The situation was as follows.
The hayloft of a very old maso, at the end of the summer. The harvest has been good, it hasn’t rained too much or too little, the hay is stacked up to the ceiling. The chute through which the peasant is going to lower it down to the cowshed and into the troughs is made of very old wood; the floor, walls and beams supporting the roof, the tiles, everything is made of very old fir. There’s a lit candle on the floor; it crackles, smokes, devours its wick. The wind is blowing through the cracks between the wall planks, agitating the flame. A stronger gust and the candle will be knocked over into the hay.
That summer of 1964, just about everybody had come to blow on the flames of Alto Adige.
First, it was started by the BAS who were in hiding, and who had dissociated themselves from the methods of the other Bumser, which they considered too soft. Enough attacking electricity pylons, they said. What was needed to free the Heimat Südtirol was action by armed guerrillas, and if blood flowed, then so be it.
Then Austrian Neo-Nazis had arrived. Self-styled intellectuals of the NDP, born of the Nazi party, pan-Germans who missed Deutschland über Alles. Italian Neo-Fascists. Far-right Austrian university confraternities. The KGB, which, from its Soviet diplomatic residence in Vienna, had made contact with the most extreme terrorists. Agents from the Italian, American, Austrian, German secret services, and even the odd Belgian one. It was understandable: any Flemish agent provocateur with an ounce of professional dignity would have wanted to emigrate to the troubled South Tyrol of the 1960s, which was far richer in career opportunities than Flanders. Finally, De Lorenzo arrived, the commanding general of the Carabinieri, as well as the recent head of the SIFAR secret service, and the man the CIA trusted to create Gladio, with his Carabinieri.
They were all there, in the fields fragrant with newly-cut hay, the rosy peaks, rocky slopes inflamed with rhododendrons in July, the sparkle of glaciers on the border and the cable cars teeming with skiers intoxicated by their athletic feats, all there to stage the dress rehearsal of something that didn’t yet have a name, but which would subsequently be called, like an after-dinner game, “the strategy of tension.” The players: bloodthirsty, earnest extremists, agents provocateurs geared toward raising the level of the conflict, and government repression almost as harsh as under Mussolini.
All you needed was to light the fire.
Peter had only a very vague idea of all this. Yes, he’d taken part in secret meetings in Alpine huts just over the border, where he’d met people who were very different from what he was used to. Students with thick glasses, for example, who recited passages from The Robbers as though Schiller had written it just for them, who would fill their lungs with the sharp air of a night in the Alps, like someone living a heroic moment and wanting to fix it in his memory. A young university assistant from Innsbruck, with thick lips and fat fingers, eloquent despite the shortness of breath he owed to his weight, convinced he hadn’t been born too late to still live the dream of the Thousand-Year Reich. A Bavarian chemist who’d taught Peter to put together a bomb, whose hands hovered over explosives and detonators with the light precision of butterflies over flowers in the field. None of them ever mentioned the fact that in order to gain a public office certificate in his own land, Peter had to speak a language that wasn’t his, or that he hadn’t found work in a factory because he belonged to the wrong ethnic group. They were concerned with other issues: the struggle for national liberation, the holy soil, Bedrohtes Grenzlanddeutschtum15, Volksund Kulturgemeinschaft16, the expansion of the German people in their rightful Lebensraum17.
Peter knew nothing about them but asked no questions. He didn’t know that they had already taken their explosives right into the heart of Italy with secret plans bearing names straight out of a photo-romances: Operation Sophia Loren, a series of explosions in Bolzano cinemas frequented by soldiers stationed there (the project was aborted before being executed); Operation Panic, against public transport in some large Italian cities (many were wounded on a tram in Rome, the car of one of the attackers was blown up by mistake); Operation Terror on Trains: a high-potential bomb at Verona Station (about twenty injured and, finally, after trying such a long time, the first dead).
