Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

  “But of course,” Caisotti said accommodatingly, “of course you’ll see the plans. It’ll be a four-story house like every other four-story house – that’s the maximum height the building code allows. I have to draw up the plans and show them to the engineers in City Hall for approval, and once they’re passed, I’ll show them to you so that you can tell me what you think.” The submissive voice was taking on a threatening edge. “I’ll bring everything up here and you can tell me what to do. . . . I’ll even let you see what all this is going to cost me and what profit I can make. You’re educated people, you understand these things better than I do. . . .”

  “It’s not a question of being educated,” Quinto said, suddenly irritated, as always, by any reminder of his status as an intellectual. “You know perfectly well how much you can offer just as we know what’s the least we’re prepared to take.”

  “If you’re already thinking of the least you’re prepared to take,” Caisotti said with a laugh, “what are we talking about?” As he spoke, he shook his head backward and forward, and Quinto noticed the thick, bull-like nape, which seemed to be subjected to a continual strain. The corners of his mouth went up and he was a shark, or bull perhaps, a bull snorting through its nostrils. His grimace might have been meant for a snigger or else an expression of anger. And at the same time he was also a poor wretch who says to himself: What’s the use? They’re just taking me for a ride, saying one thing and meaning another. I’m bound to fall into the trap.

  Quinto felt that after his remark about “the least we’re prepared to take,” he ought not to say anything more, so he concluded simply, “Anyway, we’ll reach some agreement . . .” slipping back into the vague formulas in which Caisotti liked to deal.

  But Caisotti wasn’t satisfied with this either. “Oh, yes, we’ll reach an agreement,” he said with the sorry little laugh of the man who knows he is being taken advantage of. “You mean you’ll tell me what I’ve got to do, and we’ll go on like that, putting things off from one day to the next and if I don’t get my work done in the summer, I’d like to know when I can get it done. I can do precious little building once the wet weather comes.”

  His eyes were blank, his mouth gave nothing away; all his expression was in his cheeks; they alone were unguarded. The left cheek, just above the gravelly expanse where he shaved, still showed the spot where the rosebush had scratched him. It gave a suggestion of fragile innocence to the leathery face, a suggestion intensified by the way his hair was cropped close on his nape, by his plaintive tone of voice and the bewildered way he looked at people. Quinto again found himself wanting to be nice to the man, to protect him, but this image of Caisotti as a little boy did not march with the other image, that of Caisotti as shark, outsize crustacean, crab, which was how he appeared as he sat there with his thick hands spread out loosely on the arms of the chair. Quinto went ahead with the negotiations in this fashion, indulging now the one image, now the other. But one thing was becoming clearer all the time; he positively liked the man!

  4

  “We’ve found a buyer.”

  “About time.”

  Quinto had gone to school with Canal, his attorney. A small man, he sat buried in the big armchair behind the desk, his head sunk into his shoulders. Spasms of fatigue flickered across his expressive face.

  “He’s a contractor,” Quinto said. “I came to ask if you knew anything about him – whether he’s honest, solvent, that sort of thing.”

  For years Quinto and Canal had not managed to sustain a conversation and on the rare occasions when they met in the street, they found nothing to say to each other. Their manner of life, professions, politics were all different, if not antagonistic. But now they had something concrete to discuss. Quinto was delighted.

  “What’s his name?” Canal asked.

  “Caisotti.”

  “Caisotti?” Canal sat up sharply, bringing his hands down on the table. His air of fatigue was gone. “You’ve picked a choice specimen.”

  It was not a promising start. But although he had already decided to stand up for the man, Quinto made an initial concession to his mother’s way of thinking. “Of course you’ve only got to look at his face to see the sort of fellow he is. All the same . . .”

  “It’s not his face. It’s that every time he makes a deal, every time he puts up a building, there’s trouble. I’ve taken action against him in several cases. He’s the biggest swindler in town.”

