The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  He owed his seat to the cardinal decision Togliatti had made to move away from the strict working-class mobilization of the post-war years and open the party to intellectuals and technicians, an opening that had its critics, among them Luigi Boatta. A onetime teacher at the Oenological Training Institute of Alba, he liked to say that by watering down the proletarian wine, the PCI is going to end up like that Barolo made of seven parts Squinzano and three parts Verona, with only the label from Piedmont. Amoruso had come to the party without going through any intermediary reformist stages, a point worth noting because in 1950 he had married the slim, blond Socialist senator, Adele Cariboni. It was a successful marriage, not in the least political, but the husband had been known to tell close friends that the Popular Front didn’t work in bed either. A joke that masked his one torment: he and Adele had no children.

  First in Naples, now closer to Rome in Formia, Amoruso had gracefully, his classy bourgeois pride tempered with irony, showed off his “little library” of some ten thousand volumes divided into three sections: biology, Marxist sciences, and the theater. The theater critic Silvio D’Amico had pronounced it one of the best private collections in Italy. A real Neapolitan, Amoruso’s taste in cultural matters was ample and eclectic. One Sunday he would read the works of Chekhov in the original (he’d taught himself Russian), on another he’d read Stalin and Lenin, or Claude Bernard, J. B. Haldane, or Huxley. The books in the first two sections passed, half a dozen at a time, from Amoruso’s library to the table in Ferranini’s room, and when he brought them back he would put them in place himself, his hand lingering on their spines. That wealth lined up on those walnut shelves, and the picture of marital serenity that Amoruso and Adele made: he admired them both humbly and without rancor, amazed that such good things existed in this world and could be enjoyed so unselfconsciously.

  Antonino Amoruso had an unflagging curiosity characteristic of some doctors. He had not forgotten about Ferranini’s friend, the printer in his thirties who had died suddenly in his workshop, and wanting to get to the bottom of the case, he contacted the physician who had seen the man just after he died. His brief investigation confirmed that Gennaro had been the victim of an aneurysm due to overexertion.

  He spoke to Ferranini about it during a break in committee. “We go to enormous trouble to change the bedsheets of the sick,” he said. “But we need to be able to cure them as well. And there we don’t succeed, I’m afraid.”

  Ferranini could see where those curious words were going. “And then what?”

  “Then what? That is precisely the problem! The concept of the labor-harm index has remained an economic abstraction, without any practical remedies. The socialist classics describe the dehumanization of labor, but this dehumanization is seen as a negative consequence of exploitation. Take the first man on earth, though, didn’t he wear himself out working too?”

  This was what they habitually discussed on meeting in the chamber or in the trattoria on via dei Coronari. Once in a while Reparatore or Boatta also took part. But the discussions brought no new insights. Once Reparatore observed, “In southern Italy we don’t say lavorare to mean ‘to labor, to work,’ we say faticare, as in ‘to slave, to slog.’ Labor implies undergoing violence; it is travail, a toiling through brute matter, digging it out, transporting it, transforming it. Where there’s no effort, there is no work.”

  Amoruso explained that indeed labor was a dispersal of energy, energy drawn from that physical and mental reserve that helps keep the organism above pure survival. The wage laborer pays “in person,” spending his vital substance, the stuff of his organic functioning. Ferranini observed that years before, he had seen workers leaving the job after a day at the cooperative (where their labor was not exploited by the ruling class), and they looked weary, depressed, even sad. He had tried to explain the situation to himself by saying that in any case they were living in a capitalist environment. Hounded by the competition, by the enmity of the capitalist firms.“If that is the case,” said Reparatore, “workers in the USSR must come out of their factories cheerful and energetic. But that I’m not inclined to believe.”

  “As I see it, the division of labor is at fault,” said Boatta. “It’s the division of labor that makes work hateful. And capitalism is responsible for the division of labor.”

  “Or technology,” said Reparatore. “And as a matter of fact, you find the division of labor in industrialized socialist society. Or perhaps nature is at fault; perhaps it’s an objective, natural, and inevitable thing. But still, leaving aside the division of labor, labor is harmful all the same. Take Robinson Crusoe, he did everything on his own, but it was still exhausting. And mechanization—that doesn’t help much either. It transforms work but doesn’t improve it. The machine brings greater fatigue. It transfers the wear and tear from the arms and back to other organs.”

