He wanted to talk to someone. He marched past all the compartments on the train, hoping to find Giobatta. He wasn’t there, the pursuit of fonduta had taken time. Ferranini was left alone with his thoughts all the way back; the hours were not pleasant.
When he arrived that evening at Termini station, he found someone he wasn’t expecting.
“How did you know to be here?”
“Didn’t you say you were coming back with Reparatore? I telephoned his wife, she told me where you were and that you’d probably be back now. Your colleagues aren’t as secretive with their women as you are.”
“Who did you say you were?”
“I said I was your secretary. Do I get scolded?”
“I’m not saying anything. We’ll have to see how this thing plays out.”
They ate in a little place on via Firenze.
Scowling, ignoring her warnings (“Don’t stuff yourself like that before going to bed, you’ll pay for it tonight!”), Ferranini was silent for a long time. Then he said, “In ’44. Did you by any chance know a partisan chief named Montobbio?”
“He was Captain Bianco back then. And now he’s in parliament with you, in your group. Yes, I knew him.”
“What kind of guy was he?”
“A tough guy. And women liked him. If you want the truth, I liked him too, you know, from afar. Later he got involved with a woman who looked like Ingrid Bergman and they lived together, not only up north but in Rome, too.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“No. They said she was a widow, with a grown son. The son lived up north, but he came down to Rome and took her away by force. She was attached to both of them, to her lover and her son. A great drama.”
“Did you ever meet the son?”
“No.”
Ferranini went back to his food. He was thinking, and she meanwhile pursued the matter, giving it a peculiar slant.
“I haven’t had reason to speak to Montobbio since, but I’ve seen him, and he has the reputation of being, even today, the handsomest Communist deputy in the chamber. Along with Magrò.”
“What?” Ferranini was distracted.
“Yes, well you’re not the most attractive bunch in the chamber, in general. You had Antonio Giolitti, but he went over to the Socialists. Three or four of the Christian Democrats are not too bad to look at: Alessandrini, Moro, Colombo. The neo-Fascists are better.”
“The neo-Fascists?”
“Help, I’m not saying another word, or you’ll take away my party card.”
After they finished eating, they walked down via XX Settembre and via delle Quattro Fontane.
“What if I meet a colleague at this time of night, with you on my arm? They all know we’re married, you to another man, me to another woman, and here we are walking along together in the center of town. And we’re not even young. What are they going to think? Behaving like sweethearts!”
“I am your sweetheart,” said Nuccia. “Hey. Why are you always so frightened?” All evening she’d been excited, happy. She’d met someone that morning. The encounter seemed like a good omen for the future. “Walter, you can’t imagine what happened this morning, such good luck. I hope. This morning I went to the bookstore even though it was Sunday, because I wanted to work in peace while the store was closed. It paid off: about one o’clock I went out and there on the corner of via Frattina I heard someone calling me. It was a girl from Milan I hadn’t seen in years, a classmate from school, Bianca, who’s a teacher and who’s married to a Swiss fellow named Weiss, who owns and runs a school in Frascati. We had lunch at a tavola calda. She told me her story and I told her mine. She says they can take Giulia as a boarding student in their school.”
“A boarding school, with nuns?”
“No nuns. Not a Catholic school. They have sixty little girls and bigger ones, rooming together in groups of three. Nice gardens, playing fields, greenhouses. They teach foreign languages, economics, typing.”
“And the cost?”
“Well, Bianca is offering me a special discount. I did some calculations and I think I can swing it. The publishing house will have to give me a ten percent raise and help me out with some articles. In these last months I’ve been able to publish a few things, and now I’ll have to write more. But through the bookstore I know people who can help, you know. I’ll do anything, even knock out stuff for the women’s magazines, or better, comic books.”
“Journalistic prostitution.”
“If it means I can have Giulia with me, I’ll even do the other kind, if anyone will have me,” she said laughing. “No, don’t worry, there’s no need. Think about it. You in Rome with me, and Giulia close by in Frascati. You’re happy too, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“If I go to Frascati on Sundays, you’ll come with me, won’t you?”
