Innocence

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘Oh, but I came with some friends.’

  ‘What friends? Who are they? If they came with you, why aren’t they here?’

  ‘Only two of them, they’re fetching me some coffee.’

  ‘Fetching coffee is for people who can’t think what else to do next. Come out with me a little.’ They went out together onto the entrance steps. It had been fine weather when the audience arrived, but there must have been a change since the concert began and the sky was now a darkish olive-green, only streaked with light to the southwest, over the river. The air was damp and caressing.

  ‘Come out into the warm rain,’ Salvatore said.

  ‘Well, but how can rain be warm?’

  ‘Well, try it, try it. Come outside, put out your tongue, taste it.’

  Chiara sat through the second part of the performance in a lightly damp condition, like washing, she thought, brought in from the line sooner than it should have been. Her hair was flattened down and the rain had given her cheeks a striking pale rose colour. Her own friends said nothing, but from her seat two rows further forward, made a light-hearted pantomime of rubbing with a towel. The Alessandri had noticed also, and were not quite so much amused, nor were Mr and Mrs Swinburne-Cacciano, or the Quaratesi party, or the ancient but inflexible Marquesa Cardoni. Their silent systems of communication and warning were the same, in 1956, as they would have been thirty years earlier. A dictatorship, a war and an occupation had not been sufficient to change them. Yet Chiara herself was so poor a Florentine that she listened to the second part of the concert, which was much more successful, without noticing that anyone was looking at her.

  9

  Salvatore, who was not a temperate person, intensely regretted having gone to this particular concert. What irritated him as much as anything else was that his mother had repeatedly predicted that if he went north to practise in Milan or Florence he would be got hold of by some wealthy, fair-haired girl who would fasten on him and marry him before he knew what he was doing. Now, in point of fact this girl was badly dressed and not fair-haired, or anyway only in certain lights, for example in the artificial light of the auditorium and the rainy twilight outside would anyone have called her a blonde. His mind chased itself in a manner utterly forbidden to it, round thoughts as arid as a cinder track.

  As a favourite son, he had been obliged to receive a quite unjust amount of his mother’s traditional wisdom. After he had been caught, she would say, not even with any real disapproval but with an infuriating nodding and smiling certainty, he would forget his home and even his family and they would be lucky ever to see him again in Mazzata. Curious that advice is just as irritating when it’s wrong as when it’s right.

  She had baptized him Salvatore in honour of the Saviour, whereas his father would have preferred not to have had a christening at all, and wanted, quite ineffectually, to name him Nino, after Antonio Gramsci, or perhaps Liberazione or Umanità, or even 1926, since that was the year of his birth and also that of Gramsci’s last imprisonment. Domenico Rossi’s choice of names could be laughed at, and was laughed at, even by the Party members of Mazzata. His one ally was a part-time book-keeper, one of those not born to succeed, with the short-sighted mildness of a certain kind of violent revolutionary. This man, Sannazzaro, was not particularly welcome in the house and often sat talking to Domenico in a windowless room which was really part of the kitchen passage. The police rightly regarded him as entirely harmless. But to Salvatore, as he grew up, his father had meant much more than his mother. He couldn’t ever remember agreeing wholeheartedly and without embarrassment with his mother. On the other hand he put off for as long as he could the pain of admitting to himself that his father was wrong.

  In 1913 Domenico and Sannazzaro had come up together from Mazzata in search of opportunities. They had gone as far north as their permits allowed, to Turin. Domenico had worked as a bicycle mechanic, Sannazzaro as an assistant book-keeper. They shared a copy of a weekly newspaper, Gramsci’s Grido del Popolo. In the Grido they read about an Italy, a possible Italy, without poverty, favours or bribery. Mass education would come about as a matter of course, but it would take the form not just of instruction but of question and answer between teacher and learner. Every sane man is an intellectual, but most are afraid to function as an intellectual should, that is, to stay in their own communities and organize them. If only a few thousand would do this, in Calabria, Campania, Sicily and Sardinia, the south could be as prosperous as the north. Only the lack of good sense or even common sense made it difficult to envisage the great human cities of the future with their intense, tumultuous and productive life. Under present conditions every Italian family struggled against every other to get advantages for itself. When the concept of property was abolished the struggle would be unnecessary. Even within the home there would be peace. Twelve brothers and sisters would be able to sit around a table without dispute. And the children’s education would no longer be left to women and priests. No adult would have a mortgage on a child’s character or its future. In the new community it would be free, at last, to choose.

