By March the pope had granted a constitution and freedom of the press, and had released the Jews in the ghetto from many humiliating rituals and obligations. During the same period, the grand duke of Tuscany also granted a constitution, while Carlo Alberto introduced the Albertine Statute in the Kingdom of Piedmont. Finally, there were the revolutionary protests in Vienna, in Bohemia and in Hungary, and those five days of insurrection in Milan, which would lead to the Austrians’ being driven out, with the Piedmont army going to war so that liberated Milan was annexed to Piedmont. Rumors spread among my comrades that the communists had produced a manifesto, which brought rejoicing not only among students but also workers and men of poor circumstances, all convinced that the last priest would soon be hanged using the guts of the last king.
Not all the news was good: Carlo Alberto had suffered several defeats and was regarded as a traitor by the people of Milan, and in general by every patriot; Pius IX, frightened by the assassination of one of his ministers, had taken refuge at Gaeta with the king of the Two Sicilies and, after underhand attempts to stir up trouble, proved to be less liberal than he had seemed at first; and many of the constitutions that had been granted were withdrawn. But in the meantime Garibaldi and Mazzini’s patriots had arrived in Rome. Early the following year the Roman Republic would be proclaimed.
My father left home for good in March, and Mamma Teresa said she was sure he had gone to join the Milanese rebels, except that toward December one of the Jesuits living with us received news that he had joined up with Mazzini’s supporters, who were running to defend the Roman Republic. My grandfather was devastated, and tormented me with dreadful prophecies that transformed this annus mirabilis into an annus horribilis. During those same months, the Piedmont government suppressed the Jesuit order, confiscating its property, and in order to destroy everything around them, also suppressed orders sympathetic to the Jesuits, such as the Oblates of San Carlo and of Maria Santissima, and the Redemptorists.
«This is the advent of the Antichrist,» my grandfather mourned. He naturally blamed every event on Jewish intrigue, seeing Mordechai’s darkest prophecies as being fulfilled.
My grandfather provided shelter for Jesuit fathers trying to escape the fury of the people, as they waited to be reinstated in some way among the lay clergy. In early 1849 many arrived secretly from Rome with appalling stories of what was happening down there.
Father Pacchi. After reading Sue’s The Wandering Jew, I saw him as the incarnation of Father Rodin, the wicked Jesuit who moved about in the shadows, sacrificing every moral principle to the interests of the Society, perhaps because (like Father Rodin) Father Pacchi concealed his membership in the order by dressing in secular clothes, wearing a scruffy topcoat caked in old sweat and covered with dandruff, a neckerchief instead of a cravat, a black threadbare waistcoat and heavy shoes encrusted with mud, which he trampled inconsiderately into our fine carpets. He had a thin, pale, chiseled face, oily gray hair plastered over his temples, turtle eyes and thin purplish lips.
Not satisfied with the revulsion inspired simply by his presence at the table, Father Pacchi ruined everyone’s appetite by recounting terrifying stories, uttered in sermonizing tones: «My friends,» he said with tremulous voice, «but I have to tell you: the leprosy has spread from Paris. Louis Philippe was certainly no saint, but he was a bulwark against anarchy. I have seen the Roman people these past few days! Yet were they indeed the people of Rome? They were ragged and disheveled, thugs who would turn their backs upon heaven for a glass of wine. They are not people, they are a rabble, mixed with the vilest dregs from the cities of Italy and abroad, followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini, blind instruments for every evil. You know not how iniquitous are the abominations committed by the republicans.
They enter churches and break open the reliquaries of martyrs, they scatter their ashes to the wind and use the urns as chamber pots. They rip out the altar stones and smear them with excrement, they deface the statues of the Virgin with their daggers, they cut the eyes out of the images of saints, and with charcoal they scrawl obscenities upon them. When a priest spoke out against the republic, they dragged him into a doorway, stabbed him, gouged out his eyes and tore out his tongue, and after disemboweling him, they wrapped his guts around his neck and strangled him. And do not imagine, even if Rome is liberated (already there is talk of help arriving from France), that Mazzini’s followers will be defeated. They have spewed out from every province of Italy; they are shrewd and crafty, fraudsters and deceivers; they are daring, patient and determined. They will continue to congregate in the city’s most secret haunts; their falsity and hypocrisy allow them to penetrate the secrets of government offices, the police, the army, the navy, the city strongholds.»
