The Watcher and Other Stories (5 page)

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?”

“Nobody wants to prevent an expression of gratitude, Mr. Chairman,” Amerigo said. “But we're here to administer a political election. We have to make sure that each voter is free to cast his ballot according to his own ideas. What does this have to do with gratitude?”

“What ideas do you expect them to have, except gratitude? Poor outcast creatures! Here they have people who are fond of them, who take care of them, and teach them! They want to vote. More than all those others outside! Because they know what charity really means!”

Mentally Amerigo reconstructed their idea, noted the implicit calumny (“They're trying to say that Cottolengo is possible only thanks to religion and the Church, and that the Communists would simply destroy it, and therefore the vote of these poor unfortunates is a defense of Christian charity...”), he was offended by it, and at the same time, confuting it, with a certain sense of superiority (“they don't know that ours is the only total humanism...”), he erased the insult as if it had never existed, all in the space of a second (“...and that we and only we can organize institutions a hundred times more efficient than this one!”), but what he really said was: “I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, but this is a political election, they must choose among candidates of various parties...” (“Don't start making political speeches at the polls!” the thin man interrupted him), “...they're not voting for or against the Cottolengo Institute.... And so, what you've been saying, the expression of gratitude... gratitude to whom?”

Until then, the priest had stood there listening, his chin on his chest, his heavy hands pressed to the table, looking up from beneath his beret; now he raised his voice:

“Gratitude to the Lord our God, that's what!”

Nobody said another word. They all moved in silence: the man with the goiter made the sign of the cross, the older woman in white nodded her head in assent, the orange one raised her eyes as if prepared to put up even with this, the clerk started writing again, and the chairman went back to checking the list, and so each of the officials returned to his task. Agreeing with the majority, the chairman allowed the priest to accompany the afflicted man into the booth; Amerigo and the Socialist comrade had their protest put on record. Then Amerigo went outside for a smoke.

THE RAIN had stopped. Even from those desolate courtyards a smell of earth rose, of spring. A few climbing plants were in flower against a wall. Under one of the arcades a group of schoolchildren was playing, a nun in their midst. A long sound was heard, perhaps a cry, beyond the walls, beyond the roofs: were these the cries, the groans, that people said rose day and night from the wards of the hidden creatures in Cottolengo? The sound was not repeated. Through the door of a chapel a chorus of women was heard. All around there was a bustle among the various polls set up in almost all the pavilions, in ground-floor or second-floor rooms. White signs with black numbers and arrows stood out against the columns, under the old blackened plaques with the names of the saints. Municipal guards went by, carrying briefcases filled with papers. The regular policemen dawdled, their eyes dull, seeing nothing. Watchers from other polls had come out, like Amerigo, to smoke a cigarette and stare up at the sky.

“Gratitude to God.” Gratitude for their misfortunes? Amerigo tried to calm his nerves by reflecting (theology was not his forte) on Voltaire, Leopardi (his arguments against the goodness of nature and of providence), and then—naturally—on Kierkegaard, Kafka (the acknowledgment of a god beyond man's ken, a terrible god). The election, here, if you paid it some attention, became a kind of religious rite. For the mass of voters, but also for him: the supervisor's concern with possible frauds was finally trapped in a metaphysical fraud. Seen from here, from the depth of this condition, politics, progress, history were perhaps not even conceivable (we are in India), any human effort to modify what is given, any attempt to elude the fate that falls to a man at birth, was absurd. (This is India, it's India, Amerigo thought, satisfied at having found the key, but also suspecting that he was brooding over banalities.)

This assemblage of afflicted people could only be summoned, in politics, to testify against the ambition of human forces. This is what the priest meant: here any form of action (including voting in the election) was modeled on prayer, every task carried out here (the work of that little shop, the teaching in that classroom, the treatment in that hospital) had only one meaning, a variation on the one possible attitude: prayer, that is, becoming part of God, or (Amerigo was venturing definitions) the acceptance of human smallness, adding one's own nothingness to the sum in which all losses are canceled out, assenting to a final, unknown end which alone could justify these misfortunes.

To be sure, once you admit that when you say “man” you mean a Cottolengo man and not man endowed with all his faculties (to Amerigo now, despite himself, came mental images of those statuary, forceful, Prometheus-like figures from certain old party cards), the most practical attitude became the religious attitude, establishing a relation between one's own affliction and a universal harmony and completeness (did this mean recognizing God in a man nailed to a cross?). So were progress, liberty, justice then only ideas of the healthy (or of those who could, in other circumstances, be healthy), ideas of a privileged class, not universal ideas?

Already the boundary line between the Cottolengo men and the healthy was vague: what do we have beyond what they have? Limbs a bit better turned, a somewhat better proportion in our appearance, a somewhat greater capacity for co-ordinating sensations and thoughts... not much, compared to the many things that neither we nor they manage to do or know... not much, compared to our presumption that we can construct our history....

In the Cottolengo world (in our world which could become, or already be, Cottolengo), Amerigo could no longer trace the line of his moral choices (morality impels one to act; but what if the action is futile?) or his aesthetic choices (all images of man are antiquated, he thought, walking among those little plaster Madonnas, those saints; it was no accident that the painters of Amerigo's age had all turned to abstraction by now). Forced for one day in his life to consider the extent of what is called natural misfortune (“And I should be grateful that they've only allowed me to see the brighter ones...”), he felt the vanity of everything yawning at his feet. Was this what they called a “religious crisis”?

There you are, you step out for a moment to smoke a cigarette, he thought, and you're overcome with a religious crisis.

