Pushing Past the Night

by Mario Calabresi

  Then came the medal, and more important, the words of President Ciampi: “We have rediscovered memory.” “Better late than never” is what we said in my family, and we truly meant it. It might be commonplace, but it fits the occasion. I can’t bear the malcontents, the conspiracy theorists, the people who say, “After all this time …” My reply is that we should accept it for what it is, in its most obvious aspect. The medal, like the commemorative stamp, was an important recognition. And the plaques on Via Cherubini and at the offices of the province of Milan will be, when they are finally in place. All our lives we thought it was unjust not to remember him at the place where he was killed, and not to recognize his sacrifice with a medal. Now there is one. Mama held it in her hand. The president pinned it on her jacket. This is what matters. Not being able to appreciate this would be a terrible loss. You have to try not to remain stuck, mummified, repeating the liturgy of mourning ad infinitum. That is not how you commemorate the deceased. We wanted to keep Luigi Calabresi alive, redeem his memory, clear him of the mud, and give him justice. So to see his smiling face on the stamps, on the envelopes, at the tobacconist, at the post office, on police calendars—I even found his face at a Chinese restaurant in Milan!—is a victory. And we are not interested in—and are indeed irritated by—arguments such as “They only did it in order to …” “In order to what?” “It’s a maneuver to keep you quiet, to sugarcoat the pill, to then grant a pardon to Sofri and company.” That’s certainly possible, but we cannot pretend not to see that, even if this is the case, the government’s first thought was for us, the rehabilitation of his memory. And are these things not real, visible, concrete? So we accept them rather than ruin everything with conspiracy theories. Mama’s smile on the morning of the medal was real. The peace of mind it gave her compensated for many bitter moments. To ruin everything, to poison these gestures, would have been stupid, unproductive, and above all ungenerous.

  After the trials, I never saw Sofri, Bompressi, or Pietrostefani again.

  It’s the summer of 2002 and I am visiting Paris as a correspondent for La Stampa. The French elections are taking place, and will be won by President Jacques Chirac’s Union for a Popular Movement. The soccer World Cup is being played in Japan and Korea. One afternoon I have a coffee on the terrace of the Le Monde building with the French correspondent for my paper, Cesare Martinetti, and a reporter who writes for Il Giornale of Milan. The latter invites us to watch the match on television at his house that night. I accept immediately and thank him. I have no desire to stay at the hotel by myself. Cesare jumps up. “Unfortunately, we can’t. We have a previous engagement.” Somewhat naively, I insist that he’s wrong, that we have nothing scheduled for that night, and that I would be very happy to go. Cesare adopts a stern tone that I have never heard him use. “I’m afraid we cannot, I assure you.” I take it badly. We go down to the street and for a while neither of us speaks. Then he explains. “In that house, on the armchair in front of the TV set, you would have found Pietrostefani, the man convicted of organizing your father’s murder. He plops himself down and doesn’t move. I didn’t want you to have to go through that.” He’s right. That evening we don’t watch the match. We stroll along the Seine deep into the night, conversing about the trials and about my father.

  14.

  apologies

  BENEATH THE PORTICOES of Via Valdonica, in the center of Bologna, the pedestrians lower their voices. Instinct tells me to hold my breath. The air is thick, almost motionless. The street is narrow, as if the overwhelming sadness and the senseless act that provoked it were still there, trapped between the narrow walls, beneath the vault, unable to blend with the sky. You cannot help but look around in search of the bicycle of the professor, of Marco Biagi, who was gunned down on March 19, 2002. Walking on these stones seems to be almost sacrilegious, but every day his wife and children, who still live here, do just that, courageously. They did not run away. Despite the polemics, the insults, the lack of understanding.

