Don Camillo’s Dilemma

by Giovanni Guareschi

  Another batch of reports from the front down there in the Little World of the Po Valley, where there is a running fight between the honest village priest and his deadly opponent, Peppone, the Communist mayor. And still the Good Lord strives to keep the peace in a war that keeps the whole world laughing.

  Penguin Books

  1799

  DON CAMILLO’S DILEMMA

  Giovanni Guareschi still lives at Parma, near the River Po, where he was born in 1909. His parents wished him to be a naval engineer; consequently he studied law, made a name as a sign-board painter, and, among other jobs, gave mandolin lessons. His father had a heavy black moustache under his nose: Giovanni grew one just like it. He still has it and is proud of it. He is not bald, has written eight books, and is five feet ten inches tall. “I also have a brother,” Guareschi says, adding “but I prefer not to discuss him. And I have a motorcycle with four cylinders, an automobile with six cylinders, and a wife and two children.”

  As a young man he drew cartoons for Bartoldo. When the war came he was arrested by the political police for howling in the streets all one night. In 1943 he was captured by the Germans at Alessandria and adopted the slogan: “I will not die even if they kill me.” Back in Italy after the war he became editor-in-chief of Candido at Milan. He has also scripted a film, People Like This.

  GIOVANNI GUARESCHI

  Don Camillo’s Dilemma

  Translated by Frances Frenaye

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Penguin Books Ltd. Harmondsworth,

  Middlesex, England

  Penguin Books Pty Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  First published by Gollancz 1954

  Published in Penguin Books 1962

  Reprinted 1964, 1966

  Copyright © Giovanni Guareschi, 1954

  Made and printed in Great Britain by

  C. Nicholls & Company Ltd

  Set in Monotype Baskerville

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Introduction

  Electioneering in the Home

  Back to 1922

  A Soul for Sale

  Beauty and the Beast

  A Country Priest’s Diary

  Revenge Is Sweet

  The Man without a Head

  The Stranger

  The Gold Rush

  The Whistle

  The Excommunicated Madonna

  The Procession

  Holiday Joys

  A Lesson in Tactics

  Peppone Has a Diplomatic Illness

  A Ball Bounces Back

  The Card Sharpers

  Hunger Strike

  Peppone Goes Back to School

  A Baby Conquers

  The Elephant Never Forgets

  The Best Medicine

  One Meeting after Another

  Hammering It in

  Don Camillo Returns

  Introduction

  How Don Camillo and Peppone were born and how they go on living

  I AM perpetually irritated by the virtue of the punctilious penpushers who have penetrated the most unsuspected places and lie in ambush wherever I go. They favour me with a bored and pitying glance when I rush in at the last minute before the dead-line with my typewritten pages and India-ink drawings.

  “Poor Guareschi! Just under the rope, as usual!” they are obviously thinking.

  At such times I am full of coffee, nicotine, bicarbonate of soda, and fatigue. My clothes are sticking to me because I haven’t taken them off for three days; I have dirty hands and stubble on my chin. My mouth is furry and my head, stomach, heart, and liver are all aching. A lock of unkempt hair is hanging down over my nose and black dots dance before my eyes.

  “Why do you always wait until the very last minute?” they ask me. “Why don’t you do your work little by little, while there is still plenty of time?”

  But if I had paid attention to the punctilious penpushers, I wouldn’t have got even as far as I am today.

  I remember distinctly the day of 23 December 1946. Because of Christmas, the work had to be in “ahead of time”, as the penpushers put it. At that time, beside editing the magazine Candido, I wrote stories for Oggi, another weekly put out by the same publisher. On 23 December, then, I was up to my ears in trouble. When evening came I had done my piece for Oggi and it had been set up by the printer, but the last page of Candido was still unfinished.

  “Closing up Candido!” shouted the copy boy.

  What was I to do? I lifted the piece out of Oggi, had it reset in larger type and put it into my own paper.

  “God’s will be done!” I exclaimed.

  And then, since there was another half hour before the deadline of Oggi, I wrote a hasty story to fill the gap.

  “God’s will be done!” I said again.

  And God must have willed exactly what proceeded to happen. For God is no punctilious penpusher. Because, if I had heeded all the good advice poured into my ear, Don Camillo, Peppone and all the other characters in this book would have perished on the day they were born, that 23 December 1946. For the very first story of the series was written for Oggi, and if it had appeared there, it would have gone the way of its predecessors, and no one would have heard of it again.

  But after it came out in Candido, I received so many letters from my two dozen subscribers that I wrote a second story about the big priest and the big Red mayor of a village in the Po River valley. Now, what with one joke following after another, I turned in three hours ago—late, to the disgust of the punctilious penpushers—the two hundredth instalment of the adventures of Don Camillo. And an hour later a letter arrived from France to announce the sale of eight hundred thousand copies of my first published volume, The Little World of Don Camillo.

  And so I am not in the least bit sorry to have put off until the morrow that which I could perfectly well have done the day or the month before. At times it saddens me to look over the things I have written, but I don’t suffer too awfully much because I can honestly say that I did my best not to write them. And I outdid myself in putting them off from day to day.

