The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  Someone passing Tomaso’s table said, ‘Inmy opinion he is already dead. These letters are not his …’

  The words hung behind the speaker like the curtain of plastic strips that trailed over his shoulder as he entered the bar.

  In two days Tomaso would be back on duty.

  He found himself remembering the only time he had been in hospital. The antiseptic atmosphere had appealed to him, and he could have fallen in love, in the most conventional way, with at least one of his nurses, if he hadn’t reflected that she wasn’t always the brisk efficient girl in uniform, but, out of it and in other clothes, would have the same complicated importunity as he was sure other girls had. It was a frame of mind that might have led him to consort with whores, if he hadn’t been repelled by the certainty of squalor.

  And yet he hadn’t made his bed since he moved into the narrow room.

  The best moment of his life had been when Dusa had said ‘yes’, he would write the letter. The Professor had assured him there would be no problem – Tomaso hadn’t been certain.

  What struck him though was the dignity with which the decision had invested Dusa.

  At the moment he said ‘yes’, he was sitting at an oblique angle to the table they had given him. For some minutes, ten, twenty, Tomaso couldn’t be sure, he had sat brooding, his head couched in his hand, one elbow resting on the table. Tomaso could see his lips moving. There was an odd quirk of humour to the mouth that he hadn’t been prepared for, a twisted irony in its lines. He hadn’t noticed the irony at first, and now, with only these lines visible (the rest of the face being hidden), lines that became, second by second, as it were, less lips than some sort of representative spirit twisted in an arabesque of ironic enquiry that cast doubt on their actions, now Tomaso, who had been certain that Dusa was praying, wondered if this man approached his God also in irony; and then it came to him (he recorded all this searchingly in his diary, that diary he had been forbidden to keep, and so nourished as a secret vice) that History itself, the one true God, was an Ironical Spirit; his world-view lurched.

  Dusa’s other hand began to move. It was a long, composed hand, and had been extended not quite flat, fingers bent by arthritis, on the rough blanket that covered the little table; it lay there like a hand in a cinquecento painting. Now, slowly at first, the fingers began to move, like a man trying out little series of notes on the piano.

  He said, with just a touch of lightness in his voice, ‘And you really have a means by which you can guarantee that my letters will reach my wife, and you will permit me to write directly to her, and to my family also?’

  There was a note of longing in the soft modulation of the word ‘wife’ – ‘moglie’; yet it was nostalgic rather than expectant. Tomaso knew then, with the certainty of a drumbeat, that Dusa would fight, contrive, invent, rehearse, lie, plan, counter-plan, urge, beseech, threaten – all without true hope. All the same he lifted his head and said, ‘Yes.’

  They had given him a different shirt and Tomaso could see sweat-stains under the armpits. Dusa looked round the white walls of the box in which he was confined, a box that had been inserted into the room, and one which was of course soundproof, and again let his hand drum lightly. Writing would keep him alive; he would be more himself again writing.

  Half-way through that first letter he had looked up from the sheet, and said to Tomaso, ‘I think you are a friend of my son Bernardo.’

  Statement not question. Tomaso nodded. Dusa’s face retained its immobility of a Red Indian carving, but he raised his chin perhaps two centimetres and kept looking Tomaso straight in the eye until the boy could no longer hold his gaze.

  ‘He should have done it some other way, he should have known how to. My driver, Giovanni, he used to bring Bernardo sweetmeats when he was a child. All the other servants preferred other children, but Giovanni used to say that “Bernardo has his own quality”. He should have remembered that. Between us, Bernardo and myself, it has been reduced to politics, but he should not have forgotten Giovanni … Still, he is safe, I hope; when you see him, give him my blessing. And my love …’

  ‘I don’t suppose he will come to me here?’

  Tomaso shook his head.

  That first letter had been Tomaso’s triumph. He knew that. He almost suspected it had been the reason he had been brought into the group; as a boy who could get Dusa to co-operate. Why that assumption should have been made he couldn’t know. From early on though, the Professor had said, ‘It’s Vlad here who will get him to play it our way. You wait and see … We each have our different qualities …’

  Tomaso got to his feet and went to the cassa and paid for another coffee, then went to the bar to collect it and returned with the cup to his table. He liked the small scruffy caffès which didn’t insist on table service as the big bourgeois ones did. He found he was drinking a lot of coffee, and eating nothing.

