It was a pointless act of discretion.
As in many bourgeois apartments, and before it became such an important appliance to family life that it began to appear in multiple locations, the single telephone was in a hallway between the bathroom, the kitchen, and the dining room, and it made it necessary to make phone calls standing up, in that pass-through area, which meant you were usually limited to brief, utilitarian conversations—but when it was my grandfather who made the calls, a few minutes after arriving at our home, he would shut himself behind that door, blocking all access to the kitchen, since no one dared disturb him by passing through.
And so we’d loiter in the front hall, waiting for him to finish so we could go into the kitchen and have our snacks, and through the arabesque of the glass door, we’d watch his silhouette as he gesticulated and flailed, dark in the short, brightly lit hallway, waving his free arm, but also the arm that held the receiver, and we could hear his outbursts of wrath, prompted by reasons that remained mysterious to us.
Who was it he called so insistently?
What business matters was he discussing, and why did those calls so frequently end with a receiver slammed down into its cradle?
We encountered numerous instances of his fury but never an explanation, not once.
Of his many frustrated attempts to do business, there remained, tucked away in a nook, a sheet of cellophane that, when applied to the TV screen, was supposed to give the impression of a color TV, back in the day when broadcasting in Italy was done only in black and white.
It worked reasonably well with landscapes, since the upper half was light blue and the bottom half was green.
Much less well with the faces of actors or close-ups of a show’s hostess.
Sometimes when he came over, he was accompanied by extremely elderly gentlemen wearing lugubrious black overcoats, and together they’d huddle in the living room behind closed doors, scheming and plotting.
We would sit in the dining room watching TV, in black and white, which at the time hardly struck us as an especially grave handicap, wondering who those guests might be: some of them had a prosthetic hand or an eye patch, just like the old men we’d see stroll around the institute for disabled veterans across the street from our apartment building, until my father would return home from the office, and then his patience and courtesy would be sorely tested because my grandfather, instead of hightailing it out of there, would make a point of introducing his son-in-law to his various companions, one of whom was referred to as “the general.”
Despite the fact that he was tired and hungry, my father would join them in the living room, behind closed doors. The conversations could last a few minutes or they could drag out long enough to conflict with dinnertime.
ONE TIME, the general arrived in the company of a young man in a blazer and black turtleneck.
I must have been thirteen, and my brother eleven, so we were still practically little kids, and yet that dark and serious and already mature young man was separated from the old Fascist officer and sent, for generational reasons, to my bedroom, “to spend time with the boys,” as my grandfather put it.
Once he entered the bedroom, he looked around with great interest at the furnishings and decoration, the posters on the walls and the books on the shelves, tilting his head to one side to read the titles.
Every now and then, he’d pull one down and leaf through it.
More than looking at the book, he seemed to be looking for something hidden between its pages.
He thoroughly studied the three large bookshelves on the wall, then, after taking off his jacket and carefully folding it over the back of the chair, he sat down on the far corner of my bed, in an extremely uncomfortable position, and started asking us questions.
He had an artificially pitched voice, like someone who has to make a continual effort to control himself, and he spoke in a low, grave tone, with an accent from the north of Italy, clearly enunciating each word without moving a muscle of his face; he stared at us fixedly, first at me and then at my brother, deep into our eyes, as if trying to read our secrets back there and determine whether or not we were telling the truth.
But not the truth that corresponds to the facts, something else.
He was curious to know what school we went to, what we did in our spare time, whether we played any sport, and if so, how many times a week, and why we had chosen those specific sports to play.
And then he asked us if we had made our choice.
What choice? I wondered.
I was surprised and intimidated by that interrogation, just as I had been by the close inspection of my books.
While I was trying to elude the inquisitive gaze of this stranger, letting my younger brother naïvely answer him, my eyes came to rest on his folded jacket, and I noticed a lapel pin, surprised that I hadn’t seen it before, so brightly did it glitter.
