I hadn’t seen Luca Borrello in four years but I had no trouble recognizing him; I say that with pride because he was almost unrecognizable. Borrello had gotten much skinnier and he seemed to have shaved his own head, leaving wide patches of gray, frizzy hair where he couldn’t reach or couldn’t be bothered. His hair seemed to follow a pattern set out by a barber who’d lost his mind, and his expression made me think he himself was the insane barber: his eyes had an otherworldly gleam, but his face, which had always been gaunt, was now like the mark left by an ax blow in a tree trunk, and that was what most frightened me. “It’s me, Luca,” I told him, taking him by the arm, but Borrello looked at me for a moment, then started coughing uncontrollably and slipped off toward the door. I wanted to believe that his silence and the fact that he hadn’t attacked me on sight were proof that our differences were in the past and that, somehow, Borrello understood—also, that he wasn’t going to kill Garassino after all. But I instantly grasped that Borrello was beyond all comprehension and forgiveness, in a territory that only he inhabited. So I knew there was no possibility of an understanding between us. And whether you can believe it or not, that made me happy and, at the same time, filled me with a paralyzing fear.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Lunch was uneventful, except for the fact that the Spaniards monopolized the entire conversation with a monologue about the Castilian landscape, its arid beauty, which to me was a contradiction in terms. Someone quoted Oswald Spengler, I don’t remember who, and someone else, I imagine a Spaniard, made a reference to José Ortega y Gasset. This is all to say that the lunch was quite impoverished from an intellectual standpoint. Someone referred to his vision of a future Europe characterized by a “humanism endowed with religiosity”—as absurd as it seems, I think those were his exact words, or close to them—and another maintained that such a project would not come to fruition until it was accepted that the beauty aspired to by literary works was a combination of meaning, transcendence, and a certain moral order. Flavia Morlacchi hastened to agree, spitting out some tiny bread crumbs slathered in saliva as she did so. To her right, elderly Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy had fallen asleep shortly after the first course, with her head tilted back onto the chair, snoring gently. To my left, Alceo Folicaldi, who had gone to war in Africa with Marinetti, was talking about a visit to a brothel filled with young African girls where an extraordinarily comic incident had occurred, but he couldn’t get through the story because he was laughing too hard. Mino Somenzi, to my right, took advantage of the uproar Folicaldi had provoked to talk about the bombings in the oil refineries of Ploești and the train junctions in Brașov and Pitești, in Romania, making sure that neither Ion Sân-Giorgiu nor the Germans, who were eating in silence, heard him. Someone broke a water pitcher, I think it was Enrico Cavacchioli. Beside me, Morlacchi furtively pinched her cheeks to give them some color, since cosmetics were no longer obtainable; she had a camera and tried to get a portrait of us, but no one wanted to pose for fear that the resulting photograph would be used as evidence against them in a not-so-distant future. I knew, because Morlacchi had confessed it to me on some other occasion, asking me for help I was unable to give her, that she hadn’t been able to get film for months. When she grew weary of attracting attention that way, Morlacchi took Mrs. Troubetzkoy and Cavacchioli back to their hotel in spite of their protests; alcohol had imbued them with a childish stubbornness. The author of the unforgettable ode to Palatine Hill, which began with the languid verse “Di questo Aprile d’un tempo lontano…” and which I’d almost completely forgotten, luckily, was dragging the two hoary relics toward the exit. They were both protesting and turning with broad hand gestures as if they wanted to grab on to some object to anchor themselves in the restaurant; seeing her, I thought she was looking fat and I told myself you can’t trust anyone who gains weight during a war, particularly the Second World War. Then they served that drink that had replaced coffee a couple of years earlier in Italy and we all pretended it was coffee and drank it; later “Cara al Sol” and “Giovinezza” were sung. “Cara al Sol” was sung two or three times, due to the Spaniards’ enthusiasm and as a redress, which the Germans approved with an indifference that is the best one can hope for from them, particularly when living in a country that borders theirs.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
At first there were three: Atilio Tessore, Oreste Calosso, and Romano Cataldi. They constituted, at least according to them, the vanguard of Futurist, and therefore fascist, literature in Umbria. None of them were from there, but they had all ended up in Perugia for various reasons, none of which were important. What I mean is, those reasons are considerably less important than the reason why they all left, only to end up meeting again in Pinerolo at that disrupted fascist writers’ conference.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
