Then you’ve got to bear in mind that I had absented myself from the final phases of the fighting and the Resistance. In those days, the Communist Party was highly organized and had kept intact the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica, the partisan network closest to them. I’d been lucky once not to be found out. After the Liberation, I went into hiding for nearly two years with the connivance of some of my comrades who had fallen out with the party. They were the only ones who knew anything. Do you understand now why I was not able to act after April 25? My funeral had even taken place. I went up and down the river, living in the holds of barges or in cabins belonging to people I could trust. As I relived that life in recent weeks, it seemed as though I was reliving my boyhood. Take it from me, if I were still young, if I enjoyed the health I did then, you would never have caught me. I have been on the run all my life.”
“And not a single one of the partisans realized what you were up to? Or perhaps some of them just pretended not to?” asked the commissario.
“I couldn’t say. I had other things on my mind. The episode of the disfigured bodies appeared sinister and ambiguous, but the Fascists got the blame. The same ones who shot my friend, the Kite, not long afterwards. Anyway, it was payback time for them, and they got what they deserved.”
“It took me a long time to work out that this was the key to the whole affair. You had to do it,” said the commissario. “Somebody had to take your place among the dead. So that Fascist who was recorded as missing, the savagery on the bodies of those killed in battle…it was all a set-up. You made it seem an act of hatred, you made them unrecognizable and passed off the Blackshirt as yourself.” Soneri was struggling to understand.
The other man took up the story. “Yes. I had to set to work with my knife. I then picked up a huge rock and smashed it several times on the faces of each one of them until they were a mangled mess. I dressed the Fascist in my clothes before slashing and ripping his skin. I even took a photograph of my mother and put it in his jacket pocket to make the whole thing more credible. I was really sorry to lose that portrait, but I justified it with the thought that it would make it easier to avenge her for what she had been through. The Fascist was the same build as me, and it was all very convincing. Those were not days for faint hearts.”
“Two lives. I can see that this was the only possible solution,” the commissario said. The light flickered on and off. “The others all died before you. The members of your brigade, I mean.”
“I am the last one,” the old man confirmed. “And that was another reason why I felt compelled to do justice for the others…in the name of those of my comrades who were only able to live one life, and a very brief one at that.”
“Has it been on your mind all these years?”
“Always. Each and every morning I went over the plan as though I were to execute it a few hours later. I made contact again with my comrades here, and twice a month they updated me on my intended victims. I lived with the fear that they might die before I had the chance to murder them. I would even have defended them if they had been under threat from anyone else. Maybe that’s a kind of love, like the love you have for rabbits that you tend and look after with the sole intention of having them for dinner once they have been fattened up.”
“Did the idea of forgetting the whole thing, of coming back here and starting over, never cross your mind? After all, nobody could have done anything to you after the amnesty,” Soneri said, lighting another cigar.
“As far as people here were concerned, I was dead. That was true of the Party as well,” the old man said with a shrug. “They would not have looked me straight in the eye, and I would have lived year after year in isolation, a stranger, so I was just as well off being a real stranger elsewhere. Until fifteen years ago, what they took to be my body was buried in the graveyard. Thirty years after my disappearance, they dug it up, but since there was no-one here to pay to have it transferred to the ossuary, all trace of it has been lost. The Party said the records in the National Association for Italian Partisans and the stone on the floodplain were monument enough, so I had no doubt that the one amnesty I would never have received was the one from the Party. As I’ve already said: they had no qualms, they were pitiless.”
“You would have had to explain too many things and mix personal histories with the political struggle,” the commissario said.
“That’s not all. I felt myself still too young to…” He stopped in mid sentence, overcome by conflicting emotions. “Now,” he began again, the words tumbling over each other, “now I’m of an age when I have nothing to lose.”
Soneri peered at him through the bluish smoke which acted as a lens. He was able to feel what the man wanted to express, but not to put it adequately into words. He feared that too direct a question might stem the old man’s flow. The discussion ought not to be an interrogation so much as a series of prompts for a confession and so, lingering over certain details, he raised queries which aimed to strip away the mystery, layer by layer.
“Did you feel any remorse over those boys whose faces you made unrecognizable that day down by the river?”
The old man sighed. “How would you feel after smashing the head of someone you grew up with, someone you had shared your best years with? I knew that I was saying good-bye to all hope of happiness and consigning myself to the loneliness of an existence far from my own home. Do you think I didn’t miss the Po? My dialect? All the time I was away, I always forced myself to think in dialect, but I had nothing left here. I would have been an ordinary emigrant, like so many others. I deluded myself into believing that with a new identity I could be more free, but the desire for revenge never left me.”
“And your life in Argentina?”
“I did what I could to get by, enjoying all that I could enjoy. I didn’t lack for anything, women, the good life, holidays…but when you live like that, you have to be careful not to put down roots, because otherwise the present covers the past and is in its turn, day after day, ground down by boredom.”
“What about your family? Did you ever think of them?”
The old man gave another start, threw his arms in the air and then let them fall heavily on the table in front of him. The bulb began to sway once more and the stagnant smoke was disturbed by the ripples and currents of air.
“My family!” he said sadly, more to himself than to Soneri. “Did I ever think of them? Of course I thought of them, but I thought of them as dead or violated. Ida, the eldest, they dragged her round the back of the house… there were seven of them…the middle sister managed to escape down to the river, but was chased by the Blackshirts. She threw herself in to get away from the bastards, but the current pulled her under. My father tried to save the women in the family…he came out with an axe, but they killed him with one burst of gunfire. The only one that got away was my sister Franca, the youngest of the family. Ida was left distraught and filled with shame and she disappeared. No-one heard from her again. The sister who jumped into the Po was washed up at Boretto and was brought back home on the cart of some travelling puppeteers. My mother died of a broken heart a few months later at her sister’s house, since ours had been burned down.” He had laid both his hands, palms down, on the table, and the two enormous hands seemed like the paws of some wild beast ready to spring. Then he lifted them, clenching them into fists, muttering in a broken voice: “Nothing, nothing left.”
Soneri went on gazing at him, an old man scarred by a deep, incurable wound. As he pondered the condition of those who, like him, had been caught up in violence and had sought in vain all their lives for some escape route, he had no difficulty in locating the kernel of genuine humanity behind a thick cover of hatred. In the wrinkled face he could still detect the trauma of the boy who, with one terrible leap into hatred, had become an adult.
All the while, the commissario felt a powerful need to put the one question that he nevertheless suppressed, afraid that it might yet be premature. He preferred to allow the discussion to drift in the hope that in the account it would slip out. He looked at the old man sunk in memories which had hardened into a fixation many years earlier, and which could not now be loosened. He knew almost everything now, specifically who had killed the Tonnas and what the motive was. In his role as commissario, he could relax and think of the case as closed, but curiosity held him in a tense grip which would give him no respite until it was satisfied.
“Ghinelli, Spartaco Ghinelli,” he said softly, as though the name had been whispered from a dark corner of the cellar.
The old man looked up and peered at him intently. It was his way of offering confirmation.
“Ghinelli,” Soneri repeated, “Argentina must be very beautiful
…did you never think of…”
The other man understood and replied frankly. “No. One of the beautiful things about Argentina is that there’s plenty of space for everyone, and you’re not always treading on other people’s toes. The cities are very big as well, so if you want to lose yourself in them, you can. But I was there only provisionally.”
