The Watcher and Other Stories (7 page)

And Lia at a certain point put the record back on, and hummed the tune along with it, and at a certain point, Amerigo, aside, that is to the maid asking if she could clear away, said: “Just a moment, I have to finish the soup!” and then Lia laughed and said: “But you're mad! Haven't you finished lunch yet?” And so they said good-by and there was no doubt that they had made peace.

The thought that preoccupied Amerigo during the main course was this: Hegel was the only one who had understood anything about love. He got up three times before finishing the dish in order to search among his books; but he had none of Hegel's works in the house, just a few books on Hegel or with chapters on Hegel, and for all his leafing through them between mouthfuls—“The Desire for Desire,” “The Other,” “Recognition”—he couldn't find the place.

The telephone rang. It was Lia again. “Listen, I have to talk to you. I made up my mind I wasn't going to tell you, but I will. No, not over the phone, it's not something to discuss on the phone. I'm not yet sure, really, I'll tell you about it when I'm sure, no, I'd better tell you now. It's something important. I'm afraid it's yes” (they spoke in clipped phrases: she, because she couldn't decide to be frank; he, because the maid was in the next room—at one point he went and shut the kitchen door—and also because he was afraid he understood), “no use getting angry, Amerigo darling, if you're angry, then you must have understood, well, I'm not a hundred per cent sure, but...” In other words, she was trying to tell him she was pregnant.

There was a chair near the telephone. Amerigo sat down. He didn't say anything, until Lia finally said: “Hello? Hello?” thinking they had been cut off.

At times like this Amerigo would have liked to remain calm, master of the situation—he wasn't a boy any longer!—to put up a reassuring front, a serene, protective presence, and at the same time be cold and lucid, the sort of man who knows what has to be done. Instead, he immediately lost his head. He felt his throat go dry, he couldn't speak calmly, or think before he spoke. “Oh no, you must be crazy, how can you...” and he was immediately in the grip of rage, a precipitous rage that seemed to want to drive back, into nonbeing, the glimpsed eventuality, the thought that permitted no other thought, the obligation to act, to assume responsibilities, to decide another's life and one's own. He went on talking, inveighing: “You tell me like this? You're so irresponsible! How can you stay calm?” until he provoked her indignant, wounded reaction: “You're the irresponsible one. No, you're right: it was crazy of me to tell you. I shouldn't have said anything, I should have managed alone, and never seen you again!”

Amerigo knew well that he was calling her “irresponsible” because that was what he wanted to call himself, he was angry only with himself, but at that moment his regret and his guilt were translated into an aversion for the woman in trouble, for that risk that could become an irrevocable presence, that could make an endless future of what now seemed to him a relationship that had already lasted long enough, something finished, relegated to the past.

At the same time he felt constant remorse for his egoism, for having such a comfortable role compared to hers; and the girl's courage seemed great to him, sublime, and now his admiration of this courage, the fondness for her uncertainty, so linked to his own, and his certainty that he was after all better than his first hasty reaction made him seem, that he could draw on a reserve supply of mature judgment and responsibility—all this led him to assume a completely different attitude, again with precipitate haste, and say: “No, no, darling, don't worry, I'm here, I'm beside you, whatever happens...”

Her voice melted quickly, seeking an expression of consolation. “Listen, after all, if...” And he was already fearing he had gone too far, perhaps making her think him prepared to have a child of hers, so without breaking off his protective pressure, he tried to clarify his intentions. “You'll see, darling, it'll be nothing.... I'll take care of everything, poor sweetheart, don't worry, in a few days' time you won't even remember...”

At which, from the other end of the wire, came a shrill, almost strident voice: “What are you talking about? What are you going to take care of? What have you got to do with it? The child's mine.... If I want to have a baby, I'll have it! I'm not asking you for anything! I never want to see you again! My child will grow up without even knowing who you are!”

