If you haven’t read him by the age of thirty, don’t start now. Just leave him be. In our day we used to read him. That is, we didn’t read him either, but we talked about him as if we had… Socialism! Abolishing private property! What’s your opinion, eh? Would it be possible to abolish private property? I don’t think so. But on the other hand we’ve become slaves to everything produced by the masses: electricity, wirelesses, telephones, railways, trams… As we are slaves to such things, it follows that we are slaves to the masses. And these same masses, hell and dammit, only become as good as gold and work with a song in their hearts under either Fascism or Communism. As soon as you give them freedom they start to sulk, grow churlish and rowdy, and throw their weight about so rudely that they rip this famous freedom to bits and trample it under foot. You agree?”

“Oh yes, uncle.”

“On the other hand, if the majority of the human race wants Socialism, the world will inevitably become Socialist.”

“You may be right.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. It wouldn’t be the first time the majority of the human race wanted one thing and history took another turn.”

“That may also be the case.”

“What may be the case?”

“That history will take another turn.”

“So what’s this turn then?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“On the other hand the rich, among whom I personally number myself, are disagreeable.”

“But uncle, you personally…”

“Believe me, we are disagreeable, we are block-headed, we are spoilt, we are bored stiff. Impossible to persist until the end of time with the rich on one side and the poor on the other! I am well aware, hell and dammit, that we can’t go on like this!”

“Who am I to say…?”

“On the other hand, in whose hands do you wish to place Capital? In the hands of the State? The State, to put it mildly, is a bunch of civil servants and officials, from whom the good Lord deliver us! Apart from the fact that here in Italy all officials are bandits… No, it’s no good shaking your head like that, they’re bandits to a man!”

“But uncle, I didn’t move a muscle!”

“… Officials, the world over, whenever they are invested with absolute authority, become such tyrants that in comparison the Roman emperors cut the figure of babes in arms… No, Socialism would be the Dark Ages!”

“Doubtless…”

“On the other hand, seeing that the Dark Ages occurred once, so they might occur twice…”

“Possibly, possibly…”

“On the other hand, why should there be a new Dark Ages? Who has set it up? Who has decreed it? It’s us who’ve done it, by getting certain ideas into our own heads and taking them for gospel, like when people got the notion that New Year’s Eve of the year One Thousand would be the end of the world – which obviously didn’t happen… No, I don’t believe there’ll be a new Dark Ages.”

“Neither do I.”

“On the other hand, what we have today in Italy, isn’t it a kind of Dark Ages?”

“I couldn’t say…”

“Yes, it certainly is! Dear nephew, only that cancer can save us, if it gets a move on.”

“What they say is that he’s got a syphilitic ulcer, not cancer.”

“Now he tells me! Hell and dammit, we’re ruined. Two injections and your syphilitic ulcer goes kaput… On the other hand what happens if he dies? Who seizes power? His bunch of cut-purse henchmen? They’d slit each other’s throats while they were carving up the spoils. So then, it’s the Communist gaolbirds? Worse than the Fascists! At least the Fascists are incompetent scoundrels, and whatever crimes come into their minds they make a hash of, whereas the other lot are stern and upstanding, and make a clean job of ’em.”

“Yes, true enough, but…”

“On the other hand, I am speaking lightly of Communism. What if it were something reputable and practical?”

“What they say is…”

“What they say is a load of bollocks! Even if Communism were to be workable – and I assure you it isn’t – I would rebel all the same, because it’s immoral, insomuch as it suppresses freedom…”

“That’s what I was sort of meaning.”

“On the other hand, who can take over the reins if he dies? The old fogies who now stay snug at home and flatter themselves that they’re in no trouble just because they don’t read books or newspapers and spend all day around the card table? They’re too decrepit to know how to govern the masses.”

“Of course… no doubt about it…”

“On the other hand, to hell with the masses! If they care to put their heads in a noose, well I don’t! And I can have something to say about it, can’t I, at least on my own account? On the other hand what I’ve been saying may be quite wrong, because in 1922 (you won’t remember it) the workers were already going quietly back to work and strikes were becoming rarer and rarer when along came the Pig and took away our freedom, took it from the working classes and from us. No, Antonio, the Italian workers are like the middle classes – they love freedom. It’s him, the Pig, who’s trying to bully us into thinking they don’t. Tell your mother to pray for his death, instead of praying for you not to get chilblains! Pray for him to kick the bucket as soon as possible, before I kick it myself from sheer vexation and nausea. I was told something yesterday that, if it’s true, makes life no longer worth living. They’re going to make Lorenzo Calderara the local Party Secretary of Catania. Can this be true?”

“I believe it is.”

“Calderara, son of Poxface, nephew of Chaffbelly! Lord save us! A city that has had its De Felice, its Macchi, its Verga, its Bellini, its Angelo Musco, its Giovanni Grasso, its Capuana, plus my good friend De Roberto, bends the knee in this manner to Lorenzo Calderara, commonly known as Blockhead. A hypocrite to boot, and a worm so yellow-bellied you can’t stand the whiff of him, such a brainless bloody idiot that his friends once managed to kid him he could buy himself iron gauntlets at the chemist’s.”

“Iron…? Gauntlets…?”

“Come off it, Antonio! ‘The Iron Hand’… But on the other hand, he’d scarcely have known what to do with them. A drip like that who…”

Antonio turned white as a sheet and his head flopped back against the sofa. He gawped at his uncle with pathetically lustreless eyes.

“Hey, what’s up?” asked the uncle. “What’s biting you?”

Antonio screwed his eyes up tight, leant forward and rested his eyelids on the thumb and first finger of one hand while flapping the other at his uncle to entreat him to keep quiet, not to worry… that he was getting over it…

“You, my lad,” that gentleman resumed as Antonio raised his head and laid it carefully, eyes closed, on the back of the sofa, “must pull up your socks and get back post-haste to Catania. If you hang on here the women will eat you alive, they’ll pick you clean… I’m an old man now, but even so they don’t give me a moment’s peace; so imagine someone of your age and your… Yes, quite, your genial personality!… That face of yours, though it may be cadaverous, they lick at like a lollipop… But enough of that. Let’s turn to serious topics. I know this Barbara Puglisi, the girl they want to marry you off to. I heard her play the violin the evening her uncle the monk was celebrating his silver wedding to the Church. I’m not saying she played superlatively, mind you… On the other hand, what’s that to you? She’s rich. She owns half Paternò! She went to boarding-school… Mind you I’m not saying she’s a genius… But on the other hand a woman doesn’t need to be a genius. Just as long as she’s not brainless.