History (98 page)

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in reply, charged with greater emphasis his uninterrupted series of
bad words,
which, for that matter, exploded as harmlessly as firecrackers amid his present audience. Even Useppe, in fact, from infancy, had frequented true masters of such language (and not least, among them, the Marrocco ladies ).

Davide, in his paroxysm, felt himself the precise center of a universal scandal, exactly as if he were being struck with stones. His legs wobbled, and a feverish sweat trickled from his brow. Then he clenched his fi pursuing the thread of his harangue : "Nature belongs to all the living," he hastened to explain once more, with a hoarsened voice, "it was born free, open, and THEY have compressed and paralyzed it to make it fi into their pockets. TI1ey've transformed other people's labor into stocks and bonds, and the fi of the earth into income, and all real values of human life, art, love, fri into merchandise to be bought and pocketed. Their States are banks, usurers, who invest the price of others' labor and con sciousness in their own dirty dealings : factories of weapons and garbage, intrigues, robberies, wars, murders! Their factori of
goods
are cursed slave Lagers, in the service of their profi . . . All their values are false, they live on ersatz . . . And the Others . . . But can anyone still believe in
others,
to oppose to THEM? Maybe THEIR falsifi will remain the only subject of future History. This is perhaps the crucial point in the irreparable process of inversion, where the scholarly calculators of History, even the best unfortunately, have added things up wrong ( the grim prog nosis of Power, obviously, is suppressed by anyone who, in the clenched fi of the revolution, hides the same infected sore of Power, denying its malig nancy) ! They diagnosed the bourgeois disease as symptomatic of a class

(and so, when the class was abolished, the disease would be cured! ), whereas the bourgeois disease is the crucial, eruptive degeneration of the eternal malignant sore that infects History . . . It's an epidemic of pesti lence . . . And the bourgeoisie follows the scorched-earth tactic. Before ceding power, they'll have infected the whole earth, corrupted the total consciousness to the marrow. And so there is no hope of happiness any more. Every revolution is lost in advance!"

At the beginning of his invective, he had risen again to his feet (in fact, he had thrust the chair back with a kick) . And he remained stub born boldly, in his erect position, though the leaden weariness of this
gala
day, contradicted by his teeming brain, accumulated more and more in his muscles, defying him with its weight. In vain, then, his hoarse voice tried to clear a path in the din. And moreover, listening to his own voice, at every stage, he recognized in his supposedly
urgent communications,
as in a recorded radio play, only self-plagiarism.

Indeed, he had various selves : Davide Segre middle-school student, in

488 H I S T O R Y . . . . . . 1 9 47

short pants, and high-school student in sports jacket and red tie, and unemployed vagabond in cyclist's jersey, and apprentice factory-worker in coveralls, and Vivaldi Carlo \\·ith his knapsack, and the bearded, armed outlaw Pyotr (in his underground win ter of '43-'44, he had let his hand some black beard grow) . . . All off the present orator their famous ideal products, rushing to him from every side, and running off at the same time, like ghosts . . . \Vith the air of starting here, at this very instant, the last revolution still possible, Davide resumed his invective, forcing his breathless voice to the maximum :

"The enemy must be unmasked! Shamed! His damned tin medals have to be recognized and devaluated, without delay! Salvation depends on the OTHERS! The day false values drop on the market, to shit . . . eh, you follow me . . ." In the tavern, meanwhile, the racket had increased. On the radio a very popular li ttle dance-band was playing, and the group of music-lovers, all of one mind, had turned up the volume very loud. A syncopated tune was being performed, of which I remember nothing ex cept that the musicians accompanied it, at intervals, with the words of the song, stammered to the same rhythm ( Loo-loo-look at me, ki-ki-kiss me, etc. ), thus redoubling its witty eff and inspiring an imitative din in the younger listeners. Suddenly, Davide took umbrage, and breaking off his speech, he pulled the chair up behind him, silenced. But before fl himself down on it again, with sudden resolve, he thrust out his chest towards the company seated around him. And in a self-accusatory tone ( though with a provocatory brutality, which was the equivalent of a fi brought down hard on the table), he cried :

"I was born a bourgeois!"

