Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [61]
‘So you're happy? Did you hate them? Were they bad leaders?’
‘No, what gave you that idea?’ they exchanged looks of surprise. ‘They were good. Or rather, no better and no worse than anyone else. Well, you know what they're like: heads of state, leaders, commanders … to get one of those jobs …’
‘Still,’ one of them said, I liked this lot.’
‘Me too. And me,’ others agreed. I never had anything against them.’
‘So aren't you sad they're killing them?’ I said.
‘What can you do? If someone agrees to be a leader he knows how he'll end up. He could hardly expect to die in his bed!’
The others laughed. ‘That'd be a fine thing! Someone rules, commands, then, as if nothing had happened, stops and goes back home.’
Someone said: ‘Everybody would want to be leader then, I'm telling you! Even me, look, I'd be up for it, here I am!’
‘Me too, me too,’ lots of them said, laughing.
Well I wouldn't,’ said one man with glasses. ‘Not on those terms. What would be the point?’
‘Right. There'd be no point in being boss on those terms,’ several of them agreed. ‘It's one thing doing a job like that when you know what to expect, and quite another… but how could you do it otherwise?’
The man with the glasses, who must have been the best educated, explained: ‘Authority over others is indivisible from the right of those others to have you climb the scaffold and do away with you, one day in the not too distant future … What authority would a leader have without the aura of this destiny around him, if you couldn't read it in his eyes, his sense of his end, for every second of his mandate? Civil institutions depend on this dual aspect of authority; no civilization has ever used any other system.’
“And yet,’ I objected, I could quote you cases …’
I mean: real civilization,’ insisted the man with glasses, I'm not talking about barbarian interregnums, however long they may have lasted in the history of peoples.’
The pontificating old man, the one who'd talked about fruit on branches, was muttering something to himself. He exclaimed: ‘The head commands so long as it's attached to the neck.’
What do you mean?’ the others asked. T)o you mean that if for example a leader went beyond his term and, just for the sake of arguihent, didn't get his head cut off, he'd stay there ruling, his whole life long?’
‘That's how things used to be,’ the old man agreed, ‘in the times before it was clear that whoever chose to be leader chose to be beheaded in the not too distant future. Those who had power hung on to it…’
I could have interrupted at this point, quoted some examples, but no one would listen to me.
‘So? What did people do?’ they asked the old man.
‘They had to cut their heads off willy-nilly, with brute force, against their wishes! Not on appointed days, but when they just couldn't put up with them any more. That's what used to happen before things were organized, before the leaders accepted…’
‘Oh, we'd just like to see them try not to accept!’ the others said. ‘Oh we'd like to see that!’
‘It's not the way you think,’ interrupted the man with the glasses. ‘It's not true that the leaders are forced to undergo execution . Say that and you miss the real meaning of our statutes, the real relationship that binds our leaders to the rest of the people. Only heads of state can be beheaded, hence you can't wish to be a head without also wishing for the chop. Only those who feel they have this vocation can become heads of state, only those who already feel themselves beheaded the moment they take up a position of authority.’
Little by little the customers in the bar had thinned out, each going back to his work. I realized that the man with the glasses was talking exclusively to me.
‘That's what power is,’ he went on, ‘this waiting for the end. All the authority one has is no more than advance notice of the blade hissing through the air, crashing down in a clean cut, all the applause