* * *
—
Borrello observes the pistol. Perhaps he’s remembering the last time he had one in his hands (though Linden can’t know that); he lifts his head and looks first at the dog, who whimpers and barks on the property line, and then at the prisoner, who is a young man, practically a teenager. Linden had asked himself many times what he would do in Borrello’s place, if he were one day captured by the fascists or the Germans. Of course this was hypothetical: he wasn’t expecting to be captured, he expected to die in some action or not die at all; but, if he were captured, he’d always thought he would die as he’s tried to live, with some dignity. In that moment, however, Linden realizes he wouldn’t be able to; if he ever is captured, he will die like that teenager, crying in silence, shaking, on the cusp of losing consciousness, at the hands of someone who knows nothing about him and won’t even remember him a moment later—someone who will never know his name.
* * *
—
Borrello looks at the pistol in his hand again and then, quickly, unexpectedly, he brings it to his own temple. One of the Italians pounces on him and, after a brief struggle, wrests the gun away just as Borrello is about to cock it. The men, including the prisoner, look at him in horror: one of them lets out a hysterical laugh, but the laugh dissolves in the air immediately when the German sergeant grabs the pistol from the Italian and puts it back in its holster. “He’s crazy, that guy is crazy,” he murmurs, and he makes a sign to the men, who begin to head downhill behind him, dragging the prisoner. Borrello will see him the next day, hanging from one of the balconies overlooking Borgosesia’s main square: they executed him shortly after arriving in town, without a trial of any sort.
* * *
—
As they resume their march, the man Borrello knew as “Blondie” and Linden as “Zosimus” stays back and turns to Borrello to say: “You’ve humiliated me. You’re an embarrassment to fascism. If I ever see you again, I’ll shoot you.” Then he goes off with the others.
* * *
—
When Borrello opens the door to the shed, he finds Linden curled up among the blankets. The dog slips through his legs and starts to lick Linden’s face, and Linden allows it. Borrello closes the door slowly and gently.
* * *
—
He has a coughing fit, the worst one Linden has witnessed.
* * *
—
That afternoon Borrello begins speaking: he tells Linden it wasn’t random chance that brought him to the house, it once belonged to his father’s family; he had only heard tell of it during his childhood, which took place in Sansepolcro, in the region of Umbria, where his father moved for some reason he’s not privy to. Borrello found it a few years earlier thanks to a distant relative; the house had been looted by neighbors and was in ruins. He tore down what remained, leaving only one room standing—the house’s firewood storage—and got rid of everything he found inside because it all seemed too laden with meaning, he says mysteriously: he kept only what seemed meaningless and waiting for him to imbue it with meaning. His father was a ceramicist; he made small statues of virgins to sell to women who visited the Madonna del Parto to ask for an easy birth. Borrello hadn’t inherited any of those talents: he was a writer, he says. In Perugia. There he met the best writer of his generation, but that writer died and Borrello failed in his attempt to protect and promote his work: he lost it, he says, and now that work belongs to someone else, someone who used to be his friend but no longer is, obviously.
* * *
—
Something seems to have broken in Borrello and his words burble out, with no need for questions, as if every question, thinks Linden, would be inopportune. The dog sleeps at their feet, immersed in dreams that occasionally send a shiver through its body. While Borrello speaks, the sun abandons its zenith and ceases to give off heat. The days are shorter and colder, and there’s a certain urgency in the air, related to the war but also to the physical changes Borrello is experiencing before Linden’s eyes. He watches him grow thinner and waste away. Borrello told him the night before that he’s going on a trip, but he didn’t say where to, and Linden didn’t ask.
