The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  9

  THE TIBER valley was already white, but snow continued to come down sideways, thickly, and the train slowed. Ferranini closed the window again. He was half frozen. He could feel the cold in his bones as if he’d been tossed out there in the middle of the snowy countryside.

  The heel of one of those suede shoes was tapping against the seat.

  “You understand, Ferranini?.”

  “Ah, yes. Now, yes.”

  “You asked who’s dealing with your case. You were thinking of some committee, perhaps. Maybe even the Disciplinary Committee. We’re not at that point, have no fear. Your case is in a fluid state, but care must be taken that it does not change form, if you see what I mean. I believe that’s another reason I was asked to intervene, to avoid the appearance of a disciplinary proceeding. Don’t you think?”

  Ferranini nodded, passive.

  “Now let’s hear your reply. Speak.”

  The door opened and someone cautiously placed a bag on the seat.

  “Sorry. Not here,” Fanny said promptly.

  “There’s not a seat in the entire train!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said and tried to close the door.

  The man, small and bearded, resisted. “I’m a rail-company engineer on leave.”

  “This compartment is reserved for members of parliament. Read the sign.”

  Bag and beard disappeared. Fanny smiled again.

  “You say nothing, Ferranini, and I respect your silence. In any case, through my humble intervention, you’re being sent an invitation. To reflect. And if I may, I will add some advice of my own: reflect. Now I’m done,” she said, resting her hand lightly on his knee for a moment. “I’m done. My unofficial role ends here. But listen to me further, because now I’ll speak to you in another fashion. As a friend. May I?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You live alone, I’m told. Lord, what misery!”

  “What?.”

  “That blast of heat from the radiator, can’t you feel it? You have no family, no relatives, no friends. You’re alone. Unattached, one of the few in parliament. Do you know how many unmarried deputies there are in all the parties?”

  There were seventeen. Less than four percent.

  She aimed him a maternal, admonitory look.

  “Be strong, Ferranini, protect yourself from certain disreputable temptations. Choose the purer path of the sentiments. You are still young, and life can offer you affection that is peaceful, gratifying, reassuring. Bountiful.”

  Et cetera. She went on talking although Ferranini hadn’t been listening for some time. And when she got off the train at Arezzo, he didn’t move or change position. He stayed in his corner, hands crossed behind his neck. Not a thought in his head.

  Then someone came in and sat where Filippetto had been sitting, took out sandwiches and a thermos, and began to eat and drink. It was the man with the beard. There were some people, Ferranini thought, for whom freedom came as naturally as that.

  It was his first conscious thought.

  He was numb. He got up, stretched, and pulled a book out of his briefcase. He started to read where the book fell open: “The communist organization of society will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and in which society will have no occasion to intervene.” That little volume, which never left his side, contained the Communist Manifesto along with comments, notes, and variants mostly provided by Engels. The definitive critical edition that he had himself reviewed in its time in the magazine published by the Reggio Federation. The passage he was reading came in fact from Engels.

  He knew that humane and liberating declaration, of course. But he had never stopped to think about it. Now its importance expanded and illuminated the entire praxis of communism, directly and by reflection. Society will have no occasion to intervene. It seemed to have been written for them. Shouldn’t he defend himself? It was an abuse, the party could not allow it. Filippetto or whoever had sent her had committed an abuse. He had the right to hold on to the woman who loved him. There was no need to sacrifice Nuccia; she’d done nothing wrong. And he had done nothing wrong. The only one damaged was that bully Cesare Lonati. A man who richly deserved a woman who strayed.

  He was paging through the book, his “bible.” All of a sudden he stopped.

  Comrade Togliatti’s absence. At the Reparatore wedding. After promising to come, he didn’t show up. Why? It was obvious. Because he’d been told that he would be there. The “man of Reggio.” Ferranini.

  Obvious.

