Wu Ming Read online

  Sleepless, incapable of interrupting his own ruminations, he had watched dawn rise from the window of his bedroom.

  On 8 October hope had almost been rekindled, with the promised restoration of Zone A to Italy. But on 3 November, the thirtysixth anniversary of the liberation of Trieste, General John Winterton had forbidden any patriotic commemorative demonstration. Despite the prohibition, Mayor Bartoli had hoisted the tricolour on the roof of the city hall. Winterton had ordered it to be furled and confiscated, subsequently refusing to return it to the council.

  On 4 November, the anniversary of the victory of the Great War, Rizzi had gone to the demonstration in Redipuglia, the first village beyond the ‘border’. In the military cemetery, a large crowd was commemorating the liberation from the Austrian yoke by demanding liberation from the Slavic one. Rizzi’s eyes had misted over at the sight of the delegations of the occupied cities: Zara, Cherso, Lussino, Isola . . . Unforgettable. That evening, returning to Trieste by train, the men and women had not gone home in dribs and drabs, but had filed through the streets in little processions, and then merged together in a large spontaneous demonstration. In the Piazza dell’Unità, by now more than a thousand people had stopped in front of the city hall and the Caffè degli Specchi. An English police officer had come out of the main entrance of the Prefecture, attacked and beaten the procession’s standard-bearer and torn the tricolour from his hands. At that very moment the riot squad had arrived, all black raincoats and rifles, and taken on the demonstrators. They, Rizzi included, had defended themselves by smashing up the chairs and tables of the café, using the legs as maces. During the chaos, Rizzi had, by some miracle, succeeded in recovering the standardbearer’s tricolour, which he now had about his person, folded up between his jacket and his coat.

  The commotion had continued in front of the Verdi monument in the Piazza San Giovanni, in Piazza Goldone and in the Viale XX Settembre, where the crowd had attacked a cinema reserved for the English officers. In the midst of all this confusion, a police van had crashed into a trolley bus: ten policemen injured.

  In Via delle Torri, where the street was being repaired, the demonstrators had tried to erect a barricade using crash barriers and a steamroller. The police had replied to flying stones by firing into the air, then ten jeeps had broken through the roadblock and trucks full of police had come by way of reinforcement.

  The clashes had reached as far as the Chiozza arcades.

  All in all, twenty people had been injured. Sixteen arrests.

  The students, and others besides, had decided to go to the piazza the following morning. All the processions were to converge under police orders.

  Because of roadworks, the street in front of the church had been torn up. On the demonstrators’ side there were carts, bags of gravel, some pickaxes and a heap of broken paving stones. Two roads led into the little square, Via XXX Ottobre and Via Dante. On the corner of Via XXX Ottobre was police headquarters, dangerously close.

  Among the 200 fearless fighters surrounded by the riot squad there were schoolboys, university students, some old irredentists and various citizens of no particular politics. There were also some exfascists, but, heavens above, were they not Italians too?

  The riot squad was reinforced by jeeps covered by metal netting, armoured cars, at least 300 police officers wearing steel helmets, and carrying truncheons, carbines and rucksacks containing tins of tear gas. They looked pretty threatening, but . . . was it the moment of truth, or was it not? Rizzi unfolded the tricolour and started yelling at the top of his voice.

  Eventually one of the commanders left the ranks, walked towards the crowd and stopped right in front of Rizzi, staring him straight in the eyes and clutching a riding crop. There could be no doubt about it, he was the same provocateur he had seen the previous evening. Pale as a sheet, with a face colder than the bora in December. Silence fell. Without lowering his eyes, Rizzi threw the flag over his shoulders. With a horrible English accent, the man said:

  ‘This is to be the only warning, there will be no others: hurry up, all of you, go home!’

  Rizzi thumped him in the sternum, knocking him backwards. The police officers were unable to retaliate immediately, because the demonstrators blocked them with a hail of stones and handfuls of gravel. A pick was also seen flying through the air, missing the bonnet of a jeep by only a few centimetres. Then the charge began, and the impact was terrible.

