The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  Potted plants and armchairs sat between the radiators under the windows of the loggia. On that morning of February 28, snow partly covered the windows, but the sky had cleared and the sun was beginning to color the treetops red.

  A love of ivy and Virginia creeper had led Nancy to ask to be transferred to the Green Pavilion when she’d begun to feel better. She’d always liked plants that made decorative patterns. Halfway down the loggia, peering out, she wondered which of the windows of the building nearby were Ferranini’s.

  She had finished breakfast and was smoking her first cigarette, a woman of about thirty-five, pale and drained after three weeks of illness but well on her way to recovery. A pleasing woman, and yet she had that off-putting quality of someone no longer interested in pleasure. Hands on her hips, dressing gown closed with care and something like primness, feet apart, solidly planted on the floor: there was dogged determination in her very waiting. The face, no; something uncertain and unstable kept it in motion. Some elusive, vague sentiment ready to fade away or contradict itself. Which might also be Irish fickleness; in America they said of the Irish first you bury them, then you fathom them—although maybe that was flattery. In other times Ferranini had thought, probably not wrongly, of his Nancy: Well, at least she’s honest.

  The evening before she had picked up the newspaper for the first time in a while and seen the story. Foreigner trapped by blizzard in phone booth, hospitalized at John Morgan in a state of exposure. The reporter noted that “the piquant detail is that this derelict Italian, saved by the timely action of police and the hospital, is apparently a member of the Italian parliament with the Communists, a big shot in the party across the Atlantic.”

  Nancy, rather sharper, thought to herself: The piquant detail is that this big-shot Communist was about to expire because of a strike called by the workers and their union. The shock was, all considered, bearable, and her immediate reaction was as follows:“Do you have a Mr. Ferranini hospitalized here since yesterday?”

  “Deputy Ferranini from Rome, Italy, I mean!”

  The administrative office confirmed that they did. “What’s happened then? Mr. Ferranini comes four thousand miles to visit me, Mrs. Ferranini, and you don’t even bother to notify me. Congratulations to your Department of Patients’ Relations, if you have one. And if you don’t, get one!”

  The administration offered apologies; Nancy had a reputation as a journalist and a troublemaker, so they had to watch out. Then Nancy called Walter’s ward and asked to speak to the chief physician.

  “Where is Mr. Ferranini, and how is he doing? Is it possible to see him immediately? I should tell you that you’re speaking to Mrs. Ferranini.”

  “Well, Ferranini’s condition is serious,” said Dr. Wiener. “You can’t see him.”

  At that, she leapt out of bed. “I thought it was a simple case of exposure.”

  Wiener had no vocation for dealing with other peoples’ troubles. “It’s circulatory collapse. The patient has regained consciousness, and therefore emotional reactions are to be avoided. Absolutely.”

  “He’s my husband! We’ve been apart for thirteen years.”

  “So you can wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow morning I’ll let you know.”

  Telephoning at 7:00 the next morning, Nancy had better news. After a few more calls, they gave her permission to visit. It was noon.

  Ferranini had rested all night; he had actually slept for nearly ten hours, and Newcomer could be proud he had taken the calculated risk, doubling the sedative. The cardiac situation was improving and pulmonary edema had been averted. What surprised the doctors was how alert the patient was. Awake; they were feeding him. He asked if President Eisenhower had intervened in the transport strike.

  “You’re a leftist, aren’t you?” said Newcomer, teasingly.

  But in American, “leftist” meant something vaguer, more abstract, than what “man of the left” means in Italy. Remembering that, Ferranini replied, “I’m for the workers.”

  Wiener, severe, interrupted. “Don’t tire him. The man’s pressure is at seventy.”

  “I was hoping it would be lower,” said Ferranini, who had heard him. He stopped drinking his orange juice.

  His comment didn’t surprise Newcomer, the son and grandson of herring fishermen from the north Atlantic coast (from the sea where Kipling’s Captains Courageous takes place), who, though not yet forty years old, had a good deal of human insight. Despite the patient’s rapid improvement, Newcomer guessed that the man had little desire to get well, that he was already detached from life. Newcomer paid attention to his patients; he was alert and alive and open to them, however skeptical experience had left him about the humanity of his fellow men.