"And I," replied the old man with the medal, not looking at him, but with a frank and kindly laugh, "was born a porter at the \V Market."

"Not all bourgeois are mean," the little man with the sick eyes ob served in his turn, conciliatory and judicious. "There are good ones and bad ones, and in between . . . It all depends." Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the cards, visibly anxious to follow the play: "Take it!" he whis pered eagerly, connoisseurlike, to his neighbor ( the old man with the medal ); while the latter, almost contemporaneously, had spread his thick hand over the cards in the midst of the table, announcing with victorious indifference :

"This one's mine."

Th little man with the bloodshot eyes, all agog, wriggled in his tight jacket. They counted the points, but the victory of the old man with the medal and his partner was taken for granted. The victor then assembled the deck, to deal again.

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Sinking heavily into his seat, Davide now sketched a hesitant, apolo getic smile. In that action of his "fi brought down on the table," the last of his virulence had dropped away. Indeed, his aggressive gaze of a mo ment before was followed, in his darting eyes, by another special look of his, the exact opposite : enough to make you believe that inside him there lived a wolf, a fawn, and who knows what other dissimilar creatures, of desert, forest, and hearth. At moments he looked like a kid, happy to be allowed in the grownups' company, instead of being sent to bed as on week nights.

He had bent over the table, bone-tired, but still wanting to talk, as if today, having broken the long spell of silence, he had to seize the occasion at all costs. He recalled a sentence he had read as a child in a fairy tale, about a princess set free by a prince :
for seven hours they had conversed, and they had not yet said even the seventh part of the things they had to say to each other.

The card games, at this table and at the other, continued hand after hand. Across the tables the usual words of the game fl back and forth: "give me a good one," "that's worth three points," "low card," "trump him," "I bid clubs," etc. The proprietor, on his side, had become spell bound, and half-dazed, listening
to
the generous radio program, which now off another hit song, I don't remember which. And the few young people left sang that same song under their breath, echoed by other radios outside, through the windows opened to the light westerly breeze. But Davide seemed grateful because, perhaps without paying much attenti

to him, they let him talk on. Asking for comprehension, he cast around an affectionate look, in which from inside him ( the Superego had got off his back, hiding God knows where) something terribly vulnerable could be glimpsed, a kind of ri concealment, in his stubbornness :
"1,"
he mum bled in a low voice again, "was born into a bourgeois family . . . My father was an engineer, he worked for a building fi . . . a high salary

. . . In
norma
times, besides the house where we lived, we also had
a
villa in the country, belonging to us, with a farm run by a tenant farmer-a couple of apartments rented out ( which brought in income) -an auto mobile, of course (a Lancia ) -plus I don't know what
stocks
in the bank . . ." Having ended, with this, his fi report, he stopped, as if after physica toil. And then, resuming, he informed them that in his family, from childhood, he had begun to understand the symptoms of the bour geois disease: which revolted him more and more, to the point that some times, as a boy, at the very sight of his relatives, he was overcome by attacks of hatred. "And I wasn't wrong!" he clarifi assuming again, for a fl instant, his tough-man's look.

Then, bending forward, his voice reduced to hardly more than a mur-

490 H I S T O R Y
.
. . .
. .
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mur, until it seemed a futile and disjointed grumble, addressed to the wooden tabletop, he turned to \'arious recollections of his family. His father, for example, had a whole range of diff attitudes, even diff voices, depending on whether he was talking with bosses, or colleagues, or workers . . . His father and his mother, with no suspicion of being off sive, called their employees
inferior;
and even their habitual cordiality towards them always seemed bestowed, like a gift from above . . . Their occasional benefi or alms, always fundamentally insulting, they called
charity
. . . And they spoke of
duties
in referring to all sorts of social nonsense : such as returning a dinner invitation, or a boring visit, or wear ing such-and-such a jacket on a certain occasion, or
putting in an appear ance
at a certain exhibition or stupid ceremony . . . TI1e subjects of their conversations and discussions were, more or less, always the same : gossip about the city or about relatives, hopes of typical successes for their chil dren, wise or indispensable purchases, expenses, income, rises and drops in prices . . . However, if they by chance touched on ELEVATED subjects like Beethoven's Ninth or Tri and Isolde or the Sistine Chapel, they assumed a pose of special sublimity, as if such ELEVATED THINGS were class privileges . . . They didn't regard the automobile, their clothes, the furniture in the house, as objects to be used, but as banners of a social order . . .