  Quinto was delighted to heart that Caisotti was such a scoundrel. The charm of business, it was just coming to him, was precisely that it brought one into contact with people of all sorts. It meant dealing with crooks and knowing that they were crooks, making sure that they didn’t cheat you, and indeed, if the opportunity occurred, cheating them. What counted was the “economic moment”; nothing else mattered. All the same, he felt alarmed at the possibility that Canal’s information might be so unfavorable that he would have to abandon the project.

  “But in an affair like this,” he said, “how can he cheat us? If he pays for the land, it’s his, if he doesn’t, that’s that. Has he got any money?”

  “Everything has gone well for him so far,” Canal replied. “He came down from the hills in patched pants – he could hardly read or write – and now he’s setting up construction jobs all over the place. He’s making a lot of money. City Hall is eating out of his hand.”

  The rancor in Canal’s voice was familiar to Quinto. He represented the old middle-class, conservative, honest, economical, undemanding, without much go or imagination, rather inclined to be stingy. For the last half century this class had witnessed changes that it had been unable to resist and had seen a new, traditionless class take the field. On every occasion it had had to give way, affecting an air of indifference but with teeth clenched. But wasn’t Quinto moved by the same sense of resentment? The difference was that he reacted by going to the other extreme and embracing everything new, everything that did violence to his feelings. At this very moment, as he was coming up against a new race of raw, unscrupulous contractors, he felt something like a scientist’s interest in an important new sociological phenomenon, and at the same time a positive aesthetic satisfaction. The squalid cement invasion bore the shapeless, snub-nosed features of the new man, Caisotti.

  “How much is he offering?” the lawyer asked.

  Quinto described the initial negotiations. He had got to his feet and was standing by the window. Canal’s office was in a smart street, but it faced the rear of the building. The roofs and terraces and walls belonged to the windy, sunlit city as it had been in the nineteenth century; but there too the scaffolding was sprouting, the newly painted walls, the flat roofs with the elevator shed on top.

  “Given the state of the market, it’s a good price,” Canal said grudgingly, gnawing at his lower lip. “In cash?”

  “Part cash down, part in installments.”

  “He’s made his payments all right so far, I believe. But he’s just put up a house; he ought to pay cash.”

  “That was what I wanted to find out. Now that I know where I am, we can close with him.”

  “Of course, if it were a question of having him do some work for you or of buying from him, I should have urged you not to go ahead. But in a case like this, I can’t see that it matters whether you sell to him or to someone else. . . . So long as he pays up. You’ll need to take a good look at the contract, though, the maximum height of the building, number of windows, that sort of thing.”

  Canal went to the door with him. “Are you staying here awhile or are you off again?”

  Quinto shrugged. “Who knows? Off again, I expect.”

  “How are things with you, your work . . . ?” Canal took care to leave his questions quite general. Quinto was always moving from one job to another, and he was afraid of appearing out of touch.

  Quinto’s reply was equally vague. “I’ve got a new thing in hand now, with some friends. It’s too early yet to . . .”

  “How a
bout politics?”

  Here again it was difficult to answer. They were on different sides of the fence and since they respected each other’s position, they didn’t want to get involved in an argument. But this time Quinto was a little more definite. “I’ve dropped politics nowadays.”

  “Yes, that’s what I heard. Someone . . .”

  “What’s the political situation here?” Quinto asked.

  Canal was a Social Democrat and served on the City council. “Oh, you know, the usual sort of thing.”

  “You’re well? Your wife?”

  “Yes, thanks, we’re all fine. What about you? Still a bachelor, eh. No projects in that line? Ah, well. Look, you get in touch with me again when you’ve had a word with Bardissone.”

