THEIR OBJECTIVE WAS to turn peacetime into a disagreeable misunderstanding, a meaningless intermission. A lukewarm bath in which the hero only grows soft. Against this languid and pacific image—the struggle, the challenge, a stiffening defiance, a venturing beyond, a provocation . . . There are enemies in every camp and they must be flushed out: in politics, liberalism (even the Communists are more worthy of respect, almost admirable, because they, too, battle against the liberal), laxity in the field of education, Petrarchism in literature, faggotry in terms of customs and lifestyle—these are the enemies. It is necessary to bring war, and its mythical protagonist, the warrior, in peacetime. One must violate peace, useful only to merchants and shopkeepers, fertilize it. Protract a condition of war ad infinitum.
THEY FANATICALLY SUPPORTED any act capable of shattering the individual. They believed that by breaking a person, something new and superior would emerge, something authentic, savage, and pure. It was an idea naïve in its premise, crude in its implementation, nefarious in its consequences. Anything, anything at all, as long as it could be used to crack the shell of normality, conventional identity, in short, the habits that flatten man and render him stupid, when instead he should be reawakened, whatever it takes: you could do it with boxing, drugs, beatings, prayer, gunshots, workouts in the gym, choral singing, hiking, summer camps, anything. But then this same fragmented individual sooner or later would have to be reassembled, strengthened, given discipline: after mystically losing himself in the nothingness, he had to rediscover himself. “For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.”
The ideal moment to complete this sort of recruitment-training-indoctrination was between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. I mean, back in those days: nowadays that age would be too late, or maybe the effort would be wholly pointless: adolescents have countless distractions and it’s harder to focus their energies, I mean to say, to focus their energies in a single fanatical direction. The blindness of an adolescent of today may be very profound indeed, but it’s almost never total: that young person can be seduced and deceived, no doubt about it, but by many things at once, very rarely by just one. In the darkness of their cavern, many flames flicker and gutter, many illusory will-o’-the-wisps may dance, but it is unlikely that all at once the powerful floodlight of a supposed truth will switch on. So much the better, I believe. And here I’m talking once again about the males, that’s right, the males, the poor miserable males, miserable about the simple fact that they’re male and therefore foolishly proud and fond of their misery. The female readers of this book will, I hope, forgive me for the monotony if at least they’re able to recognize in the characters populating these pages some distant reflection of their fathers, brothers, male friends, sons, and those men they may have chanced to fall in love with and who seeded their lives with insecurity. A woman thinks that she’s found a bulwark, but instead it was a cabin with walls as thin as rice paper, or perhaps it was a castle, yes, but an illusion of a castle, a trick castle whose walls, as soon you turn your back, vanish in the blink of an eye.
WHILE I TOOK PART in the political meetings on Via Spontini, with a couple of comrades outside on the lookout against possible Fascist incursions, I noticed how every twist of the discussion corresponded to a step in their radicalization. The line of reasoning would snap and then be resumed from a subsequent point that matched a higher level of virulence, exactly like a round of hands in poker, with each player seeing and raising the previous bets, so that with each hand the pot necessarily grows, and grows, the ante continuously piling up, richer and richer. A verbal risk is almost never associated with the actual risk, and that is how certain players tilt into bankruptcy without noticing. Betting a higher sum when you’re in the throes of vertigo, in the trance of total detachment from reality. More, more and more and more. Just for the giddy inebriation of that endless tailspin. The thread might have snapped at the sound of a mocking phrase, torn by an insult or a curse, or else by a paradox, which almost inevitably gets the better of all the arguments brought to bear. How so? By its sheer incongruity, which caught your interlocutor off guard, leaving him defenseless, at least temporarily, pawing helplessly at the air. By leaping from one verbal plane to another, you create a void into which your interlocutor—who was following you closely, marking you man-to-man, eager not to let you outdistance him—helplessly tumbles. It’s the best way to silence your adversary: leap from one topic to another, attack him on a level or a subject that has nothing to do with the matter at hand, passing from the rational plane to the emotional or the physical, both impossible to refute. Logic crumbles if contaminated by hatred or passion or ridicule, all that remains of its various delicate passages is a grid of threads burned to cinders, like Loki’s net. In a dispute, one theory can be opposed by another, one mental broadside can be met with a proportionate response, until someone throws the mechanism out of whack, tosses all the cards into the air. Until someone pulls out a whiff of folly, a handgun, a succession of absurd questions, low blows, flashes of genius, a beating, something unspeakable.
