by Allan Massie
‘Today?’ he said.
‘Right away. Maybe we could go to Capri? Could we go to Capri?’
You could not imagine how that dome was suspended. Surely that circle of wall could not support that soaring structure? And yet it had, for almost two thousand years. Perfectly. That was its message; you could achieve just that, perfection. Which the Japanese then came to photograph.
‘Capri?’ he said. ‘Capri?’
‘Yeah, they say it’s great. And lovely. Just lovely.’
‘It’s not possible,’ he said.
He felt the movement of her fingers stop.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you were different, Tom. What’s so special that you can’t?’
He could see her hand twisting the slim-gilt bracelet.
‘Maybe next week,’ he said, ‘but not immediately. Maybe in four days.’
A little gust of wind blew a paper bag past their table. It flipped into the gutter and rested there, as if wind and movement had never been. Tomaso retrieved Kim’s hand …
‘In four days,’ he said again.
‘I want to go now,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see Ruthie again, I just never want to see her again. Don’t you want to know about it? Don’t you? She crazy, that’s what it is. Crazy jealous. You didn’t know she was like that, but she is. She sure is. Does that make you sick?’
They went in the end to the beach, taking the metro to Ostia for the afternoon, buying swimsuits there and lying all afternoon in the baking sun. They drank beer and ate prawns and then strolled to a caffè and ordered large and elaborate ices. Kim kept her dark glasses on to hide the damaged eye. When they came back they had a plate of spaghetti in a cheap trattoria and went to bed early. Tomaso was back on duty the next morning.
He said to her, ‘I have to be away for two days. It’s an appointment I can’t break. But, after that…’
He woke early. Her words came back to him, ‘Ruthie keeps asking about that friend we met at your mother’s. She wants to see him again. Maybe if she did we could make up a foursome and Ruthie would be all right again…’
He slipped from the room, Kim still asleep. The morning was still cool and empty; rose-fresh and dew-damp. Tomaso’s dark suit and pale face had the morning’s simplicity uncorrupted by action. He walked quickly with the light step of youth, up the Via San Sebastianello to the Pincio. For a moment he was confused there, becoming as it were an island in a wave of girls. They swept past him on roller-skates, their hair stretching out behind them; they swooped like swallows round the paths that were lined with the dead statues of the dead heroes of the Risorgimento, and the first dead Parliamentarians of United Italy. Tomaso, taken by surprise, hesitated. There came a last swooping dive and the girls were gone, as a sky is suddenly emptied of birds.
He walked across the gardens. You could check there if you were being followed. At the far side, he loitered in the street, then, at the very last moment, ran for a bus. Its doors were on the point of closing but he just squeezed in. It carried him down Via del Tritone and he got off and dived into the tunnel under the street. Out on the other side he made his way by side streets to Piazza Venezia. It was just eight o’clock. Outside the second of the three caffès there he paused, as if waiting for a bus. A little grey Volkswagen stopped, and he got in.
The driver, a chubby young man in a yellow T-shirt, said, ‘Clean, Vlad?’
‘Think so. Yes.’
‘We’ll make sure.’
It was as if Dusa hadn’t moved since he last saw him. He was sitting in the same attitude as if already detached from his surroundings, from what was happening, from his life. The large pad of schoolboy’s white paper was still at his left hand, half a dozen pens and pencils to his right, the tea-cup at the edge of the little table.
They had grown accustomed to each other. From the time when Tomaso had persuaded Dusa to write the first letter, he felt that the politician looked forward to his spells of duty; and he found this disturbing. Today he could hardly keep his eyes off the naked yellow bulb that hung directly above Dusa’s writing-paper.
Dusa said, ‘I have been thinking about you a lot. You are an idealist.’
There was a single fly, a puffed-up and squidgy blue-bottle, buzzing round that naked bulb. It hummed like an electric typewriter.