This didn't mean she really wanted to have the baby; perhaps she only wanted to release a woman's natural resentment against the facility with which a man does and undoes; but she redoubled Amerigo's alarm, and he protested: “No, no, you can't... it isn't right to have children like that, it's not being responsible...” until she hung up as he was in mid-sentence.

“I've finished, you can wash up,” he said to the maid. He went back and sat down by the bookcase and thought of when he had been seated there earlier, as if it were a remote time, serene, carefree. Most of all, he felt humiliated. For him, procreation represented, first of all, a defeat of his ideas. Amerigo was an ardent supporter of birth control, even though his party's attitude on the subject was either agnostic or hostile. Nothing shocked him so much as the ease with which people multiply, and the more hungry and backward, the more they keep having children, not so much because they want them as because they are accustomed to letting nature take its course, accustomed to carelessness and neglect. But to maintain this show of detached bitterness and amazement, like some Scandinavian Social Democrat, toward the underdeveloped world, he had to keep himself blameless of that sin....

Now, too, the hours spent at Cottolengo began to weigh on him, all that India of people born to unhappiness, that silent question, an accusation of all those who procreate. This sight, this awareness, he thought, would not be without consequences as if he were the pregnant mother, sensitive as a photographic plate, or as if atomic disintegration were already at work inside him and he could produce only disastrous progeny.

How could he return to reading now, to universal reflections? Even the books open before him were his enemies: the Bible with that eternal problem of continuing, amid famines and deserts, the generations of a human race that wishes to save every drop of its seed, still unsure of its survival; and Marx, who also wanted no limitation of human semination, convinced of the earth's infinite richness: forward, all was flowing fecundity, go on, hurrah! Both books were great counselors! How could anyone not understand that the danger to the human race now was quite the opposite?

It was late; they would be waiting for him at the polls; the others had to take their turn; he should hurry. But first he called Lia once more, though he still didn't know what to say to her: “Lia, listen, I have to go out now, but look here, I...”

“Sssh...” she said: the record was playing again as if that middle telephone call hadn't existed, and Amerigo felt a spurt of annoyance (“There, for her it's nothing, for her it's nature, for her the logic of the mind doesn't count, only the logic of physiology!”) and also a kind of reassurance, because Lia was really the same Lia as always: “Hush... you must listen to it to the end... And, after all, what could have changed in her? Not much: something still nonexistent, which could therefore be thrust back into nothingness (at what point does a being become a being?), a mere biological potentiality, blind (at what point does a human become human?), a something that only a deliberate desire to make human could add to the ranks of human presences.

A CERTAIN number of the voters registered at Cottolengo were patients who couldn't leave their beds or their wards. For such cases the law provides that some of the election watchers be chosen to set up a “detachment” of the polls which can go and collect the votes of the sick in their “place of treatment,” in other words, on the spot. They agreed to form this “detachment” with the chairman, the clerk, the woman in white, and Amerigo. They were issued two boxes, one with the blank ballots and the other to contain the ballots after they had been marked. They were also given a special folder, the register, and a list of the “voters in place of treatment.”

They gathered up these things and went off. They were led up some stairs by a young man, one of the “bright” ones, tiny and squat, who, despite his ugly features, his shaved head, and the thick eyebrows which grew together, proved up to his task and full of concern; he almost seemed to have landed in there by mistake, because of his looks. “In this wing there are four.” They went in.

It was a huge, long room, and they passed between two white rows of beds. Coming from the darkness of the stairs, they were dazzled, painfully, in perhaps what was only a sensation of defense, a kind of refusal to perceive in the white mounds of sheets and pillows the human-colored shapes that rose from them; or else it was a first translation, from hearing to sight, of a shrill, constant animal cry: geee... geee... geee... which rose from some part of the ward, answered at times from another point by a chuckling or barking animal sound: gaa! gaa! gaa! gaa!

