Ferranini lost his patience. “Oh, leave me alone. You want me to start yelling too? They give us instructions, we carry them out. Or at least I do.”
“Between us,” Reparatore started up again, quieter now, “is there a single one of us who doesn’t deviate? The undersigned? Well, the undersigned, too, deviates, potentially. They treat me with respect, treat us with respect, because as Di Vittorio used to say we are one of the two wheels of the cart, and you can’t do politics without the unions, the CGIL. Are you aware of that?”
“Who says I’m not?”
“Let me talk. Suppose that tomorrow the interests of the unions are no longer in accord with the party line, something that is by no means impossible, because let us not forget that labor has needs, both immediate and not, that are not identical to those of the politicians. Well then, what happens: they accuse us of trade-unionist heresy (at the least). That is, of doing what we’re put on earth to do. The leader of the unions after the October Revolution, the great Mikhail Yefremov, better known as Tomsky, veteran of the Putilov steelworks, was in constant conflict with Lenin and Trotsky. Is that true, or not?”
“I guess it is.”
“Furthermore, leaving aside the matter of trade unionists and myself, who can swear to understand everything, to approve of everything, for example, why Khrushchev drew back after going into Hungary; why all this zeal, this bluster against the Cold War as if it were strange that there’s a war between existing socialism become state and power, world power, and the capitalists? I speak of those of us who live in direct contact with the base, the masses, the worker who wants to know and judge. I’m not talking about bureaucrats. I’m not talking about the theorists in their paper tower, Critica Marxista. Tell me, are you happy with all this, do you approve of everything? If not, say so. We’re just two friends here. Eh? Read Marx’s letters. If someone had an objection and spoke to him about it, he’d thank him: ‘You are helping me make progress, to improve myself.’ Eh?”
Under this hail of verbiage, Ferranini had long since unfolded his newspaper to read, or try to. (Italians live on blather, consume themselves in blather. Everything ends in blather, what a fool country.) Then his mind began to wander. He remembered a trip from Philadelphia to New York. It must have been in ’41. Because of the war certain imported goods were hard to find and the old man had sent him to look for them. Just before he left there was an imploring phone call from the school in Meadville. “I need tulip bulbs, you can find them in New York. Mind you, only the Fulgens cultivar, from Holland, nothing else.” As if the war were just a dream, and nothing existed but Nancy Demarr and her love of tulips. And yet her certainty that she mattered a great deal in this world was a powerful force, and he had to struggle with that force, and continued to struggle with it in some way.
Comrade Reparatore had decided to stop talking and was getting ready to fall asleep. Fine thoughts, Reparatore’s, great discoveries: who didn’t share his objections? Who didn’t know all that? He, Ferranini, envied the comrades whose only objections had to do with the conflict between politics and trade unions.
His doubts went quite a bit deeper; they were a bit more serious. These last few days “his” problem had taken definition with sudden clarity. Socialism was an optimistic program, and that was nothing unheard of, nothing new. And nothing to object to, except for one point. Ignored by the others (or considered negligible) that point expanded in his mind and became overriding, fundamental.
Abolition of the existing conditions (in Italy for example). Substantialization of freedoms, which would cease to be mere formal rights. Excellent. All power to workers and, finally, the withering away of the socialist state itself. Good. To each according to his need, without having to endure a pinchpenny calculation of his abilities. Victory over privilege and selfishness, and even, apparently, victory over nature. But here was the point. The victory over nature was only apparent. The servitude of labor remained, it was a physical necessity, even when the species did not exploit it. And the fatigue, the ordeal of labor remained as well. Biology certifies that there is no escaping the struggle for life, which is the struggle against surrounding reality, and there’s no getting away from it, and in fact no one does.
