1963
Letter to My Son
Dear Stefano,
Christmas is marching upon us, and soon the big stores downtown will be packed with excited fathers acting out their annual scenario of hypocritical generosity, having joyfully awaited this moment when they can buy for themselves-pretending it’s for their sons-their cherished electric trains, the puppet theater, the target with bow and arrows, and the family Ping-Pong set. But I will still be an observer, because this year my turn hasn’t yet come, you are too little, and Montessori-approved infant toys don’t give me any great pleasure, probably because I don’t enjoy sticking them in my mouth, even if the manufacturer’s label assures me that they cannot be swallowed whole. No, I must wait, two years, or three or four. Then it will be my turn; the phase of mother dominated education will pass, the rule of the teddy bear will decline and fall, and the moment will come when with the sweet and sacrosanct violence of paternal authority I can begin to mold your civic conscience. And then, Stefano . . .
Then your presents will be guns. Double-barreled shotguns. Repeaters. Submachine guns. Cannons. Bazookas. Sabers. Armies of lead soldiers in full battle dress. Castles with drawbridges. Fortresses to besiege.
Casemates, powder magazines, destroyers, jets. Machine guns, daggers, revolvers. Colts and Winchesters. Chassepots, 91 ‘s, Garands, shells, arquebuses, culverins, slingshots, crossbows, lead balls, catapults, firebrands, grenades, ballistas, swords, pikes, battering rams, halberds, and grappling hooks. And pieces of eight, just like Captain Flint’s (in memory of Long John Silver and Ben Gun), and dirks, ,the kind that Don Barrejo so liked, and Toledo blades to knock aside three pistols at once and fell the Marquis of Montelimar, or using the Neapolitan feint with which the Baron de Sigognac slayed the evil ruffian who tried to steal his Isabelle.
And there will be battle-axes, partisans, misericords, krises, javelins, scimitars, darts, and sword-sticks like the one John Carradine held when he was electrocuted on the third rail, and if nobody remembers that, it’s their tough luck. And pirate cutlasses to make Carmaux and Van Stiller blanch, and damascened pistols like none Sir James Brook ever saw (otherwise he wouldn’t have given up in the face of the sardonic, umpteenth cigarette of the Portuguese); and stilettos with triangular blades, like the one with which Sir William’s disciple, as the day was gently dying at Clignancourt, killed the assassin Zampa, who killed his own mother, the old and sordid Fipart; and peres d’angoisse, like those inserted into the mouth of the jailer La Ramee while the Duke of Beaufort, the hairs of his coppery beard made even more fascinating thanks to the constant attention of a leaden comb, rode off, anticipating with joy the wrath of Mazarin; and muzzles loaded with nails, to be fired by men whose teeth are red with betel stains; and guns with mother-ofpearl stocks, to be grasped on Arab chargers with glistening coats; and lightning-fast bows, to turn the sheriff of Nottingham green with envy; and scalping knives, such as Minnehaha might have had, or (as you are bilingual) Winnetou.
A small, flat pistol to tuck into a waistcoat under a frock coat, for the feats of a gentleman thief, or a ponderous Luger weighing down a pocket or filling an armpit a la Michael Shayne. And shotguns worthy of Jesse Jam es and Wild Bill Hickok, or Sambigliong, muzzle-loading. In other words, weapons. Many weapons. These, my boy, will be the highlight of all your Christmases.
Sir, I am amazed-some will say-you, a member .of a committee for nuclear disarmament and a supporter of the peace movement; you who join in marches on the capital and cultivate an Aldermaston mystique on occasion. Do I contradict myself? Well, I contradict myself (as Walt Whitman put it).
One morning, when I had promised a present to a friend’s son, I went into a- department store in Frankfurt and asked for a nice revolver. Everyone looked at me, shocked. We do not carry warlike toys, sir. Enough to make your blood run cold. Mortified, I left, and ran straight into two Bundeswehr men who were passing on the sidewalk. I was brought back to reality. I wouldn’t let anybody fool me. From now on I would rely solely on personal experience and to hell with pedagogues.
