by Allan Massie
Along the corridor to Bernardo’s room, he finds himself shivering. It is always, even in summer, colder here than you remembered. He knocks and enters, not waiting for a reply. It is a knock they agreed on a long time back.
Bernardo is stretched out on the bed, reading. He throws the book aside, leaps to his feet and flings his arms around Tomaso. Tomaso stiffens; he can’t help it, ever.
‘Vlado,’ cries Bernardo, ‘at last. I’ve been on edge. Oh yes, I’ve been on edge.’
Tomaso holds him at arms’ length. Bernardo feels soft and pudgy to him and his fingers shrink from the synthetic material from which his polo-neck jersey is made. Also there are dark patches under Bernardo’s armpits, and he smells.
Tomaso says, ‘No need for that. You’ll have heard everything from the radio, everything anyone else knows. It couldn’t have gone better. It couldn’t possibly have gone better.’
All the same something has changed between them, or rather has intervened. Tomaso recognizes the interloper; its name is responsibility. They have passed from the sunlight of the perfect liberty of the abstract. He finds for a moment that he doesn’t want to meet the questing gaze of his friend. Instead he picks up the book Bernardo has cast down. A novel by Camus.
‘This,’ he says, ‘in the last resort Fascist, whatever he thought of himself.’
‘I know of course, but it is imperative that we acquaint ourselves with all philosophy, all psychology, and come to understand it …’
‘That is easy. Know yourself, Bernardo. That’s enough to know all men, who are never unique as they imagine. In their egoism.’
Bernardo nods; he hasn’t thought of it like that before.
‘I never thought it wouldn’t go to plan,’ Bernardo says. ‘It was a good plan, and you found my information just right, isn’t that so? So how could it fail?’
‘Failure is always possible. One should recognize that, even while acting as if …’ Tomaso pauses, and for the first time that evening, smiles slightly, a broken smile, ‘as if we were the Pope. Infallible.’
Bernardo throws back his head and laughs, arrests the sound and says, his voice suddenly a croak, ‘How is he? How’s he taking it? You know, I’ve been testing myself to see if I feel any guilt, but,’ he wipes his hand backwards across his brow, ‘all I experience is curiosity. So how?’
Tomaso smiles again, ‘Like a gentleman,’ he says. ‘No, I’m serious.’
‘Does he know about me?’
Tomaso has been given notice of the question; he will certainly want to know that, they had said. And you must tell him the truth. Once he knows the truth, he can never retract.
‘Yes, he knows.’
‘And …’ Bernardo is panting like a dog interpreting such signs as may suggest his master plans to take him for a walk, ‘and …?’
‘I think it helped,’ Tomaso said. ‘Psychologically it prepared him to co-operate. It emphasized his loneliness. He’s uneducable of course, but still ready to co-operate. His first letter will be in the paper tomorrow. It’ll be delivered just before the paper goes to press. You’ll see, it’ll be sensational. It’ll have them re-casting their front pages. That’s why I came here today. I’ve brought you a copy.’
He puts his hand into his inside pocket and withdraws a slim, long brown envelope. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘you’ll like this. You’ll admire the style.’
The letter hangs a moment between them. Bernardo has gone pale. Far away in the house a telephone rings, the sound reaching them faint and blurred. It rings several times, at least a dozen.
‘What a risk,’ says Bernardo. ‘Suppose you’d been stopped.’
‘Why should I be? I’ve no record.’
‘You’re very sure of that.’
‘I would never use my own house if I had a record. My house where my mother lives. Here, you must remember, I’m still the marchese, someone of standing.’
