After a long silence, he was one of the first to speak. ‘What did the king mean? He hasn’t removed Mussolini from office, has he?’
‘Shit, Angelo! Sometimes you just don’t get it. The announcement couldn’t have been clearer. The king has removed Mussolini and put Badoglio in his place,’ explained the forestry owner.
‘Removed? It can’t be right. It was Il Duce who made us great,’ stammered Angelo, disheartened.
‘Great? Nonsense! What have we got out of this war?’ said the lock manufacturer, who had been months without a sizeable order. ‘Our economy is full of holes, just like our army. The Allies will end up winning the war and when that day comes, we’ll be on the losing side. I don’t know where you see greatness.’
‘How can the Allies win the war?’
‘They’re advancing on every front. Now they’re preparing to land somewhere on continental Europe and it won’t be long before they conquer all of Italy if they put their minds to it; the Americans have an exceptional army, much better than twenty years ago. Don’t you read the newspapers?’ the lock man again challenged him.
‘Maybe with Mussolini out of the picture Italy will leave the war before Germany drags us into an even bigger disaster,’ pointed out the forestry owner, who had a nose for politics, seeing as he didn’t have to work for a living and could devote all his time to reading the international press.
‘You are completely right, fascism was a mistake,’ Scarafile nervously interjected. He was a vintner who had used the wheat-campaign incentives to sow seed in hundreds of barren, worthless acres. He had made more money in three or four years that way than in an entire life making the finest Primitivo wine in the region.
Angelo gave him an incredulous look because he clearly remembered standing beside him on the Lungomare in Bari the day that Mussolini had come to review one of the Alpine divisions. They had been among the special guests, right in front of the Albergo delle Nazioni, and he recalled Fiorenzo Scarafile applauding with exaggerated enthusiasm and elbowing everyone out of the way to get to shake the dictator’s hand.
‘Poor Il Duce. I think we should be more appreciative of the man who brought us prosperity,’ insisted Angelo, thinking of what could happen to his son Franco if the fascists crumbled.
‘You said it: “brought prosperity”. Past tense. When was the last time you sold a fir plank? In fact, you couldn’t sell one even if you found a buyer, because there have been no shipments of timber from Russia for the last three years. And our best workers are at the front. How do they expect us to do anything without labour?’ concluded the lock manufacturer. And that was the end of the discussion, because the club had emptied around them.
Feeling nervous, the members were suddenly in a rush to get home. Or perhaps they were still planning to go to the coast for the summer. The gentlemen of Bari could go up to the towns of Gargano; nothing bad could happen up on that craggy outcrop. Angelo could still gather with his family in Savelletri and wait out Rome’s power struggle; its proximity to Bellorotondo would allow him to return to the factory when needed and from there he could also control the farms.
When they left the Gentlemen’s Circle, they saw that the girls from the bordello had also turned off the lights and closed the doors and windows. With her customers so frightened, La Bella Antonella had little to celebrate.
The disquiet at the Bari’s Gentlemen’s Circle was inversely proportional to the euphoria the cave dwellers were feeling in Matera. Without access to a radio, they weren’t able to listen to King Victor Emmanuel III’s announcement, but at midnight Roosevelt had brought them news of Mussolini’s fall from grace. That was all they needed to know: it had been three long years since they’d had such good news.
The Demonstration
GIOVANNA HAD BEGUN the final stage of her journey back to Bellorotondo, but she still hadn’t made it home as her zia was hoping. She had just got off the train in Bari and was searching for news of Salvatore. The last she’d heard was that he had been arrested after arriving in the city by sea and that he’d been held at the Alberobello political prison; that had been six months ago.
As she was leaving the station, Giovanna found out about the king’s announcement a day late; every front page of every newspaper was filled with it. In the following hours she contacted her old Party colleagues and was surprised at the naive euphoria Il Duce’s fall had awakened in the anti-fascists. Later, when she found out that some activists were preparing a demonstration to demand the release of political prisoners, she decided to stay in Bari: she sent her aunt a telegram saying she’d arrive a couple of days later.