  Rizzi found himself running a gauntlet of kicks, punches, and blows from batons and rifle stocks, ‘Son of a bitch!’ in English, although he didn’t know what it meant, ‘Son of a whore’ in Italian, which was one he did know, insults in Slovenian, and splatters of red. He and some others managed to get inside a church and close the door. There were more than thirty of them, all breathless.

  One of them was Enrico Pinamonti, thin and bespectacled, a secondary school teacher with anarchist ideas. What was he doing there? Rizzi barely knew him, they had never gone beyond hello and good evening, and now they were besieged together.

  ‘Good day to you, Pinamonti.’

  ‘Hi, Rizzi. We’ll see whether it’s a good day or not. It could be.’

  Outside there was a terrible commotion, shouts, sirens, people hammering on the door. The parish priest arrived, completely out of breath.

  ‘What on earth’s going on?’

  A middle-aged man with a tricolour kerchief around his neck replied, ‘Is this not the house of the Lord, father? You must give us asylum – those people outside are worse than the Germans and Tito’s men put together!’

  The priest walked over to the door and shouted, ‘Listen to me, I’m the parish priest. This is the territory of the Holy See, consecrated to St Anthony of Padua. It is the house of God. If you break down this door, you will have profaned a sacred place. Cease your hostilities, I will speak to the people in here and persuade them to leave, as long as there is no further violence!’

  ‘Fucked if I’m leaving this place when that lot are still out there!’ said a mop-headed young man.

  ‘If we’re going to take ’em, I’m going to dish ’em out as well!’ said a man clutching a long bronze candelabra as though it was a pike.

  ‘What are you doing? Put that down this minute! Why didn’t you stay out there, if you’re so bold?’ shrieked the priest. Meanwhile there was not a sound from outside . . .

  . . . At that very moment the door was burst open by the jet of water from a big fire truck, which immediately drenched everyone inside the church, opening the way for an even more violent charge. At the sight of the flooded church, the priest turned purple, and if had he not been a man of the cloth he would no doubt have cursed. He started shouting, ‘Where is your leader? I wish to speak to your superior officer! Immediately!’

  His words went unheeded; the slaughter had already begun. A few students had their skulls broken with rifle blows. Blood mingled with water. The man who wasn’t going to take them without dishing them out swung the candelabra around his head, then brought it sharply down on the shoulder of a policeman, hit another in the stomach, and was finally overcome by at least seven police officers, hurled to the ground, and kicked until he had stopped moving.

  Everyone who had been besieged in the church was arrested and dragged away. All but Rizzi and Pinamonti.

  A moment before the police burst in, the architect and the teacher had hidden themselves in a confessional. Just by a hair, they had escaped being beaten up and arrested. They stayed in the sacristy talking about what had happened, while the priest went to deliver his protest at police headquarters, saying that the church had been profaned and that even if the sky should fall he would reconsecrate it that very afternoon, in front of the faithful and all the people of the city.

  ‘Pretty spirited for a priest!’ remarked Pinamonti, then looked at Rizzi and added, ‘That was a good slap you gave the commander.’

  ‘That wasn’t a slap, it was a push,’ said Rizzi pedantically, his mood darkening.

  After almost a minute’s silence, Rizzi sighed and declaimed in a low voice:

  ‘Poor homeland, racked by the abuse of power

  Of the wicked and the vile.’

  ‘Ah yes you’re a poet. Pretty words, but I didn’t go to the square for my “homeland”, strange though it may seem. I’m an internationalist, I don’t believe in homelands.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I was wondering why you –’

  ‘If there’s a challenge to police violence, I have to get involved. And besides, I’m neither an irredentist nor a slavophile, nor am I a supporter of Togliatti, who changes his mind about Tito every day, following directives from Moscow.’

  ‘I don’t understand, I’m afraid. Whose side are you on?’ asked Rizzi, narrowing his eyes slightly and stroking his beard.

  ‘What I’m trying to say is, whatever happens in the end, we still have to fight our own bosses, Slovenian and Italian, all together.’

  ‘So what are your hopes for Trieste?’ asked Rizzi, curious about this unfamiliar point of view.

