Cast a Cold Eye (8 page)

After all, you say to yourself, my requirements are modest; I will give up anything for a little peace and quiet. You forget that it was in the name of peace and quiet that this despot was welcomed—just as the Jewish banker in the concentration camp forgets the donation he made to the Nazi party fund, back in 1931, when his great fear was communism; just as Benedetto Croce, antifascist philosopher, forgot in Naples the days when he supported Mussolini in the Senate at Rome, because order was certainly preferable to anarchy and bolshevism was the real menace. You cannot believe, you will not ever believe, that your desire for peace and quiet, i.e., for the permanent stalemate, has logically resulted in the noisy oppressor on the sofa. On the contrary, his presence there seems to you a cruel and unaccountable accident.

You are not happy with your wife but you do not want change. In a more romantic period you might have dreamed of voluptuous blondes, fast women and low haunts; you might even have run off with the lady organist or the wife of the Methodist minister. But you are a man of peace and careful respectability. You do not ask adventure or the larger life. Though at one time, theoretically, you may have desired these things, you have perceived that adventure for one can readily be the excuse for adventure for all, and who knows but what your wife’s or your neighbor’s capacity for adventure might be greater than your own? If all men were created equal, programs for achieving equality would not exist. The industrialist would welcome the people’s army into the gates of the factory, if he could be sure that nobody would be any better off than he. We do not want
more
than anyone else, though we may take more for fear of getting less. What we desire is absolute parity, and this can only be achieved by calculating in a downward direction, with zero as the ultimate, unattainable ideal. Our lives become a series of disarmament conferences: I will reduce my demands if you will reduce yours. With parity as our aim, it is impossible to calculate in an upward direction, for a nation will be allowed a navy which it has not the productive capacity to build, or a man may be granted freedoms which he has not the faculties to exercise, and gross inequalities will immediately result.

So long as you and I cannot accept the doctrine “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs,” the totalitarian state will supply the answer to the difficulties of democracy and Francis Cleary will be the ideal friend. At this very moment, you are planning to overthrow the incumbent Cleary, who happens to be staying with you for the weekend. In a loud voice he has demanded something to eat, though he finished lunch only an hour ago. Your wife has rushed out to the kitchen to make him a chicken sandwich, and you sit watching him in uneasy silence. You are afraid to play the phonograph because he does not like music; you are afraid to initiate a topic of conversation because he resents any mention of persons he has not met or things he does not understand; you are afraid to pick up a newspaper lest he take it as a slight—and if you cross him he will pinch the baby.

The fires of resistance are lit in your heart as the sandwich comes in and he opens it with a blunt critical finger and asks for pickles and mayonnaise. Your pulse quickens in little throbs of solidarity with your unfortunate wife. You will make, you say to yourself, common cause with her and eject the tyrant. If she will do it
for
you, so much the better; but there can be no question whatever about the heartiness of your support. The danger is, of course, that in the warm fraternity of the revolt, the coziness of plans and preparations, the intimacy of secret meetings in lonely houses at night, with a reliable farmer standing guard (
Qui passe?
), certain illusions of your wife’s may be revived. The whole question of friends may be opened again; a period of anarchy may even follow in which all the ghosts of both camps will meet once more in your living room and debate the old issues; tempers will rise and you will have to fling out of the house late at night and look for a room in a hotel. In the interests of peace, you say to yourself, would it not be wiser to select in advance some common friend and avoid the interregnum? Somewhere, only recently did you not meet a couple…? In vain, you try to recall their faces and their name. Memory is obstinate but you do not despair. The very dimness of your impression convinces you that you are on the right track. They are the ones. If you meet them again, you will know them at once and rush forward to meet them with a glad cry of recognition. There is only one difficulty. Supposing they are already engaged…?

Your only way out of this recurrent nightmare (not counting the humane one, which is hardly worth mentioning) is for you and your wife to take the logical next step, to become the Clearys, say, of Round Hill Road. Why should you shrink from it? What have you to lose? In what do you differ from the man on the sofa?

