The Watcher and Other Stories (6 page)

The dwarf rapped his little hand against the window once more, but this time the Member didn't even turn around. Surely the dwarf had nothing to say to the man, his eyes were only eyes, without thoughts behind them, and yet you would have thought he had some message to communicate, from his wordless world, his world without relationships. What judgment, Amerigo wondered, can a world deprived of judgment pass on us?

The sense of human history's vanity which had come over him a little earlier in the courtyard seized him again: the realm of the dwarf overcame the realm of the Member, and now Amerigo felt entirely on the dwarf's side, he identified with Cottolengo's testimony against the Parliamentarian, against the intruder, the only real enemy who had infiltrated this place.

But the dwarf's eyes rested, with the same absence, on everything that moved in the courtyard, Member included. Denying value to human powers implies the acceptance (or the choice) of the worse power: the realm of the dwarf, having demonstrated its superiority over the Member's realm, annexed it, made it its own. And now dwarf and Member confirmed that they were on the same side, and Amerigo could stay there no longer, he was excluded....

The black automobile returned and unloaded its freight of trembling little old women. With great relief, the Member took refuge inside the car, rolled down the window to issue some final incitements, and then left.

AT NOON the flow of voters began to thin out. At the polls they agreed on taking turns in leaving, so some of the watchers who lived nearby could slip home for a bite to eat. Amerigo's turn came first.

He lived alone, in a little apartment; a woman came in by the hour to clean up and do a bit of cooking. “The Signorina telephoned twice,” the woman said. He answered: “I'm in a hurry; give me something to eat right away.” But there were two things he wanted more than food: to take a shower and to sit for a moment with a book open before his eyes. He took the shower, dressed; in fact, he changed his suit and put on a clean shirt. Then he drew his armchair over to the bookcase and started looking through the lower shelves.

His library was limited. As time went by, he had realized it was best to concentrate on a few books. His youth had been full of random, insatiable reading. Now maturity led him to reflect, to avoid the superfluous. With women it had been the opposite: maturity made him impatient; he had had a succession of brief, absurd affairs, all of them, as he could tell from the beginning, mistakes. He was one of those bachelors who, from habit, like to make love in the afternoon and, at night, to sleep alone.

The thought of Lia, which, all morning, as long as she remained an unattainable memory, had been necessary to him, was now irksome. He should telephone her, but talking to her at that moment would undo the web of thoughts he was slowly weaving. In any case, Lia would soon call him again, and before hearing her voice, Amerigo wanted to begin reading something that would channel and accompany his reflections, so that he could resume their train after the phone call.

But he couldn't find a book that met his needs, among the ones he had there: classics, haphazardly assembled, and modern writers, especially philosophers, a few poets, some books of cultural interest. Lately he had been trying to avoid pure literature, as if ashamed of his youthful vanity, his ambition to be a writer. He had been quick to understand the error concealed in it: the claim to individual survival, having done nothing to deserve it beyond preserving an image, true or false, of oneself. Personal literature now seemed to him a row of tombstones in a cemetery: the literature of the living as well as of the dead. Now he sought something else from books: the wisdom of the ages or simply something that helped to understand something. But as he was accustomed to reason in images he went on picking from thinkers' books the image-filled kernel, mistaking them for poets, in other words, or else he dug out science, philosophy, history from pondering over Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and Oedipus blinding himself, and King Lear losing his mind in the storm.

It was pointless now to open the Bible: he already knew the game he would start playing, with the book of Job, identifying the election watchers, chairman, priest, in the characters who gather around the plagued man, to convince him how to deal with the Eternal.

Rather, sticking to texts that, even if you're just leafing through them, always offer something that grips you, the Communist Amerigo Ormea took up Marx. And in the
Youthful Writings
he found the passage that goes:

 

...Man's universality appears, practically speaking, in that same universality that makes all nature man's
inorganic
body, both because nature is (1) an immediate means of subsistence, and because it is (2) the matter, the object, and the instrument of man's vital activity. Nature is man's
inorganic body
precisely because it is not his human body. To say man
lives
on nature means that nature is his
body
, with which he must constantly progress, in order not to die....

 

Swiftly, he was convinced Marx could mean also this: once outside the society that makes men become things, the totality of things—nature and industry—becomes human, and even the handicapped man, the Cottolengo man (or, in the worst hypothesis, simply man), is restored to the rights of the human race as he makes use of this total body, this extension of his body: the richness of what exists (also “inorganic, spiritual nature,” he read earlier, perhaps through a residue of Hegelianism, that is to say, reasoned nature, as in science and art), what has become finally a general object of human conscience and human life. Can it also mean that “Communism” (Amerigo tried to make the word sound as if it were being uttered for the first time, so that it would again be possible to think, beneath the noun's husk, of this dream of a death and resurrection of nature, a Utopia's treasure buried beneath the foundations of “scientific” doctrine), that Communism will restore sound legs to the lame, and eyesight to the blind? Will the lame man then have many, many legs at his disposal to run with, so many that he won't notice if one of his own is missing? That the blind man will have so many antennae to understand the world that he will forget he has no eyes?

The telephone rang. Lia asked: “Well, where have you been all morning?”

Amerigo had explained nothing to her, and he had no intention of doing so. Not for any special reason, but because there were some things he talked about with Lia, and some things he never mentioned! and this was one of the latter. “There's an election on, you know,” was all he said.

“Voting takes two minutes. You just go and vote. I've already been.”

(For whom she had voted was a question Amerigo didn't bother to ask himself, and to ask her would have cost him an effort, it meant mixing one kind of problem—his relationship with her—and another—his relationship with politics. However, this silence weighed on his conscience, both because of the party—every Communist's duty was to make “grass-roots” propaganda, and he didn't even try with his mistress!—and because of her; why did he never talk with her of the things that were most important to him?)

