The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  ‘Outside the family you said. One thing, my dear Ettore. These people, these young idealists, may be in the habit of thinking of themselves as a family. You remember the appalling Manson case in California. That’s just what they called themselves, the family.’

  He wasn’t to be convinced of course. Nobody ever is by argument or illustration. Silenced perhaps, but not convinced. In the end he said in exasperation, ‘Well, what would you suggest?’

  I could only spread my hands.

  Elena, overhearing us, said, ‘We can only pray. His Holiness has agreed to receive me. I shall ask him to bless our prayers.’

  ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves,’ said Ettore.

  ‘What will His Holiness do?’

  Elena gave him a cold look and left the room.

  ‘I didn’t hurt her, did I?’ he said. ‘But it annoys me to encounter this reliance on prayer. It’s true what I said anyway.’

  He lit another cigarette.

  ‘It’s this waiting I can’t stand.’

  I knew what he meant. I wished they would get on with it and kill him; only somewhere, refusing to die, was a particle of hope.

  It was momentarily freshened when the door was thrown open and Sandro and Bella came in together. She was pulling him by the sleeve and her cheeks were flushed.

  ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘you should have come, Daddy. It was wonderful. Nico’s a genius. Uncle Raimundo, I wished you had spoken too. You looked so fine up there on the platform.’

  ‘There was such an expression of feeling in the crowd,’ Sandro said. ‘They can’t ignore that. They will have to compromise. You know, I felt really proud of Father. To be the son of a man who can generate such feeling, such sympathy, it’s rather wonderful.’

  They were both buoyed up. Something, invisible to us on the platform, had warmed the crowd. For a moment I was tempted to believe; only, as we passed out of the drawing-room which received sunlight flooding through leaves and half-closed shutters, into Elena’s shrouded dining-room, I realized that it wasn’t hope they had truly brought; merely youth. And more determined and desperate youth was to be found on the other side.

  Lunch was lugubrious. The children tried hard enough, and Ettore, though lost for material, spluttered manfully, but I could feel the children’s zest evaporate moment by moment. Hope, enthusiasm, even a feeling for life, all seemed in poor taste there; seemed also immature and empty. Elena’s eyes spoke eloquently of the vanity of all aspiration that was not directed towards a heavenly crown. My mother, eating nothing, but challenging each countenance in turn, with her half-dead eye of a despairing hawk, chilled the air. We were all relieved when it finished.

  I stepped out on to the terrace to smoke a cigar, hoping that Bella would join me. A silly hope, of course – I could hear her laughter, as she played billiards with Sandro. I could understand the laughter – a release from tension.

  ‘How can she, Raimundo?’ It was, to my distress, Elena who had come out, looking gaunt in black, with her head covered by a mantilla, as though she were a widow already.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘she feels it. Too much perhaps. I should say her nerves are over-extended.’

  We walked silently up and down the terrace twice. A police car drove up to the gate, two or three men got out and disappeared into the lodge. Almost at once, two or three came out and got into the car which drove away with an unnecessary acceleration. One of the Dobermans lifted his head and barked, two clear staccato barks.

  ‘I can’t speak to the children. I have never been able to. I have tried to do my duty, but Corrado is the only person I have …’ Elena made a vague, uncharacteristic sweeping gesture with her hand. ‘I am so afraid,’ she said.

  What could I say?

  ‘Not, you must understand,’ she continued, ‘of what will happen. I am resigned to that. Corrado is a dead man. Both your mother and I know that. We have already commended his soul to the Almighty. I am afraid of what has happened. Raimundo, what part did Bernardo play?’

  All I could say was that I didn’t know, but of course it wasn’t enough. It never is. If I had our national passion for ratiocination I could have made much of it, with a ‘therefore’ here and a ‘nevertheless’ there. In the end, I said, ‘I know what you fear, that in some way Bernardo has brought this on. That his disappearance is connected. I don’t know. I can’t know. We none of us can. Only, Elena, one thing, this … this horror isn’t the work of boys. It can’t be. If Bernardo has anything to do with it, be sure of one thing. He’s a victim himself. I don’t, you understand, mean by that that he is dead, not at all, I mean he has been deceived.’

