by André Aciman
But those who committed the massacre, who were they? The whole city had started to wonder the following day. There was no doubt: the first perpetrators, those materially responsible for the massacre, could be none other than the men from the military cars, four of them with licence plates “VR,” from Verona, and two “PD,” from Padua—the same ones that throughout the night had filled Ferrara with their songs and firing, and then, toward dawn, had disappeared. The avengers predicted by the radio had certainly been they. And in fact it was they, the squad members from the Veneto, who presented themselves at the entrance of the prison in Via Piangipane, and it was they, and they alone, who, with guns in their hands, had forced that poor chap, the director, to hand over the lawyers Polenghi and Tamagnini, both of them Socialists and veteran trade union organizers, and also the lawyers Galimberti, Fano and Forlivesi of the Partito d’Azione,# all of them detained since September, all awaiting investigation.
And yet, to belie the rumor which was already circulating, according to which no Ferrarese had participated in the atrocity, no Ferrarese was stained with that blood, it was quite enough to ponder the other six dead, National Councillor Abbove, Dr. Malacarne, the accountant Zoli, the two Cases, father and son, and the worker Felloni, at least five of whom were taken from their own houses. Apart from Felloni (a little-known employee of the Electric Company, who had been rounded up with the group of victims only because a little before dawn, the hour at which he usually went to work, he’d happened to run into one of the patrols which were blocking the way to the city center), no one who wasn’t from Ferrara—a point argued by many—could possibly have been able to track down National Councillor Abbove, who was not then in his home in Corso Giovecca, but in the office-garçonnière, which he had recently had built, having very cheaply bought the site within a narrow medieval cloister in the quiet and secluded Via Brasàvola, and in whose discreet shade, filled with the most various of art objects, the old epicure was wont to repair, on certain afternoons, to enjoy his declining years. No one who wasn’t from the city (very well informed indeed about what had been going on there over the previous years) could possibly have known of the secret meetings which, during the forty-five days of the Badoglio period, had been held in that big trap belonging to the National Councillor Abbove. Dr. Malacarne and the accountant Zoli had always attended, but old Sciagura, no—he had declined each and every invitation. These meetings were thought to be intended to work out a strategy for all those Fascists who, with the fall of the regime, only wanted to send word to the king, attesting to their “unconditional loyalty”—in short, to change their views as swiftly as a weathervane. And the two Cases, father and son, especially, two of the few Jews to have escaped from the big roundup in September, leather merchants who had never had a political thought in their lives and had lived, since September, hidden away in the barn of their old house in Vicolo Mozzo Torcicoda, provided with food through a hole in the floor by their wife and mother, respectively, who was as Aryan and Catholic as could be . . . who else but someone who had the most intimate knowledge of their place of refuge could have been able to point the four cut-throats sent to capture them just there, atop that dusty labyrinth of half-crumbled little staircases? Who else but . . . ?
Carlo Aretusi, yes, him, Sciagura. As to why suspicion should immediately have alighted on him (since the morning of the 16th he had resumed command of the Federation, and his name was spoken henceforth as it had been before 1922, in an instinctively hushed tone), it’s enough to recall how he had appeared at the funeral of Consul Bolognesi on the afternoon of that day.
He had never participated in the many clandestine meetings which in August had been held at the house of National Councillor Abbove, even sending word to his ex-comrades that he, not wanting to renege at fifty on what he had done at twenty years of age, had no wish to attend. And so, while he walked at the head of the interminable cortège just in front of the gun carriage which bore the coffin of Consul Bolognesi and kept casting glances of scorn and hatred in the direction of the houses in Corso Giovecca and in Via Palestro—how free and easy he seemed, wearing, despite the cold, only his black shirt with his beret of the Tenth Assault Flotilla, disbanded in 1923, his temples only just beginning to turn grey—he seemed to be exactly as he’d been as a young man at twenty. “Damned vermin, cowardly, boot-licking bourgeoisie! I’ll show you! I’ll flush you all out!” his furious eyes and curled lips seemed to be threatening. In Piazza della Certosa, before the coffin was borne into the church, he had harangued the crowd in this very tone. Grey and inert, the crowd listened. He seemed to become more and more infuriated, perhaps most of all infuriated because of that inertia.
