The Watcher and Other Stories Read online

  In those years, Amerigo’s generation (or rather, that part of his generation that had lived in a certain way during the years after ’40) had discovered the resources of a previously unknown attitude: nostalgia. And so, in his memory, he began to contrast the scene before his eyes with the atmosphere of Italy after the liberation, in those few years whose most vivid recollection now was the way everyone had taken part in political affairs and actions, in the problems of that moment, serious and elemental (these were thoughts of the present: then he had lived as if the atmosphere of those times was natural, as everyone did, enjoying it—after all that had happened—angry at things that were wrong, without ever thinking they could be set right); he remembered how people looked then, all of them seeming equally poor, and interested in universal questions more than in private ones; he remembered the makeshift party offices, filled with smoke, with the rattle of mimeograph machines, with people in their overcoats outdoing one another in volunteer work (and this was all true, but it was only now, when years had gone by, that he could begin to see it, to make an image of it, a myth); he thought that only that newly born democracy deserved the name “democracy”; that was the value which, a little while ago, he had been seeking vainly in the humility of objects and hadn’t found; because that period was over now, and the field had slowly been occupied again by the gray shadow of the bureaucratic State, the same before, during, and after Fascism, the old gap between the managers and the managed.

  The voting which was about to begin would (Amerigo was, unfortunately, sure) lengthen this shadow, widen this gap, it would drive those memories still further back, until they became less and less substantial and harsh, and more and more ethereal and idealized. So the Cottolengo visiting parlor was the perfect setting for the day: wasn’t this room perhaps the result of a process similar to democracy’s? In the beginning, here too (in a period when poverty was still without hope) there must have been warmth in the piety that filled people and things (perhaps there was even now—Amerigo didn’t want to deny that—in individual persons and places in the institution, separated from the world), and between the outcasts and their benefactors there must have been created the image of a different society, where life, and not self-interest, was what mattered. (Like many nonbelievers, looking at things from the historical view, Amerigo made a point of understanding and appreciating developments and forms of religious life.) But now this was a huge institution, a complex of hospitals, with certainly outdated equipment, which somehow performed its function, its services, and, what’s more, had become productive, in a way no one could have imagined at the time of its foundation: it produced votes.

  So is what matters, in everything, only the beginning, the moment when all energy is tensed, when only the future exists? Doesn’t the moment come, for any organization, when normal administrative routine takes over? (For Communism, too—Amerigo couldn’t help wondering—would it happen with Communism, too? Or was it already happening?) Or... or are institutions, which grow old, of no matter; is what matters only the human will, the human needs which go on being renewed, restoring verity to the instruments they use? Here, to establish the polls (now they had only to tack up in a prominent position—according to the regulations—three notices: one with the laws concerned, and two with the lists of candidates), those men and women, strangers and in part hostile to one another, were working together, and a nun, perhaps a Mother Superior, was helping them (they asked her if they could have a hammer and a few tacks), and some women inmates, with checked aprons, peeped in curiously, and “I’ll get them!” a girl with a huge head cried, pushing past the others. She ran off laughing, came back with hammer and tacks, then helped them move a bench.

  Her excited movements revealed, in the rainy courtyards beyond, a whole participation, an excitement at this election, as if for an unexpected feast day. What was it? What was this cafe in tacking up properly those notices, like white sheets (white, as official notices always seem, even with all their black print which nobody reads), which united a group of citizens, all surely “a part of the productive life,” with these nuns, and the poor girls who knew nothing of the outside world except what could be seen from an occasional funeral procession? Amerigo now felt a false note in this common effort: in them, in the election officials, it resembled the effort you make during military service to carry out the assigned tasks whose ends remain alien to you; in the nuns and inmates it was as if they were preparing trenches all around, against an enemy, an attacker: and this election bustle was the trench, the defense, but in some way also the enemy.

  So when the officials were at their table, waiting, in the empty room, and when the little group outside of people who wanted to get their voting over with quickly began to move, and when the municipal guard began to let the first ones in, all of them felt the certainty of what they were doing, but also a hint of absurdity. The first voters were some little old men—inmates, or artisans employed by the institution, or both at once—a few nuns, a priest, some old women (Amerigo was already thinking that these polls might not be too different from others): as if the opposition brooding behind it all had chosen to present itself in its most reassuring aspect (reassuring for the others, who expected the election to confirm the old positions; depressingly normal, for Amerigo), but no one felt reassured by it (not even the others), and all sat there instead waiting for some presence to make itself known from those invisible recesses, perhaps a challenge.

