The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  He laughed, and went on: “I don’t complain about what I am. In my family it’s a tradition, I dare say a destiny, that we Lamoureuxs should get something positive out of negritude. My grandfather, in New Orleans several years after the Civil War, caught the eye of a French lady because he was a handsome, tall, strong Negro, and she left him her surname and some money, along with a son. My father made that money grow during a lifetime running a pawnshop for black people in New Orleans. He married a white, a Mexican. I hope I’m not boring you with these tales.”

  He had them bring him a drink, cigarettes. He drank, lit up, and then said, “And as for myself, I’m no slouch either. I’ve earned a lot of money since the war in the honest profession of broker. Allow me to explain. There’s a little part of New York, some thirty blocks, where successful black people try to infiltrate the whites. Or to share the neighborhood. A black family that has been fortunate or has accumulated means would like at a certain point to leave Harlem and ‘make it.’ I find them the lodgings they aspire to, on the edges of the forbidden city. They rent, or buy, and pay me well. After six months they realize that for them, for us, life is impossible there, life is made impossible. I help them get out of their obligations, and they pay me well. The following day, new candidates turn up. Such has been my profession for the last twelve years. Little effort, a great deal of money.”

  He leaned over graciously to look at his traveling companion, and said, laughing, “Am I putting you to sleep? Quite often my tale has that effect: the airline companies ought to pay me a stipend. So, for twelve years, the good life. But suddenly the wind changed. A rotten illness. Which reduced happy Lamoureux to a miserable worm, lacking the strength and desire to wiggle forward. Anxiety neurosis. Three months in a clinic, watched day and night, forced to remain alive despite myself by those guarding me—for this is a disease with a certain outcome, and one only. You know what I mean, don’t you? I survived and was cured because I contracted a disease that was slightly less serious, depressive asthenia with dissociation, a condition that permits me to breathe, eat, and deambulate. Not to work, not to sleep. I haven’t slept since October 25.”

  He rested an enormous hand on Ferranini’s knee. “Shakespeare wrote no tragedy about insomnia, and that’s a pity, he failed to address the noblest subject. And so my friend, I spend three or four nights each week three miles above the Atlantic. This consoles me. Sometimes near dawn I’m able to close my eyes. And now, let me tell you how I fell ill. My fault, friend! My fault. I used to like to go south, to New Orleans, city of my forebears. I would buy stuff, old stuff, I liked cheap paintings and assorted junk. I used to drive down in comfortable stages, stopping in a small city to sleep at an elegant hotel with a ballroom where Duke Ellington played at one time. I would stop there without needing to, out of defiance because that hotel was forbidden to my race. I was passing as white, I knew it was a risk. That small city was Auburn, Alabama, a place where they don’t take it lightly when segregation is violated. In the summer there, the mood turns ugly, it’s the hot humid weather. That night pandemonium broke loose down below, and then there was a raid, a ‘cleanup’ of the rooms. They came in, I was sleeping, and they recognized me by my smell; they have a sixth sense. They tied me up and hung me outside the windowsill on the seventh floor. Three women, and two of them were older, wearing eyeglasses, maybe schoolteachers. They left me hanging out there for a couple of hours. But all’s well that ends well. Except for this damned insomnia.

  “I’ll leave you now, my friend, I’m going to stretch my legs. I’ve become a philosopher; I understand men and men’s fates. Want to know what my doctrine is? Causes are infinite, all is necessary, and nothing has a purpose. I repeat: There’s not a single purpose, not one, in anything, whether outside or inside us. This perspective allows me to feel empathy with others and understand them. Even while they sleep, I am awake. I wish them a good sleep with all my heart.”

  He stood up on his long legs and walked off into the depth of the plane, already darkened for night.

