The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Teresita, my wife. Let me say this, though. Ferranini, I’ve been close to going down. Giving up. Even last night on the train I argued with myself for eight long hours. Because it’s the individual, the rebel in each of us who refuses, pushes the chalice away. You don’t know these trials, the weakness of needing to say yes. Temptations to conform, understand? Because only a few of us appreciate the danger. The threat hanging over the workers’ movement, over our comrades! Forgive me, Ferranini.”

  The owner appeared briefly in the doorway, to see whether the deputy was ready for his coffee, or perhaps to observe this unusual encounter.

  “You should have thought of that some months ago,” Ferranini objected. “The Turin Federation did well to warn Comrade Mazzola, but Mazzola paid no heed. He didn’t give a damn.”

  “But a man can’t oppose his inner convictions. He must not.”

  “Lies. ‘I’ve repented, weakness, inner convictions.’ And meanwhile you were doing what you pleased.”

  What the devil, he thought, I’m just telling him in turn what he told me, or what I think he told me. He was too honest not to feel it was unfair to retaliate against the kid.

  “Okay,” he went on, “enough of that. Let’s get you a coffee.”

  “You see,” Mazzola sounded as dismal as before, his head still sunk on his arms, “you see, there was a way out with integrity, and I took it. With difficulty. Sorrowfully. At the end of November I did not renew my membership, and when they called me up, I said: Yes, I’m a communist—because I am that to my marrow—but not one of you. At your side if you wish, but one of you, no. I believe, I hope you’ll see my point. I know you will.”

  “One moment,” Ferranini interrupted him, moving his chair.

  “Did I misunderstand, or what?”

  “My group’s been in existence for two weeks now,” Mazzola went on as if he hadn’t heard, “and it’s made up of people who’ve followed me, or preceded me out. Our headquarters is my home in Rivoli. We’re going to call ourselves the Leninist-Stalinist Fidelity Group.”

  Damnation.

  And he’d been ironizing about repentance. This was anything but repentance. Or factionalism. This kid was a man. Without intending to, he pulled back and observed the bent figure of Mazzola anew, more seriously now, almost with respect.

  “We met,” the other said, “twenty-eight of us in all, including twelve workers from the plant where I was employed. We read Gramsci, articles from Pravda and People’s Daily, the works of Stalin and Lenin. This is Turin, where even workers want to learn, to consult the sources. There is nothing special about our project, we prepare workers, through close contact and with lessons, to keep alive the anti-revisionist consciousness. And make it clear, if we have to, that the party, not us, is guilty of deviationism.”

  “So you’re leaving,” said Ferranini. It was his turn to listen, to ask questions. He was the subordinate now, the younger. That’s how he felt in front of this kid who’d summoned up the courage.

  Mazzola, though, was not thinking about what the other man was feeling; he was making a confession, in all seriousness, and he wasn’t finished.“You don’t know how these decisions work. They seem so resolute, so sure, so decided, yet they don’t do away with the discord inside. They don’t root out the reasons. However, if they had agreed to see me this morning—”

  “See you where?.”

  “At the Direzione. I would have said: Look, here I am. Not as a rebel, not as an adversary. As a friend. There are many paths to socialism, allow me to proceed with my comrades outside your way. So far as I can without betraying Marx and Lenin, I’ll walk beside you.”

  Ferranini was listening now, absolutely intent and stunned, not in a bad way. He stared at the man’s head (there were a few gray hairs on it), at those shoulders and the slightly threadbare fabric of his suit.

  “Since I couldn’t speak to Longo, I’m speaking to you. So I won’t have come to Rome for nothing (I’m off in an hour, can’t leave my wife alone on Christmas). The man I’m speaking to, here front of me, represents the party, the way a priest embodies the Church. I still have mixed feelings; dissent, but also regret. I wonder if I can get this across to you.”

  “Lift up your head, Mazzola,” said Ferranini.

  “Please, lift up your head.”

  Very slowly he reached out a hand. At any moment he was going to touch him.

