Innocence. Julian Barnes

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СКАЧАТЬ occupation of the factories, which was a total failure, Rossi and Sannazzaro of course lost their jobs. They sold their city shoes, resoled their boots with lengths of bicycle tyres, and walked the 750 kilometres back to Mazzata. By the time they arrived they were almost starving. The village received them without enthusiasm. They had left Mazzata as failures, and returned as failures. They still attended the local Party’s surreptitious meetings, in the back room of the chemist’s shop. When Gramsci, from his prison cell, dissociated himself from Stalin’s policies, he was declared an outcast and a heretic. The two friends, loyal to him still, became less important in local politics than the flies on the ceiling.

10

      When he was ten years old Papa had taken him on a journey to see Antonio Gramsci. It was a last chance, since Gramsci, having been moved from one prison to another for the last nine years, was known to be terminally ill. There had been an international petition to the Italian government for his release, which had met with the fate of most petitions.

      By 1936 he had been transferred to Rome. He was no longer an official prisoner, but was under medical treatment at the Clinica Quisisana. The rules for visiting him were relaxed. On the other hand, there were not so very many people, and almost none of his old associates, who cared to visit him.

      Domenico and his son got a lift in a tomato lorry as far as Benevento, and then took the slow train to the capital, which gave them a good chance to look at each other without interruptions. Salvatore saw a patient man whom he loved, and who, he knew, had had to ask Mother’s permission to make this expedition, a tired man, worn and shiny like an old suit. Domenico looked back uneasily at his bright, unaccountable boy.

      When Domenico had been little his grandmother, who worked in a hotel kitchen, had edged him upstairs into the reception hall in the hopes of presenting him to a bishop (who had just arrived) for a blessing. They knelt together for a moment on the marble floor, risking everything. But the bishop, who was on a private visit and wished to indicate that he was off duty, turned his ring round on his finger so that the faithful could not kiss it. The grandmother got up and twitched the boy back to the service quarters, as though he had been in some way to blame.

      All Domenico wanted now was for his son to come into the presence of a great man. At the same time he had a few questions to ask after these many years, and of course he could not come empty-handed. On his knees, with their sandwich, he had a parcel consisting of medicines, writing paper and a woollen pullover. It was fastened with insulating tape, and anyone could tell that it had not been wrapped up for him by a woman. When they got to Rome and steamed into the old peach-coloured station in Piazza Esdraia, he tried to make it look a little more presentable.

      Salvatore was disappointed firstly when they crossed the city without seeing a single one of the new Alfa Romeo two-seaters whose image he had studied in a magazine, and secondly when the Clinica Quisisana had no bars.

      ‘It’s not a prison,’ his father told him.

      ‘Can he go away if he wants to?’

      ‘No, he can’t do that, he can’t go into Rome without a police guard.’

      Then it’s a prison, the child thought.

      There was a bell in the outer gate and when they rung it was answered by a young male nurse in uniform. Salvatore saw that he was not going to be petted, as he would have been in a convent, or a hospital run by Holy Sisters. This impressed him. He was impressed because he was ignored.

      The male nurse asked whether they had an authorization from Dr Marino or Professor Frugoni, and Salvatore felt an unaccustomed admiration for his father when he pulled out of his inner pocket a note from the Professor confirming their appointment. The nurse went away, and came back to say that the patient Antonio Gramsci was not well enough to receive visits. He was now carrying a blue folder under his arm.

      ‘Who says so?’ asked Domenico.

      It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. He stood there in the blank early spring sunshine, holding his son’s hand.

      ‘The management are anxious that he shouldn’t see members of the public without medical knowledge, who might be distressed by certain changes in him,’ said the young man, reading from the folder as though repeating a lesson. ‘The tuberculosis has affected the spine — do you understand me? — and the sight is poor.’

      ‘You can spare yourself anxiety. My permissions are all in order. In reply to a letter I sent him Comrade Gramsci himself asked us to come and see him.’

11

      Salvatore had seen deformed animals, and dead bodies of both people and animals, but 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 СКАЧАТЬ