VISIT TO A PRISONER

...From the way he acted, I understood that this must be a very serious oversight...

...A lot of people get sunstroke the first time they go out in the country," she said...

...The "red earth" was extracted by very primitive means from an exhausted bauxite mine dug out of a nearby mountain, and it was on its way to the railroad...

...in The School for Dictators, a brilliant dialogue on the nature of authoritarianism...

...He had on a few dirty rags which left some of his body exposed, and he was wearing some broken-down shoes tied with pieces of twine...

...My father was starting the oxen off behind the plow when he called me...

...Around the edge of the field, the gigantic poplars formed a barrier unmoved by a breath of wind...

...Is he a vagabond...

...In times of isolation and beleaguerment it was good to know that in Rome there was this man of irritable friendliness, warm and sardonic, who shared some of our hopes even if he did not always accept our words...

...The judge listened with a smile to my short but impassioned account...

...He stole something," answered the judge...

...I was seized with a vague sense of nausea and sleepiness...

...The man was a very poor-looking farmer...

...As soon as I set foot inside it, my heart began to beat so fast it hurt...

...Vowels and consonants, with their complicated combinations, no longer interested me...

...Whatever was best in the socialist tradition, surviving dogmas and certainties, found a home in his books—in Fontamara, that stirring fable of Italian peasant revolt...

...A man riding on a small donkey was coming along the road in our direction...

...You should have at least asked his name...

...And they had to walk since there was no other way to transport them...

...It was only then that my father realized that he had not brought along any tobacco...

...The old part of our town was backed up against a mountain and was overlooked by the ruins of an ancient castle...

...One unexpected discovery for me was the view of our town I had as I turned back from the plain...

...Not even the poorest peasant could make this sacrifice...

...Here," he suddenly said, handing me a bit of cigar...

...I recognized him immediately and my heart almost stopped...

...I was astonished...

...My father's no better than you are," I explained...

...A few years later my father consented to take me with him to Fucino for the first time...

...Who'll believe it...

...It consisted of a great rabbit warren of black peasant huts, stables for the animals carved out of the rock, a couple of churches and some uninhabited mansions...

...There was no hope of finding a friend who would give up some of his tobacco...

...In the intervening hours, the space in front of the houses was occupied by the craftsmen— carpenters, shoemakers, smiths, tinkers, wagoners, coopers, and dyers, with the tools of their trade— while long rows of small carts loaded with "red earth" and pulled by mules passed up the street...

...That evening, instead of sending me to bed at the usual time, my father took me to town with him, something which happened only rarely...

...They even added to it since their occupants were mostly craftsmen plying their trades...

...At the next table, the judge was talking with the municipal doctor...

...The guard took us to a stinking little room, which was getting a tiny bit of light from a window protected by bars...

...You won't accept the money...

...I remember every last detail of that visit since it was the first time I had ever been in a place like that...

...But with the increase in population in the last few years, the town was expanding into the valley on both banks of the river, and our street was the principal road to the plain and the Fucino Valley, where the draining of the lake had made available lots of good rich land...

...my father asked again...

...The man couldn't be moved...

...The judge kindly gave us a card permitting us to visit the man in jail...

...I must have looked very upset, because as soon as he saw me he asked whether something awful had happened...

...And there's some cool wine from our vineyard...

...seated on the front stoop with my spelling book on my knees...

...I had never before been that close to so thin and dried-up a man...

...Nor was I disturbed that my father, lost in thought, said nothing, showing that as far as he was concerned I was no longer a child...

...I.H...

...I did not insist because I was in too much of a 28 hurry to make a good impression on my father...

...I was thinking it would have been better if I had stayed home...

...I woke up in the morning when it was still dark, but he had already prepared the oxen and had the wagon drawn up in front of the door of the house...

...Then I went to the square...

...The plowing went on silently and regularly, even though the sun was beginning to burn...

...To me the stranger looked less like a thief than a violent madman...

...Just about half a one...

...In any case because he's unhappy...

...Then the whole column of "red earth" would halt for hours, among the shouts and curses of the carters...

...But something like this can make him go without speaking until tomorrow...

...That's an excellent idea," said my father...

...That's strange," said my father...

...He was arrested because he stole," he explained when I had finished...

...How could he spend the whole day in that hot air without smoking...

...The houses along the street, most of them two-storied, were unable to protect themselves from the dust or the noise...

...Then she went with me to the wagon...

