by Luce d'Eramo
I spent time with the partisans—they often came up to my room—and in fact I began to find them as deluded as I had been in Dachau.
I remember a strapping young man, from Grappa. He recalled the nights when, together with a few comrades, he would ambush the patrols of Black Brigades, the ones dressed in black with a white skull on their black berets. Sometimes, as he spoke, he ducked his head, finger on the trigger, his eye on the sights of a nonexistent rifle held against his shoulder, and his vivid complexion would pale. He would then give us a disoriented look.
I especially remember a tall, dark, rigid boy from Imola, eighteen years old, who had fought in the Po Valley. What remained most impressed in his memory were the nights he’d spent on sentry duty at a munitions depot. One day when Luciano, the lookout, was at my bedside with a bearded partisan from Milan, we talked about those nights when he’d stood guard.
His comrades would go out seeking action, hunting soldiers or Nazis who ventured into the area; they chose to leave him behind since he couldn’t move swiftly in the dark (they said) and so, as a result, he never learned. The fact is that fear of the Nazi dogs paralyzed him. The first times his buddies had brought him along with them, he’d stayed behind, frozen, as if rooted in the darkness, unable to respond to their calls (bird whistling, frog croaking); whoever went back for him had to shake him a bit before he could speak. But then on sentry duty he’d been even worse (a shiver runs down his back as he tells it). He’d stand there in the cold, in the darkness, staring at the bushes, and no matter which way he spun around, the suspicious rustling seemed to be behind him. He felt like the only exposed target on the entire plain, though his brain told him that in the fog he was only a blur, like the shadows of the woods, and that the precious crates of bullets and hand grenades wrapped in tarpaulins were hidden underground. There, the other guy was taking aim. They would shout Halt! before shooting at him (it might even be one of them) and he would just have time to toss the rifle into the marsh …
“Terrific,” the short, chubby-faced Milanese partisan with the curly beard bursts out, “great thinking!” Then, abruptly whirling around: “This is what you should have done,” he says. Crouched over an imaginary weapon in his hands, he fires a volley of shots into his friend’s darkness.
Meanwhile, some soldiers visiting other patients had come over.
“Oh sure,” a Russian veteran threw out, “you’re dreaming if you think you can react that quickly, buddy. When you’ve been on sentry duty for a few hours, out in the open, you become insensate.”
“Guerrilla action isn’t the front, where you don’t know why you’re fighting,” the Milanese replied in a deep voice, “there you have a purpose.”
“Your life is your life,” the Russian said with a shrug, “with or without a purpose. Fear plays tricks on you when you find yourself standing like an asshole, on lookout duty in the night.”
“Someone who shoots at the Russians is of course an asshole, what else would he be?”
“Listen to this blowhard, he thinks he can teach me, who—”
“Who are you calling a blowhard?”
They faced off. The others also jumped in.
“Just look at these eleventh-hour heroes,” one of the soldiers said, stepping forward.
“And you, a bunch of sheep.”
“Shirkers.”
“Nò-duè, nò-duè.”
“Ditch that beard, kid, you still stink of mother’s milk.”
“Fuckers.”
Other visitors gathered around, the patients who could get up, coming between them. A gray-haired man, blind in one eye, his other eye sad, kept saying: “Stop it, shame on you!”
“Shame on who? I lost an arm in Libya.”
“On all of you, on all of us,” he said, hands outstretched before him to quell the altercation.
“Tell it to your precious comrades who are still playing war, not to us. We’ve had enough of you clowns,” the other one said, running a hand across his forehead.
“Fascist.”
“Who’s a Fascist?” he said, grabbing the Milanese partisan by the pajama collar.
“Anyone who calls the Resistance a bunch of clowns. We liberated you from Fascism.”
“Behind the tanks of the Americans.”
By then they’d come to blows.
