VI. SUNDAY

When Gramsci wakes up on Sunday, he thinks he can hear bells in the distance. But that’s impossible. Both bells and belief have been abolished in Silver Wood, and the seventh day of the week is no longer the day of the Lord. The world was not created in seven days. That was just a legend invented by economists. In the silence of Silver Wood, one can see a few things more clearly, and here, Eugenia had explained to him, Sunday is a day of anxiety, of arrival.

In other words, Sundays are for visitors. They come from Moscow, from those avenues where the buildings will grow ragged and dirty until all middle-class life has been stamped out, ten people to a parlour, cooking, washing, sleeping, falling ill together. They come from the outskirts and the smaller villages where, during the Civil War, even the sorriest of shacks were plundered, then rebuilt, then destroyed again, and whose inhabitants now sit grimly and apathetically in front of their wooden hovels, no longer knowing whether walls or rubble are behind them. They come from Podolsk and Selenograd and Balashikha and even from Ivanovo, the upper echelons of post-tsarist Russia, the well-deserved workers and farmers and engineers and teachers and intellectuals leave the chaos and plunge straight into the kind-heartedness of the hospital. All those who truly shared Lenin’s thoughts but whose relatives got sick all the same.

A savvy anti-tsarist from Ivanovo—a city of textiles with one hundred thousand inhabitants, an Egyptian mummy, and a music academy which in the years of famine had remained open—tumbles into the glory of the sanatorium, far from socialistic inhospitality. He has already experienced exile on account of his convictions, back when people with healthy senses still believed that no revolution of the proletariat could ever break out in Russia, seeing as that the country hadn’t even entered the industrial age.

The anti-tsarist is named Apollo, an important name, an important man, he comes from a wealthy family and has worked his way up through the military before marrying the Jewish woman Julca, née Grigorevna. He spent a few years in exile in France, Switzerland and Italy before making his way back to Russia to experience the October Revolution in Moscow, and then moved to Ivanovo, a hundred kilometres away from the red Moloch. And the Revolution? For the time being, it had taken place in the villages where they stood it on its head and it stuck out its violet tongue in return.

Apollo’s convictions, in any event, seem to have gone straight into the growth of his beard—he looks just like Karl Marx. He has a son in Moscow, and five daughters. First, there is Eugenia, learning to walk again in the sanatorium; then Anna, about whom there’s not much to say; then Nadina, who didn’t come back from the Civil War; Tania, still living in Italy; and Giulia, come to the sanatorium with him in order to visit her sister.

 

Gramsci, unsuspecting in his good-natured way, is on his way to see Eugenia. Since their first meeting at the picket fence, he has often been on his way to see her, there are things to talk about, things are brewing in Italy, Italy could be the next country the Revolution pulls to its meagre breast, but there it will come from the wrong side and he has to ask Eugenia how seriously people here take Mussolini. The question goes round and round his head, he is intensely agitated, extremely uneasy when he thinks about the former socialist whose fasci will drive the communists to the side and play the Revolution by their own rules and there—

there—

the sentences break off. He looks at the woman leaning at the window in Eugenia’s room, one hand carelessly dangling, the other on the frame, and now she looks at him. She is tall. She has an oval face, haunting eyes, shoulder-length blonde hair. But that’s only half the truth. He can no longer remember whether he slid the door open against the protestations of the rug or whether he closed it. He cannot remember what he wanted to speak to Eugenia about either. He doesn’t see Eugenia or her father at all, though with his massive beard Apollo is almost impossible to miss.

The blonde woman at the window is similar to Eugenia, a milder version of the intense little flame of the Revolution, and he thinks that she must be Eugenia’s sister. What she is saying comes to him with a delay: for the moment, he only hears words, then a meaning finally comes together. She looks at him and talks about Nadina, the oldest of the Schucht sisters, missing since the confusion of the pre-Revolution. Then she stops for a moment: ‘I’m Giulia, and you must be the famous Antonio. My sister’s told me about you.’

Slowly his other senses return. The cold of the hallway. The tepid, body-like temperature of the room. The rattle of a trolley against the stairs.

So, Eugenia had told her about him. They’d already spoken about him and now here he was, now she can see him in his full inadequacy, locked into his body, into that bug-like shell. She might have been able to find pleasure in a phantom, but as he is she’ll only be able to meet him with pity or disgust.

The front hump presses on his chest while the one on his back weighs down his shoulders. He starts to shiver. Her hand tugs at her collar. A strip of sunlight streams across her cheek.

Neither his legs nor his head obey him, he wants to disappear, go back to the ceiling beam he’d been suspended from as a six-year-old, pulled up by his brother in order to let him hang out his growths in a specially built wire casing. His face twitches. Giulia’s hand shrinks from her collar.

‘Come over here, Antonio,’ says Eugenia.

Like a servant at the tsar’s court, he hobbles into the room but cannot speak a single word. Usually, he can make others laugh with just two or three sentences. Today, Eugenia speaks in a different way, and her cheeks, often pale and sunken despite the bright July light, look fresh. Listening to her he trembles and does not know why.