The Cicerone

W
HEN THEY FIRST
met him, in the
wagons-lits,
he was not so nervous. Tall, straw-colored, standing smoking in the corridor, he looked like an English cigarette. Indeed, there was something about him so altogether parched and faded that he seemed to bear the same relation to a man that a Gold Flake bears to a normal cigarette. English, surely, said the young American lady. The young American man was not convinced. If English, then a bounder, he said, adjusting his glasses to peer at the stranger with such impassioned curiosity that his eyes in their light-brown frames seemed to rush dangerously forward, like strange green headlights on an old-fashioned car. As yet, he felt no unusual interest in the stranger who had just emerged from a compartment; this curiosity was his ordinary state of being.

It was so hard, the young lady complained, to tell a bounder in a foreign country; one was never sure; those dreadful striped suits that English gentlemen wear…and the Duke of Windsor talking in a cockney accent. Here on the Continent, continued the young man, it was even more confusing, with the upper classes trying to dress like English gentlemen and striking the inevitable false notes; the dukes all looked like floorwalkers, but every man who looked like a floorwalker was unfortunately not a duke. Their conversation continued in an agreeable rattle-rattle. Its inspiration, the Bounder, was already half-dismissed. It was not quite clear to either of them whether they were trying to get into European society or whether this was simply a joke that they had between them. The young man had lunched with a viscountess in Paris and had admired her house and her houseboat, which was docked in the Seine. They had poked their heads into a great many courtyards in the Faubourg St. Germain, including the very grandiose one, bristling with guards who instantly ejected them, that belonged to the Soviet Embassy. On the whole, architecture, they felt, provided the most solid answer to their social curiosity: the bedroom of Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon had informed them that the French royal family were dwarfs, a secret already hinted at in Mme Pompadour’s bedroom at the Frick museum, in New York; in Milan, they would meet the Sforzas through the agency of their Castello; at Stra, on the Brenta, they would get to know the Pisani. They had read Proust, and the decline of the great names in modern times was accepted by them as a fact; the political speeches of the living Count Sforza suggested the table-talk of Mme Verdurin, gracing with her bourgeois platitudes the board of an ancient house. Nevertheless, the sight of a rococo ceiling, a great swaying crystal chandelier, glimpsed at night through an open second-story window, would come to them like an invitation which is known to exist but which has been incomprehensibly lost in the mails; a vague sadness descended, yet they did not feel like outsiders.

Victors in a world war of unparalleled ferocity, heirs of imperialism and the philosophy of the enlightenment, they walked proudly on the dilapidated streets of Europe. They had not approved of the war and were pacifist and bohemian in their sympathies, but the exchange had made them feel rich, and they could not help showing it. The exchange had turned them into a prince and a princess, and, considering the small bills, the weekly financial anxieties that attended them at home, this was quite an accomplishment. There was no door, therefore, that, they believed, would not open to them should they present themselves fresh and crisp as two one-dollar bills. These beliefs, these dreams, were, so far, no more to them than a story children tell each other. The young man, in fact, had found his small role as war-profiteer so distasteful and also so frightening that he had refused for a whole week to go to his money-changer and had cashed his checks at the regular rate at the bank. For the most part, their practical, moral life was lived, guidebook in hand, on the narrow streets and in the cafés of the Left Bank—they got few messages at their hotel.

Yet occasionally when they went in their best clothes to a fashionable bar, she wearing the flowers he had bought her (ten cents in American money), they hoped in silent unison during the first cocktail for the Dr.-Livingstone-I-presume that would discover them in this dark continent. And now on the train that was carrying them into Italy, the European illusion quickened once more within them. They eyed every stranger with that suspension of disbelief which, to invert Wordsworth, makes its object poetical. The man at the next table had talked all through lunch to two low types with his mouth full, but the young man remained steady in his conviction that the chewer was a certain English baronet traveling to his villa in Florence, and he had nearly persuaded the young lady to go up and ask him his name. He particularly valued the young lady today because, coming from the West, she entered readily into conversation with people she did not know. It was a handicap, of course, that there were two of them (“My dear,” said the young lady, “a couple looks so complete”), but they were not inclined to separate—the best jockey in a horse race scorns to take a lighter weight. Unfortunately, their car, except for the Bounder at the other end, offered very little scope to his imaginative talent or her loquacity.