“Well, I was busy. I'm one of the men who sit behind the table at the polls,” he said, feeling very annoyed.

“Ah. I only asked because I wanted to plan this afternoon.”

“Nothing doing. I have to go back there.”

“Again?”

“I've got myself involved.” And he decided to add: “The party, you know....”

(Amerigo's being a Communist meant no more to Lia than if he were the fan of one football team or another. Was this right?)

“Why don't you find somebody else to take your place?”

“I told you: when you start, you have to stay to the end. It's the law.”

“Smart, weren't you?”

“Hm.”

She was expert in making him nervous, this girl.

“It's the last day of your week. Oh, you know. You remember, I told you? The week of your horoscope...”

“Lia, what's my horoscope got to do with...”

“
A decisive week in your love life, other activities not advised
.”

“That magazine's horoscope!”

“It's the best; it's never wrong.”

They began one of their usual arguments, caused by the fact that, instead of saying “Horoscopes are all lies,” which would have been natural for him, Amerigo became involved—thanks to his habit of looking at things from the adversary's point of view and his aversion to expressing obvious notions—in a technical analysis of astrology, trying to prove to her that the very people who believed in the stars' influence should find it impossible to trust horoscopes in newspapers and magazines.

“No, listen: the birth hour isn't only distinguished by the position of the Sun but...”

“What do I care? For you and me, those horoscopes always hit the nail on the head!”

“You're irrational, Lia, you're always irrational.” Amerigo was growing angry. “If you would just look at the planets with some logic. Take Pluto, which is supposed to...”

“I'm basing what I say on experience, not on talk,” Lia answered furiously. There was no understanding each other.

After the phone call, Amerigo sat down at the table and began to eat, the book open before him, and at the same time he tried to resume his interrupted thinking. He had come to a point, an opening tiny as a pinprick, through which he could see a human world of a structure so different that even nature's injustices lost their importance, became negligible, and there was an end to that struggle for mastery which lies in charity, between those who offer it and those who receive it.... But no, he couldn't find his place again, it was hopeless, he had lost the thread; it was always the same with that girl! Just the sound of her voice seemed enough to alter all the proportions around him, so whatever he happened to argue about with Lia (anything at all, some piece of nonsense, horoscopes, Colonel Townsend, the best diet for colitis victims) became of all-consuming importance, and he was engulfed body and soul in a quarrel which then continued as a soliloquy, an inner rage, accompanying him for the rest of the day.

He realized that he had also lost his appetite.

“Irrational, that's what she is, that girl!” he repeated to himself, growing angry all over again, knowing, at the same time, Lia could be no other way and if she were some other way it would be as if she didn't exist. “Irrational, prelogical!”—and he felt a double pleasure, reviving his own suffering at Lia's way of thinking, and applying to it, cruelly, aggressively, the most elementary logic.

“Prelogical, prelogical!” In his imaginary argument, he went on flinging this word in Lia's face, and now he regretted not having said it to her: “Prelogical! You know what you are? You're prelogical!” And he would have wanted her to understand at once what he meant, or rather, no: he wanted her not to understand so he could explain to her at length what he meant by “prelogical” and so she would be offended and so he could go on calling her “prelogical” and, at the same time, explain to her clearly why she had no reason to be offended, on the contrary, why “prelogical” in her case was the right word for her, because when she heard herself called “prelogical” she was offended as if “prelogical” were an insult, whereas instead...

He threw down his napkin, rose from the table, and went to the telephone. He called her. He needed to quarrel again and to say “prelogical” to her, but even before he had said “Hello” Lia said in a low voice: “Sssh... be quiet...”

Music was coming, muffled, from the other end of the wire. Amerigo had already lost his self-confidence. “Well... what is it?”

“Sssh...” Lia said, as if she didn't want to miss a note. “What record is it?” Amerigo asked, just to be saying something.

“
La-la-la
... Can't you hear? I gave you the same one.”

“Oh, of course...” Amerigo said; he didn't care. “Listen, I meant to tell you...”

“Sssh,” Lia whispered, “I want to hear the end....”

“You think I called you up to listen to a record over the phone? If that's what I wanted, I could listen to one of my own without getting up from the table!”

There was a silence at the other end of the wire; the flow of music had also stopped. Then Lia said, slowly: “...Ah.
Your own
records?”

Amerigo realized he had said the worst thing he could have said. He tried, swiftly, to remedy the situation: “
Mine
... I mean
yours
, the ones you've given me....”

Too late. “Oh, I know... you don't care who gave them to you....”

This was an old question, unbearable for Amerigo. He had certain records, so what? They meant nothing to him, but once, for some reason he had told Lia he never tired of listening to them; nothing wrong with that; but when Lia learned, from a thoughtless remark of his, that the records had been given to him by one Maria Pia, she had blown the thing up in such a disagreeable way that they could never talk about it afterward without quarreling. Then she had given him some new records; and she wanted him to throw away the old ones. Amerigo had said no, on principle; he didn't care about the records or about Maria Pia, that was all water under the bridge, but he wouldn't allow objective facts like the music on a record to be linked with subjective ones like his feelings for the person who had given him the record, nor would he admit that he had to explain why he wouldn't allow this connection: it was an intolerable business, and now it had trapped him once more.

He was in a hurry, but he couldn't cut her off without making matters worse. Especially since, this time, she was pretending to say the things he always said: “Oh, I understand, a piece of music is a piece of music, the memory of a person has nothing to do with it...” and he was trying to say the things that ought to please her: “But I listen to the records I like best, I mean the ones you picked out, don't I?” So he couldn't tell whether they were still quarreling or not.