  The story of Marco Biagi’s murder is a story of madness. But it is also a cautionary tale about the power of language. About the lighthearted, then careless, and finally irresponsible use of words. About the web that can be woven from insinuations, remarks, writings, graffiti, leaflets, malicious sentences, and stubborn silences, a web that is strong enough to trap a person’s life. It does not take a mastermind to do this. All it takes is the collusion of petty, apparently guiltless behavior by the many. It is through just such complicity that the identity of a center-left professor was distorted so badly that he came to be seen as a negative symbol of the center-right government.

  Marco’s wife, Marina Orlandi, understood exactly what was happening, as did he. Together they looked for a way to break out of this web and end this complicity. They wept over the attacks on his reputation and the death threats. They appealed for and even demanded protection. The government responded by ignoring the request, closing the door in his face, and treating him with frosty toleration. The conclusion was preordained. Marco Biagi, an adviser to the Ministry of Labor, was condemned to death by the terrorists, for the crime of trying to reform the Italian labor laws. The same destiny had befallen his predecessor, Massimo D’Antona, who was shot to death in Rome three years earlier, on May 20, 1999.

  I knew about D’Antona from an insider, the Minister of Labor’s spokesperson, Caterina, who later became my wife. In the evening, she would talk to me about this Massimo D’Antona, who was writing the Labor Reform Act, about the file folders he would bring with him from his house on Via Salaria, about the last time she had seen him at the ministry. Then I remember the morning of May 20, the immediate sense that the demons had returned to strike at the center of Rome. Not far away from Via Salaria, on Via Po, is the head office of the magazine L’espresso. I called there immediately and blurted out to the editor in chief, Giampaolo Pansa, “It’s happening again. They’re back. We’ve seen this all before.” His answer was succinct. “I have the same sensation.”

  Rainfall at the commemoration. Feelings that I know all too well. Uniformed men every morning and every night waiting for Caterina to kick-start her moped or park it downstairs. It was in this period that she spoke to me about Marco Biagi, who was completing D’Antona’s work in the days after the murder, to bring it to the Council of the European Union in Brussels. According to schedule. A posthumous homage to D’Antona and his life’s work.

  Marina Orlandi remembers every moment. “On the day that D’Antona was killed, Marco was in Rome. He, too, was working for the Minister of Labor, Antonio Bassolino, in the Massimo D’Alema government. My husband phoned and told me, ‘I won’t be coming back to Bologna today. I’ll see you on Friday.’ It was Wednesday. I begged him to come home immediately. I cried and shouted. He told me no, that he had to finish preparing the document, that they wanted it ready for the press conference. I couldn’t talk him out of it. So I asked him at least not to participate in the press conference. I didn’t want them to see him. He respected my wish; at least he agreed to that. I remember the anguish that began then. At night I would get up and look out the windows. For a few days, I saw a white minivan parked downstairs in the small square. It became the symbol of my fear, of our fragility.”

  But the precautions were useless, well outmaneuvered by an ideological hatred that even today contaminates any attempt to revise Italian labor law.

  “My husband was not right-wing. He was a Socialist, but he chose to continue working at the ministry when the government changed and Roberto Maroni of the Northern League became his new boss. From that moment on, his life became harder and harder, and he was slowly but surely isolated: he was working for the enemy. Life in Bologna became difficult for us. Marco’s atrocious suffering in the last months of his life stemmed from the depiction of him as a person other than who he really was. He would say, ‘They’ve cordoned me off from polite society.’”

  Marina Orlandi lives in a house filled with plants, memories, and Chinese stamps. She has no
wish to name names or draw up lists of the good and the bad. She prefers to look to the future, and hopes that the Marco Biagi Foundation can be a place “where pride of place is given to dialogue and constructive criticism, in-depth and unbiased study.” The same way that she had envisioned it, together with her husband, the evening before they killed him. “We spoke for a long time about what he was doing to safeguard as much as possible young people, women, the least protected strata of the workforce who already had it tough, and who were very likely to have an even harder go of it. He wanted to keep going, with boyish enthusiasm, despite the fact that he felt isolated and in danger. Twenty-four hours later, he was killed. That night I resolved with all my heart that his assassins, after stamping out his life, would not succeed in stamping out his ideas, too.” On the foundation’s logo is a bicycle whose front light is on, illuminating the street.

