Pushing Past the Night

by Mario Calabresi

  And so Sunday after Sunday, year after year, we learned all the ordinary things that should belong to a shared heritage: that there were two Italys, each with its relative merits, and with good people on both sides. We learned that people from the right, the left, and the center could join together in laughter, affection, good conversation, debate, discomfort, and sadness. I quickly realized that our family was a little different, in a good way that defied stereotypes. For example, when my mother and I went to an art opening at a “leftist” gallery, we might be greeted by a brief chill in the air. We never worried because after a while the climate would change. Other people would start to see us as individuals rather than symbols, regard us with compassion, and maybe even start to question some of their own assumptions.

  I’ve always compared what happened to a shipwreck. Suddenly you lose everything; you find yourself tossing about in dark and deep water. Sometimes the disaster could have been predicted because of an approaching storm, but there are also sudden leaks in the boat, icebergs, killer whales. While the shipwreck that befell my father should have been foretold—a glance at the papers from those years tells you everything—some dramas are still unexpected and unpredictable.

  The most telling aspect of this image is the aftermath: you can be adrift for years or for your entire life. You can end up on a desert island and choose to remain there. Many victims of terrorism talk about their experience lucidly, saying that they could never again turn the page of the calendar, that their pain and anger has chained them to that moment. It’s hard to break away from it of your own will. Some people choose an island that allows them to survive. Many run as far away as they can get.

  We have to thank my mother for having had the courage to allow Tonino to help her, and fate, for bringing us into a large extended family. My mother is the fourth of seven children. Her sisters and brothers never let us down. We called one set the “Carlos,” a name that identified eight people: my oldest uncle, Carlo; his wife, Carla; and six children. In their midst you were diluted, you became part of something bigger, and differences were erased. The only problem is that they are all blue-eyed blonds or redheads. We were like dark spots: you could pick us out immediately. Then there were our African cousins, born at the source of the Blue Nile, as they used to say, the children of two courageous doctors, Gigi and Mirella, who helped to found a hospital in Gulu, in northern Uganda. They captivated us with stories that lasted for hours, about playing games in the savannah, about zebras and giraffes.

  It’s exhausting to be rescued from the waves. The difficulties cannot always be avoided, diluted, transformed, or ignored. When the problem was too great and the decision delicate we all sat together around the kitchen table. It’s where we made our most important decisions. It’s where we gathered even after we children had grown up and left home. It’s where a few years ago, attached to a poster of a Picasso exhibit, Tonino left a poem for us to find, explaining something that had never been said.

  Father

  one day

  after the other,

  for love

  elected,

  not for bread.

  Loved

  right away,

  mysteriously

  mine.

  11.

  we shall love again

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the New York Times began to publish short biographies of the people who had died in the Twin Towers. They were written with passion and filled with life and color. I was amazed to read in one of the first to appear the story of a stockbroker who had only recently achieved his crowning dream of buying a Porsche. Because of his cigar habit, however, it had immediately become filled with smoke and ash. I wondered what type of tribute this was supposed to be and whether it was appropriate to remember the victim of a terrorist attack in this way. I tried to imagine a more traditional obituary, containing expressions such as “wonderful father,” “loved by all,” “model employee,” “citizen above reproach.” What if such expressions were repeated hundreds of times, until all 2,603 of the victims had been remembered? No one would have read them. No one would have clipped them from the newspaper. No one would have conserved the memories. But I can still remember the story of a woman whose office was on one of the top floors and who was happy because she could see her son’s school from up there. For it is the little things—full and realistic recollections—that keep memory alive, not rhetoric.

  One way of preserving difficult memories is to hold long and boring ceremonies with bureaucratic rituals that go on for hours and a litany of ornate words of appreciation and a plethora of descriptions such as “barbarously struck down in the prime of his youth by the ignominious hand of an assassin.” Such ceremonies are supposed to keep memory alive, but they are all wrong, especially for an audience of schoolchildren. They shouldn’t have to drown in names and quotations that are a mystery to them, and they are easily bored if they don’t understand what a speaker is talking about. Parents and teachers sometimes argue in response, “But young people have the duty to know … They should remember.” So tell them something that’s worth the trouble of remembering.

  When I go to these encounters, I talk about my father as a normal man, not as a hero or a Martian. I talk about his weaknesses and eccentricities. After all, these “heroes” were ordinary people, defined by their limitless passion for the things they do. They are people you could identify with, who loved their work and did it wholeheartedly. Like Emilio Alessandrini, who was killed for the “crime” of making the Milan prosecutor’s office more efficient. Or Luigi Marangoni, who wanted his hospital to be run properly, and couldn’t bear for blood banks to be damaged or for orderlies in the morgue to cut deals with undertakers.

  On January 29, 2005, twenty-six years after Alessandrini’s death, I was at the high school in Pescara where he had studied. His son Marco and I each spoke about our parents. He captivated the children when he told them about the last Christmas before the murder. He wanted them to understand the void that violence leaves in the everyday life of a family. “We had just returned home after visiting various relatives, but I absolutely had to see the cartoon Goldrake on a color TV. So my father put his coat back on and we went back to my maternal grandparents so that I could. He let me get my way every time. There was a great sense of complicity between us. They say it’s not good for your father to be your friend, but this is exactly why I loved him and why I’m so sorry to have lost him.”