  Every life has lucky moments when sympathy opens one heart to others. To respond may be a mistake, not to respond must be ingratitude. The crowded print of the Grido came, in this way, in the back streets of Turin, to authentic life for Rossi and Sannazzaro. In the whole city they had not succeeded in finding one bar or café kept by a Mazzatano. Their own friendship, the weekly Party meetings and the Grido became their points of reference.

  Before the strike of 1919 they met their frail leader in person. That was before he went to prison for the first time. Rossi even had the opportunity to ask him whether there was anything he could do for him, anything he could get for him or have sent to him by way of the warders. Gramsci had said that he wanted nothing except a loaf of Sardinian bread and an Italian translation of Kipling’s Jungle Book. But his smile as he said this, not a politician’s smile, showed that he recognized the impossible.

  After the strike and the occupation of the factories, which was a total failure, Rossi and Sannazzaro of course lost their jobs. They sold their city shoes, resoled their boots with lengths of bicycle tyres, and walked the 750 kilometres back to Mazzata. By the time they arrived they were almost starving. The village received them without enthusiasm. They had left Mazzata as failures, and returned as failures. They still attended the local Party’s surreptitious meetings, in the back room of the chemist’s shop. When Gramsci, from his prison cell, dissociated himself from Stalin’s policies, he was declared an outcast and a heretic. The two friends, loyal to him still, became less important in local politics than the flies on the ceiling.

  10

  When he was ten years old Papa had taken him on a journey to see Antonio Gramsci. It was a last chance, since Gramsci, having been moved from one prison to another for the last nine years, was known to be terminally ill. There had been an international petition to the Italian government for his release, which had met with the fate of most petitions.

  By 1936 he had been transferred to Rome. He was no longer an official prisoner, but was under medical treatment at the Clinica Quisisana. The rules for visiting him were relaxed. On the other hand, there were not so very many people, and almost none of his old associates, who cared to visit him.

  Domenico and his son got a lift in a tomato lorry as far as Benevento, and then took the slow train to the capital, which gave them a good chance to look at each other without interruptions. Salvatore saw a patient man whom he loved, and who, he knew, had had to ask Mother’s permission to make this expedition, a tired man, worn and shiny like an old suit. Domenico looked back uneasily at his bright, unaccountable boy.

  When Domenico had been little his grandmother, who worked in a hotel kitchen, had edged him upstairs into the reception hall in the hopes of presenting him to a bishop (who had just arrived) for a blessing. They knelt together for a moment on the marble floor, risking everything. But the bishop, who was on a private visit and wished to indi
cate that he was off duty, turned his ring round on his finger so that the faithful could not kiss it. The grandmother got up and twitched the boy back to the service quarters, as though he had been in some way to blame.

  All Domenico wanted now was for his son to come into the presence of a great man. At the same time he had a few questions to ask after these many years, and of course he could not come empty-handed. On his knees, with their sandwich, he had a parcel consisting of medicines, writing paper and a woollen pullover. It was fastened with insulating tape, and anyone could tell that it had not been wrapped up for him by a woman. When they got to Rome and steamed into the old peach-coloured station in Piazza Esdraia, he tried to make it look a little more presentable.

  Salvatore was disappointed firstly when they crossed the city without seeing a single one of the new Alfa Romeo two-seaters whose image he had studied in a magazine, and secondly when the Clinica Quisisana had no bars.

  ‘It’s not a prison,’ his father told him.

