The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  There were of course numerous brothers and sisters – she, Renata, was the second youngest. They divided into the good and the bad – two of her sisters worked in shops, one in a factory, one brother was a clerk, the others were unemployed. As for her, she had done well enough in elementary school; only, there was no point in it. No point at all; it could only lead to drudgery. Look at her sister Nina, twenty, married with two kids, herself working in a grocer’s shop, while her husband sat around the mean caffès of the borgata. What sort of life was that? And Nina also had been beautiful.

  She put her long forefinger to the corner of her lips, which, after she pronounced these words, the epitaph of a brief summer, remained slightly apart. She would not yet let life pull down the corners of her mouth or roughen these soft and shapely fingers …

  And meanwhile, all through her childhood, the cinema and the magazines insisted that there was a different world, a world indeed of which she had already caught glimpses. When she was twelve or thirteen she used to play truant from school and take a bus to the Centre and gaze at the beautiful women.

  How had she started? Well, it had been her brother Mario who had started her. Mario was very like her – they had often been taken for twins. So he had early found himself an object of attraction; there were always men on the lookout for pretty little boys … (for a moment she caressed the memory of those first evenings when Mario, giggling in a corner with her, had told her his experiences). Naturally he had not refused. It was always so much easier for a boy, so much less shaming, because, well, people didn’t find it out so easily. Not that she felt ashamed – it was a service, wasn’t it? Anyway Mario had shown her how to set about it; and it was Mario who had introduced her to her Toni. She and Mario and Toni were a group. I must understand, Toni protected the pair of them. That was it. She hadn’t had a choice; and she smiled and kissed me on the cheek.

  What after all had she and Mario to sell but their beauty?

  And again her fingers flickered to her cheek for reassurance …

  Of course, if she could get into films …

  Her phrases came to me like the steps of an old dance routine in a dingy theatre, where the plush has faded, the lighting sheds no illusion, and the dancer believes neither in the dance nor in the audience. Yet the hackneyed echoes of nineteenth-century novels, the sad material of too many poor movies, merely emphasized to me what all the events of the past weeks had been bent on proving, that life is a charade played for real. On one level we may know, with utmost certainty, that it is quite meaningless; even so, pain, stabbing the heart, denying the body sleep, mockingly insists on the significance of actions.

  How can you deny the reality of something which hurts?

  And, as for Renata, it was all real to her. She wasn’t living her life, where others might read it, in poor novels to which they gave only a cursory voyeur’s attention, but in her undeniable emotions. And people still lived and hurt as she did. Her path of escape would narrow, might become no wider than the thin corridor that ran along the inside of the cloister to Guido’s cell. Of course she might escape – as her greenish eyes sought a way out, she might indeed be one of the ‘lucky ones’ – make her way from indigent materialism to a luxury that would be as empty, as devoid of anything but the will to possess. The will to possess that is the poison ivy of the heart. She had beauty and youth; she would lose them both, and, while employing them in this clumsy search for escape from the mean realities of her family’s life, she would destroy the capacity for love, the growth and realization of which can alone cheat (or give the illusion of cheating) what else we learn of our wolfish natures, can alone compensate for the loss of youth and beauty …

  And of course her drab story was exciting too, because simply to look at her excited me.

  ‘You don’t know anyone in films?’

  Her voice quivered with desire, as my hands had done. And of course there was no reason why she shouldn’t make that sort of escape. She would make a fine slave-girl in a Roman Epic. But to help her to that world …

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I’m old, out-of-touch, incapable. As you know.’

  I rose, a little unsteadily, from the bed, and crossed to the window, pushed the shutter aside and looked out. The day was touched with evening; for a moment, silence; as if in the country. The soft zephyr on the face. I should have been at Elena’s an hour back – I had forgotten all about her. I glanced at my watch. Mastagni was due to speak in the next hour. I looked round. Renata was straightening the bedclothes. She said, stretching over the pillow, ‘You’re not so old …’

  ‘Flattery …’

  I took some more money from my pocket.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘do something for me. Don’t take anyone else tonight. Go and see your Toni. Have a good dinner and make real love to him. I’ll think about films, there are people I used to know. Here’s my card …’

  I couldn’t fail to detect greed in the way she snatched it.

  ‘Dr Raimundo Dusa,’ she said. ‘Fine. I can call you?’

  ‘Call me when you like,’ I said.

  I descended the rickety stairs, past the stiff Sardinian concierge, and out into the gathering twilight. I found a taxi and gave the driver Corrado’s address.

  ‘I must be mad,’ I said to myself, ‘to give my address to a young whore. I who try to keep everyone out of my life.’

  But the truth was, I didn’t care, and, as the taxi wove through the traffic jams of the warm night, her face stayed with me, cutting across the neon signs of the bars, and I pictured her move with the resentful elegance of the caged cat. If nothing else, she would enter my dreams, my long nocturnal imaginings, where life moved faster …

  I had arrived at Elena’s before it struck me how Renata had shown no recognition of my name; yet Dusa is uncommon enough.

