He was so excited by this discovery that he couldn’t wait to discuss it with Lia, and when he saw the open door of an office he asked a nun if he might telephone. Lia’s number was busy. “I’ll try again later, may I? Thank you.” And he began to shift back and forth between the “detachment,” which moved among the wards, and the telephone which always gave the busy signal, and he was less and less sure of what he wanted to say to Lia; now he would like to explain everything to her, the election, Cottolengo, the people he had seen there, but there was a nun who came and went in that office and he wouldn’t be able to talk for long. And every time he heard the busy signal, he felt both irritation and relief, also because he was afraid the conversation would turn to that certain problem, and he didn’t want to face it: or rather, he wanted only to tell her that—while he hadn’t changed his intentions—even in weighing those intentions he was a different person.
So, though he was now hoping the girl’s number would go on being busy, he didn’t stop calling her, and when all of a sudden it was free, he started talking to her about something quite different, about the fact that her line was always busy.
She answered with remarks equally far from the point, that everything between the two of them was as always, but for Amerigo what was as always now seemed heartbreaking and filled with emotion, and he couldn’t even pay attention to her words, but only to their sound, as if it were a kind of music.
Suddenly he pricked up his ears. Lia was saying: “And besides, I don’t know what to take with me, perhaps I should pack a light overcoat. What will the weather be like now, in Liverpool?”
“What? You’re not going to Liverpool?”
“Of course, I am. Tomorrow. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“What are you talking about? Why?” Amerigo was alarmed by what a journey to Liverpool might mean, but also reassured because her leaving dismissed their earlier fears, and confused because Lia always made the most unexpected decisions, and heartened because Lia was still the same Lia.
“You know: I have to go visit my aunt in Liverpool.”
“But you said you weren’t going.”
“But you told me to go, you said it yourself: go.”
“I? When?”
“Yesterday.”
It was the same old story. “Uff. Maybe I said ‘go to Liverpool,’ but I was just talking. It was like saying: go to the devil, don’t bother me with this business of Liverpool and your aunt. If I said: ‘Well, go to Liverpool,’ it didn’t mean you were to go there!”
He grew angry, but he knew that, with Lia, love was precisely this way of growing angry with her.
“But you told me to go!”
“You’re like that man who took everything literally!”
Lia replied, resentfully: “What man? Whom are you talking about? What do you mean?” as if in Amerigo’s words she had sensed something extremely offensive; and Amerigo no longer knew how to end the conversation, and he was full of irritation and fury, and at the same time he knew he was caught and hanging up the phone was meaningless.
XIV
THE LAST votes they had to collect were from some nuns confined to their beds. The watchers advanced through long corridors, among rows of testers with white curtains draped up over some of the beds to frame an aged nun leaning on the pillows, emerging from the covers, fully dressed, even to the freshly starched wing of her coif. The conventual architecture (probably dating from the middle of the last century, but virtually timeless), the décor, the nuns’ habits, offered a sight that must have been exactly the same in a convent of the seventeenth century. Amerigo was certainly setting foot in a place of this sort for the first time. And in such cases, a character like him—what with the historical fascination, aesthetism, the recollection of famous books, his interest (typical of revolutionaries) in how institutions shape the aspect and the spirit of civilizations—was capable of giving way to a sudden enthusiasm for the nuns’ dormitory, of allowing himself almost to feel envy, in the name of future societies, of an image that, like this row of white testers, contained so many things: practicality, repression, serenity, command, exactness, absurdity.
But no, not at all. He had passed through a world that rejected form, and now, finding himself in this harmony virtually removed from the world, he realized it didn’t matter to him. There was something else, now, that he was trying to hold in his gaze, not images of the past and the future. The past (for the very fact that its image was complete and no change could be thought of: like this dormitory) seemed to him a huge snare. And the future, when one imagines it (that is, when one connects it with the past), also turns into a snare.
Here the voting proceeded more swiftly. The ballots were placed on a tray, over the knees of the nun, sitting up in her bed; the white curtains of the tester were drawn. “Have you voted, sister?” The curtains were drawn back again, the ballots were put in the ballot box. The huge bed was occupied by a mountain of pillows and by the body of the old woman, under her great white pectoral, with the wings of her coif touching the sky of the canopy. Waiting there, outside the curtain, the chairman, the clerk, and the watchers seemed smaller.
We’re like Little Red Ridinghood visiting her sick grandmother, Amerigo thought. Perhaps, when we open the curtains, we won’t find Granny any more, but the wolf instead. And then: Every sick granny is always a wolf.
XV
THEY WERE together again, all the election officials in the big room. There wasn’t much of a crowd now: the names that hadn’t been ticked off, in the list of registered voters, were very few. The chairman, his nervous tension past, exuded, as a reaction, an equally erratic joviality. “Ah, tomorrow, the final tally, and then the election’s over! After that, ladies and gentlemen, our duty’s done! So for another four years at least we don’t have to think about it!”
