Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  The morning of July 25, 1943, I had awakened early and gone to the living room to secretly listen to the radio. I was therefore the first in the house to learn of the fall of Mussolini; but when I communicated the fact to my mother and grandmother, I wasn’t believed: I was capable of inventing even the end of the world. I had my revenge a few minutes later when the radio repeated the news. My mother, in nightgown and slippers, rushed into the street shouting: “It’s over, it’s over. He’s fallen!”

  I was outraged and incredulous and no less outraged two months later when, on September 8th,19 people ransacked the barracks and I met a girl who was notoriously rich—and Waldensian—with a pair of skis over her shoulder, on the street that led from the barracks to the town. Behind her, Sergio Toja, who was later the first to die as a partisan, was pushing a wheelbarrow full of weapons.

  At night, he brought the same wheelbarrow to our house, where, unknown to Grandmother, we buried the weapons in the cellar. I can’t reconstruct through what intermediary we made the arrangement for this operation; I scarcely knew Sergio, who was two years older than I was. We also hid under the roof tiles some issues of Alberto’s underground newspaper Giustizia e Libertà, which seemed very important to him but which I never read.

  I found the whole thing incongruous, I couldn’t see connections between events that didn’t correspond to my usual readings of History, which corresponded, instead, to cheering crowds and orderly armies.

  Again it seemed very strange—and not to say outrageous—that, also on September 8th, Grandmother dressed some “deserting” soldiers in civilian clothes belonging to Grandfather and my uncle. And not even in the house. She gave them the garments and made them strip to their underpants on the small ledge behind the clematis.

  I had in the meantime met an anti-fascist, my Italian teacher, the pastor Francesco Lo Bue, whose nickname, Franchi, I used later when I spent time with him. We knew he was being watched.

  I studied him attentively when he slowly turned his back to the class and looked outside, while the radio was obliged to transmit some special announcement.

  With the same impassivity, long beard, absent gaze, lost, perhaps, in the previous night’s drinking (he sometimes still smelled of it) or in his theological studies, he came into the classroom and passed unhurriedly under our arms raised in the fascist salute.

  Our slow pace irritated me—in February, in the first year of high school, we were still occupied with St. Francis, writing down the observations that Lo Bue dictated to us—but I felt a kind of respect for that slow pace: it was my first encounter with a high quality of study and an indifference toward time. I also felt, although he gave no particular signal, attention focused on me. In a long comment appended to the grade on an essay on the poet Cecco Angiolieri, in which he pointed out that my opinion had already been expressed, with greater critical skill, however, by the literary critic Francesco Flora (whom we didn’t know), the word “skill” replaced “sensibility,” which he had written first and then erased. That erasure was the first literary recognition I received.

  In the meantime the resistance had begun in our valleys. One of the founding groups was launched, purely by chance, at our house, on Vicolo Dagotti.

  We rented a room to a young man, the boyfriend of Marisa, our neighbor and contemporary. He was a grown man—and so I judged Marisa’s choice odd—an officer in the Alpine troops. Entering his room with the tea tray, I found him with two other men; they had unfolded a big map of the valley on the bed and were marking points with a pencil. I connected the map and the little circles to conversations and comments, and thus, in that room full of cigarette smoke, I saw for the first time—and was incredulous and not part of it—adults disobeying.

  One morning some months later, I met, with the same sense of alienation, as if it were something that didn’t concern me, Lo Bue coming up from the town, staggering. I thought he was drunk. He stopped me and said:

  “You know Sergio is dead?”

  “I know,” I said. I was a little worried about the weapons buried in the cellar. My Dutch aunt—who didn’t know about them—every day threatened to report us because of our Jewish father and our friends. I wondered who would come to get them now that Sergio was dead. I felt not sorrow for his death but that bewildered sense of guilt you have as a young person when someone your age dies.