When they had first met five years ago, Tomaso had been very much the marchese, the little nobleman; there was after all little else for him to be. It was after a lecture at the University, and Bernardo was standing in the middle of a group, arguing fiercely, disproving everything their lecturer had said about the origin of law, and holding the little group of his fans spell-bound. There were always half a dozen of these, two or three of whom were in fact still excited by Bernardo’s status as the son of a prominent politician (Corrado was indeed the Prime Minister of the moment). The excitement was sharpened by Bernardo’s defiance of his father’s principles. It made them feel wicked and daring. They were all very young, and feeling wicked and daring in this way was new. Suddenly Bernardo noticed a youngman on the edge of the group whom he didn’t know; but who was paying him close attention, even though he was trying to disguise his interest by leaning, as it were nonchalantly, against a pillar. Bernardo dropped his voice. He didn’t yet like to be overheard by people he didn’t know – his rebellion was still a young plant. Everything he did and said remained experimental.
The students drifted off to a trattoria they frequented where the helpings of spaghetti were huge, the prices low and the clientele reliably radical.
The next day, in the same place, as he lifted a gargantuan forkful of rigatoni, Bernardo saw the same young man at a corner table; still watching him. Had he followed them there the previous day? Was he trying to force himself on them? And if so, what were his motives? Was he simply interested? Or perhaps making a report? (Bernardo couldn’t doubt that people somewhere would be preparing his dossier.) He seemed an unlikely recruit. He belonged, in Bernardo’s opinion, rather with his brother Nico’s set. He had the same elegance that Nico’s friends displayed – it always made Bernardo feel clumsy, set his teeth on edge and caused his palms to sweat.
‘Who’s that, in the corner?’ he said. ‘He was spying on us yesterday too.’
‘Oh that; a nobody.’
‘Actually he’s a marchese.’
‘Well he’s in the wrong place, we’ve no time for his sort here.’
‘I’m told he’s a very poor marchese though.’
‘Poor or not makes no difference. Is he a spy?’
‘A spy? Look at him.’
They all did; he was very slim with short dark hair that waved slightly and a pale oval face. His mouth curved and his dark eyes were soft; they shifted under the students’ gaze. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt and dark blue tie. A gold signet ring knocked against his plate as he stretched out his hand for his glass.
They began to laugh. A spy? What a joke.
‘I don’t think Security use such obvious poofs.’
The insult, ridiculous and unfounded as Bernardo realized when he got to know him, was quite understandable. In those days Tomaso had a certain pliable elegance that would undoubtedly attract one type of aristocratic pederast. He was often bothered by such admirers, whom he innocently took some time to recognize for what they were. His modesty in this respect surprised Bernardo, all the more so, when Tomaso eventually confessed to him that he hadn’t voluntarily attended church since one of the Dominican Brothers at his school had made advances to him in the vestry after he had served Communion.
‘I was very devout till that happened.’
He could smile about it. Like most egotists Bernardo wasn’t curious about others, and he never wondered whether it was this incident which had broken the sweetness of Tomaso’s smile. Of course the break, like most such breaks, was gradual, and some of the sweetness was still there when Bernardo first met him.
‘But yes, I assure you,’ said the student who claimed to know him, ‘he’s a very poor marchese indeed. He comes from some broken-down place in the Abruzzi. You know the sort of place, where they still share their quarters with the pigs.’
Again everyone laughed loudly, one or two concealing the knowledge that this was just how their own grandfathers had lived.
Tomaso pushed his chair back and crossed the room.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘you are laughing at me.’
‘It was,’ as one of Bernardo’s friends who was studying literature said later, ‘exactly like a nineteenth-century novel. Not Manzoni, of course, but Stendhal.’ This confused them since Manzoni was in fact the only nineteenth-century novelist most of them had read.
Still, Tomaso’s gesture had its effect. They were all, though callow, decent enough young men, and since he didn’t actually do anything so absurd as challenge them to a duel, they admired his nerve in approaching them and felt a certain embarrassment too. So they asked him to sit down, made a good many incoherent but sufficiently sincere apologies and ordered another bottle of wine. Fellowship was established.
Bernardo never analysed his relationship with Tomaso. Because he himself was voluble and, when free of his family, bubbled over with exuberance and argument, he easily passed as the leader. And indeed Tomaso learned much from him.
