The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  Corrado was long silent. The dark-blue-grey smoke of my cigar drifted between us.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘but there is a sort of hopeless self-admiration about that, a Narcissus who has no desire to do anything but continue to gaze at the pool which reflects his folly. I distrust it. All the same to be quite frank I find it hard to determine my position. It sometimes seems to me, Raimundo, that all I am really trying to do is shield our people from any true knowledge of things as they are. What after all have we achieved since the war, in the more than thirty years of Christian Democracy? We have given the people, or made it possible for them to seize for themselves, everything they wanted. Everything they have asked for. And are they happier? Do they understand their own natures better? Or the world’s? Aren’t they – forgive me, Raimundo, because I know that you too no longer believe – but aren’t they further from God? Sometimes, in hours when the traffic is silent, I find myself saying of them:

  Questi non hanno speranza di morte

  e la lor cieca vita è tanto bassa

  che invidiosi son d’ogni altra sorte.

  It is not a comfortable thought to bear …’

  ‘I shall match it,’ I found myself replying, ‘with a thought that we are in the western world in danger of forgetting; denying perhaps by the way we live now. Do you know the American liberal, Oliver Wendell Holmes? He became a Supreme Court Judge under Roosevelt. Well, this is what he said: “Every society is founded on the death of men.” You won’t find the sentiment remarkable, you must often have thought it yourself. Still, from an American liberal … of course Holmes belonged to the Civil War generation, he lived to be very old …’

  ‘It’s what many of our young are of course coming to decide for themselves again.’

  ‘And yet, in one sense, that decision is itself profoundly depressing, isn’t it?’

  Something hung between us. We were talking more like the brothers we might have been than we had done in years; possibly ever. One comes up, now and then, against these moments, few and fugitive admittedly, when what might have been momentarily crystallizes into what almost is. It is like taking an ice-tray out of the refrigerator at the very moment when the thinnest coat is forming on the water. Of course, almost at once, you put it down on a table in a warm room, and in instants it is as if it had never been.

  ‘Sandro,’ I said, ‘asked me to speak to you the other day.’

  ‘Sandro?’ A line carved in his cheek displaced itself an instant.

  ‘Yes. He had asked me to meet him. He is perturbed. It’s a question of Bernardo’s political affiliations apparently. I hadn’t thought I would ever mention it.’

  And that was true; it had seemed futile. The sight of Bernardo on the Sunday in his absurd synthetic polo-neck had rendered Sandro’s alarm ridiculous.

  ‘Poor Sandro,’ Corrado said. ‘He understands very little. He is, I think, entirely a creature of sensation, of reflex. Impossible to imagine him otherwise. He would do better to go on amusing himself on the tennis-court. He is skilful and graceful there. That ought to content him.’

  The brown velvet softness hanging all round us swathed our words. Once the telephone rang and Corrado answered it, speaking with remote caution, polysyllabically negative. He put it down and sipped tea, and smoothed his hand over the leather surface of his desk, the palm flat, the fingers bent.

  ‘You may think I don’t really know my children. Certainly I see less of them than many fathers, less, clearly, than I would like; but yet I do know them, I see where they are tending. Sandro’s vacant romanticism, which is really nothing more than an indolent sensuality. You see that reflected all over our poor country. Drive round the Liguian coast, so beautiful in our youth, and it is full of Sandros. They are the Italy we have been making. Nico now, Nico is of the past. The Italy where sharpness worked itself out in hopeless irony. Only Bernardo suggests a possible future, by which I mean a desirable future. I expect that seems silly to you, but Bernardo is serious. He has ideals.’

  On an impulse I told him about the Caravaggio Christ I had met in the osteria. He nodded, slowly, deliberately.

  ‘And yet they see destruction as the only way forward,’ he said. ‘I am sure they are wrong. I hope they may change. As for Bernardo, well, there is of course, another aspect. Let’s be frank. For us Italians the State has still only a dubious validity. Even I in my position can recognize that. So, we are thrown back on the family. If we can hold things steady then Nico can take on the responsibility as head of the family. He will grow into an admirable Governor of the Bank, cynical and shrewd. But if everything turns out differently, then the family will need Bernardo. They will need him in the position he seeks. So I am comparatively happy to see him where he is. And anyway I respect his convictions.’

  May 9 This journal I am keeping continues to surprise me. I have just read over what I wrote yesterday about my strange day ending in my inconclusive visit to Corrado, and apart from the fact that I surprise myself by the act of doing what I do – bothering to record it at all, that is – I have a suspicion that I am always just missing the point. It never is exactly as I have put it down.

  All my life I have resembled a man caught in a game of blind man’s buff, permanently masked.

  Sandro telephoned in great agitation. Bernardo has disappeared. He didn’t dare tell his father, and as for the Security men, there was such a mixture of violence and untrustworthiness … he just didn’t know whether he dare commit himself to mentioning it to them … no, he was telephoning from a caffè of course … the thing was, could he and Nico come round to see me?

  I consented; how I am being drawn into things.

