Don Camillo meets Hell’s Angels

by Giovanni Guareschi

  “He’s a regular whirlwind, that one,” the mountain priest went on. “You know Rughino’s practically a ghost town because the men and women who have any brains or strength find work outside, leaving the ancients to care for the children and houses. It’s only three kilometers from Lagarello, my parish, but until a few weeks ago, to get to Lagarello from Rughino was a nine-kilometer journey, just because there’s no straight road with a bridge. It’s the same story with half of those towns. Well, one day all the ancients helped by the older children started to work like madmen and now they finally have a decent road. All on account of your Don Chichi, who took the initiative, studied the situation, organized the workers, and then took up the pick and shovel himself.”

  “That’s magnificent!” Don Camillo said. “It ought to be a great satisfaction to Don Chichi.”

  “Yes and no,” the priest answered, laughing. “The fact is, now that there’s a road, the people of Rughino, rather than sit through Don Chichi’s moralising sermons, trudge six kilometers, back and forth, to come to my Mass. But I think if they play him right, Don Chichi will build an entire network of good roads through the mountains.”

  Doubtless this was a good idea, but the Curia wasn’t aware of it and so, a little while afterward, Don Camillo was called before the Bishop in person.

  “Our Don Francesco,” the Bishop explained, “is completely cured. He has suffered a spiritual crisis and we sent him to recuperate in Rughino where he has brilliantly succeeded in accomplishing great things, among them to convince his flock to build a bridge and road they had needed for years. We inaugurated it along with the civil authorities and the regional prefect paid enthusiastic compliments to Don Francesco in his speech.”

  “I’m delighted!” Don Camillo said. “Truly a triumph of persuasion.”

  “A triumph in many ways,” the Bishop amended. “The fact is, thanks to Rughino’s being linked to Lagarello now, we have been able to eliminate another useless parish. Therefore, Don Francesco having completed his mission, he is again free and can return to be of service to you, Don Camillo.”

  “Well actually,” Don Camillo stammered, “we don’t have any road problems…”

  “Don Camillo,” the Bishop cut in, “your long experience united with his youthful enthusiasm will give new life to your parish. And while we’re on the subject, we would like to suggest to you that you find more suitable accommodation for your young niece who, if you’ll forgive us, does not seem to be the proper sort of girl to be running around inside a rectory.”

  “The young woman,” Don Camillo, who had begun to sweat, explained with control, “has always been a guest of the bell-ringers family. Besides, for several months now she’s been living in another section of town.”

  “So we’ve been told,” the Bishop nodded. “All we wished to make clear is our advice to keep her as far as possible from your rectory. We say this for obvious reasons. Do you understand us?”

  “No, Excellency,” Don Camillo said.

  “Don Camillo,” the young Bishop exploded, “apart from everything else, the girl’s political bias makes her presence at your church somewhat inopportune.”

  “I understand, Excellency,” Don Camillo said with great effort, “but the girl herself is not responsible for the fact that her father was assassinated by the Communists.”

  “No, but our aim is not to keep hate alive, but to help expunge it. The girl’s presence is an obstacle to coexistence. She is the living proof of a past that is being forgotten. In any case, she’s not exactly the kind of girl you want associating with your Daughters of Mary.”

  “Perhaps not,” Don Camillo admitted, “but she’s just a modern girl, a bit high spirited, but honest.”

  “Honest!” the Bishop exclaimed, shaking his head. “Fire’s honest too, but you don’t make a practice of putting it near petrol!”

  * * *

  Don Chichi appeared at the rectory a few days later and surprised Don Camillo in the throes of a work of great moment: he was toiling away over a sign for the church door, and had so far printed the words MASS FOR THE REPOSE OF THE SOULS… The pen was a bit difficult to handle, given Don Camillo’s huge hands, so Don Chichi offered to help out.

  “May I be of assistance, Father?”

  “Thanks,” Don Camillo answered going on with his work, “His Excellency warned me that you are convalescing from a serious illness, and I wouldn’t want you to tire yourself.”

