The Watcher and Other Stories (3 page)

It was a hidden Italy that filed through that room, the reverse of the Italy that flaunts itself in the sun, that walks the streets, that demands, produces, consumes; this was the secret of families and of villages, it was also (but not only) rural poverty with its debased blood, its incestuous couplings in the darkness of the stables, the desperate Piedmont which always clings to the efficient, severe Piedmont, it was also (but not only) the end of all races when their plasm sums up all the forgotten evils of unknown predecessors, the pox concealed like a guilty thing, drunkenness the only paradise (but not only that, not that alone), it was the mistake risked by the material of human race each time it reproduces itself, the risk (predictable, for that matter, on a calculable basis, like the outcome of games of chance) which is multiplied by the number of the new snares: the viruses, poisons, uranium radiation... the random element that governs human generation which is called human precisely because it occurs at random....

And what, if not random action, had placed him, Amerigo Ormea, a responsible citizen, an aware voter, a participant in democratic power, on this side of the table, and not on the other side, like that idiot, for example, who came forward laughing, as if it were all a game?

When he was opposite the chairman, the idiot snapped to attention, made a soldierly salute, and held out his documents: identity card, electoral certificate, all in order.

“Good,” the chairman said.

The other man took his ballot, the pencil, clicked his heels once more, saluted, and marched confidently toward the booth.

“These are fine voters, all right,” Amerigo said aloud, though he realized the remark was banal and in bad taste.

“Poor things,” said the woman in the white blouse, adding then: “Well, in a way, they're blessed....”

Swiftly, Amerigo thought of the Sermon on the Mount, of the various interpretations of the expression “poor in spirit,” and then of Sparta and Hitler, who did away with idiots and the deformed; he thought of the concept of equality, according to the Christian tradition and the principles of '89, then of democracy's century-long struggle to establish universal suffrage, and of the arguments that reactionary polemics opposed to it, the thought of the Church, first hostile, then favorable; and now of the new electoral mechanism of the “swindle law,” which would give more force to this idiot's vote than to his own.

But wasn't this implicit evaluation of his own vote as superior to the idiot's also an admission that there was some logic in the old anti-egalitarian argument?

The “swindle law” was nothing. The trap had been sprung long since. The Church, after years of refusal, had taken at face value the equal civil rights of all citizens, but it replaced the concept of man as protagonist of History with that of Adam's flesh, wretched and ill, which God can nonetheless save through Grace. The idiot and the “responsible citizen” were equal before the omniscient and the eternal; History had been restored to the hands of God; the dream of the Enlightenment had been checkmated when it seemed to win. Election watcher Amerigo Ormea felt he was a hostage, captured by the enemy army.

THE WATCHERS spontaneously arrived at a division of labor: one sought out the names on the register, another crossed them off the voting list, a third checked the identity cards, one directed the voters to this or that booth, depending on which was free. A natural understanding among them was quickly formed, so they could carry out these tasks as rapidly as possible, without confusion, and there was even a kind of tacit alliance with regard to the chairman, elderly, slow, afraid of making mistakes, whom they had to urge on, all together, with determination, each time he was about to be swamped by details.

But beyond this practical division of tasks, another division was taking shape, the real one, which set them against one another. The first to give herself away was the woman in the orange sweater; she began nervously to make objections because of an old woman who came out of the booth, waving her ballot, unfolded. “Her vote's no good! She showed her ballot!”

The chairman said he hadn't seen anything. “Go back into the booth and fold your ballot now, right and proper,” he said to the old woman, and to the watcher: “You have to be patient...”

“The law is the law,” the woman insisted harshly.

“But she meant no harm...” said another watcher, a thin, bespectacled man. “You could close an eye...”

“We're here to keep our eyes open,” Amerigo might have said, at that point, to support the woman in the orange sweater, but he felt a desire to close his own eyes, as if that procession of inmates gave off a hypnotic fluid, as if it made him prisoner of a different world.

