The Watcher and Other Stories

  AFTER SHE had left (a bit disappointed and bored with my company, despite her unshakable determination to cast on others a light that was all her own), I flung myself into my editorial work with redoubled energy, partly because Claudia’s visit had made me miss many hours in the office and I was behind with the preparation of the next number, and also because the subject the biweekly Purification dealt with no longer seemed so alien to me as it had at the beginning.

  The editorial was still unwritten, but this time Commendatore Cordà had left me no instructions. “You handle it. Be careful, however.” I began to write one of the usual diatribes, but gradually, as one word led to the next, I found myself describing how I had seen the cloud of smog rubbing over the city, how life went on inside that cloud, and the façades of the old houses, all jutting surfaces and hollows where a black deposit thickened, and the façades of the modern houses, smooth, monochrome, squared off, on which little by little dark, vague shadows grew, as on the office workers’ white collars, which never stayed clean more than half a day. And I wrote that, true, there were still people who lived outside the cloud of smog, and perhaps there always would be, people who could pass through the cloud and stop right in its midst and then come out, without the tiniest puff of smoke or bit of soot touching their bodies, disturbing their different pace, their otherworldly beauty, but what mattered was everything that was inside that smog, not what lay outside it: only by immersing oneself in the heart of the cloud, breathing the foggy air of these mornings (winter was already erasing the streets in a formless mist), could one reach the bottom of the truth and perhaps be free of it. My words were all an arguement with Claudia; I realized this at once and tore up the article without even having Avandero read it.

  Signor Avandero was somebody I hadn’t yet fathomed. One Monday morning I came into the office, and what did I find? Avandero with a sun tan! Yes, instead of his usual face the color of boiled fish, his skin was something between red and brown, with a few marks of burning on his forehead and his cheeks.

  “What’s happened to you?” I asked (calling him tu, as we had been addressing each other recently).

  “I’ve been skiing. The first snowfall. Perfect, nice and dry. Why don’t you come too, next Sunday?”

  From that day on, Avandero made me his confidant, sharing with me his passion for skiing. Confidant, I say, because in discussing it with me, he was expressing something more than a passion for a technical skill, a geometrical precision of movements, a functional equipment, a landscape reduced to a pure white page; he, the impeccable and obsequious employee, put into his words a secret protest against his work, a polemical attitude he revealed in little chuckles, as if of superiority, and in little malicious hints: “Ah, yes, that’s purification, all right! I leave the smog to the rest of you....” Then he promptly corrected himself, saying: “I’m joking, of course....” But I had realized that he, apparently so loyal, was another one who didn’t believe in the Institute or the ideas of Commendatore Cordà.

  One Saturday afternoon I ran into him, Avandero, all decked out for skiing, with a vizored cap like a blackbird’s beak, heading for a large bus already assailed by a crowd of men and women skiers. He greeted me, with his smug little manner: “Are you staying in the city?”

  “Yes, I am. What’s the use of going away? Tomorrow night you’ll already be back in the soup again.”

  He frowned, beneath his blackbird’s vizor. “What’s the city for, then, except to get out of on Saturday and Sunday?” And he hurried to the bus, because he wanted to suggest a new way of arranging the skis on the top.

  For Avandero, as for hundreds and thousands of other people who slaved all week at gray jobs just to be able to run off on Sunday, the city was a lost world, a mill grinding out the means to escape it for those few hours and then return from country excursions, from trout fishing, and then from the sea, and from the mountains in summer, from the snapshots. The story of his life—which, as I saw him regularly, I began to reconstruct year by year—was the story of his means of transportation: first a motorbike, then a scooter, then a proper motorcycle, now his cheap car, and the years of the future were already designated by visions of cars more and more spacious, faster and faster.

  THE NEW number of Purification should already have gone to press, but Commendatore Cordà hadn’t yet seen the proofs. I was expecting him that day at the IPUAIC, but he didn’t show up, and it was almost evening when he telephoned for me to come to him at his office at the Wafd, to bring him the proofs there because he couldn’t get away. In fact, he would send his car and driver to pick me up.

  The Wafd was a factory of which Cordà was managing director. The huge automobile, with me huddled in one corner, my hands and the folder of proofs on my knees, carried me through unfamiliar outskirts, drove along a blind wall, entered, saluted by watchmen, through a broad gateway, and deposited me at the foot of the stairway to the directors’ offices.

  Commendatore Cordà was at his desk, surrounded by a group of executives, examining certain accounts or production plans spread out on enormous sheets of paper, which spilled over the sides of the desk. “Just one minute, please,” he said to me, “I’ll be right with you.”

  I looked beyond his shoulder: the wall behind him was a single pane of glass, a very wide window that dominated the whole expanse of the plant. In the foggy evening only a few shadows emerged; in the foreground there was the outline of a chain hoist which carried up huge buckets of—I believe—iron tailings. You could see the row of metal receptacles rise in a series of jerks, with a slight swaying that seemed to alter a bit the outline of the pile of mineral, and I thought I saw a thick cloud rise from it into the air and settle on the glass of the Commendatore’s office.

