So many different things have been heard . . . in dishonest confessions, deliriums of criminal megalomania, exhibitionism, boasting . . . People say, word has it.
Crimes have a tendency to feed off each other, they strive to outstrip each other, creating a certain continuity, replicating a character or else the backdrop against which he moves, in such a way as to highlight him; in other words, a single crime is not enough, it isn’t sufficient to create a worthy and complete figure, and that is why criminals commit more crimes, or if they don’t commit them, they dream them up, which amounts to the same thing with respect to the personality that they intend to construct for themselves: and so they multiply their stories, they vary them, they amplify and add on . . . They always throw more meat onto the fire, when it’s not the judges tossing that meat on for them. At Rebibbia Prison, in the wing where common criminals are confined, where the crimes are burglary, armed robbery, peddling narcotics, and similar offenses against property and person, when you talk with an inmate willing to open up to you a little bit, well, there’s practically not a crime out there he doesn’t know about in considerable detail, either because he’s heard about it, or else because in one way or another he actually took part in it, or else because he was excluded from it or else he ruled himself out of it at the very last minute. The network of criminal accounts is fine-grained, extremely dense, and it’s practically impossible to distinguish between the threads of the truth and the legends that form around each case. Certainly, there exists a written tradition, in the form of the verdicts issued by the various courts, but it’s very fragmentary: the restricted nature of investigations tends to shoehorn the story into a specific lapse of time, or a circumscribed physical space, framing it and detaching it from the network of events that represented its initial premise, or its natural aftermath, as well as the contiguous, parallel events. Those links have been severed and, after bleeding for a while, they have been cauterized, they’ve scarred over. At least in appearance. Because in the oral tradition resected stories have gone on living, sprouting new branches, like a tree after it’s pruned, and gradually, as the text of verdicts dried up and mummified, dwindling practically away to dust, dust that no one paid any attention to, until one fine day the decision is made to sweep it away, but in the meantime the oral versions thrived and blossomed, becoming increasingly vital and, so to speak, fresh, dewy with credibility, because of the fact that they are heard from the living voices of men, rather than having to track them down in the archival files where any statement sounds falsified, forced into the schematic structure of bureaucratic language so as to comply with the investigative hypothesis.
If I think about the effort involved along the way when you write a novel or a treatment for a film, striving to eliminate to the best of your ability the numerous inconsistencies that tend to pop up, I can imagine the extent to which conjecturing the perpetrators of a serious crime will require you, in your efforts to solve the case, to take shortcuts, skip over unclear transitions, construct daring bridges from one point to another in the tangle of events. In order to get things to add up, I’m pretty sure that investigating magistrates, in perfect good faith, find themselves twisting the facts, starting with the way they are laid out: they emphasize certain sources and overlook others that would conflict with the first, picking and choosing among the available evidence to favor those that support a plausible theory, a reconstruction of events that holds together, and backgrounding all the rest. Only through a violent effort, similar in certain ways to the aesthetic striving involved in writing a short story or shaping a statue, can a verdict attain a minimum of internal consistency: even though I personally have read my share of verdicts that truly didn’t make a lick of sense.
It’s no accident that Kafka saw the trial as the greatest possible concentration of logic and, at the same time, of absurdity: the sheer consistency with which you can develop a nonsensical premise. It’s a matter of lining up a series of difficult-to-understand events, among which the ones that actually happened may very well prove to be even more mysterious than the ones concocted out of thin air, indeed, I’m convinced that the chief use of invention is to fill in for the shortage of logic in factual reality; not so much therefore to escape the strictures of a fixed and rigid world, but rather to give some meaning to a world that fluctuates to a fault. Inventions and lies serve to inject a smidgen of logic into a world that appears devoid of it; they serve in other words to create, through sheer artifice, the passages between different zones of reality, because reality as it stands is too riddled with holes, too earthquake-battered, too riven with crevices of the nonsensical, which means that imagination is required to step in to build bridges that might allow the human mind to span the dizzying abysses of the absurd, the abysses into which that mind, if it lacked the imaginative faculty entirely, would surely plunge. We don’t use imagination to flee this world, but rather to inhabit it without going mad, and in order to attempt to live in it by giving it the meaning that it lacks.
