“But I’ve been at Frankfurt!”
“What the hell’s that got to do with it?” But Quinto had paused to think before replying, and now he had lost steam.
They walked on for a little while in silence. It wasn’t clear where Ampelio expected to find Caisotti, and Quinto didn’t ask him. Then, suddenly, as they were crossing the square, they heard the noise of an engine starting up and there the man was, behind the windshield of a small, three-wheeled truck. The bodywork projected in front like a torpedo; Caisotti was sitting stiffly in the saddle, grasping the shuddering handlebars. He was wearing a cap fastened under his chin and a windbreaker. Turning to Ampelio as though they had been talking a few hours ago, he said. “They’ve let me have my cement! I told you you only had to be patient, didn’t I? Now I can get the work going again; I’ll put on all the men I can. You give me a few days’ grace and I’ll settle the payment with interest. Right?”
Ampelio was calm and friendly. “Fine. When do you start laying the foundations?”
“Saturday.”
“This Saturday? Couldn’t start sooner?”
“Saturday will be time enough. The cement will dry over the weekend, then on Monday we’ll start work.”
“What about the payment? The second one is almost due, you know.”
“You’ll just have to be patient for a while and I’ll settle the two together. That’s for sure – I know where I am now. I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t so.”
“We’re counting on you, Caisotti.”
“We’ll beat all the records this time! ‘Bye now, and my respects to the Signora.” And with a volley of sharp reports, the machine was under way.
Quinto didn’t know what to say. “You see?” Ampelio remarked.
“See what? He’s played one more trick on us, I see that.”
Ampelio shook his head briefly as though excluding this possibility altogether. “No, no, this time he’ll keep his word.”
“Grow up, won’t you! You don’t know him. Start laying the foundations on Saturday, hell! You don’t realize what state the work’s in; go take a look. He’s just playing with you. And this business of putting off the payment again, as though it didn’t matter! And you stood there calmly and let him get away with everything!”
“What about you? You never opened your mouth all the time.”
“I wanted to watch you handle it. But I never expected –”
Ampelio shook his head. “You don’t understand the situation. He’s going through a difficult period right now, but he’s got a chance of recovering. If we’re always on his back and start taking legal action, we’ll start a panic among his creditors and the next thing we know, he’ll go bankrupt. Now the question is this: is this in our interest or is it in our interest to back him up? If he goes bankrupt, there’ll be the suit about the proceeds, with all the creditors. . . . We’ll have to hand the project over to another firm, and God knows on what terms. On the other hand, if Caisotti can put his affairs in order, we’re all right too.”
Quinto wrung his hands. This was his own reading of the situation, reached after much painful thought; he had been trying to explain it to his brother a minute back. And now . . . “I thought you wanted to bash his head in,” he remarked.
“It wasn’t the psychological moment. I realized that at once. And then don’t you see, Caisotti has given ground; all that talk of his was intended to make amends, even his final ‘My respects to the Signora.’ He changed his position in a flash.”
They were on the brink of a quarrel. Quinto had only to come out with, “All your doing, eh?” which was on the tip of his tongue; Ampelio had only to give way to the temptation to add, “It only needed a bit of energy,” and they would have come to blows. But they kept quiet. After a while, as though there were no other point to raise, Quinto said, “And we should have told him that the first thing to do is buttress the soil on our part of the site, where they’ve knocked down the wall. They’ve dumped everything there. The first rain we get, we’ll have a landslide on our hands.”
“We can leave a note about that in Caisotti’s office,” Ampelio said. “First things first. That’s a secondary matter.”
They stopped by his office. Quinto went in alone; Ampelio had gone to buy some cigarettes. The secretary was more evasive than ever. “You can leave the message with me. Oh, all right, put it in writing if you want. If Caisotti comes. . . . I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.” Suddenly she smiled and gestured lavishly. “So! The traveler returns! Got a present for me?”