  •

  When Amoruso came up from Formia he parked his automobile in a courtyard on via delle Carrozze near the Corso, and that evening he continued the conversation with Ferranini in the car, measuring Walter’s blood pressure and perfunctorily applying his stethoscope. He had done this sort of checkup before, given that his friend was averse to a more thorough examination.“You see,” said Ferranini as Amoruso was putting the cuff away in his bag, “I may be a pessimist, but for me work and its ills are merely trials that living creatures have no choice but to endure. To end that, you’d have to put an end to the antagonism that exists between living beings and the inorganic world. The ‘class struggle’ of life against the physical surroundings in which it affirms itself (or in spite of which it affirms itself) never ceases. The fact that labor is inescapable is an expression, I believe, of the active or inert hostility of the environment. Earthquakes, drought, illness, the cholesterol that clogs up arteries.”

  “You can add the hidden injury, the viral aggression, of violence and injustice,” said Amoruso. “On the part of other human beings, who, let me say, aren’t really wrongdoers because they are driven by nature’s same hostile impulses. As you can see, I, too, am a pessimist.”

  “What about machines? Machines are often blamed for our disorders and ills. But aren’t they nature too? A casing that we make to hold the forces of nature. We think we are the masters, but that’s an illusion.”

  Amoruso was fiddling with the car’s interior light, which had gone out. They sat in the dark, the courtyard intermittently lit by a flashing neon light.“This idea of a conflict, a ‘class war’ as you call it, between life and external reality is an old idea and it’s not easy to refute. At heart, it’s the grim and unassailable basis of evolution: the struggle to survive, the endless battling if you aren’t to succumb, and the only organisms that do survive are those with enough resources not to give up the fight.”

  “I know,” replied Ferranini, “and it’s also the basis of evolutionism, which argues that evolution never ceases. That is, it finally overwhelms every creature, even us humans, in the perpetual struggle of one creature against the other and the environment. Now I ask: We socialists believe in a process that comes not only to a conclusion but to a fine and happy conclusion, the triumph of man over injustice. We look forward to a society without privileges and above all without conflict. Now, how do we reconcile these two views? Because the doctrine of evolution is also science, not just poetry, and Marx praised Darwin and his great discovery. Lenin says, ‘Progress is the result of the struggle between opposites.’ But Lenin thought that the October Revolution was the beginning of the end of that struggle, and that at a certain point, let’s say after a hundred years, there would be peace and perfect well-being for the workers.”

  Amoruso made sure to have the last word. “We are socialists, and therefore believers, and we look forward to a transformation without expecting life itself to change much. But to do away with a certain kind of egotism is already a lot. This is why we must be socialists. With no illusions.”

  For many days his professional obligations kept Amoruso from leaving
Formia. Ferranini got a long and earnest letter from him “about your problem.”

  “The just war is not always the fortunate one; for us it is enough to know that ours is a just war,” wrote Amoruso, as always so ready to comfort and console himself. “Certainly, as a doctor I’m aware that a laborer cannot avoid suffering. Feeling depressed, defeated, demeaned by the product of our labor or by the materials we handle and the tools we work with adds up to a permanent and inescapable industrial injury that every worker faces. Whatever the ‘system,’ regime, et cetera employing him.“The other evening we were saying something like: If labor always diminishes your liberty and the healthy expression of your personality, aren’t you inevitably going to fall ill? And when we speak of hostile physical elements, even those superficially domesticated, like water, fire—and tomorrow, uranium—don’t we also implicitly refer to our lives in a human world where there is no benevolence except in appearance (and that intermittently)? Competition, envy, jealousy of other men (and women) or instead their indifference, estrangement, their stubborn spurning or misunderstanding. Marx, in The German Ideology, mentions the elimination of labor, but neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin ever pretended to free us from all these innumerable and serious ills. Now let me add: If we don’t mean to treat the fathers of socialism the way the women of Naples treat Saint Anthony of Padua, we must recognize that Marx’s program, and all the rest, was modest and limited. There won’t be happiness after the advent of world socialism. Nothing will be rosier and more pleasant (beyond substantial economic progress) than today. The actual abolition of work is merely hinted at, a promise that no one could ever dream would be met. But—also—there will be no more exploitation. And that is what makes our war ‘just.’ We must be content to change the sick man’s bed, but at least we’ll remove the leeches that are feeding on him.”

