He took out the letter. So, he was criticizing a decision of the party. Because suddenly now, the evidence was staring him in the face. The Direzione had sent him the letter because they considered Mazzola punishable. That is, guilty.
He leaned over the table, his chest hard against it, hands pressed to his face. Fifteen years of consistency, of loyalty, and today a rebel. A deviationist. Aligned, allied with a man that the party considered guilty of deviationism. Pointless to recall Comrade Pisani’s opinion (of Mazzola) or the even clearer words of the local party secretary. Pointless for him to re-try the man; there was the Direzione, and the Direzione had made the decision for him, and for everyone. The Direzione had said: “That fellow is deficient, he has to pay, let’s hear what measures you would apply. We already know he deserves punishment, but we will do you the courtesy of hearing you out.”
And Ferranini’s reply was going to be: You are mistaken. I stand with Mazzola.
He sat for some five minutes, immobile, the mimeographed sheet open before him, like a fool.
Rectify. And then gouge it out of his memory.
He took another sheet of paper, wrote: “Reply to communication [number, date, et cetera]. (Original conserved for my records.) With regards to interview conducted by Comrade Senator Pisani and the undersigned in Turin with Comrade Roberto Mazzola. Political conduct of aforementioned Mazzola. In my opinion, rebelliousness.” He crossed that out and wrote, “indiscipline.” He corrected, adding before “indiscipline” the words “aspirations of.”
“Aspirations”: a word he liked. He’d often used it to describe himself to Nuccia: “I had various aspirations; for many years I fed on bread and dreams.” While “indiscipline” seemed vague, generic. Mazzola was something more than undisciplined. He crossed the word out and wrote “insubordination.” So: “aspirations of insubordination.” Mazzola’s opinions? Okay, he had listened while Mazzola expressed his ideas, but as a silent witness. Pisani had been the judge and the letter from the Direzione was a consequence of the report filed by Pisani, and therefore all he had to do was repeat what Pisani had said that day. He wrote: “Mazzola states he opposes de-Stalinization. He would like to push the base toward a type of naive extremism.” Yes. Naive was the right word. He added: “His views reflect a factionalist tendency due to moralizing attitudes, if in good faith.” He canceled “moralizing” and replaced it with “moralistic and rigoristic.”
Sanctions. Better not to exaggerate. Mazzola was a good kid, fully salvageable. Formal Admonition? No, it was wrong to make too much of it. He wrote: “I propose that Mazzola receive an Admonition.”
He signed the letter, put it in the envelope, and hid it in the top drawer of his chest. Then he opened the folder containing his proposal for the reform of industrial safety legislation. He had finally remembered (how had he been so distracted?) that he could not go to the ministry for the simple reason that it was Sunday.
So he sat down to work. He still had to write the longest and most important section, the accompanying report. This part (it now struck him that he might present it directly to Longo in his role as deputy party leader in the chamber) demanded above all a certain diligence in the writing, and when it came to style, Ferranini was hopeless, as he himself knew; the first few pages had been a great struggle. When he finished, he’d decided, he would get Nuccia to do a thorough edit; she had a degree in letters, was a writer, et cetera. But first he had to finish it. Before the new year if possible.
Half an hour later he hadn’t been able to knock out half a page. The law dated January 7, 1956, was outdated already. No one respected it and no one enforced it. “What we observe on construction sites is typical: the only law being observed, as the saying goes, is the law of gravity.” Having written that, he was unable to proceed. His head was elsewhere. At 10:00 a.m., he gave up (rare for him; he was always loath to stop working even when his heart wasn’t in it). He gathered the pages and put on his raincoat. As he descended the eight flights of stairs, pausing at the landings to look out on the courtyard deep in fog (a rare event in Rome), he’d already found an excuse. He liked it when his ideas were clear, and now he had come up against something that was anything but clear. There were aspects to the business (the Mazzola business) that didn’t add up. Didn’t convince. Among other things, why hadn’t Mazzola been made to come to Rome? His leg was broken—well, they could have given him time to recover. But no, suddenly there was a great rush; they had to go and question him at his home in Turin, while he was in bed with a high fever. And furthermore, how to explain the tribute (you honor a man by condemning him, too) paid to a modest local secretary of the Party Youth Federation? They send old Reparatore, they send Ferranini, and at the last moment they ring Comrade Senator Pisani. Pisani, a big wheel. Somebody who can walk into the Kremlin any time he wants.