  ‘First of all I want Winterton and his gang to leave. After that, we should maintain the internationalist fraternity between Italian- and Slavonic-speaking workers, and reject all racial and patriotic claims. We’ve had enough of that kind of nonsense, dangerous rubbish about blood and soil, before and during the war. I know you don’t agree.’

  ‘How could I? You’re comparing the Führer’s ravings about Aryan purity with the legitimate desire to reunify the peoples of Italy in a single country! I’m an old liberal, I’ve always been anti-fascist. It’s hardly my fault if words like “homeland” have been sullied in the mouths of rabble-rousers. Ask the citizens of Pola and Zara whether they don’t want to be freed from Tito’s yoke! Families have been broken up, there’s a diaspo
ra –’ His voice choked in his throat, and Pinamonti took advantage of the fact.

  ‘Let’s drop the biblical stuff! Words like “diaspora” merely exacerbate an artificial quarrel. Grudges divide people who should really be fighting shoulder to shoulder against their exploiters. My dear Rizzi, I don’t doubt your honesty for a moment, but the homeland you want to reunify is the homeland of the bourgeoisie, the Christian Democrats, the bosses, who were all fascists the day before yesterday, and who then put on democratic clothes, and it’s not as though the Italian police behave any better than the Allied Military Government, either. Do you think we in Trieste would be any better off if they were wielding their clubs on the orders of Rome rather than the AMG? Utter nonsense. And I’d go so far as to say that nonsense of that kind enables the AMG to marshal its forces of repression all the more effectively.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Rizzi interrupted him. He wanted to know where Pinamonti’s acrobatic reasoning was taking him.

  ‘Trieste is divided between an irredentist Italian majority, a Slovenian minority and an “independentist” Italian minority: a good reason for bringing Italians from other provinces, Slovenians and independentist Triestines into the Italian police. In that way, Italian police repress pro-Slav demonstrations, while Slavs and independentists, as happened just now, beat up the Italians. It’s that race hatred, which you call “patriotism”, that fuels the machinery of the AMG, and perhaps other state machinery as well.’

  ‘So are you some kind of anarchist? What sort of formation do you serve in?’

  Pinamonti put his hand under his coat, took out a folded newspaper and passed it to Rizzi. It was a fortnightly paper called The Communist Programme. Rizzi unfolded it and skimmed it for a few minutes, lingering over the account of a meeting of the Internationalist Communist Party, which Rizzi had never heard of before, and which had been held in Trieste, of all places, during the summer.

  ‘What on earth is this Internationalist Communist Party? Are you a member?’

  ‘Actually no, but they have ideas very similar to mine. They don’t side either with Moscow or with Belgrade, they hate Stalin and they maintain that Russia is a capitalist country.’

  ‘Weird. Who’s in charge?’

  ‘No one, but the most highly regarded exponent is this fellow Amadeo Bordiga, who founded the ICP in 1921 and was expelled a few years later.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard the name. Anyway, my dear Pinamonti, I was there when Tito’s Fourth Army fired into the Italian crowd on 5 May 1945. You can analyse all you want, but when it’s a matter of life and death you’ve got to unite your forces, and I’m convinced that Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia would rather stay with us, with people who speak their language, rather than with brigands who express themselves in grunts and throw people in sink-holes in the Carso. You go on thinking whatever you want, and I’ll go on using the words I prefer, “homeland” included.’

  Pinamonti said nothing for a few seconds, then shrugged and said, ‘My dear Rizzi, you do what you want, too, but because you’re a decent guy I want to warn you that, as a patriot in this time and place, you’re going to get fucked one way or another.’

  And on that serious note their debate concluded.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, the bells of Sant’Antonio summoned the faithful. The parish priest was reconsecrating the bloodied church. The steps and the surrounding streets were crammed with people, the atmosphere was tense, and police jeeps were already assembling. Half an hour later, the priest came out in procession and, holding the cross aloft, began to bless the external walls. Silence. Men took their hats off. Everyone present crossed themselves.

  Rizzi and Pinamonti, mingling with the crowd, studied the British police, their fingers drumming on their weapons. The same officer as before – identified by some as a certain ‘Major Williams’ – ordered the ‘assembly’ to be broken up. Once again some people launched a hail of stones while the congregation tried to stop them and the priest tried to perform his function. From a side road came the rattle of rifle fire, first in the air . . . then at head height.