The only thing that interested them about Peter was that ever since he was a Bub18 he’d walked up and down the border passes with a shotgun across his body. He knew better than the wrinkles on his mother’s face the tracks of deer and on both sides of the border between Austria and Italy, slight lines of moved soil carved between mountain pines and gravel. He could therefore point them out to someone carrying sticks of dynamite under his shirt, someone who needed to avoid a guard post in order to take Italian soldiers by surprise, or someone on the run after an attack. And, finally, what these men, who were so much more educated than Peter, were interested in was the fact that Peter didn’t feel squeamish about killing—and not just trophy animals.
What turns a man into a murderer? At which moment does anger over a historical injustice blend into another resentment that’s more ancient, private, shameful because nobody else shares it, and make this man put his hand on a detonator? When does his desire to obtain what he considers the general Good become indifference to specific Evil committed in the name of that same Good? What makes him capable of breaking the most important of prohibitions which, like a wall, divides the human consortium into those who have killed even just once, and those who haven’t? What that man needs above all else is absolute conviction, or rather a state of mind that has become cold, silent and motionless like a winter lake, in which pity no longer flows except downwards, downwards in dark and invisible eddies which may barely stir the light pebbles at the bottom, but not the icy slate on the surface. Peter never explained it to anyone, let alone himself.
Gerda’s brother, whose eyes were so dark they didn’t reflect the light, had only ever seen his son Sigi a few times, and just for a couple of hours. Unlike what he had done with Ulli, Peter didn’t shoot at any target with “Siegfried” written above it in Gothic lettering: he wasn’t there for his second child’s christening.
For some time now, Leni had stopped waiting for her husband. Her parents had taken her and the two children back with them to their maso not far from the town. On the rare occasions Peter would reappear, fleeting visits and mostly at night, after weeks of absence, nobody asked any questions; not only because they wouldn’t have gotten a reply, but especially so as not to query their own opinion about the state of affairs. Officially, Leni was still Peter’s wife, but she knew now that her husband’s true family was no longer Ulli and the newborn Sigi, but unknown people who didn’t share his bed or the warmth of the Stube, but weapons, explosives, mines, wicks, detonators, plans of escape, forged documents, border crossings along smugglers’ paths, and the avoidance of roadblocks.
On 27 August 1964, the Musikkapelle of a nearby town staged a special concert on the peak of the mountain where Staggl and other members of the Consortium were building, at amazing speed, a splendid ski carousel. The event had been organized in order to contradict those who had already started to call it “the Factory”: a mountain that had now been ruined by the steel of the cable cars, no longer suitable for real nature lovers. Staggl wanted to prove to his fellow citizens and some guests who, despite the chair- and ski lifts, the refreshment spots, the poles of the cable cars (soon they would occupy three sides of the mountain), the restaurants with the innovative self-service formula copied from the soldiers’ mess, the three-star hotel built at about 6,500 feet altitude, that in spite of all that, nature still reigned supreme up on the peak and the beauty of the Heimat, with a view that spanned three hundred and sixty degrees from the glaciers on the border to the faraway Dolomites, was still the ultimate winner. The city tourists, after all, didn’t come here just to ski, now a compulsory sport for the middle classes of the economic boom, but also to enjoy all this majestic splendor.
And nothing could highlight this better than a concert performed right at the summit by musicians dressed in the costumes of their ancestors. The program included the first performance of a composition by the director of the Musikkapelle, called “An meinen Berg,” To My Mountain.
On that day, the cable car tested out by Gerda and Hannes took a lot of money: tourists and town residents went up en masse. Leni brought the children and her parents. The newborn Sigi, inebriated by the rarefied 6,500-foot air, didn’t wake up once, not even when his baby carriage kept knocking against the stones concealed in the tall grass. Ulli was holding his maternal grandmother’s hand tight, his forehead rounded like that of a roebuck, his eyes with their long dark lashes open wide in that expression of anxious anticipation he would so often have during his brief lifetime.
The public finished settling on the folding chairs arranged in the field and silence fell, punctuated only by the intelligent caws of the crows. The conductor lifted the golden baton with which he beat the tempo of marches during parades: and one, and two, and—a bang.
On the highway at the foot of the mountain, a couple of miles east and 6,500 feet lower down, a Carabinieri jeep had exploded on an anti-tank mine. Nobody died, but there were four injured, all of them seriously.
