Pushing Past the Night

by Mario Calabresi

  On the anniversary of that crime for which our friends Adriano Sofri, Ovidio Bompressi, and Giorgio Pietrostefani, who we know are innocent, are incarcerated, we—who in the past shared ideas, words, and behaviors—feel that it is our duty to recognize that before his murder, Luigi Calabresi was subject to a political and press campaign that went beyond the limits of resolute protest and that aroused sentiments of hatred toward him that helped to create the climate that led to his assassination. That campaign and those sentiments cannot be justified, then or now, not even by our sense of duty to denounce the abuses committed in the investigations into the Piazza Fontana massacre and demand the truth about the murder of Giuseppe Pinelli. There is no excuse for the way many of us welcomed the news of the killing of Luigi Calabresi: not one word was expended on the value of a human life, even that of an adversary, nor on the grievous violence that the killing of a man does to his family members.

  The signatories include Nini Briglia, who today is the director of the periodicals division of Mondadori. Briglia and I have never met, but I did telephone him to find out how this letter came about. “It was a difficult path: at the beginning there were many of us but in the end only eleven signed. The initiative was born from the desire to take a step forward, to question and face up to the tragic reality of those years. At the same time, however, we felt a strong bond with our friends, and did not want to damage their defense. The negotiations went on forever. There were some of us that wanted a more unequivocal statement, while others resisted. The end product is a hybrid that in my opinion is unsatisfactory. But it was a step forward and it was better than nothing.” The fact that I have kept it in the file in the drawer of the seventeenth-century bureau means that it was indeed better than nothing.

  One of the signatories of the communiqué was Caterina’s grandmother, the famous novelist Natalia Ginzburg. For me she was always the author of Family Sayings, which our elementary school teacher used to read out loud in class. Caterina’s uncle, Carlo Ginzburg, wrote one of the best-known essays in defense of Adriano Sofri, The Judge and the Historian. The second time that Caterina and I went out together, on a summer afternoon in Rome, we asked each other almost in unison, “Are our family differences a problem for you?” “No, not at all,” we both answered at the same time. One evening before our wedding, the prominent leftist Vittorio Foa and his wife, Sesa, invited us to their house. They had prepared gnocchi al pomodoro, as was the custom at the Ginzburg house, and Vittorio told Caterina, “This is a dinner that your grandmother would have prepared. In bocca al lupo—good luck!” Today we have two little girls, twins, who were born in New York and have both our family names: Emma and Irene Calabresi-Ginzburg. Their passports with two names that have become one are clear proof that they belong to the new century.

  Many times at the office of La Repubblica, after we had finished putting the newspaper to bed, I would stop by to see the editor in chief, Ezio Mauro. We would talk for hours about the 1970s and terrorism. His lucid views always impressed me. “Being a reporter in Turin during the first years of terrorism helped me to understand things that others could grasp only much later through deduction. I saw them unfolding right in front of me. All you had to do was go to the house of a prison guard who had been shot and meet the young wife with a child in her arms: even an idiot would have realized that the Red Brigades had to be stopped. I remember Antonio Cocozzello, an elementary school teacher and Christian Democrat councilman who had come to Turin from the Basilicata region. They shot him in the legs at a streetcar stop in the fall of 1977. He slid to the ground along the pole of a street sign and stayed there for a long time waiting for the ambulance. I made it in time to observe him and see the humble clothes he was wearing, and on the ground a plastic folder holding files for the fund of CISL, a trade union with strong ties to the Christian Democrats. He was helping people get their pensions. I went back to the Gazzetta del Popolo, where I found the terrorists’ claims: ‘We have lamed a Christian Democrat leader.’ I was well aware of what Christian Democrat power was and I didn’t like it at all, but right then and there I realized that Cocozzello had nothing to do with that power and that the Red Brigades were not on the side of the people and the poor. I went home and wrote sixty pages for my friends that I rediscovered a few years ago. In them I called the state an empty shell and asked, ‘But if we lose that shell, the democratic institutions, what will we have left?’”

