The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  A momentary silence while we were served with a glistening golden-topped maccheroni pie, all except Corrado, who, ever ascetic, ate only a slice of York ham and some mozzarella.

  ‘I detect Maria’s hand in the pie still,’ I said.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Elena, ‘in fact she still does it all by herself. She insists on doing it once a fortnight. It upsets the Filipinos having her in the kitchen, otherwise she would do it every week. A fortnight seems a reasonable compromise. Besides we don’t want to eat something as rich as this every week.’

  ‘Me,’ said Ettore, forking it in, ‘I could eat this every day. Do you know, Bella darling,’ he shouted down the table, ‘the angels in heaven eat Maria’s pie. The Virgin herself cooks it for them. It is the Holy Madonna’s own recipe. Maria told me that years ago.’

  He crossed himself, with the hand that wasn’t waving a forkful of maccheroni and chicken livers. I glanced at Bella. She was eating with gusto. Who wouldn’t want to make love to a beautiful girl who can eat maccheroni like that?

  Ettore drank some of the dark wine Corrado has sent from Longobucco. Even though he only drinks mineral water himself that doesn’t mean that he would like to see a table without wine. I understand this; in the same way I respond in sympathy, feel more alive, when I see Sandro lean over to Bella and whisper something, and her dark ringlets brush against his honey cheek.

  Ettore put down his fork and wiped his brow with a red bandana.

  ‘My word,’ he said, ‘that pie. What a pie! Fifty years I’ve been eating it, and it’s still supreme and I haven’t worked out just how she does it. When Maria dies a miracle will vanish. Lost to mankind. Bella, my angel, you must learn how to do it. It’s the proportion of truffles to chicken livers that makes it perfect. I know that, but just what is the proportion?’

  ‘It’s the little touch of saffron, I think,’ said one of the children.

  ‘My word,’ said Ettore, ‘it does you good. A real Sunday blow-out. And what do you think, Corrado old boy, of the May Day riots? Pretty rum, eh? Are you maybe backing the wrong horse?’

  ‘Oh come,’ said Elena, ‘no politics at table. No politics on Sunday.’

  A grey, quasi-moribund shadow snaked across her face. I doubt if she was really hoping to be able to head off discussion and dissension. Her expression however spoke eloquently of her deep distaste for politics. She would have liked Corrado to remain a Professor of Jurisprudence, and she had always interpreted the motive of his political involvement as disinterested duty, not seeing or refusing to recognize that it was his metier; in the political world he was a fish in water from the start.

  ‘Yes, but’, cried Ettore, ‘we live in exceptional times you know. And you don’t appreciate, my dear sister-in-law, just what my position is. Here am I, with my brother the Minister, the only man, everyone says, who can get us out of the crisis, and when do I see him? Only on Sundays. So take pity on me, don’t put me in the ridiculous position of having to reply to anyone who asks me what my brother thinks, that I don’t know, that he never talks politics when I’m about because I only see him on family occasions, on Sundays. I tell you, people would take me for a real zany, a dolt, what the English call a ned – isn’t that right, Raimundo?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘people might easily think you a ned.’

  ‘You see,’ Ettore spread his hands wide in emphasis. ‘That’s how it is.’

  Corrado made a gesture with his hand in turn, a sort of fanning motion. It moved across his face, the palm open to us and the fingers spread, and came to rest on the table before him. The long arthritic fingers wrapped themselves round a piece of bread, and began to crumble it. He closed his eyes.

  ‘It’s of course a complicated question,’ he said, speaking very slowly. Corrado’s great quality, invaluable in our political world, has always been his ability to lower the temperature. ‘There are too many sides, dark aspects of the question, which are usually ignored,’ he said. ‘In the first place we must ask ourselves whether there were in fact any riots on May Day. What, ultimately, is a riot?’

  He dropped his words among us like pebbles falling singly from a bridge into a pond. The room darkened as he spoke.

  ‘But when I say backing the wrong side,’ Ettore protested after allowing the ripples to exhaust themselves, ‘you must see what I mean. What do we gain by playing along with the Communists if all that happens is that they can’t any longer control their natural supporters?’