  Panic: in the general scramble the wounded were carried over people’s shoulders, but the police obstructed and beat those who were trying to help. On the church steps, everyone could see big patches of blood. The priest and his congregation fled inside, but the pursuit continued right up to the altar, the hoses drenched the nave, and voices were heard crying, ‘There are people dead! There are people dead!’ and ‘Christ almighty, they’re trying to kill us, fight back!’

  Rizzi lost sight of Pinamonti, then he lost his tricolour, and finally he took a bullet in his backside, which passed through his right buttock and emerged on the other side, just grazing the joint of the femur. Pinamonti got away with a truncheon blow to the temple and a few kicks in the kidneys.

  A sixteen-year-old boy died from a bullet to the heart. His name was Pierino Addobbati, said to be the son of an exiled doctor from Zara. Everyone remembered the little tricolour ribbon in his blooddrenched buttonhole. Another casualty was Antonio Zavadil, a sixtyyear-old maritime waiter of Czech origin who had become a naturalised Triestine. There were twelve serious casualties and about forty arrests. The police smashed up the headquarters of the Movimento Sociale Italiano and the ‘Flame’ athletics club, to create the impression that they had been putting down a neo-fascist demonstration.

  The Italian correspondents of the British newspapers spoke of the ‘thuggish actions’ of ‘neo-fascist gangsters’.

  From Rome, Prime Minister Pella exhorted the people of Trieste to ‘maintain the calm of the strong’.

  The following day a general strike was declared. The tension mounted until, at around ten o’clock in the morning, clashes and gunfire resumed. On the corner of Via Mazzini and Via Milano, demonstrators overturned a police jeep and set it alight. The offices of various Slovenian and independentist associations were invaded and smashed to pieces. Someone threw a hand grenade at the Prefecture. In Via del Teatro, the police opened fire on some people who appeared at the window. That day, 6 November, the police killed another four people, injuring thirty.

  When Rizzi heard of this, he was lying belly-down on a hospital bed, humiliated and exhausted, and more concerned with his own backside than he was with his homeland.

  That man Pinamonti was either a prophet or a jinx.

  III Around the world, 25 December 1953

  A substance that relaxes the heart and the sphincter, a nectar that eases rebellion in the muscles, fairy tales told to bones and joints. The bitter fruit of papaver somniferum. The hand of a Turk, a Laotian, a Burmese. Firm thumb, sharp blade, latex that touches the air and clots. Brown mush that sticks to the fingers. Filaments and fingertips, children playing with pine resin.

  Chandu, prepared opium. Loaves that fill boxes that fill trucks that meet waiting planes or ships. Compliant customs men, blind eyes turned by states and armies, investments passing from bank to bank. A kilo of opium becomes 100 grams of morphine, which become 25 of pure heroin, which is mixed with talcum powder, plaster of Paris and who knows what else.

  For every dollar spent on opium, 5,000 are earned.

  Goods that every trader dreams of, the additive that every circulatory system yearns for.

  Intersecting routes. From Turkey to Sicily via Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. From Sicily to Marseilles. From Indo-China to Marseilles on the ships of the Foreign Legion. From Marseilles to Sicily.

  From the Mediterranean to America.

  The French Connection

  The tie tight around the arm. Needle jabbed in the hollow of the elbow pierces the vein, clearly visible beneath the dark skin. Squirt of plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, useless platelets flung into the outside world. The curse involves the Creator. No one hears it.

  Apart from the Creator.

  And the cockroaches, from behind the skirting board.

  But who knows whether the Creator really exists. And cockroaches have no ears.

  Body: a shell of trembling jerks, not a muscle that does its duty without protest. Blood of the walking dead, the smell of acute gingivitis, cold sweat.

  The musician presses a handkerchief to his mouth. Sighs. Ties the tie around the other arm. Hard to press the plunger of the syringe. The hand less used seems to belong to someone else. The brain cannot direct it. Calm, calm, breathe and try again.