by Tobias Jones
‘It was the right thing to do,’ are the words Digilio claims Zorzi used in the aftermath of the bombing. ‘He spoke of the Piazza Fontana slaughter,’ continued Digilio, ‘as a war report. He spoke of it as if he had been the head of the command. He said that he had had the courage to do it, the others were weak.’
A few weeks later, in the witness chair in front of the horseshoe of judges, Pino Rauti is rubbing his hands in a scholastic manner. He’s a short man, wearing a cheap blue suit. He’s got slicked-back white hair, and eyes that seem to fall away at the edges. One of the Italian journalists tells me Rauti is playing the ‘Andreotti gambit’: the important, cultured man dragged through the courts by spiteful, lesser beings. Rauti was, in the 1960s, the leader of Ordine Nuovo: ‘the motto of Ordine Nuovo is the same as that of the SS: “our honour is called faith,”’ he wrote back in the 1960s. His is a cantankerous performance. He frequently calls the prosecution lawyer by a lesser title, and is each time corrected. During his deposition one journalist from the ‘Communist daily’ (Il Manifesto) guffaws melodramatically, rocking her hands – pressed together in praying position – backwards and forwards (the gesture usually used by imploring footballers). The judge suddenly interrupts Rauti and asks for the journalist to be ejected from the court.
In 1956, Rauti and his followers left the Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, and formed their own study centre, Ordine Nuovo. The move had been precipitated by a perceived softening of the MSI, and Rauti remained outside the party until 1969. During that time, the new movement made its position explicit: ‘the Aryan blood of the SS is still warm and so is that of the Kamikaze and of the Black Legionnaires and those of the Iron Guard who fell in the name of and for the eternal Ordine Nuovo.’ Rauti presented a paper at a conference in 1965, where Communists were described as ‘some sort of an alien presence, like the extra-terrestrial races of science fiction …’
Although Rauti denies chairing a meeting of Ordine Nuovo in Padova in April 1969, shortly before the spring bombing campaign, it’s certain that he went on an ‘educational’ tour of Papadopoulos’s Greece in the summer of that year. When an electrician came forward as a witness, claiming that he had unknowingly supplied the timers for Ordine Nuovo’s bombs, Rauti (identified by the electrician’s wife) apparently visited the shop to counsel silence. (Asked about this in court, Rauti indignantly replies that it’s inconceivable that a respected politician would do such a thing.) The strange thing – if it’s true – emerging from the trial is that Rauti and his Fascists weren’t isolated extremists, but rather pawns of a very clear, strategic plan. In his Istruttoria, the prosecutor, Guido Salvini, wrote of Ordine Nuovo that it was ‘one of the organisations of the right characterised by the most extensive collusion with the apparatuses of the state …’ Rauti’s cantankerous performance in the witness stand isn’t because he denies his Fascism (which he proudly admits), it’s because after years of appearing the most threatening extremist in Italian politics, he now seems little more than a man manipulated by much greater forces. During his deposition, newspapers report that in the early 1970s, Rauti was receiving cheques from the US embassy.
It gets even stranger, though. As I emerge into the hazy Milan sun of the June evening, I watch Rauti chatting amiably with journalists, talking about his bridge-building towards Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition. It’s partly wishful thinking on his part, but they have been in alliance in the past (Rauti claims to have swung the European elections the way of Berlusconi’s ‘Pole of Liberties’ when they shared the electoral ticket in Abruzzo, Caserta and Calabria). I’m amazed, not because Rauti might be on the fringes of a rather dark, right-wing coalition – it’s simply that he’s still there. A man whose organisation has been accused of almost every Italian slaughter is still in politics: smiling, suited, flirting with the female journalists. I join the huddle around him, and ask for an interview. He courteously invites me to Rome.
Italy’s capital is normally sneered at by those in the north. Many friends in Parma or Milan have never even been there. It’s a city sated with august classicism. The man-hole covers are still initialled with SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus. There are palm trees outside embassies and governmental palaces. Here the graffiti is very different to Parma: swastikas and celtic crosses, obscene phrases against ‘the blacks’ and gli ebrei, ‘the Hebrews’. It’s a strange, beautiful place, almost knowingly theatrical. It has the perfect balance of modernity and antiquity.