  It was Saturday, and the next day Ferranini was supposed to lead a meeting at Borgo Isonzo near Latina, a meeting of farmers. He telephoned the hospital in Formia but was told that the professore was on his rounds and couldn’t come to the phone. Ferranini didn’t pursue the matter. But what he wanted to say to him was this: Do you authorize me to inform the comrades of Borgo Isonzo that the real program of Communism, as you put it in your letter, is “modest and limited”?

  •

  The chamber would soon be adjourning for Christmas. Ferranini came out of the party headquarters with his usual friends and they headed back toward parliament.“I’m here to inform you,” said Amoruso, “that a committee to study the pathology of labor in the light of Communist principles is not going to be convened.”

  The others studied him, eyes questioning. “It’s not happening. I’ve just spoken to Nicolussi at the Research Department. I said to him: ‘Let’s put together a little committee to study the matter. We Communists have a pathologist and a physiologist of some standing in the Senate, and we have some very good doctors in the chamber. It’s not a new question, but it needs to be studied in relation to Marxist tenets.’ Nicolussi heard me out, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Pathology of labor? Okay, let’s start with ourselves. You know we’re being driven crazy by the work weighing on us? And you come here to talk about a “little committee”! We’re completely overloaded with work. And what does it consist of? Desta-lin-i-za-tion,’ ” said Amoruso in comic emphasis. “I de-Stalinize, you de-Stalinize, proletarians of the world don’t unite, don’t advance, just de-Sta-lin-ize.”

  “Even with that committee of yours,” said Reparatore, “the good thing is that you’d never have achieved anything. Talk is not enough to resolve the problem.”

  Now Boatta spoke: “I think you’re all exaggerating. Marx will certainly have resolved the problem, he resolved others even more difficult. Our job is to put his teachings into practice.”

  They had arrived at Piazza Venezia, right under the famous balcony of Mussolinian memory. Ferranini grabbed Amoruso and Boatta by the forearm. They were standing on either side of him.

  “Marxism is as solid a truth as the walls of this palace. There’s no turning back, but to go forward we may have to discard some illusions. When the exploitation of workers has disappeared, will the burden of labor also disappear? Today people discuss alienation far more than they discuss Marx. In a nutshell, the worker, exploiting his own life substance, creates the world of things. We may have some doubts about that characterization, but never mind. Will alienation disappear in the socialist state?”

  Ferranini looked around. He went on: “Let’s leave alienation aside. If you ask those girls stepping off the sidewalk who are probably typists returning to their offices ‘Do you feel alienated?,’ they’ll say, ‘We feel tired.’ Ask the same question of the man over there at the wheel of the bus, and you’ll get the same answer, and maybe he’ll even add, ‘If they paid me ten times more it would still be a beastly life.’ The real problem is that work is a burden, an ordeal, a sentence of indefinite term. Suppose they square the circle and find some kind of work that doesn’t eat people up, won’t it be just a sort of living death, a contradiction in terms?”

  “Technology can do a lot,” said Boatta. “Sure, technology, the miracle worker, the saint. But wasn’t it supposed to be socialism that worked miracles, not technology, which belongs to the capitalists as much as it does to us? And yet, there are miracles even saints can’t perform. The need to work is only going to increase, along with the population, while the available assets remain the same.”

  “We’ll colonize the planets. Russia already has Sputniks.”

  “We’ll colonize the bottom of the sea as well, although it will be an immense effort causing great pain and suffering. Admit it, there are things that technology cannot achieve. There is a law that can’t be breached, a physical and biological law that says life can’t arise and survive without sweat and struggle. And especially not without struggling against the environment, the surrounding material reality. And labor is part of this.”

  “Come, my friend,” said Boatta as they began to walk again, “humanity has always labored. Worked and worked, without thinking about it so much.”

  “True, true. But Marx taught us to look at the hard reality of labor, and to see what a plague it is.”

