He stops for a minute, shrugs his shoulders inside his navy blue loden coat, and says that he doesn’t mind. He does have a few things he wants to get off his chest first, however. As he starts walking again, he says in a dry precise voice: “Pinelli wasn’t murdered and your father wasn’t in the room. Those were times of complete madness.”
Staring down at the cobblestones as he goes, he adds, “I still get letters asking me why I acquitted the police. I did it because I was absolutely convinced that no murder had been committed. Lotta Continua did a lot of damage to Italy: first and foremost, it managed to implant in the minds of the left the idea that Pinelli had been murdered and that the trials were a sham. They weren’t interested in the truth. All they cared about was the verdict in their heads: guilty as charged. And they blame me that this didn’t happen. I still get letters today telling me, ‘You went on to become a senator but you never said why you acquitted Pinelli’s murderers.’ It’s unbearable.”
I go home and turn on the tape recorder.
I remember that a file was delivered to me with the label “first-degree murder.” I refused to do anything until they changed it to the lesser charge of manslaughter. We had to proceed with transparency. We also had to fight the stonewalling and the ridiculous old-school ways that used to prevail at the courthouse and police headquarters. You can’t believe the dirty looks I used to get when I appeared at police headquarters. I would show up with reporters in tow, to assure transparency and truthfulness. The police didn’t realize that I was putting together proof and forensics. We investigated high and low, leaving no stone unturned. And as we proceeded, all the “proof” concocted to show that Pinelli had been murdered—the ambulance, the truth serum, the karate chop, the fall—was found to be without foundation. Let me go through them one by one:
The ambulance. An elaborate conspiracy theory has been woven around the call to the ambulance. So without notifying anyone, I took the court reporter with me to visit the center where emergency calls used to come in for ambulance services. I asked to see how the system worked. They took me to the control room. There was a giant illuminated map of the city on the wall, with pushpins to indicate where the ambulances were stationed. They showed me where the ambulance for Pinelli had originated and the time it had been called. They took the register and opened it to the fifteenth of December. On that day, it was recorded that at exactly 12:01 a.m., the Piazza Cinque Giornate ambulance had been called. So we did a test to see how long it would take for an ambulance to make it to police headquarters, because according to rumor Pinelli’s body had been left on the ground for hours. We were able to determine, instead, that the ambulance had only taken a few minutes. The time of the fall and the time of the call coincided perfectly. There was no conspiracy.
The truth serum. There was a needle mark in Pinelli’s arm. Some people claimed that at police headquarters he had been injected with a dose of scopolamine, truth serum, after which Pinelli felt sick, which is why they threw him from the window. I went to the emergency room, where the doctor on duty told me, “Always the same old story! Go check the newspapers. I can remember a photographer coming in and taking pictures.” In the Corriere della Sera I found the picture of Pinelli with an intravenous needle in his arm. So his bruise was caused by the intravenous therapy that the hospital had administered to save his life. I went to the newspaper’s offices, had the negatives of the picture confiscated, printed them, and put them in the file.
The karate chop. The autopsy mentioned an oval bruise. Claims were made that it had been caused by a karate chop. We conducted an examination after exhuming the body and established that there had been no karate chop. The bruise, as the experts explained, was caused by the amount of time the body had been lying on the marble slab in the morgue.
The fall. There was yet more “proof”: the site where the body had fallen. I made a second round of phone calls to the stretcher bearers, the ambulance personnel, the people who were there, and I asked them to indicate the point of impact. We could see that the trajectory coincided exactly with the broken branches on a large bush that had been photographed the day after Pinelli’s death. There was also damage to the cornice below the window from which he had fallen.
