Pushing Past the Night

by Mario Calabresi

  Today very few terrorists are left in prison. Most have been released. Think of the biggest crimes and then do a roll call. There is a widespread sense that the terrorists were the beneficiaries of a certain leniency and were released without making a deep and lasting contribution to the truth. Instead, the state should agree to commute a terrorist’s sentence only in exchange for a complete confession and an admission of guilt.

  We should take the high road and leave the polemics behind. Instead, tired rituals are repeated. If a memorial tablet is placed for Calabresi, then demands come for a school to be named after Pinelli. If at the offices of the provincial government a hall is dedicated to Marco Biagi, then the reply comes that it should be associated with Massimo D’Antona, and that both names have to be present, in a tit-for-tat approach to commemoration that ultimately creates the false illusion that Biagi and D’Antona belonged to two different sides, thereby renewing divisions, preconceptions, and venom.

  The state fell prey to these same sterile polemics when—to avoid losing a civil suit for its failure to grant Biagi an escort—it made an out-of-court settlement to award compensatory damages to the widow and children. The amount it agreed to pay was much higher than required by the law on the victims of terrorism. Here the state paid for its shortcomings, which ultimately cost the life of a professor, and through the settlement it took responsibility for the needs of the victims’ families.

  To repress rather than to remember is a lost opportunity in a country that is short of role models.

  Victims’ rights cannot be a private matter between the state and individual citizens. Italy needs a widespread sensitivity, a collective feeling. It is still a struggle here to utter an unambiguous condemnation of political violence. The terrorists have not been repudiated as the murderers they were. All too often, they have been described as underdogs, people who waged a battle of ideas that they were unable to win. Investigations into the latest followers of the Red Brigades in 2007 showed one thing clearly: that the younger generation is still responsive to the message of the terrorists.

  The media bears a special responsibility for this state of affairs. The newspapers and television networks show too little scruple in training the spotlight on former terrorists, in giving them a stage in even the most inadvisable or inappropriate circumstances. Most disturbing and dangerous are the standard interviews: the terrorists are almost never reminded of their crimes and responsibilities. This is unacceptable, especially if they have been invited for the purpose of discussing the Years of Lead. The press usually introduces Sergio Segio, for example, as a representative of the Gruppo Abele, a social services outreach center, and almost never as a founder of the terrorist organization Prima Linea and the convicted killer of two judges, Guido Galli and Emilio Alessandrini. More often than not, Anna Laura Braghetti, the terrorist who killed Vittorio Bachelet at the University of Rome with seven bullets and participated in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, is described as a “coordinator of social services for detainees.”

  A romantic idea of terrorism is being broadcast. This is especially true when reporters cover some of the more recent outbreaks of Red Brigade violence. The media compares these episodes unfavorably to the “armed struggle” of the 1970s, which they claim was sustained by ideas and a revolutionary project.

  One woman has reflected more deeply and articulately than anyone else on Italy’s inability to engage in public grieving. Carole Beebe, an American, met Ezio Tarantelli in Boston, at the student center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a student of the prominent economist Franco Modigliani, while she was a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Brandeis. They used to go out dancing together. They were married in 1970 and she later followed him to Italy, where they had one son, Luca. Tarantelli was murdered in Rome at the university where he taught economics on March 27, 1985. There were two gunmen, but only one was identified and convicted. “The other could even be sitting right next to me at a movie theater one night.”

  A therapist and a teacher of English literature and psychoanalysis at the University of Rome, Carole Tarantelli was also a left-wing member of Parliament for three sessions. “Italy has been unable to articulate not only grief, but even a single thought about terrorism. It is neither willing nor capable of really thinking about it. Italy has never engaged in a complete reckoning.” On the possibility of the nation moving on without owning up to responsibilities toward the victims, she is absolute. “In Italy an illusion has been making headway that is equivalent to the terrorists’ fantasy that what they did can be overcome as if nothing happened. This is not a question of good or bad will. It’s a simple question of reality, because the effects of their acts can still be felt. They can be felt in the people who survived, and they can be felt every day in the absence of the people that they killed. Terrorism will not be over as long as my son Luca—who carries the marks of it—is alive. Its negative effects continue in our life every day; we cannot forget about it.”

