by Umberto Eco
He would tell me how the mysterious parties who made themselves known through those broadsheets had existed before the advent of Fascism, then had survived clandestinely, abroad, with their top leaders working as bricklayers, and sometimes they were identified by Il Duce’s henchmen and flogged to death.
Gragnola had been a teacher, I did not know of what, in trade schools, going to work every morning on his bicycle and returning home in mid-afternoon. But he had to stop-some said because he was devoting himself heart and soul by then to the Partisans, others murmured that he was unable to continue because he was consumptive. Gragnola indeed had the look of a consumptive, an ashen face with two sickly pink cheekbones, hollow cheeks, a persistent cough. He had bad teeth, limped, was slightly hunchbacked, or rather had a curved spine, with shoulder blades that jutted out, and his jacket collar stood apart from his neck, so that his clothes seemed to hang on him like sacks. On stage, he always had to play the bad guy or the lame caretaker of a mysterious villa.
He was, everyone said, a well of scientific knowledge and had often been invited to teach at the university, but had refused out of fondness for his students. "Horseshit," he later told me. "Yambin, I only taught in the poor kids’ school, as a substitute, because with this foul war I never even graduated college. When I was twenty they sent me off to break the back of Greece, I was wounded in the knee, and never mind that because you can barely tell, but somewhere in that mud I came down with a nasty sickness and I’ve been spitting up blood ever since. If I ever got my hands on Fat Head, I wouldn’t kill him because unfortunately I’m a coward, but I would kick his ass until it was out of commission for what little time I hope he has left to live, the Judas."
I once asked him why he came to the Oratorio, since everyone said he was an atheist. He told me that he came because it was the only place he could see people. And besides he was not an atheist but an anarchist. At that time I did not know what anarchists were, and he explained that they were people who wanted freedom, with no masters, no kings, no state, and no priests. "Above all no state, not like those communists in Russia where the state tells them even when they have to use the crapper."
He told me about Gaetano Bresci, who in order to punish the first King Umberto for having ordered the massacre of the workers in Milan, left America where he was living in peace, with no return ticket, after his anarchist group chose him by lottery, and went off to kill the king. After he did, he was killed in prison, with officials saying he had hung himself out of remorse. But an anarchist never has remorse for actions undertaken in the people’s name. He told me about legendary anarchists who had to emigrate from country to country, hounded by police everywhere, singing "Addio Lugano Bella."
Then he went back to bad-mouthing the communists, who had done in the anarchists in Catalonia. I asked him why he associated with the Garibaldini, who were communists, if he was against the communists. He replied that, number one, not all of the Garibaldini were communists, there were socialists and even anarchists among them, and number two, the enemies at the moment were the Nazi-Fascists, and it was no time for splitting hairs. "First we’ll win together, we’ll settle our differences later."
Then he added that he came to the Oratorio because it was a good place. Priests were like the Garibaldini, they were an evil breed, but there were some respectable men among them. "Especially in these times when who knows what’s going to happen to these kids, who until the past year were being taught that books and muskets make perfect Fascists. At the Oratorio, at least, they don’t let them go to the dogs, and they teach them to be decent, even if they do make too much fuss about jerking off, but that doesn’t matter because you all do it anyway, and at most you confess it later. So I come to the Oratorio and I help Don Cognasso to get the kids to play. When we go to mass, I sit quietly in the back of the church, because Jesus Christ I respect even if I don’t God."
One Sunday, at two in the afternoon when there were just a few of us at the Oratorio, I told him about my stamps, and he said that once upon a time he had collected them, too, but when he came back from the war he lost interest and threw them all out. He had twenty or so left and would be happy to give them to me.
I went to his house and was amazed by my windfall: it included the two Fiji stamps I had gazed at with such longing in the pages of the Yvert and Tellier.
"So you have the Yvert and Tellier, too?" he asked, impressed.
"Yeah, but it’s an old one…"
"They’re the best."
The Fiji Islands. That was why I had been so fascinated by those two stamps back at Solara. After Gragnola’s gift, I took them home to put them on a new page of my album. It was a winter evening, Papà had come home the day before, but he had left again that afternoon, going back to the city until the next visit.
