A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  There was no limit to the violence.

  The slaughter lasted all winter and spring, when the bombing started up again on a wide scale. Alexander’s armies finally succeeded in breaking through the Gothic line and occupying the vast plain, the Po river valley. The Allies entered Bologna on the morning of April 21, 1945: there were Poles, British and Americans, but also Italian soldiers from the Friuli, Legnano and Folgore brigades and a great number of partisans.

  Many of the locals were finally free to return to town: Bruno Montesi, Aldo Banti, Amedeo Bisi and others. Long beards, submachine guns slung around their necks, grenades in their belts: well-brought-up people regarded them with suspicion, or with a mix of fear and scorn.

  Montesi went to visit Fabrizio as soon as he could.

  “How are you?”

  “You can see for yourself how I am.”

  “Fabrizio, what you have to consider is that you’re alive. You can be with your parents, your friends, you can read and study, meet people, travel. You can see your country finally liberated and embarking on a new road, building a new future. For the dead, it’s all over with.”

  “They’re better off than me.”

  “That’s not true. You’ll get used to it. Little by little, things will change.”

  “Forgive me, Bruno, you did everything you could to save my life and I’m acting like a mean, ungrateful bastard.”

  “You would have done the same thing for me. And maybe, in your place, I would have said the same things. We still need you. I’ve got big plans and you can help me, right here. Work on regaining your strength, in your body but most of all, in your mind. I know you can. I’ll come back to visit again soon.”

  When Montesi came to visit Fabrizio again, it was to lay out his projects and plans; he had founded a section of the NLC right there in town, along with Banti and Bisi. But the transition proved to be anything but smooth. In the months that followed, you could cut the tension with a knife: people figured that the day of reckoning wouldn’t be far off, and they were right. A number of prominent people were justly or unjustly accused of collaborationism, of spying for the Social Republic or the fascists, and were simply dragged out of their houses in the middle of the night and put to death. For some it was a question of justice, for others ruthless revenge. In a nearly complete vacuum of rules and laws, anyone could decide, from one day to the next, to get rid of a personal enemy, to seek revenge for some perceived snub, to have the satisfaction of punishing someone who had wronged him in some way.

  One day the news spread in town that Tito Ferretti, one of the most important landowners in the area, had been killed near the Samoggia as he was travelling by carriage to the stock exchange in Bologna to check on the price of pork. He had neither sons nor daughters because he was unmarried, and for this reason his workers and tenant farmers respectfully called him “il signorino,” the term reserved for a gentleman bachelor. His mother, an elderly noblewoman, had gone to live in the city because, she said, she didn’t feel safe any longer, given the mood in town. She had often asked her son to join her, but he refused because he was much too fond of the farm, of the land and all the animals, to want to give it all up.

  “And really,” he would tell her, “who could have it in for me? I’ve given money to everyone: to the fascists, to the partisans . . . ” He was throwing ears of corn to the pigs as he spoke with her.

  “You just don’t want to part from those pigs of yours: you care more about them than anyone or anything else. You’ll end up breathing your last breath on a pig cart, Tito!” the countess continued haughtily, referring to the wagon with folding sides which her son used to take the sows and butcher hogs to market. “Anyway, you’re not a child anymore and you can do as you like. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Unfortunately her prophecy was confirmed, almost to the letter.

  For two days and two nights, the body of il signorino was left lying on the side of the dusty road, because no one dared approach the site of his murder. In the end, his niece, a twenty-five-year-old girl, went to where he lay, loaded his body onto a cart and wheeled him back home. She crossed the town from one end to another, making her way down the main road. The strain of pulling the cart soon had her dripping with sweat. There was not a soul to be seen, but closed doors and drawn shutters on either side of her. A desert of fear. The only sound to be heard in the deathly silence was the creaking of the iron rims of the cart wheels on the cobblestones. Sometimes she had to stop, when she felt she couldn’t pull her load a moment longer, but then a strength born of her hate for those who had done this to her uncle gave her new energy and pushed her forward. She knew that people were watching her from behind their windows, perhaps even the murderer himself! and she wanted them all to know that she wasn’t afraid and wouldn’t be intimidated.

  Five days later, the carabinieri of Verona sent a routine request to their colleagues in Castelfranco regarding a transfer of title for a horse and carriage which had been sold at the Verona horse fair. The local carabinieri traced the plates to Ferretti and thus the murderer’s identity was discovered, although they were not able to apprehend him because, after trying to sell off the carriage, the man had fled to Belgium and was working as a miner there. He died, not long after he had arrived, crushed under the prongs of a forklift, smashed flat as a cockroach. Word had it that before he met his unfortunate end, he had decided to talk, to reveal the names of those who had organized Ferretti’s murder. But if that was the case, no one would ever learn the answer.

  Some in town were sure that the murderer was a partisan who had asked Ferretti for money in the name of the party, had even produced a receipt on NLC letterhead, but had then put the money in his own pocket instead; in a panic that he would be found out, he killed Ferretti to keep the story quiet. Others spoke of certain activists in the party who were plotting to install the communist party in power by forming a cooperative with Ferretti’s land holdings, and had decided that the easiest way to do this was to take il signorino out of the picture. There was no lack of conjecture about the most plausible and implausible motives, because in that climate, anything could seem reasonable.

