The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  Once his mother came to the doorway, looked at him as if she would have spoken; but the moment passed. She turned away, leaving him to his night and to the thin wine that brought no comfort but a blurring of sensation.

  The next morning he drove away without a further word. His mother, rolling out the pasta in the kitchen, saw him through the slit window open the wicket-gate set into the heavy double door, and walk out. In a few minutes, when she had completed her rolling and stretched the sheets of pasta out, she went into the courtyard and crossed it and looked out of the gate, down the steps towards the piazza. There was no sign of her son, and perhaps one of the cars she caught sight of intermittently as they descended the hairpin bends to the main road was his.

  He made a telephone call from the town, from the caffè where, before experience, he had met the lawyer. The line was dead. He drove, still eastwards, till he arrived in a small town by the grey of the Adriatic, sullen under cloud. Somewhere, beyond the sea, was Bernardo; it no longer seemed to matter.

  He went into a haberdasher’s and bought a pair of braces.

  He stopped at a caffè within sight of the sea on which a thin rain was now slanting, and asked for whisky and writing paper. They brought him a yellowing pad and three fingers of Long John.

  He drank the whisky slowly, watching men in dark hats playing cards at the next table, and ordered another, an action which caused them to look at him with furtive, appraising and distrustful eyes.

  He began to write:

  There is no one I can really address this to, so perhaps I shall send it to a newspaper. After all, it is not a message to anyone in particular, but just something I feel I have to say.

  What we have done was necessary. I don’t feel guilty. It’s not a matter of right and wrong, and in any case humanity has proceeded beyond empty ethical considerations of that sort.

  So there is no guilt, but there is no feeling either, except a deep exhaustion. I am drained and futile.

  I thought there was deep purpose and significance in our action, which, it seemed to me, must certainly change something. But now it is completed and everything is exactly the same; and I realize that things cannot be made different in this way, as I had expected they would be, and so it was all in vain. It hasn’t changed even me, except to strip me of this illusion.

  I believed in belief; now I believe in nothing.

  There was a man I used to know – I shan’t give his name because I have no wish to involve him in this affair (on the other hand I am absolutely indifferent as to whether I do or not), but he will recognize himself when he sees this letter. This man used to speak to me of the necessity of the liberating action, the act capable of freeing me from the constraints of bourgeois morality. Well, I have performed it and there is no difference; it was a lie like everything else.

  He used to say we must crack the mould of our present society and start anew. But I no longer believe it can be done. The forces of inertia are indescribably strong. They have not even been made to shift an inch by what we have done.

  In the circumstances I no longer believe that man can grow to a height where lightning might strike him, and he breaks. He is quite beneath lightning. Everything that might be worth doing is beyond our capacity. Men prefer to live like slugs.

  I thought that what I was doing would make room in my heart for every kind of understanding, comprehending and approving. I find none of this any more true than a denial of the seasons can be true. And if it is impossible to make Spring in November, can we possibly go on living from November in the hope that yet again Spring will return?

  I am very tired. I am worn out by consciousness. I have had enough of seeing and feeling. Especially feeling.

  But I thought what we were doing would make us Caesars and I find we are no more than Catiline.

  It’s enough.

  He asked for an envelope, read over what he had written, folded the paper three times and put it in the envelope.

  ‘What is the name of your local newspaper?’ he asked the barman. ‘Give me some more whisky,’ he said. ‘No, not like that, let me buy the rest of the bottle.’

  Then with the neck of the bottle of Long John sticking out of one pocket and the brown paper parcel containing the new braces stuffed in the other, he left the caffè.

  He had earlier taken a room in a hotel. It had pale, dirty yellow walls. The window gave on the white-flecked grey of the sea. It was not yet dark and he sat by the window sipping the whisky. Then the street-lamps came on. Someone, passing along the front, his neck twisted to keep the rain from being blown in his face by a new-rising wind, later remembered the boy at the window with a glass in his hand.

  Sometime in the night he fixed the braces to the electrolier that hung, meagrely supplied with little bulbs, from the centre of the ceiling. They found him hanging there in the morning. The letter addressed to the Gazetta lay on the little table by the window. There was only a little whisky, perhaps one drink, left in the bottle. The bedclothes had been disturbed and the sheets were crushed, so perhaps he had rested or slept for a little. He was still wearing his dark suit though. One cuff stank of whisky.

  NINE

  Raimundo

  ‘CAN YOU come over?’ said Nico. ‘It is finished. We’ve just been visited by a ridiculous person called Dr Nittri, who says he has had a message from them. We believe him. We’d like you to come.’

  The city was in no way different. Even in the street leading to the Largo Argentina, within a few yards of where, at almost exactly that moment, Corrado’s body was to be discovered, it might have been an ordinary Thursday. But then I remember that the day Mussolini was overthrown was dominated for me by a quarrel with my mistress. What had she accused me of? It had seemed urgent to disprove it then, and now I simply couldn’t remember which sin or crime or perhaps even simply misdemeanour I was supposed to have committed.

