“Drawn by my aunt’s moans, Adelino Canepa arrived with his wife and children.My aunt cried that he was a Judas, that he had reported Uncle to the partisans because Uncle collected taxes for the Social Republic. Adelino Canepa swore by everything sacred that this was not true, but obviously he felt responsible, because he had talked too much in town.
My aunt sent him away. Adelino Canepa wept, appealed to my mother, reminded her of all the times he had sold her a rabbit or a chicken at a ridiculously low price, but my mother maintained a dignified silence, Aunt Caterina continued to dribble whitish foam, I cried.
Finally, after two hours of agony, we heard shouts, and Uncle Carlo appeared on a bicycle, steering it with his one arm and looking as if he were returning from a picnic. Seeing a disturbance in the garden, he asked what had happened. Uncle hated dramas, like everyone in our parts. He went upstairs, approached the bed of pain of Aunt Caterina, who was still kicking her scrawny legs, and inquired why she was so agitated.”
“What had happened?”
“What had happened was this. Mongo’s partisans, probably hearing some of Adelino Canepa’s mutterings, had identified Uncle Carlo as one of the local representatives of the regime, so they arrested him to teach the whole town a lesson. He was taken outside the town in a truck and found himself before Mongo. Mongo, his war medals shining, stood with a gun in his right hand and his left holding a crutch.
Uncle Carlo—but I really don’t think he was being clever; I think it was instinct, or the ritual of chivalry—snapped to attention, introduced himself: Major Carlo Covasso, Alpine Division, disabled veteran, silver medal. And Mongo also snapped to attention and introduced himself: Sergeant Major Rebaudengo, Royal Carabineers, commander of the Badoglian brigade Bettino Ricasoli, bronze medal.
‘Where?’ Uncle Carlo asked. And Mongo, impressed, said: ‘Pordoi, Major, hill 327.’ ‘By God,’ said Uncle Carlo, ‘I was at hill 328, third regiment, Sasso di Stria!’ The battle of the solstice? Battle of the solstice it was. And the cannon on Five-Finger Mountain? Dammit to hell, do I remember! And the bayonet attack on Saint Crispin’s Eve? Yessir! That sort of thing. Then, the one without an arm, the other without a leg, on the same impulse they took a step forward and embraced.
Mongo said then, ‘You see, Cavalier, it’s this way, Major: we were informed that you collect taxes for the Fascist government that toadies to the invaders.’ ‘You see, Commander,’ Uncle Carlo said, ‘it’s this way: I have a family and receive a salary from the government, and the government is what it is; I didn’t choose it, and what would you have done in my place?’
‘My dear Major,’ Mongo replied, ‘in your place, I’d have done what you did, but try at least to collect the taxes slowly; take your time.’ ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Uncle Carlo said. ‘I have nothing against you men; you, too, are sons of Italy and valiant fighters.’ They understood each other, because they both thought of Fatherland with a capital F. Mongo ordered his men to give the major a bicycle, and Uncle Carlo went home. Adelino Canepa didn’t show his face for several months.
“There, I don’t know if this qualifies as spiritual knighthood, but I’m certain there are bonds that endure above factions and parties.”
For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the hated. I am the saint and the prostitute.
—Fragment of Nag Hammadi 6, 2
Lorenza Pellegrini entered. Belbo looked up at the ceiling and ordered a final martini. There was tension in the air, and I got up to leave, but Lorenza stopped me. “No. All of you come with me. Tonight’s the opening of Riccardo’s show; he’s inaugurating a new style! He’s great! You know him, Jacopo.”
I knew who Riccardo was; he was always hanging around Pilade’s. But at that moment I didn’t understand why Belbo’s eyes were fixed so intensely on the ceiling. Having read the files, I realize now that Riccardo was the man with the scar, the man with whom Belbo had lacked the courage to start a fight.
The gallery wasn’t far from Pilade’s, Lorenza insisted. They had organized a real party—or, rather, an orgy. Diotallevi became nervous at this and immediately said he had to go home. I hesitated, but it was obvious Lorenza wanted me along, and this, too, made Belbo suffer, since he saw the possibility of a tête-à-tête slipping farther and farther away. But I couldn’t refuse; so we set out.