  10

  WHENEVER Nuccia was invited to visit Walter in his room on vicolo del Leonetto, once they’d done what they meant to do, she would begin to poke around in his chest of drawers. It needed straightening up, she said. Once, she pulled out a photograph.

  “This poor old picture. The other day it was hanging over the bed, now it’s here in the middle of your dirty linen. What’s going on?”

  It was an old photo of Ferranini’s mother, maybe the only picture ever taken of her. Ferranini always had it with him, and although he was not a man to curse (just enough to keep his blood pressure down, as Amoruso put it), sometimes when he was in a foul mood, he would take it out on the photo. It really was a sad old thing, and sometimes ended up on the top of the wardrobe or in the pile of old newspapers. He wasn’t interested enough in himself to analyze or criticize that curious habit.

  “You’re an intelligent man,” Nuccia went on, “and all things considered, you don’t entirely lack genuine feelings.”

  For Nuccia, as for other women, scolding her friend was one of the affectionate aftereffects of intimacy.

  “Here you are in this freezing room, previously occupied by a priest,” she observed. “To take a bath you have to ask the landlady’s permission, and go down to her apartment. Is that any way to live? At least get a room with a bath.”

  “There are more bathtubs in New York City than in the entire USSR. But the USSR remains the most advanced country on earth.”

  “Come on, socialism with a bathroom would be even more advanced.”

  These were Nuccia’s usual remarks, regularly repeated, and, Walter had noted, a mere hint of polemical heat turned her face hard and her voice shrill. She immediately looked ugly. He had thought about it that morning, as he was taking a few bills from the drawer to replenish his wallet. (His money was kept in a little notebook between his socks and his shirts.) He was doing it mechanically, and all of a sudden he’d seen Nuccia, right in front of him. Saw her face, heard her voice.

  Hey, he thought, this woman, this Nuccia: it’s only five or six months that we’ve been together. Or rather (to be precise) that we’ve been in the same city. Before that I knew her, yes, but at a distance. Here in Rome we began to make love. But that, if anything, would be a reason to get bored. Why do I think of her and miss her? It means I love her, no way around it. As much as I like to call it friendship.

  In truth he had never really thought about the nature of his feelings for Nuccia, and the uncertain dawn of love (at age forty-five!) seemed no more reason for cheer than the Christmas morning shuddering with rain and sleet now breaking on Rome. He had gotten up late and was dressing slowly, meditatively, between the window that didn’t close and the warmth of the electric heater. There was no great advantage in just being attached to her with a disinterested, unselfish affection, that was for sure, and he’d known it for a while. It was not passion; if they were thoroughly honest, they had to see that (she had to see it). The time for passion was past, this wasn’t the sentimental thing young people had. He didn’t want to lose Nuccia. But he didn’t want to leave her hanging, with all that might entail. Yes, she was an intellectual and no longer young, but like all women, she preferred to rose-color the daily gray, or apply Modugno’s blue. And Filippetto?

  Reflux rose from his stomach to his throat, the acid taste of a badly digested meal. And something else: bitter, physical heaves. Gagging on the circumstances. Filippetto. Cesare Lonati.

  Idiot that he was, here he was worrying about it—while those two were already at work resolv
ing the problem. Already he and Nuccia were as good as separated. Hopelessly far apart.

  That evening on his way home he had stopped at the landlady’s on the first floor to pay the rent. The doorman and his daughter were at the dinner table with her. He was a widower, the landlady separated from her husband, and they made no secret of any of it. Giordano took his meals with her and he probably shared her bed. Who was to stop him? There was nothing wrong with it. It was a crime only for Ferranini and Nuccia. For them, no. He sat down on his bed and looked around.

  “What a mess. What a mess.”

  Reggio, just a year ago, Christmas Eve. At a conference before a hundred leaders of local party sections, he had given an address entitled “The Coming National Elections and Us.” It was one of the few speeches he’d made that he recalled happily. A speech he liked. Between any one of us and the party there can be no middle ground. It would not only be wrong; it was illogical. He who sacrifices himself for socialism realizes himself, he’s coherent, he’s not giving something up the way he would be if he were sacrificing himself to a religion or a state.

