The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend (22 page)

The Professor of Criminal Law sorely desired to be able to say something here and now that might offer a little different substance to Vanzetti than what he had already received. The Professor was not at all certain that this was not the last contact of the two doomed men with the outside world, and he felt a great sense of frustration that this contact should be limited to the conversation that had already taken place. He knew enough of the everyday commonness of life and living to understand that no mighty sayings would emerge in the few minutes that were left to them; and yet he kept thinking—also as a part of that poorly pursued recollection which provokingly touched at the edge of his consciousness—that some particular and splendid phrases might arise, bearing within them the life substance of these two men, assuring them of the only immortality in which he himself was certain he believed.

Vanzetti still groped with thoughts of violence. “I find it strange,” he was saying, “that you should come here and warn me against violence. I stand here in a cell, waiting for death to come to me, but you approach and plead for no violence. Have I magical powers to order up violence out of nothing? Such powers I do not have. Violence comes when too much weight is loaded onto back of people. What kind of world have you made? Is it world without violence? At the trial, District Attorney curse Sacco and me because we will not fight in war where twenty million human souls are slain. Yet Sacco and Vanzetti are charged with violence. What a world you make where so few live with the sweat and suffering of so many! Your whole world is violence. You are my friend, and believe me, I love you and honor what you do for me, but also I know it is your world and not the world of Sacco and me. Some day it will be different, but without violence? I do not know. You crucify Christ not once, but again and again, whenever he come to you. Sacco listen to every word I say, and Sacco is plain man who talk English poorly, but Sacco is like Jesus Christ himself for pureness and goodness, and in a little while, Sacco must die—”

The Professor of Criminal Law was not able to listen to any more of this, endure any more, or hear any more of this. The mechanism in his ears still functioned, but by a dogged psychological process he was able to remove himself from the meaning of the sound. Now only the memory which he sought concerned him, until finally, like a person in a trance, he came to himself and to the realization that the interview was finished. He shook hands with Vanzetti and was somewhat surprised to discover that the flesh was warm and that the clasp was firm—and close by, he looked into the brown eyes of the man.

“Good-by, and thank you, my friend,” Vanzetti said, but the Professor was not able to speak now—not until they were outside of the prison walls, when the Attorney reminded him with some surprise that he had remained silent all through the trying incident. But now the Professor had found what he had been seeking in his memory, and he was able to say, “When we heard this, we were ashamed, and restrained our tears.”

“I am afraid I don't understand you,” the Attorney said, himself overwrought and deeply disturbed by what they had been through.

“No? I'm sorry,” the Professor said. “I had been trying to remember something, and now I remember it.”

“It sounded familiar,” the Attorney said mechanically.

“Yes—do you recall, ‘Thus far, most of us were with difficulty able to restrain ourselves from weeping, but when we saw him drinking, and having finished the draught, we could do so no longer; but in spite of myself the tears came in full torrent, so that, covering my face, I wept for myself, for I did not weep for him, but for my own fortune, in being deprived of such a friend'?”

The Attorney nodded heavily. Now the two men stood waiting in the twilight for the car which the Warden had promised he would send round to take them across the river into the city. The words of the Professor of Criminal Law had pricked at the Attorney's own memory, whereupon he wondered aloud, “What was it Socrates said then? Do you remember?”

“‘I have heard that it is right to die with good omens. Be quiet therefore and bear up.'”

And seeing that now tears ran down the Professor's cheeks, and seeing how he stood there in the lowering evening, hunched over like a great, ugly, hurt animal, the Attorney for the Defense forbore to ask any more questions or to make any additional conversation.

Chapter 15

Now V
ANZETTI
stood at the door of his cell, held there by his own thoughts and by the silent echo of all that he had just finished saying; but the two other men lay each of them upon his cot, each of them upon his back, each of them with wide, vacant eyes probing into the frightful mystery of the close, close future.

