by Allan Massie
Ah yes.
Nico arranged all admirably, and we escaped them. At the very last moment they had made their final appeal – His Holiness had consented to celebrate the Requiem Mass at San Giovanni. They understood that we might prefer a family funeral, but in the circumstances, could a devout daughter of the Church like Signora Dusa flout His Holiness?
Four cars, secretly hired in another name, followed the hearse out of the city. A grey heavy day, scirocco blowing dust and bad temper about the streets. We hardly talked on the journey.
Once Elena said, ‘You are quite sure, Raimundo, all will be ready?’
‘Father Martino assures me it will.’
‘And we have evaded the journalists?’
‘It looks like it,’ said Nico. ‘In any case we have certainly evaded the politicians. A few journalists… will they really matter?’
It started to rain as we turned up into the hills, the tops of which were swathed in mist. The hearse was being driven quickly now, the traffic jam at the edge of the city had delayed us by twenty anxious minutes.
Father Martino had been as good as his word. The little church had been swept clean. Someone had put roses, Corrado’s only flowers, on the altar. The peasants, all in black and almost all past middle-age, had gathered in the dripping piazza before the church, the men standing bareheaded. A small band of school-children – there were not many in the village these days – waited in their blue school tunics, the broad white collars of which were crumpling in the rain.
We all went into what had been my father’s house for a few minutes. Someone had put a wreath of laurel over the lintel from which the Partisans had tried to hang Enzo Fuscolo. Nico and I spoke to the priest. I can’t remember what we said.
The service was simple and brief. You don’t need many words to see off a man.
Father Martino said: ‘Corrado Dusa was a friend of the people of this village. We knew him as a humble man, an honourable man, a good man. He loved his family. He did his duty. He lived as a Christian towards his enemies. He did not, even in extremity, give way to despair. That was the final sin with which he was tempted; he withstood that temptation also. And, despair, my children, is the greatest temptation of all; for despair denies all virtue. Let us pray …’
We lifted the coffin on our shoulders, two sons, two brothers (one of each absent) and four villagers. The grey heavy clay of the churchyard gave an uncertain footing in the rain, which was now coming down steadily, blotting out the flank of the mountain across the valley. The grave had been dug near the wall of the churchyard, where the old chapel had been, at the top of the hill between two yew trees. We slithered as we climbed the slope, the coffin lurching. Someone coughed raspingly. Otherwise, the only sound came from the damp moving of feet.
Words were pronounced, words of an old ritual, an old dispensation, the Latin linking Corrado to our fathers. The women dropped flowers on the coffin as we lowered it to the soil. A little puddle had already formed where it would lie. The heavy clay fell to the wood. Elena raised her widow’s veil a moment, looked dry-eyed down, nodded her head, and let the veil descend. Some of the village women were sobbing; Bella, Sandro, and Ettore also.
Nico and I moved round the assembly shaking hands and speaking in low voices.
The grave-digger emerged from the shed at the back of the church, carrying a spade.
We all turned away, Ettore opening an umbrella above Elena.
I found Mario sitting on my doorstep.
He said, ‘My friend’s shot himself. He’s talked of doing it so often I never thought he would, then I went there this afternoon and found him. It was horrible.’
‘You’d better come in,’ I said.
He was trembling.
‘I’ve been burying my brother. Brandy?’
As I handed him the glass, I saw that his left eye was bruised, the skin broken and the pupil dilated and bloody.
‘How did you come by that eye?’
‘Oh that was the police. They wanted to be convinced I had just found Max like that. It’s nothing; not important…’
He asked me about Corrado’s funeral …
June 21 Ten days since it happened. Since they did it. And today, in a grand orgy of hypocrisy, Italy remembers the man they did nothing to save. But he is also, as I cannot help but recall, the man I did nothing to save, because of my error of judgement; but was it an error? If I could only be sure – but there is nothing of which I am certain. I can hardly contemplate the possibility. Nico said to me the other night, ‘You know, Uncle, two things I must tell you. First, that I have committed myself utterly to the Bank, not because I believe the work at the Bank is noble, necessary, or anything like that, though I suppose it is actually necessary, but because a man must have something; and anyway there are no ideals in banking. I am going to live with facts, not ideals or ideas. Second, and this is a fact too, one that I regard as central to my being, when a decent interval has passed, for we are formal, Mamma and I, we intend to observe traditional periods of mourning; after that though, I shall marry Bella. A dispensation will be necessary of course; there will be no difficulty there. I love Bella certainly, and I respect her; those aren’t my reasons alone however. If you forgive me, I have learned of the necessity of marriage from you. We are very alike, Uncle. I, too, am a natural sceptic. But it comes back to what the priest said, a priest whose beliefs I don’t need to tell you I cannot share. You remember about despair. I think for those of our temperament despair is never far distant. Bella can protect me against it. Was it St Paul who said it was better to marry than to burn? Well, marriage is certainly preferable to the consuming numbness that I can recognize in myself, that I see you hold at bay with such fortitude, and that I suppose overcame Uncle Guido. Isn’t that so?’
Isn’t that so? It was by far the longest speech Nico has ever made to me – or is likely to make – certainly the most intimate. But fortitude? He may have identified the malaise, but fortitude? That is mere rhetoric.
They will assemble at San Giovanni. The piazza will be full. The newspapers, the radio, the television have seen to that. His Holiness will speak, with his dying sincerity, of Corrado. Smug heads will nod. Of course others besides the Pope will be sincere. I cannot deny that many may have opposed negotiations for what seemed the best of reasons. For many the choice posed was painful indeed. But they took the easy way.
I shan’t go. None of the family will. Instead I shall make my own pilgrimage, my own act of piety. More rhetoric.
I shall go to see Guido.
