Don Camillo meets Hell’s Angels

by Giovanni Guareschi

  “What has your hair to do with these hoodlums?”

  “A lot, because if I still had my hair I could get up my gang and take care of those Scorpions easy as anything! One of these days it’ll sink in with you old relics that we young people, drop-outs, longhairs, rebels, hippies, whatever you want to call us, we have a system all our own and on our own we can take care of things without making tragedies of them. Oh, God, if only I still had my hair!”

  “Hair, shmair,” Don Camillo laughed.

  “Look, I can’t present myself with my hair like this, it’s that simple. It’s the bit about losing face.”

  “A man is the same no matter what length his hair is.”

  “Father, it’s easy for me to say to you that a priest is a priest no matter what he is wearing. But it’s not so easy for you to try and say a Mass in your underwear, right?”

  “Don’t be silly!”

  “Well it’s silly to you now, but yesterday when the vermin tried to strip you down to your underwear, you really made them sweat it out.”

  “Never mind,” Don Camillo interrupted. “It’s better this way, we won’t have a war between your two gangs.”

  “Yes, but how are you going to keep some poor joker from defending himself from the Scorpions by dragging out his shotgun and shooting? Listen, Father, if a boxer runs up against a stranger, if this guy is armed, he’s going to defend himself by shooting, and the boxer falls down dead. But if two boxers bump into each other and try to beat each other up, it’s only a boxing match and nobody dies. The moral of the story is…”

  Don Camillo was tired of arguing. He grubbed around in one of his desk drawers and drew out an envelope, which he handed to venom.

  “Milan,” he said, “isn’t far away. And in Milan you can find anything. Samson was destroyed by Delilah simply because he couldn’t make it to Milan. You, however, are free to go there.”

  It was three twenty in the morning when Michele Bottazzi, called Venom, exclaimed “O.K.!”, pulled on his helmet, went out and disappeared into the night.

  * * *

  Flora was confined to quarters for two days. Towards six in the evening on Thursday, Anselma let her out in the courtyard where Don Camillo, stretched out in a chaise, was enjoying a bit of fresh air.

  The little criminal no longer wore a miniskirt; instead, she was hidden under a mountain of a black dress with a neckline that appeared to creep up over her chin, a hemline that dragged through the dust, and sleeves that hung down six inches past the tips of her fingers. A little black lace handkerchief was pinned to her hair. She had whitened her face with flour and taken off all her other make-up. She looked like an allegory of the Depression.

  “Does this suit you, Uncle?” she asked insolently, as she lit a cigarette.

  “No,” Don Camillo said placidly. “The cigarette’s out of keeping. A type like you should be smoking Tuscan cigars. Just the same, sit down.”

  Flora wanted the people passing by on the street to see her reduced to such austerity, so she preferred to remain standing. But the people who passed by on the street and saw her just sniggered.

  Everybody was thoroughly aware of the incident of the girl in the bell tower. For one thing, the previous night at the commune meeting, Peppone, after reminding his constituency that Busseto had footed the bill for Verdi’s musical studies, suggested that perhaps the commune should offer to finance the studies of the parish priest’s young niece, who had shown such musical talent in her execution of her nocturne a few evenings before.

  So it was that people walked back and forth in front of the gate to Don Camillo’s little garden-courtyard and sniggered. Suddenly, however, everybody stopped to listen to some powerful motors rumbling in the distance.

  It wasn’t long before six Hell’s Angels paraded past on their motorcycles, slowly, so that everybody could get a good look at their black leather jackets. Then, isolated at a proper distance behind his advance guard, astride his big black Harley, came their chief, his chest proudly puffed out, filling almost to bursting point a black jerkin with a white skull on the back and the word “Venom”.

  His eyes were flashing, and his long, shiny, soft hair wafted in the breeze. Venom was majestic, monumental. When Flora saw him she covered her eyes. “That rat!” she cried, full of hate and fury. “I’m going to make him pay for Castelletto and that episode the other night!”

  “Dear child,” Don Camillo advised her with a smile, “try to stay away from him. He’s a violent man and he wouldn’t stop short of making you drink an entire bottle of cod liver oil.”

