Here, in the nineteenth century, a certain artless wretch called Antonio Boggia enticed a bookkeeper into downstairs rooms to check over some accounts and attacked him with a hatchet. The victim managed to escape, and Boggia was arrested, judged insane, and locked up in a lunatic asylum for two years. As soon as he was released he was back to hunting out rich and gullible folk, luring them into his cellar, robbing them, murdering them, and burying them there.
A serial killer, as we’d say today, but an imprudent one, since he left evidence of his commercial transactions with the victims and in the end was caught. The police dug down in the cellar, found five or six bodies, and Boggia was hanged near Porta Ludovica. His head was given to the anatomical laboratory at the Ospedale Maggiore—it was the days of Cesare Lombroso, when they were looking at the cranium and facial features for signs of congenital criminality.
Then it seems the head was buried in the main cemetery, but who knows, relics of that kind were tasty morsels for occultists and maniacs of all kinds . . . Here you can feel the presence of Boggia, even today, like being in the London of Jack the Ripper. I wouldn’t want to spend the night here, yet it intrigues me. I come back often, arrange meetings here.”
From Via Bagnera we found ourselves in Piazza Mentana, and Braggadocio then took me into Via Morigi, another dark street, though with several small shops and decorative entrances. We reached an open space with a vast parking area surrounded by ruins. “You see,” said Braggadocio, “those on the left are Roman ruins—almost no one remembers that Milan was once the capital of the empire.
So they can’t be touched, though there isn’t the slightest interest in them. But those ruins behind the parking lot are what remains of houses bombed in the last war.”
The bombed-out houses didn’t have the timeworn tranquility of those ancient remains that now seemed reconciled with death, but peeped out sinisterly from their grim voids as though affected by lupus.
“I don’t know why there’s been no attempt to build in this area,” said Braggadocio. “Perhaps it’s protected, perhaps the owners make more money from the parking lot than from rental houses. But why leave evidence of the bombings? This area frightens me more than Via Bagnera, though it’s good because it tells me what Milan was like after the war. Not many places bring back what the city was like almost fifty years ago. And this is the Milan I try to seek out, the place where I used to live as a child. The war ended when I was nine. Every now and then, at night, I still seem to hear the sound of bombing.
But not just the ruins are left: look at the corner of Via Morigi, that tower dates back to the 1600s, and not even the bombs could bring it down. And below, come, there’s this tavern, Taverna Moriggi, that dates back to the early 1900s—don’t ask why the tavern has one g more than the road, the city authority must have gotten its street signs wrong, the tavern is much older, and that should be the correct spelling.
We walked into a large room with red walls and a bare ceiling from which hung an old wrought-iron chandelier, a stag’s head at the bar, hundreds of dusty wine bottles along the walls, and bare wooden tables (it was before dinnertime, said Braggadocio, and they still had no tablecloths . . . later they’d put on those red-checked cloths and, to order, you had to study the writing on the blackboard, as in a French brasserie).
At the tables were students, old-fashioned bohemian types with long hair—not in the ’60s style but that of poets who once wore broad-brimmed hats and lavallière cravats—and a few old men in fairly high spirits; it was difficult to tell whether they had been there since the beginning of the century or whether the new proprietors had hired them as extras. We picked at a plate of cheeses, cured meats, and lardo di Colonnata, and drank some extremely good merlot.
“Nice, eh?” said Braggadocio. “Seems like another world.”
“But what attracts you to this Milan, which ought to have vanished?”
“I’ve told you, I like to see what I’ve almost forgotten, the Milan of my grandfather and of my father.”
He had started to drink, his eyes began to shine, with a paper napkin he dried a circle of wine that had formed on the old wooden table.
“I have a pretty wretched family history. My grandfather was a Fascist leader in what was later called the ominous regime. And back in 1945, on April 25, he was spotted by a partisan as he was trying to slip away not far from here, in Via Cappuccio; they took him and shot him, right there at that corner. It wasn’t until much later that my father found out. He, true to my grandfather’s beliefs, had enlisted in 1943 with the Decima Mas commando unit, and had then been captured at Salò and sent off for a year to Coltano concentration camp.
He got through it by the skin of his teeth, they couldn’t find any real accusations against him, and then, in 1946, Togliatti gave the go-ahead for a general amnesty—one of those contradictions of history, the Fascists rehabilitated by the Communists, though perhaps Togliatti was right, we had to return to normality at all costs.
But the normality was that my father, with his past, and the shadow of his father, was jobless, and supported by my seamstress mother. And he gradually let himself go, he drank, and all I remember about him is his face full of little red veins and watery eyes, as he rambled on about his obsessions. He didn’t try to justify fascism (he no longer had any ideals), but said that to condemn fascism, the antifascists had told many hideous stories.
He didn’t believe in the six million Jews gassed in the camps. I mean, he wasn’t one of those who, even today, argue there was no Holocaust, but he didn’t trust the story that had been put together by the liberators. ‘All exaggerated accounts,’ he used to say. ‘Some survivors say, or that’s what I’ve read at least, that at the center of one camp the mountains of clothes belonging to the murdered were over a hundred meters high. A hundred meters? But do you realize,’ he’d say, ‘that a pile a hundred meters high, seeing it has to rise up like a pyramid, needs to have a base wider than the area of the camp?’”
“But didn’t he realize that anyone who has a terrible experience tends to exaggerate when describing it? You witness a road accident and you describe how the bodies lay in a lake of blood. You’re not trying to make them believe it was as large as Lake Como, you’re simply trying to give the idea that there was a lot of blood. Put yourself in the position of someone remembering one of the most tragic experiences of his life—”
“I’m not denying it, but my father taught me never to take news as gospel truth. The newspapers lie, historians lie, now the television lies. Did you see those news stories a year ago, during the Gulf War, about the dying cormorant covered in tar in the Persian Gulf? Then it was shown to be impossible for cormorants to be in the Gulf at that time of year, and the pictures had been taken eight years earlier, during the time of the Iran-Iraq War.
Or, according to others, cormorants had been taken from the zoo and covered with crude oil, which was what they must have done with Fascist crimes. Let’s be clear, I have no sympathy for the beliefs of my father and my grandfather, nor do I want to pretend that Jews were not murdered.
But I no longer trust anything. Did the Americans really go to the Moon? It’s not impossible that they staged the whole thing in a studio—if you look at the shadows of the astronauts after the Moon landing, they’re not believable. And did the Gulf War really happen, or did they just show us old clips from the archives?
There are lies all around us, and if you know they’re feeding you lies, you’ve got to be suspicious all the time. I’m suspicious, I’m always suspicious. The only real proven thing, for me, is this Milan of many decades ago. The bombing actually happened, and what’s more, it was done by the English, or the Americans.”
“And your father?”
“He died an alcoholic when I was thirteen. And to rid myself of those memories, once I’d grown up, I decided to throw myself in the opposite direction. In 1968 I was already thirty, but I let my hair grow, wore a parka and a sweater, and joined a Maoist commune. Later I discovered not only that Mao had killed more people than Stalin and Hitler put together, but also that the Maoists may well have been infiltrated by the secret services. And so I stuck to being a journalist and hunting out conspiracies. That way, I managed to avoid getting caught up with the Red terrorists (and I had some dangerous friends). I’d lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there’s always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.”
“And now?”
“And now, if this newspaper takes off, maybe I’ve found a place where my discovery will be appreciated . . . I’m working on a story that .
