The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  Later, he had added to this, in red biro, ‘more than ever true today, and my steps are on that road. Let us go on.’

  Bernardo looks up from the paper, ‘I never thought we could get him to write like this; it’s marvellous … how did you manage it?’

  ‘We talked to him, we talked to him for a very long time, till he saw things from our point of view. We were very convincing and very persistent. But gentle. Your father is a man who can be persuaded by reason and facts. Nothing more was needed. He asked me to assure you of that …’

  ‘He asked you that?’

  ‘Yes, he said he was worried about your state of mind …’

  Bernardo squirms on his bed …

  ‘Being here, alone,’ Bernardo says, ‘I get worried too. I’m sure it’s because I’m alone. I’m afraid it’s not going to succeed.’

  Tomaso does not reply, but looks at Bernardo enquiringly.

  ‘Do you see what I mean? They’re taking it too quietly. I had thought there’d be more panic.’

  ‘They’re worried enough.’ Tomaso keeps his voice low, perhaps in response to the little trill of hysteria Bernardo’s registers. ‘The bourgeois state is adept at concealing its fears. That is all. Everything is going well. You don’t need to brood. The one thing I was afraid of isn’t going to happen. I had been terrified they would give way at once and accede to our demands. Fortunately they are even more corrupt than they are feeble, and there are those within the system who are blind enough to believe that they can profit by these events. As of course they may; very briefly.’

  Bernardo frowns, ‘It’s not because it’s my father, you understand.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m not sure everyone in the group does. There was no need to banish me here. You should know that. I agreed that he should be the one picked. It was a democratic decision.’

  ‘You’re nervous,’ says Tomaso, ‘I can see that.’ His voice is completely cool and very quiet. ‘But you would inevitably have been interrogated. We are all agreed on that.’

  ‘You can’t think I would have given anything away.’

  ‘We have discussed this before. Nobody can be trusted in an interrogation. Everyone has a breaking-point. You remember what the Algerian expert told us. As for me,’ Tomaso moves across the room and opens the shutter a few inches, ‘as for me, I shall never be interrogated. I’ll kill myself first. That’s all.’ He looks out of the window again. ‘I thought I heard the gate open, and voices. I don’t understand. Nobody comes here.’

  ‘There was that telephone call. A few minutes ago.’

  They look at each other. Fear enters the room like a blind man tapping his white stick round the skirting-board.

  Leaving Bernardo in the bedroom, Tomaso moved downstairs on silent feet. He crossed the courtyard, keeping just in the shadows; then straightened. Whatever happened, he was the young marchese returned home. That was all. He had no record. He was certain of that. He had never belonged to any Left-wing organization, had never spoken in public, published nothing. Quite early on, the Professor had made his role clear. And he’d stuck to it; even to the extent of joining the Christian Democrat Youth Movement. Therefore what he feared was impossible and absurd.

  Absurdity of another sort met his eyes. His mother was in the dining-room, and she looked puzzled and embarrassed. But it wasn’t his mother who held his gaze. There, in his dining-room, one of them perched on the table, the other stretched out in a chair that wasn’t intended to be occupied in that manner, were the two American girls who had travelled up in the bus with him.

  The one in the chair – the one in shorts – cried out when she saw him, ‘Oh no,’ she said in English, ‘isn’t it just crazy?’

  He stopped short, following her words but not understanding any meaning.

  His mother looked at him too and made a sort of helpless gesture with her hand. She made as if to speak, but the girl continued, ‘You must be Tomaso. I should have recognized you, but, well, I really did, I guess, only I wasn’t sure. I’m your cousin Kim.’

  She leapt up and moved towards him, ‘Say,’ she said, ‘what do I do, do I kiss you?’

  His mother intervened. ‘You should,’ she said, speaking slow, hesitant, rusty English, ‘have told us. You should have written a letter or telephoned. Yes, telephoned. We are not prepared.’

  Kim turned to her quickly, cornflower eyes wide and unformed face soft in apology.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I should have known. Mom hates surprises too and maybe you’re just like her. I should have thought of that, shouldn’t I, Ruthie?’

