‘So then what, Uncle Donald!’ We threw ourselves on our knees at his feet, begging him, hands together in supplication, then we shook his shoulders, yelling.
‘Tell us how it ended, for God’s sake! We can’t wait to find out! Go on with your story, Uncle Donald!’
Note 1979
I have re-read ‘Becalmed in the Antilles’. Perhaps this is the first time I’ve read the story since I wrote it. It doesn’t seem dated, not only because it works as a story in its own right, quite apart from the political allegory, but also because the paradoxical contrast between bitter struggle and enforced immobility is a common condition, both in political-military and epic-narrative terms, at least as old as the Iliad, so that it seems only natural to refer it to one’s own experience of history. As an allegory of Italian politics, when one thinks that twenty-two years have gone by and the two galleons are still there facing each other, the image becomes even more distressing. Of course these twenty-two years have been anything but becalmed as far as Italian society is concerned, on the contrary it has changed more than in the hundred years before. And the time we live in could hardly be described as ‘a dead calm’. So in that sense one can’t really claim that the metaphor corresponds to the situation; but—slowly does it—even twenty-two years ago one had to bend the words a little to talk of being becalmed: they were years of acute social tension, of dangerous conflicts, of discrimination, of collective and individual drama. The word ‘becalmed’ has a certain good-natured calm to it that has nothing in common with the climate as it was then, nor with the situation today; but what it also expresses is that heavy atmosphere of dead calm weather at sea, so threatening and unnerving for sailing ships, as depicted in the novels of Conrad and Melville, from which of course my story takes its cue. Thus the success my metaphor enjoyed in Italian political journalism can be explained by the fact that it says something more than any political jargon word, as for example ‘immobilism’. It is the impasse in a scenario of conflict, of irreconcilable antagonism, and then corresponding to that an immobility within the two camps engaged: the innate immobility of the ‘Spanish’ since immobility suits their ends and aims; while in the ‘pirate’ camp we have the contradiction between the vocation for the ‘rapid war’ with its relative ideology (‘the rules of Admiral Drake’s fleet’) and a situation where recourse to cannonfire and grappling hooks is not only impossible but would be counterproductive, suicidal even… I didn’t offer any solutions in my story—just as I wouldn’t be able to offer any now—I just mapped out a sort of catalogue of possible responses. There were the two opposing command structures, united in their desire to perpetuate the situation with the minimum amount of change (for opposite but far from unfounded reasons) first and foremost within their respective ships and then in the balance of forces outside the ships. (In this regard one can hardly deny that there have been changes, mainly in the Communist Party and on the left in general, but also amongst the Christian Democrats if only as a result of exhaustion.) Then there were the supporters, on both sides, of direct conflict, people whose policies had more to do with temperament than strategy; and the supporters, on both sides, of dialogue. (The development of these two poles corresponds to what has actually happened, the conflicting policies of achieving broad understandings and of applying revolutionary pressure each giving the illusion of activity while hardly changing the situation at all.) There is also the apocalyptic point of view (‘a hurricane perhaps that with a bit of luck would send everybody to the bottom’), an allusion to the discussions on the prospect of a nuclear war, which at the time divided the Soviets, who saw it as the end of civilization, and the Chinese, who tended to play down the risks. Likewise typical of the time the story was written is the reference to technological development, which people then hoped might offer a solution (there was a great deal of talk of ‘automation’ as of something that would radically alter the parameters of the problem). But the invention of the steam engine I evoked has perhaps remained at the level of the pirate who plays with his coffeepot.
