I found myself standing next to Belbo and a woman I had often seen him with at the bar, who I thought was his companion. (She later disappeared—and now I know why, having read about it in the file on Dr. Wagner.)
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"You know how it is," he said, smiling, embarrassed. "We have to save our souls somehow. Crede firmiter et pecca fortiter. Doesn't this scene remind you of something?"
I looked around. It was a sunny afternoon, one of those days when Milan is beautiful: yellow façades and a softly metallic sky. The police, across the square, were armored with helmets and plastic shields that gave off glints like steel. A plainclothes officer girded with a gaudy tricolor sash strutted up and down in front of his men. I turned and looked at the head of the march. People weren't moving; they were marking time. They were lined up in ranks, but the rows were irregular, almost serpentine, and the crowd seemed to bristle with pikes, standards, banners, sticks. Impatient groups chanted rhythmic slogans. Along the flanks of the procession, activists darted back and forth, wearing red kerchiefs over their faces, motley shirts, studded belts, and jeans that had known much rain and sun. Even the rolled-up flags that concealed the incongruous weapons looked like dabs of color on a palette. I thought of Dufy, his gaiety. Freely associating, I went from Dufy to Guillaume Dufay. I had the impression of being in a Flemish miniature. In the little crowds gathered on either side of the marchers, I glimpsed some androgynous women waiting for the great display of daring they had been promised. But all this went through my mind in a flash, as if I were reliving some other experience without recognizing it.
"It's the taking of Ascalon, isn't it?" Belbo said.
"By the lord Saint James, my good sir," I replied, "this is truly a Crusaders' combat! I do believe that this night some of these men will be in paradise!"
"No doubt," Belbo said. "But can you tell me where the Saracens are?"
"Well, the police are definitely Teutonic," I observed, "which would make us the hordes of Aleksandr Nevski. But I'm getting my texts mixed up. Look at that group over there. They must be the companions of the Comte d'Artois, eager to enter the fray; for they will brook no offense, and already they head for the enemy lines, shouting threats to provoke the infidel!"
That was when it happened. I don't remember it that clearly. The marchers had started moving, and a group of activists with chains and ski masks began to force their way through the police lines toward Piazza San Babila, yelling. The lion was on the move. The front line of police parted and the fire hoses appeared. The first ball bearings, then the first stones, came hurtling from the forward positions of the demonstration. A cordon of police advanced, swinging clubs, and the procession recoiled. At that moment, in the distance, from the far end of Via Laghctto, a shot was heard. Maybe it was only a tire exploding, or a firecrackcr; maybe it was a popgun shot from one of those groups that in a few years would regularly be using P-38s.
Panic. The police drew their weapons, trumpet blasts for a charge were heard, the march split into two groups: one, militants, who were ready to fight, and one, all the others, who considered their duty done. I found myself running along Via Larga, with the mad fear of being hit by some blunt object, such as a club. Suddenly Belbo and his companion were beside me, running fast but without panic.
At the corner of Via Rastrelli, Belbo grabbed me by the arm. "This way, kid," he said. I wanted to ask why; Via Larga seemed much more spacious and peopled, and claustrophobia overcame me in the maze of alleys between Via Pecorari and the Archbishop's Palace. It seemed to me that where Belbo was going there were fewer places to hide or blend in if the police intercepted us. But he signaled me to be quiet, turned two or three corners, and gradually slowed down. We found ourselves walking unhurriedly, right behind the cathedral, where traffic was normal and no echoes came from the battle taking place less than two hundred meters away. Still silent, we walked around the cathedral and finally came to the side facing the Galleria. Belbo bought a bag of corn and began feeding the pigeons with seraphic pleasure. We blended into the Saturday crowd completely; Belbo and I were in jackets and ties, and the girl had on the uniform of a Milanese lady: a gray turtleneck with a strand of pearls—cultured, or maybe not.
Belbo introduced us. "This is Sandra. You two know each other?"
"By sight. Hi."