You can’t imagine the dirty looks I got from Police Commissioner Guida when I was conducting these forensic tests at police headquarters. He couldn’t believe that a magistrate would dare come to their “inner sanctum” to investigate the police for murder …
Only one witness indicated a different point of impact, which was further away. He was a reporter for Unità, an elderly man who couldn’t muster the courage to get closer to Pinelli. He gave a very general indication. In my ruling, I stated clearly that we had to establish the reliability of the texts, and that the texts indicating the first point were more credible. While I was writing my acquittal, Panorama—which was a left-wing magazine in those days—published the opinion of a group of physics professors (still quoted by Liberazione today). They wanted to prove that Pinelli’s body had not fallen five feet from the wall, as I had argued on the basis of an objective examination, but more than sixteen feet further away. They used the point indicated by the Unità reporter, which was eight or nine yards away from the wall, and calculated the average between the points indicated by the eyewitnesses. In my ruling, I was quick to caution them: be careful, my dear physicists, depositions cannot be assessed mathematically; otherwise there would be no need for judges. Proof has to be assessed on the basis of reliability, which can only be obtained through objective studies. Two or three years later, someone knocked on my door. I answered, “Who is it?” From the other side of the door came a voice saying, “I’m a physics professor, one of the ones who signed the opinion. I came to apologize. You taught us all a lesson.”
Then we studied the possible variations in the fall and the trajectory, and we conducted some forensic tests in a swimming pool, no less, to establish what had happened. A whole battery of tests were run. In the end, the experts reached the conclusion that the body had been leaning against the railing of the window and then fallen. Let us consider the circumstances: Pinelli had been at headquarters for three days straight, almost without eating or sleeping. He had been brought in on the night of December 12 and placed in a large room with all the other people being held. The police soon released the real perpetrators, the Neo-Fascists, whose views they used to share, and they subjected Pinelli to an endless interrogation. He probably felt sick, dizzy, and fell from the windowsill, which was only three feet from the floor. One of the tests we ran particularly irked Police Commissioner Guida: I had a mannequin made that was the same weight and proportions as Pinelli, to see where he would have landed if he had been thrown from the window. From this we deduced that the body could not have been pushed by others: it had fallen. In short, there was no proof that Pinelli had been killed. No proof whatsoever. The most likely hypothesis is that, after the interrogation, he opened the window for a breath of fresh air, and the hunger, the exhaustion, and the tension made him feel faint, made him feel dizzy, and he fell over the railing.
The room. Everyone agreed—including Lieutenant Lograno, a police officer—that at the moment of Pinelli’s fall, Calabresi was not in the room because he had gone to report to Chief Allegra. The anarchist Pasquale Valitutti, who was in an adjacent room, said that he did not see Inspector Calabresi go by. I went to ascertain the exact distance between the offices, the route that Calabresi had taken, and the view that Valitutti might have had from the point where he was sitting. Valitutti might not have seen him because in the room where he was being held there was only one small window that looked out onto the corridor, and a person would have had to be standing right in front of it to see someone going by.
And so I issued the decision of acquittal, finding that Inspector Calabresi had not committed the deed. In the meantime, however, he had been murdered. Then I prosecuted members of the police for detaining Pinelli at headquarters for so long without an arrest warra
nt, but they got off following an amnesty.
What can I add? I cleared the anarchists of any responsibility for the Piazza Fontana massacre. I determined—and history has backed me up on this—that the Fascists did it, and I risked my neck for it. There is no proof that Pinelli was killed and in fact everything argues for a fall caused by a fainting spell. The trial documents are what they are, and I repeat, there is irrefutable proof. After I wrote my sentence they spray-painted on the walls that I was a Fascist. Later on, when I said that the anarchists weren’t the ones who planted the bombs, they said I was a Communist. That’s Italy for you.
The names of Giuseppe Pinelli and Luigi Calabresi have been linked for almost forty years, a longer period than either was granted to live. They have been pitted against each other in an endless struggle, one of the many that has paralyzed Italy and kept it with its eyes trained resolutely backward. For my family, too, their names are forever joined. As children we were taught that one night Pinelli, like our father, had not gone home to his little girls, and we were quiet when someone said his name, out of respect for the dead. Mama spoke about him sensitively, and said that their destinies were connected, not contradictory. One day she gave me Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. While she was handing it to me, she told me that Pinelli had given it to my father one Christmas. He and Papà were not exactly friends and they did ascribe to different political philosophies, but in the house where I grew up, Giuseppe Pinelli was never considered an enemy.