And so it is that in the oral tradition, made up as it is of muttered stories and discarded conjectures or legends pure and simple, something close to the truth can circulate.
THE STORY I AM ABOUT to tell is an appendix to the CR/M, even if it takes place before it. The chronology of understanding and fame arranges events as it pleases along the axis of time: a clamorous event, as the CR/M was, brings all the others from the past bobbing to the surface, illuminating them with its meaning, or even creates them, so that, while these events took place before, in reality they only began to exist subsequently. The principal event catapults them into the future. Which is typical of scandals, which only begin to arouse outrage at the moment that they cease. As Karl Kraus put it: “The scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.” Many things have their beginning in their end, and take to their wings at sundown, like the owl of Minerva. Things that happen before but only acquire significance afterward. The sorrowful revelations and the discoveries about the past sow the future with shocking or consolatory images.
I might say, for example, that my friendship with Arbus became authentic and powerful only when we parted ways, when our lives separated. At first it was a scholastic friendship, perhaps an alliance or a refuge, especially for me, someone who was all too easy to influence.
8
THE INFORMANT’S FRENZY is that of explaining, connecting, establishing connections between events and people. A selfish and narcissistic disposition, placed however at the service of others, who must be enlightened; the point is to reveal to them what is concealed under the official version of things, invariably false. Precisely because the Italian mysteries are so numerous and obscure, there is a widespread syndrome among those who avow they possess the formula that can explain them. Usually these individuals describe themselves as being in a perennial struggle against the version of events supplied by the authorities or against common sense, which holds tight to its misguided convictions. They set themselves up as apostles of the truth: a truth that has managed to slip under the noses of investigators, or which has shown itself off almost provocatively, practically waving and gyrating to obtain notice, under the eyes of public opinion and yet unable to win full consideration, remaining ignored, overlooked if not actually mocked and derided. The individuals in question, instead of taking umbrage at the fact, actually boast of it, because the greater the resistance to the truth of which they are proponents, the more fundamental the revelations they herald.
What can rival the pleasure of knowing something that the others, clueless simpletons, don’t? The behind-the-scenes stories, the secret reasons why things went the way they did, the names of those behind it.
In Italy there is a teeming mass of these super-well-informed and contemptuous souls, who have been able to turn the ridiculous inside out, into the stigmata of those who continue down their path, the path of truth, and claim to know who really kidnapped Aldo Moro, where Emanuela Orlandi is hidden, who planted the bombs and why, blew up chu
rches, banks, trains, railroad stations, the cars of police escorts . . .
People who know, in other words, what went on behind the scenes. Italy is the country where what happens in the light of day necessarily sinks its roots into the obscure, the occult; where nine out of ten criminal cases, among the most spectacular ones, those discussed on TV and in the newspapers, remain unsolved, unpunished, or else involve convictions of people whom many consider innocent, as if the verdicts had no value as anything other than suggestions, hypotheses, and in that case, one hypothesis against another, each might as well hold on to their own; where instead of one version of events there are at least two, or three, or ten, all of them valid, arguable and defendable, it hardly matters how improbable and ludicrous. Pirandellism, relativism, the “right you are (if you think so),” the infinite interpretation and hermeneutics, the intelligence services, the dossiers, the gossip, the Machiavellianism, the idea that behind and beneath everything, even the fact that a team wearing solid-colored jerseys instead of striped ones might have won the championship, there is a plot, a conspiracy, a Masonic lodge, the CIA, the mysterious and powerful Elder, the Vatican, the Soviets (when they still existed), the Israelis, or the omnipresent Banda della Magliana. Alternative and unofficial truths, the countertruths, are so diffuse and widespread that they themselves have become official.