  There was a lull in the flow of voters, and a footstep was heard, a kind of hobbling, or rather a banging of planks, and all the election officials looked toward the door. In the doorway a little woman appeared, very tiny, seated on a stool; or rather, not exactly seated, because she didn’t touch the floor with her feet, nor did her legs sway, nor were they folded under her. They weren’t there, her legs. This stool, low, square, a footstool, was covered by her skirt, and below—below her waist, and also below the woman—it seemed there was nothing: only the legs of the stool could be seen, two vertical sticks, like the legs of a bird. “Come in!” the chairman said, and the little woman began to advance, that is she thrust forward one shoulder and a hip, and the stool shifted obliquely on that side, and then she thrust out the other shoulder and the other hip, and the stool made another quarter-turn to catch up; and fixed to her stool in this way, she dragged herself across the long room to the table, holding out her voter’s certificate.

  IV

  YOU BECOME accustomed to anything, and more quickly than you think. Even to watching the inmates of Cottolengo vote. After a while, it seemed the most usual, monotonous sight to those on this side of the table; but on the other side, among the voters, the emotion of the exceptional event, the breaking of the norm, continued to spread. The election itself had nothing to do with it: who understood that? The thought that filled them was apparently the unusual public appearance required of them, inhabitants of a hidden world, unrehearsed to play the protagonist’s part before the inflexible gaze of outsiders, representatives of an unknown order. Some of the voters suffered, morally and bodily (stretchers carried in some patients, while others, lame or paralyzed, hobbled forward on crutches), some displayed a kind of pride, as if their existence had finally been recognized. In this pretense of freedom that had been imposed on them, was there also, Amerigo wondered, a glimmer, a presage of real freedom? Or was it only the illusion, for just a moment and no more, of being there, of displaying oneself, of having a name?

  It was a hidden Italy that filed through that room, the reverse of the Italy that flaunts itself in the sun, that walks the streets, that demands, produces, consumes; this was the secret of families and of villages, it was also (but not only) rural poverty with its debased blood, its incestuous couplings in the darkness of the stables, the desperate Piedmont which always clings to the efficient, severe Piedmont, it was also (but not only) the end of all races when their plasm sums up all the forgotten evils of unknown predecessors, the pox concealed like a guilty thing, drunkenness the only par
adise (but not only that, not that alone), it was the mistake risked by the material of human race each time it reproduces itself, the risk (predictable, for that matter, on a calculable basis, like the outcome of games of chance) which is multiplied by the number of the new snares: the viruses, poisons, uranium radiation... the random element that governs human generation which is called human precisely because it occurs at random....

  And what, if not random action, had placed him, Amerigo Ormea, a responsible citizen, an aware voter, a participant in democratic power, on this side of the table, and not on the other side, like that idiot, for example, who came forward laughing, as if it were all a game?

  When he was opposite the chairman, the idiot snapped to attention, made a soldierly salute, and held out his documents: identity card, electoral certificate, all in order.

  “Good,” the chairman said.

  The other man took his ballot, the pencil, clicked his heels once more, saluted, and marched confidently toward the booth.

  “These are fine voters, all right,” Amerigo said aloud, though he realized the remark was banal and in bad taste.

  “Poor things,” said the woman in the white blouse, adding then: “Well, in a way, they’re blessed....”

  Swiftly, Amerigo thought of the Sermon on the Mount, of the various interpretations of the expression “poor in spirit,” and then of Sparta and Hitler, who did away with idiots and the deformed; he thought of the concept of equality, according to the Christian tradition and the principles of ’89, then of democracy’s century-long struggle to establish universal suffrage, and of the arguments that reactionary polemics opposed to it, the thought of the Church, first hostile, then favorable; and now of the new electoral mechanism of the “swindle law,” which would give more force to this idiot’s vote than to his own.

  But wasn’t this implicit evaluation of his own vote as superior to the idiot’s also an admission that there was some logic in the old anti-egalitarian argument?

  The “swindle law” was nothing. The trap had been sprung long since. The Church, after years of refusal, had taken at face value the equal civil rights of all citizens, but it replaced the concept of man as protagonist of History with that of Adam’s flesh, wretched and ill, which God can nonetheless save through Grace. The idiot and the “responsible citizen” were equal before the omniscient and the eternal; History had been restored to the hands of God; the dream of the Enlightenment had been checkmated when it seemed to win. Election watcher Amerigo Ormea felt he was a hostage, captured by the enemy army.

  V

  THE WATCHERS spontaneously arrived at a division of labor: one sought out the names on the register, another crossed them off the voting list, a third checked the identity cards, one directed the voters to this or that booth, depending on which was free. A natural understanding among them was quickly formed, so they could carry out these tasks as rapidly as possible, without confusion, and there was even a kind of tacit alliance with regard to the chairman, elderly, slow, afraid of making mistakes, whom they had to urge on, all together, with determination, each time he was about to be swamped by details.

  But beyond this practical division of tasks, another division was taking shape, the real one, which set them against one another. The first to give herself away was the woman in the orange sweater; she began nervously to make objections because of an old woman who came out of the booth, waving her ballot, unfolded. “Her vote’s no good! She showed her ballot!”

