THE MYTH OF ACTION as an end in itself, devoid of any purpose other than the individual’s pure affirmation of self, culminates in the moment when he accepts his cessation as an individual: the supreme and perhaps only value of life coincides with death. Not only in accepting the risk of it, but in actually going out in search of it, in consciously procuring it, that risk. In admitting the eventuality, the probability, or even the certainty of it. Hence the aura that surrounds mountain climbers, bullfighters, acrobats, Formula One racers, and anyone else who puts themselves at risk for a reason that cannot be aligned with common sense, that has more to do with will and emotion than with necessity and thought. The death of others at this point becomes a secondary fact along the path of a quest for one’s own death. Once one sets out to achieve one’s own annihilation, the annihilation of others becomes a secondary contingency.
What prevailed in the CR/M was this secondary aspect: the impulse toward death took it out on other bodies. Once the heroic path was blocked off to them (and like all the fanatics of the extreme right of the time, the perpetrators of that bloody crime fantasized about that path in degraded ideological terms), all that remained to them were the unseemly extensions of that path, the appendices, the paraphernalia, namely cruelty, sheer arbitrary actions, indifference toward the deaths of others: instead of suffering themselves, they inflicted suffering on others, instead of dying, they killed. It’s by no means the same thing, but the sensations one draws from it are at least related.
Like little children who experience death by killing small animals: when they see them in their death agonies, they get a taste of their own.
THE REPERTORY ABOUNDED with expressions of this kind: “annihilate oneself to the last spark,” “hurtle toward death,” “training to die.”
A hero is someone who has the courage and the folly necessary to really do what others limit themselves to imagining, using it to fuel their secret fantasies, or which they achieve only in a small part or on a diminished scale. Which of course includes the great exploits, the dangerous escapades that redound to the benefit of all, glory, triumph, the noblest sacrifice of all, but also the most frightful crimes that the human conscience is capable of conceiving, and which, in fact, the hero takes it upon himself to carry out, making them emerge from the dark side where a reasonable worldview had relegated them and cowardice kept anyone from putting them into action. It is the same force the hero makes use of for his more elevated purposes that awakens demoniacal instincts and dreams. For that matter he could hardly avoid them, since this is the very task he has assigned himself: the gigantic Unspoken and Undone of mankind—that instead is exactly what the hero declares and performs, making those things frighteningly real, and he never does them on a personal basis but always in the name of those who had limited themselves to merely suggesting, or wishing, or fearing them. He truly is the personification of a collective nightmare, he is the perfect machine of Forbidden Planet. A human heart, amplified, turbocharged. Far from representing a capricious individual will, his deeds are always the expression of a shared state of mind that has finally found its champion. Its formula.
THEY WERE THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF HEROES, but they worshipped them. Just like the Christians who venerate Jesus but do the exact opposite of everything that He did. Over time, I’ve grown gradually more certain that this is exactly what veneration really consists of: dedicating your entire soul, putting it in an ideal place, up high, very very high, and so getting rid of it in such a way as to set your hands free. The bicameral mind houses, on the one hand, theory and, on the other, practice. They’re not so much at odds with each other as they are allies, in the sense that each tends to its own affairs, without interfering in what the other one gets up to. Similarly, honor and infamy can go together, faithfulness and betrayal. The hero is satisfied by death alone: at the peak of gratification there ought to be his own death—magnificent, glorious—but in the meantime he rejoices in that of his enemies, he savors in their dying agonies a prefiguring of the death that awaits him. Humanism and utilitarianism consider this to be a crime, or, even worse, sheer nonsense. But if it’s nonsense that we are looking for, the behavior of the young men of the CR/M will suddenly appear perfectly sensible. If it is senseless actions, deeds that outstrip or annul entirely the calculation of self-interest, that make those who commit those actions exceptional, then the CR/M reveals its objective, even if it fails to attain it, and shows a logic all its own by sweeping away all logic.
Violence is an unpredictable god, blinding and blinded. True, pure bellicosity lays waste to friends and enemies alike. It doesn’t distinguish among its adversaries, it simply destroys them; and only in the act of destroying them does it dub them adversaries. It unhinges all order, including the order of battle, it recognizes no tactics, at the very outside, it doesn’t know how to wage war precisely because of an excess of death-dealing force. Fundamental, wholesale bellicosity has no objective, no homeland, no rules, and no purpose. Like certain warriors from archaic times described in mythology, who fought and killed with such indiscriminate fury that it was no longer possible to say which side they were on. They were on the side of death, of destruction in and of itself. Their heroic individualism ruled out any communitarian spirit, which would have meant being and feeling themselves to be members of one army rather than another. The desire to be first, to stand out, leads people to dominate their friends as well as their enemies, and defies any and all logic, except perhaps for the inverted logic of disproportion and waste.
As a long-ago French knight puts it, neither meat nor drink satisfies me, I am not placated unless I hear the sniveling of a girl taken prisoner, unless I see the blood spraying from her white flesh, and my own semen dripping down her thighs mixed with that of my fellow warriors, and I finally see her lying dead with a wooden stake driven through her temples. There is no greater delight than the sight of a virgin body tortured and ravaged in a holy scene, as when I contemplate paintings in church, with dying female saints torn limb from limb, bloodbaths, the gratuitous offering of suffering. In this insane and visionary world, the greatest pleasure a man can take is to have his way freely with a naked woman hanging on a rope from the ceiling.