...Although I was seated in the shade, I could hardly breathe...

...Is he out of work...

...And why should I go the whole day without a smoke...

...I ran up to him, showed him the coin and proposed the trade, pointing out my father, who had stopped with the oxen halfway along the furrow...

...My name was written on the card too...

...The next day was a Sunday...

...Copyright © 1968 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc...

...But the slow pace suited my state of 27 mind: that of a boy admitted for the first time to the life of adults...

...And because he may be innocent...

...You tell him about it," said my father...

...An ox cart, obviously, moves about as fast as a man walks...

...Please...

...I hardly recognized it: a pile of houses jumbled together in a crack in the barren mountain...

...Look how funny he is...

...Did he steal something from you too...

...he answered, "Why's your father better than me...

...Was my mother at work already...

...and she gave me a bit of advice...

...in Bread and Wine, that greatest of all imaginative works about the aftermath of socialist defeat...

...In everything he wrote there is the same rebellion against injustice, the same tone of fraternal and undeluded humaneness...

...Perhaps there have been greater writers in the 20th century, but to me there has been none who yielded so strong a feeling of comradeship...

...In the pallid light of dawn, the large shape of the oxen, the crude simplicity of the things loaded up for the day—the plow, the sack of hay, the flasks of water and wine, and the basket of food—and the customary but unexpected crowing of the rooster appeared to me portents of the seriousness of the life into which I was about to be admitted...

...Please," I was repeating to him...

...Over the years he wrote to, and sometimes for, us in the friendliest spirit...

...Never...

...As a token of our love and respect, we reprint here one of Si/one's slighter pieces, yet utterly characteristic in its tone of wry friendliness, its tacit probing of the sources of his—and others'—rebellion...

...His socialism became more and more a matter of ethics, a sort of desacrilized version of Christianity, "an affirmation," as he wrote, "of the priority of the human person above all the economic and social mechanisms which oppress him...

...Barefoot and in rags as he was, he looked more like a victim than a thief...

...Over the years he came to stand for the survival of the kernel of socialist values, that which had made millions of people in the last century choose to reject the given...

...It was a working day and there was no time to stand on ceremony...

...And instead of staying with his friends at the Farmers' League as he usually did, he went to sit at a table in front of the "gentlemen's" cafe, where the town's leading citizens were enjoying the cool breeze after a hot day...

...He had friends throughout the world, friends whom he knew and friends he had never met, and to them Silone spoke for that which, in a time of ideological disburdenment, they wished to preserve...

...It was advisable for both us and the oxen to get there before the sun was too high...

...Yes," I answered, and I told him whom I had seen...

...Between the two uniformed figures, whose faces looked like death masks in the harsh summer light, the little man had an air of earthy vitality about him, like an animal who had been captured in some ditch...

...No one in our town knew where it was going...

...He probably did something the police and the judge think is stealing," my father tried to explain...

...She soon came to keep me company while I had my coffee and milk...

...After all, you're the one who knows the man...

...How happy I was when he recognized me at first sight...

...I was also astonished to hear the sound of the loom in the weaving room...

...No one had seen him...

...Every detail added to my anxiety...

...I had never seen him so angry at me...

...Was it my fault then...

...It almost made me cry...

...Without saying anything more, he left me alone in the room, the victim of a new kind of torment...

...He was not home yet...

...We'll have to take him some little present," my father proposed on the way...

...The sight of poor people handcuffed between policemen was common enough on the street where we lived because all prisoners arrested in the villages in our countryside had to pass that way...

...But what...

...But only God knows what he really did...

...I remember that she strongly warned me not to sit in the sun once I got to the Fucino Valley...

...At the first light of dawn, there began on our street the daily procession of goats, sheep, donkeys, mules, cows, wagons of every description and use, and peasants, making their way down to the plain for the day's work...

...It was as treacherous and irregular as the bed of a torrent, and it looked like a wide country road with its numerous ruts, full of mud or snow in the winter and of blinding dust in the summer...

...I could see my father bent over the plow behind the oxen, fading slowly away, then coming back, then going off again, tracing straight, ashen furrows in the earth blackened by burned stubble...

...196S q...

...I looked at the man with pleading eyes, but he was watching me with a sneer—whether of scorn or pity I could not tell...

...Never...

...My memorable day had suddenly darkened...

...It was a street of intense and noisy traffic...

...The best thing would be a cigar," I suggested...

...26 "Because he can't defend himself...

