Spirit of the Borsa
Richard West
Milan In the entrance hall of the Milan Stock Exchange, facing the bust of Cavour, there is a metal plaque in memory of a stockbroker who was killed in 1936 during the war against Abyssinia. The plaque is dirty with age, but I was able to read that the hero, though mortally wounded and in a condition 'worthy of tears', managed to force himself to smoke a cigarette in order not to
upset his fellow soldiers.
The spirit of the stockbroker soldier lived on in the Borsa during this week of the general election that seemed to threaten the very foundations of the Italian capitalist system. The threat was manifest in the leftwing posters stuck over the front of the building: 'Victory in Cambodia. Liberation of Pnomh Penh.' Inside, I was told by one of a group of young stockbrokers: 'We often get bomb scares, and tomorrow, who knows, we shall get bombs. But the market is stable. The main excitement we get is from the money exchange closing prices. Sterling is low, I hear.' This stoicism concealed a real anxiety about the political crisis. When I asked 'Are you afraid ?' they answered 'Yes, we are afraid.'
The Milan Stock Exchange, which handles seventy per cent of all share transactions in Italy, stands in the Piazza degli Affari, the Square of Affairs, near Money Street (Via Moneta) and the country's two principal banks. This Stock Exchange was built during the rule of Mussolini who, like Hitler and Stalin, rather fancied himself as an architect. The front of the building sports four huge columns resting on statues of men and women presumed to represent workers, for they are holding spades or bits of machinery. They appear overwhelmingly sad and tired from the effort of propping up a stock exchange.
The main hall of the Stock Exchange is noisy even by Italian standards, even by stock exchange standards. One gets the impression of several hundred men yelling into their telephones, the instrument crad led under the chin, leaving their hands free to gesticulate. The stockbrokers divide into two types: the one young, trim-suited, wearing a tie, buoyant and smiling; the other old, fatigued, irritated, tieless, pale, suffering from a heart condition, dark-spectacled, with a protruding lower lip.
One of the latter cornered me in the next-door Bar Borsa: 'Everything's going down. We don't have bulls and bears in this stock exchange. We just have bears. Milan was' a textile town originally but textiles are down ninety per cent. How can you expect a company to survive with strikes, walk-outs and guaranteed employment ? The Stock Exchange isn't important any more. All investment now is in the hands of the banks and institutions. The people who work at the Borsa now are gangsters. They are in the hands of the gangsters like the Mafia.'
A friend of his, Signor E. Beshiri, said he was so dissatisfied with life as a stockbroker that he had taken a job as representative of an American company. He presented me with a sample of his products which, so the package says, 'are made from seamless natural lamb membranes. They are softer than your own skin, yet possess immense strength and a high degree of natural heat conductivity—providing a complete satisfaction and maximum reliability.' Women, I read, especially prefer these pre-moistened articles which 'provide the natural sensitive feeling so essential to her complete enjoyment and satisfaction.'
This stockbroker-salesman said that his goods had been legal in Italy for sixteen years now, but he mourned that they could not be sold except in chemists' shops. He was pleased to meet an Englishman because England reminded him of Australia. 'The membranes of Australian sheep,' he told me, 'produce the finest condoms in the world.'
On Monday evening despondency came to the Bar Borsa as it was known that the Communists had acquired a big vote. 'They have bombed a supermarket,' I was told by a corporal of the police. 'These bombers are flies and one must treat them as flies. If you treat them as something more than flies they become something more than flies.' We went to another bar to watch the results on TV. A woman looking like Margery Proops talked about the 'historic compromise'; Brigitte Bardot squirted herself with scent ; everyone was agreed that whatever had happened, nothing had changed.
The next morning, when it was known that the Christian Democrats remained the largest party, the mood of the Milan Stock Exchange was still unhappy. An elderly stockbroker stabbed his finger over and over again into my shoulder to make his argument. 'Are they mad to vote Communist? It is impossible. The people are mad. When I was ten years old I was lucky to eat meat once a day, and a lemonade was for Sunday. Now everyone eats meat twice a day and as for the children they have as much Coca-Cola as they want and you don't know what to give them for presents. And yet they vote for the Communists.' He actually punched my shoulder ; 'It is impossible. We will have elections again in September.'
The stockbroker who also deals in the membranes of Australian sheep must, subconsciously, have recalled the gallant example of that soldier stockbroker who died on a burning plain of East Africa. To hide his spiritual agony, he forced himself to smoke a cigarette.
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