Ferriera strokes his blond beard; he doesn’t see any of these things.
‘It’s not like that,’ he says.
‘No, it’s not like that,’ Kim goes on, ‘I know that too. It’s not like that. Because there’s something else, common to all of them: an inner frenzy. Take Dritto’s detachment; petty thieves, carabinieri, ex-soldiers, black marketeers, down-and-outs; men on the fringes of society, who got along somehow despite all the chaos around them, with nothing to defend and nothing to lose; either that, or they’re defective physically, or they have fixations, or they’re fanatics. No revolutionary idea can ever appear in them, tied as they are to the millstones grinding them. Or if it does it will be born twisted, the product of rage and humiliation, like that cook’s extremism. Why do they fight, then? They have no “country”, either real or invented. And yet you know there’s courage, there’s a frenzy in them too. It comes from the squalor of their streets, the filth of their homes, the obscenities they’ve known ever since childhood, the strain of having to be bad. And any little thing, a false step, a momentary impulse, is enough to send them over to the other side, to the Black Brigade, like Pelle, there to shoot with the same frenzy, the same hatred, against either side, it doesn’t matter which.’
Ferriera mutters into his beard: ‘So you think the spirit of our men … and the Black Brigade’s … the same thing?’
‘The same thing, the same thing … but, if you see what I mean …’ Kim has stopped, with a finger pointing as if he were keeping the place in a book, The same thing but the other way round. Because here we’re in the right, there they’re in the wrong. Here we’re achieving something, there they’re just reinforcing their chains. That age-old resentment which weighs down on Dritto’s men, on all of us, including you and me, and which finds expression in shooting and killing enemies, the Fascists have that too: it forces them to kill with the same hope of purification and of release. But then there is also the question of history. The fact is that on our side nothing is lost, not a single gesture, not a shot, though each may be the same as theirs – d’you see what I mean? – they will all serve if not to free us then to free our children, to create a world that is serene, without resentment, a world in which no one has to be bad. The others are on the side of lost gestures, of useless resentment, which are lost and useless even if they should win, because they are not making positive history, they are not helping to free themselves but to repeat and perpetuate resentment and hatred, until in another twenty or a hundred or a thousand years it will begin all over again, the struggle between us and them; and we shall both be fighting with the same anonymous hatred in our eyes, though always, perhaps without knowing it, we shall be fighting for redemption, they to remain slaves. That is the real meaning of the struggle now, the real, absolute meaning, beyond the various official meanings. An elementary, anonymous urge to free us from all our humiliations; the worker from his exploitation, the peasant from his ignorance, the petty bourgeois from his inhibitions, the outcast from his corruption. This is what I believe our political work is, to use human misery against itself, for our own redemption, as the Fascists use misery to perpetuate misery and man fighting man.’
Only the blue of Ferriera’s eyes and the yellow glimmer of his beard can be seen in the dark. He shakes his head. He does not feel this resentment; he is precise as a mechanic and practical as a mountain-peasant; for him the struggle is a precise machine of which he knows the workings and purpose.
‘It seems impossible,’ he says, ‘it seems impossible that with all that balls in your head you can still be a good commissar and talk clearly to the men.’
Kim is not displeased at Ferriera not understanding him; men like Ferriera must be talked to in exact terms; ‘a, b, c,’ one must say, things are either definite or they’re ‘balls’, for them there are no ambiguous or dark areas. But Kim does not reason that way because he believes himself to be superior to Ferriera; no, his aim is to be able to think like Ferriera, to see no other reality but Ferriera’s, nothing else matters.
‘Well, I’ll say good-bye.’ They have reached a parting in the path. Now Ferriera will go on to Gamba’s detachment and Kim to Baleno’s. They have to separate in order to be able to inspect every detachment that night, before the battle.
Nothing else matters. Kim walks on alone, the slim Stengun hanging from his shoulder like a broken walking-stick. Nothing else matters. The tree trunks in the dark take on strange human shapes. Man carries his childhood fears with him for his whole life long. ‘Perhaps,’ thinks Kim, ‘I’d be frightened, if I wasn’t brigade commissar. Not to be frightened any more, that’s the final aim of man.’
