The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  I did, of course, but merely waved my hand.

  ‘Now it comes to X that Z is getting into what he would call bad company, but there is nothing of course that X can do about it, except watch. After all, how much that is important in life is reduced to the act of watching … I hope I’m not boring you? There comes a moment of drama. Y is kidnapped; he disappears from the scene. X, through his silent attention, knows what few others know – but what I have reason to suppose, Signor Burke, you suspect – that Z is one of those responsible. He knows too where to find Z. But he also knows that by reason of their long separation and the ideological waste land between them that Z can no longer trust him. And he also has reason for wishing to communicate with Y …’

  I looked down at the brown liquid and swirled my glass. It swung round, the whisky, dissolving the reflection of the naked bulb; settled slowly and the reflection re-formed itself.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘And what about son of Y?’

  ‘Son of Y?’ Fuscolo laughed. His laugh was a titter, like someone in the audience rustling sweets in a horror movie. ‘He might be more difficult to contact, don’t you think?’

  ‘Would your young friend know?’

  ‘That question is unworthy of you, Signor Burke. Naive.’

  ‘OK. But why do you come to me?’

  Whatever he said wouldn’t be the truth. Corruption came off him like methane from the marshes. He stank like the corpse of an old coalition.

  ‘Like X, Signor Burke, you are not deeply involved. And, I understand, that like X, you can no longer believe, because you know men for what they are.’

  ‘Flattery,’ I said, but I felt myself warm to him. There can be no flattery like the voice which tells you you have been through Hell. It gives us the message that we would like to believe of ourselves. And the man who has been through hell has nothing to fear. Only I knew, what he might not believe, that all I had done was put my nose through the gates.’

  ‘Can you tell me where to find him?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. The American girl has complicated things. She has come close to unnerving him, but yes, I can put you in touch. That, after all, is what I came to do …’

  The next morning was bright, a day of early summer with deep azure sky, but no extreme heat. Bella came to me in a white dress and sandals. Her lips brushed my cheek. We were at Canova’s in the Piazza del Popolo. She glanced at my Negroni and asked for a cappuccino and a doughnut.

  ‘Is this breakfast?’ she said, ‘or what?’

  I spread my hands. ‘As you like.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I like to lead a well-ordered life. I had breakfast and this is now elevenses. When I went to England the family I stayed with made a great thing of elevenses. Heavens, how boring they were. They lived in Barnes.’

  ‘And had two point three children and a Wolseley; no, these days it would be something different, probably a Fiat or even an Alfa, if they liked Italy. I know.’

  It was what I had run away from, after all; the willows by the Thames, the Atco mowing machine, Charrington’s Toby Ale – Sarah’s parents had lived just like that, though actually in Richmond. England was now for me a country that existed in memory and on celluloid. I felt a foreigner on my infrequent visits. Why, the last man I had voted for was Gaitskell. For a moment I could feel sentimental thinking of it: November mists, racing at Kempton with the far side of the course invisible, television in a room with a fitted carpet. It was a pool out of the main current of the river that was history. But what was happening? The river, as rivers will, was changing its course, eating into the other bank, eroding it, cutting a new and faster channel; the pool was left to stagnate; a sandbank grew up between it and the river.

  ‘One thing I liked about England though,’ Bella said, ‘was that there were no politics. You couldn’t imagine anyone killing anyone else for politics. Why, the family I stayed with wouldn’t even watch politicians on the television. I liked that. On the other hand they would watch golf and tennis and cricket by the hour. Heavens, but it was boring.’

  She frowned. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘no politics. When I think of poor Uncle Corrado … you haven’t heard anything more, have you?’

  ‘The DC Party Executive are meeting today. There’s a certain move. It’s said that Mastagni is going to make a speech in Venice tonight …’

  ‘Mastagni … I thought he had quite retired … I get confused with them all … he must be eighty-five?’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s a back number. Still he has a certain “moral authority”, as they say. The theory is he can no longer have any private personal ambition.’

