Innocence

‘Of course not.’

Perhaps we might agree about everything, Salvatore thought. No-one ever agrees with me, but she might. However, it was as if another voice said this while his rational mind was occupied with a feeling which he wished to think was either amusement or disgust at the sight of a young girl wearing a diamond necklace worth — here he left a blank, for he had no idea what it was worth and it might after all be an imitation, but why should I care, he thought, I’m not a shopkeeper — wearing it in any case as if she didn’t know she had it on, and quite without the elegant gesture, the Grace Kelly gesture, of lightly touching the jewels with one hand. Perhaps this young woman didn’t know how to be elegant, or perhaps Grace Kelly didn’t. He felt deeply irritated. He had an intimation that he was lost.

Mimi, launched on the subject of suffering, was still beside them. ‘You don’t know yet, Chiara, I’m glad to say, how much good one has to have done to one. To the back in particular.’ She hunched her shoulders, looking for a moment like a kindly old pedlar. ‘You know nothing till you’re thirty-five, then everything goes at once.’

‘If it’s your back, signora,’ said Chiara politely, ‘I believe they can do wonders now.’

‘Oh, but my dear, I’m told that they knock you about like drunken cabmen. They throw you from hand to hand. They listen to your bones, they listen for the click. And so I’ve decided that it’s not my back, but my nerves.’

This girl agreed with me about the sonata, Salvatore repeated to himself. She wouldn’t lie to me, she is the sort who doesn’t tell lies even in a concert hall.

Mimi, a wanderer by nature, had wandered away, and Salvatore abruptly asked Chiara to come outside with him for the rest of the interval.

‘Oh, but I came with some friends.’

‘What friends? Who are they? If they came with you, why aren’t they here?’

‘Only two of them, they’re fetching me some coffee.’

‘Fetching coffee is for people who can’t think what else to do next. Come out with me a little.’ They went out together onto the entrance steps. It had been fine weather when the audience arrived, but there must have been a change since the concert began and the sky was now a darkish olive-green, only streaked with light to the southwest, over the river. The air was damp and caressing.

‘Come out into the warm rain,’ Salvatore said.

‘Well, but how can rain be warm?’

‘Well, try it, try it. Come outside, put out your tongue, taste it.’

Chiara sat through the second part of the performance in a lightly damp condition, like washing, she thought, brought in from the line sooner than it should have been. Her hair was flattened down and the rain had given her cheeks a striking pale rose colour. Her own friends said nothing, but from her seat two rows further forward, made a light-hearted pantomime of rubbing with a towel. The Alessandri had noticed also, and were not quite so much amused, nor were Mr and Mrs Swinburne-Cacciano, or the Quaratesi party, or the ancient but inflexible Marquesa Cardoni. Their silent systems of communication and warning were the same, in 1956, as they would have been thirty years earlier. A dictatorship, a war and an occupation had not been sufficient to change them. Yet Chiara herself was so poor a Florentine that she listened to the second part of the concert, which was much more successful, without noticing that anyone was looking at her.

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Salvatore, who was not a temperate person, intensely regretted having gone to this particular concert. What irritated him as much as anything else was that his mother had repeatedly predicted that if he went north to practise in Milan or Florence he would be got hold of by some wealthy, fair-haired girl who would fasten on him and marry him before he knew what he was doing. Now, in point of fact this girl was badly dressed and not fair-haired, or anyway only in certain lights, for example in the artificial light of the auditorium and the rainy twilight outside would anyone have called her a blonde. His mind chased itself in a manner utterly forbidden to it, round thoughts as arid as a cinder track.

As a favourite son, he had been obliged to receive a quite unjust amount of his mother’s traditional wisdom. After he had been caught, she would say, not even with any real disapproval but with an infuriating nodding and smiling certainty, he would forget his home and even his family and they would be lucky ever to see him again in Mazzata. Curious that advice is just as irritating when it’s wrong as when it’s right.