  But that Comrade Togliatti had asked Filippetto to intervene, no, that was unthinkable. Togliatti didn’t deal with this sort of thing. However, he knew of it, and hadn’t wished to run into him. And poor Reparatore had never suspected. He hadn’t had a clue.

  And then there was sense of isolation he’d been feeling in the party, the chamber—what other explanation could there be for that? Was Lonati, the husband, behind all this? On the one hand, it didn’t seem impossible; Lonati was in the Press Office, Filippetto in Schools and Culture, they might have had dealings. And yet. She had been rather specific about this thing, this reprimand, having come from someone rather high up, which was to say not Lonati, at least not directly.

  Anyway. It was pointless to imagine interferences, intrigue. His conduct had been open to question and the party had looked into it. Nothing more. The facts spoke for themselves. And Engels? No, the passage from Engels didn’t apply. Not given the present state of society, and not even, perhaps, in Soviet society. How had he failed to see that before? Engels wrote in the future tense. Logical.

  Hot and flushed as she had been, Filippetto made sense. Nothing in the lives of anyone in the party is “personal.”

  Just think if Mazzola had known about him and Nuccia. What would a man like that have said? You, too, are becoming bourgeois. It’s convenient for you to take the wife of a comrade, and you take all you can get. My dear Ferranini, our purpose is to build socialism and you’re frittering it away in adultery. The truth is, you have sinned and you have enjoyed sinning—proudly and stubbornly.

  And what was more, the party had treated him with consideration, it had been indulgent. In its knowledge of men’s failings. A word was put in his ear, he was invited to mend his ways: You’re behaving selfishly (like an individual who hasn’t been socialized, like a bourgeois, they were all synonyms). For now we forgive you, because to err is human. That the go-between had been the curvaceous, flirtatious Filippetto mattered very little. A man may be inadequate, what matters is the message he transmits. The spring, the well he draws upon.

  Fine. Good. Nothing could be more true. Okay, but do I have to be as solitary as a dog? That was also true.

  He tossed aside his “bible” and tried to cover up. He was cold.

  When it came down to it, why was it he who had to make the sacrifice? They say: socialism. But can’t we build socialism all the same, even if Walter Ferranini has a human being to look after him? How are you feeling; you’re not entirely well, go see the doctor. Come over here and let me give you what you need. For God’s sake.

  •

  In the white dusk the train compartment lights came on, and Ferranini, eyes closed, continued to examine his conscience, contrite but stubborn. With his raincoat thrown over him right up to his mouth, under the curious gaze of the little man in the corner who went on chewing.

  At Reggio he skipped his supper and went straight from the station to meet Fubini at the Federation. Two hours later, now past nine o’clock, after a long conversation with his friend, he still wasn’t hungry. He asked him to drive him straight to the hotel.

  Not hungry, not able to sleep. At midnight he was still tossing about in the bed, turning from one hip to the other: when he thought about it, it could only be a bad omen.

  Now the problem was Nuccia. The hotel entrance, the lobby with its rattan chairs and the gray carpet in the hall, all this forcefully brought back Nucci
a. In that bunch of magazines on the table in the entryway there might still be the one she was paging through that morning when they returned to Rome. Nuccia. His thoughts of her were neither amorous nor sentimental; he just felt the hurt, the meanness of that shabby life, his life. He tossed in the bed and repeated to himself: “Solitary as a man on the moon, a man on the moon.”

  It was Lunik, the Soviet spaceship, deep in the empty, lunar solitude of its cosmic voyages, sailing straight into the heavy heart of a poor devil unable to sleep. But Walter always perceived misery as physical, not emotional. This evening, the ache from his neck to his shoulder, then precordial pain in his chest. Pain and constriction that were familiar and localized; nothing psychological there. He got out of bed and put on his suit jacket. Down under his window there was something going on, a noise, like metal clattering, a lamppost or a street sign. He needed to see what it was.

  Without turning on the light, he left the room and found himself in the hallway. It was dark. He took a few steps. “I’ll go find someone.”

