Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
I never saw Borrello’s corpse. They told me it was left in the mountains, a few yards beyond where it was found.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Someone told me they found him with his eyes wide open, as if contemplating those who observed him, trying to unravel some mystery, although it seemed obvious to everyone that the mystery was him or was in him and could no longer be solved.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Macellaio stopped beside me, inside the circle the other soldiers had formed around us. “Is it him?” he asked. I nodded; but, although it was obvious that the corpse belonged to Borrello, I couldn’t have said then, and I couldn’t say now, if it was him; by that I mean, if it was the Borrello I had known years earlier, in Perugia. In some sense it wasn’t, of course, just as I wasn’t the same person he had known, but understanding how Borrello could have changed, and under the sway of what influences, seemed as difficult to me as understanding how I myself could have changed. Macellaio lifted his head. “He fell from there,” said the soldier, pointing to the top of the rock wall. “Could he have slipped?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “He didn’t drag anything along with him, no rocks or vegetation.” “Could he have been pushed or thrown?” asked Almirante. Macellaio didn’t reply. One of the soldiers came over and whispered something in his ear: the forest around us was dense and dark and the soldiers seemed uneasy. The light had started to wane and barely penetrated the treetops. Although I didn’t think it then, I now believe we were being watched by the partisans, and I wonder why they didn’t attack, when we were in such a vulnerable position. Was there a nonaggression pact between the enemies when they were recovering their dead? I’ve never heard of anything like that; and, in any case, if such a pact existed, the fascists didn’t respect it so why should the partisans? It’s not an easy question to answer; in other words, it’s not easy for me to answer with the convictions I held in 1945 and prior, but perhaps that’s the whole point.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Macellaio turned to Almirante to ask him what they should do with the body. “Let the men bury him to one side of the path,” replied Almirante. “We should get back to Pinerolo.”
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
The most terrifying police were the so-called Special Service of Republican Police, also known as the “Banda Koch” for their leader, Pietro Koch. Their first headquarters were in Florence, in a building called Villa Triste but at that point they were located on Calle Paolo Uccello, in Milan. Koch was captured shortly after, in Florence, on the first of June 1945; on the fourth he was condemned to death; he was executed by firing squad at Forte Bravetta the following day, at 2:21 p.m. The filmmaker Luchino Visconti—an aristocrat, by the way—recorded his execution, which I suppose some would consider an honor. The Banda Koch was linked with what was called the “Ettore Muti Mobile Autonomous Legion,” which killed rebels, and with the Voluntary Militia for National Security, or the Banda Carità—for its leader, Mario Carità—which not only strove to eliminate fascism’s enemies, but also sought to cleanse fascism itself of its moderate elements, including intellectuals; but, really, all those groups acted autonomously and pursued different, often contradictory, political and criminal interests. When he reached Luserna San Giovanni, Almirante sent a telegram to Salò saying that Borrello’s body had been found, but the authorities in Salò had already sent a handful of Pietro Koch’s men to Pinerolo; when we got back to the hotel, they had already warned the conference attendees not to talk about what had happened; for that reason, and others, no one did and we all forgot about it, or pretended to. The war ended about ten days later, on May 1, 1945, and then something else began, this new normalcy, which I don’t suppose is really worth discussing. In fact, it’s possible that you, who didn’t live through the period before, consider it as disastrous and irredeemably failed as I do, that we agree on that, even though I—along with others—took part in a project that you most likely also condemn. Dare I say that this is the disadvantage, to put it one way, that you and your generation have compared to mine: we contributed to an alternative project that is absolutely incomprehensible to your generation. And it doesn’t matter how hard you try to create another alternative, even one imposed by violent means. Do you think I haven’t noticed the pistol you’re carrying under your jacket, very poorly concealed, by the way? Do you think that one can survive a war without developing a certain ability to judge people at first glance, to determine how dangerous they are and, to the extent it’s possible, neutralize that threat? Why do you think I’ve told you all this? Because of the debt I owe the dead, on all sides. And my debt to Borrello, who showed us something that almost cost us our lives, and cost him his, in one way or another.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
I’m of the opinion that Borrello tried to escape through the mountains, to France or perhaps Switzerland, and just had an accident. Many people attempted the same thing and died in similar ways, especially those who traveled at night to avoid patrols by partisans or regular troops, either Italians or our German friends, who were particularly visible and very violent in those final days of the war. The mountains in that region are complex and difficult to navigate during the day; during the night they are even more dangerous, especially for someone who didn’t grow up there. In some sense, the irregular geography of the Alps is a good metaphor for those times, when everything was irregular and we had no orientation whatsoever except for what could be culled from the contrast between our personal convictions and the way events turned their backs on them. The Italian Social Republic lasted six hundred days, although its existence was called into question almost immediately. Perhaps Borrello didn’t believe in it either; in fact, I don’t even think he was a fascist until the last moment of his life. A Futurist, sure, maybe, but not a fascist. His flight was evidence of that, and it’s possible he tried to carry it out with the help of the criminals hiding in the mountains: he could have gotten into contact with them, he could have paid them to get him across the border, he could have been abandoned by the partisans or pushed over the cliff, he could have fallen on his own while running away from them.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
