The Gladiator Read online

  Gianfranco bombed an algebra quiz. He’d studied. He’d even had Annarita help him get ready for it, though she was rushed—she had her own Russian test to worry about. He’d thought he knew what was coming and how to do it. But when he looked at the questions, his brain turned to polenta.

  And when his father found out, he probably would get pounded into cornmeal mush. Not that his old man had been any great shakes in school. He would be something better, something more interesting, than a mid-level paper shuffler if he had. He wanted Gianfranco to do what he hadn’t been able to.

  No matter what he wanted, chances were he wouldn’t get it. Gianfranco cared more about basketball and soccer than he did about schoolwork. He was better at them than he was at schoolwork, too. He wasn’t great or anything, even if he wished he were. He wasn’t tall enough to be anything special as a basketball player, either. He enjoyed the games, though, where he felt like a caged animal in the classroom.

  He was shaking his head and muttering to himself when he trudged off to history. He knew he would have trouble paying attention. He was still worrying about that stupid quiz, and about why he was too stupid to get things right. And who cared what happened back in the twentieth century, anyway? It seemed as far from his own life as Julius Caesar did.

  Besides, Comrade Pontevecchio was a bore.

  “Let’s get to work!” the history teacher barked as soon as the bell rang. “Let’s all be Stakhanovites in our quest for knowledge!”

  He said the same thing every morning. Gianfranco didn’t yawn—you got in trouble if you showed you wanted to go to sleep. But he thought this particular Party slogan was dumb. Doing more than your assigned quota made sense if you worked in a factory and made bricks or brushes or something like that. How could you learn more than was in your book, though?

  Of course, Gianfranco hadn’t learned all of what was in the book, let alone more than that. “In the nineteen sixties, what two events showed that the corrupt, capitalist, imperialist United States was only a paper tiger?” Comrade Pontevecchio asked. His finger shot out. “Mazzilli! Yes, you! Recite!”

  Gianfranco jumped to his feet. “Yes, Comrade Teacher!” But it wasn’t yes. “Uh …” His wits seemed frozen. “The Vietnam missile crisis?” There was something about Vietnam in the chapter, and something about missiles. He remembered that much, anyhow.

  It wasn’t enough. Titters ran through the classroom. Some of the laughter was probably relief. Not everybody would have known the answer. Gianfranco could tell it was wrong. He stood there, waiting for the teacher to put him out of his misery—or to give him more of it.

  Comrade Pontevecchio made a production of taking a red pen out of his shirt pocket and writing in the roll book with it. “No,” he said coldly. “Be seated. If you don’t care about the past, how can the present matter to you?”

  I’m living in the present, Gianfranco thought. The past is dead. But the history teacher didn’t want an answer. He wanted Gianfranco to sit down and shut up. Miserably, Gianfranco did.

  “What is the real answer? What is the right answer?” the teacher asked.

  Teobaldo Montefiore threw his hand in the air. He did everything but sing it out, which would have got him in trouble. Yeah, show off how smart you are, you little suck-up, Gianfranco thought scornfully. If you were really smart, you’d be in the advanced track, not stuck here with me.

  When the teacher called on Teobaldo, he jumped to his feet. “The Vietnam War and the Cuban missile crisis!” he said, squeaking with excitement.

  “Very good—so far,” Comrade Pontevecchio said. “Why are they important?”

  All of a sudden, Teobaldo didn’t look so happy. “Because they showed capitalism was doomed?” You could hear the question mark in his voice. He wasn’t sure he was right any more, even if he gave an answer that was almost always safe.

  “Sit down,” the teacher snapped, and wrote something in the roll book in red. Comrade Pontevecchio looked out over the class. “Anyone?” His scorn grew by the second when nobody took a chance. “Knowing what is only half the battle, and the small half at that. You have to know why. Do you think Marx could have invented dialectical materialism if he didn’t understand why?”

  Nobody said anything. When Comrade Pontevecchio got into one of these moods, keeping quiet was the safest thing you could do. Gianfranco stared down at his desk. People had been trying to drum dialectical materialism into his head since he was five years old, but he still didn’t get it.