“These cocky bastards,” the veteran who’d lost his arm in Libya yelled, “for a few piddly firecrackers fired at—”
“I left half my guts there,” the Russian veteran said, shaking his head. “And now they want to put words in my mouth.”
“You too, though.” I tried to calm him down from my bed. “You treated him like he was boasting!”
He came over to me, his hands joined: “But they want to make me think I was a fool. A real asshole to have served three years at the front and two in captivity! Don’t you see?”
“And what did it get you?” The Milanese partisan shook his closed fist at him. “Can you tell me that?”
“I not only lost my youth but I was a fool to boot? Go to hell…” he snapped with an irritated gesture.
Two nurses rushed in: “Have you all gone crazy, screaming like that? Do you want the administrators to prohibit visiting? Now go, off with you, all of you.”
The men scattered, pushing up a sleeve, adjusting a belt, muttering “Poor Italy,” “We’ll show you,” “Look, we just have to take it.”
“You were wrong too, though,” I told Vittorio, the Milanese partisan, the following day. “You shouldn’t humiliate them…”
“Me? Humiliate them?” he said, mouth open in astonishment.
“I know you don’t mean to, but that’s just why you humiliate them all the more” (I identified with those soldiers). “You know, these are sensitive matters—a man’s whole life, you can’t toss it out with the trash,” I said, unable to find the right words.
“And who tossed it out with the trash, me? Just the opposite! It’s you who’s okay with seeing them as slaves.”
“And what should they be, masters?”
That’s the way I was thinking by then, that was what I didn’t want to say.
Later those men with whom I had identified were the same ones who paraded in front of my bed, basically scandalized that I would get married in my condition. An infantry sergeant said to me, “And I was mourning the fact that my wife and daughter were buried in a bombing! What if I had found them like this?” he said, pointing to my legs. “It’s really true, death isn’t the worst thing.”
(The only kind memory of the visitors who filed past me is the face of the sentry from the Po Valley who stopped a moment by my bed and said, “You’re sad, huh?”)
Vittorio had left. Our last talks had been relentless.
“You don’t want to understand me,” I told him. “This isn’t a matter of redressing workers. Don’t you see those sixteen-year-olds here at the hospital who get beaten up? Don’t those scenes teach you anything? To me they do, because I did it myself in the Lagers, I came to blows and fought with those pitiful wretches, understand? I had hatred in my body. Hatred against the Nazis boomeranged on us,” I told him, “and we internees attacked one another. I learned that, you know? That much at least I’ve learned.” I told him about the strike organized by the comrades of IG Farben: “We certainly didn’t fight among ourselves there,” I said. “With all the effort it took to involve the internees, imagine if we foreign workers had quarreled with one another! We didn’t give a damn about what everyone thought before. Whether they were volunteers or deportees, it was all the same to us.”
“Exactly, all united against the Nazis,” Vittorio said, more affably.
“But because they were in command!”
However, I could never finish what I wanted to say because Vittorio quickly started in with his list of atrocities again: “And how did they command? By exterminating, by the most sinister repression, the suppression of all democratic liberties.”
“Of course!” I jeered. “You’re pre
aching to the choir, my dear Vittorio. Anyway, they’re not in command anymore.”
The next morning he stopped me in the gym and, stroking the curly beard framing his chubby face, unintentionally jovial, said, “So for you the Nazi-Fascists have now been crushed and that’s that,” he said, gesturing as if washing his hands, his eyes darting over my face. Then, almost without moving his lips, he asked, “Just like that, you would absolve them all?”
“And you want to see them at the bottom of the social ladder?”
And the next time we met: “Even at the bottom, isn’t there perhaps some small difference between enemies and comrades?” he asked, holding up the edge of a fingernail and flashing his black eyes at me.
“It doesn’t count all that much!” I shrugged. I thought of Schwarzwald and of Lulù in Dachau.
“So you’d leave them where they are? Great!” he said angrily, his voice shrill.
“I look for enemies elsewhere,” I said, also fuming.