“Well. . . .”
A simple man and woman, and such was the life they led.
But Ferranini didn’t feel easy, he needed another sort of warmth. It was 11:30. Reparatore might be back by now. On his way home he stopped by the bar on via della Scrofa to phone. Giobatta himself answered. He’d taken the 7:00 p.m. plane from Turin.
“I went to the stadium this afternoon. Juventus was playing Fiorentina, you know. . . .”
Ferranini was actually happy to have found him. Reparatore’s physical appearance and even his voice reminded him of his father. He was the man who could understand him. Or at least hear him out.
“When are you going to stop being a football fan, Giobatta, aren’t you ashamed? At your age.”
Giobatta was crisp, to the point. “At the stadium I feel I’m an individual, that’s what it is, and along with me, sixty thousand human beings! I’ll bet my day was better than yours. So, how young was the ‘young man’?”
“About thirty.”
“Mm-hmm. And tell me, did our man correct him?”
“Well, no, not to my eyes. And the young fellow—he made some concrete observations. The pursuit of affluence, careerism. These really are our limits.”
To Ferranini, Mazzola’s critique had seemed neither naive nor confused. He had taken it on himself to put together and express ideas that Ferranini shared, and with a degree of precision and concentration Walter knew that he himself did not possess. He felt Mazzola’s courage surging into him.
“That poor guy with the broken leg made sense, we need to take steps, okay our numbers may increase, but what about quality? We need to practice some self-criticism here!”
“Hey, lay off the self-criticism,” said Reparatore. “Sure. If a party card is just a lottery ticket, folks, let’s be sincere, let’s be honest. We’re turning bourgeois, turning bourgeois all over again. Am I right? And then, everything we do for our own dirty selfish reasons we can do, if nothing else, without a bad conscience. Today the rallying cry is: To hell with you, Stalinists of Prague, Stalinists of Warsaw. But Stalinism (it must have had some defects, I don’t know), what did it consist of? Intransigence. Which is a duty.”
“Get out of here, Walter, since when do we talk like this on the phone? You’re not yourself!”
“Let me speak. I’m telling you there’s something better than de-Stalinizing. What we need to do is de-Bukharinize, you know what I mean? We have to sweep the rubbish—il rusco, as we say in Emilia, the garbage of compromise, of accommodationism, of the ‘quiet life’—out of the corners (and we should hope it’s just the corners). Am I right or not? What was it you were saying this morning on the plane? Speak up. Speak!”
Tonight it was his turn to be emphatic.
•
Once he’d said (to the same Reparatore, the old wolf, who listened indulgently), “If what happens to all of us in the chamber had happened to me two years ago, or last year—this having to sit here all day long like an empty chair listening to empty speeches—I swear I wouldn’t have gone through with it. Now it seems normal. Is it that I’ve smartened up, or am I just another moron?”
He ended up convi
ncing himself that there were good reasons for his inertia. Parliamentary rule, such as it was, could only be a phase in the upward arc of socialism, or better yet, a moment of anticipation. They were there to oppose the institution itself, not what it decided or how it functioned. They were waiting for the moment when the state of affairs that institution represented and proposed to advance would be consigned to the museum of the past. Lenin had said to Amedeo Bordiga: Participate in parliamentarism to eliminate parliamentarism. Their role was not to propose, advise, or criticize, for even criticism is a contribution. Accordingly, there was no place where a Communist could repose so peacefully and so responsibly as in the bourgeois Chamber of Deputies.
Ferranini had told himself these things and told them quite seriously to others (absolute positions were made for him) but that did not prevent him from treating the institution with a certain formal deference. As Voltaire observed, the atheist is one of the very few not to take out his snuffbox in church.
