XXIV. FAMILY LIFE

Tania and Gramsci are standing on Track 8 at Stazione Termini. Billowing steam, the train comes to a screeching halt. Gramsci looks up at its dirty metal skin as the first door is pushed open, then the second, hands heave luggage out, women with bobbing skirt seams and overly tired faces struggle to keep their balance coming down the metal steps before being met with bouquets of flowers from pale-faced men. A small child clatters over the mound of suitcases. Gramsci wants to stretch out his arms and hoist the boy into the air but a matron has already grabbed him and pulled him over the platform. He is so nervous that he is ready to take any child to be his own, and by now the train is almost empty.

‘There,’ Tania whispers. ‘Compartment 4.’

Gramsci starts. It is all going so quickly now, he doesn’t know what he will say. He isn’t prepared (as if you could prepare for a reunion like you could for a speech in Parliament). And then, when the face comes into the light, he recognizes that it’s only Eugenia. That little piece of wood with fiery eyes. She is holding a child on her arm. Soft, downy hair, bright brown, almost blonde. The second she sees him she begins walking over. Just like Reverend had taught her, of all things! Gramsci feels her thin neck on his chin, her wispy torso on his chest, the child’s hair on his cheek. Delio’s frightened face is immediately pressed into his aunt’s shoulder; he has not seen his father even once.

The past winter, when he was in Moscow for two weeks, Gramsci saw his son for the first time. Before that he had only seen photos which reached him with a delay, tricked him as to the boy’s actual stage of development. Now it is like meeting him for the very first time. He doesn’t know what he should say, what he should feel. At first he simply notices: the boy has grown, as Gramsci had expected. He is handsome, but is he as handsome as Gramsci had imagined or handsomer still? Gramsci tries to conjure up the boy from his imagination and notices that the categories (bigger, smaller, more handsome, uglier, more and less) become unimportant. His son here is real, and he is a stranger. Gramsci wants to hold him, look at him, touch his arms, his hair. But Eugenia does not hand him over. The boy looks fearfully at Gramsci. But what had he expected? Closeness cannot be ordered. He will have to win Delio’s affection, and that will be tough, for the boy already has parents: Giulia and Eugenia.

And there she is. Giulia. Discreetly glowing she steps out of the train, looks at him briefly, looks at her sister, then the ground. Gramsci walks up to her, caresses her arm, feels the warmth of her body through the fabric of her blouse. He can touch her, pull her to himself, touch her skin with his fingers, carefully. No longer a figment of his imagination, but Giulia in flesh and blood.

‘It’s you again.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘If you say so, it must be true.’

She looks around as if she did not recognize a thing any more, the longer she looks into the openness of the terminus the more confused she seems. She is even more fragile than her sister and too strong a breath will blow her away, as weightless as a cocoon. Gramsci attempts an awkward embrace. He sees Tania leant up against a pole, staring at him with empty eyes.

The flat she and Gramsci have found for the two sisters and Delio is clean and bright, not as spacious as the Schucht’s in Moscow, but why should it be, Eugenia never leaves her sister’s side. Two rooms, the bedroom with a double bed and a po-faced Madonna where the two can talk themselves to sleep like husband and wife. The other room is the living room, with a chaise longue, a dining table, even a piano which Delio likes to touch. As the plane trees have grown up over the window, the kitchen is small and dark and the faces of the two women seem to be concealed by a breath of verdigris. Tania has remained out in the hall, she is keeping her distance from her sisters, even when Giulia reaches for her hand and softly tries to pull her to herself.

‘Do you all like it?’ Gramsci asks.

‘It will do,’ Eugenia answers.

They could begin a normal family life here, an almost normal one of aunt, mother and child. Gramsci will continue staying at the Passarges’, he is careful, he does not want Giulia or Delio to be put in danger on his account. He will eat with them in the evenings, he will bathe his son and put him to bed, he will sleep with Giulia when Eugenia is off doing the shopping at the market or on a walk which her doctor has ordered her to complete because of her weak legs.

An almost normal family life, for he knows that a completely normal one will never be possible. He is under surveillance, two policemen follow his every move, sometimes more, sometimes less discreetly, but always enough for him to feel their presence. That’s one thing. The other is Eugenia. At Silver Wood, once Giulia had travelled back to Ivanovo and she’d had him to herself, she was distant, or, rather, it was her body that was distant, her comportment, for what was she supposed to do with her useless legs? In retrospect, maybe they were what she held responsible for Gramsci choosing her sister instead. She was distant yet insistent somehow. She suggested he go for Giulia, she pushed him towards her, she almost acted like a match-maker, and yet he could feel that she was unhappy with his choice, that she believed she had a claim to him, that she saw Giulia as a kind of mediator through which he would be connected to her, Eugenia, in the end the real object. He is her conquest, back at the fence she’d scooped him up, she shared everything with her sister, but now she expects her sister to share everything with her.

