Life Embitters (53 page)

The café had an international clientele: a tourism that was sensitive rather than moneyed, with easy-going, liberal habits – the usual clientele one finds in literary cafés on the continent, people who tend to look like slightly odd fish. There were stiff, starchy, hard-faced English ladies in mauve dresses who looked like swordfish and Germans who were like scorpion fish. There was the occasional greasy hirsute fellow, who was short-sighted, apparently learned, and urbane. The great man in the café was Giovanni Papini, the most influential mind in Italy at the time. He always came with a retinue of other great young men – fatally destined, that is, to human greatness as soon as they were taller and less callow. Papini greeted everybody, shook hands, accompanied by a series of absolutely welcoming smiles. As he’d been anti-Austrian and anti-German during the war, the Germans adored him and the Walkyries’ eyes swallowed him whole. He seemed delighted by the feelings he aroused. In such a milieu, his extraordinary features seemed quite normal: extremely short-sighted, with lenses as thick as bottle bottoms, a prominent, protruding syphilis-inherited forehead, frizzy, wispy hair, a mouth that was both cynical and childish, an unbuttoned shirt, creased jacket, tight-lipped and edgy, he had all that was required to be
à la page
in that world of shipwrecked souls. He was coming to the end of his long poverty-stricken period and was really beginning to make his mark. He preened most when people told him he was the St George who had killed the dragon. The dragon was Benedetto Croce, the philosopher (a Hegelian), senator, and historian who had remained neutral in the war. I suspect, however, the dragon was too tough-skinned for that goldfish bowl, for St George to have speared him.

The music was still scraping away.

“
¡Qué delicado minueto de Mozart!
” the Mexican suddenly proclaimed. Ràfols looked at Llimona, Llimona looked at me, and I looked at Ràfols.
It was a piece by Vivaldi that was extremely popular in Italy. The architect managed a sadly pleasant smile. The milieu wasn’t right for him. He finished his dish of pink ice cream and bid farewell, on the excuse that the last train to Fiesole was about to depart.

When the clientele began to thin out, Ferruccio came over to our table. He was an old waiter from the coffeepot era, who wearily dragged his enormous, battered shoes. He had a huge freckle on one cheek, with a beauty spot that hung from his gray hairs. He was a great fan of Florence – though he was born in Lucca – and a great fan of tourism, because, in his view, an Italy without tourism would be a
camposanto
. The species of tourist he preferred were artists. Ferruccio had rushed to take up the
tessera
of the Fascio to stop tourism being disrupted. The towns that reacted most favorably to fascism were those most directly dependent on tourism, Florence, Arezzo, Sierra, Assisi, and Perugia. They understood that tourists don’t want noise, that trams, in their kind of town, had to run on time and that reading guidebooks is incompatible with shoot-outs on street corners. Ferruccio had grasped that fascism was pro-tourist, and carried card number 2675 of the
fascio
. All hoteliers and barbers, guides, sacristans, tram drivers, civil servants, clerks, and courtesans in Florence thought the same. What would the city be like without tourism? A
camposanto!

From the point of view of material self-interest, the old waiter was a typical representative of the most genuine Florentine spirit. He always knew the right thing to do and to think. He was obsequious towards visitors, especially if they weren’t Italian, he respected all ideas and beliefs, the more unintelligible he found a language the more he respected it. His only ambition was to be in agreement with Signor Paolo, who was the gentleman behind the counter. “If things go well for Sr Paolo,” he’d say, “I’ll be fine too.” Sr Paolo wanted what was best for tourists even though his ice cream
contained too much saccharine; consequently, he was a man worthy of respect.

“Because,” he would wonder in our presence, “what use then would be the Duomo, the Campanile, the Battistero, the Palazzo Vecchio, or the Death of Fra Girolamo? (He meant Savonarola.) What would be the point of our big museums, of Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and the marvelous
afreschi
if no tourists ever came? We would starve to death amidst so much beauty, and the whole Renaissance wouldn’t give us the price of a cup of coffee.” Passion had to be banned from the land, and it was vital to imitate the Swiss –
gli svizzeri
– who are the people who treat tourists as they should be treated. No doubt about it: Ferruccio epitomized the spirit of Florence.