  Not knowing what to say to Lo Bue, I said goodbye and set out toward the town. As I went on, an intuition slowly began to take shape in me: Franchi wasn’t drunk; he was swaying because he was desperate. He was reproaching himself because it was his own teaching that had led Sergio to his death. Ridiculous reproaches, I said to myself, each of us is responsible for ourself at whatever age. But in front of Franchi, who was reeling as if he had been hit along with Sergio, I felt again a kind of respect. In that staggering I glimpsed, in fact, the despair of true pity, what was still denied to me, since I continued to feel compassion only for those with whom I could identify.

  I disapproved of the mad undertaking in which Sergio had lost his life. At the time I disapproved of almost all the partisan enterprises in our valley, at least the ones I knew about. I found them disorganized, disorderly, pointlessly dangerous. When Franchi explained to me that their intention was to contain the Germans on another front, I thought—and told him—of the disproportion between the efficiency and number of the Germans and the chaotic paucity of the partisans.

  There was a rumor in Torre Pellice that the only ones who were well trained and sufficiently armed were the Garibaldini of Luserna—the communists. I don’t know if it was because they really were or if it was in comparison with Giustizia e Libertà. My friends were all in the Giustizia e Libertà groups, so I didn’t know anything precise about the Garibaldini of Luserna. They were talked about as people completely without scruples, textile-factory workers, Russian deserters, and soldiers from the south who had remained trapped in Piedmont, but that didn’t outrage me; scruples were an obstacle to action that I myself, however, faced only in theory. I found atrocious the execution of a fascist family in Torre Pellice (supposedly at the hands of Giustizia e Libertà)—an execution that angered everyone. But although the brutality of the act repelled me, I was tempted to consider logical the fact that the woman who might have been able to provide the names of the perpetrators was killed in her hospital bed by unknown assassins.

  I considered that rich girl carrying off the skis reprehensible and equally reprehensible the useless risk, the waste of life; seeing a gurney carrying newborns passing by in the corridor of a maternity ward, I feel content, as if I were looking at the display window of a bakery. It would never even occur to me to have an abortion.

  When the Germans (specifically the Austrian Alpenjäger) arrived in Torre Pellice, and, crouching in the attic at Marisa’s house, I saw them, from the dormer window, passing on the street in their trucks on the way to carry out a roundup in the valley, sitting motionless one beside the other, machine guns between their legs, I sensed an enormous distance between us. They sat in the open trucks, their backs slightly curved, impassive as gray sacks of cement. I didn’t recognize the world they came from, certainly it wasn’t that of Arminius and the ugly duckling—but I knew where they were going. They were going to the mountains where I had walked with friends and acquaintances, while the stones crumbled under our boots. They were going indifferent and armed. I couldn’t go with them. I stayed on the other side—as usual not absolutely faithful. The absolute, in fact, remained inside me. Experience, not the absolute I held within, determined my actions—as it often did later, too.

  Thus on that morning in June of 1944 I was pedaling beside Giorgio, whose pockets were bulging with maps. My job was to remember the facts that his informers—two hatters and a young man with a red beard—had provided him with. He remembered nothing and I boasted of my iron memory. But I was so inattentive to practical details—at home they assigned me the dirty work, washing dishes and watering the potatoes at the end of the lawn�
�that I had to be very careful not to confuse the number of submachine guns with the number of machine guns, and, besides, I recognized only the thud of mortars. All other shots for me were shots.

  At the bridge in Bibiana some quite young Italian soldiers stopped us. Giorgio says they were SS rosse—Italian SS.

  They asked for our documents, but the officer who read Giorgio’s exemption wasn’t persuaded. He asked, in an Italian accent:

  “Theology? What does that mean?”

  “I’m studying to become a pastor,” said Giorgio.

  “Meaning what?”

  “A Waldensian priest.”

  “And you’re going around with a girl? What sort of priest!”

  So they took him away. I saw him go over the bridge, on foot, pushing the bicycle, between two soldiers. They took him to Bibiana, around two kilometers away, where there was a German command. As he crossed the bridge, his pockets were bulging and looked incredibly conspicuous to me.

  I leaned the bicycle against a bench and sat down. We, the Italian SS and I, were under an enormous horse chestnut tree, just at the entrance to the bridge. There was a long table with benches and, nearby, the camp kitchen.