“Oh really? And how can you do that unless you first recognize comrades?”
“On paper? By a party card? The herd mentality again?” I ask.
“Frankly, I don’t follow you. Doesn’t the end result count for anything with you? Won’t our result be a bit different from that of your Nazi-Fascists?” he said, twisting the curly hair on his chin.
“But it’s because the result is different that we don’t need people who obey us. Our adversary can be recognized by his actions, by the factual evidence. Why would I need a follower? I’ll prove it to you. At IG Farben, for four months I was convinced that the Meister, that is, the foreman of the Ch 89, was a Nazi, I looked at him as such, then during the foreigners’ strike it was clear that he was in fact on our side. Yet he wore a Nazi badge on his lapel. I had mistaken another Vorarbeiter without a badge for a comrade, because, away from the others, he always showed me a clenched fist, winked at me, and didn’t harass me at work. And I kept smiling complicitly at him. One day he rubbed up against me and said in my ear, ‘Tonight?’ still showing me his fist, and I saw that he was holding it like this.” I showed Vittorio my fist, thumb stuck between my index and middle fingers. “Beginning to suspect, I nodded yes and asked permission to go to the toilet. I consulted Grùscenka, a Soviet comrade assigned to the latrine, and you can imagine how hard she laughed. The story made the rounds of the Lagers: I had mistaken a proposal to fuck for a communist salute. And from a man who was the section’s worst womanizer and who, while not even registered with the party—on the contrary, passing himself off to us as an anti-Nazi—was taking advantage of the deportees’ hunger.”
“And what’s that supposed to prove to me?” Vittorio said. “You think we don’t know? Or have you taken to perpetually stating the obvious just to be difficult?” And as if to himself: “I don’t get what you’re driving at.” He went on: “It seems like a trick of yours to stand back. You know, when a person clings to petty distinctions already known to all, reckoned with a thousand times”—he shook his head and looked at me—“when someone begins to resort to sophistry…”
“Sophistry?” I hooted. “Don’t you have eyes? What’s the use of hammering hatred and love into the heads of those who are exploited if they don’t see what’s subjugating them?”
I thought of my companions in the ward, workers and peasants from Emilia, victims of bombs or machine guns, who were always talking about the miseries they suffered at the hands of the Nazi-Fascists. Yet when my father, a liberal, showed up—he sometimes accompanied my mother on the trips she made from Milan every weekend to visit me—these same comrades were glad to see him:
“Such a wonderful father!” they told me.
He came in smiling, with the handsome demeanor of a former pilot, handed out tips to the nurses, brought cookies and candies to patients whose hand he kissed (as he had also done with Gheorg), snapped their photos. Tall, bald, with a Roman profile and flashing brown eyes, he was a man who sparkled in public, polished and refined when it came to women’s topics, while abruptly dismissive when talking about serious issues. Even his voice changed. Confidential and husky at social gatherings or among a few close friends, it became sharp, impatient, almost nasal when he dealt with matters that irritated him, unless he chose to deflect them with a light, somewhat distracted tone.
He was especially exuberant that summer of ’46 because he had obtained the funding to rent a nineteenth-century building on a street in central Milan, in whose ground-floor salons he displayed the aquariums he designed to order. He showed me color photos of these underwater worlds he created for the villas of industrialists, for first-run cinemas, for nightspots catering to Rotary Clubs. Genially, he went from bed to bed to show them to my neighbors as well, bending over them as they lay there in their cotton hospital gowns, contemplating the pictures with dumbstruck faces, flattered to listen to such a “true gentleman.” With great charm, he pointed out how the plants in those aquariums swayed among stalactites and ravines that seemed to have formed in sunken cities (“miniature Atlantises,” he said with a smile), in the midst of which darted precious little exotic fish, red, coral, or silver (I must admit that, among other things, he had real promotional talent).
