Don Camillo’s Dilemma

by Giovanni Guareschi

  Peppone Goes Back to School

  PEPPONE decided to go all out against clerical interference in the primary schools, and an announcement to this effect came out in the bulletin nailed to the wall of the People’s Palace. In it was the proposal that a supervisory committee be set up and empowered to visit the schools at any time to make sure that the teaching was in accord with democratic principles.

  Of course, the next day, the bulletin of the Opposition printed a reply:

  We don’t for a moment criticize our Mayor for the fact that he never finished school. We believe that ideas are much more important than good grammar. But for purposes of the present discussion we must note that it seems singularly inappropriate for primary instruction to be in the hands of someone who never finished his own. Let the Mayor hand over this job to Smilzo, who stayed two years in first grade and three years in both second and third, thus acquiring considerably more experience in the field of education.

  This piece caused considerable talk in the village, and Don Camillo made a copy of it which he took to read to Christ over the altar.

  “I am still of the same opinion,” Christ told him. “This was written by a man just as stupid as the one who pencilled the word ‘Donkey!’ on the margin of some other declaration by Peppone.”

  “But, Lord,” Don Camillo objected, “this is an entirely different matter. Isn’t it stupid of a man with one leg to insist on entering a race?”

  “Don Camillo, you’re not playing fair! A man with only one leg can’t acquire another in its place, but a man who doesn’t know grammar can always learn it. If you know the person who wrote these words, tell him that they are very stupid.”

  “I’ll try to explain,” said Don Camillo, throwing out his arms, “but it’s going to be uphill work, because he honestly believes he’s in the right.”

  “He can’t honestly believe that, when he’s out of harmony with God’s law. You know that perfectly well, because I’ve told you.”

  “Don Camillo is always in hot water,” the priest sighed.

  Peppone couldn’t take the counter-attack lying down, and so he brought out another broadside:

  We can confidantly state that if our unknown adversary were to look after his priestly affairs instead of the affairs of other people, it would be a very good thing. There are two kinds of ignorance: the ignorance of those who for obvious reasons have not been able to continue their schooling and that of persons like the ignorant priest in question, who has studied a great deal but learned nothing. He reminds us of a shiny copper pot, with a hole in the bottom, looking down at a tarnished old pot, which is obviously much more serviceable for cooking.

  This was only the beginning, and the rest was couched in much grosser terms. When Don Camillo went to kneel in front of the altar, Christ asked him if he had read Peppone’s new innuendo.

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “And have you resisted the temptation to reply?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Will you be able to keep up your resistance?”

  Don Camillo threw out his arms.

  “The future is in God’s hands,” he answered.

  “But the draft of your reply is in your right hand pocket, and so in this case the future is in the hands of Don Camillo.”

  Don Camillo took the sheet of paper out of his pocket and burned it in the flame of a candle.

  “The election is just around the corner,” he observed, “and in my mind these are mistaken tactics, from a political point of view.”

  “That may be, Don Camillo. But don’t worry about the election. I’m not for or against any ticket. I won my battle a long time ago.”

  When Peppone was beside himself with political passion, he proceeded with about as much delicacy as a Sherman tank, and so, naturally enough, this piece of prose which began with the famous “confidantly” was full of errors. People laughed immoderately at it, even without any instigation on the part of Don Camillo, and Peppone’s pride was deeply injured. He tried throwing a few punches around and received a few from persons upon whom he had not inflicted any, but he was aware that this did not alter the situation and that his grammar was just as stumbling as ever. And so he dropped the fight for a supervisory committee and fastened his energies upon the fulfilment of a very ambitious dream. No one except his wife knew anything about it. Every evening, when he set off on his motorcycle, she gave an anxious sigh, and towards midnight, when he returned she immediately asked:

  “How did you do?”

  “It’s hard going, but I’ll make it.”

  This went on for three and a half months, until one night, upon his return from the mysterious trip, Peppone announced:

  “This is it! I’m taking the plunge!”

  “What if you don’t succeed?”

  “I must, that’s all.”

  “Think how those wretched people will laugh if you fail. Couldn’t you do it in the city, where nobody knows you and if you don’t make the grade, it doesn’t matter?”

  “No, if I did it anywhere else, they’d say there was something tricky or dishonest about it. It’s got to be done in the light of day, with everything legal. I’m putting in an application tomorrow.”

  “Well, be sure not to make any mistakes in the application!”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” Peppone reassured her. “I’ve got the application all ready. They typed it up for me in the city!”

  I, Giuseppe Bottazzi, etc., etc., respectfully ask permission of the Board of Education to take the eighth-grade examinations.

  The bomb burst with a noise almost atomic in intensity, and Smilzo ran to Peppone’s house with his eyes popping out of his head.

  “Chief, people are saying that you want to take the eighth grade examinations!”

  “Well, what’s so remarkable about it?”

  “Chief, the eighth grade is tough!”

  “Good! Live dangerously!” must be our motto.

  “Chief, if you fail, you’re a goner!”

  “Verdi failed at the Conservatory, and then did pretty well.”