He’d been in parliament for five months, but he still crept in and reached his bench on tiptoe. It astonished him when colleagues shouted down the halls to one another, as if that august building were a public meeting place or a private address. He had never permitted himself to attend to his correspondence inside the chamber, and every day he took home piles of official papers and read through everything scrupulously. He was always prepared when he went to the sessions of his committee. And still there was plenty of time to take it easy. The minute he became a deputy he had relaxed, comforted by the knowledge he was not in any way responsible. He listened, he watched, with a detachment that wasn’t at all presumptuous, just happy indolence. Nor did those hours seem too long to him. Now that he was the eyes and the ears, the performance was almost always interesting.
In five months he had not opened his mouth. He felt no need to. In Rome he had learned that his nature and vocation was to be a follower: he, once so combative in Reggio, so inclined to take responsibility. “When I worked with the base, I wasn’t the base; here, next to the leadership, I’m on my way. For a lot of people the opposite happens; this is better.” It was painless for him to observe group discipline in the chamber, and what Reparatore called platitude assignment—the fine-tuned apportioning of speeches and intervention times—seemed reasonable enough. Anyway, as he knew, discipline was not less rigorous in other parties, nor less respected. The incoherent bourgeois attack on party rule was just beginning.
If only he’d continued to keep his mouth shut. One day he finally spoke, tossing in two brief quips, and it was a disaster.
The middle of December. Comrade Pigato was questioning the minister of the interior on whether he was aware of the regulations governing the American troops stationed in the Veneto. Did he not find it indecorous that the Americans, as if it were not enough that they kept military bases on Italian soil to protect their own interests, also treated our people with the contempt reserved for natives in the colonies?Pigato read out some of the regulations in question. Military personnel were “advised” to avoid contact with the inhabitants of the country (and not merely those of the female sex); to stay away from their homes and places where they gathered, including cafés, clubs, playing fields, educational institutions, churches, and public transport. They were forbidden to take on familial duties; to sign contracts or contract debts; to join firms, companies, or other commercial enterprises; to join any sort of association, even if for athletic, cultural, or religious purposes or simple entertainment. They were forbidden to purchase foodstuffs of any kind from local merchants, including, sweets, beverages, beer, cocktails, and other liquids, and in particular milk and ice cream. They were forbidden to buy or use medicines and drugs of Italian make. Et cetera.
The longish list was heard by the assembly with unusual attention, and a hint or two of embarrassment on the part of the center benches (no efforts were made to interrupt). In the minister’s absence, Undersecretary Mazza spoke. It would be useful to determine whether the information supplied by Deputy Pigato was authentic. Many of the details seemed to him unlikely.“In any case,” Mazza went on, “further clarifications with regard to the matter can be supplied by the foreign minister. Or the defense minister.”
“In any case,” came Pigato’s retort, his voice strained because he didn’t have much of one, being one of the oldest PCI deputies, “you will tell us as a member of the government, or if you prefer, in your personal status as an Italian, if what I just read out seems compatible to you with the dignity of our people? Are Italians plague-ridden, are they inferior beings? As for whether the regulations are authentic, let me simply say that I received them firsthand.”
“You, a Communist, have firsthand relations with the U.S. command?” The undersecretary’s observation was ironic.
The center and the right welcomed Mazza’s remark, and there was a “hear, hear” and a few laughs. From the Christian Democratic benches someone shouted, “Hey, old man, tell us about your Red Army friends and how sweetly they fraternize with the Hungarians in Budapest.”
But Pigato didn’t budge. The veins of his neck swelled with effort as he barked, “I’m proud to say I have no relations with the Americans. None of any kind! The orders to U.S. troops that I read aloud are in the public domain in my parts, in the Veneto.”
It was at this point that Ferranini, who was sitting nearby, felt he must intervene to support his comrade.“What is more,” he rose to speak, “what you have heard is perfectly in accord with the American mentality. They are racists.”
He couldn’t see and was never able to determine which colleague from the center benches shouted out, “Ferranini? But isn’t he the one who spent ten years in America?”
Ferranini rose again and replied, “I was there but I’d never go back.”
