The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  “Everyone says he has a weakness for art, literature. Poor Marchesi used to say his speeches were models of the use of the language. But his real passion (and the thing in which he outstrips everyone, from the days of the Comintern) is international politics. Big strategy. There’s no one with his broad-scale vision, either in Italy or outside. Here’s something he said recently: ‘We must be grateful to Eisenhower for not recognizing Communist China. In his place I would have recognized China and invested a billion dollars, and in return I’d have demanded neutrality of Southeast Asia. The Chinese have and have always had an interest in conflict with the USSR. And vice versa. The Americans are too obtuse to understand that, and we must thank them.’ ”

  Ferranini listened, transfixed by various emotions. He never drew the right card. Giobatta, his partner, was chewing him out. But then it was Giobatta’s turn to be chewed out, by his wife, for smoking too much. The packet of Toscani was sequestered and disappeared into Signora Reparatore’s immense bosom. Boatta then handed over his packet of Nazionali. “Stick this in there too; I’m smoking too much myself.”

  “Hey listen, you dolt,” Giobatta leapt up, “you think you can get away with that? We Pugliesi are jealous men, don’t try it.” Reparatore’s laugh was contagious, and even spread to Ferranini. The game then resumed in silence; on the radio they were giving the football scores. Nina got up and, beaming a pointless look at one of the card players, left the room. The atmosphere was smoky and friendly, deeply petit bourgeois, and it wasn’t as if Ferranini could pretend he didn’t know Lenin’s observation. That the petit bourgeois was simply the expression of the bourgeoisie.

  Yet as much as one pretended to consider them absolute, there were certain precepts that hovered stubbornly in midair, remained relative—and to hell with the theory. In this case, to Ferranini’s relief. He lacked a point of comparison; for him this was just a house and a family, a colleague; good people he willingly spent time with and who made him feel less alone. The petit bourgeois qualm, at least, he spared himself.

  •

  In the following days he gave not a thought to that article the pretty girl had reminded him of, until a telegram from Amoruso arrived. The doctor was in Naples and he wrote: “Have read your work; most sincere compliments.”

  He stuffed the telegram in his pocket with a shrug. (What had got into him?) It was the afternoon of February 6. That evening, on his way into the trattoria after the session in the chamber, it was nearly 10:00 p.m., he was approached by an individual who identified himself as a reporter for a popular Rome weekly. He wanted “a statement or two” on the piece that had come out in Moravia and Carocci’s review.

  He was surprised, not pleasantly. Still, his reply was fairly polite. “If you’re interested, I’ll get them to send you a copy.”

  “No, no need for that,” the other man said. “Tell me, what was the political intent of the article?”

  “Political intent? None. Mine was just a point of view.”

  “A theory?”

  “Call it a theory.” Ferranini sat down. But the fellow hadn’t finished.

  “You deal with Marxism?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “And what do you think of Marxism?”

  “I think it’s the greatest thing that has happened in the modern era.”

  The fuzzy, incompetent air of the reporter nearly made Ferranini laugh.

  “Give me a break,” said the young man, annoyed. “The managing editor sent me to squeeze something out of this famous article.”

  “So return to your boss and ask for instructions. Then come back and squeeze.”

  But the following day, in one corner of page three, Il Tempo wrote (under a blandly questioning headline “In Odor of Heresy?”) the following: “There’s no denying Moravia has exceptional instincts. In an obscure Communist MP brought to Rome by the recent elections from his native province in the north, our man has found a very unorthodox interpreter of Marx’s gospel, it seems. In the most recent edition of Nuovi Argomenti the deputy in question, Walter Ferranini, expresses a decided critique of the messianic optimism underlying the Marxist and Communist doctrine. At present, the experts in the field don’t seem to have replied, and what reception the article has had in official PCI circles is unknown. However, it’s easy to imagine it will be widely read and elicit reactions.”