Ampelio was standing in the doorway. He clicked his heels and bowed low. “Gnädige Fräulein,” he murmured.
15
The town’s most widely read newspaper was The Financial Forecast, a fortnightly published by the Chamber of Commerce. Modest in format, it consisted of only four pages, occupied exclusively with debt failures and defaulters. The names were listed in alphabetical order, with the addresses and the amount of money owing. Sometimes, with an air of reticence or excuse, an explanation was added like “Traveling,” “Sickness,” “Address Unknown,” and often, with something like a gesture of extenuation, “Insufficient funds.” A world of small projects and ambitions and failures floated in these columns of faded type: packers and mail florists, ice cream dealers, builders, people with rooms to let. . . . And the small fry whose financial designs were impossible to make out, people trying to clutch on to the banks of the great money river, people trying to get ahead in spite of their debts, condemned to bear the shame of the paltry sums they owed.
Quinto had now caught the Forecast habit too, and every two weeks, when he saw people with the new issue, he hurried to the newsstand to get his copy and studied it in the street like all the others who wanted to check the financial position of the people they had business dealings with, who were looking for the first signs of a crisis or a bankruptcy, or who were simply curious to take a look inside their neighbors’ pockets. There was one name Quinto was looking for, that name. . . . And then one day, there it was: Pietro Caisotti. Two loans for 300,000 lire defaulted. Here was the slope that all too many firms had not been able to remount. The payments, the deadline for the apartments, everything was now problematic. Everything hung by a thread.
It was a ticklish moment. Even Canal, who had made some preliminary soundings himself, recommended calm. In this crisis Caisotti showed his ability; he at once went to see the lawyer, tacitly warning him not to take immediate steps. He explained that his failure to make payment, even though the notice had just appeared in print, was in fact out of date; it referred to the situation of two weeks back, which he had just about got in hand. He was on the point of concluding certain deals, and what’s more he was owed money by various people himself and before long he’d be in a position to meet his obligations in full. It was learned through Canal’s inquiries that Caisotti was in fact due to collect a certain debt; they succeeded in discovering the date and the amount of the sum. It wasn’t a great deal and they would have to hit him quickly if they wanted to collect their debt before anyone else got at him. Caisotti was due to be paid in the morning, and it was arranged that Quinto should make a surprise visit in the early afternoon, promissory note in hand, before he could pretend that he had no money.
Quinto rang and rang again; he was about to go away when the door opened. It was the inevitable Lina, sweating just a little (it was a hot August day); she was now wearing her long black hair in a ponytail. “You’re looking for Caisotti? I don’t know if he’s in.” “What do you mean, you don’t know?” The office consisted of only two rooms. As Quinto stood there, a door opened down the narrow corridor. It was dark, and in the darkness, wary as a lizard, Caisotti peered out. He looked as if he had been asleep in his clothes; his shirt was sticking out, his belt was undone, his hair was rumpled. He seemed helpless, as though he couldn’t see or hear and only wanted to get the gummy taste of sleep out of his mouth. Then he turned about, and going over to the windows, threw open the shutters
. The light flooded the room, leaving him blinder than before. It was the familiar office, which, apparently, served as a bedroom as well. The bed, a straw mattress spread on the floor, was behind a screen; there was an iron washbasin. Caisotti went to the basin, and pouring some water from the jug, splashed it over his face, then dried himself. His face still dazed with sleep and his hair wet, he went to the desk and sat down. Quinto took the chair facing him. Lina was no longer there. Outside, the town was lying in the heavy noonday heat shot through with the elusive, tangy smell of burning sand from the beach. Quinto felt as though he’d already said everything he had come to say, even though he’d not opened his mouth. The light had not yet penetrated Caisotti’s gluey eyeballs.
