The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘Ed Mangan.’

  ‘Yes, he is a terrible journalist, is he not?’

  ‘Terrible. You know about Ed?’

  Antonio shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I have only read him. Enough.’

  ‘But you haven’t heard of his method. His famous method.’

  ‘It never occurred to me he had one.’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed.’

  ‘Remarkable – I had thought his effusions the product of pure Anglo-Saxon flair.’

  ‘Far from it. It goes like this. Ed once wrote a junk biography of Montgomery.’

  ‘The Field-Marshal?’

  ‘The same. Now in the course of what he called his research Ed was impressed by the Great Man’s habit of keeping the photograph of the enemy general on his bedside table or desk. Monty used to claim this helped him get into their minds – PR crap of course. But Ed believed it. Swell idea, he says. So he starts the habit of collecting snaps of whoever he’s working on and scattering them all over his hotel room or apartment. It’s been said by unkind critics – most of Ed’s professional colleagues that is – that this accounts for most of his blunders. He’s got no eye for a face, you see, jumbles them up. He made a balls-up of a piece on Japan because he confused Hirohito with Chou Enlai, one wily Oriental being much like another to a Wasp like Ed. All the same he sticks to his method. If it doesn’t bring success it still offers satisfaction. And that’s the great thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Right, Christopher. Who needs success if he can be happy with failure? Nevertheless the method is not so ridiculous. After all it’s what one style of journalism demands, isn’t it? That you get into the minds of your subjects. Your style, now I come to think of it. That’s what you really did in the van Meer case, wasn’t it? What about now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s an amateurishness in any group that could use someone like Bernardo Dusa, yet the operation was carried out professionally enough. They haven’t made an obvious mistake yet. Dusa’s letter could even be a masterstroke, since the intention must be to set the State at odds …’

  I arranged in the end to see Ed. You never know with a clown like that. He can have information without knowing it. So I arranged to pick him up in the lobby of his hotel, a modest dump in one of the streets down from the Piazza di Spagna – once he would have stayed automatically at the Hassler or the Excelsior. The porter didn’t like the look of me – I was wearing patched and dirty jeans and an open-neck shirt, and I was debating whether to crush him with Roman dialect or Public School English voice, when the lift creaked to the ground floor and Ed bounded out. My first impression was that he looked rejuvenated; my second that he had aged in a surprising and rather horrible way. Something had gone from his face, and that something was experience. ‘Christ,’ I said to myself, ‘he’s been born again …’

  He showed himself over-pleased to see me. Americans often are. You learn it means nothing personal, and then you learn that it’s significant to them. They really feel unhappy if they don’t find themselves delighted to meet someone.

  ‘You’re the guy here I really wanted to see, Chris,’ he said. ‘I just can’t say what it means to me you coming round like this. It’s acumen and local knowledge I’m after. Let’s go grab a beer.’

  He talked all the way through the streets, back across Tritone, past the Trevi fountain, diagonally across the piazza in front of the Gregorian University where a few prickless priests-to-be were congregating, and all the time till we were settled at a table in the Birreria Peroni, just off the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli; it was dark and cool and still empty.

  ‘Say,’ he said, ‘guess what’s happened, Chris. My daughter’s hit town, my little girl. What a time to choose, eh? What a goddam time. When I’m neck deep in this shit. So what do you make of it? I told the girls to meet us here, but we’ve time for a serious talk. So what gives?’

  I get older and I get harder and I get more remote. I felt a spurt of anger. He was so easily what I could become myself. Just like that. I could see myself losing conviction in anything but the spurious excitement of the moment, back in the dead waste land of Anglo-Saxon empiricism.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it’s just a story to you, isn’t it, Ed?’

  He protested of course. People always protest at the sort of truth that diminishes them. He told me all about his change of faith, how he’d seen the light – I’m not sure the bastard didn’t even mention Damascus; he must have, Ed couldn’t have left that cliché unturned – and he held up his glass of Coca-Cola as testimony of seriousness; evidently the suggestion that we go grab a beer merely showed how old habits of speech survive the environment and society that gave rise to them. I called over my friend, the fat sweating waiter Pepe, who had now come on duty, and asked him for a large dark one for myself and another Coke for Signor Mangan.