* * *
—
He blew up a bridge, he attacked a convoy of Germans heading from Novara to Biella, Linden tells Borrello; he sabotaged the phone line that linked rural Piedmont with Turin; he also had skirmishes with Italians, but they were brief and chaotic and he never knew for certain if he was responsible for the deaths that occurred. Linden went into the mountains in October 1943 despite the opposition of his father, a Swiss cabinetmaker from Bern who had arrived in Turin some thirty years earlier following a brother and his promises of work in Italy. There’s no need to meddle in Italian affairs, Linden’s father said, in spite of the fact that his wife and son were Italian, and in spite of the racial laws, the lynchings of the opposition, the conscription and collaborationism not being necessarily Italian affairs but rather involving an idea of justice that his son didn’t consider limited by a national jurisdiction. Naturally, Linden couldn’t formulate his thoughts that way from the beginning, but any objections were surpassed by the pressing need to do something, anything. Borrello could understand that. Later Linden was able to explain it because his comrades-in-arms explained it to him, those who’d had some sort of political education. He fought in Issime; in the Gressoney Valley; in Torrazzo; in Ribordone; in Cuorgnè, in the battle where Italo Rossi, whom his group was supporting, died; and in Valperga. He’s suffered hunger and cold, and believed he understood something. They never had much; Linden can still remember the last inventory they carried out, four days before the attack: eleven military capes, six submachine guns, eight rifles, five hand grenades, a typewriter, a calculator (both completely useless artifacts in that situation), ammunition, and fourteen pistols, including one that was inoperable and carried just for show.
* * *
—
The ammunition was considerably reduced the night before the attack, when “Zosimus” made the surprise announcement that they would do target practice; he also ordered that the grenades be tossed to test their effectiveness, claiming more would arrive the following day from the French border. Now Linden knows there were never any new grenades and the reason “Zosimus” ordered target practice was that he wanted to reduce the group’s resources and limit their ability to respond to the attack the next day; the grenades also allowed the trackers to find them more easily in the mountains. At daybreak, when the Germans attacked, the partisans were exhausted and without ammunition, Linden tells Borrello. He prefers not to say anything about the execution of the supposed traitor the day before the attack not just because of what the other man might think, but also because he prefers not to remember it: the secret trial, held without the accused in attendance; the sentencing; the march through a clearing in the forest; and the shooting in the back, which the partisans, for some reason, called “the Soviet method.” The supposed traitor had been one of them from almost the beginning; he was a mechanic from Aosta, he had gone into the mountains to avoid the draft, so he must have been eighteen or nineteen. “Zosimus” was, Linden recalls, the main instigator of the execution, but they drew straws for the actual shooting and the Communist typographer was chosen. He vomited afterward. “Zosimus” walked up to the young mechanic’s corpse and delivered the coup de grâce and, gradually, the other members of the brigade approached the body as well. One of them, the political leader of the group, ordered him buried beneath a twisted pine that grew in a hollow and commanded them to make note of the execution in the journal that the brigade kept at the request of the political leadership in Turin, but he also ordered that the grave be unmarked, so that only they knew where it was and there could be no possible posthumous tribute to the traitor.
* * *
—
Linden tries to push away a thought that comes ov
er him every time he remembers Borrello with the pistol at his temple: in the last year he’d discovered that all corpses are equal, no matter what their owners believed in before dying; as such, every death is equal to every other one and could be—in fact is—his own.
* * *
—
A few years later he will see a photograph of the young mechanic from Aosta in a newspaper; the article remembers him as someone fallen in the fight against fascism, but it also says that he died during the German attack on his brigade, a few days after his real death in completely different circumstances. Linden will write a letter to the newspaper, slowly and with difficulty, hesitating and going back and forth, in order to explain how events really played out, but in the end he will never send it.
