The Communist

by Guido Morselli

  Newcomer didn’t believe that social reality could be interpreted using the laws of physics. He had another explanation, which he cloaked in genteel understatement.

  “I’m a dilettante, I speak as a dilettante. Perhaps we could put it this way, that a third world, a third way, must be an improvement, an advance, and an advance requires not merely a middle stage but a new stage. Which is not to say that one day we won’t discover it. But meanwhile, better to wait.”

  “There won’t be a new stage,” Ferranini replied. “What you say makes Marxism one point in a historical dialectic. While instead it is the end point.”

  “I knew you’d say that!” a cheerful Newcomer exclaimed. “It was the lesson I was expecting. And I’m ready to admit that reality disproves my thesis. I lived for a number of years in India. That is a country that could hold its own, with a newly minted ideology that is antithetical to the two great systems. And yet, India is gravitating toward one. Nehru and company, with their theoretical elaboration of Gandhism, have already taken sides, and today the country, where it is not still in the Middle Ages, draws inspiration from the capitalist New Deal.”

  The visit was finished. He announced the patient’s blood pressure—110—and on his way out said, “Wait till around noon to get out of bed. You can stay up until four. Your wife is very eager to talk to you on the phone. Today I’ll let her do so. Your phone here has been blocked, but I’ll have it activated.”

  Ferranini raised a hand to stop him. “I’m not used to having a phone by the bed, it will annoy me. Leave it blocked.” Right, he thought, people here think we’re not just husband and wife but actual lovebirds.

  Nancy came around 4:00 just as he, tired out, was undressing to return to bed. Earlier, getting dressed, he’d even put on a jacket and tie. He was relieved to get back in bed. Nancy offered to help him take off his clothing.

  “No!” he said, surly. “What’s got into you? Go outside and I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

  Staggering in front of the window, sock in hand, he looked out and shivered: the trees were stiff with frost in spite of the sun, which had not yet gone down. He ruminated, partly in English. Nancy’s changed. Too bad, I’ve changed too. Who knows, though, whether I’ve changed or whether it’s just that I’m sick? As for her, you’d think she loved me. And her face hasn’t changed, she’s still the same pretty girl.

  But Nancy’s eyes, still green and pretty, had grown lifeless, they didn’t sparkle. Her face and neck were chalky white. Ferranini didn’t notice, it was her tone that struck him, attentive and even slightly humble. Perhaps now was the moment. With stubborn tenderness she had brought him more flowers. Carnations, odorless, so they wouldn’t bother him.

  They talked. But she only reminisced about the years that had passed. Of all of it, what she remembered most fondly was Alaska. But not because of Francis! No. Because Alaska was a new, clean America without poverty. Without classes.

  In Anchorage there was next to no disparity between rich and poor. Median annual temperature 46 degrees Fahrenheit, 8 degrees Celsius: cold sterilized the place against privilege. The Alaskan spoke of the States as “the lower 48.” When Nancy returned to Boston she founded a biweekly by the same name. In The Lower 48, a handful of brave polemicists, all of them intellectuals, waged war on the government and the elite groups, prodding America to add social justice to its many distinctions. In that somewhat irregular group of “intellectuals” there was Francis; the actress Erica Stein, an old friend of Nancy’s from Canadian days; Joseph O’Connor, who did TV skits; and of course Rosy Gavan. At sixty, the aunt from Boston had discovered a knack for social inquiry, that is, “demoscopic research”: stopping people in shops, church, the subway, wherever, and interviewing them about a wide variety of personal matters. In fact, the review had a double purpose. Politically, to create a movement or party that Nancy, the soul of the operation, liked to call “National Laborism”; intellectually, to promote the use of “practical sociology.” However, the review was no more. They had ceased to publish six months ago.

  “Everything bores you so quickly,” said Ferranini, eyes closed. Poor Nancy’s white face flushed with color. “Oh, Walter. Don’t say that! It wasn’t my fault. The review was honorable, it was a much-needed dose of medicine for Americans. You have no idea how ignorant people here are about the socioeconomic situation. They think the United States is not only the richest nation in the world but that the whole nation is rich. Every last person. Yes, we do have thirty percent of the world’s wealth and only five percent of the population. Still, a third of the inhabitants of this country live in poverty. Understand? Darling, do you follow me?”

