Don Camillo’s Dilemma

by Giovanni Guareschi

  “‘Folini, who is a big, strapping fellow, took hold of the wrist, determined not to let it go, and at the same time he shouted for help. Various members of the family arrived upon the scene and one of his sons tied a rope around the intruder’s arm, thus making him a prisoner.

  “‘Because Folini’s house is in a lonely and isolated spot, they could not hope to arouse the village by giving the alarm. And for fear of falling into a trap set by the prisoner’s accomplices, they did not dare set foot outside until morning. They had captured one member of the gang and when he was turned over to the police he would probably supply the names of the others.

  “‘They ventured out at dawn and made their way cautiously towards the back of the house. But all they found was a headless body. The bandits had feared that the captured man might be compelled by torture to reveal their names, or that the knowledge of his name might lead to the discovery of the rest. And so, in order to cheat the law of any clue whatsoever, they had chopped off his head and carried it away.

  “‘Since nothing on the body permitted identification, I buried it by night in one corner of the cemetery and raised a stone over the grave with the inscription: 8 November 1752. Here lies a man without face or name.’”

  Don Camillo closed the old diary, looked down for a moment at the confusion written upon his hearers’ faces and concluded:

  “And so brethren, this terrible tale has cleared up a mystery. Under the black stone there sleeps a man without face or name. A terrible tale, indeed. But there is something far more terrible rampant among us at this very hour: the presence of a hundred headless men in this village of ours who are working night and day to bore a hole through the unguarded wall of our houses, steal the householders’ brains away and leave in their place the propagandistic stuffing of an extreme left-wing party, which for obvious reasons I shall not call by name….”

  * * *

  The story of the headless man made a great impression upon the village, and everyone felt an urge to go and look at the black stone. The old Folini house at Crocilone was still standing, but it served only as a barn and the foot of the wall on the side of the open fields was overgrown with weeds. Now these weeds were cut down and the hole mentioned in the story was exposed to view. All those who passed this way after dark pedalled their bicycles extra fast or accelerated their motorcycles because of the shiver that ran up and down their spines.

  Then came the November mists, and the river took on a dark and mysterious air. One evening, as she walked along the embankment road, on her way back from Castellina, old Signora Gabini met a man without a head. She ran all the rest of the way home and arrived in such a state of collapse that she had to be put to bed. She asked for the priest, and the fellow who went to the village after Don Camillo stopped for a drink in the arcade café and told the whole story. It spread like wildfire through the village, and when Don Camillo returned from his visit to Signora Gabini he found a small crowd of people waiting in the church square to hear what sort of devilry was in the air.

  “Sheer nonsense!” said Don Camillo. “If the old woman weren’t in such a bad way, it would be laughable.”

  As a matter of fact, she had told a tale that made very little sense.

  “Father! I saw him!”

  “Saw whom?”

  “The headless man, the one buried under the black stone. I came face to face with him, all of a sudden.”

  “Face to face? But if he didn’t have any head?…”

  “He didn’t have any head, that’s just it. He was riding slowly along on a bicycle…”

  Here Don Camillo couldn’t help smiling.

  “That’s a good one! How could he ride a bicycle if he died in 1752, before bicycles were invented?”

  “I don’t know,” she stuttered. “He must have learned how in the meantime. But I know it was him for sure, the man without a head.”

  Don Camillo’s retelling of this account proved to be highly amusing and the notion of the headless man’s having learned to ride a bicycle after his death was repeated from one house to another. For a couple of weeks, nothing out of the way happened, and then suddenly the man without a head reappeared. Giacomone, the boatman, met him shortly after dusk, on the path leading through the acacia grove. This time he was not on a bicycle, but on foot, a means of locomotion much more suitable to an eighteenth-century ghost. Giacomone himself told the story to Don Camillo.

  “You’ve been drinking too much, Giacomone,” was the priest’s comment.

  “I’ve sworn off for the last three years,” Giacomone replied. “And I’m not the sort to be easily scared. I’m just telling you what I saw with my own eyes: a man minus a head.”

  “Don’t you think he might have been a man with his jacket pulled up over his head in order to protect himself from the rain?”

  “I saw the stump of his neck, I tell you.”

  “You didn’t really see any such thing; you just fancy you did. Go back tomorrow to the exact place where you thought you saw him and you’ll find the branch or bush that gave you the illusion.”

  The next day Giacomone did go back, and some twenty other villagers with him. They located the exact spot of the encounter, but they saw no feature of the landscape which might have seemed to be a man without a head. But the headless man appeared a week later to a young man, and at this point people stopped wondering whether or not the apparitions were genuine. They asked, rather: “Why is the headless man among us? What is he after?” And they did not have to look far for an answer. The headless man was looking for his head. He wanted it to lie with the rest of his body, in consecrated ground. Only Don Camillo refused to offer any guess as to the motive which caused the headless man to wander about the river roads and embankment. “I don’t want to hear such foolishness,” he said to anyone who questioned him. But one day he was deeply disturbed and confided his trouble to the Christ above the altar.