  ‘Can he go away if he wants to?’

  ‘No, he can’t do that, he can’t go into Rome without a police guard.’

  Then it’s a prison, the child thought.

  There was a bell in the outer gate and when they rung it was answered by a young male nurse in uniform. Salvatore saw that he was not going to be petted, as he would have been in a convent, or a hospital run by Holy Sisters. This impressed him. He was impressed because he was ignored.

  The male nurse asked whether they had an authorization from Dr Marino or Professor Frugoni, and Salvatore felt an unaccustomed admiration for his father when he pulled out of his inner pocket a note from the Professor confirming their appointment. The nurse went away, and came back to say that the patient Antonio Gramsci was not well enough to receive visits. He was now carrying a blue folder under his arm.

  ‘Who says so?’ asked Domenico.

  It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. He stood there in the blank early spring sunshine, holding his son’s hand.

  ‘The management are anxious that he shouldn’t see members of the public without medical knowledge, who might be distressed by certain changes in him,’ said the young man, reading from the folder as though repeating a lesson. ‘The tuberculosis has affected the spine — do you understand me? — and the sight is poor.’

  ‘You can spare yourself anxiety. My permissions are all in order. In reply to a letter I sent him Comrade Gramsci himself asked us to come and see him.’

  11

  Salvatore had seen deformed animals, and dead bodies of both people and animals, but never anything as ugly as Comrade Gramsci. Ugliness is a hard thing to forgive at the age of ten. The thick mouth of the prisoner, his father’s friend, opened darkly, like a toad’s, without a single tooth in sight. The tiny crippled body could no longer make any pretence of fitting into his ordinary clothes, which hung on him, as they would have done on a circus animal. He was not sitting down, but propped standing up against the wall. The smell of illness, stronger than disinfectant, filled the room, and there was no other air to breathe. While his father unwillingly took the only chair, Salvatore, after standing up for a while, perched on the corner of the clean, hostile cover of the bed.

  ‘We have brought a few medicines, just what we could get at the chemist’s.’

  ‘Many thanks, but no, I should prefer you to save them for someone else. All I ask for here is some kind of stimulant, but Dr Marino doesn’t prescribe those. You’re very good, Domenico, but I have all I need as far as I’m allowed it. My sister-in-law comes quite regularly.’

  The visit was not going as it should, the present was not wanted. Gramsci, in a hoarse painful voice, difficult to follow, asked about Mazzata, and for the name of the local Party secretary. When he was told it he said, ‘No, I don’t know that name.’

  ‘He’s of the new generation, Nino, you couldn’t have heard of him.’

  ‘My one dread is that my memory will go. If one is forty-four, with no books to speak of, and no memory, one can’t expect to write anything of value. I have no record of what’s happening outside here either, except the official newspapers. My mind is still clear, but I think perhaps I’ve lost the gift of patience. When I was in prison I knew my friends were saying “If he can stand five years shut up in one place or another, surely he can stand six,” but in fact the fifth year in prison is very different from the fourth, and one can’t tell what the sixth will be like.’

  ‘But, Nino, this is a clinic. It’s the first time I’ve had an answer to any of my applications to visit you. That showed me how different things are for you now.’

  ‘It means that they don’t consider me important any more. But I knew about your applications. Don’t think that I’ve forgotten what affection is.’

  By now Domenico’s enthusiasm had become more like pleading. He seemed to be begging the situation to right itself and to become what he had hoped and expected.

  ‘How could one do that, Nino? You remember Turin, you remember when the tram-lines froze and none of us could get home, and you gave us your Ten Commandments?’

  ‘In Turin,’ said Gramsci, ‘I made a resolution that I would cut every strand, every connection, between myself and my family. Of course I had no children of my own then. It was only little by little that I realized how dry, coarse and squalid is a life without affection through the bond of the flesh. You’ll tell me that nothing could be more obvious, and yet I didn’t see it at that time.’