  In the fall of 2006, Marina Orlandi felt an old fear coming back. Her instincts placed her on alert. The slogans at recent protest marches were taking on a tone she knew all too well, reminiscent of the public lynching of her husband. So she broke her own rule and ended her silence by writing a public message on the occasion of the inauguration of the Marco Biagi Foundation’s new offices at the University of Modena. “Whenever we try to address the labor issues, we end up exacerbating a conflict that quickly degenerates into a debate that is not only sterile but, as unfortunately we know all too well, extremely dangerous.” Her commitment to defending the memory of her husband is unwavering, even if she does so mostly in silence and without appearing in public. She doesn’t allow herself to be photographed, and she defends her children’s and her own privacy because she wants to continue to walk freely through the streets of Bologna.

  When slander is repeated insistently enough, it creates an entirely new person that supplants the old. I cannot help but think back on my father and the way he was portrayed between 1969 and 1972, with the collusion of newspapers, plays, films, leaflets, and graffiti (some of which seems to have survived the passage of time, as well as the denials and the proof). Today we are still obliged to read that Luigi Calabresi was trained in America, that he was in the CIA, that in 1966 he was the official escort of the American general Edwin A. Walker, and that it was he who introduced Walker to General Giovanni De Lorenzo, who was organizing a coup d’état in Italy. Yet it would take so little, the tiniest speck of intelligence or curiosity, a minimum of fact-checking, to disprove these claims. My father didn’t speak a word of English and never had the possibility to learn it or the time to travel. The only stamp on his passport was issued in Barcelona on May 31, 1969: the first day of the honeymoon that took my parents to Granada and Seville, where I was conceived. Then, he went to Switzerland on business. Nowhere else. Never crossed the ocean. This could all be disputed, to the greater joy of the conspiracy theorists, were it not for one small detail: the facts. He graduated from college in 1965. He applied to become deputy chief inspector, and in 1966 he attended the training courses at the policemen’s academy. It would be beyond belief for the CIA to assign Rome to a fresh graduate, to assign him to escort a general around Rome, or for a student at the police academy to act as the intermediary between the Americans and an Italian general planning a coup. Recently I looked into who this General Walker was: he was an American general who fought in Italy in World War II and then in Korea; he leaned so far to the right that the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy, Robert McNamara, removed him from his post and he left the army. In 1961.

  My father sued Lotta Continua for accusing him of being Pinelli’s murderer and for the American “legends” it had concocted, in the hope of demonstrating that the accusations against him were libelous. It was a suit that my mother opposed until the end—“You’re playing their game”—but my father explained that he had been asked to file suit by the Ministry of the Interior. It was a waste of time and the trial backfired, becoming an opportunity for his enemies to recycle all their libelous attacks on him. In the end, the judge was recused and the trial was suspended and assigned to other judges. It did not come to an end until four years after my father’s death, when the editor in chief of Lotta Continua was convicted of libel.

  After the recusal, eight hundred intellectuals signed a document published in L’espresso on June 13, 1971, in which my father was called “Inspector Torture” and “responsible for the demise of Pinelli.” The list of signatories was endless. I’ve met dozens of them over the years, although I’ve only talked about the document with one, Lucio Colletti. I met him at the Montecitorio Palace when, his Marxist days long over, he was a Member of Parliament for Forza Italia. I would buy him a coffee, and he would offer me one of those thin cigarettes he was always smoking, then he’d give me a few choice quotes for whatever piece I was writing. In 2001, when the election ballots were being drawn up, I did a humorous interview with him in which he took aim at his own party, calling them lily-livered softies. He said he was going to cash in his chips and retire. They took him at his word and took his name off the ballot. The next day he called me, feeling a little down, and said, “You ruined me. You know I can’t resist a good joke and you got me. But what can I say. After all, I do feel like I owe you something. Pazienza! I guess I’ll have to look for a bench in the sun.” That afternoon I saw Berlusconi in the Transatlantico Room at the Montecitorio Palace. I followed him and said, “Do you really want to act like a Stalinist and kick someone out for a remark that was meant to be funny? It’s my fault. Colletti was joking.” In the end, they put his name back on the slate, and he was ready to make fun of Berlusconi and his cohorts all over again.

