Little misunderstandings of no importance : stories

BITTERNESS AND CLOUDS

“People do you good turns and you repay them with bitterness. Why?” He was reading the final tercet of the poem by Drummond de Andrade which he was in the process of analyzing, when that sentence, spoken one afternoon many years before, came back to mind. His first good suit, jacket and trousers, in brown gaberdine with a narrow yellow stripe, perfectly horrendous as he realized later, when he had learned how to dress, but at the time he thought it was close to perfect, or at least important looking — too good for the office but indispensable for a graduation. He had looked at his reflection in the window. It was a men’s clothing shop on the Viale Libia, handling moderately priced but well-cut garments, and the minute he had put this suit on he felt at ease in it; perhaps it made him look a bit arrogant, but that didn’t hurt. It’s no good showing yourself to other people as submissive, that’s the end. Bitterness. Call it, rather, the well-spring of his being, a way to avoid being eaten alive in this world of wolves. But he didn’t answer Cecilia’s question, there was no answer to give. She wouldn’t have understood and the wolves had already eaten her up, wolves in the sense of life — you had only to look at her. At thirty years of age she was an old woman. Hair parted in the middle, some white strands already, a depressing air of resignation and her eternal fatigue. What fault was it of his if a few years before he had been in love with her and now he wasn’t? Perhaps it had been not so much love as a common purpose, their marriage had been based on a common purpose and certainly he hadn’t reduced her to her present condition. And this was the reason for his embitterment, the condition into which she had fallen, an uncared-for face and a tired body. Which was an unconscious way of displaying the sacrifices she had made on his behalf; a lament, a reproach, a mediocre remonstrance which, in reality, perversely masked her deep frustration. But how was he to blame for the defeat of a woman doomed to defeat? He had done his best to back her up. The immediate post-war years had been hard for both of them. There they were, in the uglier outlying area of the big city, with their parents dead and no one to turn to, wanting to set up house together if for no other reason than to have company. What were they to do? Jobs in the post office seemed the solution, but although these provided food and a roof over their heads, the atmosphere was squalid. A wood-burning stove and mud puddles in front of the door in the winter, humidity and mosquitoes in the summer, and all the year around the dull faces of their fellow employees, the widow who wasn’t really a widow, the assistant supervisor who talked of nothing but soccer but never bought a ticket to a match. Finally he had said: “Cecilia, let’s move on to something better, let’s sign up at the university and aim at a career.” But she was always tired. And why, after all? Wasn’t he tired, too? They had the same working hours. And the amount of housework she did — making the bed and washing a few dishes — couldn’t be called tiring. If the place had been spick-and-span he might have understood her being tired. But the three disorderly rooms, with her bedroom slippers always sticking out from under the bed, didn’t seem appropriate to a young married couple; they were the preview of an old people’s home; he had never summoned up the courage to ask even his sister to drop in.