  “Don’t worry!” the priest exclaimed, laughing. He took the pen from Don Camillo’s hand and set to drawing the letters. “My illness is a long way off!”

  In fact his illness was right at hand and came into the rectory just then. “Good morning, holy reverend Uncle!”

  Hearing Flora’s voice, Don Chichi went white and jumped to his feet.

  “Well, Don Francesco!” Flora chimed angelically. “You’ve finally come home! You’ve no idea how much we’ve needed you here!”

  “That remains to be seen!” Don Camillo exclaimed, thoroughly irritated. “As for you, there’s no need at all for you to be lurking about. So get going!”

  “I’ve brought your fridge,” Flora said, her voice full of tears.

  “I don’t want any fridges!” Don Camillo shouted. “I’ll pay you as agreed, but take that contraption home where you can use it to stuff that codfish you’re marrying!”

  “Uncle, please,” Flora protested, blushing furiously. “I’m not thinking at all of getting married. In fact, I’ve decided to become a nun.”

  “You’re crazy!” Don Camillo roared.

  “Must one be crazy,” the girl demanded, “to feel the need of praying for the salvation of men who have lost their fear of God?”

  Flora’s unbelievable temerity forced Don Camillo to lose his temper. “I don’t want to hear any more! Get out before you bring more trouble into my house. The Bishop doesn’t want you around the rectory!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he doesn’t like you!”

  “His Excellency has never met me,” Flora said with an angelic smile, “but the Good Lord knows me and I shall try to make him like me. Uncle, why is it that you want to put out the holy flame of faith and renunciation in me?”

  Don Chichi, who meanwhile had gone on with is work drawing the sign, now said: “Father: MASS FOR THE REPOSE OF THE SOULS—I’ve written that out. What else do you want to follow?”

  “OF THE DEAD WHO FOUGHT IN HUNGARY,” Don Camillo grumbled. “It’s the thirteenth anniversary of the Soviet repression in Hungary.”

  Don Chichi put down the pen and shook his head. “Don Camillo,” he said in a tone that reflected all the indignation mustered in him by Don Camillo’s barbaric treatment of his small, fragile niece, “you’ve lost touch with the world. Haven’t you noticed that the press, magazines and newspapers included, in recalling the tragic deaths of Budapest, has placed the accent—and rightly so—not on the repression but on the rebirth of Hungary?”

  “I’ll brew beer out of your reborn Hungary!” Don Camillo shouted. “Those poor men crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks haven’t been reborn, and neither have the eighteen-year old boys who were sent to prison and ‘legally’ executed for protesting against the repression!”

  “Don Camillo,” Don Chichi said in firm tones, “all that is part of the past. God thinks about the dead. We should be thinking about the living, because peaceful coexistence can only be brought about among the living. Why rekindle old hatreds? Why poison the souls of young people who don’t even know what happened in Budapest thirteen years ago? God is love, not hate. The Church teaches that we shall love our enemies.”

  Don Camillo’s ears turned red. “It’s been nearly two thousand years since Jesus was crucified,” he said, “and still today the Church represents him as crucified on the Cross. Not to make people hate the enemies of God, but to remind them of Christ’s love and sacrifice!”

  Flora chimed in, “Reverend Uncle, if you’ll notice, the new liturgy tends more an
d more to omit representations of Christ in agony and religious art is leaning away from the crude realism of the crucifixion. Don Francesco’s idea is quite apt. Jesus suffered as a man and died as a man for love of mankind. Of all men, it was primarily those who had actually crucified Him whom He forgave on the Cross. Keeping up the old tradition of wax-museum realism in depicting Christ’s martyrdom on the Cross only kept alive hatred for those who had crucified Him. Reverend Uncle, doesn’t it mean anything to you that the Pope and the Council solemnly absolved the Jewish people of deicide, after nineteen centuries of anti-Semitism and oppression? And while we’re on the subject, why remember the dead in Hungary any more than the six million slaughtered by the Germans?”

  “Because the German murderers are almost all dead or punished,” Don Camillo raved. “They no longer are a regime that threatens the liberty of the entire world! Because Cardinal Mindszenty is still under house arrest, and he represents the oppression of the Church, the Church of Silence!”

