Comrade Don Camillo

by Giovanni Guareschi

  “Your bad joke has gone far enough,” he decreed.

  “Not a bit of it. This is only the beginning.”

  “You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?”

  “I not only expect it; I demand it.”

  “Now, Don Camillo—”

  “Call me Comrade Tarocci…” And he took a passport out of his pocket. “There it is, in black and white: ‘Camillo Tarocci linotypist’.”

  Peppone turned the passport over and over in his hands, looking at it disgustedly.

  “A false name, a false passport, false colours.”

  “No, Comrade the passport is genuine. It was issued to Camillo Tarocci, linotypist and I’m practically his spitting image. It you don’t believe me, just look at this.” And holding out a piece of paper, he explained: “Here you have a membership card of the Communist Party, issued to Camillo Tarocci. Everything’s authentic and in good order.” And before Peppone could interrupt him he went on: “There’s nothing to be surprised about. Some of the comrades aren’t what they seem. But since Tarocci is one of the star members of his cell, you have only to write and ask him for the names of half a dozen fellows particularly deserving to be taken along on your tour and then choose him instead. Then while he takes a fortnight’s country vacation I’ll tag along with you. I’ll have a good look at Russia, and when I come back I’ll tell him all about it.”

  It was all Peppone could do to keep his temper.

  “I don’t know or care whether there really is a hell,” he spluttered. “But if there is one, that’s where you’re going.”

  “Then we shall meet again in the next life, Comrade.”

  At this point Peppone’s defences broke down.

  “Father,” he said wearily, “why are you dead set on destroying me?”

  “Nobody’s dead set on destroying you, Comrade. My presence on your Russian tour isn’t going to affect the state of things in Russia. The good things will be good and the bad things will be bad whether I’m there or not. Why are you so nervous? Are you afraid it isn’t the workers’ paradise that your newspapers make it out to be?”

  Peppone shrugged his shoulders.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Don Camillo went on, “I’m hoping it isn’t as bad as our papers paint it.”

  “Very fine feelings!” exclaimed Peppone sarcastically. “How objective and disinterested you are!”

  “I’m not disinterested at all,” Don Camillo retorted. “It’s to my interest that the Russians should be happy. That way they’ll stay quietly at home and not go bother other people.”

  A week later Comrade Camillo Tarocci received the news that he had been chosen to go on the Russian tour. Carrying a cheap suitcase he reported at the Communist Party headquarters, along with the nine other tour members. A young Party official received the little group introduced to him by the Senator and issued terse parting instructions.

  “Comrades, you have a definite mission to perform. You are to keep your eyes and ears open, not only on your own behalf but also on behalf of your comrades at home. When you come back you must tell friends and foes alike about the technical accomplishments and peaceful spirit of the glorious Soviet Union.”

  While Peppone visibly paled with apprehension, Don Camillo asked permission to make a statement.

  “Comrade,” he said, “it’s hardly worthwhile to travel so far merely in order to come back and tell our friends something they already know and our foes something they refuse to admit. My idea is that our mission should be to convey to our Russian hosts the joyous and grateful greetings of the Italian people for their liberation from the threat of war.”

  “Of course, Comrade,” muttered the Party official; “that goes without saying.”

  He went away, sticking out his chest and looking slightly annoyed, and Peppone turned ferociously on Don Camillo.

  “When something goes without saying then it needn’t be said. Besides, you must speak in a way that shows some respect for the person to whom you are speaking. Obviously you don’t know who that was.”

  “Oh yes, I do,” Don Camillo imperturbably replied. “He’s a twenty-five-year-old young man, who was about ten when the war began. He never fought with us up in the mountains against the Germans and so he can’t possibly know what a terrible thing war is or how psychologically important is Comrade Khrushchev’s trip to America to forward the cause of peace and disarmament.”

  “Well spoken,” said Comrade Nanni Scamoggia, a hulking fellow from the proletarian Trastevere section of Rome, with a tough and devil-may-care air about him. “When there’s fighting to be done, you’ll never see one of these Party big shots on the scene.”