  There, my friends, is the story of how the priest and the mayor of a village in the Po River valley were born. Two hundred times I have pulled the strings and made them do the most extravagant things that anyone can imagine. So extravagant that often they are literally true. Over and over I complain: “Now that I’ve brought them into the world, what shall I do about them? Kill them off and call it a day?”

  It is not that I claim to be their “creator”; all I did was put words into their mouths. The river country of The Little World created them; I crossed their path, linked their arms with mine and made them run through the alphabet, from one end to another. In the last weeks of 1951, when the mighty river overran its banks and flooded the fields of the happy valley, readers from other countries sent me blankets and parcels of clothing marked “For the people of Don Camillo and Peppone”. Then, briefly, I imagined that instead of being an unimportant fool I was an important one.

  I gave all due explanation of the river valley and its little world in the preface to the first volume, and today I can subscribe to every word I said there. I don’t know what will be the fate of this third book of stories and I refuse to worry about it. I know that when I was a little boy I used to sit on the bank of the mighty river and say to myself: “Who knows? Perhaps when I’m grown up I’ll manage to get to the other side.�
� My greatest dream was to own a bicycle. Now I am forty-six years old and the bicycle is mine. Often I go to sit on the river bank where I sat as a boy. And as I chew a blade of grass I can’t help thinking: “After all, this side is the better.” I listen to the stories borne down the mighty river, and people say:

  “He grows more absurd every year!”

  Which isn’t true, because I was absurd from the very beginning. Thanks be to God.

  G.G.

  Electioneering in the Home

  PEPPONE had hardly gobbled down the last mouthful of his supper when, as usual, he started to jump up from the table and go out for the rest of the evening. But this time his wife didn’t let him get away.

  “I want to have a talk with you.”

  “I haven’t time,” said Peppone. “They’re waiting for me at headquarters.”

  “Let them wait! After all, you’re not married to them. For months we haven’t been able to exchange a word.”

  “Don’t harass me,” said Peppone, breathing hard. “You know I’m not going out for fun. Elections are coming. Just a few days more, and then here’s hoping we’ve seen the last of them for another five years.”

  “Good. But if we don’t discuss it now, when election day does come around, I’ll find myself with a ballot in my hand and not a thought in my head. What am I supposed to do? For whom should I vote?”

  “That’s the limit!” exclaimed Peppone. “You want me to tell you how to vote!”

  “Where should I go to ask? To the priest? You’re supposed to tell me what’s what.”

  “But things are exactly the way they were before.”

  “Then I vote again for you?”

  “No, when you voted for me, it was a local election. This is a nation-wide affair, the way it was in 1948.”

  “I see. Then I should vote for the Garibaldi ticket.”

  “No, silly. The Garibaldi ticket’s a thing of the past. Every party has a symbol of its own. Do you at least know the symbols?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then all you have to do is make an X over the symbol of the party you have chosen. I don’t see what else there is to explain. Nothing has changed.”

  She shook her head in perplexity.

  “Even now that he’s dead, is the Party just the same?”

  “Just the same, only more so!” shouted Peppone, bringing a fist down on the table. “Men may pass, but ideas are eternal!”

  “But this Malenkov doesn’t seem to me as powerful as Stalin. He looks more like a compromiser.”

  “Don’t listen to foolish gossip! Just give Malenkov a chance and you’ll see! He employs different tactics, but the goal is still the same.”

  “Then you think we’re still moving towards the proletarian revolution?”

  “It’s closer than ever!” Peppone declared. “Present tactics are designed to allay the enemy’s suspicions. Then, when the time comes, we’ll put one over.”

  She did not appear to be altogether convinced.

  “You say the situation’s the same as it was in 1948….”

  “Where Communism’s concerned, it’s a hundred per cent better. In 1948 Communism was terrific, and now it’s tremendous. Stalin may be dead, but his spirit marches on, at the head of the victorious armies of liberation.”

  “So it isn’t true that the Russians want peace, the way they say they do, is that it?”

  “Of course it’s true! They want peace, but as long as there are warmongers, peace is impossible. In order to obtain peace, the western warmongers must be eliminated. And that means America, the Vatican, big businessmen, priests, landowners, reactionaries, fascists, royalists, liberals, social-democrats, imperialists, nationalists, militarists and intellectuals. It will take an enormous blood-bath to cleanse the world of this medieval residue. We must destroy a rotten old world in order to build up one that’s healthy and new. Don’t listen to gossip, I tell you. The Garibaldi ticket has been replaced by one that bears our own symbol, but the situation is just what it was before. You can go right ahead, without any misgivings, and vote as you did in 1948.”

  “All right, Chief,” she said, not mentioning the fact that in 1948 she voted for the Christian Democrats.

  “Anyhow,” Peppone said as he got up, “I’m not imposing my choice upon you. You’re free to do as you please, and I shan’t even ask what is your decision. Even as a husband, I’m genuinely democratic.”