  Each new occasion for bereavement cleared the way for more contempt and resentment. Fabrizio knew well that his friend the Blacksmith had always spoken against, and acted against, any form of violence, but he also came to realize that in such dark, uncertain, lawless times, there were others who had become accustomed to wielding power and deciding a man’s life or death with impunity, and they wouldn’t be easy to stop.

  Astorre Roversi, known as buférla, craven tormentor of women and children, was found lying stiff along the road that went to Magazzino. Someone had shot him from behind the hedge.

  As the months passed and the structures of the State were gradually reorganized, the worst of the emergency receded, but the tension did not let up. Many partisans had refused to surrender their arms, or had turned in defective or unserviceable weapons. But although there were many of them who believed that the time was ripe for a proletarian revolution, like the Russian revolt of 1917, very few were convinced that such nation-shattering change was really possible. Exhaustion had begun to set in, and worry over an uncertain future. They sensed that the blood which had flowed, the dead and the wounded, the terrible battles, would all be forgotten. The laws would be administered by the same bureaucrats who had served the old system; the new system couldn’t get off its feet without their help.

  The fire slowly turned to ash.

  With the new year, as societal structures and the norms regulating everyday life settled back into place, the turbulence seemed to cease. The few remaining loose cannons of the movement were silenced. A dull, heavy calm ensued.

  At the end of February, Armando Bruni found himself once again in the painful position of facing one of his wife’s increasingly frequent breakdowns. As he had in the past, Doctor Munari ordered her hospitalizatio
n. It was then that Armando was heard threatening the good doctor; he supposedly said: “If you send her back to the insane asylum I’ll kill you!” Or at least that was the rumor that was circulating in town.

  Three months later, one Sunday in May at eleven o’clock in the morning, Doctor Munari left home to go to church, as he was accustomed to doing every Sunday. Not out of devotion, but rather because he had become fond of watching the pretty young women chatting in the square after the high mass. He hadn’t walked more than a hundred meters when someone shot him three times with a pistol at close range, causing him to collapse in a pool of blood. His young wife heard the shots and, flooded by a sense of dread, rushed out into the street and found him in that state. She ran to him, screaming in despair, and reached him in time to hear his last breath. She fell onto her husband’s body, sobbing.

  The shots had been heard distinctly in town as well and Aldo Banti, who was sitting out in front of what had been the House of Fascism, now restored to its original role as the House of the People, took off in the direction of the noise and came back shouting “They’ve killed the doctor!” People would much later remember that he was the first to announce the doctor’s death, as if he had somehow been waiting for it to happen.

  No one else dared to approach the scene of the crime, afraid of becoming involved in some way; it was wiser to wait until the carabinieri came. The sergeant who showed up tried to question the people living in the vicinity, but no one had any information to offer. He wrote up a report to send to the judicial authorities, but they had no choice but to dismiss the case. The memory of how accounts had been settled in the recent past was still very fresh in everyone’s mind; best to steer clear of such nasty business: no one had seen anything and no one knew anything.

  Rumors abounded, however. Some even said that a woman who lived above the Osteria della Bassa had seen two individuals riding off at great speed on their bicycles towards Madonna della Provvidenza, but she never reported it, so that was the end of that. After a few months, no one even mentioned it anymore. The widow retreated into her grief. She turned the house into a museum in her husband’s memory: the book on his desk was left open to the page he had been reading, his suits and shoes remained in the wardrobe, and the armor in his collection was polished every Saturday.

  Fonso and Maria tried to spend time with her whenever they could, but she was inconsolable. She did nothing but speak of her husband, for whom she still had the utmost admiration. She always kept the windows closed and shunned the sunlight, she never cooked for herself and hardly ate anything. Every now and then Maria would bring her a little pot of hot soup or a piece of boiled meat with freshly baked bread. She’d say: “Eat something, signora! You’re still young, you can’t let yourself go like this.” Fonso thought that only time would be able to heal such a painful wound, especially because she didn’t have a guilty party to direct her hatred at.

  Three years passed during which important things happened: the king was sent into exile and the Republic of Italy was proclaimed. Someone shot at the secretary of the communist party and everyone feared that a revolution, or civil war, would break out. That didn’t happen, but people were still divided along political lines. Even cycling, the most popular sport after soccer, pitted right against left. The “whites” rooted for Bartali, the “reds” preferred Coppi, and the fights that broke out in bars regularly exploded into a white heat: tee-shirts soaked with sweat, neck veins bulging. Political rivalry poisoned everything; each individual saw in his adversary an enemy to be destroyed. At the same time, everyone was struggling, everyone wished that the world around them were different. There was very little work; many men had to migrate to Belgium, where they ended up working in the coal mines. In the dark, like mice, breathing in the black dust.

  In order to control a situation that always seemed on the verge of erupting, the local carabiniere chief was replaced by a sergeant sent by Rome who was said to be tough as iron. With his coming, the town was once again cast into turmoil.

