Waiting for Marco

VENETIAN RED (503 pp.)--P. M. Pasinetti--Random House ($4.95).

Her eyes are an ageless blue, but the ancient Signora Partibon is dying. Life flickers in her like needlepoints of sunlight refracted on a palazzo ceiling from the Grand Canal. She grips the hand of her grandson Giorgio and thanks him for his visit ("Now the whole family has come"). But Giorgio, incorrigibly honest, utters a long-banished name: "One of your sons, Marco, is not here." In a paroxysm of coughing, the old lady dies.

Waiting for Marco is like waiting for Lefty or Godot. In this first novel it represents a messianic yearning for an honest man who will redeem the corruption of Mussolini's Italy. Long before Marco makes his anticlimactic appearance, Italian Author Pasinetti explores half a dozen themes--love, death, courage, Venice, and, above all, the interplay of two families.

Pedants & Peasants. The grasping Fassolas and the well-bred Partibons share an hourglass relationship. The Fassolas are on top, but empty, feeding on the fetid air of Fascist posts and poses. The Partibons are on the bottom, but filled with grit and their own brand of gallantry --the gallantry of being their rather idiosyncratic selves. Giorgio's tawny-haired sister Elena, with whom he is spiritually close to incest, drives motorboats and herself at a swamping pace. Brother Giuliano plays cards from morning to night and takes cute tricks to bed. With Chekhovian unconcern, Papa Partibon paints while the roof is sold over his head for mortgages.

The Fassolas stuff their black shirts and their bellies. The intertwining fortunes of the two families require, and almost justify, every episode and dialogue-choked page Novelist Pasinetti allots to them. Young Enrico Fassola falls in love with Elena, but she breaks his heart and pride by having an affair with a childhood sweetheart. Test Pilot Massimo Fassola plummets to a watery death, leaving another Partibon girl pregnant. Novelist Pasinetti does deft sketches of pedants and peasants, including a notable portrait of a venomous Fascist toady.

Actions & Gestures. Like a lazy mocking mirror of human folly flow the canals of Venice. Novelist Pasinetti tellingly evokes "the bride of the sea," with its funereal gondolas, its swish of steps and voices and waves on marble landings, its wheeling pigeons under a volley of church bells. Pasinetti was born in his setting, is now a professor of Italian at the University of California at Los Angeles. He wrote his novel in Italian and then translated it into English on a tape recorder, a method that gives the book a convincing, though sometimes too pronounced, foreign accent.

At the end of the long story, Uncle Marco finally shows up, and proves to be a kind of lifelong peripatetic anarchist. His final moral counsel is: "See that you always perform actions, never gestures." But hardly anyone seems to live by that advice--except Author Pasinetti. His book, far from an empty gesture, is the kind of literary action few writers trouble to take any more; it is an old-fashioned book and uncommonly satisfying.

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