  Cocozzello was shot by Patrizio Peci, who later became the first Red Brigade turncoat. I was with Ezio one afternoon in early September 2002 when he called Peppe D’Avanzo, who was interviewing Peci, twenty years after the death of Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Peppe wanted him to describe how Dalla Chiesa had convinced him to repent and had succeeded in crippling the Red Brigades. Peppe passed the phone to Peci, whose opening remark was “Signor Mauro, do you still drive an orange Renault?” Ezio was shocked and replied no. It seems that he had been tailed for a long time and that the Red Brigades had been thinking of targeting him rather than Carlo Casalegno, the journalist whom they killed in 1977. Mauro was much younger and less important, but he wrote editorials on terrorism and did not have an escort.

  Ezio’s tales of the city and of its biggest industry, the Fiat automobile manufacturer, are filled with civic passion. “As Gianni Agnelli used to say, those who haven’t lived in Turin cannot understand what terrorism was like: because of the intensity of it all, people stopped going out at night, and in the morning they would turn on the radio to hear who had been shot. The only time that I cried was when the great journalist Walter Tobagi was murdered. I was in front of the TV in the newsroom. It followed the same pattern: acts of violence and attempts to get the factory riled up. In this case, the factory workers didn’t take the bait, except for some fringe elements. I remember the words of Pietro Ingrao, a senior figure in the Italian Communist party, after the death of Casalegno. ‘You cannot kill in the name of the working class, in the name of ideology. You who have waged a union struggle for one hundred years to improve the life of a man by one quarter of an hour, how can you then have him murdered?’ During the years of terrorism the Italian Communist Party defended the government institutions: it had many shortcomings and many faults, but its defense of the government was not one of them.”

  Judge Guido Salvini has just finished explaining to me his inquest into the death of Antonio Custra, the young policeman who died in the shootout on Via De Amicis in Milan on May 17, 1977. We speak briefly about my father, about Lotta Continua in Milan, the Piazza Fontana massacre, and the death of Pinelli. I stand up, thank him, and am on my way out the door when he clears his throat and says, betraying a certain tension, “Please, Calabresi, have a seat for another moment.” I was speechless. I turned around and did what he asked, looking at him inquisitively. “When your father died, I was seventeen years old. I was a young militant, although I was a Socialist, and I, too, shouted those slogans on the streets. Yes, the slogans that you know well, you understand what I mean. Well, I wanted to tell you that I am ashamed, and I apologize to you and to your mother. For myself I can only ask for your forgiveness. We said things without thinking. We could not imagine the violence they would cause. There is only one thing that gives me peace. When your father was killed, I was not among those that celebrated, nor even among those who spouted conspiracy theories. I felt sick to my stomach about what had happened.” My throat closed from the emotion, and I thanked him. I stood up and left the courthouse.

  15.

  breathe

  IN APRIL 2000, I was offered a job at La Repubblica by the then editor of the political section, Massimo Giannini, and his deputy, Giorgio Casada. I had been working for five years at the ANSA wire service, and I dreamed of transferring to a daily newspaper. I liked the proposal, but one thing about it made me very uncomfortable: Could I work for a newspaper that published the articles of Adriano Sofri? I thought about it for a few days, saying nothing at home, but the rumor began to circulate. One day I was stopped at the T
ransatlantico Room at Montecitorio Palace by the spokesman for one of the center-left leaders, who said to me mysteriously, “Your father is turning over in his grave.”

