* * *
—
During his only visit before his father’s suicide, after an afternoon in the hospital gardens, his father, who could still walk, decided he should get back to his room. “Let’s go along this path,” he said, pointing into the hedges and prickly plants that stood between them and the hospital’s main building. “What path?” asked Linden. His father, too proud to admit his error, too proud to admit any error, replied: “This one that hasn’t been invented yet,” and then he turned his back on his son to arduously make his way through the hedges and prickly plants, and Linden, understanding, comprehending everything for the first time in his life, began, in turn, finally, to walk by his side.
* * *
—
Some months after the death of the German activists in prison, Linden is assigned to create various profiles of local journalists. This time, he’s told, he won’t be trailing them but should go to a local library, give a false name, read newspaper collections, gather ideas. Linden does so, taking particular interest in one journalist whose articles stand out not for their rejection of Linden’s organization—that’s a feature of every, or almost every, article that mentions it—but rather for the (more humiliating and, were it to spread, more dangerous) idea that it is made up of common criminals and, therefore, no special laws should be created to judge its members. The idea, thinks Linden, is perverse: it feigns ignorance of the political nature of the crimes committed by the organization, their public manifestos, and the fact that the crimes are not the ends but rather the means, or one of the means, for the development of their political activity. Those articles intrigue Linden and leave him thinking, and for a second he believes he identifies with them, or rather identifies his contradictions with the contradictions of the author of those articles, who, of course, only pretends to have them, though that last part doesn’t matter. Days later, in the local press, he reads that this journalist he researched—one of the most virulently opposed to the organization, precisely the one who seemed to hold up a mirror to him—was shot in response to the murder of the German activists in jail. Linden finds the action absurd, and believes it places him at personal risk, as he was the one who requested the articles from libraries, with a false name but still with his face uncovered; dozens of people had to have seen him reading those articles and he could very possibly be remembered by the librarians who provided him with the material. Linden sees, also in the local press, photographs of four of the six members of his cell, whose real names he reads there for the first time, and this breaks down the atmosphere of intimacy and complicity that Linden and the other members had laboriously created over recent months—the months since the action against the old professor and, particularly, the first few months of the new year, when they had met regularly in the apartment in Mirafiori Nord, prompted by their perplexity and fear around the murder or suicide of the German terrorists—as if the cell were some sort of refuge instead of a place of utmost exposure. When he sees those photographs of his former comrades, Linden suddenly understands that he is in danger and wonders what to do; he decides to take a trip in order to find out everything about the man who saved his father’s life, and also to safeguard himself from finger pointing if the members of his cell are captured (all of them were, and in a relatively short period of time, Linden will recall years later, still perplexed), as well as to impose order on a confusing time that he believes to be definitively in the past, but also potentially in the future, if he finds, as he sets out to do, the remaining fascist writers and executes them the same way his organization did the old professor and the journalist, who is shot in mid-January and dies some twelve or thirteen days later, when Linden is already far from Turin. So Linden convinces himself that this is a private journey but also one taken in the name of his organization, which he doesn’t want to abandon despite the errors that deep down he admits took place. He gathers his things and carefully cleans his room to avoid leaving fingerprints there or on the shared furniture in the house, whose occupants observe him with indifference, and later he rendezvouses with a member of the cell he met a few months earlier at the Milan train station, who gives him a safe-conduct for a haven in Genoa. In the station’s bustling bar, which retains its former splendor and magnificence, though both are now seen as the manifestation of a dubious—at best—aesthetic taste, Pietro or Peter Linden is about to inform him of the possibility of initiating an action against fascist writers, but at the last moment he decides not to say anything. The other man tells him he’s left something for him in the bathroom of the bar, then shakes his hand and leaves, and Linden won’t see his face again until two years later, when the man is wounded and arrested by the police during a failed action. Linden will then recall what happened when he got up from the table and walked over to the bathroom and there, beneath one of the sinks, taped to the back, he found a brown paper bag that contained a fake identity, a bundle of lire notes, some handwritten instructions saying he should not be in Rome in March, and a loaded pistol, the first he had ever held in his hands.
