Don Camillo meets Hell’s Angels

by Giovanni Guareschi

  As soon as he heard the knock, he growled ungraciously: “Come in.”

  The young man opened the door, said hello, and presented Don Camillo with an envelope.

  “I can’t buy anything,” Don Camillo muttered without even raising his head from the newspaper.

  “I’m not here to sell you anything,” the man replied. “My name is Don Francesco, the assistant assigned to you by the Curia, and this is my letter of introduction.”

  Don Camillo squared him off. “Seeing you dressed like that, young man, I took you for a traveling salesman. Considering you have come to introduce yourself to a poor old parish priest, you might have found it suitable to dress like a priest yourself.”

  The little priest, who was the nervous type, paled; and Don Camillo proceeded to read the letter.

  “Fine,” Don Camillo said, folding the letter and reinserting it in the envelope. “Then you were sent here in order to show me how to be a priest.”

  “No, Father, just to remind you that we’re living not in 1669 but in 1969.”

  Don Camillo pulled a large yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and made a knot in it. “Now that I’ve made this reminder to myself, you may go,” he said.

  The little priest lost his calm. “Reverend Father! It was the Papal Curia that sent me here, and here I shall stay!” he squeaked, planting himself rigidly in front of the desk.

  “In that case,” Don Camillo said calmly, “let us profit by the occasion for a game of cards. Do you play One Hundred and Four?”

  “No,” the little priest answered through clenched teeth.

  There were some old decks of cards on the desk. Don Camillo selected one, grasped it between his powerful hands, and in one smooth movement ripped it in two.

  The little priest was not impressed. “I do play this game,” he said. “But with much less effort.” Gathering up another deck of cards from the desk he very calmly proceeded to tear the fifty-two cards in half, one by one.

  “Now I have one hundred and four just like your pile Father,” he said afterwards, smiling.

  Don Camillo nodded his approval. “However,” he said, pointing to the two piles of shredded playing cards, “I know how to make you eat all two hundred and eight pieces.”

  This was the Don Camillo of the rough and stormy past, and the little priest turned deathly pale. “See here,” he babbled, “I was sent here. Now if it’s me personally you don’t like…”

  “You or anybody else, it makes no difference. Since his excellency has decreed that I have need of an assistant, I will obey him. It was gracious of you to remind me that we are living in 1969, not 1669, and I return your courtesy by reminding you that I am the parish priest here. Your room is ready. You may refresh yourself and to dress yourself as a priest. Mufti is not allowed here during working hours.”

  Old Desolina showed the little priest up to the guest room and Don Camillo ran to confer with the crucified Christ over the high altar of his church.

  The fact was, in Don Camillo’s church there was still an old-fashioned altar, at which Don Camillo persisted in celebrating the Mass in Latin. And the faithful continued to take Communion kneeling in front of the altar rail with its little columns of marble painted to look like fake marble.

  All the other churches of the diocese had substituted their altars with what Don Camillo not very respectfully chose to call “buffet tables”; but inside Don Camillo’s church, nothing had changed at all. It was precisely this intransigence that had caused the Curia, before it took more serious disciplinary steps, to send the stubborn parish priest of the Po valley a young priest whose job it would be to persuade the old reactionary to install the changes of the aggiornamento.

  Don Camillo stalked up and down the aisles of the church, trying to think how to begin what he wanted to say, when finally the Christ called to him.

  “Don Camillo, what are you doing? Have you forgotten that the true power of a priest is his humility?”

  “Lord,” Don Camillo exclaimed, “I have never forgotten it, and here I am, prostrate before you, the humblest of all your servants.”

  “Don Camillo, it is very easy to humble oneself before God. Your own God became a man and humbled himself before all men.”

  “Lord,” Don Camillo howled in anguish, stretching out his arms, “why must I destroy everything?”

  “You’re not destroying anything. ‘Change the picture’s frame and the picture stays the same.’ Or do you consider the frame more important than the picture?”

  Don Camillo looked unconvinced.

