Diary of an Escape
Page 29
Folio 107
The Makno polling organization says that 62 out of 100 Italians want me to be arrested. That sounds good to me – it means that 38 out of 100 don’t. Always supposing that these polls actually have some kind of validity, there is no doubt that I am holding up well in the midst of the brazen and insolent propaganda that the regime is stoking against me. As for the Italian authorities, they want me dead. I had a precise account of what has happened in the past few days from a French functionary who has been literally terrified by the violence of the Italian demands. As he sees it, at least the forms should be maintained. They have been asking either for extradition or for my expulsion from France. The Corrierone confirms the news. Obviously they are hoping to get me expelled to some South American country, where they can get me kidnapped! I have no intention of departing from here. This morning, at dawn, I went on a splendid motorbike ride through the streets of Paris. I had spent the night talking to friends, and at dawn we returned home. It is Sunday and there are there no cars in town – especially not at dawn, when the weather is so blustery. How beautiful this city is, with its order and its intelligence. A rich arabesque carpet. My second home. Will it end up becoming my only home? The memories are piling up, of so many years spent in Paris, ever since I was a teenager, and of many friendships, and of dear teachers. I talk at length with Alexandre M. – an excellent philosopher and a great friend. He laughs like a lunatic when I tell him that certain people are advising me to take a Socratic attitude – in other words, to return to Italy and drink the hemlock. Unless of course I am elected to the European Parliament; but that, too, would mean swallowing the hemlock. No, he tells me, it really isn’t even worth the effort of reasoning with such ignoramuses. He reminds me that Socratic formalism did not consist in the sic et simpliciter acceptance of the law, but in honouring just laws against their wrong application. Formalism in the polis is certainly not on a par with what we can expect of the Italian state, which is notorious for the very bad laws on which it is founded. In Alexandre, good sense triumphs over high-school misreadings of the classics. We talk at length about Spinoza – it is Spinozan to save one’s own life and not to give in to compromises. ‘Anyway,’ he asks, ‘are you interested in the European Parliament?’ I tell him no. And what about the comrades … Today they were supposed to start the cross-examination of Oreste Strano – my old friend, how I love you. I cannot succeed in getting the comrades out of my head and out of my heart, not for a single moment. I turn over in bed, sensing that they are close by, like in the cell. Someone is breathing heavily – I smile … Yes, night time in prison is full of noise and of the troubled dreams of the people sleeping next to you. (Paris – 2 October)
Folio 108
Today, at last, I got to see Paola again. Her enormous tension – she is continually followed and bothered by the police. But also an enormous positive tension: she is a communist, without embarrassment and without doubts, and she combines this great strength of hers with a sense of protection and a generosity which make a great woman of her. A formidable fighter? Her sweetness is matched by a willingness to discuss and by the broad horizon of her discourse. A great tenderness. Anyway, we try to get a grip on the situation. It seems to us that the trial of strength we are traversing is not going too badly for us. But it remains a trial of our strength, and we shall either win or lose. The margin we are treading is very neat and hard. Furthermore, there are urgent things about the trial that need to be dealt with, and I also need time in order to rebuild a capacity of intervention. What to do? Correctly, given the situation, Paola is also advising me to proceed cautiously. No more interviews. OK. As for the friends, God preserve me from them … Ils ont déconné. Paola brought me the back numbers of Il Manifesto. I read the bitterness in Rossana’s articles and her rhetorical postponement of any ‘moral judgement’, but actually that moral judgement is entirely implicit in the mawkishness of the piece. I read an abstract ‘let’s forget him’ article by the restrained (but evidently irascible) Ferrajoli; then there is an outrageous attack by Cases – the ‘snob’ signorina does not play out of character. I connected with these people with too much emotion – today they reveal themselves as having not much intellectual staying power. I am saddened by this. On the other hand, I am amused by the apoplectic ragings of the great buffoon Montanelli. And of all the likes of him. Let them take it out on Pannella – what do I have to do with loyalty to the institutions? Together with Paola we laugh about it. As we leave, she seems serene. ‘Wait and see’ seems to be the best option. Certainly it seems that they are mobilizing their forces in order to destroy my image, and with this destruction to open new possibilities of repression. Maybe they want purely and simply to kill me: OVRA still lurks in Italy’s administrative structures. But first, if you don’t mind, destruction of my image! And they have to do this destruction, first and foremost, for the ex-friends. How boringly manualistic and repetitive the operating systems of the state services are! And how naïve the ex-friends! I have no fear of being destroyed, but I do fear being killed. (Paris – 4–5 October)
Folio 109
Today I see the Guru again, after he’s been pushing and pushing for a meeting, creating incredible misunderstandings and strains.