9
THE AUTHOR OF THE GREATEST NUMBER of stories running parallel to the CR/M is one of its protagonists, Angelo, brother of my classmate Salvatore. The investigators have spent years thumbing through the thousands of pages produced by his statements, where he revealed crimes committed on his own or with accomplices or else put the blame for them on other criminals, more or less well known, intertwining pending cases and providing them with a solution obtained thanks to prison confessions or confidences shared in a cell, and to a baggage of direct experience that Angelo, even though he had spent almost the totality of his adult life behind bars, wanted others to think was as boundless as that of public enemy number one. The investigating magistrates found themselves face-to-face with a strategic mind that had collected and collated the entire criminal activity of the seventies and eighties into a single shifting and delirious reconstruction, they listened to it, tried to follow the leads that that fertile mind, mixing together things that were well known, unprecedented details, and sheer inventions, produced incessantly, with the aim of earning for himself the status, then widely sought after, of cooperating witness; or perhaps those accounts issued in a continuous stream on account of a personality disturbance; or perhaps we were in the presence of an artist, a creative spirit, who shapes alternate structures to reality. A predisposal or a frenzy to confer meaning, to restore order, to make known and, therefore, to attribute to himself the truth of “the way things actually went,” in a way that no one had ever previously guessed, or confessed. It is the syndrome of revelation.
In parallel with this, there is instead the optical illusion of proliferation, the house of mirrors in which you can vanish without a trace, the labyrinth.
And yet there are judges who have taken Angelo seriously, deeming him to be a “gold mine of information.”
(Often the inmates I work with, out of discretion, out of prudence, or else by falling silent, allow those who are curiously listening to them a much broader field of possible revelations, horrifying or paradoxical, and they stop just as they get to the good part of their stories, with a sibylline “Nun me fa’ parla’ . . .”—Don’t get me started.)
WHERE ARE THE EGGS the dragon laid? How many of them hatched?
How many pages would it require to draw up a complete list of the people that Angelo claims to have killed or to know who actually killed them? It is remorse that has driven him to confess: “I have personal reasons for speaking, my decision is due to the convictions developed in prison, the need to make reparations for a repugnant murder” (namely, the CR/M).
Among the stories that I haven’t yet mentioned, there are these:
The military training on how to build timers for bombs by using plastic alarm clocks; instructions received from a French military officer, “standing six foot seven, powerfully built, olive complexion, mustache, sunglasses,” that is, a pure comic-book cliché of a retired soldier. Which means it might very well be true.
The truth about nearly all the great massacres that took place in Italy between 1969 and 1980, from Piazza Fontana to Piazza della Loggia, to the Italicus train bombing, to the bombing of the main train station in Bologna.
In 1986 he declared that the murder of Piersanti Mattarella, the late brother of Italy’s current president, was committed by the NAR so that the Mafia in exchange might free neo-Fascist Pierluigi Concutelli.
That same year, he claimed he was guilty of the attempted murder of a jewelry salesman, committed twelve years earlier. The victim was only wounded, and Angelo said that he had threatened to murder his six-year-old son, because he wouldn’t stop crying.
He claimed that he had witnessed the killing of a typesetter at Il Messaggero.
He provided details on the attempted murder of Bernardo Leighton of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party; and the rape of Franca Rame, wife of the late Nobel laureate Dario Fo (carried out by the Fascists at the behest of the Italian Carabinieri).
A criminal complaint for defamation was filed against him by Judge Giovanni Falcone: according to Falcone his confessions were inspired by “ambitions of notoriety.”
He accuses Massimo Carminati of killing Mino Pecorelli.
He says that he knows who killed Peppino Impastato: a guy whose last name is Miranda, a.k.a. “Il Nano”—The Dwarf.