Gramsci and Giulia steal out of the house with their son, carrying him off from the safekeeping of the sister-in-law. On the street, Giulia ties a thin cloth around his head, against the sun, she says, and pushes the pram forward, a white wicker contraption Gramsci had got from Sraffa, pushes it through a nearby park, sometimes Gramsci walks beside her, sometimes behind her, then all of a sudden overtakes her to bend over the basket and observe the head stick up out of the bundle of blanket and sleep and wake and begin to cry. Yes, that’s him. This is what’s become of the 3,600 grams Giulia wrote to him about and which he measured out with books to see how much 3,600 grams were: three books of Benedetto Croce’s, Marx’s Das Kapital and Dante’s Divine Comedy on top. Giulia pushes the carriage back and forth until the child grows quieter and only gurgles. Gramsci crouches down, then looks to the sky to see what his son sees. He is startled by how large and savage the world seems from the basket of a children’s carriage.

They circle the park a few times. Gramsci makes faces, turns his hands into rabbits and foxes and, seeing him, his son stops crying and cautiously begins to laugh. We’re slowly getting used to each other, Gramsci thinks, reaching into the basket to stroke his son’s hot little head. Delio bites him. Right in the middle of his index finger, and a toothless jaw can be very powerful indeed. Gramsci curses in Sardinian, a sound of distant and endlessly dry fields.

‘He’s nervous,’ Giulia says. ‘What did you think would happen, with these parents?’

‘What parents do you mean, Eugenia or me?’

Guilia shrugs and pushes the carriage back in the direction of Via Nomentana.

‘We found a new doctor for him in Moscow. A specialist for nervous disorders,’ she says.

‘You two?’

‘Eugenia and I.’

‘The parents!’ Gramsci says sarcastically.

Giulia pushes the carriage away from him.

‘Isn’t it a bit early for specialists?’ Gramsci asks. ‘Where is he supposed to go when he can speak?’

‘To kindergarten and then to school.’

‘Here in Rome we’re going to have done with all that nonsense.’

‘It’s good for him.’

‘No doubt,’ Gramsci replies and sucks his finger.

When they arrive home, Eugenia comes barrelling towards them and grabs Delio as if he had been kidnapped and now was safe again.

‘You were gone too long, he can’t take that much sun,’ she scolds her sister before casting Gramsci a disapproving glance. Her face seems shut, the face of someone who rules through simple but unbending means. And once a woman like Eugenia has made up her mind, once she uses her intelligence to get what she wants, she will be successful, Gramsci knows that much, even if he doesn’t know what it is she wants. She smiles at him, a bit of her right incisor is missing, or is it a gap due to the uneven growth of her teeth? But now it’s gone again.

That evening in bed, Giulia cautiously reaches for Gramsci’s hand, their fingers close around one another, on the nightstand an edition from Lenin, one of Eugenia’s severely ironed dresses hangs by the wardrobe, her proxy to watch over them while she’s out for a moment to walk with Delio down the street and now is probably already on her way back. It has to be quick, very quick. Gramsci kisses Giulia’s eyes, her mouth, her hand runs over his arm and up to his shoulder, he moves closer, listens for steps out in the hall, lays on top of her, and as always the steps—the sister-in-law hanging by the wardrobe, standing outside the door, looking through the keyhole—can come at any moment. Giulia spreads her legs, he edges in-between, pushes in to her, sweat begins to collect between his stomach and hers, her hand grabs his neck, then moves down his misshapen back, he breathes more heavily, they hear the front door close, they move away from each other in fear.

It could be an almost normal family life. Giulia finds a job at the Soviet embassy, Eugenia reads Lenin every morning and takes care of Delio, Gramsci goes to Parliament and meets his comrades, Tania is irritable and leaves the room whenever Gramsci caresses her sister’s cheeks. All of them are suffering from insomnia because it is so hot, Delio cries and cries and is then too exhausted, he lies awake and beats his hands about him. Two flies chase each other above his head. Giulia hears her sister waltzing back and forth at night, sees her damp forehead, and her own nightgown clings to her. Gramsci comes by in the mornings for breakfast, sometimes Tania too. They meet in the kitchen around nine o’clock and drink strong Italian coffee together. Tania hardly speaks. Lost in thought, she just stares at Giulia while Gramsci longs to take her by the arm, she seems so depressed. He misses their walks, how quickly she speaks when she wants to convince him of something.