  ‘He is reformed,’ I said. ‘He is going to become a priest.’

  ‘A man can be a priest,’ said Pepe, ‘without frivolity.’

  ‘See,’ I said, ‘your Coke proves nothing. In fact it proves the reverse of what you claim it does. I’d find it easier to believe you were politically serious if you still drank. Total conversions are always phoney. So I still say it’s just a story to you and you’re still an unreconstructed Cold Warrior.’

  I was needling him on purpose and glad to. Even at the time I knew I was covering up my own uncertainty. It wasn’t because of Bella that I felt this. She didn’t mean anything to me that way or deep down. I was angry because I didn’t know what to think.

  ‘You’re just a tourist, Ed. The journalist as tourist. I bet when you get yourself to hell you get a well-paid feature out of it …’

  He took my needling tolerantly. That’s one of the things about the born again. They’ve a good conceit of themselves.

  ‘Look Chris,’ he said, and ‘here Chris’ and ‘shucks Chris’ and went on to explain his virtues and expatiate on his serious involvement with world affairs.

  ‘I guess I reckon Dusa’s important,’ he said, ‘simply because he’s a good man.’

  But I knew what I wanted then. I wanted to believe they were going to be right when they killed him. I drank down a long gulp of the metallic beer and looked past Ed into the distance.

  I stopped listening to him. He went on talking of course; people don’t absolutely require an audience, some people at least. Instead, giving myself time to assimilate this realization, I looked round the big low-ceilinged room as if I’d never seen it before. And it was actually like that. Even the frieze – nunc est bibendum, what else? – looked new. But in fact this birreria had been a centre of my life in Rome from the beginning. I used to come here with an Irish actor who believed that beer could ward off the DTs. He was never certain if he wouldn’t find himself locked out of the apartment in Parioli by his rich-bitch American mistress after our sessions. Consequently he spent a good many nights on my studio couch, a fact which nurtured my anti-American sentiments. Later my companion was an English poet, a pseudo-poet, oh very English, drenched with the dew of Christ Church meadows, who came here to gaze on the young boy waiter of those days, but never dared do more than entice him to our table to take our order. Then they would exchange shy smiles. Even the memory of those smiles made me puke. For a long time after that I came here alone. I read the whole of Das Kapital at this very table. So the place represented a lot, the whole journey of my life.

  ‘I put that point to Raimundo Dusa,’ said Ed. ‘Guess he didn’t grasp what I was imputing …’

  ‘Raimundo?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s Corrado’s elder brother, an old buddy of mine. Used to be a diplomat. There was some kind of scandal. He’s the old school though, keeps buttoned up. Ray’s got no hope at all, just none whatsoever. He reckons his brother’s a dead man, and if you ask me, wishes they would just get on and do it.’

  But that was what everyone really felt. I knew that deep down. Nobody believed in an alternative ending, and there were man
y who saw Dusa’s letter as a disgrace and hoped he would die before he could disgrace himself any more. I couldn’t go along with that of course. I don’t own the word disgrace for one thing, and second, second, I knew that what Dusa was writing was the truth. I almost told Ed that, just to see his face, but at that moment he stood up and began waving across the room which was now full and steaming of beer and the goulash sauce they were so lavish with. I looked over my shoulder and saw two girls and a boy approach.

  The girls were full of expressions of American surprise, the pukeworthy sort occasioned by their tardy and incredulous realization that it is possible to deviate from the standards laid down by that Great God (or fallen angel), the American Way of Life. They were both classic examples of that, I saw at once. One the Brooklyn Jew girl Mark One, the other echt Californian Popsy. The pair were so typecast it made you reflect again on the creative genius of the Studio system.

