The Knight And Death; And One Way Or Another, page 5
He closed the door gingerly behind him, barring the frenzied, avid stares of the reporters congregated in the corridor. Among them, preening himself and foaming like a thoroughbred stabled among pit-ponies, stood the Great Journalist. With his articles, from which the moralists without morals drank their fill week in, week out, he had acquired a reputation for being relentless and implacable; a reputation which boosted his price among those who felt the need to buy silence and freedom from obtrusive attention.
As the Deputy made his way towards his office, the Great Journalist stopped him and requested an interview: ‘a brief one, very brief’, he specified. The Deputy made a gesture more of resignation than of assent, while from the surrounding crowd murmurs of protest were raised.
‘A private matter,’ said the Great Journalist, to the accompaniment of a chorus of ironic, incredulous remarks – ‘I bet’, or ‘Sure’, or ‘No doubt.’
In the office, seated facing each other – a desk covered with papers, books and cigarette-packets between them – eyeing each other in wordless distrust as though locked in a conflict to determine who could remain silent longest, the Great Journalist reached into his pocket for pencil and notebook.
The deputy raised the index finger of his right hand and waved it in a slow but definitive No.
‘An automatic gesture, a professional reflex … I have only one question to ask, and I do not expect an answer.’
‘Then why bother?’
‘Because neither you nor I are idiots.’
‘I am very grateful … What is your question?’
‘This story of the Children of Eighty-nine, was it you in the police force who invented it, or was it handed to you prepackaged?’
‘I will give you your answer: it was not us who invented it.’
‘So they delivered it ready-made?’
‘Could be … that is my own suspicion, but it is no more than a suspicion.’
‘Does the Chief believe that too?’
‘I don’t think so, but you’d do better asking him.’
The Great Journalist now wore a perplexed, mistrustful look. He said: ‘I did not expect you to reply, and instead you did: I expected you to brush aside my suspicions, and instead you added your own. What’s going on?’ His mind, as could be seen from his face, was a morass of discarded ideas, of corrections, of rethinking and of hesitancy. ‘So what is going on?’ This time the words were tinged with anxiety.
‘Nothing at all, I would say.’ Then, to insult him: ‘Have you ever heard of the love of the truth?’
‘Vaguely.’ He spoke with disdainful irony, as though cynically noting the insult were the only means of reacting to it: he was looking down on an individual far beneath his notice.
The Deputy returned to the attack with an ‘Indeed, indeed’, and added: ‘Tomorrow, then, I expect to read an article of yours setting out all the suspicions and doubts which I, in my personal capacity, have just confirmed.’
The Great Journalist was red with rage: ‘You know perfectly well that I will never write it.’
‘Why should I know such a thing? I am still full of faith in humankind.’
‘We are in the same boat,’ His anger was tempered by a touch of frailty, of weariness.
‘Don’t you believe it. I have already landed on a desert island.’
9
The conversation had left him drained, but the pain had gone: it cowered like a beast – squat, ferocious and repulsive – lying in ambush in one sole point of his body, of his being. The final words of the conversation, however, left him with a yearning for the deserted island, for a spot where, as though huddled over some map, he could give free rein to an ancient dream and an ancient memory: in as much as certain things from childhood and adolescence were now ancient to him. Treasure Island: a book, someone had said, which was the closest resemblance to happiness attainable. He thought: tonight I will re-read it. His memory of it was clear, since he had already re-read it many times in that old, unlovely edition they had once given him. In the course of his transfers from one city to the next, from one house to another, he had lost many books, but not this one. Aurora Publishers: yellowing paper, which after all these years seemed to have left the print parched and faded, and on the cover, from the black-and-white version of the film, a scene featuring a feckless and lacklustre Jim Hawkins together with Wallace Beery’s unforgettable Long John Silver. The same man had been equally unforgettable as Pancho Villa, so much so that after having seen both films it was impossible to read either Stevenson’s novel or Guzman’s work on the Mexican Revolution without the characters presenting themselves with the physique, the gestures and the voice of Wallace Beery. He thought of all mat the cinema had meant to his generation, and wondered if it would have a comparable impact on the new generation, and whether that scaled-down cinema, totally insufferable to him, given on television could ever have any impact at all.
He returned to the island, and a new character, Ben Gunn, appeared before him. His mind was so free, so unfettered and capricious, that from Ben Gunn, via a detail he suddenly recalled, he moved on to think about the advertising industry that threatened to flood the world. Even the producers of Parmesan cheese undoubtedly paid their toll to advertisers, but not a single advertising executive had ever remembered Doctor Livesey’s snuff-box. He gleefully imagined the poster or full-page ad that could be made from that scene: Doctor Livesey proffering, to potential buyers, the open snuff-box with a piece of Parmesan inside, just as he did in the narrative to Ben Gunn, himself a great lover of cheese. ‘A delicious cheese, produced in Italy,’ the doctor would be saying, or something of the sort.
