The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  ‘You think they may be ready to compromise?’

  ‘In the end they are politicians too; their demands will be moderated. But such compromise does not exclude execution.’

  The beer, coffee, and sandwiches arrived. I took a swig; metallic.

  ‘How did you get on with the brothers Dusa?’

  ‘They have had a letter from their father. Direct.’

  ‘And you’ve seen it?’

  ‘Not only that. I have a copy.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Here you are.’

  I sat on the edge of the desk, holding my beer glass in both hands, for the moment happy not to feel the need to drink.

  ‘This is magnificent,’ said Antonio. ‘And we can publish this? Yes? Superb. You realize, it blows everything up; it may even save him …’

  So even Antonio was inconsistent. He was certain, at one level, that he had been right all along: they would kill Dusa. And in one sense he didn’t mind at all. Dusa might be the best of the bunch, but it was a bunch that had served the Italian people pretty ill. On the other hand, Antonio was also a man of simple decency. He couldn’t condone terrorism, even where he applauded the cause. In his heart he was afraid of where even the most idealistic movement could lead us, once it took to violence. And he feared violence, whereas I … I could not look on it without envy. And I wanted to understand it, while Antonio knew it already, felt it within himself and controlled it …

  Meanwhile Antonio said, ‘I forgot, you had a telephone call. This number …’

  I glanced at the paper: Bella’s number, but for the moment I ignored it. The revelation of Antonio’s divided response was too important. I said, ‘All the same if we help them to negotiate where does that leave the Party? Won’t it strengthen all the extremists and attract still more of the young away from the Party and towards them? Isn’t that one of the things we have long been afraid of, and isn’t the fear even more urgent now …?’

  Antonio filled his pipe. ‘Everything you say is true.’ He gave me a frank, manly – yes of Antonio I can use the word, manly – smile. ‘Only if we are in a position, you and I, to do something which could save his life. Well, are we going to be able to look at ourselves in the shaving-mirror if we don’t? And I’m the wrong age for growing a beard. You have to be very young or very old to go in for that sort of self-deception without harming yourself …’

  I saw his weakness, even though I found myself unwilling to argue it with him. Affection prevented that. All the same it should have done something to my respect for Antonio, to find that here, in what was not even the last resort, he was ready to put his own peace of mind, even what you might call a sense of honour, before what his reason told him was politically, and therefore historically, right. What did it matter whether he could face himself? Apart from immediate considerations, all the logic said Dusa had to die. Things had gone too far for any other outcome to be anything but a farce.

  Which didn’t mean that it mightn’t be right to use his letter. After all, I didn’t believe it would do anything to budge Schicchi.

  I said, playing it from both ends, ‘OK, Antonio. Here’s Dusa’s letter. You take it and use it how you think best. As for me, I’m going to call my girl. That’s who this call was from.’

  ‘Oh Christopher, you and your girls …’

  Antonio knows me too well; or thinks he does.

  Bella said to me, ‘Can I trust you?’

  She had picked me up in her car and said, ‘My office think I am going to the dentist. I thought we could go out of Rome.’

  She had driven me along the Appia Antica, first past the high-walled, iron-barred, Doberman-and-electronic-device-guarded villas of the profiteers, then past the whores sitting in their Volkswagens – the years when they sat in the autumn by bonfires were long past – then turning left, through scruffy and straggling suburban villages and up into the little hills, the Castelli. The sun was shining, flowers were everywhere, lakes were deep blue. We stopped at a trattoria called ‘Il Paradiso’ and ate fettucine al burro and lake trout, and drank the house vino scelto. Rome seemed a long way away, though we had driven for only forty minutes.

  ‘I used to live here,’ I said, ‘when I first came to Italy.’

  It had been a different Italy, a different Christopher. I had stayed with an American poet and his Irish girl, in a villa overhung by mimosa trees. The garden had been full of roses, the house covered with geraniums, hyacinths too. I remember the girl coming in from the rain, her arms dripping with flowers. I had been writing poetry myself then, that self long buried. Right enough. You look back to Ancient Greece and in one century, I forget which, you find just fragments of the soldier-poet Archilochus, and any version of him is a reconstruction of fragments, and there’s nothing else; or you look even at Catullus and see how little there is, and nothing else that begins to be like him, and then you look at now; at all the verses published by all the University Presses of the USA, and you begin to feel sick. You feel very sick if you have any decency, and even sicker when you compare these and their distance from any physical reality with what is physical reality for most people. And then, you look at the system that supports all these pricks who write these verses and ask what they contribute themselves. And then you are not surprised by their distance from reality but you are still more disgusted. I started to feel that way about myself. It was about then I joined the Party.

  I started explaining all this to Bella, but I didn’t get far. It wasn’t her sort of thing.

  ‘What happened to the poet and the Irish girl?’ she said.

  ‘She bred children, he continued to write verses.’

  ‘Were they happy?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  That’s the thing about Bella; she still believes in questions like that. So, of course, did my wife Sarah.