When they got to Caselle, it turned out that a colleague from the chamber, Comrade Montobbio, had traveled with them. The pleasant, smiling Montobbio said, “Oh, I didn’t want to disturb you, you were discussing serious matters. I listened with pleasure and I’m almost entirely in agreement with you.” At the airport exit they watched him drive off at the wheel of a convertible, a powerfully built man, some fifty-five years old, and though the morning was clear and very cold, Ferranini saw that he wore no more than a suede jacket and nothing on his head. Reparatore had been with Montobbio in internal exile in ’38 and ’39, under police custody in Trentino, and knew him well. A good comrade, a good Communist; his thinking might be limited but he had tremendous courage. An excellent element, with a tendency to take charge, not a man to obey someone else’s directives. He’d been a partisan outside the command structure, alone and a bit of a ruffian. In the car that was taking them into town, Reparatore told him, “After he’d done away with quite a few Fascists (never consulting anyone else), he nearly finished off Mussolini, Il Duce himself, in December ’43. It was an equal match, when Il Duce was still strong, not like when they strung him up like a side of beef in Piazzale Loreto at the end of the party. It was a story that didn’t end well, and Montobbio had confided it only to a few close friends. You see, one fine day he and a lady friend every bit his equal moved into a place near Salò, pretending to be a couple on their honeymoon. They were there for a month, waiting for the right moment. Christmas arrived, and the priest came by to bless the house, as they do in Lombardy. The girl leaned out the window.
“Father, my husband is ill, please come up.” The priest came upstairs, they gagged and bound him, and Montobbio put on his cassock and took his pass (because in those days the priests and friars used to associate with Mussolini) and went to Il Duce’s villa. They let him in and he got to the anteroom with the loaded 7.65 in his pocket. Nobody knew that Il Duce was out, he had left by a secret gate. Montobbio waited; half an hour went by, an hour, and finally he had to leave empty-handed. He arrived back just in time. The priest, a big, strong fellow himself, had gotten free, and the lady friend, to keep him from running out and reporting them, had gone to bed with him, but now even that was finished and the priest wanted some fresh air. “Montobbio told me these details himself, laughing about it. In short, they tied up the priest once again, and gagged him, and off they went by motorbike to hide in Brescia.”
“A shame,” said Ferranini.
“A shame?”
He thought for a moment. “When a man is faithful to his ideas, he shouldn’t mix courage with certain other things.”
Corso Francia. Headquarters of the Federation.
Bordino, the Federation secretary, was waiting for them. He hadn’t requested their intervention but he felt it was a good thing. The Mazzola case was somewhat special; there were as yet no reasons to refer him to the Disciplinary Committee, and anyway Mazzola held no high position: he’d been the secretary of a town PCI youth circle, then a local party secretary. But he had a certain following in Piedmont and even beyond, and a certain prestige, and the dissident stance he was taking had begun to be a problem. Longo had done well to send people from Rome, people outside the local organization, so that there would be a guarantee of impartiality. Mazzola must listen and let himself be convinced. Bordino seemed a man of few words and quite frank, and yet there was a hint of embarrassment in his voice as he went on.
“Comrade Senator Pisani has been here in Turin for quite a few days now. He’ll be coming with you. Longo telephoned me from Rome about it.”
“Goddamn,” Reparatore blurted out, “this Mazzola moves mountains.”
“Okay, so we’re in agreement? Mazzola has been informed and he’s ready, and Comrade Pisani will be here any
minute.”
Reparatore shook his head. “Not so fast, my friend. You have Ferranini, you have Pisani, who’s an authority, not to mention a big intellect. So tell me what I’m doing here? I’m going back.” He took out the train schedule.
“You people here, you yokels, make an excellent dish, fonduta. And I have time to walk around town, eat some fonduta, and make the rapido back to Rome.”
“Longo gave orders,” said the Federation secretary.
“He gave you orders. And in case you don’t know”—now Reparatore was talking to Ferranini—“Comrade Bordino was a warehouseman at Fiat Grandi Motori ten years ago, did I get that right? And today they call him the anti-Fiat, Agnelli’s great antagonist. Every day the big man Valletta reads l’Unità to find out what Bordino’s up to. You think Bordino’s afraid of some bureaucrats in Rome?”
