Sentimental Economy Read online

  ALSO BY EDOARDO NESI

  Story of My People

  Infinite Summer

  Everything Is Broken Up and Dances:

  The Crushing of the Middle Class

  Copyright © 2020 La nave di Teseo editore, Milano

  Originally published in Italian as Economia sentimentale in 2020 by La nave di Teseo editore, Milano

  English translation copyright © 2022 Antony Shugaar

  Robert J. Gordon excerpts on pp. 121, 126, and 160 from The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War, copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press.

  Alda Merini poetry excerpt on page 185 from “Sono nata il ventuno a primavera,” in Vuoto d’amore, Einaudi, Torino, 1991.

  Curzio Malaparte excerpt on pp. 188–9 from Those Cursed Tuscans, translated by Rex Benedict, Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1964.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc. This book was set in Kepler and Trade Gothic Next by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Nesi, Edoardo, 1964- author.

  Title: Sentimental economy / Edoardo Nesi; translated by Antony Shugaar.

  Other titles: Economia sentimentale. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021061172 (print) | LCCN 2021061173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635422146 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781635422153 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Nesi, Edoardo, 1964- | COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020—Economic aspects—Italy. | COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020—Social aspects—Italy. | Economics—Sociological aspects.

  Classification: LCC HC305 .N3813 2022 (print) | LCC HC305 (ebook) | DDC 330.945—dc23/eng/20220107

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061172

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061173

  a_prh_6.0_140600474_c0_r0

  FOR MY FATHER

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Edoardo Nesi

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Well Before the Pandemic

  Taking Another Step

  Fabio, the Bernabei

  As Soon as the Quarantine Is Over

  As the Sea Tosses

  A Bunker in New Zealand

  Progress

  I’m Twenty-Two Years Old

  A Convincing Dream

  The Doni Tondo

  Billions Coming In

  Money and Perroni

  Rise and Fall

  A Personal Matter

  At Their Very Best

  The World’s Fair

  If Gordon’s Right

  September Arrives

  FAANG Stocks

  It’s Evening

  Afterword

  Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

  SIMON & GARFUNKEL

  There was an endless future.

  CARMINE SCHIAVO

  Well Before the Pandemic

  Some time back, well before the pandemic, the screenwriter and director Giovanni Veronesi, who had a show on TV called Maledetti amici miei (Damned friends of mine), reached out to ask me if I’d like to write “something about friendship,” which would then be read on air by the actress Valeria Solarino.

  I had only recently finished writing La mia ombra è tua (My shadow is yours), and I felt drained, but Giovanni and I have been friends since high school, and I didn’t want to tell him no, so I tried writing it, this thing about friendship. Try as I might, though, it wouldn’t take form, and just as I was about to tell him that I couldn’t do it, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to write something for my father, my babbo, disguising it as a message for a friend, because I couldn’t stand to think about him anymore. I’d stopped dreaming about him, I couldn’t even bring myself to cry about him.

  I gave that a try, and it worked like a charm.

  Anyone who knew me realized that I wasn’t writing to a friend.

  Those who love me understood and mercifully said nothing, and so, that evening—it was late, past midnight—I watched Valeria step on stage, lovely as the noon sun, and transmit my first message to my father since what had happened.

  Oh, ciao, listen, I wanted to tell you something.

  Yesterday I thought back to that interview with Muhammad Ali you read me a long time ago.

  Where he says that Earnie Shavers hit him with such a powerful right it shook his kinfolk back in Africa.

  It was such a hard punch that Ali’s legs folded beneath him, and he was forced to cling to the ropes to keep from falling. Muhammad Ali, the greatest, explained that if he had been knocked to the canvas, he’d never have had the strength to get back up.

  So he stayed up, wasn’t knocked to the canvas, and somehow managed to survive to the end of that round and indeed went on to win the fight.

  So, I thought maybe you read it to me because you wanted me to be like him in my life. Like Muhammad Ali. That you wanted me to refuse to hit the canvas, no matter how hard I might get punched.

  But he was Muhammad Ali, and I’m just me. And I hit the canvas hard that day. And I stayed down.

  For months on end, I stayed down.

  I’m only now starting to get back up on my feet.

  That’s what I wanted to tell you.

  That I’m getting back on my feet, and that I miss you. I miss you so much. I’d give my right arm to be able to hug you once again. Just once, that would be enough. But I know it’s not possible, so I send you my best wishes.

  And when you see him—Muhammad Ali—please tell him that I miss him too.

  Taking Another Step

  And then the world goes crazy.

  “Today we’ve decided to take another step,” says Giuseppe Conte on TV. “The administration has decided to shut down all business and manufacturing operations nationwide, except for those that are strictly necessary, crucial, and indispensable to ensuring a reliable supply of essential goods and services.”