  At that moment he gave orders for the lights to be turned on; suddenly against the outside darkness the glass seemed covered by a tiny frosting, surely composed of iron particles, glistening like the stardust of a galaxy. The pattern of shadows outside was broken up; the lines of the smokestacks in the distance became more distinct, each crowned by a red puff, and over these flames, in contrast, the black, inky streak was accentuated as it invaded the whole sky and you could see incandescent specks rise and whirl within it.

  Cordà was now examining with me the Purification proofs and, immediately entering the different field of enthusiasms, receiving the mental stimulation of his position as President of the IPUAIC, he discussed the articles in our bulletin with me and with the Wafd executives. And though I had so often, in the offices of the Institute, given free rein to my natural dependent’s antagonism, mentally declaring myself on the side of the smog, the smog’s secret agent who had infiltrated the enemy’s headquarters, I now realized how senseless my game was, because Cordà himself was the smog’s master; it was he who blew it out constantly over the city, and the IPUAIC was a creature of the smog, born of the need to give those working to produce the smog some hope of a life that was not all smog, and yet, at the same time, to celebrate its power.

  Cordà, pleased with the issue, insisted on taking me home in the car. It was a night of thick fog. The driver proceeded slowly, because beyond the faint headlights you couldn’t see a thing. The President, carried away by one of his bursts of general optimism, was outlining the plans of the city of the future, with garden districts, factories surrounded by flower beds and pools of clear water, installations of rockets that would sweep the sky clear of the smoke from the stacks. And he pointed into the void outside, beyond the windows, as if the things he was imagining were already there; I listened to him, perhaps frightened or perhaps in admiration, I couldn’t say, discovering how the clever captain of industry coexisted in him with the visionary, and how each needed the other.

  At a certain point I thought I recognized my neighborhood. “Stop here, please. This is where I get out,” I said to the driver. I thanked Cordà, said good night, and got out of the car. When it had driven off, I realized I had been mistaken. I was in an unfamiliar district, and I could s
ee nothing of my surroundings.

  AT THE restaurant I went on having my meals alone, sheltered behind my newspaper. And I noticed that there was another customer who behaved as I did. Sometimes, when no other places were free, we ended up at the same table, facing each other with our unfolded papers. We read different ones: mine was the newspaper everybody read, the most important in the city; surely I had no reason to attract attention, to look different from the others, by reading a different paper, or to seem (if I had read the paper of the stranger at my table) a man with strong political ideas. I had always given political opinions and parties a wide berth, but there, at the restaurant table, on certain evenings, when I put the newspaper down, my fellow diner said: “May I?” motioning to it, and offering me his own: “If you’d like to have a look at this one...”

  And so I glanced at his paper, which was, you might say, the reverse of mine, not only because it supported opposing ideas, but because it dealt with things that didn’t even exist for the other paper: workers who had been discharged, mechanics whose hands had been caught in their machinery (it also published the photographs of these men), charts with the figures of welfare payments, and so on. But above all, the more my paper tried to be witty in the writing of its articles and to attract the reader with amusing minor events, for example the divorce cases of pretty girls, the more this other paper used expressions that were always the same, repetitious, drab, with headlines that emphasized the negative side of things. Even the printing of the paper was drab, cramped, monotonous. And I found myself thinking: “Why, I like it!”

  I tried to explain this impression to my casual companion, naturally taking care not to comment on individual news items or opinions (he had already begun by asking me what I thought of a certain report from Asia) and trying at the same time to play down the negative aspect of my view, because he seemed to me the sort of man who doesn’t accept criticisms of his position and I had no intention of launching an argument.

  Instead, he seemed to be following his own train of thought, where my opinion of his paper must have been superfluous or out of place. “You know,” he said, “this paper still isn’t the way it should be? It isn’t the paper I’d like it to be.”

  He was a short but well-proportioned young man, dark, with carefully combed curly hair, his face still a boy’s, pale, pink-cheeked, with regular, refined features, long black lashes, a reserved, almost haughty manner. He dressed with rather fastidious care. “There’s still too much vagueness, a lack of precision,” he went on, “especially in what concerns our affairs. The paper still resembles the others too much. The kind of paper I mean should be mostly written by its readers. It should try to give scientifically exact information about everything that goes on in the world of production.”

  “You’re a technical expert in some factory, are you?” I asked.

  “Skilled worker.”

  We introduced ourselves. His name was Omar Basaluzzi. When he learned that I worked for the IPUAIC, he became very much interested and asked me for some data to use in a report he was preparing. I suggested some publications to him (things in the public domain, as a matter of fact; I wasn’t giving away any office secrets, as I remarked to him, just in case, with a little smile). He took out a notebook and methodically wrote down the information, as if he were compiling a bibliography.

  “I’m interested in statistical studies,” he said, “a field where our organization is far behind.” We put on our overcoats, ready to leave. Basaluzzi had a rather sporty coat, elegantly cut, and a little cap of rainproof canvas. “We’re very far behind,” he went on, “whereas, the way I look at it, it’s a fundamental field...”

