Don Camillo meets Hell’s Angels

by Giovanni Guareschi

  “A doctor, somebody get a doctor!” Brusco shouted, and Peppone’s high command, being near at hand, took up the cry.

  Peppone did not show any signs of life and Doctor Bognoni, who as usual had brought his little black bag along in case of emergency, was there in a twinkling. He knelt next to Peppone, felt his pulse and shouted to his wife: “Quick! Prepare a syringe of adrenaline. This man is close to death!”

  Bognoni’s shouts brought Peppone back to himself. He weakly batted his eyelashes, eyed the doctor with disgust and roared for Brusco. “Comrade! Remove this charlatan! Can’t a man die in peace?”

  Bognoni stood up and walked off; then Don Camillo came to kneel at Peppone’s side. When Peppone saw him he said, “Now finally you must be happy.”

  “Why on earth should I be happy?” exclaimed Don Camillo.

  “Because you are the troublemaker who printed up all those posters that everybody thought I wrote, and you’re responsible for this whole filthy mess!”

  “I’m afraid so,” Don Camillo admitted humbly. “But it’s a little late now for me to apologize. Can I do anything to help you?”

  “Yes,” Peppone roared, “you can go to hell, you and all the other priests in the universe!”

  “Too many people, Comrade. I don’t like tour groups,” Don Camillo answered.

  Bigio came up with a bottle of cognac and Peppone attacked it as if he were draining the Pontine Marshes.

  Then the county doctor arrived and listened to Peppone’s heart and measured his blood pressure.

  “Perfectly normal,” he said.

  “So why has he closed his eyes and become as stiff as a corpse?” Don Camillo asked, worried.

  “Because he’s stinking drunk, that’s why,” the doctor explained.

  Peppone was quite drunk, but not stinking. He found the strength to roll over and gurgle: “Reverend Father, if there’s a God in heaven, he’ll punish you.”

  There is a God in heaven and ordinarily he takes his time. But on this occasion he changed his ways and punished Don Camillo a mere twenty-four hours later.

  Hell’s Angel

  On Monday afternoon Don Camillo was holding a conference with his young assistant in his study, when suddenly in the street, in front of the gate to the courtyard, there exploded a deafening row. A group of seven disheveled young motorcyclists with bushy manes and leather jackets was gathered at the gate; they were creating an unbelievable din and furiously revving up their motors. Then one of the longhairs took up a strange looking guitar and all seven began to chant a song (if it could be called that) that would put kinks in a cat’s fur, keeping time on their klaxons during the refrain.

  From the pitch of the voice it appeared that one of the seven was a girl, and coming from her coral lips the lyrics of the song seemed to Don Camillo even more trite.

  His bad impression grew worse when the young Hell’s Angel doffed her leather jacket and revealed herself to be wearing what amounted to a sleeveless, low necked blouse in the sweetest pastel flower print that barely covered her bottom.

  “I’m going to put an end to this right now!” Don Camillo bellowed, marching resolutely to the door. But the little priest cut him off.

  “No, Don Camillo. Let me do it. I know how to handle these young people. Don’t pay any attention to their non-conformism; they’re actually much finer people than you think.”

  Don Camillo went to the window and saw the little priest emerge from the gate and speak smilingly and cordially to the Hell’s Angels, who after all weren’t that much younger than he. They let him go on for a few minutes, then the girl put her fingers in her mouth and emitted a piercing whistle. The six toughs jumped off their motorcycles and fell upon the little priest, inundating him with a flood of fists and boots.

  The little priest was plainly offensive with his pompous speeches and the ridiculous, tight-fitting priest-cum-business suit, which Don Camillo could not persuade him to abandon. But the horrible spectacle forced Don Camillo to forget his petty grievances, and like lightning he tore into the pile of Hell’s Angels; digging through them he managed to excavate the little priest, who already had been reduced to a ragbag.

  The flashy intervention by a priest so big and black threw the longhairs off guard. They stood around looking puzzled for a moment, until the imperious, shrill voice of the girl stirred them into action.