In the soupy morning air, the street empty on a Sunday, Ferranini walked and thought, gray and vexed; he walked and interrogated himself, a chill light rain soaking his hair. Be honest, Ferranini, that’s not the point. You don’t care whether it was Reparatore or Pisani they sent. Since the trip to Turin, you haven’t once thought of Mazzola, the whole thing slipped your mind. You knew they had condemned him, and it annoyed you that you would have to sign off on it too. (No, that’s not it. I stand behind the party; I was behind the party.) Yes, that is it. Sooner or later they were going to say to you: You must ratify. Pro forma, of course. Just to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. However, ratify. And now the moment has arrived and you don’t want to ratify. You like Mazzola. Okay, you only spent a couple of hours with him the other morning; you don’t know much more about him. They’re throwing him out. So? You’ve seen a lot of people ousted from politics (and elsewhere), and you didn’t go all teary. No, tell the truth: it’s that Mazzola’s ideas are a lot like your own ideas. Very. And so, one of two things: Either you acknowledge that and join him and say, “Sorry but you have to punish Ferranini too.” Or you send the letter, that letter which is by no means the formality you’d like to think it is; you sign it and you send it, and you do the dirty deed. It’s up to you.
He stood in front of a window. It was a small place lit by neon lights, empty except for a man busy polishing the countertop. It was the fellow who filled up his thermos when he stayed in his room to work. The man saw him and came to the door.
“Morning, Deputy. Caffè or cappuccino?”
The deputy hardly heard him. Let’s see, are Ferranini and Mazzola alone in thinking this way? A few days earlier in Reggio, he had seen Oscar Fubini at the Federation. Fubini hadn’t minced words: “Careerism rules here.” The Bignami cousins were of the same opinion. And what had Reparatore said that morning on the plane? That revolutionaries were becoming functionaries, and as functionaries, they wanted peace and quiet. If it was a crime to discover that Communism had become bourgeois, well then many of us are guilty. Even Nuccia. She too had asked whether their comrades were turning bourgeois.
Togliatti was no bourgeois, Longo was no bourgeois; there were some fifty, maybe a hundred men like them, who had the right to lead the party and who set an example. But the rest of them? How many leaders were not infected with personalism, with the individualism of a Montobbio? People who enjoyed the easy life, the good life, who used the party to command, to stand out, distinguish themselves, gain a position. (And people who used it to cover their backsides, like Cesare Lonati.) And the party line won’t be affected by this? The base has been silenced, those who want to interpret the base’s aspirations are called exhibitionists, “pizza-spinners,” those who still hope to realize socialism are credulous hard-liners. It’s all parliamentary maneuvering; they polemicize against the reformists and the Christian Democrats, then offer themselves as allies. In the meantime an individual like Viscardi is the nominee to run Reggio. Italy’s Kiev. You go up to Reggio and find a struggle raging. What struggle? To advance the masses to power? No, the struggle between Viscardi and Caprari. Between Panciroli and Zamboni.
He�
�d reached Piazza Colonna. He looked for a phone booth to call Reparatore. Someone who didn’t give a damn about orthodoxy, who was familiar with the Mazzola affair, someone who could give him advice. He called, and Signora Francesca answered. No, Giobatta wasn’t home. (Right, when was he ever home, he was a southerner!)
“Ferranini, now listen. Don’t forget, now.”
“What?”
“You’re invited on Wednesday. You must be here. A friend of the family, get it? There will be hell to pay if you don’t show up.”
Yes. The wedding. Their daughter was getting married.
“On Wednesday I’m in Reggio Emilia. I’ve got obligations.”
“Get out of them. Giobatta will be offended if you don’t come.”
“I’ll see.”
