Quinto would say, “Oh, good Lord, my dear, you don’t say!” and things of that sort, mere grunts and chuckles. He couldn’t manage anything more. Sometimes he said. “What can one do though?” and sometimes too he felt a positive satisfaction at a particular piece of damage that was quite beyond repair, some residue of a boyish desire to épater stirring in him, or perhaps it was the shrugging assumption of wisdom on the part of the man who knows there’s no use fighting against History. All the same, Quinto was offended by the spectacle of this landscape, his landscape, being overwhelmed by cement before he had ever really possessed it. Basically, though, he was historically minded, anti-nostalgia. He’d seen a bit of the world: hell, what did he care? He was quite prepared to create far more havoc himself, and in the field of his own life. He almost hoped that, as they stood there on the terrace, his mother would minister to these perverse inclinations, and he found himself trying to catch in the resigned denunciations that she accumulated from one visit to the next the note of some feeling more violent than regret for a treasured landscape that was dying. But the reasonable tone of her complaints kept clear of that acrimonious slope that waits for all complaints too long repeated and leads, in its lower reaches, to mania. The disease is revealed by little tricks of speech, the habit of calling the builders “they,” for example, as though they were in league to destroy one; it shows in expressions like “Just look what they’ve done to us now!” of things that damage a great many other people besides oneself. But no, his mother’s serene melancholy provided no foothold for that contradictory demon of his, and the longing to stop being merely passive and to take the offensive grew all the sharper in him. The thing stared him in the face. The district, his district, that amputated part of himself, had taken on a new life, abnormal and graceless perhaps, but for that very reason (such are the contradictions that operate in minds brought up on literature) it was more alive than ever before. And he was excluded. Bound to the place by no more than a thread of nostalgia and by the devaluation of a semiurban area with no further claim to a view, he was only hurt by what was happening.
These reflections had prompted the remark “If everybody’s building, why don’t we build too?” He had thrown this out one day in conversation with Ampelio. The Signora had overheard it, and putting her hands to her head, had cried, “Oh, no, my poor garden!” His remark and her response had set in train an already lengthy series of discussions, calculations, inquiries, negotiations. With the result that Quinto was now coming home to try his hand at real estate.
2
But as he thought the matter over by himself in the train, his mother’s words came back to him and he felt a sense of discomfort, even remorse. She was lamenting the loss of a part of herself, something she was losing that she knew she would not get back again. It was the bitterness older people feel when every general injury that touches them in some way seems a blow against their own individual life, which has no longer any means of redress; because when any one of life’s good things is taken away, it is life itself that is being taken. Quinto recognized in the resentful way he had reacted the cruelty of the coûte que coûte school of optimism, the refusal of the young to admit any sort of defeat since they believe that life will give back at least as much as it took away, so that if today it destroys some dear spot, the tone of a particular scene, something charming and beautiful but hardly to be defended, or remembered, on the grounds of its “artistic” value – well, tomorrow it will undoubtedly give you something else in exchange, something that will be destroyed in its turn but that can be enjoyed meanwhile. And yet he felt how mistaken the cruelty of youth is, how wasteful, and how much it bodes the first unseasonable taste of age; and at the same time how necessary it is! He understood it all, God help him! He even understood that basically his mother was perfectly right. Without anything of this sort in mind, she was quite understandably upset. She simply told him, each time he came home, about the way everyone was adding to their houses.
The result was that Quinto hadn’t dared tell her what he had in mind. It was this project of his that was now bringing him home. It was all his own idea; he hadn’t even discussed it with Ampelio, and indeed only very recently had it come to figure in his mind no longer as a possibility, something that might or might not be done, but as an urgent decision. The only thing that had been agreed – with his mother’s resigned consent – was to sell a part of the garden. They had reached the point where they had to sell something.
It was the period when taxation was pressing hard. Two particularly savage taxes had burst at almost the same time, after his father’s death. (Signor Anfossi, grumbling and almost too scrupulous, had always looked after these things.) One was the estate surtax, a graceless, vindictive measure passed during the immediate postwar period, which bore particularly hard on the middle class. It had been delayed by the laborious procedures of bureaucracy only to explode now, just when one least expected it. The other was the inheritance tax; it looked reasonable enough from the outside, but once you found yourself face to face with it, you couldn’t believe it was true.
Quinto was prey to a variety of emotions. He was worried by the fact that he couldn’t raise even a tenth of the money needed to pay the two taxes. And stirring inside him was an ancestral hatred of the tax collector inherited from generations of frugal Ligurian farmers who disapproved of government as such, combined with the irrepressible fury of the decent citizen at being singled out for fiscal massacre – “while the rich, as everyone knows, get away scot free.” Added to this was the suspicion that somewhere in those maddening tangles of figures was an obvious trap, clearly visible to everyone except himself. All these sentiments, which the tax collector’s pallid communication arouses in even the most innocent breast, were crossed by the feeling that he was an incompetent landowner, unable to make the best use of his property, the kind of person who, in a period when capital was in continual, speculative use, a period of swindling and paper credit, sits back with his hands in his pockets and lets the value of his property decrease. It came to him that this unreasonable malice on the part of the nation against a family without means was the beautifully logical expression of what in official language is known as “the legislator’s intent”: the intent to strike at un-productive capital. And as for the man without capital, or without the will to exploit it, why, God help him.
