This arrangement would leave them wholly at Caisotti’s mercy; Quinto saw this clearly, but he also saw that it did provide a way of escaping from all this worry, at least for a year, and moreover it spared him the remorse he would feel at leaving his mother to struggle with the rents. Travaglia too understood that this proposal was not altogether to the Anfossis’ disadvantage, and he supported it. Quinto tried to bargain and they ended up in Caisotti’s office. There was a new secretary, a redhead, new furniture, and a new fluorescent lamp. Caisotti had them both sit down and offered cigarettes. A woman came in, a countrywoman, obviously, no longer young, with a little boy. “I’d like to introduce my wife,” Caisotti said. “She’s come to live here too now. She was just about my last link with home.”
The understanding was that Quinto would discuss the whole matter with his mother and with Ampelio, who was due to come home for a visit.
He was walking up toward the villa, alone, when he saw the old carpenter, Masera. The man was going down the hill, on his bicycle; he braked when he saw Quinto and said hello.
“So you’re home for a while, eh? On business? The building, I suppose. . . . It always seems to be in the same state every time I pass by. It must be driving you all crazy. Is it true that Caisotti hasn’t paid you yet? Look, I’ve never liked to ask you, but sometimes I’ve seen you in the street looking a bit worried, and I’ve said to myself, I’ll just have a word with him now. Then I thought, no, better not. . . . But we often talk about it, the comrades, you know. . . . How did you ever go and get yourselves in Caisotti’s hands? Didn’t you know the kind of guy he is? If I told you some of the dirty tricks he’s played on us . . .”
Quinto’s nerves were at the breaking point, and yet at the same time he felt a sense of relief. This plunge in real estate, which he had defended and exalted to himself, as though to protect it from the attacks of Masera and his friends, had now become something he could discuss calmly with them. They were on his side, they were behind him.
“Oh, I know you had to sell quickly, to pay your taxes,” Masera went on. “And it was a good idea to go into partnership for your building – leave the work to others, for what that was worth. . . . But why didn’t you come to Party Headquarters to ask us? We could have given you some advice. There are contractors who, even though they’re not in the Party, are our friends, or at least they want to keep in with us. Then we’ve got a cooperative society too; it’s a going concern. . . . Come down and talk things over with us one evening. We’re planning a joint action to stop speculation, to stabilize real estate prices, to get the building code respected. It’s just not possible to put up with the sort of things that are going on now, all this swindling. . . . We can fight back; there’s plenty to be done. Look, you’ll be needing tenants soon. Well, come and have a word with us. Every now and then we hear of someone; people write to us, from Turin and Milan, people in the Party – with money too, sometimes. If we can give them an idea of the price . . .”
Quinto walked home feeling as if he was carrying a corpse on his back. Strangled by Masera’s well-meaning chatter, the daring individualism of the free-enterprise building contractor, he rolled romantic eyes wildly in the midday sun.
Ampelio was there. They shut themselves up in the dining room and, covering the table with papers, they went over their accounts from the beginning.
The Signora was in the garden. The scent of honeysuckle was in the air, the nasturtiums were an almost too vivid splash of color. If she didn’t raise her eyes to the ranked windows of the apartment buildings all around, the garden was still the garden. She went from bed to bed, pruning the dead stalks, making sure that the gardener had watered everything. A snail climbed up the pointed leaf of an iris. She pulled it off and threw it on the ground. A sudden burst of voices made her look up. There, on the top of the building, they were laying the tar on the terrace. She thought it was nicer when they made houses with tiled roofs and put a flag up to show that the roof was on. “Boys, boys!” she shouted toward the dining room. “They’ve finished the roof!”
Quinto and Ampelio didn’t answer. The shutters were drawn and the room was half dark. They sat with bundles of papers on their knees, calculating once again how long it would be before their capital was amortized. The sun was sinking behind Caisotti’s building and the light that filtered through the slats and played over the silver on the sideboard grew weaker and weaker. Now only the upper slats were bright, and slowly the light died, reflected on the polished surfaces of the trays and the teapots. . . .
(1957)
Footnote
Chapter 20
*The short-lived “Italian Socialist Republic,” proclaimed by Mussolini in September, 1943, after the collapse of the Fascist regime.
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
(Series: # )
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