‘The kitchen is no place for meetings,’ Eugenia decides, then gathers up the coffee cups and they follow her into the living room. Delio is lying on a blanket next to Giulia. He sleeps, starts awake for a moment then falls back asleep, he’s such an undemanding child, but then the undemanding little beast starts back awake again. Giulia bends over him, tries to calm him down with a bit of cloth. Eugenia forces her way in-between, ‘Giulia, please,’ and Giulia’s cheeks turn red, once again she’s done something wrong, once again it did not escape her sister, just her, and she doesn’t know where, Eugenia doesn’t tell her either, she simply presses the child to her own flat chest. ‘I would like to be loved by one, two, one hundred children, yes, there is something sick in my desire,’ Eugenia will write later, but right now she is cradling Delio to sleep while Giulia sits there like a stranger, looking at the child, and maybe thinking about how she would like the same one day, in a few years, but she knows that in this family Eugenia alone is responsible for the fulfilment of wishes, she’s the one who will stamp or discard the requests, taste all the sweet refinements of bureaucracy.

Once Delio has calmed down, Eugenia hoists him onto the piano stool. He places his tiny fingers on the keys and just when Gramsci is sure they will break, a sound escapes the instrument’s body. Delio has understood some of the notes with the help of animal sounds, left a bear, right a young chicken, and in-between an entire zoo. ‘Listen, dyadya!’ he cries.

‘Dyadya? Who taught Delio to call his father uncle?’ Tania asks.

Giulia lowers her eyes. Eugenia raises her head.

‘It was easier that way. His father wasn’t there,’ Eugenia explains.

‘His uncle wasn’t there either,’ Tania counters, walks up to the piano and lays her arm around him. She points to Gramsci and repeats the two words papa and nana while pressing down on the key to the left of the bear.

‘Papa. Do you understand?’

Delio nods but it doesn’t seem to interest him that much. He turns away, slides off the piano stool and runs after a celluloid ball Gramsci has brought for him. The ball is filled with water, swans sway back and forth inside it, a whole family with three grey swan children wobbles up and down the room. Piero Sraffa had given Gramsci the gift, perhaps he bought it in London, Gramsci has never seen something so peculiar in Italy. Delio seems to find the toy strange as well and keeps trying to open it.

‘Do you see how clever he is already? He wants to understand how it’s made,’ Gramsci says.

‘Please, he just wants to get at the swans,’ Giulia says. ‘Further-more, he thinks you can repair everything that breaks.’

‘Genia, have you taught him that I possess super powers?’ Gramsci says and laughs.

Eugenia raises her head. There is a twitch near the corner of her mouth; she refuses to allow anything else. She knows that she will defeat Gramsci, and Giulia too, for in the end Delio is the one to choose. And Delio, Eugenia is certain, will choose her.

Gramsci bends down to his son. The child drapes his arms around his father’s neck for such a long time and so intensely that Gramsci eventually has to free himself. His train is scheduled to leave in half an hour. Turin, Lazio, Naples. Gramsci has to travel across the entire country for the Party. Today it’s Florence. That has disrupted their almost normal family life, to which Gramsci now says goodbye with an almost customary kiss of his wife’s cheeks. He and Tania go down the stairs together, he rushes ahead to hold open the door for her and as she makes her way past he grabs her hand.

‘I miss you, Tania, do you know that?’

‘Let go, Nino.’

He caresses her arm, moves up to her shoulder. She shrugs away.

‘You have to look after your family now. I have nothing to do with that.’

‘We could walk together for a bit in the direction of the station.’

‘Yes, we could,’ she says and turns. ‘When the three are back in Moscow.’

He watches her go and for a moment feels as if he has been abandoned by all three, by Tania, Giulia and the terrible rest of the world. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow when he comes back from his trip, he will have Giulia once again, he thinks in order to calm down. But then he is once more plagued by the thought that things might not be so pleasurable the next time. Because it’s all too much for him, because he cannot grasp it, bring it together, be in control. He is afraid she will only have been an illusion, a trick of his emotions, and once he is back and standing out in front the Schucht sisters’ flat, an old man in a bathrobe opens the door.