“The bodies of the eleven traitors shot in Corso Roma at dawn this morning,” he had yelled in conclusion, “won’t be removed until I give the order. We want to be sure that their example will have the desired effect!”
In that paroxysm of rage could he have boasted anymore explicitly of having administered justice himself, with his own hands?
A little after, in Corso Roma, when he had unexpectedly arrived to call to attention the Black Brigade militia, who were guarding the bodies of the slain, how should one interpret his behavior, which seemed so at odds with that of a half-hour earlier in Piazza della Certosa, except that, reconsidering, it added up to more than a hundred confessions?
Sullenly he got out of the car, barely sparing a glance at the corpses stretched out on the pavement, and at once one of the soldiers took a step forward to inform him, with the air of congratulating him for having arrived at the right moment, of all that had been happening.
The whole day, the militia man explained, speaking on behalf of himself and his companions, the three of them had managed to keep at bay anyone who had tried to approach. More than once, with the aim of dispersing them—they were most likely the traitors’ relatives, women weeping and crying out, men who were swearing; it wasn’t in the least bit easy to make them obey!—they’d been forced to fire a few bursts of bullets into the air to drive them off down there to the far corners of Piazza Cattedrale and Corso Giovecca, where even now, as Comrade Aretusi could see, a few of them still seemed determined to stay. But what else could they have done—the soldier went on and, raising his arm, pointed to the window, behind which one could make out the motionless shape of Pino Barilari—about that gentleman up there, a really weird guy, I can tell you, when no hint or threat, no burst of machine-gun fire has made him budge an inch? Who knows, perhaps he was deaf? Still, if they’d known how to reach him, even if it meant breaking through the shutters down there in the pharmacy, one of them would surely have gone up to tell him from close up, politely or otherwise, to move the hell away . . .
As soon as the soldier had said “that gentleman up there,” Sciagura, with a start as though he’d been bitten by an adder, had raised his eyes to the window the young man was pointing at. It was dark by then. Seeping up over the rim of the Castle moat, minute by minute, the fog was thickening. Along the whole length of Corso Roma that window up there was the only one lit.
Still looking up at it, Sciagura let out a stifled curse and made a scornful gesture. He then turned round, and in a muffled voice, a kind of timorous murmur, ordered the three soldiers, in some twenty minutes’ time, when the men he had sent to remove the bodies arrived, to let them do it, and not to get in their way.
4.
PEOPLE IMAGINED things.
They imagined entering the apartment above the pharmacy, where no one from Ferrara, not even the Freemason brothers of the deceased Francesco, had ever even once set foot. A little spiral staircase linked the back workroom to the upstairs floor, which consisted of only four rooms: a dining room, a drawing room, a double bedroom and finally the little room which Pino had had as a boy, and to which, since being struck down by paralysis, he’d once again returned . . . By the sheer effort of imagining it, it was as though they had come to know the apartment intimately—to the extent of being able to point to the very wa
ll on which hung the portrait photograph of Scales in a heavy, gilded, nineteenth-century frame, and to describe the shape of the central chandelier which every evening cast its strong, white light over the table’s green cover and on the cards of the game of patience, or to tell of the effect of the modern furniture and objects, scattered here and there, but mostly in the double bedroom, which had been introduced by the young Signora Barilari, or to expound on the little room adjoining the bedroom where, soon after supper, Pino retired to sleep, with a child’s iron bed in one corner, a small desk against one wall, a wardrobe against the opposite wall, and at the foot of the bed, covered with a blanket of Scottish wool in red-and-blue tartan, the big armchair with adjustable back which every morning his wife replaced beside the light-filled dining room window, and on which Pino sat from morning to evening. If they’d wanted to they could even have listed one by one the authors shelved in the glass-fronted bookcase next to the radiator beside the door—Salgari, Verne, Ponson du Terrail, Dumas, Mayne Reid, Fenimore Cooper, and so on. Among the other books there was also The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by E. A. Poe, in an edition whose cover depicted a tall white ghost armed with a sickle looming over a little whaling sloop. Yet this latter volume was not behind the glass of the bookcase alongside the other books, but, rather, face down on the bedside table’s shelf beside a fat stamp album, a bundle of crayons upright in a glass, a cheap penknife, a half-consumed eraser; the volume placed, then, so that the spectre on the cover, while still being present, being there, was invisible, and did not arouse any fear.
But this wasn’t enough.