The political definition of Rauti and the MSI in the 1970s was doppiopetto: a word that means double-breasted, and sums up that ambiguous combination of respectability, duplicity and aggression. (Dare il petto, ‘to give the breast’, means to be up-front or aggressive.) The seat of the ‘Tricolour Flame’, Rauti’s political party, is a short walk from the Vatican. Rauti, the secretary of the party, sits mock-presidential between threadbare flags and ageing posters.
In 1943, at the age of seventeen, he volunteered to serve under Mussolini during what he calls the ‘civil war’. He was captured by the British in Algeria in 1945, while trying to reach Spain to ‘continue the fight’. Ironically, he graduated in law from inside a prison in Reggio Calabria. ‘I’ve been in prison a dozen times,’ he says proudly. ‘I consider myself something of an anomaly as a politician. One Russian publication once said that Rauti, with his glasses, seems like an ordinary accountant, but he’s actually a dangerous revolutionary.’ He prides himself that he is, to Communists, ‘a black beast’. He revels in using the words ‘Communists’ and ‘Russia’, just as much as the left in general jeers ‘Fascist’ each time his name is mentioned.
‘The anni di piombo,’ he says, ‘were ugly, dramatic, numbing, bloody years in the history of this country. But I have no regrets. We had so many youngsters killed by the Communists. There was never any tranquillity. Hundreds of our young people from the right were put in prison. They were terribly dramatic years, in which our youngsters responded to violence with violence.’ The only thing dangerous about Rauti now is his charm, his steely politeness, his ability to brush off any question with amiable, sometimes barbed, banter. What, I wonder, does he make of the wave of trials trying to resolve the many riddles of those years? ‘There will be no legal truth,’ he says confidently. ‘There have been court-cases and counter-cases, absolutions, inquiries, new prosecutions. The current thinking seems to be suggesting that what happened to, and because of, the right was in some way connected to the CIA. There was a sort of goading of opposing extremes at the centre of which was the power system of the Christian Democratic party. One day there would be something from the left, then something from the other side, and all the while the Christian Democrats appeared as the saviour of governmental stability. It was precisely in that period that that party received its maximum franchise …’
‘So Fascists were inadvertently the puppets of the Christian Democrats?’
He becomes impenetrable, simply staring at me, waiting for the next question. ‘Listen,’ he says eventually, ‘about some things there have been partial conclusions, but about the darkest incidents there are only question marks.’
‘And your own, personal involvement?’
‘It’s true that I was involved in some things thirty years ago, but I have always been absolved. We should turn the page. All these cases are just attempts by the Communists to demonise me and the right. Times change,’ he goes on, ‘no one wears the clothes they did thirty or fifty years ago. I might admire the Roman empire, but I don’t go around riding a chariot, right? But I’ll tell you this, we haven’t as a political party renounced our history, we haven’t renounced the ideals that are generally called ‘Fascism’. Italians are at risk of physical extinction. We have the lowest birth rate in the world, bar none. I’m not racist, but there’s a limit to tolerance. There has been such a rapid influx of immigrants, from Morocco, from Algeria, from China. These people have different colours, smells, flavours, climates. Why should they be on the peripheries of our society inst
ead of back home amongst their own?’
That evening, sitting in a bare hotel room in Via Verona, I finally find the perfect description of Italian politics. It comes from a columnist for Espresso magazine: ‘In Italy, as in chemistry, everything is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed …’ In other words, given the catalyst of time, appearances might change but the elements involved remain exactly the same. On either side of the equation, past and present, the same personalities exist, only configured slightly differently, arranged in new, confusing coalitions. It’s that which causes the surrealism and sensitivity when writing, decades later, about the slaughters or the anni di piombo: most of those names which recur throughout the history books or in the court cases are still highly active in contemporary politics. It seems there’s no crime or conviction sufficient to end an Italian politician’s career, no historical event that can’t be smemorizzato, conveniently forgotten.
