Pushing Past the Night

by Mario Calabresi

  They bristled with indignation: how could a former terrorist be seated in Parliament? And promoted to the position of secretary to the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies? Politicians were split over the issue: some rode the wave of political indignation, while others defended the decision with heartless arguments. Once again the debate quickly dispensed with the victims and shifted to the rights of former terrorists: the right to build a new life, to be reinserted into society, to freedom of speech. They had paid for their crimes—this was the most popular expression—and now they had the right to live like other people.

  “I took it very badly. This time I was absolutely sick over it: I already had to struggle to digest the fact that he had been elected to Parliament. Then when I found out that the same man who had been convicted as an accessory to the murder of my husband had become the secretary to the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, I was mortified: this was really impossible.” Mariella Magi Dionisi was twenty-two when her husband, Fausto, who was a year older, was killed. Her voice is lively, with a strong Tuscan accent. She is not the type of person who lives withdrawn from the world. She founded Memoria, one of the most active associations representing the victims of terrorism. For years she has been fighting for laws to remember the victims and to grant damages and assistance to their families.

  “There are things that are intolerable, that go beyond the pale. I don’t question the laws or allowing terrorists to rebuild their lives, but the least I would expect from the terrorists and from the government is respect and some sense of decorum. From the former terrorists, I also expect silence and a refusal to take part in public debates, if for no other reason than to avoid opening old wounds. Because the truth is that they gave us a life sentence. They have a second chance at life while we, and the persons whose lives they took, have had this possibility taken away from us forever. I was a young woman and my life was stolen from me.”

  She pauses for a minute and then begins to explain her thinking more precisely, to avoid being misunderstood. “I wasn’t offended by the fact that Sergio D’Elia was the secretary of Hands Off Cain. Everyone should work for a cause he or she believes in. It’s what happened later that shocked me. The debate in the Chamber, followed by the controversy in the newspapers, was truly indecent. The politicians outdid themselves to defend D’Elia, themselves, their decisions, and their behavior. D’Elia did not utter a single word of remorse. His defenders in the Chamber failed to pronounce even one word of remembrance for the man who had been murdered. I felt so alone after that day. A wave of depression came over me. Thank goodness some people spoke out, particularly in Florence, where the mayor, the speaker of the regional assembly, and representatives of every party expressed their solidarity. I especially appreciated the fact that many town councillors, some from very small towns in ‘Red’ Tuscany, felt strongly enough about this to vote in favor of a motion asking D’Elia to turn down his appointment.”

  Mariella Magi Dionisi feels as if she’s been condemned to spend her whole life in the shadow of the late 1970s. She finds her way back to the present only when she talks about her daughter. “For two years now, I’ve had a grandson … He’s such a joy! You should see how cute he is!”

  A new controversy erupted in November of the same year when it was revealed that Roberto Del Bello, the personal secretary of the Deputy Minister of the Interior, had been convicted of membership in an armed group and served a prison sentence of four years and seven months. In December yet another scandal broke when the Minister of Social Solidarity appointed Susanna Ronconi to the National Council on Drug Addiction. Ronconi seemed to have excellent credentials in the field, on the basis of both her experience and her publications. But she had also been a member of the Red Brigades commando that in 1974 attacked an office of the Neo-Fascist Party in Padua and took the lives of two people. This time the controversy ended with her resignation. The Rome prosecutor’s office also began an investigation of the minister for official misconduct: as a former terrorist, Ms. Ronconi was prohibited from holding public office, so her appointment was illegal. She contested the judiciary’s interpretation and complained that she was being “shackled to a story from thirty years ago.” She added: “No one is giving any importance to what I’ve done since then. It’s not right. It’s vindictive. I do not deny my responsibility and I know that compensation for human life is not possible, but I served my sentence in full and as proof that I’ve changed there is the truth of the life that I’ve lived and the concrete commitment I’ve made.”

  On January 29, 1979, Emilio Alessandrini was killed by eight gunshots fired by two members of Prima Linea, Marco Donat Cattin and Sergio Segio, shortly after dropping off his son Marco at school. He was thirty-seven, the same age as his son is today. Marco Alessandrini is a lawyer in Pescara, his father’s hometown. His father was a prosecutor who distinguished himself first for his investigations into right-wing terrorism—he uncovered the Neo-Fascists’ role in the Piazza Fontana massacre and the Italian Secret Service’s obstruction of the investigation into it—and then for an investigation into the left-wing terrorism of a Milan chapter of Autonomia Operaia. Marco has his father’s smiling face, broad forehead, gentle manners, and passion for basketball.

  Marco doesn’t enjoy speaking in public, but he feels compelled to by a strong sense of duty. His speeches are remarkable for the precise and polished language he uses. “I want to help feed my country’s hunger for memory.” The first time he found the courage to speak out was during an interview with Corriere della Sera. “It’s not true that time heals all wounds. My mother was thirty-four years old when they killed her husband. In a certain sense, she has never moved past that twenty-ninth of January.” They had left Milan for Pescara a few days after the murder, in silence. And in silence they remained for another quarter of a century. “Today we’re suffering from this rather disturbing Italian peculiarity: former terrorists elevated to the status of philosophers, writing books, granting erudite interviews. A full-fledged cultural industry has been created and we are supposed to sit back and accept it.”