  “Don Camillo: if a cassock does not make a monk, then most certainly it does not make a priest. Or do you maintain that you are more a minister of God than that young man simply because you wear a cassock and he wears a jacket and trousers? Don Camillo, do you maintain that your god is so ignorant he understands only Latin? Don Camillo: this stucco, this painted wood, this marble, these ancient words are not true faith.”

  “Lord,” Don Camillo answered humbly, “they are tradition though; the memory, the path followed for so many years, the poetry…”

  “All very pretty things, none of which have anything to do with faith. Don Camillo, you love these things because they remind you of your past and because you feel they are yours, almost a part of you. True humility consists in renouncing what one loves best.”

  Don Camillo bowed his head and said, “I will obey, my Lord.” But the Christ smiled because he could read into Don Camillo’s heart.

  The new priest was full of enthusiasm. His motto was “Demysticise!” That is, clean out all that was mere tinsel and served only to nourish superstition. But he was trying to work discreetly and avoid irritating Don Camillo. For his part, Don Camillo followed quietly along behind him, albeit with gritted teeth.

  At a certain point, Don Camillo put his foot down. “We will remove the altar,” he said in the same tone that he had offered to force the young priest to eat the torn cards, “only when I find a suitable place to relocate it.”

  This was hardly an easy chore. An altar crowned with a crucified Christ more than three yards tall is no knick-knack. But Don Camillo had a trick up his sleeve and he confided it to the Christ. “Lord,” he explained, “poor old Filotti’s heirs have liquidated his entire estate. The only thing left is the ancient, decrepit manor house with its private chapel, where I’ve always celebrated Mass once a year. They’ll agree to part with everything for seven million lire. If I could have that chapel, I would move the altar and you with it over there. Here, you are a white elephant, and nobody can figure out what to do with you. Of course, you will always be the Son of God Almighty, even if every image of you were to be destroyed, but I’ll never allow them to throw you on that heap they’ve made of things they call useless.”

  “Don Camillo,” the Christ admonished him, “you’re not talking about me. You’re talking about a piece of painted wood.”

  “Lord, my country is not a piece of coloured cloth called a flag. However, the flag of a country cannot be treated as if it were any old rag. And you are my flag, sir. That chapel would be a good place for you, but even so, seven million lire are seven million lire. And where am I going to get that kind of money?”

  “If you look where it is, you will find it,” the Christ answered, smiling enigmatically.

  The little priest was champing at the bit. “Father, even if we postpone the removal of the altar to some propitious time, we could begin the demystification by eliminating, for example, that awful painted doll of St. Antony.”

  The truth was, the statue was an eyesore. Don Camillo had found it in its niche when he had first came and he left it there, limiting his contact with it to an annual dusting.

  The patron saint of the Valley’s livestock, it seemed, had performed especially well in mitigating several serious anthrax epidemics between 1862 and 1914. He had then enjoyed prosperity and thousands of votive candles were lit at his feet daily. But once the anti-anthrax vaccination began to gain ground, the vo
tive candles petered out, and now poor St. Antony had to make do with the miserable allotment of ten tiny candles that Don Camillo had arranged in front of the niche. The niche itself was hidden behind an ancient oil vigil lamp.

  Actually, Don Camillo had grown attached to his St. Antony, but he accepted the little priests suggestion. “All right. Tomorrow you won’t find it there.”

  Est modus in rebus. He agreed to the eviction of St. Antony, but not to liquidate him the way the little priest would have liked, with four blows of the hammer, after more than a hundred years of faithful service (one hundred and eight, to be exact, because the parish records showed that the statue had been given to the church in June of 1862 by a rich landowner, one Ferrazza). Helped by the bell ringer, that same night Don Camillo dragged the St. Antony down out of its niche and carted it into the store-room. During the removal, the saint’s foot was bumped against a door handle and a chunk of his toes dropped off.