He walked homeward, very slowly. What was the point of calling, anyway? Reparatore had made his position clear right from the beginning. He hadn’t wanted to take part in the Mazzola trial.
No, there was no denying it, Mazzola was a good Communist. That was the truth, even if Comrade Pisani had reasons for teaching him a lesson. And so Ferranini could not send that letter to the Direzione without lying, at the very least. And since that letter was ready and waiting, and the words “naive extremism” were written in his own hand, of his own free will, he already counted as a liar. Hadn’t it been Reparatore himself, on the plane to Turin, who said that a man who disagrees and keeps his mouth shut is a hypocrite? Again he walked past the coffee bar where the man had come out to say “Caffè or cappuccino?,” and the alternatives—deviationist or hypocrite—began to hammer in his head absurdly, in the tone and voice of the barman, as if the two phrases were connected. After turning the corner of via della Scrofa he changed his mind; he didn’t want to shut himself up in his room. At 4:00 p.m. he had to speak in Frosinone, the usual Sunday thing. Nuccia was away in Frascati with her friend again. He decided to go to the station and take the first rapido. He would have lunch at the Hotel Cesari in Frosinone, the food was good. But he was scatterbrained and when he got to the bus stop he realized he’d forgotten his notes for the meeting. He had to go back. For the fourth time he passed in front of the place. “Caffè or cappuccino?”
•
A small downpour was drenching the hilly part of southern Lazio with gloom. Ciociaria, home to the city of Frosinone. At the last minute the rally called for Piazza Libertà in town was moved to the union hall, large enough to hold no more than a hundred people, tightly pressed. For Ferranini it was two hours of torture; everyone was smoking cigars and pipes, and the smoke, however proletarian, was more than he could bear, hard as he tried. The hall was dim and overheated, his eyes were itching and he began to cough; every five minutes he had to stop for a glass of water.
After a brief nod at current affairs he quickly moved on to one of his favorite topics: the political futility of any intermediate formation (third force) between the capitalist bloc and the USSR. Reaction or socialism, that was the choice, and it had to be made domestically as well as on the international chessboard. Anyone who hesitated, looking for balance or neutrality, ended up a reformist, assuming he was in good faith. And reformism only served reaction. This wasn’t quite what he’d come to talk about, though, and now he needed to make some sort of reference to doctrine. Human history had originated—Ferranini launched into his lesson—when humanity succeeded in producing its means of subsistence. And so history was written in part by human social organization. An elderly man in the first row got up to interrupt him.
“Comrade, explain please, we don’t understand.”
“In two words: for the Marxist, men are created by their mode of production, that is, they are what they produce and how they produce. Where production has been organized and shared, there you have men.”
The old man didn’t ponder that long. He stood up again.
“Okay, but then bees, and I have ten hives at home, are men like us.”
Ferranini replied that in the biological world there were hierarchies, and although bees also collectively produced their means of subsistence, they were not at our level. He resumed his remarks unwillingly, thinking all the while: How can we account, in Marxist terms, for hierarchy in the biological world? Marx accused Hegel of having an animalist conception of the state. Hegel argues the monarch’s claim to sovereignty depends on “natural selection,” on his belonging to a species (in the zoological sense) held to be elect. And Marx was right; those criteria are silly, and must be abandoned. But how can I show that bee society is inferior to that of human beings? Damn it, nothing was coming out right today.
They took him back to Rome by car and before 7:00 p.m. he was downtown in Piazza Colonna once again. A Sunday evening alone in the city without Nuccia: that too was an unpleasant novelty. While he was glancing at the paper to see what was playing at the cinemas, a distinguished-looking young man wearing glasses came up.
“Deputy Reparatore is waiting for you.”
“And where is he?.”
“We’re over there in that café. I’m Assuntina’s fiancé.”
In the café Giobatta sat towering over his womenfolk, nursing his Toscano cigar with conviction. He didn’t give Walter a chance to speak.
“You called? Were you looking for me? Well here I am. Let me introduce my son-in-law, he comes from your parts, Vicenza, that is. State Rail inspector. Fine young man. As for the rest of the family, here they are, my bosses, you know them. Sit down, Walter!”