  •

  There was no sleep that night for Ferranini either. Why wasn’t he worrying, thinking, making up his mind about something, he continued to ask himself. This lack of regret, this lack of purposefulness—it was more evidence of his typical failure to reflect. This trusting to fate, when twenty years ago, and he was just a young man, he had crossed the ocean with his heart cleft in two between missing what he was leaving and pride in what awaited him. Everything had been clear: his mission in the capitalist empire would begin in Boston, at the martyrs’ tombs. Now it was all abdication and irony. In truth, if no one took him seriously and all he could do was envy Mazzola, was there any reason he should take himself seriously? However, a plan. An immediate program: to know what he would be doing when that visa expired, seven or eight days hence. Return to Rome? Come on! The thought made him shiver, like a man recalling the high fever he’s just gotten over. Well then, supposing they didn’t expel him immediately, he’d have to decide what to do, where to hide. Find a life, a job. Begin again. At the age of forty-six, disheartened, incredulous, incapable. Incapable even of worrying about Nancy, who’d asked for him to come and who was in danger.

  Night behind him, night ahead. So the airplane flew, tracing its parabola, its trajectory between continents, but the plane had a route, it was going somewhere, and in the pilot’s cabin all those blue lights burned, there was no night there. He was in the dark. Outcast and purposeless, like Lamoureux. Then a memory came to him. He remembered the warm and familiar darkness of their three attic rooms in Demarr’s house, late at night when they would come in. A steep stairway up from one of the rooms not used by the Demarrs. The two of them would climb the stairs in the dark, and sometimes Nancy would go ahead, pretending to be afraid, with him behind, below her, pushing her up the creaky wooden stairs. The first times, they had to stop on the way.

  “My legs. Feel my legs. The best legs in America have always been Irish.”

  Irish. One afternoon at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, an Irishman had been sitting beside him, Finetree, from Belfast. The session had ended and Finetree had said, We Westerners must recognize that while we possess all the appearance of reality, reality itself comes from the East. He, Walter Ferranini, was turning his back on reality. He was choosing appearances, he was making a beeline there at four hundred miles per hour. Comrade Ferranini, who had told the rail workers of Reggio that their city would one day be a capital of European Communism. Ferranini the pure, the resolute. What a joke. Just a few days—hours!—was all it had taken for him to lose his way. Or anyway, to lose his obedience, his prospects, his faith. Attention, American journalists, a Kravchenko is about to land in your country. Coming from the USSR? No, from Rome, where they didn’t listen to him, didn’t grant him the honors due. Good. Good for him, tomorrow he will ask for asylum in the land of freedom. And if not?And if not, there was no going back. Fool, turncoat, whatever you like. But tired. Hopelessly tired. Utterly unable to go on. And was that so strange? There were priests who gave up the cassock. Enrico Caruso, in just three months, lost his voice. Someone’s crazy in love, and then he isn’t. Himself, for example. When that telegram came, he thought Nancy had died. The next morning getting ready to leave, he was unruffled. Of course he would get there in time. And why was that? Simple—because he was no longer in love. Love is a pessimist, love and jealousy, love and dread. Who was it who had said that? Oh yes, it was Nuccia. Nice try. Now he merely hoped, sincerely, that Nancy would recover, he needed her to recover. The enthusiasm of the past was no more. Had they told him in ’46 or ’47, Nancy is gravely ill, he would have lost his mind. When he went to the movies in those days, he always hoped there would be a girl in the film like her. He daydreamed of her voice when he walked down the street.

  They were supposed to make a short stop at Gander, Newfoundland. Instead they were on the ground for three hours; the airplane’s radio was malfunctioning. The weather report predicted snow halfway down the cont
inent, from Hudson Bay to Washington. An airport official announced they were not yet certain that Idlewild Airport in New York was open. The good-looking Lamoureux stood beside the official, and imitating his way of speaking, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we ask you not to draw any hasty conclusions about American efficiency from these mishaps.”

  What was he thinking, to joke about efficiency? One of the “appearances,” as Finetree had put it, on which the West’s reputation rested. At least that.

  They landed in New York as planned, but at midday, rather than 9:00 a.m. He missed the connection for Boston and had to wait for the next flight at 3:00 in the afternoon. The telegram had come from Demarr’s sister-in-law Rosaleen, or Rosy, with whom Nancy stayed when she was away from home. A widow, Rosy Gavan had always lived in Boston and Ferranini knew he would find Nancy with her. Nancy didn’t like staying at her own house in Camden, and she certainly wouldn’t have gone back there even if gravely ill, if old Demarr were still living there, or if he were dead. Only Aunt Rosy could have been asked to contact him. Nancy would never have confessed that belated change of heart to anyone in her own family.

