The Watcher and Other Stories (2 page)

TO TRANSFORM a room into a polling place (a room that is usually a schoolroom or a courtroom, a refectory, a gymnasium, or a municipal office) only a few objects are required—those sheets of unpainted planed wood, which form the booth; that wooden box, also unpainted, which is the ballot box; the materials (register, packs of ballots, pencils, ballpoint pens, a stick of sealing wax, string, strips of gummed paper) which are given to the chairman at the moment that the “polls are legally opened”—and a special arrangement of the tables found on the spot. Bare rooms, in other words, anonymous, with whitewashed walls; and objects even more bare and anonymous; and those citizens, there at the table—chairman, clerk, watchers, perhaps some “district representatives”—also assume the impersonal appearance of their function.

When the voters begin to arrive, the scene becomes animated: the variousness of life enters with them, each one individualized by gestures too awkward or too brisk, voices too loud or too meek. But there is a moment, beforehand, when the election officials are alone, sitting there counting the pencils, a moment that rends the heart.

Especially where Amerigo was: the room assigned to this poll—one of the many established inside Cottolengo, because each district comprises about five hundred voters, and in all of Cottolengo there are thousands—was on normal days a parlor where relatives visited the inmates, and there were wooden benches all around the walls (Amerigo drove from his mind the facile images the place prompted: peasant parents waiting with baskets of fruit, sad conversations) and the tall windows overlooked a courtyard, irregular in shape, among pavilions and arcades, a bit like a barracks, a bit like a hospital (some women, who seemed too large, pushed carts, moved huge cans; they wore black skirts like the peasant women of long ago, black wool shawls, black bonnets, blue aprons; they moved swiftly in the fine rain that was still falling; Amerigo gave them a brief glance, then came away from the windows).

He didn't want to succumb to the room's squalor, and to avoid that he concentrated on the squalor of their electoral equipment—that stationery, those files, the little official book of regulations which the chairman consulted at the slightest doubt, and he was already nervous before they began—because, for Amerigo, this squalor was rich, rich in signs, in meanings, perhaps even contradictions.

Democracy presented itself to the citizens in this humble, gray, unadorned dress; to Amerigo there were moments when this seemed sublime; in Italy, which had always bowed and scraped before every form of pomp, display, sumptuousness, ornament, this seemed to him finally the lesson of an honest, austere morality, and a perpetual, silent revenge on the Fascists, on those who had thought they could feel contempt for democracy precisely because of its external squalor, its humble accounting; now they had fallen into the dust with all their gold fringe and their ribbons, while democracy, with its stark ceremony of pieces of paper folded over like telegrams, of pencils given to callused or shaky hands, went ahead.

There, around him, were the other officials, commonplace people, most of them (it seemed to him) mustered on the recommendation of Catholic Action but some (besides himself) from the Communist and Socialist parties (he still hadn't distinguished them), performing a common task, a rational, secular service. There they were, dealing with little practical problems: how to draw up the report on “Voters registered at other districts”; how to go over the tally for the district, taking into account the list of “Deceased Voters” that had arrived at the last moment. There they were, now using matches to melt some wax to seal the ballot box, and then they didn't know how to snip off the extra length of string, so they decided to bum it with a match....

In these actions, in this identifying themselves with their temporary duties, Amerigo promptly recognized the true meaning of democracy, and he thought of the paradox of their being there together, some believers in a divine order, in an authority which is not of this earth, and then his own companions, well aware of the bourgeois deceit of the whole business; in short, two kinds of people who should have had little faith in the rules of democracy, and yet each side convinced they were its most zealous guardians, its very incarnation.

Two of the watchers were women: one, wearing a little orange sweater, seemed a factory worker or a clerk, about thirty, with a red, freckled face; the other was fiftyish, with a white blouse, a large locket with a portrait hanging over her bosom, perhaps a widow, an elementary school-teacher, to judge by her appearance. Who would think, Amerigo said to himself, now determined to see everything in the best possible light, that women have enjoyed their civil rights for so few years? They looked as if, daughter following mother, they had never done anything but prepare for elections. And what's more, it's the women who show the most common sense, good at little practical problems, helping the men, who are more self-conscious.

Following this train of thought, Amerigo was already content, as if it were all going for the best (apart from the dark prospects of the elections, apart from the fact that the ballot boxes were in an asylum, where they had been unable to hold political meetings, or stick up posters, or sell newspapers), as if this were already the victory, in the old struggle between State and Church, as if this were the triumph of a lay religion of civic duty, over...

Over what? Amerigo looked around once again, as if seeking the tangible presence of a contrary force, an antithesis, but he could grasp nothing, he could no longer set the affairs of the polls against the atmosphere that surrounded them: in the quarter of an hour he had been there, things and places had become homogeneous, joined in a sole, anonymous, administrative grayness, the same in police stations and regional offices as in the great charitable institutions. And like a man who, diving into cold water, has forced himself to believe that the pleasure of diving is in that sensation of cold, and then, swimming, has found within himself a new warmth and, with it, the sense of how cold and hostile the water really is, so Amerigo, after all his mental efforts to transform the polls' squalor into a precious value, had gone back to his first impression—of an alien, cold place—and he felt that this was the correct view.

