The occasion was surreal, though I unfortunately never saw the programme, thus missing the performance of the ‘Internationale’ by the celebrated classical avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian. Inside a vast RAI (Italian television) hangar an elaborate set had been constructed round a giant papier-mâché head of Karl Marx, the top of which was removable. From it the presenter, a well-known comedian, would from time to time withdraw large cards marked CLASS STRUGGLE, DIALECTICS and the like. Something looking like a dacha on some Chekhovian country estate had also been constructed, on whose veranda I sat with the late Lucio Colletti, a brilliant ex-communist academic, with whom I was supposed to expound THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE for not more than five minutes, when it emerged from Marx’s head. He subsequently supported Silvio Berlusconi, but even he could not yet have known or perhaps imagined this in 1983.
I do not know what happened on the rest of that Evening with Karl Marx, but I left to collect my fee, offered in cash, from a young representative of the Italian state’s public service. She gave me the following advice: ‘You know, you’re not supposed to take so much money out of the country. The best thing, I suggest, is that you pack it between the shirts in your suitcase. They’ll never bother to look.’
I should recall the 1990s with pleasure. Il Secolo Breve ( The Age of Extremes) was a considerable success in Italy. In its public mode the Italian people threw out the most corrupt regime in Europe, utterly destroying the parties of the Cold War Republic. We were in Italy ourselves at the time of the elections of 1994 which reduced those fighting it under the name Christian Democrats and Socialists to thirty-two and fifteen seats respectively in a Chamber of Deputies of 630, a triumph already tarnished by the victory, shaky as it then was, of Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition. And yet, what was particularly disappointing for its old admirers, though no longer unexpected, was the failure of what had once been the PCI. Finally in a position to take its place at the head of a progressive democratic government, it was unequal to the task. As Britain, France and Germany were ruled by governments of the left, Italy entered the new millennium by getting ready for the first government clearly of the right since the fall of fascism.
For most Italians life went on, probably more satisfactorily than ever after the most miraculous half-century of improvement in their history. And yet, would one guess so from what is (at least in my opinion) perhaps the greatest book produced by an Italian in my lifetime, Italo Calvino’s wonderful Invisible Cities? (I recall him still, shortly before his untimely death, on his green roof terrace above the Campo Marzio in Rome, with a sceptical half-smile on his dark face, full of wit and tactful learning.) It is about the stories told to Kublai Khan, the Emperor of China, of cities, real, imagined or both, encountered by Marco Polo on his travels. It is about Irene, the city which can be seen only from outside. What is it like seen from within? It does not matter. ‘Irene is the name of a distant city. Once you get closer, it is no longer the same.’ It is also about the promised but undiscovered cities whose names are already in Kubla’s atlas: Utopia, the City of the Sun. But we do not know how to reach or enter them. And what, asks the Emperor at the end, of the nightmare cities, whose names we also know?
Polo: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if it exists, it is already here, the hell of our daily life, formed by living together. There are two ways of enduring it. The first is what many find easy: accept hell and become part of it, until you no longer see that it is there. The second is risky and needs constant attention and learning: in the midst of hell to look for, and to know how to recognize what is not hell, to make it last, to give it space.
That was not the spirit in which my generation, including Calvino, saw the Italy that had just liberated itself from fascism.
21
Third World
I
In 1962 I persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to give me a travel grant to South America, in order to enquire into the subject-matter of my recent book, Primitive Rebels, in a continent where it could be expected to play a more prominent part in contemporary history than in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Those were the days when foundations still sent their air travellers by first class, by airlines whose names record a vanished past – Panamerican, Panair do Brasil, Panagra, TWA, though, except for Peru, the old national flag carriers still seem to survive. For about three months in 1962–3 I made the circuit of South America – Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia – in this luxurious style, implausible for an enquirer into peasant rebellion. It was the first of numerous visits to continental Latin America in subsequent years, both to Mexico and to various parts of South America, indeed to all countries in that continent bar the Guyanas and Venezuela. Probably the longest unbroken period I have ever spent outside the United Kingdom since 1933 is the half-year or so I spent with my family teaching, researching and writing from Mexico to Peru in 1971. It is a continent on which I have many friends and pupils, with which I have been associated for forty years, and which, I do not quite know why, has been remarkably good to me. It is the only part of the world where I have found myself not surprised to meet presidents, past, present and future. Indeed, the first one I met in office, the canny Víctor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia, showed me the lamp-post on the square outside his balcony in La Paz from which his predecessor Gualberto Villaroel had been hanged by a rioting crowd of Indians in 1946.
After the triumph of Fidel Castro, and even more after the defeat of the US attempt to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, there was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions. Though this also drew me there, my chief reason was practical, namely linguistic. Historians who deal with the activities of ordinary people must be able to communicate with them by mouth, and Latin America was the only part of what was known as the Third World where large numbers of them spoke languages within my reach. For I was not concerned simply with a geographical region, but with a much larger unknown, that is to say the 80 per cent of men, women and children who live outside the zone inhabited until the last third of the twentieth century primarily by people with (notionally) white skin.
For the first half of my life these 80 per cent knew nothing of the world and, give or take a few thousand individuals, the world knew practically nothing about them. Nothing is more impressive to someone of my age than the extraordinary discovery, since 1970, of the First World by the peoples of the Third World or – since these terms themselves belong to the era of the Cold War – of the possibility that poor people from anywhere can change their lives for the better by moving to the rich countries. Of course, with the rarest exceptions, such as the USA since the 1960s, we do not want them to come, even when we need them. A world dedicated to the free global movement of all profit-making factors of production is also a world dedicated to stop the one form of globalization that is unquestionably desired by the poor, namely finding better-paid work in rich countries. We have come to be so familiar with the century’s inhumanity that we no longer distinguish between refugees and the Afghan and Kurd emigrants transported in coffin-ships by emigration contractors, like the Italians and Russian Jews of the 1880s, who had just discovered that they did not have to live and die in the paesi and shtetls of their birth.