The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  ‘This is unusual, Raimundo,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, unusual and uncharacteristic. You were in my mind.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘This line?’

  ‘Obviously not. You must know that; on the telephone, it is impossible to protect anything on the telephone. That is why I am always so reluctant to use the instrument. If you wish to talk to me – it’s family, I take it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We had better arrange to meet. Family matters should remain as they should remain.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like to come over late tonight? There is a dinner I have to attend. For some African president. But after that. You know I never stay at these things, and this one is of no importance.’

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to go out on the Cassia at night; and anyway I have never felt comfortable in Corrado’s house, which is not really his, but Elena’s.

  ‘Why not come to me?’ I said. ‘It would be a change …’

  He hesitated. The pause was long, perceptibly longer even than Corrado’s manner has accustomed me to. Perhaps he was taking advice.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There might be difficulties. I have to remain … in touch. You will understand, Raimundo, how it is. So if you don’t mind … we can give you a bed for the night if you like.’

  I didn’t of course accept that offer, but Corrado’s position occupied my mind, off and on, for the rest of the morning. I was convinced he had turned to some security adviser and said, ‘Will it be all right if I go to my brother’s apartment?’ and received the reply, ‘We can’t guarantee your safety if you do that.’ Perhaps I was accounted a security risk; more probably, my quarter and my apartment were simply deemed too great a danger, hard to protect.

  There are those who consider Corrado the most powerful man in Italy; but keys of course have no autonomous power.

  I didn’t tell Bella what was on my mind when we met. Instead, in a resurrected grey pin-striped suit, with a dark red carnation in my button-hole, I tried to look debonair, if dated – the wicked uncle she had mentioned. She advanced towards me with her floating liquidity of motion, and we kissed.

  ‘I have a fancy,’ I said, ‘for being seen with you,’ and took her arm; we went to the Bolognese restaurant where Via Ripetta runs into Piazza del Popolo.

  How to describe what I felt? I am anyway out of practice in feeling. I took her elbow again as the waiter guided us to our table. She removed her dark glasses to look more closely at the American film stars two tables away. They were rather passé film stars and their laughter rang a little hollow. We ordered tortellini, and then some veal. The sunlight made her hair shine and then the sun ducked behind a fleecy little cloud, the only one in the May sky, and a shadow moved across her cheek like youth vanishing. I poured her a glass of white wine. She touched its rim and sat, elbows firmly on the table, glass held in both hands, looking at me. She began to talk very quickly, telling me about things I had no wish to know of – her work, her mother, her little brother, Ettore himself, my dear clumsy stupid rich and successful brother, a father whose love for his daughter was, in her words, ‘ridiculous and totally excessive’.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Papa is so jealous of any boy who looks at me.’

  She smiled, putting on the thought like a fur coat. Ettore’s possessive love made her feel warm and safe.

  ‘He might like me to marry Sandro of course, if I marry anyone, because, well, Sandro is sweet. There would be no trouble with a dispensation, there never is, is there? I’m very fond of Sandro of course, but you know, he’s very pretty, but the sort of appeal he has is for men or other boys and maybe married ladies of forty – there have been two of them trying to fix their claws in him in the last year – not for me or for any of my girl-friends. He’s too nice really, Sandro.’

  I watched her talking with this empty and decisive vivacity; and it was all I could do to keep my hands from straying from my control. Of course it was youth and energy I was responding to; an attempt to deny my present condition flickered into life.

  She wanted, it was clear, to talk of Guido. He was after all the family skeleton. She had only recently realized that he was still alive. I was surprised by her curiosity, not immediately recognizing it as a form of egoism, an expression of the egoist’s need to know everything about whatever seems even vestigially to belong to his or her life.

  ‘I want to see him,’ she said. ‘You will take me, won’t you?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I just do. It seems so terrible to know nothing about him.’