  ‘Natural supporters?’ asked Corrado. He opened his eyes for a moment. ‘Would you agree with that, Bernardo?’

  Bernardo’s mouth was full of maccheroni, but he spoke through it. ‘As far as I’m concerned the PCI are just another bourgeois party, nothing more or less, committed like them all to the perpetuation of the system and the exploitation of labour’s surplus value.’

  ‘You see, Ettore,’ Corrado said.

  ‘But when you say, what is a riot, well then I don’t understand you. I mean’ – Ettore sweated with intellectual effort – ‘we all know what a riot is. How many people were killed and wounded and how many arrested on May Day? That’s all. I tell you, I told Bella to keep at home when I heard the first rumours on the radio.’

  Corrado’s hand on the bread opened and closed again.

  ‘There’s the question of spontaneity,’ he said.

  Corrado’s method has always been to introduce philosophical speculations into practical discussions and vice versa. It’s a way, I suppose, of retaining the initiative. Now there was a pause, a silence. He could keep his eyes open. I made some remark, banal enough, to Elena about the weather or plans for the summer. She smiled at me, gratefully I’m sure. My effort, certainly tiny, was in vain. ‘What I don’t understand’, it was Bella’s voice now, and her words seemed immediately disingenuous, for I couldn’t imagine that there was anything that concerned her that she didn’t in fact understand exactly, on her own terms, ‘is what Bernardo has against what he calls the bourgeois parties. I mean, I can’t think of anyone more bourgeois than you, Bernardo.’

  Bernardo glowered, especially when his brother Nico smiled and said, ‘Oh Bella it’s refreshing and delightful to find a girl like you still existing. I bet you’re saving up to be married, and visit the department stores to select furniture. I mean, you’re talking like a little secretary with no understanding of praxis and the historical process. Or put it another way, you have a totally inadequate perception of reality. You think that because Bernardo keeps his comfortable room here, and eats family lunch on Sunday and allows Papa to pay for his clothes and Mamma to have them laundered and hasn’t got a job because he’s still after seven years studying political science at the University, you think because of all this, he’s still really bourgeois. Not at all. He’s a true revolutionary, Bernardo. He’s undermining the system, that’s what he’s doing. Anyway, he has a grasp of intellectual reality and the praxis of history, which you’ve never heard of, and wouldn’t understand darling if you had, and that’s the important thing. Bernardo is a red mole.’

  ‘Nico,’ said Elena, ‘finish your pie. We are all ready for the salad.’

  May 7 I woke up in the night, which is unusual, with Corrado’s question drumming in my head. What, after all, is a riot?

  The pity is that I have no very clear conception of what happened on May Day. I think a Communist meeting was broken up. The original impression, I’m almost sure, was that the Neo-Fascists were responsible. What, after all, would we do without them? Like Cavafy’s Barbarians, they’re a sort of solution. Later there was a bomb at the PCI headquarters, planted in spite of the closed-circuit television that covers all approaches to the building. All this of course at a time when the Historic Compromise seems just round the corner, thanks to Corrado and the ‘good sense’ of the Communist leaders. All the extremists naturally hope that this attempt to give formal recognition to the new respectability of the PCI and the fact that henceforth it will be part of the Establishment will somehow or
other be thwarted. All see it as betrayal.

  Corrado is sixty and he still concerns himself with the good of the country.

  I got up and opened a bottle of mineral water, and sat in my pyjamas reading Stendhal. Just what did he mean by that energy he so admired? Was it simply violence?

  I like being awake in the middle of the night, with the city sleeping. After a little I went out on to my terrace and gazed over the courtyard at the silent shuttered windows. What dreams are pursued behind them, what adulteries committed, in fact and in imagination?

  The light began to flicker on the leaves of the oleander bushes, first casting a filmy veil over them, faintly opalescent. I picked up Stendhal again, but there comes a time when even the literature one has deeply loved fails to hold the mind. If literature is, as they sometimes say, a mirror to life, well eventually one has no desire to confront oneself in the glass. I found for the moment at least I couldn’t care what he had to say.