Superior to the philosopher who reasons (Hamlet) is the philosopher who does not reason (Nijinsky).
4
I’M LEAFING THROUGH the photocopies of an interview with Cubbone that was published in 1987, while he was a prisoner in France, awaiting extradition to Italy.
The highlight of Cubbone’s criminal career—he was so called because of his massive physique—remains his breakout from Rome’s Rebibbia Prison on November 23, 1986, an escape that lasted twenty days, until they caught up with him in Paris. A helicopter had landed in the exercise yard, in the criminals’ section, on the soccer field during a match, and a French criminal and Cubbone both climbed quickly aboard, while their accomplices aboard the aircraft fired at the guard towers, to prevent the correctional officers from interfering. Both the pilot and the helicopter had been taken at gunpoint from San Camillo Hospital, where they were part of the emergency air ambulance service. Cubbone says that his cellmate tried to join the escape by hanging on to the helicopter, but that Cubbone kicked his hands until the man lost his grip. “If I had let him climb aboard, I wouldn’t have been his friend.” A couple more years and the man would have served his full sentence, so it struck Cubbone as a bad idea to ruin it all with a prison escape. “He isn’t like me and my comrade, wedded to life sentences without parole.” Cubbone doesn’t know at the time that he won’t spend much more time in prison. He would be found dead ten years later, in Florence, apparently of an overdose. He was hiding under the alias of Davide D’Olivia, born in Los Angeles. In reality, Cubbone was the eldest son of a concierge at the Hotel Plaza, as a boy a student at SLM, and with a younger brother also at SLM, a friend of mine. I remember him as likable and nice, and a pretty good Ping-Pong player. We played doubles in the tournament that was held during SLM’s ski week, in the Dolomite Mountains, at Lavarone.
THERE ARE STRIKING COINCIDENCES between the spectacular escape of my ex-schoolmate and other events in my own life, less vivid, certainly, but significant of something, something I can’t quite pin down, and which the writing of this book intertwines without being able to explain. For example, the fact that I first set foot in a prison (a place where I would go on to spend time for many years and where I still work today) in the criminal section of Rebibbia, in fact, just a few days after the spectacular escape by helicopter, and that my baptism into incarceration was marked by the image of the guard towers with their bulletproof glass, which had withstood those Parabellum bullets, cracking slightly in a sunburst around the points of impact from the bursts of automatic weapon fire.
Even stranger is the fact that, no more than a month ago, I happened to meet an eyewitness to the escape. He’s a building surveyor and land officer named Alfredo Rocchi, who, at my behest, is trying to settle a classic cockup at the Rome land office. Issuing from divisions of property dating back to who knows when, there survives a “relitto cortilizio” (that’s right, a “courtyard relic,” that�
�s the legal description) of roughly fifty square feet in the Talenti quarter, of which I am officially co-owner, in equal shares with my cousin, and I can’t seem to get rid of it, to resolve it: the issue has been dragging on for what seems like forever, twice yearly I get bills for condominium fees of €7.50, and by now I’m the only real relic, so I’m starting to think that that corner of a courtyard in Talenti is going to be further split up among my heirs, who will receive little more than five square feet apiece, unless Rocchi manages to put an end to this legal farrago, thanks to his contacts at the land office. I don’t believe there was any reason aside from telepathy, but the last time that I met with Rocchi, as we were going over the papers and forms, I started talking to him about Cubbone’s famous escape. Maybe I’d started with the fact that I work there, at the penitentiary . . . and Rocchi all of a sudden livened up, and in his intelligent light blue eyes, the kind of blue that only certain Roman eyes can possess, a vision glinted into life.
