by Daša Drndic
Naples is tricked out gaily. There are flowers everywhere in classical style and colourful banners flap in the wind as if readying for Carnival. The façade of San Francesca da Paola at Piazza del Plebiscito is disfigured by dozens of drapes of red and black bunting; as they ripple in the spring breeze, the church beneath them looks maniacal, keening at one moment in deep grief, and at the next, laughing hysterically.
The Italian navy is doing its level best to wow the Führer, performing mock naval battles. The audience is enthralled: gasps of delight and wonder rise to the skies, aaahhs and ooohhs float in the air like little puffs of breeze. The submarines, like immense black cormorants, dive and surface, seeking imaginary prey; children shriek and cavort; older men and women sit on deckchairs brought from home, as if out to enjoy the sun. After every exercise hats fly into the air, men’s and women’s hats. Thrill reigns, a sense of community, a vast delight at belonging. To one country, one people, to two leaders. The city has donned its uniform. Secret agents, Fascist spies, the police, military guards, come pouring out of everywhere. The Neapolitan songs slip down under the cobblestones and quiver, crouching, silent, trampled by the newly born passo romano.
In the evening Hitler is taken to a performance of Aida, to relax. The next day they bring him back to Rome where on 7 May, at a banquet at the Palazzo Venezia, he grants South Tyrol to Italy in a generous gesture. In return, Hitler receives the Discobolus of Myron. Everyone is pleased. The visit is a success.
Late in the school year the students ask their teacher Amato di Veroli, When will you bring Caccioppoli back? Professor di Veroli says, That won’t be possible. They’ve locked him up in a madhouse.
Many years later, in the 1990s, Haya sees the movie Morte di un matematico napoletano with the excellent Carlo Cecchi, and from that, from the film, she learns part of the story of Renato Caccioppoli. The rest she uncovers on her own. But by then the war is long over. What happened is being forgotten.
All the same, unpaid bills keep arriving. The story of the famous mathematician comes too late for Haya. Only now, as she takes out a picture of that charming and impulsive genius, does she understand what he had said about fear. And something else he said long ago in 1938 at a mathematics class at the state Neapolitan Gymnasium: I do not know certainty, at best I discover possibilities.
Just before the Neapolitan parade, Renato Caccioppoli is embroiled in all sorts of antics around town, and there is talk of them which Haya remembers. Having returned to Naples in 1934 from Padua, where he had been head of the Department of Algebraic Analysis since 1931, Caccioppoli teaches group theory and mathematical analysis, works on linear and non-linear differential equations, elliptical equations, and so on and so forth, plays the violin and the piano both in private and in public, speaks of literature and painting, at times sports a beard, dresses in tatters and travels with empty pockets by train from one city to the next in third-class cars, is arrested for loitering and then released, then he goes back to his mathematics, his students adore him, he adores his students, after class they drink together and think.
At the time he looks like this:
Fascism attaches itself to life in the city like the tentacles of an octopus squirting jets of black ink. The police work with dedication; the prisons are crowded; (some) people flee. Caccioppoli measures his fear with mathematical precision and realizes he cannot find it. He protests against the dull, mind-numbing, caricature-like rhetoric of the regime, always the same, the same for centuries, he rebels against the deceptive toys made of nothing but empty sheen and simple melodies for the hungry and ignorant masses, but these are things Haya cannot see (she is only eight in 1931), her father Florian does not see, nor does her mother Ada. They believe that now that they are Catholics they are absolutely safe. They believe in a better tomorrow wrapping their lives in thick black fabric and they become huge silk caterpillars, trapped bugs with squashed lungs, convinced they are already butterflies. They believe in universal obedience. If they are ever bold enough to rebel, they deserve serious punishment, as serious as God’s. Caccioppoli shouts, Italy is a wretched cur on a leash! Then he goes down Via Chiaia, just when it is teeming with pedestrians, he passes under the old bridge raised in the early seventeenth century, as if he were passing through a small arc de triomphe and behind him on a rope he drags a fattened capon. When he is not pulling off stunts, Caccioppoli meets with his friend, the Communist Trotskyite Mario Palermo and at secret meetings held in the taverns of Naples, in private flats or the warehouses of denounced bookshops, he debates, and whenever he gets his hands on a piano or a violin, he plays. In 1937 he meets André Gide, who says of him, More than a man, he was a soul.