  I wasn’t actually convinced by that. Mastagni had been one of the early DC barons, a close associate of de Gasperi. Of his generation rather than Dusa’s and Schicchi’s. He had been in all the Governments, right up to the time when Dusa had first made the opening to the Left. Mastagni had been Prime Minister a couple of times at least, but he had made the mistake of associating himself with Tambroni’s Ministry which had been ready to rely on the support of the Neo-Fascists, a move which had seemed sound enough in the context of international politics – it was the Dulles era after all – but which had rebounded domestically. Mastagni had been out, regarded himself as the scapegoat. Still, from without, he’d kept influence, saw himself almost certainly as the Italian de Gaulle, though he had of course nothing like the General’s war-time record to bolster his reputation. Perhaps he was seeing this particular crisis as the last chance he had to spring back into power; his 1958 in fact. Therefore it could be certain that he would have to take a line that diverged from, say, Schicchi’s. I had discussed all this with Antonio. He saw it my way and stressed how I shouldn’t forget that Mastagni, being a baron, had retained a local fief.

  ‘What’s more,’ Antonio had said, ‘in the current electoral situation, a man who can deliver a region, as Mastagni can still deliver the Veneto, isn’t to be sneezed at. He can hardly fail to retain influence, even power. It’s a question of how he sees fit to use it, which side he comes down on. But wait! We may, perhaps, be looking at it too simply. Eventually he might find it more effective, from the point of view of his own interests, to stiffen the Schicchi line rather than rebut it. On the whole, however, I incline to think he will take the alternative line. It is more dramatic, and old men cannot resist drama …’

  I had then telephoned Nico Dusa to give him the news if he hadn’t already had it, and test his reactions …

  ‘Is this, do you think, the response to Father’s letter, which we were very glad you published, just like that?’ he asked. There was a new note of eagerness, amounting to hope in his voice.

  ‘It could well be.’

  ‘I suppose few people have more that they might wish not to have revealed than Mastagni,’ he said.

  ‘There is that, and he is an old man, and like all old men, in a hurry. Only the young can really afford patience …’

  ‘It is lucky then that Father’s captors are young …’

  Bella lit a cigarette. ‘I can’t believe that any of it will work,’ she said. ‘If he is to be freed it must be done in a different way, at a personal level, I am sure of that.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I said.

  Hers hadn’t been Ed Mangan’s view. That was probably a recommendation in itself. He had called me in great excitement, proposing a trip to Venice to hear what Mastagni had to say.

  ‘It’s going to be a great occasion,’ Ed boomed. ‘That old guy is just at the point when he may see the light. Besides, I remember from the old days,’ Ed’s voice took on a lingering note of nostalgia as he pronounced the phrase, ‘Foster used to say he was worth the rest of them put together. And, from this distance in time, Chris, you know old Foster shines forth among our Secretaries of State. People knocked him at the time, but, my God, if we had a man like John Foster Dulles now …’

  His voice died away in admiration. I didn’t ask him how he reconciled this with his new political stance. There
would have been no point in it. The born again can square any circle, any time, no problem.

  ‘All right,’ said Bella, ‘it’s kind of you to come, Chris. Let’s go.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  In the little yellow car, my hand resting on the top of her thigh, I asked again, what she hadn’t answered the day before. ‘Tell me about this uncle …’

  She pulled her lower lip back with two square-ended very white teeth, changed gear and shot past a bus on the inside just before it began to pull towards the pavement and a stop.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ she said, ‘I’ve never seen him. It’s not at all my sort of thing wanting to see him. He’s been shut up for years – thirty, forty, I don’t know. He is, Daddy says, a complete imbecile. Daddy can’t bear seeing him, hasn’t been for – oh I don’t know how long. Uncle Raimundo goes, Uncle Corrado did, sometimes, I think. I never have. I didn’t know he existed for a long time. And then, when I found out, I was horrified. And then curious …’

  She paused. ‘I’m not quite sure where to go next …’

  We were across the river now, on the lower slopes of Monte Mario. Concrete villas sheltered behind high spiked walls. Then we turned a corner and were in an area of apartment blocks, too close together, pressing on each other, but with trees – cypresses and pines – fighting for life between them, and the balconies hung with red flowers. You had the feeling that life here was a struggle for breath, but an expensive one. There were no children playing in the streets. Every second gate had a sign Cave Canem. The bars at the corner of each street all proclaimed that they were also pasticcerie.

