The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  “It’s all much ado,” said Ferranini, who was thinking longingly of his talk with Comrade Nenni.

  “Now,” said Amoruso who hadn’t taken offense, “I’m coming with you to via dei Corornari, I’ll have a bite with you. Because I worry about you too, my boy, and I need to see how you eat. Show me how you eat, and I’ll tell you how you’re doing.” He waited in Piazza del Popolo for Amoruso’s mud-spattered Appia to appear, and after a quick foray into Caffè Rosati for an aperitivo, they got in the car. When they arrived at the trattoria, he saw that the gate next door was draped in black. And inside the courtyard at the printshop there was more black. What had happened? Ferranini rang the bell and the delivery boy came out.

  “They just took Gennaro away. He lived upstairs. Died yesterday in the shop.”

  “Oh Jesus. What was it?”

  Gennaro, the returned American, master typesetter in the shop, had been felled by a heart attack, he had simply fallen forward onto the counter without saying a word.

  “The doctor said he worked too hard,” said the boy.

  “Did you hear that?” said Ferranini. “And he wasn’t even thirty years old.”

  He thought of what Zamboni had said to him at the station in Reggio: “When will we abolish labor?” He no longer felt like eating.

  “I’m working on legislation for occupational safety,” he told Amoruso. “The truth is, labor is always, in and of itself, an attempt on life. Despite the rhetoric we continue to hear, on all sides.”

  “Hard labor is depraved,” said Amoruso, “you’re telling that to me, a Neapolitan?”

  “Be serious, come on.”

  “You think I’m joking? It’s a medical fact that hard labor is pathological.”

  “Look,” said Ferranini, “it’s difficult to contest the notion that labor is a human necessity: I can’t do it myself. For a while now, however, I’ve been asking myself whether it’s possible to have socialism without deconsecrating labor.”

  Amoruso’s reasoning followed its own path. “Nature”—now he was being quite serious—“teaches us that labor is by definition fatigue. Labor begins when a task becomes pain and fatigue because it is forcibly prolonged. Leave a horse free in the yard and you’ll see he will gravitate spontaneously to the post. But harness the horse and make him circle the post for an hour, and the horse will grow tired and try to resist. In a human being there are various psychic factors that resist having to repeat a series of gestures, even when they do not demand excessive effort. If instead, as usually happens, excessive effort is needed, and also attention, the threshold of the fatigue index is rather quickly reached.”

  “You admit, then, that Gennaro, the printer, died of exhaustion from overwork.”

  “That’s quite possible, and there is no reason to look for weaknesses in his constitution or general state of health. Among the ideological superstructures of capitalism, its lies, are theories (including medical theories) that work is health-promoting. It is false that work is salubrious, healthful. A doctor who knows his stuff and doesn’t conform to capitalist doctrine will come to the opposite conclusion.”

  Amoruso, the easy-going Amoruso, was a more orthodox socialist than he was, Ferranini had to admit. He framed the matter in class terms. He found an argument against the bourgeois mystification adulterating reality. Ferranini merely felt uncertain. He wondered if the problem was not much larger. Was it the bourgeoisie alone?

  •

  Still in her dripping raincoat, Nuccia, as soon as she got home, put half a liter of milk on to heat—her supper. She sat at the kitchen table and took out her football betting card. She was in a hurry; it was 10:00 p.m. and the shop downstairs would be closing soon. Once a rigorous systems player, she’d now returned to hopeful empiricism, that is, chance and gut feeling. SPAL against Palermo: who knew which team might win? Okay, tie. Pro Patria against Genoa?