“Ah, but I saw it, that helicopter, did you know that? I was there too, when it landed . . .”
“What do you mean,” I asked in amazement, “were you in prison?”
“Prison? Well, no, I was just thirteen.”
“Oh, of course, sorry.”
“Sorry for what? It was after school, and I was playing at the soccer field in Giardinetti . . .”
“Where, you mean the neighborhood on the Via Casilina? You’re from Giardinetti?”
“Yeah, born and raised.”
“What was the name of your team?”
“Real Giardinetti.”
“Real, like Real Madrid . . .”
“Exactly. And in fact we also had Atlético Giardinetti.”
“No kidding. Nice! In Giardinetti, just think.”
“In fact, it was the local Giardinetti soccer derby that we were playing . . . when this helicopter flew right overhead. We thought it must be a police helicopter. Someone up in the copter leaned out and displayed a machine gun, waving for us to leave. That was the last thing we kids were going to do! We were scared, sure, but we were fascinated, too . . . until it landed right in the middle of the field, kicking up a cloud of dust, and those guys got out, armed to the teeth . . .”
The old volcanic ash soccer fields on the edge of town.
Cubbone, in fact, remembers that once they took to the skies above the prison, the escapees got lost over Rome. “When you’re up in the air, everything looks different, it gets confusing, we couldn’t find the place we’d agreed on.” Then he saw the only shape that is immediately clear, even from overhead. Rectangular. “There, down there,” and he pointed to a soccer field, “put the copter down!” he shouted at the pilot. The kids in shorts and T-shirts scattered in all directions. The helicopter landed. The escapees, guns in hand, flagged down cars, and they were gone.
The interview with Cubbone is bedecked with eloquent headlines and written in such a way that it offers a portrait of a wild-eyed subject, arrogant yet almost likable. A brash yet chivalrous criminal. After the escape, his sense of liberty goes to his head. “I’m too much for the cops, I don’t even consider them my adversaries . . . and all those judges who wanted to interrogate me, who wanted to divvy up my remains . . . those armored doors, those gates, those prohibitions, poof, all of them, gone.”
His brief time on the loose ended with a siege by the French police. His two fellow escapees threw down their guns and put up their hands, whereupon what did he think? “No, fuck, not like this. What should I do? Cock my sidearm and go out in a blaze of glory? But then they’d shoot the other two like sitting ducks . . . so go ahead and kill yourself, you fucking coward. What are you waiting for? I turned my pistol around and aimed it at my chest, a split second, an eternity. I heard them shouting, give up, throw down your guns. More tear gas, they were about to blow the door. What the hell! Better a living dog than a dead lion . . .”
So he put up his hands, too.
I CONTINUE to leaf through “May the Force Be with Me,” the interview that my old classmate gave to Panorama nearly twenty years ago. I use my highlighter to mark a few paragraphs, where he makes an interesting and self-interested distinction between violence and force. The former is alien to him, it’s pointless and gratuitous, while the latter may serve a purpose. What purpose? To defend against the former. And who is it that commits the violence? Institutions. It sounds like an anarchist proclamation. And yet, at the same time, Cubbone is someone who declares that he believes in law and order, in discipline: “God, Fatherland, and Family are three words I capitalized, they weren’t antiquated words for me, they were true, they were alive.” Europe needed to be united against the red menace. He was a paratrooper in Pisa and he thought all that was great, “the jumps, the patrols, the shooting, the hikes, I liked it all, the smell of the equipment, the rifle on my cot. I didn’t give a damn about going back home on leave. That was where I wanted to stay, in the airborne, forever.” But then they expelled him from the corps: they’d discovered his criminal record, his involvement in an armed robbery, even if he’d been acquitted in the main trial and the lesser charges had been amnestied. At that point (after an unhappy interval working as a tile and bathroom fixture salesman) he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, at Fort Saint-Nicolas, Marseille, but there, too, in spite of his revived enthusiasm for “the cots, the uniforms, the smells, the paths of war,” they kicked him out after a few months. He just couldn’t do it, he couldn’t work a job like everyone else, put on a coat and tie and sell bathroom fixtures. He sniffed around, exploring every cause and hot zone where there was an opportunity to wear a uniform: South Africa, Libya . . . Israel or the PLO, it was all the same to him. “That was the life: a good weapon, something hot to eat, a good pair of shoes . . . I’d have been willing to enlist as a private, but they wouldn’t take me,” and so he built a profile as a sort of soldier of fortune. But soldiers without an army turn into bandits: Cubbone is the first to realize the fact.