  The June day was beautiful and clear, it was around noon. My feet felt very light, a sensation not repeated since. We wore boots for eight months, and sometimes, if we slept in random shelters, we couldn’t even take them off at night. The first weeks we walked in shoes, our feet, as I said, felt very light, announcing spring.

  They were cooking a bean soup, and as the smell rose toward the leaves of the horse chestnut tree, the hunger of midday rose in me. The soldiers were coming and going, setting the table. I began to swallow saliva; the smell of minestrone, increasingly dense and persistent, surrounded me. Finally—more than an hour had passed since Giorgio was taken away—when they brought the pot to the table and sat down, I asked:

  “Would you give me a bowl? I’m hungry.”

  They had me sit down and filled a metal soup plate for me. We were finishing the soup when I saw Giorgio reappear on the bridge pushing his bicycle, with the same two soldiers. His pockets appeared still to be bulging. Reaching the table, he said to me:

  “Let’s go. Everything’s fine.” So we left on our bicycles. He pedaled in silence and I tried in vain to get him to tell me what had happened.

  He told the story later, though not to me: he was taken to the barracks in Bibiana, where he was made to wait, then interrogated: who he was, where he was going, and what was the story of his document of exemption. As they were starting to raise their voices, but hadn’t yet searched him, a German officer arrived—when, years later, he decided to describe the episode to me, too, he specified “a very handsome officer”—who, taking the piece of paper and seeing the word “theology,” had said laughing:

  “Ach ja, natürlich, Theologie: ja, ja, Theologie!”

  And giving him a pat on the shoulder, sent him off.

  Then, as he was returning to the bridge and the fear began to fade, he remembered me—he was reading a lot of Dostoyevsky and, besides, was a little in love with me—and that I was with those Italian SS, alone, abandoned, in the grip of terror.

  Crossing the bridge he had seen me at the table and—he says—“as usual you were holding forth, with all those soldiers!”

  He still reproaches me today for that bowl of bean soup as if it were Esau’s mess of pottage. I could tell him that talking diminished my fear—that would please him, he knows that when I’m depressed I go out and talk. I talk to the baker, the butcher, the woman I encounter in front of a shopwindow, I give advice to the young salesgirl in the clothing store and with the porter I discuss politics.

  But it wouldn’t be exact; I was talking simply because it’s pleasant to chat while eating bean soup; I don’t remember if my “Italian SS” were very handsome like his German officer, I remember only the minestrone. Besides, I was sure he would come back. My optimism didn’t ultimately lack a sense of reality, which at the time was linked to the moment and the unpredictable, and that morning it was confined within the circumscribed area of the big table and the pot under the gigantic horse chestnut. Or might it have been a plain chestnut tree?

  Two weeks later, Giorgio was captured in Pinerolo as the result of a tip. I wasn’t with him because I’d gone to Turin for an exam. I was, so to speak, in the literature department—I didn’t attend more than five lectures, all in different places, because the university had been bombed—and I faced the difficulties of the trip (the Porta Nuova station was often bombed, and you risked having to walk for kilometers) only when there were exams.

  I found out the same evening, and it was up to me to go to Pinerolo to search for him in all the barracks. That the racial flaw, remaining hidden in that declaration to the vice principal, could represent a risk didn’t occur to anyone, least of all me. I was furious at him for stupidly getting arrested at the house where he always went (and brought me only once), facing dangers that were, naturally, pointless. Also, I was supposed to discover where they kept him prisoner by presenting myself—a ridiculous figure!—to the guard as his fiancée. I didn’t find him: he had already been transferred to Turin and from there was deported to Germany.

  I wrote him a letter in prison; it ended with the words “. . . in spite of all that”—the tour of the barracks in Pinerolo, which I blamed him for—“I love you.”

  My letter was written on very thin, durable paper. He brought it to Germany, and smoked it all there—he had learned to roll cigarettes and still rolls them today—right up to the words “I love you.” Then he smoked those, too.

