It is a starless, moonless night, we cannot see lights in the valley nor the silhouettes of the hills, and Pipetto is passing above us. No one has ever seen him; he is only a noise in the night.
Pipetto has passed, everything has gone as usual again this evening, and we return to the radio’s last songs. Out in that night bombs might be falling on Milan, packs of German shepherds might be chasing the men Pipetto helps through the hills, but the radio, with that saxophone-in-heat voice, is singing Up there at Capocabana, at Capocabana the woman is queen, and she reigns supreme, and I picture a languid diva (maybe I had seen her photo in Novella). She glides softly down a white staircase whose steps light up at the touch of her feet, surrounded by young men in white tailcoats who tip their top hats and kneel adoringly as she passes. With Capocabana (it was actually Capocabana, not Copacabana), the sexy singer is sending me a message every bit as exotic as that of my stamps.
Then the transmissions end, with various anthems to glory and revenge.
But we must not turn it off now, as Mamma knows.
After the radio has given the impression of falling silent until the next day, we hear a heartfelt voice come through, singing:
You’ll come back
To m e …
It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.
I had just listened to that song again at Solara, but there it was a love song: You’ll come back to me / because you are my heart’s one dream, / its only dream. / You’ll come back, / because I / without all your languid kisses
/ won’t survive. So the song I had heard all those evenings had been a wartime version, which to the hearts of many must have sounded like a promise, or an appeal to someone far away who in that moment might have been freezing in the steppes or facing a firing squad. Who was airing that song at that time of night? A nostalgic employee, before closing down the broadcast booth, or someone obeying an order from a higher-up? We did not know, but that voice carried us to the threshold of sleep.
It is nearly eleven, I close my stamp album, it is bedtime. Mamma has prepared the brick, an actual brick, by placing it in the oven until it is too hot to touch, then wrapping it in woolen cloths and slipping it under the covers, where it warms the entire bed. It feels good to rest your feet on it, especially as it relieves the itching of chilblains, which in those years (cold, vitamin deficiencies, hormonal tempests) made all our fingers and toes swell up, and sometimes turned into agonizing, suppurating sores.
A hound is baying from some farm in the valley.
Gragnola and I talked about everything. I would tell him about the books I was reading, and he would discuss them passionately: “Verne,” he would say, “is better than Salgari, because he’s scientific. Cyrus Smith manufacturing nitroglycerin is more real than that Sandokan tearing his chest with his fingernails just because he’s fallen for some bitchy little fifteen-year-old.”
“You don’t like Sandokan?” I asked.
“He seemed a little fascist to me.”
I once told him I had read Heart by De Amicis, and he told me to throw it away because De Amicis was a fascist. “Didn’t you notice,” he said, “how they’re all against old Franti, who comes from a poor family, and yet they fall over each other trying to please that fascist teacher. And what are the stories about? About good Garrone, who was an ass-kisser, about the little Lombard lookout, who dies because some wretch of a king’s officer has sent the kid to watch for the enemy, about the Sardinian drummer boy who gets sent into the middle of a battle, at his age, to carry messages, and then that repulsive captain, who after the poor kid loses a leg throws himself onto him with open arms and kisses him three times over his heart, things you would just never do to a kid who’s just been crippled, and even a captain in the Piedmontese army ought to have a little common sense. Or Coretti’s father, stroking his son’s face with his palm still warm from shaking hands with that butcher, the king. Up against the wall! Up against the wall! It’s men like De Amicis who opened the road to Fascism.”
He taught me about Socrates and Giordano Bruno. And Bakunin, about whose work and life I had known very little. He told me about Campanella, Sarpi, and Galileo, who were all imprisoned or tortured by priests for trying to spread scientific principles, and about some who had cut their own throats, like Ardigò, because the bosses and the Vatican were keeping them down.
Since I had read the Hegel entry (“Emin. Ger. phil. of the pantheist school”) in the Nuovissimo Melzi, I asked Gragnola about him. “Hegel wasn’t a pantheist, and your Melzi is an ignoramus. Giordano Bruno might have been a pantheist. A pantheist believes that God is everywhere, even in that speck of a fly you see there. You can imagine how satisfying that is, being everywhere is like being nowhere. Well, for Hegel it wasn’t God but the State that had to be everywhere, therefore he was a fascist.”
“But didn’t he live more than a hundred years ago?”
“So? Joan of Arc, also a fascist of the highest order. Fascists have always existed. Since the age of… since the age of God. Take God-a fascist.”
“But aren’t you one of those atheists who says God doesn’t exist?”
“Who said that-Don Cognasso, who can never grasp the most trifling thing? I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It’s just that he’s a fascist.”
“But why is God a fascist?”
“Listen, you’re too young for me to give you a theology lecture. We’ll start with what you know. Recite the ten commandments for me, seeing as the Oratorio makes you memorize them.”
I recited them. “Good,” he said. “Now pay attention. Among those ten commandments are four, think about it, only four that promote good thingsand even those, well, let’s review them. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, and don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. This last one is a commandment for men who know what honor is: on the one hand, don’t cuckold your friends, and on the other try to preserve your family, and I can live with that; anarchy wants to get rid of families too, but you can’t have everything all at once. As for the other three, I agree, but common sense should tell you that much at a bare minimum. And even then you have to weigh them, we all tell lies sometimes, perhaps even for good ends, whereas killing, no, you shouldn’t do that, ever.”
“Not even if the king sends you off to war?”
“There’s the rub. Priests will tell you that if the king sends you off to war you can, indeed you should, kill. And that the responsibility lies with the king. That’s how they justify war, which is a nasty brute, especially if Fat Head is the one who sends you off. But notice that the commandments don’t say it’s okay to kill in war. They say don’t kill, period. And then…”
“Then?”
“Let’s look at the other commandments. I am the Lord thy God. That’s not a commandment, otherwise there would be eleven. It’s a prologue. But it’s a sham of a prologue. Try to picture it: some guy appears to Moses, or actually he doesn’t even really appear, a voice comes from who knows where, and then Moses goes and tells his people that they have to obey the commandments because they come from God. But who says they come from God?
That voice: ‘I am the Lord thy God.’ And what if he wasn’t? Imagine if I stop you on the street and say I’m a plainclothes carabiniere and you have to pay me a ten-lira fine because no one’s allowed on that street. If you’re smart you’ll say back: and how can I be sure that you’re a carabiniere, maybe you’re someone who makes his living by screwing people over. Let me see your papers. And instead God persuades Moses that he’s God because he’s says so and that’s that. It all begins with false witness.”
“You don’t believe it was God who gave the commandments to Moses?” “No, actually I do believe it was God. I’m just saying he used a trick. He’s always done that: you have to believe in the Bible because it’s inspired by God, but who tells you the Bible’s inspired by God? The Bible. See the problem? But let’s move on. The first commandment says you shall have no other God before him.
That’s how the Lord prevents you from thinking, for instance, about Allah, or Buddha, or maybe even Venus-and let’s be honest, it couldn’t have been bad to have a piece of tail like that as your goddess. But it also means you shouldn’t believe in philosophy, for instance, or in science, or get any ideas about man descending from apes. Just him, that’s it. Now pay attention, because the other commandments are all fascist, designed to force you to accept society as it is. Remember the one about keeping the Sabbath day holy… What do you think of it?”
“Well, basically it says to go to mass on Sunday-what’s wrong with that?”
“That’s what Don Cognasso tells
