The Watcher and Other Stories Read online

  The thin watcher also spoke out against the woman in the orange sweater. “They both live here; they see each other every day. They must know each other, mustn’t they?”

  (They would remember that humanity could be a different thing, as in fables, a world of giants, an Olympus.... As we do: and perhaps, without realizing it, we are deformed, backward, compared to a different, forgotten form of existence....)

  “If they don’t know each other’s name, then it isn’t valid,” the orange woman insisted.

  (The more he was overcome by the possibility that Cottolengo might be the only possible world, the more Amerigo struggled not to be swallowed up by it. The world of beauty was fading on the horizon of possible realities like a mirage, and Amerigo went on swimming, swimming toward the mirage, to reach that unreal shore, and before him he saw Lia swimming, her back level with the surface of the sea.)

  “Well, it seems I’m the only one here who is interested in respecting the law...” the orange woman said, looking around, vexed. In fact, the other watchers were examining their papers, as if they were concerned with something quite different, as if they were trying to discard the problem, opposing it only with an absent attitude, faintly annoyed, and Amerigo was doing the same, Amerigo who was there for the specific purpose of giving her a hand: he was at sea, among distant thoughts, as if in a dream. And in his waking part, he reflected that, in any case, the others would have their way and would allow voters without identification to cast their ballots anyhow.

  Supported by the thin watcher, the chairman found the strength to emerge from his uncertainty and say: “I think the identification is valid.”

  “May I put my opposition on record?” the woman said, but the very fact that she asked it as a question was already an admission of defeat.

  “There’s nothing to put on record,” the thin man said.

  Amerigo moved behind the table, past the orange woman’s back, and said softly: “Take it easy, comrade. We’ll wait.” The woman looked at him, questioningly. “It isn’t worth making an issue of this. Our moment will come.” The woman calmed down. “We must raise a general objection.”

  VI

  FOR A moment Amerigo was pleased with himself, with his calm, his self-control. Perhaps this was what he wanted to be his behavior’s constant norm, in politics as in everything else: mistrust of enthusiasm, synonym of naïveté, as of factional rancor, synonym of insecurity, weakness. This attitude of his corresponded to a habitual tactic of his party, which he had promptly assimilated, as psychological armor, to dominate alien, hostile situations.

  However, as he thought about it, wasn’t this desire of his to wait, not to intervene, to aim at a “general objection,” dictated by a feeling of futility, of renunciation, by a basic laziness? Amerigo already felt too discouraged to hope he could assume any initiative. His legalitarian battle against irregularities, fraud, hadn’t yet begun, and already that wretchedness had overwhelmed him like an avalanche. If they would only hurry it up, with all their litters and crutches, if they would only get it over with, this plebiscite of all the living and the dying and perhaps even the dead: with the limited formalities he could summon to his aid, no election watcher could stop the avalanche.

  Why had he come to Cottolengo? Respect for legality? Ha! One had to start again from the beginning, from zero: it was the fundamental meaning of words and institutions that should be debated, to establish the most helpless person’s right not to be used as an instrument, as an object. And this, today, in the present situation, when the elections at Cottolengo were mistaken for an expression of the will of the people, seemed so remote that it could be invoked only through a general apocalypse.

  Extremism, like an air pocket, was, he felt, sucking him down. And, with extremism, he could excuse his sloth, his indifference, he could immediately salve his conscience: if he could remain silent and motionless in the face of an imposture like this, if he was almost paralyzed, it was because in such situations it was all or nothing, either you accepted them or else: tabula rasa.