  Wiener, meanwhile, had gone out with the nurse. “You were hoping to get worse?” Newcomer asked Ferranini. “A long time ago a doctor told me: Your heart is tired. Stay out in a blizzard and you’ll meet your demise. And instead, I’ve survived.”

  Newcomer had asked for some tea, and he stood there, holding the cup. He took Walter’s hand and squeezed it. Something happened to Ferranini that hadn’t happened for a long time, not since childhood: tears came to his eyes. “I lived for a while in India,” said Newcomer. “Burma tea is the best in the world. Taste it, I’ll get them to bring you some.”

  Ferranini received the tea with euphoria. He never drank tea. Then Nancy arrived.

  He looked at her, he studied her for a long time but said little. “The other night,” he said, when Nancy had sat down, “they told me you weren’t here.”

  “What name did you give?”

  “Mrs. Demarr.”

  “But I am Signora Ferranini,” she said.

  She said it in Italian. She had studied Italian and understood it fairly well. He spoke to her in Italian, while she used that well-modulated, educated Bostonian English to which she’d remained faithful. To Ferranini that voice and accent seemed to come from far, far away.

  “Legally I can use my married name if I please,” said Nancy. “And it pleases me to use it.”

  Ferranini was silent for a while, and then said, “You’re better. It’s obvious. But what did you have.”

  “Nephritis. Accidental intoxication. I just about kicked the bucket, you know.”

  “Really,” he said softly, meditatively. He asked about her father. “He’s at home, in Camden. He can’t go out. My brothers come. Mother, you know, died. In 1954.”

  Ferranini didn’t know. No one had told him. “Father had a stroke two months ago, at Christmas. It looked like he would die, but he’s come back; he’s stronger than any of us. The firm’s now run by Salvatore. My brother. Business is going well, it seems. As always.”

  “And the farm?”

  Nancy didn’t understand him. He said again, with some effort, “The farm. Old Laurel Farm.”

  He shouldn’t have said the words. Years ago in Reggio, when he still had passionate dreams of Old Laurel, he had already guessed, already known Nancy’s reply.

  “Not ours anymore.”

  Ferranini understood, darkly. And he understood that the reason he had come to see Nancy was above all this, to ask her this question. He had known the answer ahead of time, and still it hit him. Old Laurel, too, was finished. His hands went back and forth on the sheet between chin and chest, a tired gesture.

  Pity, pain. Sorrow for the love that was trapped back there, in their season. Suddenly he was seized by the need to fight back. The sun beat on the window, and Old Laurel was not so far away as it was from Reggio, he could get there. Try to go back. Try. There was a stripe of sunlight on the bed. He had to move, to go.

  His hands stopped moving.

  Nancy saw that he was trying to pull himself up, his arms twisted, head sunk between his shoulders. Maybe he had worn himself out talking: she was afraid, she saw him white-faced, sucking in air with his mouth half closed. She rang the bell, but feeling it was not enough, ran to get the nurse.

  “Don’t worry,” said Miss Joy, with a
glance at him.

  She helped to pull him up and gave him chloral hydrate. He forced himself to smile, to reassure her.

  “It’s nothing. I’m fine.” He spoke in Italian and hadn’t the strength to speak very loudly. Nancy didn’t understand.

  “Stay, please,” she said to the nurse. “I have the feeling he’s getting worse.”

  Newcomer didn’t believe in the popular tranquilizers and sedatives, he called them symptom suppressors. He prescribed old-fashioned chloral hydrate, which attacked emotional excitability, including affections, even the most sincere and heartfelt, at the humble organic root, the brain and spinal cord. Ferranini swallowed two fingers of water with thirty grams of chloral hydrate, and Old Laurel sank back into the mists of Lake Erie. It would regain its place among the tolerable memories. He ate some noodles in broth and the jello brought to him by the nurse. Then he dozed off. Nancy put the two sprigs of Japanese allspice she’d taken from her room into two glasses. She handled the plants tenderly, sending an affectionate and even connubial glance in Walter’s direction from time to time. Finally she left, for she too was convalescent and the doctor on her ward needed to know where she was.