Just before the parade, two days after Haya’s entire school class, entranced by Renato Caccioppoli, decide to dedicate their life to mathematics (as Haya does later), Renato Caccioppoli and Sara Mancuso walk on to the terrace of a small restaurant in the centre of town on 4 May, 1938. The night is luminous, the orchestra plays first waltzes, then marches, then a few Neapolitan songs—for appearance’s sake. People are eating pasta, mostly frutti di mare, pizzas, melanzane parmigiana, little candles flicker on red and white checked tablecloths. It is Wednesday, an ordinary evening. Caccioppoli gulps down the house red wine, rises, approaches the orchestra, and says, Play the Marseillaise. It goes like this, he says and whistles a few bars. The orchestra strikes up. The forks held by the plainclothesmen and assorted guests stop halfway to their open mouths. You heard, Caccioppoli says, the hymn to liberty; to liberty that is being suppressed in this country; to liberty which Benito Mussolini does not acknowledge, who with his German ally . . . Sara and Renato are arrested immediately. The Special Court rubs its hands in gleeful anticipation. But the Caccioppoli family are well placed. Renato Caccioppoli’s aunt Maria Bakunin is a chemistry professor at the University of Naples; Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin is his grandfather. The family obtain “medical evidence” showing that Renato Caccioppoli is deranged. They place him first in a prison clinic for the mentally ill run by psychiatrist and university professor Cesare Colucci, then he is put in a private hospital established by Colucci’s late friend, also a psychiatrist, Leonardo Bianchi. The Bakunin family have plenty of experience with handling the threatened and those who threaten; their history teems with biographies of the “disobedient” who must be spirited away; Russian history and other histories; this is a story that flows on like a muddy river. Sara Mancuso, whom Caccioppoli later marries, is released. The world of the downtrodden and abandoned literally becomes Caccioppoli’s world. Renato has his room and a piano on which he plays the Marseillaise whenever he feels the urge, when he is not working with numbers or coming up with formulae which later (with his blessing) others publish under their own names, as Hermann Weyl does in 1940. The patients adore Caccioppoli. They sing in his chorus, which they dub the “nutcase choir”. The whole hospital sings. People from the unreal world sing songs different from the songs sung in the real world, which are not, in fact, for singing, because one can only march to them, not dance. Out there song is drying up; it is no longer song. It is being squeezed out, reduced to pomace. Caccioppoli works at the asylum. He is visited by friends, colleagues, students (though not all of them). Renato goes for brief walks in the mild sun and comes up with new calculations. Haya and her friends are too young, they do not visit Renato Caccioppoli, they are told, You cannot understand. And so Haya’s life passes by with her not getting it, or getting it wrong, or getting it late, so she now tries to dismantle this misunderstanding as if it were a magic cube, the pieces of which stay stubbornly clamped shut. She opens, dissects her not-getting-it way of getting the gist into tiny, tiny segments, delving into each and every cell of the vast honeycomb her life has become. She thrusts the slender needle of reason into each of these already empty little chambers, gradually, into one after another, but out of them creep maggots, pure rot.
Renato is visited by Carlo Miranda* and Gianfranco Cimmino.*
I go to see him every
day. He accepts life among the patients calmly. He understands his incarceration as a special brand of human experience. But we are all concerned. Occasionally, when he is allowed to, we drive my car out into the country, have lunch at a little restaurant and speak of mathematics, war and women.
In 1938 Guccio Gucci (1881–1953) opens his first shop in Rome; his woman’s bag with bamboo handle is a hit.
In 1938 Italy wins the World Cup in football.
In September 1938 Mussolini abrogates the civil rights of Italian Jews.
In November 1938 a domestic version of the Nuremberg Laws comes into effect in Italy.
In 1938 King Vittorio Emmanuele III publicly supports Benito Mussolini in signing the Race Laws, according to which all Jews may be cleansed from the Government, the university, the army and other public services, and their rights to schooling and property ownership strictly limited.
In November 1938 Florian Tedeschi loses his job.
They know I am a Jew, he says. The night is balmy. The windows are open. The sea is murmuring. There is no moon.
At university they tell the professors Wear your black shirts, which does not appeal to most of them. Italian mathematics loses its finest people. Tullio Levi-Civita* is fired from the University of Padua, other universities fire Vito Voltera* Guido Fubini* and Beniamino Segre.* Enrico Fermi* goes to Stockholm in 1938 (with special permission from the Fascist government) to receive the Nobel Prize and does not return. Renato Caccioppoli is released from the asylum in 1943, organizes a railway strike and is nearly killed when strike-breakers disrupt the gathering. He takes part in meetings of the Italian Communist Party, sits often on the editorial board of Unitá, and with Unità’s editors, his friends Mario Palermo and Renzo Lapiccerello, he makes the rounds of the bistros, most often Gambrinus and out-of-the-way taverns where, until late into the night, with beer, grappa, cognac or Strega, he tries (with his friends) to work out what to do about the Nazis.
