The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  Needless to say, they didn’t take the Mastagni development seriously. They knew him after all for a windbag, and couldn’t believe… still, his manœuvring may just have determined the timing.

  When, after all, could they strike more insultingly and with greater effect than when the high chiefs of the Christian Democracy were assembled in conclave debating their proposals and communiqués? What could more blatantly show the irrelevancy of the DC to any sort of reality than action at that moment?

  They gave Dusa a bath, dressed him in the black suit he had been wearing when he was captured. They had watched him dress himself, putting on a blue-striped white shirt, newly laundered, made for him by a smart Bologna shirt-maker (but the quality was not unfamiliar to most of the Partisans). Old-fashioned as ever, he clipped in cufflinks. He knotted a blue and white dotted tie – Dusa had never been seen in public without a tie, I doubt if even his children had seen him without one. He got it on all right, the dressing, except that his socks were inside-out.

  I don’t claim to know what they said to him, where he thought he was going; but I can’t believe he didn’t know this was it. They were going to kill him; he was dressing for death. They wouldn’t have told him a lie; they had too much respect for truth.

  And maybe human dignity.

  They marched him downstairs in silence. He hadn’t got his briefcase – the papers it had contained were the only thing the Partisans could use. Someone carried his other belongings. His watch was wound up and at the right time. They asked him to get into the back of a hatchback Renault 5. He did so without a struggle. Then they opened fire, two guns at least, ten or a dozen shots. It was finished. Disposal of the body. They had nerve, these Partisans.

  They drove it to within a hundred metres of the DC Headquarters.

  Inside the Palazzo, the time now 11 o’clock on June 11, the Party Chiefs had re-convened. This time Mastagni was speaking; he had decided to change tactics. No longer waiting patiently for others to decide what he should be granted, he was instead pushing at the door. In his slow, patient, sing-song old man’s voice, he was urging the claims of … wait for it … humanity.

  He said (and I quote, as one of the secretaries gave it to me), ‘Gentlemen, there are times when even matters of high policy, sagely constructed on the basis of the most serious and illustrious principles, must yield precedence to the sacred principles’… he crossed himself … ‘of our peccant humanity. Our brother lies in danger and in anguish. Our hearts throb in response. Our souls aspire towards him. Though policy may urge that we harden our hearts, stop up the soul’s breath, instinctive humanity will have none of it …’ He closed his eyes, ‘Besides, who knows …?’

  ‘The Americans will not like it,’ said Gianni Schicchi, ‘and we have to put through the renewal of the German loan next month. They will require evidence of strength of purpose …’

  Mastagni kept his eyes shut, holy effulgence in his cheeks.

  And then the telephone rang on the President’s desk. They were off the hook. The decision had been removed from them. Their secret prayers had been answered. They observed reverent silence.

  It was broken, after some two minutes, by Gianni Schicchi: ‘The State must celebrate its servant, Corrado Dusa. San Giovanni in Laterano, yes? And perhaps His Holiness’s health will permit him to officiate…?’

  I don’t often laugh, but when I had pieced all this together, with final help from Antonio, and he had gone off, wet-eyed himself, leaving me in a little bar behind the Corso, with a Fernet Branca before me, I laughed and laughed and laughed; what the French call a fou rire.

  They had parked the Renault 5 equidistant from the DC and Communist Party Headquarters, just out of range of the PCI’s closed-circuit television scanner, and beyond the fringe of the riot police squads. It was as close as possible. And then they’d walked away for a coffee. Two fingers to the State.

  And I laughed with admiration. I’d lost Bella but I’d won that laugh. My own journey had won me that laugh.

