Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets
Page 11
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Between October and December 1935 I only received one letter from Cataldi, from Aksum, the former Abyssinian capital. In it he spoke of the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, where, according to him, the Ark of the Covenant is located, and about the Ethiopian women he had seen in the city, whom he found very beautiful, unlike the men, whom he said were a cross between monkeys and rats: he didn’t understand how a race could have such different exponents, being the product of the union between the two. At the end of his letter, Cataldi suggested putting to a vote an idea he’d had for our archive of unrealized artistic actions. This was the idea: in order to clarify why Arthur Rimbaud had wanted to disappear in Africa, and what kind of experiences he’d had there, we should travel to Paris and be as bored as possible; then, of course, we had to travel to Africa, where we would also be bored, but at least we’d be together. Perhaps it was his way of saying he wished we were there, although, under normal circumstances, Cataldi would never have said, or even insinuated, something of that sort. Obviously, war isn’t a normal situation, though I think it will end up seeming that way before too long, and Cataldi was an orphan, which perhaps has some importance in relation to our group, the leading edge of fascist literature in Umbria, in central Italy. The idea wasn’t a good one, incidentally, but we never gave it a try either; it would have been included in our minutes and you should be able to read it there, if they exist, or still exist: another advantage of our methods.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
I never received any letters from Cataldi after he went to Ethiopia, to war. But I think Calosso got one, and Luca Borrello probably got one, or maybe two; he was the person closest to him in our group, as well as the guardian of his literary work while he was away. In exchange, Cataldi was going to experience the war that Borrello wanted to and was going to tell him the story of it upon his return and, possibly, before that, in his correspondence. Of course he never did return, as perhaps you already know.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
Very possibly, and without any of us knowing it until then, what united us was our admiration for Cataldi and his work. Between October and December 1935 we only met formally on one occasion, and it was a brief gathering. Calosso read us a letter Cataldi had written him, of which I can’t remember a thing, I don’t think. Someone said Marinetti had joined the African troops, which seemed to us a confirmation of Borrello’s determination and then Cataldi’s, but also a reproach to those who, like me, despite being a Futurist and having sung the praises of war and its cleansing properties and the machines that made it possible, hadn’t made a single attempt to experience it firsthand, not a single one.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Borrello and Garassino started to meet up shortly after, I believe; almost always in the room Borrello rented in the house of a Perugian family who lived off the sale of tourist postcards of the cathedral; they were very religious, but mostly they were poor.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Perhaps his relatives in Sansepolcro received some sort of official notice. We only learned that Cataldi had died when the list of Italian casualties was made public, at the end of that war. Because we’d won, meaning that Abyssinia was recovered for the Italians, not many wept for the dead, and there were even those who envied them. The next war would destroy all those illusions, but in 1936 wars were still pretty popular. Very possibly, Borrello envied them too. The news of Cataldi’s death took us all by surprise despite our not having received word from him since October or November 1935. However, it’s likely that Borrello, who, if I’m not mistaken, thought that Cataldi went to Africa in his place (if I can say that I ever understood what Borrello thought), had known ahead of time how things would end. But I’m convinced he didn’t know what would happen next.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Michele Garassino had to publish a new book because the previous one had gone to press in 1934, almost three years prior. The poems he’d published in the Futurist magazines during that period, which he’d read to us in their earliest versions and polished and worked on for months, hadn’t been well received: many of them repeated the images from his first book, and almost all of them had the same structure and showed the same influences. Some people maintain there are two types of writers: those who make different books, or books that aspire to be different, each time; and those who try to always write the same book, or rather a book that is the same yet better, that gets closer to the personal vision they want to make public. The first group are working out of the erroneous belief that a single individual existence—and particularly, the kind we writers usually lead, which tends to be brief and generally disappointing—can produce more than one vision of that existence, and that it’s possible for a writer to totally or partially change his ideas, his interests, and those filigrees we call “style.” The second group work out of the erroneous belief that the life of a writer is a repository that holds a single, Platonic ideal of a book that can be extracted from him, and that this book wouldn’t change with the vicissitudes of individual existence, which tend to produce, at least in those who aren’t writers, visible changes of interests and ideas. Those of us who were his friends simply assumed Garassino belonged to that second group of writers and never, not for even a single moment, did we ever have the slightest intention of thinking the opposite.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
