Apart from the pleasures of coffee and chocolate, what I most enjoyed was appearing to be someone else.
But I had to limit and finally halt these adventures. I was frightened of bumping into my comrades, who certainly didn’t think of me as a religious zealot and believed that I too was fired by their enthusiasm for the Carbonari.
These aspiring national liberators generally gathered at the Osteria del Gambero. In a dark narrow street, over a still darker doorway, a sign with a golden prawn read Osteria del Gambero d’Oro, Good Wine & Good Food. Inside was a room that also served as kitchen and wine cellar. Amid smells of salami and onions, customers drank and sometimes played morra. More often than not we passed the night, conspirators without a plot, dreaming of imminent insurrections. I had learned to enjoy good food at my grandfather’s house, and all that could be said about the Gambero d’Oro was that you could satisfy your hunger, provided you were not too fussy. But I needed to get out into society and escape from our Jesuit guests, so the Gambero’s greasy food and my jovial friends were preferable to somber dinners at home.
We would leave toward dawn, our breath heavy with garlic and our hearts filled with patriotic ardor, losing ourselves in a comforting mantle of fog, excellent for avoiding the attention of police spies. Sometimes we crossed the Po and climbed up to look back over the roofs and bell towers floating on the mist that covered the plain, while the faraway Basilica of Superga, already glinting in the sun, seemed like a lighthouse in the middle of the sea.
But we students didn’t just talk about the nation to come. We talked, as happens at that age, about women. Each in turn, eyes gleaming, recalled looking up at a balcony and catching a smile, touching a hand while passing on a staircase, a dried flower dropped from a missal and picked up (the braggart claimed) while it still held the perfume of the hand that had placed it between those sacred pages. I feigned annoyance, and acquired the reputation of being a Mazzinian of strict and upright morals.
Except that one evening the most licentious of our companions announced that he had found in a chest in his attic, well hidden by his shameless, dissipated father, several of those volumes which in Turin were known (in French) as cochons, and not daring to lay them out on the greasy table of the Gambero d’Oro, he had decided to lend them to each of us in turn. When it came to me, I could hardly refuse.
Late one night, I leafed through those volumes, which must have been precious and valuable, bound as they were in morocco, spines with raised cords and red title labels, gilt page edges, gilt fleurons on the covers and some with coats of arms. They had titles such as Une veillée de jeune fille and Ah! monseigneur, si Thomas nous voyait! and I shuddered as I turned the pages and found engravings that sent streams of sweat trickling from my hair down my cheeks and neck: young women who lifted their skirts to reveal buttocks of dazzling whiteness, offered for the abuse of lascivious men—nor did I know whether to be more disturbed by their brazen rotundity or by the almost virginal smile of the young girl, whose head was turned immodestly toward her violator, her face illuminated with mischievous eyes, framed by jet-black hair parted into two side-knots; or still more terrifying, three girls on a couch with their legs open to display what should have been the natural defense of their virginal pudenda, one of them offering it to the right hand of a man with ruffled hair, who at the same time was penetrating the girl lying shamelessly beside her, while the third girl had her crotch nonchalantly exposed and with her left hand was parting her cleavage with subtle prurience through her ruffled corset.
And then I found the curious caricature of a priest with a wart-covered face, which on closer inspection was made up of naked men and women variously entwined, and penetrated by enormous male members, many of which hung in a line over the nape of the neck as if to form, with their testicles, a thick head of hair that ended in heavy ringlets.
I do not remember how that turbulent night ended, when sex was presented to me at its most dreadful (in the biblical sense of the word, like the crash of thunder that arouses a sense of the sublime as well as a fear of devilry and sacrilege). I remember only that I emerged from that disturbing experience mumbling repeatedly to myself, like a litany, the phrase of some writer or other of sacred texts that Father Pertuso had made me learn by heart many years earlier: «The beauty of the body is only skin deep. If men could only see what is beneath the flesh, they would be nauseated just to look at women: all this feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humors, bile. Consider all that is hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, in the stomach…And we who are repelled by the very thought of touching vomit or ordure with the tips of our fingers, how can we ever want to embrace a sack of excrement?»
Perhaps at that age I still believed in divine justice, and attributed what happened the following day to holy vengeance for that tempestuous night. I found my grandfather sprawled gasping in his chair, holding a crumpled sheet of paper between his hands. We called the doctor. I took the letter from him and read that my father had been fatally wounded by a French shell while defending the Roman Republic, in that June of 1849 when General Oudinot had been sent by Louis Napoleon to free the papal throne from Mazzini and Garibaldi’s army.
My grandfather was not dead, though he was already over eighty, but he shut himself up for days in a resentful silence, and no one knew whether this was out of hatred of the French, or of the papal troops who had killed his son, or of his son for having dared so irresponsibly to challenge them, or of all the patriots who had corrupted him. From time to time he let out plaintive sighs, alluding to the responsibility of the Jews in the events that were shaking Italy, just as they had devastated France fifty years earlier.
Perhaps to feel closer to my father, I spent many long hours in the attic on the novels he had left behind, and I managed to intercept Dumas’ Joseph Balsamo, which arrived by post when he could no longer read it.
This wonderful book, as everyone knows, recounts the adventures of Cagliostro, and how he had plotted the affair of the queen’s necklace, managing in a single stroke to morally and financially ruin Cardinal de Rohan, compromise the sovereign and expose the entire court to ridicule. Many believed that Cagliostro’s fraud had so contributed to undermining the prestige of the monarchy that it contributed to the climate of disgrace that led to the Revolution of ’89.
Dumas goes further, and sees Cagliostro, alias Joseph Balsamo, as someone who intentionally organized not just a fraud but a political plot under the protection of universal Freemasonry.
I was fascinated by the ouverture. Scene: Mont Tonnerre—Thunder Mountain. On the left bank of the Rhine, a few leagues from Worms, a range of desolate mountains begins—the King’s Chair, Falcons’ Rock, Serpent’s Crest and, highest of all, Thunder Mountain. It was here, on the 6th of May 1770 (almost twenty years before the outbreak of the fateful Revolution), as the sun was setting behind the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, almost dividing it into two hemispheres of fire, that a Stranger from Mainz climbed the slopes of the mountain, abandoning his horse at a certain point, until he was seized by several masked beings. After blindfolding him, they led him through the forest to a clearing where three hundred phantoms awaited him, wrapped in shrouds and armed with swords. They began to question him most carefully.
What do you wish? To see the light. Are you ready to swear an oath? And a series of tests began, such as drinking the blood of a traitor who had just been killed and pointing a pistol at his head and pulling the trigger to prove his obedience, nonsense of that kind, reminiscent of Masonic rituals of the lowest order, well known to regular readers of Dumas, until the traveler decided to cut things short and turned disdainfully to the gathering, making it clear that he knew all their rituals and tricks, and that they should therefore stop play-acting with him, because he was something more than all of them, and was by divine right the head of that universal Masonic congregation.
And he called for the members of the Masonic lodges of Stockholm, London, New York, Zurich, Madrid, Warsaw and various Asiatic countries, all of course already assembled on Thunder Mountain, to bow to his command.
Why were Masons from throughout the world gathered there? The Stranger explained. He asked for the hand of iron, the sword of fire, the scales of diamond to banish the impure from the earth—in other words, to humiliate and destroy the two great enemies of humanity, the throne and the altar (my grandfather had
