Pushing Past the Night

by Mario Calabresi

  The Italian legal system is best described as byzantine. Trials can drag on for years, and an initial conviction is often followed automatically by a second trial on appeal, and a third trial to confirm the legitimacy of a sentence, which could overturn the previous verdicts, and order that the whole process be started over again. Rather than guarantee the validity of a verdict, these multiple steps and the inconsistency of their outcomes tends to sow confusion and create fertile terrain for often outlandish conspiracy theories, a trend the Italians describe as dietrologia (literally, behind-ology, based on the sense there is always a dark truth hiding “behind” the official version).

  Lost in this quest for justice is the human cost of terrorist crimes. This book casts a much-needed light on the lives that have been forgotten in the battles over historical truth. Rather than devote his memoir exclusively to his own family, Mario Calabresi also gives voice to many other victims of terrorist violence. This is not a manifesto or a political pamphlet. It is simply an attempt to disentangle the stories of the families from the warring ideologies that so irrevocably determined their fate.

  1.

  the premonition

  THERE WAS NOTHING NORMAL about the day he was killed. But no day had been normal for quite a while, so his murder wasn’t entirely unexpected. Premonitions, panic attacks, anxiety, and even tears had become my parents’ constant companions. No one could say exactly when it started. Or maybe one could. Perhaps it was the evening that my father came home, shaken, and announced, “Gemma, Pinelli is dead.” Or the day that graffiti calling my father Commissario Assassino—Inspector Murder—started to appear on walls throughout the city. Or the morning that the ferocious press campaign began, filled with violence, sarcasm, threats, promises, and taunts. And then there were the political cartoons. Not long after I was born, the newspaper of the militant left, Lotta Continua, printed one in which my father is holding me in his arms, intent on teaching me how to use a toy guillotine to decapitate a doll representing an anarchist.

  The details that I have collected over the years and filed away in my memory have transformed an ordinary day into a fateful one. Foretold. Almost expected.

  You could say that my parents had been preparing for the tragedy to explode for some time. Unconsciously. Almost irrationally. When I try to imagine those moments today, those days of wavering between composure and despair, I find it hard to breathe. I struggle to understand how we were able to survive. First together, as a family. And then my mother, by herself.

  Now I’m finally writing, but for years, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been filing away memories, conversations, secrets.

  With my mother, you can only talk about that period in small doses. Her pain is reawakened so quickly that you can only make brief incursions into the past. If you linger in the early 1970s for too long, you risk reopening old wounds. So it’s best to restrain your curiosity.

  With my maternal grandmother, Maria Tessa Capra, you can talk for hours. She was born two years before the Russian Revolution and lived through two world wars, the bombing of her house, and a husband imprisoned in Germany. She was widowed and lost one of her seven children, but she never stopped fighting. But the only way you can talk to her, to be honest, is for hours: if you sit down on her sofa or on one of her kitchen chairs and ask a question about the past, you had better have plenty of time. Anything less would be meaningless. She likes to remember, loves to remember, even if it does sometimes cause her pain. From her I learned the magical and healing value of words and the importance of sharing memories.

  With my father’s friends, who I used to visit over the years, the best approach was always to ask a few extremely cautious questions. To avoid breaking into closets filled with more skeletons than I could handle.

  So with the passage of time, I have placed six memories in a row—six images that are symbolic of my parents’ ordeal, of their pain:

  Grandfather. My maternal grandfather, Mario Capra, was a manufacturer and vendor of fabrics. One Sunday, after lunch, during the worst of the press campaign, he took my father aside and whispered to him, “Luigi, things here are getting too dangerous. It’s time to quit the police force. Let’s find you another job: I can get something for you in Rome, so you can leave Milan and its demons behind. You’ll make more money, I swear.” According to my grandmother, my father interrupted him right then and there, just as my grandfather was trying to win him over with a joke about government salaries. His answer was laconic. “Thank you, you’re too kind, but I could never accept. It would mean that I was running away, that I was trying to escape. It would be like admitting I was guilty. I’ll stay until the end, looking everyone in the eye.” That night my grandfather couldn’t sleep. He stayed up late speaking with my grandmother from the bed of their big house near the San Siro soccer stadium. “He has chosen his destiny. There’s nothing we can do to save him.”

  The mail. For my mother, everything became distressingly clear when she noticed that the mailbox was always empty. One day the mail suddenly stopped coming. When she asked the doorman, he replied, “I keep putting it in the box. Ask your husband.” When she did, he denied everything, saying that there was simply less mail. He made a few jokes that time has erased and then he changed the subject. My mother became suspicious. One morning, she invented an excuse to leave the house before him. She looked in the mail slot and saw a letter with an address written in Magic Marker. Rather than pick it up, she left it there and waited. When later on she went back out with the stroller, the mailbox was empty. She waited until evening to ask my father, “Was there any mail this morning?” When he said no, she realized what was happening and felt something die inside. Letters had been arriving filled with insults and threats. He hid them from her so that she wouldn’t become even more frightened. Many years later, she would come to appreciate the love behind a gesture that may have permitted them a few more weeks of normality, no matter how limited.