  ‘To know about him? Well, I can help you there.’ I placed my blotchy hand on her wrist. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘Guido was the most talented of us. When he was very young he published a book of poems – The Shades of Things – I thought it wonderful and it still seems to have had a rare quality. But,’ I sighed, ‘Guido felt the need for a faith. He rejected the Church, he believed passionately in Science you see; and they seemed to conflict. Perhaps that was already a little old-fashioned. Then, as a young man, a very young man, you must understand, because (I don’t know of course) this may shock you, he believed equally passionately in the Regime. But then, there were incidents that shattered both his faiths …’

  ‘Yes?’ she said, ‘I do want to know …’

  ‘Oh I’ve no doubt they would seem very trivial. He had a job in the Department of Statistics and he discovered that the figures there were being cooked, figures which pur-ported to give scientific justification for certain practices of the Regime, and there was simply no such justification. It was a political ramp. So he resigned, not in hatred, simply indifference. That was the terrible thing,’ – I gazed into my glass fearful of reflection – ‘his indifference. What he had believed in was shown to be false and tawdry, and so he found there was nothing left to care for. That was, you see, all no good. On his good days, or rather one should say in his good periods, for his condition goes in cycles of weeks, even months sometimes, that’s still his state, indifference. He just found there was nothing to care about. Do you know, he was married, to a very lovely girl? One day he came home and found her in bed with the chauffeur, and what do you think he did?’

  Bella’s eyes opened wide in expectation.

  ‘He sat down on the edge of the bed and chatted. Then he began to ask the chauffeur when a car that was being repaired would be ready. That was shortly before they took him away.’

  She turned her hand round in mine and scratched my palm gently.

  ‘But even in Italy surely,’ she said, ‘it’s not a sign of insanity is it to decline to commit a crime passionnel?’

  ‘But understand,’ I said, ‘he truly didn’t care.’

  ‘What did he look like? You know I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photograph of him.’

  ‘He looked very like your Uncle Corrado. They were sometimes taken for twins though actually Guido is five years older.’

  ‘He sounds like Sandro,’ she said. ‘Something like that happened with him and me. I don’t mean I was in bed with a chauffeur or anything like that. Not my style.’ She held her face up to the sun. ‘But simply there was an occasion when Sandro should have been jealous and instead he started talking about tennis. Not to cover up how he felt but rather because he couldn’t feel what I thought he ought to be feeling. Does that sound awful?’

  I said, ‘There are always things we ought to feel, but you can’t will feeling. You can’t force it. Perhaps you can educate it, but at the critical moment, it’s either there or it isn’t. We’ve all had experiences – I’m speaking of us as a nation and a civilization, as well as individuals – that make it difficult, often, to have the fresh natural feelings we think we ought to. You’re lucky in your father, you know. He’s still spontaneous, and not given to this sort of gloomy reflection.’

  For a moment there was something blank, warm and blank as a young heifer, in the beauty that confronted me; she lacked the imaginative reach that would allow h
er to understand what others felt. For her, Sandro’s action had been quite incomprehensible; and she shied away from anything like that. She had instead to be able to take things in both hands, as she held her wine-glass, elbows firmly planted. She put on her dark glasses.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I know I’m lucky in Papa really. When I think of the difficulties my cousins have, it’s clear enough how fortunate I am. All the same …’ she tilted her chin, ‘Uncle Corrado makes me curious, you know. You never know what he’s really thinking about things. And all this politics, everyone says it’s so important, but I don’t know, Uncle, I live my life happily without politics.’

  ‘That’s the ideal condition,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway, they’re so boring.’