  I think of the life of Ezio Tarantelli and of what was robbed from us, of everything that he had to offer. Of the opportunities that terrorism took away from our country.

  13.

  the rules of the kitchen

  FOR YEARS I filed away newspaper clippings, wire dispatches, documents, and notes, accumulating tons of words, controversies, and rage. I kept this strange archive in boxes, colored backpacks, and an old blue Samsonite suitcase from the 1970s. On different occasions last year, I opened them all up. The dust burned my eyes while I struggled to find a thread that would connect the thousand of articles and columns on the trials, appeals, ad hoc laws, petitions, proclamations, controversies over pardons, hunger and water strikes, and infighting among ex-terrorists. I read and reread the statements by two former members of Lotta Continua, the journalist Giampiero Mughini and the writer Erri De Luca, when they finally came clean about what happened to my father. Mughini went so far as to admit, “I think that a Lotta Continua commando killed Calabresi.” For his part, De Luca asserted, “Any of us could have killed Calabresi.” Their admissions provoked a furious backlash from their former comrades, who immediately denied their claims.

  The day came when I didn’t know what to do with all these yellowing files anymore. Whenever I opened them up, hours would go by as I searched for their underlying meaning. I wanted to think that they would help me write a book that finally explained exactly what had happened. Then I realized that it was a hopeless endeavor, and that I, too, would continue to be a prisoner of these petty, squalid polemics. Unless I took a major step. So I got up my courage, took a deep breath, and in an almost unconscious leap, like jumping off a cliff, I threw everything away. Years of nocturnal labors ended up in the trash. The only thing I kept was a blue file with the things that seemed most shocking. After a moment of panic, I felt lighter. Today I use the same blue suitcase to hold trays of slides from family vacations.

  There are also slides from the summer in Liguria in 1988 when an evening news station informed us that sixteen years after the murder of my father, a series of arrests had been made. I had just turned eighteen. Until that moment, the biggest topic in the month of July had been over what time I had to be home at night: I argued that my curfew days were well over, but somehow I couldn’t prevail. And then all of a sudden the whole family was catapulted into a story we thought had been relegated to the past and become almost a private matter.

  On July 20, Leonardo Marino, a former Lotta Continua militant, after having turned himself in voluntarily to the police, confessed to taking part in the assassination of my father. He claimed that he had been the driver, and he named three other Lotta Continua members as his accomplices: Ovidio Bompressi, Giorgio Pietrostefani, and Adriano Sofri. This set in motion a series of trials, appeals, Supreme Court decisions, and requests for clemency that would last well over a decade.

  The immediate result was a media frenzy and a complete disruption of my family’s life. My mother was called by the magistrates in Milan for
questioning. Threatening phone calls started to come in at night. Journalists waited outside our door, and a group of policemen from the antiterrorism squad stood around in the yard.

  We had no preconceived ideas about the men who had been arrested, despite all the news coming out in the papers about them. For hours we sat around the kitchen table discussing what we should do. No one felt like cooking, so we survived on focaccia with cheese from the bakery. In the end, we decided to apply to join the proceedings as a civil party.

  Little did we know how many long, mortifying years we would end up spending in the courtroom. Today my mother always says that when the final bill on her life is drawn up, these years should be deducted. But they were also educational. For one thing, they convinced me to abandon law school. Every day, as I was descending the immense staircase of the Palazzo di Giustizia, the huge Fascist-style courthouse of Milan, to Corso di Porta Vittoria, I used to ask myself, What am I doing? Am I studying so I can come back inside here every morning? And then would I ever find the necessary peace of mind to be a judge? I made the happy decision to transfer to the history department.

