The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  ‘Love to.’

  ‘Today then?’

  ‘No. Tomorrow.’

  She spoke without a note of interrogation, certain that my life was without engagements.

  ‘Splendid,’ I said, ‘I’ll meet you here. I’ll be here when you finish work. One o’clock? Right. We’ll go somewhere where they have good maccheroni.’

  She made a little moue.

  ‘It pleases me to watch you eat maccheroni,’ I said.

  She smiled again. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘certainly.’

  I watched her go, swinging the shoulder-bag she still defiantly carried, daring the motor-bike thieves. A game she would enjoy. I watched the long swing of her legs, the free movement of her chestnut hair. The crowd closed behind her.

  In the afternoon, guilty, I took a taxi to Monte Mario to visit Guido in his asylum. The nurse said, ‘You had better not enter today. He’s been having a bad turn. I’m afraid it was necessary to strait-jacket him. He’s weak now but the sight of you might excite him again.’

  He had a big strong face, the nurse, and a Sicilian accent.

  ‘All we can do for him really is keep him from hurting himself and others,’ he said. ‘If the doctors tell you differently it’s a pack of lies.’

  I looked through the spy-hole at Guido who had been my favourite brother. He was curled up, foetus-like, in the strait-jacket, which came half-way down his thighs. He was wearing no other garment and had fouled himself. I could hear a sort of whimpering. An eye glared redly in a yellow-mottled and dirt-streaked face. His mouth, half-pressed against the floor, was open, the lips very red as if he had been biting them so that the blood surged back.

  ‘They’d like to take his teeth out,’ said the nurse. ‘They irritate him and pain him and we think make him even worse. He’ll have them out next week, when he’s calmed down. There’ll be something for you to sign, sir.’

  The body on the floor began to heave, the movement coming first in sharp little spasms. Then it stumbled to a position half-erect and, with short nervous paces, keeping its thighs together, began to scurry across the room, then round the far side. The head darted right and left and the feet scurried, hardly leaving the ground. It was a sort of insect shuffle.

  ‘He’ll do that for hours sometimes,’ said the nurse. ‘Like something in the zoo, isn’t it, sir? You know, he occasionally seems to be laughing.’

  I nodded. Nausea kept me from speaking. Maybe I should bring Bernardo, not Bella, to see this. Maybe it should be Corrado came once a fortnight.

  ‘Your brother, the Minister, was here yesterday,’ said the nurse. ‘He doesn’t often come, but when he does, you know, I think the lunatic knows him. He senses his power maybe. I’m not of your brother’s way of thinking. I have’ – he lowered his voice – ‘older allegiances. Like yourself I think sir. Indeed I regard your brother as a traitor, but there’s no doubt, sir, the lunatic responds to him. Only it’s a false response, sir, because he’s always worse afterwards. He has a reaction to the experience, as you might say. It’s a different sort of experience,’ – the nurse licked his lips quickly and rubbed his hands energetically together – ‘a different sort of experience he really understands.’

  We had reached the end of the long stone corridor, the nurse’s keys jangling against the wall on his side, as every now and then he swayed against it. He knocked on the heavy deal door.

  I didn’t know the man behind the desk. He was new here, though the ash pallor of his face suggested years of half-life in the half-light of this half-world of the asylum system.

  ‘I am honoured to meet you,’ he said, ‘only the day after your so distinguished brother. It is, dottore, encouraging to think that even so hopeless a case as your unfortunate brother can still attract the attention of two such distinguished and busy men.’

  ‘Busy?’ I said, ‘I’m in no way busy.’

  ‘Your historical researches,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry’, he said, ‘that you’ve found poor Guido in such a low state. He’s had one of his bad turns.’

  ‘Couldn’t he even be cleaned up?’ I asked, but I was aware of the naivety of the question and didn’t require his deprecating administrator’s smile.

  ‘We do try,’ he said, ‘but of course he doesn’t co-operate. As soon as we have him clean he fouls himself again.’

