“Was there never some woman who asked you to start living again?”
“From the moment they came into my life, I removed any illusion they might have had. How could I do otherwise? Every time I thought about it my family came back to mind, and I would have been a coward if I had forgotten. The Fascists would have won. And that Tonna who carried on sailing up and down the river, while on riverbanks on the other side of the world I looked in vain for something similar to what he had… Oh, I wanted a life, that’s true, but I could not erase the past.”
“But they too, the Tonnas, their lives were destroyed. They were never happy,” Soneri said.
“They brought it on themselves,” was Ghinelli’s furious answer. “It was other people’s lives they chose to ruin, our hopes for a more dignified future. The Party gave us that hope, because the priests never gave it to us. With a few exceptions, they too were on the other side.”
“Now the Party too is dead.”
Ghinelli clenched his fists tightly while his face turned a deeper shade of scarlet, but it lasted only seconds before quite suddenly the tension evaporated. “It’s a time of plenty, and people have forgotten the grim days of the past. In an age of prosperity, everybody hates everyone else because egoism springs up everywhere, and nowadays that’s the only foundation of the world. Mark my words, poverty will return and people will seek unity again, but it’ll have nothing to do with me. At the most, I’ll have left an example, and sooner or later someone will follow it.”
The commissario rolled that ambiguous remark around in his head, then asked: “Where you inspired by some example from the past?”
“I killed them with an ice-pick. Does that tell you anything?”
“Trotsky was no Fascist.”
“He was a dangerous visionary. I trust those who describe him in those terms. If we had paid heed to him, they would have massacred us all, each and every one of us.”
Soneri felt as though he was back at the debates he had listened to as a student. These were words he had heard de-claimed thousands of times at assemblies in occupied sports halls and cinemas, and now they left him with a bitter savour of nostalgia and of passion spent amidst the glittering well-being of today. It seemed as though a century of history had gone by, but in fact all that had passed was the brief period separating youth from the present.
When he came back to himself, he saw Ghinelli looking at him intently, communicating thereby his need to retell his story. Soneri then felt entitled to put the question that he had been wanting to ask from the outset.
Before he got the words out, the old man resumed in a new flurry of words. “In what I did, I wanted there to be something symbolic, can you understand that? Something that would leave a mark on people’s minds. It wasn’t only the ice-pick that might make people remember me, nor the act of revenge in itself. I understood that the value of what I was doing was linked to the timing. Revenge more than fifty years later. A crime of the post-war period, left suspended but executed a half-century on.” Ghinelli went on relentlessly, warding off Soneri’s question. “Never mind curiosity about the incident and journalistic tittle-tattle. What matters is the coherence of my act. They’ll say I was mad, but I know that some people will remember me and will hold to an idea that was mine. In times like these, all you can do is keep the flame alive. When the time is right, it will act as a detonator.”
The commissario relit his cigar. “Maybe,” he said dryly, “but the majority will look on it as a crime committed among pathetic old folk.”
“I know,” Ghinelli said sadly, “but I don’t much care.”
Soneri felt there was more to be said. He had an overwhelming sense that besides the politics and the desire for revenge, there was a private motive behind Ghinelli’s flight, and once again the urge to ask the question became strong, but at the crucial moment, he found himself lost for words. What was lacking was the more intimate, the perhaps less noble but infinitely more human side of things. All he could do was whisper, “You have not told me everything.”
The old man once more peered at him with focused menace and deep rage, and this allowed the commissario finally to utter the question, the question he should have asked first, even though he also knew that if he had, he would never have found out what he now knew.
“Why after fifty years?” he said, ignoring the replies he had already been given.
His insistence implicitly meant that he wanted to know all the rest, the factors that now seemed to him the most important of all.
He watched Ghinelli’s face dissolve among its wrinkles into an expression which could produce either laughter or tears. Finally it settled into a bitter, sardonic grin, perhaps one of shame. “Because first I wanted to live,” he said.