I don’t remember if I’ve told you about Romano Cataldi yet, and, actually, everything revolves around him, in a way. Before I tell you how we met him, I should mention some of the things we learned years later, which he revealed in bits and pieces and often only incompletely, without the slightest pride or enthusiasm—although they clearly thrilled us and made us proud to be his friends. He had lost his mother at the age of twelve and shortly afterward left home to live on the streets, in cellars, and on bales of hay between Cantiano and Foligno, to the east of Perugia. One day he stole some tomatoes, then a few potatoes, and then some apples that were still green; when he thought he’d perfected his methods, he tried to steal some eggs and got caught by a peasant farmer who beat him so bad he lost an eye; he kept stealing and spent fifteen days in jail after he got caught again. When he was released he went to Sassoferrato and got a job as an actor in a play but quit a few hours later over an argument with the theater owner, who reported him for theft when Cataldi fled in his Alpine hunter costume. The show was abruptly interrupted by one of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s volunteers abandoning the battle of Bezzecca to flee toward the outskirts of town along the Via Roma. Cataldi told us that he had no better clothes at the time and felt the Garibaldian uniform was appropriate pay for the minutes he’d been onstage, because, in his opinion, he was enormously talented as an actor. However, the theater owner, the local police, and the audience disagreed. That made Cataldi a repeat offender and he spent a month in jail, and after his release he was served with another six months for begging in Fondiglie, in an attempt to get back to Umbria. Upon his release he spent five months working on a farm on the outskirts of Gubbio learning to raise pigs—and being treated like one, from what he told us. Then the clapper at one of the local churches disappeared and Cataldi was sentenced to three years in jail despite not having any religious inclinations and no clapper being found in his possession. From what he told us, during those three years in jail he learned to read and started writing, first his memories, which he was afraid he would forget if he didn’t put them down on paper, particularly the years he’d spent with his mother, and later some short stories, tinged with a certain violence, which the prison authorities destroyed for indecency before his sentence was served. Which wasn’t serious, really, as he was able to reconstruct them from memory soon after, and they were the first things he read us when we met him, many years after all that and at a time when Cataldi—who had enlisted in the army after leaving prison, gone to Africa, done hard labor, worked the grape harvest, spent ninety days naked in a wooden cage beneath the Tunisian sun, and managed to return to Italy after deserting again and walking forty-nine kilometers with an iron rod through one infected leg before having it removed at the hospital in Sidi Bel Abbès; he then escaped from the nurses by holding a knife to his throat and threatening to take his own life, allowing him to board a ship setting sail from the Port of Oran—was one of the leaders of the young fascists in Perugia.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Cataldi had an obsession with counting the number of times the letter a appeared in the books h
e was reading. His literary opinions usually consisted of a statement such as “The Factory Owner by Romano Bilenchi has 78,342 a’s” without making clear in any way whether he’d liked the book or not. In fact, it is quite likely that his vowel counting had completely distracted him from its content, to the point that he was incapable of declaring a positive or negative opinion. On the other hand, I recall that Cataldi wanted to write like Bilenchi. He was very skilled at spelling entire sentences backward, after only a quick glance and without a single mistake. In his head, literature was ruled by symmetry, and it’s possible his decisions were as well, as he tended to make them in pairs, sometimes with a long time between the first and the second. One day, for example, a farmer’s house on the outskirts of Foligno burned down. On another occasion a pig farm was destroyed during the night on the outskirts of Gubbio. Those two incidents did not form a pair, even if their author—never found, by the way—was the same person, but rather each formed a pair with other incidents in the past.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Michele Garassino and I were studying Italian literature at university, in Perugia, at the time. My literary background, if at all relevant, is of no interest here; it’s much less interesting than Garassino’s, as his is, unfortunately, criminal. His father had an imports store in Arezzo and made a trip to Algiers that allowed Garassino to get his hands on a copy of the only published book of poetry by Arthur Maddow, an American who renounced his family’s money and lived in Sicily and Tunisia. Maddow published that book in 1931 and not, as is often said, in 1938. Garassino read Maddow’s poems with the help of a dictionary and thought—or this is what I believe he thought—that the fascination and enthusiasm provoked in us by certain works involve a transference, and the property of the works shifts from the creator’s hands to the reader’s; in other words, Garassino made Italian versions of the poems, learned them by heart, published them in the magazines within his reach, those small magazines that proliferated in places like Arezzo and Perugia, and read them publicly. He read them to Borrello and me and Oreste Calosso and Romano Cataldi so many times that we too ended up believing that, being his, they also belonged to us in some way. They were lovely, terrible poems that spoke of cities in Sicily and Tunisia and in the United States that Garassino had never seen; in the absence of firsthand information about all those places, we found added