  Mamma yesterday looked at me sadly. She said, ‘You are the eldest, Raimundo, but I find myself wondering what would become of us all if something happened to Corrado.’

  ‘Oh come, Mamma, you’re just quoting the newspapers,’ I replied.

  She made a gesture of irritation and turned her face away from me.

  I looked at the clock. It was only half-past seven. The day had scarcely begun. I strolled back on to my little terrace. Across the courtyard I could see movement in one of the hotel bedrooms. A man stirring – he must be English or American for he had been sleeping with windows and shutters open. He was naked to the waist, below a head of shaggy dark hair. I saw him sit on the bed and stretch his hand out. The next gesture I recognized from the cinema. He was pumping the shells out of a revolver. He got up and walked across the room with a long lurching stride. He turned and crossed to the window opposite me, and leant on the sill, not apparently aware of me watching; he held a glass between his hands. I couldn’t help thinking that the revolver had been left loaded overnight in case he decided, suddenly, to make an end of things. I suppose he was about forty-five, the second age of suicide.

  Seven forty-two.

  I would take a little walk, among the thousands going to work. Often as I watched them surging along the narrow streets, edging their little cars against each other, testing the other’s nerve, I was aware of a twinge of envy. To be going to work: I remembered how as a schoolboy, and then as a student, I had longed for the day when I would go to work; would be free of this world of affairs; no more dependent.

  Our lift shuddered to a halt. Maria, the portiera, nodded to me. For many of the other residents she comes chittering-chattering out of her lodge. I can’t decide whether her reticence towards me indicates respect or distaste. Curiously enough, I find this worrying. I have myself after all a considerable respect for Maria. She is a virtuous woman, but not a prig.

  My walk took me through the old ghetto, the walls ochrous and bedecked with fading and tattered posters. ‘La Lotta Continua’ scrawled in large literate hand in several places. Light motor-bikes and scooters surged around me, nipping at my heels like terriers. There was no malice in it. They were young men and girls, clerks and shop assistants, hurrying to work, their minds on the shirts and gramo-phone records and jeans they were planning to buy later in the day.

  In Campo dei Fiori I stopped for a coffee. The market outside the bar was busy of course, thronged with housewives who were buying their fruit and vegetables, many of them before setting off for work. But so many others, here, in this old part of the city, had no jobs – their husbands were still artisans or often unemployed – and they would go home to tend house; some of the older ones would even take the bowl of vegetables down to the door of their tenement to peel and prepare.

  At this hour Campo dei Fiori was still an Italian market; the foreigners who lived around, students, teachers, writers, painters, journalists, girls of less than a fixed occupation, layabouts and remittance men, were still in bed. But the local unemployed youth were already gathering round the caffè doors and already, as the sun climbed higher into the azure bowl that pressed down on the jagged roofs of the piazza, there was a murmur of simmering discontent in the air. It is not sweet to do nothing in Campo dei Fiori. The mood is too sultry for that. One day, two or three weeks back, sitting with Prince Radziwill outside the little wine-shop two doors along, we saw a young man, a boy, in a striped towelled shirt and white jeans, sprint, wild-eyed, round the corner. ‘A thief,’ said the Prince, unconcerned, as the crowd opened an avenue for him. A fusillade rang out, in little thuds, not rings at all. He was thrown heavily forward, belly-flopping to the cobbles. His left leg kicked two or three times. That was all. His face was turned to the side and rested on a cabbage leaf, a note of surprise caught in the open calf-like eye. A carabinieri squad car screamed into the piazza, and various officers quickly debouched and began drawing chalk-lines and driving the crowd back. We sat there quite half-an-hour, and then a carabinieri ambulance took the boy’s body away. ‘The times we live in,’ said the Prince. ‘Well, he’d have had to endure three or four years in prison before his trial, I suppose. Better possibly just to get rid of him like that. No loss, but …’

  ‘Where will it end?’ said Fr Ambrose, the English Augustine, who had joined us. His red squirarchical face ran sweat as usual.