  And it is indeed the ideal condition, I thought, as, having watched her swing off down Via Ripetta a little later, I moved to Rosati’s and ordered more coffee. But it is a condition which can only be attained by those who are happy enough to benefit from others’ achievement, others’ struggle; and that achievement, that struggle, can only take the form of successful political action. The poor are always oppressed by politics, even where they themselves employ no political vocabulary. All this is true, but yet, when I hear a politician say, ‘this Italy of ours’, I shudder …

  I sat two hours at Rosati’s watching the ebb and flow in the piazza. Towards four o’clock crowds began to surge back through the Gate, coming from the bus station beyond, on their way back to the shops and offices where they worked. The girls looked younger as well as smarter than the girls of my youth. Most of them wore trousers. They chattered like confident starlings. They were the fruits of Corrado’s Italy; thirty years in which we have built a society to satisfy needs in as short a time as possible. But of course needs spawn needs. Expectations rise.

  The American film stars – perhaps only she was a star, he her agent or lover or ex-husband – had finished their lunch also and came and sat at the next table.

  ‘O.K.?’ he said.

  ‘Scotch,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bit early,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the way I feel.’

  ‘If it’s the way you feel, I guess it’s the way I’d better treat you.’

  He slapped his thigh, a big tawny man with bloodshot eyes and a too ready laugh. She snapped at her cigarette-lighter as the shop-girls scurried past, chattering still.

  Corrado was waiting for me at the villa. I had paid off my taxi, identified myself at the gate, waited while they telephoned, and then finally approached the house in the glare of a searchlight. Probably there was a gun trained on me, in case I suddenly tore off the mask I was wearing and revealed myself as a terrorist, no brother at all. (But there is always the dire moment when the terrorist is discovered to be indeed your brother.)

  Corrado sat in his library. A Filipino ushered me in. The room was draped in brown velvet. Behind the drapes the walls were cork. My brother suffered from noise, though he lived so much of his life surrounded by it. He was wearing a dinner-jacket with an air of embarrassment. Despite years of official dinners he still wore it as though it was fancy dress, something they’d compelled him to put on for sport. I glanced at his hands; they were less blotched than mine, but the long fingers of his Chopin-playing youth were curled by arthritis.

  He said to the Filipino, ‘Bring some tea, will you, please.’ He moved his head infinitesimally in my direction, ‘Perhaps you would prefer something else, Raimundo? I forget about these things. Tea is all I take nowadays. It’s not too much to say that I depend on it. I’m rather ashamed of that …’

  I told him tea would be admirable.

  ‘We never seem to find the opportunity to talk,’ I said.

  There was a chess board on the desk in front of him. Perhaps he had been playing over a game, following the thinking, the intuitive flashes and nervous schemes of the Grand Masters.

  ‘Do you still play?’ he said.

  ‘Chess was never my game. I played bridge when I was young and again when I was posted in Washington. Now, nothing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Not even scopa? In the osteria you frequent?’

  ‘Not even scopa. Not even there.’

  ‘I am sorry to have had to drag you out here, and so late. But you will understand, the way things are, whatever my nominal position, I have in certain ways to do as I’m told. Nothing, Raimundo, is so easily exaggerated as the power of a politician.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that. You forget I was in Washington – for my second term there – during the Vietnam years. I saw the last year of Johnson in ’68 and Nixon’s first two. You don’t have to remind me of the impotence of politicians.’

  ‘Yet impotence isn’t the right word. Not impotence. You know what we are? People think we’re technicians or, more grandiosely, executives – they have this image of the executive, who says do and it is done, and so forth – and we’ve inherited of course the idea of leadership, though for fairly obvious reasons the word itself is suspect, nowhere more so than here in our Italy. But none of that meets the case. Viewed candidly, we are mages.’

  His face abruptly twisted itself into a sort of mask, like a primitive idol. ‘We are witch-doctors,’ he said, ‘our task is to bring on the rain. That’s all. It’s an uncomfortable role because it so easily infringes the legitimate one of the priest’s. But that’s what we are: Fisher-Kings, symbolic victims too. I don’t usually talk like this, you understand.’ The corner of his mouth moved. The Filipino entered and placed the tray on the desk and poured us two cups of tea, pale straw-coloured, with lemon in it. He went out without a word.

