Around 1902, his appetite whetted by the fortune one of his former tenants had made manufacturing cured meats in Modena, Giarrentani opened his own cured-meats company in Reggio and engaged in a brisk competition with the other man, even imitating his brand name. The first contemplated revenge. He waited until the bully count had expanded and put all his capital into the company, then in a few short months, lowering his prices week by week, he drove him to the point where he had to sacrifice his factory and then his lands. Giarrentani was barely able to hold on to the villa where he lived in Vimondino, and he had to endure the humiliation of seeing his old sharecroppers become his peers, for the winner of the match, who had no interest in keeping the lands, sold them one after the other at very convenient prices, and so for once, a war between capitalists brought good fortune to the workers.
The town was the only one in the province of Reggio to produce hemp, a hemp famous for its quality; the buyers arrived from England and snapped it all up. Under King George, the ropes on more than one of His Majesty’s ships were woven with Vimondinese hemp. The sharecroppers-turned-bosses recruited field hands (going up in the Apennines to find them) for the hardest work. And they basked in their indolence, their miserly well-being, quite foreign to the political energy of the rest of the province, and for that matter to Emilia as a whole. The impatient socialist Ferranini once held a rally in Vimondino; no one showed up, and he refused to go back there. The town produced a couple of interventionists between March and May 1915, and later quite a few squadristi ready to take part in the tamer exploits of the Bolognese Fascist boss Leandro Arpinati.
Amos, the older of the two Bignami cousins and older than Ferranini himself, could remember a thing or two from those earlier days.
“Arpinati treated the people from Vimondino like chicken thieves. His exact words were: ‘You people are only good for stealing chickens.’ ”
Among the few people there, none of them natives, who kept his eyes open politically was Mirko Ferranini, Walter’s father, who had come from Cesena to Reggio in 1910 to work as a fireman on the Reggio–Guastalla line. As a young man he’d belonged to a cell of anarchists, an offshoot of that Bakunin League of Young Romagna that had given the movement some of its least hotheaded and most coherent men, such as Capriani. But even Mirko, who had married in ’16 after being promoted to engineer, grew tame. A railway engineer is a precision instrument, he would say, and it was clear that meant a man of order. The Red leagues after the war, the popular uprisings in Emilia against the growing forces of reaction, had little effect on Vimondino, or on Mirko Ferranini either. Only in the spring of ’21, when in America, in Dedham, Massachusetts, Sacco and Vanzetti were charged and threatened with the electric chair (not a vain threat, as it turned out), did Mirko begin to come back to life. They were martyrs of his old faith, and suffering with them, although far away, he finally felt himself redeemed. He wrote to the elder of the two, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and some months later he had a reply from prison. He wrote again, and Vanzetti replied, and in the last of those letters he said, “Yes, all power to anarchism, but now we must close ranks. It would be wrong to spend our forces and squander our hopes. The revolution that has triumphed over the tsar is a worthy cause for the sons of Bakunin.” The engineer, who had decorated the kitchen and bedroom of his house with photographs of the martyrs cut from the newspapers, did not understand poor Vanzetti’s counsel, or decided not to speak about it, but the seed bore fruit in his son. Walter Ferranini (one of the few Italian Communists of today to have read the works of Malatesta and other masters of anarchism) was a socialist even before he became a man.
He got there all by himself, without knowing (without any way of knowing, in Italy between ’29 and ’34) that socialist doctrine existed—or socialist reality. He glimpsed certain truths—that liberty was merely a formal right; that capitalism depersonalized human beings—on his own, in a sudden burst of revelation, the way a fifteen-year-old boy will guess what a woman’s body is like. But he was, and would remain, a simple soul, despite a crude speculative instinct that pushed him to seek out ideas, to dig into them; and he was modest, although spontaneous and direct, qualities that usually didn’t accompany modesty. He never made much of his political education, although it was certainly precocious. More than once Ferranini had thought, and said, perhaps even to one of the Bignami cousins, “If I am a good socialist, I cannot take the credit. I couldn’t lean to the right because that was to go against nature. Nor to the left in the sense of an anarcho-syndicalist, because that made me think of Vanzetti; I’d been immunized for life against that side.” (He had kept those three letters, and promised himself he would go and pay homage to the tombs of Sacco and Vanzetti, wherever they might be.)