"You see, Casaubon," Belbo said to me then, "you must never flee in a straight line. Napoleon III, following the example of the Savoys in Turin, had Paris disemboweled, then turned it into the network of boulevards we all admire today. A masterpiece of intelligent city planning. Except that those broad, straight streets are also ideal for controlling angry crowds. Where possible, even the side streets were made broad and straight, like the Champs-Elysées. Where it wasn't possible, in the little streets of the Latin Quarter, for example, that's where May '68 was seen to its best advantage. When you flee, head for alleys. No police force can guard them all, and even the police are afraid to enter them in small numbers. If you run into a few on their own, they're more frightened than you are, and both parties take off, in opposite directions. Anytime you're going to a mass rally in an area you don't know well, reconnoiter the neighborhood the day before, and stand at the corner where the little streets start."
"Did you take a course in Bolivia, or what?"
"Survival techniques are learned only in childhood, unless as an adult you enlist in the Green Berets. I had some bad experiences during the war, when the partisans were active around ***," he said, naming a town between Monferrato and the Langhe. "We had been evacuated from the city in '43, a great idea, exactly the time and place to savor everything: mass arrests, the SS, gunfire in the streets.... One evening I was going up the hill to get some fresh milk from a farm, and I heard a sound up in the trees: frr, frr. I realized that some men on a distant hill were machine-gunning the railroad line in the valley behind me. My instinct was to run, or just dive to the ground. I made a mistake: I ran toward the valley, and suddenly I heard a chack-chack-chack in the field around me. Some of the shots were falling short of the railroad. That's when I learned that if they're shooting from a high hill down at a valley, then you should run uphill. The higher you go, the higher the bullets will be over your head. Once, my grandmother was caught in a shoot-out between Fascists and partisans deployed on opposite sides of a cornfield. Wherever she ran, she risked stopping a bullet. So she just flung herself down in the middle of the field, right in the line of fire, and lay there for ten minutes, her face in the dirt, hoping that neither side would advance very far. She was lucky. When you learn these things as a child, they are hard-wired in your nervous system."
"So you were in the Resistance."
"As a spectator," he said. I sensed a slight embarrassment in his voice. "In 1943 I was eleven, and at the end of the war, barely thirteen. Too young to take part, but old enough to follow everything with—how shall I put it?—photographic attention. What else could I do? I watched. And ran. Like today."
"You should write about it, instead of editing other people's books."
"It's all been told, Casaubon. If I had been twenty back then, in the fifties I'd have written a poetic memoir. Luckily I was born too late for that. By the time I was old enough to write, all I could do was read the books that were already written. On the other hand, I could also have ended up on that hill with a bullet in my head."
"From which side?" I asked, then immediately regretted the question. "Sorry, I was just kidding."
"No you weren't. Sure, today I know, but what did I know then? You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing—you can always repent, atone—but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing. I was a potential traitor. What truth does that entitle me now to teach to others?"
"Excuse me," I said, "but potentially you were also a Jack the Ripper. This is neurotic—unless your remorse is based on something specific."
"What
does that mean? But, speaking of neurosis, this evening there's a dinner party for Dr. Wagner. Let's take a taxi at Piazza della Scala. Coming, Sandra?"
"Dr. Wagner?" I asked, about to take my leave of them. "In person?"
"Yes. He's in Milan for a few days, and maybe I'll be able to persuade him to give us some of his unpublished essays for a little volume. It would be a real coup."
So Belbo was in contact with Dr. Wagner even then. I wonder if that was the evening Wagner (pronounced Vagnere) psychoanalyzed Belbo free of charge, without either of them knowing it. But perhaps this happened later.
In any case, that was the first time I heard Belbo talk about his childhood in ***. Strange, he talked about running away, investing it with a kind of heroism, in the glorious light of memory, but the memory had come back to him only after—with me as accomplice but also as witness—he had unheroically, if wisely, run away again.