Ferranini knew them well, the two daughters Nina and Assuntina, and their mother. At the start of the parliamentary session, he had spent the better part of his first month in Rome at his friend’s home. The fiancée Assuntina appealed to him: plump and soft as an olive, shy as her father was bristly, expansive, dark eyes, smiling and demure. Assuntina ventured to speak over her father’s thundering, “You’re coming on Wednesday, aren’t you?”
“Hey, careful,” warned her father, “if you don’t come you are no longer my friend. Boatta is traveling. Amoruso is ill. Woe to you if you don’t show up. And,” said Giobatta without waiting to hear his reply, “Comrade Togliatti is likely to be there.”
Ferranini’s expression changed. “No, are you serious?.”
“I invited Togliatti and he accepted. We were close friends in other days. If he’s at all able, I think he’ll come.”
Ferranini was feeling relaxed when he left the café. The meeting with Giobatta and his family, good, warmhearted people, had been invigorating. Waking the next morning, he thought again about the Mazzola business. He no longer felt any hesitation. “Naive extremism, moralistic revisionism” and as the sanction to apply, “Admonition.” At the very least. A balanced judgment. It was true that Mazzola had expressed views and opinions that coincided with his personal views and opinions, but there were times when you had to set aside personal opinions. Otherwise we’re finished. Otherwise we fall back into an anarchic atomism that Communism has long surpassed. Precisely because it has succeeded in becoming a great and unified mass movement.
Suddenly the matter was luminous, clear. Come, Comrade Mazzola, you speak of discipline and you oppose discipline? Some consistency, please. You, Mazzola, have become personalist in your anti-personalism, individualist in order to combat individualism. It is precisely in the name of your principles that you must be judged wrong. Just as I would be wrong (because I share your opinions on various matters) to play party reformer instead of going down to Frosinone to proselytize.
The party has a great leader—and he’ll take care of getting it back on track, if needed. We stand behind him. Our job is to implement. To obey, and to pursue the struggle, if necessary.
He was astonished that he had felt any uncertainty at all. No, he would go there in person. He took the letter to party headquarters and by 10:00 a.m. the matter was closed. That evening when he came by the bookstore to meet Nuccia, she found him in good humor.
“Walter, I’m pleased to see you smile. What’s going on with you?.”
&nbs
p; “Nothing.”
“But something’s up, no?.”
“Tomorrow I’m going down to Formia to see Amoruso who has the flu. The day after, there’s Reparatore’s daughter’s wedding. The chamber’s on holiday, isn’t it? Holiday for me too.”
Nuccia, though, was down. She hadn’t been able to grab on to anything to lift herself out of her despondency. She’d spent Sunday afternoon at Frascati with her friend, who suggested she look for a lawyer among Walter’s colleagues. She must find out about her rights (and responsibilities). The only way was to talk to a lawyer. She tried to raise the question with Walter.
“Yes, there are lawyers in my group, too many of them in fact. But face it, yours is no ordinary matrimonial tale. To some extent, it involves discipline. And they are bound by party discipline too.”
The party, that machine bearing down on her. It had been foolish to think she would find someone in it to help her.
“But Walter, I’m alone. Like this, you leave me alone.”
They went out shopping, which provided a little distraction. He’d asked her to help him choose a present for Assuntina Reparatore.
“First of all, you need a blue suit. And you don’t have one, am I right?”
He didn’t.
“I’m going dressed like this. I’m not the elegant type, some Montobbio wearing a suede jacket. A Communist doesn’t need to be elegant.”
“Come on, Khrushchev has beautiful blue suits, and wait and see, your man Togliatti will show up in blue with a pearl gray tie.”
“You think?.”
“Of course.”
“That may be but I cannot permit you to say ‘your man Togliatti.’
Respect where respect is due.”
Still, her observation had struck him. He had already resigned himself to going to Zingone for the suit when he hit on the ideal solution: tomorrow in Formia he’d ask Amoruso to lend him a suit. They were the same size.
The Communist Page 18