The Watcher and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

desire of his to wait, not to intervene, to aim at a “general objection,” dictated by a feeling of futility, of renunciation, by a basic laziness? Amerigo already felt too discouraged to hope he could assume any initiative. His legalitarian battle against irregularities, fraud, hadn’t yet begun, and already that wretchedness had overwhelmed him like an avalanche. If they would only hurry it up, with all their litters and crutches, if they would only get it over with, this plebiscite of all the living and the dying and perhaps even the dead: with the limited formalities he could summon to his aid, no election watcher could stop the avalanche.
    Why had he come to Cottolengo? Respect for legality? Ha! One had to start again from the beginning, from zero: it was the fundamental meaning of words and institutions that should be debated, to establish the most helpless person’s right not to be used as an instrument, as an object. And this, today, in the present situation, when the elections at Cottolengo were mistaken for an expression of the will of the people, seemed so remote that it could be invoked only through a general apocalypse.
    Extremism, like an air pocket, was, he felt, sucking him down. And, with extremism, he could excuse his sloth, his indifference, he could immediately salve his conscience: if he could remain silent and motionless in the face of an imposture like this, if he was almost paralyzed, it was because in such situations it was all or nothing, either you accepted them or else:
tabula rasa
.
    And Amerigo shut himself up like a hedgehog, in an opposition that was closer to aristocratic hauteur than to the warm, elementary partisanship of the people. In fact, the nearness of other members of his party, instead of giving him strength, infected him with a kind of irritation, and when the woman in orange spoke up, for example, he was seized by a contrary reaction, as if he were afraid of resembling her. His thoughts raced in such an agile objectivity that he could see with the adversary’s own eyes the very things he had felt contempt for a moment earlier, only to swing back, then, and feel with greater coldness how right his criticism was, and, finally, to attempt a serene judgment. Here again he was inspired not so much by a spirit of tolerance and of solidarity with his neighbor as a need to feel superior, capable of thinking all that was thinkable, even the adversary’s thoughts, and capable of reaching a synthesis, of perceiving everywhere the patterns of History, according to the prerogative of the true, liberal spirit.
    In those years the Italian Communist party, among its many other tasks, had also assumed the position of an ideal liberal party, which had never really existed. And so the bosom of each individual Communist could house two personalities at once: an intransigent revolutionary and an Olympian liberal. The more schematic international Communism became, in those hard times, the more explicit its official, collective expressions became, the more the militant individual lost inner richness, to conform to the compact, cast-iron block, and the more the liberal, housed in the same individual, gained new, iridescent facets.
    Was this perhaps a sign that Amerigo’s true nature—and the true nature of many like him—would have been, if left to itself, a liberal’s, and that only a process, precisely, of identification with what was different, enabled him to be considered a Communist? Asking himself this question, for Amerigo, was like asking himself what was the essence of an individual identity (if such a thing ever existed...), beyond the external conditions that determined it. To weld in him—and in so many like him—those various metals was “the task of History,” he thought—in other words, a fire beyond them (which went beyond individuals, with all their weaknesses)....
    That fire glowed, however faintly, even in those polls, in all