  Ettore and Bella had already arrived at the villa, both in tears. Sandro was weeping too, but not Nico and not Elena, who was already dressed in black.

  ‘Bastards,’ Ettore said, holding me tight and banging his palms on my back, ‘bastards’.

  We couldn’t leave each other, and yet, after the first five minutes, there was really very little to say.

  Nico had taken my arm as soon as I was free of Ettore, and led me aside. ‘We must stop them making propaganda of it,’ he said. ‘My father made that quite clear, that he doesn’t want the men of power present at his funeral. Since we all, especially Mamma, regard them as murderers equally guilty as the terrorists, there is no dispute about that. But there will be an attempt, won’t there?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘but if we obtain the body as soon as the autopsy is completed, then I don’t see what they can do.’

  ‘I agree. Tell me, Uncle, will you go to San Grigliano, and make arrangements there. I shall have to hold the fort here, but we thought, a simple country funeral. Mamma and I, we have had time to discuss it …’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  San Grigliano is the small estate in the Sabine hills which came to us from my mother’s family. It is also where the Partisans tried to hang Enzo Fuscolo. I was glad to get away, to take a train out of Rome and hire a car, and drive in sunshine into hills scented with thyme and oregano.

  The peasants were cutting hay in the fields on the slopes of the mountain when I arrived, making a pattern that was antique and charming. Someone, seeing the car and recognizing me, made off for the priest, and in a little he arrived, from the field where he had been working himself. He was an old-fashioned priest, wearing a cassock; when he worked he hitched it up to his knees. He greeted me with that degree of reserve he kept for a Voltairean sceptic who was nevertheless a man of some distinction.

  ‘I know of course why you have come, and of course it shall be done.’

  ‘We can’t fix a date,’ I said. ‘We don’t know when the body will be released.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘But what we
would like to do is to drive here, as soon as we get it. And we should like the funeral service and interment to take place as soon as we arrive. Is that possible? Otherwise, you understand, we will be swamped by outsiders, by the international press, by politicians who want to force themselves into the act. We don’t want that. We want to do as Corrado said, to exclude the men of power, and have only those who … loved him present. We should like to have all the villagers, all your flock. And you will conduct the service.’

  ‘Everything will be ready,’ he said. ‘You have my word for it, dottore.’

  Looking at his brown face, a face that spoke of experience and innocence at the same time, I was tempted to question him, or rather, I suppose, for who knows what trick the conscious mind is victim of, to seek reassurance from him; that is, I almost asked him if I had been right or wrong not to have told the policeman that I had recognized that photograph of the young man. But I didn’t; and later I was glad I had restrained myself. It would have been self-indulgence on my part.

  What’s more, having rejected the Church, I have no right to seek consolation from its priests.

  The bell commenced to toll from its tower, sending slow, ringing strokes across the valley and up the hillside. Figures detached themselves from the fields, laying down their labour, becoming men and women with tanned and cracked faces as they shuffled, mostly in black, the men with studs at the necks of their shirts but no collars, into the piazza, where the priest stood waiting for them on the steps of the church.

  I couldn’t help thinking, this is the real, the enduring Italy, the one Virgil celebrated, one that has changed nothing in essentials since his day. When they looked at me it was levelly, with no cupidity and little calculation.

  The priest began to speak to them using the dialect that these days sounded both strange and familiar in my ears. As he spoke they listened, most of them with heads bowed.

  Some of the older men might have been among the Partisans who had hanged Enzo Fuscolo. Remembering the madness of his talk in the railway station – when he had spoken of Corrado’s imminent death in apocalyptic terms – I couldn’t help looking for sanity among these peasants. Yet, when I thought about it, the rough justice of the Partisans had done nothing to prepare Italians for civil life; if we continued to tear ourselves apart, wasn’t it to some extent at least because of the honour we accorded to that violence we had decided to commemorate?

  In the same way the great vulgar Monument of the Risorgimento in Rome was over-blatant; a man shouting that his deeds might be ignored.

  We have too much history.

  I thanked the priest, and told the peasants I was grateful to them for their sympathy.

  ‘My brother always loved San Grigliano,’ I said. ‘It represented to him so much of what was best in this Italy of ours that we cannot afford to lose.’

  I arranged with the priest that I would telephone him as soon as we knew when we would be able to move.

  I had said to Enzo Fuscolo:

  ‘I thought you stood for order. You used to speak, all your miserable Party spoke, of the need for discipline, of the dangers of a liberty that degenerated to licence; and so forth. It was always empty as the wind, but in a cruel and corrupt way, it made sense. You could grant it some sort of validity. But now…’

  His eyes were crafty as well as mad. ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘Even your nephew, dottore, has realized it’s too late. Now it must all be eradicated …’

  ‘Why did you want to see me?’ I said. ‘Simply to crow? You implied that you had some information.’