A few ‘historical’ details: I am unable to establish the exact date of the story; I remember that there was a long delay in the publication of that issue of Città aperta, so the story must have been written some months before when I was still in the thick of internal discussions for the renewal of the Communist Party. Among the people engaged in this debate my story was immediately praised by the supporters of revisionism, whether on the right or the left: both ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘reformers’ felt it supported their points of view; though it has to be said that the two camps were not always clearly defined then. After the issue of Città aperta was published, the story then appeared in Espresso and hence reached a very wide audience. Avanti wrote an editorial about it. Later an extreme left-wing pamphlet, Azione comunista, published a parody of the story, tying it in to particular situations and people. Maurizio Ferrara then replied to this parody with another parody, likewise personal and polemical, which was published in Rinascita under the pseudonym ‘Little Bald’. But in the meantime, in the summer of 1957, I had resigned from the Communist Party, and ‘Becalmed’ was seen as a sort of message to explain that decision, which wasn’t the case since the story belonged to an earlier period.
The Tribe with Its Eyes on the Sky
The nights are beautiful and missiles cross the summer sky.
Our tribe lives in huts of straw and mud. In the evening when we get back tired from gathering coconuts we sit at the entrances, some on their heels, some on a mat, the children, bellies big as footballs, playing round about, and we watch the sky. For a long time, perhaps since time began, the eyes of our tribe, these poor trachoma-inflamed eyes of ours, have been gazing at the sky: but especially since new celestial bodies began to cross the starry vault above our village: jet planes with white trails, flying saucers, rockets, and now these guided missiles, so high and fast you can’t see or hear them, but in the sparkle of the Southern Cross, if you look very hard, you can pick up a sort of shiver, a tremor, at which the most expert of us say: ‘There, a missile passing at twenty thousand kilometres an hour; a little slower, if I’m not mistaken, than the one that went by last Thursday.’
Now, since this missile business has been in the air, many of us have been seized by a strange euphoria. Some of the village witch-doctors, in fact, have led us to believe, by inference, that since this shooting star originates from beyond Kilimanjaro, it is the sign foreseen in the Great Prophecy, and hence the day fast approaches, as promised by the Gods, when after centuries of slavery and poverty our tribe will reign over the whole valley of the Great River, and the barren savannah will bring forth millet and maize. So—these witch-doctors appear to be insinuating—it is hardly worth us racking our brains over new ways of emerging from our present situation; we should trust in the Great Prophecy, rally round its only rightful interpreters, without asking to know more.
It has to be said, however, that even though we are a poor tribe of coconut gatherers, we are well informed about everything that goes on: we know what a nuclear missile is, how it works, how much it costs; we know that it won’t only be the cities of the white sahibs which will be scythed down like fields of millet, that as soon as they really start to fire them these things will leave the whole of the earth’s crust as spongey and cracked as a termites’ nest. No one forgets for one moment that the missile is a diabolical weapon, not even the witch-doctors; on the contrary, in line with the teaching of the Gods, they are always heaping curses on it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is convenient to consider the missile in a good light too, as the shooting star of the prophecy; not letting one’s mind dwell too much on it perhaps, but just leaving a little mental window open to that possibility, partly so as to let all our other worries fly out the same way.
The problem is—and we’ve seen this time and again—that a little while after some devilry appears in the sky above our village coming, as the prophecy foresaw, from beyond Kilimanjaro, another, worse than t
he first, always appears from the opposite direction, and shoots away to vanish beyond the peak of Kilimanjaro: and this is a sign of ill-omen, dashing our hopes that the Great Day is approaching. Thus, one moment in hope the next in fear, we stare up at an ever more armed and lethal sky, as once we read our destiny in the serene trajectories of the stars, the wandering comets.
The only thing people talk about in our tribe now are guided missiles, while we are still going about armed with crude axes and spears and blowpipes. Why worry? We are the last village at the edge of the jungle. Nothing is going to change here, until the Great Day of the prophets dawns.
Yet even here these are no longer the times when a white merchant would occasionally arrive in his piragua to buy our coconuts, and sometimes he would cheat us on the price and sometimes it was us fooled him: now we have the Nicer Nut Corporation, who buy the whole harvest en bloc, imposing their prices on us, and we have to gather the nuts faster than before in teams that work shifts day and night to reach the targets laid down in the contract.