That same year, 1936, Borrello tried to join the Italian detachment headed into combat on the nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War, however, he was rejected again because of poor eyesight.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Perhaps he felt some relief at being once more allowed to demonstrate his desire to know war firsthand while at the same time being exempted from actually doing so, or perhaps he already had that desire to lose himself, to disappear, that we would see later on, and he truly did want to go to war. While he unquestionably wanted to disappear, his desire to go to war seems doubtful, particularly considering that, ever since the official announcement of Cataldi’s death, and perhaps even earlier, Borrello had only one objective, which was organizing Cataldi’s work and delivering it for publication with the help of Garassino, who became his confidant and a familiar presence in the house where Borrello lived, the house of the postcard sellers. Going to war would have been perfectly reasonable given that we all aspired to conflate our lives and our work; it would have been, to put it one way, an obligation, but in that moment it seemed that Borrello chose the work, although his friend’s work rather than his own. Of course, we later understood that he’d actually chosen life, although not his own life either, but others’ lives. However, we didn’t know that yet, and wouldn’t know it for a few years.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Do you know what a monster is? Have you ever seen one? Do you know what happens to those who cross a monster’s path? Seeing a monster is as dangerous as being a monster yourself because seeing one and turning into one are the same thing, of that I can assure you.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Maybe it was something we owed Cataldi; I mean, something Borrello owed him, and perhaps Garassino as well, though, from what I understand, he hadn’t yet incurred his debt. Perhaps Borrello and Garassino grasped that they needed a martyr but didn’t yet know they would be the martyrs, or one of them would, or maybe all these interpretations are false, or maybe all of them are true each in their own way.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
They may have been preparing Cataldi’s book between May and August 1936, or perhaps earlier, since March or April. If I’m not mistaken, Garassino read us some texts during a dinner in June. I remember well how magnificent the texts were, absolutely extraordinary: they began timidly, but then unfolded to reach heights that none of us, or at lea
st not me, had ever thought Cataldi capable of. They were texts that transcended Futurism, that took its themes and led them in another, unexpected direction; they weren’t raucous, but they were surprising, and I remember that the one most surprised by them, or more precisely by the reaction they provoked in us, was Garassino. I remember that he read them to us and then collapsed in his chair, as if disappointed or exhausted, although it actually must have been exactly the opposite. Then he tried to light a cigarette, but his hands—I was beside him and saw it clearly—were trembling. Borrello, on the other side of the table, took the texts and put them away in a cardboard box. Perhaps he too assumed these were emotions provoked by the work of art and by the disappearance of a friend, because, when he could, after having carefully put away the texts, he placed a hand on Garassino’s shoulder and left it there for a while.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
In July and August I wasn’t in Perugia, I was at my parents’ home in Florence. I don’t have much to say about that except my father was also a writer, not sure if you’re aware. At the end of August I returned to Perugia and in September Borrello tried to kill Garassino; in July the box where Borrello stored the poems, maybe under his bed in the house of the Catholic stamp sellers who stationed themselves at the doors to the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo in Perugia, simply disappeared, and Borrello never found it again. Actually, he did find it, in a way, but only in September, and only, if you’ll allow me to phrase it this way, when it was already too late for almost everything, except for trying to commit a crime, if the crime hadn’t been committed earlier, with more lasting, permanent effects, and by someone who wasn’t Borrello.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Then we headed to the dining hall where the first dinner of the conference was to be held; it was in the center of the city, in a somber basement that the owner (who, if I remember correctly, was from Venice) had equipped with a long table that looked like a gangplank, and gas lamps. The precariousness of the setting clashed with the table’s solidity, which made me believe, once again, that there wasn’t a war going on out there and that the months of rationing and scarcity had been nothing more than my misapprehension. Before the food arrived, even before we’d had anything to drink, Henri Massis stood up and proposed a toast for closer ties between France and the Third Reich. The proposal seemed to catch the Germans by surprise (they stood up despite having empty glasses and feigned taking part in the imaginary toast), except for Johst, who merely nodded. Of course, ties between Germany and France couldn’t get any closer, as the former had been raping the latter for some time, so the attempted toast wasn’t met with much enthusiasm from anyone, not even Lucien Rebatet, who must have been thinking that if relations were any closer, France would be left gasping for air. Then Svend Fleuron tried to explain something about the tailoring of the gloves he was wearing, which were fairly inappropriate for the climate. If I remember correctly—and believe me, the story is hard to forget—the gloves had been made with Russian astrakhan lambskin that had been manipulated inside the sheep even before her offspring was born, so that, marinating in the placental juices, the leather took on a softness that—it can only be described this way—was not of this world. Because cadavers decomposed rapidly even in the harsh Russian winter, both had to be handled as quickly as possible, and