  Amoruso addressed Boatta: “If you think about it, Ferranini’s argument is in a certain sense Marxist. Marx would never have conceded just because the conclusion was negative, or not very heartening.”

  “Our Ferranini, eh?” Reparatore was teasing. “Who would believe it? All those wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano producing a speculative mind.”

  It was almost true. When he was expounding his ideas, Ferranini spoke clearly and precisely. But when it came to those images, vague yet substantial images that precede and occasion ideas, he’d never been able to articulate them. As a kid, after he’d been fired from the railway, he’d become a driver for the shoe factory at San Donato di Vimondino. For seven years he worked himself to death, driving around in the van loading and unloading, up to sixteen, eighteen hours a day. He imagined the world, the world of his companions who worked in the shoe factory, and the world of everyone who labored, as a face of solid rock. A rock face. There was just one reality, a solid, heavy reality of machines, of asphalt, of soil and cement, and it bore down on the human beings destined to hold it up, the struts and beams made of living flesh. Hundreds of millions of human beings with their feet nailed to the ground, shoulders and heads bent under the load of one heavy plate. That huge gray, hostile, malign mass that would crush them otherwise, crush everything and everyone. He could see them vividly before his eyes. There was a sphere of pain and effort, and thanks to it, there were men and women free to move about and enjoy life, enjoy their repose.

  Later, after much reading and listening he had matured politically, and that image was replaced by a more logical design of the relationship between the classes, between labor and the parasite classes. The disparity between the two had seemed fatal and inescapable, but it was actually nothing more than injustice, man-mad
e and eradicable. What always struck him when he read socialist texts was the sarcasm with which they treated that falsifying ideology extolling the benefit of labor, considered a gratifying and elevating activity (and so man was called homo faber). When this was all just ruling-class rhetoric defending the status quo by sanctifying toil and fatigue. As if a man could elevate himself when machines and matter bore down on him, squeezed out all his energy, leaving him just about able to eat, sleep, and reproduce, manufacturing more human material. This all seemed clear and obvious. And yet the rock face remained. Maybe it was part of the superstructure? Part of the capitalist contrivance the proletariat would sweep away?Ferranini sank into this familiar meditation. In the meantime they arrived at the entrance of parliament.“Nattering, nattering,” said the irreverent Amoruso, “here we reach the gates of the natter-mill.”

  “Have some respect,” said Boatta. “You’re giving me history lessons? In 1917 the Bolsheviks called the Duma the chatter-shop. I’m merely saying we’ve arrived at the natter-mill.”

  I, who come from the shoe factory, should not complain, thought Ferranini. Why go and get so worked up? The people inside, every one of them, would call me a fool.

  •

  It was 11:00 p.m. when Nuccia got back from Frascati. December 17. She’d gone there for the third time, to arrange every last detail with her friend Bianca. Her daughter would enter boarding school (as Bianca called it) after Epiphany in January. Her room, already occupied by a girl of her age, the daughter of a man with the Swiss legation, was as nice as could be, with furniture painted sky blue and a window looking onto the pines of Villa Aldobrandini. After a series of phone calls that had tested Nuccia’s patience as well as her finances, the grandparents had agreed. (Her mother had always found it incomprehensible that Nuccia didn’t keep the child with her but left them to look after her, and she did have some objections.) At New Year’s Nuccia would go to Monticello and get Giulia. Things were going well, so well she had trouble believing it herself. Her life was falling into place, and she was finding peace. At last, at age thirty-eight. She had been struggling and it hadn’t been pleasant: her soul split in two, the remorse (the child sometimes asked total strangers for news of her mother), the instability, the secrecy. (“What do you do in Rome?” her father would close his letters. “Tell us the truth, you’re involved with someone.”)Now she could fling the windows open and relax a bit. When Giulia was in Rome staying with her, maybe she’d be able to confide in her father, to tell him the truth (nothing she wanted more!) and get him to accept it. What luck, her running into Bianca Weiss; the world was not such a bad place after all, if you could meet a helpful person who could resolve all your problems there on some street corner. That morning (the 17th and a Friday to boot, and she believed in such bad omens) she got a reply from her publishing house at the bookstore. They agreed to pay her ten percent more. It wasn’t much but still reassuring. There was money to send the girl to Frascati; she’d be able to look after her.