merit in those poems, which made us think that literature creates even when it pretends to imitate. Garassino was our best man, we thought at that time, and it’s possible Garassino thought so as well, in the same way it’s possible he still thinks so, years after a presumptuous young man studying in Rome discovered the books of Maddow and of Garassino and unmasked him, perhaps in the hope of creating the sort of scandal that nothing any of us—writers who were relevant in the 1930s—say or do could possibly provoke now. Garassino responded, I remember, by writing a long article in the Corriere della Sera that wasn’t exactly a defense against the accusation of plagiarism—which he, therefore, admitted to—but rather he maintained that everything, absolutely everything, is plagiarism, appropriation, starting with the very words we use. While not bad, his article wasn’t very original either: Garassino had more or less copied his statement from Bruno Giordano Sanzin’s 1931 defense against accusations that his poem dedicated to Umberto Boccioni, Modernolatria, was, actually, a slightly bulked-up plagiarism of some lines Boccioni had written in the margins of his painting The City Rises.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Actually, the story is more complex than that. Some time later, also in Corriere della Sera, Sanzin admitted, to everyone’s surprise, that he had enjoyed Garassino’s article very much, and he wondered if that was because it was so similar to a text by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which he had plagiarized, undiscovered, some years earlier as an experiment, with the consent of Marinetti himself. No one likes to lose, and it seems that plagiarism is invariably a losing game, except that its rules are different than they seem, and known only to a very few. Perhaps the sole innocent party in this story was Marinetti, with whom the chain of borrowing and theft began, but perhaps he too had plagiarized someone and his deception is yet to be discovered. In my opinion, no theft has occurred until you miss what’s been taken from you, and that almost never happens with texts. When Garassino plagiarized Maddow, he made us believe we had a genius among us, which led us to strive to match his level. Was that not a magnificent gift? And we were all children then, and that is exactly what children do: they appropriate what they like, or they break it.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
OK, when I stop laughing I’m going to tell you something about Atilio Tessore that he apparently didn’t mention: all of his work, all of him, is the result of the publication of the complete works of his father, Filippo Castrofiori. At fifty years old, in 1934, Castrofiori, who had up until then lived off of earnings from an unclear source—Castrofiori is a Jewish last name, I guess you know what I’m getting at—self-published the six thick volumes of his Complete Works, which none of those close to him knew he’d written, except his family. The first volume was devoted to his collected poetry; the second his prose, composed of two novels and an essay about a perpetual motion machine he’d invented; the third his plays; the fourth his correspondence with the primary European intellectuals of the century—Miguel de Unamuno, Hermann Graf Keyserling, Max Scheler, Oswald Spengler, Rabindranath Tagore, Charles Maurras, José Ortega y Gasset, those are the names that come to mind right now; the fifth was an opera libretto he’d written about the “anthropogeography” of Friedrich Ratzel; and the sixth gathered a selection of his private diaries. Castrofiori was surprisingly popular in the years following the publication of his works, and Tessore—who adopted a pseudonym in order to make it look as if he had no desire to profit from his father’s success, which he actually did as much as possible—took advantage of the circumstances to print a somewhat premature book of poems. It’s not that he didn’t have talent—actually, I think he does—but rather that his talent was encumbered by great anxiety about profiting from what his father had achieved and, at the same time, being judged on his own merits, which were significantly inferior to those of his prolific, somewhat disconcerting progenitor. Of course, that is something his own father had foreseen and hoped for: after the publication of his Complete Works, Castrofiori never published anything again, and devoted what remained of his life to promoting his son’s work among his friends and acquaintances. He didn’t ask for anything in exchange, as far as I know, but he crushed Tessore with his generosity and enthusiasm, which were those of someone who, in order to guarantee his family patrimony, gives his children a property completely disproportionate to their abilities, which they have to manage and multiply whether they want to or not: I think I’ve already mentioned that Castrofiori is a Jewish last name. He financed the performance of his son’s erotic play in a Roman theater in 1937, which got awful reviews, as well as the publication of his next two books, which his father insisted on writing the prologues for—without reading them, I imagine. He paid to have a lot of postcards printed up and mailed out, with his son’s face and an advertisement for his work on the back. Perhaps by then he understood that his son lacked a talent in keeping with his father’s ambitions and he set out to destroy him with massive exposure before he could bring down the family legacy, or perhaps he still believed in him and was supporting him gladly. It doesn’t matter which is true; what’s relevant here is that, if Atilio Tessore and his work are anything, they are merely offshoots of his father’s opus, even if they engulfed him unwittingly; but I’ll tell you all about that when I’ve finished laughing about his so-called moral integrity. Just give me a moment to catch my breath.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Tall and thin. Very tall and very thin, that’s the first thing I’d say about him. After that, I would say that I met him in medical school, where we were both students, and that he was an in