7.
capsized
RHETORIC AND FORM are triumphant at times when all else is collapsing. Imposing funerals, uniformed authorities, the presidential honor guard, the Minister of the Interior paying housecalls, and an indignant political class issuing admonitions and promises: all that’s left in their wake are a few small things. The image that comes to mind is a person combing the beach in search of personal effects after a hurricane, bending down to find the things that still belong to him. All that remains is a reality consisting of a slow reconstruction, an exhausting recovery of memories, a journey that for many people turns into a suffering so great that they try to either flee or repress the memory.
Reality is three children sitting on the floor in the evening around a Geloso magnetic tape player listening to the voice of their father reading a fairy tale. We would listen to it in our bedroom, after putting on our pajamas, while Mama stayed in the kitchen. The tape was always breaking, and we fixed it over and over again, until we lost it forever.
Mama with her head on the kitchen table, crying inconsolably.
I remember the afternoons we spent at the cemetery, in Musocco, in the northern suburbs of Milan. We used to follow a ritual: we would buy flowers—we loved white daisies—go fill up the watering can at the fountain, and take turns climbing an eight-rung ladder on wheels to clean the picture of Papà Gigi smiling on his wedding day. We would give him a kiss and then go off to play, leaving Mama by herself. In winter we would race under the porticoes. It was so cold that the water in the fountain would freeze. In summer it was cool and we would hide behind the gravestones in the garden. I once asked my mother why she hadn’t wanted him to be buried in the ground, like in the American cemeteries, such as Arlington, where the fallen from many wars are laid to rest beneath the lawn. Her answer was simple. “Because I didn’t want him to get caught in the rain. I would find no peace imagining him in the ground on stormy nights.”
When we got to the gates, we used to stay silent for a long time. There were small compensations, however. In the fall, there were chestnuts, making everything a little nicer. And there was always our friend who had died as a child. His parents used to place toy cars over his grave. We would play with them and after a while we started to trade: we would bring one from home and in exchange we would take one of his. One day we took two, but at the gates Luigi said, “We can’t do it, poor kid.” My mother didn’t know what we were talking about, but we hurried back to return the car.
Everyday life had its anomalies. Some nights for dinner we would have milk and cookies or scrambled eggs. When we ask her today, “Mama, do you remember? It was so nice to have breakfast twice,” she groans, “How dreadful, I feel so embarrassed.” She wanted to manage on her own and was too proud to ask for money from her parents, and she confesses that some times she could barely make it to the end of the month. But on payday she would buy calves’ liver, and for us it was a royal feast.
In the two years following my father’s death, we all lived at the home of our grandparents, who showered us with attention and care. Then Mama decided that the time had come for her to manage on her own, taking full responsibility for the three of us. She wanted to hold together through her own strength and resources what remained of the family she had dreamed of having. She rented a house, found a job as an elementary school religion teacher, and made a go of it with all the energy that a twenty-eight-year-old woman can muster. And she succeeded, thanks to our cooperation and a faith in life and God from which she never faltered.
I have to admit that the three of us didn’t want her to come to the playground with us. All the other children were accompanied by their fathers. So when we wanted to go we used to wait by Uncle Dino’s window. He provided us with a male figure we could look up to, and we thought that if he came along with us to the playground everything would be all right.
Policemen’s Day was one festivity that Mama would have preferred to skip. Too much sadness, too much ceremony, too many ritual expressions of solidarity. But we children would insist on going just for the salmon canapés, an absolute luxury. In those days, you couldn’t find inexpensive salmon at the supermarket all year round. It used to be available only at Christmastime at our grandparents’ house, and serving it to children was considered wasteful. So we were always the first ones at the buffet, and we would empty all the trays before the shocked eyes of the officials and directors. Mama would say nothing. Maybe she thought it was the least the state could do for us. At the Policemen’s Day parade we would feel shy and enchanted at the sight of the Padovani girls, who were always dressed up, always perfect. Their father, Vittorio Padovani, had been killed by terrorist machine-gun fire on December 15, 1976.