‘One way or another,’ Dusa said, ‘we’re coming near the end of the period of waiting. Things must come to a point of resolution. Now, either Mastagni makes his appeal, which was certainly timid enough, much more effective, putting my former colleagues in a position from which they can decide to amend their strategy and accept negotiations, or, I suppose, everything is finished. The issue’s clear enough at last. That’s why I have been waiting to speak to you. As if you were my poor son Bernardo; and perhaps, by your intermediation, directly to him. For, naturally, Bernardo has greatly occupied my thoughts. Very painfully, to be sure; and yet, after all, he resembles me more closely than any of my other children does. I can understand him better than I can understand poor empty Sandro for instance. You won’t have met my youngest son Sandro, I suppose?’ Tomaso shook his head. ‘He’s a good boy, but, as I say, empty.’
Dusa gave a little smile that might have been meant to carry comfort. ‘You mustn’t think death is so very important,’ he said. ‘Of course, if you don’t believe in God, if you have not been a faithful son of the Church, I suppose it might loom disproportionately large. But I see we are at the conclusive moment and I do not intend to embarrass you, my son, in any way. What would be the point, even though you were to me the man who has to point the gun. The decision wouldn’t be yours. All the same I am glad to see you again.’
He stretched out his hand and lit a cigarette… ‘I stopped smoking thirty years ago at the first mention of a possible connection with cancer. Now you see… I am grateful to you all, I want you to know that, first, even though it is impossible that I should not also at the same time resent what you are doing to me, even more particularly to my family. To forgive your offences against me is possible … to forgive those against my family, that demands more charity than I can summon up. All the same I am grateful … but I am curious about you. Tell me about yourself …’
He gave a faint smile and gestured with the cigarette, ‘I do not of course mean police questions, who you are and so on, even though you will admit that in present circumstances the probability is that I could be acquainted with all such dangerous facts and the danger would be extinct. But that doesn’t interest me … I am interested in why, what you really believe, in (I suppose) what you hope to achieve …’
‘How can you face death like this?’
The words were blurted out; Dusa raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve had time to prepare,’ he said.
Tomaso got up and began to walk about the room. ‘I’ve never suffered myself,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen signs of deprivation. Look at Italy, unprecedented prosperity, and still great poverty for many, and that’s not the worst of it. The dishonesty, the lack of purpose, the selfishness, nothing but greed and lies, how could you have encouraged it? Whose life has any meaning, any significance at all? Not even the rich. All my life I have felt like a skeleton here. Always. I used to feel the same way, but think differently. There was a man I used to know who read Nietzsche. He was an old Fascist, he had really believed in Mussolini, he tried to convince me that there were superior beings, men set apart, and that nobody else mattered, they were just the mob. But then I remembered the peasants on our estate, and I saw their children in the borgate, and I knew that what he said was all lies, all vanity. One man is as important as another, everyone should have a chance, and we have a system that makes nonsense of that truth, and so we have to smash it, to smash it do you hear, and that means first of all destroying the State. Well, for a long time, our people hoped that the PCI would do that, it’s what they promised to do, after all, but they have been corrupted, and you, you,’ Tomaso’s voice faltered, he struck the table with his first to help him go on speakin
g, ‘you are the first instrument of that corruption, for you have invited them into the structure of this bourgeois State, this State committed to exploitation and deprivation, that’s why …’
He had never spoken so much, he who had always been silent, feeling these things but letting others speak.
‘All action,’ Dusa said, ‘contains the seeds of its own corruption. Should we then abstain from action? It’s been brought home to me that I have lived my life with the wrong goals, and yet, my son, my goals have not been so different from yours. It has been brought home to me that I have lived it in the wrong manner, and yet my commitment to action has not been dissimilar to yours. I have come to see that, aiming for good, I have made a mistake in the way I have defined my life, and yet… have you any conception, my son, of what power is…? Power is the greatest cheat of all, the ultimate delusion. I have not been the chief of the Christian Democracy. My word has never been effective, just like that. I have fought battles there, winning some, losing others, more often perhaps losing. I cannot tell. Victory is never what it appears on the prospectus. Power is a drug, a pleasure, but also and always less than you think. Your target is never achieved, it recedes. Action corrupts, yes, my son, you are right there, but it is itself corrupted; and political action is and always must be a matter of constant compromise. I have no doubt you would call them shabby and seedy, these compromises. What gets done is so much less than is planned; and it is for this, and in this, that I have passed my life. When I tell you that, can you be so confident that your own purity of will and deed can survive?
