“Wait a minute,” he said. “If it’s the custom here for men to use pure alcohol, then I’ll follow their example. Since this is considered a woman’s perfume, then a woman should have it.”
He started to give her the bottle, but she drew her hand away.
“Aren’t you a woman?” asked Scamoggia.
“Of course,” she stammered.
“Then take it. I’m not putting it up for sale; it’s a present.”
She seemed perplexed, but finally she took the bottle and stowed it away in the bag swinging from her shoulder.
“Thank you, Comrade,” she managed to say.
“You’re welcome, good-looking!”
Comrade Petrovna tried to give him a haughty bureaucratic stare but succeeded only in blushing like a little capitalist. She ran to catch up with the rest of the party, while Scamoggia closed his suitcase, lit a cigarette and let it dangle from one corner of his mouth, with an air of obvious satisfaction.
A bus was waiting for them, and they climbed in. As Peppone was hoisting his suitcase on to a shelf above the seats Don Camillo tapped him on the shoulder.
“Chief,” he said, “there must be some sort of mix-up. I seem to have your suitcase.”
Peppone examined the tag and saw that it was indeed his. He took the other one down from the shelf and sure enough it was tagged with the name of Camillo Tarocci.
“Nothing serious,” said Don Camillo. “Just as I said, it’s a mix-up.”
Peppone sat down, across from Don Camillo. After the bus had started a second thought crossed his mind.
“So when we went through the customs I was carrying your suitcase,” he said.
“Accidentally, you were.”
“And accidentally did your suitcase have something contraband in it?”
“Oh, nothing much. A few holy cards, a picture of the Pope and some communion wafers.”
Peppone shuddered all over.
The bus was travelling through an endless expanse of flat country, where scrawny cows were grazing on the meagre autumnal grass. Comrade Petrovna announced that they were going to visit a tractor factory, after which they would be taken to a hotel for dinner and a night’s rest.
The factory was on the outskirts of the city of R. It was an agglomeration of dismal grey cement buildings rising abruptly out of the plains to the north.
“This ugliness is the product of what’s called an ‘industrial civilization’, and it’s the same the world over,” Don Camillo thought mournfully to himself, feeling acutely homesick for his faraway village, where every brick had been put in place by a man’s hand and men and things were bound by invisible ties together.
The workers wore the indifferent, bored air common to their kind. Some parts of the factory were staffed exclusively by women, stocky little creatures who did not in the least resemble Comrade Petrovna. At a certain point Comrade Rondella could not help edging up to Don Camillo and saying:
“Comrade, these women don’t look as if they’d grown up in the same favourable environment as our charming interpreter!”
Don Camillo made a shattering reply.
“Comrade, you can’t look at women factory workers as if they were contestants in a beauty parade! Every self-respecting Communist knows that.”
It was no time for an argument, especially as Peppone was shooting dagger looks in their direction.
The visit was prolonged beyond all measure, because a zealous young manager explained in detail even things that required no explanation, with volleys of statistics that Comrade Petrovna had to translate without omitting a single one. Finally they came to the end of the assembly line. Don Camillo seemed to be thunderstruck with admiration at the sight of a finished tractor and said, turning to Peppone:
“Comrade Senator, this tractor is just like the one which the Soviet government presented to your agricultural co-operative at home!”
Peppone would gladly have committed mayhem. The tractor in question had stubbornly refused to work, and the whole province had laughed about it. Now he was forced to smile and say what a boon it was to his peasant constituents. But when he had finished his little speech the mechanic in him won the upper hand. He took aside one of the engineers and pointed out a certain part of the fuel injection pump, which he explained did not function for such and such a reason. The engineer listened attentively and then shrugged his shoulders since he could make no better reply. Fortunately Comrade Petrovna came over and offered to interpret for him.
“He gets the point,” she said to Peppone. “They’re waiting for authorization to make the necessary changes.”
The engineer laughed and said something more, causing the girl to knit her brow and hesitate for a moment. Finally, without looking Peppone in the face, she added:
“He says the authorization may arrive from one year to the next.” She started to rejoin the group, but Scamoggia came to meet her.
