Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
Oh, yes. Borrello used to say that everything he knew about Futurism he’d learned from Palazzeschi, but it’s possible he was joking and only really thought that when he began to distance himself from the movement, when the wellspring started to dry up, because Palazzeschi, in his opinion, didn’t know much about the movement either. Palazzeschi would contradict himself, he didn’t know the publication dates of certain texts or he would confuse them along with their authorship and a large part of their content; he often didn’t even seem to remember who was a Futurist and who wasn’t. Borrello felt somewhat confused when these things happened, and experienced a sort of restiveness he had no way of expressing; but the restiveness and confusion always dissipated when Palazzeschi showed him a poem of his that had just been published in the press, a reference to his work in an article by another writer or, more often, the letters written to him by Marinetti, or Ardengo Soffici or Giovanni Papini, which Palazzeschi would pick up at the main post office in Sansepolcro, on long walks he preferred to take alone, in order to, as he would say, give free rein to the profound emotions that would take hold of him when he read them for the first time.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
That arch, the arch at the main entrance to Borrello’s parents’ house that Palazzeschi had repaired, collapsed a few weeks after he left, killing the family dog, who usually lay beneath it to watch the scant traffic that passed through Sansepolcro. Even before that: one day Borrello read in the newspaper about a banquet in Rome to celebrate the Florentine poet Aldo Palazzeschi’s return after a few months in Paris; in the paper was a photo of Palazzeschi, a person Borrello had never seen in his life. Perhaps “his” Palazzeschi had never seen him either; he refused to give any explanation and fled the city as soon as possible, but not before insulting his hosts and their son and cursing the dog, who, alarmed by the shouting, awoke from his usual drowsiness to bite Palazzeschi’s calf, ruining his trousers in the process.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Perhaps “Palazzeschi” had tried to explain this to Borrello when he told him about the forged Alessandro Manzoni letters; maybe he understood there isn’t much difference between falsifying some texts and falsifying their author and he wanted, somehow, to tell him that. Perhaps he had also succumbed to the fascination with Futurism—like Borrello, like all of us—and had decided to live out that fascination in his own way, in the only way available to him; maybe he was crazy, although, in general, madmen prefer to live their own craziness rather than other people’s, which is the only thing that distinguishes them from the so-called sane. Perhaps he was simply teaching Borrello a lesson, a lesson with no definitive conclusions, from which one could learn a lot and, at the same time, practically nothing at all. In some sense, the “fake” Palazzeschi continues to be a mystery; for a time there was a suspiciously high number of Futurist evenings put together by Florentine poet Aldo Palazzeschi in the small city of Veneto and later in the area around Pescara, before ending abruptly not long after.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
That was how we met him. One day, the Florentine poet Aldo Palazzeschi visited Perugia. In the crowd at the gathering, scattered among those who insulted and threw rotting vegetables at the poet, there were some who defended him. Arguments broke out constantly in one part of the room or another, and were stifled with difficulty by those in favor of things not getting out of hand, who were impeded by scandalmongers and those anxious to see a good fight. We were there, of course; we were fans of Palazzeschi but also of scandals and brouhahas. At a certain point, one of the spectators challenged Atilio Tessore, who was short and wore glasses, and was, let’s just say, an easy target. From the other side of the room, Romano Cataldi stood up and headed over with two of his friends. But he stopped short: a fist had flown through the air and the man who’d tried to punch Tessore was on the floor. Beside him stood a very tall, very thin young man. We later found out his name was Luca Borrello and he came from Sansepolcro. That was how he became one of us. His passion for Futurism made him our ally, and his facility for winning fights and confrontations, the savage energy he gave off in those situations, turned him into Cataldi’s best friend.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
