The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  These worries spread abroad and reached the upper echelons.

  Yet despite these things, when asked his opinion by the select court of his most faithful followers that encircled him, Carlo Aretusi, nicknamed Sciagura, drew down his mouth in an expression of doubt.

  “Don’t let’s exaggerate,” he replied with a smile.

  In the inseparable company of Vezio Sturla and Osvaldo Bellistracci he had maintained his—you could call it permanent—station for, by now, twenty years, at the very same table of the Caffè della Borsa. And so it was to him, as the most authoritative member of what at the time of the “action squads” had been Ferrara’s famous Fascist triumvirate, that the most delicate questions were addressed without delay.

  Sceptical, nostalgic, Sciagura kept on smiling. Despite the insistence of the others, he couldn’t be induced to see that in Pino Barilari’s behavior there was anything at all threatening.

  “That draft dodger a subversive?” he finally blurted out, laughing. “If only you’d been with us in Rome in 1922!”

  Thus it was—it’s worth recording because this had never happened before—that the little group of his confidants were able to hear from Sciagura’s lips, twisted into an emotional expression for the occasion, a remarkable abundance of detail about the March on Rome.

  Ah yes, Sciagura sighed. He, unlike certain others, was always reluctant to speak at all about the March on Rome!

  Why—he continued at once, with emphasis—why ever would he waste his time blathering about an event like that, which if it had meant a seizure of power for many, who consequently accrued personal advantages, for him, as for others like him—and here Sturla and Bellistracci nodded in silent confirmation—it represented one thing only: the end of the revolution, the definitive eclipse of the glorious era of the squads?

  And then, when you considered the matter closely, what was it if not a kind of military convoy making for the capital, with stops at all the stations, to gather the platoons of comrades-in-arms (in those days, the tunnels made for the fast trains between Bologna and Florence weren’t yet even dreamed of), a proper troop of armed Carabinieri and Royal Guards placed as protection along the whole line? Fat chance that they’d be there to guard the four Fiat 18 BLs which, in 1919, had pushed as far forward as Molinella, deep into the Red zone, to set fire to the HQ of the Workers’ Organization. That was some feat—which, for the first time, had drawn all of Italy’s attention to the Fascist Federation of Ferrara, and which, to be precise, led to the very first friction between the Ferrara and the Bologna federations, as the latter had considered (and explicitly called) the Molinella expedition a “provocative interference.” Fascism was at that time anarchic, Garibaldi-like. Then, as opposed to later, bureaucrats were not preferred to revolutionaries. But in 1919 or ’20 the young Sciagura, the young Bellistracci, the young Sturla, armed only with clubs, with knuckledusters or, at the most, with some old SIPE-manufactured hand-grenades left over from the war, would leave by night from Porta Reno looking for a fight with the Communist dockers who crowded the drinking dens of Borgo San Luca—it had actually been them, the Bolshevik workers from beyond Porta Reno, who had nicknamed him Sciagura, Calamity: and he had always boasted of the name, and had always worn it like a medal for bravery. No way were they counting on any assistance, even of an indirect kind, from the police! It wasn’t until 1922, or rather ’23, that the police began to give a hand to the Fascists. In that later period, before setting out on any punitive raid, they used to assemble with all the trucks and cars in the Castle’s central courtyard. After 1923, the farm owners from out of town might also have been seen, rushing to offer their cars, declaring themselves highly honored to put them at the service of the Cause!

  But getting back to the March on Rome and the son of Dr. Barilari—in the end it was him, the boy, who provided the only real entertainment for the whole trip. Thinking back, it was actually he who salvaged the March on Rome.

  He had joined them at the last moment, when the train was already leaving, so a hand had to be stretched from the window to haul him up like a dead weight. The way he was dressed! He was wearing a grey-green cloak which must have been his father’s and reached down to his hocks, military puttees which slipped down his legs every five minutes, big, low-cut, yellow shoes, and in addition a great fez, which, crushed down on his head, made his ears stick out like a bat’s. What could you do, seeing yourselves gawped at by his idiot eyes on stalks, but split your sides with laughter? It seemed like the boy thought that he, Sciagura, was a kind of Tom Mix and that the others in the “hand-grenade” squad had been the sheriff’s posse. “Who are you? Not by chance Dr. Barilari’s son?” someone had soon asked. Too out of breath to reply, he’d nodded in the affirmative. “But does your daddy know you’ve sneaked away with us?” He shook his head for No, all the while staring at them with his baby eyes as if he’d been dropped into a cowboy film.

  At eighteen years old, he was far from being a kid. But he was worse than a kid.

  At that age he was still a virgin. Since the train, on the way there as on the way back, stopped at more or less every station, and they made the most of nearly every stop by going in search of brothels, and he, Pino, always stubborn as a mule, refused to set foot inside any of them, it ended up with them hauling him in by force. He resisted, dragged his feet, pleaded with his hands together and wept. “What’re you so scared of—you think they’re going to eat you?” the others said. “At least come in and have a look. Word of honor we won’t make you go upstairs into any of the bedrooms!”