It was a shield with a cross on it, the ends of which opened out into the shape of arrowheads.
He complimented my brother on his answers about soccer and exercise.
“Sports are healthy,” he said, clenching a fist, “. . . but they alone aren’t enough!” and he opened his hand in a caress with a sort of final pat on the back of my brother’s head; he, being less mistrustful than me, smiled.
As he made these gestures, the first ones since he had sat himself down on my bed in that position, he was so rigid that he didn’t seem to be sitting but rather hunched on his thighs, his snugly fitting black turtleneck, which till then had made him seem skinny or even frail, puffed up around his chest and arms.
Actually, none of us was especially athletic, but seeing that the stranger cared so very much about staying in physical shape, my brother Riccardo had placated him with a lie.
“What about you, have you made your choice?” asked the young man again, in that gloomy voice of his.
HE SHOWED US HIS HANDS, the knuckles big as walnuts and two or three fingers that wouldn’t straighten out.
He told us about his fights, using a cold, dismissive tone that was, at the same time, exalted and detached, as if the scenes of violence were being projected for the umpteenth time on a screen in the back of his mind and he was trying to decide which stills to show, and in what sequence, in his narrative.
He spoke in a laconic manner, so laconic that it was practically incomprehensible, presenting us with only the preliminaries of his stories, or else the conclusion, usually bloody, from which he derived an abstract and indisputable moral.
“But they were forced to repent . . . that’s right, bitterly repent . . . because even if you outnumber the enemy ten to one, it’s not necessarily the case that you have victory within your grasp!”
His omissions and ellipses forced us to ask him questions to find out more, and it was at that moment that he, in a calculated manner, would withdraw, as his gaze became even more dark and distant.
“No, you’re too young, there are certain things that you shouldn’t know about yet . . . but you’ll learn, yeah, you’ll learn on your own . . . very soon!” and he’d shake his head.
The maxims with which he larded his stories were built around such words as “courage,” “honor,” “loyalty,” “battle,” and “death,” but above all, “honor,” which recurred constantly and was coupled with the other words as if it were a sort of invariable part of the discourse: “Honor in battle is what survives of a man.” “Those who prefer death to infamy preserve their honor.” “Honor does not limit itself to doing only what is allowed.” “I choose to be faithful to honor rather than to money.” They all tracked back to a dramatic moment in which it had been necessary to choose, to opt among difficult alternatives, choose a side without hesitation. And he had made that choice. For someone like him, a battle began every morning when he woke up. And in order to face up to it, there was no way other than to draw on extreme resources. “Even when I shave in the morning, I wonder whether this might not be the last time.” What he wanted us to take away from his s
tories, the thing that he wanted us to be struck and impressed by, was the sheer disproportion. The adversaries to fight against were always twice or three times as many, or else they possessed overwhelming physical bulk, or they made use of superior logistical resources. They had heavier clubs and cudgels, newspapers with greater circulation, political connivance, cash contributions, a more extensive, fine-grained organization. But most important of all, they always outnumbered, there were always more of them, a human tide. This inevitable, chronic disproportion of strength was however offset by the virtues that formed the core of his proverbs, namely, courage, honor, loyalty, defiance in the face of death, all things that were capable of overturning the certain outcome of the clash, in fact, to hear him tell it, you almost felt a twinge of pity for that mass of helpless adversaries who wound up taking a beating in spite of their superiority, at least on paper. And however the battle wound up going, it still ended in glory: if you won, obviously, but even if you lost, because a defeat at the hand of overwhelming and unfair opponents remained in any case a form of moral victory, which cast its glow even brighter and farther, like a bonfire on a mountaintop. There was a special savor in defeat, and in mantling it with nobility through a reconstruction of events that seemed to focus on the moment at which the hero would be betrayed, surrounded, and wounded, but as he fell that hero would drag his adversary down with him, subjugating him morally, triumphing over his vulgarity and mediocrity. I was struck by the resemblance between the stories he told and the singular military history of Italy, which was still taught at school in my day, entirely made up of acts of individual heroism against vast and powerful armies. That history traced back to ancient Rome, or even further back, to Thermopylae, and then given that running start, hurtled all the way up to those young heroes, little more than boys, who threw sticks or crutches or hand grenades at heavily armed soldiers, or scrambled under tanks bare-handed, or rode torpedoes like horses to blow enemy ships sky-high, or let themselves be blown up in order to prevent the invasion of their city, or held off armies ten times their number in the snow. Always fighting against hopeless odds, always martyrs, men lost in the farthest-flung outpost, rebels against destiny. And I, overcome with emotion though I might be, in the end couldn’t help but wonder: but we Italians, didn’t we ever once manage to win a war just because our army was more powerful? Could it be that we always had to rely on a bold exploit that could he handed down to posterity, engraved on a plaque, after the hero had been killed in the process?