He claims that the person who shot Giorgiana Masi (by the way, that day, May 12, 1977, among the demonstrators on the Ponte Garibaldi, Marco Lodoli and I were there, too) was the Legionnaire, his accomplice in the CR/M.
Fausto and Iaio, left-wing militants: they were murdered by Massimo Carminati, a.k.a. “Er Cecato,” the One-Eyed Man (that’s right, him again).
And again in 2005 he claims responsibility for the killing of a Turin prostitute, Franca Croccolino: a murder he supposedly committed thirty-five years earlier.
Et cetera.
10
AMONG ALL THESE STORIES there’s another one that concerns me in particular (having come this far together, I’m tempted to say, that concerns us) because it contains a couple of unsettling elements that are exemplary of the period in which they took place. When: two years, perhaps twenty months prior to the CR/M. Where: on the outskirts of the QT, which is to say in that quarter that can rightly be called its twin, in both a spatial and an anthropological sense, because it extends, a mirror image of the QT, along the eastern edge of Via Nomentana, and revolves around Piazza Bologna, the way the QT does around Piazza Istria, the two piazzas reasonably similar except for Piazza Bologna’s monumental post office, designed by the architect Mario Ridolfi, a building that characterizes the otherwise insignificant roundabout from which five or six streets run away in a spoked radius, streets with an inexplicable assortment of names.
What, in fact, does Via Lorenzo il Magnifico, named after Lorenzo the Magnificent, have to do with the home provinces of Via Livorno and Via Ravenna? Or for that matter with Viale XXI Aprile (namely, April 21, a date that marks Rome’s Christmas, the anniversary of its ancient foundation)?
And who on earth were Michele di Lando and Sambucuccio d’Alando?
Behind the barracks of the financial police, known as the Fiamme Gialle, or Yellow Flames, for their distinctive logo, on Viale XXI Aprile, there lived an eighteen-year-old youth who will be known in this book as Cassio. Cassio Majuri. Like many other young men of the Nomentano quarter, a district that is in fact so similar to the QT that it is often mentioned in the same breath or even considered to be a part of it, Cassio was a right-winger. He’d been born into the right wing, he thought of himself and proclaimed himself to be a right-winger. His family belonged to the right wing, the school that he attended, the SLM Institut
e, was a majority right-wing establishment, and so for Cassio it was neither easy nor difficult to think and believe the things he thought and believed.
He played rugby. He studied very little. He frequented in a sporadic manner the local office of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano. He was theoretically shy around girls, but as he built up his physique by playing sports and by treating them rudely and crudely, in his imagination he believed that he could have not just one girl, but many. He met Angelo during a political assembly at which a mid-level official had been provided with a detail of bodyguards, given that at the time it was common for right-wing headquarters or offices to be targeted by sudden and violent attacks. There was no need for any particular organization or degree of planning on the part of the groups behind those attacks: even I—always quite skeptical about this sort of symbolic operation, designed specifically to do physical harm to some adversary or other, chosen at random—found myself taking part in similar actions a couple of times, with no planning aforethought: all it took was for there to be, during any ordinary political assembly, which might have been called to discuss the exploitation of miners in South America, say, or some other such subject, a sudden piece of exciting news, for instance, a badly beaten comrade who claimed to have been attacked by a group of Fascists, or a girl who claimed to have seen a certain right-wing enforcer enjoying an espresso at the café on Piazza Istria, all alone and apparently not looking for trouble . . . and there you had it, a perfect opportunity for a retaliation or an emblematic operation, and off went a commando mission, ready for action. Usually, without advance planning, which meant lacking any of the necessary equipment, such as clubs or helmets, except for the very few helmets that might have been worn by those who had come on a motor scooter, but back then helmets weren’t required, so they were few indeed . . . and within ten minutes or so you found yourself on a war footing outside one of those places known at the time as covi, or Fascist lairs. You could count on sheer force of numbers, rather than armaments and the fighting quality of your combatants.
The Catholic School Page 153