Meantime, his eyes were fixed on The Knight, Death and the Devil. Perhaps Ben Gunn, from Stevenson’s description of him, had some resemblance to Dürer’s Death. The thought prompted him to view Dürer’s Death as in a grotesque light. The weary appearance of Death had always unsettled him, as if it implied that Death arrived on the scene wearily and slowly at the point when people were already tired of life. Death was weary, his horse was weary, both a far cry from the horses of the Triumph of Death, or Guernica. Death, the hour-glass or the menacing pinchbeck of the serpents notwithstanding, expressed mendacity rather than triumph. ‘Death is expiated by living.’ A beggar from whom alms are begged. As for the Devil, he was as weary as the rest, too horribly demonic to be wholly credible. A wild alibi in the lives of men, so much so that there were moves afoot at that very moment to restore to him all his lost vigour: theological assault therapies, philosophical reanimation techniques, parapsychological and metaphyschic practices. But the Devil was tired enough to be content to leave it all to mankind, who could manage everything better than him. And the Knight: where was he bound for, armed from head to toe, so unshakeable of purpose, dragging behind him that weary figure of the Devil, and so hastily refusing Death charity? Would he ever struggle up to the walled citadel on high, the citadel of the supreme truth, of the supreme lie?
Christ? Savonarola? No, no, far from it. Perhaps what Dürer had placed inside that armour was the real death, the real devil: and it was life which, with that armour and those weapons, believed itself secure in itself.
Wrapped up in these thoughts, themselves affected by a strain of incandescent delirium, he had almost dozed off: the Chief, who came bursting into his office, found him in that state and said: ‘You really are unwell.’ Since he had become aware that the Deputy was failing and in pain, the Chief no longer sent for him when he had to talk to him: a kindness that the Deputy appreciated, but not without an element of annoyance.
‘Not as much as I would like to be,’ replied the Deputy, shaking himself awake, but feeling his pain reawaken too.
‘What are you saying?’ the Chief replied, pretending to be scandalised, but having understood perfectly well that the point the other wished to reach in feeling unwell was the point where he would feel no pain at all. However he was too blissfully happy to be side-tracked by anyone else’s problems: ‘Have you heard? What do you think?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said the Deputy, with measured and gleeful malice, ‘he deserves some punishment for what he has got up to: a charge, as well the obvious one of self-calumny, of giving misleading information, of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the peace …’
‘What do you mean?’ This time not pronounced formally, but as a cry from the soul.
‘I mean what I have meant from the very beginning: if we go along with this game of the Children of Eighty-nine, if we give a hand in creating them, this story will have no end; there’ll be victims one after the other, and I do not just mean in the form of the corpses of murder victims, I mean people like the one you have in your clutches right now.’
‘What do you mean?’ once more, but this time heartfelt and almost imploring: ‘What we have in our hands is a vital link in the chain, and you want us to toss it away as if it were worthless.’
‘You’re quite right: a link in a chain, but it is a chain of stupidity and human suffering, a chain of a quite different sort from what you have in mind. Be patient, listen to me for a moment … This boy will carry on denying today, maybe even tomorrow, for a whole week, let’s say for a month: but the day will come when he will confess to being a member of a subversive, revolutionary association called the Children of Eighty-nine. He will declare himself ready, no … desperate to collaborate and, with our assistance, will provide the names of one, two, three accomplices, fellow members … I wonder if he’ll choose from those of his acquaintance he likes most or least; that’s a psychological mechanism that would repay study, don’t you think? … In any case, we’ll soon have further links in our chain … By this time – you don’t need much imagination to picture it – the police force will be out and about talking to professors, janitors, barmen, disco owners, managers of takeaway sandwich stalls – a new word, that … it makes me tremble all over … as though they had stuck together sandwiches and book stalls – Anyway, there they are busily interrogating, with the aim of getting as many names as possible of the people this young man saw regularly … in the unlikely event of his obstinately refusing to talk, of his refusing to provide names, we would have no problem in picking one or two names at random from the list which will emerge from these enquiries …’
‘You really are unwell,’ he said in a concerned, persuasive tone: ‘Take a holiday: a couple of months off. You’re due it: I’ll see to it right away, if you like.’
‘Thank you. I’ll think it over.’
10
‘Morphine is wonderful: it is essential to take it when you can’t stand it any more,’ a medical friend had advised him, handing over a little packet. The effects of a morphine dose were wonderful, more so when they succeeded an intolerable level of pain. The stronger the storm the greater the peace. ‘Peace after the Storm’, ‘Saturday in the Village’, ‘The Solitary Sparrow’, ‘Infinity’: Giacomo Leopardi, that poet happy in his unhappiness. What great and profound sentiments, expressed with utter simplicity and even with banal images had he revealed and stamped indelibly on the memory of that generation of Italians who could now be called ageing: in their far-off school years, and thereafter. Did they still read him nowadays in school? Maybe so, but there was certainly no child who knew his poems by heart. Par coeur, as the French teacher would put it, distributing the poems of Victor Hugo, almost invariably Victor Hugo. He could call them to mind even now:
Devant la blanche ferme ou parfois vers midi
Un veillard vient s’asseoir sur le seuil attiedi ….