Whenever one made inquiries at the tax office or the bank or at one’s lawyer’s, the answer was always the same: Sell. Everyone is selling now – they’ve got to, to pay their taxes. (“Everyone” obviously meant “everyone like you,” that is, property owners whose property consisted of a few unproductive olive trees or some houses with fixed rents.) Quinto’s thoughts had at once turned to the piece of land known jocularly at home as “the flowerpottery.”
The flowerpottery, which had formerly served for raising vegetables, was a small plot of land at the bottom of the garden. On it stood a shed, formerly a chicken coop, now full of flowerpots, tools, potting soil, and insecticide. Quinto regarded it as a marginal addition to the property; he was bound to it by no childhood memories, since everything he remembered about it had gone: the coop where he used to watch the lazy-stepping hens, lettuce seedlings fretted by snails, the tomatoes craning up their slender sticks, the zucchini snaking along under cover of their leaves, which spread out over the ground. In the middle, queening it over the rest of the kitchen garden, there used to be two succulent plum trees, which, after oozing gum and darkening with ants through a prolonged senescence, finally dried up and died. The need for a kitchen garden had gradually lessened, what with the children away at school and then at work, the older generation dropping away one by one, and finally Signor Anfossi, tireless thunderer to the last – and when he went, the house really seemed empty. So Signora Anfossi had moved in with her flowers and turned it into a kind of clearinghouse, a nursery, using the ex-hen house for storing flowerpots. The soil had proved to be moist and exposed to the sun, hence particularly suited to c
ertain rare plants, which, having been granted temporary accommodation there, proceeded to make themselves at home. The spot had acquired a mixed air, devoted at once to horticulture, science, and elegance. It was there rather than among the gravel paths and flower beds of the garden proper that Signora Anfossi liked to pass her time.
“We’ll sell it,” Quinto had said. “It’s a good building site.”
“Oh, is it?” his mother had replied. “And where, pray, am I going to move my calceolaria? There isn’t another place in the garden. And what about the pittosporums, which are so high already? Not to mention the espalier of plumbago, which will be ruined.” She paused as though an unexpected fear had struck her. “And what happens if once we’ve sold the land, they decide to build there?” As she spoke, there rose up before her eyes the gray cement wall crashing down onto the green spaces of her garden and transforming it into a bleak back yard.
“Of course they’ll build there.” Quinto felt irritated. “That’s why we’re going to sell it. Why would anyone want to buy the land if they couldn’t build on it?”
But in fact it wasn’t easy to find a purchaser. The builders were looking for new sites near the sea, with a view. The district was already overbuilt, and it was scarcely to be expected that people from Milan or Biella who were looking for a neat little apartment would shut themselves up in a hole like that! Moreover, the market was showing signs of saturation and a slight downward curve in the demand for houses was expected. Two or three firms that had gone ahead a bit too fast found themselves neck deep in unpaid debts and went bankrupt. The price originally fixed for the site had to be lowered. Months went by, a year, and still no buyer appeared. The bank was no longer willing to extend further credit required by the unpaid taxes, and threatened to foreclose. Then Caisotti showed up.
3
Caisotti came with the man from the Superga agency. Neither Quinto nor Ampelio were at home, so Signora Anfossi had to show them around the site. “He’s quite uncouth,” she told Quinto afterward. “He can scarcely speak Italian. But that chatterbox from the agency was there and he talked enough for two.”
While Caisotti was busy measuring the borders of the site, the sleeve of his jacket caught on a wild-rose bush. “I don’t want you to think I start by taking away what doesn’t belong to me,” he said, laughing, as she patiently freed his coat from the thorns.
“That would be too bad, wouldn’t it?” she said. Then she notcied that there was blood on his face. “Oh, dear, you’ve scratched yourself.”
Caisotti shrugged, and putting his finger in his mouth, rubbed his cheek with spit. There were traces of blood at the corners of his mouth. “Come up to the house and let me put something on it,” the Signora said. Gradually the note of severity she had given to the interview, the figure below which she could in no circumstance go (“Anyway I shall have to speak to my sons. I’ll let you know definitely one way or the other”), the strict clauses about the maximum height of the building, the number of windows, and so on – all this began to give way before Caisotti’s easygoing way of putting things on a conciliatory basis, of making everything a matter of more-or-less, and what’s-the-rush?