  One month earlier I had paid a visit to the high school where my father had studied, San Leone Magno of Rome, which had decided to dedicate a plaque to him on a wall of the courtyard. I went with his older sister, my aunt Wanda. Speeches were given by the deputy police chief, the prefect, who had known my father well, and the school principal, who depicted him as a model student. “You could already tell back then that he would be a hero.” My aunt whispered in my ear, “You wouldn’t believe how much trouble he got into! He even flunked his senior year and had to finish high school somewhere else.” At the end they asked me if there was anything that I wished to say to the students. From their faces, I could see that all those stories from the 1970s didn’t mean a thing to them, so I changed the tone. “Let’s be honest. He wasn’t exactly a model student. As a matter of fact he was a catastrophe! He even flunked.” The students started to pay more attention and to look at me in amazement. So I said what was in my heart. “The people that they introduce to you as heroes were ordinary people, but with a great love for democracy and the Republic. They did their work with passion.” I didn’t have the courage to add that he hadn’t graduated from their school. I could already see the pained look on the face of the principal, who probably wasn’t aware of the fact, so I thanked them and directed everyone to the buffet.

  Every now and then there are unexpected moments of pure magic. On May 23, 2003, the eleventh anniversary of the assassination of Giovanni Falcone, Italy’s most famous anti-Mafia judge, about a hundred wives, children, and mothers of hero-victims
of our history came from every part of Italy to Mestre, on the outskirts of Venice. They came without fanfare, learning of the event by word of mouth. They came to remember, to try to give life to a shared memory that included the victims of Mafia violence, terrorism, and massacres. They were joined by students from the Venetian high schools. A joint effort by the national policemen’s union and a small volunteer association, this initiative became an unprecedented ritual for the sharing of these experiences. The audience gathered in the theater that day listened to the families’ testimony in hushed silence.

  Giuseppe Esposito was five years old in 1978 when the Red Brigades of Genoa killed his father, Antonio, on the municipal bus that was taking him to the Nervi police station. His son describes him affectionately but in an understated way, describing how he got to know his father through newspaper clippings and family friends. “He was a meticulous and thorough investigator, more Carthusian monk than policeman chasing bandits.” But he didn’t stop at personal memories. He also mentioned that the National Association of Partisans had decided to add Esposito’s name to the list of those who had died for freedom.

  Not far away, three women were listening to him, filled with emotion, thinking of their own sons or husbands. They had arrived together on the train from Rome. Maria Bitti, the widow of Marshal Mariano Romiti, shook her head. Her husband had been killed by the Red Brigades, while he was waiting for the bus in a working-class suburb on the day of their fourth son’s fifteenth birthday. Next to her was Eugenia Vergani, who had lost her son in a Red Brigade kidnapping on St. Valentine’s Day in 1987. The third woman was the widow of Domenico Ricci, the driver of Aldo Moro, who was killed during the kidnapping on Via Fani. They had the painful and depressing job of sifting through their memories, and they took the floor to explain their feelings to the young people gathered for the occasion. They talked about days spent searching through family albums for a photograph that would pierce the numbness that had engulfed them. They asked the audience to understand, and they showed how their sorrow is renewed every time they talk about it: each of them wept with anger and disbelief, saying they could find no peace, in part because the list of victims continues to grow.

  Manlio Milani summarized the overarching theme of the event. “Through this assembly, by keeping these memories alive, we can recall the people who were lost and the reasons for their disappearance.” On May 27, 1974, he and his wife, Livia, were at dinner in Brescia at the home of Clementina Calzari and Alberto Trebeschi. The next day, a bomb exploded during an anti-Fascist protest in the center of the city, at the Piazza della Loggia, taking the lives of eight people, including Alberto, Clementina, and Livia. “All three of them were teachers. They helped to found the school of CGIL, one of Italy’s three largest trade unions. For twenty years, we were always together. They died together, struck by the bomb. I am the only one who survived, together with Giorgio, the son of Clem and Alberto, who was one and a half years old at the time and the projection of our hopes.” His words are filled with regret for a lost world that was denied a future. “Alberto and I were members of the Italian Communist Party. We were active in a cultural circle that included a cinema section. On September 11, 1973, the day that Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, was murdered during a military coup d’état, we were at the Pesaro Film Festival. There were some Latin American directors—a really beautiful group of people—and we lived the Chilean tragedy with them. The four of us were politically active, fighting for good schools for the children of factory workers, but we also had dinner parties and went on vacations together.” Milani is the head of the Association of the Families of the Fallen and he directs the House of Memory in Brescia, a well-run center that organizes lecture series for schools, most recently on the rhetoric of the 1970s. He inherited the burden of testifying, a duty he never shirks. “I still get together with Giorgio. Today he is a big, good-looking, intelligent boy. He was raised by Alberto’s twin brother. Every time I see him I tell him, ‘I’m getting old, but I’m still here. When you’re ready we can talk about it.’ But he can’t, and every time I ask he shakes his head no.”