  In the afternoon she was back. Ferranini had slept and eaten; his heart beat more regularly and his blood pressure had recovered to the point that Newcomer had said cheerfully, “But you were just starving and in need of sleep.” Ferranini received her happily.

  “Oh, thanks for coming,” he said in English.

  He seemed not to remember she had been there that morning. Once again he asked her why she’d been hospitalized.

  “As you see,” he told her, “I came as soon as you called.”

  “And it was so good of you. It’s not as if I’ve done all that much to deserve it.”

  That was the end of that. But she did find his reappearance (trapped in the snow, passed out in the phone booth) “terribly sweet.”

  “You’re still the same old Walter. Only you could pull that off.” She talked. She had done a lot of things, “pursued many paths.” In ’47 she’d been in Canada, Quebec, and as she got to know the Canadians she found that a number of them liked the idea of political union with the United States. And so she threw herself into the annexation cause with enthusiasm. She founded a Daughters of the American Revolution chapter and attracted more than four hundred members. Between ’49 and ’52 she’d been a newspaper correspondent in Anchorage, Alaska. There she’d run into Francis, also a journalist, and it was marvelous, a great romance. Love and mutual spiritual understanding, neither one prying too much into the other’s business.

  “You wouldn’t understand, Walter, you’re Italian. Three years together and no promises, no vows. No arguments. Reasonable concessions on either side; I lived at the hotel and Francis had a small apartment. Weekends together. Francis a bit younger than me, a leftist, quite convinced, and a musicologist, writing a book about Schoenberg. I was interested in social matters, sociology. We helped each other, encouraged each other. Definitely. Maybe hard for you to fathom.”

  True, he couldn’t fathom it. Sometime between ’49 and ’52 he had met Nuccia, and seen that she cared for him. From their very first meetings what was important to him was to have found someone he could talk with about America and Nancy.

  “Nothing to say? Don’t tell me you’re jealous of Francis.”

  Jealous. In all those years of thinking about her, the idea that she might have taken a lover had never once crossed his mind.

  “What’s that smell?” he said. “I don’t know, darling.”

  “Flowers. Did you bring them? The smell’s too strong.”

  They were the same powerfully fragrant winter flowers Nancy had in her room that day he went to visit her at her boarding school in Meadville. She meekly took the two flowerpots out into the hallway. Ferranini looked around him for the first time. He noticed the oxygen canister near the bed. Newcomer, making his afternoon rounds, could see right away on entering the room that 203 was improving. But he made it clear that the visitor should leave, because he needed to examine the patient. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Yes, we were ready to give you oxygen, we were even ready to bid you farewell. Your myocardiopathy is a textbook case, my friend, and I don’t suppose this is the first time you’ve been told that. What you need is a very peaceful life, you know. But you are ruled by your nervous system, and while relationships are dangerous for you, you obviously need them.”

  It was true: now that Nancy was gone, Walter felt weaker. His mouth gaped open, hungry for air, and his head fell back and began to bob again. Newcomer, from the chair beside the bed, kept a sharp eye on him. This patient of his must have suffered badly and worked very hard, probably in his youth. Studying his face you could see traits of naiveté and stubbornness, a kind of exotic primitive idealism that had struck Newcomer in the faces of Stakhanovites and other heroes of labor glimpsed in photographs.

  “Tell me. You are a Communist; do you believe that ideology is so ingrained today as to modify human appearance? Is there, say, a Marxist physiognomy and another for the neo-capitalist?” Ferranini turned slowly toward him. Clever doctor, this Newcomer, I’m having trouble breathing and so he’s trying to distract me. “You know,” Ferranini said, “I may not deserve to call myself a Communist.”