THAT WAS WHY THEY “wanted to be found out” . . .
Bellicosity in its purest state does not actually pursue any objective, save for that of revealing in full those who act it out; it produces neither pleasure, nor profit, nor utility; it leaves no creation behind, for the most part it undoes existing creations. It is therefore gratuitous, which makes it by and large inexplicable. For that matter, from the point of view of this mind-set, anything that can be explained is worthless.
THE TARGET REMAINS the utilitarian spirit. If you place importance only on actions for their own sake, which have no practical objective, that produce nothing outside of the fame or the infamy of whoever commits them, if you imagine that nothing is noble but that which serves no purpose, the following step in your reasoning will be that what is noble is not merely that which is useless, but even that which is harmful. The supremely free act, and therefore the beautiful act, the act that is truly superior because free of any obligations to obtain a positive outcome, then, will become the negative act: the acts of those who commit gratuitously evil deeds. For no reason, with no objective.
11
THE STORY OF THE LEGIONNAIRE is not a topic for this book. He comes on stage with the CR/M and immediately exits in the opposite direction, like a viper crawling through a wall. Anyone interested in pursuing further reading into this character, at least as fascinating as Angelo, but far more mysterious and, so to speak, hypothetical, starting with his appearance, of whom we have photos taken when he was eighteen years old, and then various identikit sketches layered on them, depicting him as older, with mustaches, eyeglasses, and beards.
The obsessive loquaciousness, the verbal and subsequently criminal activism of the accomplice finds its extreme opposite in the mute and oblique shadow of the fugitive, Signor J
acques, the man about whom nothing is certain except for his sheer evil. Overlooking his criminal record, the only trace of his presence here on earth that I’d like to adduce in this context is that of his death (real or alleged, which is still the topic of debate, the kind of debate that inflames the airwaves on television shows), and of his burial.
ON THE SHORES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN, in the Kingdom of Morocco, directly facing the Kingdom of Spain, there are two fortified strongholds under Spanish sovereignty. One is Ceuta, directly across from Gibraltar, the other is Melilla, almost two hundred fifty miles to the east. It is here, in the cemetery of Melilla, that a veteran of the ranks of the Tercio de Armada, the Spanish Foreign Legion, named Massimo Testa de Andrés, lies buried. From the photograph taken upon his enlistment, he has been identified as the one perpetrator of the CR/M who was never captured. In spite of the fact that the cross adorned with symbols of the Spanish legion bears the date of April 11, 1994, the corpse of Massimo Testa was actually found by the Spanish police on September 9, 1994, in a drab one-room apartment, and his death, from a heroin overdose, was dated to roughly a week previous. The body, in an advanced state of decomposition, was lying facedown, balanced over a stool, with one arm dangling and the chin jammed into the drawer of the nightstand. He was in his underwear. On his right arm were three tattoos: an arrow piercing two hearts, a scorpion, and the words “Amor Madre.” Under one knee was the syringe assumed to have injected the lethal dose.
The mini-apartment where Testa lived is cheap and bare. Over the bed hangs a banner with a portrait of Bob Marley framed in the outline of Africa, and at the lower corners are a marijuana leaf and a lion run through by a sword. On the armchair is a kaffiyeh.
There are more syringes still sealed in their packaging on the edge of the bed.
According to records, Massimo Testa de Andrés had been released from the legion in 1993. At the military hospital, where he was taken after a collapse, he had confessed to the doctors that he was addicted to heroin.
ELEVEN YEARS LATER, November 2005, the grave in Melilla was dug up to exhume a femur and a fibula so that genetic testing could be done on them, in order to establish whether Massimo Testa was in fact simply an alias of Angelo’s accomplice, who fled in the aftermath of the CR/M and was never arrested. The femur was sent back to Italy in the custody of the medical examiner and assistant district attorney who had come to witness the exhumation. The fingerprints taken by the Spanish police when the dead body was found did in fact match those on file at police headquarters in Rome in the aftermath of the CR/M; and the DNA result was positive. One singular detail is that the skeleton emerged from the coffin wrapped in a blanket, the same one that had been found in Testa’s apartment, and in the folds of that blanket was found the syringe used to shoot up for the last time, as if corpse, blanket, and syringe had been hurriedly or perhaps, quite to the contrary, religiously assembled prior to burial, like old-fashioned grave goods.
AS I’VE SAID, the Legionnaire is not the subject of this book, perhaps because his story is excessively overflowing and teeming with conjectures, rumors, contradictions, investigations and counterinvestigations, and borderline hypotheses.