  EIGHT

  Tomaso

  THE MOMENT for Tomaso had been when he heard the familiar voice say, ‘I wish to repeat and finally to make clear to you, Honourable Corrado Dusa, that this is not a murder, but an execution. It is indeed and in truth the execution of the sentence of the People’s Court for crimes against the Italian People and their democratic rights …’

  Tomaso wanted to say, ‘… but these are only words’; yet with what else but words had Dusa himself constructed his life? Only, he had no words now. Instead a curl of a smile hovered at the edge of the mouth. For the lightest moment he touched his lips, which were cracked with the unseasonable cold he had developed, with just the tip of his tongue, and then he bowed his head, almost as if he accepted the just sentence of the Court. But it wasn’t really like that – it was a measure of his indifference now it had come to the point. The long battle was concluded. He could do no more. So, with Southern resignation, the almost Eastern acceptance of Fate that history has imprinted on the Mezzogiorno, he surrendered to the effective, the dominant, Will.

  He showed the same deference when they told him to get into the back of the car; only when Angelo and Birgitta presented the muzzles of their guns to him, did he momentarily close his eyes as if to ward off the significance of what was about to happen.

  Tomaso had to watch. It was the culmination of fifteen months’ planning and fear. Dusa’s hand moved, independent perhaps of conscious will, in a vain gesture of self-protection. The guns spat. Even in the confined space of the hatchback’s boot, the body kicked, convulsed; then was still.

  Nobody had spoken since they left the room into which the plaster-board box that had contained Dusa for so many days had been inserted in late April. They all knew what they had to do. And for the moment they didn’t even exchange glances.

  All the same, now it was over, Tomaso sensed Angelo relax. Birgitta blew down the muzzle of her little Beretta. She slipped it into a shoulder-bag that advertised Cinzano Bianco.

  The act they had just performed severed them from their past.

  Consciousness of this crept over the morning of the horizon. Tomaso moved, on legs that were not exactly unsteady but unwontedly aware of themselves, towards the door of the garage and opened it a crack. An old woman in a black dress ragged at the hem was fingering through a dustbin on the other side of the little cobbled street. She hadn’t heard the sputter of the silenced guns. It was just five o’clock in the morning.

  Had she been up all night? Where did she sleep? It was to prevent her sort of fate that they… Tomaso drew back from the door. The morning breeze, stirring a grey light, was still cool.

  Angelo said, ‘We’ve two hours to kill. Some coffee’d be a good idea.’

  Tomaso shook his head, not so much to the coffee, which in fact he wanted, now he thought about it, but simply in general negation.

  (‘I felt proud,’ Enzo Fuscolo had twice said to him, describing how the other Partisans at the end of the other war had tried to hang him.)

  He approached the door again. The old woman had found something in the bin, a brown paper parcel, from which she extracted a piece of pizza. She thrust it between her jaws which almost certainly contained no teeth, and began to tear at it.

  ‘You have to admit, he died better than he lived,’ Angelo said.

  The Professor flashed an open hand, fingers rigidly twisted, across a screwed-up face.

  ‘What does that signify?’ he cried. ‘Nothing. Life, not death, is the test.’

  ‘Still, he might have been a nuisance,’ Angelo said, his accent becoming, as it usually did in moments of emotion, more strongly Roman. ‘It was nice of him to be cooperative.’

  ‘Vlad,’ said the Professor, ‘you understand what you are to say when you telephone Dr Nittri at the University. That he is to go personally to the Dusa house, not telephone. He is to go there to tell them the news and where the body is to be found. What we must now do is prevent the State from making this man a
martyr; we must show how they have alienated the mourning family, because they have refused to listen to the claims of humanity; in this way we demonstrate how the State, for all its vaunts, is no more Christian than it is democratic.’

  ‘Christian,’ Angelo spat.

  ‘Nevertheless, it has been a stage in the evolution of humanity and human society. That is all,’ the Professor said.

  The old woman had finished the pizza and begun rootling again in the bin. Upstairs in their larder they had a lot of bread and tins of tunny fish and beans.

  ‘And then of course you resume normal life, which anyhow has not been much interrupted. Dani and Marco will attend to what has to be done here.’

  ‘I’m going to make that coffee,’ Angelo said. ‘Mornings without coffee…’

  Dani put a green loden coat over Dusa. Then they locked the garage door again and went upstairs.

  Birgitta said, ‘It’s funny to have lived through a day like this, to have had the sort of experience that you know will form your life for ever.’

  ‘That’s surely happened to you before,’ Angelo said,

  ‘you’re not a virgin, are you?’