  For a long time I have been a good Party member. I’ve accepted – having first accepted that the Party was the Way – I’ve accepted step by step its retreat from a position where it was demanding a new start, to where we are now. I’ve accepted the Gramscian theory that we must accommodate the non-proletarian classes – how should I not, having inserted myself into the class of intellectuals with our historic function?

  And it’s all going wrong.

  I couldn’t tell Bella anything of that.

  Instead we talked about her cousins. I asked her what they thought had happened to Bernardo. She said, ‘They are afraid …’

  ‘Of what he’s done or of what has happened to him?’

  ‘Of both. But perhaps more of the former …’

  She looked me straight in the eyes as she said that, and then quickly at her plate again and began taking some flesh off the trout’s backbone, with neat, certain movements.

  I said, ‘You think his disappearance is connected with his father’s capture, don’t you?’

  ‘It must be,’ she said.

  She didn’t have much time for Bernardo, thought he was silly, given over to theories; vain and weak also; anyone who flattered him could do what they liked with him; and he had no sense of family decency or duty.

  ‘He’s a bit of a rat,’ she said.

  Of course I’m nearly schizophrenic. I know that, have done so for a long time. I must be. Else how could Bella’s complete indifference to everything I think important, that is, her absolute mindlessness, make her seem more attractive to me. Her mouth never looked more desirable than when she was uttering these meaningless and conventional platitudes.

  Then she said, ‘Christopher, I want you to do something for me. There’s someone I want to see. He’s in a lunatic asylum. Will you come with me? I don’t want to go there alone.’

  She told me about her Uncle Guido, and I knew why I had been chosen to accompany her. Foreigners don’t really count. Even one as Italianized as myself isn’t one hundred per cent real.

  We published Dusa’s letter to his family. It aroused a good deal more speculation. Would there be a successor whi
ch actually named the scandals? Were the revelations for real? We were inundated with calls, pretty fierce ones coming from DC headquarters. The police descended on us. I had telephoned Nico Dusa and he had thanked me and told me to say straight out that he had given me the letter. We published that fact too. He was afraid that they would stop up the channel and no more letters would be received direct from his father. On the other hand he agreed with me when I pointed out that they could scarcely welcome an allegation that they were coming between the captured man and his family because they were afraid either of the truth or of the public sympathy which was attaching itself to the beleaguered family. Where the family was concerned the DC bosses were on tricky ground. They couldn’t say openly what they no doubt had come to believe: that the ground had shifted and, in a sense, Dusa, his family and his kidnappers all now wanted the same thing – negotiations and a settlement; that they were therefore objectively on the same side, and that the DC hierarchy, the PCI bosses and of course the Police were united against them. No, they couldn’t admit to that; they had to continue to treat Dusa as their potential martyr and actual hero while doing all in their power to obstruct the course of action which he was so impassionedly advocating. Of course they talked of torture, drugs and brain-washing; that wasn’t the way his letters read. They were authentic Dusa, cool, crafty and compromising; in every sense of that word.

  Certainly negotiations of a sort were under way. But they were the wrong sort of negotiations; negotiations about negotiations and confined within the politically respectable class. Which I myself was on the point of leaving.

  * * *

  I was going home in a night that was still warm, through the narrow streets, now cleared of motor-cars and strangely silent, around the Pantheon. Apart of a city that had become myself – there, in that apartment block, my friend Tony had gassed himself, there, in that bar, I used to drink through the night with a girl-friend called Vlashka, an improbable Pole, there I saw the carabinieri beat a young man to death, and ran away in fear which turned to shame on the steps of that bar there, but when I got back, all had gone and I could never be certain it had really happened; a lot of things in my life have long been in that indetermined condition.

  Through a narrow alley, above which the houses almost meet so that it is only too easy to steal your neighbour’s shirt from the lines of washing stretched across the gulf to dry. Rome, which goes on and on – that doorway there has seen, even to my knowledge, three men knifed to death: one in the quattrocento, one in the days when the French revolutionary troops threw out the Papalists, and one the week before last. All for the same reason; they knew things dangerous to know and could not be trusted to keep them to themselves.

  I turned into my own doorway, rounded five flights of stairs and heard breathing. It sat ahead of me in the dark. Not, as it might often have been, a girl. Slightly asthmatic. There was no staircase light. The moon was too far round to creep in at the slit that served as a window at this level. I stopped. The wheezing was held in check.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I called, softly.

  ‘You come back late, Signor Burke.’

  The words were forced out, grudgingly. A dry salvaged voice.

  There was a shuffling. The figure was rising to its feet. Though a couple of steps above me, it came only level with my chin. I was aware of the outline of a hat’s brim just below eye level.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said.

  ‘Oh I don’t want anything. Not for myself. I thought we might talk. Yes, I am alone …’

  There was something caustic about the voice, a note of superiority despite its flat, rather common, timbre.

  ‘Might we?’ I said. ‘You think I should want to?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘In that case you might let me past to open the door.’

  ‘You forgot to lock it,’ my visitor said, ‘but I thought it more polite to wait on the stairs.’

  I pushed past him, almost without the tension that the possibility of a knife in the ribs was breeding. All the same, I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

  He was as small as he had seemed, and slight, in the shabby suit of a decayed clerk. The hat, a Trilby as I had thought, stained and worn.