It would be understandable if Italy had undergone its own peace process. But, unlike Northern Ireland or South Africa, the past isn’t faced before being forgotten; it is simply never faced. Nothing is ever, ever admitted. ‘The one constant of Italian schools,’ writes Giorgio Bocca, ‘is that of removing the history of the previous half century … the fear of history seems congenital, ordinary people have somehow understood that to talk about history, to interrogate history, isn’t prudent, that there’s something inconvenient in history …’14 The result is that nowhere in the world is as good at reinvention or rehabilitation as Italy. It’s called gattopardismo, the ‘leopardism’ of Lampedusa in which everything pretends to change, but remains exactly as it was.
It’s similar to the notion of trasformismo, which is usually used to describe the ‘revolving-door’ image of Italian governments (hinting that the actual doorman, and those going in and out of the lobby, remain for decades the same people simply in rotation). Another slightly bewildered British journalist once called it the Italian version of musical chairs, in which no chair is ever removed. The political music might change, and people will shuffle into other ‘armchairs’, but basically the same players always remain in the game.
By the time investigators, in the early 1970s, had identified Rauti and members of Ordine Nuovo as the probable perpetrators of the Piazza Fontana bomb, the bombing of 12 December 1969 was already beginning to seem not simply an isolated, tragic act of terrorism, but rather a reflection of the entire ‘strategy of tension’. Suspicions regarding such a strategy were increased by the long list of ‘illustrious corpses’ which began to be added to the original victims of the bombing; adequate evidence, it seemed, that Piazza Fontana wasn’t the inspiration of a few fanatic delinquents, but rather the product of a well-drilled organisation. (Illustrious Corpses – the title of Francesco Rosi’s 1975 film based on a work by Leonardo Sciascia – was fictional, but the atmosphere was similar: mysterious murders which seemed anything but coincidental.) As the Presidente della Corte d’Assise di Roma wrote in 1971: ‘it’s necessary immediately to fix a date for the trial. I have received a list of the witnesses who have died mysteriously and public opinion is worried …’
Pasquale Juliano, a Paduan policeman investigating Franco Freda, another Fascist suspect, was accused of irregular conduct and suspended; the only witness in his defence, himself a former policeman, was found by his wife at the bottom of a stairwell. (He had predicted his own violent death, saying to a friend: ‘You’ll find me in the basement with a blow to my head, or in the lift-shaft’.) Other strange deaths followed. Armando Calzolari, a treasurer for the Fronte Nazionale of the ‘Black Prince’, Junio Valerio Borghese, went missing in December 1969. His body was found over a month later, on 28 January 1970, at the bottom of a well on the outskirts of Rome. Left-wing journalists suggested at the time that he had been killed because he was about to make revelations regarding the Milan slaughter. Another victim, Vittorio Ambrosini, a 68-year-old lawyer and brother of the President of the Corte Costituzionale, had hinted that he knew the names of those involved in the bombing. In October 1971 he fell from the seventh storey window of a hospital. (It was intended ‘to be passed off as suicide’ claimed one former Fascist to Guido Salvini in April 1995.)
The problem with the Piazza Fontana trial is the way in which it seems entirely divorced from reality. There are so many words. Words everywhere, and not a shred of common sense. Documents multiply amongst themselves, which sire new pieces of paper, loosed from all logic. The longer I spent following the trial, the more it seemed like something out of Kafka. Legalese that promises clarity only ushers in confusion. One English academic often sitting beside me in the press gallery sighs: ‘You know that the bill simply to photocopy the documents of this case would be about 16 million lire? That’s five thousand pounds of photocopying!’ The transcripts of another recent trial (in which the seven-times Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was accused and absolved of involvement in the murder of the journalist Mino Pecorelli) came to 650,000 pages. The number of documents gathered by the Slaughter Commission is now well over one million. Inevitably, after the first, spectacular accusations, media interest in the Piazza Fontana trial is ebbing away because it’s all so mind-boggling, increasingly impossible to see the wood for the trees.