I don’t think he fled. There was something pure in Borrello, a decency and a sort of tempered savagery. There was also a certain secrecy. A habit of turning inward that could be seen as a tendency to engage in the type of inner drama we Futurists didn’t commit to paper: on the one hand, because it went against the grain of the politically provocative literature in the first person plural that we believed in; on the other, because we soon had more than enough outer drama, which we inherited but also contributed to in large part. I don’t know if Borrello wrote those inner dramas he seemed prone to by nature, and I suppose now we’ll never know because, from what I’ve been told, he left behind no written work. But the retreat into himself that he seems to have carried out somewhere in central Italy during the years before the conference and his death, is sufficient proof that he had a talent for it. It also seems proof that there was something broken inside him. It’s possible not even Borrello himself could put a name to what was broken, but it was clear to everyone, including myself, who had known him and seen him again in Pinerolo during the conference. It was not only a physical change, though the physical change was notable, but also one of a, shall we say, moral nature, as if his inability to protect Cataldi’s work—whatever one thinks of it, and whatever is said about what happened to it—had hardened into a sort of rod that had served as his spine for years. Seeing him in Pinerolo, I had the impression that rod could only break beneath the weight of the moral standards Borrello had chosen for himself. Although all of us who called ourselves Futurists and fascists should have had those same standards, now it seems clear to me that only Borrello lived with them right up to the very end, beneath the added
weight of disappointment and hatred. A hatred of himself and possibly also of others, although that hatred was never expressed in a violent way. Perhaps this was a manifestation of his purity, which was no longer the purity of violence.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
What are you going to do now? Kill me? Maybe it’s not such a bad idea, particularly considering that I would have done it, at your age and in your situation; but first I have to ask: What do you know about Luca Borrello? What can you tell me about him, because I’ve discovered I know nothing about him, I practically never knew him, I only thought I knew who he was and what he believed in.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
Why wasn’t it investigated? It’s not hard to imagine for someone like myself, who lived through that time when the regime and the country were putrefying. Borrello disappeared on the night of April 20; the next day they found his body in the mountains beside a spring, if I’m not mistaken. April 21 was also the day the government of the Italian Social Republic tried to reorganize their forces in Como, and failed. Three days later, on the twenty-fourth, Bologna and Ferrara fell, and on the twenty-fifth, Genoa. Also on the twenty-fifth, the partisan rebels rose up in arms against the Germans and began to come out of the mountains and head to the cities in the north. For days, those cities had been covered in smoke but, for the first time in a long time, that smoke wasn’t from bombing but from all the files, documentation, and Party membership cards being burned. Anything incriminating was destroyed, as if fascism had to die twice, first crushed by the military forces divvying up the country, then at the hands of its own followers. Of the two defeats, the second was the one that made us fascists feel ashamed, and as such was worse, although we would have preferred not to have had to live through the first either. Borrello’s death was not investigated for various reasons, all of them linked to what was happening at the time and to the specifics of his death. If it was suicide, a hypothesis I don’t subscribe to, there would be no reason to investigate, because the Italian Social Republic rejected the idea that people killed themselves there and they would deem such deaths accidents. If it was a murder perpetrated by the partisan rebels—either because he’d been taken for a spy, or because he’d mistakenly entered their territory on his way to France, or simply because of some error in calculation: maybe Borrello was betrayed by rebels who’d offered to get him across the border; because, after having agreed to do so, they’d somehow discovered he was a fascist writer—then the investigation of the crime was impeded by the impossibility of finding those responsible for his death, which took place at night and in the forest, not to mention the fact that it’s difficult and, of course, inconvenient to judge those who, with some quick sleight of hand, were about to dole out justice instead of submitting themselves to justice doled out by others. And if he’d been killed on the orders of the government of Salò or by someone at the conference with the authority to kill one of their colleagues or have them killed—which seems relatively improbable in my opinion—it was in someone’s best interest that the death remain unsolved. There are more reasons, however, and I would like to mention them. First of all, Salò had already been abandoned and there was a marked perception among the various security organs of the republic that its authority then stemmed only from the use of force and, as a result, was short-lived; its armed forces, those of the so-called Banda Koch, for example, were the last ones clinging to an idea before dissolving, disappearing, and seeking some sort of refuge from the victors’ revenge, which, naturally, the history books always call “justice,” for some reason that escapes me. Secondly, one