At the beginning of September, a Carabiniere was killed in a neighboring valley with a shot to the head through the window of his barracks. The death was attributed to terrorists, but apparently it was a settling of private scores.
In the night between the sixth and seventh of September, in an isolated Alpine hut, a Secret Service infiltrator executed in his sleep Luis Amplatz, one of the two BAS Schützen in hiding who had decided to embrace armed struggle. His funeral had more resonance and attendance than a state funeral: even the South Tyroleans who didn’t share the armed struggle considered Amplatz’s death an execution by the regime.
A few days later, near the town where the Hubers and Staggls lived, another military jeep was blown up, this time by a remotely controlled bomb. Six Carabinieri were injured, four of them seriously. One of them lost an eye, the other, a leg.
The cows are sniffing anxiously the acrid smell of the candle. Soon, the flame will reach the hay. It’s hard to imagine who could save the hayloft at this stage.
Once a month, a boy would deliver to Frau Mayer whatever was necessary for making sweets: flour, sugar, pine nuts, raisins, candied fruit, confetti made of colored icing, silver beads, cocoa powder. He was from Trento, and had a surname ending in “nin,” like a child’s nickname, but everybody called him Zuckerbub: sugar boy, or sugary. The latter interpretation was owing to the glances, sweeter than his merchandise, that he would shoot toward every woman without exception. When they announced his arrival from the kitchens, even Frau Mayer would check herself in the wall mirror behind the bar.
The hotel owner did not interfere with Herr Neumann’s management, and let him supervise the sacks being unloaded from the van. However, when the Zuckerbub arrived, she always found a way of going to the spot at the back of the kitchen; she’d ask for details of an old invoice, send her regards to the boy’s boss—her old school mate—or give the general duties man instructions on how to dispose of certain barrels: anything, just so she could show herself, even briefly, to those eyes that would wrap around a woman’s figure like silk. Frau Mayer spent the rest of the day when the Zuckerbub made his deliveries in a state of vague anticipation, of trusting melancholy, in the blurred memory of something all-consuming but which she wouldn’t have been able to name.
Frau Mayer’s feelings were as unspecific and rarefied as the young man’s precision and determination toward Gerda: he would come to pick her up on her first evening off, and take her dancing.
For all his experience as an Italian male with a smile like honey, even the Zuckerbub wasn’t used to stepping into a nightclub with a woman who caused everyone’s pupils to dilate: men’s from desire, women’s from comparison.
Gerda had never been taken out like this either. With Hannes, she hadn’t been out in public. When they’d met, they’d always been on their own, not only on that suspenseful—appropriately so—day in the cable car, but on other occasions too. Hannes would drive his Mercedes, with her sitting next to him, as far as the bends of the passes and there, in the secluded, windy fields, they would make love. Once, he had taken her to Cadore, to a hotel like the one where she worked ten months a year, albeit smaller. Gerda was spared the embarrassment she felt toward the staff, people like those with whom she worked and sweated every day: they didn’t leave their room for two days, and ordered food and drinks to be left outside the door.
Gerda had experienced this secluded love as proof of its absoluteness. It never occurred to her that Hannes might have been motivated by embarrassment or different intentions. Be that as it may, Gerda had never been out in public with a man.
There was a juke box.
“Which song do you like?” the Zuckerbub asked.
“Mina.”
He slipped in a coin, and she selected a 45: “È l’uomo per me.” Then he put his arm around her waist and pulled her toward him. Gerda thought of the singer’s Egyptian eyes, of the thousand implications in her expression, and smiled: now she too, Gerda Huber, Hermann and Johanna’s daughter, was dancing.
They spent the night making love amid the sacks of sugar and flour in his van. There were silver beads, chocolate flakes, and colored sugar sticks tangled in Gerda’s hair. Thanks to the Zuckerbub’s cheerful and expert touch, she returned to the hotel feeling as creamy, soft and light as a Carnival cake.