And then Gianna was born, but that wasn’t his fault either; she had wanted a child. “This isn’t the moment,” he had told her. “Let’s wait, and time it better. A child’s a burden, one that will swallow up what little free time we have.” But she cried at night; the longing for motherhood consumed her like a fire and it must have been the only warmth within her because the rest was desert. Finally the silly woman struck a bargain. She’d take total care of the child and he could enrol at the university, he could even leave his job and devote his whole time to his studies. Since she’d had a promotion, her salary would be enough for them to live on and, if he didn’t object, she’d do some moonlighting at home over the weekend; a private postal service was offering just such employment. He said all right, if that was what she wanted. He wasn’t the one to stifle her maternal instinct, but it was agreed that he didn’t have to change diapers. He’d spend weekends at the university library, where a friendly guard would let him in on Sundays. If she wanted a child, he wanted a university degree; they both had their priorities. The agreement was clear and he respected it. She did, too, silently and with no audible complaint, only her usual resignation. Job, housework, take-home assignments from the office, care of the child. The little girl was just like her mother, things happen that way; nature is implacable. The same apathy, the same resigned look, the same defeat written on her face. As she grew, on the rare Sundays when he didn’t go to the library, he tried to awaken her interest in something, to rouse her from her precocious torpor. “Do you want to take a walk with Papa, to go to the zoo?” And the voice of a humble, common-sense little woman answered: “I must keep Mama company, thank you, Papa. She asked me to lend her a hand with the housework.” And so there they were, at it, bolstering up his “privilege” of being a middle-aged student, toiling over his books late at night in order to keep up with the young classmates who appeared on Monday morning rested and casual, with neatly creased trousers and pullovers in the latest style, quite the young gentlemen. Of course he felt it in his heart to hate those young gentlemen. And this surge of feeling, tinged with bitterness and resentment, rose, again, from the depths of his being. His hatred of them was mute and inexpressible and only increased by the fact that they shared the same political stance. In their case there were rich fathers, a long liberal tradition, membership in the postwar Partito d’Azione. Their inherited political background was a luxury and their own left-wing views even more of one. For him, instead, they marked an achievement, a painful journey slowed by family considerations, respect for a church-going mother and father with too many children to support to be able to indulge in politics. His way of being a left-winger was based on firsthand acquaintance with want, the refusal to accept it, and, finally, revenge. This had nothing to do with their abstract, geometrical ideology. He had said as much, one day, to the most stupid among them, who voiced disapproval of his choice, for director of his thesis, of an unpopular and downtrodden professor known to harbour nostalgia for the days of the dictatorship. He had looked his fellow-student in the face and said, “It’s all very easy for you to be on the left, my boy. You’ve no idea of the difficulties of real life.” And the other had only stared at him with amazement.

The Professor. He wasn’t a genius, no doubt of that. But more brilliant teachers had scowled when he asked their advice about a subject for his thesis. The Professor had shown immediate understanding of his situation as a middle-aged student and a father. “I hope, at least, that you’re not like those presumptuous young fellows who, instead of recalling our country’s heroic past, look only to a radiant future.” And he had answered, cautiously: “Every form of government has its good points, Professor. It’s only that today the past of which you are speaking is in total disrepute.” Their understanding, at least at the start, was based on mutual respect, and was advantageous to him. Working out his thesis didn’t take too long; the worst part was the typing. He stayed up until all hours pecking away at a typewriter which Cecilia brought home every evening from the office. The reproachful look on her tired face was underlined by the hardship of carrying an old Olivetti, as big as a tank, up four flights of stairs while Gianna memorized geometry theorems in the kitchen. The rest went smoothly enough. Top marks for the oral exam; the thesis was substantial and the Professor, when he wanted to, could count on the support of some of his colleagues. Publication, too, turned out to be fairly easy, at the hands of a printer who also ran up university lectures and did not make the usual charge on this occasion. The dedication To my Master seemed useful as well as necessary. Bitterness came afterwards, when it was a question of a post as an assistant in the department. The Professor’s talk had become less guarded and neutral. Gone were the days of mutual respect; he demanded approval and complicity.

