THIS WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN. Social inferiority has always been one of the ideal conditions attendant on domination, and the young men accused of the CR/M did nothing but perpetuate an age-old scorn for the weak. They considered themselves to be untouchables, above the law. And they considered young women to be property with which they could do as they pleased. Only they’d picked the wrong historical era, by a couple of centuries at least. Whatever else you might say about it, our era does provide tools to the weak with which to demand justice. Power does encounter an objective limit in the law. Only the law, and only a posteriori, can provide a counterweight to the inequality that made the rape possible in the first place: inequality of age, experience, social standing, role, number, and physical strength. There can be no doubt that the victims were abused not because they were particularly attractive but because they were defenseless. Proof that rape has nothing to do with any excess of sex drive on the part of those who commit it and those who suffer it can be found in the fact that many rapists are impotent and that their victims are devoid of any physical attraction, homely, nondescript young women, women in their later years, or with unremarkable sexual features, and who do nothing to dress provocatively. A rapist’s penis is often tiny. That is not the basis of his power, and in any case, it can be substituted by surrogates of all kinds, clubs and various other implements, used both as physical objects and as symbols of domination.
The motif of rape is predictable—indeed a venerable old tradition even considers it to be inevitable—in which an isolated, defenseless young woman is left at the mercy of a man or a number of men. Young shepherdesses with their flocks, goose herders, little washerwomen, barely older than children, who go from one village to another carrying food or linen, serving girls and handmaidens are the historical target of these abusers. In the old French ballads to which I referred previously, the story is told in a lighthearted fashion. Things that are inevitable often ring as casual, disillusioned. A knight spots a young shepherdess, approaches her, lays her down on the meadow, lifts her blouse, finding her flesh is white and her breasts are firm, and, in spite of her protests and her pleas, he takes not only his own pleasure, but also the virginity of the sheepherding girl. Then he rides off on his steed, in no hurry, perhaps after giving her a gift of a silk sash or some other trifle. In the bourgeois setting, the characters of the story change, instead of peasant girls we have college coeds, shopgirls, office clerks, telephone switchboard operators; and the landscape becomes urban or suburban instead of pastoral.
THE TRUE MYSTERY of the CR/M is not the identity of the murderers, about which writers have outdone themselves: the black hole of that crime is the identity of the victims. The fact that they were “ordinary girls” is the most mysterious, enigmatic definition imaginable: what does it mean to be ordinary? Reading the morning papers, in the days that followed the CR/M, threw most Italian families into a state of consternation, as they discovered from one day to the next that their beloved sons might actually turn out to be rapists, and that their daughters were wide open to the tender mercies of sex maniacs every time they went out in the afternoon “with friends.” Which friends? Going where? To do what? The questions were relentless and went unanswered. Danger was everywhere, on every side. Just outside the front door, there lay a vast, unknown territory. Till then, we were certain that we knew it, but now streets and piazzas were no-man’s-land.
The account of the murderers’ exploits, spiced up every day with new details, as casual as they were bloodcurdling, suddenly undermined all moral defenses, to utter collapse. The press exploited the morbid aspects of the story (innocence violated, sex, blood, wealth) to draw in readers and then to chastise them with moralistic tirades that, in their turn, did nothing but kindle new life into the reader’s morbid fascination. When you bring out the rot—even with the noblest of purposes, that is, to cleanse and purify ourselves of it—it’s almost impossible not to be infected by it. As you denounce it and shine a bright light on it, to some extent you are forced to acknowledge its inevitability. The carrion has been unearthed, and its guts befoul the air. An authentic love of truth cannot be separated from an unholy passion toward truth’s discoveries, however obscene they may prove to be. And so, if you want to learn more, you must be willing to overlook the very same moral laws in the name of which you have prepared yourself to investigate.
From this point of view, the CR/M was a scandal, a genuine scandal. The kind of scandal that disfigures in an indelible fashion the space that it lays open to the glare of daylight. That which was revealed gave others the opportunity to fall into the same errors. Instead of protecting from, they encouraged to. The scandal served at the same time as a warning against the evil detected, but it also implicitly instigated others to commit the same crime by the force of a negative example, suggesting that by now the world was contaminated and there could be no respite from corruption and violence. Either you were victims or you were perpetrators (the slogan “We are all responsible,” which dates back to distant Catholic roots, has had an incredible popularity in our country, and caused the damages I’ve already discussed: by summoning us all to accept glaring or hidden guilt, at the same time it dilutes that guilt in a sort of generic collective sin, which can be condoned equally collectively), or else both things together, perpetrators and victims, which leads to a sort of general amnesty. Stigmatized in words, the horror became accessible, within reach of one and all. A scandal is never beneficial, it can never restore the thing that has been lost, though it has proven illusory, seeing that the sickness had already spread before the fever spiked.