  The note. His friends like to tell stories that they have repeated over the years of his confidences, of the letters in which he disclosed his fears, his presentiments. One particular scrap of paper has always moved me: a note scribbled on a piece of newspaper that my mother found in his wallet, showing how inadequate and even naïve his defenses were. It gives the license plate of a car and then reads, “11.3.71. They’re following me. Two young guys in a car. Writing down my license plate.”

  The premonition. One morning, on Corso Vercelli, exactly one week before the murder, while she was holding me with one hand and pushing the stroller carrying my younger brother, Paolo, with the other, Mama looked at her reflection in the pharmacy window and thought, “I’m a widow.” First she tried to banish the thought, then couldn’t take it anymore and started sobbing in the middle of the street.

  The pistol. My father had a police gun, which was normal. A small revolver. He kept it unloaded in a drawer, hidden between some sweaters. One morning, while my mother was straightening up the house, she noticed it was missing. When she asked him why, he answered that he had taken it back to police headquarters, where it would stay. She pressed him for an explanation, but he cut off the discussion, saying, “Gemma, let’s forget about it. I don’t want to keep it here. And I don’t want to carry it with me. And besides”—at this point he brought up an idea that he had also mentioned to his friends, who couldn’t believe that he walked around without a gun—“it wouldn’t matter anyway: if they shoot me, they’ll shoot me from behind. They’ll never have the courage to look me in the eye when they shoot. And even if I did have enough time to react, I would never shoot anyone.”

  The promise. Four or five days before he was killed, probably on Friday, May 12, or Saturday, May 13, 1972, my father took me to my grandparents’ house. He was leaving me there to sleep over so that he and my mother could go out to dinner that night. At the door, before he left, he asked my grandmother, “Mama”—which is what he had called her ever since they became close, even if she was his mother-in-law—“
promise that if something happens to me …” She tried to stop him. She even put her hand over his mouth, but he still managed to tell her, “Please, Maria, promise me that you’ll take care of Gemma and the children.” All she could do was nod, with a lump in her throat, while he was hurrying away.

  You might think that this is only the suffering of one family, six frames from a home movie. But there is an entire film to see, and for years I have made it my mission to watch it from start to finish, in the hopes that I might one day understand. Although the brute violence of the threats was plain for all to see, almost no one seems to have realized the tragic turn that this campaign of hatred would take.

  My curiosity to know, to find out what had been said and written about my father, took root when I was fourteen years old. In my first year of high school, I started to skip class to check out the newspapers in the periodicals room of the Sormani Library, a few hundred yards from the courthouse where the trials of my father’s murderers would take place. I spent a lot of time there, with an occasional break every few months, at least until the end of my first year of high school. I would get there early in the morning and wait for the main entrance to open so that I would be one of the first to go in. I would rush in with my microfilm requests: to avoid lines and long waits, I often prepared the yellow request slips ahead of time. First I would read through back issues of Italy’s top mainstream newspaper, the Corriere della Sera. I started with its coverage of the Piazza Fontana massacre, which triggered the series of events leading up to my father’s death, and got as far as the day of his murder. It was a solitary and methodical task that left me exhausted, with my eyes aching, but hooked. I immersed myself in another era, completely losing my sense of time. I would erase all thoughts of school, quizzes, homework, and my classmates. It was an all-consuming experience. Sometimes I felt like a bystander, as if I were observing the events from far away and they had nothing to do with me. Other times the anguish would make my mouth dry and my legs numb. Then I would stand up, rewind the microfilm, and move to the next room, the video room, an amazing, fascinating place with an exceptional collection. You would choose a movie, then wait at your chair in front of the video screen for the clerk to load it into the VCR. It was an extraordinary public service, a fitting symbol of a great modern city like Milan. To stay in historical context, or maybe just because I was a prisoner of those years, I would ask for films from the 1970s, by directors like Fellini, Truffaut, and Kubrick. I would always watch alone, always in silence. At the end of every morning, to return to the present, I would take a walk to the Luini bakery, on the other side of the Milan cathedral, the Duomo, where I would order fresh panzerotti with tomato and mozzarella: for years they were my lifesaver, the switch that turned my life back on. I would get two and eat them on my way home, on a route that took me past the ancient fortress of the city, the Castello Sforzesco.

  As I got deeper into my research, I started to check the magazines, starting with the left-leaning weekly L’espresso. Ultimately I got to Lotta Continua, which published diatribes written by my father’s most virulent critics, some even calling for his murder. It was a jarring experience, to say the least.

  Even today when I read what they wrote, even when I try to put things into perspective and acknowledge their sense that the “enemy” state was too opaque, I still can’t stomach sentences such as this one, from June 6, 1970: “That American lackey with the broken window will have to answer for his crimes. We know where he lives.” Or this article from October 1, 1970, one week before Lotta Continua was sued for libel by my father (a lawsuit that quickly backfired and turned into yet another public attack on him): “We’ve been too nice to Police Inspector Luigi Calabresi. He gets to keep living peacefully, to keep doing his job as a policeman, to keep persecuting our comrades. But he has to learn that everyone knows his face, including the militants who despise him. And the proletariat has issued its sentence: Calabresi is responsible for the murder of Pinelli and he will have to pay for it dearly.”