Hours later that evening, he felt he could hear his own voice echoing off the walls: “I was there but I’d never go back.” Thank heavens, thank heavens! What if Togliatti had been present to witness his debut? To have spoken, his first time, and revealed himself guilty of personalism. Pretending to take a political position while underneath there was nothing but his miserable private life. And supposing that guy, that unknown colleague, had added, “Ferranini is here on the far-left benches only because a woman dumped him, otherwise he’d be an American citizen,” what would he have said?He had said he’d never go back to America, and that was true. Materially, literally true. But it was also true that they’d never take him back.
That bitter conclusion stymied him, and all he could do was try to distract himself. Block his thoughts. Later that afternoon, thinking about it—still in the chamber, the session was dragging on—he decided he was being unfair to himself.
He wasn’t ignoble. Even if they would take him, he wouldn’t go back. When he arrived in Boston in ’39 he’d sworn he would be America’s enemy, America the nerve center of world capitalism, executioner of Sacco and Vanzetti. Now that he was older he saw, less ingenuously but deeply, what was intrinsically lacking in a system that socialism had outreached. Love too was behind him. A falsifying love, making him confuse America and happiness, America and youth. He would never go back. Yes, his conscience was clear.
Or was there more?
A few days earlier (“I don’t know why but I don’t like saying I have a mistress; it’s the term I don’t like”) Nuccia had announced that Walter was not an introvert, nor, for that matter, introspective. A characteristic defect and a commendable one (in a world where not only the educated but grocers called themselves introverts). So long as he didn’t exaggerate, although in her opinion, Walter did exaggerate sometimes, yes. Nuccia was quite right, yet this once Walter proved her wrong. This once he looked within himself, so attentively and with such determination that Nuccia, poor thing, would have been astonished. Here was the point: he had managed to lower the tone of the debate in the chamber by introducing an emotional note, his reaction to something that had once injured his petty ego. Were Americans racist? They discriminated. Physicall
y. They didn’t like dark-skinned people, they didn’t like five-footers, short people. They admired the tall, the blond, the Germans, English, and Scandinavians. But this was no “fact”; it was an old injury to his amour propre (or to his love itself). Ferranini had not spoken as a critic of capitalist America, he had spoken as a man rebuffed. America, the sweetness and the rage, was still in his blood.
As a boy in Vimondino, eight or nine year old, he’d had a crush on a girl his own age (red-haired like Nancy, and called Nellina, or Nella). To hide his feelings, almost as if to revenge himself on this Nellina, or Nella, who hadn’t noticed a thing, he shoved her and scowled at her, and if anyone mentioned her he’d say, “She’s ugly, she’s stupid.” And that was what had happened here too. Pigato was merely the occasion. Pigato didn’t need his help. He’d jumped at the opportunity to castigate a country he’d been unable to forget, to revenge himself because he’d been unable to forget.(I’ll never say another word unless the group obliges me to, and only when the budget is being discussed. Some technical point, about public instruction or labor, when the budgets come through next year. They won’t catch me again, mother of G. . . !)The following morning he was due in Reggio for a meeting of the provincial council of cooperatives. As soon as he boarded the train he sat down to pore over the newspapers column by column. Both Avanti! and l’Unità had brief mentions of Pigato’s questioning, and neither wasted even a line on the “American,” Ferranini. He exhaled.
•
One of the good things about parliamentary sessions was that they gave him an opportunity to meet his comrades (and his friends, at least that). Reparatore, Amoruso, and Boatta. The first two he never saw outside the chamber. Reparatore was always traveling around Italy in his role as a CGIL inspector. Amoruso had recently become department chief at the hospital in Formia and only appeared in Rome when it was strictly necessary to attend the sessions. Devoid, and unenvious, of the professional political experience of Ferranini and the other two, Amoruso belonged to the educated bourgeoisie (if somewhat in the manner of the old, rhetorical Italian humanism) and had cultivated and would go on cultivating a role as a good Marxist dilettante.
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