A few hours later, Frau Mayer appeared in the kitchen tight-lipped. Herr Neumann wondered if any of the guests in the dining room had made a complaint. With a gesture as hard as stale bread, she indicated Gerda who was cutting up radishes into flower shapes for garnishes on the salad counter. All the kitchen staff had the same thought: she was jealous. With cutting politeness, she said, “Zwei Soldaten fragen nach Ihnen.”19
Gerda looked up at her chef. Herr Neumann tucked his chin into his fat neck in a sign of agreement. Less than twenty minutes later, Gerda was at the barracks at the end of the road. There were two soldiers behind the desk in front of her. One was sitting down and she thought he had a higher rank, even though she knew nothing about medals or decorations. The other one was standing, his mouth half open, as though unable to decide whether to view her as a citizen, a stunning-looking woman, or a suspect. The one who was sitting spoke.
“Is Peter Huber your brother?”
“Yes.”
“What do you know about his activities?”
“What activities?”
“When did you last see him?”
“When my mother died.”
“When was that?”
“A year and a half ago.”
“Are you very close?”
She blinked. “He’s my brother.”
“Your brother stands accused of attacks against infrastructures of the Italian state.”
“What does that mean?”
The officer sucked the air in through his teeth in contempt. “Yes, of course. You people here don’t even know what the Italian state is.”
“No . . . ‘infra . . . ’?”
The soldier who was standing looked away from Gerda for the first time and, even more submissively than required, said to his superior, “‘Infrastructures’ is the word she doesn’t . . . ”
He was silenced by the other man’s irritated look. The soldier cast down his eyes then raised them again at Gerda and resumed his astonished silence. The tone with which the sitting officer addressed Gerda contained gratings, handcuffs, harsh but fair sentences:
“It means bridges, Signorina. Roads, electricity pylons . . . And especially soldiers struck down while doing their duty.”
It didn’t take them long to realize that Gerda knew nothing about her brother. They kept her a little longer than necessary but just for form and not out of any particular cruelty. Gerda felt quite indifferent to all this: if she could enjoy a couple of hours of unexpected rest, then she certainly wasn’t about to complain about it. Still, she was upset: what was Peter doing? Why were these soldiers asking about him? She felt sorry picturing Leni’s disorientated face, her two children. Then she thought of Eva and her arms felt empty. She had placed her daughter on the large Schwingshackl family like a pebble atop a Mandl, a stone cairn along a path—a path from which you should never stray or you risk roaming blindly in a blizzard, amid pine trees and quarries: her life.
The lower rank soldier escorted her to the barracks exit. He stepped over the threshold that separated the Fascist buildings from the sidewalk and thus, free from architecture-bound constrictions, asked if he could see her again.
He’d already arrested her once, Gerda said, so he could always do it again.
The young soldier gave a silly laugh but she didn’t care. It’s not as though she had to marry him, have a child with him, exchange promises of eternal love. All she had to do with him, on her next evening off, was to sway her hips against the gritty velvet of Mina’s voice.
It was a mixture of mold, rot, stale alcohol, and urine. It hung over the scent of cut hay that spread from the fields around the town, weighing over the breeze on that clear September night, and, slippery, filtering in through the nostrils like a poisoned tentacle. This smell greeted the four Carabinieri who knocked on the door of the Shanghai house just before dawn. Its residents couldn’t have been sleeping very soundly: as soon as Marshal Scanu, the highest ranking officer, lifted his arm to knock again, the peeling door turned on its hinges. The air that came out from inside the house triggered in him an archaic terror, like a curse.
The corporal and the two Carabinieri with him also came from the South and the islands, and all four were almost half a head shorter than the man who opened the door. Only the hats with the peaks evened out the proportions. Some had been posted to Alto Adige just few months earlier, some years, but they all missed home very much. One thing, though, couldn’t be denied about South Tyrol residents: these people were precise, clean, and valued tidiness very highly. These people didn’t ask you, “Everything all right?” but “Alles in Ordnung?.”20 Therefore, they had never seen a house like this.
