“And now we come to the last commandment: ‘Don’t covet other people’s stuff.’ But have you ever asked yourself why this commandment exists, when you’ve already got ‘Don’t steal’? If you covet a bike like the one your friend has, is that a sin? No, not if you don’t steal it from him. Don Cognasso will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing. But there’s bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don’t, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there’s good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, even a used one, and it’s good envy that makes the world go round. And then there’s another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can’t see any reason that a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger. And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed. But that’s exactly what the commandment prohibits you from doing. The tenth commandment prohibits revolution. Therefore, my dear boy, don’t kill and don’t steal from poor kids like yourself, but go ahead and covet what other people have taken from you. That’s the sun of the coming day, and that’s why our comrades are staying up there in the mountains, to get rid of Fat Head, who rose to power funded by agrarian landowners and by Hitler’s toadies, Hitler who wanted to conquer the world so that that guy Krupp who builds Berthas this long could sell more cannons. But you, how could you ever understand about these things, you who grew up memorizing oaths of obedience to Il Duce’s orders?”
“No, I understand, even if not everything.”
“I sure hope so.”
I noticed that Gragnola always wore a long, thin leather sack that hung from his neck, beneath his shirt.
“What’s that, Gragnola?”
“A lancet.”
“Were you studying to be a doctor?”
“I was studying philosophy. I was given the lancet in Greece by a doctor in my regiment, before he died. ‘I don’t need this anymore,’ he told me. ‘That grenade has opened my belly. What I need now is one of those kits, like women have, with a needle and thread. But this hole is past stitching up. Keep the lancet to remember me by.’ And I’ve worn it ever since.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a coward. With the things I do and the things I know, if the S.S. or the Black Brigades catch me, they’ll torture me. If they torture me, I’ll talk, because evil scares me. And I’ll be sending my comrades to their death. This way, if they catch me, I’ll cut my throat with the lancet. It doesn’t hurt, only takes a second – sffft. I’ll be screwing them all: the Fascists because they won’t learn a thing, the priests because I’ll be a suicide and that’s a sin, and God because I’ll be dying when I choose and not when he chooses. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Gragnola’s speeches left me sad. Not because I was sure they were evil but because I feared they were good. He lived in a world made sad by an evil God, and the only times I saw him smile with any tenderness were when he was talking to me about Socrates or Jesus. Both of whom, I would remind myself, were killed, so I did not see what there was to smile about.
And yet he was not mean; he loved the people around him. He had it in only for God, and that must have been a real chore, because it was like throwing rocks at a rhinoceros – the rhinoceros never notices a thing and continues going about its rhino business, and meanwhile you are red with rage and ripe for a heart attack.
When was it that my friends and I began the Great Game? In a world where everyone was shooting at everyone else, we needed an enemy. And we chose the kids up in San Martino, a village on the peak above us.
The people of San Martino made ideal enemies, since in our minds they were all Fascists. In reality, that was not the case; it was just that two brothers from San Martino had joined the Black Brigades, while their two younger brothers had remained in the village and were the ringleaders of the bunch up there. But, still, the town was attached to its sons who had gone off to war, and in Solara it was whispered that the people of San Martino were not to be trusted.
Fascists or not, we used to say that the boys of San Martino were no better than animals. The fact is that if you live in such an accursed place you have to get up to some mischief every day, just to feel alive. They had to come down to Solara for school, and we who lived in town used to look at them as if they were Gypsies. Many of us would bring a snack to school, bread and marmalade, and they were lucky if they had been given a wormy apple. In short, they had to do something, and on several occasions they bombarded us with rocks as we approached the gate of the Oratorio. We had to make them pay. So we decided to go up to San Martino and attack them while they played ball in the church piazza.
But the only way to San Martino was by the road that went straight up, with no bends, and from the church piazza you could see if someone was coming. Thus we thought that we would never be able to take them by surprise. Until Durante, a farmer’s kid with a head as big and dark as an Abyssinian’s, said yes, we could, if we climbed the gorge.
At the time, no one climbed up the gorge – and forget about coming down – because you would lose your footing at every step. Where there were no brambles, the earth fell away beneath you; you might see a thicket of acacia or blackberry with an opening right in the middle and think you had found a path, but it would be just a random patch of stony ground, and after ten steps you would start to slip, then fall to one side and tumble at least twenty metres. Even if you survived the fall without breaking any bones, the thorns would scratch your eyes out. On top of that, it was said to be thick with vipers.
Climbing up would clearly require training. It took us a season: we started with ten metres the first day, memorizing each step and each crevice, trying to place our feet in the same places on the way down as we had on the way up, and the next day we worked on the next ten metres. We could not be seen from San Martino, so we had all the time we wanted. It was important not to improvise; we had to become like the animals that made their homes on the slopes of the gorge – the grass snakes, the lizards.
Two of my friends got sprains, and one almost killed himself and skinned the palm of his hand trying to stop his fall, but in the end we were the only people in the world who knew how to climb the gorge. One afternoon, we risked it: we climbed for an hour or more and arrived out of breath, emerging from a dense thicket at the very base of San Martino, where between the houses and the precipice there was a walkway, with a wall along it to prevent the locals from falling over the precipice in the dark. Our path reached the wall at the very point where a gap opened, a breach wide enough for us to slip through. Beyond that was a lane that went past the door to the rectory, then opened right onto the church piazza.
When we burst onto the piazza, the San Martino boys were in the middle of a game of blindman’s bluff. A masterstroke: one of them could not see at all and the others were jumping here and there in their efforts to avoid him. We launched our munitions, hitting one boy directly on the forehead, and the others fled into the church, seeking aid from the priest. That sufficed for the moment, and back down the lane we ran, through the gap, and down the gorge. The priest arrived in time to see our heads disappearing into the shrubs, and he hurled some terrible threats at us, and Durante shouted “Hah!” and clapped his left hand against his right biceps.
the art is inside