When he left home, he did it in the most proper and painless manner, leaving a letter behind him. It was the day he got his first salary payment as an assistant. A pittance, but enough for one person to live on. He had found a room in an old building behind the hospital, very small, with a window overlooking a courtyard filled with stretchers. It was not attractive, and he spent a week whitewashing the walls and installing a table bought from a junk dealer, a chair, and a coat rack. There was already a bed; he had only to add a mattress. An outsider might have called the room a miserable affair, but he saw it as an example of sobriety. He thought often of Machado, who lived in a room like this one, with a table, a chair, a bed, and an iron washstand, in the boarding house kept by Dona Isabel Cuevas. He had read Campos de Castilla and found in it a spiritual affinity. Especially in the Retrato which opens the collection, with a sort of catalogue of events, sometimes anecdotal in character but at the same time allusive, summing up a whole life: restrained but firm ethical and ideological statements and a joking reference to his mode of dress. It was a Sunday afternoon and he sat at his work table, re-reading the Retrato for the nth time. First he underlined three lines and then transcribed them. Mi historia, algunos casos que recordar no quiero. IYa conosceis mi torpe alino indumentario. /Hay en mis venas gotas de sangre jacobina. “My story, some events that I do not want to recall. / Already you know about my shabby clothes. /There are drops of Jacobin blood in my veins.” Those lines, he thought, belonged to him personally, they could have been his own. And then he copied two more. He was looking out of the window at the hospital courtyard. It was May, and the slender trees were green. At one point, a nurse, holding a little girl by the hand, stepped out from a small iron gate bearing the word “Radiology” in a yellow triangle above it. They were advancing very slowly because the child’s legs were encased in two metal braces all the way up to the hips. The legs were scrawny, rigid and deformed, and she walked with obvious difficulty, as if imitating the pathetically grotesque waddle of a duck. She seemed no more than eight years old, with fair hair and a checked dress. The nurse sat her down on a stretcher, tapped her on one cheek, made a reassuring gesture indicating that she should be patient, and then went away. The girl sat there patiently, looking at the empty courtyard, while the nurse re-entered the hospital. At this moment a white cat came out of the opposite corner. Hard to say whether the cat or the child was the first to see the other. They exchanged stares and then the cat trotted towards her like a puppy and jumped nimbly onto the stretcher, where the little girl took him into her arms and kissed him. He lowered his eyes to the poem before him and re-read the line Mi historia, algunos casos que recordar no quiero. He saw that the printed words were quivering through his tears and, in his notebook, added three more lines to those he had already copied: Pero mi verso brota de manatial sereno IY, mas que un hombre al uso que sabe su doctrina /Soy, en el buen sentido de la palabra, bueno [But my verse flows from a source serene/ and, rather than an everyday man who knows his doctrine,/ I am, in the best sense of the word, good].

That summer he made a trip to Spain and Portugal. The Professor, through the “Friends of Spain”, got him a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There were no strings attached; it was an invitation, a reward for his interest in Spanish culture. Spaniards were proud of their culture and flattered if scholars from foreign universities wanted to consult their libraries. The only obligation which he incurred was the delivery of the proofs of an article written by the Professor for a review in Madrid to which he was a contributor. It was a no-account review, but that wasn’t his affair. Barcelona overwhelmed him. An immense, sunlit city with tree-lined boulevards, splendid late nineteenth-century buildings and cordial and affable people — the city which had suffered the worst damage during the civil war. After ten days he felt that he belonged there. His heart, his very nature were akin to those of the people who thronged, in the evening, to the lower part of the city, the harbour, the cafes, the wine shops, and the sordid taverns in the alleyways. It irked him to have to stay in the luxury hotel where he was put up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While he took his dinner in the brightly lighted dining room, in the company of well-dressed travellers eating shellfish, he longed to be among the simple, noisy folk in the taverns which he had glimpsed during his afternoon walks, drinking in, with an almost physical pleasure, the liquid Catalan speech, so different from the dry sonority of the Castilian. All of this reinforced his anti-Franco feelings. His heart was unequivocally with the victims of the war; he remembered, suddenly, all that they had endured and was deeply moved by it. He decided, on the spot, to learn Catalan, as a tribute to Catalonia. Meanwhile he thought of another tribute, the book by Orwell, which he had read on the train and thrown into a rubbish bin at the frontier railway station, because it was the tribute of an English snob, of the same class as the travellers eating shellfish at his hotel, people who knew nothing of the soul of the common people of Spain. He felt more and more bitterness towards certain false progressives of his acquaintance and boundless affection for the crystal-clear figure of Dolores Ibarruri. She was the earthy embodiment of the Spanish people, she was generosity and self-sacrifice in person. La Pasionaria! He really should have gone to Moscow, to shake her hand and embrace her, instead of to this wretched dictator-ridden country where he was to deliver the Professor’s rhetorical pages to a pro-Franco review. Meanwhile the train was taking him to Madrid. The journey was monotonous and the headquarters of the review disappointing, a colourless office in a building near the Prado, where a distracted employee thanked him in a perfunctory manner. Now Madrid was all his, even if he didn’t take to it. He hated the aristocratic monumentality of the public buildings, the elegance of the fashionable section, the vastness of the Prado, the paradoxical, shapeless Goyas, all in the detestable styles of baroque monstrosity and romantic fantasy. He couldn’t resist the temptation of taking a train across the Castilian plain, on a pilgrimage to Soria, a stripped, sober town to which he was drawn by a poem. The room in Dona Isabel Cuevas’ boarding house was intact: a table, a chair, a bed, a washstand. He wandered with emotion through the unpretentious town, encircled by the lunar desert of Castile. In an antiquarian bookshop, he found, after considerable insistence, a photograph of Machado with a dedication in his own writing dated 22 January 1939, when the poet, hounded by Franco’s police, was fleeing towards the frontier and death. The bookseller was a circumspect, suspicious fellow, fearful, perhaps, of a trap, and so, although his Castilian was first-rate, he spoke in Italian. His reassuring words obviously came from the heart; he held out the money and got what he wanted. Back in his Madrid hotel, a letter from the Professor awaited him, and it was in the terms of an obligation, an order laid upon him. He was to proceed to Lisbon on another errand; a first-class railway ticket was enclosed. Well, he was glad enough to go. The Professor wanted to place another of his stale articles in a Portuguese review, and he would take it there and make the necessary arrangements. Why not? It was almost a satisfaction, a sort of subtle revenge. The melancholy, honest face of Machado smiled at him from the bottom of his suitcase, he covered it with the Professor’s pages and his personal belongings, took the train and, at the border, told the customs officer that he had nothing to declare. The slight risk that he was running was his revenge and his talisman.