It is right not to conceal the truth, but if the truth is rotten, it will infect anyone who comes to know it.
Innocence was ruined for good. If innocence had ever existed.
No one could be further from death
than two ordinary eighteen-year-old girls
but at the same time no one could be closer
and better suited for the role of victim: that’s
right, suited to dying, fittest for death.
Their immaturity makes them a tastier fruit
unripe and yet ready to break off the branch.
Their fall will cause a thud
that can be heard echoing in the distance
fatal and dramatic in a way that it wouldn’t be
if the fall were due to natural ripening.
They weren’t ready for death. This wasn’t their season.
Their souls unconfessed, unshriven, great or small
though the sins committed in a short lifetime might have been.
It’s not part of the plan for an afternoon outing
to end your life drowned in a bathtub
after long hours of abuse and torture. Untimely death.
The one comforting thought is that an individual
can only suffer pain and misfortune within certain limits
beyond which they will either be annihilated or fall senseless.
This is the ironic observation that Dante makes concerning
the centaur Cacus, killed by Hercules with a hundred
blows of a club, of which he may have felt the first ten, certainly no more.
LIKE ABEL IN GENESIS, who is there practically only so he can be slain by Cain, a similar role is played in the CR/M by the two girls. The attention is wholly directed upon the guilty party, rather than the victim. What interests Holy Scripture is the drama of the malefactor, his torment, his headlong flight, the way he will be punished and, at the same time, preserved from punishment. Once he has been killed, the mild-mannered Abel shuffles off the stage. That in general is the victim’s problem: no self-respecting actor would be willing to play a character who disappears fifteen minutes into the movie. It seems that the very name Abel means, in Hebrew, “nothingness.” Were the two girls in the CR/M nothingness? If I say little or nothing about them in this book, am I every bit as unjust as the anonymous author that Bible scholars have identified with the letter “J”?
SEX CRIMES CREATE A MORBID COMPLICITY that bleeds its color onto anyone who has anything to do with it. The first to be contaminated is the victim, involved in the indignity of it, which often leads her to keep the rape, or the violence suffered, a secret in order to avoid suffering its shame. This extends to the families of the perpetrators and of the victims, who were unable to educate, inhibit, or protect, and to its witnesses, direct or indirect, each of whom carries within them a fragment of responsibility: and if we extend the concept of witness to include anyone who has learned about what happened, by reading the newspapers or watching TV, or those hybrid forms that are books but especially movies (by its very nature, rape lends itself more to a visual reconstruction than a verbal description), then you can see that the degree of moral involvement in a rape can stretch out to touch the whole of society. You need only open a newspaper to become part of this corrupt community.
AS LONG AS RAPE was considered a crime against morality and not against a person, it was inevitable that the victim should be bound up with the rapist in the same aura of shame. You become impure not only for acts committed but also for acts suffered, like a plague victim who has contracted the disease against his will; he may just be an innocent victim, but he arouses the same disgust nonetheless.
THE MINDS AND PRIVATE LIVES of sons and daughters become an impenetrable jungle. That’s what it always has been, true enough, but, with the exception of a few special cases, the parents never thought they had anything particular to worry about. As long as the kids didn’t flunk school or say too many dirty words, the rest was routine business. But now, behind the routine, anything could be lurking. Indeed, routine normality had become frightening, peace and quiet an unsettling sign. There, in their rooms, the kids might be scheming, coming up with something horrible: rapes, ambushes. Or maybe they were just working on a translation out of Latin. Some of the victims of political terrorism were singled out and then murdered as a result of afternoon meetings not much more focused and thought through than ordinary discussions of what movie to go see. The decision was made of who needed to be taught a lesson, by breaking their legs, who to rub out, who to shoot. And if you weren’t one of the murderers, you could always be one of the victims. All girls had turned into potential prey, now that you could no longer trust “polite young men.” Some said that an anthropological mutation was under way, others claimed that the bourgeois class’s frenzy for domination was no longer reined in by the hypocritical counterweights of restraint and one’s good name.
And then there’s the crisis of the family. Ah! Perhaps no notion has been called upon so frequently to explain such a wide varieties of phenomena as the “crisis of the family” . . .
THIS SENSATION WOULD SWELL until it became paranoid in the years that followed, with political violence striking right to the threshold of the home and often even inside. Flaming gasoline leaking in under the front door. Apartment house atriums where adversaries were hunted down and finished off. Dead bodies sprawled on the stairs, splatters of brain matter on the plaster. The visual documentation never takes in open fields of view or long perspectives, they’re always apartment house gates, parking lots lined with mopeds, low walls, rest areas, bus stops, front doors of large apartment buildings, narrow sidewalks, manholes, car doors, shattered driver’s side windows through which you can see, half tangled in the steering wheel, the murdered victims. The leatherette front seat of a Fiat 750 is no longer a comfortable, familiar setting.
