Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets
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Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Why did he head to the southwest instead of the southeast, by which I mean back to Umbria, where he may have still been living, or to the north, toward the Swiss border? Was it a mistake? In the north was freedom or something close to salvation, the same salvation sought by Benito Mussolini and many officials of the republic, who were arrested by irregular forces when they headed in that direction; toward the southwest were only Allied troops and, therefore, arrest and likely execution. So why did he walk those twenty or twenty-one kilometers from Pinerolo to the place where his body was found? How many hours did it take? Four? Five? Why did he walk at night along roads that are difficult even by day and that descend and rise along the silhouette of the mountains? Did he want to turn himself in? I doubt it. Borrello was the one out of all of us who had best understood that Futurism wasn’t simply an aesthetic, a posture in the literary scene, or inclusion in a clique, but a combative attitude toward all of life. Renouncing that attitude and the idea that life can be, to put it one way, “used” as a transformative tool, like a weapon, had led him to question everything, including his own identity. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s something I’ll never understand.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
I don’t need to make any effort to remember that conversation. In fact, I found it reproduced perfectly in those papers in that archive, in Salò. The report was signed with an initial, which matched—by the way—the one on most of the reports the secret police had had drawn up about the conference and which their secretaries hadn’t burned, perhaps because they ran out of time. But finding out who had written it wasn’t difficult and, as far as I was concerned, it could have been signed with its author’s real name, because the only people involved in that conversation, the one in front of that restaurant in Pinerolo, at Borrello’s request, were Borrello, Tessore, and me.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Why are we fascinated by monsters? Is it because we understand, since they have nothing to lose, having already been excluded from humankind and the sorts of commitments and loyalties humankind demands, that monsters speak the truth? Is it the intuitive conviction that monsters reveal our own monstrosity and in that way protect us from something worse? And what would that something worse be? Becoming them? Wouldn’t that in itself be the liberation promised by the monsters and the reason they fascinate us? Luca Borrello was a monster, but what is a monster anyway?
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
At this point I don’t remember the conversation as much as its transcription, which was a summary, so I also feel obliged to summarize. He didn’t want to discuss the past with us, said Borrello, but rather the immediate future and the types of problems it would pose to Futurist writers. He had taken us over to a streetlamp, which gave off a dim light that fell on us like a fine rain. When the war ends, he said, with the Italian defeat—which is to say, with the defeat of both the partisan rebels and the Italian authorities, he said, which surprised me—Futurism will be over, along with the regime that was so inseparably identified with it. On the other hand, he maintained while still coughing—a cough that made his entire body shake, I recall—Futurism had always been too revolutionary and anarchic to represent the art of the fascism in power and we hadn’t understood that. The end of fascism, he added, garnering some mild, purely formal objections from us, doesn’t have to be the end of Futurism. But in order for that to happen Futurism has to distance itself from fascism, it has to see fascism as its inflation and perversion, the perversion of the absolute faith in art to which we Futurists are committed. We needed to save ourselves and save the ideas of compassion and solidarity that had buoyed us, and also save the ideas of individualism and freedom that, contradictorily, we had also fostered, and which had given meaning to Futurism, and we had to do it before the fall of fascism dragged us down with it. “Fascism is made up of all fascists, not just Mussolini,” objected Tessore, “and we all do it in our own way. It will survive,” he added. Borrello looked at him as if he didn’t understand. “But will we survive?” he asked him. “And will what we believed in survive, or will individualistic art take over again?” If we didn’t want to see a return to that art, he added, we had to plot a peaceful, public conspiracy to save what could be saved. We had to witness the collapse of history without collapsing along with it. “What do you want to save?” I asked him. “Us,” he replied in a frenzied coughing fit. “There is no us,” replied Tessore, turning his back on him. “What we believed in,” Borrello insisted. “Are you afraid of dying?” Tessore asked him. Suddenly, it seemed that he was the one who was afraid, and I was too. Borrello closed his eyes, as if dazzled by the light, and then smiled. “It’s not death that worries me, but the deaths we carry inside and the holes they’ve left within us,” he replied. “We turned literature into politics and then we turned politics into crime,” he said, “and we have to save what can be saved, save our ideas before they are transformed into terror,” he added. Then he moved a little, outside of the streetlamp’s cone of light, and when I looked again he was no longer there, he was already gone.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