  Don Chichi smiled. “The Church of Silence doesn’t exist, because God is everywhere and speaks to anybody who wants to listen.”

  “All right then,” Don Camillo bellowed, dripping with sweat, “what’s the purpose of the Church? Why did the Son of God descend to earth to suffer and die like a man? In any case, you write what I tell you to. I’ll think about the rest of it!”

  Don Chichi, delighted to see the fat old priest billowing fumes and sweat, snapped back tauntingly: “Don Camillo, I see there’s another blank card. I imagine that you’d like to fill it with an announcement for a High Mass on May 8th.”

  “Of course! You wouldn’t want me to ignore VE-Day, would you?”

  “Victory in Europe,” Don Chichi spat with disgust. “A black day in human history, there are no victories in war! We should forget that and all other commemorations like it. In war, everybody loses and everybody’s in the wrong.”

  “I want to remember the souls of the people in that war,” Don Camillo shot back.

  “The same old story, the same old dead men,” Don Chichi said sarcastically. “This makes the Church into a grave-robber who spends his time in the cemetery of history unearthing hardened bones and putting them in a display case. Father, what is this morbid religion of yours, with its lugubrious slogans? ‘We are born to suffer’; ‘Remember that death comes to all’… No! Remember that you must live! This is the meaning of Jesus’s revelations. It’s the meaning of the resurrection!”

  Flora gazed at Don Chichi with ecstatic eyes. “Don Francesco,” Flora said, “you’ve struck right to the heart of things. This is why kids today won’t have any part of the Church—because the church spends its time talking about dead people, because it only teaches you how to die, not how to live. Because it denies men all rights and loads them down with duties. Because it won’t admit the concept of earthly happiness and maintains that Paradise exists only in Heaven. At the same time, it maintains that anyone who lives according to God’s law and the social proprieties can find happiness on earth too. And then it creates for priests a bunch of mangy crows who think the birds that chirp on a bright spring morning fall deeper into sin with every note, when actually they’re singing praises to the Lord!”

  “Flora,” Don Camillo hissed, “will you stop being stupid!”

  “It’s true, Uncle. Look at that sweet Sœur Sourire, who sings about God, accompanying herself on the guitar and millions of people’s eyes filling with tears listening to her—didn’t they force her to leave her order? Wasn’t it the mangy crows that cast her out?—Don Francesco, would you have done such a thing? You’re a bright young priest, educated and modern, would you have stopped that nightingale from singing the praises of the Lord?”

  “Never!” Don Chichi exclaimed, very moved.

  “Don Chichi,” Flora went on in a caressing voice, “leave the old priest to his cadavers—it’s the only thing left of a long, useless life. Make up his posters for him. Some old fossils will undoubtedly turn up at the eighth of May Mass; but there won’t be a soul at the one for the Hungarians. Then maybe the old fogey will understand it’s not the time for dead people, but for the living. If it’s any comfort to you, I’m entirely and whole-heartedly in agreement with you.”

  “That’s enough for me!” Don Chichi said, going back to work.

  Flora turned to Don Camillo, who hadn’t stopped gaping at his incorrigible niece.

  “Hey Unc, where do you want the fridge put?”

  “I really don’t care,” Don Camillo whispered.

  “I’ll have it put in your bedroom. That way, instead of going to bed every night, you can climb inside the fridge, and you’ll sleep ever so much better. The orthodox Church needs a lot of well-preserved corpses.”

  Don Chichi sniggered.

  Don Camillo went off to supervise the unloading of the refrigerator. Then when Flora was climbing back into the pickup, he stopped her.

  “Fiend,” he hissed in a low voice, “what plans have you got up your sleeve for poor Don Chichi?”

  “To sell him a fridge,” Flora replied simply.

  “Keep far away from here! Don’t you get me into trouble with the Bishop!”

  “Don’t get nervous, Unc. I’ll sell the Bishop a fridge too.”

  “Don’t say things like that, even as a joke.”

