The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  ‘I was afraid you would say that. It’s a pity I’m no actor. My manner shows – I’m always being told – my social and hence political prejudices only too clearly. A friend once told me I spoke in public with a sneer and a sniff. And I feel it’s essential we strike a popular note.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘an old dandy like me …’

  I left the sentence finished only by a shrug of the shoulders. The rally is for Sunday morning, ten o’clock in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, just down the road.

  ‘I’ll sit on the platform,’ I said, ‘but I won’t speak. It would not be beneficial. However, have you got Carlo Poggi?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to reach him.’

  ‘Leave him to me. I’ll oblige him to speak.’

  He nodded and set off for his office. He has decided to resume work as usual. He is of course quite right. What else can he do? And work serves as an anodyne. All the same I wished he could have stayed. The apartment rang with emptiness as the lift descended.

  Later in the morning when I was on the point of going out, thinking I might stroll down to Navona for coffee, pretending to myself I might stop in an antiquaire on the way, the telephone rang. It was an American journalist, one I had known in Washington. The next phase of the campaign beginning. Could we meet?

  ‘Naturally, but I doubt if I can be of any service. But, as you say, we can meet. Would you like to come round here?’

  He was called Ed Mangan, a lean rangy type such as one once thought quintessentially American, now undoubtedly, like myself, a little out of date. He had once had a reputation as a roving correspondent, the man who could bring back the good, odd-angled story. ‘No stability though’, editors used to say and many of them viewed his reports with almost as much distrust as professional diplomats automatically did. Like so many Americans of his generation and stamp, he ran through wives, jobs, and bottles with the certainty born of that American affluence, that there was always a fresh supply available from the same stock. He had none of our European frugality. I used to find that attractive. When I last met him, his fourth wife, an Israeli photographer, had just left him. (Or was she his fifth?) At any rate her complaint that she was tired of his Errol Flynn heroics had curiously hurt him. It is of course depressing for a man in his fifties to discover that a girl half his age regards him as insufficiently adult. But once he would have dismissed her as a prig.

  He was uncomfortable in my apartment.

  ‘Let me take you out to lunch. You know I’ve always been a guy for public places, Ray.’

  ‘You’re looking good,’ he said, as we settled ourselves at a table in the little restaurant in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, outside which, on Sunday, Nico would plead for his father’s life. Like so many journalists, Ed has always tended to be unthinking in his observations. He has never really looked at people; close examination discourages articulacy.

  ‘I guess you’re not getting far with that skunk Schicchi,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of thing are you hoping to write, Ed?’

  ‘I’m not filing anything just now. I’m working for a news magazine these days, not a daily. It’s a heavy piece I’ll be writing when I write one. That’s why I’m digging deep.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘the lamb is always very good here.’

  He waved aside the bottle of Barolo the white-haired old waiter had brought.

  ‘Should have told you, Ray, I’m on the wagon these days. How do I see it? I’d like to think Schicchi fixed it. You know, my views have veered a bit recent years. Well, you can’t stand stuck in the same place. I’m a ’forties man of course, and I started in full reaction to 1930s Ivy League New Deal Socialism and all that shit. I really thought Richard Nixon had it right about Alger Hiss. Matter of fact, I still do. Hiss was a motherfucker if ever there was one. So was Nixon of course. But that’s not the point, not any longer. It’s not original to say that Vietnam opened my eyes. I came to see what the United States had come to stand for in the world. Not original at all. But who the hell prizes originality these days? We’re through with all that shit too. But the way I see it, what we were legitimately trying to defend in the ’forties and’ fifties just isn’t worth defending these days. The Free World’s evaporated. I mean if we’re engaging in dirty tricks to make the world safe for the Seven Sisters and ITT and John Connally – and there’s a jerk if ever I saw one – well then include me out, as Sam said. We’ve got to move on, loosen up. NowI see this as a matter of principle and expediency. Combined. It’s right and it’s smart too. And that’s unbeatable. And that’s where I reckon your brother had got to also. You know, Ray, I used to think of him as just another stooge politician, but he’s been covering ground, same as me. So if you ask me who fixed this, assuming for the moment it’s a fix, then I’d say Schicchi. He’s just the same sort of rat-fink as Hiss or Connally.’