A monster, it seems clear to me, is someone who was born before their time, someone who forces us to look our period, which is not theirs, straight in the face, even if that glare dazzles, even if it permanently blinds us.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
“Don’t you see,” Macellaio said to Almirante when we were finally inside the car. “If he had been pushed he would’ve tried to hold on to the rocks and he would have fallen feetfirst. If they had tied his feet and hands so he couldn’t escape, or so he couldn’t try to grab on to the rocks, we would have found the ropes, and marks on his wrists and ankles. If they’d shot him, we would have found bullets in his body.” “What do you think happened then?” Almirante asked him, but Macellaio didn’t answer: he didn’t hear him or pretended not to.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
After Borrello’s death, when the conference dissolved—for lack of a better word, spontaneously—each of us kept searching. But the nature of the search changed after Borrello’s death. From that moment on it was no longer a search for death and the end. The Fascist Writers’ Conference, conceived as support but also as the manifestation and conclusion of a project that would bring together art and life, literature and politics, was prevailed over by death, I now think. Our later searches came out of changing plans, out of desperation, but also out of the desire to save something, not just ourselves. That something could be called by different names, but for me it was Borrello and Cataldi and what they both believed in and what I believed in too and, to be completely frank, I still believe in: the idea that literature is life, but improved, and that literature should strive to embody what is most alive.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
I believe Luca Borrello was a monster. What happens to monsters when they’ve been cornered, when they can no longer distract us from our monstrosity with their own?
Rome
MARCH 1978
Laws are against the exception, and I’m only interested in the exception.
FRANCIS PICABIA
Pietro or Peter Linden jumps when the tape recorder stops: Oreste Calosso has been silent for a few moments and Linden looks over at him. “What are you going to do now?” the man asks. Linden doesn’t respond; in fact, he doesn’t know, as he is still lost in the past and in Borrello’s story. He is aware that he was the one who insisted on getting involved despite having maintained and continuing to maintain that he and his generation should be concerned not with the past but with the future—and the reparation of the past in the future, as well as the task of preventing the past from repeating in the future, although the past never actually repeats itself. People often say past events will repeat themselves in the dearth of some sort of
intervention, but it never happens in the way one expects. Political totalitarianisms come back in the form of economic imperatives, and social oppression comes back through an invitation that, by its very nature, cannot be refused: to consumption and perhaps to commerce. Linden can’t think about it at that moment, while he is trying to decide how to respond to Calosso, but in the following moment he will theorize that his concern for the past imposed itself, somehow, when he went against all of his organization’s security measures and directives (though the organization isn’t aware of what he’s doing and likely never will be) and returned to that bookstore on the corner of Reggio and Pisa to find out what books the professor had ordered, and took them home. In them he read a name that rang a bell and then he visited some of the writers whose names appeared in that book and then again in the Italian phone books. At first he thought the ones he didn’t locate there were already dead or were unlisted or lived abroad, but those last two options now seemed unlikely. The writers he did visit (as a result of his personal investigation but also the tips and contacts offered by the writers themselves, which led him to Ravenna, Florence, Genoa, and Rome, as if they were his guide dogs, he thinks—despite him wanting to believe that it is obvious he is not the blind man in this story) all wanted to talk. That could be interpreted as a desire to clarify the story, a conviction that by telling everything they knew, or everything they claimed to know, they were doing justice to Borrello’s resolve to be a writer and to his desire to save his friends and colleagues long after they’d ceased to be either, or it could have been a decision designed to keep them off the list of suspects in his death. Another possibility, thinks Linden, is that the writers he interviewed, whose testimony readily creates a narrative (certain facts converged with others, so all it took was composing an ordered story, even if that story couldn’t be further from the essential truth, which was betrayed by forced logic), had simply wanted to talk about themselves, and had accepted his offer to do so despite not being the main focus of the conversation. Although, thinks Linden, it’s possible that they were the main subject of the conversation, in some sense, and that all the interviews were the result of Linden’s desire to talk about Borrello’s death coming up against their determination not to, or to do so only if in exchange they were able to talk about themselves, leading to a mutual satisfaction that followed the initial disappointment of, after years of writing, being interviewed not about themselves but about someone else, regardless of what they