The Watcher and Other Stories Read Free Page A

further back, until they became less and less substantial and harsh, and more and more ethereal and idealized. So the Cottolengo visiting parlor was the perfect setting for the day: wasn’t this room perhaps the result of a process similar to democracy’s? In the beginning, here too (in a period when poverty was still without hope) there must have been warmth in the piety that filled people and things (perhaps there was even now—Amerigo didn’t want to deny that—in individual persons and places in the institution, separated from the world), and between the outcasts and their benefactors there must have been created the image of a different society, where life, and not self-interest, was what mattered. (Like many nonbelievers, looking at things from the historical view, Amerigo made a point of understanding and appreciating developments and forms of religious life.) But now this was a huge institution, a complex of hospitals, with certainly outdated equipment, which somehow performed its function, its services, and, what’s more, had become productive, in a way no one could have imagined at the time of its foundation: it produced votes.
    So is what matters, in everything, only the beginning, the moment when all energy is tensed, when only the future exists? Doesn’t the moment come, for any organization, when normal administrative routine takes over? (For Communism, too—Amerigo couldn’t help wondering—would it happen with Communism, too? Or was it already happening?) Or... or are institutions, which grow old, of no matter; is what matters only the human will, the human needs which go on being renewed, restoring verity to the instruments they use? Here, to establish the polls (now they had only to tack up in a prominent position—according to the regulations—three notices: one with the laws concerned, and two with the lists of candidates), those men and women, strangers and in part hostile to one another, were working together, and a nun, perhaps a Mother Superior, was helping them (they asked her if they could have a hammer and a few tacks), and some women inmates, with checked aprons, peeped in curiously, and “I’ll get them!” a girl with a huge head cried, pushing past the others. She ran off laughing, came back with hammer and tacks, then helped them move a bench.
    Her excited movements revealed, in the rainy courtyards beyond, a whole participation, an excitement at this election, as if for an unexpected feast day. What was it? What was this cafe in tacking up properly those notices, like white sheets (white, as official notices always seem, even with all their black print which nobody reads), which united a group of citizens, all surely “a part of the productive life,” with these nuns, and the poor girls who knew nothing of the outside world except what could be seen from an occasional funeral procession? Amerigo now felt a false note in this common effort: in them, in the election officials, it resembled the effort you make during military service to carry out the assigned tasks whose ends remain alien to you; in the nuns and inmates it was as if they were preparing trenches all around, against an enemy, an attacker: and this election bustle was the trench, the defense, but in some way also the enemy.
    So when the officials were at their table, waiting, in the empty room, and when the little group outside of people who wanted to get their voting over with quickly began to move, and when the municipal guard began to let the first ones in, all of them felt the certainty of what they were doing, but also a hint of absurdity. The first voters were some little old men—inmates, or artisans employed by the institution, or both at once—a few nuns, a priest, some old women (Amerigo was already thinking that these polls might not be too different from others): as if the opposition brooding behind it all had chosen to present itself in its most