  Smiling, Newcomer leaned forward and gave him a tap on the foot. “Very good, Ferranini! Like all men of faith, you’re troubled by doubts. You feel unworthy. Here you are, tended by heathens, a guest in the wicked Babylon of the anti-Marxists. Have no fear, we don’t intend to take you prisoner. And remember that your wife is here, two steps away.”

  He struggled for words to reply. When you didn’t feel well, having to speak a foreign language was a chore.

  “Don’t laugh, doctor. I must leave within four days. Hardly a prisoner.”

  Leaving, he thought, made sense. He was ready and in four days he’d be back on his feet. His problem was different. Leave for where? For what? Some Communist. If Newcomer only knew.

  And Nancy. “Your wife.” Who had actually called him darling! “Tell them to give me something good to eat, doctor. You need to get me back in shape. Make me eat.”

  “Try not to think too badly of America,” said Newcomer, his stethoscope on the patient’s ribs. A pinpoint of sunlight that had pierced the icy windows now played on the nape of his neck. “As you see, we let devotees of Communism come in. We tolerate the Beat poets, we allow our blacks to convert, or convert back, to Islam.”

  Ferranini was touched by the man’s warmth and vitality; he felt regretful but not bitter. The strong neck and shoulders, the pleasant voice that came out clearly even as Newcomer leaned awkwardly over the bed, his evident and easy self-possession—with that cordial hint of irony in his speech and thinking—he was sorry their communication was limited to these minutes of prodding and poking. Newcomer spoke to distract him, the better to get a normal reading of his pulse and pressure. He treated him like what he was: a poor, sick, impressionable creature.

  “Don’t take me too seriously,” Newcomer went on. “I know the case for the other side. Our tolerance, our liberty, is merely formal. A freedom that doesn’t alter the effective subservience of the individual in the least. Up and down the social ladder. The estrangement, the alienation. Now, Ferranini,” he said, straightening up, “I was going after an intermittent extrasystole that could be heard very clearly the other day. This morning, it seems it’s not there.”

  He removed the stethoscope from his ears. “I know those objections, and not only do I know them, I appreciate them. I share them. I’m not an admirer of the state of things in this country. I’ll say more. If I knew that things worked better elsewhere, I’d be inclined to leave. Yes, yes, that’s right, the place you’re thinking of. But I’m not confident I will find better elsewhere. Bear with me another minute while I take your blood pressure. Did you know that this device was made by an Italian? Riva Rocci was the name. Is that too tight? As I said, I’m not very
confident. Both here and there, technology is galloping forward, even if here we also have plutocracy. I’d say there are hidden analogies between the two countries. Do you know America?”

  “I’m beginning to.”

  “I speak from empirical evidence, you know; I don’t have a theory. There’s a dominant social type I would call the Ungregarious American. His personality, his inner life, is asocial, superficial, not very empathetic. Contacts between individuals are subordinated to organizational functions, to the status the individual derives from his organizational role. Contacts outside that don’t survive. Nor do they get formed until organizational roles are defined. The difficulties you’ve experienced are not the only problems the system has. The extraneous element is first isolated and identified before it’s integrated into the system. You know about that, don’t you?”

  Ferranini didn’t reply. Yes, he did. But what was the point of bringing it up? He’d lost any desire to talk about it and he wouldn’t have known how.

  “But there’s an even more serious difficulty, I’d say. Which is the tenuous nature of all relationships, which are always conditional, always reversible. Apparent,” Newcomer continued. “While the organization, by contrast, is absolute. Man serves the organization and not vice versa. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to leave this country, not at all. But to go where? Over to the other side, where opposite premises have produced similar results. Obviously you don’t agree! Another solution? I don’t believe there is a third option, I see only two. Ferranini, do you believe in the third world?”

  “I’ve never liked what’s in-between.”

  “I think I know what you mean. And so I stay put. I don’t bother to look further. How do you explain the fact that there’s no third world?”

  “Well, there are only two poles, the positive electric charge and the negative. The physical world is bipolar.”