Giovanna’s next forty-eight hours were frenetic. That morning of 26 July, she met up with some former classmates from the Istituto and a former university professor, Fabrizio Canfora, who had taught her philosophy. And she also took part in a meeting of teachers involved in the Liberal Socialism movement. The contagious happiness of her former classmates excited her, but she soon realized that she was watching them as if from a distance, as if they were actors on a stage while she remained in the audience. Her flight from Barcelona and her time in the refugee camps in southern France had made her wary. Freedom, justice and peace were pretty words, but in real life the only things that were valuable were the ones that allowed you to survive; sometimes, it was enough to fall asleep in the hope of being able to open your eyes to a new day.
The next morning she marched through the streets of Bari with her fellow demonstrators, setting aside her scepticism to shout, ‘Viva la libertà!’ More than two hundred people had gathered, including university students, professors and workers. They marched down the Via Sparano, chanting slogans in support of the political prisoners but when they had passed the Piazza Umberto I and were approaching the Via Niccolò dall’Arca, near the cinema, they were cut off by an army detachment, forcing them to stop just below the local headquarters of the Partito Nazionale Fascista. When the officer shouted, ‘Prepare arms!’, Giovanna thought he was crazy, but she soon grasped that the soldiers were obeying and loading their weapons. They were getting ready to shoot. Giovanna couldn’t believe what was happening.
In the four years she had spent in southern France, Giovanna had developed a sixth sense to alert her to any unexpected danger. A fleeting movement drew her eye to the fascist headquarters: she looked up and saw armed men hiding behind the windows. But just as she was about to warn the other demonstrators and shout for them to flee from that fatal trap, a familiar figure brought her attention back to the building: her cousin Franco was peeking out from behind one of the shutters and giving instructions to another man, who was leaning out over the street with a rifle in his hands. She stared at him, so frozen in shock that she didn’t react until the army officer shouted, ‘Fire!’
The first round hit the front line of demonstrators. It was the sign the men hidden in the fascist headquarters had been waiting for, and they too began to shoot from the windows. The demonstrators were trapped between the two sets of gunmen and many fell helplessly in the crossfire. The soldiers didn’t hold back; in fact, just a few metres from the head of the demonstration, they put their all into shooting the anti-fascists.
Giovanna was trapped beneath the corpse of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Playing dead, she didn’t move until she saw the fascists disappear from the windows. When she was sure that the military had also retreated, she started running and didn’t stop until she had reached the safe house she’d agreed on with her old Party comrades. There, she learned that many had died, maybe more than twenty, and that more than fifty had been injured in the crossfire. At midnight, she had a premonition and moved to another apartment. She got away by the skin of her teeth; that night, the army and the secret police combed the city. Franco was the most thorough: he had many apartments searched and arrested the most prominent demonstrators.
A mere forty-eight hours after Mussolini’s removal, the anti-fascist euphoria was subdued. The dictator had fallen from grace, but
the king and the army, led by Marshal Badoglio, had too many things to hide and were unwilling to open the doors to freedom. Italy had touched the end of the war with its fingertips, but a few miserable leaders had condemned the Italians to continue fighting. The country was about to become the scene of even more violent combat.
A Never-ending August
THAT AUGUST OF 1943 was sweltering. The Englishman and Vitantonio had abandoned the shepherd’s hut in Murgia and no longer left the Matera caves while they waited for the Allied landing. Roosevelt had entrusted his herds to the care of a nephew and had joined them in the cave, which wasn’t made for so many people. Year round, the temperature inside remained stable at fourteen degrees, but that summer, with four men inside, it grew unbearable. Outside, the heat was horrific and only the cicadas seemed to be comfortable in the scorched air. The chirping that emerged from the gravina was so obsessive that it drove the men, trapped in their own refuge, crazy. If they went out to stretch their legs, it was even worse: a couple of minutes of exposure to the sun left them so stupefied that they had to come running back to the monotony of the cave.