I didn’t care that much for Riccardo. In the early sixties he turned out very boring paintings, small canvases in blacks and grays, very geometric, slightly optical, the sort of stuff that made your eyes swim. They bore titles like Composition 75, Parallax 17, Euclid X.
But in 1968 he started showing in squats, he changed his palette; now there were only violent blacks and whites, no grays, the strokes were bolder, and the titles were like Ce n’est qu’un début, Molotov, A Hundred Flowers. When I got back to Milan, I saw a show of his in a club where Dr. Wagner was worshiped.
Riccardo had eliminated black, was working in white only, the contrasts provided by the texture and relief of the paint on porous Fabriano paper, so that the pictures—as he explained—would reveal different figures in different lightings. Their titles were In Praise of Ambiguity, A/Travers, Ça, Bergstrasse, and Denegation 15.
That evening, as soon as we entered the new gallery, I saw that Riccardo’s poetics had undergone a profound change. The show was entitled Megale Apophasis. Riccardo had turned figurative with a dazzling palette. He played with quotations, and, since I don’t believe he knew how to draw, I guess he worked by projecting onto the canvas the slide of a famous painting. His choices hovered between the turn-of-the-century pompiers and the early-twentieth-century Symbolists.
Over the projected image he worked with a pointillist technique, using infinitesimal gradations of color, covering the whole spectrum dot by dot, so that he always began from a blindingly bright nucleus and ended at absolute black, or vice versa, depending on the mystical or cosmological concept he wanted to express.
There were mountains that shot rays of light, which were broken up into a fine powder of pale spheres, and there were concentric skies with hints of angels with transparent wings, something like the Paradise of Dore. The titles were Beatrix, Mystica Rosa, Dante Gabriele 33, Fedeli d’Amore, Atanòr, Homunculus 666. This is the source of Lorenza’s passion for homunculi, I said to myself.
The largest picture was entitled Sophia, and it showed a rain of black angels, which faded at the ground and created a white creature caressed by great livid hands, the creature a copy of the one you see held up against the sky in Guernica. The juxtaposition was dubious, and, seen close up, the execution proved crude, but at a distance of two or three meters the effect was quite lyrical.
“I’m a realist of the old school,” Belbo whispered to me. “I understand only Mondrian. What does a nongeometric picture say?”
“He was geometric before,” I said.
“That wasn’t geometry, that was bathroom tiles.”
Meanwhile, Lorenza rushed to embrace Riccardo. He and Belbo exchanged a nod of greeting. There was a crowd; the gallery was trying to look like a New York loft, all white, with heating or water pipes exposed on the ceiling. God knows what it had cost them to backdate the place like that. In one corner, a sound system was deafening those present with Asian music—sitar music, if I recall rightly, the kind where you can’t pick out a tune. Everybody walked absently past the pictures to crowd around the tables at the end and grab paper cups.
We had arrived well into the evening: the air was thick with smoke, some girls from time to time hinted at dance movements in the center of the room, but everybody was still busy conversing, busy consuming the plentiful buffet. I sat on a sofa, and at my feet lay a great glass bowl half-filled with fruit salad.
I was about to take a little, because I hadn’t had any supper, but then I saw in it a footprint, which had crushed the little cubes of fruit in the center, reducing them to a homogeneous pave. This was not that surprising, because the floor was now spattered in many places with white wine, and some of the guests were already staggering.
Belbo had captured a paper cup and was proceeding lazily, without any apparent goal, occasionally slapping someone on the shoulder. He was trying to find Lorenza.
But few people remained motionless; the crowd was intent on a kind of circular movement, like bees hunting for a hidden flower.
Though I wasn’t looking for anything myself, I stood up and moved, shifted in response to the impulses transmitted to me by the group, and not far from me I saw Lorenza. She was wandering, miming the impassioned recognition of this man, of that: head high, eyes deliberately myopic-wide, back straight, breasts steady, and her steps haphazard, like a giraffe’s.
At a certain point the human flow trapped me in a corner behind a table, where Lorenza and Belbo had their backs to me, having finally met, perhaps by chance, and they were also trapped. I don’t know if they were aware of my presence, but the noise was so great that nobody could hear what others were saying at any distance. Lorenza
