While many of the guests were still dancing, a small group had formed around the professor, three or four boys and two girls. Only the boys talked. The sole woman who took part, and she did so with irony, was the professor. I saw right away that the older boys, Nino, Armando and one called Carlo, found it somehow improper to argue with her. They wished mainly to challenge each other, considering her the authority, bestower of the palm of victory. Armando expressed opinions contrary to his mother’s but in fact he was addressing Nino. Carlo agreed with the professor but in refuting the others he strove to separate his arguments from hers. And Nino, politely disagreeing with the professor, contradicted Armando, contradicted Carlo. I listened spellbound. Their words were buds that blossomed in my mind into more or less familiar flowers, and then I flared up, mimicking participation; or they manifested forms unknown to me, and I retreated, to hide my ignorance. In this second case, however, I became nervous: I don’t know what they’re talking about, I don’t know who this person is, I don’t understand. They were sounds without sense, they demonstrated that the world of persons, events, ideas was endless, and the reading I did at night had not been sufficient, I would have to work even harder in order to be able to say to Nino, to Professor Galiani, to Carlo, to Armando: Yes, I understand, I know. The entire planet is threatened. Nuclear war. Colonialism, neocolonialism. The pieds-noirs, the O.A.S. and the National Liberation Front. The fury of mass slaughters. Gaullism, Fascism. France, Armée, Grandeur, Honneur. Sartre is a pessimist, but he counts on the Communist workers in Paris. The wrong direction taken by France, by Italy. Opening to the left. Saragat, Nenni. Fanfani in London, Macmillan. The Christian Democratic congress in our city. The followers of Fanfani, Moro, the Christian Democratic left. The socialists have ended up in the jaws of power. We will be Communists, we with our proletariat and our parliamentarians, to get the laws of the center left passed. If it goes like that, a Marxist-Leninist party will become a social democracy. Did you see how Leone behaved at the start of the academic year? Armando shook his head in disgust: Planning isn’t going to change the world, it will take blood, it will take violence. Nino responded calmly: Planning is an indispensable tool. The talk was tense, Professor Galiani kept the boys at bay. How much they knew, they were masters of the earth. At some point Nino mentioned America favorably, he said words in English as if he were English. I noticed that in the space of a year his voice had grown stronger, it was thick, almost hoarse, and he used it less rigidly than he had at Lila’s wedding and, later, at school. He even spoke of Beirut as if he had been there, and Danilo Dolci and Martin Luther King and Bertrand Russell. He appeared to support an organization he called the World Brigade for Peace and rebuked Armando when he referred to it sarcastically. Then he grew excited, his voice rose. Ah, how handsome he was. He said that the world had the technical capability to eliminate colonialism, hunger, war from the face of the earth. I was overwhelmed by emotion as I listened, and, although I felt lost in the midst of a thousand things I didn’t know—what were Gaullism, the O.A.S., social democracy, the opening to the left; who were Danilo Dolci, Bertrand Russell, the pieds-noirs, the followers of Fanfani; and what had happened in Beirut, what in Algeria—I felt the need, as I had long ago, to take care of him, to tend to him, to protect him, to sustain him in everything that he would do in the course of his life. It was the only moment of the evening when I felt envious of Nadia, who stood beside him like a minor but radiant divinity. Then I heard myself utter sentences as if it were not I who had decided to do so, as if another person, more assured, more informed, had decided to speak through my mouth. I began without knowing what I would say, but, hearing the boys, fragments of phrases read in Galiani’s books and newspapers stirred in my mind, and the desire to speak, to make my presence felt, became stronger than timidity. I used the elevated Italian I had practiced in making translations from Greek and Latin. I was on Nino’s side. I said I didn’t want to live in a world at war. We mustn’t repeat the mistakes of the generations that preceded us, I said. Today we should make war on the atomic arsenals, should make war on war itself. If we allow the use of those weapons, we will all become even guiltier than the Nazis. Ah, how moved I was, as I spoke: I felt tears coming to my eyes. I concluded by saying that the world urgently needed to be changed, that there were too many tyrants who kept peoples enslaved. But it should be changed by peaceful means.
