Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Maps always provide a different perspective. Have you noticed that certain people seem bigger the further away from us they are? The exact opposite happens with maps, in relation to what they represent. Things are always bigger than they appear on a map, and more complicated.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Why didn’t I join the search? It didn’t seem necessary. I went back to Florence that day, in a car Hanns Johst made available for me, along with Ion Sân-Giorgiu, Henri Massis, and Erwin Kolbenheyer, who, by the way, I never saw again after that: it seemed obvious that the conference was over.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a topographic map of the region Pinerolo is in. To the west is a simple plain, but to the east there are all sorts of challenges: high mountains spread out all over the territory creating complicated passes and hollows that intersect two streams, the Chisone and the Pellice. If Borrello had been kidnapped, we thought, we wouldn’t ever find him in that complex terrain, which only the rebels, or “partisans” as they called themselves, knew how to move through without being seen. If, on the other hand, he’d been murdered already, most likely the “partisans” would have disposed of his body somewhere on the outskirts of one of the region’s cities: Pinasca, Bricherasio, Luserna San Giovanni, Torre Pellice, or Pinerolo itself. If, in the end, he was wounded, he could be anywhere, probably to the east. So four groups were created: one headed north, toward San Pietro Val Lemina; another followed the Via Nazionale to San Germano Chisone; a third went southward following the Chisone, and a fourth southeast through Miradolo and San Sebastiano. The groups were made up of members of the Black Brigades who’d been sent from the surrounding towns by order of the ministry in Salò and joined by some of the conference participants, whose reasons for aiding in the search must have all been different. I was part of the third group, the one following the course of the Chisone. I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps out of fear that I would be accused of passivity or even complicity. Maybe out of fear of staying by myself in Pinerolo, where Borrello’s absence was, for lack of a better word, omnipresent. And possibly also due to a bad conscience, because the previous night I had rejected his arguments and accused him of being a defeatist. I’d said that to his face and then gone back to the table and repeated it. Borrello is a defeatist, he believes the republic is done for, I’d said. The next day he disappeared and the rain was making the search for him difficult.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Why would I worry about being among the suspects? Hadn’t I defended Borrello the day before, when he said we should take part in the impending regime change to keep our mission from ending completely? Haven’t they already told you, you who are so young, that Borrello was accused of being a defeatist, that they claimed he was a mole, that they insinuated he’d gone crazy? Which is to say, he’d gone crazy with loneliness and weary saturation. Borrello’s last project revealed how he’d walked a narrow, unclassifiable path; there were only rumors of the project’s existence—persistent, curiously unanimous rumors, as if all those repeating them had actually seen Borrello working on it, or, more plausibly, they’d all accepted the rumors because they thought Borrello’s body of work had grown diffuse, transforming and taking on increasingly singular, strange forms (as if L’anguria lirica wasn’t singular and strange enough) as opposed to signaling a direction that only Borrello followed, a direction we said we wanted to follow but didn’t. That last project sounded like one of those nightmares in which you’re both victim and assailant, weapon and wound, at the same time.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
It seemed obvious that the soldiers didn’t know what they were searching for, nor how to go about it. They questioned me at length, first in the hallway and later in Borrello’s room, which Almirante had the hotel manager open, though it was clear to me we both knew the room was unlocked. The manager was crying the whole time, covering her mouth with a dirty handkerchief, as if the missing man was one of her relatives and not a complete stranger who had been staying in her establishment for less than twenty-four hours. The soldiers seemed anxious to slap her across the face, and only restrained themselves because of Almirante’s presence and the orders they’d received from Salò to treat the case with the utmost speed, discretion, and efficiency. It was evident both to us and to them that the authorities didn’t want anyone to disappear at a conference whose function, if it had one, was to create solidarity with the cause of the Italian Social Republic instead of sabotaging it. The head of the soldiers was a hirsute man appropriately called Macellaio, meaning “butcher,” who seemed to derive some pleasure from the fear he elicited in his subordinates. He ordered them to organize a search that, as we immediately confirmed, had already been organized by the Germans, so Macellaio placed his men under German orders. He didn’t allow me to join them, however: when they had all left, he sighed deeply, as if he had been holding his breath, convinced that the air exhaled by writers is tainted—which of course it is—and demanded that we sit with him. Almirante and I took our seats and he asked the hotel manager to bring us three glasses and a bottle of wine; I told him I preferred not to drink, but the man pretended not to have heard me. When the woman arrived with the glasses and the bottle, he demanded she stop crying and the woman began to cry harder. Macellaio smiled and poured the wine. His gesture forced us to drink with him, and Almirante and I reluctantly took sips. Then the man fell silent: he seemed to