  “You underestimate me!” Flora answered, furious. “You don’t know yet what it is to tangle with the Scorpions. I’m going to pull out his greasy hair lock by lock, root by root! I want to hear him squeal with pain! I want to get him really riled!”

  “It’s not going to be easy,” Don Camillo chuckled, happy, but not overjoyed for he kept thinking about how much Venom’s wig had cost.

  Flora lost her composure and turned her back on Don Camillo. She walked resolutely toward the gate to the bell tower courtyard. But she forgot that she had on a dress with a hem that dragged in the dust, and it caught in the hortensia branches, sending her headlong into the flower bed.

  “The love of flowers is a sign of gentleness of soul,” Don Camillo observed in a loud voice.

  One Occasion On Which a Cellar Was More Important Than a Dome

  Don Camillo was having a bad spell. As if Flora wasn’t trouble enough, the little priest sent by the Curia was souring his life with his mania for reform. It was logical, therefore, for Don Camillo to pass most of the day in his manor house, newly won with the help of God and, in a certain sense, Garibaldi.

  In his new chapel, he had set up the old altar with its huge crucifix, the abbot St. Antony, and all the other trinkets cast out of the parish church by Don Francesco’s reformist zeal. The only thing that interested Don Camillo was the chapel, but this was attached to the manor house, and although the walls were thick and solid, the roof was quite decrepit. Therefore, when he wasn’t inside the chapel talking to the Christ, Don Camillo was up on the roof, fixing tiles and plugging holes.

  It was for this reason that one afternoon he was able to spot a small van pulling up in front of the rusty gate to the nettle-infested garden. Out came Peppone, Brusco and Smilzo, obviously not expecting to find Don Camillo there.

  The first to detect the priest’s presence was Smilzo, who gave the alarm by shouting to Peppone: “Hey, chief, what’s that big black bird perched on the roof over there?”

  “Just a black crow, a species, fortunately, that’s becoming extinct,” Peppone answered as loud as he could, as soon as he had registered Don Camillo’s presence.

  A tile dropped from the sky and grazing his shoulder, shattered at his feet, startling Peppone. “Hey, Father!” he shouted. “What kind of joke is that?”

  “Oh, forgive me, Comrade Mayor,” Don Camillo shouted from the rooftop. “I mistook you for that murderer Garrotte. It’s a bit of a bother, all you comrades looking alike.”

  This was really ungenerous behaviour on the part of Don Camillo, for there wasn’t the faintest resemblance, exterior or interior, between Comrade Giuseppe Bottazzi, nicknamed Peppone, and Comrade Egisto Smorgagnino, nicknamed Garrotte.

  * * *

  This Garrotte had come back to town at the end of the war and been hailed as a hero; and he had become virtually the spiritual leader of all the Valley’s Communists because of his heroic feats as a fighter in the resistance.

  Then in 1947, his record was adjudged severely less heroic, and Garrotte, who had gained his kudos from the enormous quantity of people he had killed, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. Garrotte had taken to his heels to hide behind the Iron Curtain. Twenty years later, Garrotte had been amnestied without having spent as much as one minute in gaol and had returned to the town fat as a pig and arrogant as a cock.

  This situation was not to the liking of Peppone or his
comrades, and when a big shot from Party headquarters told Peppone that on a certain day Garrotte would be arriving in town and that a suitably festive reception was to be organized and an equally suitable cordon of protection arranged for him, Peppone had answered: “Right: I’ll tell the cops to keep an eye out to prevent him from killing any more people.”

  Perceiving how things were, the Party big shot did not insist. However, on the day Garrotte was supposed to arrive, all the walls of the town were papered with posters praising and welcoming the returning hero. And Garrotte’s float was followed by an endless queue of cars filled with people flying red banners. There was even a lorry with a brass band on it playing The Red Flag and Bye Bye Baby.