  Nico was alone in the drawing-room when I was shown in, standing aloof in the shadows, engaged in cleaning a cigarette-holder. He looked up from the task a moment, ‘Mamma will be down quite soon. I made her rest for a bit. She’s at the end of her tether.’

  ‘It’s hardly surprising.’

  I sat down. The heavily furnished room was gloomier than ever. An ormolu clock of the Second Empire period ticked dully. When it chimed the quarter the note sounded hollow.

  Nico glanced at his watch. ‘The clock’s slow,’ he said.

  ‘What time is Mastagni due to speak?’

  ‘About now.’

  ‘We can’t expect anything from him, can we?’

  ‘No.’

  How many silences there are, which stretch their slow length through our lives: the silence of embarrassment, the silence of boredom, which shows itself in the glazed eye, the restless fidgeting, the silence (true perfect silence) of satisfied love, the long heavy silence of death, the sharp silence of apprehension, when the senses stand on the alert. Which was ours now.

  Nico had aged and hardened during the ordeal. I remembered what Corrado had said of him, that he was the Italy of the Past, cynical and shrewd, who would make an admirable Governor of the Bank if things held steady …

  I got to my feet and strolled over to the window and stood a long time looking obliquely out on the terrace. I could see wasps flying in and out under the eaves up to my right.

  ‘You’ve got a wasps’ nest there I think.’

  ‘We tried to clear it out. I thought they had gone. We’ll have to do it again. I’m sorry, Uncle,’ he said, ‘I’m not really able to think much, to make conversation with you, or anything. I should have told you at once, we’ve had another letter from Father. I don’t have it here, Mamma took it upstairs … but … it’s concerned wholly with his funeral arrangements. He has given up. He says that it is to be private, that no representative of the State, or of his Party, which has abandoned him, is to be present. He absolutely forbids it. He wants only to be surrounded by those who have been true to him, whom he loves, his family. That’s why I made Mamma lie down. It’s all over, and that clown Masta
gni is making his important speech. Too late. Too late. Even if he does say something. As for the rest, I sent Sandro out. I couldn’t stand having his pained futility beside me. I told him to go to play tennis.’

  ‘That was cruel, Nico.’

  ‘They have done nothing, nothing but talk. We have all done nothing but talk, even you, Uncle. I have done nothing but talk myself.’

  ‘But what could we have done …?’

  ‘Oh I know …’

  He crossed the room and switched on the big old-fashioned wireless set. ‘There will be some news,’ he said, ‘soon.’

  There was only music, and he turned it low. Richard Strauss, I think … odd how the mind continues to register the unimportant detail.

  ‘I wish it was over,’ he said, ‘and we could begin living again. What do you think Bernardo is doing? Is he, too, still alive? Or have they disposed of him? Sandro and I went to see an English journalist Bella has taken up with. Did you know that? Useless. I can hardly think beyond the personal. Do you know at one time I was resentful that when I suggested to Father I might go into politics, he didn’t encourage me. How would I stand if I had? And how do they feel, you think, these zealots who have him and who are going to kill him? For what? An idea? An ideology? To give it a grander name. We have had too much of ideology.’

  His whole torment was that of the man of business, the practical man who is the exemplar of our civilization, suddenly confronted by the realization that there are those who don’t play by the same rules, who are indeed governed by an idea, which they are ready to turn into action.

  ‘What do they want, what do they really want?’

  ‘I doubt if they could tell you,’ I said. ‘Surely Bernardo tried and failed?’

  ‘Oh often enough.’

  ‘Yes, when it comes to that all they can do is spout out words, slogans, which one must admit are perfectly meaningless. But, and this is where the practical man like you, Nico, or like your Uncle Ettore, goes astray, fails to understand them, their motivation is not merely verbal. No, and it’s not absurd either. Possibly the only member of the family who can really understand it is your father himself. But I have glimmerings. You see it’s based on feelings, and though I don’t have any feelings strong enough to precipitate action, yet I sufficiently share these feelings to have some understanding of how they could lead even to such dreadful action as this.’

  I took a turn about the room, lit (unthinkingly) a Toscano, wondered if it was worth saying anything. It was almost dark outside now, the scent of the oleanders strong. A family should have been rising from their supper together.

  ‘So often those who turn to violence are among the best,’ I said. ‘That’s a common enough phenomenon, even though it’s equally true that any movement of this sort is sure to attract its share of psychopaths and those wretches whose only pleasure lies in destruction. And one must realize too that moments of this sort are essentially responsive. That’s obvious. They are a form of reaction to things as they are. Look how we live today, in this Western Europe which is increasingly a copy of the United States. On the one hand we have no values except material ones. We have abolished religion – oh we pay lip service to it, nobody more so than the barons of your father’s party – but, in effect we have abolished it, because none of us in the West – I might more truthfully say in all Europe and America – believes that there is anything beyond this life.’

  ‘Surely that’s not true. There are many who still believe in life after death. Look at Mamma.’