That night, as on many previous as well as future occasions, we were defended by the workers in the room, who didn’t understand Futurism but understood and sympathized with its revolutionary potential; toward the end of the night—I repeat, like many other times—the police burst in and carried off Palazzeschi amid booing and applause. The next day, the press gave us completely free publicity, us and Futurism and the vanguard of fascist literature in Umbria. It was a special occasion for us, because we met Borrello, who would years later become so important to us—in some sense, obviously, he saved our lives. Likely it was also special for Luca Borrello himself, not only because he met us (if he hadn’t before then, at least via word of mouth) but also because for the first time he had the opportunity to see Aldo Palazzeschi, whom, actually, in a certain sense, he’d lived with for several weeks in Sansepolcro a few years earlier.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
One of our German friends, I believe it was Hans Blunck, took the floor to discuss a certain “theory of discontinuity” created by Professor Hans Jürgen Hollenbach—I think that was his name—which, in his opinion, made clear that art neither creates nor imitates, but rather exists as a force in the bosom of the history that gives rise to it and endows it with meaning. In order to understand this, one merely had to observe the interstices between series of events, more than the series of events themselves, maintained Blunck. Hrand Nazariantz stood up and tried to call our attention to how, in his opinion, Hollenbach’s theory, which he had never heard of before, was linked to the representations of history that can be found in Armenian churches; he tried to explain them to us, but his explanation came up against the limitations of his vocabulary and the strong Bari accent he’d acquired. What saved us, in some sense, from having to continue enduring that was a telegram of support that Ezra Pound had sent from Sant’Ambrogio. It was read, eliciting some discussion, by Juan Ramón Masoliver, who’d been his secretary. I remember the text of the telegram because when Masoliver finished reading it I asked him to give it to me; it said: “Here are their tomb-stones. / They supported the gag and the ring: / A little BLACK BOX contains them. / So shall you be also, / You slut-bellied obstructionist, / You sworn foe to free speech and good letters, / You fungus, you continuous gangrene. / Come, let us on with the new deal, / Let us be done with pandars and jobbery, / Let us spit upon those who pat the big-bellies for profit, / Let us go out in the air a bit. / Or perhaps I will die at thirty?”
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Perhaps not even Ezra Pound himself knew what that meant, but he repeated it, literally, word for word, during his trial in Washington some years later; which is to say, after having been arrested, locked up like a caged animal in an internment camp in Coltano, or in Padula, or in Laterina, I can’t remember which; after having thrown himself onto the electric fence, according to what he told me; after having been deprived of the possibility of writing, transferred to the United States against his will, locked up in a psychiatric hospital where, this time, he did almost go mad, and where twentieth-century poetry almost went mad with him.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Marinetti sent us a telegram shortly after our intervention at the Futurist evening organized by Palazzeschi. “Art, before you, was memory, anguished evocation of the lost Object (happiness, love, landscape) and therefore, nostalgia, ecstasy, pain, distance. Now, with Futurism, art becomes art-action, in other words, will, optimism, aggression, possession, penetration, joy, brutal reality in art,” it read.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Perhaps Ezra Pound’s telegra
m was some sort of reprimand, since it went on to say: “It has been your habit for long / to do away with good writers, / You either drive them mad, or else you blink at their suicides, / Or else you condone their drugs, / and talk of insanity and genius, / But I will not go mad to please you, / I will not flatter you with an early death, / Oh, no, I will stick it out, / Feel your hates wriggling about my feet / As a pleasant tickle, / to be observed with derision, / Though many move with suspicion, / Afraid to say they hate you; / The taste of my boot? / Here is the taste of my boot, / Caress it, / lick off the blacking.” Years later I still think there is much truth in that, and not much madness; although, really, who could possibly know.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