  Playing the football pools was a way into popular fantasy for her, and she wasn’t blind to that. There was the pleasure of standing in line with the maid who worked for the lady across the hall, the cashier in the grocery shop where she’d bought the biscuits and Cirio sour-cherry jam. It was how she convinced herself that those four pages of comment on Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of social objects (or collective structures) that she’d just delivered to Paese Sera would not separate her, the intellectual, from the good people who worked (and daydreamed) close by her personal and “practico-inert” life, in Sartre’s cumbersome phrase. Big ideas and so forth could still be forgiven, Nuccia said to herself resolutely, so long as they were free of privilege and claptrap. No posing, no inane stances. Bucking platitudes, both figurative and concrete, was something she did even too diligently, if not actually charmingly. She risked the noted perils of anti-conformism, being formalistic in reverse. In the bookstore when friends and clients asked “And what are you reading?,” she had a copy of Carnacina’s huge gastronomy tome on her desk, she whose supper consisted of a caffè latte.

  She hadn’t even told Walter she was toiling away at an introductory essay to a collection of works by Blanchot, Rousset, and Barthes (from Writing Degree Zero), commissioned by her editor, who thought she was (and had said so) one of the few in Italy critically competent to approach that bristly tribe.

  It was here that a less estimable side of her character appeared, for as we know pride/modesty employs a subtle semiotics that fools the very victim, to his/her detriment, and not only his/hers. For example there was the episode (it turned out well, as it happened) she had become involved in while she was a partisan in Val d’Ossola, among the young volunteers who had followed Alfredo Di Dio and his men that fabled September of 1944.

  She had distinguished herself by her courage and her perfect knowledge of the territory, and thus one day she was chosen to go down the valley, south, to stockpile medicines. One young woman (herself), two young men, and three mules: they had to skirt the ridge of the mountain, staying as high up as possible. On their return, Nuccia, leaving the others in a secure spot with the supplies, crept down toward the track to inspect a column of Germans with their tanks and trucks who had stopped to take a swimming break by the river (a lot of them were already in the water). The reconnaissance mission was her idea, and the Germans might have shot her for it, but in her weakness (her mistaken pride) she didn’t want to mention it, even to the chiefs, though the information might have been useful. She got it in her head that they would praise her, and she didn’t think she deserved that and didn’t want to look like she was chasing rewards.

  But then the Germans went back on the march. Vague, alarmed reports came through, and Nuccia, sorry now that she hadn’t spoken, decided she must put herself to the test again and do better this time. She had been writing up, with very little help, one of the news-sheets they printed up there to keep alive a sense of orderly civilian life (not to keep spirits up—no need of that), and she suddenly abandoned her comrades on a pretext, donned a pair of white tennis shoes, and with a racket under her arm hurried down steep paths to meet the German column on the main road. She met them that evening well ahead of Cuzzago, as they were lighting their campfires. Her courage was of the clearheaded, ironic variety, not very common in a woman. She let herself be captured and questioned, maintaining, in French, that she was a foreigner on holiday.

  Naturally they didn’t believe her, nor did she expect them to; she had a plan. That night they put her in the back of a car with a man sitting in the front seat keeping watch on her. She kept her eyes open and noticed that while the tanks stayed behind there was a great coming and going of Alpenjäger troops on a mule track that most likely went up to Monte Zeda or Monte Tògano. They were trying to get around the Val d’Ossola front from the east by sending men and light artillery up on the heights. That was good to know; now all she had to do was get out of there. That is, if she was lucky, because the guard did not sleep, did not talk, would not even take a cigarette. She was lucky. Drawn by the scent of young flesh, a predator was circling her cage. I
t was the Oberstleutnant who had questioned her the evening before. She gave him a signal. It was night, raining. She continued sending him signals, doubly tenacious (she recalled cheerfully) because even at twenty-four she hadn’t been beautiful, although she prided herself on having an intriguing face. Until finally he appeared. The guard was sent away and the large, short-legged, heavy-breathing Oberstleutnant—half satyr, half paternal, Nuccia recalled—carried her off, tossing a coat over her, to the woods at the edge of the road. There would be no Judith in Val d’Ossola; as soon as they lay down on the sopping-wet moss at a safe distance from the camp, Nuccia leapt up again. She was urchin-thin at that age. Her escape was not all that thrilling; she had guessed right that the man would not shoot or raise the alarm; it wasn’t in his interest.