“We’ll start thinking about it, all right...” Amerigo grumbled, already foreseeing (though he was mistaken) that the day he was living through would be remembered among the dates of an Italian reaction (instead, the famous “swindle law” didn’t pass, Italy went on, expressing more and more clearly its two-headed nature), the date of a worldwide petrification (but throughout the world the things that seem most stony really move), pacifying only lazy consciences like the chairman of these polls, and stifling the aroused consciences’ need to seek further (instead, everything proved more and more complex, and it was increasingly difficult to distinguish the positive and the negative thing, and increasingly necessary to discard appearances and look for the essences that weren’t makeshift: few and still uncertain...).
Now the watchers gathered around one of the last voters, a big man with a cap. He had no hands; he had been like this since birth: two cylindrical stumps came from his sleeves, but, pressing one against the other, he could hold and handle objects, even small ones (the pencil, a sheet of paper: in fact, he had voted by himself, had folded the ballot by himself), as if in the grip of two huge fingers. “Anything: even light a cigarette,” the man said, and with rapid movements he extracted the pack from his pocket, held it to his mouth, drew out the cigarette, pressed the box of matches under his armpit, struck one, puffed on the cigarette, impassively.
They were all around him, asking him how he did it, how he had learned. The man answered curtly; he had the large, flushed face of a worker, steady, without expression. “I know how to do everything,” he said. “I’m fifty years old. I grew up in Cottolengo.” He spoke with his chin jutting forward, with a hard, almost defiant manner. Amerigo thought: Man triumphs even over malign biological mutations; and he recognized in the man’s features, in his clothes and manner, the traits that mark working humanity, also deprived—symbolically and literally—of something of its completeness, and yet able to build itself, to affirm the decisive role of homo faber.
“I know how to do any kind of job by myself,” the big man in the cap was saying. “The nuns taught me. Here at Cottolengo we do everything for ourselves. Workshops and everything. We’re like a city.
I’ve always lived in Cottolengo. We don’t lack for anything. The nuns see to it we have everything.”
He was confident and impenetrable: in that sort of smugness at his strength, his belonging to an order that had made of him what he was. Will the city that can multiply man’s hands, Amerigo asked himself, be already the city of the whole man? Or is homo faber valid because he never considers his wholeness sufficiently achieved?
“You’re fond of them, aren’t you, of the nuns?” the woman in the white blouse asked him now, eager to hear a consoling word at the end of the day.
The man went on repeating in a sharp, almost hostile tone, like the dutiful citizen of the productive civilizations (Amerigo was thinking of both the great countries): “Thanks to the nuns, I was able to learn. Without the nuns to help me, I wouldn’t be anything. Now I can do whatever I want. You can’t say a thing against the nuns. There’s nobody like the nuns....”
Homo faber’s city, Amerigo thought, always runs the risk of mistaking its institutions for the secret fire without which cities are not founded and machinery’s wheels aren’t set in motion; and in defending institutions, unawares, you can let the fire die out.
He went to the window. A shred of sunset glowed among the sad buildings. The sun was already down but there was a reddish color behind the outline of the rooftops and the eaves, and in the courtyards it opened perspectives of a city that had never been seen.
Women, dwarfs, passed by in the yard, pushing a wheelbarrow of twigs. It was a heavy load. Another woman, huge, a giantess, came and pushed it, almost running, and she laughed. They all laughed. Another woman, also huge, walked in sweeping, with a twig broom. A very fat woman was pushing a kind of caldron between high poles, on bicycle wheels, perhaps the evening soup. Even the ultimate city of imperfection has its perfect hour, the watcher thought, the hour, the moment, when every city is the City.
Smog
Translated by William Weaver
THAT WAS a time when I didn’t give a damn about anything, the period when I came to settle in this city. Settle is the wrong term. I had no desire to be settled in any sense; I wanted everything around me to remain flowing, temporary, because I felt it was the only way to save my inner stability, though what that consisted of, I couldn’t have said. So when, after a whole series of recommendations, I was offered the job as managing editor of the magazine Purification, I came here to the city and looked for a place to live.
To a young man who has just got off the train, the city—as everyone must know—seems like one big station: no matter how much he walks about, the streets are still squalid, garages, warehouses, cafés with zinc counters, trucks discharging stinking gas in his face, as he constantly shifts his suitcase from hand to hand, as he feels his hands swell and become dirty, his underwear stick to him, his nerves grow taut, and everything he sees is nerve-racking, piecemeal. I found a suitable furnished room in one of those very streets; beside the door of the building there were two clusters of signs, bits of shoebox hung there on lengths of string, with the information that a room was for rent written in a rough hand, the tax stamps stuck in one corner. As I stopped to shift the suitcase again, I saw the signs and went into the building. At each stairway, on each landing there were a couple of ladies who rented rooms. I rang the bell on the second floor, stairway C.
The room was commonplace, a bit dark, because it opened on a courtyard, through a French window; that was how I was to come in, along a landing with a rusty railing. The room, in other words, was independent of the rest of the apartment, but to reach it I had to unlock a series of gates; the landlady, Signorina Margariti, was deaf and rightly feared thieves. There was no bath; the toilet was off the landing, in a kind of wooden shed; in the room there was a basin with running water, with no hot-water heater. But, after all, what could I expect? The price was right, or rather, it was the only possible price, because I couldn’t spend more and I couldn’t hope to find anything cheaper; besides, it was only temporary and I wanted to make that quite clear to myself.