My childhood was chiefly if not exclusively bellicose. I used blowpipes improvised at the last minute among the bushes; I crouched behind the few parked cars, firing my repeater rifle; I led attacks with fixed bayonets. I was absorbed in extremely bloody battles. At home it was toy soldiers. Whole armies engaged in nerve-racking strategies, operations that went on for weeks, long campaigns in which I mobilized even the remains of my plush teddy bear and my sister’s dolls. I organized bands of soldiers of fortune and made my few but faithful followers call me “the terror of Piazza Genova” (now Piazza Matteotti).
I dissolved a group of Black Lions to merge with another, stronger outfit, then, once in it, I uttered a pronunciamento that proved disastrous. Resettled in the Monferrato area, I was recruited forcibly in the Band of the Road and was subjected to an initiation ceremony that consisted of a hundred kicks in the behind and a three-hour imprisonment in a chicken coop. We fought against the Band of Nizza Creek, who were filthy dirty and awesome. The first time, I took fright and ran off; the second time, a stone hit my lips, and I still have a little-knot there I can feel with my tongue. (Then the real war arrived. The partisans let us hold their Stens for two seconds, and we saw some friends lying dead with a hole in their brow. But by now we were becoming adults, and we went along the banks of the Belbo River to catch the eighteen-year-olds making love, unless, in the grip of adolescent mystical crises, we had renounced all pleasures of the flesh.)
This orgy of war games produced a man who managed to do eighteen months of military service without touching a gun, devoting his long hours in the barracks to the grave study of medieval philosophy. A man of many iniquities but one who has always been innocent of the squalid crime of loving weapons and believing in the holiness and efficacy of warrior values. A man who appreciates an army only when he sees soldiers slogging through the muck after the Vajont disaster, engaged in a peaceful and noble civic purpose. A man who absolutely does not believe in just wars, who believes wars are unjust and damned and you fight always with reluctance, dragged into the conflict, hoping it will end quickly, and risking everything because it is a matter of honor and you can’t evade it.
And I believe I owe my profound, systematic, cultivated, and documented horror of war to the healthy, innocent, platonically bloody releases granted me in childhood, just as when you leave a Western movie (after a furious brawl, the kind where the balcony of the saloon collapses, tables and big mirrors are broken, someone shoots at the piano player, and the plate-glass window shatters) cleaner, kinder, relaxed, ready to smile at the passerby who jostles you and to succor the sparrow fallen from its nest-as Aristotle was well aware, when he demanded of tragedy that it wave the blood-red flag before our eyes and purge us totally with the divine Epsom salts of catharsis.
Then I imagine the boyhood of Eichmann. Lying on his stomach, with that death’s bookkeeper expression on his face as he studies the Meccano pieces and dutifully follows the instructions in the booklet; eager also to open the bright box of his new chemistry set; sadistic in laying out the tiny tools of The Little Carpenter, the plane the width of his hand and the twenty-centimeter saw, on a piece of plywood. Beware of boys who build miniature cranes!
In their cold and distorted minds these little mathematicians are repressing the horrid complexes that will motivate their mature years. In· every little monster who operates the switches of his toy railway lies a future director of death camps! Watch out, if they are fond of those matchbox cars that the cynical toy industry produces for them, perfect facsimiles, with a trunk that really opens and windows that can be rolled up and down-terrifying! A terrifying pastime for the future commanders of an electronic army who, lacking all passions, will coldly press the red button of an atomic war!
You can identify them already. The big real-estate speculators, the slumlords who enforce evictions in the dead of winter; they have revealed their personality in the infamous game of Monopoly, becoming accustomed to the idea of buying and selling property and dealing relentlessly in stock portfolios. The Pere Grandets of today, who have acquired with their mother’s milk the taste for acquisition and learned insider trading with bingo cards. The bureaucrats of death trained on Lego blocks, the zombies of bureaucracy whose spiritual decease began with the rubber stamps and scales of the Little Post Office.
And tomorrow? What will develop from a childhood in which industrialized Christmases bring out American dolls that talk and sing and move, Japanese robots that jump and dance thanks to an inexhaustible battery, and radio-controlled automobiles whose mechanism will always be a mystery? . . .
Stefano, my boy, I will give you guns. Because a gun isn’t a game. It