  Ferranini had an intense need for silence. A need that intensified whenever Nancy was around. A confused desire to go back, to understand. Without speaking, perhaps looking at her, but in silence.

  But that (keen, ardent) flow of chatter kept coming. She went on: “One twentieth of the U.S. population, that is, at least eight million men and women, live in absolute poverty, they would be poor even in the underdeveloped part of the world. Venezuela, Bolivia, Greece, Italy. Can you imagine? This is why I gave up the National Review, the American Heritage movement, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, and took up National Laborism. You didn’t know, but for two years, in ’56 and ’57, I subscribed to your hometown newspaper. From Reggio Emilia.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, Walter. I would look for your name and read the speeches you gave, and your articles. I was close, very close to you. You can’t deny that our beliefs have a strong affinity. You’re a socialist; I’m a National Laborist.”

  Oh, please. This was all he needed. His eyes ran over her unbuttoned dressing gown, under which the arms, waist, bosom were broader and plumper than those of his Nancy. Where on earth had she gone, his Nancy?“Are there no national roads to socialism?” she went on. “We are very close, darling, even spiritually. The silly and frivolous girl of the past is gone, and in her place is a woman worth your esteem. A woman who can stand at your side and do you honor—here, in Reggio Emilia, wherever. Do you want to hear how my conversion happened?”

  “Your conversion,” he said, and felt terribly sad. “Well, it was shame. I was ashamed to think that the most powerful nation on earth, which claims to be a moral guide to all humanity (and is!), had as much social injustice as any of the others. One day a mother wrote to me. Hers was a family of ten, with her husband, seven children, and the grandmother, and to get by they farmed eighteen acres, a piece of land not much bigger than the grounds of this hospital. They had to borrow against the year’s crop: twenty dollars a week at ten percent. Am I making a mistake to talk about America’s dirty linen? I’m destroying your illusions. Is it a mistake?”

  She was sitting in the chair beside the bed, her toes tucked between the two mattresses, fanning herself with the newspaper and studying him. Sincere, uncertain, wanting to know.

  “Ring for the nurse,” said Ferranini. “I asked for some milk; I need sustenance. They don’t seem to understand that I need to eat.”

  The nurse came and they asked for milk. “I see you don’t want to answer me,” she started up again. Ferranini waved a hand vaguely. “Do you honestly care what I think?” He was about to add: You haven’t once asked what I’ve been doing all these thirteen years.

  “You talk,” he said. “Go ahead, you have a lot to say.”

  “Yes, there is a lot,” she said in that earnest way that made him smile, though he didn’t feel like it. (Tired and sweaty, Nancy’s face was aged, lined. She was beginning to look like her mother.)She’d learned so many new, unexpected things that now she had “a different perspective on the world,” she had changed. “I’m not the same person, if you only knew”: it was three days she’d been saying that and studying him to be sure he was listening and believed her. She had been in the South, the Deep South with its unfathomable human contradictions. She had lived for a few months in Alabama, where the rural social struct
ure hadn’t changed since the antebellum years. Human beings, both high and low, whose minds were utterly set. Hostile to progress, as if their entire sense of self depended on maintaining their beliefs, even against their own interests. A sub-feudal world trapped in the past.

  From her description—objective, competent—it was clear Nancy was familiar with the problems. Her diagnosis was a tribute to the Nicholson-Murray school of sociology. Poverty produced deep-rooted psychological weaknesses, and that was one of the reasons it endured. Nancy had met people who were poor and attached to their condition, who were loyal to those responsible for their poverty. She’d met Charles Cutler, seventy-five years old, who lived with his wife in a wood hut with a leaking roof. And no toilet! Nancy had been scandalized. The old man was proud of his hovel and determined never to leave. Meanwhile he was paying ninety dollars a month rent to the owner, the wealthy wife of a Texas hotshot, a Democratic party leader, one Lyndon Johnson.