He too suffered from temptations. But not of the faith; if anything, it was his vocation as a militant that was threatened. His greatest temptation was tied to a peculiar, vital craving, of mysterious origin but already quite overwhelming when he was just a child growing up in the country, a child who in summertime would lie on his stomach looking down into the pits where the hemp was retted (giving off a stink worse than the sewer), brooding on the worms and larvae that swarmed on the water’s green slime. That same craving sent him into town to search the book stalls for tattered old editions of Fabre’s insects or Maeterlinck’s life of termites. A craving to flush the spiders out of the attic and the toads from the ditches and classify them. A magnifying glass he’d been presented by Zanasi, the teacher in Vimondino (from Ferrara and a Fascist, the same Zanasi who at Porta Po in Ferrara in ’27 foiled the attempt on ras Italo Balbo’s life), that poor magnifying glass was to hang from his neck for years on a piece of twine.
Finally the craving became conscious, and thirteen-year-old Walter understood that to satisfy it would mean sacrifice, and, what was harder, asking others to sacrifice. “All I can do,” his father said to him, “is to let you keep on studying without considering you crazy or a slacker.” The boy was persistent, and lucky, too, for a while; he knocked on many doors and in Reggio found a pharmacist, Bignami (another one), who had many children and took him in as a babysitter and shop boy, and in return gave him room and board and allowed him to continue his education. He grew fond of him and looked after him and even got it in his head the boy might study to be a pharmacist. Ferranini turned to Amos who was taking his coffee.
“Oh, remember the pharmacist near the hospital? A widower, with a lot of children?”
“I certainly do; he was a relative of ours,” said Amos. “Distant relative. One of those pale-faced socialists like Turati. You know what happened to him right after the Great War, in Bologna?”
“No.”
“You, Vittorio, did you ever hear about it? The thing was that the Socialist Congress was being held in the Teatro Brunetti in Bologna and Bignami the pharmacist, who was the organizer, met Anna Kuliscioff, and fell in love with her. And she with him, at the time. And you know, she was over fifty years old! All hell broke loose. Turati was as jealous as a wild animal; it almost led to another split among the Socialists.”
With the pharmacist’s help, young Ferranini had finished the gymnasium and was in the first year of liceo. His goal was approaching, it was becoming clearer before his enchanted eyes: Bologna, university, biology. “Biology,” said Ferranini; it was a word that had once set him shivering like the name of a first love, just the sound of it. Then came that terrible December of ’29. In just one month his father was dead of pneumonia and Walter had said farewell to school and was back in Guastalla working as a loader at the railway warehouse, to help out his mother. She’d been left with a pension of ninety lire, her mind was undone by misfortune, and the neighbors were afraid she would throw herself under a train. But it was her heart not her head that went to pieces; she died in ’31, not even forty years old, of an aneurism. That same year the carabinieri found a packet of leaflets in the station depot where the young man was working, leaflets he was supposed to take home that evening. To distribute amo
ng his apathetic, sometimes hostile fellow townsmen.
“Emilia Was and Will Be Red,” was written at the top of the leaflet. Fired on the spot, an orphan without relatives or a home, young Walter had learned, directly, painfully, what real labor was. At the station warehouse he sometimes loaded six thousand kilos of milk all by himself and all in one day. Fatigue had marked him permanently, and had clarified certain aspects and problems of labor that no theoretical study can ever teach. They took him on at a small shoe factory at San Donato (he stayed for seven years), and there too it was all toil: packer, driver, porter, loader and unloader of crates, heavy rolls of leather, great demijohns of acid, from six in the morning to seven at night. He didn’t have the constitution for heavy labor, and the weariness wasn’t just in his mind. When he was called up and went for his medical exam, they found a heart murmur.