  ‘There is more than one kind of virginity… I thought you knew that, Angelo.’

  It was half-past nine when Tomaso made his way through the echoing glass and marble of the Termini Station, which was full, as usual, of tourists, soldiers coming and going on leave, priests arriving for congresses, small town businessmen who could not afford to fly from Milan or Turin or Pisa when it was necessary to visit a Ministry to obtain some essential but otherwise worthless permit. Tomaso moved through the crowd like a ghost or a saint; one who had no dealings with them. If his sensibility had been differently formed he might have felt himself a visitor from another planet.

  All these people – even the priests who had heard innumerable confessions delivered in extremis and who had administered the last rites more often perhaps than they would be able to recall – were virgins. Not one of the soldiers who stood about hopelessly wishing they could afford to buy even one bottle of beer between two of them, was really anything more than an actor in the game of war; most of them of course were only clerks.

  For a moment he paused, in the fancy that he had caught the eye of a carabiniere, who was standing in the middle of a crowd of circulating Japanese tourists rather like a statue of Napoleon in a piazza. But no, the dark brooding eye of the policeman swept over Tomaso in utter vacancy; probably his anguish was fixed on thoughts of a beefsteak or plate of fettuccine.

  Tomaso found the telephones and dialled the number he had been given. When told what he had to do, Dr Nittri said, with a painful weakness in his voice, ‘Do I have to go? Can’t I telephone?’

  Tomaso explained again that that was impossible. In the first place the Dusa telephone was tapped. Accordingly, if Dr Nittri telephoned then the agents of the State would know as soon as the family, which was undesirable.

  ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘surely you realize that humanity demands the signora learns of it in person, that the family has the information before the authorities for this reason also.’

  And he repeated again the information that was to be given.

  Dr Nittri at last acceded, not without a self-pity that brought the first smile of the day to Tomaso’s face.

  He replaced the receiver and went to the cassa to get a second gettone. At the same time he ordered a cup of black coffee, and went to the bar and drank it. He had not in the end been able to touch the coffee Angelo had made earlier. He returned to the telephone and dialled the number of Kim’s pensione. The woman at the desk said, ‘She doesn’t answer the telephone.’ Tomaso could not settle; it was necessary he spoke to Kim before the news was public. He was sure of that; of course she would not be much interested in it – that was hardly the point.

  The carabiniere was looking at him again, though still remaining Napoleonically unmoving. Tomaso left the station, walking on his quick, light, narrow feet, a slightly floating gait, detached and protected by the chastity of his dark suit; like a shadow moving across the waters. He was surprised by the deep blue of the day outside the station.

  10.59.

  He couldn’t, of course, go home, back to the mean room where he slept, even though he had now been awake for almost thirty hours. And it was equally impossible to sit down at a caffè table with the morning newspaper that would not contain anything but speculation on the affair that had now advanced, irrevocably, beyond that empty stage. Tomaso sat, for a moment, on the edge of a fountain, dangling his fingers in the water; but when a middle-aged man with sandy hair and an open, flowered shirt that revealed wisps of curly grey hair sprouting from the chest, approached him with conspiratorial smile, he began walking again.

  Suddenly – he had reached the street of the airline offices, the Via Bissolati – he felt the mood of the city change. The word was out; they knew. The matter was accomplished. He turned up the Via Veneto, because it was so utterly a part of the city with which he felt no affinity at all, and sitting down at a table, covered with a pink cloth, asked a waiter to bring him a cup of coffee. The waiter nodded assent, and then, as he turned away, Tomaso said, ‘And a glass of whisky, please.’

  It was something he had drunk only once in his life before; for an experiment which had proved distasteful.

  The man was a long time returning with the order. Tomaso sat watching a crowd collect round the newsstand, a crowd that was agitated and yet hushed; they must know there could be nothing in the newspapers yet, but they continued to stand there, as though the proximity to the source of news gave them something they lacked. The waiter at last laid the cup and glass on the table before him.

  ‘They have killed him,’ he said, ‘they have just discovered the body.’

  Tomaso couldn’t reply.