  One day, three years after the doctor’s murder, the news got out that Armando Bruni had signed a police statement in which he declared that his remorse had finally forced him to speak up and to admit that he had killed Doctor Munari. But that wasn’t all: he had also fingered Bruno Montesi, Aldo Banti and Amedeo Bisi as the organizers of the crime. Political activists, all, and the founders of the local chapter of the National Association of Italian Partisans.

  Fabrizio, who over those three years was slowly beginning to learn to live with his disability, was profoundly shocked. Montesi came to see him the next day, ashen faced and red-eyed, looking like he hadn’t slept all night.

  “I’ve come to say goodbye. They’ll be coming to get me soon; it may be a question of days, or hours. I just wanted you to know that I’ve done nothing. I’ve always been against violence and besides that, why would I want to kill the doctor? He never bothered with politics and as far as I know, he did his job well. It makes no sense. Even as far as Aldo and Amedeo are concerned. They may be hotheads, but they’re not stupid. Even if they had been planning such a thing, they would have had to run it by me and I would have said no.”

  “Leave here, then. Leave Italy, go to Yugoslavia—the party will help you.”

  “No. I’m staying here, I’ll stand trial if I need to. They have nothing against me . . . except Armando’s confession.”

  Fabrizio dropped his eyes, embarrassed.

  “I didn’t believe it for a moment. Your uncle is not capable of killing a fly. But the truth is that he is so hard up, in so many ways, that anyone could have convinced him to sign anything, with threats or with promises. Even just for a bowl of soup for his family.”

  “Bruno, they’ll find other witnesses. They’ll find a way to trap you, this is only the beginning. Get away while you can!”

  “No, you’re wasting your breath. I’m not going. This is my country and I fought to free it. Like you did. You’ll see, in the end the truth will out.”

  Fabrizio stared straight into his eyes: “You’re so sure?”

  “It’s what I hope,” replied Montesi. “Goodbye.”

  Fabrizio watched him walk off with a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his pockets, just like always. He felt tears come to his eyes.

  “Good luck, Blacksmith,” he said to himself.

  The same evening, Maria went to the house of the doctor’s wife with the excuse of bringing her the clothes she had washed and ironed, but as soon as she stepped in the door she burst into tears. “It wasn’t him, signora,” Maria sobbed, “he didn’t do it! I know him well. He may be a poor wretch but he’s not a murderer! He wouldn’t even know how to kill someone.”

  The doctor’s wife touched her face: “I know Maria, I know he couldn’t have done such a thing. It was those other mutinous fanatics!”

  Maria was confused; she hadn’t meant to blame anyone else. But she left the house badly shaken: this was the second of her brothers who had been accused of murder.

  The accused were transferred to Sondrio, a mountain town in the far north of Italy, so they could be tried in a court outside of their region because of presumed bias closer to home. But the trial had taken on great political significance and journalists from a number of the Emilia Romagna newspapers had been sent out on assignment. On the first day of proceedings, there was quite a crowd present in the courtroom. All eyes were on the doctor’s wife, deathly pale in her black dress. Her eyes were heavily made up and her lipstick was blood red, making her look like a mythological Fury. She stared at the defendants with contempt in her eyes; the hatred that had been seething within her had finally found its target.

  As the members of court filed in, the buzz of voices lowered, only to be silenced completely when the clerk said: “The accused may rise.”

  Armando was the lead defendant but also a witness for the prosecution; he was separated from the other three and never looked
at them.

  After he had had been sworn in, the judge asked him: “What pushed you to speak three years after the fact?”

  “Remorse,” replied Armando. “I couldn’t hide the truth any longer.” The Blacksmith tried in vain to meet his gaze.

  Armando was not a very convincing witness: he often got mixed up and contradicted himself. The defense attorney, a clever, seasoned professional, had an easy time poking holes in his testimony. Armando was soon gasping like a fish out of water at the increasingly cogent questions the lawyer was barking out in rapid succession. The poor man was sweating, and his spit had dried up at the corners of his mouth. The day ended with the two sides more or less equally placed, and the courtroom in an uproar.

  As was to be expected, the prosecution produced more witnesses. One was a twelve-year-old boy who on the day of the crime had climbed to the top of a cherry tree, from where he had seen everything. The other was a fortune-teller whose testimony was quite vague; she gave the unpleasant impression of speaking as if someone were prompting her. The defense rebutted by producing a doctor’s report which certified that the boy on the cherry tree was so nearsighted that he couldn’t have recognized his own mother at that distance. The entire house of cards built up by the prosecutor came tumbling down. In the end, the defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence.

  The public prosecutor would not give up; he appealed the sentence in an attempt to save the face of those who had constructed the entire investigative and prosecutorial machine: the new iron-tough carabiniere sergeant and those who had installed him in office. The appeal ignored the fact that the sergeant, who had personally interrogated Bruni and obtained his confession, had already been accused of abuse, violence, sadism and assorted other iniquities by none other than his direct superior, Lieutenant Rizzo, in an official report. The superior officer’s efforts to make the truth known were met with his transfer first, and later his dismissal from the force.