  • • •

  In the July 3, 2002, issue of Corriere della Sera, the former editor in chief, Paolo Mieli (he would return to the paper’s helm in December 2004), replied to a letter on the subject of universities and specialized degrees. Referring to the long list of signatures affixed to the bottom of the letter, he took the opportunity to say something that had evidently been on his mind for some time. The title of his reply was “Beware of Signatures at the Bottom of Petitions and Manifestos.” I have the clipping in a large envelope in the center drawer of a seventeenth-century bureau bought at an auction at the charterhouse of Pavia in 1969. It was the prize piece of my parents’ house on Via Cherubini. On the left side of the drawer are thousands of letters collected in colored files. On the right is the envelope with letters to the editor or articles that have a special meaning.

  Mieli wrote:

  I wish to object, with all due respect, to the form of your protest. “I have a great dislike for public petitions, for any type of petition. Because I consider them, in the best of cases, useless and sometimes ridiculous, almost always tainted with identifiable outbursts of exhibitionism. To sign this type of sheet costs nothing, absolutely nothing. Despite the gladiatorial tones that abound in these petitions, it takes no courage to adhere to one. On the contrary. Let me add that many years ago my signature ended up (mea culpa) at the bottom of one of these protests. It was the promoters’ intention, and mine, that this appeal serve as a step in favor of freedom of the press, but due to a reprehensible ambiguity in its formulation, the text gave the impression of defending the armed struggle and encouraging the lynching of Luigi Calabresi. Shortly thereafter the inspector was killed and I, some thirty years later, am still ashamed of that coincidence. As I believe (or at least I hope) are all those whose names appeared at the bottom of that sheet. Ashamed is the least I can say: any word of apology to the wife and children of Luigi Calabresi seems inadequate in view of the gravity of this episode. I am quite familiar, as I said, with how signatures end up on this type of petition. Sometimes you get a hasty phone call. But often the people directly concerned know nothing about it. The Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos—the author of the book on which the film Z was based, which evoked the events leading up to the coup d’état by the colonels in Athens—tells the story of how in 1967, a few days after the coup, he read in Le Monde a petition by seventy French intellect
uals requesting his own immediate release. “I was having an espresso at a sidewalk café underneath the Roman sun and I became alarmed,” he recalls. “I immediately phoned Gallimard, my publishing house, to tell them that I was safe and sound abroad and that I would soon be in Paris.” But the surprise did not end there. Two months later, when he arrived in the French capital, he contacted some of the people who had signed the petition and discovered that none of them knew they had signed. Ultimately Marguerite Duras explained what had happened: everyone had delegated their signatures as a blank check to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. When Sartre and his wife decided to protest something, their action automatically included the signatures of the other sixty-eight. Vassilikos at least had the courage to tell the tale and the honesty to joke about it.

  From the same envelope, I take out a letter from Folco Quilici, written in 1991, and a paid advertisement published on May 18, 1997, in the left-wing newspaper Manifesto. In the letter, Quilici, a writer and documentarian famous for his works on the sea, describes how he discovered that his signature was among the eight hundred. “Dear Signora Calabresi, I wanted to tell you that it was not me. I have the feeling that it was someone else or that my signature was added without contacting me. Indeed, please believe me when I say how saddened I am by the assassination of a man of courage.” The newspaper clipping instead comes from people who were on the other front: it is a short communiqué prepared on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of my father’s death. At the bottom there are eleven signatures, all from former leaders of Lotta Continua.