Teresa’s sadness has retreated to the back of his mind. He’d rather not think about it. He’s more concerned with the mysteries of his own existence, weighed down by his own sorrowful secrets.
Yet, as his old friend Heraclitus might remind him, all is flux, and the waters of his daily life are about to carry him in a new and more intriguing direction.
The question is: how much has their course been influenced by his decision to go to the annual Festa de l’Unità, the Communist Party fete whose posters the hunchback Gobbetto has put up all over Campino? It’s not an event he normally attends. Yet for some reason the universe is trying to get him there.
Nonno Mario does not approve of the Communists, even though the days have long passed since Campino’s Communists and Fascists would break one another’s legs whenever they happened to meet on a dark night. That struggle is over. Those who still regard themselves as Fascists have by this stage reinvented themselves under another name and become insignificant, while Italy’s Communist Party has developed into the biggest in the Western world, thanks to the country’s massive working class, all desperate for the better living conditions they think Communism will provide.
The fathers of several of his friends are Communists. Right until his death Fiorenzo’s father, Pino, was a card-carrying member. He tried to get his sons to become party workers too. Aguinaldo fought him ferociously. Fiorenzo took the line of least resistance, always finding something to occupy him whenever Pino went off to attend a party meeting at the house of Giacomo Gandolfini, Campino’s mayor and head of the local Communist cell, whose wine cellar’s ample supply of Bardolino boosted party numbers.
The merits and demerits of Communism during illicit smoking sessions in the maize fields are often the subject of the debates between Fiorenzo and Pistola. What attracts them to Karl Marx’s thinking are his ideas on the redistribution of wealth – mainly because neither of them has any – and it’s after one of these debates that Pistola ends up at the Communist fete.
It starts as a discussion in the form of what they like to think is a Socratic Dialogue. Socratic Dialogues are not normal conversational fare for Campino boys, but since Nonno Mario has insisted on his grandson’s having the classical education he didn’t have himself, Pistola has indulged in so many Socratic Dialogues with Fiorenzo in Professor Orvieto’s philosophy class they both consider themselves experts.
The Liceo Classico Virgilio in Mantova is a stuffy school where the principal insists on calling students ‘Signor’. Yet it’s advanced for its time, encouraging free thought and animated discussion. It provides the kind of classical education that produces notaries, theologians, men of letters and senators of distinction. Pistola and his friends don’t want to be notaries, theologians, men of letters, or senators of distinction. What makes it worse is that, unlike the school’s other students, all from elitist old families who live in Mantova so they can walk to school, Pistola and Fiorenzo and Donato have to take the train to Mantova from Campino. It’s a little puffer that stops every few kilometres to pick up workers, and takes an hour. They get home at dusk and have to stay up until midnight translating Latin and Greek.
But they get a perverse kick out of their classical studies, and since they’re by nature argumentative, the debating virtues extolled by this particular barefoot unwashed Greek appeal to them. They can recite the concepts Professor Orvieto has drummed into them: ‘Respect other points of view; postpone judgement; willingly revise your opinion; trust your doubts; persevere and be patient.’
This time it’s Fiorenzo who leads the Socratic Dialogue, puffing on the last of Pino’s thin black Alfas, which he found under a silkworm tray while gathering up the final remains of the dank-smelling mess. In Professor Orvieto’s professorial tones and measured pace, he launches forth: ‘Is the brotherhood of man a viable concept? Are human beings capable of working together for the common good?’
‘Well, you have to ask yourself how many human beings are basically selfish,’ Pistola replies. ‘And how many,’ he goes on, lying on his back gazing at the sky, ‘instead of doing their fair share, will simply take advantage—’
‘Are you saying people are by nature out for themselves only?’
‘How else do you think mankind has survived since the Stone Age?’ Pistola stretches out a hand for his turn at the cigarette. ‘How will you live to fight another day, and continue to reproduce your own seed, unless you’re more concerned for your own welfare than that of your fellow man?’ This line of reasoning so enchants him that he sits up and continues, trying not to smirk: ‘I’m willing to revise my opinion but your argument had better be good.’
‘Wait a minute! If a soldier is wounded in battle,’ says Fiorenzo, frowning, ‘and his friend might get killed if he drags him to safety, you’re saying most people would leave him to die so they can live to fight another day?’ He stares hard at Pistola. ‘So why did my father save Cremonini then?’
It’s such a potent point that Pistola collapses back down again, fearful that Fiorenzo might unleash one of the emotional outbursts to which he’s been prone since his father’s death.
‘Your father was not like other men …’ Pistola begins lamely, ambushed again by feelings of guilt and responsibility. ‘Tell you what,’ he says brightly, handing the cigarette back to Fiorenzo, ‘in memory of your father, I’ll go with you to the Festa de l’Unità. I’ll buy you lunch. Your father would like that. He knows what’s going on.’
‘Cristo! And I’m smoking his last Alfa!’ Fiorenzo lets out a stream of evil-smelling smoke, and breaks into a paroxysm of coughing.
Knowing there’ll be girls at the festa, they rush home to spend time in front of the mirror with their pots of brillantina, both trying to achieve the current trend known as ‘Tipo Inglese’. For Pistola, this involves battling to divide the springy Italian locks that leap from his scalp with the curly vigour of a sheep’s coat into the neat side parting managed easily by English boys, whose thin straight hair tends to limp tamely from their heads. He usually loses the battle.
Tipo Inglese includes shirts in a fine check, and trousers in a dusty greeny-grey called ‘lovat’, tapered with no turn-ups. Not an outfit that falls within Pistola’s financial ambit. Instead, he has to make do with a short-sleeved cotton shirt in a Hawaiian print he found on Campino’s street market. He toys with the idea of going for a hairstyle that suits the shirt, the Tipo Americano crewcut, also all the rage, but decides it would be an even more difficult game for his energetic curls to play.
He does however have classy new birthday shoes. Pale camel-coloured mock-suede lace-ups for which Nonno Mario has outlaid a hefty sum.
On the way to the festa, they fetch Donato. By the time they get to the grassy farm field outside the village where the festivities are being held under the trees, things are well under way. The indefatigable hunchback Gobbetto has put his festa posters on the walls of all the nearby villages and attracted a larger crowd than usual.
The Festa de l’Unità manages to be both a social occasion and an unashamed party promotion, though few people take much notice of the shrill, tinny rendition of the Communist Party anthem, the ‘Bandiera Rossa’, being blared out from loudspeakers hung on trees. It’s just background noise. So are the fuzzily printed posters of Stalin, Lenin, and Italy’s most famous Communist martyrs, nailed up on the trees. Men