  Two days later, the Corriere della Sera took up the story. “We know just how cautiously,” said the journalist, “Communist militants and leaders are granted the party imprimatur when they express their views to press outlets not those of the party. And therefore it is all the more significant that a PCI deputy, Ferranini, dared to publish in Nuovi Argomenti a piece of Marxist exegesis that is novel, to say the least. In substance, the article affirms that the enervation that comes with labor is not merely the consequence of alienation and exploitation but an intrinsic quality of work, part of a process that is not historical but physical, natural. At present, it should be noted, the PCI daily has made no comment.” One of the popular weeklies, along with a photo of Ferranini (a Polaroid, taken by someone—a paparazzo?—in Largo Chigi standing next to Luigi Boatta), offered some clever speculations. “The man is not important enough to merit a proper excommunication. We predict he will be sent to atone for his ideological sins by doing pious works (organizing) in the provinces. Or perhaps to meditate on the holy texts (Marxist) in some Red convent.”

  In one week, Ferranini’s article had been quoted from and summarized, more or less arbitrarily and in bits and pieces, by many other bourgeois newspapers of the north and center.

  “You might as well get a subscription to Eco della Stampa, the press service,” said Nuccia in an attempt at humor.

  They met in the bookstore, on Tuesday, a day that Ferranini had noticed was less busy than others. He joined Nuccia in her tiny office; the only concession he granted her. He stayed at the most half an hour.

  “The press likes a scandal,” he said, “but journalists have a short memory. Next week they’ll have forgotten about me.”

  “But in the meantime, they will speculate.”

  “They don’t know where to turn. The Italian bourgeoisie has no arguments, and cannot have any.”

  “And how is the party reacting?”

  “I have no idea. What will be, will be.”

  He spoke calmly, he seemed certain. Nuccia didn’t believe it; she was afraid of what Walter was hiding, and at the same time, it hurt her to feel she was no longer in his confidence. She tried to inquire: “It strikes me as odd, on your part.”

  “What?”

  “That you didn’t ask you superiors for permission. To write that article.”

  “I did ask them. But then I was out of sorts for a number of days. All those things, including the ones you know about.”

  That is, the meeting with Filippetto, which he’d told her about. And the Mazzola business, which he hadn’t.

  “In any case,” he said, “that same review published Comrade Togliatti’s views some years back.”

  “My dear,” she said, genuinely touched by his ingenuity, “don’t you know there are different standards? Look at this article. There’s a column about the Ferranini affair. It ends up like this: ‘. . . the party leadership in Reggio Emilia has already caused the PCI serious headaches in the past.’ What are they getting at, in your opinion?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Excuse me, but you might get an idea of how your case will play out by looking at the precedents.”

  He was sitting at Nuccia’s desk; she was standing near him with a hand on his shoulder. He rose, pushing the hand aside.

  “The precedents? As if this were some case in the law! I laid out a thesis. Thoughts that have been in my head for years, not something I imagined. Based on my own experience and that of many other workers.”

  “And what does Reparatore say? And Boatta?”

  “Boatta’s up in his home territory, Piedmont. Reparatore’s on the road, in B
usto Arsizio and Monza, for the textile strike. The chamber’s on leave; there are local elections in various provinces. We’re on call at home. And so, I’m on my own. It doesn’t matter. I laid out a thesis, a truth. The experience of the workers.”

  He was repeating himself. But that conviction kept him afloat.

  “And Amoruso?” she insisted.

  “Amoruso’s gone home, too. For all that I can expect from Amoruso! I mean, he’s as much of a Communist as you are. Or rather, you are much more of one, you come from the Resistance.”

  That he didn’t have to attend parliament in those days seemed undeserved good luck. Not only did he not mind the isolation; he sought it. For the first time in six months he decided to change trattoria.

  In the morning he waited for l’Unità to arrive with the mail and for Giordano’s little girl to bring it up. He didn’t want to read the other papers, and kept clear of the newsstands so as not to be tempted. For an entire week, apart from his meals, he stayed in his room to study, to work. He completed his proposal to reform the industrial safety laws, having taken it apart and begun afresh. One afternoon when Nuccia ventured to approach vicolo del Leonetto, she found him unshaved, lying on the bed with his feet at the head (to catch the light from the window), taking notes from three huge volumes of Nordenskiöld’s History of Biology, one of which lay face-down on his chest, so that he appeared to be standing at a lectern.

