Pushing Past the Night (14 page)

Marina Orlandi lives in a house filled with plants, memories, and Chinese stamps. She has no wish to name names or draw up
lists of the good and the bad. She prefers to look to the future, and hopes that the Marco Biagi Foundation can be a place “where pride of place is given to dialogue and constructive criticism, in-depth and unbiased study.” The same way that she had envisioned it, together with her husband, the evening before they killed him. “We spoke for a long time about what he was doing to safeguard as much as possible young people, women, the least protected strata of the workforce who already had it tough, and who were very likely to have an even harder go of it. He wanted to keep going, with boyish enthusiasm, despite the fact that he felt isolated and in danger. Twenty-four hours later, he was killed. That night I resolved with all my heart that his assassins, after stamping out his life, would not succeed in stamping out his ideas, too.” On the foundation's logo is a bicycle whose front light is on, illuminating the street.

In the fall of 2006, Marina Orlandi felt an old fear coming back. Her instincts placed her on alert. The slogans at recent protest marches were taking on a tone she knew all too well, reminiscent of the public lynching of her husband. So she broke her own rule and ended her silence by writing a public message on the occasion of the inauguration of the Marco Biagi Foundation's new offices at the University of Modena. “Whenever we try to address the labor issues, we end up exacerbating a conflict that quickly degenerates into a debate that is not only sterile but, as unfortunately we know all too well, extremely dangerous.” Her commitment to defending the memory of her husband is unwavering, even if she does so mostly in silence and without appearing in public. She doesn't allow herself to be photographed, and she defends her children's and her own privacy because she wants to continue to walk freely through the streets of Bologna.

When slander is repeated insistently enough, it creates an entirely new person that supplants the old. I cannot help but think back on my father and the way he was portrayed between 1969
and 1972, with the collusion of newspapers, plays, films, leaflets, and graffiti (some of which seems to have survived the passage of time, as well as the denials and the proof). Today we are still obliged to read that Luigi Calabresi was trained in America, that he was in the CIA, that in 1966 he was the official escort of the American general Edwin A. Walker, and that it was he who introduced Walker to General Giovanni De Lorenzo, who was organizing a coup d'état in Italy. Yet it would take so little, the tiniest speck of intelligence or curiosity, a minimum of fact-checking, to disprove these claims. My father didn't speak a word of English and never had the possibility to learn it or the time to travel. The only stamp on his passport was issued in Barcelona on May 31, 1969: the first day of the honeymoon that took my parents to Granada and Seville, where I was conceived. Then, he went to Switzerland on business. Nowhere else. Never crossed the ocean. This could all be disputed, to the greater joy of the conspiracy theorists, were it not for one small detail: the facts. He graduated from college in 1965. He applied to become deputy chief inspector, and in 1966 he attended the training courses at the policemen's academy. It would be beyond belief for the CIA to assign Rome to a fresh graduate, to assign him to escort a general around Rome, or for a student at the police academy to act as the intermediary between the Americans and an Italian general planning a coup. Recently I looked into who this General Walker was: he was an American general who fought in Italy in World War II and then in Korea; he leaned so far to the right that the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy, Robert McNamara, removed him from his post and he left the army. In 1961.

My father sued
Lotta Continua
for accusing him of being Pinelli's murderer and for the American “legends” it had concocted, in the hope of demonstrating that the accusations against him were libelous. It was a suit that my mother opposed until the end—“You're playing their game”—but my father explained
that he had been asked to file suit by the Ministry of the Interior. It was a waste of time and the trial backfired, becoming an opportunity for his enemies to recycle all their libelous attacks on him. In the end, the judge was recused and the trial was suspended and assigned to other judges. It did not come to an end until four years after my father's death, when the editor in chief of
Lotta Continua
was convicted of libel.

After the recusal, eight hundred intellectuals signed a document published in
L'espresso
on June 13, 1971, in which my father was called “Inspector Torture” and “responsible for the demise of Pinelli.” The list of signatories was endless. I've met dozens of them over the years, although I've only talked about the document with one, Lucio Colletti. I met him at the Montecitorio Palace when, his Marxist days long over, he was a Member of Parliament for Forza Italia. I would buy him a coffee, and he would offer me one of those thin cigarettes he was always smoking, then he'd give me a few choice quotes for whatever piece I was writing. In 2001, when the election ballots were being drawn up, I did a humorous interview with him in which he took aim at his own party, calling them lily-livered softies. He said he was going to cash in his chips and retire. They took him at his word and took his name off the ballot. The next day he called me, feeling a little down, and said, “You ruined me. You know I can't resist a good joke and you got me. But what can I say. After all, I do feel like I owe you something.
Pazienza!
I guess I'll have to look for a bench in the sun.” That afternoon I saw Berlusconi in the Transatlantico Room at the Montecitorio Palace. I followed him and said, “Do you really want to act like a Stalinist and kick someone out for a remark that was meant to be funny? It's my fault. Colletti was joking.” In the end, they put his name back on the slate, and he was ready to make fun of Berlusconi and his cohorts all over again.

•   •   •

In the July 3, 2002, issue of
Corriere della Sera
, the former editor in chief, Paolo Mieli (he would return to the paper's helm in December 2004), replied to a letter on the subject of universities and specialized degrees. Referring to the long list of signatures affixed to the bottom of the letter, he took the opportunity to say something that had evidently been on his mind for some time. The title of his reply was “Beware of Signatures at the Bottom of Petitions and Manifestos.” I have the clipping in a large envelope in the center drawer of a seventeenth-century bureau bought at an auction at the charterhouse of Pavia in 1969. It was the prize piece of my parents' house on Via Cherubini. On the left side of the drawer are thousands of letters collected in colored files. On the right is the envelope with letters to the editor or articles that have a special meaning.

Mieli wrote:

From the same envelope, I take out a letter from Folco Quilici, written in 1991, and a paid advertisement published on May 18, 1997, in the left-wing newspaper
Manifesto
. In the letter, Quilici, a writer and documentarian famous for his works on the sea, describes how he discovered that his signature was among the eight hundred. “Dear Signora Calabresi, I wanted to tell you that it was not me. I have the feeling that it was someone else or that my signature was added without contacting me. Indeed, please believe me when I say how saddened I am by the assassination
of a man of courage.” The newspaper clipping instead comes from people who were on the other front: it is a short communiqué prepared on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of my father's death. At the bottom there are eleven signatures, all from former leaders of Lotta Continua.

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?'”