We discuss calling it off, on both sides. I really don’t think that we shall meet again. But he promises me loyal support in the coming months and years. And so I do the same. Will he keep his word? I dare to hope so. As for myself, in the tiredness of these days, I still set to work. I am completing a long mémoire for the French authorities – on the whole business of the 7 April case and on the undertakings I shall make once I receive a residence permit. Moi Philippe Rivière … I hope this is going to work. I still have not seen any of the Italian refugee comrades in France, not even the closest friends among them. I know that they are looking for me, and in so doing they are making problems for me. I would like one of them to read my mémoire, so that I don’t write something that could damage someone. I know that they have their own, ongoing negotiations with the French government, and I don’t want to jeopardize them. I discuss this with the French comrades and they offer to act as go-betweens. What’s more, they say, here among the emigrés there are perhaps more political families than there were groups in Italy. I can feel a strong tension building up inside me – to begin again. To begin again with political work, in line with, and matched to, the tasks which are required by the present – and not by the past. It is important that I manage to carry through this leap in consciousness – a leap forward. It is decisive. I am winding up the spring. When it is released I must be perfectly prepared to receive its impulse. Otherwise I run the danger of falling flat on my face. I have to pay a lot of attention to the French situation. This is now where I live, and I live protected among scientific and bureaucratic congregations (I mean, of the high public sector). Here politics is second nature. Today they see me as being part of their milieu, unlike previously, when they used to look at me curiously and half ironically, like at some kind of savage. A miracle due to the fact of my imprisonment, a transformation brought about by the way in which I conducted myself in prison and by the fact of having won a battle. Thus, if I want to revive my work, it has to develop in relation to the given political conditions. We shall see. These are difficult problems. Making your exit is an art.
PS In yesterday’s Corriere even one of the heads of the P1 lodge, Cesare Merzagora, was attacking me as a ‘coward’, a ‘destabilizer of the system’ (sic!). But how is it possible that such a ruling class manages to continue to reproduce itself? What difference is there with fascism? What difference is there, let us say, between Merzagora and a fascist freemason, for instance a Grandi or a Bottai? Why this never-ending pitiful tragedy? (Paris – 6 October)
Folio 110
Dying a bit in order to begin again. The bureaucratic difficulties are numerous – administrative difficulties related to the granting of a residence permit, difficulties which then affect the preparation of my nomina
tion for the Collège International. (On its executive council there are representatives of four separate ministries. My closest friends preferred to defer the naming of the foreign components, so as to avoid creating scandals – and at the same time they have produced a warm letter for Ton-Ton.) And political difficulties such as the lack of contacts with Italy, the media baying at my heels like a lynch mob, the enmity of the French ambassador in Rome, and so on. I am finishing the mémoire – if it is used properly it could be decisive in the environment of the French high administration. But it is true to say that I am in a situation of very heavy isolation, and when all is said and done I cannot even count on being able to settle here. Given that, I have to programme this isolation and this uncertainty. How long will they last? It’s hard to know. However, there will be elections in France in 1986, and the Right is growing, and, despite the fact that the right to asylum is written into the material constitution of this republic, if a right-wing government gets in, it would certainly be more inclined to accept requests from the Italian government. Thus the problem is how to organize a basic political work which can move from Europe to Italy during the coming two years. It is not the first time when I find myself moving in uncertainty, within a defeat and on the look-out for a re-foundation. But on the other occasions (halfway through the ’60s; and at the start and in the middle of the ’70s) at least the material conditions of my existence were assured, and the fabric on which we were working had been created over a long period. Now, if I take a closer look, it is evident that the problems are dramatic. But probably it is precisely this radicality of the problem, with all the desperation and the risks which colour it, that guarantees the intensity of its unfolding. And the importance of the result, if we manage to achieve it. This isolation is distance, but it can also be (and will be) an immediate coming close to the situation and a radical change. The tendency is moving within these limits. We are living an enormous paradox – the fall of the Empire is not the same as the centuries-long process described by Gibbon; rather it is a rapid and deadly implosion. It has the rhythm of a heart attack, not of TB. It is within this tension that intelligence has to be organized. This separateness, which I discovered during the class struggle in the crisis, and which was bizarrely imposed on me (and heightened) in prison and now in exile, is beginning to present itself as a hegemonic rule of society. Deep, dark, ontologically determined and without future. We need to die within it and be born anew. They accuse me of being a coward – let them continue to do so. I have always avoided notions of being strong and being weak; in fact I have preferred to embrace weakness, and if I have been strong it is certainly not by vocation but by constraint. Anyway, strength of spirit is a purely intellectual fact: it means locating oneself practically and theoretically on an average point in a possible history, heightening the independence and the separateness of the possibility, of prediction, and thereby building their strength. We have to cover in the mind what the proletariat and all the exploited live in their everyday lives and obscurely construct in their concrete history.
I have to turn myself into a marginalized person. I am that anyway, so why not make it a key element in rebuilding? The political situation in Italy is perverse, and the European situation is threatened by a Right which is on the rampage and is increasingly fascist in ideological terms. However, alongside all that, sometimes in total separation and sometimes crossing the same institutional level according to rules which are no longer corrupt, there exist currents of thought and a will for struggle within which one can rebuild. Dying a bit, in order to be able to begin afresh. A terrain of immediate intervention, of direct protest, of effective denunciation is almost impossible, and anyway it is unrealistic to think in terms of going down that path. Now is not the time for a vox in deserto clamans. But it is also true that this is what a lot of people want; it is true that we can collectively construct the modalities and the potenza of it. Time is playing in our favour, because it is a new time, an alternative time to the slavery of work and oppression, a new time, which has been internalized at a mass level, and with unexpected dimensions. God help me … within this choice of a new time, of a new immersion in the deep substrate of the desires of the exploited. The risk is enormous, and only an extreme lucidity of analysis can permit us to construct the light-filled determination of conscious rebellion – a new capacity for constitution. From physical uneasiness to a rational undertaking, from rational uneasiness to the constitutive strength of the masses. Avoiding the temptation of suicide. So many times I must, yet again, traverse frontiers. Recover reason’s desire for living, and its joy. Once again I have to bring a fleshly reason to bear on the surfaces of the world. (Paris – 7–10 October)