  ‘And dishonoured,’ she said.

  The sky was a deep azure, the sun grilling. All over Italy families were finishing large luncheons at wayside trattorie. They were crouched over transistors listening to the prognostications for the afternoon’s football matches, due to begin in half an hour.

  Before I left, I spoke briefly to my mother. As always, she dismissed me curtly. Corrado has been all her life for a long time now. But, you know, his death won’t kill her. That sort of thing only happens in bad novels. It used to be frequent in real life if one can believe the historians, but it’s a long time since any doctor certified a broken heart as the cause of death. As for me, I believe neither historians nor doctors.

  I refused the offer of a lift.

  ‘I like travelling by bus,’ I said. ‘Now more than ever.’

  No doubt they all thought the remark meaningless, an inappropriate display of a tiresome affectation. I couldn’t be bothered explaining that I meant it. I find the sight of people going about ordinary sensible business comforting. Especially so on Sunday afternoons, when the buses are always full of families going to visit their sick relatives in hospital.

  A comedy therefore: so much said, so much felt, so little communicated.

  I look up from my typewriter and I see my American novelist … if he is a novelist – oh yes, what else could so lost a man be? – a retired diplomat perhaps? He is sitting at his window, a glass in his hand. Involuntarily, I raise a hand towards him. He lifts his glass and then, returning my salute, turns down the thumb of his other hand.

  But which of us is in fact Caesar and which the gladiator? We are all of course gladiators, and all our triumphs merely postpone that moment when we salute Caesar as we recognize that we are about to die.

  TWO

  Tomaso

  THE BUS moves from the railway station down a potholed street criss-crossed by overhead wires, past straggly houses, the yards dotted with rose-bushes, chickens, barelegged children and thin and tawny dogs, and out across a plain towards the hills. Baked earth gives way to fields of maize and peas and beans, the last filling-stations are left behind. It is evening light, turning to violet, and the cypresses are black. The road runs straight for miles and then makes abrupt changes of direction to fit the configuration of crop lands and irrigation channels. Within, the radio plays loudly, mid-Atlantic pop. No one seems to notice.

  The bus is almost full, but coming to a little village, the last before the hills, yet takes on more passengers than descend. The two young American girls make ready to shift their rucksacks which block the rear of the passage, but a peasant insists that they needn’t trouble themselves and instead squats on the sacks. He wears blue overalls, open at the neck to reveal wisps of grey curly hair against a chest the colour of rich earth. From time to time he turns round to wink. The girls smile at each other. One of them moves her legs slightly to the side. She is short and fat and wearing blue jeans and a cream coloured shirt, with sweat-stains under the armpits. She says something in bad Italian to the peasant who laughs and turns half-round again so that his shoulder presses against the other girl’s long, naked Californian legs. These have for the last twenty miles attracted the disapproving stare of the fat, black-clad peasant woman further along the back seat. She in turn keeps her body pressed well forward, disregarding comfort, so that the young man, on her le
ft, will be spared the sight of these legs. The old woman’s lips move all the time, as if in prayer.

  Beyond the other American girl, the one in jeans, is a young priest. The girl has been unhappily conscious of his garlic and winey breath since the journey started; wrinkling her nose in distaste. The priest hasn’t spoken to her or to the young man on the window side of him, who for his part has not spoken either, but kept his face averted, his eyes searching the landscape as if for marks of recognition.

  He is very pale this young man, and could be compared to a Christ painted by Caravaggio. A tooth pulls back his lower lip, making it deep red. Every now and then the silent American girl, the one in shorts with the long Pacific Ocean legs, sneaks a quick glance along the line at this young man. His name is Tomaso, which is how some of the other young men in the bus greeted him at the bus-stop. Then he nodded politely but distantly, as one who could no longer put a name to his fellows. This is true enough. Once, a lifetime ago when they were all at the village school, he knew them well, but now acquaintance has withered. (They still recognize him, for he is a person of consequence here, being a local landowner, and indeed nobleman.) He has moved on and away. His new associates, his comrades, don’t even know him as Tomaso. They call him Vlado, or sometimes Vlad.