exhaustible source of words that one day, I don’t know how, just dried up, though that happened later. The likely date of our first meeting is March, or maybe April, 1931. The famous Futurist dinner at the restaurant Penna d’Oca had taken place in November of the previous year and Marinetti had already published his “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking,” which I’d been quite interested in, for some reason I can’t recall. Although, if you force the issue, I’d admit that I can remember why, that what interested me about Marinetti and the other Futurists was their vitality and sense of humor. In that moment I believed those both to be youthful characteristics, but now it seems obvious that youth tends to take itself terribly seriously and isn’t exactly what I’d call vital. In that era there was a magazine in Perugia called Lo Scarabeo d’Oro, whose entry into literary history is disconcerting to me because the magazine was bad, bordering on dreadful. It was run by a Perugian writer named Abelardo Castellani, who had enjoyed some limited but still significant success a few decades earlier: since then he’d been a professor of literature. He didn’t have much to teach, but he was adamant, and his influence, which I consider negative, is visible in all of us who studied under him. That negative influence is, of course, the only phenomenon that ever takes place in the teaching of literature. Castellani was a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe, which, according to some, is a symptom of intellectual immaturity. The range of his literary interests was considerably smaller than the range of opinions he held about alcoholic beverages: mostly positive opinions, though all preferences were put aside when any alcoholic beverage entered into his line of sight. Castellani wore a messy mustache that gave observers the impression they had caught him eating a rat, and when he drank, the rat drowned beneath his nose. Explaining how I met Borrello involves having to tell you these things. One day, despite having no interest in him, Castellani sent me to interview Marinetti, who was staying at a local hotel, and ask him to contribute to our magazine. I had read everything about the Futurists, and most of their books, including all of Marinetti’s. So, if I had to describe my emotions as I went to meet him—all, incidentally, quite puerile, and therefore perfect material for a novel, which is what I believe you’ve come here in search of: nervousness, expectation, a sense of opportunity, joy, worry—the description would go on too long. I will merely say that Marinetti received me in his room, which was dark. The room became darker and darker as the minutes passed. We had set the interview for 7:00 p.m., shortly before a dinner at which the city’s dignitaries were set to honor him, which obviously pleased Marinetti. As we spoke about his work, or he spoke, my pulse calmed, but it also grew harder for me to write in my notebook as I could scarcely see it. Marinetti seemed to have no problem with the scant light. He was pacing from one side of the room to the other, often stopping in the cone of light on the carpet beside the window in such a way that it illuminated his shoes and his trousers up to the knees. He had magnificent shoes. I mean magnificent Italian shoes, or just Italian shoes, if you prefer. I don’t remember much of what he told me, though it all must be somewhere in his manifestos. For some people, quoting themselves constantly is a sort of flirtatiousness. In Marinetti it was more of a necessity: on the one hand, all of his ideas were contained in his dozens of manifestos; on the other, it was hard for him to imagine anyone could have better ideas. He was like a theater impresario who’d been abandoned by his cast some time ago, so he’d decided to play all the roles himself in a drama that, of course, he himself had written. When he finished speaking he stared at me, as if I should applaud or attack him—often his audiences did the latter, frequently with eggs—so I set aside my notebook and asked him to contribute to Lo Scarabeo d’Oro. If I had to guess what Marinetti was feeling in that moment, I would say that, judging from his gestures, he felt relief. He sat down on the bed and wrote some words on a piece of paper he rested on the night table. He wrote as quickly as he spoke, and then stood up and said that his wife was waiting for him. We shook hands in the doorway, with what I believed to be a strange emanation brought on by a transfer of some sort, possibly of talent, but it was just my nervousness, my perception of my own, entirely imaginary, importance. When I got to the lobby I pulled out of my pocket the page Marinetti had given me. The lines were written on top of each other and the words made a jumble of ink. He’d folded it before the ink was dry and it was no longer possible to make out anything of what the great man had written. I turned around, about to ask him for another contribution, or for him to read the page to me, but just then I saw the writer and his wife being pulled from the hotel by the local dignitaries. A moment later, it was impossible to see where they’d gone.
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