But something in him resisted. Or rather, not in him, in his way of thinking, but around him, in the very things and people of Cottolengo. Girls with pigtails bustled by with baskets of sheets (toward, Amerigo thought, some secret ward of paralytics or monsters); idiots filed past, in lines, commanded by one who seemed only a shade less of an idiot than the others (these so-called “families,” he asked himself, with sudden sociological interest—how are they organized?); one corner of the courtyard was cluttered with plaster and sand and scaffoldings because they were adding another floor to one of the pavilions (how are the bequests managed? What percentage went into expenses, additions, and how much into increase of capital?). Cottolengo was, at once, the proof and the denial of the futility of action.

Amerigo's historical attitude was regaining strength; all is history: Cottolengo, these nuns going to change the sheets. (A history, perhaps, that has remained stationary at one point in its course, clotted, turned in on itself.) Even this world of the retarded could become different, and would certainly become so, in a different society. (Amerigo had only vague images in his mind: luminous institutions, ultramodern, model educational systems, memories of pictures seen in the newspapers, an atmosphere that was almost too clean, rather Swiss....)

The vanity of everything and the importance of each action of each person were contained within the walls of the same courtyard. Amerigo had only to walk around it and he would encounter the same questions and the same answers a hundred times. So he might just as well go back to the polls; he had finished his cigarette; what was he waiting for? “A man who behaves well in history,” he tried to conclude, “even if the world is Cottolengo, is right.” And he added hastily: “Naturally, to be right is not enough.”

A LARGE, black automobile came into the courtyard. The chauffeur, with his visored cap, hastened to open the rear door. An erect, clean-shaven, gray-haired man stepped out. He was wearing a light raincoat, the kind with many buttons and loops, and the collar half turned up. People sprang into action, the policeman saluted.

The thin watcher asked the chairman in a low voice, ahem, since the Member of Parliament who was his party's candidate had arrived could he step out for a moment because he wanted to go just for a moment you understand to report how things were proceeding here.

The chairman answered in a low voice, ahem, to wait because since Members of Parliament are entitled to enter all the polling places perhaps the Honorable Member would come in here too.

And he did come in. The Honorable Member moved through Cottolengo with self-confidence, haste, efficiency, and euphoria. He inquired about the turnout of voters, he uttered a few words of kindly greeting to the voters waiting in line, as if he were paying an official visit to a summer camp for slum children. The thin watcher went over to say something to him: probably that the Communists were making difficulties, and how was he to behave with them when they wanted to put everything on record all the time. The Member barely listened to him, because he wanted to know only what was absolutely indispensable about what went on in here, and he didn't want to dwell on details. He made a vague, circular gesture, as if to say the machine was turning anyway, and turning well, there were millions of votes, and in these rather prickly situations, if a thing's done promptly, well and good: otherwise, let it go, skip it and pass on!

Then, abruptly, he asked about someone, flinging his questions to left and right: “Where is the Reverend Mother? Where is she?” and he went out into the courtyard again. The Mother Superior, informed, was already on her way to him; he went toward her, spoke to her as an old friend and as if he were jokingly giving her a scolding.

He chose to continue his tour of the various polls with the Mother Superior accompanying him. A little retinue followed him, mostly local candidates of the various districts (every so often one of the men would step forward, to tell him of some difficulty) and boys acting as messengers for the party (rushing back and forth with lists of voters transferred to other institutions but still entitled to vote here, or in any case, people for whom transportation had to be arranged), and the Member would give brief orders, unleash the messengers, the chauffeurs, answering everyone, taking him by the arm or clasping his elbow, to encourage him but also to thrust him promptly away.

At a certain point the cars for transporting voters had all gone off to collect people. A few messengers were dawdling, waiting to make another trip; the Member didn't like to see people standing idle, so he sent them off with his own car. Thus, each of them having been given a job, his retinue had dwindled. The Member found himself alone in the courtyard, and he had to wait until his car came back. The sun filled half of the sky; but still, in spurts, a few raindrops fell from the clouds. The Member stood for some moments in the solitude that kings and the mighty feel when they have finished issuing orders and see the world revolving on its own. He cast a cold, hostile look around him.

Amerigo was watching him through a window. And he thought: “As far as that man's concerned, Cottolengo doesn't even graze the lapel of his raincoat.” (Catholic pessimism about human nature could be recognized beneath the Member's open manner, but Amerigo preferred to see it as lucid cynicism.) And he thought, too: “He's a man who likes his food, who smokes with a cherrywood cigarette holder. Perhaps he has a dog and goes hunting. Surely he likes women. Maybe he went to bed last night with a woman who isn't his wife.” (Perhaps it was only Catholic indulgence toward his own gray conscience, as a good bourgeois paterfamilias, that gave the man his youthful look, but Amerigo chose to see him as a pagan, epicurean spirit.) And all of a sudden his aversion was transformed into solidarity: weren't they perhaps, the two of them, more alike than any of the others in here? Didn't they belong to the same family, the same side, the side of earthly values, politics, practicality, power? Weren't they both desecrating the Cottolengo fetish, one using it as an electoral machine and the other trying to unmask it in this function?

Looking out of the window, he noticed, at another window sill, two eyes that appeared behind the pane, a head that could only reach up as far as the nose, a huge skull covered with down: a dwarf. The dwarf's eyes were staring at the Member, and stubby little fingers were raised against the window's glass, the wrinkled palm of a tiny hand, striking against the pane, striking twice, as if to call him. What did the dwarf have to tell the man? Amerigo wondered. What was he thinking, the dwarf, of that authoritative personage? What was he thinking, he asked himself, of us, of all of us?

The Honorable Member turned, his gaze went to the window, lingered only a moment on the dwarf, then moved off, far away. Amerigo thought: “He has realized there is one who can't vote.” And he thought: “He doesn't even see him, he doesn't deign to glance at him.” And he also thought: “There, the Member and I are on one side, and the dwarf on the other,” and he felt reassured by this.