The Twenty Days of Turin

by Giorgio de Maria

  The scenery of De Maria’s stories matches his protagonists’ depersonalization. Even when the setting seems recognizable, there is always some clue that we’re in a treacherous mirror universe where the hand of Fate lurks to gaslight the unwary. “The Death at Missolonghi,” presented as a rambling letter from a bishop to a cardinal, carries an obviously false date, “the December of 1879.” This befits its unreliable narrative, which puts Byron at the mercy of an elderly Venetian shopkeeper he has cuckolded. We’re none too sure when The Twenty Days of Turin occurs, though its subtitle (“A Report from the End of the Century”) implies that it’s nearing the turn of the millennium. Our earliest clue that something has been displaced comes in the first chapter, where statues of Napoleon and Vincenzo Vela are described facing opposite ways from their real position in 1970s Turin.‡ Only the book’s first terror victim, addled by insomnia, seems to recall their correct setting: “I could swear the statues of Vincenzo Vela and Napoleon Bonaparte had swapped places. It isn’t Vela with his back turned on us, is it?” It should be Vela, at least in our reality, but this eludes the narrator, who later notices that two other statues have traded pedestals across town without explanation. “I thought that if I were a sculptor I would have made some corrections to the monument,” he says. “Yet I had to admit that I felt a touch out of place myself, even if I didn’t know enough to say what my rightful condition could be.”

  The entities behind the book’s carnage deserve some space of their own. Giorgio De Maria’s son Domenico has confirmed in conversation that his father, writing The Twenty Days of Turin, hinted that the novel in progress would concern terrorism. At the time, Italy was home to roughly a dozen militant political organizations, from Marxist “armed cells” to clandestine neofascist networks. At least four thousand cases of political violence—some higher estimates run to fourteen thousand—are thought to have occurred during the “Years of Lead,” leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded.

  The era’s insurgent groups were far from homogenous. Left-wing radicals such as the Red Brigades focused their violence on authority figures and avoided indiscriminate strikes on the public. Seeking popular legitimacy, they explained their reasons for each attack in lengthy communiqués. While their favorite assassination targets were police and judges, the Red Brigades gained lasting notoriety with the killing of former prime minister Aldo Moro. Their violent strategy ultimately backfired, losing the support of their blue-collar base. Neofascist groups, meanwhile, waged a far bloodier campaign. Bombing civilian crowds in squares and railway stations, they caused the highest death tolls of any attacks in Italy’s history since the Second World War. With few exceptions, they did not claim responsibility for these acts and—thanks to a now-infamous relationship with law enforcement and government officials—they went largely unpunished until the 1980s. Even since then, prosecution attempts have often ended in limbo. In the case of the 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing, which caused eight deaths and over a hundred injuries, Italian courts only managed to convict two surviving perpetrators in 2015.

  These neofascist terror groups suggest the most obvious human model for the “foul, small-minded deities” that threaten De Maria’s Turin. In keeping with their real-world counterparts, the entities remain forever untouchable, hiding in plain sight while authorities round up desperate, ill-fitting scapegoats. The narrator himself, when challenged, cannot find the nerve to name them aloud. Nor shall you hear the surprise from me. I’ll only say that the entities’ physical form evokes a very understandable Italian fear of the 1970s: that the past wasn’t as dead as it looked, not even in a quiet museum city. As Segre the attorney laments, “It’s very hard to rebuild anything when you haven’t yet severed the serpent’s head.”

  If De Maria had limited himself to writing a flat political allegory, The Twenty Days of Turin mightn’t have aged as well as it has. His entities, however, have an odd feature to their hostility that makes them uniquely discomforting today. Before the massacres, Giuffrida and Segre accidentally hear them conversing and making horrific howling noises with “the intonation of war cries.” Importantly, the creatures are not speaking face-to-face, but over the airwaves. Each voice reports what it sees from a blinkered, solitary position in Turin, and jealously tries to outdo the reports of its rivals. Even before they develop the capacity for speech, the nascent beings are driven by attention-seeking and one-­upmanship: “Every now and then, a single voice would stick out from the choir, a metallic-sounding voice that seemed to express a clear desire to push its way through, to overtake the others stuck in their common effort.” Segre has the impression that the howls, coming from “disparate directions,” were “relaying some kind of message,” but also “rising up against each other.”

  This hardly matches the old-fashioned terror of radical vanguards and synchronized cells, of insurgencies that counted on thousands of followers as a social base. More than anything, it resembles today’s “lone wolf” terrorism, where no-hopers are inspired to copy the massacres of other no-hopers in a rolling wave of despair. Replacing a chain of command, we have friendless deviants who prompt equally friendless imitators far away through a sort of perverse quantum entanglement; the atomized lead the atomized. Whether he worships Breivik or al-Baghdadi, the lone wolf terrorist is a figure in Plato’s Cave, called to violence by the currently trending shadows of other lone wolves. And like the Library users they slaughter, De Maria’s entities have a frustrated, pathetic quality that they cannot conceal in their bragging. Never having met in person, they scream threats at each other through the unearthly communication medium that binds them. Their terror attacks are less a coup d’état than a personal contest for status, a status they initially try to measure in virtual quarrels over which of them is more privileged. Their rage, in short, feels wholly contemporary.