But, as they were saying, Continental standards were mysteriously different; at the frontier at Domodossola a crowd gathered on the rainy platform in front of their car. Clearly there was some object of attraction here, and, dismissing the idea that it was herself, the young lady moved to the window. Next to her, a short, heavy, ugly man with steel-rimmed spectacles was passing some money to a person on the platform, who immediately hurried away. Other men came up and spoke in undertones through the window to the man beside her. In all of this there was something that struck the young lady as strange—so much quiet and so much motion, which seemed the more purposeful, the more businesslike without its natural accompaniment of sound. Her clear, school-teacher-on-holiday voice intruded resolutely on this quarantine. “
Qu’est-ce que se passe?
” she demanded. “
Rien,
” said her neighbor abruptly, glancing at her and away with a single, swiveling movement of the spectacled eyes. “
Cest des amis qui recontrent des amis.
” Rebuffed, she turned back to the young man. “Black market,” she said. “They are changing money.” He nodded, but seeing her thoughts travel capably to the dollar bills pinned to her underslip, he touched her with a cautioning hand. The dead, noncommittal face beside her, the briefcase, the noiseless, nondescript young men on the platform, the single laugh that had rung out in the Bounder’s end of the car when the young lady had put her question, all bade him beware: this black market was not for tourists. The man who had hurried away came back with a dirty roll of bills which he thrust through the window, “
Ite, missa est,
” remarked the young lady sardonically, but the man beside her gave no sign of having heard; he continued to gaze immovably at the thin young men before him, as though the transaction had not yet been digested.

At this moment, suddenly, a hubbub of singing, of agitated voices shouting slogans was heard. A kind of frenzy of noise, which had an unruly, an unmistakably seditious character, moved toward the train from somewhere outside the shed. The train gave a loud puff. “A revolution!” thought the young lady, clasping the young man’s hand with a pang of terror and excitement; he, like everyone else in the car, had jumped to his feet. A strange procession came into sight, bright and bedraggled in the rain—an old woman in a white dress and flowered hat waving a large red flag, two or three followers with a homemade-looking bouquet, and finally a gray-bearded old man dressed in an ancient frock coat, carrying an open old-fashioned black umbrella and leaping nimbly into the air. Each of the old man’s hops was fully two yards high; his thin legs in the black trousers were jack-knifed neatly under him; the umbrella maintained a perfect perpendicular; only his beard flew forward and his coat-tails back; at the summit of each hop, he shouted joyously, “
Togliatti!
” The demonstration was coming toward the car, where alarm had given way to amazement; Steel Glasses alone was undisturbed by the appearance of these relics of political idealism; his eyes rested on them without expression. Just as they gained the protection of the shed, the train, unfortunately, began to move. The followers, lacking the old man’s gymnastic precision, were haphazard with the bouquet; it missed the window, which had been opened for the lira-changing, and fell back into the silent crowd. The train picked up speed.

In the compartment, the young man was rolling on the seat with laughter; he was always the victim of his emotions, which—even the pleasurable ones—seemed to overrun him like the troops of some marauding army. Thus happiness, with him, had a look of intensest suffering, and the young lady clucked sympathetically as he gasped out, “
The Possessed, The Possessed.
” To the newcomer in the compartment, however, the young man’s condition appeared strange. “What is the matter with him?” the young man, deep in the depths of his joy, heard an odd, accented little voice asking; then the young lady’s voice was explaining, “Dostoevski…a small political center…a provincial Russian town.” “But no,” said the other voice, “it is Togliatti, the leader of
Italian
Communists who is in the next compartment. He is coming from the Peace Conference where he talks to Molotov.” The words,
Communist, Molotov, Peace Conference,
bored the young man so much that he came to his senses instantly, sat up, wiped his glasses, and perceived that it was the Bounder who was in the compartment, and to whom the young lady was now re-explaining that her friend was laughing because the scene on the platform had reminded him of something in a book. “But no,” protested the Bounder, who was still convinced that the young lady had not understood
him.
He appeared to come to some sort of decision and ran out into the corridor, returning with a Milanese newspaper folded to show an item in which the words,
Togliatti, Parigi, Pace,
and
Molotov
all indubitably figured. The young lady, weary of explanation, allowed a bright smile as of final comprehension to pass over her features and handed the paper to the young man, who could not read Italian either; in such acts of submission their conversations with Europeans always ended. They had got used to it, but they sometimes felt that they had stepped at Le Havre into some vast cathedral where a series of intrusive custodians stood between them and the frescoes relating with tireless patience the story of the Nativity. Europeans, indeed, seemed to them often a race of custodians, didactic automatons who answered, like fortune-telling machines, questions to which one already knew the answer or questions which no one would conceivably ask.