  For all his time alone just now, he was free from too much reflection. It was a life of primary sensation, wary as a beast. He took note of the movements of the street, which kept coming between him and the words in the newspaper in front of him; these anyway seemed remote. They read like messages from another world where everything could be expressed in abstractions … Tomaso moved his foot slightly, a small cramp nestling like a crab in his toes … Forty-seven hours till he returned.

  An argument had started among the youths over by the pin-ball machine. Tomaso saw hands flashing, cutting the air, striking the perspex top of the machine, being extended in gestures of incredulity; voices were raised; it was apparently a simple dispute over procedure. He felt a small stab of envy; he had never belonged to such disputes. Instead he kept watch, holding himself taut in his thin black suit and white shirt, with no tie; for the first time in years he needed a haircut.

  Women were emerging from Mass in the church opposite, some of them clearly workers who had gone to church off an early morning shift. Unlike the old women in black, these removed the headscarves they had been wearing as soon as they were free of the church portals.

  A police car stopped with sudden violence at the door of the caffè, and three policemen bulging in their summer uniform, the leather of their gun-belts gleaming and the revolvers themselves bouncing against their hips, like butcher meat suspended on hooks, debouched from the car, and flowed with a swelling motion like a sea-wave into the caffè, one of them even stamping on Tomaso’s toe as they forced their way past. For a moment the boys round the fruit-machines moved with a self-conscious casualness; their indifference to the police entry a matter of will and nerve. Tomaso himself hesitated in the movement of his hand towards his coffee-cup; he couldn’t be sure that the cup would not rattle on the saucer.

  But the policemen themselves had no interest in anyone in the caffè. They crowded round the bar, shouting for lemonade and sweet cakes. Their talk, loud, complaining and then ribald, was of work schedules and girls. They were men by themselves. The slight tension was dissipated.

  Tomaso felt a hand rest very lightly on his shoulder. Looking up at a face in shadow, seen from this unusual angle, he didn’t at once recognize Enzo Fuscolo, whom he hadn’t anyway seen for a long time.

  ‘Marchese,’ said Fuscolo, and sat down opposite him.

  His presence brought back to Tomaso the steam from Lenya’s samovar and the curling yellowish smoke from the brown-papered Russian cigarettes with long cardboard mouthpieces that she used to smoke. And then a thin voice discoursing of a desert wind …

  The little man sat on the chair opposite him. Its legs or perhaps the pavement were uneven, for, though his movements were of the very least, minimal, the chair constantly seemed in motion. Without looking at the bar, he summoned the boy who had been serving drinks there. He raised one finger to him, and said, ‘A glass of mineral water and a coffee for my young friend.’

  Tomaso could find nothing at all to say. It seemed absurd to ask, for instance, how Lenya was. On the other hand, he could hardly resume the conversation about, say, Nietzs
che, which they had left off five years before. Yet this was exactly what Fuscolo now did.

  ‘When the lesser men begin to doubt whether there are higher men,’ he said, ‘the danger is great …’

  Tomaso remembered him saying that in Lenya’s kitchen. He had been explaining why, in spite of their opposition in politics, he had found Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin ‘absurd’. ‘Take my word for it, Marchese,’ he had gone on to say, ‘this is the beginning of the disintegration of the Soviet Empire. Oh, it will take years, decades, no doubt, but there it is … it has begun …’

  ‘Do you remember when we used to talk?’ said Fuscolo.

  ‘Yes,’ Tomaso nodded his head, the word coming out as scarcely more than a breath.

  ‘We had some good talks. I was sorry when you went away, though I recognized of course that you felt it imperative. I had enough respect for you to grant you your right to what was imperative. So I made no move to follow. Lenya is dead now.’ He sipped the water which the boy had laid on the table before him with a gesture which had something in it beyond the distaste that any waiter may legitimately feel for any customer. ‘Cancer,’ he said.

  ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I haven’t exactly ignored you, Marchese. If I was to speak to these fat fellows by the bar about you, they wouldn’t know what to do, would they? You know what I mean, no need to spell it out. What you are doing is certainly in accord with the Nietzsche we used to discuss, isn’t it?’

  Tomaso for the first time looked at him, ‘What can you know?’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Fuscolo, ‘what can’t I? That rather more exactly puts the question. It’s what it amounts to. Oh, you have done very well. You have destroyed the great men. The State lies in ruins. You have made a joke of it. But you are not just humorists, are you? You … what will you do next?’

  Somewhere, not far away, probably at the junction with Via Cavour, there was a traffic jam. The noise of horns had been growing in stridency for some minutes. Now it had become almost continuous. The policemen at the bar came to the door and stood there looking in the direction of the noise. They jostled each other, one of them leaning his hand on the table to steady himself, and then turning to apologize to them. All the time Fuscolo continued to fix the boy with a gaze that he could not meet.

  ‘I mean,’ said Fuscolo, as the policemen turned back, joking about the incompetence of their colleagues in the traffic control section, ‘I mean after you have killed him …’

  Tomaso got to his feet, kicking his chair over backwards as he did so. He began to walk rapidly away, with no idea of where he was going, merely to put a distance between them. But that made no sense. It didn’t alter his consciousness that they had been betrayed – it had to be betrayal – that all was in ruins, and that somehow, because of his remote connection with this man, or because of some other connection – Kim’s blonde hair and pouting lips shimmered before his eyes – it was his fault. He hadn’t gone as far as the corner, when he slowed down, his feet dragging, and when he felt a hand rest on his elbow he was almost glad.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he said, unaware that he was asking the same question.

  ‘It depends,’ said Fuscolo, ‘on how you develop your ideas. You can’t imagine that it distresses me to see the State in ruins, this Liberal-Christian experiment. After all, what have I, what have you, to do with what merely is, what is no longer, and can never be, in the condition of becoming? Like you I feel a cleavage, a deep and unbridgeable chasm, that separates me from everything that is customary or reputable. We are the same. Do what you will, Marchese.’

  For some minutes they walked in silence, till they arrived opposite the blank wall that ran along the side of the railway station. Then Fuscolo said, ‘The bourgeois State is doomed. A consequence of its denial of the principle of superiority, its attempt to be all things to all men. The result is nothing. Not nihilism, which is vibrant, but simply nothingness, torpor. So I approve of what you are doing, but, I ask you, Marchese, what happens next?’

  Tomaso shook his head; he had to get rid of this terrible Old Man of the Sea who understood everything and nothing at the same time. Fuscolo pulled at his arm.

  ‘You don’t, I hope,’ he said, ‘any longer indulge yourself in fantasies about social justice? Surely you are concerned with the prime problem, which is the liberation of the spirit of free men. Who can always, at any time, anywhere, be only a minority. Who must control, exercise sovereign power.’

  The little man licked his thin lips and pressed his mottled and scaly hand on Tomaso’s dark sleeve. The day yawned before Tomaso, empty as the hills of his Abruzzi, with this mad voice cawing like the ravens that flew circling the ruined castles of long-dead barons. And across the city, Dusa sat in his white shirt in his white-lined box, writing.

  Tomaso said, ‘It is all nonsense what you are saying, mad nonsense from the past. I have to go. I have an appointment. No, not what you think. There’s no point following me. I’m going to see a girl, my girl.’

  And with no forethought or real exercise of the will he had thrust out his hand, stopped a taxi, and then heard his voice giving the name of the pensione where Kim was staying.

  It was only to get away of course, but, even so, once in the taxi, having looked back to see Fuscolo standing there, oddly forlorn on the pavement’s edge, he didn’t countermand the order; though when he entered the hotel in the Via del Babuino he found himself half-hoping she was out …

  The woman behind the desk watched him as he made for the stairs; her voice had held a note of contempt. He knocked on the door. Kim’s voice answered, muffled, and he pushed open the door, which had been off the latch.