  ‘Information?’ The word asserted its old magic on him. ‘Everyone is playing a double game, and nobody understands the significance of his own actions. That is what I have learned. Gianni Schicchi thinks this will strengthen the Christian Democracy – their display of firmness of purpose will please their masters. But who can applaud a puppet? What we are seeing is the crumbling of the State. You and your parasite family will be destroyed with it, and then? Out of the rubble of decay, out of the fire, the phoenix of the order that is the true liberty, the liberty of devotion…’

  Mad words, as mad as Ed Mangan, as mad as Mastagni, as mad as the terrorists themselves.

  They fitted themselves to the rhythm of the train’s wheels descending the mountain track.

  But Bella had telephoned me, and said: ‘Uncle, you didn’t like seeing me with Christopher, I think.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s over. That sort of thing, it doesn’t answer. Unless we behave ourselves… I don’t know but it’s all part and parcel of demoralization, isn’t it?’

  * * *

  Young Mario had called on me again, and said: ‘This woman who cleans for you, she’s not much good, is she? Let me do some of that.’

  I had gone to see my brother, who had said, ‘He did his duty.’

  And Nico, meeting me as I left the old woman, stony-eyed and self-righteously facing her dead future, had taken me by the arm as if one of his own age, led me to a little room, normally hardly used at all, and poured each of us a glass of French brandy.

  ‘Have you heard?’ he said, ‘Bernardo is going to be on American television. I have arranged for a video to be flown to me. RAI refuse to carry it, even as a news flash.’

  A terrorist camp somewhere in the Middle East. The reporter, nobly honouring the promise of secrecy that he had been obliged to give in order to obtain the interview, could not be specific as to the exact whereabouts. Bernardo looked plump in the face; I couldn’t detect fear or guilt.

  He was profuse: ‘I loved my father, but I love Italy and humanity. I shall never have to make such a decision again. There was no choice. My father was himself, I shall always believe, a victim; how else could a man of such humanity have become the associate of those inhuman wolves who would not lift a finger to redeem him? We asked for very little, for recognition of our position, for the release of some comrades, themselves victims of the fraud and violence of this State, dominated by the multi-nationals and the CIA. Eventually we asked for the exchange of simply one prisoner: a woman. But the chiefs of the so-called Christian Democracy were adamant. Recognition of us would have involved admission of the justice of our principles. Accordingly, it is they, not my brother and sister Partisans, on whom my father’s blood rests. It is their names that are stained. Yes, I shall continue to struggle for the liberation of the Italian people…’

  Nico switched off the set. He poured more brandy in my glass (we were back again alone in the little sitting-room). He stood with his back to me, elegant in a dark suit, looking out on a garden on which the first drops of rain were falling.

  ‘I think we shall get the body tomorrow,’ he said.

  We didn’t talk of Bernardo.

  Ed Mangan said: ‘You wonder who intervened. You really do. Mastagni was just going to swing it, wasn’t he, Ray, and they blew it. It makes you think. You know, you can’t help wondering if in the last resort, at the very last moment, the plot wasn’t switched. It looks like it was directed against Mastagni. After all, if he’d taken over, and I reckon if they’d admitted him to the Government, he would have – he’s that calibre, isn’t he? – well it would have given a new sense of direction. So was it aimed at keeping him out? Did that skunk Schicchi tip the word? I said at the beginning, if you recall, Schicchi’s a motherfucker in the Nixon class …

  ‘You know something,’ he said, ‘your brother nearly pulled it off. Another week and he’d have done the Richard II stunt. Well, Italy’s in for a rough time now. That narrow, anal-fixated clique around Schicchi have really dug their claws in the nation now.’

  He could be right.

  Even Ed Mangan could be right.

  International opinion– aphrase that has as much meaning as a cream puff – is highly impressed however. Not for a long time – not perhaps since the fall of Fascism – has Italy had such a good press. Who would have thought the Italians would have had somuch steel in them? Gianni is featured on
the cover of Time magazine. ‘He stood firm,’ they say. The Times observes that ‘In this frightful ordeal the nerve, good sense and resilience of the oft-maligned Italian political class has been exemplary. Both the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party have shown courage and judgement in refusing to allow this tragedy to damage the structure of the State. These are dark days, and days of mourning, for Italy; but they should be days of pride also.’ Le Figaro speaks likewise; and there is almost envy in the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

  I can imagine Gianni preening himself, his hand closing on the mercury of power.

  Carlo Poggi telephoned, desolate of course.

  Five minutes of desolation; they proved the prelude to the request that the family should cease its obduracy, and co-operate with the State in celebrating Corrado.

  ‘You cannot take his letters seriously. The autopsy will reveal how he was drugged. Raimundo, no one has worked more closely with Corrado than I, I owe everything to him, I love him as a father. Can you deny me the right to participate in the mourning? Can you deny Italy?’

  Gianni, wisely ignoring me, has spoken three times to Nico and has tried to bully him into allowing him to speak to Elena. He even presented himself at the villa seeking an interview. When he was refused he told the Press that ‘The wholly natural desolation of the Dusa family, a desolation shared by the whole nation and in particular by the Christian Democracy, has blinded them to the realities of the situation, that Corrado Dusa was the martyr for the cause of Christian Democracy and the Italian nation. We lament him as brother, colleague, and hero.’