the gloves had to be fitted onto their owner’s hands as soon as they were pulled out of the sheep: otherwise, they were discarded. When crafted this way they were so good that no modification was necessary, and the glove makers merely had to measure the hands of the future wearer, a task they devoted enormous attention to, in order to later produce—blindly, and guided only by their sense of touch, with just a few tiny instruments introduced into the sheep’s uterus through her vaginal canal often even before she was sacrificed, when the calf was already completely formed—the ordered gloves, extracting the leather using those tools when the lamb was still alive, which, according to experts in the field, gave it a particularly vibrant color. “Well,” concluded Fleuron, “we do something similar with our ideas and thoughts: we are their manufacturers and their murderers at the same time,” he said. Though for me the conclusion of his story pointed more toward the purity of an art that can only be achieved through crime. How did I react? I congratulated him on his gloves, of course.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
If you run with the pack, you don’t have to bark. But do wag your tail.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
I wasn’t in Perugia when I got the news, which was conveyed over the phone by the doorman of the house I lived in there, that Borrello had showed up and tried to force his way in. The doorman had kicked him out rudely, according to what he told me. In some sense, the news wasn’t a surprise: those kinds of things were common between us, especially when we were drinking, and Borrello was the one with the lowest alcohol tolerance. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the doorman had told me that he’d tried to come in through the window, but later I learned, from the others, that he’d also attempted to get into their homes. It seems he’d spent an entire night wandering through Perugia, making incomprehensible accusations, fueled by what we imagined was alcohol but was actually—and we only found this out later, when most of us had returned to Perugia, at the end of August—desperation and urgency, because Borrello had lost the box that held the texts Cataldi had given him, he had lost it or it had been stolen, he imagined (mistakenly), by me or someone else who was out of town. At the end of August, when we saw each other again at a sort of partial, secret gathering, without Garassino, who was still away, and without Borrello, who we couldn’t find despite various efforts, we decided that we would do something for him, that one by one we would open up our rooms so he could see we didn’t have what he was looking for, and that we would do so consecutively and in the course of one afternoon, to show him we weren’t hiding anything, we trusted him, and that we were hoping he would trust us as well, so he would know that the loss of Cataldi’s texts was also a loss for us.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Atilio Tessore and I were in agreement. We had to bribe the postcard sellers so they would let us into his room. It wasn’t hard, as they seemed used to providing certain services in exchange for modest sums of money, something we verified a few days later with more serious consequences for everyone. When we went into his room, we found Borrello lying in bed in a disastrous state, wearing clothes it didn’t seem he’d changed in several days. Tessore must have been unaccustomed to that sort of thing, and possibly surprised himself when he kicked Borrello in the back to check if he was alive. We watched him in horror, but then Borrello turned and asked us what we were doing there. Calosso explained everything, and it looked as if Borrello was smiling, actually, not because he was surprised by our behavior, our generosity if you prefer, but rather because of his absolute lack of surprise. Because (and I thought this later, some time later) Borrello in fact knew we were going to do that: allow him into our rooms to search them with a fine-tooth comb. And he knew (this I also understood later) he was going to refuse to do so. At some point we found ourselves all standing there, in his room, in front of the small window. Two pigeons had built a nest in the cornice of the building across the street and were gently, but regularly, cooing, in a way that I found irritating. Tessore, Borrello, Calosso, and I looked at each other. Actually, Borrello looked at the three of us, and told us that he appreciated it, but that it wasn’t necessary. That he already knew who had stolen Cataldi’s texts, and it was all his fault, that he had thought about it and now knew that it was all his fault. Then he turned around and asked us to go and leave him there alone.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Garassino returned to the city, if I remember correctly, on September 2. The day before he sent us a note saying that the publishing house of the magazine Artecrazia was going to publish his new volume of poems; he added that some o
f them would be featured in that week’s issue and that he’d brought us some of the first copies. He asked us to meet him in a restaurant called Il Letto Caldo, very close to the entrance of the city’s walls, at eight the following evening.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Il Letto Caldo was a small restaurant, but quite popular among the students at the University of Perugia. It had a cheerful atmosphere generally, but I don’t remember anything cheerful about that night. When Calosso and I arrived at the restaurant, Garassino was already settled at a table in the back and waved us over. As he did, I noticed that he was trembling slightly and the magazines he held shook as if rocked by the wind. There was an urgency in his gaze and his gestures, which I mistakenly interpreted as enthusiasm. “Where are the others?” he asked, looking over our heads. When we explained that Tessore was expected to arrive a bit late and that we hadn’t heard anything more from Borrello since the day of our visit, he seemed relieved. Then he held the magazines out to us. In them were his poems. One could say.