  In the face of such confidence, Smilzo could find nothing to say. With all the nonchalance of a gentleman flicking an ash off the end of his cigarette, Peppone added:

  “If I haven’t got an inferiority complex, why should you have one?”

  This was the last straw. If Peppone knew the meaning of an inferiority complex, then he must be up to his ears in culture.

  “Chief,” Smilzo stammered, “have you been studying all these months? It must have cost you an awful lot of money?”

  “Why? I took a cramming course at a night school in the city, for adults and children together. At the desk next to mine there was a twelve-year-old boy called Mario Bibelli, a little fellow that didn’t come up to my shoulder. He’ll pay a visit here some Sunday.”

  “Amazing!” exclaimed Smilzo. “It sounds like an old-fashioned romantic novel.”

  “Reality is the true romanticism of both yesterday and today,” said Peppone didactically. “Both De Amicis and De Sica are neo-realists, even if the former did his writing a century ago.”

  Smilzo went away completely convinced of one thing: Peppone had turned into an intellectual.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if he were to write for some literary magazine,” he said to Brusco, Bigio, and the rest of Peppone’s henchmen. “This is going to be a bitter pill for some people to swallow.”

  It was a bitter pill for Don Camillo, who was burning up with eagerness to talk to Peppone and size up his new education. Peppone seemed to be avoiding him, and this exasperated his curiosity all the further. Finally he did get hold of him, by means of a personal visit to the workshop. Peppone greeted him with gentlemanly indifference.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I was just passing by,” said Don Camillo, “and wanted to inquire about the health of our mayor.”

  “There’s no mayor here. Here you have only Giuseppe Bottazzi, the blacksmith,
descendant of the blacksmith of the same name who brought the family to this village several centuries ago and was beheaded because he stripped a priest of his ill-gotten gains. There’s the nemesis of history for you!”

  “The nemesis of history? How do you mean?” asked Don Camillo in utter astonishment.

  “I mean that maybe this time there’ll be a different ending and Giuseppe Bottazzi will not only strip the priest of his ill-gotten gains, but kill him!”

  “Ill-gotten gains? But I have no more money than a jumping jack-rabbit!”

  “I’m not speaking of money. You’ve captured the confidence of a great many ignorant people, and we take it away!”

  The conversation was taking an unpleasant turn but Don Camillo swallowed his pride for the sake of acquiring further information.

  “What will be, will be,” he said. “How about the examinations?”

  “Trifles!” answered Peppone. “The important examination is the one I take every day with this hammer and anvil. And I pass it, time after time.”

  As Don Camillo was going away, he saw Peppone’s wife at the door.

  “Did you come to rag him?” she said aggressively. “It’s eating you up, isn’t it, that you can’t brand him as someone that never got through school?”

  “No,” said Don Camillo. “But it’s still too early to say. We’ll see what happens when he’s put to the test.”

  Don Camillo went home in a gloomy state of mind.

  “Lord,” he said to the Christ over the altar, “that poor fellow is so swollen with pride that he deserves to fail every single subject.”

  “I don’t know about that, Don Camillo. I’m not on the examination committee. That’s for them to decide.”

  “God is everywhere,” objected Don Camillo, “and He’ll be in the schoolroom where that country bumpkin comes to make a fool of himself.”

  “Certainly, Don Camillo, God is everywhere. Right now He’s here listening to the stupid things you are saying.”

  Don Camillo threw out his arms in discouragement.

  “For some time now, I haven’t been able to say the right thing!”

  * * *

  The matter of examining Mayor Peppone was a headache to the Board of Education. Things had to be conducted with such scrupulous care that no one could find an excuse for saying that either success or failure was due to the candidate’s political office or party affiliation. A special commission was made up of the board’s director and two teachers from another township, one a stiff, elderly woman the other, a middle-aged man. Peppone was in a radiant mood, with no doubts at all as to his ability to get through. When he received notice that the examinations would be held the next day he burst out with:

  “It’s about time! I was beginning to be thoroughly bored.” He went to bed in a good humour and got up in one that was even better. Immediately he put on his best suit, filed his fountain-pen, tested it on a piece of paper, and started to leave the house.

  “I’ll go with you as far as the school,” his wife suggested.

  “Don’t let’s be silly about it!” said Peppone.

  “Your son insists on going,” she told him.

  “Don’t make me look ridiculous; I’d seem like a schoolboy, and all those wretched people will be staring out their windows at me.”

  And so Peppone went off alone, but when he reached the school, his wife and son were already there, lurking behind a hedge, all red in the face from having run across the fields to beat him. As he started up the steps into the schoolhouse, they waved to him and he waved back at them with his hand hidden halfway down his back. The commission welcomed him with icy politeness.

  “Sit down,” said the director. “You will have written examinations in arithmetic and composition. Remember that the allotted time is four hours.”

  Then they set before him four sheets of officially stamped examination paper, two for a rough copy and two for the finished product.

  “Shall we begin?” asked the director, after Peppone had sat down and taken out his pen.

  “By all means,” said Peppone.