Nevertheless there are those among us who say that the times promised in the Great Prophecy are nearer than ever, not because of the celestial omens, but because the miracles announced by the Gods are now just so many technical problems that only we, and not the Nicer Nut Corporation, can solve. Easier said than done! Meantime, you try and touch the Nicer Nut Corporation! Seems their agents with their feet up on the tables of their offices in the docks on the Great River, glasses of whisky in their hands, are only concerned about whether this new missile mightn’t be bigger than the last; in short, they don’t talk about anything but missiles either. There is agreement, here, between what they say and what the witch-doctors say: it is in the power of these shooting stars that our entire destiny lies.
I too, sitting at the entrance to my hut, look up at the stars and at the rockets appearing and disappearing, I think of the explosions poisoning the fish in the sea, and of the courtesies those people who decide the explosions exchange with each other between one missile and the next. I’d like to understand more: certainly the will of the Gods is made manifest in these signs, certainly they foretell the ruin or the fortune of our tribe… Still, there’s one idea I can’t get out of my head: that a tribe that relies entirely on the will of shooting stars, whatever fortune they may bring, will always be selling off its coconuts cheap.
Nocturnal Soliloquy of a Scottish Nobleman
The candle keeps guttering because of the air wafting in through the window. But I can’t allow darkness and sleep to invade the room, and I must keep the window open to survey the heath which is moonless tonight, a formless expanse of shadows. There is no light whether of torch or lantern for at least two miles, that’s for sure, nor any sound other than the cry of the grouse, and the footsteps of the guard on the castle walls. A night like any other, and yet the MacDickinsons’ attack could come before the day dawns. I must spend the night keeping watch and reflecting on the predicament we find ourselves in. A little while ago Dugald, the oldest and most loyal of my men, came up to my room to reveal a problem of conscience: like most of the peasants around here he is a member of the Episcopal church and his bishop has ordered all the faithful to take the MacDickinson family’s side, forbidding them to bear arms for any other clan. We, the MacFergusons, belong to the Presbyterian church, but out of an old tradition of tolerance we don’t make religion an issue for our people. I told Dugald I considered him free to act according to his conscience and his faith, but I couldn’t help reminding him how much he and his family owed to our clan. When that rough and ready soldier left, his white whiskers were dripping tears. I still don’t know what he has decided. It’s no use pretending otherwise: the ancient conflict between the MacFergusons and the MacDickinsons is about to erupt in a war of religion.
Since time immemorial the highland clans have fought it out amongst themselves along the lines of good old Scottish custom: every time we get the chance we avenge the murder of our kinsmen by murdering members of rival families, while each in turn seeks to occupy and devastate the lands and castles of the others, yet this strip of Scotland has so far been spared the ferocity of a religious war. Of course everybody knows that the Episcopal church has always openly supported the MacDickinsons, and if today these poor highlands are ravaged more by the raids of the MacDickinsons than by the hail, we owe it to the fact that the Episcopal clergy have always made fair weather or foul in this land. But so long as the greatest enemy of the MacDickinsons and the Episcopal church were the MacConnollys, who being proselytes of the pernicious Methodist sect believe that peasants who don’t pay their rents should be pardoned and ultimately that one should hand out one’s lands and chattels to the poor, the clans hostile to the MacDickinsons all preferred to turn a blind eye. From every Episcopal pulpit ministers preached hell and damnation on the MacConnollys and whomsoever bore arms under them or even so much as served in their household, and we MacFergusons, or MacStewarts, or MacBurtons, good Presbyterian families, let the matter pass. Of course the MacConnollys were themselves partly responsible for this state of affairs. Hadn’t it been they who, when their clan was far more powerful than now, recognized the Episcopal clergy’s old right to a tithe upon our lands? Why did they do it? Because, as they said, it was not these things (mere formalities or little more) that were important in their religion, but other more substantial matters; or because, as we said, those damned Methodists thought they could beat the Devil at his own game and fool us all. In any event ill befell them and in very short order. We, for our part, certainly can’t complain. We were allied to the MacDickinsons then and took care to increase the strength of their clan, since they were the only ones who could take on the MacConnollys and their accursed ideas with regard to oat harvest taxes. When we saw the Episcopalians leading one of MacConnolly’s men into the village square with a noose round his neck and proclaiming him a creature of the Devil, we didn’t turn our horses that way because it was none of our business.