  Ferranini had recognized the address at the bottom of the telegram, West Brompton Terraces, his wife’s mysterious dwelling toward which his jealous thoughts had often flown.

  It was the gray, drowsy, even-more-silent-under-the-snow Boston of Sacco and Vanzetti—not so far away, he seemed to recall, from the prison where in a damp yard in the autumn of ’39 he had paid tribute to their tombs. Two rows of small brick houses, each with a small, fenced-in rectangle of grass, like in the cemetery. The bell rang for a while, and then a neighbor appeared to say that Mrs. Gavan was out, but he could make himself at home all the same, the door wasn’t locked. There was a rocking chair with a lacy cover near the cold fireplace. He waited there, in shadows that smelled of coal and lavender water, listening to the pendulum clock strike the hour.

  Aunt Rosy was very courteous when (it was past 7:00 p.m.) she finally appeared.

  “I thank you. My niece is better. She’ll be delighted.”

  She’ll be delighted. She didn’t speak the usual Americano but an elegant, crisp, clear English. He’d envisioned her as tall, thin, dressed in dark colors, returning from some meeting at church, and instead here was a plump little perfumed lady in an electric-blue raincoat with pale blue hair. Coming from the editorial staff meeting of a literary review.

  “I’m sorry to be home so late, I work at the Literary Quarterly. Very, very busy. For a couple of days now my niece has allayed our concerns somewhat, but we had reason to fear for her life. Nephritis, very advanced. I’ll tell you about it. And then Demarr, her father, is also ill and can’t leave his bed. You see. Poor Nancy, at the origin of everything was a terrible depression. Conflicts at work, a noble social mission that’s been obstructed in every way, even at the highest levels and by some of the most influential elements in this country. I’ll tell you about it. Recently she was living in Westchester outside New York. She was running a very combative magazine, The Lower 48, maybe you’ve heard of it—”

  “Tell me right way,” Ferranini interrupted her, “where is she?”

  “In a hospital, obviously. I’m getting there. But first I have to explain.” She glanced toward the front door to be sure it was closed. “Why do you think my niece wanted me to warn you? Why did she want you to come here before going to see her? To prepare you, that’s why. She wants you to be informed.”

  “Take me there now. Please! Let’s go.”

  He was in a hurry, he wanted the final chapter. He knew that for him, everything depended on that first meeting. Those first moments, the way she looked at him, would decide everything. Why did he need to babble on with this woman?

  Rosaleen’s eyes widened. “Go? My friend, I’m sixty-three years old and you want me to set out like that, with no preparation? It’s four hundred miles, and a night train.”

  “But where is she?” he howled. “Where is she?”

  “In Philadelphia, my friend. Of course.”

  All of a sudden, the anticipation that had kept him together in the hours since he had landed collapsed—just as the time came to leave. There were no taxis, and he was lucky to catch one of the last buses in circulation. From the headlines of a newspaper he learned, as he got seated on the train, that a double disaster had befallen the Eastern states: an Arctic blizzard, and a strike of transportation workers (who were “scandalously underpaid,” the paper said). Trains were still running, at least some. And in fact, by 1:00 p.m. he was back in New York. He hadn’t known that the train he’d gotten off continued on to Washington and would have taken him to Philadelphia, and by the time someone told him, it was too late. He prepared himself to spend the night in Pennsylvania Station, immense and warm and strangely empty. He was resigned even to these wearying delays in various stations; they seemed inevitable and significant, marks of destiny. He was a rootless creature: the lives of others moved to the beat of the tender family obligations; his, to that of departure timetables. Every form of life, the biologists said, had evolved to occupy a particular habitat. His was a railway world, pending, contingent; some unknown evolutionary sin had condemned him to this.

