The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  Gianni turned. His tongue flickered like a serpent’s fork.

  ‘It is good to be reminded that the young can be generous,’ he said. ‘Pray, dear boy, that the same spirit animates your contemporaries who hold your father.’

  Carlo Poggi was waiting for us in an antechamber.

  ‘Let us have some coffee,’ he said. ‘I can now at last tell you how the position truly is.’

  There was, he explained, a document. It recorded the decision of the Grand Committee of the Party. In the event of the kidnapping of one of their members, the others undertook in no circumstances to negotiate with the putative kidnappers. On the contrary, these were to be pursued merely as common criminals. Any appeals, purporting to come from the prisoner, were to be discredited. They would be denounced as drug-induced, the result of brain-washing.

  The document was signed, in holograph, by all the members of the Committee, including of course Corrado.

  ‘It reads,’ said Carlo, ‘as though he drew it up.’

  ‘I will be surprised,’ he said, replacing the coffee-cups on the little tin tray so that they concealed the cross with which it was marked, ‘if they don’t adhere to it. I’m sorry to have to say this, really sorry, but as your uncle here will recognize, apart from the grand question of Reason of State, there are elements here who are less than heart-broken by what has happened. The policy which your father and I have been driving through does not command universal support. Even many of those who back it do so with resentment, not conviction. Corrado was finding himself lonely, even here.’

  As we left the building, Nico put his arm round Sandro’s shoulders. I said, ‘There’s a press photographer there.’

  The picture was in next morning’s Messagero. Nico’s face is blurred and in shadow, but Sandro is clearly enough in tears; at the same time he resembles Leonardo’s John the Baptist. ‘No comfort for Dusa’s children’ says the caption. Nico telephoned me this morning; it might do some good perhaps.

  ‘If that’s the opinion of the Party, the policy, just as that bastard Schicchi indicated, then the only thing that can move them is public opinion. And we need sentiment to move that. Sandro in tears is a beginning.’

  There is a hard elegance emerging in Nico.

  Meanwhile, there is still nothing; the silence is Acheronic. The newspapers of course are full of speculation. They repeat the suggestion that Corrado is being held in the city. It seems this is the official line, but is it merely maintained to allay opinion? After all, the corollary is that if he is still in the city, then the police and carabinieri, ‘working with their customary assiduous efficiency’, as the journals have it, will eventually hit upon the PRR’s Headquarters and place of concealment. I wish I could believe it. But while such a belief is general it is easy for the authorities to refuse to negotiate.

  Not that any offer has yet been made by the kidnappers. After their first paean of triumph, the silence is worrying. It is like waiting, beleaguered, for plague to reach the city. Perhaps there are internal dissensions. That is my only hope. And then it frightens me in its turn. If they fall out with each other they will panic. Prisoners are never safe when their guards panic.

  I have spent hours walking the streets, not because I hope for anything, but because it is an alternative to sitting at home, a substitute for action and a refuge; at least the telephone will not be so insistently dumb in the streets.

  Yesterday in the afternoon I walked through Parioli, absurdly scanning the shuttered villas, as if one of them would suddenly reveal that it held my brother. But the half-doors opened and fat women emerged with poodles. I sat in caffès and watched small businessmen, parodies of my dear Ettore, cheat despair by activity, ice cream and conversation. A woman with an apricot-coloured poodle wearing a ribbon of yellow silk leant over and set it in the chair opposite and fed it walnut cake; her fat lips blubbered endearments. An Englishman with a worn and lined face that remained obstinately young – something about the wide eyes and the too red, fleshy lips, the mouth that was never quite shut – and with the long swept back hair of the Public Schools, came in with a bundle of books and set them down loosely (so that one of them slipped to the floor) and fetched himself three glasses of brandy from the bar, and came back, sat down, and drank them. He pulled a book from the pile and began to read; it was a battered Penguin copy of Under the Volcano; a book, as it happened, which I myself read, actually in Mexico City, when I was Second Secretary there, and which then seemed to me surrealistically Anglo-Saxon and self-indulgent. That refrain ‘they are losing the Battle of the Ebro’; why not admit that it was a battle not worth fighting in a dishonest war?