16
After which, brother Etienne de Provins, brought into the presence of the aforesaid officials and asked by them to defend the order, said he did not wish to. If the masters wished to defend it, they could, but before his arrest, he had been in the order only nine months.
—Deposition, November 27, 1309
In Abulafia I found other tales of Belbo's running away. And I thought about them that evening as I stood in the darkness in the periscope listening to a sequence of rustling sounds, squeaks, creaks and telling myself not to panic, because that was how museums, libraries, and antique palaces talked to themselves at night. It is only old cupboards settling, window frames reacting to the evening's humidity, plaster crumbling at a miserly millimeter-per-century rate, walls yawning. You can't run away, I told myself. You're here to learn what happened to a man who, in a mad (or desperate) act of courage, tried once and for all to stop running away—perhaps in order to hasten his encounter, so many times postponed, with the truth.
FILENAME: Canal
Was it from a police charge or, once again, from history that I ran away? Does it make any difference? Did I go to the march because of a moral choice or to subject myself to yet another test of Opportunity? Granted, I was either too early or too late for all the great Opportunities, but that was the fault of my birth date. I would have liked to be in that field of bullets, shooting, even at the price of hitting Granny. But I was absent because of age, not because of cowardice. All right. And what about the march? Again I ran away for a generational reason: it was not my conflict. But I could have taken the risk even so, without enthusiasm, to prove that if I had been in the field of bullets, I would have known how to choose. Does it make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince yourself that you would have chosen the right one—had you had the Opportunity? I wonder how many of those who opt for fighting today do it for that reason. But a contrived Opportunity is not the right Opportunity.
Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it. You have to seize Opportunity instinctively, without knowing at the time that it is the Opportunity. Is it possible that I really did seize it once, without knowing? How can you feel like a coward because you were born in the wrong decade? The answer: You feel like a coward because once you were a coward.
But suppose you passed up the Opportunity because you felt it was inadequate?
***
Describe the house in ***, isolated on the hill among the vineyards—don't they call those breast-shaped hills?—and then the road that led to the edge of town, to the last row of houses (or the first, depending on the direction you come from). The little evacuee who abandons the protection of his family and ventures into the tentacular town, walking the broad avenue, skirting the Alley he so enviously fears.
The Alley was the gathering place of the Alley gang. Country boys, dirty, loud. I was too citified: better to stay away from them. But to reach the square, and the newspaper kiosk and the stationery store, unless I essayed a circumnavigation almost equatorial and quite undignified, the only course was to go along the Canal. And the boys of the Alley gang were little gentlemen compared to the Canal gang, named after a former stream, now a drainage ditch, that ran through the poorest part of town. The Canal kids were filthy subproletarians, and violent.
The Alley kids couldn't cross the Canal area without being attacked and beaten up. At first I didn't know that I was an Alley kid. I had just arrived, but already the Canal gang had identified me as an enemy. I walked through their area with a children's magazine open before my face, reading as I went. They saw me. I ran. They chased me, throwing stones. One stone went right through a page of the magazine, which I was still holding in front of me as I ran, trying to retain a little dignity. I got away but lost the magazine. The next day I decided to join the Alley gang.
I presented myself at their Sanhedrin and was greeted with cackles. My hair was very thick at the time, and it tended to stand up on my head a bit like Struwwelpeter's. The style in those days, as shown in movies and ads, or on Sunday strolls after Mass, featured young men with broad-shouldered, double-breasted jackets, greased mustaches, and gleaming hair combed straight back and stuck to their skulls. And that's what I wanted, sleek hair like that. In the market square, on a Monday, I spent what for me was an enormous sum on some boxes of brilliantine thick as beanflower honey. Then I spent hours smearing it on until my hair was laminated, a leaden cap, a camauro. Then I put on a net, to keep the hair tightly compressed. The Alley gang had seen me go by wearing the net, and had shouted taunts in that harsh dialect of theirs, which I understood but couldn't speak. That particular day, after staying two hours in the house with the net on, I took it off, checked the splendid result in the mirror, and set out to meet the gang to which I hoped to swear allegiance. I approached them just as the brilliantine was losing its glutinous power and my hair was again assuming, in slow motion, its vertical position. Delight among the Alley kids, in a circle around me, nudging one another. I asked to be admitted.
