Pushing Past the Night (11 page)

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.

I
N THE AFTERMATH OF
S
EPTEMBER
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,

T
HE
P
IAZZA
F
ONTANA 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?