So he replaced his dream of fighting a war with fairly standard criminal activity. When he was found dead, he’d been wanted by the law for crimes that had little enough glory to them: kidnapping a child, an armed robbery in a jewelry store, the murder of an officer in the anti-terrorism unit.
I REMEMBER SEEING the newspaper photographs of his first arrest, on the island of Ponza, in a swimsuit . . . I was stunned . . .
LATER YOU WILL HEAR more about a life story that can be compared in many ways with that of Cubbone, with reference to one of the protagonists of the CR/M, whom I have dubbed, in fact, “the Legionnaire”: the extreme right, youthful crimes, time on the run, the Foreign Legion, heroin, and finally, a mysterious overdose and death.
“I’M THE SON of an era without medals, without heroes, without causes to believe in and fight for.”
5
SOME TIME AGO, a magazine asked me to contribute to a special issue in which each writer was expected to indicate three keywords of their being, or feeling themselves to be, leftists, and to explain the reason for their choice. By inviting me to take part, they took it for granted that I was a leftist; I imagine, in fact, that the request was made to all the intellectuals, writers, directors, etc., with the same implicit assumption: it’s obvious that you’re a leftist, even if you’re disappointed now, skeptical, even if you’re not marching anymore, even if . . .
After mulling it over, and not for a very long time, truth be told, I decided to turn down the invitation.
I was at a loss.
All the left-wing words that came to my mind could have been taken for right-wing words.
Let’s take, for instance: “liberty” or “courage.”
And then, “minority,” a word I’m sincerely fond of.
But I’m not at all certain that it’s a left-wing word.
What coloration can we give this word?
In the political world I lived in as a young man, and in big cities like the one I grew up in, what was in the minority was unquestionably the right wing. It was in
the minority just about everywhere, among students, in the schools, in Italy, even in Rome, which has never been a city with a great Socialist or Communist tradition. Being a right-winger meant you were in the minority everywhere, except for certain quarters, certain schools, among them, SLM.
SLM was necessarily a right-wing school, and therefore being a leftist there meant swimming against the stream, trying to stand out, and yet cultivating your own beliefs in the quasi-secrecy of a clandestine sect, like those worshippers of the goddess Kali, the Thugs.
Yes, we left-wingers at SLM felt we were thugs.
What a delightful paradox: Communists at a school run by priests! In a quarter overrun by Fascists! There was something almost snobbish, ostentatious, about this choice.
And so our way and our reasons for being left-wing were, basically, right-wing in nature, or at least they tracked back to those values and feelings which, what with a long history of being scorned by the left (let one example serve for all the others: courage—for instance, the courage displayed by the mercenary Fabrizio Quattrocchi in Iraq, as he was about to be executed by his captors, in uttering the phrase, now famous in Italy: “Now I’ll show you how an Italian dies,” which, taken literally, in that murderous context, I consider to be the most enigmatic and interesting statement conceived and uttered by one of my compatriots in the past several years), and after being derided at every level but, above all, in intellectual and journalistic circles, those values were handed over to become the appanage of the right.
Aside from everything else, how does an Italian die? If he does stand out for the way in which he lives, will he also differentiate himself for the way he dies—his own special way of dying?
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