•
That was a nice piece of luck, wasn’t it; it meant they gave him an exemption. (He had finished eating and was going over that chapter of his life with the two cousins, letting the hour pass until it was time to get up from the table.) Because if the army hadn’t rejected him, Abyssinia awaited, and perhaps Spain.
“Instead,” said Vittorio Bignami, “we went to Spain on the right side.” He plowed on, certain of what he was saying. “Which is why, you see, it makes no sense that you aren’t getting ahead here in Rome too. In the party. You’ve played all your cards right.”
Ferranini, however, was annoyed by his insistence. “First of all, remember that I wasn’t here during the Resistance. Someone of our age who wasn’t a partisan is a second-rate communist.”
“You weren’t a partisan because you were in America. How long was it?”
“Five years.”
“And it wasn’t your fault. You went there after fighting in Spain because you couldn’t come back here. And you’ve also been to the USSR. There aren’t many like you.”
“Come on, friends, let’s be serious,” said Ferranini, not very nicely, his temper souring. “I spent forty days in the Ukraine, nearly all of it in the countryside. What I know of the USSR is just about enough to be able to say that our cooperatives in Reggio Emilia—”
“Your cooperatives.”
“Let’s put it this way: there’s night and day between them and a real collective enterprise. I mean in terms of mentality. I’ve said it over and over: what we do here gets done for our own filthy interests.”
The Bignami cousins looked at each other and tried to laugh.
“My friends, there’s little to laugh about. We are individualists, the opposite of socialists; we think about the land the way we think about a girl’s titties. We lust for ownership, although we use the language of collectivism.”
He grew heated as he went on. His seriousness was all out of proportion; that wasn’t unusual in Ferranini.
“In Russia they may be less advanced than we are in terms of technology, say, machinery and seed, fertilizers, insecticides, silos and dairies, baling, but let me say this, they have gone way beyond our concupiscent mentality. That’s the difference, and get it into your heads, otherwise all my preaching is for nothing.”
“It’s the world we live in,” said Vittorio, “the capitalist system.”
“What the hell, boys, are we supposed to change the system or not?”
“We’ve had our coffee,” said Amos, gently trying to distract him, “and we forgot the cheese course. What kind of Reggio natives are we?”
The waiter came to clear the table and they asked him to bring cheese. Once again they ate in silence, although Vittorio did take the opportunity to admire the “titties” of two flowery, out-of-season female tourists (Germans? English? you had to be in Rome to see them) who were just then sitting down not far from their table.
Amos was commenting on the cheese, a Reggiano, with his mouth full. “This is the genuine stuff, made in winter, from two milkings. Once upon a time there was hardly any of it on the market; it didn’t get as far as, I won’t say Rome, not even Bologna. After the war, it was the steel vats instead of the wooden buckets, the electric heaters in the dairies, that made production expand, and for that to happen, as you know, Ferranini, we had to have workers’ collectives like the farmers’ cooperatives, and the other cooperatives, we needed Collina, Maccaferri, and (say it proud!) the Bignami cousins. We’ve done a lot, even if you’re not content. There are billions that don’t go in the bosses’ pockets, billions shared by the workers.”
Ferranini, still eating, shrugged his shoulders.
“You,” Amos went on, “have always been too modest, in Spain, at home, here, everywhere. Did you tell them, at the party, that you can speak Russian? Did you tell them you correspond with the top scientists of the Soviet Union?”
Ferranini glanced around the room. “Get out of here, Bignami. Hush. Soviet scientists have better things to do than write to me.”
“Oh, we learned about it from Fubini in the Federation, isn’t that right, Vittorio? What was he called, that big-shot professor at the University of Moscow who wrote to you? Bosciàn?”
