Don Camillo meets Hell’s Angels

by Giovanni Guareschi

  “No,” Venom growled. “But just this: why me?”

  “‘Why me?’” Flora mimicked aggressively. Suddenly she’d developed a flaming sword too and looked like Joan of Arc. “Who do you think you are? I thought you were supposed to be fighting this absurd world created by moralizing criminals that same way I am. Even if we belong to different gangs, aren’t we essentially alike? Answer me, Venom the Great Rebel—don’t you just love this disgusting world that the old fools have built and would like to foist off on us? Does it really seem to you that these dirty old hypocrites deserve respect? Don’t tell me the Army cut off your rebellious spirit as well as your hair?”

  “No!”

  “Well, then, why not use these old fools and liars to build a world that’s worth living in? Do the shameful old hypocrites fear one thing, and that’s scandal? Perfect! I’ll terrorize and threaten them with scandal. I just used you as a pretext on the questionable assumption that you were one of us. You are, aren’t you? Are you angry? Do you want to run home and tell them it’s not true, that you don’t have anything to do with it, that you’re a good little boy while I’m a nasty brat? That’s fine with me. Go ahead!”

  “No,” Venom answered. “I haven’t changed and I still believe we have to stick together. The way I see it—”

  “Yes?”

  “Since you told them I knocked you up, the way I see it, you ought to go through with it. To, shall we say, validate the protest.”

  “I’m opposed to extremism,” Flora protested. “And besides, you’re not my type.”

  “And who would your type be?” Venom bridled. “That scab Ringo? I’ll smack his face.”

  “Don’t you dare. He helped me sell a refrigerator to his aunt, a dishwasher to his sister, and a washing machine to his brother-in-law. And besides, I never said anything about Ringo being my type.”

  Venom shook his head. “I don’t get how come you don’t think I’m groovy.”

  “It really bugs you?”

  “After all, I run the town. I’ve got the best cycle in the area, everybody thinks I’m great.”

  “Like me?”

  “There’s nothing great about you. You’re just crazy. Also, I can do judo and I’m learning karate.”

  “A definite step in the right direction,” Flora admitted.

  “Speaking of the embryo,” Venom went on, “when they see nothing’s happening, how are you going to explain that?”

  “I already have my route and my clients. But for right now, it would be nice if you went along with it.”

  “Naturally. ‘Venom’s a good kid and won’t cop out.’”

  “Are you staying long?”

  “I’m going away again tomorrow. If you want. I’ll give you my address. You might need it.”

  “That’s unlikely, but give it to me anyway. Here’s my business card.”

  “Great. Could be you might sell my barracks an icebox.”

  Flora’s business card in his pocket, Saint Michael plucked a feather out of his wing, wrote his address on it, and handed it to Flora. Then he left without saying a word. That’s how kids are these days: hard. Heartless, even.

  Watching him walk off, Flora counted four wings, not two. “I know I’m not seeing things, she muttered as she rounded the corner, nearly stripping the gears.

  That’s the Way the Sheep Baas

  Don Camillo was roasting chestnuts in the bell ringer’s fireplace, when suddenly a voice made him jump out of his skin: “Good morning, holy, holy Uncle!”

  “I thought we agreed you weren’t to set foot in here ever again,” Don Camillo said without turning round.

  “In fact we did,” Flora admitted. “But when I heard you needed me, I swallowed my nausea and came.”

  “I need you?” Don Camillo shouted hysterically.

  “Not me personally, but a two-hundred litre fridge with a freezing compartment.”

  Don Camillo pulled the frying pan out of the fire, jumped to his feet, and squared himself off in front of the girl. “You and your fridges can go straight to hell!” he shouted threateningly.

  “Don’t I wish we could,” she retorted. “What a land office business I’d do down there.”

  She pulled the catalogue out of her bag and thumbed through to a certain page, flattening the book out on the table. “Now this is the model I had in mind for you. Twelve monthly payments: you won’t even be aware of paying them.”