  ‘It’s somewhere up here,’ she said.

  A long blank white wall suddenly stretched out. Alone among the walls in the quarter, nothing grew on it, neither flower nor greenery.

  ‘This must be it,’ she said. ‘It was built as a convent, I think.’

  We had to wait a long time in a dank little room, with religious tracts on the cheap table fromthe department store, and a crucifix on every wall. The life went out of Bella as we sat there; her fingers moved over her dress, smoothing invisible creases. A nun had shown us into the room, with murmurs of inquiry and mutterings over the unsuitability of our visit. I lit a cigarette in defiance of the notice prohibiting it. Ten minutes passed, perhaps a quarter of an hour. The clock on the wall was electric, giving off a low throaty hum, no tick; like an insect. The door opened and a man came in.

  He introduced himself as the Director, offering a handshake firm by will rather than nature. He exuded unreliability like the manager of a suburban cinema, touching his wisp of a moustache and saying, ‘You have come at an unfortunate time. That’s one thing. Your uncle Guido has had one of his bad turns. Sometimes he is conversable. Not just now. Really you would gain nothing by seeing him. Anyway, signorina, there is another consideration. Do you have anything in writing? From your father perhaps or one of your uncles? By way of authorization rather than identification, you understand. I would hardly require the latter – apart from your word for it, I can see clearly enough that you are a Dusa – but we do have an understanding – the clinic and your father and his brothers – that we admit no one else without express authorization. You comprehend? I am sorry. Desolated. But that is how it is. And anyway, as I say, the time is hardly suitable. He is not well. Come back next month with the proper authority.’

  Bella pleaded, argued, fluttered her eyes. Pointless. The Director could not be moved.

  ‘All right,’ she said at last, conceding, ‘but tell me something Doctor, this sort of illness of my Uncle’s … how does it come about?’

  ‘For me,’ he said, ‘it is first and foremost an illness of the spirit. He does not wish, has never wished, to recover. It is an illness of withdrawal, which can become total.’

  ‘And how do you treat it?’

  ‘How can we? We keep him physically well. That is important. Occasionally, from time to time, in the past, we have stimulated him. With a little electric shock, you understand. Oh quite a small one. Enough to rearrange and enliven the brain. It can be effective. Six months ago he was reading the newspapers. But it does not last. Then there are drugs, they are necessary too. But for a beautiful girl like you, signorina, this sort of talk, this sort of place, cannot mean much. You are in your Springtime, your unthinking Spring. Enjoy it, young lady. Take her away, signore, and let her smell the flowers.’

  ‘Is there any chance that he will recover?’ Bella persisted.

  ‘Oh if he wanted to get well, perhaps he could, even now. But …’ He spread his hands, palms open, and smiled.

  We got no further. He was all compliment and evasion. We left, Bella pale and defeated. I’d never seen her look like that.

  We made our way down a long whitewashed corridor, behind a nun jangling a bunch of keys. Doors off the corridor had little spy-hole windows. Then to the left there was a courtyard. Three or four figures, dressed in blankets, were shuffling round it, watched by two lounging, sallow-faced men in white jackets, one of whom wore boots to the knee. Their faces were quite without expression as they watched the patients.

  The booted one, who was holding a piece of water-melon in his huge paw, shouted, ‘Come on now, no stopping, no lingering. You’re out for exercise, not to sniff the flowers.’ He spat out some melon-seeds and rubbed his mouth with the back of his wrist.