  “Does your work leave you time for these studies?” I asked him.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said (he always answered with some hauteur, in a slightly smug, ex-cathedra manner), “it’s all a question of method. I work eight hours a day in the factory, and then there’s hardly an evening when I don’t have some meeting to go to, even on Sunday. But you have to know how to organize your work. I’ve formed some study groups, among the young people in our plant...”

  “Are there many... like yourself?”

  “Very few. Fewer all the time. One by one, they’re getting rid of us. One fine day you’ll see here”—and he pointed to the newspaper—“my own picture, with the headline: ‘Another worker discharged in reprisal.’”

  We were walking in the cold of the night; I was huddled in my coat, the collar turned up; Omar Basaluzzi proceeded calmly, talking, his head erect, a little cloud of steam emerging from his finely drawn lips, and every now and then he took his hand from his pocket to underline a point in his talk, and then he stopped, as if he couldn’t go ahead until that point had been clearly established.

  I was no longer following what he said; I was thinking that a man like Omar Basaluzzi didn’t try to evade all the smoky gray around us, but to transform it into a moral value, an inner criterion.

  “The smog...” I said.

  “Smog? Yes, I know Cordà wants to play the modern industrialist.... Purify the atmosphere.... Go tell that to his workers! He surely won’t be the one to purify it.... It’s a question of social structure.... If we manage to change that, we will also solve the smog problem. We, not they.”

  He invited me to go with him to a meeting of union representatives from the different plants of the city. I sat at the back of a smoky room. Omar Basaluzzi took a seat at the table on the dais with some other men, all older than he. The room wasn’t heated; we kept our hats and coats on.

  One by one, the men who were to speak stood up and took their place beside the table; all of them addressed the public in the same way: anonymous, unadorned, with formulas for beginning their speech and for linking the arguments which must have been part of some rule because they all used them. From certain murmurs in the audience I realized a polemical statement had been made, but these were veiled polemics, which always began by approving what had been said before. Many of those who spoke seemed to have it in for Omar Basaluzzi; the young man, seated a bit sideways at the table, had taken a tooled-leather tobacco pouch from his pocket and a stubby English pipe which he filled with slow movements of his small hands. He smoked in cautious puffs, his eyes slightly closed, one elbow on the table, his cheek resting in his hand.

  The hall had filled with smoke. One man suggested opening a little, high window for a moment. A cold gust changed the air but soon the fog began coming in from outside, and you could hardly see the opposite end of the room. From my seat I examined that crowd of backs, motionless in the cold, some with upturned collars, and the row of bundled-up forms at the table, with one man on his feet talking, as bulky as a bear, all surrounded, impregnated now by that fog, even their words, their stubbornness.

  CLAUDIA CAME back in February. We went to have lunch in an expensive restaurant on the river, at the end of the park. Beyond the windows we looked at the shore and the trees that, with the color of the air, composed a picture of ancient elegance.

  We couldn’t understand each other. We argued on the subject of beauty. “People have lost the sense of beauty,” Claudia said.

  “Beauty has to be constantly invented,” I said.

  “Beauty is always beauty; it’s eternal.”

  “Beauty is born always from some conflict.”

  “What about the Greeks?”

  “Well, what about them?”

  “Beauty is civilization!”

  “And so...”

  “Therefore...”

  We could have gone on like this all day and all night. “This park, this river...”

  (“This park, this river,” I thought, “can only be marginal, a consolation to us for the rest; ancient beauty is powerless against new ugliness.”)

  “This eel...”

  In the center of the restaurant there was a glass tank, an aquarium, and some huge eels were swimming inside it.

  “Look!”

  Some customers were approaching, important peop
le, a family of well-to-do gourmets: mother, father, grown daughter, adolescent son. With them was the maître d’hôtel, an enormous, corpulent man in frock coat, stiff white shirt; he was grasping the handle of a little net, the kind children use for catching butterflies. The family, serious, intent, looked at the eels; at a certain point the mother raised her hand and pointed out an eel. The maître d’hôtel dipped the net into the aquarium, with a rapid swoop he caught the animal and drew it out of the water. The eel writhed and struggled in the net. The maître d’hôtel went off toward the kitchen, holding the net with the gasping eel straight out in front of him like a lance. The family watched him go off, then they sat down at the table, to wait until the eel came back, cooked.

  “Cruelty...”

  “Civilization...”

  “Everything is cruel...”

  Instead of having them call a taxi, we left on foot. The lawns, the tree trunks, were swathed in that veil which rose from the river, dense, damp, here still a natural phenomenon. Claudia walked protected by her fur coat, its wide collar, her muff, her fur hat. We were the two shadowy lovers who form a part of the picture.

  “Beauty...”

  “Your beauty...”

  “What good is it? As far as that goes...”

  I said: “Beauty is eternal.”

  “Ah, now you’re saying what I said before, eh?”

  “No, the opposite.”

  “It’s impossible to discuss anything with you,” she said.

  She moved off as if she wanted to go on by herself, along the path. A layer of fog was flowing just over the earth: the fur-covered silhouette proceeded as if it weren’t touching the ground.

  I SAW Claudia back to her hotel that evening, and we found the lobby full of gentlemen in dinner jackets and ladies in long, low-cut dresses. It was carnival time, and a charity ball was being held in the hotel ballroom.