Mrs. Esposito’s husband taught at the elementary school of St. Paul’s Academy (private and Catholic) of Camden. When school reopened in September 1945, she decided to enroll the children there, and Demarr incautiously agreed. His eldest daughter learned about it too late, and Mrs. Esposito was fired on the spot. Nancy then drove to the school to pick up her two brothers, and she scolded them, too. Afterwards she laid into her father. The kids were meant to go to an American public school, not debase themselves studying with Poles, Puerto Ricans, and Italians. Demarr, who had learned his lesson in the debacle with his wife, gave in right away this time.
It was past midday. Ferranini was in the kitchen. Busy stirring polenta in a pot, when he caught the end of her tirade. He strode out, tearing off his apron, grabbed her by the arms, lifted her up, held her suspended above the floor, then dumped her in a chair. Demarr intervened, not to defend his daughter but to come to Ferranini’s aid. Livid, his eyes glazed, Walter was in a state. He staggered to the door to leave, to be gone, but he couldn’t open it and stood there frozen to the doorframe.
He came back two days later (from the South where Demarr had sent him to sell off some stock; the company, growing large, was always short on liquidity). The words he had to say were already in his head, pulsing like veins. He asked her pardon; he spoke to her, patiently. Told her that she was mistaken, and how she was mistaken. (He had come to some conclusions on the road. It was not her fault. She was a good person, she had accepted him when she saw he loved her, poor devil that he was. She was good, and therefore she could be reclaimed; he must clean off the mud they’d splashed on her; he could do it, he’d have her back, he’d make her new.) He took her face between his hands, spoke to her calmly and gravely, his lips on her hair. It was sweet to reason with her that way. She was young and fresh and had too much love coming to her to give in to these crooked, old, foolish, inhumane ideas. Yes, America had won the war, but more important, notions of humanity—really just one notion, that we are all one race, all of us, even the Puerto Ricans, and all men need the same things, bread, a house to live in, a woman—those notions had to triumph inside America.
And finally poor Ferranini had only this to say: “When we were engaged, you asked me if I was a Commie.” A Communist. “Well, even a Commie can be a good worker, a good citizen of the United States of America.”
Nancy let him speak, frowning, her face closed. Later, she didn’t come to bed but went to sleep downstairs. She was silent for days, until the middle of the month, when she usually left for Boston. And then she departed, without special preparations, saying goodbye to her father, her brothers, and tossing him a “so long.” Ferranini had no illusions, he knew he was losing her, but he had determined to be brave, and he was. Two months went by. She didn’t return. Thanksgiving Day came and went. She didn’t show up. (He had clung to the hope that she would come back for Thanksgiving.) She phoned her father once a week (and also her mother at Vanport), with vague news of herself, never speaking of her intentions. She just said she was moving from Boston to New York. She’d gotten a job as the editorial secretary at the National Review.
Demarr and Ferranini, both suddenly widowers, studied each other; the old man stunned and confused, the other mute and embittered. Ferranini’s father-in-law began to lecture him in a way that seemed silly, to put it mildly. It must be another man who had taken her away, you had better go find out, if you care about your honor. It’s not right to leave a girl alone at her age. “Oh stop it,” he once shot back. “Honor. I couldn’t care less about it. I couldn’t care less about living. Understand?”
He was still going to work, punctual and patient, his head elsewhere, the accounts bouncing around inside like marbles. He was terribly restless, in perpetual motion from office to warehouse to office, and there were evenings when it took him an hour at the calculator to draw up an invoice. He’d find himself with the telephone in hand unable to remember who or why he was calling. As for Old Laurel, where the crocuses lay under deep snow, he went back (for the fourth year and this time without anyone waiting for him and without being sent). He knew so little about himself and these things that he had no idea what drove him to return, to count those trees one by one and name them, and the bushes, and the stones. Pale he’d always been, but now his skin turned yellowish and he neglected himself, his clothing, and all the rest, until Demarr had to remind him that in America you shaved every morning, at the very least. And ever fatherly, handed him a jar of Saint Andrews iodized salt, good for the liver, he said.