And that emotion began to be tinged with suspicion.
ASIDE FROM HIS REASONS for proposing such a bellicose vision of life to us, which were inevitably to remain utterly obscure, there was something about our guest’s words, gestures, and glassy gaze that left me baffled. As if his effort, his incessant striving drained any energy he might have to savor the result obtained by that effort. In his carefully calculated, pompous words there never echoed even the slightest smidgen of joy. Everything seemed simply to cost sacrifice, and the sacrifice merely to illuminate in a sinister gleam a charred, incinerated panorama. When all is said and done, if the struggle itself is a value, why shouldn’t the opposite also be a value in and of itself? Peace and quiet, abandonment, flight, or tenderness? And if, when the struggle was over, the highest that you can obtain is the preservation of what was there before, the unbreakable position assumed from the very beginning (obsession with loyalty, attachment to values), doesn’t the struggle itself become only apparent motion, a deception, or, in the final analysis, nothing more than a way of passing the time of day?
AT THAT AGE, I began to scratch the surface of values with a jackknife. In truth, I had already started to do it as a boy, it was my favorite game. The gilding came off immediately.
ONE TIME, he had been chased and surrounded. They’d started beating him with steel rods. As he hunched down to protect his head, he’d been unable to pull out his pistol, and by the time he got his hand into his pocket to pull it out, his hands were so badly fractured that he couldn’t get his finger into the trigger guard. But it was enough to see the weapon appear in his hands for his assailants to desist and take to their heels.
He said that he was sorry he hadn’t been able to fire, he would have put down at least one of his assailants.
“After all, maybe it’s better this way.”
My brother asked him if he had the pistol there with him.
“Would you let me see it?”
He smiled and answered no, he wasn’t carrying it today.
“After all, it wouldn’t make any difference. If they seriously want to do it, they can kill me before I have time to say amen.”
And he gave my brother another sporting pat on the back of his neck.
“And I won’t even have time to realize it’s happening. In the end, it won’t make a bit of difference.”
They were all phrases uttered in a hollow, important tone of voice.
He needed to display authority, since authority was his religion.
His black turtleneck made him look like a priest.
He never smiled and his sermon intimidated us without convincing us.
He left, calling us camerati—“comrades,” but specifically and exclusively Fascist comrades.
6
ALL YEARS ARE CONCENTRATED in a single year, the entire twentieth century and a fair chunk of the twenty-first boil down, are foretold, are stowed away, take refuge, are present, and verge on the ridiculous—all in the year 1975. That year makes a succession of other years snap to attention, it makes them scurry along. There’s nothing like abuses and excesses to contribute to the advancement of time, and therefore to its fixation. Abuse and abuse alone is memorable. Time stretches out and sways over a point where bands of prerequisites and consequences converge. A dust cloud of events settles over that frozen image, the way the snow settles over the landscape in a snow globe.