...I'll give it to you...

...It seemed as if he and his donkey were being carried along by the low dense cloud which raised the invisible feet of the animal from the ground...

...I was having my first difficulties with vowels and consonants, and here was an unexpected distraction that made me laugh...

...The long, dusty, poplar-lined road was deserted, as were the rectangles of fields near ours...

...The sun was already high, and it was unlikely that anyone was still on the road...

...Either you give half a cigar or you don't...

...This pitiful, farcical sight approached as I was "Visit to a Prisoner," translated by Harvey Ferguson II in Emergency Exit by Ignazio Silone, Volume 39, World Perspectives, planned and edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen...

...As we slowly came into the plain, the crowd of peasants, wagons, mules and donkeys dispersed to the right and left, until we were almost alone...

...Finally I found my father in the stable, watering the oxen...

...My father looked severely at me, dragged me to my feet by the ear and led me to his room...

...Depressed, I sat on the grassy bank of the canal which separated the field from the road...

...Too bad for him," the man answered...

...Fine," I said to him, running along beside the donkey, "take this and give me what you have, please...

...Not having a durable roadbed, it changed appearance with the seasons...

...Take this coin," he said, "and offer it to everyone who passes in exchange for a cigar or a pinch of snuff...

...And every evening until late the same procession of men and animals passed in the opposite direction, showing clear signs of fatigue...

...And in the later, more problematic fictions too...

...He's a laborer at the brick factory, and it seems he stole something from the manager," answered the judge...

...When we got to the field, my father loosened the oxen from the cart and hitched them to the plow, without saying a word, without even looking at me...

...My father took off his jacket, lifted the iron goad and urged on the oxen in an angry voice...

...This was an important event for me...

...The few times I met him in Rome we leaped across the barriers of language and culture, for we had shared an experience of aspiration, defeat, and renewal that was stronger than word or custom...

...I had the sensation, all of a sudden, of having become a man...

...I haven't got a whole cigar," he answered me...

...S everal years passed...

...I asked him, rubbing my injured ear...

...We've got some nice food in our basket," I told him...

...But about noon my father's voice roused me from my stupor...

...If you like, I'll give you my share...

...I continued to trot along beside the donkey, but I was beginning to lose hope...

...my father asked the judge, with whom he was on good terms...

...We had to leave so early because it was about five miles to the middle of the Fucino Valley, where our farmland was located...

...He showed us an opening in one of the walls at about the height of a man, through which we could talk to the prisoner...

...I ran to tell my father about it...

...A small, barefoot, ragged little man, handcuffed between two policemen, was proceeding by fits and starts along the dusty deserted street, as if to the rhythm of a painful dance, perhaps because he was lame or wounded in the foot...

...He had come out of the Italian socialist movement, had joined for a time with Gramsci and Bordiga to form the Italian Communist movement, had broken from the CP as it became Stalinized, and then devoted the remainder of his life to writing, yet also with intermittent participation in the Italian socialist movement revived after the Second World War...

...That's funny," my father said, after I had told him of my good luck with the man...

...He even seemed to be enjoying himself...

...I had to stand on tiptoe to see him...

...I felt especially mortified that my father kept repeating, "I've never forgotten something like that...

...Very often, when the weather was bad, one of those wagons got stuck in a rut hidden by the mud...

...Never make fun of a man who's been arrested...

...Where's the thief from...

...Stop a minute, and come see...

...I looked around for someone to enjoy it with me, and at that moment, from inside the house, I heard my father's heavy footsteps...

...The sun was already high and we were too far into the Fucino Valley to think of turning back...

...It struck me that even good friends greeted each other with barely a nod of the head...

...I was horrified at the thought...

...I said to him with a laugh...

...What is that man they arrested today accused of...

...What have I done wrong...

...The waters of the canal were turbid, immobile, stagnant...

...I was watching the peasants in front and in back of us in the line of wagons and animals, and I was trying to act as they did, hiding my emotion...

...One evening I was sitting on the threshold of the house with the Fables of Fedro on my knees, when I saw the very man who had given me the half-cigar passing by, handcuffed between two policemen...

...I ran to my grandmother...

...I had never seen it as a whole before, outside myself, with its own valley...

...He had a bundle on his back that made a noise like a cicada every time he moved...

...How was I going to get that piece of cigar...

...Why not...

...After Mass, coming out of the church, I found my father waiting to take me to the judge as we had agreed...