  Keep this in mind: the party is not outside of us, it is us, everything from the animal on up. From the belly on up. Does the party rule us? It’s our conscience that rules.

  He wouldn’t change a word. Perfect. All the more so because the man who said that and thought that believed it one hundred percent. He still did.

  One moment, though. In front of him, among the section leaders, had sat a man he’d never seen before. A man in his sixties, with a beard, who every so often applauded approvingly. And Ferranini, as he spoke, had seen himself reflected in the ardent, honest, sweaty face of that good comrade. When the meeting was over, he pointed him out to Oscar Fubini. “That guy? He was a Fascist of the first hour. Friend of Dino Grandi, used to write for L’Assalto. Today, sure, he’s a good element, head of the PCI organization in such and such.” (A large town in the province.) What, then, was this abstraction, the party? These men and their missions, the mass plus the cadres. There were the Fubinis and the Ferraninis (the Mazzolas—no, no longer), and then there were the Fascists of the first hour. There were the profiteers, like Montobbio. And the gangsters. Like Bolognesi. But how could a party represent our conscience if it was not uniform, not consistent but only a jumble? A jumble.

  And so our conscience really is ours, Ferranini, in a fit of naive black nominalism, went on thinking. A man’s personal conscience, if he had one. And that was that. Anything more was drivel, even if in good faith. Especially when elections approached and above all when we were running for office.

  Sitting in the bay of the window where he could see without having to turn on the light, he began to look over the notes for the bill he intended to propose. He wanted to add something. An article that seemed pertinent. It wasn’t difficult to get down, he had it clear in his head, sentence by sentence, and he scribbled it on the back of a receipt from the trattoria. “A worker who over a period of two years suffers two or more serious industrial accidents, where it can be determined that these are not due to objective causes, shall undergo, at the employer’s expense, a period of no less than ten days of observation in an authorized medical institute specializing in psychiatric and behavioral examinations. Treatment, if deemed necessary, shall be equivalent to that enjoyed by the permanently disabled.”

  “Enjoyed by”? Better say “prescribed to.”

  The thermos of hot coffee, ordered last night at the coffee bar, sat on his chest of drawers, but he couldn’t make up his mind to drink it. It was his sole pleasure of the morning, and he was hoarding it.

  It was his fate that 1958 should end this way. In Reggio, pushed aside. All but discarded for the benefit of Viscardi-Ancellotti. In Rome, unknown. Unappreciated. (Priceless that encounter with Della Vecchia who had no idea who he was; so gratifying!) Fate had made just one little concession, his work. Because it looked like sooner or later, probably sooner rather than later, Nuccia would resign herself to giving him up. So there was only that dream (contained in those thirty pages, including the introduction), that one day the Ferranini plan might become known, debated, law. Hopes he could save some worker’s skin. And meanwhile, admit it, save himself. Keep afloat as best he could.

  More? No more.

  Or yes, books. Humanity’s bible, Marx, his guide, and a guide for all mankind.

  He shut himself up with his books all morning. There was a passage in some work by Marx that had given him the idea for last year’s speech in Reggio. After a couple of hours of research (and some brushing up in the meantime), he found it in one of the texts in his room. It was Marx’s critique of human dichotomy in today’s society, capitalist society. Modern man is split; there’s the citizen—political man—and there’s the private individual with all his inherent characteristics and inclinations (what Marx, with the power and economy of a sculptor, designated as forces propres). Only revolution could unite a man’s halves. Communist man does not submit to the state but identifies his whole self, even what is most personal and heartfelt, with the community. There is no conflict, only full and spontaneous harmony. shall be the complete, unbroken human being.

  Let’s hope so, he thought bravely as he put on his raincoat and went out to eat.

  •

  The next morning as he was just waking up, Giordano arrived with two telegrams. One came from Monticello: “I wish you a happier Christmas than my own. Nuccia.” The other was from Formia, from Amoruso: “Telephone immediately. Good news.”