thought about that someone else. This revealed the futility of the sort of effort Michele Garassino had spoken to him about a few days earlier, when he told him—Linden now thinks he was being too honest, possibly in an attempt to hide some greater, more important dishonesty—that day after day he would sit in the same chair and imagine that finally someone would visit to interview him about his work. In preparation, he would rehearse his answers, which meant also rehearsing questions that, in a fit of overzealous scrupulousness, he tried to make as bad as the ones journalists usually ask when interviewing writers. “Yours are bad too, but at least they’re unexpected,” he said, adding, “despite that, I would prefer not to answer, although I invite you to ask me more: I’m going to pretend you don’t exist and that I’m the one inventing your questions. That way I won’t interrupt my routine: every evening, year after year, in this same chair, in front of this window. You see that window there? I’ve seen two people die in that house, two old people; I saw their children get rid of the remains of what had been their parents’ lives, paint the walls, and put the house on the market; and later I saw how the house was rented out and someone else died there too and the children of that someone got rid of their things and painted the house and it was for rent again and in all that time I haven’t run out of questions.” Pietro or Peter Linden doesn’t know what to do with that but he has the impression that, in some sense, the story told by Garassino and the other writers (who embody the type of thinking he’s always loathed, ever since he became acquainted with the meaning of the word “fascist,” a word he’d heard hundreds of times from his father and his father’s friends, mostly in a disdainful tone, though sometimes he’d also heard his father maintain that it was pernicious to judge all fascists equally, in a rare gesture of moderation, thinks Linden, who would listen with some surprise, just as his father’s friends did; those were friendships he’d made after the war, when he tried to set up a carpenter’s shop in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Milan, and before, in the years when he fought the fascists in the Piedmontese mountains), sometimes he thinks that story has provoked a series of schisms in his way of seeing things. He’s unable to predict the consequences of this, although it’s obvious that as a result the boundary between the fascists and a varied “us” (in which he and his organization are located probably to the farthest left of the spectrum) is blurred, and may never be clear. If he is correct, and the schism really exists, it manifests in various realms: in literature, where it now seems obvious to him that his way of thinking about books, organizing them around his political ideas or in some cases lack thereof, is mistaken; also in the idea that the fascists, including the fascist writers, made up a homogenous front, as well as in the idea that they make up one now. In Ravenna, in Florence, and in Genoa, Linden wondered if it was up to a revolutionary like him to finish off those fascists—he was armed, it wouldn’t have been hard to do—however, something always prevented him, and Linden thinks at that moment it could be that he’s not a murderer, that he lacks the skills if not the motivations of those who carry out such tasks within his organization. It’s also possible—but Linden doesn’t even consider this—that he’s a coward. Another possibility, however, is that Linden was unable to kill the people he found—Oreste Calosso, for example, who at that moment is observing him from the opposite side of a low table, without the slightest regret for having been and, in fact, continuing to be a fascist writer—because one of the schisms the story has provoked in his life and ideas now divorces a certain idea of justice from the conviction that justice can actually be carried out by individuals or even the organization. What do we call “justice”? Revenge? wonders Linden, but that question, which he’s been asking himself since the old professor’s killing, is impossible to answer. Some time later, in jail or after his release, Linden will read about people’s regrets about trying to achieve justice with violence, and he will recognize a face or two from his years in Turin, but he won’t know if what they regret is having resorted to violence or having believed that using it for political agitation could bring about change of some sort; in other words, if what they regret is having killed or having believed in the transformative potential of death; at that point, Linden hadn’t killed, but he would pay the price as if he had and, more importantly, he would remember the story of Borrello, whose death was, in some sense, transformative, and had the nature of political action, whether that was deliberate or involuntary. By that point, Linden would have gathered all the fragments of the story and imagined the parts that were missing and would conceive, finally, of the story as a crime, a view of the events that didn’t actually offer him any comfort. He would think about all that during the years in jail that he won’t mention, or barely, to his son, when he has one; by that time, Linden will have the impression that Borello’s story had all taken place in some distant, very distant, past, and in some sense that would be true, since it was more than thirty years earlier than now, when he sits before Calosso, in what he believes is the end of his investigation. On the other side of the table, the writer clears his throat and Linden thinks he’s about to say something, but he remains silent. Linden remembers what Calosso asked him a moment earlier, but prefers not to respond; he’d like to redirect the situation, in some sense, and make Calosso the main focus of the conversation, if he wasn’t already, right in that moment when he believes there is nothing more to say, but he can’t help asking him, even though the question seems superfluous: “So, do you believe that Borrello committed suicide?” Calosso has a big head suppo