  I found I couldn’t eat the lamb after the ravioli. My teeth shredded the meat but I couldn’t swallow. Ed might have given up drink but when he got excited his eyes were still shot with bloody streaks.

  I said, ‘That’s the sort of theory you journalists love to cook up. Gianni’s not unhappy about this, but to think he could devise anything of this nature … no, no.’

  ‘Maybe so, maybe so. We’ll see. Now tell me, Ray, what about your brother’s boy, Bernardo? What’s the story there?’ It was foolish of me not to have anticipated this. I fell back on a plea of ignorance.

  ‘Aw, come off it, Ray,’ he said. ‘You’ve got me all wrong, you’re reading the wrong story. Listen, I’m not primarily interested in getting a story right now. I’m interested in something bigger. A deal. I estimate there’s just the basis of a deal. Look, these kids who have your brother, they’re approachable. And your nephew’s right there, ready to make the first move. Hell, listen, if we can get it over to them that there’s the basis of a deal, that’ll get them off the hook. You don’t think they really want to have to kill Corrado, do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think they do. I think they’re crazy enough to like the idea.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘straight from the shithouse, that. Whatever else they may be, these kids are idealists.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pouring myself a glass of wine, ‘with all the frightening purity of the idealist.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if we could get a message through to your brother, telling him to retract, publicly, make a confession of error, that would put them on the spot, wouldn’t it? It would place them on the same side. And boy, these kids needs a leader.’

  I was lost. My sort of logic couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, in this world.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘as far as I know Bernardo has just vanished.’

  ‘Sure, he’s gone to ground. What else could the kid do? Boy, that kid’s been living impaled. Impaled.’

  He forked a mountain of green salad into his mouth. A huge benevolent herbivore.

  I said, ‘It’s been put to me, Ed, that the group who hold Corrado are a front for a Right-wing organization. I don’t mean your suggestion about Gianni Schicchi, which I take as a joke, however much you’d like to think it true … what’s your reaction to that?’

  ‘Hell, there’s plenty of these goddam Fascists want your brother out of the way. Sure. And they’re not crying in the streets now, you can bet on that. All the same, the idea’s balls. These kids are smart. They’re not going to be fooled by some half-assed guy in a black shirt. No, no, they’re what they say they are, pure idealists, and the only hope there is of saving your brother is to persuade him to join them, to become their leader. Hell, there’s good precedent for it.’

  ‘There is?’

  ‘Sure. You ever study any English history?’

  ‘Of course, an Anglophile like me …’

  ‘Well, you recall the story of young Richard II and the Peasants’ Revolt.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m astonished you do.’

  ‘My day, we learned something at Princeton. “I’ll be your leader,
” he said. Remember? That’s what we’ve got to get across. That’s the message. It’ll defuse the situation.’

  I crumbled bread.

  ‘A bit subtle, don’t you think? And, as I recall the story, the boy king tricked them.’

  ‘Hell,’ said Ed, ‘history doesn’t have to repeat itself that close.’

  The idea was mad. That was certain. Yet, as I said to Nico later in the afternoon when I called on him at his bank, we were in a position where sanity didn’t promise to achieve much. I was, though, in the wrong surroundings in which to advocate madness. Nico’s office (which he shared with two other young executives whom he had asked to leave us alone together for a moment) was a monument to the bad taste of the first decade of the century. No doubt it all represented money. A Cupid on the cornice had folded his wings over his eyes, as though denying the mercenary nature of whatever was transacted there – an attitude which invaded his world also of course. The furniture was heavy, dark, mahogany, and oppressive; full of sharp edges. You could hear, in a dull rhythm, the traffic from the Corso below.