Meanwhile the fellow from the agency talked ceaselessly. He was a big man in a white suit; he came from Tuscany. “As I was saying, Signora, it’s a real pleasure to put through a deal with a friend like Caisotti. Signor Caisotti – believe me, I’ve known him for years – is a person one can always do business with. He’ll meet your terms, you’ll see, Signora. You’ll find yourself thoroughly satisfied, I promise. . . .”
I’d be more satisfied still, she said to herself, returning to her constant preoccupation, if we didn’t have to sell. But what else was there to do?
Caisotti was a countryman who had gone into the building business after the war. He always had three or four jobs under way; he would buy some land, put up as large a building as the local regulations permitted, and stuff it with as many tiny apartments as it would hold. He would sell the apartments while the building was still under construction and then, with a tidy profit to show, at once buy some more land and repeat the process. Quinto turned up promptly in response to his mother’s letter, in order to see the deal through. Ampelio sent a telegram saying that he was busy with certain experiments which made it impossible for him to come, but urged that they should not go below a certain figure. Caisotti didn’t try to go below this figure, and Quinto found him strangely easy to deal with. He commented on this afterward to his mother.
“Yes, but what an untrustworthy face the man has! And those tiny little eyes!”
“Of course he’s untrustworthy,” Quinto said. “So what? Why should he look honest? An honest face on him – that would really be dishonest!” He broke off, realizing that he was speaking more warmly than he had intended, as though Caisotti’s appearance was what principally mattered.
“Well, I wouldn’t trust him,” she said.
“Of course not,” Quinto agreed, “neither would I. And he doesn’t trust us. Didn’t you notice the way he hesitated at everything we said and how slow he was in replying?” He liked this relation of spontaneous, mutual distrust between Caisotti and themselves and he was sorry that his mother didn’t appreciate it too. This was the proper relation between people who look after their own interests, between men of the world.
Quinto was at home when Caisotti paid a second visit to conclude the negotiations. He came into the room as though he were in church, his lips curled back. He was wearing a khaki cap and took his time about removing it. He was a man of about forty-five, fairly short but solidly built and broad-shouldered. He had on an American-style checked shirt, which followed the curve of his belly. He spoke slowly, with that plaintive, questioning whine peculiar to the Ligurian hill country.
“As I said to the Signora, sir, if you’ll take a step to meet me, I’ll take one to meet you. You know my offer.”
“Your figure’s too low,” Quinto said, though he had already decided to accept it.
The man’s big, fleshy face seemed made of a stuff too formless to retain its lineaments or expressions; they at once tended to subside as though engulfed not so much by the deep folds at the corners of his eyes and mouth, but by the sandy, porous texture of his whole face. He was snub-nosed and there was an unusual distance between his nostrils and his upper lip, which made him look either stupid or brutal, depending on whether his mouth was open or shut. His lips were thick and fleshy in the middle, but they disappeared altogether at the corners, as though his mouth ended in two deep slits in either cheek. This gave him rather the look of a shark, a suggestion heightened by the slightly receding chin above the broad throat. But the oddest thing was the way his eyebrows moved. When Quinto said dryly, “Your figure’s too low,” it seemed as though Caisotti were trying to draw his scanty eyebrows together in the middle of his forehead, but all he succeeded in doing was to raise the skin above the bridge of his nose by a fraction of an inch. The skin corrugated tentatively until it resembled a navel, and this upward thrust communicated its motion to the brief canine brows, which instead of drooping did their best to stand on end, trembling with the effort to keep stiff. The brows in their turn affected the eyelids, which curled up into a fringe of tiny, quivering folds as though they were trying to make up for the missing brows. Caisotti sat there with his eyes half closed, looking like a whipped dog, and said plaintively, “All right, then, you tell me what I ought to do. I’ll show you the estimates, I’ll show you what figure I can hope to get for the sort of building one can put up there, with no view and no sun. I’ll show you everything and you can tell me if I’m going to make a profit or if I’m going to be out of pocket. I’ll put myself in your hands entirely.”
Caisotti’s pose of docile victim had already made Quinto feel uneasy. “All the same,” he said, in the effort to be conciliating, “it’s a good central position, you know.”
“Yes, central is central,” Caisotti agreed, and Quinto was glad that they had found some com
mon ground. He was relieved to see the fold on Caisotti’s forehead smoothing out and the eyebrows being hauled down from their unnatural elevation. But Caisotti carried on in the same tone of voice. “Of course, it won’t be a particularly fine building,” he said, giving what Signora Anfossi called one of his horrid laughs. “You realize I can only have it facing this way.” He gestured with his thick, short arms. “It won’t be anything very fine, but you say it’s central and I agree with you.”
The phrase about the building “not being particularly fine” had revived the Signora’s anxieties. “We’d want to see your plans first,” she said. “After all, we’ll have to look at the place every day of our lives.”
Quinto’s expression during this exchange was a blend of fatalism and arrogance, the expression of a man who knows that the last thing to be hoped of the building was beauty and that, at best, it might achieve a mean anonymity indistinguishable from the anonymous structures all around. This at least would serve to keep it quite separate from the villa.