For him, an outsider, it was a uniform procession, mostly of women, and he had a hard time distinguishing differences among them: there were those who wore checked aprons and those in black with bonnet and shawl, and the white nuns and the black nuns and the gray nuns, and those who lived at Cottolengo and those who seemed to have come there just to vote. Anyway, they were all alike to him, ageless old bigots, who voted in the same way, amen.

(Suddenly he imagined a world where beauty no longer existed. And it was female beauty he thought of.)

These girls with their hair in braids, orphans perhaps or foundlings brought up in the institution and destined to remain there all their lives: at thirty they still had a slightly infantile look, he couldn't tell whether it was because they were backward or because they had always lived there. You would have said they went straight from childhood to old age. They resembled one another like sisters, but in each group there was one who stood out, the brightest, the dutiful one, explaining endlessly to the others how the voting procedure worked, and when there were some who had no documents, she would sign for them, swearing to their identity, as the law allows.

(Resigned to spending the whole day among those drab, colorless creatures, Amerigo felt a yearning need for beauty, which became focused in the thought of his mistress Lia. And what he now remembered of Lia was her skin, her color, and above all one point of her body—where her back arched, distinct and taut, to be caressed with the hand, and then the gentle, swelling curve of the hips—a point where he now felt the world's beauty was concentrated, remote, lost.)

One of the “bright” girls had already signed for four others. Then came another of the women all in black, Amerigo couldn't tell if they were nuns or what. “Do you know anyone?” the chairman asked her. She shook her head, dismayed.

(What is this need of ours for beauty? Amerigo asked himself. Is it an acquired characteristic, a linguistic convention? And what, in itself, is physical beauty? A sign, a privilege, an irrational stroke of luck, like—among those girls—their ugliness, deformity, deficiency? Or is it a gradually shifting model we invent for ourselves, more historical than natural, a protection of our cultural values?)

The chairman urged the woman on: “Look around. See if somebody knows you and can identify you.”

(Amerigo thought that instead of being there he could have spent Sunday in Lia's arms, and this regret didn't now seem to contradict his sense of civic duty which had led him to act as watcher: to make sure the world's beauty doesn't pass in vain, he thought, is also History, civic action....)

The little woman in black looked around, all at sea, and then the same “bright” girl sprang forward and said: “I know her!”

(Greece... Amerigo was thinking. But isn't placing beauty too high in the scale of values also a step toward an inhuman civilization, which will then sentence the deformed to be thrown off a cliff?)

“Why, she knows them all, that girl does!” The shrill voice of the woman in orange rose. “Mr. Chairman, ask her if she can give you the voter's name.”

(For thinking of his friend Lia, Amerigo now felt he should apologize to this beautyless world which for him had become reality, while Lia appeared in his memory as unreal, a shade. All the outside world had become a shade, a mist, while this one, inside, the Cottolengo world, so filled his experience that now it seemed the only real one.)

The “bright” girl had come up and was taking the pen to sign the register. “You know Battistina Carminati, don't you?” the chairman asked in one breath, and the girl promptly answered: “Oh yes, yes, Battistina Carminati,” and she signed the register.

(A world, Cottolengo, Amerigo thought, that could have become the only world in the world if the evolution of the human species had reacted differently to some prehistoric cataclysm or some pestilence... Who could speak of the backward, deformed, idiots, today, in a world that was totally deformed?)

“Mr. Chairman! What kind of identification is that? You told her the name yourself!” The orange woman was enraged. “Try asking Carminati if she recognizes the other girl...”

(...A path evolution might yet take, Amerigo reflected, if atomic radiations do act on the cells that control the traits of the species. And the world might become populated by generations of human beings who for us would be monsters, but who to themselves will be human beings in the only way that beings are human....)

The chairman was already bewildered. “Well, do you know her? You know who she is?” he asked, and nobody could say to whom he was speaking now.