  In the most audacious and horrifying crime of the Years of Lead, the former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on March 16, 1978, as he was being driven to Parliament. Eight weeks later, after long and fruitless negotiations, his bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of a car in central Rome. What is often forgotten is that the gunmen also murdered five members of Moro’s escort. Years later, on February 27, 2007, a TV special was broadcast titled The Return of the Red Brigades. In one part, the anchor, Claudio Martelli, interviewed the founder of the Red Brigades, Alberto Franceschini, at the scene of the crime on Via Fani in Rome. After decades of silence, the families of the fallen policemen wrote a letter to the columnist Corrado Augias of La Repubblica to describe their discomfort over that interview:

  This scene took us back thirty years, to that terrible day when our lives stopped at the same time as those of our loved ones. We were horrified to see a terrorist standing next to the plaque that commemorates the massacre. We were disgusted to hear talk of the Red Brigades at that historic place, which should be sacred to the nation and to our collective memory. Lorenzo Conti—whose father, Lando, the former mayor of Florence, was murdered by the Red Brigades in 1986—went on a hunger strike to protest the presence of former terrorists in the government. The President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, implored him to suspend the strike, saying: “I want our public opinion and our politicians to remember the gravity of the terrorist attacks on democratic institutions. And I want them to remember the men who defended these institutions with courage, making the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.” Also in keeping with the head of state’s remarks, we feel that it is indecent to film and present interviews of this type at commemorative sites.

  In his response, Corrado Augias may have finally given the family members the understanding they were seeking.

  What the letter says is perfectly true. After spending a few years
in prison, terrorists implicated in the taking of human life are given back their freedom. On the release form is stamped, I believe, “time served.” But the time of those whose husbands or brothers were murdered is never served, and it could never be stamped on a piece of paper. There is no getting past the disparity of treatment between those who killed and those who were killed. It goes on through the years, aggravated by the fact that the killers write memoirs, are interviewed on TV, participate in films, and occupy positions of responsibility, while no one goes to the widow of a police officer and asks her what life has been like without a husband, whether there are any children who grew up as orphans, whether the passage of time has healed the wounds, the mourning, the sorrow.

  Why were they killed? Because of the dreams of a group of firebrands who were playing revolution, fooling themselves into thinking that they were the chosen ones, beautiful souls devoted to a noble utopia, without realizing that the true “children of the people,” as Pasolini called them, were on the other side, the targets of their ridiculous folly.

  10.

  a left-wing painter

  IT TOOK A LEFT-WING PAINTER to get me to stop reading Robinson Crusoe twice a year. He picked it up and said, “There are lots of other books where you’re not alone on a desert island after a shipwreck. They’re nice. You’ll like them.” For security I took the novel back from him and continued to keep it next to my bed for years, but I accepted Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca (The Diary of Hurricane Johnny, an Italian children’s classic), Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and later on David Copperfield and the tales of an English veterinarian, James Herriot, that my grandfather gave me as a present.

  At the time, I was already in elementary school, but the painter had first come into our lives while I was in kindergarten. He appeared one afternoon right before dark. We saw a man with a big headful of curls at the door and liked him instantly. We were always looking for a father figure. Nonno and our uncles did their part, but at sunset we were left alone with my mother. She would give us our baths, putting all three of us in the tub together, and we would splash around in the water. Then, when it was dark, we would be overcome by sadness. For years the night brought us nightmares and tears. The painter said his name was Tonino. Studying him carefully, I noticed that his fingers were smudged with blue tempera. After a moment of hesitation, I jumped up and put my arms around him, saying, “Tonino is mine.” We sequestered him and he spent his time playing with us, wrestling and tickling us on the sofa.

  He had come by to visit my mother, but she had barely enough time to give him the grilled cheese and ham sandwich that she had prepared. When he was on his way out, Luigi, who was almost three, asked him, “When are you coming back?” Caught off-guard, Tonino answered, “Tomorrow.” And just like that he started coming for one hour every evening, before going off to teach illustration at the Castello Sforzesco night school. He spent all his time with us on the living room rug. Mama would look at us while leaning against the doorframe and then make him something to eat.

  He entered our lives slowly, with tact and delicacy. He started to take us to Parco Sempione in the broken-down red Spider he drove and then to the planetarium and the museum of natural history. Once he showed up with a huge roll of brown packing paper and crayons, and from that moment on we spent the afternoons lying on the floor coloring.