Pound was arrested by two partisans on May 3, 1945, shortly after our conference—or, better put, after the hasty end of our conference days before its scheduled closing ceremony—in his house in Sant’Ambrogio, in Rapallo, not far from Genoa: he was translating Mencius, the Chinese philosopher, disciple of a disciple of a grandson of Confucius. “Ashes of Europe Calling” was the title of the radio program he offered to do for his captors; he had already done some one hundred and twenty, each ten or fifteen minutes long, from December 1941 to July 1943, but Pound, for whom bragging was an essential activity, used to say that he’d done three hundred plus the articles in the press. If that were true, the author of the Cantos would hold the dubious honor of being the person who most wrote about fascism; even more than Mussolini himself, who perhaps wasn’t as well acquainted with it despite having created it. For Pound, the war was against the banks, usury, arms sales, and international capital, an activity carried out, he maintained, by Jews. “This war is part of the secular war between usurers and peasants, between the usurocracy and whomever does an honest day’s work with his own brain or hands […] The peasant feeds us and the gombeen-man strangles us—if he cannot suck our blood by degrees,” he said. Perhaps he was a spy, or a double agent, or perhaps he subscribed to some other mode of literature; I can affirm that, at least since 1943, Pound was trying to escape Italy. During the war, foreigners were obliged to periodically come in to the police station and would be stripped of their ration cards at the slightest sign of disaffection for the regime; their bank accounts would also be blocked, which made it difficult, if not impossible, to leave the country. According to Pound’s calculations, one would need something like eighteen hundred dollars to escape Italy in 1943, and he didn’t have the money, which may have been the Jews’ fault, although most likely wasn’t. He admired Walt Disney and watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs several times in 1938, in a movie theater in Rome with his daughter, and I prefer to remember him that way, smiling in a dark cinema.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Perhaps it was the influence of Pound’s words, a result of exhaustion after a day of deliberations; or, more likely, we were all going crazy, like the author of the Cantos had; but the fact is in that moment, for the first time, I was aware of the ridiculousness of how we were all dressed, which didn’t spurn elegance, at least superficially, but if you scratched the surface of that elegance it revealed that we were all survivors: wrinkled yet perfectly knotted ties over dirty but still starched shirts, with rings of filth and desperation at the necks. Someone, I believe it was Lucien Rebatet, wore a child’s eyeglasses, mended at the bridge and then smeared with shoe polish to cover up the repair: they pressed tightly on his temples, drawing a sort of scar on either side of his face. Luciano Folgore, who spoke next, was wearing a wrinkled jacket with wide greasy lapels on which a lone fascist insignia floated, less useful at that point in the war than the handkerchief that peeked out of the jacket’s chest pocket, but all suspended, in time and in space, just like him, with his cuffs rolled up and a severe expression or, better put, beyond any adherence to a moral attitude, in his own tiny—or enormous, I don’t know which—world. It’s not that any of this was surprising: actually it was all we had seen in the last year, when on the sides of the roads in northern Italy cars abandoned for lack of gasoline were crowded alongside gutted, rapidly decomposing horses, and families trying to escape God knows where dragging carts filled with children and mattresses, or sometimes just small suitcases. What was surprising was for it to show up there and in those circumstances, at the conference, which had been conceived to deny all that, as a demonstration of the possibility of a victory that, if you examined the faces and attire of those of us in attendance, seemed, for the first time, impossible no matter how blind you were.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
I saw him again years later, during the Fascist Writers’ Conference in Pinerolo, in April 1945. Even though he hadn’t changed substantially, I had trouble recognizing him. Only did after Michele Garassino pointed him out to me during the afternoon session. And only because of his feverish gaze behind metal-framed glasses whose temples seemed to have been twisted again and again, as if they were a child’s toy: I knew that gaze, which I had last seen when Borrello shot Garassino and thought he’d killed him. He had scars on his forehead and at the corners of his mouth, and his face, whose features seemed to have been distilled by the sun and the cold and perhaps hunger, looked like a plowed field.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