* * *
—
The next day he starts building a chest with some ash wood he found in the shed; most of the time he works seated so as not to tax his broken leg. The dog lies beside him, and sometimes plays with the wood shavings that fall to the floor, licking them up and then spitting them out with a sneer. Borrello has gone down to Borgosesia and Linden works at his own pace: he nails the boards and runs the plane over them to the slow, regular rhythm of his thoughts. He can see himself doing it and thinks, to his surprise, that taking up his old habits again makes him happy. He hasn’t worked as a carpenter for a year and enjoys returning to it, restoring a meaning to his actions that he can only deem authentic: as if the year spent up in the mountains had been a parenthesis, not necessarily false but at least distanced from his true nature, a parenthesis in which Linden played a part, somewhat begrudgingly and with growing displeasure as the dead piled up on his conscience, weighing heavier and heavier collectively but blurring grotesquely in individual terms. In the end he will only remember one face, he thinks, made up of scraps of all the faces of the war dead, and he won’t know if that face is an enemy’s face, or the face of one of his own.
* * *
—
The only thing he cannot understand is why Borrello wanted to take his own life and what that has to do with the trip he’s thinking of taking. Does someone attempt suicide when he has a task ahead of him like a trip, wonders Linden, contemplating the ash box. He still has to make a lid, he thinks, but the size is fine, or at least it seems so to him.
* * *
—
When Borrello returns it is almost nightfall; the dog is first to realize he’s approaching and runs to meet him. When it reaches his side, it leaps up and Borrello runs a hand over its head. The animal follows him, sniffing the tracks left by the man and, sometimes, glancing behind him, toward the valley; it barks at the houses in the distance, as a sign of self-importance or of something that is perhaps happiness. Borrello seems exhausted: he coughs hard once or twice before he can speak; when it finally seems he can, however, he remains silent. Linden had pumped some water a moment earlier and offers it to him, but the other man shakes his head. They’ve entered the house and the dog stays at the threshold, whining, not daring to follow. Seeing the animal, Borrello pulls something wrapped in bloody paper out of his backpack. Pig’s lungs. He puts them down on the ground outside the house. The dog pounces. Outside, in the valley, a train passes. The sound is familiar but still gives them each a shiver.
* * *
—
Borrello has brought a large round loaf of bread and some salted meat, and the two men eat in silence; afterward, before lying down on the bed, he instructs Linden to heat some water in two pots. When the water’s ready, Borrello sits up and asks Linden to come over with the lamp and the pots. He puts everything on the table and then slowly removes the bandage on Linden’s head and studies his wound, standing by his side. “The gash on your forehead is closed now,” he says, “but it could open up again if you’re not careful.” Borrello pulls a strip of bandage and a quarter of a bar of purple soap out of his backpack. He wets the bandage in the hot water and then rubs it over the soap, making foam. He runs it all over Linden’s forehead with quick, short movements and then takes another strip of bandage and soaks it in the second batch of hot water: he rinses and dries the wound and applies an iodine tincture. Then he has Linden extend his leg over his lap and removes that bandage: the wound is still open, but a small layer of fat and skin has begun to form over it, obscuring the bone. Borrello repeats the procedure and teaches Linden how to clean and dress his wounds himself. “There’s no necrosis or infection,” he says with pride, “and the bone is set in place. You’ll feel some pain for a while, but it will heal; however, it’s important that you keep your leg immobilized for another month, at least. I’m going to teach you how to do it,” he says before cleaning the wound and replacing the splint. The scene seems to Linden to have some religious significance, but he doesn’t know what exactly: when Borrello finishes, the two men remain in silence. Linden stands up to head toward the shed, but the other man indicates that he can sleep in the house, where he’ll be less vulnerable to the night’s cold. He stands up, opens the door, and tosses out the water he used to clean the wounds. Then he throws some wood on the fire and turns off the lamp, removes his jacket, shoes, and glasses, and gets into bed. Linden hears him cough a couple more times and then clear his throat. “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow,” Borrello starts to say. “At dawn, if possible.” Linden wants to ask where he’s going, but he doesn’t because he believes Borrello would rather not tell him. Instead, he asks how long he’ll be gone. Borrello doesn’t answer. “It doesn’t make any sense.” Borrello seems to be arguing with himself, as if hallucinating, between fits of coughing. “They want to defend the idea that things don’t collapse, but things do collapse.” Linden doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “A noble impulse, something pure.” Borrello’s turned his face and is speaking directly to Linden, who doesn’t know how to respond. “Perhaps that could be saved, perhaps there’s a way to reconstruct it later, for the others: what we did, but without those of us who weren’t up to the task and ruined it.” Linden waits for the other man to continue, but he doesn’t; he asks him once more when he expects to return, but Borrello doesn’t speak again that night.