  ‘Guess so. I did warn you, baby.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Maria. Gee, I just love saying that, Aunt Maria. Yeah, I’m sorry. But it was so sudden. Course I was always planning to come and see you, I just suddenly felt I couldn’t stand another goddam church or art gallery a day more. And I don’t like your Italian beaches. Hey, Tomaso, can you follow me? It’s terrible, my Italian’s so goddam lousy I have to speak to my own family in English. But I’m sorry.’

  Tomaso looked at his mother for elucidation.

  She gave a surprisingly wide and open smile and threw her arms open too.

  ‘But you’re here,’ she said. ‘That’s the main thing. You must not think us inhospitable. It was surprise, surprise, you understand …’

  She was all at once bustle. A room had to be prepared – the girls could sleep together, yes? Yes? It would be more convenient. ‘Yes, of course,’ said the Ruthie one and began to speak to his mother in an Italian that was rapid and confident though ungrammatical and hideously pronounced. Kim is so impulsive, she says, making her apology sound like commendation. When she takes an idea into her head, it’s immediately like it was riveted there. Just like that. So, all at once tiring of being a tourist, she just had to come and see her aunt and cousin. Why, they hadn’t even been to Rome yet. Of course it could wait, they had the notion of spending a year in Rome, there was work they could both get there, and of course, just at the moment, with this kidnapping and the police activity, she had the impression that Rome might not be too pleasant, even for foreigners.

  ‘No,’ said his mother, ‘not even for foreigners.’

  It was terrible, wasn’t it, Ruthie continued, and did she know? Kim had a notion her father might be there. So that showed how strong was her sudden desire to see her aunt and cousin that she hadn’t bothered to check whether he was really there.

  ‘Her father,’ his mother said, ‘I never met him. And do you know, it is twenty-five years since I saw my sister. She came back to Italy once, but I didn’t see her.’

  She began to set the table. They must eat. It was nonsense to say they had had a sandwich in the bar – she could imagine the sort of sandwich it would have been – salami made from donkeys that had died of the plague. So, please …

  Kim, still leaning on the edge of the table, with her long legs crossed at the ankle so that she stood on her right foot, the left one resting lightly on its toes, which gleamed ruby-red out of the open sandals, stretched into her bag and withdrew a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘isn’t it neat, cigarettes with my name.’

  She took one and put it between her lips and pushed the pack towards him.

  KIM in red letters on the white pack.

  She snapped a lighter and lit her cigarette and blew smoke towards him while he still hesitated; her look was insolent and yet innocent; could it be both? He took a cigarette.

  When she wasn’t smoking she let the cigarette dangle from her hand. Everything she did, every gesture, was ridiculous, phoney, B-feature movie.

  He said, speaking with a slow politeness, ‘Have you been long in Italy?’

  ‘Three weeks; Florence, Venice, Verona, Parma. Verona and Venice were great, but Florence was a real drag.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A drag. A bore, you know.’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  ‘You don’t live he
re, do you?’

  ‘It’s my house.’

  ‘But you don’t live here all the time.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You live in Rome, don’t you? I guess you still do.’

  ‘Most of the time. Or sometimes.’

  ‘Do you have a job there?’

  ‘No, I’m a student.’

  ‘A student. Still?’

  ‘In Italy we stay students a long time often.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There are no jobs, you see. For most of us that is. So, we stay students. It gives us a reason for being.’

  ‘Oh.’ She kept her eyes on him and her mouth hung a little open, then she said, ‘But our aunts in Rome – it’s funny isn’t it, Tomaso – hey, I can’t manage that word, not all the time, what do your friends call you …?’

  He swallowed. ‘They call me Tomaso, I’m afraid. Italians don’t find it difficult to manage.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Mind if I call you Tom then? Or Tommy? What was I saying? Oh yeah, our aunts in Rome, and it’s funny to think we share aunts, they told Mom they hadn’t seen you for a long time.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  She shrugged and smiled at him. ‘So what, Tom? I’m glad to meet you.’

  They sat down to supper.

  ‘It sure is funny,’ said Ruthie in her quick, bad Italian, ‘how I’ve picked up the language and Kim, who’s half-Italian, hasn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother speak to you in Italian?’ Tomaso asked Kim.