  The room was half-dark, the shutters closed and the long curtains still drawn. Even so he could see that the mess was frightful. There were clothes strewn everywhere, thrown down anyhow, and the air stank. Ash-trays brimmed and someone had knocked over a bottle of scent. A bottle of brandy (Stock 84) stood open and three-quarters empty on the dresser.

  He switched on a light. Kim was lying on the bed, her legs drawn up to her mouth, like one just waking. She wore a short nightdress that was crushed and streaked with something yellow. Her hair hung over a face blotched and red with crying. One lip was puffed up and her left eye was bruised, bluey-yellow and blackening.

  ‘Kim,’ he said, ‘Cousin, what has happened?’

  She put her arms round him and kissed him hard on the mouth, lurching on him hard so that, to keep himself from falling over, he had to put his hands on her naked bottom. She stank of brandy.

  ‘It was Ruthie,’ she said. ‘She beat me up. She just beat me up. Ruthie. Me.’

  She was sobbing and for the first time Tomaso couldn’t resist. He took her in his arms and helped her to the bed. He leant over her and kissed her again, and she pulled at his tie and began to unbutton his shirt.

  Later, as she lay asleep, crushing his arm, and wisps of hair tickling the corners of his mouth, Tomaso watched flies crawl over the ceiling. He could feel the afternoon hot and drowsy beyond, imagine the heat stretching itself down to Piazza del Popolo, just freshening as the city opened out to the gardens above. Had she merely wanted reassurance? And he release? He stretched out his finger and lightly touched her sleeping and bruised lip. She shifted slightly, moving one soft damp leg on top of his. He let his finger run off the lip and rest on the tender cheek. She gave a little moan. He fell asleep, dreamless as not for a long time.

  When he woke it was evening and Kim still slept. He thought, as lovers so easily think, that she slept like a child, and he warmed, as again why not for nothing is more natural, with a protective pity. If he hadn’t been afraid of waking her, he would have risen and cleaned and tidied the room. But anyway, it was better and warmer to lie here, perhaps for ever.

  She stirred, woke, smiled. They made love again. Night closed in on them, boy and girl, asleep, entwined.

  Tomaso woke at four. It was still hot and he felt still a glow of sweat, but now the f
ish swam in his belly. In the distance, in the Borghese Gardens, an owl hooted. Tomaso disentangled himself and padded to the window and opened the shutters and leant out over the city. A police car screamed through the streets, leaving a long silence behind it. He crept back to bed but comfort and sleep had fled.

  In the morning Kim, shaking a little, was full of projects. She showered and washed her hair and talced her body, and came back, dressing-gowned and fragrant, to kiss him and drink the coffee which he had ordered. She made up her face and brushed her hair with long sweeping strokes, and put on a short simple white dress with pink horizontal stripes.

  ‘Christ, what a mess,’ she said. ‘Let’s get the hell out.’

  They walked, their little fingers linked together, through narrow streets towards Navona. Near the Pantheon they stopped at an old jewellery shop. Kim admired a bracelet of old slim gold, and they went into the shop. Tomaso bargained and bought it; he slipped it over her hand.

  ‘Don’t let’s go to that big piazza,’ she said. ‘That jerk Chris goes there. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see anyone else.’

  She pressed herself against him. He held her a moment, kissing. They had passed perhaps a dozen news-stands and he hadn’t bought a paper.

  They sat in a caffè by the Pantheon and drank freshly squeezed orange juice, hardly speaking but always either holding hands or just lightly and repeatedly touching each other. Swifts buzzed black across a sky the colour of cornflowers … Japanese tourists swarmed, yackety yack about them … a German made a scene with the waiter … two old women, in black cowls, shuffled past … a Franciscan elbowed them into the gutter … carabinieri, gorgeous in blue and red, like over-fed macaws, strutted by, silent in self-importance… Kim played with Tomaso’s fingers until he lowered his eyes which had been fixed on the Pantheon’s shimmering dome and smiled at her. ‘Take me away,’ she said. ‘Take me out of town. Take me to the beach …’