  The bus leaves the plain and begins to climb into the mountains. They pass an inn, a chapel, and see, down in the valley below, the lights of two or three little towns. At each stop, where tracks from the mountain villages come down to join the road, passengers descend. No one now joins the bus. When there is a motor road to a village, the bus diverges from the main route and climbs tortuously to the little piazza. There is always a church in the piazza and a caffè-bar, with three or four men sitting outside in the still-warm evening, not drinking but just sitting. Usually in silence. They are labourers who have ended their day’s work or young men who have never held a position. Always, when they see the church, the fat woman crosses herself, and mutters to the young man beside her, who follows suit. His movements are careless, the gestures of an idiot. The Californian girl, at whom, despite his mother, he keeps trying to look, hasn’t dared glance in his direction since she took her seat. The sight of his baying mouth with the lolling tongue displayed turns her stomach. She can’t bear deformity.

  The priest makes no sign that he has noticed the churches. Nor, of course, does Tomaso. Once, at one village, he seems to recognize one of the young men outside the bar, and makes a gesture; the merest gesture, one finger momentarily raised.

  The road becomes steeper, and it is now quite dark, the thick warm pall of summer mountain night. At last with a great crashing of gears the bus rounds the last hairpin and passes through a narrow gateway, up a long narrow cobbled street, which it almost fills so that a woman carrying a bucket of water has to press herself against the wall to let it pass, and in to another little piazza, its destination. The dozen or so passengers left, who of course include all those in the back seat, get to their feet, seize their various luggage and prepare to descend.

  There are only two lamps in the square which is therefore deep in shadows. The peasant helps the girls with their rucksacks. They thank him, and look for a moment as though they are getting ready to ask a question, but he has vanished.

  ‘Hey,’ says the girl in jeans, ‘that was quick.’

  ‘I’ll say so,’ says the other girl, whose name is Kim.

  ‘Well, you wanted to come here. What do we do now?’

  ‘You got to admit it’s different, Ruthie.’

  ‘It’s certainly different. It feels like the end of the world.’

  ‘It’s kind of what I wanted,’ says Kim as she swings her rucksack on to her back, ‘after all that culture.’

  They make to cross the square to the little bar.

  ‘Guess they’ll know over there where they live,’ Ruthie says; there is a touch of Brooklyn in her voice, the ever-present suggestion of complaint.

  Even in the dim light Kim’s long legs seem to shine and attract every eye. You could imagine eyes at every crevice, behind every slatted shutter. Only, exceptionally, Tomaso does not follow them with his gaze. But he notices that when their backs are turned the fat woman spits into the gutter.

  He lets them go, and himself, in dark denying suit and shirt pale as his cheeks, moves slimly in the opposite direction and up a dark alley, round a corner where two mangy dogs fight over a dirty bone, and up steep worn and slippery steps to a house built seemingly into the hillside. There is a big ancient studded door against which he bangs a heavy iron, dog-headed knocker. Silence extends itself. His fingers clench and unclench. Dogs bark in the valley, a distant radio can be heard playing Puccini, and a cock crows. Tomaso waits. At last he can hear a key being inserted in the lock. It turns grindingly. The door opens, on a chain.

  ‘It’s me, Mother,’ he says, and the chain is unhooked.

  They don’t embrace. They are long past embraces, even as a formality. But she puts her hand on his shoulder for an instant and very lightly, not giving herself time to receive any stiffening or shrinking response. Two spaniels come barking from within the house. She says ‘quiet, dogs’. They see Tomaso and something goes out of them, animation and excitement, and they keep close to their mistress’s skirts.

  ‘I never know when you’re coming,’ she says.

  ‘It’s impossible that you should.’