  I took the train to Milan. My mother as usual served us coffee in the orange-bordered cups, the last souvenir of our apartment on Via Cherubini. I told her about the job offer and said that I was thinking of turning it down. She amazed me once again with her freshness and insight. She calmly asked me a series of questions: “Is it a good job? Do you like it? Is it a promotion? Are there people that you can learn from?” I answered yes to every question, but cautiously. So she added one final question. “If Sofri didn’t publish there, would you have any doubts?” No, I would almost certainly go, I replied. She smiled and said, “So go, then. Don’t listen to anyone, relax. I knew your father better than anyone, and I’m sure he would have said the same thing. He loved challenges, confrontation, mixing with people. In his head there weren’t two Italys, just one.” Then she looked at me. I was still confused, so she added what was perhaps closest to her heart. “Mario, don’t let other people decide your fate. They already did it once when you were a child. This time you be the one to decide.”

  I signed the contract. Some people were perplexed, but no one said anything to me about it, until November 2005, when at a high school ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Years of Lead, the speaker asked me out of the blue: How can you work for La Repubblica, where Sofri also writes? I answered with a joke. “If that’s the criterion, then there are not many papers I could work for in Italy … maybe I should change professions.”

  I remember one Sunday with Silvio Berlusconi at Santa Margherita Ligure. I managed to get an interview from him on the street, the only kind he would allow. I had just started working at La Stampa after a year at La Repubblica. I find him by the seaside, getting out of a car together with his daughter Marina. They buy a few things and then get an ice cream. I tag along. At every store we enter, Berlusconi says hello and then repeats the same lines. “Do you see this boy? He would be a great journalist but last year he became a Communist … unfortunately, he works for La Repubblica.” He says it once, twice, three times. I play along with it, smiling, limiting myself to saying, “Cavaliere, life is unpredictable: you can become a Communist without realizing it, even in the twenty-first century.” Then at every exit I ask him another question for the interview. At the fifth store, a pharmacy, one of the clerks makes a face when she hears “La Repubblica” and looks at me suspiciously. I feel like a stranger in a strange land, and the whole thing seems truly grotesque. I’ve been coming to this town for years, to the beach, to dinner, to the discotheques, summer and winter. I felt at home until a few moments ago. Can a label suddenly change who I really am? To tell the truth, Berlusconi was quick to accept my working for an opposition paper. A few months earlier, he had agreed to grant me and La Repubblica the interview in which he revealed that he had had a bout with cancer, but I have never forgotten the reaction of that pharmacist.

  The important thing, I have always thought, is to be yourself, to be faithful to your ideas, to respect your own history. Then you can have peace of mind anywhere you go. Almost anywhere.

  I have a sixth sense. There are situations when at a certain point I perceive something in the air that tells me to leave. I remember an evening in 1992, at a party. I don’t like the atmosphere, I don’t like the conversation. I am on pins and needles until I overhear a sentence. They’re talking about my mother. I take a breath and stop to listen. A woman is speaking. “It’s so disgusting. They gave all this money to the widow and she plays the victim, talking, talking.” She adds, laughing, “They should have killed her, too.”

  I hold my breath for a few seconds, perfectly still, like a stone. Something inside me dies. I have only enough breath to say nine words very slowly and in a low voice. “I don’t think that’s exactly the way things are.”

  “What do you know?”

  I look her in the eyes. I don’t have the energy to argue, or maybe instead I’m afraid that I won’t be able to control myself. So I am discreet. “The money. She didn’t get very much. She became an elementary school teacher to take care of her children.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s my mother.”

  No one says a word. The seconds ticking by seem like an eternity. The woman turns beet red, looking for words she cannot find. I feel faint. I look for the hostess, say good night, and thank her. I make it to the door, go out into the humid Milanese winter, and search for air. My head is pounding.

  “I struggle to keep all these things far from my heart, to forget them, not to focus on the rudeness, the insults, to be able to look to the future, to avoid being embittered.” Mama is speaking on the telephone. I’m telling her about the boxes filled with paper that I want to throw away, the hurtful sentences that I’ve found in the newspaper clippings, all the things we have had to digest. “How did you manage?” I ask her.