  “Oh, I’m not changing my mind,” she protested. “I chose once and for all, last time.”

  “Good,” said Peppone, starting towards the door. “And would you get my gun out of the drawer this evening so I can clean it when I come home? If we win, then we’re to start shooting. That’s orders.”

  After Peppone had gone, his wife stared for a long time at the door. Then she raised her eyes to heaven and prayed:

  “Lord, make them lose!”

  Meanwhile, as Peppone passed by the church on his way to the People’s Palace, he mumbled to himself:

  “Lord, please let us win. But without my wife’s vote, if you don’t mind!”

  Back to 1922

  IN the village and its surroundings there were quite a lot of people who started as early as February to lay aside money for the pre-Lenten Carnival. There were twelve rival clubs, five in the village and seven in the countryside, and every Saturday the members contributed part of their pay to the decoration of the floats which each one entered in the parade. In short, the brief Carnival season was a very important affair.

  The floats came into being bit by bit in farmyards scattered over the plain. Each club chose the farmyard most suitable for the purpose and with poles, sticks, reed mats and blinds, strips of canvas and tarred paper built a shed which housed the construction. Only members of the club were allowed to look in until the great day came. Then the shed was joyfully torn down and the float emerged, for all the world like a chick newly hatched from the shell. There were sizeable prizes to be won, and individual floats and costumed figures came from nearby townships and even from the city. For three whole days the village was crowded.

  The Carnival was a serious affair, not only because it drew so many people in a spending mood to the village, but also because it brought with it a complete truce to all political activities. For this reason Don Camillo never made it the butt of any of his sermons.

  “Lord,” he explained to Christ over the main altar, “we’ve come to a point where men behave themselves only when they’re silly. Let’s allow them their fun: Semel in anno licet insanire.”

  As for Mayor Peppone, he frowned upon the Carnival because it irritated him to see that men couldn’t pull together for any cause other than a frivolous one.

  “They’ll all come across with the money to decorate one of their stupid floats,” he protested. “But just try to put over something worth while, such as the People’s Revolution, and every last one of them is a skinflint.”

  Peppone spoke against the Carnival for six months of the year. For the other six months he worked overtime organizing the parade and helping to build his own club’s float. Incidentally, he put up considerable money. And if a local float failed to win the first prize, he took it as a personal insult.

  That year everything smiled upon the Carnival, because it came in a period of exceptionally fine weather and people came from far and wide to see it. Competing floats and wearers of fancy dress arrived from a widespread area, and no one had ever witnessed so long a parade, which as usual wound its way around the village three times. From his post in the grandstand Peppone looked down at the first round with general satisfaction, finding it worthy of the population gathered in such large numbers to acclaim it. As a result his deportment seemed to be modelled upon that of the Lord Mayor of London.

  When the parade came around for the second time he began to look more closely at the various entries in order to determine whether those of the village were likely to carry away the first prize, or at least the second, third, fourth, and fifth priz
es. In other words, he was transformed from Lord Mayor of London into mayor of his own town. And among the single competitors for a fancy-dress prize his eyes fell upon a Red Indian riding a motorcycle. After the fellow had gone by, he wondered exactly what had drawn his attention, for the costume had nothing extraordinary about it, being composed chiefly of a big cardboard nose and a band of chicken feathers around the head. He concluded that it must have reminded him of something from times gone by, and sure enough, it came to him in a flash that it was the poster figure that used to advertise “Indian Motorcycles”.

  During the third round Peppone ascertained that there was indeed a basis for his conclusion. This was the “Indian Motorcycle” figure, and no mistake about it. Only the figure wasn’t riding an “Indian” at all; he was astride an old BSA model. Where motorcycles and their engines were concerned, Peppone was like one of those musical quiz experts, who no sooner hear a few notes from a piece than they can tell you its title and composer. And there was a further reason why he could make no mistake: this particular motorcycle had been in his hands for repairs at least a hundred times. Only one question remained in Peppone’s mind: Who was riding in Indian costume on Dario Camoni’s old BSA?

  He left the grandstand, having momentarily lost all interest in the parade. This was a matter that had nothing to do with the mayoralty; it was of a strictly private character. He made his way with difficulty through the crowd, trying to keep up with the Indian, and during a brief pause, the latter turned his head and looked at him. Peppone’s doubts vanished. The rider of Dario Camoni’s old BSA was Dario Camoni. Even behind a cardboard mask, those were unmistakably his eyes.

  Peppone continued to follow the parade, step by step, and nothing in the world could have stopped his implacable Panzer pursuit. When the parade had gone around for the third time it drew up in the open space between the village and the river and disbanded. There was such an array of floats, lorries, and farm wagons that the Indian could not possibly escape. The only opening in the crowd was on to the Street that had led them away from the central square. He was aware that Peppone had been following him and did not hesitate to turn around in this direction, even at the risk of running down a pedestrian. But after he had gone a few yards an enormous float blocked the street and he had to dart into an alley on the right, with Peppone practically panting down his neck from behind.