The shrill cry came from a tiny red face, all eyes, the mouth opened in motionless laughter: a boy, sitting in bed in a white shirt, or rather not sitting, but emerging, trunk and head, from the bed's opening as a plant peeps up in a pot, like a plant's stalk that ended (there was no sign of arms) in that fishlike head, and this boy-plant-fish (At what point can a human being be called human? Amerigo asked himself) moved up and down, bending forward at each “geee... gee...” And the “gaa! gaa!” that answered him came from another boy who seemed even more shapeless, though a head stuck out in his bed, greedy, flushed, a large mouth, and it must have had arms—or fins—which moved beneath the sheets where it seemed sheathed (to what degree can a creature be called a creature of whatever species?), and other voices echoed, making more sounds, excited perhaps by the appearance of people in the ward, and there was also a panting and moaning, like a shout ready to burst forth but promptly stifled. This came from an adult.

In that wing, some were adults—it seemed—and some, boys and children, if one was to judge by the dimensions and by signs like the hair or the skin color, which count among people outside. One was a giant, with a huge infant's head held erect by pillows: he lay immobile, his arms hidden behind his back, the chin on the chest which extended into an obese belly, the eyes looked at nothing, the gray hair hung over the huge forehead (an elderly creature, who had survived in that long fetus-growth?), frozen in a dazed sadness.

The priest, the one with the beret, was already in the ward, waiting for them, he, too, with his list in hand. Seeing Amerigo, he glowered. But at that moment Amerigo was no longer thinking of the senseless reason for his being there; he felt the boundary line he was supposed to check was now another: not that of the “people's will,” long since lost from sight, but the boundary of the human.

The priest and the chairman had approached the Reverend Mother who was in charge of that wing, with the names of the four registered voters. The nun pointed them out. Other nuns came forward, carrying a screen, a little table, all the things necessary to the voting in there.

One bed at the end of the ward was empty, neatly made; its occupant, perhaps already convalescing, was sitting on a chair beside the bed, dressed in flannel pajamas with a jacket over them, and sitting at the opposite side of the bed was an old man wearing a hat, certainly the patient's father, who had come to visit him that Sunday. The son was young, simple-minded, of normal stature but somehow, it seemed, numbed in his movements. The father cracked some almonds for the son and passed them to him across the bed, and the son took them and slowly put them to his mouth. And the father watched him chew.

The fish-boys burst out with their cries and every so often the Reverend Mother broke away from the polling group to go and quiet one who had become overexcited, but without much success. Each thing that happened in the ward was separate from the other things, as if each bed enclosed a world out of communication with the rest, except for the cries that stimulated one another, in a crescendo, and spread a general agitation, partly like the racket of sparrows, and partly mournful, moaning. Only the man with the enormous head was immobile, as if untouched by any sound.

Amerigo went on watching the father and son. The son had long limbs and a long face, which was also hairy and numb, perhaps half blocked by paralysis. The father was a peasant, also in his best suit, and in some ways, especially in the length of his face and his hands, he resembled his son. Not in the eyes: the son had the helpless eyes of an animal, while the father's eyes were half shut, wary, the eyes of an old farmer. They were sitting obliquely on their chairs, at either side of the bed, so they could stare at each other, and they paid no attention to anything around them. Amerigo kept his gaze on them, perhaps to rest from (or to avoid) other sights, or perhaps, even more, because he was somehow fascinated.

Meanwhile the other officials were taking the vote of someone in bed. They did it like this: they put the screen around him, with the table behind it, and, as he was a paralytic, the nun voted for him. They removed the screen, Amerigo looked at him: a purple face, flung back as if dead, mouth gaping, gums bared, eyes wide. Only that face, sunk in the pillow, could be seen: it was hard as a stick, except for a gasping that seemed to whistle at the base of his throat.

Where do they get the nerve to have such creatures vote? Amerigo asked himself, and only then did he remember that it was his job to prevent them.

They were already setting up the screen at another bed. Amerigo followed them. Another hairless, swollen face, stiff, with opened, twisted mouth, the eyeballs sticking out of the lids without lashes. But this inmate was restless, disturbed.