«When a priest spoke out against the republic, they dragged him into a doorway, stabbed him, gouged out his eyes and tore out his tongue.»
«And my son is among them,» cried my grandfather, crushed in body and spirit.
Excellent beef braised in Barolo then arrived at the table.
«My son will never understand the beauty of such a thing,» he said. «Beef with onion, carrot, celery, sage, rosemary, bay leaf, clove, cinnamon, juniper, salt, pepper, butter, olive oil and, of course, a bottle of Barolo, served with polenta or puréed potato. Go on, fight the revolution. All taste for life is gone. You people want to be rid of the pope, and we’ll end up being forced by that fisherman Garibaldi to eat bouillabaisse niçoise. What is the world coming to!»
Father Bergamaschi often went off, dressed in secular clothing, saying he would be away for a few days, without explaining where or why. Then I would go into his room, take out his cassock, dress myself up in it and admire myself in a mirror, moving about as if dancing—as if I were, heaven forbid, a woman, or as if I were imitating him. If it turns out I am Abbé Dalla Piccola, I have discovered here the distant origins of these theatrical tastes of mine.
In the pockets of the cassock I found some money (which the priest had obviously forgotten), and I decided to treat myself to a little gluttonous transgression and explore places in the city that I had often heard praised.
Thus dressed—and without realizing that in those days it was already a provocation—I headed off into the labyrinth of Balôn, that part of Porta Palazzo then inhabited by the dregs of Turin’s population, where the worst band of miscreants to infest the city were recruited. But on feast days Porta Palazzo market offered extraordinary entertainment. The people jostled and shoved, pressing around the stalls; servant girls flocked into the butcher shops; children stood spellbound in front of the nougat makers; gourmands purchased their poultry, game and charcuterie; and in the restaurants not a single table was free.
In my cassock I brushed past women’s flapping dresses, and from the corner of my eye, which I kept ecclesiastically fixed upon my crossed hands, I saw the faces of women wearing hats, bonnets, veils or headscarves, and felt bewildered by the bustle of carriages and carts, by the shouts, the cries, the uproar.
Excited by the exuberance, from which my grandfather and my father had until then kept me hidden, though for different reasons, I pushed my way to one of Turin’s legendary places at that time. Dressed as a Jesuit, and mischievously enjoying the curiosity I aroused, I arrived at Caffè al Bicerin, close to the Sanctuary of the Consolata, to taste their milk, fragrant with cocoa, coffee and other flavors, served in a glass with a metal holder and handle. I was not to know that one of my heroes, Alexandre Dumas, would write about bicerin a few years later, but after only two or three visits to that magical place I learned all about that nectar. It originated from the bavareisa, except that, whereas in the bavareisa the milk, coffee and chocolate are mixed together, in a bicerin they stay in three separate layers (which remain hot), so you can order a bicerin pur e fiur, made with coffee and milk, pur e barba, with coffee and chocolate, or ‘n poc ‘d tut, meaning a little of everything.
It was a magnificent place, with its wrought-iron front edged by advertising panels, its cast-iron columns and capitals and, inside, wooden boiseries decorated with mirrors, marble-topped tables and, behind the counter, almond-scented jars with forty different types of confections. I enjoyed standing there watching, particularly on Sundays, when this drink was nectar for those who had fasted in preparation for communion and needed some sustenance on leaving the Consolata—and a bicerin was also much prized during the Lenten fast, since hot chocolate was not regarded as food. What hypocrites.
Apart from the pleasures of coffee and chocolate, what I most enjoyed