  “Walter, you mustn’t let yourself go like this!”

  “Well, I’m purging myself of my sins. And my ignorance.”

  He seemed somewhat cheered to see her, and didn’t scold her for not warning him of the visit.

  “I suggest you go to Reggio until the chamber reopens. In any case we won’t be seeing each other, and in Reggio you have Fubini. And the Bignamis.”

  He said nothing. But you could see the thoughts passing through him, and Nuccia regretted having spoken.

  “Come with me tonight. No, not to the restaurant; we’ll have a caffè latte at my place. Nobody knows you there.”

  “So what I wouldn’t permit myself a week ago, I should now permit?”

  The words, if laconic, were clear. Nuccia shouldn’t have insisted.

  “And why not? If anything, now’s the time.”

  “From now on,” he said, scratching his beard noisily with both hands, “I’m obliged to be pure. I don’t like the word much, but that is the truth.”

  “Ah, what fun it is to be your woman!” she let slip.

  “Drop me then, if you want to have fun. You’re free. I know what I’m doing; I don’t want them to be able to attack me for my private life as well. Yes, it is a sacrifice, but I’m the first to make it.”

  •

  Those friends in Reggio were on Ferranini’s mind, yes. Too much. He thought of them, of his city, even of Vimondino. With nostalgia (as if it had all been suddenly taken from him), self-reproach, bitterness at having been unworthy, having disappointed.

  He regretted thinking that Ancillotti was a fool. After all, he was a good element, someone who made an effort, courageous. When it occurred to him that maybe the Red Hunchback was gloating and telling people at the Boiardo “I knew it!,” he suppressed the thought.

  Fubini didn’t get in touch. He wasn’t the type to put a good face on things. Viscardi, out of spite, bothered to. “Sorry to see the absurd campaign that the right has mounted using the pretext of your text. I believe you are wrongly accused and as such I trust you will count on my friendship.”

  Amoruso’s solidarity was also something he could have done without. One evening, on his way down the stairs to go out to eat, he heard him coming up, out of breath and speaking in dialect with his fellow Neapolitan Giordano. He got right to the point, there on the landing.

  “My friend, it’s an unpleasant thing, this. Threatening to turn bad. Then again. We discussed those three or four concepts in your article so many times. Profoundly. They’re watertight. I say: We reason, and to reasoning, one must respond with reason. Let’s just see if they’re able to prove us wrong.”

  Meanwhile it was clear to Ferranini that Amoruso, glib as ever, had hijacked the whole discussion. “No longer my thing,” thought Ferranini. “Joint paternity and many thanks if he even recognizes I had something to do with it.”

  But the other, wheezing and ranting, said, “The party, discipline, they say. But I’m a doctor, my good friend, and before discipline, for me, comes knowledge. True, or not?”

  “Do me a favor and let me out. Come down. Let’s go eat.”

  “I’ll take you down to Formia, we’ll eat at home. Now tell me: is it true, or not? How does this get in our way? These are not the days of Stalin. Debate is permitted. And I repeat: I’m a doctor, not just a deputy for the PCI. Truth matters!”

  “Got it. You are a doctor, the party doesn’t count for you, it’s just a club. Between you and me, that is the difference.”

  There was no more talk of dinner in Formia.

  On the afternoon of February 21, Ferranini interrupted his self-imposed quarantine and went out, to the movies. He’d seen in the paper that they were showing a Western at the Metropolitan. At his front door, he was stopped by a big kid who’d just gotten out of a van.

  “Is there a Walter Ferranini here?”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Pasticceria Ribaudengo. There’s a letter.”

  The truck, full of parcels, smelled of fresh pastries. The letter was from Boatta, who, he now remembered, lodged with a cousin, the owner of a confectionery shop somewhere near Termini station. “I’m expecting you this evening for communications that concern you.”