One of his fi jolts-the fi perhaps?-was something he had never forgotten . . . "I must have been about ten, or eleven . . . My father is driving me in the car, probably to school {it's early in the morning ), when in the street he is suddenly forced to put on the brakes. Some man has stopped us, not aggressively, but almost apologetically. From what I can understand, he is a worker, discharged the day before from a building job because of the direct intervention-it seems-of my father. I never learned the reason . . . He's still a young man (maybe forty ), but with some gray in his eyebrows; medium height, not heavy, but strong, so he seems taller

. . . His face is broad, with solid features, though still a bit adolescent, the way men often look in our parts . . . He's wearing an oilskin jacket and a beret, with some plaster spattered on it; you can see he's a mason. At every word, jets of steam come from his mouth (so this must have hap pened in mid-winter) . . . And he stands there, waving his arms, wanting to explain himself, trying even to smile, to win my father over. But instead, my father doesn't even let him speak, shouting at him, swollen with anger: 'How dare you? Not another word! Step aside! Get out of the way!' At fi

I think I see a twitch in the man's face; when already, inside, all my blood has started pounding in one desire, or rather one infi determination : that man must react, with his fi maybe even a knife, against my father! But instead, he steps back to the edge of the street, in fact, he even puts

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his hand to his beret, like a salute, while my father, furious, almost running him down, has stepped on the accelerator . . . 'You should hide yourself! Rabble! Scum!' my father goes on shouting; and I notice that, in his anger, the skin between his chin and his collar has made some reddish, vulgar furrows . . . In that other man, on the contrary, who has remained in the street, I saw no sign of vulgarity. Then I was overcome with a disgust, at being inside the Lancia with my father, worse than if I had been driving a tumbril to the guillotine; and I realized that we, and all our fellow bour geois, were the world's scum, and that man left in the street, and his fellows, were the aristocracy. And in fact, could anyone but a noble being, of true dignity, immune to all meanness and deceit, be found at that man's age, humbly begging another man his own age, off his labor in ex change for . . . ? I remember that along the last stretch of the street, I was ardently wishing I had already become heavyweight champion, so I could wreak that sublime mason's vengeance on my father . . . And for the whole day I didn't speak to him or to my mother or my sister, I hated them so much . . . That, I think, is where it began . . . I no longer saw them with the same eyes : it was as if I were looking at them always through a magnifying glass . . . fixed . . . precise . . .
"

"And where's your family now?" the man with the bloodshot eyes asked, with interest. But Davide didn't answer his question, nor did he show any reaction to the interruption except a vacant glance, returning at once, as if pressed, to tell his rosary of charges : there was nothing, in his family's exi nothing that wasn't counterfeit and polluted : their actions, their vocabulary, their thoughts. And all their daily choices, even the most trivial, were foreordained, according to certain philistine Credos they honored as maxims of a higher ethics : such and such a person is invi because he's a Count; you don't enter that cafe because it's com mon . . . But when it came to the real laws of ethics, their confusion was such you would really believe they were the unknowing butts of a joke. In his father's opinion, a building worker who took a roll of copper wire was unquesti a thief; but if someone had said to his father that his famous
stocks
were stolen from the wages of the workers, he would have taken this as an absurdity. If an armed robber had broken into their house, destroying and murdering, his father and mother would naturally have considered him an infamous criminal, deserving life imprisonment; how ever, when the Fascist robbers acted the same way against the Ethiopian territory, his parents off their own gold to help them. A system in which they themselves lived comfortably gave them no cause for suspicion. Out of sloth, they ignored politics, and the govern relieved them of concerning themselves with it, and of all responsibility. They were blind, led by the blind, and leading other blind, and they didn't realize it .