  “Why on earth do I need a fridge?” Don Camillo roared.

  “Well, first of all, because it’s a huge bargain, with the discount I’m giving you. Secondly, buying it from me, you’re doing Peppone out of business. Thirdly, you can give the fridge to me as a wedding present when I get married.”

  Don Camillo’s jaw dropped. “Ah, so now you’re getting married!”

  “Well obviously someday I’ll get married. Do I seem to you the type who couldn’t get herself a husband, when there are so many morons running around?”

  Disappointment fired up Don Camillo’s anger again. “So there’s no chance at all of avoiding a scandal!”

  “You mean it wouldn’t be a scandal if a girl brought a child into the world two or three months after she’d been married? Is this the kind of morality you were taught in the seminary?”

  “Do we have to start this all over again?” Don Camillo howled, pounding his fist on the table.

  The girl was infinitely impudent and finally Don Camillo lost his temper. “Shameless hussy, first you rob me of my St. John and now you want to blackmail me for eight thousand lire a month?”

  “Any other uncle, or at least one who wasn’t a priest, would do at least that to help out a poor orphan niece who was pregnant,” the tiresome brat quavered.

  Flora was very beautiful even though she was cynical and disrespectful; but now a shadow of sadness veiled her eyes. And the fact was, she had gained weight and puffed out.

  “Just sign on the dotted line,” she explained. “I’ll leave it for you to think about.”

  “All right, I’ll think about it,” Don Camillo growled.

  “Great,” said Flora. “Now let’s go into the shop.”

  “What shop?”

  “Yours. I want to confess.”

  “You mean you are going to make me listen to your confession?” Don Camillo squeaked, horrified. “Me?”

  “Of course,” Flora said, calmly peeling a chestnut. “If Mary Magdalene was heard by Christ, why shouldn’t a miserable little parish priest like you listen to me? Don’t tell me you think you’re better than Christ!”

  “No!” Don Camillo stormed. “But I’m your mother’s brother and I just don’t know what to make of a niece like you!”

  “The fact we’re related has nothing to do with it. I’m a sinner and I’m here to confess to the parish priest.”

  “Find another parish priest to empty that black well of yours into!”

  “No, most holy Uncle. You know all the facts and it’s simpler to tell you.”

  “I refuse! How could I have the proper spirit of serenity listening to you? I couldn’t get rid of my perfectly justifiable resentment, I couldn’t judge you with the proper impartiality!”

  “The hell with your judgment, Father. You’re not the Almighty. You listen, take counsel with the Almighty, and then he will decide. I know what’s bothering you: that picture of St. John. Priests all despise money. Other people’s money that is, but when it comes to their own, watch out!”

  “The picture doesn’t matter at all. I’d have given everything I have to get you out from underfoot. Your immorality appalls me!”

  “Honest work is not immoral,” Flora retorted. “And the work I do is honest because I do it in broad daylight!”

  “When I say immorality, refer not to what you do in broad daylight but to what you perpetrated in the dark of night and what will very soon cause a poor fatherless wretch to be brought into the world. Furthermore, I despise your conscious malice. I know what our nasty game is: to get even with the man
who got you in trouble, you’re setting about as best you can to ruining his parents by robbing them of their clients.”

  The girl laughed. “I’m not robbing anybody of anything. I know how to sell better than they do and I sell more than they do. They wait for the mackerel to jump into their nets, I go and seek them out where they live. It’s the same thing with you. You parish priests hide in your rectories all tucked away comfortably in armchairs like income tax collectors, waiting for the sheep to come in. The trouble is, people have to go to the income tax collector to be shorn, otherwise their furniture is confiscated and they find themselves in the clink. But no law forces them to come here. Now look, dear Uncle, if you want clients, you’ve got to go out and get them the way I do. New priests like Don Chichi understand this and they go to hotels, places of entertainment, and into the factories to get after the workers. They learn how to drink, to play poker, to swear, dance the ‘Monkey’, and hate the capitalists. Sometimes they even get married to avoid becoming bureaucrats the way you old parish priests have.”

