‘You know, Cary, I don’t get you. Everything you do, the way you move, the way you speak in that accent that isn’t English and isn’t American. I can see it, you work hard on your character. No, not your character in this film, I mean a character you’re going to be playing every day for the rest of your life. I feel you’ve nearly got it, but. there’s one thing that doesn’t convince me, you know?’
She talked like that during the coffee breaks on The Toast of New York, she turned to look at Cary, but it was Archie she was talking to, a cocoon about to pop.
‘I imagine they expect the same of me, my mother expects it, Hollywood expects it but. I won’t do it. Why not just be yourself?’
The poor girl from Seattle. They had broken her into tiny pieces, all of them together: the producers, the politicians, the police, the gutter press, the bloody psychiatrists. and of course Cliff. The great playwright Clifford Odets, good friend of Cary’s, intellectual prick. He had seduced her with his big words, sound causes (a long way from home and with McCarthy still to come), the bust of Lenin on his bedside table, quotes from books. He had seduced her and dumped her, abandoned her to the vendettas of Hollywood, to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, to a bitch of a mother who would have her locked up.
In a madhouse, just like Elsie.
Archie couldn’t find peace, and he made Cary feel guilty as well.
Just as she had been seventeen years before, the same blond hair, the shaved eyebrows, the body that hadn’t yet been raped, draped in a kind of shroud. She came back to them smiling, but reminding them that they had not once spoken out against her persecutors.
Chapter 7
Bar Aurora, 18 January
‘You see, in Italy, it isn’t the Italians who make the decisions, that’s what it is, I’m telling you. If it was up to me, I’ll tell you where I’d send the Allies. Oh yeah, you can say that we lost the elections in ’48. Course we did, with all the moolah that the Americans have given to the Christian Democrats and all the southerners following the priests. Down south that’s the way they like it. It’s what they’re used to: taking things easy, isn’t that right, Walterún? You tell us, you were born and bred down there.’
Walterún scrutinises his cards, perplexed, ignoring Melega’s question. When political questions arise Walterún hardly ever intervenes, so much so that some people cast doubts on the soundness of his convictions. It’s all slander, of course, but it’s true that it is difficult to discover what he thinks about a pile of important questions, such as Italian Trieste, Germany or the coming of television.
Today the main topic is Trieste, or rather it is Mauro Melega, the best boccette player in the whole bar, who is talking in his usual voice, too loudly, forcing everyone to listen to him, even if some of us, heaven alone knows, might like to concentrate on their own affairs. Then you know how it is: it starts with this and that and you end up talking urbi-et-orbi even about serious things, and in the end you can’t even remember how you started.
‘Those southerners are all Christian Democrats out of convenience, because everybody knows that the Americans and the priests will always give you a present, whether it’s a bar of chocolate or a pair of shoes doesn’t matter: thanks and shut up. The Yanks and the Vatican are in charge in Italy, all because we, the only ones who know what’s best for Italy, aren’t in government. We’re always the ones who have to do everything for everybody. Look what a prize bollocks they made of Trieste at the end of the year. They rise up against the Americans and the British, they want to drive them out, and they’re right, the poor things, you can’t have strangers in your house all your life. But the Allies are worried that Tito will take Trieste, and they don’t trust the Italians. Moral of the tale: they haven’t let go for ten years. And the people of Trieste are getting well fucked over.’
Walterún lifts his head from his trump cards and stretches his neck: ‘Go on then, explain to me that story about Tito that I keep forgetting. How come he’s a fascist? I mean, he’s a communist, but really he’s a fascist?’
Melega sighs, with the face he makes when he wants to say, ‘another ignorant southerner’: ‘Right, listen carefully, I’m only going to say this once. Not everyone who claims to be a communist is a real communist. Otherwise we’d already have taken over the world! Tito, for example, goes along with the Americans, he acts the whore, he’ll go with anyone. He wants to make socialism, but he wants to do it according to his rules, the way it suits him, he won’t listen to anyone, least of all the Russians, who had their revolution before he did. But what I say is that if someone got things right before you did, you pay him some attention, don’t you? It means that he’s got more experience! But the Slavs are horrible people, you can never trust them, gypsies the lot of them, worse than the southerners. But we’re the only ones standing guard, so we don’t end up in that situation.’
Then, because he’s about to hit the jack, Melega leans over the billiard table and is silent for a moment, concentrating on the game. Turning his back on the door, he fails to notice that Benfenati, from the Section, is here on his usual visit. After scoring his point, he is about to continue with his speech, particularly the insults directed against gypsies, southerners and tramps, but Bortolotti manages to save him: ‘Benfenati’s here, Mauro,’ he says loudly. ‘Why don’t we ask him to explain this business about Tito?’
Melega just manages to bite his tongue; he rolls his eyes like someone who has just escaped a danger, throws back his head and greets the new arrival. He has Bortolotti to thank for avoiding a slanging match, and us too, because no one could have saved us from a lecture on Gramsci and the southern question. Because Benfenati isn’t a bad person, quite the opposite in fact, and also a very good comrade, sure, but he has this one shortcoming, which is that whatever people are talking about, he has to stick his nose in and tell you the Party line on it. Now that’s absolutely fine if you’re talking about Tito’s fascism, for example, everyone’s interested, but other times he does it just for the sake of chatting and once he goes off on his little lecture, you’re never going to bring the subject back to football or some actor’s divorce or whatever. Some people say he does it just because that’s what he’s like, he always wants to be top of the class, while others swear that it’s the Party that’s taught him to be like that, ‘activism starts in the family, in the place of work, in the bar. ’ Or something of that kind.
‘. and after the war Tito had the Russian technicians shadowed when they came to give him a hand with the reconstruction, see what I mean? Fine example of international solidarity among the workers! And then there’s the fact that he’s a nationalist, he treats the Soviet Union like any other bourgeois state, and on top of that he’s arrogant, ambitious, presumptuous, typical of the counterrevolutionary Trotskyites.’
Bottone nods, convinced, this Tito strikes him as a scoundrel, while Garibaldi, as usual, decides to be bloody-minded.
‘Ok, so at the end of the day you’re trying to tell us that the Yugoslavian communists became fascists because Tito and Stalin didn’t get on, is that it?’
‘No, Garibaldi, don’t put words in my mouth! There are serious ideological reasons, and besides. ’ He raises his hands and hooks the index finger of one into the thumb of the other: ‘First, in the Yugoslavian Communist Party there are no discussions, woe betide anyone who dares to criticise, the rulers aren’t elected, there’s a police check on militants and a real Turkish-style despotism. Second,’ and his index fingers meet to form a cross, ‘Tito says that the peasants are the most solid base of the Yugoslav state, in the face of Lenin and the proletarian hegemony. Meanwhile, in the countryside, he doesn’t do anything Marxist, and one day he allows the little private farm to generate capitalism, the day after that he’s acting the demagogue, hoopla, all of a sudden he wants to sweep away all the wealthy peasants, nationalise the land, like that. Thirdly’ — his whole hand engulfs his middle finger — ‘he’d bring the communists in the Free Territory of Trieste over to his side, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s someone there like our old comrade, who —’