In those years, Amerigo's generation (or rather, that part of his generation that had lived in a certain way during the years after '40) had discovered the resources of a previously unknown attitude: nostalgia. And so, in his memory, he began to contrast the scene before his eyes with the atmosphere of Italy after the liberation, in those few years whose most vivid recollection now was the way everyone had taken part in political affairs and actions, in the problems of that moment, serious and elemental (these were thoughts of the present: then he had lived as if the atmosphere of those times was natural, as everyone did, enjoying it—after all that had happened—angry at things that were wrong, without ever thinking they could be set right); he remembered how people looked then, all of them seeming equally poor, and interested in universal questions more than in private ones; he remembered the makeshift party offices, filled with smoke, with the rattle of mimeograph machines, with people in their overcoats outdoing one another in volunteer work (and this was all true, but it was only now, when years had gone by, that he could begin to see it, to make an image of it, a myth); he thought that only that newly born democracy deserved the name “democracy”; that was the value which, a little while ago, he had been seeking vainly in the humility of objects and hadn't found; because that period was over now, and the field had slowly been occupied again by the gray shadow of the bureaucratic State, the same before, during, and after Fascism, the old gap between the managers and the managed.

The voting which was about to begin would (Amerigo was, unfortunately, sure) lengthen this shadow, widen this gap, it would drive those memories still further back, until they became less and less substantial and harsh, and more and more ethereal and idealized. So the Cottolengo visiting parlor was the perfect setting for the day: wasn't this room perhaps the result of a process similar to democracy's? In the beginning, here too (in a period when poverty was still without hope) there must have been warmth in the piety that filled people and things (perhaps there was even now—Amerigo didn't want to deny that—in individual persons and places in the institution, separated from the world), and between the outcasts and their benefactors there must have been created the image of a different society, where life, and not self-interest, was what mattered. (Like many nonbelievers, looking at things from the historical view, Amerigo made a point of understanding and appreciating developments and forms of religious life.) But now this was a huge institution, a complex of hospitals, with certainly outdated equipment, which somehow performed its function, its services, and, what's more, had become productive, in a way no one could have imagined at the time of its foundation: it produced votes.

So is what matters, in everything, only the beginning, the moment when all energy is tensed, when only the future exists? Doesn't the moment come, for any organization, when normal administrative routine takes over? (For Communism, too—Amerigo couldn't help wondering—would it happen with Communism, too? Or was it already happening?) Or... or are institutions, which grow old, of no matter; is what matters only the human will, the human needs which go on being renewed, restoring verity to the instruments they use? Here, to establish the polls (now they had only to tack up in a prominent position—according to the regulations—three notices: one with the laws concerned, and two with the lists of candidates), those men and women, strangers and in part hostile to one another, were working together, and a nun, perhaps a Mother Superior, was helping them (they asked her if they could have a hammer and a few tacks), and some women inmates, with checked aprons, peeped in curiously, and “I'll get them!” a girl with a huge head cried, pushing past the others. She ran off laughing, came back with hammer and tacks, then helped them move a bench.

Her excited movements revealed, in the rainy courtyards beyond, a whole participation, an excitement at this election, as if for an unexpected feast day. What was it? What was this cafe in tacking up properly those notices, like white sheets (white, as official notices always seem, even with all their black print which nobody reads), which united a group of citizens, all surely “a part of the productive life,” with these nuns, and the poor girls who knew nothing of the outside world except what could be seen from an occasional funeral procession? Amerigo now felt a false note in this common effort: in them, in the election officials, it resembled the effort you make during military service to carry out the assigned tasks whose ends remain alien to you; in the nuns and inmates it was as if they were preparing trenches all around, against an enemy, an attacker: and this election bustle was the trench, the defense, but in some way also the enemy.

So when the officials were at their table, waiting, in the empty room, and when the little group outside of people who wanted to get their voting over with quickly began to move, and when the municipal guard began to let the first ones in, all of them felt the certainty of what they were doing, but also a hint of absurdity. The first voters were some little old men—inmates, or artisans employed by the institution, or both at once—a few nuns, a priest, some old women (Amerigo was already thinking that these polls might not be too different from others): as if the opposition brooding behind it all had chosen to present itself in its most reassuring aspect (reassuring for the others, who expected the election to confirm the old positions; depressingly normal, for Amerigo), but no one felt reassured by it (not even the others), and all sat there instead waiting for some presence to make itself known from those invisible recesses, perhaps a challenge.

There was a lull in the flow of voters, and a footstep was heard, a kind of hobbling, or rather a banging of planks, and all the election officials looked toward the door. In the doorway a little woman appeared, very tiny, seated on a stool; or rather, not exactly seated, because she didn't touch the floor with her feet, nor did her legs sway, nor were they folded under her. They weren't there, her legs. This stool, low, square, a footstool, was covered by her skirt, and below—below her waist, and also below the woman—it seemed there was nothing: only the legs of the stool could be seen, two vertical sticks, like the legs of a bird. “Come in!” the chairman said, and the little woman began to advance, that is she thrust forward one shoulder and a hip, and the stool shifted obliquely on that side, and then she thrust out the other shoulder and the other hip, and the stool made another quarter-turn to catch up; and fixed to her stool in this way, she dragged herself across the long room to the table, holding out her voter's certificate.

YOU BECOME accustomed to anything, and more quickly than you think. Even to watching the inmates of Cottolengo vote. After a while, it seemed the most usual, monotonous sight to those on this side of the table; but on the other side, among the voters, the emotion of the exceptional event, the breaking of the norm, continued to spread. The election itself had nothing to do with it: who understood that? The thought that filled them was apparently the unusual public appearance required of them, inhabitants of a hidden world, unrehearsed to play the protagonist's part before the inflexible gaze of outsiders, representatives of an unknown order. Some of the voters suffered, morally and bodily (stretchers carried in some patients, while others, lame or paralyzed, hobbled forward on crutches), some displayed a kind of pride, as if their existence had finally been recognized. In this pretense of freedom that had been imposed on them, was there also, Amerigo wondered, a glimmer, a presage of real freedom? Or was it only the illusion, for just a moment and no more, of being there, of displaying oneself, of having a name?