  Afterwards I sat on my little terrace and watched the windows across the courtyard. My American suicidal writer lay on his bed – I could see a foot pointing to the ceiling. The strains of jazz drifted from his open window; an old music, the plangent wail of Bix Beiderbecke’s trumpet, striking a note of curiously innocent, because entirely personal and unsocial, despair. But from another window I saw the flash of binoculars, and knew I was their target, which was absurd of course.

  I let my nephews in, Sandro in soft high-necked lambs-wool jersey and linen trousers, both the colour of a pale canary, and Nico in dark suit and spotted business tie. Sandro was nervous. He moved about touching things, his hands unable to rest; and he talked in a quick gentle voice about my possessions.

  ‘It’s worse than I told you on the telephone,’ he said. ‘I’ve got in the habit of not talking on the telephone. Because at the villa they’re all bugged you know. It’s making me neurotic. I’m even wondering if my bedroom is bugged too.’

  I didn’t tell him his ridiculous idea was ridiculous. On the contrary it seemed only too likely. Naturally the security people want to know everything that is said in the household of a leading politician; they never know what might not be useful. Besides, there were men of influence, in his own Party and elsewhere, who didn’t like the direction in which Corrado was moving. They would be happy to find any means of thwarting him. Of course the villa would be bugged and its telephones tapped. That is the world we live in.

  Nico sat in a cane chair and crossed his legs. He said to Sandro, ‘Stop it. Control yourself. We haven’t yet told Uncle what it is. Uncle, Bernardo has indeed disappeared, but the day before yesterday, security men came to the villa looking for him. They would like to question him about his affiliations, they said. Because of Father they were being very discreet, but still … There are aspects of the PRR which are “disturbing” – their word. Bernardo was out at the time. So I asked if Father knew of their interest. They said, no, it was a different department, though actually he has overall responsibility in that area as I understand it. But it was clear that they didn’t awfully care if he knew. Otherwise of course they wouldn’t have come to the villa. That suggests …’

  ‘Have you spoken of this to your father?’

  Nico looked at me sharply.

  ‘That’s the curious thi
ng. I tried to. I admit I approached it obliquely, but you know that’s normal in conversation with him. He pretended not to understand. Well, you know Father – he just doesn’t fail to understand. Anything. Words, implications, hidden significance – he has the most sensitive antennae. So, if he didn’t understand, it was because he chose not to. And then, this is the other thing, Giovanni, his driver, who has been with Father for years, ten at least, is worried. He’s seen too many unaccounted for faces, which he nevertheless recognizes now, on their route every morning. He says Father won’t listen to him either. He says he’s becoming a fatalist.’

  ‘But why have you come to me?’

  ‘Talk to Father. That’s what we’d like you to do. We’re aware of things moving under a dark surface, and we’re frightened …’

  Nico gave me a quick smile of excuse; the language was as hard for him to pardon as the emotion.

  ‘I saw your father last night,’ I said. ‘I came out to the villa and spoke to him about Bernardo, as you asked me to, Sandro. He is comparatively happy, he said, about the boy. What more can I do?’

  ‘But that was before all this.’ Sandro’s voice trembled; he was an actor lost behind a vast proscenium arch, remote fromthe audience, cast in the wrong play; hired for drawing-room comedy, thrown down on the Theban plain.

  We went on talking a long time, though there was really nothing we could say that was of any purpose. To bend the metaphor we were all spectators of a drama we couldn’t understand. Bernardo and Corrado were fish viewed in an aquarium; the fact that we had them under our eye, could track their movements, didn’t help us to comprehend them, since their element was different. And it was probable they couldn’t have explained themselves. I asked the boys if they had talked to their mother.

  ‘She makes a virtue of not questioning Father,’ Nico said. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, turning the slim gold band of his wristwatch so that it caught the light, flashing messages of agitation, ‘I have the terrible feeling some disaster is impending.’

  ‘I had a terrible dream last night,’ said Sandro. ‘I was lying in bed, or rather on my bed, sweating and there was a great thud, a sickening weight on my chest and a bird sitting there. A great big bird, some kind of buzzard or kite, perhaps a vulture. It pressed hard on my chest and dragged its beak across my belly and then put its tail in my mouth so that I couldn’t scream. I woke up shivering and the sweat running off me, and I was sick. Terribly sick, the way I sometimes was as a little boy. Do you think dreams have any meaning, Uncle?’

  I knew they did but I could only give Sandro an empty gesture, spreading my hands wide. I got up and opened a window. A different, keener music was wafted to us.

  May 10 Hot this morning with the promise of a grilling day. I was reluctant to get up, though I know of course that as the summer advances, the early morning and occasionally the late evening will become the only tolerable hours of the day. Now, I sit at my desk, doodling with this journal. There is no reason to go out, I could make coffee here, and yet I shall because suddenly, looking round the flat, I feel a yellow emptiness such as Guido once described to me in a lucid moment, early in his confinement. I can hear the American’s typewriter, already moving fast.

  4 p.m. I didn’t answer the telephone I heard ringing as I left the apartment in the morning.

  It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had; except to my day.

  At 8.33, as he was driving from Mass to his office, Corrado’s car was ambushed. Five members of his bodyguard were shot. Automatic rifle fire. He himself was abducted.