  Then he thought about going downstairs and calling her. At her home on via Ovidio. I’ll tell her: they can’t force me to do without you. They know very well they don’t have the right. Anyway, let them do what they will. He had stopped in the dim hallway, a few steps from his door, and he stood there for five or ten minutes immobile. Wide-eyed, one arm hard against the wall for support.

  He went back to the room. He was having trouble breathing and he rang the bell, hoping to get a coffee. In the meantime he sat at the table waiting (no one came) and instinctively, without being aware of it, drew pen and paper from his briefcase. He lay them in front of him, spellbound by the graph-patterned pages of the notebook. He was still shivering from the cold, and that mournful noise of clattering metal kept up outside. Finally he began to write. “In the pretechnological world. . . .” He went on. Slowly, but with a peculiar ease, as if he were writing a lesson he’d memorized. The mechanical activity of writing relieved him. After a little while he felt better. He threw himself on the bed, jacket and all.

  “I’ve reconsidered,” said Fubini. “We must get Ancillotti to come along. He’s the one who’s up on things now.”

  Ferranini didn’t object. In the end, his antipathy for the man was also a case of personalism.

  “Let’s go get him. Provided he doesn’t talk too much.”

  They planned to drive around the province; there were several things they had to deal with, the most serious of them being the perennial fierce struggle (beyond rivalry or competition) between entities of similar origins and scope that should have been able to coexist peacefully—and even cooperate to some degree or at least provide mutual assistance. There was a case in Olmeda, toward the hills, and Ferranini suggested they begin there, at La Vittoria, a factory cooperative that he’d played a large part in founding in ’49, during the time he’d worked so hard to expand the cooperative movement from its traditional base (consumer, agricultural, artisanal, and mutual insurance societies) into the industrial sphere. La Vittoria had a labor force of some seventy men and women, and was the economic backbone of the town. But it was administered by two men, both paid-up members of the PCI, who were as greedy and shortsighted as any monopolistic entrepreneur, ambitious and not very scrupulous. Last summer, selling children’s leather sandals on street stalls across Emilia at a price of two or three hundred lire per pair, they had decimated the local market. Other producers, among them some small cooperatives, had suffered badly, and the complaints had made it all the way to Rome. One of the worst hit was the shoe factory in San Donato di Vimondino where, when it was still privately owned, he had once worked. The section rep at La Vittoria, a warehouseman, had tried to stop them from underselling and the management had fired him. Just like the classic factory owner facing insubordinate labor delegates.

  Comrade Guidotti, the ex-warehouseman, had mysteriously been informed of Ferranini’s arrival and was waiting for them as they drove into town. The car stopped and he nearly forced himself in, his face purple from the cold north wind and from bottled-up rage. The gist of what he had to say was: the time has come, get rid of those two and put me back in or I’ll take my party card and rip it up before your eyes. Such were the problems Ferranini had to resolve during his pastoral visits, often right then and there, improvising. It wasn’t pure politics, no; politics was only tangentially involved, but this was the life of the base—petty, combative, concrete issues—and it was his life.

  Pastoral visits. The term was not inappropriate when it came to Villa, half a kilometer outside Olmeda. The little hamlet of Villa owed its modest prosperity to the Garagnani family, for whom a hundred of the hundred and fifty inhabitants, including kids, worked at home or in the factory. They made rosaries. The factory was the largest producer of its kind in Italy and exported to all five continents. The Garagnani family were among other things convinced socialists, and eight percent of the population of Villa belonged to the PCI, a decent percentage even in the province of Reggio.

