She had baptized him Salvatore in honour of the Saviour, whereas his father would have preferred not to have had a christening at all, and wanted, quite ineffectually, to name him Nino, after Antonio Gramsci, or perhaps Liberazione or Umanità, or even 1926, since that was the year of his birth and also that of Gramsci’s last imprisonment. Domenico Rossi’s choice of names could be laughed at, and was laughed at, even by the Party members of Mazzata. His one ally was a part-time book-keeper, one of those not born to succeed, with the short-sighted mildness of a certain kind of violent revolutionary. This man, Sannazzaro, was not particularly welcome in the house and often sat talking to Domenico in a windowless room which was really part of the kitchen passage. The police rightly regarded him as entirely harmless. But to Salvatore, as he grew up, his father had meant much more than his mother. He couldn’t ever remember agreeing wholeheartedly and without embarrassment with his mother. On the other hand he put off for as long as he could the pain of admitting to himself that his father was wrong.
In 1913 Domenico and Sannazzaro had come up together from Mazzata in search of opportunities. They had gone as far north as their permits allowed, to Turin. Domenico had worked as a bicycle mechanic, Sannazzaro as an assistant book-keeper. They shared a copy of a weekly newspaper, Gramsci’s Grido del Popolo. In the Grido they read about an Italy, a possible Italy, without poverty, favours or bribery. Mass education would come about as a matter of course, but it would take the form not just of instruction but of question and answer between teacher and learner. Every sane man is an intellectual, but most are afraid to function as an intellectual should, that is, to stay in their own communities and organize them. If only a few thousand would do this, in Calabria, Campania, Sicily and Sardinia, the south could be as prosperous as the north. Only the lack of good sense or even common sense made it difficult to envisage the great human cities of the future with their intense, tumultuous and productive life. Under present conditions every Italian family struggled against every other to get advantages for itself. When the concept of property was abolished the struggle would be unnecessary. Even within the home there would be peace. Twelve brothers and sisters would be able to sit around a table without dispute. And the children’s education would no longer be left to women and priests. No adult would have a mortgage on a child’s character or its future. In the new community it would be free, at last, to choose.
Every life has lucky moments when sympathy opens one heart to others. To respond may be a mistake, not to respond must be ingratitude. The crowded print of the Grido came, in this way, in the back streets of Turin, to authentic life for Rossi and Sannazzaro. In the whole city they had not succeeded in finding one bar or café kept by a Mazzatano. Their own friendship, the weekly Party meetings and the Grido became their points of reference.
Before the strike of 1919 they met their frail leader in person. That was before he went to prison for the first time. Rossi even had the opportunity to ask him whether there was anything he could do for him, anything he could get for him or have sent to him by way of the warders. Gramsci had said that he wanted nothing except a loaf of Sardinian bread and an Italian translation of Kipling’s Jungle Book. But his smile as he said this, not a politician’s smile, showed that he recognized the impossible.
After the strike and the occupation of the factories, which was a total failure, Rossi and Sannazzaro of course lost their jobs. They sold their city shoes, resoled their boots with lengths of bicycle tyres, and walked the 750 kilometres back to Mazzata. By the time they arrived they were almost starving. The village received them without enthusiasm. They had left Mazzata as failures, and returned as failures. They still attended the local Party’s surreptitious meetings, in the back room of the chemist’s shop. When Gramsci, from his prison cell, dissociated himself from Stalin’s policies, he was declared an outcast and a heretic. The two friends, loyal to him still, became less important in local politics than the flies on the ceiling.
When he was ten years old Papa had taken him on a journey to see Antonio Gramsci. It was a last chance, since Gramsci, having been moved from one prison to another for the last nine years, was known to be terminally ill. There had been an international petition to the Italian government for his release, which had met with the fate of most petitions.
By 1936 he had been transferred to Rome. He was no longer an official prisoner, but was under medical treatment at the Clinica Quisisana. The rules for visiting him were relaxed. On the other hand, there were not so very many people, and almost none of his old associates, who cared to visit him.
Domenico and his son got a lift in a tomato lorry as far as Benevento, and then took the slow train to the capital, which gave them a good chance to look at each other without interruptions. Salvatore saw a patient man whom he loved, and who, he knew, had had to ask Mother’s permission to make this expedition, a tired man, worn and shiny like an old suit. Domenico looked back uneasily at his bright, unaccountable boy.
When Domenico had been little his grandmother, who worked in a hotel kitchen, had edged him upstairs into the reception hall in the hopes of presenting him to a bishop (who had just arrived) for a blessing. They knelt together for a moment on the marble floor, risking everything. But the bishop, who was on a private visit and wished to indicate that he was off duty, turned his ring round on his finger so that the faithful could not kiss it. The grandmother got up and twitched the boy back to the service quarters, as though he had been in some way to blame.
All Domenico wanted now was for his son to come into the presence of a great man. At the same time he had a few questions to ask after these many years, and of course he could not come empty-handed. On his knees, with their sandwich, he had a parcel consisting of medicines, writing paper and a woollen pullover. It was fastened with insulating tape, and anyone could tell that it had not been wrapped up for him by a woman. When they got to Rome and steamed into the old peach-coloured station in Piazza Esdraia, he tried to make it look a little more presentable.
Salvatore was disappointed firstly when they crossed the city without seeing a single one of the new Alfa Romeo two-seaters whose image he had studied in a magazine, and secondly when the Clinica Quisisana had no bars.
‘It’s not a prison,’ his father told him.
‘Can he go away if he wants to?’
‘No, he can’t do that, he can’t go into Rome without a police guard.’
Then it’s a prison, the child thought.
There was a bell in the outer gate and when they rung it was answered by a young male nurse in uniform. Salvatore saw that he was not going to be petted, as he would have been in a convent, or a hospital run by Holy Sisters. This impressed him. He was impressed because he was ignored.
The male nurse asked whether they had an authorization from Dr Marino or Professor Frugoni, and Salvatore felt an unaccustomed admiration for his father when he pulled out of his inner pocket a note from the Professor confirming their appointment. The nurse went away, and came back to say that the patient Antonio Gramsci was not well enough to receive visits. He was now carrying a blue folder under his arm.
‘Who says so?’ asked Domenico.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. He stood there in the blank early spring sunshine, holding his son’s hand.
‘The management are anxious that he shouldn’t see members of the public without medical knowledge, who might be distressed by certain changes in him,’ said the young man, reading from the folder as though repeating a lesson. ‘The tuberculosis has affected the spine — do you understand me? — and the sight is poor.’
‘You can spare yourself anxiety. My permissions are all in order. In reply to a letter I sent him Comrade Gramsci himself asked us to come and see him.’