He had been living the life of an animal, without looking ahead or back; he had drawn no conclusions, sought no justification. The war’s end, a great breach closing for him too, brought him no relief. He preferred not to register it, to ignore it. All those years, the announcements, the bulletins, the propaganda (the devastation of that poor country of his he’d left behind), the whole gigantic hue and cry had passed him by without moving him from his stolid tranquillity. From time to time he would think to himself that he was utterly rotten, that he stank. He lacked conviction, though; it was a weary litany.
He didn’t bother to cross-examine himself, now that he had abundant evidence. He didn’t try to imagine or put together a future, or accept the past, now filled up with rubble. It was years since he’d read a book, or debated, or tried to make sense of a problem. “My mind’s scattered” was enough of an excuse. Honing a definition to the point of paradox, grating away at an idea to expose the nerve, things once so compelling (at the age of twenty, twenty-two), things that drove him to confront even more difficult ideas, an impulse to react (for example, against the anarchism widespread among his comrades in Spain): all that was finished and forgotten. The impulse he’d once had to assert himself, to impose a thought process, a discipline around him—gone.
He did not look back, however; he didn’t confront himself. Self-examination, taking stock of one’s life, those were worth doing when a man still cared, still had personal hopes. Days dragged by, hours spun around on the kitchen clock; he shuffled along, eyes shut. As far as he was concerned the world was irrelevant, he had no purpose, no interests. Old Joe Sorrentino, one of the company’s suppliers, told him he was leaving the business, that he had bought a little house in Florida. Did Demarr intend to keep on working; who was he going to leave the firm to? Ferranini gaped at him, stunned by such an absurd question, as if he’d been asked for news from the great hereafter.
Yet someone was making decisions, and for the both of them. Just after that sad Thanksgiving, Ferranini got the news. The letter was under the door to his apartment when he returned, dazed, after he was treated to a long tirade from Demarr, who was worrying about the business. No more war, goodbye windfall, the days when people bought without weighing price and quality were gone. The army was demobilizing, industries were laying off, it was tough to sell. Nothing new, thought Ferranini as he listened, no big deal: Are you capitalists or not? You aren’t the ones who really suffer, and so you accept the downturns, the unemployment, as part of the system. Demarr didn’t see it that way. His company depended a lot on working-class customers, and when people were out of work, profits fell. To stay afloat, they must cut costs. The war is over, get it? Time to tighten our belts, at home and on the job. Ferranini had to do his part too. Could they keep Old Laurel, for instance?
Fair enough, Demarr was right. And he was right to involve Ferranini. Wasn’t he a capitalist himself by now? He’d enjoyed all the fat years without a word; how honest was it to stand in judgment now, to condemn “you capitalists” just because the last years had turned lean? He couldn’t find fault with Nancy either. He had to admit she was right in one respect, unless he was a hypocritical lout. Socialism meant both men and women enjoyed liberty; when he was young he’d been critical of bourgeois matrimonial servitude, was he going to cling to it as a husband? It made no difference that her letter was shabby and pompous, its false courtesy meant to hide her indifference, her contempt. America (the letter went on) dem
anded the active participation of its women, as it had in frontier days, to defend itself against internal enemies, and Nancy Demarr was certainly not one to hold back. She would thank him “with all her heart” for restoring her liberty. Standing as they did on opposite sides, there was no future for them. No man loyal to the Communist Party could be true to the United States. His silence during these last weeks “encouraged” her to believe that he shared her judgment, therefore (here was the point Ferranini had sought, with an icy attention he hoped was indifference, among all the pointless words) she asked that he deliver his written consent to their mutual liberation to Lavy and Blumenstein, attorneys at law, New York, NY. Thanking him in advance, and her thanks also for the “good times” that would remain “indelible” in her memory. Et cetera.