I was in the kitchen of the main wing, which because we had just enough wood for the fireplace was the only heated room in the house. The light was dim. Not because the blackout meant much in Solara (who would have ever bombed us?), but because the bulb was muted by a lampshade from which hung strings of beads, like necklaces one might offer the primitive Fijians as gifts.
I was sitting at the table tending my collection, Mamma was tidying up, my sister was playing in the corner. The radio was on. We had just heard the end of the Milanese version of What’s Happening in the Rossi House, a propaganda program from the Republic of Salò that featured the members of a single family discussing politics and concluding, of course, that the Allies were our enemies, that the Partisans were bandits resisting the draft out of sloth, and that the Fascists in the north were defending Italy’s honor alongside their German comrades. But there was also, on alternate evenings, the Roman version, in which the Rossis were a different family, with the same name, living in a Rome now occupied by the Allies, realizing in the end how much better things had been when things were worse, and envying their northern neighbors, who still lived free beneath Axis flags. From the way my mother shook her head, you could tell that she did not believe it, but the program was lively enough. Either you listened to that or you turned the radio off.
But later-at which point my grandfather would come in, too, having held out in his study until then with the help of a foot warmer- we were able to tune in to Radio London.
It began with a series of kettledrum beats, almost like Beethoven’s Fifth, then we heard Colonel Stevens’s winning "Buona sera," with his accent reminiscent of the dubbed voices of Laurel and Hardy. Another voice we had grown accustomed to, thanks to the regime radio, was that of Mario Appelius, who concluded his exhortations to victory with "God curse the English!" Stevens did not curse the Italians, in fact he called on them to rejoice with him in the defeat of the Axis, talking to us evening after evening as if to say, "See what he’s been doing to you, your Duce?"
But his chronicles were not only about battles in the field. He described our lives, people like us, glued to the radio to listen to the Voice of London, overcoming our fear that someone might be spying and get us thrown in jail. He was telling our story, the story of his listeners, and we trusted him because he described exactly what we were doing, all of us, the local pharmacist and even-Stevens said-the cop on the corner, who knew the score and was biding his time. That was what he said, and if he was not lying about that, we could trust him about the rest. We all knew, even us kids, that his report was propaganda, too, but we were drawn to an understated propaganda, without heroic phrases and calls to death. Colonel Stevens made the words we were fed each day seem excessive.
I do not know why, but I saw this man-who was nothing but a voice-as Mandrake: elegant in his tailcoat, his neat mustache only slightly more grizzled than the magician’s, able to turn every pistol into a banana.
After the colonel finished, the special messages began, as mysterious and evocative as a Montserrat stamp, for the Partisan brigades: Messages for Franchi, Happy is not happy, The rain is past, My beard is blond, Giacomone kisses Muhammad, The eagle flies, The sun also rises…
I see myself still adoring the Fiji stamps when suddenly, between ten and eleven, the sky starts buzzing, and we turn out all the lights and run to the window to await Pipetto’s passage. We heard it every night, at more or less the same time, or that was how legend had it by then. Some said it was an English reconnaissance plane, some, an American plane that came to drop packages, food and arms for the partisans in the mountains, perhaps not far from us, on the slopes of the Langhe.
It is a starless, moonless night, we cannot see lights in the valley nor the silhouettes of the hills, and Pipetto is passing above us. No one has ever seen him; he is only a noise in the night.
Pipetto has passed, everything has gone as usual again this evening, and we return to the radio’s last songs. Out in that night bombs might be falling on Milan, packs of German shepherds might be chasing the men Pipetto helps through the hills, but the radio, with that saxophone-in-heat voice, is singing Up there at Capocabana, at Capocabana the woman is queen, and she reigns supreme, and I picture a languid diva (maybe I had seen her photo in Novella). She glides softly down a white staircase whose steps light up at the touch of her feet, surrounded by young men in white tailcoats who tip their top hats and kneel adoringly as she passes. With Capocabana (it was actually Capocabana, not Copacabana), the sexy singer is sending me a message every bit as exotic as that of my stamps.
