Wu Ming - 54

‘. then a fisherman brought me over here, I slept under the canopy of the market and the moment I woke up I asked around to see if anyone knew where you lived.’

Pierre had run through the whole of the journey in a few minutes. His memories flashed by as though in a film, from Ravenna to

Sipan, his deal with Ettore, the letter to Nicola, the meeting with Darko. Everything.

His father had listened without interrupting, chewing wild fennel, his eye fixed on the goats. He was still holding the Mauser in one hand, and stroked his beard with the other.

They were sitting there, not far from the path, under a maritime pine with a twisted trunk. There was a smell of resin and dry grass.

Pierre had expected to be welcomed into the house. A table, a chair, something to eat, but after the gunfire nothing surprised him. Knowing how to be with other people is a matter of training like everything else. It didn’t look as though there were many visitors around here. Vittorio Capponi had lived in

Sipan for almost three months. He’d probably fallen out of the habit.

Pierre tried to fill the silence and check his thoughts. ‘I made my decision on the spur of the moment. Yes, to cut a long story short, I’d been thinking about it for ages, but difficulties were always coming up. They seemed insuperable to me, and perhaps I’d never have done it if hadn’t been for that letter that never came, and the last one I sent you, to the old address, the one that was returned to me.’

Pierre looked at his father again, as though waiting for a reply to an unvoiced question. He felt it deep down in his throat, a dim awareness suppressed until then by the impetuosity of his quest. Why did you stop writing, dad? Why haven’t I heard from you for over a year? Why?

His thoughts ran through his brain faster than the ticking seconds. He saw his father’s eyes again, just as he had seen them the last time, in Italo’s cellar, in the faint candlelight. Proud, determined, prepared for anything. Their colour darkened by the shade of his beret. Ready to say ‘farewell’, and to linger inside you for ever.

He saw Nicola’s face again. His eyes had changed, too. Now, on the few occasions when he talked about their father, there was no way of telling what light flashed there. He looked away, staring obliquely at the floor.

He stretched out a hand to his father’s shoulder, and chose the easiest among a thousand questions. ‘What’s up, dad, aren’t you feeling well? Aren’t you pleased to see me? What is it, has something happened?’

Vittorio Capponi lolled his head, took a deep breath and finally looked Pierre right in the face.

Nine years later, on a remote Dalmatian island, he saw those eyes again.

Filled with exile and resignation.

Chapter 42

Sipan, a minute later

‘Of course I’m pleased to see you, Robespierre,’ Vittorio began without

smiling. ‘But I’d rather you’d stayed at home and spared me all this.’

‘All this what?’ Pierre insisted.

Vittorio struggled for words. His pronunciation and his way of expressing himself betrayed the fact that he had been used to speaking a foreign language for a long time. ‘This crap,’ he said finally. ‘This rock where I’m forced to live, shooting at anyone who turns up. This poor thing that I’ve become.’

‘But dad, what’s happened to you, will you tell me? Why have you kept us in the dark for so long?’

‘And what was I supposed to tell you?’ Vittorio’s face darkened. ‘Last year I buried my second lifelong companion, she died slowly before my eyes. What else is there to say?’

Pierre got up, so as not to reply straight away.

‘You could at least have dropped a line or two,’ he said. ‘No more than that, just a couple of lines. After Milena died I wrote to you twice: you never replied.’

‘Haven’t I hurt enough people already? I came here to live far from you all, I’ve never made it back, I’ve written twice a year, and now I’m supposed to burden you with my troubles? You knew something, didn’t you? Politics was going badly, life was going badly, things in my head were going badly, but a father doesn’t weep on his son’s shoulders.’

‘And instead you don’t give a sign of life for more than a year?’ said Pierre. Then he regretted it. But it was too late to turn back.

‘I just don’t feel I’m alive, Robespierre. Do you want me to tell you everything? Fine. It’s as though I’m dead. So I thought it was better for you to forget. Death is contagious, a dead man’s letters make you die inside.’

Pierre felt the blow. He swallowed hard to check his tears, but neither operation was entirely successful. Vittorio seemed to do the same, then he started talking again. Pierre listened to him in silence, still walking, slowly, around a white stone that protruded from the grass.

Things had started going badly in the early fifties, with the first elections of the workers’ councils in the factories. As far as Pierre could tell, this was still an experiment, but in essence the state was granting workers the chance to take control of the reins of the companies where they worked. His father had been keen on the project. He said that self-management was the only way forward for true socialism. So, as a member of the union, he wanted to put his name down on the electoral list for the workers’ council in his factory.

‘They knew we were enthusiastic about it, but they played dirty: they gave me a promotion, a job that didn’t interest me, in an office in Split. I had to take it and give up the election. That was the start of it all.’

After that there was a succession of little signs. The ‘Italian comrade’ started getting ‘awkward’; his compatriots were accused of being spies for the Cominform, relations with Italy were becoming increasingly tense over Trieste, and a generous helping of racism completed the picture. The partisan war was a faded memory. The ‘hero of the people’, Vittorio Capponi, was becoming a foreigner once more, while official blessing was still being bestowed on the internationalism of the workers’ movement.

‘No, Djilas didn’t give me much help. Friends? Did I write that we were friends? Well, not really, that was just to help you understand. The fact is that I didn’t mind some of his ideas, particularly when he attacked Party bureaucracy and accused the Central Committee of being rather undemocratic and very, what’s the word, Mafioso , is that right? The problem is that he was one of the four most important people in the country, he drove around in a Mercedes, with a chauffeur, he frequented the smartest drawing rooms, hunts, big ceremonies. He dreamed of devoting himself entirely to theory and literature, but he had important political jobs, and in the articles in the paper you would have thought he was attacking himself.’

Milena had passed away in March the previous year. A lingering death, a horrible illness. Pierre understood that the illness had been fatal for his father as well. He had thought he would be able to pick himself up by throwing himself headlong into politics. Milovan Djilas wrote his critical articles for the Party newspaper, and Vittorio had followed his example in a few local or Italian-language dailies. It had been a time of hope and enthusiasm. Then, all of a sudden, disaster struck. Djilas had been released from all his positions, and forced to engage in self-criticism. His most fortunate followers had had to leave their jobs and politics. In most cases they had been removed from their villages, from their friends and family.

‘And it hasn’t stopped there. They’re turning up the heat. People are saying that sooner or later, the moment the Western press stops taking an interest, we’ll be taken to the concentration camp for members of the Cominform, unceremoniously thrown out of the country. That’s why anyone who walks down my path finds themselves staring down the barrel of a Mauser. I’m just waiting for them to come. Every day. But it’s no way to live, always on the alert, always anxious. But you see, I can’t trust anyone, and I’ve had to sever my connections with my friends as well, to keep them out of it.’