* * *
—
Then the following things occur: Linden takes the train to Genoa, arrives at the local station, gets off the train, and decides he won’t go to the safe house; he takes a hotel room in the neighborhood near the station where two Ethiopians and an elderly married couple from Voltaggio are staying. The couple is in Genoa because the old man has to undergo knee surgery: at some point he shows Linden his knee, one morning when they’re both waiting in line for the bathroom, and it’s an oozing stump on a joint devastated by cancer, wounds and operations hastily performed on the front during wartime. A few days later the couple will disappear from the hotel, and Linden will ask the owner about them when he returns from the job the Ethiopians got him, unloading cargo boxes in the back room of a bar at the station; the owner will tell him they went back to Voltaggio after the man’s leg was amputated. Some time later, in Florence, Linden will meet Atilio Tessore, who will tell him that one day, during the war, he met a writer who lost a foot when accidentally crossing a minefield, and that the man wasn’t as bothered by the loss of his limb as he was by the loss of all his money and a manuscript he carried hidden in his boot; by then Linden will have already read Tessore and the other Futurists from the Perugia region—and he’d know that they were Futurists and not something else; or that they were Futurists and fascists, in that order—but he won’t have found even a single book by Luca Borrello. By that time, he’ll have finally decided to interview Espartaco Boyano, with a false name and identity, slipping into the small, dark apartment the former Futurist poet has at number 23 Via di Roma, near the Santa Maria in Porta Basilica, where he’ll have arrived after consulting the telephone directory (and before interviewing the others—Atilio Tessore in Florence, Michele Garassino in Genoa, as well as Oreste Calosso in Rome—against the orders of his organization) and by following the directions several different people had given him. And Linden will have understood something, but by then this would no longer be his story but the story of a handful of writers and a conference meant to celebrate a republic in its death throes that had possibly never even existed, and the story of two good men, one of whom will become his father, and of two murders. But, as I said, that story will be other people’s story, not Linden’s, and it should be told—he will tell it, many years later, in Bologna, under woeful conditions he’ll pretend to have forgotten—as something that didn’t happen to him at all; or, at least, as something that didn’t happen to him in his youth but rather shortly after it ended, after the deaths of the old professor and the journalist, deaths which he contributed to in no small measure. He didn’t know what to think about his responsibility in those events and the ones that followed them, trapped between his convictions and the incidents that resulted from them, which he would never be able to frankly explain to his own son, even when that son asked him to as he was setting out along his own path. Linden will often think about that in
the years to come, but he will also often think, without being able to explain why, about that man from Voltaggio who came to Genoa with his wife to have his leg amputated.
Ravenna,
Florence,
Genoa,
Rome
MARCH 1978
Interviews: Part II
The images should not show the crime in and of itself, but rather those who witnessed it.
CLAUDE LANZMANN, “What Is Memory?”
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
Ah, yes, the Fascist Writers’ Conference, sure: at one point we were calling it, among ourselves, the “Idealist Writers’ Conference”; but now I think that “Autistic Writers’ Conference,” or “Imbecilic,” or “Insane,” would have been a more appropriate name.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
The idea, apparently, was Ezra Pound’s. He convinced Fernando Mezzasoma that holding a conference of fascist writers would help mitigate the bad press that had plagued the Italian Social Republic since its founding, which is to say, since a fistful of German paratroopers rescued Mussolini so he could meet with Hitler, and Hitler, God only knows why, gave him a country. Actually, the problem with the Italian Social Republic wasn’t propaganda, but more of a political and military problem: a small number of men were trying to sustain a national project that was threatened from the south by the Allied advance; from the north by the German occupation; and domestically, by despondency and incompetence, by disaffection, the ineptitude of its leaders and by those bands of criminals who called themselves “partisans” and wrote history in such a way as to make their crimes look like heroic acts. So, actually, what was threatening the Italian Social Republic on all sides, including above and below—in other words, truly on all sides—was reality, which is always the worst threat. Despite that, the idea of holding a fascist writers’ conference wasn’t the worst idea one could have in those days and it was fairly easy to bring about because Pound regularly corresponded with many people within Italy and beyond who aligned themselves, to varying extents, with the regime. What’s more, we, the fascist writers, didn’t have much to do in those days, as the paper shortage and the international siege condemned us to writing with the hope of publishing only after the war had ended. Of course it was clear to most of us that, once the war ended, and the various sides thought it over, we probably wouldn’t be able to publish what we were writing, not to mention the quite plausible possibility that, once the war had ended, we would all be hanging from streetlamps on corners. So, I thought, why not attend a conference of fascist writers: a similar gathering held in Spain during the Civil War had produced some results, it seemed—of course those were “antifascist” writers, or so they said, although it’s obvious that their conference did more for them than they did for their republic, another argument for taking part in our little fascist get-together. So the authorities of the Social Republic said yes to old Ezra, which was actually the simplest way to get rid of him: I know what I’m talking about, and there is no one who feels more sympathy for those poor nurses in that hospital in D.C. where they locked him up: we should have done it long before, but the truth is we didn’t want to overwhelm our already meager medical staff. And Ezra accepted and put out a call for like-minded writers in a bimonthly newspaper called Il Popolo di Alessandria, which was where I first read about the conference in October 1944, although I obviously got more and more news of the event in the months following, from other writers and from Ezra himself, always so loquacious, and despite the fact that, I now realize, it would have been best, at least in retrospect, best and most convenient, if I’d never bought the newspaper that day.