  “Get that fat father!” she cried.

  The six hooligans pulled themselves together and piled on top of Don Camillo. Their attack was well planned: Four of them blocked Don Camillo’s arms and legs, and the other two rained blows all over him.

  Don Camillo, a passable pugilist under ordinary circumstances, did not expect such an attack and acted like an elephant beset by a tribe of petulant monkeys. It was all he could manage to try and shake the howling rabble off his back. Then came the angry, pouting voice of the girl: “Come on! Strip off that burlap sack! Lets see what colour long johns he wears!”

  This turned out to be a tactical error for when Don Camillo heard it, he called to the Christ: “Lord, are you going to allow a minister of God to be stripped down to his underwear in public?”

  “Certainly not, Don Camillo,” the distant voice of the Christ replied.

  Don Camillo suddenly thought of the race-horse who decides in the last stretch to come out of seventh place and make for the post. Freeing his arms in one swipe, he caught hold of the two toughs tackling his feet, and, gripping their manes, belted the two melonheads against each other. His victims flopped into the dirt at his feet. The other four hoodlums, urged on by the girl, attacked with admirable vigour; unfortunately for them, there happened to be a pole propped up against the gate, a supple, strong acacia stock that in the hands of Don Camillo became a lethal weapon.

  They didn’t put up much of a fight against this kind of attack and as soon as they could, the Hell’s Angels, full of bruises and welts as big as plums, hopped on their motorcycles and took off, shouting over their shoulders, “We’ll see you later.”

  Not all seven Hell’s Angels, however. The hellish girl stayed behind, leaning against the gate, imperturbably puffing on a cigarette.

  Don Camillo was now enflamed, and he started menacingly toward the troublemaker, planning on making her see the light.

  The girl didn’t bat an eyelash and when Don Camillo was within arms length she said, smiling, “Hi Unc!”

  Don Camillo stopped dead and eyed the scantily clad girl. Decently clothed she would have been a pretty girl, between sixteen and eighteen years old, but her impertinent red locks, her insolent clear eyes, and her immodest mini-skirt made her thoroughly repellent.

  “Who do you think you are, Miss Minimonster? What kind of house of ill repute spawned you?”

  “I come from your sister Josephine’s; in fact, I’m your niece Flora.”

  “I don’t have any niece called Flora!” Don Camillo shouted.

  “The truth is, I was baptized Elizabetta,” the semi-clothed girl explained with an angelic smile that could provoke a parish priest to slap her face. “But the boys call me Flora, for reasons which will become obvious.”

  Don Camillo had detected familiar features in that saucy face and his anger was mounting. “And you mean to say that you are supposed to be my niece, the daughter of my only sister, you wanted those long-haired tough friends of yours to beat me up and strip me down to my underwear!” he bellowed.

  “Well, one good turn deserves another, Uncle. Wasn’t it you who only last week told my mother not to worry about me because you were sure you could swiftly turn me into the sweetest, humblest Daughter of Mary imaginable, right? A regular pillar of the Altar Guild, right? Well, do you still think you can, or would you like me to hop on my bike and scoot back to the big city to console my poor, put-upon old woman?”

  Don Camillo gripped the acacia club, but the miniskirted hellcat continued to hold his gaze defiantly.

  “Anselma!” Don Camillo shouted.

  Anselma was the bell-ringer�
�s wife. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, the bell-ringer’s husband, since she was one of those women who look like armoured cars; and when they deal out a slap, their victims often can’t even remember their own names.

  “I cannot touch her,” Don Camillo explained to Anselma when she came out.

  “Well I can,” the armoured car answered; she had been watching the entire episode from the window.

  The miniskirted girl didn’t seem to care. “If you dare put your hands on me, I won’t answer for what might happen,” she announced, fire in her eyes.

  “Don’t worry, child,” Anselma reassured her. “No hands. I leave manual labour to the grape pickers. A dough paddle does the job much more efficiently.”

  “Very clever,” Don Camillo said. “I think perhaps that’s the only way to show her the ways of the real world.”