“Yes, all right, I’ll take it,” I said to Signorina Margariti, who thought I had asked if the room was cold; she showed me the stove. With that, I had seen everything and I wanted to leave my luggage there and go out. But first I went to the basin and put my hands under the faucet; ever since I had arrived I had been anxious to wash them, but I only rinsed them hastily because I didn’t feel like opening my suitcase to look for my soap.
“Oh, why didn’t you tell me? I’ll bring a towel right away!” Signorina Margariti said; she ran into the other room and came back with a freshly ironed towel which she placed on the footboard of the bed. I dashed a little water on my face, to freshen up—I felt irritatingly unclean—then I rubbed my face with the towel. That act finally made the landlady realize I meant to take the room. “Ah, you’re going to take it! Good. You must want to change, to unpack; make yourself right at home, here’s the wardrobe, give me your overcoat!”
I didn’t let her slip the overcoat off my back; I wanted to go out at once. My only immediate need, as I tried to tell her, was some shelves; I was expecting a case of books, the little library I had managed to keep together in my haphazard life. It cost me some effort to make the deaf woman understand; finally she led me into the other rooms, her part of the house, to a little étagère, where she kept her work baskets and embroidery patterns; she told me she would clear it and put it in my room. I went out.
Purification was the organ of an Institute, where I was to report, to learn my duties. A new job, an unfamiliar city—had I been younger or had I expected more of life, these would have pleased and stimulated me; but not now, now I could see only the grayness, the poverty that surrounded me, and I could only plunge into it as if I actually liked it, because it confirmed my belief that life could be nothing else. I purposely chose to walk in the most narrow, anonymous, unimportant streets, though I could easily have gone along those with fashionable shopwindows and smart cafés; but I didn’t want to miss the careworn expression on the faces of the passers-by, the shabby look of the cheap restaurants, the stagnant little stores, and even certain sounds which belong to narrow streets: the streetcars, the braking of pickup trucks, the sizzling of welders in the little workshops in the courtyards: all because that wear, that exterior clashing kept me from attaching too much importance to the wear, the clash that I carried within myself.
But to reach the Institute, I was obliged at one point to enter an entirely different neighborhood, elegant, shaded, old-fashioned, its side streets almost free of vehicles, and its main avenues so spacious that traffic could flow past without noise or jams. It was autumn; some of the trees were golden. The sidewalk did not flank walls, buildings, but fences with hedges beyond them, flower beds, gravel walks, constructions that lay somewhere between the palazzo and the villa, ornate in their architecture. Now I felt lost in a different way, because I could no longer find, as I had done before, things in which I recognized myself, in which I could read the future. (Not that I believe in signs, but when you’re nervous, in a new place, everything you see is a sign.)
So I was a bit disoriented when I entered the Institute offices, different from the way I had imagined them, because they were the salons of an aristocratic palazzo, with mirrors and consoles and marble fireplaces and hangings and carpets (though the actual furniture was the usual kind for a modern office, and the lighting was the latest sort, with neon tubes). In other words, I was embarrassed then at having taken such an ugly, dark room, especially when I was led into the office of the president, Commendatore Cordà, who promptly greeted me with exaggerated expansiveness, treating me as an equal not only in social and business importance—which in itself was a hard position for me to maintain—but also as. his equal in knowledge and interest in the problems which concerned the Institute and Purification. To tell the truth, I had believed it was all some kind of trick, something to mention with a wink; I had accepted the job just as a last resort, and now I had to act as if I had never thought
of anything else in my whole life.
Commendatore Cordà was a man of about fifty, youthful in appearance, with a black mustache, a member of that generation, in other words, who despite everything still look youthful and wear a black mustache, the kind of man with whom I have absolutely nothing in common. Everything about him, his talk, his appearance—he wore an impeccable gray suit and a dazzlingly white shirt—his gestures—he moved one hand with his cigarette between his fingers—suggested efficiency, ease, optimism, broad-mindedness. He showed me the numbers of Purification that had appeared so far, put out by himself (who was its editor-in-chief) and the Institute’s press officer, Signor Avandero (he introduced me to him; one of those characters who talk as if their words were typewritten). There were only a few, very skimpy issues, and you could see that they weren’t the work of professionals. With the little I knew about magazines, I found a way to tell him—making no criticisms, obviously—how I would do it, the typographical changes I would make. I fell in with his tone, practical, confident in results; and I was pleased to see that we understood each other. Pleased, because the more efficient and optimistic I acted, the more I thought of that wretched furnished room, those squalid streets, that sense of rust and slime I felt on my skin, my not caring a damn about anything, and I seemed to be performing a trick, to be transforming, before the very eyes of Commendatore Cordà and Signor Avandero, all their technical-industrial efficiency into a pile of crumbs, and they were unaware of it, and Cordà kept nodding enthusiastically.