  What we need in Italy is a place like the memorial in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the 58,260 victims of the Vietnam War. It’s made of black marble. The visitors’ faces are mirrored in the engraved names, which can be touched, caressed with the fingers, transferred onto a sheet of paper by rubbing a pencil on top. It’s a place of collective memory. It would be nice if there were something of this kind in Italy to remember the victims of left-and right-wing terrorism.

  Attempts at a monument have been made at a couple of places in Rome. The Casa del Jazz is an estate confiscated from the cashier of the Magliana Gang, an organized crime syndicate based in Rome that was particularly active in the 1970s. The villa has an amazing building and two acres of parks with Mediterranean pines, in the middle of which is a large stela with the names of 683 innocent victims of the Mafia from 1893 to the present. On Sunday mornings, concert evenings, or moonlit nights, it is always filled with people who have stopped by to read, to chat, to comment. At the Leadership Academy in the Flaminio neighborhood, there is a memorial to policemen who have fallen in the line of duty. All the names are there, engraved on illuminated plates. Unfortunately, it’s a place that’s difficult to reach.

  After years of talk, it might finally become a reality: a “Day of Memory” dedicated to the victims of terrorism and massacres. A bill has been presented to the Chamber of Deputies according to which, on the Day of Memory, municipalities can host ceremonies, events, meetings, and moments of silence in public and at the schools to build a shared memory. The suggested date for the commemoration is May 9, the anniversary of the murder of Aldo Moro. An alternative date is March 16, when Moro was kidnapped and five members of his police escort were massacred on Via Fani. The Association of Victims of Massacres suggested December 12, the date of Piazza Fontana—the event, they emphasize, that triggered everything else—to give the commemoration the proper chronological framework.

  When I think of Aldo Moro, I think of his heartbreaking letters from prison, of his gentleness and sensitivity toward his family. In his final letter to his wife, he wrote,

  My dear Noretta,

  I fear that my possibilities are running out and, unless there is a miracle, that I am near the point at which I shall conclude this human experience … how I want to hold you close and express to you all the sweetness I feel, mixed though it is with bitterness, for having had the gift of a life with you, so rich with love and deep understanding … Be well and try to be as tranquil as you can. We shall see each other again. We shall meet again. We shall love again.

  12.

  lost opportunities

  THE PIAZZA FONTANA MASSACRE took place forty years ago, making it closer chronologically to the rise of Nazism than to the fall of Saddam Hussein. The time has come to consign it to history, together with the period of bloodshed that was ushered in on that afternoon. The time has come to speak of those years more calmly, to understand what happened and why. But too many truths are missing, too many crimes unaccounted for, too many victims still awaiting justice. Every time that Italy seeks closure to this painful era, there is a public outcry driven by reasons of convenience and self-interest.

  Today people are still asking the whereabouts of the perpetrators of massacres that took the lives of 150 people, as well as questioning the complicit silence in which the history of red terrorism remains enshrouded.

  Difficult though it may seem, I think we can and must turn the page, but let us not forget that each page has two sides: we cannot read only the side dedicated to terrorists and their strategies: we must also and above all read the other side, about the victims.

  Can someone like Manlio Milani agree to turn the page? A survivor of the Piazza della Loggia massacre in Brescia, he is still wondering why the woman he loved was murdered, and who was responsible for it. What about the people who are still awaiting compensatory damages from the state? Who
are awaiting payment for treatment to take care of injuries they’ve suffered for decades? Who feel that the truth—about who is responsible, who colluded—is still being hidden from them? Who see the murderers of their father, brother, son, wife, or husband giving speeches at universities, on television, at conferences? How can we expect clear-headed judgment from those who feel forgotten, brushed aside, defeated? How can you ask them for the courage of clemency?

  We must begin with the victims: their memories and their need for truth. Their demands for justice, assistance, help, and sensitivity should finally be fulfilled. By the government, politicians, and even the television stations, newspapers, and civil society. It would be to everyone’s benefit to have a country that is able to turn the page with serenity.

  President Napolitano understands this. He feels the need. His predecessor, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, worked to unify the collective memory of Italians, to rebuild a concept of patria as a home where everyone can find a place. Napolitano has used this idea as his starting point, but he seems to feel a special urgency to heal the wounds. Despite a political class that is always looking for wedge issues, polemics, and divisiveness, he advances full speed ahead, forcing others to follow him.

  In his year-end message in Rome, he spoke of respect for the memory of the victims. He did the same in Milan and in Bologna, where he remembered Marco Biagi, and as the professor’s family noted favorably, the climate in the city changed. Then he chose to write to La Repubblica after its publication of a letter from the family members of the men in Aldo Moro’s escort, to emphasize that he fully agreed with their words: “The legitimate reinsertion into society of perpetrators of terrorist acts who have made their reckoning with justice should be the occasion for an explicit recognition of the unjustifiable criminal nature of the terrorist attack on the state and on its representatives and servants, and should be accompanied by public behavior inspired by the greatest discretion and propriety.”