  The trials forced me to pay closer attention to the newspapers. Although I found the news biased, I did become good friends with some of the journalists, and we used to talk for hours outside the courtroom. The profession itself intrigued me more and more. My classmates and I also developed a passion for politics. Every Monday evening, we would go to the town hall to observe the council’s proceedings. Major changes were about to take place that would eventually shake up the entire postwar political order in Italy. In the city, a web of corruption was uncovered that could be traced to the highest levels of government. The ensuing scandal, which became known as Tangentopoli, or Kickback City, brought down one of the most powerful men in Italy, Benito Craxi, and with him the Socialist Party that had long ruled the city and the country. In its wake, a new political force sprung up, the separatist Northern League, which wanted to wrest power away from Rome and create stronger regional government.

  I became involved in grass-roots movements and worked on the 1993 mayoral campaign of Nando Dalla Chiesa, the son of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the hero who had helped defeat the Red Brigades in the late 1970s and was ignominiously assassinated when he tried to apply the same techniques to halting the Sicilian Mafia. One day at a covered market we ran into a representative of the Northern League who later became speaker of the Milan city council. She saw us enter and shouted into the megaphone, “Here are the friends of the terrorists. The terrorists will not rule Milan.”

  In the end, the Northern League’s candidate, Marco Formentini, won the mayoral election and the Socialists were driven from power. All around us, the city and the political climate were changing, but the trials continued unabated. The hero of the kickback scandal, Judge Antonio Di Pietro, railed against political corruption. In the courthouse corridors, we saw his rise and fall. Still the trials went on. In Rome Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of a new party, Forza Italia, became the prime minister, and still we were at the courthouse.

  At the Palazzo di Giustizia, my schoolmates never failed me. They took turns keeping the family company and listening and debating: Andrea, Marcello, Bea, Enzo, Saida, Larry, and Silvia. For years I’ve remembered their generosity, their physical presence, and their sharing of the difficult moments. It still continues today, and it is something for which I am grateful.

  Two people whose lives were linked by the same tragedy, the murder of General Dalla Chiesa by the Mafia, telephone us every year on May 17, the anniversary of my father’s death, and after every verdict from the many trials of my father’s killers. They are his son, Nando, and Gianmaria Setti Carraro, the brother of Manuela, the general’s young wife, who was killed with him. There is no one else like them. We used to tell a family joke, saying that they were substitutes for the government, which was nowhere to be found.

  My mother developed her own clear-cut rules on how we should deal with all the media attention: never polemicize, never speak too much, show respect and kindness to everyone, and above all, trust in the judiciary. “We are not seeking revenge. We are seeking justice, and we will respect the verdicts that come,” she told us clearly at dawn on the day of the first hearing, while we were sitting in the kitchen. “I did everything possible for you to grow up without grudges or hatred. The last thing I want is to ruin that now.” She spent many nights sitting at Luigi’s bedside to comfort him. After a detailed account of the morning of the homicide was given in court, we heard her speaking to him that night in a soft voice for hours. He was looking for a thread to tie him to the present, to an idea of the future. He didn’t want to lose himself, to start wallowing in sorrow over the fact that he’d never known his father, that he was born too late. They talked and talked, helping him get a grip on his anger, transforming his suffering into something more manageable.

  Luigi’s feelings are sharper, more raw. He has always been very direct in telling Paolo and me, “The difference between us is that he never held me in his arms.” Mama remembers the leap she felt in her belly when she received the news of the murder and she understands him. “When I see his anger, I feel exactly what I felt that day.” Every now and then he hurtles into my mother’s home in a fury. Like the time he learned that Adriano Sofri was at the Palio of Siena, a traditional horse race in medieval costume, at the window where the government officials were seated, being welcomed and introduced as a celebrity by the mayor. Or the time he was holding a page torn out of a magazine with a picture of Sofri in a boat on the pond in Rome’s Villa Borghese gardens, with his son and granddaughter. “Here’s the difference, don’t forget it: our father didn’t get this chance to become a grandfather.” At that point, my mother took him aside and tried to console him.