  The girl made a strong effort to get away, but Anselma didn’t budge an inch.

  “Her name is Anselma,” Don Camillo explained to Flora. “Though everyone calls her ‘El’. It’s a nickname for ‘Elephant’. I think you better start by lengthening your skirts about a foot and a half.”

  “Never!” Flora squealed with rage.

  “Too bad,” Don Camillo sighed. “That means we’ll have to shorten your legs by a foot and a half.”

  A Wakeful Night

  Flora did turn out to be a God-given punishment. Don Camillo quickly found out why his sister, an invalid widow, had given up on the project of straightening out the girl, who’d definitely got off to a bad start.

  Flora, the very night of her arrival, laid her cards on the table as far as Anselma was concerned. “It’s not going to do you any good to bar the doors and windows and treat me like a prisoner. I haven’t the slightest intention of trying to escape. I want the old bag of a priest to get down on his knees and beg me to leave.”

  “Little Girl,” Anselma admonished her, “you really don’t know what you are saying. Remember that when things were really rough, your uncle confronted bands of Communists that were running amok.”

  “Communists, pooh,” Flora sneered. “Buffoons like the priests, the Fascists, the Liberals, the Socialists, the middle class, the military, the police, the entire establishment. They’re all walking cadavers. Members of the Living Dead. Zombies. We kids are really in control now and nobody’s going to stop us from going on!”

  “Not even God?”

  “God?” Flora hooted. “God is dead.”

  Anselma, being the bell-ringer’s wife, considered herself dependent on God for her livelihood. She lost her temper. “If you were my daughter,” she said through clenched teeth, “I’d give you a slap in the face. But seeing you’re not, I’m going to give you two!” But like certain kinds of explosive, the sound came after the damage was done: By the time she had said the word “two”, both slaps had already arrived at their destination.

  “They’ll help you to sleep,” Anselma explained.

  “Well, they’ll keep you up all night,” Flora said under her breath as she climbed the stairs to her room.

  Flora was prophetic. At two in the morning, the bells began to ring furiously and the entire town was on its feet and running. Don Camillo, too, bounded out of bed, and as soon as he reached the ground floor he ran into Anselma, who was the picture of humiliation.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Don Camillo bellowed.

  Anselma shook her head in desolation. “Father, the window of the sun room opens out on the rectory roof, and from the rectory roof a certain troublemaker, who shall remain nameless, can climb out on the church roof and slip in through the little round window in the bell tower…”

  “And so?”

  “Well, since your niece happens to be the troublemaker—I said I wasn’t going to mention any names, but you’ll find out soon enough that it’s her up there, having more fun than a pig at a picnic. And she’s pulled the ladders up after her and blocked off the trap-doors at the landings!”

  A number of townspeople had gathered and Peppone came up to Don Camillo. “Father, either you stop this scandal, or I will take the necessary measures!”

  “Do take them, then, Comrade Mayor,” Don Camillo answered. “If you’ve got a helicopter, get it out and go to work!”

  Flora had thrown herself into her task with gusto; and now, having discovered the mechanism that operated the carillon, she was composing a pop song on it, with the bells acting as accompaniment for her own inhuman yowls. Hearing her squeals, Smilzo let out a snigger. “That must be our parish priest’s new lady love, calling for her tea!”

  Don Camillo would not put up with that sort of joke and picked up Smilzo by his lapels. Peppone intervened. “You’re not going to deny that those are the dulcet tones of a lady?”

  “They’re the roars of a tiger!” Don Camillo shouted. “What sin have I committed to deserve this female cyclone, all of a sudden?”

  Brusco interrupted him. “Aha, Father, then the problem is that lively little niece of yours who arrived yesterday with that herd of boyfriends who wanted to reduce you to your underwear.”

  Peppone and his pals had a god laugh while in the background Flora’s efforts grew louder and louder.

  “Lord in heaven,” Don Camillo whimpered, “how can I make her stop?”