After the war, with many honours, as a member of scholarly academies and institutions, Caccioppoli returns to mathematics. He works on film. He plays music. He publishes. Sara Mancuso leaves him. He drinks. He drinks more. He often prefers to be alone. Occasionally, he goes to the opera with an old priest, to concerts of classical music, and then retreats again into his ravaged universes.
Into Euclidian realms and realms of his own. This is what he looks like:
On Friday, 8 May, 1959, around noon, he strolls along his favourite Via Chiaia, he has a short cappuccino and two grappas. He goes home. He waits for his best friend Giuseppe Scorzo Dragoni to arrive from Rome. Giuseppe is one day late.
That evening he shoots himself in the head.
The asteroid 9934 1985 UC is given the name Caccioppoli. Mario Martone makes a film about him. The Mathematics Department at the University of Naples is named Renato Caccioppoli.
Behind every name there is a story.
Frantic, on 14 December, 1938, Florian Tedeschi humbly requests to be received by the banker Pasquale Simonelli.*
Four days later Florian Tedeschi sits in a salon at Villa Simonelli and with a trembling hand he brings a cup of fine, nearly transparent Chinese porcelain to his lips. He quietly sips the black tea. Inanely, though maybe not, he says: My wife adores Gigli. And I, too, adore Gigli. Simonelli says not a word.
Simonelli is a large man, and what’s more, he’s portly. Next to him Florian is tiny. Florian is wearing a beige trench coat, rumpled and tattered, which he doesn’t take off while he sips Simonelli’s tea. Seven days later, Florian Tedeschi goes to Tirana where a job as an accountant awaits him at a large construction consortium. Everything is as it should be. Florian is not plagued by doubts. In 1938, of the 47,000 Jews then living in Italy, 10,000 are card-carrying members of the Fascist Party.
In early April 1939 Italy attacks Albania. The Albanian Parliament votes to be annexed to Italy. King Zog flees to Greece. In Naples Ada sells her furniture, bedding and rugs; she gives away their clothes. In May the family are reunited. Florian makes headway at his job. He is proud. He buys a new suit, Italian, a new trench coat, black, that he tightens with a belt. In Tirana they tell him You are being transferred to the Banca di Napoli. You are going to Vlorë. The climate is mild there and you can swim in summer. So, the Tedeschi family swim that summer.
Vlorë has many names which are differently spelt and pronounced, more names than Gorizia, and all of these names pour into the town on an inlet covered by a blue cloak of air, over which, at night, the mountains whistle. Aulon, Avlon, Avlona, Avlonya, Vallona, Valona, Vlona, Vljora, Vlonë, Vlorë. Olives, black and oiled like the eyes that open Haya’s first kiss with Ludovik, whose yellow shirt has a hole on the right shoulder. Ada’s vegetable pastries, lambs from Karaburun, cold yoghurt before leaving for school, where, as in Naples, there hang portraits of Vittorio Emmanuele and Mussolini, harapash, toasts with Falanghina. A new waystation on the journey, the route of which Haya cannot discern. Vlorë, like a pocket-sized Naples. An Italian school, Italian neighbours, Italian chocolate. A romantic trip to the island of Saseno where the troops are stationed (our troops, Florian says), the drip that jiggles on the tip of Ludovik’s nose, misted by Haya’s breath. Valona, fortified just like Gorizia. Her first visit to the theatre. Yet another language for the same departures, the same flights. Sea: det; touch: prekje; fear: frikë flag: flamur; Jew: çifut: war: luftë journey: udhëtim. Sadik Zotaj street, a bench beneath the window on which Haya kneels and waits, waits? Aron, a mohel from Corfu, arrives and circumcises Orestes, while Florian is off touring Banca di Napoli branch offices in the interior. Oh, yes, life is beautiful. It flows by the Tedeschi family, who find palms, sandy beaches and abundant fresh seafood in Valona to eat with Barilla-brand tortiglione. Many years hence, as so often happens in Haya’s old age, the past elbows into her wait like a blow, like a surfacing diver, breaking, transparent and wet, through an elusive wall (of memories), and Valona shimmers before her eyes, completely changed. The bygone decades have formed clusters of insights dwelling in the meanders, the warehouses, the hiding places of her consciousness, wrapped up in the ironed rags of logic, and now they start tumbling out of warped compartments, piling up, like rubbish, around her feet. She tries to bring order to this vast disarray, because after she retires from her job as a maths teacher at the Dante Alighieri Classical Secondary School in Gorizia, she has the time, yes, while she waits, she has the time to wonder How could I not have known? How could I not have seen?