  I waved my hand. ‘There are survivors,’ I said, ‘certainly. That doesn’t change the fact that we expect complete gratification in this life. We all seek earthly crowns. And we have come to identify the summum bonum with material satisfaction. That’s the whole point of the consumer society. Now what’s the consequence?’

  I was not sure that Nico was really listening to me. He had begun fiddling with the knobs of the wireless again. It was, as I said, an old wireless, an electrically powered one, and tuning was always a problem. We had given it, I remembered, to my mother in 1950, Holy Year. Had it been that she might hear the Pope’s broadcasts? Yes, that was right – she had suffered from shingles, and had been unable to attend Mass at St Peter’s, or at San Giovanni, and we had bought this fine German set as, I supposed, compensation.

  ‘There are two consequences,’ I said. ‘First, many feel a lack. What is offered seems inadequate, not so much in quantity – these are usually people who have been well enough supplied with material goods – but in quality. They feel there must be more to life than this getting and spending. At the same time, consequence two, there are still many in our society who have what seems a quite inadequate share even of what is offered. They ought therefore to have more; social justice demands it. And curiously the same people experience both feelings, simultaneously, even though it is perfectly obvious that they are incompatible, contradictory. Hence perhaps the violence of their acts.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense to me.’

  ‘No, but sound banking doesn’t to them. For them money is a symbol which is worshipped as a god. The curious thing about this terrorism is that it is completely modern. We have seen nothing like it before, which may be why it is so hard to deal with.’

  ‘I don’t follow that, and I can’t quite agree either that we have no ideals in conventional society. We do surely – democracy, liberty, social justice, they’re not just abstractions.’

  ‘Aren’t they? Are you so sure? But what I was going to say about the novelty of this terrorism is simple enough. Of course we’ve had terrorism in the past. But that terror has always been aimed at something specific, clearly identifiable – an independent Italy, Poland, Ireland, the establishment of a Calvinist State, or the re-establishment of a Catholic one. The object is plain enough – you can tell when it has been achieved. But now, this time, it is quite different … these young men, they are pursuing a chimera, something that will never be achieved, the Just Society, and so the failure will always be evident; the Revolution never comes, for it is always perverted …’

  ‘And for this chimera, as you call it, they will kill my father?’

  ‘Yes, Nico, they will …’

  I put my Toscano to my lips, but, forgotten in my eloquence, it had extinguished itself. I got nothing but a cold sour taste. As I took out matches to relight it, the door opened and Elena came in.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I shall go to see His Holiness. He has granted me an audience.’

  The wireless crackled to life.

  ‘Here is a report from our correspondent in Venice of the important speech made this evening by the Honourable Mastagni …’

  It had, said the announcer, been an evening pregnant with excitement. The political temperature was running high in the whole of the Veneto, and beyond it, all over Italy, as the veteran statesman took to the rostrum to make what had been heralded as a significant intervention in the Dusa affair … He had spoken for more than an hour, to repeated cheering …

  But the veteran orator’s language had been even more than usually opaque. At the end nobody was quite certain what he had meant. Whether it was a clarion call to action or whether he approved the Government’s course and merely thought they should be more ready to shout loudly …

  ‘It’s quite clear,’ said Nico, switching off the set, ‘no one has bought him yet. The Honourable Mastagni is still for sale.’

  FIVE

  Tomaso

  TOMASO SPENT these days waiting. He was off duty and commanded to ‘be himself’. It was an order he found puzzling. How could he be what he didn’t know?

  Waiting, he would have passed much of the day lying in bed if he had not been afraid of what that implied. He very strongly didn’t want that, and he found the narrow cell, with the peeling plaster and the naked bulb, turned his thoughts in that direction. He couldn’t help it; there was nowhere to sit or lie but the bed.

  So, he went out into the streets.

  Hi
s room was high up in a tenement in the bleak area near the railway station, an area that had never recovered from what it had been built to do, which was to house the first workers, clerks, builders, navvies, waiters, small employees, lured to Rome by the city’s sudden expansion after 1870, its transformation from being a souvenir of the Ancient World remoulded by the Renaissance Popes into a celebration of what was in so many ways a vainglorious fraud, the liberal monarchy of the Piedmontese. But it was still a quarter of transients, where questions were politely left unsaid.

  Tomaso would go down to the bar on the corner early in the morning, and sit there with a newspaper before him on the rickety metal table till the sun was high. Long before then there were always half a dozen or so unemployed youths hanging round the pin-ball machines, gloomily joking, eyeing the girls who swung past on the pavement. The boys bulged in their jeans, bracelets shone on their wrists; the studs gleamed on their leather jackets. For the first days Tomaso was afraid that they would speak to him. The thought was deeply embarrassing; how could he reply? But it never happened; they were too sunk in the apathy of their own being.

  He sat there and watched a yellow dog squirming round the newspaper kiosk. It lifted its leg, with a gesture that was at the same time furtive and precise, on each of the four corners of the kiosk. Then it began rootling among the cabbage leaves in the gutter.