  The good Lord took mercy on him. The bell-ringer came over and told Don Camillo that there was someone waiting for him in the sun room.

  Actually there was some thing awaiting him there, a monstrous man straight out of the comic book romances. Jet-black overalls, gloves and crash helmet, the visor pulled down over the face, leaving only his eyes uncovered, he looked like something out of Diabolique.

  “Father,” the spectre said, “I think I can help.”

  “Venom!” Don Camillo exclaimed. “What’s happened to you?”

  “I have to be able to fade into the night,” the youth explained. “I don’t want any of them to see me shaved down to nothing.”

  “What about the army?”

  “I passed the physical,” Venom answered. “I’m off with the next shipment of recruits.”

  “She’s dragged all the ladders up to the belfry and blocked all the trap-doors,” Don Camillo said, turning to the problem in hand. “How am I going to get up there?”

  “If there’s a lightning rod conductor going up there, I can climb it.”

  “No, that’s much too dangerous.”

  Venom laughed. “Dangerous for a priest, but not for me.”

  He slipped out of the little window over the rectory roof, clambered up to the church roof and grabbed on to the lightning rod wire. Then the night enveloped him.

  “Oh Lord,” Don Camillo moaned, falling to his knees, “please help him!”

  “Don Camillo,” the far-off voice of Christ replied. “Am I wrong, or didn’t you tell me that boy doesn’t belong to your flock?”

  “No, my Lord, you’re not wrong, I’m the one that was wrong. But for the love of God, please don’t get distracted! Keep your hand on his brow now!”

  “And if he falls, how am I supposed to save him, pull him up by his hair? Especially now that you’ve shaved him bald?”

  Don Camillo began to sweat blood and meanwhile the infernal clanging went on.

  Then, suddenly, it stopped.

  Don Camillo sped down to the room at the foot of the bell tower. A scrabbling sound could be heard up in the tower. The trap doors in the landings came open one by one and the ladders dropped down from them. Finally the last trap door opened, the ladder came down, then Venom appeared, a bundle over his shoulder.

  The bundle was Flora.

  In order to handle her more easily, Venom had packed her up, using the rope from one of the bells. He’d shut her up by stuffing one of his leather gloves in her mouth.

  When they landed on solid ground, Venom held the bundle out to Don Camillo, but the priest drew back his hands and snarled “Throw her over in that corner!” Then he shouted for Anselma and she came running.

&nbs
p; “Take that foul mess away!” Don Camillo roared, pointing at the girl. “And tell that mob the show is over and they can go home to bed.”

  * * *

  Evicting Flora from the belfry had been quite a job and Venom was glad to toss down a couple of glasses of wine. They were alone in Don Camillo’s study, and Venom had taken off his helmet to let the air circulate around his shiny round head.

  Don Camillo had wanted to be told the details of the enterprise, but Venom shook his head. “Father, let’s forget it and talk about serious things. You’ve brought the plague into your house. I know her, she’s really vermin!”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “At Castelletto, two months ago. She was with the Scorpions, a gang of Hell’s Angels from the city. They’d come down to Castelletto to start a punch-up, but since Castelletto is our territory, we beat them up and they had to scarper with their heads all bashed in. The six that brought the chick over yesterday are the ringleaders, and since you’ve made them look pretty bad, they’re not going to let you off easy. They’ll be back.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Don Camillo growled. “I’ve still got a few acacia sticks stashed away in the woodshed.”

  Venom shook his head. “I’ve got a stoolie in the city and he phoned me to say that the scorpions have got a big operation planned. The whole flock of them is coming here to shake things up and break the girl out of here.”

  “So let them come,” Don Camillo snarled. “We’ll get the police all ready for them.”

  “Father, there isn’t anything you can do. These boys come when nobody’s expecting them. There’s about fifty of them and they work together like a machine. They know the fuzz won’t shoot at them and they’ll get off clean.”

  Venom was really bubbling with rage and stamping up and down the carpet like an angry lion. “Now why?” he shouted, finally stopping in front of Don Camillo. “What made you shave my head?”