  5

  Quinto emerged from this exchange of pleasantries with his nerves on edge. He had to traverse a stretch of the main street that he normally avoided on account of its crowded confusion. When he came home, he liked to walk in the countrified outskirts of the town or along the sea front, where he could still recapture the pulsations of the past, the marginal deposits which memory had preserved. But today he felt no nostalgia for a passing order. Seen from these sidewalks, the aspect which the city offered was the same as ever, appallingly unchanged, and what new elements there were – faces, young people, stores – didn’t count; his adolescence felt disagreeably close. Why in the world had he come back? All he wanted at the moment was to see the thing through quickly and be off. The idea of staying there filled him with disgust.

  He noticed a man on a bicycle propped against the curb; his face seemed familiar. A stringy old fellow in a sweater, his sunburned arms resting on the handlebars. He was a carpenter, Quinto now remembered, a Party member who must have been on the committee in the days when he served on it himself.

  He was talking to someone. Quinto walked by, supposing that the old man hadn’t recognized him, but he didn’t look away because he did not want to give the impression that he was cutting him. But the carpenter had seen him, for he said to the other man. “Why, it’s Anfossi!” waving to him in a friendly way. Quinto waved back with equal friendliness, but didn’t stop. The carpenter, however, put out his hand and said, “Good to see you, Anfossi. So you’ve come home for a while, eh?”

  They shook hands. Quinto had always liked the old man’s somewhat owl-like face, with those tortoise-rimmed glasses and the crew-cut white hair; he liked his voice too, with its broad northern vowels, and his strong, soft handshake. All the same, on this occasion he would have been happy to dislike him; a response to the old man’s warm humanity did not fit in with his present frame of mind, which was leading him to feel well-disposed toward Caisotti. And anyway he didn’t want to stop. He wanted to stop even less when the carpenter (Quinto was irritated at not being able to remember his name since he felt that he could only reply in the right tone of voice if he called him by his first name) began saying, “We’ve been following your career, you know, all those articles in the national press. The national press!” he repeated for the benefit of the other man.

  Quinto shrugged and tried to explain that he was no longer writing articles, but the carpenter wouldn’t listen. “No, no, it was fine work! One could see you meant what you said.”

  He pointed to the other man, whom Quinto didn’t recognize in the least, and said, “You remember him, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Quinto said. “Good to see you again.”

  “But it’s Comrade Martini, don’t you remember?” the old man insisted, as though Quinto had confessed to not recognizing him. “Comrade Martini of the Santo Stefano Section.”

  “You held a meeting at Party Headquarters in Forty-six to explain the Amnesty to us,” Martini said.

  “Yes, yes, I remember,” said Quinto, though he remembered no such thing.

  “Those were the times, though!” said the man called Martini. “Things looked hopeful then, eh, Masera?”

  Quinto was much relieved to find that he remembered the carpenter was called Masera, and as though the end of his search for the man’s name meant the end of his sense of guilt, he managed at last to look at him in a friendly way. He now recalled a windy evening when they had bicycled together along a road by the sea, which at the time was partly blocked by potholes. Masera’s bike had been as rusty and brokendown as the one he had now. They had been going to a meeting. It was a fine, warm memory.

  “Everything looked hopeful then,” Masera repeated, but in the manner of someone who takes a pessimistic line in order to be told by a better-informed comrade that “things still look hopeful now, more so than ever. The struggle is on . . . .” But Quinto said nothing, so that Masera was forced to add himself, “And they still look hopeful now, eh, Anfossi?”

  “Ah,” said Quinto, stretching out his arms.

  “But it’s hard here, I’ll say it’s hard! Men being fired – ah, the dirty bastards! What are the comrades saying where you are?”

  “It’s hard there too,” Quinto said.

  “Times are hard everywhere!” Masera laughed, as though this solidarity in hard times made things a bit better.

  “Tell him . . .” Martini whispered something to Masera, of which Quinto managed to catch only the word “lecture.”