  ‘The smell,’ I said, ‘really a stench …’

  ‘It doesn’t worry him, you may be sure of that. When he’s round the corner, it’ll be different of course. You know how he usually is. I assure you, dottore, he’ll be nicely cosmeticized in a day or two.’

  I sighed and, ignoring his expression of distaste, lit a cigarette.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ I said.

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied, and made great play of searching for an ash-tray.

  ‘That nurse,’ I said.

  ‘Devoted.’

  ‘I’m not making a complaint,’ I said.

  There was a silence.

  ‘He doesn’t perhaps have a certain relish for physical treatment?’ I asked. ‘He doesn’t beat him, does he?’

  ‘Dottore,’ he said, ‘you’ve been more affected by the sight than I thought you were. I apologize. Sit down. You must sit down. And perhaps a restorative. A glass of cognac perhaps.’

  I allowed myself to be persuaded; weak and foolish of me. Yet to stir up trouble and such-like could hardly do Guido any good. And where else, except the State asylum along the road, could we take him? Mamma would never hear of that.

  But why should that nurse – that gaoler – have concluded that I was a Fascist too?

  And he did it with approval. Not like our committed young who apply the opprobrious term to anything they may chance to disapprove of. I don’t really mind being called a Fascist by them, since it’s practically impossible to avoid it and I have never been one for spitting against the wind, but I’m hanged if I’ll submit to being claimed by the tawdry crew themselves.

  I took a little nap after I had written up this diary that I don’t know why I keep, and woke, after a bad dream, with Sasha lying on my chest purring. I was tempted to stay in bed fondling the cat, and, if I didn’t, it was only because I felt that succumbing to this I would always succumb. I have after all little enough cause to rise at any time. So, like a moralist, I pushed Sasha aside, my hand deep in the softness of his fur; and ignored his little protest. I showered and looked over the violet-lit emptiness of the courtyard, scent of magnolia rising towards me. I could see the not-quite-suicide of the morning, or rather I could see the top of his head, a grey streak showing. He was sitting at a table, doubtless one of those gimcrack little tables, inadequate for any purpose, which are made specially for the bedrooms of second-rate pensioni. The sound of typewriter keys, uncertainly and irregularly struck, came to me. I pictured him hammering out a dime novel in despair, trying to reanimate an old dream of genius with the aid of bourbon. ‘If I were kind,’ I said to myself, ‘I would go and greet him and say, Brother.’

  Instead, I went down to the osteria, where I had no need to call for a quartino of white wine to be set on the table before me. It was cool and damp out of the evening sunshine. My stomach tightened at the sour smell of stale wine and sawdust. Fr Ambrose smiled at me.

  ‘I was beginning to think our little club would be thin tonight,’ he said. ‘The Prince has gone to the country, I’m told.’

  I sipped my wine.

  ‘They still haven’t made any arrests in connection with the May Day riots,’ he said, ‘other than those who were picked off the street at the time, that is. But I understand they’ve decided they weren’t spontaneous, and that they were indeed instigated by the Left.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, ‘Left, Right, does it matter? I never read the papers, of course.’

  ‘You can’t need to,’ said Dr Eustachio, a pert young lawyer who has taken to dropping in on the sessions of our wholly informal club, ‘with your connections, that is.’

  ‘When
I see my brother,’ I said, ‘we talk about family affairs. Or literature.’

  ‘Oh certainly,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said a young man in a dark suit I didn’t know, ‘I should think he might be happy to. He’s certainly, as they say, the key to the situation, and he must be grateful for any respite. But if you ask me, the key won’t turn. There’s no way out of the crisis by Parliamentary means. We’re heading, within months not years, for a dictatorship, whether of the Right or Left depends of course on the development of the next weeks. It depends possibly on just what precipitates the more intensive crisis that is bound to arrive in one form or another.’

  ‘And it follows that that must be done deliberately. By a single positive act. An act perhaps shocking in itself but yet made in accordance with the truly perceived demands of historical necessity. An act therefore entirely autonomous, containing its own justification in its own being.’