  But Peppone had had nothing to do with it; it was entirely the work of the Bognoni couple and the Maoists from La Rocca. The parade had filed through the deserted streets and stopped in the middle of the square. Here the Bognoni couple climbed on to the Garrotte’s float and proceeded to deliver sonorous discourses and eulogies welcoming the brave Comrade who was bringing the spirit of the proletarian revolution back to the valley. They didn’t forget to snipe at “capitalist” comrades who had turned to “shopkeeping”.

  Peppone and his high command were listening from the waiting room in the town hall, and at this point he commanded: “Gigiola, let’s go!”

  Gigiola, the chief of police, had been a whip during the Resistance and had never forgotten it. He moved into the square followed by his four cops and began to tuck parking tickets under the windshield wipers of all the cars in the parade, which were lined up in a “No Parking” zone. Beginning, of course with Garrotte’s car.

  From the heights of the truck, Garrotte saw him, jumped down and confronted him menacingly.

  “Comrade Gigiola!” he shouted. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “When I’m doing a job, I don’t recognize anybody,” the police chief replied. “The fine is a thousand lire. This is a ‘No Parking’ zone.”

  Garrotte, oozing resentment from all his pores, paid up and said: “I’ll move my car to a place where parking is forbidden to bourgeois comrades!”

  That he did, followed by the entire Maoist contingent: he had moved to La Rocca where he had settled in to become the guiding light of the autonomous Maoist cell.

  * * *

  This much is true; however, only the vilest intentions could be behind any assertion that Peppone and Garrotte looked alike. But it annoyed Don Camillo to distraction to see Peppone and his henchmen hovering around his house. What were they up to? What was so entertaining about a priest on a rooftop? They couldn’t have “just dropped by”; to come to the house involved driving up a long private road that ended in front of the gate of the nettle-infested courtyard. They had obviously come with some evil idea in mind, and the proof was that they were thoroughly disconcerted to find that the house was not deserted.

  “Father,” Peppone shouted up, “aren’t you even going to ask us in?”

  “I can’t possibly receive visitors now,” Don Camillo answered. “As you see, I have the bricklayers in the house.”

  “All I can see is a priest on a roof,” Smilzo sniggered. “And that’s not a pretty sight.”

  “If you wait a second I’ll try and brighten it up with a bit of music,” Don Camillo replied, hoisting up a tile, making as if to throw it at Smilzo’s head.

  “Now that he’s bought himself this dilapidated shanty he doesn’t half give himself princely airs!” Smilzo tittered, taking a quick step back.

  They clambered into their van chortling like turkeys and drove off.

  At sunset, Don Camillo descended from the roof to have a chat with the Christ. “Lord, what evil scheme brought them over here?”

  “Don Camillo, men are not always motivated by evil schemes.”

  “Lord, this house has been abandoned for years. Why should they suddenly come round just when the house becomes my property? It’s clear they’re plotting something against me.”

  “Don Camillo,” the Christ reprimanded him, “why do you give yourself such airs? If the floor here suddenly caved in under your feet, would you believe that a floor built perhaps three hundred years ago had lain in wait for all that time until the precise moment when it could crumble under your feet?”

  “Not at all, sir. In any case there’s no risk of that since beneath this pavement is nothing but solid ground.”

  To emphasize his declaration, Don Camillo gave the brick paving several hearty stamps, and heard a distant hollow echo: this was no solid ground down there, but a big hole!

  It was ridiculous to think that there was a crypt under a chapel built no more than two hundred years ago as a wing to a manor house. It was more reasonable to think that the cellar underlying the whole house extended beneath the chapel too. Don Camillo collected his torch and went down to inspect the cellar, wherein heaps of ancient junk were rotting silently. Up against the wall that divided the chapel cellar from that of the main house, there was a mountain of barrel staves, and it was next to these that Don Camillo found a square patch of wall which, in spite of the care taken to camouflage it, was clearly of very recent construction. With a piece of roof beam, Don Camillo battered in the wall, which hid a narrow door, and found himself underneath the chapel.

  There, diligently oiled and wrapped in grease paper, were ninety machine guns, eighty pistols, and a fair sized pyramid of small waterproof metal boxes stuffed with ammunition.

  Like many manor houses built with a castle in mind, the cellar contained a deep well, long in disuse, but still full of rancid, black water.