Vanzetti held his hands in front of him, fingers curled around the bars in the opening of his cell door. He looked upon his hands which were himself, and he raised again in his mind the eternal question of how it would be when his whole person, his being and his knowingness became nothing, without memory or awakening. Fear blew over him like a cold and irresistible wind from which he tried vainly to shelter himself; now he no longer wanted a delay or postponement in the execution; his despair being such that if a thought could have brought about his own death, he would have wished the end and finished living. But thinking of himself that way made him think of Sacco, and he knew that what he suffered, Sacco also suffered. His heart went out in great pity to Sacco, and he called to him.

“Nicola, Nicola, do you hear me?”

Wide-eyed, Sacco dreamed in his wakefulness, his thoughts voyaging back like a boat driving through a sea of sorrow. Everything turned into its opposite; if he recalled gladness filled with laughter, within him it turned into unhappiness wet with tears. He would yearn to remember a particular thing, but the moment this sought-for vision recreated itself within his mind, he sought to drive it away. He remembered all the times when, with his wife, Rosa, he had taken part in this or that amateur dramatic performance. Rosa was beautiful and gracious and talented; and he had always felt that she should have been a famous actress. He had always known how wonderful she was, and never had he understood the mystery which surrounded the action she took in marrying him. He had always firmly believed that no one else understood it either, and that one and all said, “Just think and try to understand how that beautiful Rosa has married Nick Sacco. Now what does she see in him?” To which, no doubt, someone else answered, “Have you ever known it to fail—plain women marry the handsome men, and men of the most exceeding plainness, the most beautiful women. It has to be that way, and life levels out that way. If not for that fortunate provision of nature, you would have two races coming into being—the very beautiful and the very plain.”

In any case, she had married him, and each night he repeated the substance of the miracle to himself in terms of both realization and gratitude.

“It is my Rosa who has married me,” he would say to himself, “plainly and evidently.”

Now he repeated it to himself, and it stabbed into him like physical pain squeezing his already-tortured heart. When he drove this pain away, a new scene replaced it. He and Rosa had given a concert in a simple arrangement of
The Divine Comedy
. They had worked it out themselves in the most obvious manner, and yet it was effective. For example, when Rosa would say,

“Nor when poor Icarus felt the hot wax run,
Unfeathering him, and heard his father calling,
‘Alack! alack! thou fliest too high, my son!”

Sacco would answer:

“Than I felt, finding myself in the void falling
With nothing but air all around, nothing to show,
No light, no sight but the sight of the beast appalling.”

Again he flung this agonizing thought from him, wondering why his mind had sought and selected the honey-liquid Italian of just those two verses. It became more than he could bear, and he turned over onto his stomach, burying his face in the tear-dampened palms of his hands, and crying into his hands, “Rosa, Rosa, Rosa—” until he had fought through the spasm of grief and fear, and once again memory returned, offering him this time the recollection of strikes and. picket lines and places where working people met to consider what a handful of poor people could do, with no union and no unity. He tried to separate all these things in his memory in order to file each one, but there were so many strikes and so many picket lines, so many occasions—the machine workers at Hopedale, the shoe workers at Milford, the textile workers at Lawrence, the pale men and women from the paper mills. He saw again the aftermath of each tiny meeting where the hat was passed around and a collection was taken. It was then his habit and practice to crumple a five dollar bill in his palm so that no one could see it or know how much it was and thereby feel ashamed or mortified because they had to give less—and having done this, to drop the bill into the hat.

Those were days when he was earning from sixteen to twenty-two dollars a day, working overtime as a finely skilled shoe worker. It was more than enough money for all their needs, and Rosa too would say, “Yes, yes, help them, help them. These are your good comrades.” But for all that the job brought in twenty-two dollars a day, he resigned and threw it away when the war began, and talked it through with Rosa for all of one night, his feeling that he would die, lay down his life, kill himself before he would take up a gun and shoot down a fellow worker, German or Hungarian or Austrian or anything else.