“Where are you going?” Pino had asked on the evening of December 15, raising his head from a game of patience.
Having got up from the table, his wife Anna was already moving toward the door. And it was from the shadowy corridor, at the end of which the trapdoor opened on to the spiral staircase, that her calm voice reached him in reply.
“Where do you think I’m going? I’m going down to close the shop.”
Who knows? Perhaps he hadn’t heard on the radio, early that afternoon, the report from Verona. What is certain is that at nine o’clock, when the chimes of the Castle clock had faded over the whole city with the slow sweetness of a benediction, one would have expected Pino to be huddled up in his child’s bed, the covers drawn up to his ears. Closing his eyes, going to sleep. Hearing his wife get up from the table to go down to the pharmacy—at that hour there was always something to do down there: tot up the day’s earnings and, finally, having drawn down the shutters, to lock up from inside—and seeing her about to leave through the drawing room door, so tall and beautiful and indifferent, what would Pino be thinking about except that? To fall into a deep sleep. And that evening, perhaps, even earlier than usual.
They also imagined everything else, naturally, everything else that happened.
They saw the eleven men lined up in three distinct groups against the little wall of the Castle moat, the coming and going of the blue-shirted legionnaires in that space between the portico of the Caffè della Borsa and the opposite sidewalk, the desperate sneer of the lawyer Fano, when, an instant before the firing began, he had shouted “Murderer!” at Sciagura, who was standing a little apart lighting a cigarette, that clear light, that incredibly clear moonlight which, since midnight, with the wind’s sudden change, had made every stone of the city a piece of glass or coal, and Pino, finally, whom only the cry of the lawyer Fano had managed to drag at the last moment from his child-like deep sleep, hidden up there, shaking on his crutches, behind the windowpanes which overlooked the scene . . . And it was thus, for months and months, the whole time it took from December 1943 to May ’44 for the war to slowly advance up the Italian peninsula, as if the collective imagination needed to return to that spot, to that fearful night, and to have before its eyes the faces of the eleven men who were shot just as Pino had seen them from his lofty vantage-point.
The Liberation came, and finally Peace, and for many Ferrarese, for almost all of them, came the anxious need to forget.
But can one forget? Is it enough to want to?
In the summer of 1946, when in the conference room of the ex-Fascist HQ in Viale Cavour the trial began of the twenty or so presumed perpetrators of the massacre of three years earlier (most of them from the Veneto, collared in the Coltano concentration camp and the prisons), and when, hiding under a false name in the refuge in Colle Val d’Elsa where he had been tracked down by the young and very active provincial secretary of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia,** Nino Bottecchiari, Sciagura too made his entry into the big cage, the dock of the accused, this seemed the most auspicious occasion finally to place a covering stone over the past. It was, however, true, they sighed, that no other city in northern Italy had supplied as many adherents to the Republic of Salò as Ferrara had, no other middle class had been so ready to kowtow to the dismal banners of its various militia and special corps. And yet it would have needed very little indeed for that error of calculation which many had made under the pressure of such exceptional circumstances, and which the Communists of the region, taking control of the town hall in 1945, had tended to turn into a stain of eternal infamy, for that simple, only human error to become along with everything else just a bad dream, a terrible nightmare from which to awake full of hope, faith in themselves and in the future! Sufficient to this end would have been the condemnation of the assassins, and then every memory of that night of December 15, 1943, that fatal, decisive night, could be rapidly and finally erased.
The trial inched forward in the heat and boredom, provoking in the jostling crowd which gathered for every sitting a growing sense of futility and impotence.
Made restless and uneasy by the loudspeakers placed in the avenue outside which broadcast the proceedings as far away as the city center, as the middle of Corso Roma, the court interrogated the accused one by one. From behind the bars of the big cage placed along one side of the courtroom, between two windows, the accused kept responding in the same way: none of them had been involved in the punitive expedition of December 1943; none of them had even been to Ferrara. They all seemed so sure they had nothing to fear that some of them even risked the odd joke. There was one from Treviso, for example, with long curly dark hair and a jutting, unshaven jaw, who admitted that, yes, he had in fact once been to Ferrara, but twenty years earlier, on a bike to meet his girlfriend—a joke which didn’t fail to elicit a sly and good-natured, typically Neapolitan grin from the presiding judge, who always seemed inclined to distance himself from that aura of populist, revolutionary justice the trial had begun to assume. If he had allowed the sittings to take place in the ex-Fascist HQ—so he had said on the first day—it was only because the courthouse, half-destroyed by a bombardment in 1944 and in the process of reconstruction, was still unfit for use.