For years photographers used to wait for us outside the main door to our house and follow us around. My mother, her hair almost completely gray, would put on a pair of dark sunglasses and quicken her step, pushing the baby carriage with Luigi inside. I trotted behind her and tried kicking them away.
I remember the pressure of feeling different, of not being normal children. We didn’t have the right to a first or last name. No, we were “the children of …,” a fact that weighed on our every movement, every game, every friendship with schoolmates. Our experience is captured perfectly in the words of Benedetta Tobagi, whose father had been killed seven years after our own, and also in the month of May. In The Silence of the Innocent, she writes: “I do not remember my childhood as normal. I had the persistent sense of a double life—one black, one white—of a heavy, suffocating parallel world that I couldn’t share with anyone. A child’s life is normally measured out in schools: kindergarten, elementary school, middle school. Mine was measured out by the ‘Tobagi affair’ … Ever since I was little, I could remember someone always asking me whether I was related to Walter Tobagi. I remember once at elementary school, I must have been six or seven, I tried to pretend that I lived in a different world, that I still had my father next to me.”*
In kindergarten I used to keep my distance from the sandbox. I looked at it from a distance. I didn’t want to go near it. It was too dangerous: a place where sadness and humiliation had ambushed me. But it wasn’t always like that. On one of the first days of kindergarden, we were all digging in the sandbox with our shovels, in a circle, telling stories, showing off, as children do, with tales about what our fathers made us do at the beach. When it was my turn, I said, after hesitating for a moment, “Mine tells me to make castles.” An older boy interrupted me. “That’s not
true, you don’t have a father!” I started to blush, to defend myself, to explain that I did have a father, but it was useless. “My mother told me: they shot your father and he’s dead.” I left the sandbox in silence and never went back. And when my brothers went there, despite my attempts to dissuade them by claiming that the sand was dirty and filled with worms, I stayed close to the edge, leaning against the wall to make sure that pain—sudden and disguised as a child—would not attack them, too.
Once I started elementary school, I kept to myself. My brothers were still in preschool, so I had no one to look out for. I was alone. During afternoon recess, I didn’t go to the playground with the other children, asking instead for permission to stay in the classroom. I always finished my homework before everyone else, went to the small library in the back, and stayed there to read until the school day was over—first comic books, especially Mickey Mouse, and then my favorite book, Robinson Crusoe.
I felt perfectly comfortable in this bubble of solitude, but it was obviously lined with sadness. The bubble was finally burst in a funny, even clever way by Rosario Carro, nicknamed Iaio, the youngest in a line of brothers who had grown up at the San Siro racetrack, where their father trained horses. One afternoon he stopped me at the door to the classroom and said, “Chief O’Hara, why don’t you show us how you play soccer?” He caught me completely off-guard. He knew that there was an inspector in my life, but had turned him into a cartoon character and then turned me into that character. I tagged along after Iaio to play soccer, and he told everyone, “He’s the son of a policeman, an inspector … Chief O’Hara, as my brothers say. His father is a guy that catches thieves.” At the end of the afternoon, I took him aside, near a tree that acted as a goalpost, and asked him, “Do you know that they killed him?” I didn’t want to pretend again and risk painful misunderstandings. He replied, “Of course I know. My brothers told me, but we don’t have to go around telling everybody.” About ten years ago, I was passing by the racetrack—my grandparents still lived nearby. I stopped the car, went in, and asked for the Carro brothers. I was directed to a series of stalls where I could find them. They were all there. Iaio was walking a beautiful bay to the training track, and I went up to him and gave him a big hug.
Pushing Past the Night Page 6