  The country was spinning out of control, and one young couple—in early 1970, my mother was twenty-three years old and my father thirty-two—was becoming more and more isolated. One night in a burst of enthusiasm she said, “Let’s go out tonight, to someplace hip like Brera or the Navigli, someplace that’s alive!” He replied with a bitter truth. “I would love to go to Brera, but I’d have to take along an escort …” Those few times that he did get out of work early, my aunt Graziella would rush over to babysit me. My parents used to reserve separate tables at restaurants off the beaten path. Or they would go to the movies, their great passion, taking care to go in only after the show had begun, to avoid recognition. “They were an extraordinary couple who lived in growing isolation from the city.” So said Antonio Lanfranchi, a Milanese businessman who knew them in those years. He was the author of one of the few tributes to my father in Corriere della Sera that was not official or from the family. On May 18, 1972, he wrote, “Antonio Lanfranchi mourns his friend Luigi Calabresi.” This was so unusual that Arnaldo Giuliani, the news chief at Corriere, looked him up for an interview. When Lanfranchi told me about this episode one afternoon in September 2005, I thought he was lying or maybe exaggerating. Then I went to check, and sadly, he was telling the unvarnished truth: only four private citizens had published tributes in the newspaper to Luigi Calabresi, the father of two children with a third on the way, killed by two gunshots to the back, the victim of a rabid public lynching.

  2.

  piazza del popolo

  MAY 14, 1977, on Via De Amicis in Milan: a young man in a ski mask, bell-bottom jeans, and boots, his arms outstretched in a shooting position, his hands gripping a pistol. The picture is seen around the world. One week later, Umberto Eco writes in the magazine L’espresso, “Remember this image, it will become exemplary of our century.” It is the emblem of the clash that set Italy on fire, the symbolic snapshot of 1977, of a generation lost to violence, of a year with 42 assassinations and 2,128 acts of political violence.

  Everyone knows this powerful picture. For some it became an icon of the Years of Lead, the period of political violence in Italy that started in the late 1960s and went on into the 1970s and early 1980s. Many see it as representing the ultimate defeat of ideas, of political protest. Others identify it with strength and rebellion. But no one goes below the surface. Because if they did, if they turned the picture around and looked behind it, they would discover a complex and almost unfathomable world. I was one of the many who knew nothing about this story, and I only came to discover it accidentally, thanks to my mother and a ceremony in Piazza del Popolo.

  A Roman dawn in May 2004. Piazza del Popolo is beautiful. The light is warm, the air almost cold. A girl in combat boots with facial piercings sobs helplessly. Instinctively a woman embraces her, holds her close, and tells her, “It’s a wonderful thing that they’re giving this medal to your father. You should be proud.”

  The day before, the President of the Republic had fallen and fractured his collarbone. There are concerns that he might not be able to present the medals of valor today. Not even the medals to commemorate the victims of terrorism, the gold medals that have taken an eternity to be conferred. The medals that send your mind back thirty years, that make you relive sudden pains for which you are never prepared, pains that never bother with formalities such as announcing their arrival. They just show up and tear you away from the present. And they drag you down to almost forgotten lands, lands that don’t seem to belong in Italy. Lands that have been left untilled and hidden from view.

  If you were to go to the trouble of turning the picture around, of trying to look back at Via De Amicis through the eyes of the young men aiming P38 pistols, you would see other young men in uniform. Young southerners standing in the middle of the street. Then you would see a bullet strike a twenty-two-year-old boy from Naples who has just arrived in the city. You would see him crumple and die. The next day, the newspapers carry his picture, the only picture of him on
file. His name was Custrà, Sergeant Antonino Custrà.

  You would have to keep looking, sift through the files, blow away the dust, and see past the bureaucratic rhetoric that designates the policeman as victim number 14 of the Years of Lead. And then you might see something else, something that might make you feel uncomfortable or ill at ease: you would see a young widow fleeing the city, following the coffin of her husband, taking him home. She is not alone. Her belly is swollen. She is expecting a baby girl who will never know her father. But no one has ever looked that deeply. No one has bothered to take the journey from that day on Via De Amicis to the present decade, to the baby girl who became the girl wearing combat boots.

  We are having breakfast. For my mother, it’s the second time this morning. She got up at 5:30 a.m. so that she could make it to Piazza del Popolo on time. She did everything in silence, letting us sleep in, and she went out by herself. They were rehearsing for Policemen’s Day in Rome. Together with the other widows, daughters and sisters, she walked in front of the honor guard. She stopped at the spot marked on the cobblestones with masking tape. She pretended she was receiving the medal from the hands of the president. She allowed it to be pinned to her chest. Then, to her dismay, she had to remove her jacket and give it to an official, who would not return it until the next morning, the day of the ceremony. A group of seamstresses at the presidential palace had to sew a piece of Velcro onto it for the decoration.