And I shall ask Mario to send his sister Renata to me this evening. Is that my response to Nico? He picks a wife; I call a whore. Well, it is a matter of generations and tastes.
19.00 Guido was better today, ambulant as they say.
The Fascist warder greeted me with that air of complicity that I find so displeasing and embarrassing. He said, ‘It’ll be a proper farce at San Giovanni, won’t it? What a set of hypocrites. You’ll see, they’ll make no real effort to catch those bastards who did it. Whereas a man like me, he’s watched all the time. There’s no justice, I tell you. But you’ve found out that, haven’t you?’
And he winked obscenely.
He led me to the courtyard round which a number of blanketed figures were shuffling.
‘It’s a great thing of the new Director’s,’ he said, ‘this exercise.’
Guido moved with great concentration, making sure he kept always the same distance behind the man in front. He found it more difficult to keep in step, and it clearly displeased him when he had to change feet to regain a lost rhythm. Once his eyes flickered in my direction. For a moment – oh, shorter than the life-span of the most wretched insect – I thought I detected recognition there. At once however his gaze returned to the back before him.
After perhaps twenty minutes, one of the guards blew a whistle, and the movement stopped. The more self-aware of the lunatics began to shuffle off towards their cells. One of the guards took Guido by t
he arm and led him in my direction.
‘Do you want to spend some time with him, dottore? There’s no need to.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘We’ll take him to his cell then. He’s more relaxed there. Familiar surroundings. But there’s no real point, you understand. He’s been very detached the last weeks, not taking in anything if you ask me.’
I sat with him in his cell. I told him – why not? – all about poor Corrado, from the beginning, in detail, admitting even, what I had admitted to no one else, my own failure. I have never been sure whether Guido doesn’t sometimes, in certain states, understand everything that happens around him, everything you care to say; whether he doesn’t understand and simply declines to respond; perhaps it is all there, stored-up, material for his dreams.
I don’t know; it’s possible; at that moment I believed that was how it is.
And speaking to Guido was a form of confession, the only one allowed to me, but one where one could not delude oneself with the luxury of absolution.
All the time I spoke, his fingers were busy, picking at threads in the blanket which covered him.
‘That’s it then,’ I said, ‘you know the whole story, my dear.’
I leant over and kissed his cheek as I had kissed Corrado’s in his coffin.
Outside it was evening sunshine. The leafy suburban streets were filling with Saturday girls, laughing and lazy.
I walked for a bit, then took a taxi.
From its window, as we stopped at a traffic light, I saw the mad face of Enzo Fuscolo. He was sitting at a caffè table, with a copy of Paese Sera open before him. He was very pale and the tic in his face was working fast. I could see – or did I perhaps imagine? – the huge headline of the paper, and a photograph of the crowd at San Giovanni. And I thought of the waste land in which he must live.
A little later I paid off my taxi and walked through the streets to a wine-shop, not my usual one, but one just off the Corso where, for a reason I have never understood or troubled to inquire, the walls are covered with tiled reproductions of Beardsley drawings. I sat in that harmless adolescent decadence and drank a quartino of the house wine which comes from Marino. It was very still in the wine-shop, the only noise coming from the dripping of a tap and the buzz of two bluebottles. I sipped my wine and thought of Renata.
I can hear her light confident step on the stairway, but when I try to picture her face, Corrado’s, then Guido’s, gets in the way.
About the Author
THE DEATH OF MEN
Allan Johnstone Massie was born in Singapore in 1938, brought up in Aberdeenshire and educated at Drumtochty Castle, at Glenalmond, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read History. He was a schoolmaster at Drumtochty Castle in Scotland for ten years and taught English as a foreign language for three years in Rome. His first novel, Change and Decay in All Around I See, was published in 1978. In the years since then he has written seventeen novels, including a historical series set in ancient Rome: Augustus (1986), Tiberius (1990), Caesar (1993), and Antony (1997). These widely successful works have been translated into fourteen languages. His novel The Ragged Lion (1994) was on the life of Sir Walter Scott, while King David (1995) took its subject from the Old Testament. Massie’s non-fiction work includes The Caesars (1983) on the twelve emperors of ancient Rome, Byron’s Travels (1988), and Glasgow: Portraits of a City (1989). He has written critical biographies of Muriel Spark (1979) and Colette (1986).
Massie’s second novel, The Last Peacock (1980), won the Frederick Niven Award in 1981, The Death of Men (1981) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and A Question of Loyalties (1989) won the Saltire Society/Scotsman Book of the Year Award. A Question of Loyalties belongs to what the author has described as ‘a loose trilogy of novels dealing with the European crisis of the mid-twentieth century’, the others being The Sins of the Father (1991) and Shadows of Empire (1997).
Allan Massie was a Creative Writing fellow at Edinburgh University from 1982 to 1984 and at the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde from 1985 to 1986. He was editor of The New Edinburgh Review from 1982 to 1984, and has worked as a television critic (Fraser of Allander award for Critic of the Year, 1982), and a sports columnist. He has also been the principal fiction reviewer for the Scotsman for over twenty-five years, and a columnist and reviewer for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
JOSEPH FARRELL
Joseph Farrell is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He has written or edited books on various Italian topics, including the Mafia, Italian theatre, the novelist Leonardo Sciascia and the playwright Dario Fo. He has also translated works by several Italian novelists and dramatists, including Carlo Goldoni, Vicenzo Consolo, and Fo. He has presented many documentaries for BBC radio, appears frequently on radio arts programmes, and does book and theatre reviews for, among others, the Times Literary Supplement and The Herald.
Copyright
First published in hardback in Great Britain
in 1981 by The Bodey Head Ltd
First published in paperback in Great Britain
in 1982 by Robin Clark Ltd
This edition first published as a Canongate Classic in 2004
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Allan Massie, 1981
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 546 0
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