  Nico looked at home there. I could see him growing harder, darker, more stick-like as the years passed; more respectable too, like the furniture. It was difficult to believe what Bella had said, that he wrote poetry.

  But then he said, ‘Living and working here I am learning the limits of sanity. Some day, Uncle, I should like you to take me to see my Uncle Guido. Or at least his asylum. I confess though I don’t entirely follow the mechanics of your American friend’s plan.’

  ‘I don’t think he has reached that stage. Nothing concrete. He was in a very excited condition. Let me explain. Here’s a man who has devoted all his life to spurious action and intense but fabricated emotion. He has been dominated by instant Romance, urgent politics, deadlines, and bourbon. Now, in the middle of the way, he has his revelation; his encounter with his own particular leopard. He stops drinking. His political beliefs change direction so abruptly that you might speak in terms of a religious conversion. What’s the result? A buoyancy. The sudden conviction that everything is possible. I’m afraid I can’t share it. Indeed I don’t know why I have troubled you with his speculations.’

  Nico shifted pens on his desk; old-fashioned dip-pens with nibs that you replaced from time to time. I wondered where on earth you could still buy such things. Possibly the Bank had a store of them; possibly there was an ageless stationer’s shop in the Vatican City that would still supply them.

  ‘But do you think,’ Nico said slowly, ‘that he may have some sort of scheme and that it could possibly have a chance of success?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘And even if the answer was yes, could we possibly adopt such a scheme? Is Father’s life worth preserving at that price? For it would be a price, wouldn’t it? The price of integrity. His integrity and ours.’

  There was an intolerable itching in my right calf. I leant forward and scratched under my trouser-leg. Nico sat and watched me. He frowned.

  ‘He looks so terrible in that photograph, though. I wish to hell I knew. Mother is becoming hysterical. Suppressed hysteria of course. She has telephoned me three times today. She keeps saying we must do something and then crying out that of course she knows there is nothing to do. Do you know what I have found myself thinking? That I wished they would kill him without further delay. I am ashamed to confess such a wicked thought, but there it is. He would never forgive us if we tried to force him to do as your American suggests.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I said, ‘be sure about that. You can never be sure of people’s reactions. Even if he survives this, he’ll emerge a different man. He has now had these days to look into his soul – we’ll agree to call it that – he’ll come through different. You see, he has been so busy for years, he can’t have submitted himself to this sort of examination. And then he’s so alone … though I imagine they never leave him physically alone … by the way, I’ve got Carlo Poggi for you. He didn’t want to speak … but he’s going to …’

  ‘Carlo didn’t want to speak? Father made him.’

  ‘And I imagine he’s always resented it. You have to be a better man than politicians tend to be not to resent the man who helps you to rise. Besides, Carlo is convinced – though he didn’t say so – that Corrado is doomed, that his policy is doomed, that all this will cause the Party to swing back to the Right, and he has remembered that he is almost fifty-five. But I persuaded him that the appearance of loyalty would still be a future service to him. “Assume a virtue if you have it not”, I said to him.’

  Nico rose and walked to the bookshelves. For a moment he stood there, his elegant back turned towards me, his long manicured fingers playing lightly on the calf-bound volumes of Annual Reports. Shadows fell across his face – several of the bulbs in the electrolier which, hanging from the centre of the ceiling, alone lit the room, had died and had not been replaced. Nico pulled a slim gold cigarette case from his pocket and lit a cigarette with a slim gold Cartier lighter.

  ‘We can’t,’ he said, ‘have anything to do with a scheme of the sort that your friend seems to be proposing. I grant it’s only embryonic and we don’t know its shape, but look around, Uncle. Look at me where I stand. I laugh sometimes at the Bank, of course I do, and at times I resent it. I have my other life. I write poetry, I love my parents. Some day I shall have a wife and children. Meanwhile I have my enjoyments – that’s not important. I don’t have much respect for Father’s Party. And the treatment we received from Schicchi hasn’t encouraged respect to develop. All the same, I work here because I believe, among other reasons of course, that work of this sort has to be done and done properly. It’s in its way a métier. Money has to be managed, and managed sensibly and honestly. That’s all. But, as a corollary, this belief imposes a certain view of society – represents one too, of course, I can’t deny that. So, apart from all other considerations, to try to initiate negotiations such as your friend has outlined, or to be party to such plans, would constitute a denial of everything that Father himself brought me up to believe in. I would be cheating him. Besides,’ he looked me full in the face and smiled with a release of charm, ‘I don’t believe it could possibly work. Father would never do it …’ (Was there a slight hesitation in his voice, or did I imagine it?) ‘We should simply look fools.’

