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'Are you particularly interested in agricultural machinery?' she inquired ingenuously.
'No, but I like to hear you talk.'
This was a sacrilegious offence to a temple of labour and Comrade Petrovna paled and
stiffened in proper bureaucratic style. 'Comrade ...' she started to say in a harsh, metallic voice.
She had never been in the Trastevere section of Rome or looked into a pair of eyes like those
of Scamoggia. They swallowed her up, and all her rigidity melted away.
R. was a typical Russian city of about a hundred and fifty thousand people, with few
automobiles and little traffic of any kind on the streets. The hotel was small and ill kept and Don
Camillo found himself in a thoroughly uncomfortable room. He wondered with whom he was to
share it, but his doubts were soon put to an end by the arrival of Peppone.
'Look here, Father - I mean Comrade--,' said Peppohe, 'you've got to stop pulling Rondella's
leg. Let him alone, even if you don't like him.'
'But I do like him,' replied Don Camillo. 'Where the Party's interests are at stake, I hew to the
line. The fellow is sadly muddled; there are remnants of bourgeois ideology in his mind and it's up
to us to clear them away.'
Peppone threw his hat against the wall. 'One of these days I'm going to strangle you,' he
hissed into the priest's ear.
The group gathered in the dingy dining-room. Comrade Oregov sat at the head of the table,
with Peppone on his right and Comrade Nadia at his left. Don Camillo manoeuvred himself into a
place opposite Rondella, thus causing Peppone's temperature to boil over. It boiled over again
when he saw Don Camillo raise his hand to his forehead to make the sign of the cross as he sat
down.
'Comrades,' he exploded,'what wouldn't T give if some of those stupid reactionaries who are
always talking down the Soviet Union could be with us? If only they could see it with their own
eyes!'
'It wouldn't be any use, Comrade,' Don Camillo said dismally. What with pretending to smooth
his hair and brush the lapels of his jacket, he had successfully made his sign of the cross.'Their
own eyes wouldn't convince them. They go around with blinkers.'
Comrade Petrovna translated these words, and the tourist bureau official nodded his shaven
head in approval as he murmured a reply.
'Comrade Oregov says that you have hit the nail on the head,' she said to Don Camillo, who
acknowledged the compliment with a slight bow.
Scamoggia, who was always ready to second what Comrade Tarocci said, added an
observation of his own.
'Our country is a century behind. Our stinking industrialists think they know it all, just because
they produce a few miserable machines. But if they were to see a factory like the one we visited
today, they'd have heart failure. And it isn't one of your biggest and best, is it, Comrade
Petrovna?'
'Oh no, it's just a second-rate plant,' she responded. 'It's the last word in modern technology,
but the production is rela tively small.'
Don Camillo shook his head sadly.
'We Italians ought to feel humiliated to see that a second rate Soviet factory is so far ahead of
the Fiat Company, which is our greatest producer of cars.'
Comrade Peratto, from Turin, who so far had had very little to say, was wounded in his local
pride.
'That may go for the tractor department, but when it comes to cars, the Fiat's not to be
sneezed at. We have no right to belittle the Italian workers who made it what it is today.'
'Truth above everything!' exclaimed Don Camillo 'Truth is more important than the pride of the
Fiat Company. As long as national pride leads us to condone the backwardness of our social and
economic system we shall never learn the lesson of efficiency which the Soviet Union can teach
us. A man whose fiancee had only one leg insisted that two-legged women were inferior to her.
That's exactly the attitude we have towards our half-baked accomplishments. Here in Russia
industry has two strong legs to stand on.'
'And what legs!' echoed Scamoggia, looking boldly at Comrade Petrovna.
'I don't see what you're driving at,' Comrade Rondella said to Don Camillo.
'A Communist must face up to the truth, even when it is painful,' Don Camillo
explained.'We've come here to search for the truth, not to indulge in sentimentality.'
The tourist-bureau official had followed the conversation carefully, asking Comrade Petrovna
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