His upbringing had ensured his complete ignorance, so that Bernardo easily represented a superior culture to him. He came, as has been said, from an old house. Ancestors had been petty lords in the Abruzzi since the thirteenth century. The family had produced a couple of cardinals at the time of the Counter-Reformation, grim loveless men, both Dominicans. Mismanagement, a peculiarly un-Italian lack of vitality, had caused the estates to dwindle. Tomaso’s father had lived through the Fascist Era in lethargy. He had served unenthusiastically in the Army, returned home slightly wounded in the Western Desert, and viewed the Partisans, very active locally, with a bien-pensant in difference. They might be right to rid themselves of the Germans and the Fascists; all the same he couldn’t be expected to consort with such types. The local leader was a Communist grocer after all. They were sure to want to steal the little land he had left to him. So he remained at home, and, too stupid to read, played endless games of patience and counted his ancestors.
Somehow he had married about that time. His bride was a distant cousin who had almost had a vocation. Her father, a Roman lawyer – the cousinship was on the maternal side – had deplored this, and talked her out of it. It did him little good. Either way he lost his favourite daughter, for, as he was to say mournfully, the difference between a convent and a broken-down castle in the Abruzzi with a half-dead husband wasn’t as wide as a needle’s eye.
Soon the castle became uninhabitable – there’s a limit to the degree of decay that even decayed aristocrats find acceptable – and they moved a few hundred yards down the hill to one of their houses in the village. The shame didn’t exactly kill Tomaso’s father, but he now found it intolerable to be seen in the piazza. For the last five years of his life he never ventured further than the courtyard, and went that far only when the outer door was closed. He died when Tomaso was eight; perhaps, as his priest said, he had never recovered from his desert wound.
Tomaso was then at the village school, a quiet reserved child, but not unhappy playing with the other children of the village, who, with natural good manners, somehow contrived to treat him as an equal, a good fellow, and someone who deserved a certain respect, all at the same time. Nothing that happened in his life made a more positive impression than this.
Of course he couldn’t stay there, and it was impossible he should proceed to the liceo (the grammar-school) in the nearby town. Who knew what sort of irreligious ideas he might imbibe there? For one thing was certain: despite all precautions a good many of the teachers were Reds, socialists, even Communists. His mother, for all her piety, might have allowed herself to be guided by her own father, who advised her to give the boy a good modern education, an ordinary one. ‘Let him learn,’ he said, ‘that he’s a citizen of a modern democratic republic, a Christian one certainly, and let him forget his ancestry. That sort of consciousness is obsolete, brings no kind of happiness these days. Let him forget all that. He’s got no estates worth a penny. After all, I earn more in a week than his patrimony’ – he dwelt on the word with a resounding irony – ‘his patrimony will bring him in in five years. The boy’s got some talent for mathematics. Let him set out to become an engineer. That’s what Italy needs after all, engineers and technicians.’
However, he didn’t have the final word. That lay with the boy’s uncle, his father’s brother, a man corrupted by bigotry. He insisted that Tomaso follow the family tradition and receive his education from the Dominicans. Accordingly Tomaso was sent to an appropriate Church School. For two years, adoring his mother, he adored her God. Then he noticed the hypocrisy routinely imposed on his fellows. He shrank from it, fastidiously. Then came the incident in the vestry. There was of course no one he could tell – his grandfather had despaired of conversing with him. To tell his mother was patently impossible, and as for his uncle … There was nothing to do.
In this atmosphere of frigid piety and coarse hypocrisy, his mathematical talent withered. He fell back on books, especially poetry, and made himself drunk on Leopardi, Ungharetti and Quasimodo.
He would have liked to do his military service. He explained this later to Bernardo, who found both desire and explanation incomprehensible. Somehow Tomaso felt there was a stain on him, that he had something to expiate. The truth was that, in his withdrawn condition, he had become infected by Romantic notions. He had concluded that he could only put his life right by service which would rid him of his father’s disgrace in North Africa. The idea was absurd. He couldn’t imagine that he would see action, and he couldn’t have begun to say how eighteen months’ clerking in an Army barracks would do anything to salvage honour – he was actually thinking in words like that. His youthful diaries reveal a subtler and deeper explanation; reading between the lines, you sense that he hoped to find in the barrack-room the comradeship and decency he hadn’t experienced since he was on close terms with the boys at his elementary school.