  She gives a little shrug of her shoulders that says it would be nice to know, but that she has long stopped hoping for consideration.

  He follows her across the little courtyard, warm with the scent of oleanders, and under a doorway, over which glows a candle lit to St Veronica, for whom she has a special devotion. The room they enter has a fine mahogany table and a set of dining-chairs which date from the second half of the last century, and a big carved sideboard, which is much older, almost certainly sixteenth century and genuine. Over it hangs a painting of the Madonna and Child from the same period. The walls are yellowed by old candle-smoke.

  Tomaso sits down at the table, his ear keen to the silence. His mother moves on slippered feet and places a jug of wine and a bottle of mineral water and two glasses before him. Then she sets out a basket of grey, thick-crusted bread, a bowl of wrinkled black olives, and she retires to the kitchen and comes back with newly sliced rough country ham and black-rinded pecorino cheese. She sits down and looks at her son. He pours himself a glass of water and sips with long straight lips, like a serpent.

  ‘Eat something. You are too thin.’

  ‘I’ve always been so,’ he says, ‘and survived.’

  All the same he tears off a crust of bread, pours a glass of the yellowish wine, dips the bread in it and nibbles. He puts an olive in his mouth; and lets its bitterness refresh him.

  ‘You’re well?’ he says. ‘I hope.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she nods.

  ‘How is he? My friend.’

  ‘He’s strange. He seems nervous.’

  ‘I told you he’s been overworking. The doctors feared a total nervous collapse. Where is he now?’

  ‘In his room. He spends most of his time there. “Anyone would think you regarded yourself as a prisoner,” I said to him. He listens to his radio a lot. News programmes.’

  ‘He hasn’t gone out, has he?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘That’s all right. I didn’t think he would.’

  Tomaso tears off a piece of ham and eats it.

  ‘Good,’ he says, ‘there’s nothing like real country ham.’

  ‘There’s been nothing happening here, has there?’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘nothing. Nothing happens here. You know that. The cow had a calf, but you’re not interested in that sort of little event, are you, son? It would be nice if you were.’

  ‘It will be nice when I can be…’

  He knows that she would like to take the conversation further, to explore his answer and all that it implies. She would like, or part of her would like, to call for sympathy
. He looks for a moment directly at her fine, modulated features, her retired elegance, her goodness, which gives her strength to suffer and yet endure, but not to act, never to act, and for that moment he would like to speak his heart. He would like to put his head again in her lap and say ‘Mamma’ and not the cold ‘Mother’ which is all his lips can bring themselves to frame. The desire is vain and fleeting. There is that between them which makes anything of that nature impossible. It is not because of what has happened but of what is missing. A profound gulf separates them; they stand on opposing cliffs; and it is crossed only by a fragile, rickety suspension bridge sustained by duty and a worn love.

  The moment passes, the silence remains.

  ‘It’s so peaceful’, he says, ‘after Rome. I was thinking that all the way up in the bus. It’s good.’

  ‘And poor,’ she says. ‘The peasants leave the land, more and more every year. Three more holdings abandoned since last summer. Not that they were worth anything to us in rent. But it means the life departing.’

  Of course there is one other support for their bridge and that is the trust he unhesitatingly lays in her; that is, after all, why he has sent Bernardo here.

  ‘I’ll go up to see him now,’ he says, not wanting to talk about the estate and peasants and rent.

  ‘Yes,’ says his mother, and sighs. ‘You’ll want to talk to him.’

  No other woman, he thinks, could have said that without irony in such circumstances. He takes an oil lamp and crosses the courtyard again and mounts the staircase that rises above the shed where they used to keep cows in his grandfather’s time. At the turn of the staircase he lifts his head to the sky and sees stars twinkling and a young moon rise. He pauses there, looking at the heavens, into a space which makes sense to him, even while that sense, of necessity, includes the mockery of all that he is aiming to achieve; and yet the mockery is not directed at him – indeed in moments he is at one with it – and when he thinks of the frenzied activity that the forces of repression spew out, he relaxes, looking still at the stars and feeling good.