“Comrade,” he said, displaying a set of teeth as white as those of a Hollywood moving-picture idol, “I didn’t hear those last figures about the replacement parts. Could you get the manager to repeat them?”
The manager obliged with a fresh volley of statistics, enough of them to choke an adding-machine. Scamoggia nodded approvingly and shook the manager’s hand.
“Thank you,” he said to Comrade Petrovna. “You don’t know what pleasure you’ve given me.”
“Are you particularly interested in agricultural machinery?” she inquired ingenuously.
“No, but I like to hear you talk.”
This was a sacrilegious offence to a temple of labour and comrade Petrovna paled and stiffened in proper bureaucratic style.
“Comrade…” she started to say in a harsh, metallic voice. She had never been in the Trastevere section of Rome or looked into a pair of eyes like those of Scamoggia. They swallowed her up, and all her rigidity melted away.
R. was a typical Russian city of about a hundred and fifty thousand people, with few automobiles and little traffic of any kind on the streets. The hotel was small and ill kept and Don Camillo found himself in a thoroughly uncomfortable room. He wondered with whom he was to share it, but his doubts were soon put to an end by the arrival of Peppone.
“Look here, Father—I mean Comrade—” said Peppone, “you’ve got to stop pulling Rondella’s leg. Let him alone, even if you don’t like him.”
“But I do like him,” replied Don Camillo. “Where the Party’s interests are at stake, I hew to the line. The fellow is sadly muddled; there are remnants of bourgeois ideology in his mind and it’s up to us to clear them away.”
Peppone threw his hat against the wall. “One of these days I’m going to strangle you,” he hissed into the priest’s ear.
The group gathered in the dingy dining-room. Comrade Oregov sat at the head of the table, with Peppone on his right and Comrade Nadia at his left. Don Camillo manoeuvred himself into a place opposite Rondella thus causing Peppone’s temperature to boil over. It boiled over again when he saw Don Camillo raise his hand to his forehead to make the sign of the cross as he sat down.
“Comrades,” he exploded, “what wouldn’t I give if some of those stupid reactionaries who are always talking down the Soviet Union could be with us? If only they could see it with their own eyes!”
“It wouldn’t be any use, Comrade.” Don Camillo said dismally. What with pretending to smooth his hair and brush the lapels of his jacket, he had successfully made his sign of the cross. “Their own eyes wouldn’t convince them. They go round with blinkers.”
Comrade Petrovna translated these words, and the tourist bureau official nodded his shaven head in approval as he murmured a reply.
“Comrade Oregov says that you have hit the nail on the head,” she said to Don Camillo, who acknowledged the compliment with a slight bow.
Scamoggia, who was always ready to second what Comrade Tarocci said, added an observation of his own.
“Our country is a century behind. Our stinking industrialists think
they know it all, just because they produce a few miserable machines. But if they were to see a factory like the one we visited today, they’d have heart failure. And it isn’t one of your biggest and best, is it, Comrade Petrovna?”
“Oh no, it’s just a second-rate plant,” she responded. “It’s the last word in modern technology, but the production is relatively small.”
Don Camillo shook his head sadly.
“We Italians ought to feel humiliated to see that a second-rate Soviet factory is so far ahead of the Fiat Company, which is our greatest producer of cars.”
Comrade Peratto, from Turin, who so far had had very little to say, was wounded in his local pride.
“That may go for the tractor department, but when it comes to cars, the Fiat’s not to be sneezed at. We have no right to belittle the Italian workers who made it what it is today.”
“Truth above everything!” exclaimed Don Camillo. “Truth is more important than the pride of the Fiat Company. As long as national pride leads us to condone the backwardness of our social and economic system we shall never learn the lesson of efficiency which the Soviet Union can teach us. A man whose fiancée had only one leg insisted that two-legged women were inferior to her. That’s exactly the attitude we have towards our half-baked accomplishments. Here in Russia industry has two strong legs to stand on.”