  When I saw him reading this, I revolted. I asked for a gettone and called Elena. I proposed that I come – ‘as usual’, I said – for lunch on Sunday. She thanked me.

  I thought to myself as I sat down, ‘If we had this Anglo-Saxon obsession with alcohol and self-destruction, which makes of life such a private affair, none of this would have happened.’

  The afternoon died on me in that caffè in Parioli when a little man came in. He wore a faded grey suit with a faded grey stripe. His shoes were polished but the leather was cracking across the uppers and his tie was a little frayed. A long knife-scar ran down his left cheek. He made no attempt to summon the waiter and, when one came to serve him, didn’t look at him as he asked for a glass of mineral water. He glanced at the young Englishman who was drinking more brandy and drumming with long yellowed fingers on the table. The little man’s lip twitched and he turned his head towards me.

  ‘Good evening, dottore,’ he said.

  For another moment I still failed to know him; yet he spread disillusion about him like a marsh gas, decay like a Fascist housing scheme; and he had the petulant lips of a spoiled priest.

  ‘I’ve been saying to myself all day,’ he said, ‘since I saw the photograph of you with your nephews in the paper, that we would meet again. Then when I was passing and saw you sitting here, not a bit changed, still with that look of a certain superiority, I knew it was time. I’ve had this sort of coincidence happen to me often.’ He picked up his glass and sipped the mineral water; the level in the glass scarcely fell. ‘You can imagine,’ he said, ‘I’ve got mixed feelings about what’s going on. I warned your brother over thirty years ago, remember. Or maybe you preferred not to know. They were about to hang me. That’s the sort of thing you’ve always preferred to be able to ignore, isn’t it, dottore? As a matter of fact they did hang me; only it didn’t take, and I lived. So here I am still.’

  It was the lisping Barese accent that brought back the past: Enzo Fuscolo, once my father’s clerk and protégé, the brilliant young man from the poor part of town.

  ‘You can’t,’ I said, ‘imagine I want to talk to you. I’ve been thinking you dead since 1945.’

  He tittered; a little sound, light as a feather, airy as a madhouse.

  ‘But I’ve kept in touch, you know. Eventually Corrado found me useful. Politicians sometimes need unsavoury intermediaries. I don’t mind telling you I had a hard time of it in the years just after the war. Do you know, I worked as a dishwasher for a bit? Then I got a job as a clerk with a transport company. I only retired from it last year.’

  His treachery had nearly destroyed my father, nearly involved us all in ruin, and he took another sip, smaller than a finch’s sip, from his mineral water.

  ‘And if you ask me,’ he said, ‘Corrado has been seeking this. One way or another. Either his policy has been, as it certainly has been, wrong in conception and execution, so that it has provoked what has happened; or he has more simply desired martyrdom. They could do with a good martyr.’

  The titter again, the little titter of the choir school that had stayed with him through treachery, sentence of death and long neglect. It was the partisans of course had tried to hang him, stringing him up from the lintel of my father’s house (which had been my maternal grandfather’s before) in a Sabine village.

  ‘A political movemen
t that is the political wing of the Church militant and they don’t have a martyr. At least we provided Matteoti for the socialists.’

  He put his hand in his pocket and withdrew a little crumpled brown paper bag and took a currant from it, a single slightly yellowish squidgy currant with the body of a well-fed insect, and popped it in his mouth.

  ‘You realize, don’t you, that he’s had it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So?’ He held up the copy of the Messagero.

  (I was finding that though I despised him, and had cause to wish him nothing but ill, he was yet someone I could converse with; we were intimate with the knowledge of shared guilt. The thought bred leeches on my body.)

