Innocence

‘How could one do that, Nino? You remember Turin, you remember when the tram-lines froze and none of us could get home, and you gave us your Ten Commandments?’

‘In Turin,’ said Gramsci, ‘I made a resolution that I would cut every strand, every connection, between myself and my family. Of course I had no children of my own then. It was only little by little that I realized how dry, coarse and squalid is a life without affection through the bond of the flesh. You’ll tell me that nothing could be more obvious, and yet I didn’t see it at that time.’

‘I don’t know how to answer you,’ said Domenico hesitantly. ‘This is my only son, my respect for you has never changed, I’ve come not only to see you once again but to ask about the things that still confuse me.’

Salvatore continued to stare fixedly at the sick man, and now it seemed to him that he looked, in his crumpled suit, more like a squab or a fledgling bird, with large nocturnal eyes, disturbingly blue, and a beaked nose. On top of a cupboard full of medicine bottles there were three photographs, one of a girl, one of a boy, one of a woman with both the girl and the boy. These were evidently the prisoner’s children, and Salvatore, who pondered a good deal about such things, felt sick at the thought of how the hunchback could have managed to beget them. The height of his own ambition, at the moment, was to dive into the irrigation tank in Mazzata from the topmost height of the containing wall. Now he was looking at a fully-grown man whose body was of no practical use to him whatever.

A change of tone, much like a change of temperature, told him that the discussion was now about himself. It continued as though, by some curious fiction, he was not in the room at all, and in accordance with the same fiction he pretended not to listen. His school work was mentioned. This, though in a way reassuring, was bitterly disappointing, worthy of his mother and her friends, not worth travelling to Rome for. He was ready to say, or to have it said for him, that he had passed the first of his junior intermediate exams. His father made nothing of that, but, trembling with urgency, passed rapidly on. His hands, hanging down loosely between his knees, pressed themselves together to emphasize every point.

‘Of all the truths I’ve learned from you, Comrade, whether I’ve heard them with my own ears or whether I’ve read them, I’ve been interested most of all in what you’ve had to say about education. Through the upbringing of our children we can begin, even today, to build the society of the future. My son here is intelligent, but he will stay with me in Mazzata, I shan’t lose him to the cities. He will be an intellectual for the people of Mazzata. When he goes to the Liceo, I shall prevent his learning Latin. Latin is still what it has always been, the means by which one class can overawe and humiliate another. I shall go to see the school authorities and insist that he is taught simply and naturally, through question and answer.’

When he paused, awaiting for words of approval, Gramsci said: ‘Let him learn Latin.’

He was speaking now with increasing difficulty.

‘Let him learn Latin. I learnt it. Education should never be acquired easily. Skill in a trade doesn’t come without work and suffering, and after all, learning is a child’s trade.’

Slavatore saw that his father was disconcerted, and although this was nothing new, he was sorry.

‘And science?’

‘Of course, if you’re certain you can distinguish it from witchcraft.’

‘Nino, in Turin you advised both of us to read Rousseau.’

‘Who were “both of us”?’

‘Myself and Luca Sannazzaro, you remember Luca?’

‘Don’t try to make me infallible,’ said Gramsci, ‘you can see I have enough trouble without that. In 1927, when they moved me from Ustica to Milan, I was allowed to plant a few seeds of chicory, and when they came up I had to decide whether to follow Rousseau and leave them to grow by the light of nature, or whether to interfere in the name of knowledge and authority. What I wanted was a decent head of chicory. It’s useless to be doctrinaire in such circumstances.’

Shuffling himself round into a new position, he looked directly at Salvatore.

‘If your father won’t let you learn what you want to, what will you do?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Gramsci began to tell, in his shadowy voice, stories of his own elder brother, who had been defiant as a child and as a gesture had taken the family cat to the village baker and asked him to roast it. When his shoes were locked up to prevent his running away he blacked his feet with polish and went off just the same. The story began to steal in its own right into the hidden reaches of Salvatore’s mind. He forgot the hospital room for the moment and gave way to the charm of what had happened then to someone who was indisputably here now. Gramsci went on to say a little about himself, as a crippled child, whose mother had always kept a coffin and a white dress ready for him, as he wasn’t expected to last long. ‘However, I have lived for more than forty years.’ He, too, had felt that it might be necessary to escape from home, and with this in mind he had always kept some dry corn in his pockets, and a candle and a box of matches.