  ‘Exercise is very important …’ said the nun. ‘It is part of the Director’s programme of physical fitness. You have no idea how unfit and useless the patients used to be until he took over.’

  She unlocked a metal grille and led us into a narrow dark room under the gateway; then opened a small double-locked wicket-gate, let into the huge double gates, and we stepped into the sunshine.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ I said. We drove down Monte Mario in silence. Then she said, ‘Stop a moment, there’s Uncle Raimundo …’

  I put the brakes on. She called out. A grey man in a shabby linen suit turned from the window of the antiquarian bookshop he had been contemplating, and raised the cane be had been leaning on. His skin was all papery, and when he spoke, his voice was hoarse.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he said.

  FOUR

  Raimundo

  MY DIARY lapsed, became a series of jottings, a feeble ill-rooted plant; like our State. That is, in a sense, the whole problem of Italy, that we have never authenticated our State. And so, those with a grievance or a mere temperamental disaffection, resort to the bomb, the gun; just as my native Calabria was always rich in political brigands in the days of the Bourbons; and then, after the Risorgimento, the same brigands re-appeared, now calling themselves Borbo-niste.

  But perhaps the cause of my falling silent was more immediate. I think it may have been the letters Corrado began to send us from his prison. They challenged me, those letters, and in the face of such a challenge, I relapsed into my numbed condition.

  I couldn’t believe they were anything but authentic, and yet, on reflection, how they substantiated what I have written in the first paragraph of this, my long delayed but at last resumed reflections on, and account of, this terrible business. For what did Corrado do, in these letters, but deny the State that he had helped to create? Instead he was turning back to that eternal Italian reality, the only thing we are prepared to trust, the Family.

  Even though the Family, in the person of Bernardo, had acted the part of Judas.

  (But of course Christ forgave Judas more easily and completely than he forgave Caiaphas, and so Corrado with Bernardo.)

  I am different, spoiled perhaps, victim of a residual faith in humanity. I have these principles, certainly vague and feeble enough, but nevertheless there, implanted in me by my liberal education, and these in fact deny the over-riding virtue of that Italian reality, the Family; and instead assert the claims of the State. For whatever else it may contain, however it may itself be corrupted, it is the State, not the Family, which exists as the means of guarding civil life; and that is, aft
er all, what we (if not the anthropologists) mean by Civilization. It is a product of the State. Without the sanction of the State, we are back in the days of the robber barons. Isn’t this what Aquinas meant by his justification of the State, that, for fallen man, it is the sine qua non of civil life? And here was Corrado, in these letters, denying the validity of that State to which he had apparently consecrated his life; denying its ambiguous Reason, and refusing to push that consecration to the point of self-sacrifice.

  Ah, but there is another, more throbbing, note, the voice of humanity.

  What could be more moving than the pain of Corrado’s letters, their revelation of a soul which felt itself so hopelessly abandoned – and yet kept hoping – kept hoping and scheming and refusing to surrender? And the letters were complemented in my sympathetic imagination by the sight of my American across the courtyard engaged on his wholly private battle with despair. In my dreams, shot through with images from the Inferno, the American’s face continually merged into Corrado’s, and both, who had thus become one, were sucked into a morass of grey mud, watched over by serpents; they sank down, mouth opened in a scream that would be choked by the mud, and at last only the tips of their straining fingers showed above the glistening surface.

  I took tomy bed for three days, after the first letter. I tried to sleep, drugged, through the telephone and the silence that followed. Occasionally I rose to feed the cat, make myself tea (was anyone giving Corrado the tea on which he had come to depend?) and then I looked always across the yard to this American, whom in a sense I had come to adopt. If he came through, then … I watched him as more faithful men have watched the sky for ominous birds. He sat at his jerkily-moving typewriter, he raised his glass; once the boy visited him, and I saw him fish in a jacket with that unmistakable movement that precedes the exchange of money. Once too, he smiled across the courtyard to me, a smile that contained a wealth of that irony that can come to a man who goes on without hope; it is a very arrogant irony of course.