  The speaker was a pale young man I hadn’t seen there before. I divined at once that he had come with the man in the dark suit, though he wore, a little uneasily, the conventional uniform of blue denim; he sipped a lemonade. I had seen his face before, but not in the flesh. He was without doubt a Caravaggio Christ.

  ‘That sort of language worries me,’ said Fr Ambrose. ‘I don’t want to seem to be taking advantage of my cloth, but it smacks of Jesuitry; and I think the Jesuits have a lot to answer for. I speak as an Englishman of course.’

  The Caravaggio Christ was unmoved. His face had the immobility of a wax creation.

  ‘The Jesuits were Spanish in origin,’ he said, ‘but it’s true they accommodated themselves to the Italian genius. And in turn moulded it. Bourgeois morality is alien to the intellectual structures within which they operate. As did Machiavelli. As must we today, transcending such. How can it be otherwise? Bourgeois morality is a papier-mâché structure.’

  ‘This means then that you would condone violence,’ said Dr Eustachio. He pulled at his moustache, drawing attention to his superiority.

  ‘Condone is a term wholly without significance,’ said Caravaggio. ‘Say rather we recognize and consequently accept its inevitability. Consider, if you like, the new autostrada that by-passes Padua. Some big politician wanted that highway built and it cost one and a half trillion lire. Right; money for his friends. That could have been spent on cardiac or dialysis centres, which naturally we still don’t have, but the autostrada was worth more votes than the hospital. So someone whose life could have been saved is dead because of this cynicism, and others are dying because that road has been built. So who is the worse killer? That politician or the boy – maybe me – with a machine-gun?’

  I looked at Fr Ambrose. His rosy English face had lost all rigidity, his cheeks sagged in pendulous bags of inertia. And yet the argument lay in his territory, I felt. As for me, I recognized the language, the diseased poetry of Romanticism that could scrawl the words, ‘the machine-gun is beautiful’, on the walls of university buildings.

  ‘What we have to say is this,’ said Caravaggio. ‘In our circumstances violence has to be a central ingredient of a true Communist programme. The fact is inescapable since violence already thwarts the programme. The State cannot arrogate to itself the legitimate use of violence. Remember that. Come,’ he said to Black Suit, ‘we must be about our further business.’

  Fr Ambrose drew back the skirts of his habit as they passed. I watched them out. The beaded curtain trailed across Caravaggio’s shoulder, and the strands fell separately back. He was the real thing, Caravaggio; no doubt about it. Black Suit by contrast was the opportunist every movement attracts, but Caravaggio was the sort you would find on a cross or before a firing-squad. Yet it was Black Suit was the worrying portent; when men of that stamp joined a movement …

  Dr Eustachio said, ‘We ought to report to the police, don’t you think …?’

  ‘My poor dottore,’ I said, ‘what would you have us report? That we have heard some foolishness? Some talk, even advocacy, of violence. You can hear the same in any Roman caffè.’

  ‘That chap,’ he persisted, ‘he meant it, you know. It’s no laughing matter.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean there’s anything we can do about it.’

  I sipped the harsh thin Marino wine. ‘Nothing at all,’ I repeated. ‘Unless you really wish tomake yourself an object of interest to the authorities.’

  ‘That story of his, example or what have you,’ Fr Ambrose said. ‘Not as quick on the uptake as I might be, y’ know, but it shows their lack of logic. After all, what did he admit? That there were more votes in the highway than in the hospital? So it was more democratic, would you say? Yes, the present system, on their own admission, don’t y’ know, gives people what they want. That makes it undoubtedly more democratic. In my book or any other I can read.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he would have an answer to that. He would say, wouldn’t he, that the people have been deceived; conditioned to want things they wouldn’t want if their judgement had been left free. It’s a matter of induced desires. Propaganda. Written into the capitalist system. Imprinted. So it’s got to be got rid of. People have to be freed from this sort of thing. Accordingly it’s no good just continuing to demand reform of the State. That just means more of the same, even if in a slightly different form. No, no, the State must be abolished. The argument, you know, hangs together …’

  Fr Ambrose clapped his hands, great hams of hand coming heavily together.