rted by a strong neck and wide shoulders; when he speaks, his voice seems to emerge from his chest, or further down, from someplace near his solar plexus, from where a strength—which hadn’t seemed aggressive to Linden until that moment—emanates. But just in that instant, when Calosso tilts his head, observing him, in a gesture that could seem submissive or acquiescent in someone else, it makes Linden think that Calosso is stronger than his outer shell and could destroy him. Despite that, what Calosso says next isn’t violent, it doesn’t include the slightest hint of violence. “You see,” he says, “Borrello knew how to make people act in a certain way. In that sense, if you prefer to look at it this way, he knew how to manipulate people; but ‘manipulate’ isn’t exactly the right word, not when you look at its connotations, which are almost all negative. Borrello had learned to write using events as an alphabet, and in doing so he reached a more authentic and important fusion between art and life than the vanguards had. His death could be interpreted as a text to be deciphered, it’s true, but only because it was part of a life that aspired to be read as such. We knew this already but his death proved it, later, when we were all forced to ‘read’ that death somehow. Maybe he had an accident trying to reach France, there’s no way of knowing for sure, but that’s much less important than the perplexing state his death plunged us into, along with the feeling that an era was ending and that we had to do something to save ourselves from that end. If Borrello hadn’t known how to get people to act in one way or another, his death wouldn’t have had so many consequences; but obviously he did, and his death did, because that death seemed to form part of a body of work. Shortly after I met Borrello, he showed up one day with two versions of a lecture on literature as forgery that Marinetti had given a few days earlier in Rimini; both transcriptions had problems: the first and fourth paragraphs didn’t match and their contents were problematic: in the first version forgery was considered a literary practice and in the second, an execrable activity, more politics than literature. Determining which of the versions was the correct one, which hadn’t been corrupted by the transcription, meant analyzing the styles and holding their contents up to our own views—the views we held about what Marinetti could have said on the subject and, indirectly, what we ourselves thought about him—and arguing, most of all arguing. So that was all we did for weeks, until the subject got replaced by some other, possibly more relevant subject. After Borrello’s death, when we returned to Pinerolo, we were told we should go back to Milan immediately; the order was really just the confirmation of the premature end to the Fascist Writers’ Conference, which we all knew was coming. The Germans had provided some cars, and they were already waiting outside the hotel, blocking traffic on Pinerolo’s main street, which hadn’t been overwhelmed yet by the anguish of the end of the war, but which would succumb that very day with the news that the operations in Como had failed. The urgency and expectant anxiety at the Americans’ arrival would break the calm that still reigned in the city, in contrast with what was going on inside the hotel, where we were all hastily gathering up our things, myself included. Someone on the lower floors had started burning papers, possibly documents, and smoke was spreading through the hallways, particularly on the upper floors, which was where my room was located. Almirante had sent a young soldier to help me move my things to a car. There was fear in the soldier’s face, a stark fear that he may have hoped looked like military rigor but was clearly fear of what was happening in that hotel, of the screaming in the hallways, of the maneuvering of the woman in charge to hide all objects of value (presumably negligible value), of the writers who were rushing down the stairs with suitcases and without saying goodbye, anxious to leave that conference and return to Milan and then to their home countries, in the case of those who weren’t Italian, before Milan and those countries collapsed on top of them. The soldier was very handsome and looked as if he were sculpted in stone, like one of the many sculptures in those days that wavered between reproducing the classical ideal and its geometric abstraction while striving to represent bold, vigorous, deeply Italian masculinity; but in his face there was fear, something that was never shown in those statues, and the impression the fear gave was that the sculpture could collapse at any moment. I didn’t give him time to, however, and ordered him to follow me. ‘You see that box?’ I asked, opening up the broom closet at the end of the hallway. ‘Bring it down,’ I ordered, and the soldier’s shiver of terror made me realize something I hadn’t understood before, and it was the fact that the box looked like a coffin.” “What happened to the box with Borrello’s manuscripts?” asks Linden. Calosso points, smiling for the first time since the interview started. “It’s right there, at your feet.” Linden leans over to stroke it; he thinks he can tell it’s made of ash: the years have darkened the wood, and the pale rose that must have been its original color has shifted toward red; otherwise, the wood is in good shape. It seems significant to Linden that the box was always there, on the carpet, between the chairs where he and Calosso are sitting. He wants to say something more, or say it in a tone that doesn’t reveal any sort of childish anxiety, but all he can do is ask if he can open it. Calosso gestures with his hand, as if waving away an insect flitting in his face. “Before you do, I want you to know something else,” he answers. “In there you’ll find everything Borrello produced from his break with the Perugian fascist writers until his death in Pinerolo. Everything, except for an annotated index of his works I made shortly after the war (in April or May 1947, I can’t remember which), was written by and belongs to him. I’d like to think that the study of these works will solve the mystery of Borrello, but I’m afraid it only deepens and intensifies it. In the box you’ll find, among other things, some ten or twelve pages handwritten in pencil on both sides; it’s a short story, one of the few Borrello ever wrote. Its plot is the following: someone comes across two versions of a lecture on literature as forgery; it’s impossible to reliably determine which of the versions is correct; the first is a defense of the practice and the second deems it unbefitting; there are other divergences between the two texts, which are the subjects of study by a handful of young writers; the writers are young, and passionate about literature, each one of them is, to put it one way, willing to give his life for the others. The portrait offered of them is moving, it makes you think that literature and friendship, or a certain idea of friendship, always go together and always unfold in the same way, despite people imagining themselves unique, thinking that everything happens for the first time with them. At one point in the story, the action jumps ahead several years to when a surviving member of that group of young men meets the lecture’s author in a banal social situation; they chat about dozens of subjects, and find they have things in common (surprisingly, due to their age difference). Then, the young man, who is no longer that young, asks the other about his text on forgery and the other admits he has no idea what the young man is talking about. ‘I’ve never written a text on forgery,’ he says, so the young man, who, as I mentioned, isn’t really that young anymore, tells him the story of the two texts and their divergences, and then their supposed author (who actually isn’t, as we’ve seen) says that the differences between the two stances defended in the two texts, which the young man and his friends found extremely significant, are, actually, nonexistent, seen in perspective. He goes on to say that forgery is literature thrown at life, completely in and against life, as both versions maintain in different ways, and that, really, his friend had involved him in a story that had forgery not as a subject but rather as a process, showing that that friend understood how to write literature into life, how to make those two things into one. I believe there’s no need for me to tell you that Borrello’s story is a belated justification of his forgery of Marinetti’s supposed lecture, and that, as he has his literary copy of Futurism’s inventor say, the subject is not as important as the process, the trick that sustains it. I don’t suppose I have to tell you that the discussions between the young men in the story are the ones we had wh
en Borrello brought us the alleged texts by Marinetti. Maybe there’s a story here inside another story or a story reflected in another story, but that doesn’t matter, except in relation to the fact that, as one of his characters says, it was about writing literature into life, and Borrello learned how to do that. Why not think of his death as the final sentence of his book? Out of some misguided survival instinct? Borrello seems to have been interested only in the survival of ideas and their projection onto a hostile world. Hostile because those ideas revolved around ‘literature,’ which is supposedly removed from life; but Borrello’s life and death revealed that there is no life beyond literature.” When Calosso goes silent, Linden observes two things: night has fallen, there is no longer any light in the room, and the sounds of the elevator, which he hadn’t noticed until then, can be heard unusually vividly, as if the elevator is going up and down right in the middle of the room; he thinks he sees that Calosso has shrunk, as if emptied of some air he’d been holding in that whole time, and that the threatening energy emanating from him has dissipated. Linden has an intuition, or a certainty he prefers to disguise as an intuition, that has paralyzed him since he saw the box for the first time. Calosso stands up and walks over to the wall, where he flips a light switch, and Linden leans forward and sees it: his father’s signature, so recognizable to him, delicately engraved on one of the corners of the box. Calosso doesn’t sit back down, and Linden understands that the interview is over: he knows he’ll have to make up the rest, but he doesn’t know he’ll have plenty of time, an unthinkable amount of time when, in jail, he thinks about everything, and thinks long and hard about who could have turned him in to the authorities, telling himself, every time, that it must have been the man in front of him at that moment. “Can I open it?” he asks him. Calosso answers: “You know full well it’s yours: it has been since the first moment you stepped into this room. Now take it with you.”