Then the transmissions end, with various anthems to glory and revenge. But we must not turn it off now, as Mamma knows.
After the radio has given the impression of falling silent until the next day, we hear a heartfelt voice come through, singing:
You’ll come back
To m e …
It’s written in the stars, you see,
you’ll come back.
You’ll come back,
it’s a fact
that I am strong because I do
believe in you.
I had just listened to that song again at Solara, but there it was a love song: You’ll come back to me / because you are my heart’s one dream, / its only dream. / You’ll come back, / because I / without all your languid kisses / won’t survive. So the song I had heard all those evenings had been a wartime version, which to the hearts of many must have sounded like a promise, or an appeal to someone far away who in that moment might have been freezing in the steppes or facing a firing squad. Who was airing that song at that time of night? A nostalgic employee, before closing down the broadcast booth, or someone obeying an order from a higher-up? We did not know, but that voice carried us to the threshold of sleep.
It is nearly eleven, I close my stamp album, it is bedtime. Mamma has prepared the brick, an actual brick, by placing it in the oven until it is too hot to touch, then wrapping it in woolen cloths and slipping it under the covers, where it warms the entire bed. It feels good to rest your feet on it, especially as it relieves the itching of chilblains, which in those years (cold, vitamin deficiencies, hormonal tempests) made all our fingers and toes swell up, and sometimes turned into agonizing, suppurating sores.
A hound is baying from some farm in the valley.
Gragnola and I talked about everything. I would tell him about the books I was reading, and he would discuss them passionately: "Verne," he would say, "is better than Salgari, because he’s scientific. Cyrus Smith manufacturing nitroglycerin is more real than that Sandokan tearing his chest with his fingernails just because he’s fallen for some bitchy little fifteen-year-old."
"You don’t like Sandokan?" I asked.
"He seemed a little fascist to me."
I once told him I had read Heart by De Amicis, and he told me to throw it away because De Amicis was a fascist. "Didn’t you notice," he said, "how they’re all against old Franti, who comes from a poor family, and yet they fall over each other trying to please that fascist teacher. And what are the stories about? About good Garrone, who was an ass-kisser, about the little Lombard lookout, who dies because some wretch of a king’s officer has sent the kid to watch for the enemy, about the Sardinian drummer boy who gets sent into the middle of a battle, at his age, to carry messages, and then that repulsive captain, who after the poor kid loses a leg throws himself onto him with open arms and kisses him three times over his heart, things you would just never do to a kid who’s just been crippled, and even a captain in the Piedmontese army ought to have a little common sense. Or Coretti’s father, stroking his son’s face with his palm still warm from shaking hands with that butcher, the king. Up against the wall! Up against the wall! It’s men like De Amicis who opened the road to Fascism."
He taught me about Socrates and Giordano Bruno. And Bakunin, about whose work and life I had known very little. He told me about Campanella, Sarpi, and Galileo, who were all imprisoned or tortured by priests for trying to spread scientific principles, and about some who had cut their own throats, like Ardigò, because the bosses and the Vatican were keeping them down.
Since I had read the Hegel entry ("Emin. Ger. phil. of the pantheist school") in the Nuovissimo Melzi, I asked Gragnola about him. "Hegel wasn’t a pantheist, and your Melzi is an ignoramus. Giordano Bruno might have been a pantheist. A pantheist believes that God is everywhere, even in that speck of a fly you see there. You can imagine how satisfying that is, being everywhere is like being nowhere. Well, for Hegel it wasn’t God but the State that had to be everywhere, therefore he was a fascist."
"But didn’t he live more than a hundred years ago?"
"So? Joan of Arc, also a fascist of the highest order. Fascists have always existed. Since the age of… since the age of God. Take God-a fascist."
"But aren’t you one of those atheists who says God doesn’t exist?"
"Who said that-Don Cognasso, who can never grasp the most trifling thing? I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It’s just that he’s a fascist."
"But why is God a fascist?"