enjoy our not knowing what to say, and between the three of us some sort of tense calm was established, which made us aware, I think for the first time that day, of our present moment, of the wine we were drinking, of the rain that was falling on the other side of the window, in a city that feigned indifference to Borrello’s disappearance despite being cognizant of the commotion it had provoked at the hotel. Along with the calm established by Macellaio’s silence there was also a certain resignation, as if the search for Borrello was already a thing of the past and we were merely reminiscing; I wondered if that wasn’t Macellaio’s way of lessening the drama of his investigations, giving the impression to those most interested in the case that it was actually already solved. When the time seemed right to him, and without any warning, Macellaio said: “Nice wine.” He poured some more and insisted, with a gesture, that we drink. “What do I need to know about the missing man?” he finally asked us. Almirante improvised a response, but the other man wasn’t listening; he interrupted with a wave of the hand and stood up clumsily before Almirante had a chance to finish. “Let’s go,” he said, and we followed him.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Now it all seems like a dream, a dream of more or less identical rooms that the hotelkeeper opened for us before retreating and languishing in the hallway until we were finished. But there was nothing to finish. Macellaio gestured, the woman opened the door to a room, and he and Almirante and I would enter; then we watched Macellaio as he studied the room, sometimes leaning over to catch some detail, the outline left by a body in the bed, the papers accumulated on a desk, the clothes laid out on some piece of furniture, the placement of personal objects or lack thereof; his investigation lacked any methodology, any scientific nature, or intensity, and gave the impression that he wasn’t ever lingering over anything. Macellaio didn’t seem interested in the objects themselves as much as in the relationships between them, as if those relationships were some sort of clue that we were obviously unaware of but he wasn’t: when he believed he’d grasped that clue, or its absence, he would leave the room and we would follow, the hotelkeeper would close the door behind us and open up another when he signaled to her. Macellaio wasn’t known for his adherence to established police protocols but neither was he known for creating new, more effective ones; in fact, he seemed to have opted for an absence of protocol, and that absence created in others a compulsion to speak, to tell all
. If I had been guilty of Borrello’s disappearance I would have confessed it at the first opportunity, to break the silence and escape his clutches and, for lack of a better expression, fall into the hands of the State, whose laws at least I would be familiar with. But at the time I didn’t know he was an improviser and, in that sense, better suited to understanding an improvised life than those who struggle to make life, to make the always contradictory and mostly absurd facts of life fit in with a predetermined process and baseless hypotheses. Macellaio knew, of course, that anything left empty when it should be full will be filled by others for appearances’ sake, as giving meaning to something is always less effort—and more reassuring, no matter what they say—than accepting a lack of meaning in something that should have it. In that situation, as Macellaio ran his gaze over the sequence of rooms, forcing Almirante and me to witness something we didn’t understand, I deemed him to be of exceptional intelligence, with brilliant investigative methods that involved feigning indifference at all times. Even when the hotelkeeper tried a key in a door—number 14—and stepped back and said, with some surprise, “It’s open,” and then allowed us into a room that I was seeing for the second time in the span of a few hours and that Almirante had perhaps already seen though he didn’t mention it, but which Macellaio was seeing for the first time and which should have been particularly interesting to him, being as it was the room of a missing, possibly dead person, yet he didn’t seem interested in the slightest. Macellaio was known among his colleagues for his fondness for wine, for leading one of the most brutal of the Black Brigades, and, as I told you, for his lack of method; in other words, for dispensing with the formalities they sought to restrain in that era, but which they actually only covered up: extortion, torture, and murder. It seems that when the partisans entered Turin, he headed to the woods behind La Venaria Reale, to the north of the city, and fired a shot into his mouth. Perhaps he avoided an act of revenge that way, probably an inevitable one in his case, maybe also in Almirante’s case, though Almirante was more intelligent, or less brave and skillful, and he went into hiding for a few months until things had calmed down, which he knew would happen sooner or later. Macellaio may have known that too, irrespective of which he committed suicide in the woods, perhaps with the same callousness with which he seemed to scorn all method. Although what I’m saying isn’t really true, as Macellaio did have a method, which could be called “waiting,” and which he employed for Borrello’s disappearance, but this only occurred to me after the phone rang at the hotel reception desk. The older son of the hotelkeeper—who kept breaking into brief, unfounded crying jags as if suddenly remembering that something had occurred in her establishment that she, for lack of a better word, would deem an ordeal—answered the call and then went up the stairs two by two and stood before us and told us what Macellaio might have already known, or considered quite likely, so that not much more than just waiting was necessary. This waiting was the only method he possessed and, it seems clear to me, yielded the best results for him. It unfolded before my eyes in all its—one could say—shrewdness, which I can only compare with the shrewdness of a peasant, which Macellaio may very well have been before joining the Black Brigades. The facts of life, as I’ve already said, are always contradictory and absurd, which is also what Atilio Tessore would’ve said and I say it to you here with his exact syntax and mannerisms to see if you recognize my old friend in me, something that, actually, I hope doesn’t happen. The woman’s elder son, as soon as he caught his breath, told Macellaio that they’d found a body to the southwest of Pinerolo, on the edge of a village called Rorà.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