As for Sciagura, not only did he too deny any direct or indirect involvement in the “event” of December 15, 1943, but from the first moment that the Carabinieri put him in the cage, he never lost an opportunity to display, along with the most punctilious respect for the court called to judge his “actions,” his deep disdain for the crowd down in the public space, whose behavior, he said at a certain point, revealed only too clearly the baleful effect “of the present state of affairs.” So was it, he added, with factional hatred, with the thirst for revenge that could be seen on all those faces that the much hoped-for national pacification was to be achieved? Was this the climate of freedom to enable the court to pass a cool and unprejudiced judgement on a man like him, only guilty of having been “a soldier in the service of an Idea”?
All this was merely blowing smoke in the eyes of the court, evasive tactics meant to delay and to stop the proceedings from becoming too legalistic, which would be to his disadvantage, whereas a political trial could only work in his favor.
“I was the foot soldier of an Idea,” he kept repeating in a self-pleased way, “not the system’s hired assassin nor the servant of foreign powers!�
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Or in a maudlin tone: “Everyone now speaks ill of me!”
He didn’t need to add anything more. But each time it was as though he hinted that his persecutors of today shouldn’t fool themselves that condemning him would draw a veil over what they themselves had been yesterday. Every one of them had been just as much a Fascist as him, and no court verdict was going to wipe away that fact.
“And in the end what was it he was being accused of?” he said, going on the offensive one day. If he’d not misunderstood, he was accused of having supplied the list of eleven persons who were shot on the night of December 15, 1943, and of having personally directed the execution of those “unfortunates.” But to convince a “proper,” a “responsible” court that he, Carlo Aretusi, had really done those two things, proffered the list and directed the execution, proof was required—not mere suppositions! “There’s no point in chattering about the slaughter, since I myself am ready to assume full and complete responsibility for it!” It seemed he’d declared as much some days after the “famous night,” and it may indeed be that, on that or on another occasion, those had been his words. And so? Once again, proof is required, proof! As for the sentences he may have spoken then, “in the heat of the moment,” they were “in all probability” intended to assure “our German allies” of the commitment and unconditional loyalty of Italy. After September 8 the Germans had become the real rulers of Italy, and, as we know, they wouldn’t have had any hesitation in reducing every town in the land to a pile of rubble. So what counted wasn’t words, and words, remember, spoken in public so that others might hear and heed them. What counted were facts and deeds, not to mention the medals for valour that he, during the First World War, had won fighting against those very Germans to whom he was now accused of being a lackey—he, a lackey?—a stormtrooper on the Piave! And since the stockholders of the Agricola Bank had been referred to, why not also remember that the honorable Bottecchiari, the Socialist lawyer Mauro Bottecchiari, who until the fall of the “Badoglio government” had served on the board of directors of that bank, had been released at Christmas from the Via Piangipane prison due to his, Carlo Aretusi’s, direct intervention? Also the schoolmistress Trotti, another Socialist, had been set free on the same occasion, and it’s a shame that now she’s no longer with us to testify on his behalf. But the honorable Bottecchiari is still enjoying the best of health. So why not call on him at once and ask him to relate all that he knows of the matter? The honorable Bottecchiari is a good man, utterly trustworthy and above any pettiness, and for this reason he, Sciagura, had always had the utmost respect for him since the remote times of 1920, and ’22. The truth is that compared to how things were once, nowadays everywhere in Italy political conduct has massively deteriorated! Another truth ought to be told: that today they wanted to condemn Carlo Aretusi mainly because he had been “promoted” to lead the federal Fascist secretariat of Ferrara on the day after Consul Bolognesi’s assassination. For a reason of this kind, of “scheming politics” today, they wanted to make a scapegoat of Carlo Aretusi. A “proper” court, a “responsible” court, a court that wouldn’t let itself be “swayed by factional prejudices” would at once have understood that he had accepted the directorship with the exclusive aim of hindering certain “lawless desperadoes” from instigating a reign of terror. And, in fact, what had been the first step he had taken as soon as he was appointed but to restore without delay the bodies of the victims to their respective families?