Who He Is
Francesco Antonio Moscarda is the father of Vitangelo Moscarda, founder of the Richieri bank, and never appears alive in the novel: he is a dead man his son evokes, and the first image of him is that of a tall, fat, bald man with a thick red beard and almost glassy blue eyes, with on his face a smile of tenderness, part compassion and part mockery (ch. III of Book III). He lost his wife early and had a house built to get out of the house full of memories, leaving it unfinished (ch. II of Book II). He tried, by fair means and foul, to make his son finish something, and only succeeded in getting him married young, in the hope of a grandson who would not resemble his son (ch. I of Book I). More than fearing, he suspects: the smile he left his son also came from the reality others gave him, the father, which he sensed (ch. V of Book III). He knows, or suspects, that the town takes him for a usurer, and he leaves his son idleness and fame without ever warning him (ch. VI of Book III). Where he is wrong, through the voice his son lends him in the vision: he takes Vitangelo for a poor naive man who runs after thoughts without fixing on any, and that is why he loved him (ch. III of Book III).
Trajectory
In ch. I of Book I Vitangelo says that his father tried, by fair means and foul, to make him finish something, and succeeded only in having him marry young, in the hope of a grandson who would not resemble him. In ch. II of Book II he shows the house the father had built after the mother's death, left unfinished, with the arched gateway without a door, and which, after the father's death, the neighborhood women have taken as their courtyard.
In ch. II of Book III the son discovers that even the idleness he thought was his own depended on his father's wealth, and in ch. III of Book III the father appears to him, summoned, with the same almost glassy blue eyes. The smile turns into a cold, hidden grimace, and the son looks at the hands with red hair, the rings, the thick stickpin in the tie, the watch chain: too much gold. The dread that follows is that of necessities no one chose:
Fu un attimo, ma l’eternità. Vi sentii dentro tutto lo sgomento delle necessità cieche, delle cose che non si possono mutare: la prigione del tempo; il nascere ora, e non prima e non poi; il nome e il corpo che ci è dato; la catena delle cause, it was a moment, but an eternity. I felt within me all the dismay of blind necessities, of things that cannot be changed: the prison of time; being born now, and not before or after; the name and the body given to us; the chain of causes.
In ch. IV of Book III the son moves from "I" to "we" and describes what happens to all sons when they see their father from outside, and the point of connection between the two is birth:
E sentiamo la nostra vita come lacerata tutta, meno che in un punto per cui resta attaccata ancora a quell’uomo. E questo punto è vergognoso., and we feel our life as torn all over, except at one point by which it still clings to that man. And this point is shameful.
In ch. V of Book III the banker of school conversations is, for the town, a usurer. The question the son poses puts the reader in the same place:
Se vostro padre fosse boja, come si tradurrebbe nella vostra famiglia questo titolo per accordarlo con l’amore che voi avete per lui e ch’egli ha per voi?, if your father were an executioner, how would that title translate in your family, so as to match the love you have for him and he has for you?
In ch. VI of Book III Vitangelo asks himself whether he is not worse than his father: his father at least worked, and he only signed. In ch. I of Book IV the other faces of the banker appear: he gave money to whoever asked for "a little" and then stopped, and none of those he supported called him a usurer with more fury than Marco di Dio. In ch. V of Book IV the son separates himself from him before Quantorzo, warning that he is not his father:
T’avverto, caro mio, che non sono mio padre., I warn you, my dear, that I am not my father.
In ch. VI of Book IV, alone in the cubicle of the cupboard, he sees his father's hands, waxen, white, fat, with rings and red hairs, taking the papers off the shelves, and then looks at his own and asks whether they belong only to him:
Sì: erano quelle che io mi conoscevo. Ma appartenevano forse soltanto a me?, yes: they were the ones I knew as mine. But did they perhaps belong only to me?
In ch. I of Book V Quantorzo replies to Firbo that the father too had his luxuries of kindness and no one thought of having him declared incompetent; Vitangelo sees the flaw: the father proved in business that he had his head screwed on. In ch. VIII of Book V the bank bears the father's name, since he founded it, and the son wants it removed. In ch. VII of Book VII Canon Sclepis speaks to him of his father as someone who did so much harm, and of his thought as a hair shirt for the son.
Themes Embodied
The father is inheritance in person: the body, the name, the profession, and the money that Vitangelo believed he had made on his own. He embodies Money and wealth as origin, and the title they give him varies with who is speaking: banker to the son, usurer to the town. He is Appearance and reality applied to a dead man, and the way the son reads him in ch. III of Book III prepares the general lesson of the novel, that no one is one person for everyone.
The book gives the father a voice only within the son's vision, and his figure is made of accounts: the smile, the hands, the rings, the titles. That makes him the most fixed character of all, the only one the son can never ask what he was. The cubicle scene (ch. VI of Book IV) suggests that the price of this distance is that the son's hands, for an instant, are more the father's than his own. The warning in ch. V of Book IV is above all the end of the tolerance the father had for Marco di Dio, but the cubicle shows that the separation is not only one of conduct.
Divergent Readings
The father's smile can be read in two ways, and the text leaves both standing. In the first, it is the tenderness of a man who loves his son, with the compassion of one who knows he will finish nothing and with the affectionate mockery of one who enjoys it. It is the smile the son keeps as his only living legacy (ch. V of Book III). In the second, it is the cold, hidden grimace that the vision reveals (ch. III of Book III): the tenderness is horribly malicious, and the son now reads it as that of someone who knows what the town thinks and takes pleasure in his naivety. Whoever reads it the first way sees a father who loves; whoever reads it the second sees a usurer who smiles; and the son himself passes from one to the other within the span of a single chapter.
The difference between the two readings is what one expects of a father who lends to whoever asks him. If the money he gave Marco di Dio was tenderness, Marco's hatred is unjust; if it was a way of amusing himself with other people's illusions (the text says the father delighted in fostering these illusions, laughing at his own particular smile), the hatred is justified. The text supports both because Marco's scene in ch. I of Book IV shows the father giving, laughing and stopping, and what is known of him does not decide between generosity and calculation.
Relationships
- Vitangelo Moscarda: the son who sees him from outside (ch. III of Book III), discovers that he is the heir of the usurer (ch. V of Book III), and separates himself from him before the director (ch. V of Book IV).
- Marco di Dio: the protégé who hated him as no one else did and went on hating the son (ch. I of Book IV).
- Quantorzo: the son's friend who invokes the father's name to defend the bank (ch. VIII of Book V) and recalls that the father also had his luxuries (ch. I of Book V).
- Firbo: the other of the two friends to whom the son handed the bank after the father's death (ch. I of Book I).