  “When the United States backed down and let the Soviet Union keep missiles in Cuba to balance the American missiles in Turkey, what did that show?” the teacher demanded.

  Gianfranco thought he knew, but he wasn’t about to stick his neck out. Luisa Orlandini cautiously raised her hand. Luisa was pretty. Even if she got it wrong, Comrade Pontevecchio probably wouldn’t bite her head off.

  Probably.

  He nodded to her. She stood up. “It showed the American capitalist regime was only a paper tiger, Comrade Pontevecchio,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he agreed—he’d called the USA a paper tiger himself. “And what does the Vietnam War have to do with this?”

  “The Vietnamese were trying to liberate the south from a neocolonialist dictatorship, and the Americans tried to prop up the reactionary elements,” Luisa answered.

  “Yes, that’s also right.” Comrade Pontevecchio warmed all the way up to chilly. “And what happened then, and why?”

  “Well, the Americans and their reactionary running dogs lost. I know that,” Luisa said.

  “Sì. They lost. But how? Why? How could America lose? In those days, it was very rich. It was much bigger and richer than Vietnam. What happened?” Luisa didn’t know. Comrade Pontevecchio waved her to her seat. He looked around for somebody else. When no one volunteered, he pointed at somebody. “Crespi!”

  Paolo Crespi got up. “The Americans stopped wanting to fight, didn’t they, Comrade Pontevecchio?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “Uh, I’m telling you, Comrade.”

  “Well, you’re right. When the United States brought its soldiers home from Vietnam in 1968, that was another signal to progressive forces around the world that not even the heartland of capitalism would go on defending an outdated ideology anymore. And so the cause of Socialism advanced in Asia and Africa and South America. One war of national liberation after another broke out and triumphed. Meanwhile, what was happening here in Europe. Does the term ‘popular front’ mean anything to you?”

  It was in the textbook. Gianfranco remembered that much, but no more. Comrade Pontevecchio frowned when no hands went up. “You haven’t been studying as hard as you should have.” He pointed at a girl. “Sofia! Tell me about popular fronts!”

  She got to her feet. “I—I’m sorry, Comrade Teacher, but I don’t know.”

  “And what excuse do you have for not knowing?”

  “No excuse, Comrade Teacher.” That was the only right answer. You were supposed to know. If you didn’t, it was your fault, nobody else’s. That was how teachers and the rest of the school system looked at things, anyhow. If the textbook was boring and the teacher hated students … well, so what? Textbooks had been boring ever since they were written on clay tablets, and teachers couldn’t wallop kids the way they had in the old days.

  Comrade Pontevecchio picked on a boy. He didn’t know what a popular front was, either.

  “This will not do,” the teacher snapped. “Get out your books. Write me a fifteen-minute essay on what popular fronts were and why they were important. Anyone who does poorly will have more work assigned. These are your lessons. You will learn them.”

  Gianfranco almost hadn’t brought his textbook. The miserable thing was thick as a brick and weighed a ton. But he would have been in big trouble if Comrade Pontevecchio caught him unprepared. He opened the book and looked in the index. There they were—popular fronts. Oh, boy, he thought. He flipped to the right page and sta
rted scribbling as fast as he could. If he parroted the text, he couldn’t go wrong. And he didn’t have to think while he wrote, either. Comrade Pontevecchio didn’t care what he thought or if he thought, as long as he ground out the right answers.

  Popular fronts, he rediscovered, combined Communists with non-Communist Socialists and other fellow travelers. The first one came along in France before World War II, to try to rally the country against Fascism. It didn’t work. But later popular fronts swung France and Italy and Scandinavia away from the weakening USA and toward the USSR.

