Pushing Past the Night

by Mario Calabresi

  Then there are the sudden, uncontrollable moments of pain. For the Calabresi children that feeling of being shipwrecked has a name: Bambi. Children have loved the Walt Disney film about a white-tailed fawn ever since it came out in 1942, but when we went to see it at the movies, in the mid-1970s, it turned into a catastrophe. We were at the Gloria Cinema, on Corso Vercelli, and we were enjoying the story until the moment that the hunter killed Bambi’s mother. My mother started to cry in the middle of the theater. It was so sudden and unexpected that we started crying, too, overwhelmed by our feeling of loss. At the end of the film, we waited for everyone else to leave before getting up. We were embarrassed and for years we never spoke about what had happened.

  * Giovanni Fasanella and Antonella Grippo, eds. I silenzi degli innocenti (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2006).

  8.

  we have to say good-bye

  FRANCESCA MARANGONI looks at me as if to say, Do you think I’m crazy? “Of course I’ve never seen Bambi. Nor did I ever take my children to see it.” We’re seated on a bench in the Guastalla gardens, behind the State University, next to the Milan Polyclinic, where her father was medical director until the day in 1981 that the Red Brigades shot him.

  For almost eight years, I’ve kept a clipping about her from L’espresso. In a long article titled “The Forgotten Victims Speak,” she describes the sudden pain that sometimes assails her, and the time she broke down in tears in a movie theater. She starts to tell me about it. “I was watching Bertrand Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country, a film about an elderly French painter who gathers three generations of his family at his country home near Paris. The classic situations occur: they eat, they argue, they fight. Toward the end, the prodigal daughter arrives, and in the final scene she dances with her elderly father. A farewell dance. She does so knowing that it may be their last moment together …” Francesca hesitates and bites her lip. Tears well up in her eyes and she tells me, in a shaky voice, “It made me realize what I would never have. My own father would not be at my wedding and he would never see my children.” She is still crying, twenty-six years later, during the lunch break that she has set aside for me.

  In a photo that her mother keeps on a table in the living room, the family is pictured during their last summer together, in England, in front of Leeds Castle. Her father is wearing a suede jacket. He’s young. Francesca is a pretty sixteen-year-old in red jeans. You can see that they were close.

  She refuses to wipe away her tears. “I have two children. One is seven, the other’s four, and I’ve never had the courage to tell them. One day my oldest heard something from his cousin, so he asked me, ‘Did Nonno die because of a war?’ He thinks there are good guys and bad guys and that in war the good guys always win. It’s hard for me to explain to him that there was no war. Only some people who thought they were in a war, who had their minds made up that they were in a war, and one day they started shooting guns. But I don’t have the courage to tell him. I can’t find the words, so I change the subject. All of this is incredibly painful. Over the years I’ve had to develop a sense of distance.”

  Francesca Marangoni works at the Marangoni Center for Transplant Coordination, a pavilion at the Polyclinic named after her father. She, too, is a doctor. “To tell you the truth, I had no vocation for medicine, but it was in the air. Everyone expected me to become a doctor. If I were to be reborn, I would want to be surrounded by books, by paper, not by the dead … but I know that he would have been pleased. The hospital was his life. And to think that it was a nurse, a head nurse, who gave his name to the ‘hospital column’ of the Red Brigades …”

  A few yards from where we’re sitting, they planned out the death of her father, but she doesn’t want to discuss former terrorists. She is upset by reports that some of them might become civil servants or serve in Parliament. “At the very least, they should be condemned to public silence: we have nothing to learn from them. If they had to follow a series of steps to be reintegrated or rehabilitated into society, good for them, but that doesn’t change anything. No one can bring back what they took away. I don’t think they have any more right to rehabilitation than other criminals. But for my own peace of mind, I wanted to look the terrorists in the face: I went to the trial in the courtroom—which looked more like a bunker—at the San Vittore prison. The defendants’ cage was like a circle of Dante’s Inferno. It held the whole Walter Alasia cell, shouting, cursing, turning their backs on us, eating. Once they even started throwing food at us. In the middle of our lawyer’s arguments one day, a couple started having sex in front of everyone. The police noticed and all hell broke loose. It almost makes me laugh to think about it today. The judge reprimanded them, demanding respect for the widow. One of their lawyers had the nerve to turn toward my mother and say, ‘But the signora is not offended.’ She immediately retorted, ‘But I am offended!’ In other words, they acted like complete jerks.

  “Somehow this message did not get through to the public. Throughout the trial, the terrorists were depicted wearing a halo of social commitment, as combatants rather than as losers who had waged an armed struggle to escape their bleak lives, people who were poor in ideas and spirit. The only one who made an impression on me was the cell leader, Vittorio Alfieri. He was always quiet and attentive, and today he is a free man, living in seclusion. After the trial, he wrote us a confidential letter of apology. I don’t know what became of the others. I don’t think that any of them are still behind bars and frankly I don’t care. Luckily the people who murdered my father weren’t famous enough to be on television, to give interviews, or to be covered in the newspapers. This was one indignity, at least, that I was spared.