  As for me, I remarked that the boy’s shirt had been striped like a brand of candy I used to buy on Coney Island.

  I had my second cup of coffee in the Corso, at Bernardo’s in the Galleria Colonna; and here, the mood was different again – it was just a city, almost any city, going to work. Only there was a difference. You could imagine the work done by the artisans and shopkeepers in the ghetto and towards the Tiber. Here, under the marble pillars, which supported office blocks, reality had become purely surreal. (Oddly enough, I was talking about Surrealism just yesterday afternoon with Nico at Corrado’s, immediately before leaving. How we had got on to the subject I can’t recall, but he said to me: ‘but Nuncle, don’t you see, it’s your generation that’s surreal, not mine. After all, you’re a product of the twenties, aren’t you?’ I had no answer for the boy, though I told him I would introduce him to Di Chirico himself if he cared to come to the Greco about noon. He could discuss it with the maestro in person. For my part, I said, and then found myself shrugging my shoulders unable to recall what I had been planning to say.)

  The words of the English poet, Eliot, came to me: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’

  I sipped my cappuccino, thinking that thought now.

  ‘What a strange place to see you, Uncle.’ It was Bella, looking like a nectarine.

  ‘If it comes to that,’ I said, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m here every morning. I work in one of the offices above.’

  ‘What do you do there?’

  ‘I import and export. It’s one of Daddy’s subsidiaries. How little you know of us, don’t you?’

  She sat beside me and laid her long pale fingers lightly on my wrist. I was distressed to see how freckled and worn it looked; a blotchy old man’s wrist.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ I said, ‘you have a job then?’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘And do you do it brilliantly?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I can imagine … will you have some coffee with me?’

  ‘Yes, please, and a doughnut. No, two doughnuts. Usually I can only afford one, but since my wicked uncle’s paying … you looked, Uncle, as if you were thinking very mournful thoughts … so mournful I almost didn’t stop.’

  ‘I’m glad you did.’

  ‘What were you thinking though?’

  ‘You were quite right. They were mournful, my thoughts.’

  ‘On such a beautiful day? How could you? Tell me what they were then.’

  She bit into the softness of her doughnut. Her teeth were beautifully white. A little spurt of the confectioner’s cream the doughnut contained escaped from the c
orner of her mouth. A quick snake’s flick of the pink tip of her tongue retrieved it.

  ‘I was thinking of a poet. An English poet. Well, he was American really.’

  ‘Oh poets,’ she said. ‘They used to make us read poets at school. I don’t read them now. What had he to say, this poet?’

  ‘He said, “I had not thought death had undone so many”.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She gave me a long candid, deeply brown-eyed look. ‘Nico writes poetry,’ she said, ‘did you know that?’

  ‘Nico?’

  ‘Yes, very restrained, very ironic, very dry, he says. You see, you don’t know anything about us.’

  ‘Yes, that’s obvious. I’ll have to cultivate you all. I had chocolate with Sandro the other day.’

  She smiled. ‘It is exactly like Sandro still to drink chocolate. You know he still sleeps with his Teddy-bear? Sandro’s very sweet, but so young. And therefore confused. I could easily worry about Sandro if I chose to worry about people. Of course, it’s all terribly difficult for them. I mean, I do think Aunt Elena’s weird, and as for Uncle Corrado, well it may be true what the papers say, that he’s the only man who can save the country and so on, but that’s not very real, is it? I mean, as a father, he’s a bit of a wash-out. What I don’t understand is how Papa is so comparatively sane. Of course, I know he’s only a half-brother though you always call him brother, but I mean there’s Uncle Guido too isn’t there?’

  ‘There is indeed.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him of course, but from what I hear … will you take me to see him some day.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like it. Ask your father.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect to like it. Papa can’t bear to go any more. It’s years since he’s been.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think Papa was so sensitive. He says he can’t bear it.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Think about it,’ she said, ‘won’t you? I must go. I’m late.’

  ‘Why don’t we have lunch together some day? Let me get to know you.’