Unfortunately, I spoke in Italian. An outsider. Their leader, Martinetti, who seemed a giant to me then, came forward, splendid, barefoot. He decided I should undergo one hundred kicks in the behind. Perhaps the kicks were meant to reawaken the serpent Kundalini. I agreed and stood against the wall. Two sergeants held my arms, and I received one hundred barefoot kicks. Martinetti applied himself to his task with vigor and skill, striking sideways so he wouldn't hurt his toes. The gang served as chorus for the ritual, keeping count in their dialect. Then they shut me up in a rabbit hutch for half an hour, while they passed the time in guttural conversation. They let me out when I complained that my legs were numb. I was proud because I had been able to stand up to the liturgy of a savage tribe. I was a man called Horse.
In *** in those days were stationed latter-day Teutonic Knights, who were not particularly alert, because the partisans hadn't yet made themselves felt—this was toward the end of '43, the beginning of '44. One of our first exploits was to slip into a shed, while some of us flattered the soldier on guard duty, a great Langobard eating an enormous sandwich of—we thought, and were horrified—salami and jam. The decoys distracted the German, praising his weapons, while the rest of us crept through some loose planks in the back of the shed and stole a few sticks of TNT. I don't believe the explosive was ever used subsequently, but the idea was, according to Martinetti's plan, to set it off in the countryside, for purely pyrotechnic cal purposes and by methods I now know were very crude and would not have worked. Later, the Germans were replaced by the Fascist marines of the Decima Mas, who set up a roadblock near the river, right at the crossroads where the girls from the school of Santa Maria Ausiliatricc came down the avenue at six in the evening. Martinetti convinced the Decima marines (who couldn't have been over eighteen) to tie together a bunch of hand grenades left by the Germans, the ones with a long pin, and remove the safeties so they could explode at the wate
r's edge at the exact moment the girls arrived. Martinetti knew how to calculate the timing. He explained it to the Fascists, and the effect was prodigious: a sheet of water rose up along the bank in a thunderous din just as the girls were turning the corner. General flight, much squeaking, and we and the Fascists split our sides laughing. The survivors of Allied imprisonment would remember that day of glory, second only to the burning of Molay.
The chief amusement of the Alley kids was collecting shell cases and other war residue, which after September 8 and the German occupation of Italy were plentiful: old helmets, cartridge pouches, knapsacks, sometimes live bullets. This is what you did with a good bullet: holding the shell case in one hand, you stuck the projectile into a keyhole, twisted it, and pulled out the case, adding it to your collection. The gunpowder was emptied out (sometimes there were thin strips of ballistite) and deposited in serpentine trails that were set alight. The casings, especially prized if the caps were intact, went to enrich one's army. A good collector would have a lot of them, arranged in rows by make, color, shape, and origin. There were squads of foot soldiers, which were submachine-gun and Sten casings, then squires and knights, which were 1891 rifle shells (we saw Garands only after the Americans came), and finally, a boy's supreme ambition, towering grand masters, which were empty machine-gun shells.
One evening, as we were absorbed in these peaceful pursuits, Martinetti informed us that the moment had come. A challenge had been sent to the Canal gang, and they had accepted. The battle was to take place on neutral ground, behind the station. That night, at nine.
It was late afternoon, on a summer day, enervating but charged with excitement. We decked ourselves out in the most terrifying paraphernalia, looking for pieces of wood that could be easily gripped, filling pouches and knapsacks with stones of various sizes. Some of us made whips out of rifle slings, awesome if wielded with decision. During those twilight hours we all felt like heroes, me most of all. It was the excitement before the attack: bitter, painful, splendid. So long, Mama, I'm off to Yokohama; send the word over there. We were sacrificing our youth to the Fatherland, just as they had taught us in school before September 8.