I’D GOTTEN A LETTER from Ballarin in Venice, sent shortly after his return. Despite my friend’s certainty that Turin now held me in chains like Prometheus bound to his rock, I eagerly considered his invitation to pack my bags and meet up with him. Ballarin explained that, dead city for dead city, in the Most Serene Republic the eyes and ears could at least have their fill, even if Marghera stank to high heaven. My artistic sense had to take certain perks into account, however ephemeral they were. Why leave off a decision indefinitely when it would only bring me advantages? This was all very kind coming from a friend. I replied that, for now, my work at the company was the only thing I had to survive on: if I ever saw a chance to get a job in his neck of the woods, I would’ve sprung on it immediately. Of course, I omitted the essentials; my recorder wasn’t like his flute—a hippogriff that could be ridden at will, taking off into the air!
And I knew this well, especially after I’d made my visit to Giuffrida. Even the comforts of Bach’s sarabands and certain adagios by Vivaldi and Albinoni—which for better or for worse I’d always been able to perform and find relative peace in—were now lost to me. Any beauty their musical phrases once had could no longer move me. They felt strange and hollow, as if my memory of the slurping noise I’d heard at Giuffrida’s house were acting retrospectively to drain me of pleasure. I felt run-down and bitter: I placed my hands on the instrument without any certainty and breathed out foolishly like someone puffing into a blowgun. I even tried to set aside the classics and throw myself into a punkish mode with noisy items chosen out of my kitchenware. Yet the battering of saucepans with ladles, the furious grating rhythm of knives being whetted, only made my inner condition worse: there was an endless surfeit of anguish and desolation that I couldn’t expel.
I had an ugly dream. I dreamed that a bunch of young archaeologists digging around Volterra had discovered bas-reliefs revealing that the great poet Virgil had actually been an ostrich. The sculptures dated back to the Augustan period. The anonymous artist depicted the poet in various positions: standing upright with his long neck almost vertical and his tiny head and beak animated by two eyes that shone with intelligence; in another panel, you saw him running through the Imperial Palace and flapping his wings, among Pretorian guards with their weapons on display. This was followed by a group scene: “AVGVSTVS IMPERATOR” . . . “QVINTVS HORATIVS FLACCVS” . . . “PVBLIVS VIRGILIVS MARO STRVTHIOCAMELVS” . . . “PVBLIVS OVIDIVS NASO,” and next to them certain palace advisors. These revelations had touched the whole world and strengthened the case of those who believe that a sublime soul can reside even in the body of an animal.
The dream cast a sinister light on my recorder; it made me think of the pipes played by the shepherds who chitchatted in Virgil’s Bucolics. I broke the instrument in half and threw it out the window. My dream vision of bas-reliefs had me scared. I’d seen them passing in front of my eyes, barely a hand’s-breadth away; then, just as close, they hid themselves inside me so I could no longer see them but feel them. Their presence within me prevented examining what lay behind them; they had become the lid of a sarcophagus where all my richness was stowed away. Yet someone could very well have dug an underground tunnel to come and sap me dry.
In this mood of hesitation and self-doubt, I left the house at eight in the morning to go to work. Sometime around six in the evening I went to the public library to peruse old newspapers in the archives, which spoke of events I would’ve paid a fortune to forget. “IS THIS STILL THE CITY OF GRAMSCI AND GOBETTI?” read a headline in La Stampa. And elsewhere: “AN ERUPTION OF VIOLENCE”—“WAVE OF SENSELESS FURY SWEEPS ACROSS TURIN”—“SITUATION NOW CRITICAL”—“A DISTRESSING MYSTERY” . . . These were newspaper articles from the middle of July, when it was no longer possible to talk about scattered crimes, albeit with certain features in common, but genuine barefaced massacres. “If we were still dealing with a few attacks, even the frightening ones which happened on Corso Stati Uniti and in Piazza Carlo Felice, we could at least think it was the work of a madman; and this might have brought us some relief, both for our faith in wider humanity and knowing it wasn’t politically charged,” a police functionary told the press. “But when, as in this case, the madness has a collective quality and implications that may be ideological . . .”
Meanwhile, the Gazzetta del Popolo reported, “The festive atmosphere of summer seems to have fled in the wake of these massacres, a nightmare which our city, already plagued by mass insomnia, cannot easily take its mind from. The shopping arcade of Galleria Subalpina is flooded with the sound of shuffling crowds . . . There is a register for signed condolences, guarded by four officers, with a large bow of black crepe pinned to the flag just above the table. People flock to add words of support to these mortuary records which, for lack of more white space, are taken to the Town Hall. Some children believe that those papers are where grown-ups write down their wish-list for the holidays. It’s difficult—impossible, even—to explain to them what they’re seeing.”
In the retail areas, most of all in the clothing stores, business stagnated painfully: “The mannequins, young and beautiful, smile with plastic faces at a sad, shriveled crowd . . .” And then came a message from the President of the Republic: “The horrendous bloodbaths which have sown death throughout Turin, a city dear to us indeed, leave our nation appalled by their monstrous savagery, by their magnitude and by the brutish recklessness with which they are carried out. Somewhere in this tragic chain of terrorist acts, there’s a link that must be broken at all costs to safeguard the life and freedom of our citizens. It is up to the forces of democratic order; it’s up to the court authorities, before whom lie a number of complaints against the incitement of terrorist acts, to give the rule of law back to the sovereign people who demand it. It’s up to all citizens to support the efforts of justice and the forces of democratic order in the defense of life against this murderous violence. To you, Mr. Prime Minister, and to you, the Honorable Minister of the Interior, I express my highest solidarity for the action this government is undertaking in order to clamp down relentlessly on these criminal acts fixed on upsetting the free and democratic direction of our country. I wish to pass on the most heartfelt of condolences, on behalf of the Republic and myself, to the families of the victims.”