  ‘Yes,’ I said again, hearing my voice sleepy. I lit a cigar, gesture against the imposition of intimacy. ‘Of course you are right. He is doomed. But you should also realize that one is compelled to go through the ceremonies, even without hope, because it is only by doing so that one gives hope a chance of birth. By all the rules, by all we have reason to expect, Corrado is a dead man already. Only he still breathes. What did you feel when they put the rope round your neck?’

  He smirked. The memory pleased him. It is not after all everyone who merits a hanging. ‘I felt important. I had done my duty.’

  Had the second life he was vouchsafed been an anticlimax, a long parade of bathos?

  ‘You may be hoping,’ he said, ‘at this very moment that our encounter is not accidental. After all,’ he popped another currant in his mouth and his little tongue flickered again as he glanced at the Englishman who was sinking lower in his chair, his shoulders deep-hunched, ‘you may be wondering – and why not? – whether Corrado’s captors are really and truly of the Left or whether they are either agents provocateurs, or are being used? Being used. And do you know, you are in good company. Some of them themselves, the more intelligent and thoughtful, must be pondering that question. It keeps them awake at night.’

  I was the fish he played and I couldn’t tell whether he desired anything more than to tug the hook and twist it in my mouth.

  ‘Every society,’ he said, ‘is built on death. So they could be making a mistake. They might do better to release him. But first, either way, he must be humiliated. That’s axiomatic, thoroughly stripped of dignity and made to cry. To cry publicly. He cannot be allowed to emerge as a hero.’

  I nodded dumbly. Enzo Fuscolo was shedding years as he spoke; his own humiliations were withering; the years as a humble transport clerk shrivelled before me.

  ‘You say Corrado found you useful?’

  A faint pink touched his grey cheek, like the very last touch of a watery November sun on a crumbling and dirty wall.

  ‘There are always times,’ he said, ‘when it is necessary to make secret contact with your enemies. Old friends make the best intermediaries; there is less to be explained between them. I don’t claim much for myself. My own career was broken in two. But it was a career.’

  He slipped a card from his breast pocket and placed it before me.

  ‘If I can be of service …’

  He had drunk perhaps an inch of his mineral water.

  The Englishman lurched to his feet, again spilling his book. I could hear him at the cassa, demanding three Stocks, doubles. I wondered if he would get home. I picked up his book … a line of Spanish caught my eye: los manos de Orlac, a murderer’s hands …

  Night had fallen by the time I left the bar where I had indeed had nothing but a cappuccino and a cheese sandwich. The air was heavy with flowers in the streets, it was an evening for enjoyment, and the pavement caffès in the viale had no empty tables. Here and there children, still allowed up by indulgent parents, darted to and fro between the tables, calling for ices. Motor-bikes roared and left behind faint nostalgic echoes. I walked among the crowds. Would I have halted everything still, or stifled animation, if I had called out who I was? Did they care? They whom, in a sense, Corrado had made possible.

  But that was an empty rhetorical way of looking at things.

  It yet contained truth.

  My apartment resembled a family vault. I laid my clothes across a chair or hung them up with the neatness and care of an old dandy who can no longer afford a valet. But I had always found it distasteful to have male servants. For some years, when I first lived in an apartment of my own, Maria used to come over from my mother’s several times a week to tend to my clothes.

  I got into bed, hearing little noises of the summer night.

  Of course I couldn’t sleep. I could not accept. That was what, at last, when I had thought myself wholly acquiescent, I had come up against. Because it wasn’t for me, but for my brother. I turned on my face and saw him as a child. I turned on my back and heard Guido’s voice from the corner of the room. I sat up, pulling my long, thinned, old man’s legs beneath me, hugging my knees and groaning as I have always imagined the old in asylums groan.

  A cry of pain or shame disturbed me. Did it come from without or from my own breast?

  I rose and padded through the apartment exploring its dim and vacant recesses. Sasha was out; it was hard to be more alone; only elsewhere in the building countless slept. And all over the city.

  A solitary light across the courtyard attracted me. The American’s.

