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 Vagnère) 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.
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,