  Without these fronts, he wrote, the victory of Socialism in Europe, while it still would inevitably have come, would have been slower. It might even have required warfare to eliminate reactionary forces from the continent. That was what the textbook said, and the textbook had to be right. If it was wrong, the authorities wouldn’t use it—and what would they do to an author who was wrong on purpose? Send him to a camp? Kill him? Purge his whole family? Gianfranco wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Was everybody in the class writing the same ideas in the same words? Everybody with any sense was. Why stick your neck out when the answers were right there in black and white? How many times would Comrade Pontevecchio read the same sentences? How sick of them would he get?

  Serve him right, Gianfranco thought. The teacher called for the essays. The students passed them forward. Comrade Pontevecchio grudged a nod. “Now, at least, you know what popular fronts are.”

  He was right. Gianfranco didn’t think he would forget. He still didn’t care, though. But Comrade Pontevecchio didn’t care whether he cared.

  After what seemed like forever, the bell rang. Gianfranco jumped up much more eagerly than he had to recite. Escape! But it wasn’t escape from school, only from history. Literature didn’t interest him, either. Nothing in school interested him a whole lot. He felt as if he were in jail.

  And his father and mother got mad because he wasn’t a better student! How could you do well if you didn’t care? All he wanted to do was get out. Because afterwards …

  But he couldn’t think about afterwards yet. If he did, he would start thinking about how long it was till he got out. And that would hurt, and then he would pay even less attention than he usually did.

  He sighed. Off to literature.

  This year, literature covered twentieth-century Socialist writers who weren’t actually Communists. Fellow travelers, Comrade Pellagrini called them. A light went on in Gianfranco’s head. History and literature were talking about some of the same things, but coming at them from different angles. That was interesting. He wished it happened more often.

  All the same, the class itself wasn’t that exciting. Right now, they were going through Jack London’s The Iron Heel. Gianfranco had read The Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire” in translation the year before. Those were gripping stories. London plainly knew about the frozen North, and he was able to put across what he knew.

  The Iron Heel was different. It was a novel about the class struggle, and about the ways the big capitalists found to divide the proletariat and keep it from winning the workers’ revolution.

  “Marx talks about how, in the last days of capitalism, the bourgeoisie are declassed and fall into the ranks of the workers,” Comrade Pellagrini said. “You all know that. You started studying The Communist Manifesto when you were still in primary school.”

  Gianfranco found himself nodding agreement. He would have nodded agreement to almost anything Comrade Pellagrini said. She didn’t look much older than the girls she was teaching, but she made them look like … girls. She was a woman herself, more finished than the girls, and prettier than almost all of them, too. She carried herself like a model or a dancer.

  She was so pretty, Gianfranco almost thought it would be worthwhile to study hard and impress her with how much he knew. Almost. She treated students the way a busy doctor treated patients. She was good at teaching, but she didn’t let anybody get personal. And Gianfranco knew that if he tried to impress her and failed, he’d be crushed. Better not to try in that case, wasn’t it? He thought so—and it gave him one more excuse not to work too hard.

  “How does London take Marx’s dynamic and turn it upside down, at least for a while?” the literature teacher asked.

  Gianfranco looked down at his desk. He couldn’t answer the question. If their eyes met, she was more likely to call on him. He thought so, anyway. Most of the time, he looked at her when he thought she wouldn’t be looking at him.

  She called on someone else—a girl. The student made a hash of trying to explain. Comrade Pellagrini called on a boy. He botched it, too.

  The teacher let out an exasperated snort. “How many of you did the assigned reading last night?” All the students raised their hands. Gianfranco had … looked at the book last night, anyway. Comrade Pellagrini scowled. “If you read it, why can’t you answer a simple question?”

  No one said a word. People looked at one another, or at the clock on the wall, or at the ceiling, or out the window—anywhere but at Comrade Pellagrini. Maybe she thought it was a simple question. Gianfranco didn’t. You couldn’t just copy from the book to answer it, the way he had in history. You had to recall what you’d read and make that fit the question. It all seemed like too much bother.

  “All right. All right.” The teacher still seemed angry. “You need to know, so I’ll tell you—this once. Doesn’t London show the bosses raising some workers to the bourgeoisie with what amounts to bribes to turn them against their natural class allies?”