The Stube that led to the front door was covered in piles of wood, dirty clothes, loose engine parts. On the shelf of the wooden stove, there were saucepans and plates covered in old dirt mixed with the crumbs and leftovers of food in a single smelly slush. Various pails more or less full of dirty water cluttered the floor over which were scattered dozens of empty bottles. Until a year and a half ago, the house had been lived in, even though it was dark and damp, but it was now reduced to a dump, a junk dealer’s storeroom, a trash can. The man who had opened the door was wearing a yellowed undershirt, old pants covered in crusts, and had an unkempt beard.
Standing there in the middle, they questioned him. They were looking for his son. He said he hadn’t seen him for a long time. Did he know where he was? No. Where he was living? He had no idea, even his daughter-in-law had left. The Marshal made a show of not believing him and threatened him with serious consequences for lying. The man remained silent. The two Carabinieri started searching the house. When people have their house searched they always follow and make sure that nothing is broken, put everything immediately back in its place, rush to open every lock to avoid it being broken or even just to speed up the process. But not this man. He stood motionless in the middle of the room, lit up by a single bulb, silent, as though the coming and going of the soldiers did not concern him.
He didn’t ask the reason they were looking for his son, not because he already knew it but because, in this old man—who wasn’t even sixty yet—there were no more questions left.
Scanu looked at Hermann Huber’s face and thought of a cemetery.
Raids, searches, military incursions into the homes of civilians aren’t carried out when the sun is up, when people have washed faces and their bellies are warm with caffelatte, when the humors used by the body to express itself to itself in the pagan intimacy of sleep have been washed away with water, soap, work clothes. Nor are raids conducted when the soup is simmering on the stove, when the welcoming smell of translucent onion wafts out of a cast-iron pan into which potatoes and cumin seeds will also soon be poured, and the bread is on the board, ready to be sliced. If the peasants are in the fields and so are their women, when low, black, late summer clouds menace cut hay, and every arm is needed to make sure it’s safe in the hayloft before the first crack of thunder, then that’s not a good time for raids either. Nor is it a good time when the earth is already black but the sky still opalescent and, inside the Stube, babies have already fallen asleep in the arms of their older sisters, women are darning holes in socks, and men are talking about the stretch of road that slid down during the most recent thunderstorm. Raids, arrests, searches: they, too, like all human activities, have a correct and appropriate moment which, since the dawn of time, has only ever been the darkest hour before sunrise.
When nocturnal animals are back in their dens, with a moribund bit of fur or feathers in their mouths, and the daytime ones haven’t yet emerged; when humans have stopped running and flying with the eternally agile body of dreams, but haven’t yet been remembered by their earthly one, full of aches and pains; when the currents between the valley and the mountain are in harmony, when, for a moment, cold and warmth no longer stir and mix as usual and the air is still; there: that dark, silent and motionless brief space of time when nothing happens is the time when people expect soldiers to arrive, complete with jeeps and boots, and abrupt shouts not aimed at being understood but at terrorizing, with that primeval power that the man who has a weapon in his hand possesses over the one who has not.
Instead, it was in full daylight, just before noon, that the soldiers arrived to the group of masi clinging to the slopes of the valley and gathered around the little church. It was an inter-forces operation involving Alpini, Carabinieri, police. There were almost a thousand of them, they had jeeps, armored vehicles, and even a tank. In other words it wasn’t hard to notice their arrival. Shots were fired from behind a haystack. Was it Peter? If so, were the others who were responsible for the anti-tank bombs that had injured half a dozen soldiers a few days earlier, there with him? Were the people behind the haystack terrorists? If so, how many? Just one? More than one? No one ever found out. They’d fired from behind a makeshift shelter, like children playing at cowboys, but the weapons were real and a soldier was injured. Whoever they were, they ran away along the steep slopes behind them, along the hunters’, then steinbocks’ paths, then, like after every attack, dispersed in Austrian territory, leaving the residents of the group of masi to face the reprisals and frustration of Italian soldiers on their own. Suddenly, the tolling of bells filled the cool September air, as though sounding the alarm.
It was Lukas, the elderly sacristan with thin, often disheveled hair, arms that were short but muscular from decades spent pulling the bell rope. The fact that the village was surrounded by armed soldiers didn’t seem to him a good enough reason to fail in his daily task: toll the bell twelve times to mark noon. The soldiers, however, didn’t know Lukas or how zealous he was: they were sure this was a signal for terrorists to attack from above, so they mounted an assault against the group of masi, as though storming a fortress.