  “Lord, since I’ve had this parish, I’ve never seen so many people come to church. Except for Peppone and his henchmen, the whole village has turned up, old and young, infirm and healthy.”

  “Well, aren’t you glad, Don Camillo?”

  “No, because they’re driven only by fear. And I don’t mean the fear of God, either. And it bothers me to see them in distress. I wish the nightmare could have an end.”

  Christ sighed.

  “Don Camillo, aren’t you one of these fear-stricken people yourself?”

  Don Camillo threw out his arms in protest.

  “Don Camillo doesn’t know what fear is!” he said proudly.

  “That’s very important, Don Camillo. Your fearlessness is sufficient to liberate the others from their fear.”

  Don Camillo felt better, but the apparitions of the headless man continued, and they were further complicated by the intervention of Peppone, who came up to him one day in the square and said in a voice loud enough to be heard on the other side of the river:

  “Father, I hear strange talk of a man without a head. Do you know anything about him?”

  “Not I,” said Don Camillo, feigning astonishment. “What’s it all about?”

  “It seems that a man without a head has been seen at night around the village.”

  “A man without a head? It must be someone looking for the People’s Palace in order to sign up with your party.”

  Peppone did not bat an eyelash.

  “Perhaps it’s a ghost cooked up in the rectory and sent out to scare people into hiding behind the skirts of the priest.”

  “No ghosts are cooked up in the rectory, either with or without a head,” retorted Don Camillo.

  “Oh, do you import them from America?”

  “Why should we import them, when your party manufactures the best headless ghosts to be found?”

  Peppone gave a mocking laugh.

  “It’s a known fact that the ghost is of your fabrication.”

  “It’s fabricated by diseased minds. It’s true that I told the story of the headless man
, but that’s history. Anyone can see the document for himself.”

  Don Camillo led the way to the rectory, with Peppone, Smilzo, Brusco, Bigio, and the other Red big shots following after. The book was still on the priest’s desk, and now he pointed it out to Peppone.

  “Look up 8 November 1752, and read what you can find there.”

  Peppone leafed through the diary until he came to the passage in question. He read it twice through and then handed the book to the others.

  “If you have any doubts as to the authenticity of the document you’re free to submit it to any expert you please for study. My only fault is not to have foreseen that a two-hundred-year-old story would work so dangerously upon people’s imaginations.”

  Bigio nodded.

  “So there’s some truth to the story of the headless man, after all,” he mumbled.

  “The truth is just what’s set down in that diary,” said Don Camillo. “All the rest is reckless imagination.”

  Peppone and his henchmen went thoughtfully away. That same evening two more villagers ran into the headless man, and the next day a delegation of mothers came to Don Camillo.

  “Father, you must do something,” they told him. “You must bless the grave marked by the black stone or say a mass for the repose of the occupant’s tormented soul.”

  “There’s no tormented soul,” said Don Camillo firmly. “There are only your benighted imaginings, and I don’t want to bolster them by appearing to take them seriously.”

  “We’ll go to the bishop!” the women shouted.

  “Go where you please. But no one can compel me to believe in ghosts!”

  The nightmare became more and more of a menace. Dozens of people had seen the headless man and even the most hardheaded of the villagers were tainted with the contagion of fear. Don Camillo finally resolved to do something about it. Late one night, after everyone had gone to bed he knocked at Peppone’s door.

  “I’ve been called to the bedside of a dying man. It’s too far for me to go by bicycle. Will you take me in your car?” It was pouring rain, and this request seemed logical enough. Peppone took out the car which served by day as a public bus.

  “Just drive me by the rectory first,” said Don Camillo.

  Once they were there he got out and insisted that Peppone come inside.

  “I’ve got to talk with you,” he explained once they were in his study.

  “And was it necessary to put up such a show?”

  “Yes, and this isn’t the end of it, either. The whole village is going mad and those of us with our wits still about us must do something to dissipate this terror. What I am about to propose isn’t honest, but I assume full responsibility for it before God and man. We must pretend to have found a skull. We’ll decide together on the most appropriate place, and I’ll bury it there, together with half of an eighteenth-century coin. The other half, of course, will go under the black stone. Then you, as mayor, will order some digging in the place where we have left the skull. Is that clear?”

  “It seems rather gruesome to me,” Peppone stammered, with perspiration breaking out on his forehead.

  “It’s more terrible to see the growth of a collective frenzy among our people. We must drive out one fear with another. Now, let’s get down to details.”

  It was two o’clock in the morning when Peppone went out to his car. Almost immediately he began cursing.

  “What’s the matter?” called Don Camillo from the door.

  “The battery must be run down; it won’t start.”

  “Leave it here and come back tomorrow morning,” said Don Camillo. “I’ll walk home with you. Getting wet doesn’t bother me.”