Dusa spoke without moving at all, his words coming to Tomaso as a sort of automatic language, disembodied, out of nature; yet the two of them might have been holding hands round a table and listening to a spirit speak, the words seemed to have so little connection with Dusa; even his mouth hardly opened, the words sliding forth. When he fell silent, only his fingers shifted slightly like crabs edging across the wooden surface.
‘You see, my son,’ he said, ‘the limits of action are abruptly reached. Oh, when one has no power, then certainly anything is possible. But when you are given actual political power, then you quickly discover what a cheat it is. Look, I pray you, at the Russian Revolution. I have never believed that Lenin and Stalin were evil in will; on the contrary, what they willed could only be what we should all desire: prosperity and justice. Their wickedness lay elsewhere: in their ignorance, in their ridiculous and fundamentally childish optimism. They knew nothing of the limits of action, of the complex obscurities of the human heart. How could they know anything of Man, who had rejected knowledge of God? … If I could only convince you, my son…’
He lit another cigarette, drawing smoke deep into the lungs it would no longer be able to corrupt.
Tomaso said, ‘But greed doesn’t have to be encouraged, and a system which does encourage it can only perpetuate injustice. And that is our Society today, the result of our type of State. Isn’t that true?’
‘Yes,’ Dusa said, ‘it is true. I do not believe however it could be otherwise.’
There was no means of knowing the time in the box. Tomaso felt himself in limbo; there it was always either the cafard hours of twilight or those barren wastes that stretch towards morning.
Dusa picked up his tea-cup, and sipped again a liquid which had long been cold. ‘I wrote again to my family while you were off duty,’ he said.
Tomaso nodded with the deference of the functionary in whom there is respect but no flattery.
‘About my funeral. I said that I do not want any of the men of power to attend; only my family, my loved ones… if I had taken another route, and yet, almost any way can be corrupted. The Saints after all are in their proving the most fiercely assaulted … when you see Bernardo, if you ever see him again, you will give him my love. You will assure him that it still extends to him. A deep love. You will do that.’
There was no question in his voice. Tomaso nodded again.
‘Of course,’ said Dusa, ‘I ask myself if my life could have taken another course, if I assumed the wrong responsibilities. I cannot make up my mind. On the one hand, for my sake, for my family’s, obviously this is true; I have been in error. On the other, when I look back and consider Italy as it was under Fascism and at the end of the war, I ask myself how any man of good conscience could have stood apart. How? The country was bleeding, broken. I could not believe in any politics that were separated from the min-istrations of the Church, and yet …’ he lifted his hands, spread them wide, ‘here we are.’ The hands fell with a thud to the table, a discordant thud with something of a rattle in it.
‘Do you have a girl?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Tomaso’s lips remained parted after speaking the word, as though it had surprised him …
‘And is she one of your … colleagues?’
He shook his head …
‘My wife has always hated my public life. She hates the Party, she hates power. And fears it… what about your girl? Will you be able to reconcile the public life you have embarked on with the responsibilities of love? Or will you, like me, betray love… if you betray love, you betray wisdom. I won’t say you betray God, though that is true also…’
The door opened. One of the comrades entered, carrying a tray. He put it before Dusa. There were a pot of tea, a cup, a slice of lemon and some biscuits on the tray. He said, ‘We would like you to have a bath after your tea.’ Dusa lifted his head.
‘A bath?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Tomaso found he couldn’t meet their prisoner’s eyes. He kept his own fixed on the rough hessian that covered the floor. He shuffled his feet, making a small scratching sound as he did so. He could hear the tea being poured into the cup. There was no sound of tea-pot knocking against the china.