  The date is March 21, 2020, and the prime minister of the Italian Republic is once again addressing the nation live, this time alongside a woman who’s signing his words for the hard of hearing.

  “We’ve worked all afternoon with the trade unions and the manufacturers’ and professional associations to draw up a detailed list setting forth the manufacturing sectors, categories of production, and public utility services, the ones that are most vital to the continued operation of the state in this phase of the emergency.”

  We’ve worked all afternoon.

  “All supermarkets will continue to remain open, as well as all stores selling foodstuffs and other basic necessities. So let me point this out: we expect no restrictions on the days that supermarkets can remain open to the public. There is no reason for any runs on stores. There is no reason we should see long lines, which would be entirely unjustified at this time. Pharmacies and other retail
outlets selling pharmaceutical goods will also remain open. Likewise, banking, postal, insurance, and financial services will continue to be provided. We will ensure all essential public services, such as transportation. We will of course further ensure all related ancillary services that are necessary for those permitted essential services.”

  That was Conte, the university professor from Puglia who taught law in Florence and was elevated from complete anonymity only to be parachuted, unbelievably, into the office of prime minister, summoned by the populists of the Five Star Movement to govern Italy, in a coalition with the racists of Matteo Salvini’s Northern League.

  “The People’s Lawyer,” as he announced that he wished to be called and thought of when he took office, Conte visited the White House and loudly stated that his administration was a change government, exactly like Trump’s government. Trump, in return, thanked Conte and called him “my new friend,” going so far as to endorse him in a tweet, though he misspelled his first name as “Giuseppi.”

  Conte, Giuseppe Conte, who just one year after that day in Washington spectacularly switched his alliance, becoming the prime minister of a new coalition government of a diametrically opposed persuasion. In this new administration, the Five Star Movement replaced the right-wing Northern League with the left-wing Italian Democratic Party.

  “We will slow down the country’s productive engine, but we will not stop it,” he says, and then he continues, dressed as sharply as a dance hall Romeo, making a special effort to appear solemn and heartfelt: “The state is here.”

  I cradle my face in both hands, I slowly start shaking my head while muttering under my breath that it’s unbelievable, but then I lurch upright from the sofa and stride outside to my garden, where I begin watering the already-damp soil around my camellia tree, even though it’s pitch-dark. As I spray the base of the tree, I snarl to myself, because I know that the obscene closing of ranks between industry and labor I’ve just witnessed is an extreme, last-ditch effort to stem the rise of infections, seeing that every day brings nearly a thousand new deaths, and outside the main hospital in Bergamo army trucks are idling, ready to haul off loads of coffins—I know it, and I expected it, like everyone else had. Still, this announcement disturbs me much more than the other, actually more terrible, announcement with which, only a few days previous, the lawyer of the Italian people had ordered us all to remain at home, doors locked and windows shut, allowing us out only to tend to documented work-related necessities, situations of urgent need, or issues involving our health.

  What will happen tomorrow?

  What will all these people do when their work is shut down—for the moment, shut down indefinitely, by the way?

  There are millions of them. Where will they get their income, if no income is being produced anywhere?

  And what is the meaning, anyway, of those three terrifying adjectives that Conte has just uttered, if and when they are applied to labor, which in the opening words of the Italian Constitution is boldly declared to be the foundation of the republic? (That is to say, of course, if no one has changed those opening words, in the still of the night, without alerting the rest of us, in compliance with some new and stupid iconoclastic furor.)

  Necessary.

  Crucial.

  Indispensable.

  What types of work, after all, are now to be considered unnecessary, not crucial, and dispensable, if the work in question allows a people to survive?

  What jobs can we dispense with and still hope not to derail, in the first place, the economy itself, and after that the very fabric of the state, civil coexistence, and society at large?

  And come to think of it, who makes that decision, anyway, people who worked on it for a whole afternoon? Who are they and what have they done, their whole life long, so as to be ready and able to make such a scalding, immense decision that is clearly destined to dig a ditch—no, make that a yawning trench—between the Italians, dividing them on the basis of some presumed necessity of their occupations, rewarding some and condemning others?

  I snarl, of course I snarl, because I clearly understand that the death knell is tolling for the larger manufacturing sector once again, and especially for textiles, my beloved textile industry, but also for business and trade in general, for shops, for all stores, for bookstores, cafés, restaurants, and hotels. They’ll go the way of the museums and movie houses and theaters and discotheques and concert halls and stadiums and sports arenas that have already been shut down, and the churches, because you can’t even go to Mass anymore, or for that matter to public parks, and you’re not allowed to walk on beaches or hike in the mountains.