  On April 27, 1990, the Third Court of Assizes of Milan, presided over by Manlio Minale, entered into chambers. Five days later, on May 2, the sentence was read. I remember the paralyzing wait. We couldn’t help it. The energy needed to keep up any pretense of normality was gone, and we spent the last two days alternating between the sofa and the bed. I was sleeping in the same bedroom as Paolo and I remember that afternoon, prostrate, immobile, as if we were undone by the summer heat. Later that afternoon, someone attempted a joke, but in the end it was impossible to break the tension. We were all waiting for the telephone to ring, and we all raced to it every time it did. Finally our lawyers notified us that the sentence was about to be read, so we rushed to the courthouse. When we realized that the defendants had been convicted, my mother started to cry. I asked her why. I thought it must have been the memories. She caught me completely off-guard. “For Bompressi’s daughter. Today she has lost her father.”

  The time arrived for the Court of Cassation to confirm the verdict. Mama was inflexible with the lawyers. “We are not coming to Rome. It’s the court of final appeal and it’s better for a widow and orphans to be outside the hall, to avoid putting any emotional pressure on the judges.”

  After the many trials were over, the time began for the long and heated debates over whether to grant clemency. My family’s position has always been the same, and we have repeated it to every President of the Republic: we will accept any decision taken in the general interest, but we ask that the sentences themselves be respected. It would be unacceptable to grant a pardon that resembled a new instance of justice, that could be interpreted or presented as a reparation or acquittal.

  We take no pleasure in the incarceration of the convicts: it never gave us back anything, nor has it ever been a source of consolation for us. What matters are the sentences, the state’s commitment to seek the truth, to do justice. At home we have always been irritated when someone has asked us to approve or deny parole or a pardon. We reject the medieval notion that the victim’s relatives should decide the fate of the convict. The responsibility for the decision lies not with the family but with the courts and Parliament, on the basis of the legal code. These are not private matters. Justi
ce is the duty of the state. Despite my family’s position of absolute neutrality, we are often cited as if we were in favor of clemency by representatives of every part of the political spectrum fighting for the release of convicts. From the right, I remember getting a telephone call from a group of Forza Italia members of Parliament. They had been asked to sign a document that was supposed to end the wrangling between the Ministry of Justice and the president’s office over whether to grant clemency to Bompressi. They wanted to know whether it was true, as they had heard from their coordinator, that my family had approved the text. I said that it was not, adding that it was not right to lay at our door the responsibility for decisions that would be unpopular with the electorate.

  From the left, I remember being invited to the headquarters of the Democratic Party of the Left. The justice adviser very politely proposed to me a type of exchange. He said that the time had come to allow the clemency to go forward, just as the time has come to rehabilitate the figure of my father. Each of us could do his part. We left each other respectfully, but I told him that I didn’t see a moral equivalency between the two, and above all that granting clemency was not our responsibility.

  One evening, shortly before writing a letter to the newspaper Il Foglio, explaining that the time was ripe for granting a pardon to Sofri, Silvio Berlusconi invited me to dinner at his home on Via del Plebiscito in Rome. His political adviser Gianni Letta was also at the table. The prime minister had just arrived from Brussels and he had a stomachache. The only thing he ate was yogurt. He took two tablespoons of an antacid and explained to me what he had in mind. He spoke to me about the importance of symbolic gestures, about the need to detoxify the climate around the judicial system, and he asked me whether my family and I were open to agreeing on a gesture of clemency. He mentioned that he had met my father and he spoke of him with great respect and esteem. But I told him that this was not feasible, that you couldn’t ask it of my mother, that if he thought it was right to take a step in this direction then we would respect his decision, but that we did not want to be involved. I remember that he took it badly, tapping his fingers on the table and rubbing his jaw. Then his chef Michele’s gelato arrived and he forgot all about the acidity in his stomach. I said good-bye to him and took the stairs. Letta accompanied me to the courtyard and said, “You’ve done the right thing. This time I do not agree with him, and he knows it.”