His face clouded once again. “Stop this nonsense. I wrote to him; I learned some Russian just for that. I wrote Oparin, Bosciàn, Lepeshinskaya, back in ’47 when I was still a kid. I had a passion for biology, and I used to study on my own. Oparin had just discovered the Koatszervatnyi mechanism, coacervates, it’s a bit difficult to explain.”
“Hey, Fubini told us they wrote to you too.”
“Fubini should mind his own business. They replied to me—that was it. Bosciàn, one of the greatest biologists who ever lived, wrote: ‘I don’t have much to tell you; I’m only a veterinarian.’ And you call me modest? Give me a break! Bosciàn had understood the mysteries of the cell, the origin of life itself.”
The second Bignami, Vittorio, the chief organizer inside the Federation, now spoke up. Animate matter and its cells had brought to mind those cells, equally important, that were his daily bread: the party cells of Reggio and the province. The ever-perfectible science of organization was just what he wanted to talk about, and the conversation picked up and became animated. Ferranini saw that he could have been more indulgent with them. He was quite happy to see his two comrades, and in any case he would gladly have done without his reputation as difficult (utterly honest, true-blue, but hard to know how to deal with and so avoided by many). In the end, it was always the politicians who needed politics more than politics needed them.
•
Close to 10:00 p.m., as they were getting ready to leave, the owner came to say that the Honorable Ferranini was wanted on the phone. Nuccia? Could it be? It was rare that his friend called him in a public place, even at the trattoria. He had so often warned her to be careful.
But yes, it was Nuccia. She was at the station, waiting for a train, summoned to Milan by her publishing house. They were concerned about the store. (They had sent her to Rome a few months earlier to manage a bookstore in the center.) And there were going to be complaints because, it was true, she wasn’t selling much, although she’d gotten herself sent to Rome promising to salvage a business that was in trouble. But it was not her fault; the bookstore was a hole, the staff transient, and Romans didn’t read, or only newspapers on the bus, over people’s shoulders.
“It’s all right; I can take care of myself. Believe me, they won’t budge me from Rome. I’m worried about Giulia; she’s in bed with a fever. I got a letter today from my father.”
Nuccia was separated from her husband, and her parents looked after her child. A girl of seven. Too young, Nuccia said (quite candidly) for a mother like herself who was “too old.”
“It’s the flu, I think. In any case, I can’t stay for more than two days. I leave Saturday night and I’ll be back Sunday morning.”
“Except for the fact,” said Ferranini, after hearing her out, “that you can’t go because the trains are canceled. There’s a rail workers’ strike.”
He himself had been sent to speak to the Union of Railway
Car Workers at Trastevere station. And Boatta had announced the start of the strike during his speech in the chamber. Three hours ago.
“No, Walter. The word came in: counterorders, comrades. No strike. I’m here and the trains are arriving and departing. Unfortunately. I was counting on it.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Surprised, my dear? This is the way things always go for us.”
“Come on, you cynic. Qualunquista!”
“As you like,” said Nuccia cheerfully. “But we lack method, decisiveness, toughness. And you know who said that. Gramsci, of course. But also the man from Predappio.” Mussolini.
“Enough foolishness,” he said sharply.
There were certain matters Ferranini refused to joke about, and in any case he never joked. Not about anything. There was no getting around it: Nuccia had a streak of qualunquismo.
“Sometimes you lack all sensitivity. You were a partisan. Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Sensitivity I have in bed, where it’s more useful to you. Ah, listen. I have an idea you might like. That you should like, rather.” Her voice was low. “Saturday night, come over to my house. You can get the key from the doorkeeper. I made the bed for you with fresh-ironed sheets.”
A pause. Was she waiting for him to say, You didn’t have to do that?
“I get in at seven the next morning; I’m home at seven thirty. I’ll just clean up a bit. At a quarter to eight, you know Walter, we’ll be . . . happy. You know?”
It wasn’t much. Except that Ferranini was faithful to his habits (so very faithful!) and felt at ease only in his own room, no frills and no heat. Changing beds bothered him; he was no longer young.
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