They kicked doors down, barked orders as though the war wasn’t over and Italians and Nazis were still allied, they fired at panic-stricken hens around their boots, turning them into motionless heaps of blood and dirty feathers. They forced everyone out of their houses, men, women, old people and children. A soldier burst into a Stube where a deaf old woman was spinning, shut away in the private silence that had enveloped her for decades. He was a young man from Niscemi, outside Caltanissetta, just two months in the army. He was eighteen, and was holding an assault rifle he barely knew how to use. When he saw the old woman motionless amid all the screams and shots, he was certain she was hiding something. He shot at her face. The bullet missed her and got stuck in the pine-coated wall right next to the gray plait twisted around the old woman’s head; like a new knot in the old timber. Only then did the woman raise her head.
Two other soldiers burst into Leni’s parents’ house. When Ulli saw them, he ran across the kitchen and buried his face between his mother’s legs: perhaps to blot out that unfathomable nightmare. Leni lowered the pan in which she was about to melt some butter and turned it sideways, placing it in front of his head like a shield. One of the soldiers remained on the doorstep; the other one went up to the little bed in the corner of the room and pointed the automatic rifle against the head of little Sigi, who was asleep, shouting at Leni to tell him where her husband was or he would shoot.
Leni didn’t know where Peter was. She didn’t know where he went, what he did, or why. She’d never known or asked. She wasn’t even certain that the furtive man who had come in and out of her bed in the middle of the night a few hours earlier had been the same to whom a long time ago she had sworn to be faithful before God. She hadn’t seen her husband’s face in the daylight for months. All she knew was that the head of one of her children was sticking to her thighs with the frying pan shielding it, and that the other one, so soft and smelling of sleep, was in the firing line of the rifle on the opposite side of the kitchen. Her children’s heads seemed farther apart than two continents; between them, like an ocean, stretched her powerlessness as a mother.
Leni and the soldier remained looking at each other in silence, as though searching for an answer neither of them knew. After a while, the soldier (aged twenty, born in Bucchianico, near Chieti, education level: elementary school) frowned and blinked like someone with a speck in his eye but who can’t rub it because his hands are occupied. Then he lowered the rifle.
All the men and a few women had been assembled and handcuffed. Tied up like that, they were led to the stream behind the houses. Among them was also Sepp Schwingshackl and his elder sons. When the raid started, his wife Maria was in front of the hayloft with Eva in her arms. She barely had the time to put her down on the ground before they clipped the handcuffs around her wrists and took her away. Eva remained sitting amid chamomile flowers, her hands on the ground, spread open like fans. Her fingers weren’t stepped on by spiked boots, her face wasn’t burned by the incandescent barrels of automatic rifles, but nobody entirely knows why. As though saving Eva had become her destiny, Ruthi ran to her. She lifted her up against her protruding left hip, the way mothers do when they want to keep their right side free, and remained there, motionless, frozen by uncertainty and fear, amid hen feathers and the traffic of soldiers. One of these (born in Accettura, near Matera, age: eighteen, school qualification: three years of middle school), with forehead and cheeks covered in pimples, his upper lip with just the shadow of a velvet down, had started firing at the crossing point of the beams that were holding up the roof of the hayloft. Eva opened her eyes wide at every shot. She followed with her gaze as the cartridge cases splattered and fell on the ground like crazed insects, the cloud of smoke that surrounded the barrel like the steam from a pan cooling down. Tff! the BM59 made a noise, and Eva’s eyes became two dark blue buttons, Tff! and Eva held her breath. T-Tff!
The men were kept standing by the stream for several hours. The soldiers fired at the walls of the houses, threw grenades into the haylofts, stole Speck, cheese, bread and beer. Four drunk Alpini grabbed Eloise, Ruthi’s eldest sister, by the arms and dragged her behind a manure pit. They had already thrown her to the ground when the lieutenant-colonel commanded them to let her go. The girl was about to run home crying, but was put together with the group of people tied up the stream. When the sun began to set they were all still there, standing, supporting one another to avoid fainting.