  ‘I don’t know how to answer you,’ said Domenico hesitantly. ‘This is my only son, my respect for you has never changed, I’ve come not only to see you once again but to ask about the things that still confuse me.’

  Salvatore continued to stare fixedly at the sick man, and now it seemed to him that he looked, in his crumpled suit, more like a squab or a fledgling bird, with large nocturnal eyes, disturbingly blue, and a beaked nose. On top of a cupboard full of medicine bottles there were three photographs, one of a girl, one of a boy, one of a woman with both the girl and the boy. These were evidently the prisoner’s children, and Salvatore, who pondered a good deal about such things, felt sick at the thought of how the hunchback could have managed to beget them. The height of his own ambition, at the moment, was to dive into the irrigation tank in Mazzata from the topmost height of the containing wall. Now he was looking at a fully-grown man whose body was of no practical use to him whatever.

  A change of tone, much like a change of temperature, told him that the discussion was now about himself. It continued as though, by some curious fiction, he was not in the room at all, and in accordance with the same fiction he pretended not to listen. His school work was mentioned. This, though in a way reassuring, was bitterly disappointing, worthy of his mother and her friends, not worth travelling to Rome for. He was ready to say, or to have it said for him, that he had passed the first of his junior intermediate exams. His father made nothing of that, but, trembling with urgency, passed rapidly on. His hands, hanging down loosely between his knees, pressed themselves together to emphasize every point.

  ‘Of all the truths I’ve learned from you, Comrade, whether I’ve heard them with my own ears or whether I’ve read them, I’ve been interested most of all in what you’ve had to say about education. Through the upbringing of our children we can begin, even today, to build the society of the future. My son here is intelligent, but he will stay with me in Mazzata, I shan’t lose him to the cities. He will be an intellectual for the people of Mazzata. When he goes to the Liceo, I shall prevent his learning Latin. Latin is still what it has always been, the means by which one class can overawe and humiliate another. I shall go to see the school authorities and insist that he is taught simply and naturally, through question and answer.’

  When he paused, awaiting for words of approval, Gramsci said: ‘Let him learn Latin.’

  He was speaking now with increasing difficulty.

  ‘Let him learn Latin. I learnt it. Education should never be acquired easily. Skill in a tr
ade doesn’t come without work and suffering, and after all, learning is a child’s trade.’

  Slavatore saw that his father was disconcerted, and although this was nothing new, he was sorry.

  ‘And science?’

  ‘Of course, if you’re certain you can distinguish it from witchcraft.’

  ‘Nino, in Turin you advised both of us to read Rousseau.’

  ‘Who were “both of us”?’

  ‘Myself and Luca Sannazzaro, you remember Luca?’

  ‘Don’t try to make me infallible,’ said Gramsci, ‘you can see I have enough trouble without that. In 1927, when they moved me from Ustica to Milan, I was allowed to plant a few seeds of chicory, and when they came up I had to decide whether to follow Rousseau and leave them to grow by the light of nature, or whether to interfere in the name of knowledge and authority. What I wanted was a decent head of chicory. It’s useless to be doctrinaire in such circumstances.’

  Shuffling himself round into a new position, he looked directly at Salvatore.

  ‘If your father won’t let you learn what you want to, what will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  Gramsci began to tell, in his shadowy voice, stories of his own elder brother, who had been defiant as a child and as a gesture had taken the family cat to the village baker and asked him to roast it. When his shoes were locked up to prevent his running away he blacked his feet with polish and went off just the same. The story began to steal in its own right into the hidden reaches of Salvatore’s mind. He forgot the hospital room for the moment and gave way to the charm of what had happened then to someone who was indisputably here now. Gramsci went on to say a little about himself, as a crippled child, whose mother had always kept a coffin and a white dress ready for him, as he wasn’t expected to last long. ‘However, I have lived for more than forty years.’ He, too, had felt that it might be necessary to escape from home, and with this in mind he had always kept some dry corn in his pockets, and a candle and a box of matches.