At 10:00 a.m. precisely Ferranini, followed by Senator Paolo Pisani, rang the bell at the building on via Savarino a Rivoli where the young Mazzola couple lived on the second floor, their windows shaded by the branches of a cedar.
Signora Mazzola received them shyly. “My husband is very pleased you have come to see him.”
Ferranini had heard Mazzola was in bed with a broken leg.
“They put on a plaster cast, and now I’m keeping him in bed because he has the flu. This morning he had a fever over a hundred.”
“Take us to him,” said Pisani. “We won’t trouble him for long.”
Ferranini was surprised to find that Mazzola appeared genuinely content to see them. From his slender face, you’d guess he was no more than thirty. His skin was delicate, fair, and reddened by the fever.
“I’m afraid I must receive you here,” he said smiling. “Broke my tibia skiing. Twenty days off work. It’s a bourgeois sport, I’m aware,” he said, once again excusing himself with a smile.
“I’ve read that the Soviet ski team is winning some races at Chamonix,” said Pisani, who lowered himself carefully (old, thin, arthritic as he was) into a cretonne-covered chair between the sickbed and the window. Ferranini took his place on a chair beside the door.
“There are other things that may be more bourgeois in your mode of acting and thinking,” Pisani resumed. “Your lack of self-critical knowledge. You don’t mind if I get right to the point?”
“Go ahead,” said Mazzola, with just a tiny tremor in his voice.
“All right. That and the exhibitionist satisfaction of showing off what we all too easily take to be our own ideas, and which are instead timeworn errors. What, in a fashionable expression that you, too, have helped to disseminate, is called the impatience of the base—very often no more than the presumption of young people reluctant to bow to the experience of their elders. Recently you spoke at a debate on the question ‘Is there a crisis in the youth movements of the parties?’ At Novara, if I’m not mistaken.”
“No, comrade, it was at Vercelli. And not recently. Three months ago.”
“The details are irrelevant, I think. You spoke in the presence of Liberals, Social Democrats, and Republicans. You said there was a crisis in the Young Communist Federation. A symptom, in your view, of a lack of communication, both practical and ideological, between the new grass-roots generation—buzzing with intransigence, eager for concrete action—and the hierarchy. And here you mentioned the Central Committee, for what reason it was unclear. Implicitly or not, you accuse the hierarchy of being paralyzed by attendismo, by fence-sitting. And even by trasformismo, by political opportunism. In any event, of being obsolete, laggards, defeatists. Disappointing, in short. A scenario both callous and unwarranted.”
•
While he spoke, Comrade Pisani observed with evident interest the motions of a great cedar bough that the stiff northern wind was whipping back and forth until it nearly struck the windowpanes. Pisani, the most cultivated and incisive speaker in the party, if not the most stirring or persuasive, expressed himself in a cool, quiet monotone. Ferranini had heard him speak many times but never so close at hand, in such a small space. The pleasant Pugliese inflections of Giobatta Reparatore were still in his ear, and what struck him most about Pisani was an indefinable something that both drew and repelled him. In a country where such a thing was practically unheard of, Pisani’s diction was lucid, coldly precise. There was no accent or any trace of a provincial or regional origin (he’d been born and raised in a Tuscan city). It made his words sound neutral, inconsequential. Like a Sangiovese (thought Ferranini), that might even be fourteen percent alcohol but had no zest, no distinction.
“The Novara episode was just the first that comes to mind. I’m told you’ve held dozens of meetings and written dozens of articles. Three, recently, in a publication of the metalworkers’ union. One of your favorite theses is that socialism contains a ‘Christian’ tendency and also a ‘Catholic,’ that is to say a lax, negligent tendency, and the PCI, in your view, is ‘Catholicizing.’ This distinction between the two tendencies is not your own, Mazzola.”
“That’s true, I read it in a book. I don’t remember which book.”