She had baptized him Salvatore in honour of the Saviour, whereas his father would have preferred not to have had a christening at all, and wanted, quite ineffectually, to name him Nino, after Antonio Gramsci, or perhaps Liberazione or Umanità, or even 1926, since that was the year of his birth and also that of Gramsci’s last imprisonment. Domenico Rossi’s choice of names could be laughed at, and was laughed at, even by the Party members of Mazzata. His one ally was a part-time book-keeper, one of those not born to succeed, with the short-sighted mildness of a certain kind of violent revolutionary. This man, Sannazzaro, was not particularly welcome in the house and often sat talking to Domenico in a windowless room which was really part of the kitchen passage. The police rightly regarded him as entirely harmless. But to Salvatore, as he grew up, his father had meant much more than his mother. He couldn’t ever remember agreeing wholeheartedly and without embarrassment with his mother. On the other hand he put off for as long as he could the pain of admitting to himself that his father was wrong.

In 1913 Domenico and Sannazzaro had come up together from Mazzata in search of opportunities. They had gone as far north as their permits allowed, to Turin. Domenico had worked as a bicycle mechanic, Sannazzaro as an assistant book-keeper. They shared a copy of a weekly newspaper, Gramsci’s Grido del Popolo. In the Grido they read about an Italy, a possible Italy, without poverty, favours or bribery. Mass education would come about as a matter of course, but it would take the form not just of instruction but of question and answer between teacher and learner. Every sane man is an intellectual, but most are afraid to function as an intellectual should, that is, to stay in their own communities and organize them. If only a few thousand would do this, in Calabria, Campania, Sicily and Sardinia, the south could be as prosperous as the north. Only the lack of good sense or even common sense made it difficult to envisage the great human cities of the future with their intense, tumultuous and productive life. Under present conditions every Italian family struggled against every other to get advantages for itself. When the concept of property was abolished the struggle would be unnecessary. Even within the home there would be peace. Twelve brothers and sisters would be able to sit around a table without dispute. And the children’s education would no longer be left to women and priests. No adult would have a mortgage on a child’s character or its future. In the new community it would be free, at last, to choose.

Every life has lucky moments when sympathy opens one heart to others. To respond may be a mistake, not to respond must be ingratitude. The crowded print of the Grido came, in this way, in the back streets of Turin, to authentic life for Rossi and Sannazzaro. In the whole city they had not succeeded in finding one bar or café kept by a Mazzatano. Their own friendship, the weekly Party meetings and the Grido became their points of reference.

Before the strike of 1919 they met their frail leader in person. That was before he went to prison for the first time. Rossi even had the opportunity to ask him whether there was anything he could do for him, anything he could get for him or have sent to him by way of the warders. Gramsci had said that he wanted nothing except a loaf of Sardinian bread and an Italian translation of Kipling’s Jungle Book. But his smile as he said this, not a politician’s smile, showed that he recognized the impossible.

After the strike and the occupation of the factories, which was a total failure, Rossi and Sannazzaro of course lost their jobs. They sold their city shoes, resoled their boots with lengths of bicycle tyres, and walked the 750 kilometres back to Mazzata. By the time they arrived they were almost starving. The village received them without enthusiasm. They had left Mazzata as failures, and returned as failures. They still attended the local Party’s surreptitious meetings, in the back room of the chemist’s shop. When Gramsci, from his prison cell, dissociated himself from Stalin’s policies, he was declared an outcast and a heretic. The two friends, loyal to him still, became less important in local politics than the flies on the ceiling.

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When he was ten years old Papa had taken him on a journey to see Antonio Gramsci. It was a last chance, since Gramsci, having been moved from one prison to another for the last nine years, was known to be terminally ill. There had been an international petition to the Italian government for his release, which had met with the fate of most petitions.

By 1936 he had been transferred to Rome. He was no longer an official prisoner, but was under medical treatment at the Clinica Quisisana. The rules for visiting him were relaxed. On the other hand, there were not so very many people, and almost none of his old associates, who cared to visit him.

Domenico and his son got a lift in a tomato lorry as far as Benevento, and then took the slow train to the capital, which gave them a good chance to look at each other without interruptions. Salvatore saw a patient man whom he loved, and who, he knew, had had to ask Mother’s permission to make this expedition, a tired man, worn and shiny like an old suit. Domenico looked back uneasily at his bright, unaccountable boy.