  The second was amusing more than curiosity-provoking. What did you want to bet that the lovely Senator Adele Cariboni was expecting? First the wedding at Reparatore’s and now a happy event in casa Amoruso. These friends of mine are not exactly stray dogs.

  He went out to phone, but quickly found himself at the train station. By one that afternoon he was in Formia, arriving at Amoruso’s house in a freezing rain, panettone in hand. Remarkably, there were no guests. Adele was in bed, with a cold. Ferranini, unworldly though he was, had the good sense not to mention what he’d thought when he read the telegram. Amoruso, responding to the unexpected visit with his usual sociable expansiveness, led him to a chair and pushed the drinks cart toward him.

  “Now let me tell you. You’ll be thrilled. Hey, did you see the northern Christmas we’ve got down here? There’s snow over there on the Aurunci hills.”

  The two of them ate by themselves at a table by the fire, and Amoruso told him the news. The Soviet Academy of Sciences in Leningrad was celebrating its second centenary, and Amoruso had been chosen to represent the party. The elderly Di Costanzo, a professor of chemistry in Naples and one of the patriarchs of southern Italian Communism, was supposed to go with him. But Di Costanzo didn’t feel up to the trip and had asked Amoruso to help him be exonerated. Amoruso had then called Longo in Rome.

  “Were you able to speak to him?” Ferranini interrupted. Poor Mazzola was on his mind.

  “Now listen, this is the good part! Sure, naturally Longo took my call.”

  “Because you’re his physician.”

  “Because I am—I won’t say a PCI deputy, but a PCI member. You amaze me. Damn it, Communism abolishes the state, and party hierarchies will remain? We’ll still be cooling our heels in a waiting room? So. Longo knew nothing about the matter. He asked me to call back in half an hour, and he would look into it. I call back. I say, ‘In place of Di Costanzo we’ll name Ferranini.’ ”

  He said no.

  “ ‘Now just a minute,’ Longo says, ‘he’s not a scientist!’ I say, ‘What do you care? The party is not a scholarly academy, and its delegation can include politicians.’ And I say, ‘I’m not a scientist either. And Ferranini knows Russian, he’s already been to Russia.’ ‘Okay,’ says Longo, ‘call me back in half an hour. I’ll look into it.’ I call him back the third time. Approved.”

  “Me? You mean I’m approved?.”

  “You’re approved. In three days, Ferranini and Amoruso are off to Leningrad. Say you
’re grateful, and that you’re pleased. As soon as you get back to Rome, confirm your consent with them.”

  He was much more than pleased, he was moved, and he was having trouble not showing it. They’d conferred this honor on him, setting aside the fact that he’d been admonished for his private conduct. He had been feeling alone, a pariah, and now this comfort arrived from on high. With a rush of gratitude he thought: once again, the party shows—to one of its least-worthy sons—its generosity and foresight, its readiness to forgive and console. And the news came just as he was succumbing to a further doubt, criticizing the way party leaders behaved toward the troops.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he said to Amoruso. “I don’t deserve this.”

  When he arrived in Formia, he’d been tempted to speak to his friend about the meeting with Filippetto. Luckily, he’d kept silent. That thing was finished, no need to mention it again. Now he must return the favor, obey his leaders, and put his affairs in order. No point in digging things up again.

  Amoruso asked, “And Moravia? The piece for Moravia. You have to write it, you know.”

  “It’s done,” he said with new enthusiasm. “It came out a lot better than I expected.”

  “Send it to him. You’ll see, Amoruso’s going to launch you, put you in the picture! Damn it, you’re a fellow of merit, but you’re also a shrinking violet. It’s no good hiding yourself in this world, my friend.”

  The next day his “piece” for Nuovi Argomenti came back from the Press Office in the mail. Someone had attached a slip with the following word scrawled sideways in red pencil: “Unreadable”—followed by some initials, MC or NC, and the date.