“I’ll tell you. It comes from a 1919 issue (if I’m not mistaken) of Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo, in which Tasca wrote of that distinction for entirely different purposes. I advise you to read it, Mazzola, to refresh this argument of yours, which smells of rancid anti-Catholicism. Not just in honor of our open-door policy toward the Christian Democratic masses but for an even better reason. Have we ever asked ourselves” (here Pisani fixed his eyes on Ferranini for a moment; the matter was addressed to him, then) “why the Communist movement has spread so widely in Catholic countries, in Latin America, for example? I would say that even the most timid interpretation of the phenomenon urges feelings of solidarity, and let me say in all seriousness, gratitude toward the Church of Rome. That clarified, let us now turn once more to ourselves. Comrade Mazzola, the leitmotif that I pointed to in your public expression, the oft-repeated theme, is that those who wish to obtain a reform of the party’s inner life must join with you and those who think like you. To restore intransigence. And more, to restore morality. Do I quote you accurately?”
“Yes.”
“The ‘purists’ like yourself must prevail over the bourgeoisified, that is, the rest of us. And afterwards, wage war on external enemies, realize programs without compromise, refuse all temporizing tactics, align with Stalinism that’s understood as extremism.”
Mazzola listened, his fine hair glued to his head with sweat. He didn’t move a muscle. He said, “It was far too great an honor for you to have come to see me, comrade. But I was pleased. Now I understand why you came.” He smiled, a smile apparently neither bitter nor ironic, and then said, “The honor you do me stands, nevertheless.”
He didn’t bother with his other visitor; it was clear that so far as Mazzola was concerned only Pisani mattered. And yet Ferranini felt sympathy for the man.
“Don’t be upset, Mazzola. Comrade Pisani came to”—he stopped for a moment to search for a word and found nothing better—“to help you.”
Pisani looked around, sent him a glance that did not express agreement but neither did it show dissent or surprise. If anything it meant: What you may have to say is of no account, it is nothing. He saw young Signora Mazzola come into the room. She carried a tray with three steaming cups of coffee.
“Roberto, I’m going out before the shops close. I’ll leave you with your friends. I’ll just leave the front door ajar.”
She left, and Ferranini was the only one of them to take a coffee. While he drank it, he noticed that the room was not a bedroom but a very plain sort of sitting room, and Mazzola lay on a sofa made over into a bed. Ferranini thought: His wife transferred him here so that we would not have to enter their marital bedroom, out of delicacy, then, out of modesty. Then he thought: They love each other. And then he thought: Nancy. Would Nancy have ever done such a thing? Meanwhile the other man resumed speaking. The words with which he began (“Now it’s time for me to classify your attitude, except th
at it amply speaks for itself”) made it clear that Pisani felt the mission he was carrying out was beneath him, tedious. His tone was cold and patient, annoyed.
Reparatore had not exaggerated. Pisani was a big intellect, and the party colleagues who called him the Italian Suslov after the Soviet hard-liner were not wrong, nor were the bourgeois papers that dubbed him Doctor Subtilis, the hairsplitter. Not that he hadn’t played an active political role in the PCI; when still quite young, he had been one of the founders at the Livorno Congress of 1921. But by education and temperament he was destined to occupy himself with doctrine, and he was a strenuous and honest defender of rigorous orthodoxy. Yes, he had a good mind, and in party circles it was said that Joe Stalin (another doctrinal highbrow) had once observed: “With Togliatti we have the poet, with Pisani the philosopher. Fortunately there’s no need yet of the revolutionary.” That revolutionaries were superfluous in the present moment, or rather, harmful, was exactly the objection that Pisani, annoyed, was now repeating to that young man in his little room.
“Your attitude speaks for itself, Comrade Mazzola, and there is no need here to mention the great man who diagnosed extremism as the infantile disorder of socialism. I’d like to think you were able to recognize your errors on your own. But the fact they are so elementary and so evident makes your conduct harder to justify. By seeking to spread them by means of your naive but persistent proselytizing you have assumed a great responsibility. Are you aware of this? I’m told that in just a few months some two to three hundred letters from your sympathizers have arrived in your office in the Turin Federation. That is a not a negligible number, Comrade Mazzola.”
“My sympathizers, as you call them, are many more than that. Each letter is signed by three or four persons.”
The Communist Page 13
