Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

by Patricio Pron

  Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978

  I was taking a class that usually ran late and that night, once again, luckily, went overtime. It was taught by a bald, terribly shy teacher whose light eyes were always looking away, lost at the back of the classroom, on the exit door—which he insisted be closed at the start of each class—or on the floor of the room, or on its ceiling. He had a measly bit of fluff beneath his nose that danced each time he addressed us, which was all he did the whole class, because he didn’t allow questions or answer them. But where some saw arrogance there was really just shyness, and the consequences of a quite serious case of tuberculosis he’d suffered as a child. It had affected his spinal development, so he, whose name, by the way, was Luigi Bagiolini, had a defect that meant he stood at a seventy-five-degree angle. It was that stance, which many judged artificial, simply an affectation, that was most natural for Bagiolini and, as such, he gave his classes leaning forward, looking at the ceiling or the back of the room or the exit, and always seemed to be bowing before his own lectures, as if he were venerating himself or, better put, what he was saying, which was always or almost always disconcertingly and brutally brilliant beyond any doubt. Although, as I mentioned, had there been any doubts, they couldn’t have been raised as Bagiolini didn’t allow for them. On the other hand, that prohibition opened the door for abundant doubts, if not about the subjects he was teaching, then about Bagiolini himself. It was said, first of all, that he’d discovered that a large part of the posthumous poetry of Lucio Piccolo, from Capo d’Orlando, was written not by the poet but rather by a professor from Messina who, upon realizing Piccolo’s work wasn’t important enough to justify the publication of his complete works he’d been planning, had written poems in Piccolo’s style to round out the volume. Bagiolini had uncovered the ruse but chosen not to denounce him, and only mentioned it as a warning to his students when he taught Piccolo’s complete works. He would linger particularly on the poems written by the professor from Messina, which he considered the finest of the Sicilian poet’s oeuvre; in his opinion, Piccolo’s work could be derided as mediocre, or superficially mediocre, only when considered in its entirety or through each poem individually, as neither way was how Piccolo would have wanted his work to be read. Bagiolini insisted that Piccolo’s work was the result of the poet’s understanding that innovation in literature was, in the best-case scenario, incomprehensible to contemporary readers and acknowledged only when read in later times, by the readers of the period the writer had anticipated and in the context of other works that had emerged from it. To avoid alienating either his contemporary or his future audience, Bagiolini said, Piccolo had decided that his literary project should consist of a series of an indeterminate number of mediocre poems among which would appear fifteen or sixteen extraordinary poems, spaced out to avoid any hasty interpretation. They would be the best poems written by any author of his generation: poems, of course, that he had already written. His intent was that someone would find them among all the others and use them to reconstruct the book he’d originally conceived, without the mediocre poems placed around them as cushions so that lazy readers or those threatened by visionary literature could rest comfortably on the work. That book was published yet invisible, and of course only Bagiolini had been able to locate it. Incidentally, the poems written by the professor from Messina that completed Piccolo’s body of work were absolutely necessary because they abetted his project of obliterating, of hiding, the fifteen or sixteen good poems that had been written for readers of the future; the others were for the present, which is always brief, too brief in almost every case, and not particularly generous with writers.

  It was also said that Bagiolini had spent years working on the reconstruction, minute by minute, of the day in which Giacomo Leopardi had composed his poem “Brutus the Younger” in 1821. Bagiolini had already lost hope of finding—amid all the irrelevant details he’d located in Leopardi’s correspondence and personal diaries, and the statements of those who knew him, particularly those who visited him that day—an event of some importance that explained and justified the writing of the poem, which he considered a masterpiece (an opinion that, actually, was his alone among the experts on Leopardi’s work). He had found only minor, banal, entirely trifling events, which possibly even Leopardi had forgotten about by the next day, showing that the triviality of everyday life has no effect on literature and perhaps even stimulates it or turns out to be its necessary flip side. People also said that Professor Bagiolini endured his authoritarian and extremely violent wife, whom he’d married only for her money and who forced him to sing in a choir despite his hating music and, even worse, having no talent for it in the slightest.

  Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978

  The poems were extraordinary, they had such power and, in a sense, the rigor that Garassino’s first book, about Africa, had lacked. They also managed something only good poems do, which is to establish a completely particular time and space, a self-absorption, apart from where and when they are read, which in our case, I will remind you, was at a restaurant frequented by students, in Perugia near the city’s ancient walls. It was possibly the least appropriate place to read poetry and, therefore, the ideal spot to test what the poems could actually have achieved anywhere, including a brothel, a public library, or a church. Their immense quality, their power—which situated them, to put it one way, outside of this world—was extraordinary. In that sense, for us, reading those poems was flattering, as Garassino was one of us, and his personal triumph was, or should have been, ours as well, or at least something that belonged to him but we could use, or at least recognize as the product of something we had been part of, even if only as witnesses. I later understood that our reaction was typical of all those who know and spend a lot of time with a writer whose achievements become, through proximity, something that also belongs to them. It is precisely that which a writer most resists, because he considers his achievements his alone. Often they are nothing more than the results of his efforts—tedious, as anyone who’s attempted writing knows—to impose himself on his circumstances, which the writer generally finds irritating and stupid. Yet those circumstances are what the others feel so proud of because they constitute them. I would later understand that the last thing a writer wants is for his achievements to be shared and seen by others as a source of pride and with a certain sense of ownership, and that’s the reason why so many of a writer’s friendships end after (and in fact due to) a book’s publication. If they had truly understood what I wrote, the writer thinks, if they’d done the work of carefully reading what I wrote, then they would feel ashamed, they would realize that I did it to offend and ridicule them, that I wrote it behind their backs, against them and what they represent, so that they could never feel proud of themselves, so that they would never dare to believe a personal achievement in spite of them and to humiliate them was an achievement of their own. What I’m trying to say is that they were good poems and that, as we read them, all of us there with Garassino—who watched us with nervous expectation, and sometimes hid his face behind a glass of wine he was pretending to drink—searched for the words to best express our admiration and our astonishment. Until a certain surprise seeped into that admiration, followed by a paralyzing perplexity and later an insistent, even burning, desire for what we were reading to not be true. It was like in the nocturnal schisms of nightmares where you are aware you’re dreaming but yet, at the same time, immersed in fear, you believe everything that is happening. Boyano was the first to lift his gaze from the page and ask Garassino what he had done. Garassino—who perhaps at that moment felt relief at someone finally asking him that question—responded that he’d used what another man no longer had any use for, and that it was all literature; that through literature and in his poems—as they were now his—the dead man’s memory would be perpetuated, his work would be read, finally, and perhaps read the way he would have wished, as things belonging to the world of the living, u
ntarnished by the burden of premature death.

  Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978

  Because of Bagiolini’s class, and as I’d foreseen, I was late to the gathering at Il Letto Caldo. When I finally arrived, no one was there and the scandal had already died down, although it was still being discussed at the tables. A student I knew, who was aware of my friendship with the Perugian Futurists, told me everything and then showed me where the incident had occurred, and the bullet holes in the back wall, next to a photograph of a man with a penetrating gaze who was perhaps the owner’s father, a local politician, an actor, or some other figure of no consequence.

  Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978

  Garassino had taken Romano Cataldi’s texts and had broken them up into verses. He’d made literal poems out of some of them, merely transcribing the original texts into a poetic language that, admittedly, reflected a great talent for rhythm. But in other cases he had “broken” the texts into units that he’d shifted around, as if they were pieces of a puzzle that could be put together many different ways—by which I mean, generating new images each time or simply the same ones. In either case, there was talent in it and I had to admit, and I believe anyone would have to admit—meaning, anyone who could read the book outside of its context—that the poems, which were brilliant, were now Garassino’s poems. Perhaps that was what upset and hurt us more than the theft, which is simply one in a wide range of literary practices. The fact that Garassino had improved Cataldi’s texts, which, as he told us, he’d gotten by bribing the postcard vendors Borrello was living with so he could steal the box from his room. What is there to say when that happens? Probably a few things. But we couldn’t say them, not then nor, unfortunately, much later, which is when we should have, because just then Borrello came into the restaurant. I stood up and headed toward him on reflex, habit if you will, but he seemed not to see me. When he reached our table, he pulled a pistol from the back of his waistband and shot four or five times at Garassino, who was still sitting down, leaning against the restaurant’s rear wall. Let’s just say that what saved his life was what kept Borrello from dying somewhere in Africa or in the skirmishes of the Spanish Civil War: his terrible eyesight. After emptying the pistol, with no time and perhaps no desire to confirm whether or not he’d killed the man who had been his best friend and collaborator in the months prior, Borrello threw the latest issue of Artecrazia onto the table and left through the front door of the restaurant before anyone managed to catch him. By the time I stood up—we were all on the floor, which, obviously, wasn’t very heroic but was quite sensible—Borrello had disappeared and I didn’t yet know that I wouldn’t see him again for almost ten years. Nor that, when I did see him, he and I, in some sense, would be other people.

  Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978

  I’m not going to answer that, not because I’m offended by the question, which I understand perfectly, but because I think it is poorly formulated. What is truly important in literature? The authors or the texts? If you believe it’s the former, you have no reason to read and therefore no opinion to offer about literature: you live with your back to literature, in a world of shadows. On the other hand, if you believe that what’s important is the texts—which is exactly what the word literature comes to mean, or came to mean; God only knows what the authors of your generation think it means, if they’ve even bothered to pose the question, which I doubt, particularly as I made the mistake of trying to read them—then in that case you have nothing to reproach me for, because what I did was give those texts new life, a life unburdened by their author’s untimely death that instead would benefit from the existence of an author who could sign them, promote them, and, eventually, if necessary, defend them. That this author had my name is the least important part of it, although I will say, the fact that those texts did indeed bear my name was as beneficial to them as it was to me, or at least didn’t do me any serious harm. Besides, isn’t that how things are done? Don’t we spend our lives manufacturing books like pharmacists manufacture prescriptions, simply pouring things from one vessel into another? Don’t we all spend our lives braiding and unbraiding the same twine?

  Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978

  We were later able to reconstruct the hours prior to his abrupt appearance at Il Letto Caldo with the help of a map of the city and by asking some people who had seen him. Borrello left his house in the early afternoon—soon after waking up, it seems—and headed to the train station: like the rest of us, he had received Garassino’s announcement of his publication in Artecrazia and the celebration that night; unlike us, he couldn’t or didn’t want to wait for Garassino to give him a copy of the issue, and he bought it himself when the train from Rome arrived with the first copies of the day’s press. Perhaps he read the poems “by” Garassino in one of the bars at the station, but most likely he couldn’t resist reading them right there on the platform, because by the time he reached the bar, according to the waiter, Borrello was already beside himself. He ordered a coffee and a grappa and read or reread the poems; when the waiter brought his order, he asked for a second grappa. What was going through his head in that moment is hard to know and, in general, given that we’re talking about Borrello, impossible. He paid, went back to his house, and confronted the couple who sold postcards in front of the cathedral. The owner of the house, who was in the kitchen preparing beans for supper (which was the main food in that home, she insisted when we interviewed her, as if that were somehow proof of her decency), denied everything, to Borrello and again when we questioned her, but her oldest son—he had a scar covered with ointment that ran across his left shoulder blade, possibly the result of a fight with other vendors in front of the cathedral, nothing unusual in those days—admitted it. In other words, he admitted that his mother had sold the box of Cataldi’s texts to Garassino, and for a relatively small sum of money. We never found out why he’d confessed, whether it was to get rid of Borrello, to aggravate him, or to aggravate his mother, or perhaps for some other reason. I can think of one now that we didn’t consider at the time: that he’d had something against Garassino, whom he’d met on his periodic visits to the house and perhaps didn’t like for some reason or another. However, it’s obvious that Garassino could only have gotten the texts from Borrello, who never would have handed them over willingly and who, by the way, was seeming quite desperate in those days. As far as I know, Garassino never admitted to paying that woman for the box of Cataldi’s manuscripts, but, at least in private, he never denied the fact that those poems had “originally”—I think that was the expression he used—been what Cataldi had entrusted to Borrello before setting off for Africa. Nor did he offer any explanation as to how he could have acquired them in some other way apart from theft: Borrello never would have lent him the texts or allowed him to copy them. Those texts had an importance to Borrello that transcended their literary quality. They were memories of his dead friend, but also some sort of amulet guaranteeing him something, possibly luck or fortune; more likely, a purpose for his life, the conviction that he had something to do and he was doing it. I don’t know. In any case, what happened next, according to the son, was that he admitted they’d sold Cataldi’s texts to Garassino, at which point Borrello became furious and punted the pot where dinner was cooking (navy beans, insisted the woman). Then the son hit him and a neighbor soon joined in, and between the two of them they kicked Borrello out of the house, then went up into his attic room and threw his belongings out the window. He said that by the time they threw out the first few things Borrello was gone, he’d left without waiting to gather them up.

  Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978

  I don’t know about you, but it seems ignominious that it was postcard sellers who sold Cataldi’s texts to Garassino. What is a postcard, in any case? An object that, apart from what’s depicted on it, means nothing until it’s been received by its addressee. What I mean is that it’s a souvenir with no memory—
or just a provisional memory—behind it. In that sense, we saw Cataldi’s texts as diametrically opposed to the postcards those miserable wretches earned their living selling, when they weren’t committing crimes: the texts were the basis of a memory we’d already acquired. A rarity, a souvenir with a real memory behind it, as opposed to some potential, still incomplete one.

  Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978

  It seems he was drinking later somewhere; by the time he visited one of his fascio comrades and asked him for a revolver, Borrello was completely drunk, according to the man’s testimony. He also said that, of course, he gave him the pistol: that was how things were done in those days, then Borrello headed to our meeting point and shot Garassino. I don’t know what he did in the ten years following, so you’ll have to imagine it yourself, but perhaps, in order to do that, you need to know this: I didn’t see him again until the interrupted Fascist Writers’ Conference, and by that time, I thought, it was already too late to tell him, in case he didn’t know, that I hadn’t taken part in the theft of Cataldi’s texts. It was also too late to tell him that I wished—as I think the others, except for Garassino, did too—they’d never been stolen, for the sake of our friendship, for the sake of Cataldi, for the sake of our role as the vanguard of fascist literature in Umbria, but also out of a certain vision of what could be called—for lack of a more appropriate, less puerile term—“poetic justice.” Of course, at the conference, Borrello showed us that it wasn’t too late, at least not to redo what had been done badly, what was twisted and seemed beyond repair. Even today I still regret not having told him that I wasn’t what he’d thought, that at least among all the people attending that conference I wasn’t, although the truth is that I was. I only ceased to be—if you can name the date when you change your mind, or at least perceive you have—after that conference; more precisely, on its second day, when it ended, tacitly and precipitated by circumstances, without anyone lowering the stage curtains, or saying any words. Borrello was to blame for that ending and for my change of heart, obviously.