  Ed’s voice broadened to lecturing tones now he had a real audience, and he boomed on while the Jewish bitch settled and re-settled her duck-arse (piles?) on the chair and looked around the room with a tape-measure in her eye. I knew when she opened her lips, thick purplish lips they were, she would utter approved liberal sentiments, a Kennedy-worshipping cow if ever I saw one. And I’ve seen plenty, too many.

  As for the other girl, Ed’s daughter Kim, with her strawberry-pink mouth and everlasting legs, she made me creep with lust. It was all she was for, and it would never satisfy. Just looking at her made me feel savage – she was the bubble at the end of the American rainbow, what all that liberty and self-indulgence ended in; symbol and more than symbol of the catastrophe in which they’ve involved us all; Coca-Cola made flesh.

  She looked back at me with her lips slightly open – it was hard to believe they were ever quite shut – and then stroked them with her beer.

  She was a girl who would always caress herself.

  But the boy; I’ve been dodging writing about the boy. He wore a thin dark suit and a set pale face and a lock of hair that kept trying to fall softly over his eye. He held himself very still and hardly touched his beer – you could see he didn’t like it, taste and associations too I should think. He ate a few olives. I had seen him before. I knew that, but not where, and I knew his stillness meant he was special. Once or twice he moved his tongue very gently across his lips, just wetting them, as if to keep them from cracking. All the time he listened to Mangan and the girl Ruthie exchange approved liberal sentiments, with no expression on his face. No dissent at all. He might have been a young man in the Foreign Ministry. Even when I spoke up for the Paestinians against the Zionist Fascists, he stayed still.

  The girl Kim called him Tom. She named him Tom every empty sentence she spoke. There was no response from him.

  Ed went on explaining to Ruthie and Kim or to all of us, but really to them, the way he saw Italian politics. He drew on all his Time experience of the Cold War, and he placed the Dusa family and the Christian Democrats, and had all of the facts and none of the judgement. Kim’s long fingers sought Tom’s across the table. She blew smoke-rings at him, and she turned to me and smiled over the rim of her glass. She had a few refills. Every now and then she gave me a smile to keep me in the game. In a pause she said, ‘I just can’t understand how people get hot over politics. Tom here gets hot. I know he does. It doesn’t show, but I can just feel him simmer. I haven’t found out yet what else he gets hot over.’ She touched her pink lips with pink tongue. ‘Do you get hot?’ she said, looking at me straight. ‘Christopher,’ she added.

  Ruthie leant over the table and said urgently, though not maybe to stop me answering Kim, ‘Maybe you can tell us, Ed says you’ve lived here a long time,’ she paused as if waiting for confirmation even of this, as if she had already formed the conviction that nothing Ed said could be accepted without corroboration.

  ‘Seventeen years,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t call you Christopher,’ Kim said, ‘it doesn’t sound right. Chris? Maybe Kit. Kim and Kit, how’s that?’

  ‘Oh fine,’ I said.

  ‘Why do they make the poor man write these letters?’ Ruthie said. ‘Do they just want to humiliate him? It looks like it’s pure sadism to me. Jesus, it’s sadistic.’

  ‘You could call it a process of education,’ I said. ‘They’re showing him things as they really are. You don’t know how these bastards of his Party have exploited this country, these people. They’ve crucified the working-class. He’s learning what it feels like.’

  ‘Aw come on,’ she said, ‘it seems much like any place else. When I think of what my people …’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘your people. What happened to your people’s going to be an excuse for the rest of history. For anything, Vietnam, Palestine, anything. As for this country – sure it’s much like any place else – what difference does that make?’

  I got to my feet and put a ten-thousand note on the table.

  ‘That’ll take care of the beer,’ I said.

  There is no difference between ignorance and wilful innocence. These people, these Americans, go about the world with their eyes shut. If they see dead bodies floating down a canal, they call for a relief organization. They don’t see how greed is at the heart of all brutality, all injustice. How can they when their whole system is founded on greed and nothing else?