The next morning Demarr was waiting for him at the office, in shirtsleeves in front of an open window. His face was apoplectic, the old man sweated and panted all the time, even in winter.
“Are you aware, Walter, that we have dozens of gallons of solvents in the storeroom? You’d better get them out of there! If an inspector comes around, not even the Blessed Virgin of Carmine can save us.”
From time to time, the inflammables were supposed to be moved to a warehouse out of town. Ferranini hadn’t given the order for a month. He’d simply forgotten about it.
“I’m an idiot,” he said, but his tone was truculent, he didn’t try to justify himself.
“You’re no idiot, you’re just going crazy. Make her come back, I tell you. Bring her home. She’s okay, believe me, good as gold, but you’ve got to understand her. Listen, here’s something I just remembered. She was nine years old; we wanted to put braces on to straighten her front teeth. There was no persuading her, and so I said, ‘Look, Papà isn’t going to smoke until you go to the dentist.’ And I threw my pipe in the stove. There I was, after dinner, all silent, with a toothpick in my mouth. She was watching me. Then she got up and grabbed my arm and said, ‘Papà, take me to the dentist.’ What’s the matter, Walter? You think that’s funny?”
“Don’t mind me, Demarr. Forget about me.”
“What is it, Walter? You don’t believe me?”
The doors to the old twin-engine Dakota that would take him across the Atlantic, listing badly, closed for departure a few minutes past midnight on December 30, 1945, as his thirty-first year drew to an end. During the long, restless night journey he was struck by the coincidence. His youth was gone. America was slipping away in the night behind him, its darkness and its lights, and with it, irremediably but also without any residuum, his past, the good and the bad that had been his.
Naturally, he was wrong about that too. They were late to land at Shannon, and in the half hour he waited, he eagerly took in the Irish accents of the airport workers and the girl at the newspaper stand, reminiscent of the way his mother-in-law and Nancy spoke when they first met. Their documents were inspected; American nationals were invited to step to one side. Without thinking, Ferranini joined the group of Americans. The customs officer came over.
“Sir, to the other side.”
He felt like cursing.
5
ITALIAN rail workers know the Provvida well, the commissary in all the big stations where they and their women shop. Ferranini, ex–rail worker, had his reasons to remember it too. While they waited for the 8:34 to Rome, he pointed out the place to Nuccia.
“I spent six of the most wretched months of my life there.” A lot of places and things in Reggio still brought his rotten American adventure to mind. Too many.
“I worked there as the manager, just after I got back from Camden. It was one big room with nothing in it but a few crates of dried pea flour, condensed milk, and cans of mackerel. Made in the USA. From New Jersey to Reggio, just like that.”
They were walking up and down under the platform roof in a thick fog, which isolated them. He was telling her about his return, how everything in those days was alien to him (“Tell me that’s not unpleasant”), how everything was alien, as if it were a crime to speak Italian, or live in Italian-built houses. It took a while for him to feel cleansed, to regain his old sensibility. An American army rifle company from the East Coast, half of them Chinese, was stationed in Parma. He didn’t go there, didn’t want to hear them speaking or smell the Virginia tobacco. If people asked where he had been all those years, he didn’t reply. He changed the subject.
“You do go in for self-criticism,” said Nuccia. “Such a dedicated Communist. Can’t you just say you were in love?”
“The people from State Rail, from the State Rail cell, came to ask me to join in January ’46. Them, understand? With open arms. They had been here starving, getting shot at from every side, while I was living it up. And understand, I was ashamed to be seen getting a party card. But about the rest, all my fool Americanitis, I wasn’t ashamed, you see.”
He was talking quite loudly. Someone under the platform roof turned to look. “Watch it.” Nuccia smiled. “You’re an authority in Reggio Emilia.”
But Nuccia wasn’t one to give up. Now she was citing the example of Karl Marx.