In Lisbon they were polite and attentive, unlike the Spaniards. The review was located in a handsome building on the Placa dos Restauradores, the Palacio Foz, with an English-style facade, a slate roof, and heavily carpeted rooms. They sang the praises of the Professor and he went along with them, adding a more graceful and subtle appreciation of his own, whose slyness certainly escaped the pompous editor, an unconscious symbol of idiocy. Certainly, he said, with maximum hypocrisy, he too was a friend of Portugal, a small country but a great one. For the time being he couldn’t contribute to the review; besides, his name meant nothing, he was only an assistant to the Professor and, moreover, he took no interest in politics, tie might, eventually, be able to make some translations, under a fictitious name; his Portuguese wasn’t all that good, but he could count on the help of a Portuguese reader in an Italian university, whom they doubtless knew. And they, in their turn, could count on his good will. The Professor was old, had many commitments and couldn’t make frequent trips to Portugal. He, on the other hand, was happy to travel.

And so it went. The texts he was given to translate were stupid and easy, but the pay was good. Their very stupidity bore out his inner instincts, kindling the secret fire of his resentment. As for the photograph of Machado, he hung it over his table, between the bed and the window giving onto the hospital courtyard. But he wouldn’t be staying much longer in this squalid rented room, he knew; a competitive examination for a better post was in the offing. He would come out first and then hang the photograph in a place worthy of it. Meanwhile, half consciously, he was coming to resemble his idol. He let his hair grow — bushy and unpom-maded — over his forehead, giving it the shape of Machado’s. The cut of his mouth was similar also; the thin lips were like a cynical slash, which dissembled the injustices to which he had been subjected. He was reading the reflections attributed to the fictitious Juan de Mairena and was fascinated by Machado’s capacity to wear masks, by the subtle ability to assume various roles, which he too enjoyed. “My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger than my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.” The fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell — this notion gave him a feeling of infinite lightness, a sort of remission of his pains, of innocence. It was in such a state of innocence that he lived through the examination days unaware of the difficulties involved. The examination was not on Machado; obviously, it covered purely technical, theoretical matters of metrics. And yet this very abstract poetical grammar, so proudly uncontaminated, seemed to him a metaphor of his existence, of pure thought, free of thought’s harmful effects. He passed the examination with flying colours, just as he had expected. And, at this point, it was easy, too easy to give him any satisfaction, to cast off the old Professor.