The lieutenant-colonel of the Carabinieri didn’t like the way things were going. This was not the fight against terrorism he had in mind. He was here, in a village that looked like an idyllic vision in the golden September light, directing an operation that was tactically a failure, as any first-year military academy student could have seen. Moreover, it lacked any sense, both in its operational orders as in its means: could anybody please explain to him just what there was to gain with hunting down terrorists who would slip away up and down smugglers’ paths between Austria and Italy in an M47 armored vehicle, an exasperating mass of caterpillars and iron which would stop after an hour even on a plain, let alone up here?
He hadn’t even been able to pick the men he was now commanding. On the contrary, these troops seemed to have been selected precisely because of their inefficiency: drafted boys capable only of scorching their fingers on the barrels of the BM59s, people who’d been handed Berettas without any training . . . All you could do was close your eyes and not even think of the damage they could do with those sub-machine guns in their hands.
Still, what worried the lieutenant-colonel most were certain non-commissioned officers, people who said strange things and showed off too much historical knowledge of, and even nostalgia for, the Mussolini era. Sometime earlier, when he was still in Rome, the army commander General De Lorenzo had personally given the lieutenant-colonel a worrying order: to pick out the men willing to fire even on civilians, and add their names to a special list. The lieutenant-colonel could not refuse but, in the best military tradition of passive resistance to senseless orders, he had shilly-shallied, beaten about the bush, and stalled for time while awaiting developments. For as long as he had been commanding this motorized battalion in Alto Adige, nobody had mentioned the list of the “willing,” as De Lorenzo called them, to him again. But now, seeing all these non-commissioned officers who weren’t lifting a finger to stop their men from looting, getting drunk, and firing at random, the lieutenant-colonel wondered if that perverse selection hadn’t already been implemented by someone else.
Marshal Scanu, for instance, a trusted non-commissioned officer for whom he had respect: the lieutenant-colonel had received the explicit order to exclude him from the operation. As though the human compassion, despite the official jargon, which Scanu had shown in his report on the living conditions of Hermann Huber, the father of the wanted man Peter Huber, had not been appreciated. The lieutenant-colonel was beginning to wonder if perhaps someone wanted to keep away from operational duties anyone who could build a bridge of understanding between the armed forces stationed in Alto Adige and its residents. Someone behind a desk in Bolzano or even in Rome, someone more interested in blowing on the flames of this land that was already on fire than in bringing moderation or soothing the violence. Someone who wanted the situation to come to a head. It wasn’t a certainty but a feeling he couldn’t share with anyone, let alone substantiate. But if it really was a matter of strategy, then what could be the reason? For whom would it be advantageous to trigger violence instead of soothing it? The lieutenant-colonel really couldn’t understand, he just sensed that there was a lot, too much, that he didn’t know. And, remembering with a lump in his throat the solemn moment when he had sworn loyalty to the Republic and the Constitution, it was a thought he didn’t like. Not at all.
At that moment, in the lapis lazuli sky of almost autumnal high pressure, the helicopter appeared. It ruffled the tops of fir trees, grass, jacket lapels, with its spinning blades, and landed in the field. A colonel of the Alpini got out. He spoke quickly, abruptly, without looking the lieutenant-colonel in the eye.
“How many people have you arrested?” he asked.
“Fifteen.”
“Good. Stand them against the wall and shoot them.”
The lieutenant-colonel stared at the officer. The noise of the helicopter was impairing his hearing, he must have misunderstood. “Excuse me?”
“Stand them against the wall,” the colonel articulated. “Every one.”
The lieutenant-colonel stood motionless. He spoke softly, politely. “I’m here to deal with crimes and make arrests. I’m not a murderer.”
The colonel started to shout. “You have to shoot them, do you understand? And then burn the village. Raze it to the ground!”
The lieutenant-colonel realized he was hungry, or rather his stomach contracted in a spasm and he remembered that he hadn’t eaten for several hours. He felt a hungry man’s anger explode inside him and also began to shout. “You’re crazy!”