“Your wife didn’t deserve it, but when a man’s in love, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Marx was in love with Jenny, and one time he didn’t show up at a congress in Belgium, just because Jenny asked him not to leave her.”
“Marx, the saints: what do they have to do with it? My problem was that I pulled the wool over my own eyes, if you see what I mean. I knew what my wife and America stood for. I just pretended not to. A man like me is subject to constant temptation so long as he lives in a world that’s not socialist. He has to struggle. That world got inside me; that’s what was disgusting! I defended it. I longed for it.”
As if to confirm that Ferranini really was an authority, a bald, bent man in a gray jacket, his face radiating hope, emerged from the door of the Provvida.
“I recognized your voice. You don’t know me, but I am, believe it or not, your successor. At the Provvida. My name’s Zamboni. Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to ask a favor, for my son.”
“Walter, the train’s arriving,” warned Nuccia.
“We’ll take the next one. Tell me, Zamboni.”
“Well, briefly, my boy was the switchman here in the station. Now he’s at home with psychasthenia due to exhaustion, and they’ve acknowledged he’s sick but won’t pay the compensation he should get because it was work-related. Ivan Zamboni. Should I write it down?”
“Don’t bother. I’ll talk to the station chief right now.”
“That would be a great help. Ferranini, my son is in bad shape. You’re a socialist, tell them that the days of the exploiters of labor are numbered. But when are we going to be liberated from labor itself?”
The train had pulled in and was already departing. Ferranini left Nuccia in the café and went to look for the stationmaster.
He was out, but there was a deputy. A young fellow from the hamlet of San Donato near Vimondino.
“Remember Don Marx?”
“Sure thing.”
“I’m his brother’s son.”
The old man, who’d been dead for a while, was the priest of Vimondino, Massimo Panciroli, “Don Max” or “Don Marx,” as some of his parishioners liked to call him. It seemed that one day at the pulpit he’d disclosed that the evil Karl Marx was not in fact the devil but more like Jesus Christ, since both preached against Mammon and the worship of material goods.
Village news finished, the young Panciroli spoke of his party affiliation. He was proud of his position.
“I head up the rail-workers union here in Reggio, we’re affiliated with the CGIL. Officially—in practice I’m in charge of other things, too. You must know the Keller plan.”
“I know of it.”
Keller was one of Lenin’s assistants, and when the provisional government fell he served the Revolution by reorganizing Russia’s railroads. Keller was the name used by insiders for a plan prepared by the party to run the railroads in cen
tral Italy in the event of an emergency.
“You must know, comrade,” young Panciroli went on, getting up to close the door, “that under our plan the Piacenza–Arezzo and Ferrara–Ancona lines are divided up into many segments, each one assigned to a group, in addition to the three commands for Bologna, Florence, and Ancona. I’m the leader of a group, which is in turn divided into several teams with different functions. There are two types of action to be undertaken: Operation T, meaning transport, and Operation S, sabotage and interruption of service. I have one team at the engine house, one that’s responsible for the track, one that takes care of the power lines, and another in charge of signals and switches.”
Ferranini thought of the great party headquarters on via delle Botteghe Oscure, where the Keller plan lay in one file among thousands, hidden and probably forgotten in a locked safe covered by an inch of dust.
“Let’s hope that the zero hour doesn’t come too late,” the young man said.
“The plan is good,” Ferranini replied.
“Although the human element leaves a lot to be desired. In certain ways, if you know what I mean. There’s plenty of initiative—too much, even. What’s lacking is discipline. And you, who are outside the railroad environment, it would great if the next time you came back to Reggio you could look into a matter between me and my subgroup leader. My immediate subordinate in the structure of the plan. He’s only a switchman in the company, but he’s destroying what I’ve accomplished in two years of hard work. With his presumption. He stirs the men up against me. He wants my job, he doesn’t want to be under me. It’s not right; the position is mine, I earned it and I have the right to hold on to it.”
“Oh Christ, they’re all the same,” Ferranini blurted out.
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