* * *
—
The next day Borrello gathers his things. The dog seems to know that something in the situation is about to change, and is uneasy. Linden has finished the ash wood box and, after carving his initials into it and carefully placing all the papers he found in the shed inside of it, gives it to Borrello. “I don’t know if you’re still a writer or not, but this way you can save what you’ve written,” he says. Borrello is pensive for a moment and then thanks him: he seems flattered that the other man thinks his work deserves saving, but he also seems overwhelmed, as if Linden had added more weight to the burden he’s been trying to cast off, unsuccessfully, all this time.
* * *
—
Borrello has a wheelbarrow he sometimes uses to gather firewood and he now spends some time greasing its wheels. The next day, he says, he’ll go down to the valley to board the train, if it comes. He’ll go to Turin, he says, and, if that’s not possible, to Milan. From there he’ll figure out how to get to Pinerolo, which will take him two or maybe three days. Linden nods in silence: on a map of the region he indicates as best he can the areas Borrello should avoid if he doesn’t want to run into partisans and then he gives him his safe-conduct. Borrello thanks him and leaves the house. A little while later, Linden finds him sitting in front of the path that leads to the valley, observing it and playing with the dog, who gently nips at his shoes. “Will you take care of him?” he asks. Linden nods. “What will you do when your leg’s healed? Will you go back to the mountains?” he asks. “I don’t know,” replies Linden; the idea of killing again repels him, but he thinks that if he doesn’t return to the partisan fight the sacrifices of the last year and the deaths of his comrades-in-arms will have been meaningless. Perhaps, he thinks, that’s all war is, inertia provoked by a series
of revenges that overlap until the first humiliation—the origin of it all—has been forgotten. Killing demands more killing, thinks Linden, but it also demands not knowing who is being eradicated, and maybe because of that ideologies are necessary, a ton of words designed to confuse in such a way that those who hear them forget the intimate knowledge they have of their enemies, who start to seem like dangerous strangers. Ideologies are designed to make you forget, he thinks, that the face of the enemy is your own, disfigured by a relatively minor detail or two. He crossed a line by getting to know Borrello, he tells himself; he understands he probably shouldn’t have ever crossed that line, and now he will no longer be able to kill those who are fascists like Borrello; or those who aren’t fascists like him but could have been. Soon, when the war is over, the Italians will find a way to continue living together, you don’t have to be an expert in history to understand that, he thinks; fascists and antifascists will end up pretending that nothing happened, and it’s possible that actually nothing did, nothing relevant in relation to the long periods over which history is written, which exceed men’s individual existences as well as, probably, their comprehension. One day, the accountant from Turin confessed to him that he was afraid, and what he feared was not capture or death but the advent of a time when the partisan struggle would be betrayed by its leaders and its own violent, anarchic nature. At the time Linden told him he didn’t think that was possible, that the difference between them—what they believed in—and the fascists was so vast that not even history, when written many years later, could ignore it. But the accountant replied that the only difference he could see was between those men who had done bad things voluntarily and those who’d done them unwittingly, and the partisans and the fascists fell into both categories. The difference, he said, was clear to him, but only on a personal level: he would never be able to explain that difference to anyone and he’d have to live out the rest of his days with that inexpressible conviction. Linden saw him fall during the attack on their brigade and since then he’s thought on a couple of occasions that, unlike him, the accountant from Turin would never recant, he wouldn’t ever hesitate and he wouldn’t see the Resistance betrayed, but even still Linden prefers not to be in his shoes. Something in the partisan fight is unquestionably, irreducibly pure, he tells himself; and that purity is simply not of this world.
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 20