“And what legs!” echoed Scamoggia, looking boldly at Comrade Petrovna.
“I don’t see what you’re driving at,” Comrade Rondella said to Don Camillo.
“A Communist must face up to the truth, even when it is painful,” Don Camillo explained. “We’ve come here to search for the truth, not to indulge in sentimentality.”
The tourist-bureau official had followed the conversation carefully, asking Comrade Petrovna to translate every word. Peppone was sitting nervously on the edge of his chair, but fortunately just at this moment the food was brought to the table and the hungry group fell eagerly upon it.
The cabbage soup was not to their liking, but its taste was eclipsed by a savoury roast of mutton. Their hosts had even thought to provide them with wine, which relaxed the tension and loosened their tongues. The subject of the tractor factory was brought up again and Comrade Peratto, in order to wipe out the bad impression he had made by boasting of Fiat cars, called Don Camillo’s attention to the ingenuity of a certain device in the Russian tractor factory’s assembly line.
“Of course,” said Don Camillo; “the Russian people are ingenious and inventive above all others. They had demonstrated their talent not only in the invention of the radio and the sputnik but also in the perfection of all sorts of lesser gadgets. Take the washbasins in our bedrooms for instance. Instead of having one tap for hot water and another for cold, they join them together in a single outlet which allows you to run water of whatever temperature you choose. This may seem like a small thing, but where else are you to find it?”
Rondella happened to be a plumber and he could not let this go by.
“Comrade, don’t be silly. My grandfather knew how to put two taps together. Where do you come from?”
“From the part of Italy that has more Communists than any other; in other words, from the most progressive part of the country. Besides, if I’m silly, I’m in good company. In Churchill’s memoirs you can find the very same thing, and nobody can say that Churchill’s a Communist.”
Rondella’s ideas were not muddled; they were crystal clear and he insisted upon expressing them.
“I don’t give a damn about Churchill! I say that by exaggerating these things you play right into the enemy’s hands. If truth comes above everything, then we must show it some respect.”
Don Camillo took off his misted glasses, wiped them and put them back on his nose. Then he broke the silence with these solemn words:
“Truth? Truth is whatever coincides with the interests of the working class. Comrade, you trust your eyes rather than your reason. And your reason is weak, because there are too many capitalistic cobwebs in your brain.”
“And you have a brain like a sieve,” Rondella retorted angrily. “Besides that, you’ve gone out of your way to step on my toes ever since we met. When we get back home, I’ll take care of you!”
“I’m not as patient as you are,” said Don Camillo, “and I’ll take care of you here and now!”
It all happened in a flash. Rondella stood up and punched Don Camillo in the jaw and Don Camillo shot him a return blow which toppled him back into his seat. The tourist-bureau official conferred with the interpreter and she passed on what he had to say to Peppone. Peppone got up, took Rondella by the scruff of his neck and hustled him outside.
“Comrade,” he said when Rondella had recovered some degree of composure, “the commissar noticed that you were out of sorts. Apparently this climate doesn’t agree with you. An hour from now an aeroplane leaves for Berlin, and he can arrange for your finding a place on it. From there you can go straight home.”
“With pleasure!” shouted Rondella. “You can’t imagine how glad I’ll be to see the last of the whole bunch of you.”
“Don’t take it so hard. Well see you when we return.”
Rondella opened his wallet, took out his Party membership card and tore it to pieces.
“We may meet,” he said, “but I’ll be on the other side of the street.”
Peppone had to give him a kick in the pants, but he did so with sincere regret. When he came back into the dining-room he put on a brave smile.
“It’s all settled. He’s most grateful for Comrade Oregov’s thoughtfulness.”
Then he raised his glass and proposed a toast to the victorious Soviet Union, to which Comrade Oregov responded with a toast to peace and the forthcoming liberation of the Italian working-class from capitalist tyranny.
“How about drinking to Nadia?” Scamoggia whispered in Don Camillo’s ear.
“Take it easy, Comrade!” was Don Camillo’s reply.
