The Watcher and Other Stories Read Free

its most zealous guardians, its very incarnation.
    Two of the watchers were women: one, wearing a little orange sweater, seemed a factory worker or a clerk, about thirty, with a red, freckled face; the other was fiftyish, with a white blouse, a large locket with a portrait hanging over her bosom, perhaps a widow, an elementary school-teacher, to judge by her appearance. Who would think, Amerigo said to himself, now determined to see everything in the best possible light, that women have enjoyed their civil rights for so few years? They looked as if, daughter following mother, they had never done anything but prepare for elections. And what’s more, it’s the women who show the most common sense, good at little practical problems, helping the men, who are more self-conscious.
    Following this train of thought, Amerigo was already content, as if it were all going for the best (apart from the dark prospects of the elections, apart from the fact that the ballot boxes were in an asylum, where they had been unable to hold political meetings, or stick up posters, or sell newspapers), as if this were already the victory, in the old struggle between State and Church, as if this were the triumph of a lay religion of civic duty, over...
    Over what? Amerigo looked around once again, as if seeking the tangible presence of a contrary force, an antithesis, but he could grasp nothing, he could no longer set the affairs of the polls against the atmosphere that surrounded them: in the quarter of an hour he had been there, things and places had become homogeneous, joined in a sole, anonymous, administrative grayness, the same in police stations and regional offices as in the great charitable institutions. And like a man who, diving into cold water, has forced himself to believe that the pleasure of diving is in that sensation of cold, and then, swimming, has found within himself a new warmth and, with it, the sense of how cold and hostile the water really is, so Amerigo, after all his mental efforts to transform the polls’ squalor into a precious value, had gone back to his first impression—of an alien, cold place—and he felt that this was the correct view.
    In those years, Amerigo’s generation (or rather, that part of his generation that had lived in a certain way during the years after ’40) had discovered the resources of a previously unknown attitude: nostalgia. And so, in his memory, he began to contrast the scene before his eyes with the atmosphere of Italy after the liberation, in those few years whose most vivid recollection now was the way everyone had taken part in political affairs and actions, in the problems of that moment, serious and elemental (these were thoughts of the present: then he had lived as if the atmosphere of those times was natural, as everyone did, enjoying it—after all that had happened—angry at things that were wrong, without ever thinking they could be set right); he remembered how people looked then, all of them seeming equally poor, and interested in universal questions more than in private ones; he remembered the makeshift party offices, filled with smoke, with the rattle of mimeograph machines, with people in their overcoats outdoing one another in volunteer work (and this was all true, but it was only now, when years had gone by, that he could begin to see it, to make an image of it, a myth); he thought that only that newly born democracy deserved the name “democracy”; that was the value which, a little while ago, he had been seeking vainly in the humility of objects and hadn’t found; because that period was over now, and the field had slowly been occupied again by the gray shadow of the bureaucratic State, the same before, during, and after Fascism, the old gap between the managers and the managed.
    The voting which was about to begin would (Amerigo was, unfortunately, sure) lengthen this shadow, widen this gap, it would drive those memories still