  All went smoothly, and Ferranini the Marxist only had to conceal some annoyance once, when he spoke to Garagnani and his workers and this guy Ancillotti urged they “pray to the Blessed Virgin” that devotion (rosary sales) would flourish. Ferranini was nicely prepared when the problems and questions did come out. He was all patience, very much against his own grain. When possible he chose the route of persuasion, and proved astute, at times even subtle. In his favor, his prestige was known to all up and down the province, though he was quite unaware of his glory, only enhanced by his modesty and by the reputation he had for being not just fair and impartial but severely, even austerely honest. He’d be the first to be astonished if someone told him that, sure, Reggio province was happy that it was quite impossible to slip a pair of shoes or a couple of kilos of cheese into his car—but that he earned their deepest respect when, after a lunch in his honor, it was never said that he’d drunk a glass too many or left a bruise pinching some girl at the rally.

  On this tour, since Ancillotti had come along, Ferranini held back somewhat, curious to see how the Red Hunchback (whose own prestige was on the rise, said Fubini) would handle things. Quite often, though, he’d had to intervene. Around noon they’d arrived on the plain to visit the Workers’ Furniture Factory in Fratta Po. According to Ancillotti this was a party stronghold, managed in an exemplary way. Ferranini, dubious, asked some questions and it became clear that the factory wasn’t making full pension contributions or keeping proper records, and that out of the thirty-four employees, four workers, immigrants from southern Italy, didn’t even have labor books recording their job titles and periods of service.

  Confronted with these facts, Bolognesi, the manager, came out with the excuse that “we’re a family” and that people preferred it that way, without the withholding and the formalities. Ferranini then pointed out that in the older of the three shops the circular saws lacked the legally required safety devices, even though the law was not all that exacting. He told him quite calmly, “I intend to inform the appropriate authorities. You can provide your explanations to them. If you intend to put things in order, fine, if not, I will make it my business to suspend your production.” Bolognesi grumbled something about “nice solidarity” and hinted that someone in the Federation would defend him (meaning Viscardi). Ferranini added, “I can assure you that your party membership for ’59 is at risk. To be a Communist means to be willing to make sacrifices, not play the gangster. Do you understand? This comes to you from Comrade Ferranini, someone who still makes sacrifices himself.” Fubini was staring at him.

  Back in the car, Ancillotti took it upon himself to defend Bolognesi. Ultimately, they were all owners at the furniture factory. Economize on the contributions and the gain still went into the worker’s pocket. Later Ferranini would learn from Fubini that Bolognesi was in the Hunchback’s good graces because, being a huge football fan, he financed the Reggio team, of which Ancillotti was the president.

  Ferranini knew Fratt
a Po well, he’d lived for a few months, from August to December of ’46, in the nearby village of Càsole as the manager (in practice, clerk and teller) of the Family Circle, a consumer cooperative. Cooperative: in other words, a tavern with a grocery shop attached. Between Càsole and Vimondino there were fifteen kilometers of paved road, but back then it had been just gravel, with tall poplars on one side and fields, usually deserted, near the river. Every day at 1:00 p.m. when his work at the Family Circle was finished, he would wear out the gravel riding his bicycle back to Vimondino, where his afternoons were dedicated to the PCI, to a little section that had just been founded in a barn at the edge of town. Instead of staying in Càsole to eat at the tavern and to save those few lire he had on him, he’d pick up lunch at the shop, a hundred grams of mortadella and a quarter loaf of bread. He always stopped to eat at the same place, where beyond the line of poplars was a hedgerow of robinia, and in between the two ran an irrigation ditch. A riale, as they called it there.

  He looked for the place, and when the car came close, made up a reason to stop and get out. The trees were bare in winter, but otherwise nothing had changed, not the stones at the bottom of the riale, not the elasticity of his legs as he jumped over it toward the robinia and the fields. A crooked wall of mossy stone ran along the meadow’s edge, and far away you could see the bell tower of Vimondino, red with its small metal cross, it too a bit crooked. Some days when it was hot he’d cooled his feet in the water before eating his lunch, and once, just as he was splashing in the ditch he heard a woman’s voice call him. It was his cousin Alda, more or less his same age, on her way back to San Donato on her motorbike. They hadn’t seen each other for months.