Innocence. Julian Barnes
never anything as ugly as Comrade Gramsci. Ugliness is a hard thing to forgive at the age of ten. The thick mouth of the prisoner, his father’s friend, opened darkly, like a toad’s, without a single tooth in sight. The tiny crippled body could no longer make any pretence of fitting into his ordinary clothes, which hung on him, as they would have done on a circus animal. He was not sitting down, but propped standing up against the wall. The smell of illness, stronger than disinfectant, filled the room, and there was no other air to breathe. While his father unwillingly took the only chair, Salvatore, after standing up for a while, perched on the corner of the clean, hostile cover of the bed.
‘We have brought a few medicines, just what we could get at the chemist’s.’
‘Many thanks, but no, I should prefer you to save them for someone else. All I ask for here is some kind of stimulant, but Dr Marino doesn’t prescribe those. You’re very good, Domenico, but I have all I need as far as I’m allowed it. My sister-in-law comes quite regularly.’
The visit was not going as it should, the present was not wanted. Gramsci, in a hoarse painful voice, difficult to follow, asked about Mazzata, and for the name of the local Party secretary. When he was told it he said, ‘No, I don’t know that name.’
‘He’s of the new generation, Nino, you couldn’t have heard of him.’
‘My one dread is that my memory will go. If one is forty-four, with no books to speak of, and no memory, one can’t expect to write anything of value. I have no record of what’s happening outside here either, except the official newspapers. My mind is still clear, but I think perhaps I’ve lost the gift of patience. When I was in prison I knew my friends were saying “If he can stand five years shut up in one place or another, surely he can stand six,” but in fact the fifth year in prison is very different from the fourth, and one can’t tell what the sixth will be like.’
‘But, Nino, this is a clinic. It’s the first time I’ve had an answer to any of my applications to visit you. That showed me how different things are for you now.’
‘It means that they don’t consider me important any more. But I knew about your applications. Don’t think that I’ve forgotten what affection is.’
By now Domenico’s enthusiasm had become more like pleading. He seemed to be begging the situation to right itself and to become what he had hoped and expected.
‘How could one do that, Nino? You remember Turin, you remember when the tram-lines froze and none of us could get home, and you gave us your Ten Commandments?’
‘In Turin,’ said Gramsci, ‘I made a resolution that I would cut every strand, every connection, between myself and my family. Of course I had no children of my own then. It was only little by little that I realized how dry, coarse and squalid is a life without affection through the bond of the flesh. You’ll tell me that nothing could be more obvious, and yet I didn’t see it at that time.’
‘I don’t know how to answer you,’ said Domenico hesitantly. ‘This is my only son, my respect for you has never changed, I’ve come not only to see you once again but to ask about the things that still confuse me.’
Salvatore continued to stare fixedly at the sick man, and now it seemed to him that he looked, in his crumpled suit, more like a squab or a fledgling bird, with large nocturnal eyes, disturbingly blue, and a beaked nose. On top of a cupboard full of medicine bottles there were three photographs, one of a girl, one of a boy, one of a woman with both the girl and the boy. These were evidently the prisoner’s children, and Salvatore, who pondered a good deal about such things, felt sick at the thought of how the hunchback could have managed to beget them. The height of his own ambition, at the moment, was to dive into the irrigation tank in Mazzata from the topmost height of the containing wall. Now he was looking at a fully-grown man whose body was of no practical use to him whatever.
A change of tone, much like a change of temperature, told him that the discussion was now about himself. It continued as though, by some curious fiction, he was not in the room at all, and in accordance with the same fiction he pretended not to listen. His school work was mentioned. This, though in a way reassuring, was bitterly disappointing, worthy of his mother and her friends, not worth travelling to Rome for. He was ready to say, or to have it said for him, that he had passed the first of his junior intermediate exams. His father made nothing of that, but, trembling with urgency, passed rapidly on. His hands, hanging down loosely between his knees, pressed themselves together to emphasize every point.
‘Of all the truths I’ve learned from you, Comrade, whether I’ve heard them with my own ears or whether I’ve read them, I’ve been interested most of all in what you’ve had to say about education. Through the upbringing of our children we can begin, even today, to build the society of the future. My son here is intelligent, but he will stay with me in Mazzata, I shan’t lose him to the cities. He will be an intellectual for the people of Mazzata. When he goes to the Liceo, I shall prevent his learning Latin. Latin is still what it has always been, the means by which one class can overawe and humiliate another. I shall go to see the school authorities and insist that he is taught simply and naturally, through question and answer.’
When he paused, awaiting for words of approval, Gramsci said: ‘Let him learn Latin.’
He was speaking now with increasing difficulty.
‘Let him learn Latin. I learnt it. Education should never be acquired easily. Skill in a trade doesn’t come without work and suffering, and after all, learning is a child’s trade.’
Slavatore saw that his father was disconcerted, and although this was nothing new, he was sorry.
‘And science?’
‘Of course, if you’re certain you can distinguish it from witchcraft.’
‘Nino, in Turin you advised both of us to read Rousseau.’
‘Who were “both of us”?’
‘Myself and Luca Sannazzaro, you remember Luca?’
‘Don’t try to make me infallible,’ said Gramsci, ‘you can see I have enough trouble without that. In 1927, when they moved me from Ustica to Milan, I was allowed to plant a few seeds of chicory, and when they came up I had to decide whether to follow Rousseau and leave them to grow by the light of nature, or whether to interfere in the name of knowledge and authority. What I wanted was a decent head of chicory. It’s useless to be doctrinaire in such circumstances.’
Shuffling himself round into a new position, he looked directly at Salvatore.
‘If your father won’t let you learn what you want to, what will you do?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
Gramsci began to tell, in his shadowy voice, stories of his own elder brother, who had been defiant as a child and as a gesture had taken the family cat to the village baker and asked him to roast it. When his shoes were locked up to prevent his running away he blacked his feet with polish and went off just the same. The story began to steal in its own right into the hidden reaches of Salvatore’s mind. He forgot the hospital room for the moment and gave way to the charm of what had happened then to someone who was indisputably here now. Gramsci went on to say a little about himself, as a crippled child, whose mother had always kept a coffin and a white dress ready for him, as he wasn’t expected to last long. ‘However, I have lived for more than forty years.’ He, too, had felt that it might be necessary to escape from home, and with this in mind he had always kept some dry corn in his pockets, and a candle and a box of matches.
‘That’s enough about me,’ he added resolutely, with his hinged, toothless, tender smile. ‘What have you got in your pockets?’
There was a silence. ‘Answer, boy,’ said Domenico, threatened with humiliation. He repeated the question in their own dialect. ‘Answer.’ Salvatore did not at all like this concentration on his own case. The smell in the room was, he thought now, of something gone bad, or at any rate of something on the turn. Even if he didn’t say anything, he could go some way towards pleasing everyone simply by putting his hands