At first, he doesn’t dare to look at Giulia.

‘Yesterday I had a book of Nadina’s in my hand,’ Giulia says to her sister. ‘I finally took the bookmark out. She had thirty more pages to read.’

‘Oh, she read Sorel a few years ago already. She put it aside because she can’t bring anything to a close.’

‘You just can’t miss her.’

‘What are you saying, Giulia? She read it years ago.’ Eugenia pushes out her chest, turns from her sister and looks towards the window, running a hand along her severe part. The painfully drawn hair gives her face a touch of something mad. Nothing can be disordered. Everything must be dominated. ‘Look at these birch trees!’ she exclaims. ‘They’re everywhere. The whole facility is surrounded by them. Tell me, Antonio, have you ever been able to bear Russia? The Russian landscape?’

‘Today’s Russia is for all of us . . .’

‘Give today’s Russia a break! Forget politics. Do you see these birches? Don’t you have any opinion of them?’ Eugenia’s finger taps the windowpane. ‘I hate these trees. Their white trunks.’

‘Do not be so harsh, dearest Eugenia,’ says Gramsci.

Eugenia sparkles at him. ‘Birches,’ she says. ‘Birches everywhere. And the Revolution wasn’t won with tenderness.’

By the time Gramsci looks to the window, everything has become blurry, the birches are only white shadows, the paths winding confusedly and tremulously like bright eels. In his head, he hears the noise of meetings, the park and the woods disappear behind rows of stools, comrades’ backs, red banners. And there, he’d wanted to avoid it, he sees Giulia’s face mirrored in the glass. The fine lines of her chin. The glazed stare. They look at each other, look at each other a little longer, then a little longer and a little longer still. He cannot stay here. He is an imposition on what this woman must have presumed about him. That’s how it is. He knows it. And there, what is that, what does that mean? She smiles at him.

Run as fast as you can. Something utterly disinterested in rules is pushing back against power, something that refuses to obey anyone or anything, how could it not end in chaos and terror and distress? Flight is the only thing that can help, flight back to his room. So that was Giulia. Comrade Giulia. That was the shock about what you had not understood for so long, about what, in truth, it is all about.

 

Gramsci is lying face down on his bed. He is racked by shudders more than ever before. A roaring breaks loose in his head and sweat runs down his back. His body is in dull pain, it closes around him tightly, leaving no room for his consciousness.

In thirty-one years he has never experienced this kind of shock. Not when his father was taken away by the police and led from the house, through the yard, down the streets of Ghilarza because he’d hidden a few lire from the land-registry office and in return received five years, eight months and twenty-two days in jail. Not when his brother tied him into a corset and hoisted him up to the ceiling beam to hang like a salami left out to dry, looking down on his family, a distant event made up of whorls of hair, parts at the back of a head. Right now, this is greater than all of that. This here he will not be able to master. He must stay away from Giulia. That much is obvious. It’s awful. He hadn’t known how the world could be—how huge and terrifying and beyond all reason.

Apparently, true love was real. There was Manzoni and Shakespeare and Dante, yes, yes, of course, in one’s imagination there was Heaven and Hell and death and the Lord God too. But let us remain in the world. There were sighs like oh, that expression of rapt longing, yearning desire, oh, oh, oh, but it just did not want any connection to his name. Oh Antonio. It didn’t sound right to his ears, and even if there were five or five hundred other ways to whisper Antonio, none would ever refer to him. At best, ‘Oh, Nino!’ would just be a furious shout after doing something wrong.

He cannot explain to himself how to get close to a woman, how to get close to another human being. He is convinced, and has been for years, that it is absolutely impossible for him to be loved and that this has been dictated by fate. He has made himself so at home in the world of thoughts that it has become bearable, overwinterable. Thirty-one years long, and he could have held out another thirty-one, or at least that’s what he has believed. It was clear to him that nothing came after winter. He does not need to ask himself why hold out at all, because, for him, such categories—‘for me’—do not exist.

He can barely move. The blanket seems too heavy, his body is tired, he can only turn his head. He looks towards the window and there, behind the curtains, hanging in tatters in front of the paths, something is moving. A face appears, her face, and he tries to remember: Petrarch, Manzoni, Flaubert, this kind of face had to have appeared somewhere just like this. Dante, Goethe. What would Ibsen’s characters have done at this very moment? They would have failed, but how?

He closes his eyes and sees his mother hunched over a sewing table, trying to repair what has long been irreparable: socks, an apron, Teresina’s jacket with the spots on the back. He sees his father under arrest, walking down the street flanked by two policemen, being taken away from the family and what’s going to happen now? His sister bent over a schoolbook. She looks up, her dark, serious face turned towards him, a soft tuft of hair on her upper lip through which the light falls. The taste of old bread pushed back and forth through his mouth with a numb tongue. The smell of bitter spring meadows. And then everything drifts away, he doesn’t feel his body, the years break away, branches from cold undergrowth.