SCENES FROM A PLAY
299
DoN PAoLo. Well, anyhow, please spare me now the tale of the "heart–
rending'' scene. I know the sort of thing: you went to him, threw
yourself at his feet, beat your breast and repeated Mea culpa, wept and
confessed. Isn't that what happened? And you finally departed with the
firm and pious intention of returning to confess after each new lapse.
(Changing his tone).
Murica, confessors and psychiatrists can allow
themselves the luxury of mercy, but a revolutionary party, and you ought
to know this much because you have belonged to one, a revolutionary
movement, if it's not to betray its mission, in certain cases has got to be
merciless to the point of cruelty. Was it Don Benedetto that made you
come up here?
MurucA. Don Benedetto wanted to have you come to his place but I
preferred to come here.
They both sit down at the table.
DoN PAOLO. To be frank, I didn't think you so audacious.
MuRICA. I assure you, it's not exactly audacity. Perhaps it's courage.
DoN PAOLO
(stern and aggressive).
Courage? Murica, you're mistaken.
A traitor can be foolhardy, rash, imprudent, anything you like, but not
courageous. Courage is a peculiar attribute of honesty.
MuRICA. Maybe, Pietro, you were born upright, honest, pure and there–
fore, by virtue of nature, also courageous. My courage, on the other
hand, if I may be allowed to speak of it, isn't natural; it's always, as in
this very moment, a victory over fear: because by nature I'm timorous
and weak. It's only very recently that I've begun to understand what
courage in your sense really is, I mean courage as an aspect of honesty.
DoN PAoLo. Maybe you think it courageous honesty to sneak into the
trust of your comrades and then betray them to the police?
MurucA. My self-denunciation to Annina, at a time when no one even
dreamt of suspecting me, was a difficult, painful and supreme act of
courage.
DoN PAOLO
(after a short pause).
The perniciousness of individuals
of your sort lies precisely in this double-facedness, in this inextricable
alternation of sincerity and falsehood, good intentions and cynicism,
audacity and irresistible, uncontrollable panic. So you confessed every–
thing to Annina, did you? All right; but afterwards? What about the
subsequent arrests, the arrests yesterday and this morning? Who was at
the bottom of them?
MurucA. I don't know. From the day I spoke to Annina I never moved
beyond the four walls of Don Benedetto's house.
(Short pause).
I ar–
rived at Don Benedetto's place by sheer accident that very same day.
Driven to despair by the irreparable past, I fled across the countryside
without realizing how nor where I was going, torn by the feeling that I