Kim is logical when he is analysing the situation with the detachment commissars, but when he is walking along alone and reasoning with himself things become mysterious and magical again, and life seems full of miracles. Our heads are still full of magic and miracles, thinks Kim. Sometimes he feels he is walking amid a world of symbols, like his namesake, little Kim in the middle of India, in that book of Kipling’s which he had so often reread as a boy.
‘Kim … Kim … Who is Kim …?’
Why is he walking over the mountains that night, getting ready for a battle, with power over life and death, after that gloomy childhood of his as a rich man’s son, and his shy adolescence? At times he feels at the mercy of crazy swings of mood, as if he’s acting hysterically, but no, his thoughts are logical, he can analyse everything with perfect clarity. And yet, he’s not serene. His parents were serene, those parents from the great middle class which created their own riches. The proletariat is serene for it knows what it wants, so are the peasants who are now doing sentry duty over their own villages. The Soviets are serene, they have made their minds up about everything and are now fighting with both passion and method, not because war is a fine thing but because it is necessary. The Bolsheviks! The Soviet Union is perhaps already a serene country, perhaps there is no more poverty there. Will Kim ever be serene? One day perhaps, we will all achieve serenity and will not understand so much because we will have understood everything.
Here men still have troubled eyes and haggard faces. Kim has become fond of these men, though. That little boy in Dritto’s detachment, for instance. What’s his name? With that rage eating up his freckly face, even when he laughs … He’s said to be the brother of a prostitute. Why is he fighting? He doesn’t know it’s so that he should no longer be the brother of a prostitute. And those Calabrian brothers-in-law. They’re fighting so as not to be despised folk from the south any more, poor immigrants, looked down on as foreigners in their own country. And that Carabiniere is fighting so that he won’t feel a Carabiniere any more, always spying on his fellow man. Then there’s Cousin, the good, gigantic, ruthless Cousin … They say he’s out for revenge on a woman who betrayed him … We all have a secret wound which we are fighting to avenge. Even Ferriera? Yes, perhaps even Ferriera; the frustration of not being able to get the world to go as he wants it. Not Red Wolf, though. Because everything that Red Wolf wants is possible. He must be made to want the right thing, that is political work, commissar’s work. And learn that what he wants is right; that too is political work, commissar’s work.
Perhaps, one day, thinks Kim, I won’t understand these things any more. I’ll be serene, and understand men in a completely different way, a juster way, perhaps. Why perhaps? Well, I shan’t say ‘perhaps’ any more then, there won’t be any more ‘perhaps’ in me. And I’ll have Dritto shot. Now I’m too linked to them and all their twists. To Dritto too. I know that Dritto must suffer a lot for always being determined to behave badly. Nothing in the world hurts so much as behaving badly. One day as a child I shut myself up for two days in my room without eating. I suffered terribly but would not open the door and they had to come and fetch me by ladder through the window. I longed to be consoled and understood. Dritto is doing the same. But he knows we’ll shoot him. He wants to be shot. That longing gets hold of men sometimes. And Pelle, what is Pelle d
oing at this moment?
Kim walks on through a larch wood and thinks of Pelle down in the town going round on curfew patrol with the death’s head badge on his cap. Pelle must be alone, alone with his anonymous mistaken hatred, alone with his betrayal gnawing at him and making him behave worse than ever to justify it. He’ll shoot at the cats in the black-out, even, from rage, and the shots will wake the bourgeoisie nearby, and make them start up in their beds.
Kim thinks of the column of Germans and Fascists who are perhaps at that moment advancing up the valley, towards the dawn which will bring death pouring down on their heads from the crests of the mountains. It is the column of lost gestures. One of the soldiers, waking up at a jolt of the truck is now thinking ‘I love you, Kate.’ In six or seven hours he’ll be dead, we’ll have killed him; even if he hadn’t thought ‘I love you, Kate,’ it would have been the same; everything that he does or thinks is lost, cancelled from history.