  ‘No, never. She wasn’t exactly popular with her family after her first divorce, and maybe she just decided to let it go. It’s only the last few years since her operation she’s wanted to repair things. Of course it’s maybe been easier since our grandfather’s death. I wouldn’t know, but Mom says it has.’

  ‘Tomaso,’ said his mother, ‘maybe your friend would like to join us?’

  He gives her a long, dead look and then rises to his feet. Perhaps the girls will be difficult to move. In that case it is better they meet Bernardo now and don’t wait till he has become a mystery. They are not after all the sort who will have read the newspapers and anyway the photographs of Bernardo were unrecognizable. No foreigners of course ever watch television, and there isn’t one here to alert them. So he rises, and goes to fetch him.

  Towards the end of the meal the talk inevitably turned to the kidnapping. Up to that moment they had kept to generalities, empty talk, never easy but at least all on the surface. It was sustained mostly by Ruthie and Bernardo, who gave the impression of experiencing a sense of liberation. He must have been bored. Tomaso was never bored that way. He never felt restless and anxious to be doing things; only empty and numb.

  They ate bread, ham, salami, and olives, the pecorino cheese and a salad of fennel, his mother apologizing all the time for the inadequate nature of the food. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘it will be different. Tomorrow I will have a lamb killed, but we won’t eat that tomorrow. Still I know that Piero shot some partridges and pigeons yesterday. Of course partridges are out of season, but Piero pays no attention to that, and we can always call them all pigeons. Pigeons are never out of season. Do you like pigeons, Kim? What sort of name is that? Haven’t you another, a saint’s name?’

  ‘Pigeons? I don’t know that I’ve ever eaten pigeons.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t get them in California,’ said Ruthie. ‘We call them squab in Connecticut.’

  ‘No, I guess I never ate them. And Kim’s my only name, Aunt Maria. My mom wasn’t too keen on the church when I was born.’

  ‘Kim,’ said Maria, shaking her head.

  All the time Tomaso was aware of Kim. She kept looking at him, not slyly as people had looked at him, nor with the open invitation that he had known whores and some peasant girls give, but in a new way he found disturbing. It seemed as if she was going to make some demand on him. And it would be a demand he would find hard to refuse.

  The impression strengthened when his mother left them. They had a quick exchange first in which each urged the other to be the one who would tell Kim she couldn’t dress that way in the Abruzzi.

  ‘You tell her it’s not safe, Son.’

  ‘Or decent, Mother.’

  ‘That goes without saying, but it is that she might not understand. No doubt over there they have other standards. But here, it’s dangerous too. You tell her that.’

  ‘You must try, Mother. I can’t speak to her about things of that sort.’

  It was Ruthie who raised the subject of the kidnapping. Tomaso experienced distaste; he recognized her type so immediately and unmistakably.

  She said, ‘However desirable reforms are, you corrupt them by means of that sort. I’m prepared to be convinced that this group – what do they call them? The PDP is it? – are idealists, but this sort of thing does no good. It puts them out of court.’

  Bernardo laughed; he could deal with liberals any day.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘if you think of reform merely as a desirable correction of the existing state structure. What you don’t realize is that reforms of the kind that I imagine you would consider desirable are in themselves utterly and completely unacceptable, inasmuch as anything which serves to ameliorate the existing state of society is in fact worse than leaving it unreformed in its present corruption. Don’t you see? Reforms perpetuate injustice.’

  ‘That’s just clever talk,’ said Ruthie, whose brows were wrinkled and whose Italian might also be considered to be under attack.

  Tomaso looked at her over the rim of his wine-glass. Americans were not absolutely hopeless. He must guard against that prejudice. Still they were even more deeply stained by the delusory lies of liberalism than any other people. And since she was, he imagined, Jewish, she must be wedded to the imperialist conspiracy.

  Bernardo spread his hands wide in pity. ‘Clever talk,’ he cried. ‘Listen. Do you agree that society is organized on a basis of injustice?’

  ‘Sure.’ Ruthie blushed. ‘I can see that. I’m not dumb, you know.’

