Wu Ming - 54

‘Hey, Pierre, you finally did it, eh?’

‘Did what?’ he asked, gripping the railing.

‘Got yourself out of the shit and sorted everything out for everybody.’

Pierre thought he could glimpse a half-smile in the darkness of the wharf.

‘You’ve been decent. A fool, but decent.’

Pierre returned his smile. He heaved himself towards the ship’s rail, followed by his father.

L’Unità, 1.7.1954

From the Hiroshima bomb to the peaceful use of atomic energy

Soviet nuclear power launches a new phase in human progress

With the signature of the surrender — the law of the terror of United Fruit returns to Guatemala

Large numbers of drug-traffickers arrested in Rome and Naples

L’Unità, 4.7.1954

Serious gaps in Government inquiry into scandals related to the Montesi case

L’Unità, 6.7.1954

Serious territorial losses anticipated by the plan for trieste

Two thousand arrests in Guatemala

Repeal of the law for agrarian reform

Il Resto del Carlino, 11.7.1954

Days of waiting and trepidation

The banners of Trieste ready to flap over the balconies of the houses

The drug route

A long and terrible route populated by dreams and drenched in blood with, in Italy alone, countless paths, highways and even aeroplane runways. A long and serious inquest into drug-trafficking, also taking in the Montesi trial, has been conducted by Lamberto Sorrentino, who has, in the course of his laborious inquiry, approached smugglers, dealers and idlers, and even had a stay in a clinic for addicts, enabling him to give the reader of Il Resto del Carlino a version of this searing problem

Il Resto del Carlino, 1.8.1954

Trieste accord between 9 and 15 August

L’Unità, 2.8.1954

Tito makes new claims on zone A

Il Resto del Carlino, 4.8.1954

Italian tricolour hoisted over the terrible summit of K2

Il Resto del Carlino, 5.8.1954

Scelba has reported to the chamber the danger of a left-wing dictatorship

‘The threat hangs over the political life of the country’

Il Resto del Carlino, 6.8.1954

Trieste accord to be announced after assumption day

L’Unità, 19.8.1954

Atomic fall-out over Washington eighty hours after explosion in Nevada

L’Unità, 20.8.1954

sudden death of Christian Democrat leader de Gasperi — a nation mourns

L’Unità, 25.8.1954

‘Touchez-pas au Grisbi’ at Venice Festival

Latest Jean Gabin yields up its booty

Il Resto del Carlino, 26.8.1954

Trieste accord may be announced in mid-September

L’Unità, 26.8.1954

‘Witch-hunter’ investigated on Monday

McCarthy before Senate commission for ‘conduct unbecoming’

Il Resto del Carlino, 31.8.1954

A mysterious obstacle in the way of solution for Trieste

L’Unità, 03.9.1954

The United States already has weapons prepared to give the soldiers of the New Wehrmacht

L’Unità, 10.9.1954

The chain of silence must be broken and light shed on the Montesi affair

The level of protection enjoyed by the leading players confirms the political responsibility of the Government

Il Resto del Carlino, 20.9.1954

A speech by the Marshal at Celje

Tito extends hand to the USSR

Prospect of ‘normalisation’ with the East

L’Unità, 22.9.1954

Justice on the way: two arrest warrants issued

Piccioni and Montagna in jail

home

I Paris, 14 July

Seventy-five parts potassium nitrate. Fifteen of charcoal with low levels of sucrose. Ten of pure sulphur, non-acidic; alternatively replaced or accompanied by starch, rubber, sucrose. The composition of the explosive powder.

Gunpowder.

The potassium nitrate releases oxygen and produces combustion.

It is almost certain that it was an eighth-century Chinese monk who gave birth to the age of bangs, with all its incalculable consequences. It was Roger Bacon, thirteenth-century philosopher, who passed on to us the formula as it is today, while Berthold Schwarz, a sixteenth-century German monk, was the first to use it to fire a projectile.

In any case, the art of fire is a very ancient one, much of it shadowy and unknown. In China, once again, there are records of pyrotechnic exercises from the second or third centuries AD. There are hardly any detailed publications on the subject: the essay by a sixteenth-century Italian, Vannoccio Biringuccio, On Pyrotechnics , in 1540, a treatise on technical chemistry. Then nothing until a dense manual from the late nineteenth century. After that, little more.

But mankind’s fascination with the infinite variations in the art of fire remains immense, perhaps precisely because of the air of secrecy surrounding it. On the playful, popular level alone, no festival or fair, no mountain village or international metropolis, is complete without glittering luminous pyrotechnics, marvelled at by children, admired by adults.

Paris couldn’t get out of it. Certainly not with a festival like the 14th of July on the horizon, even though French pride had been dealt a severe knock by events in Indochina, and the festivities were going to be in a minor key.

Fireworks are obtained by mixing metals with explosive powders. As they burn, carbonates and oxides of different metals produce the different tones and colours of each firework. There are rockets called ‘chokes’ or ‘vortices’ that rotate on their own axes and soar into the air leaving a luminous trail. The ‘bombs’ or ‘aerial shells’, on the other hand, need iron mortars fixed to the ground with wooden battens. Each one is a cartridge full of smaller fireworks which, once a certain altitude has been reached, explode in all directions. By modifying the arrangement of the charges within the main firework, different shapes and intensities may be achieved.

Toni knew these things because he had always admired fireworks displays. He had researched the subject, he knew a few things about it. He had often said it was how he would like to go. A nice multicoloured bang lighting up the sky. Now they had ‘Stars of the East’, his favourites. Golden tears filling the sky. Toni watched the spectacle from inside his car, through the windscreen.

A rotten year for France, 1954. Who gives a toss? thought Toni.

He thought he’d fucked them good and proper. He’d fucked them twice over. The Marseillais. The bastards.

But he had been waiting for them. Dead-eye from Naples always settled his scores.

He had sent three of them to their creator. Toni thought of the other, less choreographic use of the black powder.

The blaze of the Stars of the East was at its peak, Toni could see it everywhere, increasingly blurred. The taste of blood filled his mouth.

Toni couldn’t help noticing that it was not as he had imagined it would be. A nice polychrome explosion colouring the sky. It was different from the colourful geometric figures, the intestine bursting from his torn belly. And the gilded tears of the Stars of the East inundating the sky were different from the blood now flooding into the back space of the car and pouring copiously out of it, on to the pavement, tinting it a dark red. Fuck tuberculosis, he thought.

Toni thought about all these things. As he died.

II Eastern suburbs of Bologna, 2 September

McGuffin had shown cartoons of cats chasing mice.