He began to talk, slowly, sighing, as though they were in the middle of a conversation. “You know, when things get to a certain point, I give up, I let them do what they want.” He carried on in this strain. The light bothered him and he closed the shutters. What a headache it was, he went on, trying to build houses, with everyone putting spokes in your wheel! City Hall wouldn’t let you do this, the state hit you for taxes, you have to depend on a dozen people for everything you need. Quinto noticed that Caisotti’s complaints were all phrased in such a way as to make it impossible for him to disagree; and it was a special kind of agreement they elicited, being addressed not so much to the business colleague or the creditor, but rather to someone holding the political views which he held himself, or had formerly held.
“And it’s the same with the cement,” Caisotti continued. “A hell of a situation that is. They’ve got us by the throat, there’s no way out; it’s a monopoly. . . .” And he began complaining about the big cement companies, quoting instances, restrictions, violations, mentioning places where it would have been easy to get all the cement he wanted if they hadn’t been taken over and closed down by the all-powerful cement companies. He showed more skill than Quinto would have expected in identifying the causes of his difficulties and in setting individual facts within a general frame of reference. All the same it was wearisomely familiar, the old, old story about the little man being crushed by the big monopolies that turned up inevitably in every discussion of the Italian economy. Quinto found it particularly irritating since he was not at the moment disposed to consider the situation from this point of view. Not that he didn’t agree; Caisotti’s case was, in its broad outline, undeniable. But Quinto’s role was now that of the owner of real estate and he wanted to look at things the way real estate owners looked at them.
Caisotti described an attempt to start a stone quarry in his village, where he owned a small piece of land; the land was valueless, just a heap of stones, but these stones, according to Caisotti, were perfect for making cement. He’d spent a lot of money on the project, he said, and then the cement companies stepped in and prevented him from going ahead. This reference to “a small piece of land” made Quinto (real estate owner) prick up his ears; this property constituted, in Canal’s eyes, a kind of final guarantee, since a foreclosure could be put on it. Now it appeared that it was all stones, the right kind for cement maybe, but useless because the monopoly had succeeded in stopping the project.
“Ah, it’s a struggle, it’s a struggle,” Caisotti said. “Who would have thought, Anfossi, in those days, that it was going to be still like this? Remember?”
“Mmm,” Quinto murmured. He wasn’t sure whether Caisotti’s reference was to particular memories or simply to common knowledge.
“We thought that once we’d come down from the hills and chased them away, everything would be all right. And now look. . . .”
It appeared that Caisotti had fought with the partisans and indeed in the very outfit to which Quinto had belonged. He had been an inspector in the commissariat, with which Quinto had never had much to do, since the different units of the brigade had been spread out in different parts of the valley and in different valleys. But now it was coming to him that he had once seen the man, wearing a khaki shirt and carrying a Sten gun slung over one shoulder; he had been raising hell about the requisitioning of some beef. Caisotti was much better informed about Quinto and remembered the units to which he had been attached and reminded him of the places where they had bivouacked. Quinto had forgotten the names, but obviously they would be familiar to Caisotti, who came from those parts.
He had gotten up and was standing in a corner of the room. “Do you see this?” High up on the wall, half hidden by a cupboard, was a picture; it was one of those composites with the pictures of all the men of a particular city or formation who died in the war, a white, red, and green ribbon around one corner and underneath, the inscription: “In Memory of the Men of the—th Brigade who Gave their Lives for Freedom.” What with the indistinct light and the dirty glass, the picture was hard to make out. Quinto stared at the tiny faces of the fallen, but he didn’t seem to remember any of them. He had known so many men who had afterward lost their lives. He was still easily moved by the memory of how even on their last evening he had eaten baked chestnuts with them from the same pot and slept beside them on the straw. He found himself looking for a particular face, a man he had scarcely known who had been killed, stupidly, almost as soon as he arrived. They had been out on patrol together, and it was just chance that one took one side of the road, one the other. He thought for a moment that one of the tiny photographs looked like him, but then he saw another that could just as well have been him. The pictures had been taken ages ago; many of the faces were those of schoolboys, others were men in uniform with their berets and insignia. It was impossible to tell one from the other. Quinto sighed deeply. What was there to say now?