‘That’s enough about me,’ he added resolutely, with his hinged, toothless, tender smile. ‘What have you got in your pockets?’

There was a silence. ‘Answer, boy,’ said Domenico, threatened with humiliation. He repeated the question in their own dialect. ‘Answer.’ Salvatore did not at all like this concentration on his own case. The smell in the room was, he thought now, of something gone bad, or at any rate of something on the turn. Even if he didn’t say anything, he could go some way towards pleasing everyone simply by putting his hands in his pockets and turning them out. But with all the force of his being he didn’t want to do so.

‘Bene, it doesn’t matter,’ Gramsci said. ‘How could it matter? Perhaps, anyway, you think I’m not strong enough to be a good friend for your father?’

‘No, sir, I don’t think that.’

Now Gramsci moved again, sidling a little towards the right and establishing himself fairly securely against the washstand with its jug and basin of enamelled tin. There he held out his hand.

‘Children don’t like sick people. Are you afraid to touch me?’

‘I don’t want to touch you if I’m going to catch anything,’ Salvatore said. ‘With my cousins, there are seven of us in the house at home.’

‘Seven!’ shouted Domenico. ‘What has that to do with it, why do you mention that?’

‘You won’t catch anything,’ said Gramsci, and the child stepped forward and felt his hand crushed as though the bones were being ground together under the thin skin. When the travelling fair came round in autumn there was a machine called ‘The Initiation’ which gave you, as you gripped the handle, an electric shock. But that was not for anyone under the age of twelve.

‘Now it’s your turn. Since you didn’t answer, I’m doing you more than justice. You can ask me anything you like.’

Another chance not to fail his father. It was a moment when he could do him real credit, and he knew very well what kind of credit was wanted. Immediately he could picture the two of them, their visit over, back in the station refreshment room where they had gone when they arrived, the street lights on by now, his father praising him for his good question while he himself melted a lump of sugar in a long-handled spoon, slowly, feeling satisfaction and pity.

‘Ask anything you want,’ Gramsci repeated. In his present position he could take out a cigarette, although his disease had eaten so far into the vertebrae that he had difficulty in balancing his head well enough to smoke it. Patiently Domenico struck match after match, trying to get the tobacco alight.

Salvatore knew by now the question he ought to put. He regretted that he hadn’t wanted just now to say what he had in his pockets. That had been a mistake. He was quite well used to being told to put questions, as well as answering them, in the presence of a school inspector. That was simply a matter of knowing what was wanted. The more important these men were, the easier it was to reply. One of them had told the whole class to remain standing and to answer the question in the first lines of the Fascist Chorus of Youth: ‘Duce, Duce, when the time comes, who will not know how to die for you?’ Impossible to go wrong there. But Salvatore had also half-absorbed from the long droning evenings in the passage room, and from what they had earnestly tried to explain to him, the concerns of his father and Sannazzaro. Supposing he tried: ‘Comrade Gramsci, sir, when the time comes, who will not want liberty?’

Courage. But the words he had formed in his mind suddenly made themselves scarce, and still wanting and intending to say something quite different he asked loudly: ‘Why are you bleeding?’

And in fact a trickle of blood had appeared at the corner of the mouth of his father’s friend. Gazing at the hunchback in his niche, seeing the first drop ooze past the clamped cigarette to the edge of the chin, Salvatore knew that everything could be saved if only it wasn’t allowed to fall. Blessed Mary, Mother of God, Shelter of the Homeless, don’t let it fall. But as Gramsci opened the other side of his mouth to answer as he had promised, and possibly even to smile, something final and disastrous happened, he leaned forward and dark liquids began to make their escape from several parts of the body. Domenico Rossi put his whole fist on the bellpush and with his other hand threw open the door. ‘Get help!’ The boy clattered down the shining corridors, weeping. So far in the clinic he had seen no women, but a woman was needed now. Behind one of the shut doors with their squares of frosted glass he might find one.