  And Amerigo shut himself up like a hedgehog, in an opposition that was closer to aristocratic hauteur than to the warm, elementary partisanship of the people. In fact, the nearness of other members of his party, instead of giving him strength, infected him with a kind of irritation, and when the woman in orange spoke up, for example, he was seized by a contrary reaction, as if he were afraid of resembling her. His thoughts raced in such an agile objectivity that he could see with the adversary’s own eyes the very things he had felt contempt for a moment earlier, only to swing back, then, and feel with greater coldness how right his criticism was, and, finally, to attempt a serene judgment. Here again he was inspired not so much by a spirit of tolerance and of solidarity with his neighbor as a need to feel superior, capable of thinking all that was thinkable, even the adversary’s thoughts, and capable of reaching a synthesis, of perceiving everywhere the patterns of History, according to the prerogative of the true, liberal spirit.

  In those years the Italian Communist party, among its many other tasks, had also assumed the position of an ideal liberal party, which had never really existed. And so the bosom of each individual Communist could house two personalities at once: an intransigent revolutionary and an Olympian liberal. The more schematic international Communism became, in those hard times, the more explicit its official, collective expressions became, the more the militant individual lost inner richness, to conform to the compact, cast-iron block, and the more the liberal, housed in the same individual, gained new, iridescent facets.

  Was this perhaps a sign that Amerigo’s true nature—and the true nature of many like him—would have been, if left to itself, a liberal’s, and that only a process, precisely, of identification with what was different, enabled him to be considered a Communist? Asking himself this question, for Amerigo, was like asking himself what was the essence of an individual identity (if such a thing ever existed...), beyond the external conditions that determined it. To weld in him—and in so many like him—those various metals was “the task of History,” he thought—in other words, a fire beyond them (which went beyond individuals, with all their weaknesses)....

  That fire glowed, however faintly, even in those polls, in all present there, and gradually it was revealed in each, varying in its degree of intensity, in the individual temperature they ran in playing their parts: Amerigo’s vacillation, the orange woman’s impatience (she was a member of the Socialist party, as he learned the moment they could go off to one side and talk), the thin, young Christian Democrat’s need to believe that he was (even if there was no need) on a battle line, surrounded by enemies, the chairman’s apprehensive rigidity, caused by his tenuous conviction in the system, and, for the woman in the white blouse (who overlooked no opportunity to underline her disagreement with the other woman), a need to feel edified and protected from the scandal of disobedience.

  As for the others at the polls (all of them Christian Democrats, or further to the right), they seemed concerned only with smoothing over the differences: all of them knew that everyone in here would vote the same way, didn’t they? Then why become upset, why look for trouble? There was nothing to do but accept things as they were, friends or enemies.

  Among the voters, too, the importance of what they were doing varied. For the majority the act of voting occupied a minimal space in their awareness, it was a little “x” to make with the pencil against a printed symbol, something that had to be done, as they had been taught, with great care, like the proper way to behave in church or to make their beds. With no suspicion it could be done any other way, they concentrated their effort on the practical act, which was in itself—especially for the invalids or the mentally deficient—enough to engage their complete attention.

  For others, more emotional, or indoctrinated in a different didactic system, the election seemed to take place in the midst of perils and deceit; everything was to be distrusted, a source of offense or fear. Certain nuns in white hab
its were especially obsessed with the idea of spotted ballots. One would go into the booth, stay in there for five minutes, then come out without having voted. “Have you voted? No? Why not?” The nun would then hold out the ballot, open and unmarked, and point to a little dot, faint or dark. “It’s got a mark on it!” she would protest, in an angry voice, to the chairman. “I want a new one!”

  The ballots were printed on ordinary paper, greenish, made from a grainy pulp, full of impurities, spattered with printer’s ink from top to bottom. Soon the officials learned that whenever one of those white nuns came to vote the scene of the rejected ballot would be repeated. They couldn’t be convinced that these were only defects in the paper, and that their ballots wouldn’t be invalidated because of them. The more the chairman insisted, the more stubborn the little nuns became: one—an old, dark nun, who came from Sardinia—actually flew into a rage. They must surely have been given God knows what instructions about the question of the stains or spots: they were to watch out, at the polls there were Communists who spotted the nuns’ ballots on purpose, to spoil their votes.