Nothing was settled. Caisotti asked for a deferment on the first payment; he had to finish another building already under way. Once he’d finished it, he could concentrate all his material and all his men on the Anfossi site and complete the work within the stipulated time – which, he reminded Quinto, was to be figured from the date the contract was approved by City Hall, not from the date when it was signed. To make things more difficult for him at this stage, he said, would hurt them as well as him.
Quinto went home in a foul temper. It was not only his failure (once again) to make Caisotti pay up, but also the discovery that he was an old comrade in arms. A fine turn Italian society had taken! Two partisans, one a peasant, the other a student, who had taken up arms together in the belief that they were building a new Italy. And look at them now! Both accepting the world as it was, both chasing money. And they didn’t even possess the old bourgeois virtues; they were simply a couple of real estate sharks. It was no accident that they were in partnership and, of course, trying to swindle each other.
However, Quinto reflected, Caisotti had at least retained the habit of looking at his difficulties as part of the social struggle. Whereas in his case . . . ?
16
Shrouded in scaffolding, a chaos of planks, ropes, buckets, sieves, bricks, splotches of sand and lime, the house began to grow in the fall. Already its shadow was falling on the garden; the windows of the villa were shut out from the sky. But it still seemed no more than a temporary structure, a mere obstruction, something that would be pulled down the way it had been put up. That was how Signora Anfossi tried to see it, concentrating her displeasure on transitory symptoms like the objects that fell from the scaffolding onto her flower beds or the piles of planks in the road. She refused to look on it as a house, something that would always be there staring her in the face.
Caisotti proposed that in place of the first payment, he should increase the number of rooms to be handed over to the Anfossis. Negotiations were prolonged; during the discussions about the size of the additional rooms, it was discovered that Caisotti had made them all narrower than the contract stipulated so he could squeeze one extra room into each apartment. He was stealing their property, as it were, and proposing to pay them with what he had stolen! Canal spotted the trick in time and a supplement to the contract was drawn up; several clauses of the original contract were
revised and the reversion clause was strengthened and extended to cover the delivery of the new apartments. This was fine, but they were still no nearer getting any money out of him, still no nearer the day when the building would be completed.
Ampelio paid a two-day visit during these negotiations. Both he and Quinto were at home, when who should suddenly turn up but Lina. She was bringing some papers: Caisotti wanted her to check some facts before entering the contract on the books at City Hall. Why Caisotti was being so scrupulous was far from clear, since he had never troubled himself about this sort of thing before. Signora Anfossi, as it happened, was out; this was unfortunate since it was always finally up to her to find the papers and accounts which Quinto, as he rushed frantically about, left scattered all over the house. Whenever information was needed, the Signora was the person to see.
Quinto and Ampelio sat down in the study to go over the papers while Lina sat opposite, looking softly at them. “Wait a moment while I look for the account we drew up the other time,” Quinto said, and went off next door to ransack his drawers. He turned half a cupboard upside down and hunted through a dozen files, but couldn’t find what he was looking for. When he returned, Caisotti’s papers were still lying on the desk, but there was no sign of either the girl or Ampelio. She must have left, Quinto supposed. She would be back for the information tomorrow. He called, “Ampelio!” but there was no answer. He hadn’t gone out, because his beret was still on the hatrack; he was balding and never went out without it. Perhaps he was upstairs. Quinto went up to the next floor and looked into a number of rooms, calling his name; he even went into the bathroom and from there into his brother’s room.
Lina and Ampelio were in bed. The girl at once pressed her face into the pillow; her black hair spread out and around, a pink shoulder emerged from the sheets. Ampelio raised himself up on one elbow; the ribs were clearly visible in his lean, naked body. Mechanically he reached for his glasses on the side table. “Christ,” he said. “Do you have to stick your damn nose in everywhere?”