When he took him the second edition of his thesis, minus the hateful dedication, he felt that he was carrying out an insipid and disappointing obligation. If the Professor had been argumentative, if he had lashed out against him, as he had expected, there would have been a frank, excited discussion. The Professor was waiting for him in his study with a melancholy air; he played the part of a man betrayed and shunted aside and welcomed him with tears in his eyes and no courage to put up a fight. “I didn’t know that you were my enemy,” he said; “it’s the greatest sorrow of my old age.” It was sentimental blackmail, based on a presumed friendship, old age, and disillusionment, which reminded him of Cecilia’s oblique reproaches. And he couldn’t bear this because it was a subtle and yet unfair way to recall Madrid and Lisbon, to accuse him of that silent and bitter scorn of which he had undoubtedly been aware and with which the Professor now hoped to put pressure upon him. At this point he voiced his disdain, calmly but sarcastically, in sentences whose rhythm recalled the Ma-chado of the Coplas per la muerte di don Guido. While he whispered bare, cutting words of revenge, his mind, off on its own tack, freed by thought from thought’s harmful effects, silently recited, in a familiar rhythm: Al fin, una pulmonia mato a don Guido, y estdn las campans todo el dia doblando por el: din-dan! Murio don Guido, un senor de mozo muy jaranero, muy galdn e algo torero, de viejo, gran rezador.”… This was the death of Don Guido, a gentleman who, when young, was very haughty, very gallant and something of a bullfighter; but when old was given to prayer.” The Professor interrupted his silent recital and told him to go away, and he went, savouring the taste of victory. For it was a victory, and he knew that many other victories were to follow.

The second was Giuliana, a victory not over her but over life. He rescued her from the status of a premature old maid and restored to her a youthfulness that she tried to conceal, erasing her idea that she was ill and replacing it with the conviction that she was healthy, all too healthy, and needed only a man to give her protection and a feeling of security. The only thing about her that disturbed him was her conciliatory nature, of a transparency which seemed to him simple-minded and perhaps damaging to them both. He made her do away with violet perfume, a modest lambswool coat, loud laughter, and anything else that might make her conspicuous. He would teach her or, rather, “construct” for her the pattern of a university career, which was to be learned like a profession. This didn’t mean that she was to be his creature, that would be an oversimplified interpretation. What they had was a common purpose, an existential partnership, that was his idea of love, if only she could understand. And she understood.

Other victories came in a pleasing enough manner. Chiefly victory over a colleague who thoughtlessly or frivolously had wronged him. Such wrongs are searing because they presuppose a lack of attention to the wronged party. And he could not tolerate inattentiveness, it was a form of humiliation that made him pale, one which he had experienced all too many times, which reminded him of the days when he was a pariah, when he had had to buy wretched suits at the shop on the Viale Libia and to imagine that they were well-tailored. But searing wrongs are the richest and most productive; they swell in the mind and postulate elaborate and complex answers, not rapid and disappointing acts of liberation. No, he knew that searing wrongs nest in some secret area; they crouch there like lethargic larvae and then create ramifications, colonies, anthills with winding passageways which deserve their own painstaking, detailed topography. A topography which he had studied in painstaking detail, patiently, because there was no way of taking direct revenge except through an unsatisfactory, poisonously personal attack in some scholarly periodical. He had, then, to find an indirect approach. This called for alliances, deliciously allusive conversations, subtle understandings, elective affinities.

There is a delicate pleasure in identifying the friends of our enemies and making them the secret objectives of revenge. He worked on it for months, years. His enemy’s favourite student had just gone to a university in the north; by one of life’s little coincidences he was in the same field. To find a possible enemy for him was difficult but not impossible; he had only to study the location of various colleagues and the second one he found was a good choice. He didn’t know the man well. He’d met him at some congress or other and was on first name terms. He was a mediocre, arrogant fellow whose writings were marked by awkward syntax and vague conclusions; they extolled second-rate authors in second-rate reviews. But this was not his Achilles’ heel. The weak point of this prospective ally was his wearisome career in the shadow of a pitiless superior who had humiliated him for years as if he were a superfluous object, calling him Smerdyakov, like the servant of the Brothers Karamazov. Here was the weakness to be exploited, not heavy-handedly but with a light touch, which would not threaten blackmail but surreptitiously hint at it in a way possible between congenial spirits. After only a brief conversation the machinery was put in motion and he watched it from the sidelines with deliberately prolonged enjoyment. An enjoyment which followed a set course to the very end, like a symphony. And when it was over he started again and finished with a short, syncopated rondo, which was easier but less gratifying. His second alliance, with an ambitious and spiteful young woman colleague gave him little satisfaction. She was a frank and obvious schemer who had betrayed a friend, usurped her place with the old Professor and installed herself, almost insolently in his department. To have her on his side was actually tedious; privately he called her “the gangster’s moll”.