  ‘I’m called Enzo Fuscolo,’ he said. ‘You won’t have heard of me, I think.’

  ‘No.’

  He was looking at me searchingly.

  ‘You don’t remember a bar in Parioli, just off Piazza

  Ungheria, ten days ago either?’

  ‘No.’

  I took a bottle of whisky from the cupboard and two tumblers.

  ‘Not for me, thank you,’ he said.

  ‘As you choose.’

  I poured myself one, which I needed.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was talking to Raimundo Dusa …’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ah, I have interested you at last.’

  I sat down in one of the deck-chairs with the tumbler held in both hands. I stretched out my legs …

  ‘Up to a point,’ I said. ‘There are a lot of Dusas around these days. Too many of them, all except the ones I might be interested in meeting. Speaking as a journalist. Perhaps you are going to offer me an interview with one of them …’

  He smiled. His smile worked on only one side of the face, the side that wasn’t marked by a long scar that ran almost up to his eye.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

  I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was sizing me up, and playing with me at the same time. There was now no sense of danger, and, as I reflected later (with some surprise) not even any real sense of puzzlement either; and that was certainly odd, because I had after all no idea who he was, where he had come from or why he was there. Yet I sat sipping my whisky, and had surrendered the initiative to him, even though he had come tomy apartment in this way. I ought to have been challenging him to account for himself; but I wasn’t.

  ‘It’s understandable, of course, that you are not interested in Raimundo Dusa. Why should you be? He is a dead man, quite dead. Even as a symbol of a sort of Italy, a sort of civilization if you like, that is vanished, he is of no interest. Of no importance. Nothing, after all, is as dead as a dead Liberal. I’m sure you agree with me on that point.’

  He smiled again.

  ‘Yes, Raimundo is a dead man. Whereas, I, I, Enzo Fuscolo, am a ghost. Much more significant. And, Signor Burke, I know quite a lot about you. We have watched you and identified danger. You are consumed by what? Hatred? Disgust? It doesn’t really matter what, does it? And it doesn’t matter either who I mean by “we”, does it? Not for the moment anyway. I know all about your interest in the Dusa case too. And that is what is really urgent, isn’t it ..?’

  He paused, an open invitation to speak. I waved my hand and stretched out for the whisky and topped up my glass …

  ‘And there are only two Dusas who count. Corrado and Bernardo. Yes? And, as a journalist, you would like to meet them, talk to them, wouldn’t you? Not that I’m promising you that, yet. No. Still, one thing you must admit about this case. It reveals, doesn’t it, how the personal and the public penetrate each other …’

  He was speaking like a man who had been silent for a long time.

  ‘And that fascinates you, doesn’t it? The case is beginning to obsess you. It’s like a microcosm of Italy, and, for a long time, Signor Burke, you have been obsessed by my country. And what happens when personal inclination and public – what shall we say? – obligation, even interest, pull in opposite directions? That interests you too, doesn’t it …?’

  I sighed: ‘I don’t follow you at all. Not at all. Look, it’s late. I assume you have come here for some reason other than just letting me know that you know a bit about me.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘but it is necessary to get one’s orientations first, and, as I say, that is difficult when there is a sort of clash between personal inclination and public duty. You see, Signor Burke, I have a problem. I would like to lay it bef
ore you … I have your permission?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Suppose … we will set it out like this … suppose. You have a man of fairly humble birth but with ambition and with a certain ardour of soul. He is an idealist, this man. He commits himself to a cause, to what he conceives to be a great cause. He is no time-server, as so many who lend their voices to the cause are, but a true idealist, a true believer. Because of his constancy he is broken when the cause dies. When it is overcome. He nearly dies – for the cause – but he does not quite die. He lingers, partly alive. I say, only partly, because, in his ardour for the cause, he has destroyed all other natural affections. He has no family, for they have disowned him, no friends, for his true friends are dead, and those he thought friends have proved traitors. He survives, just a shell. True, he continues to work for the old cause, but he does so without hope, for this cause is itself in the same condition. So, there we are. The man’s life is in effect over, and if anything sustains him, it is bitterness, his sense that what was good has been betrayed. Then he comes on a young man who seems to him his own youth reborn, someone with the same innocence and the same ardour, the same commitment to action. Only this young man’s ideals are perverted and they, the old man and the young one, find themselves separated. Time passes. The old man lives a life which would be quite empty except for his memories and the fact that, from time to time, men of power find it useful, even necessary, to employ him. This means that he remains – oh, only vestigially – engaged in affairs. He has in a sense a patron. This patron, who certainly uses him reluctantly and who has no more cause to love him than he to love the patron in turn, becomes a man of great power, even though the new political structures make it necessary for him to disguise the power he wields, which is of course one reason why he makes use of our … what shall we call him, Signor Burke? We cannot call him “our hero”. There are no heroes in our modern world. Let us be conventional. Let us just call him X. Yes, in the end, I like the idea of calling him X. And the patron we shall call Y. And the young man Z. XYZ. It is after all appropriate. What are politics but the algebraic expression of life, of our ideals and desires? You can’t find that too metaphysical?’