I, on the other hand, am walking through a larch wood and every step I take is history. I think ‘I love you, Adriana’ and that is history, will have great consequences. I’ll behave tomorrow in battle like a man who has thought tonight ‘I love you, Adriana,’ Perhaps I may not accomplish great deeds but history is made up of little anonymous gestures; I may die tomorrow even before that German, but everything I do before dying and my death too will be little parts of history, and all the thoughts I’m having now will influence my history tomorrow, tomorrow’s history of the human race.
Now, instead of escaping into fantasy as I did when I was a child, I could be making a mental study of the details of the attack, the dispositions of weapons and squads. But I am too fond of thinking about those men, studying them, making discoveries about them. What will they do ‘afterwards’ for instance? Will they recognize in post-war Italy something made by them? Will they understand what system will have to be used then in order to continue our struggle, the long and constantly changing struggle to better humanity? Red Wolf will understand, I think; I wonder how he’ll manage to put his understanding into practice, how will he use that adventurous, ingenious spirit of his when there are no more daring deeds or escapes to be made? They should all be like Red Wolf. We should all be like Red Wolf. There’ll be some, on the other hand, whose anonymous resentment will continue, who will become individualists again, and thus sterile; they’ll fall into crime, the great outlet for dumb resentments; they’ll forget that history once walked by their side, breathed through their clenched teeth. The ex-Fascists will say: ‘Oh, the partisans! I told you so! I realized it at once!’ And they won’t have realized anything, either before or after.
One day Kim will be serene. Everything is clear with him now. Dritto, Pin, the Calabrian brothers-in-law. He knows how to behave towards each of them, without fear or pity. Sometimes when he is walking at night the mists of souls seem to condense around him like the mists in the air; but he is a man who analyses; ‘a, b, c,’ he’ll say to the commissars; he’s a Bolshevik, a man who dominates situations. ‘I love you, Adriana.’
The valley is full of mist, and Kim is walking along a slope which is as stony as a lakeside, The larches appear out of the mist like mooring-poles. Kim … Kim … Who is Kim? He feels like the hero of that novel read in his childhood; the half-English half-Indian boy who travels across India with the old Red Lama looking for the river of purification.
Two hours ago he was talking to that liar Dritto, to the prostitute’s brother, and now he is reaching Baleno’s detachment, the best in the brigade. There is a squad of Russians with Baleno, ex-prisoners who had escaped from the fortification works on the border.
‘Who goes there?’
It’s the sentry; a Russian.
Kim gives his name.
‘Bring news, Commissar?’
It’s Aleksjéi, the son of a moujik, an engineering student. ‘Tomorrow there will be a battle, Aleksjéi.’
‘Battle? Hundred Fascists kaput?’
‘I don’t know how many kaput, Aleksjéi. I don’t even know how many alive.’
‘Sale e tabacchi, Commissar.’
Sale e tabacchi, is the Italian phrase which has made most impression on Aleksjéi, he repeats it all the time, like a refrain, a talisman.
‘Sale e tabacchi, Aleksjéi.’
Tomorrow there will be a big battle. Kim is serene. ‘A, b, c,’ he’ll say. Again and again he thinks: ‘I love you, Adriana.’ That, and that alone, is history.
Chapter Ten
In the dark morning, without a glimmer of light, Dritto’s men are moving silently around the barn, preparing to leave. They wrap blankets round their shoulders; it will be cold up on the boulders of the crest before dawn. As they do so they think not of what will happen to themselves but to the blanket that each takes with them. Will they lose it running away, will it be soaked with their blood as they lie dying, or be taken from them by a Fascist and shown round the town as booty? But what does a blanket matter?
Above them, as if the sound came from above the clouds, they can hear the enemy column on the move; big wheels turning on dusty roads without headlights, the tramp of tired men asking their section leader if they still have far to go. Dritto’s men talk in whispers as if the column were passing right behind the walls of the barn.
Now they are spooning boiled chestnuts out of their billycans; no one knows when they will eat next. Even the cook will be going into action this time; he is ladling out the chestnuts, cursing under his breath, his eyes swollen with sleep. Giglia has also got up and is wandering round among the men’s preparations without finding anything useful to do. Every now and again Mancino pauses to glance at her.
