you know, it’s not always easy to distinguish in practice. The same behavior that’s good when it aims to enhance the collectivity, is bad when it’s not aimed at the collectivity. The ‘I, individually, must make money, must distinguish myself, enrich myself, surpass the others.’ It’s not easy to distinguish, it’s a question of intention, state of mind. Isn’t that right, comrade?”
“You are right, Ferranini. These imponderables become highly ponderable in the long run, in their effects. We’ll meet again, no? Continue the
discussion.”
A minute later Ferranini was on the phone. He had to let it out, tell the whole story right away.
“Where are you?” said Nuccia. “Still at the chamber? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine, better. I feel like another man.” His friend Amoruso the doctor, his diagnostic skills honed, understood that in a glance. They’d run into each other in the doorway as Ferranini was leaving parliament.
“Just coming in at this hour? But it’s midday!” Ferranini said to his colleague.
“What, I’m supposed to get in at nine? I have more important things to do.”
Here Walter got the explanation he’d been looking for. Amoruso was the personal physician of Luigi Longo, the deputy secretary of the party, and he’d gone to examine him at Botteghe Oscure. The last time Longo had said to him, “We’re going to need Ferranini one of these days. Tell him to stay in Rome.”
“But is Longo ill?” Ferranini’s concern was genuine. He was the only one among the party leaders who had approached him, and he liked him for his dry, sober manner. He liked his reputation, too: a tough, severe Piedmontese from Cuneo.
“Well, I guess I can tell you. He makes no mystery of it, he couldn’t care less. He’s got a gastric ulcer big as a dog’s dug, too large, really, and he only survives by living a monk’s life.”
At Piazza Colonna they turned onto the Corso. Amoruso took him by the arm and continued, confidentially: “It’s the ailment of leaders, especially political leaders, and of our party above all. Because at the base we are ‘compact,’ as the song goes (and as we should be) but at the top we’re anything but, dear friend. Longo and Della Vecchia. Especially Longo. They’re pulling left, they want to take action, they’re Battleship Potemkin types, not possibilists. And let me say that as a Communist, a militant Communist, by no means do I approve of them.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do.”
“Anyway, for the last thirteen years Longo and Della Vecchia have been gnawing at the brakes, but in Filippo Turati’s case it’s the lining of his stomach he’s gnawing at, which is worse. Understand: we’re not talking about actual conflict here, Don Filippo is discipline incarnate, he’s a born lieutenant. He obeys, goes along, conforms. A man of perfect loyalty (if there’s a second attack let’s hope they shoot at me, he told me) but certainly another condottiero, someone more bellicose, less cold, less methodical, less wise, might have been a good thing. As for the big man himself, he’s happy to have a Longo at his side. Togliatti is a man of two natures: one is his own, the extremely able temporizer, and the other is the combativeness of Longo and Della Vecchia. And who is to say the PCI has not profited from this dual consciousness; we’re still the strongest in the world after the Russian and the Chinese. There’s nothing new in this; it’s no great discovery.”
The Communist Page 11