  “And when these bureaucrats start setting up a bureaucracy—” added Comrade Walter Rondella, a working-man from Milan. But before he could say any more Peppone interrupted.

  “We’re not here to hold a meeting. If we don’t step fast we’ll miss the train.”

  He walked briskly towards the door, shooting Don Camillo an atomic glance loaded with enough power to topple a skyscraper. But Don Camillo preserved the stony expression of a comrade who, whatever the cost, will not deviate a single inch from the Party line.

  On the train Peppone’s chief preoccupation was not to let the diabolical Comrade Camillo Tarocci out of his sight. He sat directly in front of him in order to block his way. But Don Camillo did not seem to be in a mood for making trouble. He took out of his pocket a book with a red jacket and a gold hammer and sickle stamped upon it and with an impenetrable expression on his face immersed himself in its perusal. At rare intervals he raised his eyes and looked out at the fields and villages gliding by the train. As he closed the book and started to put back in his pocket, Peppone remarked:

  “Must be good reading.”

  “The very best,” said Don Camillo. “It’s a collection of excerpts from Lenin.” And he added, handing it over for inspection: “Too bad it’s in French. But I can translate any part you’d like to hear.”

  “No thanks, Comrade,” said Peppone, closing the book and returning it to its owner.

  He looked cautiously around him and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that all his other travelling companions were either dozing or turning the pages of illustrated magazines. No one had noticed that in spite of the red jacket and the French title, Pensées de Lénine, the book was actually a Latin breviary.

  At the first stop several of the men got off the train. Comrade Scamoggia came back with a bottle of wine and Comrade Rondella with an extra of an evening newspaper, over which he was shaking his head disgustedly. On the front page there were pictures of Khrushchev’s last day in America and the usual crowd of smiling faces around him.

  “I don’t know what it is, but to see him smile in the company of those grinning mugs is more than I can stomach.”

  “Politics is a question of brains, not of feeling,” said Don Camillo. “The Soviet Union has been struggling all along to achieve peaceful co-existence. The capitalists who fostered the Cold War are the ones who have very little to smile about. The end of the cold war is a capitalist disaster.”

  But Rondella had all the obstinacy of the typical organized Milanese worker.

  “That’s all very well. But I have a perfect right to say that I hate capitalists and I’d rather be seen dead than caught smiling with them.”

  “You have a perfect right to say what you please. But don’t say it to us; say it to Khrushchev. By the time we get to Moscow he’ll be there. You can ask to see him and then say to his face: ‘Comrade Khrushchev, you’re on the wrong track’.”

  Don Camillo was as sly as the slyest Communist secret agent. Comrade Rondella turned pale.

  “Either you can’t or you won’t understand me,” he protested. “If I have to handle manure in order to fertilize a field, then I’ll handle it. But no one can force me to say that it has a good smell.”

  “Comrade,” said Don Camillo quietly, “you fought with the Partisans, I know. When you were
ordered into danger, what did you do?”

  “I went.”

  “And did you tell your comrades that you couldn’t stomach the idea of risking your life?”

  “Of course not. But what’s the connexion?”

  “War is war, Comrade, whether it’s hot or cold. And the man who’s fighting for a just cause can’t afford to have opinions of his own.”

  “Drop it, Comrade Rondella,” intervened Peppone. “We’re going to a country where you won’t run into any capitalists, that’s one thing sure.”

  “And it makes me feel considerably better,” admitted Rondella.

  “The thing I’m happiest about,” said Comrade Scamoggia, “is that for a whole fortnight we shan’t run into any priests.”

  Don Camillo shook his head.

  “I wouldn’t be too certain about that, Comrade. In the Soviet Union there’s freedom of religion.”

  “Freedom of religion? Ha! ha!” jeered Scamoggia.

  “Don’t laugh! The Soviet Union takes its freedom seriously.”

  “You mean there are priests there too? Does that filthy breed really defy extermination?”