  He slept for two or three hours. Then he went to the restaurant and consoled himself eating, as he’d so often done. This time, however, paying particular attention to the intrinsic flavors of his food, frankfurters with mustard, so familiar to him from Chicago and his early immigrant days. He ate a lot, he ate passionately; nearby was a group of navy boys, noisy and cheerful, drinking California champagne. He felt for a moment that he had come back to the surface of things, was enjoying an effervescent new sensation, in a situation that was, yes, uncertain, but also open-ended. Wasn’t Nancy getting better? He was going to see her. And he was free. He could have her back, start over. In the meantime he was enjoying a new awareness of something else, a particular smell he’d first noticed the morning he landed. It was the smell of America he’d so longed for, Virginia tobacco and with it a scent half chlorine, half ocean, or what? Maybe only the scent of distant chemical plants.

  He got to Philadelphia in the early afternoon, aboard the only train traveling south.

  Nancy was in John Morgan Hospital in Haddington, a neighborhood Ferranini seemed to remember. On the other side of town, beyond Fairmount Park where he used to take old Demarr to play golf. Memories began to resurface. Over there, inside the station, you went down to the subway. But the gate was closed. The strike. In the square outside (it was snowing), the people huddled by the wall taking shelter from the storm didn’t move or reply. No taxis to be seen among the silent automobiles covered with snow. A dark day despite all this white around, said a policeman he’d asked about a taxi; apparently his question was absurd. He moved back under the roof of the entryway and tried approaching the drivers of two military vehicles for a ride. The first just laughed; the second man, a black, pretended to drive right at him, also jeering.

  •

  Now that he’d been restored to the city of his nostalgia, he was anxious to move quickly, he’d already wasted twenty-four hours of the few he’d been granted. He began to walk, his valise on his back. Walking to the hospital might take him two hours; it was four or five miles, no more. At 4:00 p.m. he’d be there.

  After a long, straight hike, numb and half blind, he permitted himself a rest in what seemed to him to be Market Place. He calculated he had done about a quarter of the distance. The snow was coming down sideways, biting, dry; he could barely see but he had his bearings. He was still pretty good, after all those years. The route he needed to take was fairly clear in his mind; if he followed the other pedestrians along the course of the river, he should arrive at city hall, where he hoped to find some means of transportation or other. One evening he had met Nancy there on the street buying flowers (a Puerto Rican was selling cut flowers in a kiosk there), and that June evening Walter, taking one from the bunch, had put it in her hair. But city hall didn’t material
ize. He went into a large store where a man began trying to sell him, incongruously, a refrigerator; the man told him he was far from city hall, and in any case, to get to Haddington he had to cross the river and cut through the center of town toward the west. A woman shop assistant, to whom he’d explained he was looking for a hospital, took an interest in him. She went to ask, and informed him that a van making home deliveries was about to leave, and that it would be going near Fairmount.

  She was quite courteous. Maybe, he thought, she was eager to please because she was a mulatto, because of her pale yellow skin. Ferranini forced himself to wait, but they didn’t leave for another half hour, and the van had a long route to follow; it was already twilight when they let him out. He didn’t go into Fairmount Park, afraid he would get lost. The blizzard was not letting up. He took the avenue along one side. There was a little group, kids let out of school, who were squealing with excitement at getting to walk for once, and Ferranini tried to keep up with them. He made his way up the great, curved, tree-lined street. The trees on one side formed a single mass with those of the park, and the light filtering through from the headlights did not prevent the place from looking primitive and fierce, a forest. The city beyond had vanished. Then the kids all left the avenue and turned onto a side street. As soon as he was alone he felt lost, and his arm began to hurt, worse than the cold and fatigue. It wasn’t the right arm, carrying his valise; it was that quite different pain in the left forearm, running up his neck and the back of his head. And with it came the distressing image, even before he felt the void in his chest, of a strange, oppressive emptiness from diaphragm to throat. A premonition.

  His breathing was still normal, though. Best not to think about it, distract himself, and meanwhile get some rest. Here and there along the avenue cars appeared, empty, snowed in. He rested on one, sweeping off snow with his hand to feel the metal underneath; the car felt like a surrogate human presence. He tried to calculate how far the hospital could be; he might have walked a mile and a half since getting out of the van, always keeping to the edge of the park. Therefore he had the same distance to go, or a bit more, close to an hour’s walk.