While kidnappings for ransom frightened only a minority of the wealthy, and Mafia and Camorra murders back then were restricted to the south, political violence could strike anywhere and anyone: you could be blown sky high in a train, in the branch office of a bank, at the station, someone might crack your skull open because of the length of the hair covering that skull, or the style of your shoulder bag, and if at home one of your children was interested in politics—and in that period, more or less everyone was interested in it, impossible to remain neutral—the evenings when that child was still out were chilling, the possibility remained wide open he might have been stabbed, knocked off his motor scooter, kicked repeatedly in the head.
IT PROBABLY WASN’T actually the cause of it, but the decline of the traditional family did allow the violent manifestation of problems that had previously remained within its confines, imploding there in silence, causing less alarm or remaining entirely invisible. In the past, many prosperous males had experienced their sexual initiation and had maintained the possibility of letting off their sexual steam within the perimeter of the domestic setting. These were the “ancillary love affairs,” a singular blend in household customs of sex abuse, the duties of the household help toward their employers and masters, hierarchic relations, and prostitution diluted and masquerading as workplace interactions, all of them practices that would send you straight to prison nowadays. These were long considered an acceptable solution or even a source of domestic stability, since they warded off far riskier and more uncontrolled sexual adventures. With the drastic reduction in size of housing and household staff, and the consolidation of the civil rights of even young women of working-class extraction, if a male now wishes to vent his libido between the walls of home, he has no option but to turn to his wife, provided she is still attractive to him; and, unfortunately for him, his wife nowadays can meet his advances with an unchallengeable rejection. Another door is now barred shut. Previously, one could comfortably indulge in various forms of sexual abuse, but now you have to go out onto the street. The first-mentioned phenomenon was less clamorous and glaring than the latter. The latter proves more violent than the former.
14
AJOURNALIST WHO WAS WILLING to help me, Carmela G***, had the opportunity to read some transcripts from the questioning of Angelo, dating back to late 1993 and early 1994. She was not allowed to make copies of them, only to read them and make recordings on her cell phone of what she thought might be interesting to me. The alarmed tone of her voice cannot be reproduced here. Listening to the recordings, it is clear that these are in many cases first-person statements that Angelo himself made; at other times the transcripts speak about him and his accomplices in the third person; in yet other cases, it is Carmela herself who reports on and summarizes what she is reading, or else makes her own comments (which I have marked here in italics). I couldn’t say which of Angelo’s statements are true, or which of them was taken by the investigators to be true. By and large, I’d have to guess, very few of them. I have transformed many of the names mentioned in the interview sessions of questioning, or else I camouflage them, omit them, or abbreviate them with asterisks to avoid legal problems. Aside from the person being questioned, there are numerous mentions of his accomplices in the CR/M, whom I have previously referred to as the Legionnaire and Subdued: the full reason for the first nickname will be illustrated below, I adopted the second nickname in reference to the defense strategy employed in the CR/M trial. That strategy was to pass off their client as a young man whom his companions instigated, subjugated, and practically forced to join them, a classic figure in rape cases, so much so that we find it punctually recurring in every filmed depiction: the weak, reluctant one. Personally, I doubt that the real person was like that at all. But in a book, the nickname worked nicely. Some may point out the unsettling correspondence with a well-known brand of girl’s clothing: adorable little dresses and rompers, shorts, tops, and tees. And then there’s Cubbone.
. . . AFTER JOINING Avanguardia Nazionale [National Vanguard], at the start of 1971 I was recruited into the Fronte Nazionale [National Front] by Dalmazio Rosa, who had been my teacher at SLM and was the son of Major Rosa, repubblichino, an adherent of the Fascist Social Republic of Salò, and one of the those investigated in the Golpe Borghese coup attempt.
. . . I was treated like a child prodigy (I was just sixteen years old) and that climate of conspiracy excited me.
The National Front meetings were held on both Via Angela Merici and Via Tolmino, though not
at MSI headquarters, but in a secret office that was located in the same building as the embassy of Nationalist China.
. . . contacts with Nuova Europa, Fronte Studentesco, Lotta di Popolo . . .
. . . the distribution of counterfeit dollars and cocaine . . . and then arms trafficking with the Legionnaire in Bordighera. The weapons were concealed in trunks in the cellar of a villa (later identified as Villa Donegali) that had once belonged to an SS officer.
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