  It was a tremendous effort, but in a couple of hours, Don Camillo was able to dump all the guns and ammunition into the well, and to top it all off, he threw in an additional pile of debris he had found scattered around the cellar. The black water engulfed everything and covered it all over. To work more efficiently, Don Camillo worked in his underwear and tunic. When he had finished the job, he went upstairs, washed, dressed, lay down on an old sofa, and instantly fell asleep.

  He awoke just after midnight. There were people wandering about inside the house—three people who were talking out loud, certain there was no one to overhear.

  It was inevitable that Don Camillo, who had meticulously polished up one of the machine guns to find out exactly what it was, had forgotten to throw it in the well along with the others: and it was precisely this nasty instrument that the three intruders found aimed at them when Don Camillo, switching on his torch, blocked their passage.

  “Well well,” Don Camillo exclaimed. “Mr. Mayor! To what do I owe the honour of this visit?”

  Peppone had no time to answer because other people were arriving too. Not through the front door, unlike Peppone and comrades, but through a first-floor window. They heedlessly tore out the window’s iron grille by the roots, causing a rude din. Don Camillo turned off his torch and retreated into a dark corner.

  The second shift also numbered three, and these too were talking out loud, very calmly.

  “The loot’s still in the cellar under the chapel,” one of the three explained. “I checked it the night before last. We’ve got to get it out in thirty-two minutes because Gino’s coming with the tractor and the trailer loaded with tomato crates. It’s the tomato season and the roads are jammed with farm trucks taking tomatoes to the factories. When the boy comes, everything must be down there ready to load on the trailer.”

  They went into the cellar, but were back in a few minutes, furious.

  “Chief,” one of the three said, “we’ve been robbed!”

  “It could only be Peppone. He was the sole person besides me who knew where the loot was hidden. But I’ll make him talk, that sack of… Anyhow, we’ve got to stop the boy from bringing the tractor and tomato crates!”

  “Not at all,” Don Camillo said, lighting the torch and stepping forward while Peppone and comrades backed further into their corner, “listen to me, Garrotte, let the tomato boy come here. A ride in the fresh air will do h
im good.”

  Garrotte’s eyes were fixed on Don Camillo’s machine gun.

  “Garrotte, see what good care I’m taking of it?” Don Camillo said. “The same goes for the rest of it. So go back to La Rocca, and set your mind at ease: when Mao orders you to bring on the proletarian revolution, you have only to come to me to take back your guns.”

  Garrotte, gross as a pig, seemed to exude fat and hatred from his person and Don Camillo felt sorry for him.

  “You can go now,” Don Camillo said, herding them towards the door.

  Garrotte went out into the fresh, starry night, and a powerful kick from Don Camillo aided him to clear the twelve step stairway easily.

  “Your charms lacked only that one touch,” Don Camillo explained. “Now you may go on your merry way, certain that one day God will cast you into the fires of hell.”

  The other two got the same send-off and all three went back to La Rocca with warm backsides. Having dealt with the disreputable trio, Don Camillo returned to make contact with the first onslaught.

  “If people find out about this, half the world will split their sides laughing,” Don Camillo explained, “but I’m very selfish and want to keep this laugh to myself. Inside of one week the roof must be fixed, Comrade Bottazzi! Comrade Smilzo is quite right: a priest on a rooftop isn’t a very pretty sight.”

  “You don’t imagine I’m going to shinny up there on your roof, do you?” Peppone huffed.

  “Hardly! Comrade Brusco is a contractor and he can send whoever he feels like up there. The important thing is, Comrade, you’re paying for it!”

  “This is dirty blackmail!” Peppone protested, trying to put on a ferocious face but not succeeding because, when you come right down to it, things had turned out exactly right.

  A Thrashing Followed By a Salting

  The progressive little priest sent by the Curia to straighten out Don Camillo was named Don Francesco, but because of his nervous, wiry frame, his tailored businessman-priest suits, his continual state of agitation, and arrogant attitude, he had been re-named Don Chichi by the entire parish. The name means nothing in itself: it simply captured exactly the way he was.