  ‘I knew they would,’ said the waiter. ‘Bastards. Shot he was, and crammed into the boot of a car. Bastards.’

  Tomaso picked up the whisky; even the smell was corrupt, associated with a style of life that had to go. He sipped it, and felt nausea.

  The traffic moved as usual. It was as if a shiver had passed over a forest, disturbing the leaves a moment, and then all was as if it had never been. A girl, resting against the plane tree, with one foot drawn up behind her, its sole pressed against the bark of the tree, in such a way that even from his side-on position he saw both her thighs, turned her face to him, and smiled. She wore a very short, white dress and the smile she gave him was inviting. Tomaso felt himself flush; it was a world that embarrassed him. A man – German perhaps? – came up, touched the girl on her bare arm and spoke to her. She nodded slowly, and they went off together. The German tried to take her hand as they turned the corner. Tomaso saw her disengage herself…

  It was extraordinary to be drinking whisky, just like two linen-suited Americans who had settled at the next table. He heard one of them say, ‘You know the wops have surprised me. I didn’t reckon they had it in them to behave as well as they have over this. No panic, no softness. They’ve come out of it well.’

  Tomaso ordered another whisky. Someone, speaking in a Milanese accent, said, ‘But who are the PDP? In my opinion they don’t know themselves. Look at the results of their actions. They will not be what they ostensibly hope for, not at all, my friend. Quite the contrary. In effect, they will contribute towards the re-establishment, the reinvigoration of the Christian Democracy. I tell you there are many good Christian Democrats who are also good patriots who do not in their hearts regret the disappearance of Corrado Dusa, though they would prefer that it should have been another type of heart attack perhaps.’

  Tomaso went into another caffè and got a gettone and telephoned Kim’s hotel again. This time he was put through to her room, but it was Ruthie who answered. There was a note of triumph in her voice.

  ‘She won’t speak to you,’ she said. ‘You’ve no right to telephone, no right to involve Kim… we’re leaving anyway, but what you’ve done to Kim was wrong.
It was wicked. You see, we know, we fucking know. I don’t know how you could think to call Kim again, after everything…’

  There was nothing Tomaso could say. He hung up. Back at the table he ordered another whisky.

  What else was there to do?

  He didn’t go home that night. For the first time he felt hunted. In the early evening he found a pensione and, using the identity card of a student from Puglia with which he had been provided, took a room. He slept for fourteen hours and woke, drained, not refreshed at all, aching in his limbs. He spoke to nobody but went to a movie, and came out in the dark, not knowing what he had seen. He went back to the pensione. He hadn’t bought a newspaper.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. He lay for a long time, stretched out stiff, almost as a corpse, looking at the ceiling on which orange sodium lights from the street-lamps played. There were movements, creakings and voices throughout the cheap hotel. He turned over and over, changing position in search of a sleep that refused to come. Around six in the morning he rose, went downstairs, paid the heavy-eyed girl he had summoned by repeated ringing of the bell, and went out into the freshness of a morning that assailed him with a leper’s guilt.

  He took an early bus dotted with the tired faces of allnight workers, and an exhausted looking girl with long streaked-blonde hair hanging in rats’ tails, who looked at him and offered a half-smile. Tomaso looked away, and then got off the bus near the yard where he kept his car. Nobody had moved it. He drove off into the hills.

  His mother received him with silence also. He wanted to ask her if the police had been there, but found he couldn’t. She served him with food as though waiting on him in an hotel. Whenever he came into the room where she was sitting she would find something urgent to do. The spaniel kept close to her skirts.

  Tomaso sat in the courtyard in the evening watching the storm clouds climb high in the mountains to the East. Westward the golden sky was streaked with savage red and green. Pigeons cooed in the eaves. Over in the town, across the high wall, a dog barked. A donkey clip-clopped up the steps between the wall and the hillside scrub. After a little he went to the outhouse where the wine was kept and drew some into a litre flask. He sat there and sipped as the light turned to violet and then died. For a long time his eyes stayed fixed on the window that had been Bernardo’s, an innocence ago. You could never imagine truly what you were ignorant of.