But they discovered that he was unfit, a lesion in his lung. That dream of comradeship paled. At last he went to Rome, to the University, to study law. It bored him stiff, till he met Bernardo.
He had first lived with some of his mother’s relatives, bright social people who didn’t know what to make of the silent boy; soon, they were almost unaware of his presence in the household. Tomaso rarely talked to them but the apartment irked him. He walked much in the older parts of the city – his relatives lived in Monteverde, which didn’t appeal to him. Soon he moved out, again almost unnoticed, and took a room in what was really a lodging-house in the Via Leonina. The gloomy building in the Suburra might not seem any improvement on his aunt’s apartment; it was all heavy, dark smoked-oak furniture and tasselled lamp-shades and thick velvet curtains hanging in doorways. But there were no obligations. The landlady quickly proved to be a slut, whose cleaning-woman had taken her measure.
She was in fact a White Russian, brought up in Shanghai and briefly married to an Italian engineer who had built bridges for the Kuomintang. He had been killed in an air-crash in 1940, leaving her this large apartment and little else. Soon after the war she had taken her first lodger; now there were eight of them, mostly medical students whom Tomaso found immediately unsympathetic. The landlady, Lenya, would drift through the apartment in unbuttoned kimono, her fat yellowing poodle at her heels, lamenting the changed times. Curiously something in him responded to her; she appealed to the same element that governed his taste in poetry. ‘It was better under Mussolini,’ she used to say. ‘Look at me, I didn’t have to live like this then, not at all.’ She took a fancy to Tomaso; White Russians and an impoverished marchese had a good deal in common. As for him he listened to her in their loneliness, sitting sipping camomile tea while she complained of headaches, poverty, strikes, crime, her liver and the modern world.
One night he found her entertaining another guest in the kitchen. A small man with a scarred face – he was the first non-resident (apart from the cleaning lady and a Jewish girl one of the medical students used to smuggle in on Saturday nights) that Tomaso had ever seen in the apartment. Lenya introduced him merely as ‘my friend’. It was Enzo Fuscolo.
Tomaso found the little man’s look
both insolent and disconcerting.
‘Lenya has told me about you,’ Fuscolo said.
He didn’t go any further, and the next half-hour was devoted to the habitual litany of Lenya’s woes. All the time Tomaso was made uneasy by the intimacy with him that Fuscolo’s nods, raised eyebrows, and twisted smile seemed to insist on. The little man sat otherwise still in his shabby grey suit, neither eating the petits fours (actually a little stale) nor drinking the tea that Lenya had placed before him, but all the time seeming to involve Tomaso in a conspiracy of complicity.
That was the first time. Thereafter Enzo came often enough, and soon was talking over Lenya’s moans in a harsh compelling voice that spoke to Tomaso of desecration, broken honour, and a cold piercing nihilism. Tomaso never consciously committed himself to this, but he listened. What he heard, and hearkened to, was despair; there was no meaning to action.
During the long summer vacation that first year he stayed in the Abruzzi village, alternately reading Nietzsche and considering suicide.
Of course most young men of any sensibility consider suicide, many of them no doubt seriously enough. It was only when in the autumn Bernardo, seen by Tomaso for the first time in many months, said over a cappuccino, ‘But of course, Tomaso, life is meaningless if there is no social purpose’, that the mists began to rise. All the same it was Christmas before he had freed himself from Enzo Fuscolo and moved away from Lenya’s apartment to a room near Campo dei Fiori. Still, he noted in his diary at that time:
‘Of course there will always be a part of me that recognizes that Enzo’s philosophy of existential nakedness contains an ultimate truth; only it is a truth which is quite unacceptable. For it is impossible to confront the void and agree to live. And I have discovered that I desire to live. So there is only one direction in which I can move.’