The waiter had thought profoundly about tourism, and the conclusions he’d drawn had led him to admire artists boundlessly. Ferrucchio was a man of statistics and down-to-earth realities. According to him, the painter who brought most profit to Florence and the state was Sandro Botticelli.

“Does Ghirlandaio bring it in?” I asked him.

“The Ghirlandaio in the Hospital of the Innocents brought in four hundred thousand lire to the nation in entrance money last year. We can know that for sure, because there’s nothing else to see at the Innocents.”

“What about Masaccio?”

“Masaccio is a painter who generates seasonal income. When the French come in spring and the autumn, he flourishes. At other times, he dips. Botticelli doesn’t oscillate so much because the English come by all the time.”

“Signor Ferruccio, be straight with me: who do you think brings more to the state coffers: the Renaissance or the Montecatini Company?”

“The Renaissance,
s’immagini!
” the waiter replied, astonishingly quickly.

At twelve the quintet stopped scraping. The Mexican seemed saddened and deflated, once their outpourings were at an end. He ordered his last coffee and shot of grappa.

We said goodbye to Ferruccio till the next day and started walking. By that time, the streets were deserted and ill-lit. Some dark, severe façades, their windows fronted by huge iron-barred grilles, lent our footsteps a funereal echo. The oppressive air lightened under the lively impact of the stone. The hoofs of a horse pulling a carriage rang out as it moved over the cobblestones into the distance. We walked along the Via dei Calzaiuoli, a commercial street, which, for that reason, appeared less severe than others; we reached the Piazza de la Signoria, where we went our different ways by the Loggia dei Lanzi in front of Donatello’s Judith. I walked through a labyrinth of narrow streets to reach the bedroom I was renting in a big house in Borgo degli Apostoli.

In Florence I tended to link the city with the slenderest forms in life and art. That’s why in my own private mythology I consider Donatello to be the quintessence of the Florentine spirit; in the terrain of writing, of style, I find Niccolò Machiavelli to be a fine representative of someone with the airiest, lightest language.

In that cool, ill-lit ramshackle house in Borgo degli Apostoli I read Machiavelli a lot. The more I read, the more he fascinated me as a writer and the less I felt drawn to the man who grasped that magnificent goose quill.

I found the following among my jottings from the year. It schematically outlines my reading and thoughts that lean towards childish naïveté rather than wisdom.

“It can help to place Machiavelli,” I comment, “if one always bears in mind that he was neither Ghibelline, Petrarch Guelph, or Boccaccio, and that all Leonardo is summed up in that declaration that rings so true:
Io servo chi mi paga
. The words “Guelph” and “Ghibelline” shouldn’t be interpreted in a simplistic, primary way, because they are hugely complex words when projected onto the politics of the time. On the Ghibelline side there is respect
for Empire, the aristocracy in their castles, and the plebs – the
populino
. On the Guelph side stands the bourgeoisie, submission to the Church, and a longing for peace and quiet. When one scrutinizes this struggle, one acknowledges yet again how even the greatest of men are mere puppets driven by political passions that are always tied to individual self-interest. When glossing, for example, Dante’s line about “
l’avara povertà dei catalani
,” one shouldn’t forget that the poet supported the most fanatical wing of the Ghibellines and that the Catalan rulers in Sicily were stalwart self-confessed Guelphs. It is also extremely helpful to place Machiavelli against the background of contemporary politics and see him against the horizon of the savage internecine struggles that constituted Italian life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: wars between factions of the citizenry and wars between cities, wars between cities and castles, Ghibellines and Guelphs, wars between tyrants, wars between the chiefs of different cities, of the
condottieri …
When Machiavelli appears, a contemporary of Signor Ludovico (in Ariosto), in the fifteenth century, passions seemed to have calmed down slightly. The formula of the principalities had been agreed. Violence, for the most part, had waned. Brute strength was no longer worthwhile. The courtier puts in an appearance, the nauseating courtier described by Castiglione.

“Macchiavelli is fully a courtier. However, there are different kinds of courtiers. The rich courtier knows when to bow, rides on horseback, is discreet, self-effacing, and simply aspires to occupy a place in society. The poor courtier, if he wants to advance himself, must have ideas, that is: he must be able to find suggestions to furnish the imagination, intellect, and feelings of the prince. Macchiavelli puts himself forward. Passionate by temperament, in amoral times – three centuries without morality in public life – he thinks of himself as a politician. He offers his services. He is no jester.
He is a serious fellow – a man who worries away. It is completely wrong to minimize the role of jesters in politics. Jesters have been highly influential in the history of Europe. Jesting is one of the most practical instruments for wielding influence, the flattery of the man who entertains the man in power. Machiavelli wasn’t in their ranks. He was a poor, sharp-witted courtier, a powerful, elegant writer, ready to furnish the mind of his prince. He hired out his services to their Lordships, like a second-rate secretary.