  “If you’ve come here to make sacrilegious speeches, you can leave right now!” Don Camillo snarled.

  “I came here to make a confession. And if you refuse to hear my confession, I’m going straight to the Bishop’s secretary to lodge a protest.”

  “All right,” Don Camillo fumed, as he stalked off towards the church.

  Flora knelt at the confessional. “Father, bless me for I have sinned,” the wretch said. “First I would like to confess the sin that weighs most heavily on my mind, because I committed it with malice.”

  “Speak, my child; I will hear you.”

  “I took advantage of the naivety of a poor parish priest and led him to believe that I was expecting a child, for the express purpose of making him give me money that I needed to start up my little business. Furthermore, this morning I tied a sheet around my waist and padded it to keep him fooled so that I could sell him a fridge. Then I confessed the whole hoax to him here in church to prevent him from punishing me.”

  “Dear child,” Don Camillo replied, with great effort, “last year a hoodlum who had held me up in an alley pulled the same trick on me. I respected the secrecy of the confessional but it didn’t prevent me from giving him a kick in the seat of the pants afterward.”

  “To err is human, to forgive divine,” Flora warned him. “But I’m not sure God will forgive you this time.”

  “Dear child, I hope, with the help of God, to succeed in cleansing myself of animosity towards you. Do you mean, then, to say that you and that young man never had any sinful relations?”

  “Neither with him nor with anyone else,” Flora affirmed. “I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s true.”

  “Do you mean to say that, appearances notwithstanding, you have some moral principles?”

  “No! Your morality nauseates me. All I’m saying is that the right bloke hasn’t come along.”

  “Dear child, you’re on the road to damnation. Sin doesn’t come only with acts, you know: words, thoughts, and omissions can also be sinful. It’s sinful to create a scandal as you have done. It’s not any more sinful for a girl physically to commit a sin; it’s also forbidden to act like a sinner. In your case, you’ve committed a mortal sin not so much by fooling your poor uncle, but by accusing an innocent young man of a grave lack of propriety. What is he going to say, when he finds out you’ve accused him falsely?”

  “He already knows it,” Flora declared. “He and I have talked about it.”

  “And what did he say to you?”

  “Well what could he say, poor dear. He said it was all right with him.”

  “Dear child, does it seem right to you, the damage you might do to that poor boy’s reputation?”

  “But I’m not doing him any harm!” Flora protested.

  “You obviously want to marry him; that much is clear. Do you really think his offence merits such heavy punishment?”

  “I don’t want to marry him to punish him, I want to because I like him!”

  “And if you don’t want to punish him, why are you working so hard to ruin his father’s business?”

  “I work for Peppone,” Flora confessed. “I’m competing with his shop, but all the merchandise I sell comes from him.”

  Don Camillo mentally called upon the Christ. “Lord in Heaven, please help me. It’s the first time the devil himself has come to confess. What can I do?”

  “Don Camillo,” the distant voice of the Christ answered. “You must find out whether the girl has repented her acts or not. Everything depends on this.”

  “Dear child,” Don Camillo asked Flora, “do you repent what you’ve done or not?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” the brat said. “What’s the point of repenting something that’s worked out so perfectly?”

  “Do you hear that sir? Not a whit of penitence!”

  “Well it was exactly what I expected her to say,” the Christ answered.

  “Go, you are forgiven,” Don Camillo whimpered. “Your penance will be three Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glorias, to be said in front of the Virgin’s altar in the riverside chapel. Now go quickly, child! Have pity on a poor old parish priest who’s racked with the temptation to come out and cover your face with slaps!”

  Don Camillo’s voice revealed his inner turmoil, and Flora raced out of the church as fast as she could. A few moments later, Don Camillo heard her pickup drive off, so he emerged from the confessional to confer with the Christ over the high altar and unburden himself of the sadness in his soul. “Dear Lord, if the young people make a joke out of the most serious things in life, what on earth is going to become of your Church?”