  A figure appeared at the window, a younger figure than the American’s and slimmer, with an aureole of curls framing an oval face. I sensed rather than truly saw his nakedness. The American approached from behind, laid an arm around the shoulder and drew the boy away from the window, drew him downwards and out of sight. I could reconstruct all that had gone before, what was to come, the enaction on the cheap divan, the movement from grey to dark purple back to grey.

  I went out into the night. In fact it had passed its nadir. The smell of blossom wafting from the Gardens of the Palazzo Colonna now, for a moment, made itself felt in the city, so briefly almost free of traffic. My feet led me, as though I was recovering the American’s tracks, to a little bar off the Via del Tritone, where all through the night, the despairing mingled with the curious and the mercenary. Once, years back, for a few months of hollow insomnia, I had found myself there once or twice a week, rarely advancing to the action which simultaneously expressed a wild hope and self-contempt.

  There is no more hopeless act than that in which, at the moment of climax, you cannot look into your lover’s eyes.

  I ordered a glass of beer and leant against the bar. My young Englishman from Parioli had found his way down here to these lower depths, still reading his novel, still drinking brandy, but now wearing an old Army greatcoat. It hung open, the skirts trailing on the floor. He closed the book and lit a cigarette, having to snap the lighter two or three times before succeeding. His blue eyes were blood-flecked. Except for a couple of furtive Arabs there was no one else in the bar.

  Corrado could never have come to a place like this. Once, when we were all young, Guido proposed that Corrado should be made to see life, as, somewhat naively perhaps, he called what he might be intending to offer.

  ‘You can’t get it all from books,’ he said.

  ‘If I want to know something like that – and I can’t see why I should – I ask my priest,’ Corrado replied. How much of a joke was that?

  But a politician couldn’t continue to function if he admitted the sharpness of despair; they were wise to deny themselves that. Even the most conservative of them believes that somehow the fabric can hold together; and Corrado, however ultimately sceptical, was committed also to a belief in the possibility of amelioration; and such a belief excludes this sort of bar.

  Was … was committed … was?

  Can he still exclude the despair Guido confessed far more fully than I? Compared to Guido’s situation this bar is nothing but a border town; a customs post where you are searched and asked to declare whether your luggage contains even the smallest particle of that drug called Hope.

  May 15 They have released a photograph of Corrado, posed against a background which featur
es a copy of yesterday’s Messagero. Proof that he is still alive, which of course one had not yet begun to doubt. They have stripped him down to a singlet, he who has never been seen in public without a tie. His face has twisted itself into a mask of passivity and endurance; but if you did not know his situation you might read irony in the twist of the mouth.

  The manner of his dress emphasizes his helplessness; and emphasizes also that he has been reduced to his essence; the trappings stripped off.

  What surprises after the initial horror has been absorbed is that his kidnappers are not apparently the PRR, but a group nobody seems to have heard of, calling themselves the ‘Partisans of the Proletariat’. Cynically, I don’t feel it can make much difference who holds him; they are all the same moral canaille. Experts (a concept I profoundly distrust) speaking on the wireless in their most instant capacity, have with their fullest Nescafé sagacity, propounded the theory that the PDP is a splinter group of the PRR, itself of course the offshoot of some acronym I can’t recall.

  They proclaim that they are proceeding with the trial of Corrado before a ‘People’s Court’. They are too ignorant of history, even recent history, to know that the term stinks.

  He will be charged with crimes against the Italian People, more of whom went away on holiday last year than ever before, fewer of whom die as infants than ever before, fewer of whom are in serious want than ever before.

  It is too silly; and I suppose will mean death.

  But first of course their comedy, and we on our part can’t give up. Nico came to see me. He has organized a rally, without, naturally, any support or assistance from the Party hierarchy. The speakers, who will include Manbola, the dissident Communist, will demand that the Government offers to negotiate with the kidnappers. Nico wanted me to speak. I demurred.

  ‘We can’t,’ I said, ‘make it too much a family affair. It has to go beyond the family. One speaker to represent us, and it must be a son. You, my dear Nico, since I can’t imagine our dear Sandro could carry it off.’