  He didn’t believe us. At a certain moment he, Sciagura, smiling and winking, intervened and took him aside, and whispered something in his ear. “You really don’t want to come in?” he said. “Go on, stop pretending!”

  Only then did he decide to go in, even if then, as soon as he’d entered the salon with all the others, he huddled down in a corner all on his own. The girls, egged on and touched by him being so scared—it should be said they always had a weakness for Fascists!—were all in competition to pet him; you can’t imagine what lengths they went to. Listening to him, you’d think those girls had turned the brothel into a home for abandoned children. And sure enough the madam came in to sort things out. “Now what’s going on here, girls?” she yelled at them. “Are we running a wet-flannel factory?” Every time they stopped off, it was a comedy, a farce of this kind.

  The mother of all scenes happened at Specchi, a brothel in Bologna, on the return journey.

  The Porrettana line‡ was never-ending—they’d been bored to death on the way there—so at Pistoia, before they had to cope with the Apennines, they’d got out in twos and threes to buy up all the flasks of Chianti they could get their hands on. Up in the mountains it gets cold, and so misty you can’t see ten meters ahead. To pass the time, there was nothing to do but drink and sing songs, the result being that when they arrived at Bologna toward midnight, all of them, Pino included, were completely drunk.

  At the end of Via dell’Oca, pressing his back against the knocker made of nail-heads on the small entrance door, Pino once again started going through his usual theatrics of resistance. It was then, that he, Sciagura, perhaps because of the alcohol, or the boredom of the journey, or the anger at having taken part in that great travesty that was the March on Rome—at Rome, they’d stayed barely a couple of days, for most of that time stuck in the barracks and never getting even a glimpse of Il Duce, because, they said, he was haggling with the king about forming a government—anyway, suddenly, without knowing quite how, he found himself with the Mauser in his fist pointed at the boy’s throat, saying that if Pino didn’t stop whining and go in right away, or even, when they’d gone in to the little salon upstairs, if he refused to go up to a room with a prostitute, he’d have to face a lot worse than syphilis. As things turned out, it was probably then that he actually did catch it!

  It had been he who accompanied the boy upstairs, to make sure that the two of them did their business and t
hat properly. Lucky Pino had done as he was told! If he hadn’t, then he, Sciaguro, drunk as he was and levelling that revolver at him, well, anything might have happened.

  3.

  WHO IN Ferrara does not remember the night of December 15, 1943?§ Who could forget the slow creep of the hours that night? For everyone it was an anxious, interminable vigil, with burning eyes peering through the slats of blinds at streets cloaked in the darkness of a blackout, and the heart leaping every minute at the crackle of machine-gun fire or the sudden passing, even noisier, of the trucks packed with armed men.

  Death holds for us no fear,

  Long live death and the cemetery . . .

  sang the unseen men in the trucks. It was a cadenced, rather than warlike song, but that lilt, too, was full of desperation.

  News of the assassination of Consul Bolognesi, the ex-Federal Secretary (who, since September, after the interval of the Badoglio period,¶ had been called upon to reorganize the Fascist Federation and assume its governership), had spread around the city in the early afternoon of the 15th. A little later, the radio supplied the details: the Topolino car found on a country road near Copparo, the left-side window wide open; the victim with his head slumped on the steering wheel “as though sleeping”; the “classic” shot to the back of the neck, “more telling than a signature”; and the contempt, “the unstoppable tide of contempt,” which the news, as soon as it was received, had provoked in Verona, in the heart of the Constituent Assembly of the New Social Republic assembled in Castelvecchio. Toward evening, it was possible to hear a live recording from the session in Verona. A thin, high voice had suddenly taken over from the deep, sorrowful voice of the speaker, who, having informed the listeners of the death of Consul Bolognesi, had begun to fashion his eulogy, shouting angrily and sorrowfully like a child throwing a tantrum: “We shall avenge our comrade, Bolognesi!” The radios were switched off, people stared at each other with frightened expressions, and already the dull rumbling of distant tanks approaching and the lacerating rat-a-tat of the first bursts of machine-gun fire could be heard outside.

  No one went to bed, no one even thought of sleeping. There wasn’t, in short, a single person in Ferrara who didn’t fear that their house would be raided. But it was above all in the city’s middle-class apartments that feverish discussions and arguments raged.

  What was happening? What would happen now?