And the other victories, the official ones. Published books, articles, scholarly meetings. His greatest success came, once more, from the Iberian Peninsula. The dictatorships were over, there were no more limitations, and no one to prevent him from exercising his critical powers on a sixteenth-century courtier-poet, commemorated at a congress of scholars from all over Europe which took place in an aristocratic, baroque country mansion, far from the capital and surrounded by olive trees and vineyards. He had managed to be scheduled near the end, intending to deliver a dry, technical paper, an apparently neutral, rhythmical reading which actually pointed up relentlessly the stylistic wiles of the poet in question, his concealed plagiarism of his great contemporaries. But at one point there was a paper by a Dominican monk, of his own age, a professor of Classics and for years editor of a literary review which, during the superseded government had held to a vaguely liberal and anti-Fascist “cultural” line, with no definite political colouring. Now this champion of vague anti-Fascism spoke in a conciliatory manner of the compromising courtier-poet, in terms of the autonomy of the poetical text, of human weakness and the necessity of putting aside biographical details, because “poets have no biography except in their poetry”, and we must pay due respect to the solitary, mysterious inner Word which dictated the words of their poems. There was intolerable Platonism in this specious and surreptitious allusion, a fuzziness that spilled over into a metaphysical logos, an influence of Spinoza which the speaker gracefully linked with pre-Socratic philosophy but which was actually tied up with Right-wing neo-idealism. And then the monk’s humility, his conciliatory tone, his forgiveness of human weakness in the name of the poetic text, these were a form of subtle arrogance, a reversed censorship, a blackmailing expression of the remission of sins. No, no sin was to be remitted; he would not tolerate such a vision of the world or let himself be trapped by so treacherous a formula.

And so he spoke up as he thought he should under the circumstances. First he apologized for quoting himself, he simply had to do it. Meanwhile he called his hearers’ attention to examples of phonetics, scansion, and vocabulary which he had picked out in order to show the similarities between the poet’s text and those of his manneristic contemporaries. He was perfectly aware of the autonomy of a poetical text, but every text has its place in a context, and the context was here. At this point he unsheathed his long sword. The classicist had used old-fashioned, outdated language — he was not up on contemporary criticism; in short, he was poorly equipped. And so he spoke of Bachtin and the meaning of context within the text; he displayed the gems of his chosen examples against a broad cultural panorama. This allowed for no indulgence or compromise; he left no space for the no-man’s-land of literature shaped by a Platonic canon; he showed them, peremptorily and incontrovertibly, an x-ray labelled literature and life. And he won. Not immediately, of course, because he incurred an aggressive attack on the part of three young intellectuals. But the important thing was that in academic circles he won the reputation of an uncompromising scholar, with a cutting edge like that of a diamond.

And then there were comforting and reassuring domestic victories: an apartment in the centre of the city, a rich library, a study where the photograph of Machado was finally hung in an appropriate setting, near to books that were worthy of him. He transcribed the tercet of the curious poem by Drum-mond de Andrade that he had chosen to analyze, and wondered what title to give to its presentation at a forthcoming congress. He attempted a translation and read it aloud in order to measure the effect it would have on his hearers.

What are our poems made of? And where?

What poisoned dream responds to them?

If the poet is embittered and the rest is clouds?

He rather liked the poet, after all; he was dry and realistic, with clear vision, even if it was, perhaps, veiled by a metaphysical streak which he considered superfluous. On second thoughts there was something querulous in that late-Romantic reference to a vague empyrean where poetical concepts floated in abstract form before descending in the shape of words into such a miserable receptacle as the poet, a mortal man contaminated by sin and embitterment. But perhaps this elegantly melancholy poet was unaware; he was, in his way, a young gentleman who had written these words without understanding their meaning, in the belief that they had mysteriously arisen out of some depth of cosmic space. But for him, as he read them, they held no mystery, they were clear as crystal, he had the key, he could snatch and hold them in the palm of his hand, and play with them as if they were the wooden letters of a child’s alphabet. He smiled and wrote: Bitterness and Clouds. For a rhythmical reading of a twentieth-century poem.

He himself was the true poet, he could feel it.