  Before long my mother’s parents asked her to come by their house, alone. They needed to speak with her, and asked her to take a seat across from them at the round table in the dining room. The first to speak, with concern, was my grandmother. She asked whether it was true that a “longhair” often came to her house. My mother, embarrassed, said yes, that there was a teacher, an artist, with somewhat long curly hair, whom she spent some time with. So was it true, Nonna asked, that the painter lived in a house with many other people? “We heard about it from the children.” The painter was living in a four-room apartment that he shared with a computer programmer, Baldassarre Giunta, nicknamed Sino; a cartoon artist, Antonio Dall’Osso; and a changing roster of other artists, most of them Tuscans from Lucca. For us it was a magical place, full of drawings and colors, a place where you could open the refrigerator and grab whatever you wanted, certainly less orderly than our grandparents’ house. The occupants of the house—who regularly paid their rent—adopted us and even today they never miss the sad or happy moments of our lives. At weddings they always send us a shipment of Tuscan wine, and on the walls of our house there are paintings by the Tuscan painter Giuliano Natalini.

  After what had happened, it’s not hard to understand my grandparents’ attitude. At one point they burst out, “Well, Gemma, let’s call a spade a spade. He’s a long-haired painter and a Communist who lives in a commune. What do you see in him? Why are you dating him?” At first my mother tried to defend him, saying that he wasn’t a Communist and that there was no commune. Then she snapped and said peremptorily, “Because he loves my children and makes them laugh. I have nothing more to discuss.”

  My grandparents understood and made an effort to accept a person who was so unlike them. The next Sunday, they invited him to lunch. I remember a palpable tension that dissipated only thanks to the Piedmontese specialties being served, bagna cauda (a warm fondue-like dish of olive oil, garlic, and anchovies served with raw or cooked vegetables) and risotto, and to my mother’s younger brother, Zio Attilio, who is completely bald today, but back then had a headful of curls. He broke the ice by saying something like, “They told me you were a longhair, but your hair’s shorter than mine!”

  Attilio was the good-luck charm of our childhood. He taught us to love bicycles and American music. He infected my brothers with his passion for motorbikes and enchanted us with his work as a fashion photographer. His studio was our refuge when we skipped school, and it was an amazing place. When you’re sixteen, going from high school teachers to fashion models is a leap you don’t easily forget.

  The disconnect between Tonino and my grandparents was repaired so thoroughly over time that I came to see it as a model for the way Italy could be if the fences and barricades between people were to fall. They influenced each other and learned to appreciate each other, but without surrendering their guiding principles, although with the changing of the seasons they began to see eye to eye in a few areas.

  We lived our lives experiencing the best of two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. We children took turns spending weekends and holidays with my grandparents, who were textile manufacturers: we went skiing in Courmayeur or hiking in Switzerland. For Easter vacation, they would take all three of us to Venice. Nonno always had a late-model Lancia. They taught us the importance of the work ethic, saving, and charity, and how to recognize a fabric blindfolded. With Mama and Tonino, who came to live with us in 1976, we traveled instead in a Fiat 127. We drove up and down Italy to discover beaches and monuments, and little by little all three of us started to breathe again, and to no longer feel threatened and lost. My brothers started to call Tonino Papà. I did not. It took me several more years, but when I did, it was because I was truly convinced that he had become our father.

  Children have always been Tonino’s passion. With Bruno Munari, one of Italy’s greatest designers, he used to organize workshops for kids to encourage their creativity. Among his many accomplishments, he designed the peace flag—the rainbow standard that in recent years has invaded the Italian streets.

  Tonino taught us how to fish, how to use a camera, how to row, to swim, to draw, to recognize the stars and the right wind for flying kites, to build sand castles, to make surfaces for playing marbles, and above all to never give up, to never take anything for granted, to fight for the things that you love.

  He got up at night when we cried and invented grandiose methods for fighting our sadness. Every morning he came to wake us up with a puppet show of imaginary characters. He told little stories and made jokes. The morning became a time of the day that was not to be missed. He never tried to push Papà Gigi
to the side. He sustained us during the trials and always encouraged us to keep his memory alive.

  In December 1982, in a small church that overlooks the Gulf of Tigullio in Liguria, my mother and Tonino were married, and two years later our fourth brother, Uber, was born. With his arrival, our story turned another page: in the city records and on the mailbox there were now three last names, sometimes making it very difficult to explain things. It wasn’t always easy, especially for Uber, whose life was weighed down by a heavy and never-ending story. He was little, still in nursery school, when one night before going to bed he said, “Mama, I don’t know what to do. I love my brothers and I’m sad that their father is dead, but if it hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have been born.” During his first year of high school, one of his teachers organized an assembly about Adriano Sofri, who had been convicted of instigating my father’s murder, but had gone through multiple trials with varying outcomes. The only speaker invited was Guido Viale, the former leader of Lotta Continua. My brother asked why the opposite side wasn’t represented, and he was told, “Why, do you want those poor guys to go to jail?” He came home and asked for everything to be explained to him, to be given all the details of the story. Uber wanted to take the floor at the assembly, so that at least one voice would remember Luigi Calabresi, even if Uber wasn’t his son. We thanked him, then my mother asked him to stay home that day, so that he would miss the assembly. We never felt that he was different from us. Now we were four and our stories blended into one.