When Domenico had been little his grandmother, who worked in a hotel kitchen, had edged him upstairs into the reception hall in the hopes of presenting him to a bishop (who had just arrived) for a blessing. They knelt together for a moment on the marble floor, risking everything. But the bishop, who was on a private visit and wished to indicate that he was off duty, turned his ring round on his finger so that the faithful could not kiss it. The grandmother got up and twitched the boy back to the service quarters, as though he had been in some way to blame.

All Domenico wanted now was for his son to come into the presence of a great man. At the same time he had a few questions to ask after these many years, and of course he could not come empty-handed. On his knees, with their sandwich, he had a parcel consisting of medicines, writing paper and a woollen pullover. It was fastened with insulating tape, and anyone could tell that it had not been wrapped up for him by a woman. When they got to Rome and steamed into the old peach-coloured station in Piazza Esdraia, he tried to make it look a little more presentable.

Salvatore was disappointed firstly when they crossed the city without seeing a single one of the new Alfa Romeo two-seaters whose image he had studied in a magazine, and secondly when the Clinica Quisisana had no bars.

‘It’s not a prison,’ his father told him.

‘Can he go away if he wants to?’

‘No, he can’t do that, he can’t go into Rome without a police guard.’

Then it’s a prison, the child thought.

There was a bell in the outer gate and when they rung it was answered by a young male nurse in uniform. Salvatore saw that he was not going to be petted, as he would have been in a convent, or a hospital run by Holy Sisters. This impressed him. He was impressed because he was ignored.

The male nurse asked whether they had an authorization from Dr Marino or Professor Frugoni, and Salvatore felt an unaccustomed admiration for his father when he pulled out of his inner pocket a note from the Professor confirming their appointment. The nurse went away, and came back to say that the patient Antonio Gramsci was not well enough to receive visits. He was now carrying a blue folder under his arm.

‘Who says so?’ asked Domenico.

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. He stood there in the blank early spring sunshine, holding his son’s hand.

‘The management are anxious that he shouldn’t see members of the public without medical knowledge, who might be distressed by certain changes in him,’ said the young man, reading from the folder as though repeating a lesson. ‘The tuberculosis has affected the spine — do you understand me? — and the sight is poor.’

‘You can spare yourself anxiety. My permissions are all in order. In reply to a letter I sent him Comrade Gramsci himself asked us to come and see him.’

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Salvatore had seen deformed animals, and dead bodies of both people and animals, but never anything as ugly as Comrade Gramsci. Ugliness is a hard thing to forgive at the age of ten. The thick mouth of the prisoner, his father’s friend, opened darkly, like a toad’s, without a single tooth in sight. The tiny crippled body could no longer make any pretence of fitting into his ordinary clothes, which hung on him, as they would have done on a circus animal. He was not sitting down, but propped standing up against the wall. The smell of illness, stronger than disinfectant, filled the room, and there was no other air to breathe. While his father unwillingly took the only chair, Salvatore, after standing up for a while, perched on the corner of the clean, hostile cover of the bed.

‘We have brought a few medicines, just what we could get at the chemist’s.’

‘Many thanks, but no, I should prefer you to save them for someone else. All I ask for here is some kind of stimulant, but Dr Marino doesn’t prescribe those. You’re very good, Domenico, but I have all I need as far as I’m allowed it. My sister-in-law comes quite regularly.’

The visit was not going as it should, the present was not wanted. Gramsci, in a hoarse painful voice, difficult to follow, asked about Mazzata, and for the name of the local Party secretary. When he was told it he said, ‘No, I don’t know that name.’

‘He’s of the new generation, Nino, you couldn’t have heard of him.’

‘My one dread is that my memory will go. If one is forty-four, with no books to speak of, and no memory, one can’t expect to write anything of value. I have no record of what’s happening outside here either, except the official newspapers. My mind is still clear, but I think perhaps I’ve lost the gift of patience. When I was in prison I knew my friends were saying “If he can stand five years shut up in one place or another, surely he can stand six,” but in fact the fifth year in prison is very different from the fourth, and one can’t tell what the sixth will be like.’

‘But, Nino, this is a clinic. It’s the first time I’ve had an answer to any of my applications to visit you. That showed me how different things are for you now.’

‘It means that they don’t consider me important any more. But I knew about your applications. Don’t think that I’ve forgotten what affection is.’

By now Domenico’s enthusiasm had become more like pleading. He seemed to be begging the situation to right itself and to become what he had hoped and expected.