  Terrified, that’s what they were, these little white nuns. And in trying to make them see reason, the officials were of one mind: in fact, it was the chairman and the thin supervisor who became the most angry, since they weren’t trusted and were treated as perfidious enemies. Like Amerigo, they wondered what could have been said to those poor women, to frighten them so, what horrors they had been threatened with, descriptions of the menacing Communist victory, which might be caused by a single wasted vote. The glow of a religious war filled the room for a moment, then was extinguished in nothingness; and the performance of their task resumed its normal course, drowsy, bureaucratic.

  VII

  THE JOB assigned him now, in the division of labor among the officials of the polls, was to check the identity papers. Swarms of nuns came to vote, hundreds at a time: first the white ones, then the black. As far as documents went, nearly all of them were in order; often the identity cards had been issued just a few days before, brand new. In the weeks before the election, the registry officers must have worked night and day to furnish documents for entire religious orders. And photographers, too: photograph after photograph, passport size, passed before Amerigo’s eyes, all the pictures equally divided into black and white spaces, the oval of the face framed by white coifs and by the trapeze of the pectoral, all framed in the black triangle of the veil. And what it meant was this: either the nuns’ photographer was a great artist, or else nuns are especially photogenic.

  Not only because of the harmony of that celebrated pictorial motif, the nun’s habit, but also because the faces came out as natural, serene, and with a good likeness. Amerigo realized that this checking the nuns’ documents was becoming, for him, a kind of spiritual repose.

  When he thought about it, it was strange: as a rule, in those little square photographs, ninety times out of a hundred the sitter has widened eyes, bloated cheeks, a mindless smile. At least that was how he always looked, and now, checking these identity cards, in photographs where he found the face tense, forced in an unnatural expression, he recognized his own lack of ease before the glass eye that transforms you into an object, his lack of detachment in his attitude toward himself, his neuroses, the impatience that prefigures death in the photographs of the living.

  But not for the nuns: they posed in front of the lens as if their faces no longer belonged to them; and so they came out perfectly. Not all of them, of course (Amerigo now read the nuns’ photographs like a fortuneteller: he could distinguish those who were still bound by earthly ambition, those moved by envy, by unextinguished passions, those who were fighting themselves and their fate): you had to cross a kind of threshold, forgetting yourself, and then the photograph recorded this immediacy, this inner peace and blessedness. Is it a sign that blessedness exists? Amerigo wondered (these problems were not familiar to him, and he tended to associate them with Buddhism, with Tibet), and, if it does exist, should it be pursued? Should it be pursued, to the detriment of other things, of other values, in order to be like these nuns?

  Or like the total idiots? They, too, in their freshly printed identity cards, were happy and photogenic. For them, too, offering an image of themselves was no problem: did this mean that the goal which a nun’s life attains, after a toilsome path, is given to idiots by nature, by chance?

  Instead, those who remain at a halfway house, the afflicted, the misfits, the retarded, the neurotic, those for whom life is difficulty and alarm, are terrible when photographed: with those taut necks, those rabbity smiles, especially the women, who still cherish a residual hope of looking pretty.

  They brought in one nun on a stretcher. She was young. Strangely, she was a beautiful woman. Dressed as if she were dead, her face, flushed, seemed composed, as in the religious pictures hung in churches. Amerigo would have preferred not to be drawn to look at her. They left her in the booth on the stretcher, with a stool nearby, so that she, too, could make her “x.” Amerigo, while she was in there, had her photograph before him, on the table. He looked at it and was frightened. Even in its features, this was the face of a drowned woman, at the bottom of a well, shouting with her eyes, as she was pulled down into the darkness. He realized that everything in her was refusal, writhing: even her lying there motionless and ill.

  Is it good to be blessed? Or is this anguish better, this tension that stiffens faces at the photographer’s flash and makes us dissatisfied with the way we are? Always ready to make extremes meet, Amerigo would have liked to go on clashing with things, fighting, and yet achieve at the same time, within himself, a calm above it all.... He didn’t know what he would have liked: he understood only how far he was, he and everyone else, from living as it should be lived the life he was trying to live.