Every evening, Giuseppe ‘the Professor’, a teacher from the north exiled to Basilicata, would come to the cave and tell them the latest. He got the news from the mayor of Matera and the more tolerant military men, particularly Francesco Paolo Nitti, a cultured officer who always sought out his conversation. That was how Giuseppe confirmed Mussolini’s arrest and exile, first to the island of Ponza and then to La Maddalena on Sardinia; later they learned that Il Duce had been sent to Abruzzo.
But the good news didn’t continue. When it came down to it, Marshal Badoglio’s new government turned out to be just as reactionary and afraid of freedom as all the fascist governments before it had been. The Allies, meanwhile, were advancing rapidly in Sicily, but showed no signs of landing on the mainland. Closed up in the cave, Vitantonio and his friends were growing desperate and soon their euphoria turned to disenchantment. The month of August seemed to drag on for ever.
A Disconcerting Ceremony
THE NINTH OF September 1943 became a legendary day in Bellorotondo. When the official ceremony for the unveiling of the restored memorial to the victims of the Great War began, the temperature had already exceeded forty-two degrees and two newly recruited carabinieri who couldn’t stand the sun had already fainted. The carabinieri had filed into the square at ten, half an hour before the agreed arrival time of the Bishop of Bari and the regional governor, who were to inaugurate the new monument. By then, the local authorities and church officials had filled the dignitaries’ dais and the veterans, musicians and general public had also taken their places, anxious for the conclusion of the official pomp; most of them were only thinking about the celebratory concert and lunch.
The mayor had ordered everything to be ready to start just as the regional officials arrived but, inexplicably, an hour and a half later they still hadn’t shown up and the event was on hold. Then, just as the bells of the Immacolata rang out noon, the first policeman fainted and the ceremony started to spiral out of control.
At that point, the carabinieri were still lined up under the midday sun; the dignitaries and clerics had already broken rank and taken shelter at the entrance to the square in the shadow of a generous holm oak. The musicians and veterans had rushed to follow suit, seeking the protection of the three carob trees in the middle of the piazza; the public, on the other hand, chose to gather on the side that was protected from the sun by trees and the Convertini-palazzo wall. The green of the Convertinis’ garden was a welcome marvel in that suffocating heat.
Signor Maurizio, the former mayor, was sitting in a chair that he’d had placed in the shade and was admonishing the new mayor, his son Maurizio Junior, for losing control of the event. The crowd was growing impatient, but just when it seemed disaster was imminent they heard the deep rumble of a motorcycle coming up the Corso XX Settembre. When the diabolical machine came to a halt in the square, a messenger dismounted and looked around for those in charge.
‘My God! They’d better get here and get started or we’re going to melt like a block of ice,’ complained the mayor, who didn’t understand what was going on.
‘It’ll be a miracle if no one dies,’ declared Father Constanzo, echoing the mayor’s pessimism. His cassock was sticking to his back and two long white stains that began at his armpits revealed that he was sweating like a pig.
Just then, the second policeman fainted and everything started unravelling. The dispatch rider handed a telegram to the young mayor. The poor man read it and felt his legs buckle beneath him.
‘No one is coming. The king fled from Rome last night, to Brindisi,’ he managed to explain. ‘All the regional officials, headed up by the bishop and the governor, have gone there to welcome him instead.’
‘The king and the bishop are in Brindisi and we’re here, in this hellish heat and surrounded by this group of savages who are just waiting for us to leave so the dancing can start,’ bemoaned the rector of the parish. Another big white sweat stain had just appeared on his cassock, right in the middle of his back.
All eyes turned to the mayor, awaiting his instructions; but young Maurizio seemed totally lost and incapable of regaining the initiative.
‘Come on, let’s wrap this up,’ said Father Constanzo, who just wanted to go back to his house to turn on the radio.