  It’s true, they reasoned, seated torpidly around those same tables, the tablecloths still covered with crumbs and only half-cleared of the lunch’s dirty dishes, on which, at a given time as on every other evening, they were vainly attempting to eat supper—it’s true that the city was resounding with the noise of gunfire, with lugubrious songs that spoke of death and cemeteries. But this shouldn’t make them think that the Fascists—who had, even in Ferrara, shown remarkable moderation, confining themselves since the previous September to rounding up the hundred or so Jews they’d managed to get their hands on and a mere ten anti-Fascists, locking them up in Piangipane Prison—had now suddenly switched tactics and wanted to bring about a general and radical turn of the screw, beginning in the city itself. Good Lord, they might be Fascists, but they were also Italians! And, to tell the truth, a lot more Italian than many others who liked to expatiate on Freedom while polishing the shoes of the foreign invader. No, surely there was nothing to fear. If the Fascists were kicking up a bit of a fuss, swaggering about looking fierce, with skulls on their berets, they were doing it mainly to keep the Germans at bay, who, left to themselves, wouldn’t have hesitated to treat Italy like some kind of Poland or Ukraine. What poor devils the Fascists were! You had to understand the predicament they were in, and the personal tragedy of Mussolini, also a poor fellow, who hadn’t yet retired from public life to his summer residence, the Rocca delle Caminate, as he perhaps hoped to, due to Italy’s dire plight. But the king, the king! On September 8, all the king could do, along with Badoglio, was cut the cord. By contrast, in the hour of crisis, Mussolini, as a good Romagnolo (the Savoy royal family and Badoglio were Piedmontese, and the Piedmontese had always been a stingy, untrustworthy lot!), hadn’t hesitated for an instant to wade into the waves, rush up the gangplank and grab the tiller . . . And frankly, how should the assassination of the Consul Bolognesi be judged—a paterfamilias, besides, and a man who’d never harmed a hair on anyone’s head? No true Italian could approve of a crime like that, which was, it was obvious, a servile imitation of Yugoslavia or France, intended to spread the flames and all the horrors of a partisan war into Italy too. The destruction of all the finest Western and Mediterranean values: in short, Communism—that’s the real aim of a partisan war! If the Yugoslavs and the French, despite the recent experience of Spain, wanted Communism, well, they had their Tito and their De Gaulle. For Italians today, as things were, there was a single obligation: to stay united and save what could be saved.

  Finally, and mercifully, daylight returned. And with the light, the songs and shooting ceased.

  And at the same time, at a stroke, the nervous chattering behind doors and windows ceased. But the anxiety did not abate. Daylight, restoring even to the blindest a clear sense of reality, made it even more acute. What did that sudden silence portend? What was it hiding or preparing? It could easily be a trap fashioned to trick people into coming out so that they could then be rounded up. They stayed cooped up inside their houses for at least two hours, before vague news of the massacre had gradually spread, as if by its own momentum.The victims of the reprisal were said to be fifty, a hundred, two hundred. If the most desperate predictions were to be given any credit, not just Corso Roma, but the whole city center would be strewn with corpses.

  And yet there were only eleven, laid in three separate heaps along the wall of the Castle moat, on that stretch of sidewalk exactly opposite the Caffè della Borsa. To count and identify them, which was done by the first who dared approach—from a way off they didn’t even look like human bodies: rags, poor rags at that, or bundles thrown there in the sun and the dirty melting snow—it was necessary to turn those that lay face down over on to their backs and separate, one from the other, those who fell embracing each other and had become a tight tangle of rigid limbs. There was only just time to count and recognize them. Because soon after, emerging from the corner of the Corso Giovecca, a small military van came to a halt with a theatrical screech of brakes in front of the group who had gathered around the bodies. “Away! Move away!” the Blackshirts militia who were riding in the van yelled out. Still pursued by their shouts, nothing remained for those who were present but slowly to retreat toward the two ends of Corso Roma, and from there, under the sun now already high, their eyes still on the four militia men down there who kept guard over the dead with machine guns in their hands, to let the whole city know by telephone what they’d risked and what they’d seen.

  Horror, pity, crazed fear: all of these were mingled in the impression which the announcement of the names of the dead awoke in every household. There were only eleven of them, agreed. But they were persons only too well known in Ferrara, persons about whom, beyond their names, a surfeit of details both physical and moral were too familiar for their end not to appear from the first a terrifying event, of an almost incredible brutality. It will seem strange that the nearly unanimous abhorrence of the murder could at once be accompanied by an equally widespread intention to treat the murderers respectfully, to make a public show of supporting and submitting to their violence. Yet this is what happened, and it would be futile to try to conceal the fact, if it’s true, as it was, that in no other city of northern Italy could the Fascism that was reborn in Verona have been able to count such a large number of enrolled Party members as might be seen on the morning of the 17th in long, silent lines in the courtyard of Ferrara’s Fascist headquarters in Viale Cavour, waiting for the Federation offices to open. Bent, submissive, disheartened under the worn-out greatcoats made of autarchic fabrics, they were the same silent tide of people who, the afternoon of the day
before, had step by step followed the coffin of Consul Bolognesi along Corso Giovecca, Via Palestro, Via Borso, up to Piazza della Certosa, and in whose leaden features the few who had remained inside their houses to watch the cortège from behind their blinds had, with a shudder, been able to recognize their own faces. What else was there to do but give in? The Germans and Japanese, even if for the moment they seemed in retreat, would reverse the situation, uncovering an arsenal of secret weapons of unheard-of power, and win the war with a lightning strike. No, there was only one road left to take.