  “Sì, Comrade Pellagrini,” everyone chorused. Once the teacher gave the answer, seeing it was right was the easiest thing in the world.

  “I want you to finish The Iron Heel tonight,” Comrade Pellagrini said. “We’ll have the test on Friday, and then next week we’ll start 1984. You’ll see how Orwell shows the tyranny of capitalism and Fascism.”

  A girl raised her hand. “I had to read that book in another class,” she said when the teacher called on her. “He calls the ideology in it English Socialism.” She sounded troubled, feeling there was something dangerous in the book that she couldn’t quite see.

  But Comrade Pellagrini brushed the question aside, saying, “Well, so what? The Nazis’ full name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. They weren’t real Socialists, and they weren’t for the workers. They used mystification to confuse the German people, and it worked.”

  That seemed to satisfy the girl. It didn’t matter to Gianfranco one way or the other. He hadn’t read 1984 yet, and hoped it would be more interesting than The Iron Heel. But how interesting could a book be when even its title lay more than a hundred years in the past? And how interesting could it be when you had to read it for school?

  The dismissal bell. Well, it was the dismissal bell for most people, anyhow. Annarita knew Gianfranco would be leaving now. But she had the Young Socialists’ League meeting. She didn’t really want to go—nothing would happen there. Nothing ever did. And she’d get back to the apartment an hour and a half later than usual, and still have a whole day’s worth of homework to do.

  People in the same boring uniform she was wearing filed into the auditorium. Most of them looked as unenthusiastic as she did. For them, this was something you did because you were in the League. Being in the League put you on the fast track to joining the Party. And getting your Party card was a long step towards a prosperous, comfortable life.

  But there were a few eager faces, too. Some kids really believed in the stuff the grown-ups who ran the League shoved down their throats. Annarita felt sorry for them—they were the kind who couldn’t see their nose in front of their face. And there were kids who liked to run things, too. She didn’t feel sorry for them. They scared her.

  Filippo Antonelli was one of those. He banged the gavel. “The meeting will come to order!” he said loudly. He would graduate at the end of the year, and she wouldn’t be sorry to see him leave. He intended to study law and go into politics. She thou
ght he would go far if he didn’t get caught in a purge. As long as he went far from her, that suited her fine. He turned to the girl sitting next to him. “The general secretary will read the minutes of the last meeting.”

  Stalin had been general secretary, too. He’d used that innocent-sounding post to run the Soviet Union. Isabella Sabatini didn’t have ambitions like that—or if she did, she hid them where Filippo couldn’t see them. She was in Annarita’s year, so maybe she’d show her true colors once he was gone. For now, she just read the minutes. They were boring, and got approved without amendment. They always did.

  “Continuing business,” Filippo said importantly.

  “First item is preparation for the May Day holiday at the school,” Isabella said. “The chairman of the May Day celebration committee will make his report.”

  He did. There would be a celebration. They had money taken from the Young Socialists’ League dues. They would spend some of it on ornaments and propaganda posters, and some more on a dance. The school administration had given them a list of approved bands. They would choose one.

  Annarita looked at her watch and tried not to yawn where people could see her do it. The May Day celebration was the same every year. Preparations for the celebration were the same every year, too. Only the band at the dance—sometimes—changed. Everything would go more smoothly if the people in charge didn’t take it so seriously.

  “The celebration of the victory over Fascism will be the next piece of business,” Isabella said.

  That was the same almost every year. Two years earlier, in Annarita’s first year at Hoxha Polytechnic, it had been bigger than usual. That was the 150th anniversary of the end of the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union called it. But it got back to normal last year, and would be normal again this May.

  After the committee for the celebration of victory over Fascism reported, Filippo asked, “Any new business?” There hardly ever was. Annarita hoped there wouldn’t be. Then they could get on with talking about the curriculum. They were going to send the administration a report. The administration wouldn’t read it—the administration never read student reports. But it would go on file, and show the Young Socialists’ League was doing its job.