‘Hey, Giglia,’ he says, ‘it’s not safe for you to stay here in the camp alone. You never know.’
‘Where d’you expect me to go to, then?’ asks Giglia.
‘Put on your skirt and go to a village, they won’t do anything to a woman. Dritto, tell her to leave, she can’t stay here alone.’
Dritto has not eaten any chestnuts, he is directing the men’s preparations almost silently, with his collar up. He does not raise his head or reply at once.
‘No,’ he says eventually, ‘she’d better stay here.’
Giglia glances at her husband as if to say, ‘You see?’ and ends up bumping into Cousin who, without even looking at her, snaps, ‘Out of the way.’ She turns on her heel, and goes back into the hut to sleep.
Pin is also in everybody’s way, like a hunting dog watching its master’s preparations.
‘The battle,’ he thinks, trying to excite himself, ‘now there’ll be the battle.’
‘Well,’ he says to Giacinto, ‘which shall I take?’
The commissar takes no notice of him. ‘What?’ he says.
‘Which rifle shall I take?’ asks Pin.
‘You?’ exclaims Giacinto. ‘You’re not coming.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Out of the way. This isn’t a time to take children along. Dritto doesn’t want you to come. Out of the way.’
Pin is furious, he’ll follow behind them unarmed, jeering at their backs till they turn and shoot at him.
‘Dritto, Dritto, is it true you don’t want me to come?’
Dritto doesn’t reply, he is taking little puffs at a cigarette-end, as if he were biting it.
‘There,’ says Pin, ‘stuff you lot, he says it’s not true.’
Now I’ll get a clip on the back of the head, he thinks. But Dritto says nothing.
‘Can I go into action, Dritto?’ says Pin.
Dritto smokes.
‘Dritto says I can come, did you hear, Giacinto?’ exclaims Pin.
Now Dritto will say: ‘Shut up; you stay here.’
Instead of which he says nothing. Why?
Pin says, very loudly, ‘Right, then I’m coming.’
And he goes slowly towards the place where there are still some unallotted weapons, whistling so as to attract attention to himself. He chooses the lightest rifle.
‘Then
I’ll take this,’ he says, loudly.
‘Does it belong to anyone, this one?’
No answer. Pin goes back to where he was before, swinging the rifle to and fro by its strap. He sits down on the ground, right in front of Dritto, and begins testing the bolt, the firing-pin, the trigger, crooning: ‘I’ve got a rifle! I’ve got a rifle!’
Someone shouts: ‘Quiet! Are you mad?’
The men are getting into single file, squad by squad, group by group; the ammunition bearers arrange their shifts.
‘You understand, then,’ says Dritto, ‘the detachment will take up position between the pilon on Mount Pellegrino and the second gorge. Cousin will take over command. You’ll get new orders from the battalion when you arrive up there.’
Now all the men’s eyes are on him, sleepy brooding eyes, crossed by locks of hair.
‘What about you?’ they ask.
Dritto’s lowered eyelashes are covered with a slight discharge.
‘I’m ill,’ he says, ‘I can’t come.’
There, now they can say what they like. The men say nothing. ‘I’m a finished man,’ thinks Dritto. Now everything can take its course. It’s terrible, though, that the men say nothing, make no protest; that means they’ve already condemned him, are pleased at his shirking this last test. Perhaps they expected it. And yet they cannot understand what it is that makes him do this; neither does he, Dritto, himself. But now everything can take its course, there is nothing for him to do but let himself drift.
Pin, on the other hand, understands everything; he is watching attentively, his tongue between his teeth, his cheeks burning. There lies the woman, with that warm breast of hers under the man’s shirt, half-buried in the hay. She feels hot in the hay at night and she keeps on turning over. Once, she got up when everyone was asleep, took off her trousers and got back naked between the blankets. Pin saw her. Yes, while the battle rages in the valley astounding things will be happening in the barn, things a hundred times more exciting. That must be why Dritto is allowing Pin to go into action. Pin has dropped the rifle at his feet and is following every movement with his eyes, very attentively. The men continue getting into line; no one tells Pin to do so.
The Path to the Spiders' Nests Page 14