“In order to furnish the mind of his prince, Machiavelli does what poor courtiers have always done, since the wealthy have no need ever to go beyond allegory: he describes with cold incisiveness, passionately, as if writing detective fiction, what his eyes see in the life of his times. A superficial summing up of Machiavelli: life and history are stripped of any transcendent meaning; they are but a struggle between forms, a struggle that is always, necessarily, won by the strongest. The world has no purpose or endpoint. Men have been the same in every era. The march of humanity through history is mainly expressed in the ebbs and eddies around the struggle for power, that many desire and few attain – the wiliest and the strongest. Man is simply a combination of passions and self-interest and the government of State is government over individual passions and interests. Family, Municipality, Principality, and State are forms emptied of content within which individuals give rein to their aggressive drives. Ancient history (the
Discourses on Livy
) is exactly the same as modern history, and one only has to recreate its victories and eliminate its failures to be right about everything and wield might and right over everyone.
The Prince
, the coda to his political science, is a selection of maxims to enable one to control all eventualities and fulfill all one’s aims, by manipulating, duping, subjecting, and killing individuals. He examines the facts by isolating them in a vacuum and as the product of man’s wiles or ineptitude. Morality doesn’t exist. It is a
fantasy dreamed up by sensitive souls. The people do not believe, the prince thinks for everyone when he thinks on his own behalf. Government is the relationship between one lucid, egotistical consciousness and a universal lack of consciousness.

“What does Machiavelli’s conception of the world mean? It is a very complex issue. Is it a description of the world as it is, forged by the diktat of a steely observer’s eye, incisive and genuine for the same reasons that we now consider Dostoyevsky’s psychological observation to be infinitely more real and genuine than anything produced in this respect by previous literature? If that’s how things are, as they seem to be, something that is hardly in dispute in terms of the Italy of his time, what was he trying to do when he wrote his books? Did he do it to rid history and psychology of all the falsehoods, infantile nonsense, and conventional thinking scribes had poured into them over so many centuries? To replace the previous weight of paper fictions with a description of the free play of human passions, thus earning fame and glory time could never erase? Or perhaps in the name of patriotic duty was he trying to eliminate all futile, dangerous and impractical fantasies from the minds of princes? These questions have been answered, though very diversely. According to Burckhardt, apart from being a great writer, something nobody denies, Machiavelli was a discreet, sharp-witted adviser, and his conception of history is plausible. Conversely, Alfredo Oriani, in the first volume of his
Political Struggle in Italy
, reckons he is a complete idiot.

“Because it is a curious fact that Machiavelli, who established himself as the maestro of the cynic in politics, was one of the most gullible men of his age. He never understood, foresaw, or achieved any positive outcomes. His public life was a succession of disappointments and disasters. He always wanted to give the orders, and rarely managed to be obeyed by
anyone. He always backed the wrong horse – I mean prince. He supported Soderini’s Republic, just before the Medicis were restored to power. He put himself forward as a strategist, worked out a battle plan and an army built along his lines was decisively destroyed in Prato. He advised the legate of Leo X to establish the Republic in Florence while simultaneously dedicating
The Prince
to Julian of Medicis in order to equip him as a despot. He joined Boscoli’s conspiracy and then abandoned him, thus losing all dignity and decency. Depressed by this catastrophe he crawled before the Medicis like the lowest of servants. He put all his hatred into his sardonic struggle against religion and the clergy. He never understood the spirit of religion or its latent or real strength. He appreciated Savonarola’s lunacy but not his reforms. Sent to Germany he didn’t see the reformation –
the
Reformation! – that was being born before his eyes. He didn’t see the beginning of Italy’s decline in the huge error made by Ludovico il Moro with the subsequent crossing of the Alps by Charles VIII and Louis XII of France. His ideas about Julius II, Venice, the League of Cambray make no sense. He died a lonely man, cursed by everyone and a mystery to himself.