  “It will die out of its own accord, when poverty and ignorance are gone,” put in Peppone. “Poverty and ignorance are meat and drink to those black crows.”

  But Don Camillo was colder and more severe than ever.

  “Comrade Senator, you know better than I that in the Soviet Union poverty and ignorance have been done away with already. If there are still priests, it can only be because they have some power which there is as yet no way to overcome.”

  “What have they got?” Scamoggia shouted. “Aren’t they made of flesh and blood, like ourselves?”

  “No!” shouted back Peppone. “They’re the dregs of the earth! They’re a band of cowards hypocrites, blackmailers, thieves and assassins! Even a poisonous snake will go out of his way to avoid a priest, for fear of being bitten.”

  “You’re going overboard, Comrade Senator,” said Don Camillo. “Your violence must be based on something personal. Tell me, did some priest do you dirt?”

  “The priest’s yet to be born that can do me dirt!” protested Peppone.

  “What about the priest that baptized you?”

  “I was only one day old!”

  “And the priest that married you?” Don Camillo insisted.

  “Don’t argue with him, Chief,” laughed Scamoggia. “This comrade is the dialectical, hair-splitting type; he’ll always have the last word.”

  And he added, turning to Don Camillo:

  “Comrade, you’re a man after my own heart! You know what you’re talking about and you hate the priests just as much as I do.”

  He poured wine into the paper cups and proposed a toast:

  “To the Soviet Union!”

  “Down with capitalists!” said Comrade Rondella.

  “Death to priests!” roared Peppone, looking Don Camillo straight in the eye.

  As Don Camillo raised his cup he gave Peppone an eloquent kick in the shins.

  It was midnight when the train reached the frontier. The moon was full, bathing in its light the villages perched among the mountains. Every now and then the travellers caught a glimpse of the plains below, with rivers running like ribbons across them and cities that were clusters of sparkling lights. Don Camillo stood at one of the corridor windows, puffing at his cigar butt and enjoying the sight. Peppone came to stand beside him, and after gazing at length out of the window heaved a deep sigh.

  “You can say what you like, but when a man is about to leave his country he suddenly appreciates it.”

  “Comrade, you’re indulging in outworn rhetoric and nationalism. Don’t forget that our country is the world.”

  “Well then, why do so many poor fools want to go to the moon?” Peppone asked without thinking.

  “Comrade, something distracted my attention, and I didn’t hear your question.”

  “It’s just as well you didn’t,” mumbled Peppone.

  Operation Rondella

  The tri-motor plane on which the little group embarked at an airport in East Germany was so noisy that no one could make his voice heard above the din. Comrade Don Camillo was forced to hold his tongue and Peppone enjoyed relative peace of mind. Nevertheless he remained alert, for Don Camillo was a dangerous character even when he was silent. For the moment he was confining his anti-Communist activities to reading the supposed excerpts from the works of Lenin, and Peppone had no cause for worry until the priest closed the book and smote his forehead with one hand as if he had just had a bright idea. But he quickly neutralized the effect of this alarming gesture by stroking his hair and then dusting off the lapels of his jacket.

  “Amen,” muttered Peppone with a deep sigh, which cleared his sputtering carburettor. The plane was gradually losing altitude and soon put down its wheels on Soviet soil.

  “Lord, my little church seems very far away!” Don Camillo thought as he went down the waiting steps.

  “But Heaven is very near,” the Lord reassured him.

  Don Camillo pulled himself together and resumed the role of Comrade Tarocci.

  “Comrade,” he said gravely to Peppone, “don’t you feel an urge to pick up a clod of this sacred earth and kiss it?”

  “Yes, and after that to ram it down your throat,” Peppone muttered between clenched teeth.

  Notice had been received of the visitors’ arrival, and a girl stepped forward to meet them, followed by a man in a flapping, faded raincoat.

  “Greetings, Comrades!” she said brightly. “I am Nadia Petrovna, your interpreter, and this is Yenka Oregov from the Government tourist bureau.”