  “I staked my bets on life. What else could I do at the age of twenty-five with two little children to take care of and a third on the way? I kept busy every day, the only antidote for depression, and I tried to inoculate myself against giving in to laziness, to hatred, to becoming an angry victim. This doesn’t mean you should be docile or put your head in the sand. It means you should fight for truth and justice and continue to live, renewing the memory every day. To do otherwise would mean giving in completely to the terrorists, and handing a victory to their culture of death.”

  The sons of Marina Orlandi Biagi were twelve and nineteen when their father was killed. They are big boys with open friendly faces, smiling, making plans, traveling, arguing. It’s miraculous that she was able to keep them going, to push them toward the future. Marina protects them, but she has never constructed easy truths or given into despondency, and she keeps alive the lesson that their father had taught them: “Marco used to say that even though they were young, they should feel like an active, integral part of society, and that they already had great responsibilities. He would tell them that they were good boys, in order to prepare them to be good men. He used to tell them to always seek truth and justice, without worrying about being unpopular, to take the side of the weak and reject the violent.” Marina has no intention of giving in to despair or anger, and while she is speaking I see my mother and many other widows from the Years of Lead. “The terrorists struck my family with an unacceptable cruelty, but they did not succeed in taking away our life force.”

  Twenty-five years after the death of Tobagi, Giampaolo Pansa wrote of how he was summoned to give a deposition at the 1983 trial where he met Stella, the journalist’s widow.

  Stella spoke to me at length. One of the things that she said has stuck in my mind: she told me that she was trying to raise Luca and Benedetta without hatred for anyone. I left the bunker of that trial humbled by her equanimity. Not long after, I read an interview with Stella in Corriere, and I found the words that I had heard in the witness-box. “My children are perfectly aware of what happened. I have always told them everything, they know everything. And I think I’ve succeeded in freeing them from any feeling of rancor or hatred.”

  As for me, there is one thing I am certain of: those awful years changed all of us for the worse. They made us more hard-hearted, more brutal in our anxiety to forget, to erase the shadows of the dead and even the faces of those who are still alive. I often hear people say that we did too little to protect the militants and the gunmen. I don’t know if that’s really true. What I do know for certain is that we were inhumane with the wives, the children, and the parents of those who were killed.

  For a long time, I oscillated between my mother’s lesson and a blunt desire to take out my anger on everyone. When the talk began about clemency, I was shocked. I felt uncentered, without any fixed point to hold on to. Then I came up with the idea of going to the mountains, of looking for the place deep in the Valle d’Aosta where my grandfather had taught me to ski. For days and days, he had worked o
n it: lessons with a coach in the morning, and practice with him in the afternoon. He seemed to be rushing me, until he said, “Now I think you’re ready to ski the Val Veny trail.”

  The descent through the woods rewards you with a complete panorama of the Mont Blanc chain. In front of the Brenva Glacier, he straightened his coarse wool cap, took off his gloves, and put in his mouth a Baratti rhubarb candy, which he always kept in his pocket. Then he started to talk to me and I realized that all those lessons had a single goal, to bring me to this place. “When your father died, I looked for him for a long time. Then one day when I was here by myself, I found him, and every time I come back I feel him. I wanted you to know.” He said nothing more and I remained in silence. Three years later, Grandfather died from a stroke, before the trials had begun.

  That morning I went up on the first ski lift, the one taken by the ski masters in red ski jackets. The trails were still pure and the snow squeaked beneath my skis. When I made it to the point where you can see the rock wall of Aiguille Noire de Peutérey, which cuts across the summit of Mont Blanc, I was completely alone. Standing still with my eyes staring at the ice, I found first my grandfather, then Papà Gigi. I stood there for a long time listening to him, and I felt that it was right to look forward, to move, to commit to opening a new chapter out of respect for his memory. I had to carry him into the world with me, not humiliate him with arguments and rage, if I did not want to betray him. I had to place my bets on life and on love.