  “Don Camillo,” the Christ said in a reassuring tone, “don’t let yourself be carried away by what appears on the television and the newspapers. The fact is, God does not need men. It is men who have need of God. Light exists even in a world of the blind. As somebody once said, ‘though they have eyes, yet they cannot see.’ The light won’t go out just because there’s nobody to see it,”

  “Well, sir, tell me why that girl acts like that. Why does she extort, rob, steal and cheat to get something she could have just by asking for it?”

  “Because, like most young people today, she’s dominated by the fear of being judged an honest woman. It’s the newest kind of hypocrisy: once upon a time, dishonest people went to great lengths to be judged honest. Now honest people go to equal lengths to be considered dishonest.”

  Don Camillo spread his arms. “Lord, what is this insanity? Does it perhaps mean that the great circle is about to close and the world is rushing towards self destruction?”

  “Don Camillo, why are you so pessimistic? Was my sacrifice in vain then? Do you mean that my mission among mankind has failed because men’s malice is stronger than the goodness of God?”

  “No sir. All I meant to say was that these days people only believe in what they can see and touch. But there are essentials that cannot be seen or touched: love, goodness, piety, honesty, purity, and hope. Most of all, faith. Things which one can’t live without. This is the self-destruction I was talking about. It seems to me men are wiping out their entire spiritual heritage, the only true fortune they have accrued in thousands of years. One day not very long from now, men will find themselves back in the brutalism of the caveman—the caves will be skyscrapers filled with the latest equipment and miraculous machines, but men’s souls will be primitive and brutish. Lord, the people now muster great armies who terrify and ravage and disintegrate men and things. But perhaps only those armies can restore men’s true richness to them: they will destroy everything and men, liberated from their earthly well-being, will turn to God again. And once they find him, they can reconstruct the spiritual dominion which today they are bent on destroying. Dear Lord, if this is really what’s happening, what can we do about it?”

  The Christ smiled. “The same thing the farmer does when the river floods his fields: try to save the seed. When the river goes down,
the land comes out again and the sun dries it. If the farmer has saved his seed, he can sow in in his field, which is even more fertile now that the lime-filled water of the river has soaked into it. And the seed will take root, and the fat golden spikes will give men bread, life and hope. The point is to save the seed, which is faith. Don Camillo, you have to help those who still have faith to keep it intact. The spiritual desert every day grows broader, every day new souls dry out because they’re abandoned by faith. Every day men of many words and no faith are destroying the spiritual heritage and faith of other people. Men of every culture and religion.”

  “Sir,” Don Camillo asked, “do you mean to say that the devil is so clever these days that he can dress as a priest?”

  “Don Camillo!” the Christ reproved him, smiling, “please, I just went through the agonies of the Vatican Council, do you want me to go through even more torture?”

  “Forgive me, sir,” Don Camillo apologized. “My head is full of wind. What can I do?”

  “You could sign the agreement for the fridge.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve gone in for electrical appliances too.”

  “Not I, Don Camillo, but that poor girl has.”

  Don Camillo went back to the rectory all confused. He still couldn’t believe he had heard the Christ right when he said “poor girl”. Anyway he signed the contract but it was quite a chore because, perhaps from the smoke from the fireplace, perhaps from the diabolical sulphur fumes Flora had left behind, his eyes were full of tears.

  Remembering a May Day Long Ago

  When Don Chichi had disappeared one day, Don Camillo had notified the Curia, but they had replied that they knew about it and he shouldn’t worry.

  Don Camillo had not worried; hardly, since what worried him was the little priests presence, not his absence. So he never gave the matter another thought, until four months later when he ran into a mountain priest whom he’d known in the seminary, who told him that Don Chichi, shortly after his disappearance, had been assigned to the tiny parish of Rughino, which was to have been Don Camillo’s punishment.