  “Once I ran into one of the defendants from the trial at a children’s playground. I’d memorized his face. When I saw him again, I froze. I wanted to go up to him and say, ‘Look, I know who you are. I saw you in the cage.’ That’s all. But I regret to say that I never got up the courage to do it.

  “I have the impression that society as a whole has only a superficial respect for us and for those who died, under the rubric, ‘the family’s suffering.’ But here at the hospital I find real traces of my father that go beyond the plaques and the commemorations. He is still alive in the memories of the many nurses who studied with him, and in the memories of some of his colleagues. They stop me in the corridors and tell me stories that fill me with emotion, and I feel as if he is near me.”

  Francesca remembers clearly her father’s bitterness when he came under fire at the hospital for testifying at the trial of nurses associated with the militant group Autonomia Operaia who were accused of sabotage. Some militant orderlies had pulled the plug on refrigerators containing blood for transfusions, so it had to be thrown out. They wanted to prove that the system didn’t work and had to be brought down. For them the hospital was the symbol of a corrupt society, and Dr. Marangoni a criminal for enabling it to function. By throwing a wrench in the works, they thought they were releasing the social tensions needed to bring about the revolution.

  Rather than praising him for his courage in standing up to the saboteurs, some hospital workers passed out leaflets attacking him. “That morning I had a test in classical Greek. I was in my first year of high school at the Liceo Classico Beccaria, and when I got back home he was very upset. He served on the committee that authorized thermal spa treatments, and his opponent had accused him of denying treatments to workers in order to curry favor with the bosses.” He had been receiving threats for some time. “I knew, but I didn’t think that anything would really happen. But one morning he explained to me that he wouldn’t be accompanying me to school anymore. It was best not to take the same route every day. He was afraid they were going to kneecap him. He said, ‘Who knows whether I’ll still be able to walk or ski?’ They chose to go after him also because he was an easy target. If we had lived in the center of town, on a small narrow street where you couldn’t loiter or hide, then maybe he would still be alive today.”

>   Instead their apartment was in front of the San Siro stadium, on a spacious street, and Luigi Marangoni was killed while he was driving his car through the gate to the road. His wife, Vanna, was looking out the window to see him off, as she did every morning. “It was my way of trying to protect him,” she told me a few hours after my conversation with her daughter. “That day I heard something popping, but it was Carnival, so I thought it was just firecrackers. Then I noticed that his car had stopped and that the exit was blocked by a white Fiat Ritmo waiting by the side of the road. Two people wearing berets and dark glasses jumped into the Fiat and took off. A little further up the road they picked up a third person. My husband’s car wasn’t moving. It was then that I said to myself, ‘It’s happened. This time it’s really happened.’ I ran downstairs in my bathrobe and nightgown. The doorwoman tried to stop me: ‘Don’t go out. They’re shooting.’ I told her, ‘Don’t you understand? They’re shooting at my husband!’ When I was outside, I didn’t see him, so I thought they’d kidnapped him, which gave me some hope. But when I got closer to the car I realized that he was slumped back against the seat. I opened the door, fell to my knees, and put my arms around him. He was covered with broken glass, and was losing a lot of blood from his neck. I placed my hand over his face so he could feel me, to give him some warmth, even though there was nothing left to do. I realized that our life together had just ended and I told him, ‘We have to say good-bye.’ I closed his eyes before they put him in the ambulance.”

  The flyer claiming responsibility for the murder said that Luigi Marangoni was a servant of the state and of the Christian Democrats. His widow, Vanna, speaks in a soft, low voice. “And to think that he’d never even voted Christian Democrat. He was a liberal, a perfectionist, completely dedicated to his job. He had gotten rid of all the riffraff in the hospital morgue, where some of the employees had been cutting deals with funeral parlors. He made even more enemies when he testified at the sabotage trial. Three nurses also testified. They were kneecapped inside the hospital. The terrorists gave him a death sentence. But first they wanted to smear his good name. They passed out a pamphlet claiming that he had been paid off to deny thermal spa treatments for some bank employees. He went home that night and started to cry. It was January 31. He realized the leaflet was a warning sign. He woke me up that night and told me, ‘Remember that I’m an honest man and that you have to love me. Please forgive me if I leave you and Francesca alone, but it’s not my fault.’ That was all he said.”

  This tiny woman remained silent for a long time, her gaze lost in memories or perhaps in regret for what might have been. Then she added a final thought. “It was a complete waste. It didn’t help anyone and I was cheated. They took away a part of my life.”

  In late May 2005, my mother paid the widow a visit, and they spoke for a long time. Mama was also struck by her quiet tone and heavy sadness. When she left, she called me from her cell phone on her way home. My mother is a person who believes in moving on, in always looking forward, in reconciliation and forgiveness. She is sustained by her strong, fervent faith. But that afternoon, her voice was shaking. She told me, “You see, Mario, I listened to her for a long time. It made me think again of my children, of Papà Gigi, of all the people that we’ve met over the years who haven’t found the strength to go on living, of what the terrorists did to us, of how we were all left alone, and how the parade passed us by. We were too nice about it, too patient.”