  Nothing else. But it was enough.

  He thought of his meeting with Filippetto, right there at Termini station. Those seemed like good times, long ago.

  He began to walk mechanically down via della Scrofa, unaware of the driving rain. In Piazza Colonna the traffic was blocked by a hundred or so men and women with flags and placards: textile workers on strike from Tiburtina Tessile, on their way to demonstrate under the windows of the Industrialists Association and the Ministry of the Interior. He stood for a while watching them. He was about to join them when it occurred to him that he might stand out. He looked at them enviously, tenderly. He’d have stopped the march just to go and touch one of their red flags, looking black in the rain.

  Three weeks ago those same people had been listening to him at the union hall in Tivoli.

  He trudged through the streets of the center waiting for 6:00 p.m. to arrive; he walked by the window of Nuccia’s bookstore. At 5:30 he reached the little place on via Varese that served as the cousin-pasticciere’s office and as Boatta’s office and pied-à-terre when he was in Rome. Boatta was out and only appeared an hour later. The cousin was typing up invoices and so Boatta took Ferranini to the fourth floor, where his bedroom was. The conversation was brief. When he’d returned to Rome two days ago, Boatta had learned the Direzione was about to consider the Ferranini case. He’d asked for any decision to be postponed, and for authorization to speak to Walter.

  “Rectification is impossible; some action will have to be taken. However, if you don’t make a fuss, and you align yourself right away, the situation may improve. But first of all: how did you get into this mess? Look, this thing is huge. Did you see the press, how they exploited it?”

  He clutched his face between his hands.

  “If you wanted to tackle a theoretical matter (whatever you may have to do with theory!) you could have sent it to Rinascita, or, I don’t know, Critica Marxista. They would have shot it down, bang, party’s over.”

  Old Boatta had taken the only chair in the dimly lit room, and Ferranini was perched on a trunk. He was sweating.

  “Critica Marxista,” he said. “Above all, a review I’ve been reading for years. Yes, that was the place. And as for shooting me down, maybe they wouldn’t have. So I shot myself down. What can I say: I lack a brain, or mine is upside down.”

  “What got into you, wre
tch? This is no joke. Sure, I’ve heard you go on about those questions. Was I supposed to know you’d go and put them in print?”

  “I hadn’t ever thought about it. But apparently I was waiting for the occasion without being aware of it. They said to me: Send us an article—”

  “Oh, fine. There you are, one of the two or three hundred of us who have Italian Communism in hand, and this was how you were thinking. I have to say, I just can’t fathom what you’re made of.”

  “Now look, Boatta. I’m at the party’s disposition. I’ll stay in Rome; I won’t move from here. I’ll wait. In the meantime, thanks. Thanks for speaking to me.”

  He left. And he was telling the truth, he was grateful to him. Now he knew, he was certain, that he could consider himself guilty. He needed that. Until that moment, he hadn’t been able to. He had been minimizing, as if the grave, inexcusable deed he had done had been unconnected to him, merely formal. He had continued to mull over the article and its content; he hadn’t even touched the wrapper on the review, but he remembered what he had written word for word. Honestly, as much as he had racked his brain with self-criticism, he had found no transgressive intent, no deviationist tendencies. Not even “substantial error.” It was the opening to a discussion, in the expectation that the others were more right than he and would demonstrate it. Finally, he recognized that.

  •

  After the meeting with Luigi Boatta, his error stood out, obvious, capital. It was to have chosen (chosen?) a bourgeois platform for the debate. About a problem that touched the core of Marxist teaching. A problem that might be one of the delicate points, maybe even one of the deep weaknesses of the system.

  Now, convinced of his error, it was a comfort to feel indebted and ready to pay. He had no doubts: he had not responded to Moravia’s invitation out of calculation or vanity. Yet it was still unforgivably careless, the behavior of an individual who had acted utterly on impulse. They would accuse him: You are irresponsible. And he would admit: I’m irresponsible. Take all my duties away. I don’t deserve even to lead a party cell.