And now that the MacDickinsons and their people are lording it in every village and hostelry, bullying and browbeating everybody so that no one can walk the high roads of Scotland without a kilt of their tartan, the Episcopal church chooses this moment to hurl anathema at us, the families of the upright Presbyterian faith, and to stir up our peasants and even our cooks against us. It’s clear what they’re after: an alliance with the MacDuffs or the MacCockburns, old supporters of King James Stuart, papists or very nearly, that will bring them down from their mountain castles where they have been reduced to living like bandits among the goats.
Will it be a religious war? Really there’s nobody, not even the most bigoted Episcopalian, who believes that fighting for steak-guzzling MacDickinsons capable of knocking back pints of beer even on a Sunday would amount to fighting for the faith. How do they see it, then? Perhaps they think that this is part of God’s plan, like the captivity in Egypt. But Isaac’s offspring were never asked to fight for the Pharaohs, even if God did choose to make them suffer so long in exile! If there is a war of religion, we MacFergusons will accept it as a test to strengthen our faith. But we know that on these shores the faithful of the rightful Church of Scotland are an elect minority, and that they may have been chosen by God—though God forbid!—for martyrdom. I have picked up my Bible again, which in the recent months of frequent enemy forays I had somewhat neglected, and now I leaf through the pages in the candlelight, though never losing sight of the moor down below where a rustle of wind has lifted, as always just before dawn. No, I’m at my wit’s end; if God starts getting involved in our Scottish family quarrels—and in the event of a war of religion he can hardly do otherwise—who knows where it will end; each of us has his interests and his sins, the MacDickinsons more than anybody, and the Bible is there to tell us that God’s intentions are always different from those that men imagine.
Perhaps this is where we have sinned, in always refusing to think of our wars as wars of religion, in the illusion that we would thus have greater
liberty to compromise when it suited us. There is too great a spirit of appeasement in this part of Scotland, not a clan that doesn’t fight without its ulterior motives. We have never taken sufficiently seriously the question of whether our religion should be administered by the hierarchy of this or that church, or through the community of the faithful, or from the depths of our consciences.
There, down there, at the edge of the heath, I can see them, torches gathering. Our guards have seen them too: I can hear the whistle sounding the alarm from the top of the tower. How will the battle go? All of us perhaps are about to pay for our sins: we didn’t have the courage to be ourselves. The truth is that amongst all these Presbyterians Episcopalians Methodists there’s not one in this part of Scotland who believes in God: not one I say, whether noble or cleric, tenant or serf, who truly believes in that God whose name is forever on his lips. There, the clouds are paling to the east. Come on, everybody, awake! Quick, saddle me my horse!
A Beautiful March Day
The thing that most disturbs me as we wait—and we’re all here now, under the Senate portico, each in his place, Metellus Cimber with the petition he has to present, Casca behind him who is to strike the first blow, Brutus down there under the statue of Pompey, and it’s almost the fifth hour, he shouldn’t be long now—the thing that most disturbs me is not this cold dagger hidden under my toga here, nor any tension as to how it will go, the possibility that something unforeseen could thwart our plans, it isn’t the fear that someone has betrayed us, nor uncertainty as to what will happen afterwards: it’s just seeing that it’s a beautiful March day, a holiday like so many others, and that people are going around enjoying themselves, not giving a damn about the Republic and Caesar’s powers, families heading for the country, young folks going to the chariot races, the girls wearing a kind of tunic that falls straight down, a new more cunning way of having you guess their shape. Standing here between these columns, shamming, pretending casual conversation, I feel we must look more suspicious than ever; but who would ever guess what’s happening? The people passing by are a thousand miles from thinking of such things, it’s a beautiful day, all is calm.
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories Page 12