The Chisone begins in the Cottian Alps, more precisely in a mountain called Barifreddo, and it ends in the river Po, of which it is a tributary. Although it is quite deep in certain stretches and seasons, particularly in May and June, its most notable characteristic is the deafening sound of its rushing water. Because of that, but also because of the nature of our search, we didn’t speak much. At some point, however, we took shelter from the rain beneath the overhang of an abandoned building beside the torrent. It seemed to have once housed a mill, whose wheels had been dismantled and dragged along the riverbed, and all that was left to bear witness was the pillar where its axis had rested. Between the pillar and the building there was a fissure, a void like a gap in the teeth of someone laughing at us, mocking our objective. We were joined in our search for Borrello along the riverbed by Eberhard Möller, Hrand Nazariantz, Alceo Folicaldi, and Luys Santa Marina. Some sort of military complicity had been established between those last two and the soldiers, which was revealed in small gestures. When we took refuge in that house, Folicaldi and Santa Marina sat with the soldiers and gave them cigarettes. The soldiers leaned their rifles against a wall to smoke. Later they took off their raincoats, exposing mended, ill-fitting uniforms that looked like they’d previously belonged to other, now dead, men. They spoke in low voices, as if conspiring, and I only heard the words “Africa,” “two months,” and “blood.” I didn’t know whether the second phrase referred to how long the speaker had been a soldier or to the time he had left to serve. In the latter case, he, obviously, would be referring to the end of the war, but I couldn’t tell if that was with disappointment or with joy. When they’d finished smoking, the soldiers stood up and Nazariantz went over to ask them to stop the search: it had started to rain harder and it was practically impossible to make out anything beneath the dense curtain of water. The soldiers looked at each other, unsure, but only for a brief moment. Folicaldi nodded and the soldiers began to follow him back toward Pinerolo. There was nothing in the place we’d stopped that led us to believe we’d turned a page. Nothing that made us think of a break after which there should be a second phase, or a third, and, because of that, because it didn’t actually seem that we had finished anything, I had a clear, devastating awareness of the futility of our search.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
I didn’t know that Tessore had left until I returned to Pinerolo that evening, along with the others who’d taken the Via Nazionale to San Germano Chisone: the heat had been scorching that day, and we were exhausted and dirty. Near Porte we’d heard shots in the mountains, and in San Martino some boys had thrown rocks at us from a roof: Bruno Munari had had to go back to Pinerolo with a soldier because of a head wound that, I suppose, he did his best to play up. Does Tessore’s hasty exit from Pinerolo seem suspect to me now? No, not really. Did it seem that way to me then? No. When we reached the hotel we got the news that Borrello’s corpse had been found almost five hours from Pinerolo, which made it unfeasible for Tessore to have gone to the site of the crime and returned in such a short period of time. There’s no reason to stoke that suspicion, in my opinion.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
The corpse was at the foot of a cliff, beside a spring that ran between some large rocks; the rocks must have come loose not long before, which explained why the winter snow hadn’t yet crushed them into pebbles like those that covered the riverbed until it disappeared from view, in a place where the mountain seemed to spin like a ballerina. We didn’t have time for much: a car had taken us to Luserna San Giovanni and from there we’d had to climb up some paths forged by goats and, seemingly, the transport of heavy objects on skis, which had left two deep furrows, one on either side of the trail. Almirante and I were sweating profusely, and Macellaio and the soldiers were too, although unlike us they weren’t sweating because of the climb but rather because of the knowledge that they were in partisan territory, behind regional enemy lines that had been drawn practically since the start of the war: Italian fascists and Germans governed the cities and towns, but the mountains belonged to the rebels. Knowing that, the beekeeper who had found the corpse that morning had refused to take part in the search, leaving us with only a sketch to orient ourselves in that territory, which none of us were familiar with, not even the soldiers, who clung to thei
r rifles and machine guns as if they were sacred icons and rosaries. I couldn’t tell you what I was expecting exactly: the idea that Borrello was dead seemed absurd to me for the first time in many years, since I had given him up for dead that night in Il Letto Caldo. Perhaps the only thing I wasn’t expecting was what I found when we finally reached Borrello’s corpse. He was lying against a big rock drenched in blood and small clots of gray matter, in a position that made him seem to be merely sleeping, despite his eyes being open.
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 14