Rosa had understood. A quality which had entered into their relationship from the very beginning was the immediate and deep understanding on the part of each of them of the problems of the other. Many people, friends of his, said, “Oh, Sacco—Sacco is a simple and easy-going man.” Perhaps he was; but this made him feel more deeply, not less deeply, and in that way his wife was just as simple and direct. They merged together. Whenever Sacco saw men and women who were not getting along together, scrapping and biting at each other all the time, he was filled with a terrible sense of pity, just as when he saw someone crippled badly. He knew men who committed adultery, but to his way of thinking, they were driven like mad animals.

He had only to look at Rosa. Not that their marriage always went like a dream of romantic love. They would grow angry at each other, fight with each other, be silent toward each other—but always it broke and everything poured out and nothing was concealed. It was a condition of equality as well as frankness, for neither ever excluded the other, and to their friends they always seemed like two children, in love and bound as comrades at one and the same time.

This condition seemed to Vanzetti the most wonderful thing between two human beings that he had ever seen—particularly the grave and straightforward manner in which Sacco dealt with his wife. One day Vanzetti had come to their home and, finding the house empty—they never locked their door, feeling that if anyone needed their few poor possessions, he was more than welcome to them—he sat down in the shade of the front to wait for them to return. Vanzetti sat in the corner made by steps and wall, sunk in the shadow, comfortable and cool on that summer afternoon, and unobserved by Sacco and Rosa as they returned.

It happened that at that time, Rosa was growing heavy with the first child, and for that reason they walked very slowly; but, as is the case with so many women, the pregnancy had cast a glow all over her, a tint upon her beauty as if there were light spread thinly everywhere under her skin. She and Sacco held hands, and as they walked, they turned their heads every so often to smile at each other. It was a gesture so simple and natural that Vanzetti was quite overcome by it; and, as he said afterwards, he was filled with the desire to weep for the plain joy of such happiness.

Sacco had his own memory of that day. They had walked down to Stilton Brook and had taken off their shoes and stockings and sat on a rock with their feet in the water. They sang together the delightful song which had been written for so foolish a purpose as to celebrate the opening of a cable railroad in Italy, and then they talked about a name for their child.

“If it is a boy,” he said, taking up the favorite and endless discussion, “Antonio.”

“No.” They had agreed on Dante already. “Why do you always change?”

“Maybe it will be twins, and then we will need two names.”

“No. It will not be twins.”

“A girl?”

“I thought you agreed that Ines is the most beautiful name in the world.”

“Rosa is.”

“Nick,” she had said then, “just suppose someone was listening to us saying the most foolish things anyone could dream of saying, like two little children who have just fallen in love. We have too much. Bite your fist.”

He bit his hand, and Rosa began to cry.

“Why—why are you crying?”

“I filled up inside,” she said simply.

He kissed her, and she stopped crying. They sat for a while. They walked back through a field of wild flowers, and he picked buttercups and snapdragons and Indian paintbrush and daisies, like a little boy, twisting all the flowers into a wreath for her hair. Then, hand in hand, they came walking back to their house, where finally they spied Vanzetti sitting in the shade; and suddenly he, Sacco, was overwhelmed with a sense of his own riches and Vanzetti's aloneness, and he thought,

“Poor Barto—poor, poor Barto.”

Once again the piercing agony of pain bit through recollection. Sacco sank his teeth into the edge of his palm, biting harder and harder, in the hope that one pain might shut out another. And it was through this cloud of misery that Vanzetti's voice came to him, the calm and even and reassuring tones of Vanzetti calling to him,

“Nicola, Nicola, do you hear me? Nicola, are you there, and what are you doing? Tell me, dear friend.”

Sacco sat up on his cot, driving away memories and the past as one drives off one's enemy—and he tried to answer his friend in the same voice his friend had used, but for him it was not possible to speak without grief. All he could say was,