In that ward in which our food was served in earthenware bowls with the aluminum cutlery of the Lagers, he emphasized the high cost of the fine porcelain with which he had his underwater metropolises constructed. And that unapproachable price aroused reverence in the patients, who seemed to get a boost from it.
Finally, he would return to me: “Such nice companions you have, such darling little women, you’re well-off here. So don’t do anything foolish again, you hear?” he said, with a sideways look that was stern yet playful, as if to say: I don’t want to say it again, you’ve already paid so much …
*
But wait, am I about to start over again from the beginning? I’m dismayed. You’re right, you’re right, I tell the literary compartment of my brain, I’ll stop right now. Only one more thing (I mentally raise a finger, asking my censor for permission) and then that’s it, it’ll only take two shakes of a lamb’s tail, I promise. Just this one thing, be fair, it’s too important.
One Sunday, that ’46 in Bologna, I asked my father what inquiries he had made when he learned that I’d been repatriated.
“Inquiries? Why?” he asked distractedly.
“Didn’t they telegraph you from Verona that I had arrived on August 2 of ’44?” I said hesitantly.
“Yes, I don’t remember the date but I think so. It’s true, that’s right, we were expecting you any day. But excuse me, didn’t you write us that you had been captured in a Nazi roundup on the street in Verona?”
“Yes, Papa, but I wrote to you about it six months later.”
It was the last time I’d been in touch with my family, in December ’44. As I said, after Thomasbräu I had gotten hired at Siemens under my real name, and from there I was able to send home word of myself (I did it mainly for my mother, who, despite her perceptual distance, I sensed was suffering because of me).
“Forgive me, Lucia, I have no memory for dates, you know. I don’t know how much time had passed, but a repatriation is not a simple thing, my dear girl, the Germans were exacting, you were out of the hospital, am I right? We knew these things took time. Besides, why dig up the past, sweetheart, you’re here now, think about enjoying life. As soon as you’re up to it, you’ll see, we’ll come and pick you up at the hospital and take you for some nice drives, forget this wheelchair, hm? Isn’t that better? You’ll see, you won’t have time to be sad. Let me take care of it. Look at this,” he said, taking some new color photos out of his bag, “this little crested fish, flat as a blade, tell me, don’t his fins look golden?” And I recognized myself in that little confined creature, caught by the lens with his mouth like a suction cup against the glass.
It was then, I think, that I began to erase my departure from Verona. It had been an imaginary danger, thinking that my father was looking for me. I could easily h
ave gone to work in a factory in Turin or elsewhere. What an error of judgment.
Perhaps that had been the deepest obstacle—for thirty years—to remembering the about-face in Verona, a reluctance to talk about my family. More accurately, I was afraid to reopen the whole question of my relationship with my parents.
What did my paralysis have to do with all those years of self-censorship? Who knows whether the excuse I’d subconsciously been giving myself not to sever relations with my father a second time didn’t go back to ’46.
XIII
Due to my economic difficulties, by early ’60, I was no longer able to pay my rent. Toward June, I asked my father if he could put me up with Lorenzo for a few months until I got back on my feet.
After I’d split up with Domenico, my mother had also separated from my father, amicably. Years earlier she had already resumed her studies when she was certain that her husband was squandering the family assets. With a diploma in French that she had obtained as a young woman in a college in Grenoble, in middle age she had enrolled at university, learning Latin all over again and majoring in languages with the highest honors. Then, after passing the competitive exams, she began teaching. She was now a tenured instructor at a high school in Milan, where she lived. My father had never forgiven her for “rearing up like a suffragette.” He referred to her as “Granny the student!” and from then on relations between my parents had deteriorated.
My father had furnished a penthouse apartment in Balduina, in which he let me and my son live during a time when I began to systematically forge contacts with workers and immigrants from the south. I studied the conditions of the borgatari in Pietralata and in the huts at Gordiani and I became friends with some of the employees in the gas refineries in San Paolo. When the gas workers went on strike in September, I banded with them from the outside to support their demands (I wrote about it as well).