Dusa said, ‘I have one last request to make. Would it be possible for me to speak to my wife …?’
Tomaso lifted his eyes. They met his comrade’s, blank and wondering as his own must be.
‘We would have to take instruction on that,’ the comrade said.
SIX
Raimundo
JUNE 10 A morning of the most perfect gold and blue; I woke idle as Sasha, who was already spread out in the sun like an emblem. For at least five minutes I basked in well-being, mindless of my brother. The result of my encounter with Renata?
Almost certainly. I could still smell her tawny skin, feel myself warming to her bronze-gold beauty. I felt no shame, but then the ache of an old man’s lust, embroidering fantasies. Will such idle dreaming ever stop?
All this, as I lay in bed listening to the wakening traffic of the day’s unfolding.
Elena telephoned. She was going to have her audience with His Holiness as she had already told me on my visit to the villa yesterday. Had I anything else to suggest? This was the last chance. What could I say? I could not bring myself to tell her what I knew, that the whole business was vain; she might receive a comforting gesture; no more. So, wearily, I said, ‘You can urge him to bring all possible pressure, even at this very last minute, to bear on Schicchi and the gang. That, I’m afraid, is all. Unless they can be brought to negotiating point, everything is hopeless.’
It is indeed the very last minute. Just now, 11.30, Nico has called me to say that the terrorists have just issued a new communiqué. Even at this moment of utmost urgency, they have lost nothing of their wordiness:
‘Comrades,’ it starts, ‘the battle begun on May 10 with the arrest of Corrado Dusa has now arrived at its point of conclusion.’ It talks of the Christian Democrats having replied to their own offers of ‘positive negotiations’ with ‘counter-revolutionary violence, hundreds of preventive arrests and special arbitrary laws, and’ (using a phrase the delicate perversion of which I almost admire) ‘political genocide’. They vapour about what they call the ‘lurid collaboration’ of the PCI – the sting is at least what the Communists’ inhuman obduracy, dictated solely by their political ambitions, seems t
o merit – and they spout the usual cant about ‘the State of the Multi-nationals having been stripped of its grotesque mask of formal democracy’. Concluding that ‘no amount of anti-guerrilla psychological warfare can disguise the victory of the revolutionary movement and the incandescent defeat of the imperialist forces’, they say that ‘the only language the servants of imperialism have shown themselves to understand is the language of the gun, and that is what the proletariat is learning to speak. Thus we conclude the battle joined on May 10, executing the sentence to which Corrado Dusa has been justly condemned.’
‘Do you think it means?’ Nico hesitated …
‘It depends. It could just have a future sense, still, I think it does not necessarily imply that they have done it. It could be the last turn of the last screw.’
‘Precisely. My opinion exactly. Sandro is of course certain that Papa is dead – he is lying on his bed in tears. Even if our fears were fact, what would be the point of that? As for Mamma, she is still at the Vatican. Well, I suppose there is nowhere she will receive better comfort. They are certain to have heard the news there too. I hope they tell her. But, listen, Uncle, is there still anything we can possibly do with the Party? What about Mastagni?’
I could not bring myself to say, ‘There is nothing.’ Nor could I say, ‘Everything is confused. People think they are still playing a part when in fact the curtain has come down on the Comedy.’ Instead I said, ‘I’ll try to see how things lie, but don’t hope, dear boy, don’t hope. What about your English journalist? Can you get any information from him, Bella’s friend? A Communist shift of direction is the only thing I can imagine which might …’
‘I have already tried. He was drunk.’
When he put down the receiver, I called Ed Mangan; at least he had gone to Venice to hear Mastagni, and though I had no faith in him … quite simply I couldn’t think of anything else to do … he might know someone at the State Department, my own contacts were all out of date … an attempt to call Gianni Schicchi was rebuffed… the chiefs were in conclave … Ed was out, I left a message.