  9.

  the chamber of deputies

  THERE IS A POINT when the normally mild-mannered, easygoing, civic-minded people who go by the reassuring name “the relatives of the victims” start to grow restive. They rebel, they speak out. Not that anyone notices. In a country that’s used to full-throated protests, to people lying down on railroad tracks or occupying the stage at pop music festivals, the relatives’ words fly well under the radar. Their protest takes the form of angry letters or threats to return commemorative medals. Respect for the dead prevents them from giving full vent to their feelings, but the pain underlying these small gestures is of terrifying dimensions.

  These sudden eruptions never stem from a single provocation. They always come after a series of insults, affronts, slights. I have developed a key to understanding these outbursts through my passion for cataloging. I’ve learned to predict and sometimes even staunch them, warning government officials that malcontent was growing and would soon erupt, somewhere. Luckily not everyone turns a deaf ear. Some officials have shown that they understand these delicate moments and, in silence, without fanfare, without seeking political gain, have tried to heal the pain.

  One such instance was the day in July 2004 when, after years of stalling, Parliament finally approved in committee, by a unanimous vote, new regulations to benefit the victims of terrorism and massacres. Shortly thereafter, however, problems arose with funding the measure. So for many victims, the promised restitution has been a dead letter. Five years have gone by and the law has still not been fully implemented. Exasperation has led some family members to take a step that they would never have contemplated earlier: they decided to file suit against the state.

  The malcontent of the families comes from their sense that the state has ignored or abandoned them. Their feelings are easily understood in light of an unfortunate series of events in spring 2006 that combined chance, carelessness, and a remarkable lack of political, historical, and cultural sensitivity. On May 31, a few days after he was sworn in as president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano issued a pardon to Ovidio Bompressi, the convicted murderer of my father. The decision had actually been made and finalized under the previous president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. The only thing that Napolitano did was affix his signature to the document.

  The problem is that no one alerted us beforehand. I was on my moped one day when my cell phone rang, not with one call but with two. They were from Luigi Contu, my boss at the ANSA news agency, and Arturo Celletti, the political reporter for the Catholic newspaper Avvenire, calling to warn me that the wire services were carrying the story about the pardon. I was flabbergasted. My cell phone fell from my hands and was crushed beneath the wheels of a passing bus. I raced home to phone my mother before reporters called seeking her comments. Luckily she was in the park watching her grandchildren play on the trampoline. When I told her the news, she was beside herself. Not because of the pardon itself, which we had never opposed, but because of the sloppy and off-handed way it was handled. Thanks to confusion and mismanagement, a potential gesture of appeasement had been turned into a slap in the face.

  Allow me to explain my position. I don’t think that the government should be required to seek the victims’ permission before passing laws or deciding whether to grant pardon, parole, early release, or supervised furloughs. Such matters should be carried out in the general interest, which might not necessarily coincide with the interests of the “families of the victims.” If the state, the judiciary, the government, or the president thinks that an act is appropriate, necessary, and justified, then the pain of private citizens should obviously not be an impediment. Nor is there any requirement that the families be notified. But there is plain common sense: the sensitivities, kindnesses, and gestures that can ease the pain and help people to accept it. Let us remember that most of the people killed in the Years of Lead worked for the state and paid for their service with their lives. Rather than pay tribute to their sacrifice, the country seems to be suffering from a kind of emotional illiteracy.

  My mother’s phone started ringing nonstop after the news of the pardon was broadcast. The calls were not from politicians or even journalists, however. They were from people like Carole Tarantelli, the widow of Ezio, a jurist killed by the Red Brigades at La Sapienza University in 1985; Marina Biagi, the widow of Marco, the expert in labor law killed by the New Red Brigades in 2002; representatives of victims’ associations; people who had been kneecapped by the Red Brigades, like Maurizio Puddu, or who had lost loved ones in the bombings, like Manlio Milani,
whose wife died in the Piazza della Loggia massacre in Brescia. All of them were angry. Some wept with rage. There was also a call from Rosa Calipari, who had lost her husband in Baghdad when he was killed by an American soldier while accompanying the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena to freedom.

  The next day Giorgio Napolitano telephoned—early in the morning, after reading the newspapers, which had drawn attention to the fact that the family had not been notified. He explained that the presidential palace had been convinced that communications were being handled by the Ministry of the Interior. The phone call was long, clear, and direct, and helped to forge a relationship of mutual esteem and respect.

  In early June 2006, Sergio D’Elia was appointed secretary to the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies. A newly elected deputy, he had run on the slate of Rosa nel Pugno (Rose in the Fist), a coalition of the Radical and Socialist parties. Before entering the political arena, he founded the human rights organization Hands Off Cain, which advocates the abolition of the death penalty. But in the 1970s he had also been a militant in the armed struggle, as a member of the terrorist group Prima Linea. For his role in the January 20, 1978, murder of Fausto Dionisi—a police officer killed during the attempted escape of a group of terrorists from a Florentine prison—D’Elia was sentenced to thirty years in prison, which was reduced to twenty-five on appeal. After serving twelve years, his sentence was commuted by the Rome Tribunal in 2000. His civil rights were restored, despite the objections of Dionisi’s widow and his daughter, Jessica, who was two and a half at the time of her father’s death.