Oh! combien de marins, combien de capitaines
Qui sont partis joyeux pour des courses lontaines
Dans ce morne horizon se sont evanouis…
And he had them even more par coeur now. The sheer beauty of the expression, which he translated ‘in the heart, from the heart and for the heart’. He discovered himself sentimental to the point of tears. But the doctor, with that sybilline, contradictory phrase, had only intended to warn him against dependency.
But what was the point at which a person just could not stand it any more? He pushed it further and further into the future, like some finishing-post in a contest between the will and pain. And not out of any fear of dependency, but from a sense of dignity in which the mere fact of his having been for the greater part of his life an upholder of the law, and of its proscriptions and prohibitions, played a part. He was well aware of what morphine was in a pharmacopoeia, in a hospital, in a doctor’s bag or at the bedside of someone who had arrived at the point of being unable to take any more. Still, he could not quite bring himself to view it in the sunlight of permitted things, removed from the shadow of transgression and crime in which he, after years of practice, had been accustomed to considering it. The law. A law, he thought, however iniquitous, is still a form of reason: to obtain the objective of extreme, definitive iniquity the very people who willed and framed the law must themselves distort it and do it violence. Fascism was, among other things, this: a constant evasion of its own laws. So too was Stalin’s communism – even more so.
And the death penalty? But the death penalty has nothing to do with the law: it is an act of self-consecration to crime, of the consecration of crime. A community will always, by a majority, proclaim the need for the death penalty, precisely because it is a consecration. The sacred, whatever it had to do with the sacred … The dark pit of being, of existence.
Morphine, then. And a curious thought, prompted by curiosity, occurred to him: he wondered if in the year in which Tolstoy set the death of Ivan Ilich the use of morphine, for that purpose, was already known. 1885, 1886? It was reasonable to assume it was known, but was there any reference to it in the story? He thought not, and drew a kind of comfort from that reflection. Tolstoy was motivated by perhaps the same considerations as he was in refusing his character morphine. Thinking over that short story, he began to search inside himself for comparisons. Death as a quidditas, a quantum which coursed in the blood among bones, muscles and glands, until it found the niche, cradle or little cavity in which to explode. A minuscule explosion, a point of fire, an ember initially flickering, then of constant, penetrating pain: and it grew and it grew until, having reached the point where the body no longer seemed able to contain it, it overflowed into everything around. Only the mind, with its tiny, momentary victories, was its enemy, but there were moments, interminably long moments, when pain fell on every single thing, darkening and deforming everything. It fell on every pleasure which remained within reach – on love itself, on well-loved pages, on happy memories. Because it took possession of the past, too, as though it had always been present, as though there never had been a time when it was not there, when the body was healthy, young and given over to joy, in joy. Something resembling a satanic inversion of inflation was under way: those tiny reserves of joy which had been successfully put aside in the course of a life were being malevolently devoured by that pain. On the other hand, perhaps everything in the world took place under the sign of inflation; everyday the currency of life was losing its value: all life was a kind of empty, monetary euphoria bereft of purchasing power. The gold standard – of emotions, of thought – had been pillaged: the things of real value had now an unaffordable, if not wholly unknown, price.
Without having really decided, he was embarked on a search to check what was left of his personal reserves. He was walking along the banks of the river, stopping every so often to look at the muddy water, to watch life and time flow by.
He arrived at her house worn out: only one flight of stairs, of old stairs with low, smooth steps, but for him every ascent was now an exertion. Strangely, though, the exertion chased away the pain. He decided he must discuss it with a doctor; for all he knew there existed an exertion therapy; these days they discover so many, grow tried of them, rediscover them, only to grow tired of them all over again. The fact is that just as nature, with precious few elements at her disposal, is capable of forging an infinity of different faces, so it is, obscurely, with the intestines. What can a doctor know about all that? Even when there is the will to communicate to him that little which each of us feels – of the heart, of the lungs, of the stomach, of the bones – a doctor has no option but to refer it all to abstractions, to universals: even when everything is reported to him with the greatest of precision, like Proust in the dentist’s waiting-room describing his toothache to Roditi, giving Roditi the consolation of discovering his own to be identical.
He rang the doorbell: carillon notes in the distance; something which always upset him, but more so now than ever. As usual, she came to the door a few minutes later, in the dressing-gown which, he was fully aware, she had slipped on that very minute. Mais n’te promenes donc pas toute nue … Never walk about completely naked. He remembered, many years previously, in a small theatre in Rome (in Via Santo Stefano del Cacco, alongside both his office and that of Inspector Ingravallo, familiarly known as Don Ciccio Ingravallo; because such was the truth of the pages of Gadda’s novel that he had the impression of having bumped into him on those offices rather than on the printed page), having seen Franca Rame walk about the stage, certainly not naked, and clad in a nightdress which was anything but transparent: because in those days transparent attire, let alone nudity, could provide one of his colleagues with the justification for girding himself in the tricolour sash and having the curtain brought down in any theatre. No longer: today clothes are removed without a second thought, in the theatre as in reality; and to think that in his childhood taking off one’s clothes was considered the height of madness. ‘He stripped himself bare naked’: reason enough, if anyone appeared in that state, for the strait-jacket, the doctor’s surgery, the asylum.