  ‘But then speaking to a brother is a rare luxury,’ Corrado said. ‘Do you know the only other person I have spoken to in this manner? The Holy Father, no less. So you are privileged. And do you know what he replied? He put his hand on my brow and said, “My poor son.”’

  I thought: at the age of sixty Corrado is learning to laugh at himself. I sipped my tea.

  ‘I went to see Guido yesterday,’ I said.

  The only light in the room shone down on the desk, directly on the chessmen; it was a lowered and shaded lamp such as you find in billiards-saloons. Corrado’s face lay just in shadow, now that, with his tea-cup in his hand, he was leaning back in his chair. He took another little sip of tea.

  ‘But you go every fortnight,’ he said.

  And of course we never discuss it.

  ‘The nurse told me you’d been there the day before.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not happy about the situation. I feel guilty.’

  Corrado said, ‘What Guido is, what has become of him’ – did we both have the same instantaneous vision of the young Guido in a pageant, laughing, on horseback, standing in his stirrups dressed as Guiscard conquering Calabria? – ‘is beyond us. The Guido we knew and loved is buried. His personality is extinct. All we can do now is care for the body which houses the immortal soul and its condition, the soul’s that is, may, for all we know, be immaculate.’

  ‘I know nothing about Guido’s soul,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think the nurse beats him and the new director is no good at all, he’s one of those people corrupted by the atmosphere in which he has lived. The nurse is a Neo-Fascist, did you know?’

  Corrado closed his eyes and made a bridge of his fingers.

  ‘He’s not now a Party member,’ he said. ‘It’s not, you know, Raimundo, a job likely to attract a good class of recruit, not at all …’

  ‘Naturally,’ I said, ‘I understand that. But one looks for a little sympathy, a little tenderness. I have the impression that all he is interested in is simply control.’

  ‘There are times however, in any government of any sort, when that is all one may hope to be able to achieve.’ I sighed.

  ‘Do you mind if I light a cigar?’ I said.

  Corrado made a vague fanning gesture.

  ‘Toscani,’ he said. ‘Whenever I have thought, as I have often foun
d myself thinking in the past, that we were losing you, that you were becoming that dead thing, the cosmopolitan, I have been happy to remember that you have always smoked Toscani. Of course, do smoke one now. You can have no idea how much I am depressed by the cosmopolitan. Even in our Party, you understand, which is an historically authentically Italian Party, we have these Euro-types, or even worse, the half-Yankee businessmen. They understand nothing, nothing but making money.’

  We both found ourselves smiling.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘our dear Ettore doesn’t really, despite appearances, belong in that category. He is something different, an older model as they say.’

  He picked up a pawn and moved it across the board.

  ‘What fatigues me is that I see our problem so differently from the way they see it; and they will make no effort to see it my way. They are blind to the sort of reality that most of our countrymen in fact experience. But you haven’t come here to talk politics, and yet in the end I often find myself wondering whether there is indeed anything else. You’ve come to talk about Guido. Yet, you know, even there, well … political analogies abound. Where he is, Guido is in safe hands. That’s all. There is nothing else we can do for him, except pray, except pray. We have there reached the limits of action. The limit of action, you can come up against that more abruptly than most people think.’

  As I looked at my brother, and heard these words, ‘the limit of action’, I had a picture of an old peasant on a hillside in Calabria ploughing a field cut out from the macchia, a field which required that each year its boundaries be defended and redefined; and I saw the old peasant every day mounting his donkey to ride out from his village and renew the struggle. That was the sort of struggle which, in reality rather than in rhetoric, in fact continued. There was no ultimate point to it, except the experienced necessity of survival.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘when I think of Guido, as he was … well, I suppose one of the characteristics of being Italian, something that has formed our sensibility and outlook for centuries, is that we have never been able to avoid the consciousness of ruins. We’ve always had very directly before our eyes these reminders of the instability of fortune, these images of the vanity of human aspirations. Guido is our family temple of Antiquity.’