  May 18 Today might have been written by a humorist. Voltaire perhaps, or more savagely, Swift.

  Nico’s rally in the morning was well attended but feebly conducted. It wasn’t Nico’s fault. Nobody on the platform, however, could do anything more than trot out stale rhetoric. I except Nico himself, of course, whose few words were from the heart. But they were drowned in the flood of dirty words the other speakers loosed.

  After it, I said to him, ‘You’re not, I trust, too disappointed. The crowd was gratifying.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘and a good deal of empty indignation was released, wasn’t it? You were right, though, Uncle. They’re not going to do anything for him. You know, I despise Carlo Poggi even more than I do Schicchi. Schicchi has at least his own game he’s playing, and my father is not a pawn of course, but a piece he’s still prepared to sacrifice for strategic advantage. There are after all times when one throws one’s Queen, aren’t there? Yes, there’s a case for Schicchi, who perhaps genuinely believes that Father’s policy is disastrous, and who anyway may hope to extract something from his martyrdom. But Poggi is nothing but a rat.’

  A Cardinal, whom I didn’t know – one of Roncalli’s more eccentric appointments I should imagine – approached Nico and congratulated him on ‘so fine a display of filial devotion’. I took Nico’s arm and guided him out of the piazza, down a narrow lane and across the Corso to where he told me his car was parked.

  ‘Sandro was in the crowd,’ he said. ‘He’ll get home on his own. He’ll be able to tell us how things felt down there. You always, I suppose, get a different impression there.’

  Arrived at the villa, we found ourselves in a simulated normalit
y. Elena was going through the motions of real life. Sunday lunch would be ready for us in twenty minutes, as though everything beyond the walls of the garden was an hallucination. She extended the same half-dead cheek to me in the same manner that spoke of distaste yielding to duty.

  ‘How’s mother?’ I said.

  ‘She will come down to lunch today. Maria is with her now. Only,’ she said, ‘it is ageing her this.’

  ‘I am as ever grateful to you for the care you take of her.’

  I went through into the drawing-room and found Ettore already there.

  ‘Raimundo,’ he said, ‘you’re back. How did it go? Myself, I couldn’t face it. It will do no good anyway, we know that.’

  He walked up and down the room as he spoke, taking quick puffs of his cigarette and stabbing it in my direction to emphasize his meaning. He kicked his legs out.

  ‘Did you see Bella? She insisted on going. Accompanying Sandro. I tried to dissuade her, but no good. Girls nowadays. She’s taking the business to heart. I had no idea she was so fond of Corrado. Of course she’s an affectionate girl.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t see her. There was a big crowd.’

  ‘But no trouble, eh? No trouble?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Thank God for that. You never can tell nowadays.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette but not before lighting another from the butt.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘the state of my nerves. I thought I had stopped smoking. Raimundo, is there any hope? You’ve seen the politicians, haven’t you? They’re not going to do anything, are they?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re not going to do anything.’

  ‘I thought as much. Bastards, that’s what they are, one and all, bastards. There’s only one thing left then. And that’s money. These people have their price. It’s got to be paid.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not monetary.’

  ‘Oh no, Raimundo, if you’ll forgive me, it’s in matters of this sort that chaps like me have the advantage over you intellectuals. In the end, outside family, it’s always a question of money. Finally, you know, that’s all there is. It’s how things are done. All we’ve got to do is find the price they can’t refuse.’