  The chairman said he hadn’t seen anything. “Go back into the booth and fold your ballot now, right and proper,” he said to the old woman, and to the watcher: “You have to be patient...”

  “The law is the law,” the woman insisted harshly.

  “But she meant no harm...” said another watcher, a thin, bespectacled man. “You could close an eye...”

  “We’re here to keep our eyes open,” Amerigo might have said, at that point, to support the woman in the orange sweater, but he felt a desire to close his own eyes, as if that procession of inmates gave off a hypnotic fluid, as if it made him prisoner of a different world.

  For him, an outsider, it was a uniform procession, mostly of women, and he had a hard time distinguishing differences among them: there were those who wore checked aprons and those in black with bonnet and shawl, and the white nuns and the black nuns and the gray nuns, and those who lived at Cottolengo and those who seemed to have come there just to vote. Anyway, they were all alike to him, ageless old bigots, who voted in the same way, amen.

  (Suddenly he imagined a world where beauty no longer existed. And it was female beauty he thought of.)

  These girls with their hair in braids, orphans perhaps or foundlings brought up in the institution and destined to remain there all their lives: at thirty they still had a slightly infantile look, he couldn’t tell whether it was because they were backward or because they had always lived there. You would have said they went straight from childhood to old age. They resembled one another like sisters, but in each group there was one who stood out, the brightest, the dutiful one, explaining endlessly to the others how the voting procedure worked, and when there were some who had no documents, she would sign for them, swearing to their identity, as the law allows.

  (Resigned to spending the whole day among those drab, colorless creatures, Amerigo felt a yearning need for beauty, which became focused in the thought of his mistress Lia. And what he now remembered of Lia was her skin, her color, and above all one point of her body—where her back arched, distinct and taut, to be caressed with the hand, and then the gentle, swelling curve of the hips—a point where he now felt the world’s beauty was concentrated, remote, lost.)

  One of the “bright” girls had already signed for four others. Then came another of the women all in black, Amerigo couldn’t tell if they were nuns or what. “Do you know anyone?” the chairman asked her. She shook her head, dismayed.

  (What is this need of ours for beauty? Amerigo asked himself. Is it an acquired characteristic, a linguistic convention? And what, in itself, is physical beauty? A sign, a privilege, an irrational stroke of luck, like—among those girls—their ugliness, deformity, deficiency? Or is it a gradually shifting model we invent for ourselves, more historical than natural, a protection of our cultural values?)

  The chairman urged the woman on: “Look around. See if somebody knows you and can identify you.”

  (Amerigo thought that instead of being there he could have spent Sunday in Lia’s arms, and this regret didn’t now seem to contradict his sense of civic duty which had led him to act as watcher: to make sure the world’s beauty doesn’t pass in vain, he thought, is also History, civic action....)

  The little woman in black looked around, all at sea, and then the same “bright” girl sprang forward and said: “I know her!”

  (Greece... Amerigo was thinking. But isn’t placing beauty too high in the scale of values also a step toward an inhuman civilization, which will then sentence the deformed to be thrown off a cliff?)

  “Why, she knows them all, that girl does!” The shrill voice of the woman in orange rose. “Mr. Chairman, ask her if she can give you the voter’s name.”

  (For thinking of his friend Lia, Amerigo now felt he should apologize to this beautyless world which for him had become reality, while Lia appeared in his memory as unreal, a shade. All the outside world had become a shade, a mist, while this one, inside, the Cottolengo world, so filled his experience that now it seemed the only real one.)

  The “bright” girl had come up and was taking the pen to sign the register. “You know Battistina Carminati, don’t you?” the chairman asked in one breath, and the girl promptly answered: “Oh yes, yes, Battistina Carminati,” and she signed the register.

  (A world, Cottolengo, Amerigo thought, that could have become the only world in the world if the evolution of the human species had reacted differently to some prehistoric cataclysm or some pestilence... Who could speak of the backward, deformed, idiots, today, in a wo
rld that was totally deformed?)

  “Mr. Chairman! What kind of identification is that? You told her the name yourself!” The orange woman was enraged. “Try asking Carminati if she recognizes the other girl...”

  (...A path evolution might yet take, Amerigo reflected, if atomic radiations do act on the cells that control the traits of the species. And the world might become populated by generations of human beings who for us would be monsters, but who to themselves will be human beings in the only way that beings are human....)

  The chairman was already bewildered. “Well, do you know her? You know who she is?” he asked, and nobody could say to whom he was speaking now.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” the woman in black stammered, frightened.

  “Of course, I know her; she was in the Sant’ Antonio ward last year, wasn’t she?” the “bright one” protested, twisting her face toward the watcher in the orange sweater, who replied: “Then ask her to tell us your name!”

  (If the only world in the world were Cottolengo, Amerigo thought, without another world outside, which, in exercising its charity, overwhelmed and crushed and mutilated it, perhaps this Cottolengo world too could become a society, begin a history of its own....)