  Don Camillo wanted to fix the damaged foot with some plaster before he went to bed, and so, while he was mixing up the plaster to apply to the chipped stucco, he noticed that, jutting out of the saints broken foot there was the toe of a black boot. And the boot was made not of plaster but of painted wood.

  The lower part of the grey tunic that covered the saint down to his feet was cracked, and a light blow did the trick. This revealed something completely unexpected: St. Antony wore, under his habit, breeches with boots and spurs.

  Another blow did away with the upper part of the habit which came off like a crust, and behold, a piece of red shirt.

  In a few moments, the crust of plaster covering the original wooden statue came away, and once stripped, St. Antony turned out to be, unequivocally, the great Garibaldi.

  The right arm still upheld in its fist a miniscule crucifix; but it was clear that originally he had been holding a sword. The pilgrims walking stick that the saint had held in his left hand was a handy camouflaging of a flag standard.

  What was not clear was why Garibaldi had been masquerading as St. Antony; however, it was not long before Don Camillo found that out too. Garibaldi’s red shirt had a white spot on the left, in the shape of a heart. The heart wasn’t wood but plaster, and Don Camillo tested its consistency with his knuckles. It was a fragile layer that shattered immediately, opening up a hole from which cascaded a tinkling shower of gold napoleons. Along with the napoleons, out came a leaflet folded in four.

  On it was a story of the town, a little ridiculous perhaps, a little pathetic, but a piece of history.

  In April of 1862, Garibaldi had visited the county seat, where he had been feted like a demigod. The Garibaldi effigy in painted wood, the work of a local artisan, was part of the festivities. But Garibaldi had delivered an extremely hard-line speech against the priests of Rome and against “evil priests” in general to the workers’ guild, and a certain Ferrazza, probably the head of the anticlerics of the town that later became Don Camillo’s parish, had been so inspired by the speech that he had bought the Garibaldi statue and had him transformed into the stucco St. Antony. Then he gave him to the parish church.

  These days, nobody understands that kind of joke, but there was a time when people got a laugh out of some very ferocious tricks. Here, the ferocity of the trick consisted not so much in bringing Garibaldi into the church and having him worshipped as a saint, but rather in filling up Garibaldi’s chest with gold napoleons accompanied by this sarcastic note: Dear priest (yes, priest, for there is gold here and only priests can detect gold, being so greedy for it!): Contrary to what you say, there is no Satan in the heart of Garibaldi. Instead, there is a precious treasure which you will certainly not refuse. Priest, if Masses are still being celebrated by the time you read this letter (and I doubt they will be), do celebrate a Mass for the repose of the soul of the anticleric Garibaldi-lover Alberto Ferrazza, and use the napoleons to buy yourself a few nice banquets and toast the everlasting glory of Giuseppe Garibaldi!

  The napoleons amounted to one thousand, which translated into lire came to about six million. Don Camillo could buy old Filotti’s house and relocate the altar and the big crucifix in the family chapel, exactly as they were.

  He also brought over the Abbot Garibaldi, after having him re-covered with stucco by a plaster specialist.

  And the first Mass he celebrated in the chapel was for the soul of the departed Alberto Ferrazza. He celebrated it in Latin, of course, in the presence of a few old diehards.

  “Lord,” he afterwards explained to the Christ, “they’re a bunch of broken-down old donkeys. They only keep a hold on life because of the strength of their memories of the past and their dear departed. They don’t understand that even the Church has to renew itself.”

  “Exactly what you don’t understand, Don Camillo,” the Christ pointed out.

  “Perhaps so, sir,” Don Camillo admitted humbly. “In any case, I’m not out of line because this is a private mass inasmuch as this chapel is now my property, thanks to the help of God!”

  “Thanks to the help of Garibaldi,” the Christ amended.

  “Lord, it was you who told me to look for the gold where I would find it and precisely there it was that I looked. It’s St. Antony who compromised my good faith by messing about in the Garibaldi affair.”

  “Certainly, Don Camillo,” the Christ said, smiling. “In a town like this, where the dead people are even more insane than the living, a parish priest like you is just what’s called for.”