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Domenico was right in believing that this visit to Rome would provide a lasting memory for his son. Salvatore’s resolution, as soon as he began to be able to translate his impressions into terms of will and intention, was this: I will never concern myself with politics, I will never risk imprisonment for the sake of my principles, I will never give my health, still less my life, for my beliefs. He also resolved to be a doctor. In the end we shall all of us be at the mercy of our own bodies, but at least let me understand what is happening to them.

The sight of his father’s tears as they walked back to the station was also disagreeable to Salvatore. He was reluctant to admit to himself that, for the moment, he was older than his parent, and ashamed that they hadn’t got a handkerchief between them. There had been a napkin, but that was left behind with the basket and the unwanted presents at the Clinica Quisisana. Eventually they stopped in front of a little shop, and Domenico, still much moved, sent his son, by himself, to ask for a handkerchief. The man behind the counter told him that he must buy three, they were only for sale in packets of three. Salvatore stood there, solidly occupying his ground. ‘My father only needs one. You must sell him what he needs.’ The shop-keeper put his hand to his ear, pretending not to understand. Salvatore repeated what he had said in clear Italian. ‘It’s the law,’ he added. He paid for a single handkerchief and counted his change with insulting care. On that afternoon he decided that as soon as possible he would be emotionally dependent on no one.

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Hard work and opportunism are the secrets of biological success. Gramsci himself was fond of the proverb ‘Where one horse shits, a thousand swallows feed.’ But from the usual source of help, the family, Salvatore received very little. All that it really came down to was that during his years of medical training he was able to lodge at a reasonable rent over a greengrocer’s shop belonging to his great-aunt’s step-daughter’s niece.

As a medical student his call-up was deferred, and just before the Allies landed in Sicily he got himself transferred to Bologna. The following spring the great neurologist, Professor Landino, returned from a long exile, and Salvatore expected to be deeply influenced by him, but was disappointed. Honourable men are rare, but not necessarily interesting. Landino was not interesting. Neurology, however, made its appeal in the simplest possible way, for its own sake. As a junior he made notes on case after case of back injuries which had been caused two or perhaps three years earlier when the patients had come to grief in a truck or some military vehicle which had run over a mine or a pot-hole. The surgeons had removed the injured disc from the spine and fused the vertebrae above and below it to make as neat a job as possible. And now there was no inflammation, nothing to be read from X-rays or tests on the cerebrospinal fluid, and yet the patients complained of agonising pain. There were women, too, admitted to the hospital who were unable to move one arm or both, who couldn’t stoop down to lift their children, whose faces were distorted and fixed into a singer’s open-mouthed grimace. The pain was in their imagination, but as real, of course, as if it wasn’t. In fact, it was impossible in these circumstances to attach any meaning to ‘real’ or to ‘imagination’. There was no acceptable diagnosis to make. He was in the face of pain which left no trace, and healing without explanation. The specialists, however confident, knew no more, perhaps less, than a dog who lies down in the shade until it feels better. But whatever exists, can be known. Salvatore didn’t delude himself that he was capable of great discoveries. But he thought he might set himself to see why no discoveries had been made so far. ‘Gentlemen,’ Professor Landino began, with a smile which acknowledged the women students but implied that he was too old to learn new tricks, ‘not for nothing is neuralgia associated with artists, sensitives and degenerates.’ He paused on these last words, giving them equal weight. ‘We define neuralgia as pain whose origin is not clearly traceable.’

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Salvatore’s natural associates in Bologna should have been the small group of students from the South, predictable in their habits, the civilian brothel on Saturday nights, on Sundays their thick best suits which in some cases had been inherited or borrowed from their fathers. Since they could not get used to the Bolognese food in the university cafeteria, which seemed to them designed to poison the first generation of post-war doctors, they made an arrangement with a café run by a Neapolitan, where places were kept for them every day. During his first year Salvatore considered these habits and set himself up against them. ‘Any behaviour that is expected of you,’ he argued, ‘makes you less of an individual. As a doctor I shall have to know what is normal and take any variation from it as a danger signal. As a human being, I should do the opposite.’