“We’re here to talk business, Mike,” Carlos repeated, in a choked voice.
I had the feeling he suddenly felt too weak to stand up. But Mike was already at the door.
“Coming?” he shouted impatiently.
“Yes, Mike,” Carlos answered. “Yes, we’re coming.”
We crossed a kind of exotic garden with peacocks and flamingos strutting around loose among the stone monsters Mike caressed as he passed.
“That’s a Moore nude,” he said. “That’s a Branco. Of course, it’s a little old-fashioned. I bought them three years ago. They were pioneers, precursors; they lead directly to my work. But I’m the one who truly breaks new ground now. That’s what all the critics say.”
Carlos shot me a desperate look. At the other end of the garden there was a glass pavilion whose aluminum roof began at the ground and made a kind of roller-coaster loop into the air before coming back down again.
“Fissoni did that,” Mike said. “The best Italian architect, if you ask me. A Communist. But you know, Communism here has nothing to do with the kind at home. It’s not subversive. It’s all in the mind. Intellectual. Almost all the best painters and sculptors here are Communists.”
Carlos emitted a kind of asthmatic whine. He still didn’t dare speak, but he looked at us, darted a finger toward Mike’s back and then touched his own head. We went into the pavilion. Inside, around a vat of concrete there were crates, barrels, sacks of plaster and tools of all kinds; it was like being in a construction yard. And everywhere, too, were Mike’s “works.” What the “works” were supposed to be and what they were worth I don’t know to this day and no doubt I never will. All I saw, speaking personally, were lumps of concrete in strange shapes out of which stuck pieces of iron and twisted pipe.
“It doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before, does it?” Mike asked proudly. “The critics in Alto say I’ve discovered entirely new forms. They say I’m the spearhead of spatialism—I bet in America they don’t even know what that is.”
“No, Mike,” Carlos said gently, the way you talk to a sick person. “No, they don’t know what it is yet.”
“Well, they’ll find out soon,” Mike said with satisfaction. “All my works—there are exactly thirty now—are leaving for New York tomorrow. I’m having a show at the Meyerson Gallery.”
I’ll never forget Carlos’ face when Mike said that. At first an expression of incredulity, then of panic, while he turned toward us, as though to make sure his ears hadn’t betrayed him. But what he probably read on our faces— well, on mine and Shimmy Kunitz’, because the twitches running over Swifty Zavrakos’ face kept anyone from seeing what was happening there—must have confirmed his worst fears, and the expression of astonishment and panic was soon followed by one of frightening calm.
“You’re going to show this in New York, Mike?”
“Yes,” Mike Sarfatti said. “And I can promise you it’ll cause a sensation.”
“That’s for sure,” Carlos answered warmly.
At that moment, I must admit that I really admired the mastery over himself that Carlos displayed. Because it wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen if Mike Sarfatti, the man who was the incarnation of all our hopes and ambitions at a particularly dramatic moment of the Syndicate’s history, returned to New York not to impose his iron grip on the unions once more, but to organize an exhibition of abstract art in a Manhattan gallery. A real tidal wave of mockery and derision—the legendary hero was going to be the object of one of the biggest laughs that had ever shaken the bellies of the labor bosses. Yes, even today I have to admire Carlos’ calm. Maybe he sweated just a little; he had taken out a new cigar and lighted it, and now he was staring at Mike, his hands in his pockets, kindness in his eyes.
“The catalogue’s already printed,” Mike said. “I’ve had them run off five thousand copies.”
“Oh, fine,” Carlos said. “That’s just fine.”
“We’ll have to send them to all our friends.”
“Sure, leave that to us.”
“It has to get into the papers. We’ve got to move into the cultural field. It’s a matter of prestige—very important. Culture! That should be our next conquest. We must bring culture to the masses. What the Syndicate should do right now is build a culture center in Hoboken.”
Carlos looked a little shaken.
“A . . . what?”
“A culture center. The Russians build them everywhere for the workers. We’re wrong to criticize the Communists so blindly. They’ve done some good things—and we should follow their example. Besides, the guy who wrote the preface to my catalogue, Zuccharelli, he’s a Communist. And that doesn’t keep him from being the best art critic alive.”
“A Communist, eh?” Carlos murmured.
“Yes, and I owe him a lot. He’s given me encouragement when I needed it most. Without him, I wouldn’t ever have thought of having this show in New York.”
“Is that so?” Carlos said.
“And he’s really helped me find my way to what I wanted to do. He says it just right here, in his preface. Listen to this: ‘A truly spatial sculpture must express the Einsteinian notion of space-time, by constantly modifying its nature before our eyes in a kind of controlled mutation of matter. Sarfatti’s work, rejecting immobility, refusing to commit itself to a single well-defined structure, is rooted in movement, in change, and achieves a clear break with the reactionary tradition of artistic stagnation, which, not unlike capitalism in the social field, seeks to immobilize forms by fixing them forever. In this sense it can be called truly progressive.’”
I wiped away the drops of cold sweat that had burst out on my forehead: I felt I was watching something like the entrance of the worm into the fruit. It was clearly no longer possible to bring Mike back to his senses in time; and to lock him up in a mental institution at this vital moment of our social struggle would spell disaster for our prestige. We had to forget about the man. The only thing that mattered now was his legend. He was a living myth, and his name was still invaluable to us. At all costs, we had to preserve the myth of the giant of Hoboken, save his name from a ridicule that would make us the laughing stock of every union local in the States. This was one of those moments in the affairs of men when the greatness of the cause suddenly prevails over all other considerations, when the importance of the end justifies the means. The only question—was our moral fiber still intact, were we still determined enough and firm enough in our convictions, or had years of prosperity and easy living damaged our will?
In other words, had decadence set in?
But a glance at Carlos’ face, where an expression of grim resolution had already drowned out the anger and the outrage, completely reassured me: I felt that the old warrior had already made up his mind. I saw him nod suddenly to Shimmy Kunitz. Mike was standing at the edge of the vat of cement where his last “work,” probably still unfinished, raised a stump bristling with barbed wire. The expression on his face had something pathetic about it: a mixture of megalomania and a kind of boundless astonishment.
“I didn’t know I had it in me,” he said.
“Neither did I,” Carlos said. “You must have caught it here.”
“I want all our friends to come and see this. I want them to be proud of me.”
“Yes, Mike,” Carlos said. “Yes, son. Your name will stay big, the biggest, just as it’s always been. I’ll take care of that.”
“They’re still accusing us Americans of being barbarians,” Mike said. “They’ll see. We can’t let Europe have a monopoly on culture.”