  Talking, laughing, crying, and eating as much as I could when the opportunity presented itself, writing letters and walking in boots, in love and unhappy, I passed the war years the way I did any others. Very seldom did events frighten or sadden me.

  Once in Turin I was seized by panic. I was crossing the Corso Vittorio bridge when the air-raid warning began to sound and right afterward came the siren.

  I didn’t like going into shelters—I still remembered the terrible stories of the first bombings in Turin: we’d seen the red flashes in a very clear night sky behind the shaking windowpanes—and I always tried to stay outside until the last moment. Then, as I had that time, seeing someone run, I began running, too. Thus with the others I reached one of the shelters dug under Monte dei Cappuccini, while the thuds of the first bombs could be heard in the direction of Mirafiori. When I glimpsed the black hole of the shelter entrance I immediately tried to separate from the crowd so as not to have to go in. But the people pressing me on all sides lifted me off the ground and transported me inside, bathed in fear down to my boots.

  I was generally a prudent girl, uninvolved and often cowardly. Prudence abandoned me only during sudden bursts of rage. While my pity was directed mainly toward people I felt were like me, the rage that invaded me was immediate, blind, and uncontrollable, a rage against the oppressor, whoever it might be, and I abruptly lost any sense of distance and priorities. Rage boiled inside me when, riding in a tram forced to take a detour, I passed the men hanged on Corso Vinzaglio; the violence was all the greater given how impotent I felt, provoked that time even more by the dirty posters dangling above the hanged men than by the sight of their waxy doll-like faces.

  I was already well aware that my sudden attacks of anger had nothing to do with courage conscious of its goal; as soon as they cooled off I regretted their effects and wasn’t proud of them, but I had trouble controlling myself.

  For a fit of rage against the literature teacher who had made fun of my friend Evi, I was suspended in the last year of middle school: I was the first girl in the school ever to be suspended. And on a much more serious occasion I risked my life and the lives of others.

  One of the fascist soldiers in Torre Pellice had been murdered, and the funeral was planned—with the population invited to participate—for three in the afternoon. Shortly before three, something occurred to me that I wanted to tell a friend
who lived in the “new houses,” that is, the Collegio teachers’ houses. So I hurried to her house: the street was deserted and the windows all shuttered. On the way home, as I emerged from the “new houses,” I saw at the end of the street, right next to the monument of Pastor Enrico Arnaud, the fascist’s funeral procession, a meager band of men in uniform, carrying the coffin on their shoulders. I turned and ran back into the house, but, five minutes later, a loud banging of fists against the door announced the fascists’ arrival. They led us out, my friend, her mother, and me, and a small dark man, gesturing, ordered us to honor the coffin of their fallen comrade with the fascist salute: “I saw you, you scum, you were running home so you wouldn’t have to salute at the funeral. Scum, like all the other scum in this town.”

  In front of the fuming little fascist, the familiar anger began to flare up. I thought: “Never ever will I give your salute.” Then I perceived the two women beside me, my friend and her very pale mother—I remember them as looking in fact green—who were raising their arms, trembling. That visible tremor immediately shamed me—I wasn’t yet frightened—and I raised my arm in the last fascist salute of my life.

  As soon as the fascists had gone off on the road to the cemetery, my companions—we stood there as if of stone, motionless in front of the house—began to insult me. That agitated me much more than the preceding scene, since I couldn’t bear to be called “crazy.”

  On occasions when I somehow realized (or feared) that I was making a poor showing, whatever the circumstances, values were flattened in the background and I remained alone in the foreground, with my clumsy gestures and my graceless appearance; I remained to recover or to defend.

  In the last winter of the war I worked in Turin, where Franchi had given me the job of helping the French refugees housed in the barracks of San Paolo (with the assistance of a clandestine center that functioned almost openly with the usual imprudence, to me horrendous, in a noble palazzo, maybe on Via Maria Vittoria). With the five hundred lire a month earned in this job, I supported myself in Turin, where I lived not because of the refugees and still less because of the center on Via Maria Vittoria, but for love of my “A.”