The Foreign Correspondent Read Online Free PDF

Oxford University, again for economics, where he’d managed to stay for two years. At which time his tutor, an incredibly kind and gentle man, had suggested that his intellectual destiny lay elsewhere. It wasn’t that Weisz couldn’t do it—become a professor—it was that he didn’t want to do it, not really. At Oxford, not really was a variant spelling of doom. So, after one last night of drinking and singing, he left. But he left with very good English.
    And this turned out, in the strange and wondrous way the world worked, to be his salvation. Back in Trieste, which in 1919 had passed from Austro-Hungarian to Italian nationality, he spent his days in the cafés with his hometown pals. Not a professorial crowd: scruffy, smart, rebellious—a would-be novelist, a would-be actor, two or three don’t know/don’t care/don’t bother–mes, a would-be prospector for gold in the Amazon, one Communist, one gigolo, and Weisz.
    “You should be a journalist,” they told him. “See the world.”
    He got a job with the newspaper in Trieste. Wrote obituaries, reported on an occasional crime, now and then interviewed a local official. At which point, his father, always cold, positively glittered with frost, pulled a string, and Weisz returned to Milan, to write for Italy’s leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera. More obituaries, at first, then an assignment in France, another in Germany. At these, now age twenty-five, he worked—worked harder than he ever had, for he had at last discovered life’s great motivation: fear of failure. Presto, the magic potion!
    Too bad, really, because Mussolini’s reign had begun, with the March on Rome—Mussolini had gone by train—in 1922. Restrictive press laws soon followed and, by 1925, the ownership of the paper had passed to fascist sympathizers, and the editor had to resign. Senior editors went with him, a determined Weisz hung on for three months, then followed them out the door. He thought about emigrating, then returned to Trieste, conspired with his friends, tore a poster or two off a wall, but generally kept his head down. He’d seen people beaten up, he’d seen people with blood on their faces, sitting in the street. Not for Weisz.
    Anyhow, Mussolini and his crowd would soon be gone, it was simply a question of waiting it out, the world had always righted itself, it would again. He took tepid assignments from the Trieste newspapers—a soccer match, a fire on a cargo ship in the port—tutored a few students in English, fell in and out of love, spent eighteen months writing for a commercial journal in Basel, another year at a shipping newspaper in Trieste, survived. Survived and survived. Forced by politics to the margins of professional existence, he watched as his life drifted away like sand.
    Then, in 1935, with Mussolini’s ghastly war in Ethiopia, he could bear it no longer. Three years earlier, he’d joined the giellisti in Trieste—the would-be novelist was now locked up on the prison island of Lipari, the Communist had become a fascist, the gigolo had married a countess and both had boyfriends, and the would-be prospector had found gold and died rich; there was more than treasure to be found in the Amazon.
    So Weisz went to Paris and took a room in a tiny hotel in the Belleville district and commenced to live on the diet imagined by every dreamer who went to Paris; bread and cheese and wine. But very good bread—its price controlled by the brutally sagacious French government—pretty good cheese, supplemented with olives and onions, and wretched Algerian wine. But it did the job. Women were a classic, and effective, addition to the diet: if you were thinking about women, you weren’t thinking about food. Politics was a tiresome addition to the diet, but it helped. It was easier, much easier, to suffer in company, and the company sometimes included dinner, and women. Then, after seven months of reading newspapers on café rollers, and looking for work, God sent