  She spoke excellent Italian, and if it hadn’t been for her fixed stare and the severity of her tailored suit, she might have been a girl from our own part of the world.

  Peppone introduced himself and his companions, and after an orgy of handshaking the tourist-bureau official made a little speech welcoming them in the name of their Soviet brothers, co-fighters for the cause of freedom, social justice and peace. He was a stocky fellow, some forty years old, with a shaven head, a square jaw, thin lips, darting eyes and a bull neck. Standing there in the raincoat that came almost down to his ankles, he had the unmistakable air of a policeman. He spoke without moving the muscles of his face and with such wooden gestures that if his speech had not been translated to them they might have taken it for a prosecutor’s harangue rather than a welcome. Comrade Nadia Petrovna affected the same official stillness, but there was something definitely softer about her.

  Comrade Nanni Scamoggia was struck dumb, although she was by no means the first pretty girl he had seen in the course of his heartbreakers career. He was twenty-eight years old and every inch a Roman, with shiny, black, wavy hair, eyes that had a slightly perverse expression and long ashes, an ironical twist to his lips, broad shoulders, narrow hips and feet as small as a ballet dancer’s. He wore tight-fitting trousers, a red shirt and a black leather jacket, and a cigarette drooped out of one corner of his mouth. He was half tough, half dandy, quick to use his fists and accustomed to having his way with women.

  As the little group crossed the airfield, with Peppone, Comrade Oregov and Comrade Nadia Petrovna leading the way, Scamoggia regained his power of speech.

  “Comrade,” he said to Don Camillo, “how’s she for an atom bomb? Do you find her as easy on the eyes as I do?”

  “I do,” answered Don Camillo, mentally asking the Lord’s indulgence. “They don’t make girls any prettier than that one.”

  He spoke loudly, for the benefit of Comrade Rondella, who promptly rose to the bait.

  “She’s pretty enough,” he admitted, “but we’ve got just as pretty girls at home.”

  “At home they know how to dress,” said Don Camillo. “But put one of them into the clothes Comrade Petrovna is wearing and, she’d cut a very poor figure. This girl has real classical beauty; she’s not just one of those dolls you see in our cities. Especially in Milan, wher
e they’re born knowing all the answers.”

  “Nonsense, Comrade!” protested Rondella. “There are girls in Milan as pretty as you could hope to see.”

  “Cool off, Comrade,” intervened Scamoggia. “We’ve got pretty girls, all right, but this one has something special. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s there.”

  “It depends on the environment in which she was brought up. It’s environment that shapes the man, and also the woman. This is an elementary truth, but plenty of people don’t seem to understand it.”

  Comrade Rondella had another two cents’ worth to put in, but a sudden halt interrupted him.

  “Customs inspection,” announced Peppone, threading his way back among them. And he added, in Don Camillo’s ear:

  “I hope you aren’t carrying anything that will get us into hot water.”

  “Comrade,” said Don Camillo reassuringly, “I know the ways of the world.”

  The inspection was quickly over, because Peppone had made efficient preparations for it. Every member of the group had the same type of cheap suitcase and all the contents had identical weight. The only thing that gave any trouble was a bottle in the possession of Scamoggia. The customs inspector unscrewed the top, sniffed at the liquid inside and then handed it over to be sniffed by Comrade Petrovna.

  “He wants to know why you’re carrying a woman’s perfume,” she explained.

  “It isn’t a woman’s perfume,” Scamoggia told her. “It’s eau-de-Cologne for after shaving. What sort of lotion do they have around here? Gasoline?”

  She started to reply, but she could see that a fellow as tough-looking as this one wasn’t to be put in his place so easily. And so she contented herself with translating only the first part of his statement. The inspector muttered something unintelligible and put the bottle back in the suitcase.

  “Here they have pure alcohol,” she informed Scamoggia. “He says you can keep it for your own personal use, but you’re not to sell it.”

  After they had left the field Scamoggia stopped and reopened his suitcase.