  I haven’t known how to record this. I don’t know why I am doing so, except that there is nothing else I can do. It is almost as if I commenced this journal eight days ago in preparation for this moment.

  The telephone must have been alerting me to what had happened.

  By chance I went for breakfast to a bar where I am not known. I remember that I sat there reading the paper, the Corriere, with a sort of abstracted attention. It was an article about the Historic Compromise and of course any of us could have written it in identical language; the language of meaningless authority.

  A young American, in jeans and a torn shirt, came and sat at the next table, and began reading Henry James. The Bostonians. Occasionally he nodded his head as though James had got it right. He didn’t look like the Bostonian friends I used to have.

  My article said: ‘… in any case it is necessary to consider whether the realignment proposed by the Honourable Dusa is on the one hand dictated by parliamentary or electoral strategical requirements or represents on the other a veritable intellectual realization of new structures and the obligations these impose on ideology’.

  (I record this, like this, which is how my mind’s camera took it, simply because I am waiting; and if I do not sit and force myself to write, I find I walk about the apartment, which feels emptier and more frightening every minute, and more distorted, so that the only object that can retain actuality is the telephone.)

  The American was joined by a girl. She had big dark eyes and dark hair and was very thin. I thought she was perhaps a dancer. She kept pulling at strands of her hair with vague fingers. He looked at her for a minute and said, ‘All right then, why don’t you sit down? You’re late, I was thinking you weren’t coming.’

  ‘You are silly,’ she said – they spoke in English; she had a very soft voice – ‘why shouldn’t I?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I could think of reasons,’ he said.

  ‘It was the police. They stopped the bus three times and turned it out. Three different sets of police of course.’

  ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘I mean, Christ, what the hell.’

  ‘Apparently some politician’s been kidnapped. I don’t know. They take more notice when it’s a politician.’

  ‘Who cares, but you know, Judy, this country’s crazy. It doesn’t make sense like. The things that go on happening. Maybe we should think of getting out.’

  ‘You can then. How the hell can I? I couldn’t take Toots,’ she said. ‘She counts as an Italian citizen, remember. Her father would never let her – I’m stuck here, Ted. Things have to get much worse before he’d …’

  I went on listening to their conversation, storing up their artless revelation of their private problems. No doubt they spoke frankly, not thinking that they might be understood, but perhaps not caring whether they were or not; they were clearly absorbed in each other. At one point, contradicting the vigour of her words, she extended long thin fingers and drew them lightly down his cheek that looked as if it had never felt a razor. I went on listening, storing it up, my memory on automatic pilot, occupying myself with what they said, to dull the awareness of the fish that had begun to swim deep down in my belly.

  I told myself there were countless politicians. It couldn’t be Corrado. There was no reason why it should be.

  Only.

  I knew it was.

  And yet I continued to sit there and listen to them, and they were now talking about Henry James.

  ‘You don’t get the sense of evil in this one,’ the boy said. ‘It’s a comedy of course, and yet you know it’s potentially there. That’s the marvellous thing about James. He knows where you find corruption, and he knows what it can do. He just knows. I tell you, it’s kind of frightening.’

  I said to myself, ‘You ought to go and find out. You ought to telephone Elena.’

  I did nothing of the kind. Instead I found that my hands were shaking and my legs felt watery. I called to the bar-boy and asked him to bring me a cognac. As I drank it, taking it down in two gulps – it wasn’t very good brandy and it burnt my throat as it descended – I found myself wondering where my brother was, what he was feeling. I shuddered again.

  Somehow I got home. I expected to find – I don’t know what – some evidence of what had happened I suppose. But Maria was out of her lodge and there were no police. I took the lift up to my apartment, and again there was nobody waiting for me. I let myself
in; the sun still streamed through the open window. Someone had put a parrot in its cage out on a balcony opposite.

  The exact sameness of the apartment was terrifying.

  I wished I had spoken to the young Americans. Or to somebody.

  I turned on the wireless. Within minutes there was a newsflash which confirmed everything I had shrunk from knowing. It said too that the police were certain Corrado must still be hidden in the city.

  That was it. Of course I telephoned the villa at once. A voice interrupted my call to say no calls were being received. I explained who I was.

  ‘I’m sorry, dottore. It’s in the hands of Security. Instructions are the lines are to be kept clear for information. I take it you don’t have any to offer?’

  I protested. In vain. Should I go out to the villa?

  May 11 I was still wondering about that when the doorbell rang. To my astonishment it was Bella.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ she said, ‘that I’ve come here, I mean?’

  I spread my hands wide.

  ‘Father told me to – he’s coming round himself.’

  ‘Ettore? But why?’

  ‘I’m shattered by it. They’re so vile, these people. Will they kill him?’

  I had been shrinking from the question which she brought out, after a pause, staccato. Her young directness brought me up against it. She threw herself down on a couch, her hair tumbling over the arm which supported her head. She was actually anxious to consider the question on its merits.

  ‘We don’t yet know who has him. Which group it is,’ I said, ‘Nobody’s claimed credit yet, have they?’