  They had walked some distance along the road skirting the village when all of a sudden Peppone halted and gripped Don Camillo’s arm. There walking ahead of them was the headless man. A flash of lightning allowed them to make him out quite clearly. He walked slowly on, and Peppone and Don Camillo followed. At a certain point he took a narrow road leading towards the river, and stopped under an old oak tree. Don Camillo and Peppone stopped too, and once more they saw his figure in a flash of lightning. A third flash followed, and almost simultaneously a blast of thunder. The lightning had struck the hollow oak and levelled it to the ground. And the headless man had disappeared.

  Don Camillo found himself curled up in bed without the slightest idea of how he had got there. They awakened him early the next morning and dragged him outside. Half the village was gathered around the fallen oak and amid the uptorn roots there shone a white skull. No one had any doubt whatsoever. The skull belonged to the man without a head, and the way it had appeared proved it. That same morning they buried it under the black stone, and everyone knew for certain that the nightmare was over. Don Camillo went home in a daze and stopped to kneel before the altar.

  “Lord,” he stammered, “thank you for having punished my presumption. Now I know what it is to be afraid.”

  “Have you taken up a belief in headless ghosts, Don Camillo?”

  “No,” the priest replied. “But for a brief moment last night, my mind was invaded by the collective fear.”

  “That’s practically a scientific explanation,” Christ murmured.

  “It’s just a way of covering up my shame,” Don Camillo said humbly.

  Anyhow, the headless man acquired a head. Was it rightly his, or no? The main thing is that it pacified him and he no longer inflamed the popular imagination. And the great rolling river quietly carried one more story, like a dead leaf down to the sea.

  The Stranger

  THE dilapidated little car drove slowly around the village square, skirting the arcades, and came to a stop in front of the draper’s. A thin, almost distinguished looking man about forty-five years old, got out. His left arm seemed to be glued to his side, all the way down to the elbow, and this detail contributed to the definite picture his appearance left in the mind of an onlooker. He took a big leather case out of the car and strode decisively into the draper’s shop. The draper didn’t need to look at the calling-card held out by the visitor to know what he was after.

  “I’m overstocked,” he explained. “Business has been slow for some time, and the floods gave it a knockout blow.”

  The stranger opened his case and showed his samples. The material was very fine, and the draper couldn’t help eyeing it with interest.

  “I can’t buy a thing just now,” he said finally. “Try coming back in the spring. I can’t make any promises, but I hope we can do some business together.”

  The salesman thanked him politely, asked if he might jot down the name and address, put his samples back in the case and returned to the car, which sputtered some twenty yards down the street and then stopped, obviously because there was something drastically wrong with the engine. Luckily for the stranger, Peppone’s workshop was only fifty yards farther on, and he was able to cover this distance fairly fast in spite of the fact that he had to get out and push the car. When Peppone heard the blast of a horn, he came promptly to the door.

  “Hello there,” said the stranger. “I’m having a little trouble. Can you see what it’s all about?”

  Peppone had shuddered when he heard the stranger’s voice and now he said rudely:

  “Not now. I’m too busy.”

  “Well, I can’t get it started, so I’ll just leave it here. Have a look at it as soon as you can, will you?” And he walked away, while Peppone stared after him from the door.

  “As soon as I can, eh? No, as soon as I feel like it!”

  He went back to his lathe in the workshop, but try as he would to put the matter behind him, he couldn’t get the stranger off his mind. No matter how often he told himself that the similarity was a matter of pure coincidence, the more he was persuaded that it wasn’t coincidence at all. Finally he interrupted his work, threw open the wide glass-paned door of the workshop and pushed in the car. Shutting the door behind him, he searched the car’s dashboard compartment for its registration papers. H
e took a quick look at them and quickly put them back where he had found them. No, it wasn’t a coincidence at all. He had a wild impulse to kick the car to pieces, but on second thought he decided to repair it. The roar that burst from the engine when he pulled out the self-starter caused him to chortle with joy.

  “I’d like to see his face when he finds out what a mess it’s in!” he said to himself. He lifted off the bonnet and started to work. When he had taken out the cylinder block, he called his boy and sent him to find Smilzo. A few minutes later he was giving Smilzo some very definite instructions.

  “I’m your man, Chief,” said Smilzo. “I’ll stand out there under the arcade and as soon as I see the fellow coming, I’ll run to call the police. Then, when a policeman arrives, I’ll follow.”

  Ten minutes later the stranger returned and immediately scrutinized the engine of the car.

  “I thought so,” he said after a while.

  “It’s a serious business,” Peppone explained, enumerating all the minor bits of business connected with it. But he was interrupted by the arrival of the village policeman, in full uniform.

  “Good morning, Mr Mayor,” said the policeman, lifting his fingers to his cap in a salute. “There’s a paper here which you must sign.”

  Peppone looked at him with annoyance.

  “Tell the clerk that this isn’t my time for signing papers. I’ll sign it when I come to the Town Hall this afternoon.”

  The policeman saluted again and about-turned. Peppone continued to list the deficiencies he had found in the engine until for the second time he was interrupted. Smilzo drew himself to attention before him, raising his left arm and a clenched fist.

  “Chief,” he said, “the proofs of our poster are here. We’ve got to decide whether the speech will be at nine o’clock or ten.”