  Naturally it wasn’t long before Peppone’s spy network informed him about Don Camillo’s stroke of good luck. So, coming across Don Camillo in the street one day, Peppone asked with heavy sarcasm: “Father, is it true you’ve opened up your own business?”

  “No, Comrade. I still work for the same boss. Up there, Mao hasn’t yet arrived to disseminate confusion.”

  Peppone let it go at that.

  Mao Does Not Take to the Water of the Po River

  Of the eight parts of the commune administered by Peppone and his comrades, the one called La Rocca was the most uncivilized. Only a few miles separated it from the big town; but not all miles are the same, and sometimes, even in a huge metropolis, all you have to do is turn a corner into a side street and you find yourself in another world. La Rocca was situated in the lowlands of the Po, and the centuries long fight against the great river had made its inhabitants hard and violent. To them anybody who came from anywhere other than the banks of the Po river was a foreigner.

  Practically all of them were Communists but their Communism was Stalinism, and the only form of coexistence they recognized involved beating their adversaries over the head with a stick.

  Doctor Bognoni, therefore, did not encounter much resistance in persuading the people of La Rocca to found their own autonomous Maoist cell and name him their chief. And the day an inspector from the regional commune arrived in La Rocca to bring the strayed comrades back to the fold, he found the town walls papered with Stalinist and Maoist sayings and manifestos. There wasn’t a soul to be found anywhere.

  It was inevitable that somebody should take advantage of the situation and drag out Mao’s feat of three years past. At seventy years of age, Mao had swum fifteen kilometers at a furious pace; huge yellow posters reminding the people of his triumph were hung on the walls in Don Camillo’s parish and in La Rocca:

  Mao astonished the world with his exhibition of strength three years ago. The time has come for the Maoist comrades of La Rocca to think over the fact that it appears that their chief, Comrade Bognoni, cannot himself swim. If its chiefs cannot swim, how can the proletarian revolution succeed?

  Concerned Comrades Who Can Swim

  The poster was anonymous but any fool could guess that Peppone had masterminded it. The La Rocca faction took offence immediately and with typical impetuousness they counterattacked with this manifesto:

  While the chief of the La Rocca Maoist cell has no pretensions to being able to swim as the great Chairman Mao, it is certain that he will triumph over
the chief of the so called “Comrades Who Can Swim” (provided, of course, that the fat accumulated during his career as a petit-bourgeois shopowner will permit him to remain afloat.)

  The reply came immediately:

  Attention Little Mao of La Rocca! If after your cod liver oil cure you feel as strong as a whale, take care you do not end up as a load of blubber!

  The air was warming up and the people became more and more amused. Naturally when Don Camillo ran into Peppone and his high command in the street, he didn’t forget to ask cheerfully how training was progressing and if they had set the date yet for the historic meet.

  “I, stoop to that sort of tomfoolery? Never!” Peppone retorted brusquely.

  “I see,” Don Camillo said, with a hint of malice, “now that the situation has got out of hand, Mr. Mayor, you are contemplating a strategic retreat.”

  “Retreat? Never!” Peppone shouted.

  “Hooray for our chief!” the high command cheered. “Priests may have a face for every occasion, but we show the same face to all!”

  The match of the century was held one Sunday afternoon and half the world was present on both banks of the river.

  The course was across the river and back. A committee was set up on the opposite bank to check the two champions as they finished the first lap; then back to the starting point, with the man who reached it first, of course, being the winner.

  Comrade Bognoni was young and thin whereas Peppone, although he was stronger, was longer in the tooth and fatter in the gut. The first lap—the trip out—sent the La Rocca faction into frenzied cheers because Bognoni touched the opposite bank first. But it was those cheers that turned Peppone into a maddened beast and he forgot his years and fat and called up strength he did not know he had for the return trip. Coming back, he caught up with Bognoni, and after a desperate struggle managed to beat him. Peppone touched the finishing line with glorious unconcern, waved debonairly to the cheering crowd, then passed out cold as a dead fish.