more death was completely insignificant in a moment when death’s proliferation—on the cities and battlefields, when they weren’t one and the same—had led to its devaluation, for lack of a better term. Thirdly and finally, because Borrello’s death, and this is something very telling, I suppose, gave the conference attenders a feeling of finality: the end of the conference itself, but also the end of the idea of fascist literature, or, at least, the end of the idea that it could somehow help governments that could no longer help themselves and had given up trying. The Fascist Writers’ Conference—or “Idealist Writers’ Conference,” “autistic,” or “idiotic,” or “crazy,” or however you want to describe the writers—had come too late, something none of us had been able to grasp, possibly due to the fact that, in general, literature always arrives late, even literature that strives to anticipate events. In some sense (I would say, if the comparison weren’t a bit ridiculous), the conference was the last desert island for a handful of sailors shipwrecked from an idea about politics and an idea about how literature and power could mutually nourish each other. Borrello’s death exposed that, and it became immediately clear to all of us. No one officially ended the conference: the participants gradually dispersed, first in government cars that took most of us to Milan, which was as far as they could get, and then along back roads, like the mountain passes Borrello took in a futile search for his salvation, finding his death instead.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
A couple of years ago someone insisted on seeing me. Someone like you who said he wanted to know everything about the conference in Pinerolo. I didn’t meet with him, but what he said reverberated inside of me for some time. He told me there was documentation about what had happened in Pinerolo and that documentation was available in a local archive in Salò. One day, months after his call, I visited the archive and discovered he was right, a large part of the conversations that took place during those days was secretly recorded. Not only the official conversations that had to be used by the press and the cultural authorities of the Italian Social Republic and, to a lesser extent, by the other European fascist governments, but also the private conversations that had taken place during the meal and in the hotel hallways over the brief hours the conference lasted. Even though the reports were signed with pseudonyms and code names that, I imagine, were used by the participants in their role as informants to the secret police, I had the feeling I could recognize some speaking styles, certain intonations and word choices. However, I didn’t recognize myself in my own conversations, which seemed like they’d been formulated by someone else; I didn’t blame the informants for that, just my own memory, which obviously modified, altered, or obliterated events. The hours I spent in that archive were unusually intense, though I doubt that was visible to anyone who happened to glance over at me, a man sitting in a chair in a corner of the reading room. When the light from the large windows grew slanted, I remained there in the darkness, sitting with my legs curled around the chair’s legs because I’ve always sat that way, for as long as I can remember. Reading a more realistic, and therefore more real, version of my life than the version I could recall, learning something about the past and the way we remember it. I’m not mentioning this so that you’ll draw any particular conclusion about me, as I’m not at the center of this story, but so that you’ll understand the official surveillance that went on at the conference. And you should be aware of something I only learned from those reports: Borrello had opposed the government a few years earlier, in other circumstances, in the framework of another attempt by the republic’s authorities to discipline writers who shared their ideology.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Another possibility is that Borrello was killed to undermine the fascist writers from within; which is to say, to plant distrust that would lead us to disagreements, to confrontation. It doesn’t seem likely, but, at this point, hardly anything from that period does.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Which is to say that any of them, any of the secret police informants or their proxies, any of the many bands and organizations more or less tied to the republic’s authorities, could have killed him: anyone could have believed he had betrayed someone or something. What’s more, it could have been a revenge murder or a botched theft, though it seems clear Borrello didn’t have any
thing that could be of interest to anyone at all.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Borrello refused to sign an accusation against a handful of Umbrian writers who had, a few weeks earlier, attempted—in fact, demanded—to be allowed to continue to be considered fascists despite not adhering to the aesthetic agenda. We will never know why he did that. Perhaps due to personal ties, though they were younger authors, authors we hadn’t met—at least I hadn’t—and who hadn’t published yet: their text on subscribing to fascism but not its aesthetics was their first publication. It was also their last, because rejection of the fascist aesthetic was a strike against them while fascism was in power yet supporting fascism condemned them after its fall, all of which must have been obvious to Borrello, and perhaps—I’m thinking now of the self-destructive tendencies so common among writers—also to the young Umbrians themselves, who disappeared shortly after the accusation. Of the writers denounced for deviance, I can only remember the name Corrado Govoni, probably for all the wrong reasons. There’s something I can’t stop thinking about, however, and that’s what Borrello told us that time in front of the restaurant, in Pinerolo during the conference, when he asked Atilio Tessore and me to step outside with him for a moment. He told us—and this happened, as you may recall, a few short hours before his death—that we had turned literature into politics and politics into crime, and that it was our fault.
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