  She returned to her old self for a moment. “But the nature down there is just fascinating. The Southern forests are so different from our woods. The Everglades, in Florida. Twenty varieties of orchids, wild orchids I mean, and all marvelous!”

  “Some people might call you self-absorbed,” Walter observed.

  “But you have a real political temperament, that’s the truth, and you’ve gotten involved here. And how!”

  “You don’t like that,” said Nancy, discouraged. “No! Actually I envy you. Your personal interests mean less to you than the political ones. You’re great. Not like me.”

  •

  The rooms at John Morgan were tidy and antiseptic, but in Ferranini’s an out-of-season spider turned up, something he couldn’t explain because he’d forgotten there was a huge green park below. The spider had fallen into his glass of water and now he was trying to push it under with a spoon, that is, kill it. The thing had no intention of dying and kept bobbing up; it was a crime any patient might commit, but when Miss Joy, the attractive nurse from Texas, caught Ferranini doing the dirty deed, she took the glass away. All innocence, she asked, “So is it true that Italians detest animals?” Yes, he had said—maybe because we can’t take it out on the blacks.

  Later he found himself thinking that perhaps Miss Joy was not entirely wrong, and that he and the spider were equally stupid to hold on so desperately to a last little bit of life, beyond its season. He had even said to Newcomer that morning, “So when will you let me out of here?” If there was someone without any reason to get out, someone unworthy to stay afloat, that was him. “I’m empty. They’ve taken everything out. I don’t have a single idea that’s worth knocking against another,” he thought, and apart from ideas, he had no hopes or prospects to light his way. Nothing mattered anymore, he felt no impulse to look into himself, or to look back to see what might be left of him.

  His conscience—difficult convalescent!—wasn’t really dark and murky so much as sleepy, reluctant. A house may fall down, but when you visit it looking for something you’ve lost, it’s still a house. For Ferranini, though, even the ruins had been razed by those last days in Rome, the leap across the Atlantic, the dizzying encounter with this desolate new America. What had he lost? He no longer had a name for it; all he could say was: Rome. But the moral and physical distress were both old; they had been growing for a while (not that he’d noticed, where in his simple soul had it hidden?). To say “Rome” was not really enough. His whole world was coming down. Many things, some deduced with pain and difficulty, had brought it down, and yet they remained hard to define. At most they were vaguely, instinctively felt.

  Everything had become white. No outlines, no color, no relief. His mind refused to go there. Just one thought emerged: I will not begin again. No.

  Okay, one day he would think about it. Put order in his mind. One of these days. Explain (to himself, certainly not to others, who would that be?) how it happened. Begin again, no.

  This interval in hospital had come at just the right time, and it was foolish to be in a hurry to leave. It was a deferment. An excuse not to live, for a man who had left life behind him. And then, there was Nancy.

  Poor thing. She was doing her part, and even doing it well. It was worth having met her all those years ago if only for that. For the good turn she was doing him. Her speeches, her diligent accounts, explanations, justifications. Alaska, Alabama, Francis (“You’re not jealous!”), American populism, a second New Deal. All that foolishness, the illusions of a no-longer-young lady who had never gotten pleasure from anything else and would never have anything else.

  That morning for the first time he tried to look after Nancy with goodwill. Newcomer had the day off, and Ferranini asked Wiener to get detailed information about Nancy’s health from her doctor. Wiener must have gone right to work because the phone rang at 10:00 a.m. It was the department head of the Green Pavilion, Nancy’s doctor.

  “You are her husband?”

  “I’m her husband,” he said coolly. What difference did it make? He had said crazier things, he’d been forced to say many.

  “Well then, your wife’s situation: She’s fully recovered from the accidental intoxication that brought her here. There remains an acute state of anxiety, accompanied by depression as happens in these cases. Your wife has slept badly the last few days. She is agitated.”

  “And it is my fault,” said Ferranini.

  “I expect so. In a way.”

  “I understand, doctor. I’ll take care of it.”