  “Then take this down: ‘Problem: A cement basin of parallelepiped form has a base 40 by 60 centimetres in size and is fed by two taps. The first tap pours 8 litres of water a minute and the second tap 5 litres of water every other minute. In thirty minutes the flow from the second tap alone fills two-fifths of the basin. How long will it take to fill the whole basin if both taps are open? How high is basin?’”

  As Peppone diligently wrote down the problem, he noticed that his hand had begun to tremble. “I shouldn’t have done so much hammering last night,” he said to himself. “It has tired my hand.” Meanwhile the director told him to shift to another sheet of paper and take down the composition theme set for him by the woman teacher.

  “Theme: Narrate some event, either recent or long ago which made a strong impression upon you.”

  Peppone took this down with some difficulty, for his hand continued to tremble. Then he ran a handkerchief over his perspiring forehead. He looked over the two sheets, and reread the arithmetic problem. A parallelepiped—what the devil was that? Two minutes earlier, he had known perfectly well, but now it had gone out of his head completely. The tap whose flow sufficed to fill two-fifths of the basin filled him with confusion. What could be meant by two-fifths of a parallelepiped? And what about the other tap, which poured in water continuously?

  His head was empty, as he looked again at the theme for a composition. What was an event? What events had he witnessed, and how could he tell the story of any one of them? He thought back to his night school classes and tried to fish out of his memory some of all that he had heard therein the last three and a half months. But not a single word could he recapture. Then he thought of his wife and son waiting for him outside, and there was an ache in his heart.

  The three examiners sat around a table at the far end of the room, as stiff as statues. Peppone wiped the perspiration off his brow. The clock in the church tower rang ten. How perfectly terrible! He looked out the window to make sure he had heard correctly. Yes, the hands were pointing to ten, and so were those of the clock in the schoolroom. He had barely written down the questions, and it was ten o’clock already. And those damned taps were still pouring water into that damned parallelepiped!

  The old charwoman brought the news to the rectory.

  “Father, I saw him with my own eyes. He’s been staring for a whole hour and a half at the paper, and perspiring as if he had a high fever. Not a single word has he written!”

  Don Camillo listened to her with satisfaction.

  “That’s what he gets for being so stuck-up,” he exclaimed.

  “He looked just like a schoolboy,” the old gossip continued. “He came up the road alone, but he got his wife and son to walk along parallel to him, behind the hedge. They met him at the schoolhouse door and waved good-bye.”

  With that the charwoman went away, promising to come back later. She came at eleven o’clock, even more excited than before.

  “Things are still exactly the same,” she reported. “He’s still perspiring, and still staring at the paper. In two more hours, time will be up. His wife and child are still hiding behind the hedge. She’s chewed up half a handkerchief; she’s so nervous. Father, I only wish you could see the state that big bully is in now!”

  And Don Camillo thought he had every right to see the big bully brought so low.

  The two strokes of half past eleven rang out, and Peppone was thinking that he had only an hour and a half more. Just then the charwoman came to call the director. The director went out into the hall and met Don Camillo.

  “Excuse me,” said the priest, “but even if the mayor is playing schoolboy he can’t neglect his municipal duties. There’s a poor woman who may die if he doesn’t sign the papers authorizing her immediate removal to a city hospital.” And he held out a sheet of paper, adding: “Will you give it to him?”

  “That’s not regular,” the director stam
mered.

  “I know, but it would be still more irregular for a poor woman to die simply in order not to disturb an examination. I don’t think this will upset your examinee.”

  The director shrugged his shoulders.

  “Father,” he said in a low voice, “it’s positively nerve wracking: all he’s done is perspire!”

  Don Camillo smiled.

  “All these boys are the same way. Outside school they go in for a lot of big talk, but in class….”

  The director took the sheet of paper and started to go back into the classroom. Then he changed his mind.

  “Father, I’ll send him out here and let you give it to him in person. I’ll leave the door open.”

  Don Camillo glimpsed the sad state of Peppone and calmly waited for him. Meanwhile after Peppone had heard what the director had to say, he slowly got up and came out into the hall.

  “Forgive me, Mr Mayor,” said Don Camillo, “but it’s an urgent matter.”

  Peppone took the sheet of paper and read: “I, Angiolina Pateri, widow, without means of support, state as follows…”

  “I’ve already told you that I can’t do anything for her,” he said, handing the paper back to Don Camillo. “I had this same statement in my hands two weeks ago.”

  “Two weeks ago, things were different,” Don Camillo shot back at him. “Please read on. Here you have the notarized signature of the doctor.”

  Just then the director came out into the hall again.

  “Mr Mayor,” he said, “since you’re called upon to decide an important matter, this time won’t be counted. The commission has noted the exact hour at which you left the room.”

  “Thank you,” said Don Camillo. “I shouldn’t want to have on my conscience the theft of time from a mathematics exercise or a literary masterpiece.”

  Peppone gritted his teeth and shot a bitter glance at Don Camillo.

  “Come, Mr Mayor, hurry!”

  Peppone reopened the paper and scrutinized the declaration: “The undersigned certifies that Angiolina Pateri is in a desperate condition and must be sent away for a surgical intervention; meanwhile, ten minutes from now, you ask for permission to go to the toilet.”