  VIII

  THE ABUSES to which an opposition party’s watcher can usefully raise objections during the balloting at Cottolengo are limited. To become angry because they allow idiots to vote, for example, doesn’t achieve any great result: when the documents are in order and the voter is able to go into the booth by himself, what can be said? You can only let it go, perhaps hoping he hasn’t been taught well and will make a mistake (though this occurs rarely) and will increase the number of invalid ballots. (Now that the batch of nuns was finished with, it was the turn of a horde of young men, resembling one another like brothers, with their twisted faces, dressed in what must have been their best suits, as they are sometimes seen filing through the city on a Sunday when the weather is fine, and people point to them: “Look at the cutu.”) Even the woman in the orange sweater was almost solicitous with them.

  The cases where you have to be more alert are when a medical certificate authorizes a half-blind woman, or a paralytic, or someone without hands, to be accompanied into the booth by an authorized person (usually a nun or a priest) who can make the “x” for her or him. With this system, many poor wretches, incapable of discrimination, who would never be able to vote even if they had the use of their eyes or their hands, are promoted to the rank of bona fide voter.

  In such cases there is almost always a certain margin for doubt and protest—for example, with a certificate of very weak eyesight: the watcher can immediately raise a protest. “Mr. Chairman, this man can see! He can go and vote by himself!” the woman in orange would exclaim. “I held the pencil toward him and he reached out and took it!”

  This was a poor man with a deformed neck and a goiter. The priest accompanying him was large, heavy, blunt-faced, a beret pulled down to his ears; his manner was harsh and practical, not unlike a truck driver’s; he had been bringing voters in and out for some while. He held out the palm of his hand, vertically, with the document plastered over it, and he struck it with the other hand: “Medical certificate. It’s written here that he can’t see.”

  “He can see better than I do! He took two ballots, and then he noticed there were two of them!”

  “You think you know better than the oculist
?”

  The chairman, to stall for time, pretended amazement. “What’s the trouble? What’s the trouble?” Everything had to be explained to him again from the beginning.

  “Let’s see if he can go into the booth by himself,” the woman said. The man was already on his way.

  “Oh no!” the priest said. “What if he makes a mistake?”

  “Ha! If he makes a mistake it’s because he isn’t capable of voting!” the woman in orange replied.

  “Why are you taking it out on this poor unfortunate man? Shame on you!” the other woman official, the one in white, said to the first woman.

  At this point Amerigo intervened. “We could surely make a test, to see if his sight...”

  “Is this certificate valid, or isn’t it?” the priest said.

  The chairman examined the paper up and down and from side to side, as if it were a bank note. “Oh, yes, it’s valid....”

  “It’s valid, if it tells the truth,” Amerigo protested.

  “Is it true that you can’t see?” the chairman asked the man with the goiter. The man with the deformed neck looked up. He didn’t speak; he began to cry.

  “I object! They’re intimidating the voter!” the thin watcher said.

  “Poor creature,” the older woman in white said. “Not a spark of compassion!”

  “Since the majority of the watchers agree...” the chairman said.

  “I object!” the orange woman said.

  “So do I,” Amerigo said.

  “What’s all this fuss?” the priest said to the chairman, curtly, as if angry with him. “Are you preventing a voter from casting his vote? Mr. Chairman, have you nothing to say?”

  The chairman decided the moment had come for him to lose his temper, to fly into a rage, the most violent rage that could be mustered by the mild, whining man he was. “Why, why, why,” he said, “why, what is this? What’s come over you all? Why do you want to stop this man? They all live here, poor things, at the Little Home of Divine Providence, which took them in when they were mere babies! And now, when they want to show their gratitude, you want to prevent them! Gratitude to those who have given them nothing but kindness! Have you no feelings?”