“It’s an order!”
“It’s a crazy order!”
“I’ll report you for insubordination if you don’t obey!”
“We’re not Nazis!”
Men of every rank, both Alpini and Carabinieri, had drawn nearer. Not even the older ones had ever seen two officers screaming at each other like that in front of the troops. Jaws dropped, many men remained with their mouths open, forgetting themselves. The lieutenant-colonel took the colonel by the arm, dragged him to the helicopter, and threw him inside with a shove. Like a backpack, or an ammunition box.
“Take him away,” he said to the pilot, more like a prayer than an order.
The pilot had watched the scene in silence without leaving the cabin. His mouth hadn’t fallen open. On the contrary, he’d kept his lips so tight that all that remained in the middle of his face was a purple line. He started the engine, avoiding the lieutenant-colonel’s eyes, like someone bound by the selfsame sense of shame. The engine began to stir the air, the soldiers all raised hands to their heads to stop their berets from flying off, and some of them started closing their mouths.
The helicopter flew up, metallic and animal-like, like a Medieval war fantasy. The lieutenant-colonel watched it grow distant, smaller, and finally disappear in the sky, which was beginning to have pink streaks across it. He felt overwhelmed by a warm flush of gratitude for that pilot who was now risking punishment at the very least, and whose name he didn’t even know. He’d even already forgotten his face.
The consequences of the military operation that took place on that golden September day in 1964 were many and various.
No terrorist was arrested during the operation. All the men who’d been arrested were released within a few days as it was proved that they had nothing to do with the recent dynamite attacks. Only an old man who was hard of hearing, and who didn’t manage to communicate with the investigators, was transferred to Venice where he was kept in custody for almost three months, until the following December.
Sigi was marked forever by that rifle barrel pointed at his baby head: he grew up to be a nostalgic devotee of Andreas Hofer, full of rage and exultation, and joined the Schützen. At least that was Ulli’s version whenever he tried to find a reason for his brother becoming an obtuse, homophobic racist. However, this explanation circumvented the fact that if anyone was traumatized that day, then it was only Ulli and his mother: Sigi had slept through it all.
One night at home, after the auxiliary Carabiniere from Niscemi had been relieved of his draft duties, he dreamed of the moment when he’d fired at the deaf old woman. This time, however, after he’d pulled the trigger, the old woman’s face disintegrated before him in an explosion of fire, blood and horror. The morning after, the young man ran to the church of Santa Maria Odigitria, where he prostrated himself fervently at the feet of the Madonna, who had already granted him most precious grace: poor aim.
The Italian newspapers didn’t report the raid, only the local German-language ones did, and were then accused of propaganda against the government. A representative of the provincial council began collecting evidence from the village residents: he meant to present them at a memorial in support of a parliamentary investigation by the Südtiroler Volkspartei. He was working on his paper when, a couple of weeks after the events, he died in murky circumstances while rock climbing. They even said that the rope he was tied to had been sabotaged. In any case, the parliamentary investigation at the Chamber of Representatives on 25 September 1964 took place without the documentation, which the councillor hadn’t had sufficient time to put together. Member of Parliament Almirante therefore had no trouble in describing as “Austrian-sympathizing propaganda” any allegation of abuse committed by the Italian Armed Forces. That’s how he used to refer, in all his official appearances, to German-speaking South Tyroleans.
When he returned to base, the lieutenant-colonel immediately telephoned the army commander General De Lorenzo. He informed him of the crazy orders he’d received, and of his obvious refusal to implement them.
“Yes, they have already informed me that you refused to fight,” the general replied.
The lieutenant-colonel’s hairs stood up on his forearms, as though in the presence of a strange, incomprehensible phenomenon.
That very evening, an urgent dispatch arrived relieving him of his charge in Alto Adige and ordering him to transfer within twenty-four hours as assistant commander with the Legion in Udine. As is customary whenever there is a change of destination, his superiors gave him the usual report, an essential evaluation for advancing his rank. Ever since he’d entered the army he’d always obtained the maximum grade, “excellent,” but now they only just gave him “average.” This was an indelible stain on his career.