  ‘Bravo,’ he cried, ‘I must say you do it jolly well, Raimundo. You have the patter absolutely. More wine, signora. The abolition of the State, yes well, what they’re really asking for is the abolition of human nature as it’s always been, don’t y’ know.’

  ‘You could put it like that,’ I said. ‘Of course it’s what the Church has always asked for too. In its more enthusiastic moments at least.’

  Fr Ambrose wiped his big fleshy hands on his skirts. He picked up the wine-jug and poured two glasses. He eyed his wine and sipped it, then took a deeper swallow.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘that’s true, but at the same time we have to accept things as they are.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘so do these types. Up to a point, I think, anyway.’

  There was a moon over the Colosseum as I walked home, and I asked myself: ‘What made me respond to Caravaggio as I did? There was a note there struck home.’

  The fat whore at the corner of the street beckoned towards me as she always did, and I touched my hat, courteously, as I always do. She comes from San Giovanni dei Fiori in Calabria, and has worked in Rome twelve years. She takes a bus out to the suburbs every dawn and is home in time to see her ten-year-old son off to school. Her name is Margherita. Good-night, good-night, good-night.

  May 8 I woke thinking of Bella, and thinking I had dreamt of making love with her. And had I dreamt this, or had I not?

  My hand was hot on the bed-cover, sun-streaked through the slatted shutter. I must therefore have slept better than usual, where better means longer. Depth of sleep is something I no more look to have. I pictured Bella, in a way uncles should not picture nieces, on my bed, lying back, not teasing, but open and generous. That afternoon, after lunch and sun and wine in a restaurant, I pictured my hand, my blotchy sexagenarian hand, not being resisted.

  Groaning, I eased myself to my feet. The tiles were warm to the touch. It was eight o’clock.

  I threw open the shutters and leant on the wall of the terrace smoking a cigarette. Spring was over; there was no freshness even in this morning air. Summer was upon us, the all-devouring Roman summer.

  I could hear movement from the kitchen. It must be one of Katrina’s days. I called out to her, requesting coffee. In a few minutes she padded through, grumbling at me beneath her breath.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, but she didn’t reply. Katrina is no old family servant. Her husband used to have a shop, but for some reason he didn’t make a success of it, and fell into debt. Now he sits at home reading the papers, while Katrina,
who must be almost seventy, goes out cleaning. It’s no wonder she doesn’t care for me.

  And what she does to the coffee I can never understand. As usual I poured it away, and dressed myself in a thin jersey, an American sweatshirt in fact, and slacks, and, muttering about cigarettes, went down to the bar for an espresso. It was already hot; time to move slowly, in the shade of the wall.

  The barman who knows my connection with Corrado tried, as he often does, to engage me in a political discussion.

  ‘I’m a socialist,’ he said, ‘and I say it must come, this historic compromise which brings the Communists into the fold, but the time isn’t ripe yet. Of course your brother’s a clever man. He doesn’t really want an alliance with the Communists. He just knows that the talk about it will eventually weaken them. After all there’s no point in being a Communist if they are in fact coming into the Government, no point at all. You might as well join one of the Centre Parties and so make a proper arrangement. Conversely, it will dilute the attraction the PCI still holds for the really enthusiastic Red, who doesn’t want to have to make the compromises and temporization the system demands. Undeniably therefore, what’s proposed is subtle. Still you can’t deny its dangers either. There can be no doubt, that in the interim, before it bears fruits, the situation will exacerbate itself. What will the CIA have to say, for instance? If you ask me, things will have to get worse before they can improve. That’s clear enough …’

  I reflected, as I occasionally acknowledged his remarks with a little grunt or a nod of the head, that conversations, identical to this in opinion, if not in exact expression, are going on all over the city.

  On an impulse I asked for a gettone and went to the telephone and called Corrado at Party Headquarters. I knew he should have arrived there; for years his routine has been inflexible. It took some time to be transferred to him – I wondered if they imagined that I had discovered some means of exploding telephonic bombs. At last, when I had convinced them of my identity, I was put through. The note of caution in his voice meant nothing; I have never known it absent.