The rector of the Immacolata signalled for the band to start playing a military march and grabbed the arm of the mayor, who was in a daze. Calling the other officials over, they formed a chaotic column, filing hastily towards the centre of the square to sit back down and mark the start of the ceremony.
Following the scheduled programme, a local poet went up to the dais and began to read some horrible verse. His delivery was equally terrible and suddenly the temperature in the square went up three or four degrees. Father Constanzo wore his cassock unbuttoned to his belly and ran a handkerchief over his sweaty chest. The commander of the carabinieri did the same, undoing his clammy tunic. Sitting in his chair, the former mayor grabbed his wife’s fan out of her hands and started compulsively fanning himself. Three or four of the carabinieri in formation began to sway and it looked like they too might faint at any moment.
The mayor looked dazed. He had taken off his jacket, then loosened his tie and slung it over his shoulder. His hair was stuck to his damp forehead and his shirt to his stomach, which was also dripping. He was gripped by an intense panic attack, but unexpectedly, when everyone was expecting the worst, he had a moment of lucidity that saved the event: the mayor started to clap to put an end to the poetry recital and the audience, who couldn’t stand another minute of it, joined in. The poet thought they were applauding his verse and, after a pause, tried to resume his reading with even more enthusiasm. At that point, the horrified mayor pounced on him, hugged him and led him off the stage. The square burst into another round of applause, the sincerest one the mayor had received since replacing his father in the post.
The love affair between the mayor and his constituents was short-lived, however: when he walked back up to the stage he pulled a bundle of pages out of his jacket pocket, which was still slung over one shoulder, and began to prepare to read the speech he’d written for the bishop and the governor. A murmur of disapproval spread through the square.
‘This idiot is capable of droning on until there isn’t a single carabiniere left standing,’ one of the veterans said out loud. He was standing beside Skinny in the shade of the carob trees.
The mayor must have heard him, or perhaps he was still flushed with the applause he’d received, because suddenly he felt sorry for that poor crowd on the brink of sunstroke and decided to spare them. He put the pages back in his pocket, stepped down from the dais, approached the monument, and whipped out the Italian flag to lay it on the new stone with the names of the forty-two victims of the Great War. Then he went back to the dais and shouted, ‘The monument is inaugurated! Long live Bellorotondo! Long live Italy!�
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The square responded with another enthusiastic ovation and surprising shouts of ‘Long live the mayor!’ It was the mayor himself who was the most surprised. The townspeople were just happy that they’d been spared the rest of the scheduled programme. The festivities were about to begin.
‘What about “The Royal March”?’ pleaded the carabinieri commander, addressing the mayor.
‘You can give the band the order. But please, for the love of God, don’t let them go on too long. Let’s get this over with.’
The band launched into the first few bars of ‘The Royal March’. Suddenly, from the square, some of the veterans, egged on by Skinny, responded with the first verse of the Republican anthem ‘Fratelli d’Italia’, which for them was the true national anthem. They caught the commander by surprise, who responded by demanding more verve from the players, but the musicians’ interpretation grew increasingly apathetic while they waited to see which song the crowd would favour. Everyone in the shade of the carob trees, mostly veterans, had enthusiastically started in on the Republican anthem and soon the town’s fascists added their voices; they too loathed the royalist song.
‘Brothers of Italy
Italy has awoken,
Strapped Scipio’s helmet
To her head.
Where is Victory?
Let her bow down
For God made her
Slave to Rome …’
The whole square was shouting, infected by the enthusiasm of Skinny and his gang. In fact, the commemoration was in honour of him and his former brothers-in-arms, the soldiers who had died in the trenches twenty-five years earlier, between 1915 and 1918. That was why Donata had politely refused the invitation to sit on the stage and was now singing passionately among the peasants and veterans. This event was also in honour of her Vito Oronzo. And Francesca’s Antonio.
The Last Son’s Secret Page 16