  He should have thought of this; his presence wasn’t good for her. Maybe it was for the best that he was getting ready to leave. He asked her not to come down; he would go to her. “Oh Walter, I’m pleased. Come to my room.” He told her he’d prefer to meet halfway, in the covered passageway between the two pavilions, and he waited until 4:00 p.m. to get up. At 4:30, he thought, I’ll just say goodbye and come back to my room. He’d been four full days in bed but he took the stairs up the one flight; he felt strong enough. Nancy was sitting in a chair with her newspapers still folded in her lap (she never forgot her papers). Her face was wet with tears.

  “You’re so good, you’ve always been so good to me.”

  “You’ve said that before, don’t get upset.”

  The loggia was not much used. They were alone. “Walter, you’re so sweet. Do you remember that night when, before we went to sleep, I told you that I felt another calling, that I wasn’t born for family life, and you said: ‘Maybe not for family life but for love, yes, for my love’?”

  She had unbuttoned the neck of her dressing gown quite naturally, and a sliver of flesh was visible. He took her hands and squeezed them.

  “Darling, I treated you badly. In ’45. When I went to Boston.”

  “You’ve already said so; let’s not talk about it.”

  Just then the young Demarrs came to pay a visit—a good thing, Ferranini thought. All three of them appeared: Salvatore, Nicola, Carmelo. The elder Demarr had baptized his sons with Italian, or rather Pugliese names. And the three, who all looked a lot like him, also shared his expansive, somewhat distracted manner. They embraced Ferranini. Nicola (who was never going to be a proper WASP) told him flatly that he looked ghastly, he should take care of himself. Carmelo, the youngest, nearing twenty, brought out half a dozen fresh eggs from the dairy near home for Nancy to drink. Carmelo didn’t remember Ferranini but the others did and treated him like an unexpected, somewhat pathetic elderly relative. Salvatore, in his thirties, was running the family business; Nicola was a doctor. They told him about their father, who was feeling better and now wanted to buy himself a trailer and head South. He would end up in some “cemetery for elephants,” he told them. One of those cities of the old, where the retired are kept in segregation until they die.

  Salvatore spoke of the trials and successes of Demarr Incorporated, which had recently expanded into pharmaceuticals, and his plans to move the main office from Camden to Philadelphia. Already, Nancy had regained her smile. She laughed with Carmelo over the eggs a
nd gave out advice to Salvatore. Her command of the business amazed Ferranini.

  It’s me who depresses her, he thought. Her mood had changed just like that.

  The arrival of the brothers had raised his spirits too. He gathered that they had been trying to convince her to join the firm, and she was resisting.

  “I’m not cut out for business, fellows.”

  Nicola, the doctor, seemed to have most authority. “Nancy is the eldest,” he said, “we should make her manager.” And then he said (Ferranini was sure he’d understood this part), “The main thing is to keep the medicine cabinet under lock and key.”

  Now things were clear. When the brothers left, he didn’t beat around the bush.

  “Your accidental intoxication, that was sleeping pills, right? You tried to kill yourself. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  This time Nancy didn’t adopt a maudlin tone. She was calm and straightforward. “It’s true.”

  “Why? What happened? Was it Francis?”

  He was quite serious, anything but ironic. She said, “If anything it was Erica Stein. She was part of my group, a great friend and a supporter of the review. Last year she took a revolver and shot herself.”

  “And you wanted to follow her?”

  “I’ll tell you. Erica had been working for two years on Broadway, as the star in a musical. She got laryngitis, lost her voice completely, and they replaced her. Two months away from the stage, and she had lost her fans, friends, contract, and even her lover. They found her with a note that said, ‘For the rest of the world I’m already dead anyway.’ Do you understand what that means?”

  “No!”

  “It means that here, if you cease to carry out a given economic role, you no longer exist. As a human being. Understand? I had never thought about it and it hit me, it made a terrifying impression on me. Does that seem so strange, darling?”

  “A person doesn’t hang on to life because another person’s hanging on. And a person doesn’t kill herself because another person did.”