“I don't know, I don't know,” the woman in black stammered, frightened.

“Of course, I know her; she was in the Sant' Antonio ward last year, wasn't she?” the “bright one” protested, twisting her face toward the watcher in the orange sweater, who replied: “Then ask her to tell us your name!”

(If the only world in the world were Cottolengo, Amerigo thought, without another world outside, which, in exercising its charity, overwhelmed and crushed and mutilated it, perhaps this Cottolengo world too could become a society, begin a history of its own....)

The thin watcher also spoke out against the woman in the orange sweater. “They both live here; they see each other every day. They must know each other, mustn't they?”

(They would remember that humanity could be a different thing, as in fables, a world of giants, an Olympus.... As we do: and perhaps, without realizing it, we are deformed, backward, compared to a different, forgotten form of existence....)

“If they don't know each other's name, then it isn't valid,” the orange woman insisted.

(The more he was overcome by the possibility that Cottolengo might be the only possible world, the more Amerigo struggled not to be swallowed up by it. The world of beauty was fading on the horizon of possible realities like a mirage, and Amerigo went on swimming, swimming toward the mirage, to reach that unreal shore, and before him he saw Lia swimming, her back level with the surface of the sea.)

“Well, it seems I'm the only one here who is interested in respecting the law...” the orange woman said, looking around, vexed. In fact, the other watchers were examining their papers, as if they were concerned with something quite different, as if they were trying to discard the problem, opposing it only with an absent attitude, faintly annoyed, and Amerigo was doing the same, Amerigo who was there for the specific purpose of giving her a hand: he was at sea, among distant thoughts, as if in a dream. And in his waking part, he reflected that, in any case, the others would have their way and would allow voters without identification to cast their ballots anyhow.

Supported by the thin watcher, the chairman found the strength to emerge from his uncertainty and say: “I think the identification is valid.”

“May I put my opposition on record?” the woman said, but the very fact that she asked it as a question was already an admission of defeat.

“There's nothing to put on record,” the thin man said.

Amerigo moved behind the table, past the orange woman's back, and said softly: “Take it easy, comrade. We'll wait.” The woman looked at him, questioningly. “It isn't worth making an issue of this. Our moment will come.” The woman calmed down. “We must raise a general objection.”

FOR A moment Amerigo was pleased with himself, with his calm, his self-control. Perhaps this was what he wanted to be his behavior's constant norm, in politics as in everything else: mistrust of enthusiasm, synonym of naïveté, as of factional rancor, synonym of insecurity, weakness. This attitude of his corresponded to a habitual tactic of his party, which he had promptly assimilated, as psychological armor, to dominate alien, hostile situations.

However, as he thought about it, wasn't this desire of his to wait, not to intervene, to aim at a “general objection,” dictated by a feeling of futility, of renunciation, by a basic laziness? Amerigo already felt too discouraged to hope he could assume any initiative. His legalitarian battle against irregularities, fraud, hadn't yet begun, and already that wretchedness had overwhelmed him like an avalanche. If they would only hurry it up, with all their litters and crutches, if they would only get it over with, this plebiscite of all the living and the dying and perhaps even the dead: with the limited formalities he could summon to his aid, no election watcher could stop the avalanche.

Why had he come to Cottolengo? Respect for legality? Ha! One had to start again from the beginning, from zero: it was the fundamental meaning of words and institutions that should be debated, to establish the most helpless person's right not to be used as an instrument, as an object. And this, today, in the present situation, when the elections at Cottolengo were mistaken for an expression of the will of the people, seemed so remote that it could be invoked only through a general apocalypse.

Extremism, like an air pocket, was, he felt, sucking him down. And, with extremism, he could excuse his sloth, his indifference, he could immediately salve his conscience: if he could remain silent and motionless in the face of an imposture like this, if he was almost paralyzed, it was because in such situations it was all or nothing, either you accepted them or else:
tabula rasa
.