  Now, tonight, those old tales of Val d’Ossola so distant they were next to unbelievable, she had the football pools, the betting card. The faint promise of a Saturday night. Simple, superficial things, these were vital too, in their way, and nothing was at stake beyond two hundred lire.

  Nuccia was convinced she needed to win, and win a lot, urgently. The count in her head was very simple: she needed two million to keep Giulia with her, expenses, school, clothing, the things the grandparents were now taking care of. Another million to get herself an old Seicento to drive and to pay for that lightning trip to America.

  A four-day, round-trip visit to America was foremost among her immediate plans. Nuccia wasn’t one to waste time investigating her own psyche. Why did she have to go and see Nancy? To try to reconcile the two of them. That was how she spared herself remorse, pain, doubts. But I want my heart to be hot, scorching (she said to herself), not at peace, I couldn’t care less about having a clear conscience. Which meant she was really going to hear that woman say: I don’t want your Walter, you keep him (and maybe she’d shoot back: You are a fool, you have no idea what kind of a man Walter is, and in any case, have no fear, I’ll certainly keep him). But more than that, and above all, she wanted to see Nancy with her own eyes. She was burning with curiosity to see her. And finally to be able to say, “And so? That’s it?”

  Walter. A rapid burst from the doorbell, it was Walter. She was befuddled, hastily hiding the betting card.

  “How nice, you’ve never surprised me like this before. Stay here, sleep here.”

  Ferranini never visited her there in the evening. All those magistrates living upstairs, downstairs, next door. He was ready to make the socialist revolution, but still a man of order.

  “I came to tell you that I’m leaving at six tomorrow morning. They’re sending me out. With Comrade Reparatore.”

  “So you saw Longo, did he call you?”

  Ferranini had seen no one. He’d gotten his instructions by letter at home, and that was it. He was not in a good mood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Oh, the great conspirator!” said Nuccia, but without hard feelings. “Don’t worry, I won’t snatch your secret.”

  He sat down on the table to remove his shoes, which were full of water; it was pouring outside.

  “I’m only going away for a day, I don’t see why I have to sound off about it. Come on, tell me: why should I squeal?” He turned sour, tossed his shoes on the floor. “Really. Why squeal? Okay, you’re my woman. And so? You make me sound off and what do you get out of it? Tell me!”

  He had an obsessive temperament, Nuccia supposed. She’d seen him unable to back away from an (unhealthy) thought at a certain point, unable to wrestle that thought back to its real dimension. It was pointless to try to distract him. You had to plant a different thought in place of his doubt, his suspicion, a thought with some connection to the other, one that seemed no less significant.

  “Walter, as of noon yesterday I’m a Communist too, I want you to know. I finally got my card. Yesterday at the Ludovisi section.”

  Ferranini stopped rubbing his feet and stared at her. “Why was that?”

  “Why? Well the idea came to me when I was talking to Amoruso the other day. He didn’t trust my political convictions.”

  “Oh, wonderful.”

  “Not just because of that, damn it! It’s perfectly reasonable that I should want to line myself up with my man, have another bond with you.”

  “Oh, wonderful. It’s not your duty but your man that inspires you to join the party. Any idea what the party means to the Russians, how you join the party in the USSR?”

  Here Nuccia came out with the wrong answer. “But this is Italy!”

  “So we do things the way we please, all’italiana?”

  “Hey, they took me. And I thought it would please you. Oh, Walter!”

  “I’m not saying you don’t have the credentials, you have a history that many might envy. If they’d gotten their hands on you in ’44, you would have ended up in some torture chamber. But that’s another question.”

  “I’d say it’s the same question.”

  He was walking up and down in agitation. In his socks.

  “You signed up the way you might go to the shop to buy a bottle of cologne. And you went to the Ludovisi, where the rich people live.”