  Finally, readers of a metaphysical bent may wonder what the entities precisely are. Is Giuffrida right in his theory that their voices represent society’s “unconscious mind venting itself”? Or could they—as the Millenarist characters believe—be twisted angels sent to punish mankind, seraphs who happen to speak Italian instead of Enochian?

  On its original cover, The Twenty Days of Turin reproduces a nineteenth-century lithograph by Félicien Rops titled Satan Sowing Tares. A towering figure creeps over a city, one hand outstretched, scattering his naked underlings from open fingers onto the scene below. Rops based the print on a parable in the Gospel of Matthew. In the story, Satan is an enemy who sows a farmer’s wheat field with tares—toxic weeds that look almost identical to the true crop. Asked by his servants how to combat the infestation, the farmer replies, “Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.” Jesus himself later reveals that the parable represents Judgment Day: “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one. The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.”

  It’s apocalyptically fitting, then, that De Maria’s entities schedule their carnage for July, the traditional wheat-gathering month on European calendars since the Middle Ages.

  The motif has a local precedent with which De Maria was likely familiar. In 1821, Joseph de Maistre, the foremost Catholic contrarian of Turinese history, argued that it was symmetry and proportionality, not lack of cruelty, that confirmed the hand of an intelligent Creator. “If the plague recurred each year during July,” he wrote, “this pretty cycle would be just as regular as the return of harvest time.”

  Like Maistre before him, De Maria imagined a Divine Providence that was ruthless, opaque and, viewed through limited human eyes, seemingly amoral. The Twenty Days of Turin offers none of the cozier fears expressed in the phrase “. . . or the terrorists win.” Nobody wins in De Maria’s nightmare, where the Cosmos itself has become terroris
tic. It’s open to doubt if even the Cosmos can reach its goals. The only safe choice available is not to pry too deeply. To paraphrase the novel’s most fearsome mortal character: Why insist on searching where human reason could find only shadows?

  But then, someone has to ignore such warnings, or else ghost stories wouldn’t be ghost stories.

  * English in the original text.

  † English in the original text.

  ‡ Turin’s Vincenzo Vela Monument, designed by Annibale Galateri in 1911, now stands at the T-junction where Corso Castelfidardo cuts across the northern tip of Corso Stati Uniti. A bronze statue shows the sculptor Vela inspecting his masterpiece, a stone image of the dying Napoleon in his chair. During the 1970s, Corso Castelfidardo, which had not yet been extended into its present T-junction, terminated at the monument, forming a sharp corner with Corso Stati Uniti. The Vela statue, then, would have faced away from any real house on Corso Castelfidardo. However, the novel’s plot implies the reasons for such a “mistake.” Before 1941, the statues of Vela and Napoleon stood outside the Gallery of Modern Art on Corso Galileo Ferraris—directly opposite the fictional location of Segre’s apartment. The house where De Maria hosted his 1950s salons lies two blocks away on the same street.

  The

  TWENTY

  DAYS of

  TURIN

  A Report from the End of

  the Century

  I.

  INSOMNIA

  HIS NAME, IN ITSELF, will mean close to nothing nowa­days to people caught up in very different business from our own, but we’ll give it regardless: Giovanni Bergesio. You’ll find no shortage of Bergesios in Turin, but I doubt that’s the reason his identity has gone unremembered. It’s simply the fate of all the names that have ever opened long lists of the dead, from natural disasters, from floods, from cholera outbreaks, from plagues . . .

  Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and that we hoped was not true; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane.

  So wrote Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year. Who those two Frenchmen were who died in 1664, we don’t know; it doesn’t interest us to know and we won’t quarrel with the English author for not being more specific. It’s hard indeed to place epidemics by full right into the category of “historic events,” as one does with wars. Whoever dies first in a war often enough has his name etched in history, and the same for anyone who has the rotten luck to die last, in the instant when hostility ceases. So what draws us to Bergesio, then, if the “Twenty Days of Turin” were neither a war nor a revolution, but, as it’s claimed, “a phenomenon of collective psychosis”—with much of that definition implying an epidemic?

  The newspapers had written about him on July the third, ten years ago, with much foresight, we needn’t say, regarding the things that would follow. It was added that several members of his family were still alive and that it was possible to talk to at least one of them.

  The dwelling where I now interviewed her was the same place where the victim had lived, and this aided our task of moving backward. The house can be found on Corso Castelfidardo, almost at the corner of Corso Vittorio, two places where the fury of those days was most unleashed. There to welcome me was Bergesio’s sister, fiftyish and unmarried, with a ceremonious lilt to her voice. She’d scarcely heard the reason for my visit before dashing to fling open every room and every crevice of the house, all to make it understood: “The scene is exactly like the last time he saw it, before heading out that night!” Maybe our museums are as carefully tended as that apartment was. There was a smothering overload of objects, of knickknacks, nineteenth-century paintings, stuffed birds . . . A hothouse of relics that would soon be covered in dust and cobwebs if tireless hands didn’t do their best to clean them nonstop. And Bergesio’s sister was the only one in the house to generate that superhuman effort!