About five years, from 1931 to 1936. That was how long our friendship lasted. It was also how long we were on the cutting edge of Italian fascist literature in Umbria, if such a claim can be made. There were six of us: Atilio Tessore, Michele Garassino, Oreste Calosso, Romano Cataldi, Luca Borrello, and me. Just like all the other Futurist sections in Italy, we were organized as a political party but shied away from the better known aspects of such institutions. There was no out-and-out obedience, no seriousness, no struggle for internal power. What’s more, our structure was complex and I never really understood it fully. Cataldi was the leader, of course; he was older than us, had been in Africa and returned, and he spurned publication. Below him were Tessore and Garassino, who had already published their first books and were, for all intents and purposes, “our” writers. After them, I think, came Calosso and me. Borrello was always with us—calling what he did studying would be even more of a lie in his case than in ours—but his situation was more complex. He was the one closest to Cataldi, who had brought him into his fascist group, but he was also the most Futurist of us all, which, tacitly, created a conflict between him and Tessore and Calosso, who were somewhat conservative in both aesthetic and political terms, although that last part we only found out later. Garassino was closest to Borrello in aesthetic terms, but we now know that wasn’t entirely true, because the poems he published under his name in those years weren’t his own, nor were the ones he published later. Garassino was the most fascist of us, along with Cataldi, and, therefore, also the closest to Borrello in that sense. But the truth is that Borrello seemed to float on the margins of our structure, and that—which should have been obvious to us from the beginning, and a cause for alarm—we only grasped some time later.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
What did Borrello write? Nothing, everything, horror after the horror, I suppose, fear.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
The invasion of Ethiopia, also known as the “Second Italo-Ethiopian War,” wasn’t, in my opinion, an invasion exactly and perhaps wasn’t a war either, but rather a campaign to recover a territory traditionally claimed by Italy and, as such, already part of the Italian territory, at least in symbolic terms. Although, now that I say it, I realize I can’t think of any way a territory can belong to a state except symbolically, despite it being obvious that there are different degrees of symbolic possession, and that those territories where it operates most visibly, burying itself into the territory, to put it one way, are those in which there exists a symbolic possession without any political sovereignty, which gives them, again in symbolic terms, greater significance than those territories where political
sovereignty is guaranteed and, as a result, need no recovering, as happened in Ethiopia when the recovery some people called a war began, on October 3, 1935. I’ll spare you the details, because if you’ve ever been anyplace where a war of recuperation broke out, a patriotic war in some sense, whose objective wasn’t expansion and acquisition of territory but rather its reclaiming—in other words, the reparation of what can only be seen as an injustice—you already know firsthand about the ubiquitous grand declarations and statements of support, the reconciliation of people who’d been mortal enemies just days earlier, the enthusiasm of the press for what is finally news, the popular displays of joy (all more or less spontaneous, more less than more), the flags, the chanting, the euphoria of those who enlisted voluntarily to contribute to the war effort. Luca Borrello was one of those volunteers, but he was rejected due to his poor vision. Paradoxically, Cataldi, who was missing one eye and had a file crammed with disciplinary actions that culminated in desertion, was accepted. That war was ours, it belonged to us somehow because it was a war we had prepared for with so many skirmishes, in many confrontations, not only literary ones. It’s possible that, if there’d been time for such a thing, Borrello and Cataldi would have ended up enemies over the fact that the latter was able to carry out what had been denied to the former, but that never happened. Instead there was some sort of transferral, in which Cataldi was to take part in the conflict in a way that Borrello had been denied while Borrello was to remain in Italy and ensure that Cataldi’s work reached readers. This transferral wasn’t metaphorical in any sense. When Cataldi left for Africa, he dragged along with him a large part of the young fascists in Perugia—although perhaps “dragged” is too strong a word: his influence over those young men was great, but they would have enlisted anyhow—and he gave Borrello a box containing everything he’d written to date and Borrello promised to take care of it but didn’t fulfill that promise, which perhaps was beyond him. The next thing I knew he burst into the dinner where we were celebrating Michele Garassino’s new book, with a pistol in his hand, and shot Garassino in the face.
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