My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey. I must wait for the memories to come of their own accord, following their own logic. That is how it is in the fog. In the sunlight, you see things from a distance and you can change directions purposefully in order to meet up with something particular. In the fog, something or someone approaches you, but you do not know what or who until it is near.
But when I think of my life at the Oratorio I can see it all, like a film. No longer proglottidean but, rather, a logical sequence …
Life changed when I was eleven years old, with my evacuation, in 1943, to Solara. In the city, I had been a melancholy boy who played with his schoolmates for a few hours a day. The rest of the time, I was curled up with a book. In Solara, where I could walk to the town school by myself and romp through the fields and vineyards, I was free, and uncharted territory opened up before me. And I had many friends to roam with.
When the Allies were bombing the city, we could see the distant flashes from our windows in Solara, hear the rumbling of something like thunder. The war had made us fatalists, a bombing was like a storm. We kids kept playing calmly through Tuesday evening, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. But were we really calm? Were we not beginning to be marked by anxiety, by the stunned and relieved melancholy that grips anyone who passes alive through a field strewn with corpses?
At the Oratorio, where we spent our afternoons after school, we were basically free, rounded up only at six, for catechism and benediction; otherwise we did as we pleased. There was a rudimentary merry-go-round, a few swings, and a small theatre, where I trod the boards for the first time, in “The Little Parisian Girl.” Older boys also came to the Oratorio, and even young men – ancient to us – who played Ping-Pong or cards, though not for money. That good man Don Cognasso, the Oratorio’s director, required of them no profession of faith; it was enough that they came there instead of caravanning toward the city on bicycles, even at the risk of being caught in a bombardment, to attempt the climb up to the Casa Rossa, the bordello famous throughout the province.
It was at the Oratorio, after September 8th of 1943, that I first heard about the partisans. For a while, they were just boys who were trying to avoid either the Repubblica Sociale’s new draft or the Nazi roundups, which meant being sent off to work in Germany. Later, people began to call them rebels, because that was what they were called in official communiqués. Only when we found out that ten of them had been executed – including one from Solara – and when we heard via Radio London that special messages were being directed to them, did we begin to call them partisans, or patriots, as they preferred. In Solara, people rooted for the partisans, because the boys had all grown up in those parts, and when they came around, although they all now went by nicknames – Hedgehog, Ferruccio, Lightning, Bluebeard – people still used the names they had known them by before. Many were youths I had seen at the Oratorio, playing hands of scopa in flimsy, threadbare jackets, and now they reappeared wearing brimmed berets, cartridge belts over their shoulders, submachine guns, belts with two grenades attached, or even holstered pistols. They wore red shirts, or jackets from the English Army, or the pants and leggings of the King’s officers. They were beautiful.
By 1944, the partisans were appearing in Solara, making quick incursions when the Fascist Black Brigades were elsewhere. Even among the partisans, there were divisions. On occasion, the Badogliani came down, with their blue neckerchiefs; people said that they backed the monarchy and still charged into battle shouting “Savoy!” Other times, it was the Garibaldini, with their red neckerchiefs, singing songs against the King and his right-hand man, Badoglio. The Badogliani were better armed; it was said that the English sent aid to them but not to the other partisans, who were all Communists. The Garibaldini had submachine guns, like the Black Brigades’, captured in occasional clashes or in some surprise attack on an armory, and the Badogliani had the latest-model English Sten guns. One of the Badogliani once let me fire a round. Most of the time they fired to keep in practice, or to impress girls.
Gragnola. He frequented the Oratorio. He insisted that his name was pronounced Gràgnola, but everyone called him Gragnòla, a word that brought to mind a hail of gunfire. He replied that he was a peaceful man, and his friends answered back, “Come off it, we know …” It was whispered that he had connections to the Garibaldini brigades up in the mountains – he was even a great leader, someone said, and risked more by living in town than he would by hiding out, because if his activities were ever discovered he would be shot at the drop of a hat.
Gragnola acted with me in “The Little Parisian Girl,” and after that he took a liking to me. He taught me how to play tressette. He seemed to feel uncomfortable with the other adults at the Oratorio, and he spent long hours chatting with me. Perhaps he knew he was saying things so outrageous that if the others heard him they would take him for the Antichrist, and so he could only trust a kid.
He showed me the clandestine broadsheets that were circulating. He would never let me take them because, he said, anyone caught with one would be shot. That was how I learned of the Ardeatine massacre, in Rome. “Our comrades stay up in the hills,” Gragnola used to tell me, “so these things won’t happen anymore. Those Germans, they should all be kaputt!”
Gragnola had been a teacher, I did not know of what, in trade schools, going to work every morning on his bicycle and returning home in midafternoon. Then he had to stop: some said because he was devoting himself heart and soul to the partisans; others murmured that it was because he was consumptive. Indeed, Gragnola had the look of a consumptive, an ashen face with two sickly pink cheekbones, hollow cheeks, a persistent cough. He had bad teeth, he limped, he was slightly hunchbacked, with shoulder blades that jutted out, and his jacket collar stood apart from his neck, so that his clothes seemed to hang on him like sacks. Onstage, he always had to play the bad guy or the lame caretaker of a mysterious villa.
He was, everyone said, a well of scientific knowledge and had often been invited to teach at the university, but he had refused out of fondness for his students. “Horseshit,” he later told me. “Yambo, I only taught in the poor kids’ school, and only as a substitute, because with this foul war I never even graduated from college. When I was twenty, they sent me off to break the back of Greece, I was wounded in the knee, and never mind that because you can barely tell, but somewhere in that mud I came down with a nasty sickness and I’ve been spitting up blood ever since. If I ever got my hands on Fat Head” – this was his name for Mussolini – “I wouldn’t kill him because unfortunately I’m a coward, but I would kick his ass until it was out of commission for what little time I hope he has left to live, the Judas.”
the art is inside