The dinner ended on a gay note. An hour later, while Comrade Rondella was flying towards Berlin, with a befuddled head and an aching behind, Peppone and Don Camillo retired to their room.
“Put out the light. Comrade,” said Don Camillo. “You can put it on again as soon as we’re in bed.”
“Ridiculous!” exclaimed Peppone.
“Ridiculous, my eye. A priest can’t be seen in his underwear by a Communist senator.”
When the light went back on Don Camillo took a notebook and wrote in it: “Return to the fold of Comrade Walter Rondella.” Out loud he said:
“Another redskin bites the dust!”
“Only a priest could play so filthy a trick! But you’re not putting over anything else on me!”
Don Camillo sighed.
“You’ll have to consult the inhabitant of my pen about that.”
Peppone stared at it with fascination, while Don Camillo unscrewed the top and extracted a slender object which turned out to be a crucifix.
“Lord,” said Don Camillo, raising his eyes to heaven, “forgive me for putting hinges on Your arms and on those of the Cross. But there was no other way I could bring You with me.”
“Amen!” roared Peppone, burying his head under the sheet.
A Forced Rest
“In illo tempore: Missus est Angelus Gabriel a Deo in civitatem Galilaeae cul nomen Nazareth, ad Virginem desponsatam viro, cui nomen erat Joseph, de domo David, et nomen Virginis Maria. Et ingressus Angelus ad eram dixit: Ave gratia plena: Dominus tecum….”
The aeroplane on which he was travelling, together with the druggist, swooped so abruptly that Peppone was left gasping. He wondered confusedly what the Latin was doing way up there in the air and how that hatefully reactionary druggist had come to be with him on the trip to Russia. Before he could settle these questions in his mind the droning Latin broke in on his consciousness again.
“Quae cum audisset, turbata est in sermone eius, et cogitabat quails esset ista salutatio. At ait Angelus ei: Ne timeas Maria, invenisti enim gratiam apud
Deum….”
With enormous difficulty Peppone raised an eyelid which seemed to weigh half a ton. Gradually his eye fell upon a faded tapestry hanging on the wall with Russian characters on it.
“… et vocabis nomen eius Jesum. Hic erit magnus, et Filius Altissimi vocabitur….”
Peppone opened his other eye and turned completely over. He was aghast to see that at the table which the Soviet hotel administration had alloted to this room Comrade Camillo Tarocci was celebrating Mass. Out of the red-jacketed volume of excerpts from Lenin he was reading the Gospel according to St Luke.
Peppone leaped out of bed and ran to hold his eye to the keyhole of the door. His heart was pounding and for a moment he thought the only thing to do was to throw a sheet over Don Camillo’s head. He thought better of this and began to shuffle around the room, making as much noise as possible in order to cover up the Latin sounds. He would have continued this indefinitely, had not the tinkle of a damned little bell rung in his buzzing ears. He didn’t want to listen, but he was forced to acknowledge its reality, and when Don Camillo raised the tin cup which was serving as a chalice, he came to a halt and bowed his head. Steps rang out in the corridor, but Peppone did not budge.
“God help us!” he muttered to himself.
The steps stopped in front of the door; someone knocked and said in almost unrecognizable Italian:
“Time to get up Comrade!”
Peppone grunted an answer, and the steps moved onto the next door.
“Ite, Missa en….” said Don Camillo at last.
“It’s about time,” gasped Peppone. “You can keep the blessing for yourself.”
“Lord, forgive him,” whispered Don Camillo, bowing before the tiny crucifix which he had set up on the upturned bottom of an empty water carafe. “He’s so jittery he can’t think straight.”
“I’d like to know if you weren’t jittery when they knocked at the door,” roared Peppone.
“Did somebody knock? I didn’t hear.”
Peppone didn’t press the point because he knew that Don Camillo was telling the truth. Besides, he was dead tired and only wished he could go back to bed, even if it meant resuming his dream trip with the reactionary druggist.
Comrade Don Camillo Page 4