  Masera nodded, smiling understandingly and at the same time doubtfully, as though he had had the same idea himself already but dismissed it as hopeless. “Are you still against public speaking?” he asked, turning to Quinto, “or have you finally turned into an orator? Now that you’re here, you see, we were thinking that if you could come to Headquarters and give a talk – well, the comrades would certainly appreciate it.”

  “No, no, I have to leave almost immediately, and anyway I can’t make speeches, you know that, Masera.”

  “Still the same, eh?” said Masera, laughing and slapping him on the back. “Hasn’t changed a bit, has he?” he said to Martini, whom Quinto still didn’t remember ever having seen before. “Not a bit,” Martini agreed. They were honest, friendly people, but Quinto had no desire to feel himself among friends. Quite the contrary, these were the days of every man for himself, pistol at the ready – the kind of relationship you had with businessmen, contractors, wide-eyed men who knew what was what.

  He compared Masera with Caisotti: Masera, trusting, expansive, prepared to find everything in line with his dream; Caisotti, wary, reticent, untrustworthy. No doubt about it though, it was Caisotti who was in touch with his time; he was accepting the conditions of the age, shirking nothing, you might say, whereas poor Masera, with all that stuff about being decent, pure in heart, and so forth, was really an escapist. He wasn’t living in the real world at all. Quinto shook off the burden of guilt with which Masera’s straightforward social conscience threatened him. You were still doing your duty too by taking part in private enterprise and dealing in land and money; it wasn’t an epic sort of duty, maybe, in fact it was rather prosaic, rather bourgeois, but hell, he was a bourgeois. How on earth had he ever supposed he was anything else?

  Quite reassured now about his bourgeois status, Quinto felt the uneasiness he had experienced with the two workingmen give way to a generalized, almost casual good will. It wasn’t altogether insincere: now that he was saying good-bye, he really wanted them to think well of him.

  6

  Nowhere were the reports on Caisotti favorable. As a result, Quinto found himself taking the man’s side. He was being victimized, the whole city was out for his blood, all the stuffed shirts were against him, and yet the poor bricklaying peasant, armed only with his shy, uncouth nature, was standing up to them.

  The point was that these negative judgments still left Quinto free to go ahead. People disapproved, but they didn’t warn him off altogether. He was the sort of person who liked doing things that were moderately controversial but would never court head-on disapproval, and he found himself supplied with approval and disapproval in exactly the proportions that his temperament required.

  Moreover, since he still had
to fight down a certain personal uneasiness in the first place, he was reassured by the thought that he was in professional contact with his fellow citizens. He felt he had finally returned to the ranks of the traditional middle-class element in the district, united in the defense of its modest interests, which were under attack. And yet, at the same time he realized that every step he was taking was helping the rise of Caisotti and his like, the new shifty, graceless middle-class that matched the graceless, amoral age they were living in. Let’s face it, Quinto said to himself; you people have lost every round! And with this his hostility shifted from the small society of his home town, from his mother and Canal – and from Masera the carpenter. His opponents were now his friends in the big cities in northern Italy, where he had lived all these years, years spent discussing the shape of the new society, the role of the workers and of the intelligentsia. Caisotti has won, Quinto told himself.

  He couldn’t wait to give his friends there a demonstration of his new position. He got on the train and next day he was lunching with Bensi and Cerveteri in the usual modest restaurant in Turin.

  They were talking about starting a review to be called The New Hegel. The waitress was trying to get their order; it was her third attempt, but they were too deep in conversation to pay any attention.

  Bensi looked at the menu and read the list of dishes, but apparently nothing took his fancy.

  “Why not call it The Hegelian Left?” he said.

  “In that case, why not The Young Marx? More punch.”

  “Are you going to order?” The waitress was still at it.

  “I propose The New Rhine Gazette.”

  “What about getting hold of the actual heading of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and using the same characters?” Quinto suggested. His remarks were never quite to the point, but they had a casual, professional air about them. He still hadn’t found an occasion to reveal his disagreement with the group, though this suggestion was intended to open the way.