  How do you go on living without the unnecessary and the noncrucial and the non-indispensable? Hadn’t we always said that those were what made life worth living, ennobling our existence, the pillars of what makes Italian style what it is, the things we stamp MADE IN ITALY, the flowers in our nation’s buttonhole, symbols of the wonderful history of the special communion between art and craft and artisanry and industry and culture and environment and food and wine and tourism, this story that we told to an enthralled world, a world that had believed it, decreeing Italy to be the land of style and fine taste, the best country you could ever hope to live in?

  Ah, this must be the ache of the phantom limb, because it’s hurting as if I still owned it, our old factory, instead of having sold it fifteen years ago; as if my father were still here, still alive, and tomorrow morning I was going to have to muster the courage to pick up the phone and call him to work out which of the two of us would be the one to go down and padlock the front gate of our woolen mill, the Lanificio T. O. Nesi & Figli, because things are never really entirely gone, not even when they’re over and done with, and neither are people, not even when they’re dead—and Faulkner was right when he said that the past is never dead, it’s not even past.

  Fabio, the Bernabei

  It was nice, though, the quarantine, lovely, really, with my daughter back from London just in the nick of time—Angelica on the last Ryanair London–Pisa flight, a flight I’d always cursed for the sheer discomfort they made you travel in, but ever since it delivered my darling daughter back to me just when she was needed, a flight that I now adore and will always root for—and my wife Carlotta, who never stopped making ravioli, and since we live in a great big house in the middle of a forest we could all live in peace and quiet, each left to our own devices, to read and study and listen to music and make video calls, and basically the only time we saw each other was at lunch and dinner, and then we’d have a gelato and sit down together to watch the TV series about Michael Jordan.

  In the mornings I’d write aimlessly; in the afternoons I’d go out into the forest to run myself ragged with murderous, pointless labors, like raking off from an escarpment the oak leaves that had piled up over the years and kept the laurustine shrubs and ferns and broom plants and hornbeams from sprouting, such a heavy mantle of leaves that not even the relentless Saint-John’s-wort could spring up and spread, and as I worked I listened to Bowie’s “Lady Stardust” on endless rotation, turned all the way up. That song constantly, and no other.

  Every evening I’d uncork a big bottle of white wine—some evenings more than one—and tell myself I needed to stay calm and hang tough.

  Maybe because there weren’t many cases in Prato, I was never afraid of catching the virus. With no rational reason backing it up, I lived through the whole pandemic in the absolute certainty that, even if I were to catch Covid, I wouldn’t even notice it, because I was bound to be one of the asymptomatic ones. So I almost always went out to do the grocery shopping, invulnerable me, but the relief of being out in the world lasted several minutes at most. All it took was the sight of streets empty of cars to strip me of that sense of relief, all it took were the endless lines of people socially distancing in front of the supermarkets, the sound of my footsteps in the terrible silence of the abandoned city. Ten short
minutes, and I couldn’t wait to get back home.

  Every day that passed, I was surprised at how little I missed the freedom to do all those silly, overambitious things that from time to time I loved to do on a whim. But when I mentioned that to Carlotta, she replied, “What freedom are you talking about? You never go out!” because, truth be told, lately I’d been something of a homebody, only leaving the house in the morning to have breakfast at the Bar Perugia, the café that Salvatore runs. He knew my babbo, had come to bid him farewell at Misericordia funeral home, and when he was there, face-to-face with the coffin, he made a sort of brief, understated bow that I’ll never forget.

  And then, out of the blue, a dear friend of mine dies: Fabio Bernabei.

  During a brief interregnum when the Covid rules had been ever so slightly watered down, Fabio had chosen to defy the police checkpoints and had driven to visit a friend at his factory—very close to where I live, by the way: less than a mile away, as the crow flies. They were talking about the idea of producing masks when his friend had to take a phone call and Fabio took advantage of the opportunity to step out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette.

  “The call might have lasted two minutes, at the very most,” his friend tells me at the funeral, and when he calls Fabio’s name and hears no answer, he steps out onto the balcony and sees him lying on the ground, motionless. Then and there, his first thought is that Fabio must have slipped, and so he rushes over to him and kneels down beside him to help him to his feet—because Fabio is overweight, seriously overweight, and riddled for years with various maladies that both prevent him from having an operation and keep him from doing the physical exercise that would have gotten him into shape for an operation, so he just can’t seem to get any better—and the friend shakes him and calls his name again, but Fabio says nothing and isn’t breathing and just lies there, motionless, flat on his back, dead as a doornail, with the cigarette still emitting a plume of smoke between his fingers.