  ‘And reforms are intended to ameliorate social conditions without changing social relations.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘All reforms are intended to keep the present structure operable and prevent revolution.’

  ‘Well, I see where you’re heading. Yes, I guess so, ultimately.’

  ‘Good.’ Bernardo beamed like a prosecuting attorney who has elicited a damaging admission. ‘In that case reforms are counter-revolutionary.’

  Kim smiled at Tomaso. ‘I don’t follow all this, Tom, but that poor man they’ve captured. He’s kind of sweet. You know who he reminds me of? Snoopy.’

  ‘Snoopy?’

  ‘Surely you know about Snoopy. I guess most everyone’s heard of Snoopy. Charlie Brown’s Snoopy.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Bernardo laughed. Tomaso looked at him swiftly. There was a quality in the laugh that made him wary. A dangerous note of strain.

  ‘Oh yes,’ cried Bernardo, with a great whoop. ‘You’re absolutely right. Absolutely right. It’s no good saying that sort of thing to Tomaso here, he’s a sort of saint, you know, a lay saint, and he knows nothing of that sort of culture, but you’re absolutely right. Corrado Dusa’s a sort of Snoopy. And what’s more, he’s a good man, the best of the bunch by a long way. That’s why he was chosen of course. To take someone like Schicchi for example, Gianni Schicchi, would have been pointless. Not only would nobody care what happened to him, but, more important, he represents the system at its worst. He is therefore irrelevant. But Dusa’s different. He’s decent and humane and, so you see, in the last resort, dangerous. He’s the sort of man who can even make people believe in the present state of things. So …’ he spread his hands wide again. ‘Alternatively you can say he’s the cornerstone. You pull him out and, crash, the whole edifice will begin to crumble. But Gianni Schicchi, he’s nothing but an excrescence, a gargoyle. Rip him off the building and its appearance is actually improved. Pointless. Moreover, obj
ectively Schicchi is working for the Revolution. You know the policy Corrado Dusa has been advocating?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Ruthie.

  ‘He has been advocating what we call the Historic Compromise. In case you don’t understand that, let me explain.’ Bernardo’s voice warmed to the authoritative tone of a university lecturer. ‘You know that in Italy we have had this curiosity of thirty years of one party rule, all because the official opposition, the Communists, the PCI, have been unacceptable to our two masters, the Vatican and Washington? Just so. Therefore the corruption of the state has proceeded unchecked to a point where it may be seen, objectively again, to be preparing the way for a real, an effective, revolution in which the working-class and the intellectuals in historic alliance will seize power and dismantle the State apparatus. Now the most intelligent of the establishment, which includes the leaders of the Christian Democracy and the leaders of what we call the lay parties, and of course the leaders of the PCI, have come to see that only one thing can avert this and create conditions in which counter-revolutionary ameliorating reforms are possible. This is naturally the admission of the PCI to the Government, so that all the parties which support the State, as it is presently constituted, will collaborate. Dusa has been the leader of this move. He has possibly won the consent of the Vatican though not yet of the CIA, who are of course historically stupid and slow to appreciate reality.’

  ‘You could say,’ said Tomaso, ‘that objectively the CIA are working for the Revolution.’

  ‘So,’ Bernardo said, ‘it is evident that Dusa had to be the target of all true revolutionary forces, simply because he is a good and intelligent man. The wrong idealism is the worst corruption.’

  His words hung in the night air. Two or three moths hummed flutteringly and demandingly round the light beyond which the room fell away into darkness. Kim yawned. She had found the discourse hard to follow. What she understood made no more sense than what she didn’t. She stretched out her long leg so that her toes touched Tomaso’s ankle. He moved his foot away. She let her long fingers play with her cigarette lighter, then took a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke in his direction. Nothing in her life had prepared her for being here, for listening to this sort of talk any more than for finding herself in a mountain village where women spat in the street behind her and hens and donkeys wandered in the lanes. She said to Tomaso, ‘Why don’t we go out for a breath of air; it’s kind of stuffy here.’ It was the moral atmosphere she referred to. He could do nothing but accede. Both felt she had gained a point, but Tomaso knew his will was weak only in inessentials.