I’m beginning, finally, to understand why so much scandal, even murderous, is simply ignored in Italy. It’s too confusing to find the truth. It takes so much time. There is so much legalese and mystification that it’s impossible to say explicitly, concisely, what happened. The way in which that mystification and confusion occur is very simple. Italy has more laws than any other European country. The oldest university in the world, in Bologna, was founded for precisely that reason: to decipher and recipher the Justinian codes, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the Digesto and the rest of the Roman laws. What’s important is not the principle, but the points of law. Codify, recodify, encrypt. Quod non est in actis non est in mundo: anything not written down, documented, simply doesn’t exist. The standard compliment for a history book here isn’t that the argument seems convincing, it’s simply that the book is documentato, that it’s based on documentary evidence. The Codice Rocco from 1931 even demanded a certificato di esistenza in vita: it wasn’t sufficient to be alive, you had to prove it with a document.
Italy’s great novel of the nineteenth century, Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, has a lawyer who is appropriately called Azzeccagarbugli, ‘pettifogger’ or ‘bamboozler’. Debate relies not upon common sense or precedence, but upon producing alternative documents which trump the others in their intricate absurdity. To be convincing you have to deploy impenetrable pomp. That is how Italian power works, by bamboozling the listener: ‘Using erudite law, which is by its very nature inaccessible to the many,’ one Italian academic has written:
Italian power became something naturally distant from the population, as the language of command was distant and diverse from ordinary language. Law detached itself from life. It became something for specialists, intellectually refined … abstract. The use of something as coarse and democratic as an Anglo-Saxon jury would be unthinkable … the law will remain always a thing of bamboozlers, of cryptic language, which is of liars, a power used only to take in and deprive the weak.15
The irony is that Italy, so painfully legalistic, is as a result almost lawless. If you’ve got so many laws, they can do anything for you. You can twist them, rearrange them, rewrite them. Here, laws or facts are like playing cards: you simply have to shuffle them and fan them out to suit yourself.
* * *
28 September 2000. A colpo di scena in the courtroom – a show stopper. Martino Siciliano, the other pentito on whom the Piazza Fontana trial pivots, is due to start his deposition. Siciliano was at the same school as Zorzi in the 1960s, and is described in one paper as a ‘controversial character, psychologically flawed, divided between collaboration with justice, the need for money [and] fear of his ex-boss, Delfo Zorzi …’ In recent years, Siciliano has more or less auctioned himself to th
e highest bidder, accepting employment and money from Zorzi, before taking a wage and a modest, protective escort from the Italian state. Zorzi calls his former friend a ‘Falstaff’, ‘an alcoholised megalomaniac’ serving ‘Communist justice’.
Then the colpo di scena. Siciliano goes missing. Since his arrival from Colombia, he had been staying in a hotel on the outskirts of Milan. All that’s left in his hotel room is a book entitled Little Money, Much Honour. His brother claims that Siciliano, who had previously provided hundreds of pages of interviews, had lost faith in the state, having been ‘treated like a tramp’. It’s unlikely that those interviews, conducted by Salvini, will now be admissible as evidence. None of which goes reported in the press. During the weekend following his disappearance, journalists are on strike. By the following Monday, the press are more preoccupied with Italian gold medals in the Sydney Olympics and the weekend exploits of Ferrari, the so-called cavallino rampante (the ‘rampaging little horse’) than with the disappearance of another witness.
A little later Panorama, a weekly magazine owned by Silvio Berlusconi, finds a bizarre scoop. Martino Siciliano, the AWOL pentito, hadn’t actually been receiving millions of lire from the official slush fund for that purpose. He had been receiving money directly from Guido Salvini, the investigating magistrate to whom he had made his confessions; a financial collaboration which seems at best unwise, and certain to cast doubt on the veracity of the pentito’s confessions. Another scoop for the defence is that Carlo Digilio, the infirm pentito in a Lake Garda clinic, has identified a photograph of the man he claims was his CIA contact. Defence lawyers, though, track down the man, and claim the CIA agent is actually an old American in a small town in Kansas, and reveal that he wasn’t even in Italy when the alleged meetings with Digilio, in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, took place.