  I stopped, angry and not wanting to be in the apartment alone – there might be voices in that echoing solitude – I went into a little bar by the Pantheon and started drinking grappa. I downed two or three nerve-calmers quickly. A little man, a tenor who had lost his voice, came in and ordered a glass of milk. We nodded to each other. Sometimes he came and spoke to me here in his rasping dead whisper and told me about his daughter in Cincinnati. Or he asked me about my friend Katerina, a Polish violinist, who used to tell us here, in this bar, night after night, stories about her father who was a cellist. So many of them ended with the words, ‘and he was so drunk it was as bad as the night he fell off a platform in Baden-Baden in the middle of a piece by Saint-Saens’ – it had become a refrain. I found absurd tears pricking my eyes when I remembered this and I looked at myself sardonically in the long mirror behind the bottles. As I did so, I remembered where I had seen the boy Tom before. It had been in a wine-shop in the Suburra. I was with a Calabrian girl of mine called Margarita and she had pointed a boy out and said that was a sort of cousin, Bernardo Dusa, the politician’s son. Bernardo was interesting, she had said. We should have a talk, some other time. But now she wanted to go home and fuck. So I didn’t meet Bernardo. I couldn’t believe then he was likely to be interesting. He looked as callow as they come.

  There were two more letters from Dusa the next day. Their tone was more desperate still, the accusations against his colleagues now backed by threats of what he might disclose if they took no action to free him. The tone spoke of his fearful isolation. It brought him real to me. You couldn’t read the letters and not feel that here was a man for the first time brought up against all sorts of reality that he had managed to deny all his life. They were stripping him naked. He had relied on his authority to protect him from all sorts of knowledge, and it was torn away. It was a rape before execution. Lines long dead in my imagination came back to me when I read these letters – they had that chill of knowledge that you get in the real thing – Lear and Dostoevsky and Dante. He was in the desert, with no shadow under the red rock. It stayed with me this realization – all through the grilling day. In the evening I took a tram up the Janiculum and stood under the statue of Garibaldi on his horse, thinking with rage of the lusts, lies and treacheries that seethed in the city spread out below. I sat at a caffè and ordered beer, only beer – the Consul used to proclaim that the Mexican stuff was full of vitamins, but nobody has ever made that claim for Peroni, except in jest or self-derision.

  ‘Stop. I never knew the world was like this.’ That was what Dusa was crying. Crying from the heart. I had known it at least since I was fourteen. I could not forget the captai
n of our dormitory, a tall elegant blond bully, the Housemaster’s pet, a boy who really liked the CCF, a real creamy English boy with the false charm of the Chilterns, bathed in Home Counties security. One day, it was November, he drove us too far. We took him, five of us, after games that afternoon, all of us sweaty and muddy from rugby, and first thrust him down in a cold bath, and four of us held him there, crying already, while the fifth cropped his blond wavy hair. Then we tied him, naked but for the wet rugger socks which we hadn’t troubled to remove, to the changing-room pegs, and left him there over tea. The socks made him look more ridiculous and lost than if he had been fully naked. There was no one to hear his cries. He was whimpering and abject by the time I came to let him go. All the time it was happening I was two people, sadist and masochist. He recovered of course, resumed his swagger or the appearance of it. Years later, when we were seventeen and the same height, he having stopped growing early, I having grown late, we became friends, even shared a study. He took my sister to dances. Once, when he was a cavalry subaltern and I an undergraduate, we met by chance in the Antelope in Eaton Terrace, drank a lot of whisky and went back to the flat I had borrowed and went to bed together. He couldn’t meet my eyes in the morning, afraid of contempt. We’d made him so he couldn’t ever believe in anything again. The destroyed can’t afford illusions. America of course has never experienced defeat.

  The light over the city turned dark violet. I switched from beer to vodka. It wasn’t fanciful to see that Corrado Dusa is today exactly where Alastair Raven was that afternoon in November, 1953. The politician and the prefect both brought low. Dormitory prefect only of course, and we didn’t encourage Alastair to write letters about it. But Alastair could only be friendly, or, let’s be honest, love those who had seen his nakedness; I expect he’s married and lives a lie to his wife. There is that special bond between torturer and victim. They each know something of deep importance about the other.