I mean to say that, along with what happened from January 1 to December 31 of that year, there also fluttered down on 1975 the events our parents had witnessed when they were children, and others still that had yet to occur and even those that, someday, we may ourselves still be capable of glimpsing with bleary, rheumy eyes, now old men and women with taxidermically stuffed souls and internal organs replaced by spare parts. Every generation ought to have reserved front-row seats to be able to say: “Those times, those times there, those times there were mine and mine alone.” Hands off. But that’s not the way it works. Time belongs to everyone. And in every single instant of it, it manifests itself in its punctuality and its entirety: if only we had been capable of understanding that in a single point of time everything is concentrated and revealed! If we were only capable of it now!
Before the seventies, the eighth decade of the twentieth century, there had never been anything interesting in the world. Nothing, ever. No noteworthy event. The Egyptians and the Maya and the countless wars of the Romans and Frederick Barbarossa and Magellan and the bombing of Hiroshima or man on the moon offer little that is comparable to that spectacular decade, that crucial, axial year, around which our little orbits revolve.
I WANT TO OFFER an example that everyone will be free to judge from the angle they prefer; an experiment that aside from me (and my contemporaries) has as its protagonist my son Leone, a smart, curious young man, the way I was at his age, or perhaps even more so. Leone and his contemporaries, in other words. I asked Leo to draw up the most complete and scrupulous list possible of the movies he saw in the past year, 2012. By which I mean firstrun films, in movie theaters, with a ticket and not on TV. And I’ll put it side by side with the list I reconstructed of the movies I saw when I was the same age he is now, that is, eighteen, in 1975. Maybe I saw others, but the ones listed below I definitely saw. In some cases, I could even list the movie theaters where I saw them.
MOVIES SEEN IN 2012 BY MY SON LEONE, AT AGE EIGHTEEN:
The Avengers (Whedon)
Snow White and the Huntsman (Sanders)
The Hobbit:
An Unexpected Journey (Jackson)
Ted (MacFarlane)
Skyfall (Mendes)
The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson)
Men in Black 3 (Sonnenfeld)
Seven Psychopaths (McDonagh)
The Raven (McTeigue)
The Dictator (Charles)
MOVIES SEEN BY ME, AGE EIGHTEEN, IN 1975:
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
Three Days of the Condor (Pollack)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir)
Amici miei (My Friends, Monicelli)
The Passenger (Antonioni)
Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa)
Night Moves (Penn)
Nashville (Altman)
Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet)
We All Loved Each Other So Much (Scola)
The Phantom of the Opera (De Palma)
Chinatown (Polanski)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog)
The Conversation (Coppola)
Love and Death (Allen)
Lenny (Fosse)
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Scorsese)
The Man Who Would Be King (Huston)
French Connection II (Frankenheimer)
Kings of the Road (Wenders)
The Sunshine Boys (Ross)
A Slave of Love (Mikhalkov)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper)
Immoral Tales (Borowczyk)
Shampoo (Ashby)
The Suspect (Maselli)
Cría Cuervos (Saura)
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman)
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Schlöndorff and von Trotta)
Adele H (Truffaut)
The Longest Yard (Aldrich)
Scent of a Woman (Risi)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Peckinpah)
Deep Red (Argento)
The Front Page (Wilder)
Tommy (Russell)
Young Frankenstein (Brooks)
Fantozzi (Salce)
Jaws (Spielberg)
Note: there is no question that we went to the movies a lot, far more often than people do nowadays. Aside from being the most classic form of entertainment (not that there were many others), watching movies, watching lots of movies, watching all the movies that there were, was considered an integral part of any curious young man’s or woman’s education, like listening to records and reading magazines and comic books: indeed they were, in those years, the essential component of that education. Film was still the art of the century, it pulled the twentieth century behind it like a mighty titan, his feet braced on the ocean bed, pulling a broken-down ocean liner behind him. How short was its cycle! As brief as the century itself. But what catches the eye in the respective lists isn’t so much the demand, as it is the supply: that is, the quantity and the quality of the films that a young man could see back then. And to think that we were already out of the legendary age of the silver screen, in theory, on the downward slope.
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