"Listen, you’re too young for me to give you a theology lecture. We’ll start with what you know. Recite the ten commandments for me, seeing as the Oratorio makes you memorize them."
I recited them. "Good," he said. "Now pay attention. Among those ten commandments are four, think about it, only four that promote good things-and even those, well, let’s review them. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, and don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. This last one is a commandment for men who know what honor is: on the one hand, don’t cuckold your friends, and on the other try to preserve your family, and I can live with that; anarchy wants to get rid of families too, but you can’t have everything all at once. As for the other three, I agree, but common sense should tell you that much at a bare minimum. And even then you have to weigh them, we all tell lies sometimes, perhaps even for good ends, whereas killing, no, you shouldn’t do that, ever."
"Not even if the king sends you off to war?"
"There’s the rub. Priests will tell you that if the king sends you off to war you can, indeed you should, kill. And that the responsibility lies with the king. That’s how they justify war, which is a nasty brute, especially if Fat Head is the one who sends you off. But notice that the commandments don’t say it’s okay to kill in war. They say don’t kill, period. And then…"
"Then?"
"Let’s look at the other commandments. I am the Lord thy God. That’s not a commandment, otherwise there would be eleven. It’s a prologue. But it’s a sham of a prologue. Try to picture it: some guy appears to Moses, or actually he doesn’t even really appear, a voice comes from who knows where, and then Moses goes and tells his people that they have to obey the commandments because they come from God. But who says they come from God? That voice: ‘I am the Lord thy God.’ And what if he wasn’t? Imagine if I stop you on the street and say I’m a plainclothes carabiniere and you have to pay me a ten-lira fine because no one’s allowed on that street. If you’re smart you’ll say back: and how can I be sure that you’re a carabiniere, maybe you’re someone who makes his living by screwing people over. Let me see your papers. A
nd instead God persuades Moses that he’s God because he’s says so and that’s that. It all begins with false witness."
"You don’t believe it was God who gave the commandments to Moses?"
"No, actually I do believe it was God. I’m just saying he used a trick. He’s always done that: you have to believe in the Bible because it’s inspired by God, but who tells you the Bible’s inspired by God? The Bible. See the problem? But let’s move on. The first commandment says you shall have no other God before him. That’s how the Lord prevents you from thinking, for instance, about Allah, or Buddha, or maybe even Venus-and let’s be honest, it couldn’t have been bad to have a piece of tail like that as your goddess. But it also means you shouldn’t believe in philosophy, for instance, or in science, or get any ideas about man descending from apes. Just him, that’s it. Now pay attention, because the other commandments are all fascist, designed to force you to accept society as it is. Remember the one about keeping the Sabbath day holy… What do you think of it?"
"Well, basically it says to go to mass on Sunday-what’s wrong with that?"
"That’s what Don Cognasso tells you, and like all priests he doesn’t know the first thing about the Bible. Wake up! In a primitive tribe like the one Moses took out for a walk, this meant that you have to observe the rites, and the purpose of the rites-from human sacrifices on up to Fat Head’s rallies in Piazza Venezia-is to addle people’s brains! And then? Honor thy father and mother. Oh hush, don’t tell me it’s good for children to obey their parents, that’s fine for children, who need guidance. But honor thy father and mother means respect the ideas of your elders, don’t oppose tradition, don’t presume to change the tribe’s way of life. See? Don’t cut off the king’s head, though God knows if we have a head on our own shoulders we have to, especially with a king like that dwarf Savoy, who betrayed his army and sent his officers to their death. And now you can see that even Don’t steal isn’t quite as innocent a commandment as it seems, because it orders you not to touch private property, which belongs to the person who got rich by stealing from you. If only it ended there. There are three commandments left. What does Thou shalt not commit impure acts mean? The Don Cognassos of the world would have you believe its only purpose is to keep you from wagging that thing that hangs between your legs, and to drag in the stone tablets for the occasional wank seems a bit much. What’s a guy like me supposed to do, a failure? That beautiful woman my mother didn’t make me beautiful, and I’m a gimp to boot, and I’ve never touched a woman who’s a woman, and they want to deny me even that release?"