The first banner of Albanian independence is raised in Valona back in 1912. When the Tedeschi family move to Valona in 1939, there are about 600 Jews living there, but she, Haya, remembers only Fanny Malli, because Fanny led a rabbit on a leash, and Ruben Ketz, because he had pockets full of black pebbles and spoke Albanian better than she did. In retrospect, she knows there was once a synagogue in Valona, which the Italians turned into a weapons armoury during the Great War, and there had been a Jewish cemetery, because before the bombs began to fall, while walking with Ludovik across a ploughed building site, she noticed a little tablet with a Star of David on it and oddly carved letters. Those are our enemies, Florian and Ada say, the Greeks and the Albanians, the partisan bandits. Haya believes there are enemies everywhere around them, although she is no longer a child. Italian boats sink in the Albanian port. The Italian confectioners shut down.
We are losing the war, Florian says.
The Germans don’t like us, Ada says.
In Tirana, Enver Hoxha closes his shop, called Flora, where he sells alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, sandwiches and tobacco, for the opening of which he had submitted the necessary paperwork to the (Italian) municipal administration, signed Envero Hoxha. In a rash of demonstrations, Albanian anti-fascists clash with the carabinieri and the local police. The newly sworn-in Albanian prime minister, Mussolini’s favourite Mustafa Merlika-Kruja, persecutes, arrests, tortures and kills all those who are against the regime. The Italians capture Koçi Xoxe and condemn him to death by hanging. The yout
h leader Qemal Stafa is killed. In Korçë, anti-fascists set fire to the barracks of the Italian Army, and on 24 July, 1942, they blow up an armoury with the weapons inside; the Tedeschi family run into the textile shop on the ground floor of their building and hide among the bolts of floral cotton; they themselves becoming a decoration, a pattern, in the growing maelstrom. At Tirana airport the spotlights are smashed; the Communists sabotage the central telephone switchboard and cut all telephone lines, and the organized uprising begins. Florian Tedeschi continues making the rounds of the interior branch offices of the bank where he is a loyal employee. Ada packs the basics. Orestes declares, I want to go for a swim. Paula skips rope in the living room. Nora says, I got my period. Down in the cellar Haya presses Ludovik’s icy fingers between her legs, then twists like the stem of a yellow gerbera and says ah. Her whisper and Ludovik’s whisper light up the woodshed, from which cats scamper, prowling for rats
syçkë pëllumb
lamtumirë
im verdhë ëndërr
të dua
të dashuroj
Ada’s breath smells of cheap perfume. The bus is full of women, children, farm animals. They rumble through the Albanian wilderness and remote mountains. The roads are ghastly. It takes them a week to reach Tirana. Florian locks up his desk as if he will soon be back to his bills, extracts, copies, calculations, interest rates, but he will not. He jumps into a car in Valona, sits next to an Italian general, who is also on the run, and before his family arrive he reaches the Dajti Hotel, only recently opened, orders sausages, un rocchio di salsiccia, a mixed salad of all sorts of vegetables, and blackberry and vanilla ice cream: Genuine Italian, nothing finer, winks the waiter. At dusk he strolls along Viale Savoia, A beautiful avenue, he says, and is breathless at the sight of the elegant villas nestled in Mediterranean vegetation. A new old chapter is being written, one of political intrigue, murders on demand, secret services, of people disappeared, families disappeared, stories never to be untangled, whose rotten threads like ratty street brooms poke along the ground and do nothing but smear the shit. Enver Hoxha is photographed more often, his two gold teeth flashing. Ada and the children abruptly forget their pidgin Albanian, and all they repeat is faleminderit shumë, faleminderit shumë, after which they fall suddenly silent. The Tedeschi family spend several nights on straw mattresses in the foyer of the Dajti Hotel, while around their heads stomp polished Italian boots. Later, in 1944, in chorus with Ada and Florian, Haya will tell their relatives in Gorizia, Those were terrible times for us Italians there.