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Perhaps they’d made a list. But it’s hard to imagine who could’ve come up with it, besides Ezra Pound himself. And in that case, it’s hard to imagine Pound was aware of our existence. We were a handful of Italian writers scattered across a shrinking country that was never properly a country at all. They called it “The Republic of Salò,” but none of us ever used that name. For us it was simply the Social Republic, the remains of a shipwreck that, I now believe, we had a hand in provoking. Although, of course, the ship was a magnificent example of a very common kind of boat in the Italian naval fleet: beautiful and imposing when seen from the outside, but with engines that had broken down long ago, and holds filled with rats.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
“He often presents the appearance of a man trying to convey to a very deaf person the fact that the house is on fire,” someone declared about Ezra Pound. Who? T. S. Eliot, who knew him well and who always knew which house was burning and when.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
I’m not sure there was a list of Italian authors, but I recall there being one of sympathetic foreign authors who could possibly participate in the conference, and I helped draw it up myself, at a meeting in Turin with hapless Ottavio Zuliani. Where? I can’t even remember, although I haven’t forgotten the jacket Zuliani was wearing, which was too big on him, making me think, I don’t know why, that he’d taken it off a dead man. I may not have been better dressed, of course, but this isn’t the time to go into Italian style in 1944, which was basically dead men’s clothes worn by dead men, the former only separated from the latter by the thin film of a soap bubble that was always about to burst. One of the first names Zuliani and I mentioned was Richard Euringer, who had written an anti-Semitic play entitled The New Midas and had won the national prize for German Passion, whose subtitle was “A Hymn to Our Führer.” None of us had read it, of course, but we imagined his convictions would be in line with ours; later, however, Philipp Bouhler, who was the head of something vaguely called the “Party’s Control Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature,” rejected Euringer because he’d recently had problems with the censors. Bouhler announced that his office would pay the travel expenses for any German authors taking part in the conference, but in exchange he not only refused to invite Euringer and Hans Hagemeyer, possibly because of some sort of personal conflict, but also forced Hermann Burte on us. Burte had already taken part in a “European tour” of German writers in 1940 and was the author of a novel with the incredible title of Wiltfeber, the Eternal German. In any case, our list went through Bouhler’s hands and was returned to us with some modifications; the definitive list of Germans (who were, in the end, the only friends we had left, although they were somewhat awkward friends, the kind who put their feet up on your table and criticize what’s on your plate) was made up of Eberhard Möller, who had written plays and a novel about the Panama Canal, as well as reporting for the SS Propaganda Company; Hans Blunck; Erwin Kolbenheyer; Heinrich Zillich; and, of course, Hanns Johst, who had dedicated his Schlageter to Hitler. Some authors were simply never found, like the Austrian Josef Weinheber, who was an alcoholic in addition to being a great poet, and who committed suicide a month before the Red Army entered Berlin; Friedrich Bethge, who must have been somewhere writing chess problems for the soldiers’ newspaper; and Felix Hartlaub, who was working in the office charged with writing the war diaries of the German Army’s High Command and wasn’t allowed to take leave.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
It’s possible he wasn’t allowed to leave his office even temporarily because they really needed him there, although it was already obvious that the war diaries of the German High Command were a version of history that wouldn’t win out, just as the German Army wouldn’t, so it wasn’t necessary to be exhaustive: every entry in that diary was, actually, an argument in favor of condemning the army’s survivors. Though maybe, in light of everything Hartlaub had learned at the main Wehrmacht headquarters, he wasn’t authorized to leave so he couldn’t fall into enemy hands and possibly reveal relevant information; or perhaps it was the complete opposite, and Hartlaub’s bosses were reluctant to let him go out of fear that he would run off. Shortly
after the war we learned that, although seemingly a convinced National Socialist, Hartlaub was privately a dissident. That was revealed in his satirical drawings and the publication of his personal diary; unlike the texts he’d published during his relatively brief career, his private writing was dry, austere, harsh: the literature of the ruins, which constituted the primary line of German literature starting from the end of the war. Hartlaub had somehow learned to speak the new language, but he couldn’t profit from it because he died or disappeared, which is the same thing, in Berlin, in April 1945.
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 3