  Just as she seemed ready to cast the most light on the past, with a flash in her eyes, she made me sit. I was struck by the fixity of her smile, the tautness of her neck ligaments, whenever she answered questions. She must have held beauty in her youth, a somewhat stiff beauty typical of certain English governesses, with a few features nonetheless that made her shape local beyond doubt. I surmised, after some broad questioning, that her life’s philosophy led her to gaze with strong sympathy toward those esoteric groups who regard the “Twenty Days of Turin” as part of a providential design, a dire warning signal from on high addressed to humanity. She too, like the Millenarists, was a vegetarian. In the earliest days of her youth she’d already managed to pluck, from the living voice of the old Guru Krishnamurti, words she could no longer forget: “The truth can be understood only by an impartial mind, capable of detachment and serene judgment, pure . . .” And she continued to quote, for my benefit, selected phrases from the venerable sage. She seemed to prefer one word above all the others: spirituality. She uttered it often, and each time it came out of her mouth—naturally, to lament the shortcomings of modern man!—it resounded across the room like a faithful musket shot. Never did such a gentle mist of saliva cleanse my face as during those declarations of faith in the spirit! I tried to ask her if she’d happened to attend the “Library” a few times back in the day, but she blushed so much that I thought it was sensible to give that topic a miss.

  Our spiritual, mature signorina seemed to strike up an elusive resistance when my questioning fell on her brother’s last days. She preferred to skim over his adult life. In its place, she lingered on the happy times of his childhood, a childhood lived out with his family in a fervent communion of playtime. “When he died, Giovanni was thirty-five and not very satisfied with his line of work,” she said suddenly in a hushed voice, tightening her lips and turning away her head. I had no time to get a foothold before she continued, forcefully, staring me in the eye, “Giovanni loved trees and flowers and nature! He had always loved them, since he was a boy!” It was like an injunction to believe whatever she was saying. I was starting to get used to the abrupt changes in her voice: sweet tones, almost velvety, when she drifted off into memories of the good old days, and an aggressive huskiness as she set out to impart me with several of her profoundest convictions. I still had a chance to get closer to the heart of the matter with a cautious encircling maneuver. I began to talk about myself, about my positively unexciting work. I told her I was working at a firm, that I loved playing the recorder and I’d written some books on municipal historiography. And then, little by little, I began to bring in the topic of insomnia.

  “Did Giovanni suffer from insomnia at that time, too?” I asked her. She denied it. She denied it flat-out. Her brother never suffered from insomnia one bit! No, there was never a time when he failed to be well rested! She put too much emphasis on that story, and I gathered that she was lying. But I gathered too that she would rather die than admit to the contrary. Her declared love for nature, for flowers, her veneration of her brother’s childhood; they all betrayed a stubborn desire to see “the beauty of things” at any cost.

  And it wasn’t hard for me to picture her manners a decade earlier, when the nightly city came alive with sleepwalking presences. I could imagine her “putting up a fight,” the tendons of her neck pinched tight in agony, her spasms as she grappled in a deadlock with the impossibility of sleep. The categorical imperative of “spirituality” erected to prohibit herself from poking her nose out the door—to avert the shame of associating with other women who stooped to walking outside in their skimpy nightclothes. A victory was attained at the cost of a hermetic seal against the outside world; and the past, which was now fossilized, triumphed. Maybe she even resembled her brother somehow. I tried asking her, and she admitted it. Yes, she took after him in her love for the fine arts, especially painting. She went to get me some of his late tempera works out of a drawer: paperboard sce
nes of woods, of gardens, of farms, of a rustic landscape under a mild sky spotted with frayed cloudlets—nothing that would expose an outlook less than optimistic about the world. I learned that Bergesio had been employed at a bank.

  “He didn’t write much? Didn’t leave a diary?” I asked. But the suspicion that my questions were edging once more toward the topic of the Library made her even more red-faced than before. I asked again if he’d said anything to her in the last days of his life—asked if they’d been on good terms. Now a tiny speck of truth came to the surface. Toward the end his behavior had become withdrawn, his sister confessed. It was all simple fatigue, of course, because he slept too little! No, one shouldn’t confuse his sleeplessness with that insomnia—the one all the newspapers kept mentioning! Giovanni was different from other people. He lost sleep because he wanted to live in the country, to be a farmer, to paint . . .

  “This was his real world here!” she exclaimed, flapping his tempera sketches.

  “And that was why he couldn’t sleep,” she added to bolster the point. Her head gave a series of insistent nods almost as fast as a woodpecker. The mention of insomnia had left barely enough rapport between us to continue the conversation. On her cheeks I spotted the glimmer of two little teardrops: she sniffed her nose and quickly wiped them away. I had to be ready to jump on this moment of weakness.

  “How he must have suffered, signorina, in those final days!” I urged, taking her hand. She turned away yet again, her head started to lurch back and forth and more tears sprang from her eyes.