Public opinion called for the punishment of the culprits and whoever may have incited them. Even the Church authorities demanded it: they certainly didn’t look kindly on the suspicion, which was then nastily spreading, that the killers were being unleashed at nighttime from the Little House of Divine Providence. Whoever they were, they had nothing to do with the unfortunate guests of the house, who were in fact fully conscientious creatures. If they were evil, it at least wasn’t by nature, but from the instigation of deviant ideologies . . . And people would do well to throw aside their misgivings about the Library, one of the few benevolent institutions, if not the only one, born in the midst of a society that had lost nearly all its moral sense!
On July the sixteenth of that year, a thirty-six-year-old man named Antonio Mangiaferri was arrested by a police unit at his house, a ramshackle dwelling on Via Barbaroux. The charges against him were based on the testimony of a tram driver who had seen him in Piazza Cavour behaving in a way that left no doubts. His height measured at six feet and two inches. He had a patchy history of delinquency. He had drifted from one job to another, either out of restlessness or from being regularly fired due to his rebellious nature. He read pamphlets inciting subversion. He nursed ambitions of becoming an actor which he hadn’t managed to fulfill, except some bit parts in minor films that circulated around the fringes.
Mangiaferri’s arrest finally allowed editors to splash their front pages with an image of “the monster himself.” And he truly was a monster, with his vacant look, his long chin, his prognathic jawbone, a scar on his right cheek, a deep horizontal furrow cutting across his face—and huge hands that could’ve played lawn bowls with watermelons.
Everyone agreed that the witness could be counted on as a sensible, trustworthy person and a man of few words. “Angelo has a heart of gold,” his brother said. “If he went to the police, to the carabinieri, to report a thing like that, you can be absolutely sure of what he says. I can say personally that he’s had a photographic memory since he was a kid. For years, we helped our parents who ran a dry cleaner’s. Angelo always remembered absolutely everything: the customers’ names, their addresses. There was never a risk he was wrong. He could recognize—with one glance—all the garments that got given in for dry cleaning. And if you don’t believe me, go and ask my mother, Francesca Moroni; she’s seventy-four years old and she lives with my sister . . .”
The foreign press, however, remained puzzled in the wake of the arrest and the political motivations that were pinned to the crimes. It didn’t match the descriptions of the killings, however woolly, given by tourists who had passed through Turin. One could agree on the gigantism of the murderers (though not in every case: some killers were of almost normal stature). Yet their rage didn’t seem to revolve solely around human beings. No, they didn’t just grab passersby and throw them on the pavement or against trunks. After they’d slaughtered a few citizens in that fashion, they seized others, choosing them with care out of the crowd. Having accomplished what seemed like a selection process, they used them as human cudgels to bash one another. That’s right! And they weren’t dressed in tatty clothes like Mr. Mangiaferri. Some tourists swore that they’d seen them in sweeping, low-hanging cloaks—full of flouncy pleats—which opened at the front, revealing torsos enclosed by narrow blousons with long rows of buttons. Their breeches often clung tight to their legs. The expressions on their faces were nearly always serious and pensive, even in the heat of combat, which saw the “duelists”—such we’ll call them—begin by moving close to each other, taking their time to square off properly. Once the distance between them had narrowed to one short step, they raised their human clubs and bludgeoned one another, quietly but furiously. Yet why they did it, no one really understood . . .
In the face of such feverish accusations, our own press reacted with unanimous outrage. Our delegates to the European Parliament threatened to quit if this foreign smear campaign against a city rich with glorious traditions wasn’t stopped at once. And when the insinuations continued—as, indeed, did the killings—our threats took a more concrete form. The most alarming example of which was our determination not to repay huge debts to the International Monetary Fund.
Now the overseas papers became newly cautious. In a gambit that carried a strong flavor of reconciliation, the famous psychoanalyst Jean Lescaut expounded a theory within the pages of Le Monde that might have appeared to form a sensible compromise. The insomnia of the Turinese—whose causes, nonetheless, he could just barely understand himself—had brought citizens to the extreme limits of bearable psychic tension. When those limits were crossed, that tension exploded like a stick of gelignite; human antagonisms were magnified a hundredfold, and this could enable forms of aggression that were unthinkable in a normal situation. Such cruelty would fall on the first passerby who came to hand, and who in turn could very well be an aggressor. This also explained the code of silence that shut the lips of witnesses: Who would have the nerve to testify against his neighbor, when the following night, or the night after that, he too might behave exactly like him? The outpourings of grief inside Galleria Subalpina were a way to exorcise the sense of guilt that each citizen harbored deep within.
This explanation served to calm the waters. Our relations with other European countries went back, in a manner of speaking, to normal. As for Lescaut’s theory of psychic tension, it wasn’t held in high regard by the investigators: it lacked an ideological motive, and if studied with care, it ultimately suggested an underlying grievance that compelled and affected all citizens without discrimination. As a consequence, it was found preferable to keep Mangiaferri behind bars and track down any individuals near him who may have been accomplices. Notwithstanding the protests of certain radical groups, the law never came around to prosecuting the people who found themselves in jail. After four years locked up, Mangiaferri and others like him were freed when their terms of remand in custody expired. But the Twenty Days of Turin—which ended on July the twenty-second as suddenly as they had begun—were a distant event by now, an event that no one wished to recall.