Let me try to recount a glimmer of his enigma by transcribing a number of wiretaps recorded by the investigators, where the voices recorded were not those of the protagonists themselves, but rather two supporting actors, who were however very close to the heart of the Legionnaire’s family, so close that it would not be wrong to say they had every right to claim membership in that family, out of long habit if not of actual blood: namely two elderly housekeepers, one still working for the Legionnaire’s mother, the other now retired after many years working in the house of his aunt. They are respectively Severa Acutillo, sixty-five, and Adelina Porru, eighty. All of the landline phones and the cell phones of relatives and connections, thirty years after the CR/M, were placed under surveillance in order to gather information that might lead to the capture of the fugitive, or else establish once and for all whether he had actually died and been buried there, in Melilla, under the name of Massimo Testa de Andrés. These transcripts are the result of months of listening and patient decipherment. By sheer chance, so incredible as to seem like something more, the two phone conversations recorded through these wiretaps took place just a few days before and roughly a month after the double murder committed by Angelo in Campobasso, in April 2005.
Thirty years later, the network of the CR/M reemerges, bringing to the surface both corpses and facts that ought not to have anything to do with each other: but which that network takes in and exposes to the light.
FIRST PHONE CALL, from the wiretap on the home phone of the Legionnaire’s mother.
Hello? Adelina?
Yes.
I’m calling before I go out because I don’t know how late I’ll get back . . . yesterday, did you see . . . I mean, did you see the program . . .?
Which program?
The program on TV.
No. Or actually, yes, I was watching it, but then . . .
They revealed the whole story about the young man . . . the signora’s son.
Who do you mean, Leo?
What Leo are you talking about, Adeli’ . . . the son of my signora, not the son of your signora . . . the one who had . . . come on, Adeli’ . . . he was there from start to finish . . . how they did, what they did . . .
Are you serious?
Yes, I sure am!
Okay, but that guy didn’t do a single day behind bars . . .
Exactly . . . that’s why they’ve been looking for him high and low and they have their doubts . . . but anyway, they’ll talk about that next week.
What are they going to say?
Eh no, they still can’t say.
But why, can’t they find him?
Eh?
Severa, I’m asking you, can’t they find him?
No, they’re not going to find him. They can look . . . they can look all they want! He’s dead!
Dead . . .?
Dead.
What do you mean, dead? Who? Him? Do you really mean it?
Yes, I really mean it. But the family didn’t want that to get around.
Are you sure he’s dead?
How am I supposed to be sure? They never told me so to my face. But I heard them talking to each other: he’s dead now, isn’t he?
Then that must mean he’s dead.
His mother is having a mass said for him. In his memory.
That’s certainly news to me.
I’ve known about it for a couple of years now.
So he’s been dead for a while?
A few years, yes, it must have been.
And where was he? Where is he buried now?
I don’t know. He was in Spain . . . maybe there.
But then why are they still looking for him . . .?
They’re looking for him, but they can’t find him. Next Monday there’s another episode. Maybe they’ll explain it.
Let’s hope so.
Did you see the finale of the broadcast?
I . . . no, I didn’t, I got tired after a while, it was past ten, by the end I’d already fallen asleep, sorry . . .
Well, that’s a pity. They told the story, from start to finish. And they showed his picture, too.
Oh, they did? That boy was really a young criminal.
Yes, yes, he was, a criminal.
But handsome.
Handsome, you say? Yes, a good-looking young man. No question about that.
SECOND PHONE CALL, same phone line. (Between the first call and the second, Angelo committed his new murders and was arrested: the newspapers are full of articles about this new crime, and of course the story of the CR/M is dragged back out, and with it the Legionnaire and his run from the law, which has been going on now for thirty years. A TV program that specializes in the pursuit of missing persons is featuring him.)
Last night, you watched it, I hope!
Yes, from start to finish, this time. We a
ll watched it.
And thanks be to God . . . have mercy on his soul . . . I saw the whole thing, too.
And they put it in the paper.
And on the TV news, on the TV news . . . they were talking about him . . . but I changed channels . . . they were talking about what he’d done.
Yes, they mentioned him and the other guy they put back behind bars.
But this is already two episodes they’ve featured him.
More than two! Three!
But I only saw two.
Three, I tell you. From start to finish they were talking about him.
Just think how the signora must have felt when she saw it!
Eh, yes, Madonna . . .
Seeing him . . .
And the photographs, too . . .
Yes, but Severa . . . it isn’t true at all that he’s dead. That’s a big fat lie.
But who told you that?
That he isn’t dead?
Who told you that he isn’t dead?
I heard someone say that he was dead . . .
Of course, you heard someone say it, Ade’, you heard it from me! Don’t you remember? I told you myself, for Pete’s sake!
Sure, sure . . . whatever you say . . . but the thing is he’s definitely not dead. He’s been seen . . . he’s been seen around . . . in December when he was walking, in that place, there . . . on the program!
But it could have just been someone who looks like him!
No, no . . . this woman they talked to was certain it was him . . . that guy’s no deader than I am, he’s actually in Rome . . .
Well, I don’t know about that, the one who says he’s in Rome is that girl who . . .
No, they said for sure that now . . . and everyone knows it, that he’s in Rome . . . and at the beach, near Anzio, I think. Anzio.
That’s a lie.
Why do you say it’s a lie, come on, Adeli’!
Oh, Severa!
The Catholic School Page 114