  Nuccia searched for another tack, another tone. She took off her suit jacket; there was nothing underneath but her slip and brassiere.

  “I’m going to be a lousy Communist, I’m not much interested in politics. I’m interested in you. So, private life doesn’t count? Longo is always the deputy secretary of the PCI even in bed with his wife?”

  “Listen, drop it now, it’s better.”

  “You like private life too. Who was it that coined the verb nucciare? To nuzzle. Come on, warm up, be a good fellow, who invented the term?”

  He wasn’t quite an obsessive, but Ferranini was utterly devoid of any sense of humor, that was for sure. Accustomed as he was to taking everything seriously, he blamed his origins: people from Emilia were like that.

  “That has nothing to do with it. It’s your fault that you brought it to mind.”

  Her snort of laughter met an uncompromising frown.

  6

  THAT SUNDAY the monthly order sheet had Comrade Deputy Ferranini down for a meeting to discuss “The USSR Under the Guide of Comrade Khrushchev.” It was no great prospect, forcing three hundred workers to forego a morning of leisure while he served up that threadbare topic inside the Traiano Cinema of Civitavecchia. But this other matter they’d palmed off on him, to take Comrade Mazzola by the ear because he was suspected of, or accused of, deviationism (easy to say, but it was a serious charge, something that could sink a man), that one he didn’t like at all. Mazzola. Roberto Mazzola of Turin. He didn’t know him. Remembered reading somewhere articles under that name, knew that he was an important figure in the Young Communist Federation, although he had no role in the party nationally, at least at present, and that he had been a partisan in Piedmont. Or in Lombardy. That was it, and he had never met the man.

  “What can I say,” Reparatore was lumbering into the seat to his right, “I don’t know him either but maybe that’s why they sent us. What did they write to you?”

  “That Comrade Bordino would give us more details when we got there. It seems the man’s disorganized, muddleheaded. There’s nothing solid against him, but they say there’s an ‘atmosphere of indiscipline.’ He says he doesn’t believe in de-Stalinization, and these days, you know—”

  “An atmosphere. Okay, so we come because of the atmosphere, alight from the atmosphere, to correct the atmosphere. It’s crap, Walter, crap! Anyway, why didn’t Longo speak to us about it directly?”

  “Hush, you’re too loud. Don’t shout like that, Giobatta.

  Big Giobatta Reparatore, u’ notaro—the notary, as they called him down in Cerignola—represented old-school trade unionism in the chamber and in the party: he was the rebel, the frondeur. Schooled by Verganini and Del Buono, an associate of Di Vit
torio and from the same Puglia town, he’d done two years of jail time at Santa Maria Capua Vetere, two years of confino, internal exile, in the far north at Baselga di Piné, and had been shot during the uprising against the Nazis in Naples. He’d been one of the first leaders of the CGIL. In his three sessions in parliament he’d become quite a figure because of his thundering oratory and refusal to mince words (reprimanded innumerable times by the president), and because of his fierce, unsociable habits. He shaved twice a week, saw no one, recognized no one. He was fond of Walter Ferranini, of whom he’d once said, in his absence, “He’s one of the few here who never lifted a finger to get here.” And he himself was also certainly among those few. The party electoral archive held a singular document, the doctor’s statement he had sent in ’48 in support of his refusal to be named a candidate (the fact was, he was close to stone-deaf). But Togliatti, urged by Della Vecchia, had forced him to accept.

  Reparatore was still talking in the same loud voice. Fortunately they would soon be taking off, the plane engines had begun to roar.

  “Wait and see if I’m not right that this Mazzola is a kid. In Rome our beards are gray, we like the quiet life. The young prefer to protest in the streets.”

  Ferranini let him go on.

  “You’ll see, this Mazzola is a leftist. Deviating left is just being consistent, or at the very most, intransigent. Deviating the other way, that would be bad. I can’t stand this making us play the Dominicans of the Inquisition. What do you say? Say something,” he was shouting in his ear. “What’s the matter? You won’t answer?”