  “Why not? I sold the Bishop’s secretary a fridge to give to his sister. Why shouldn’t I sell one to the Bishop too?”

  Flora zipped off in her pickup and Don Camillo turned his eyes towards heaven.

  “Dear Lord,” he said, “what do you make of all this?”

  “How should I know,” the distant voice of the Christ replied. “I don’t know anything about fridges.”

  * * *

  The night before the Mass for the Hungarian Dead, Don Camillo received a letter in which the secretary, by order of His Excellency stated his disapproval of the politically inopportune gesture. He also received a crate which contained a colour photograph, beautifully framed, of Cardinal Mindszenty, tagged with a small card:

  Compliments of

  Flora Electrical Appliances

  Don Camillo threw the letter into the fireplace and went to hang the portrait over the main doorway under the Mass announcement.

  Don Chichi watched him do all this, then after Don Camillo had climbed down the little stepladder, he shook his head and said, looking at the portrait of the Magyar Cardinal, “Why do you have this urge to make a martyr out of yourself? Even him, couldn’t he have found a way to live with the authorities in his country?”

  “Take pity on him,” said Don Camillo. “He got out of line because of that other rowdy who got nailed up on a cross. The usual business that goes with extremists.”

  * * *

  It was a strange Mass, because apart from the few old cronies who could find Masses to attend even if they were celebrated inside the Rock of Gibraltar, there wasn’t a single cleric present, a sign of the Catholic hierarchy’s disapproval of initiative antagonistic to the Church’s movement of dialogue and non-militance. In recompense, Don Camillo had the entire Socialist contingent, who were there to show that in spite of their Marxism they thought quite differently from the Communists.

  Peppone and his henchmen were there too: they had come to show that in spite of their Communism, they were made of quite different mettle than the Soviet and Chinese extremists.

  Don Camillo’s sermon was short and sweet: “Brothers, much has been said about the dialogue between people who stand on opposite shores. The souls that we are here today to remember stand on the shore of Death, and we are speaking to those of us who remain on the shore of Life. Let us listen to what they are saying to us, and our hearts will find the proper answer. Amen.”

  The great river was brimming with limey water, and all the people coming out of the Mass went to the banks to see whether the water level was rising or going down, and they remembered Don Camillo’s simple words.

  Some of them straightaway saw the blood-red glow on
the waters near the other shore.

  The Little Boy Who Saw Angels

  A scrawny little boy was struggling along in the mud on the highway, and on his bony shoulders he carried a bag that appeared to contain something very heavy. The quiet and the black, bare trees that stood out like ghosts from the chilly fog, then melted back into the gray, made the atmosphere seem part of another century, and the scene reminded one of the story of Tobias or at least Les Miserables.

  Don Chichi, pulling his Fiat up beside the boy, rolled down the window and said, “Where are you going?”

  “To Piletti’s farm,” the boy answered, resting his sack on the roadside wall.

  “It’s a long way in this cold.”

  “I don’t care,” the boy answered with a timid smile. “I like to walk alone in the fog because then I can talk to the angels.”

  Don Chichi helped the boy in with his sack.

  “It’s kind of heavy,” the boy said. “It’s potatoes, the little ones that the peasants set aside for the swine. I earned them doing odd jobs. They gave me a pumpkin too. Pumpkin, you know, cooked right in the coals is very sweet and my little brothers and sisters love it.”

  “There are that many of you?”

  “Five sisters and four brothers. But Citti, my older sister, works in the city. She’s already sixteen.”

  “What does your father do?”

  “We live alone with our mother. Our father is dead.”

  “But how do you manage to live?”

  “We don’t know, Father. Only the Good Lord knows, but it’s enough for us that He knows. Turn right here, we live down there in that yellow house.”

  It was no house, it was a miserable lean-to. Inside the only room, which was divided in half by a shaky wall made out of grape pickers’ baskets, seven children were playing around a woman whose pitiful clothing hardly served to cover up her well-developed thirty-year-old body. There were no beds, only straw mats, and no furniture, only fruit crates. The only luxury was a ramshackle old iron stove, obviously filched from some junkyard.