2.32 p.m.

Just six months ago, another terrorist attack, horrifying and inexplicable: it was further south, along the coast . . . Here they are, it’s them, or, rather, it’s us . . . We are the pink-cheeked hale and healthy sunburnt fair-haired pudgy besandalled be-T-shirted Westerners, with the vacant blue-eyed apparently mild-mannered gaze, open to amusement and slightly bewildered, of someone on holiday . . . We are the target, the cannon fodder of terror . . . We are the ones who are unexpectedly mown down by machine-gun fire as we get off a tour bus, baseball caps on our heads, reflex camera around our necks, to go see the pyramid . . . And after all there’s nothing worth seeing in a pyramid, devoid as it is of details . . . Or else kidnapped while, with our wallets full of Western currency but without any real reason other than simple enjoyment or the desire to help out, we venture into savage territories only to have our throats cut in the end, in front of a video camera . . . At the sound of shots, we turn in surprise while we’re in queue at the airport check-in counter, just a split second before our apparently innocent craniums, the craniums of business travellers, tourists, sweet & democratic Westerners, progressives who wouldn’t hurt a fly, evening strollers who clean up their dog’s poops, citizens who separate their garbage and recycling with eight different plastic bags, health nuts who don’t smoke and go running every morning and have a physical check-up once a year . . . Who at age fifty have no doubt already passed their first routine colonoscopy . . . Before our cranium explodes into a certain number of fragments, scattering in all directions our apparently innocuous brain matter . . . Here we are, in potentially hostile territory, enclosed in this box that runs on air conditioning, waiting to be able to think ‘OK, I’ve been down there . . .’, waiting to be able to debark from our plane in Stuttgart, in Copenhagen, in any place whatsoever in Northern Europe and then to be able to say to our friends at dinner: ‘They’re nice people, they’re just like us, they want peace, the extremists are just a minority . . .’ And there was no need to spend a week here snorkelling to be able to say such a thing, which is actually not true, because they aren’t the same as we are . . . We are the red-skinned yellow-haired whites whose women go everywhere with plunging necklines and short shorts, we are the ones who live to advanced ages and believe in nothing . . . And for that we might be killed in the middle of the night by a hand grenade while we sleep comfortably in a four-star hotel in Mumbai, Sana’a or any other place . . . While we lie in the hollow we’ve burrowed for ourselves in the bed, while we fuck some whore that the desk clerk procured for us . . . We are the ones, tall & bemuscled, who one tender evening full of promise are blown sky high along with an entire pizzeria on the island of Bali, mixing the shreds of our body with the wreckage of the gridwork steel roof beams and the canvas awning, along with the shrapnel fragments of the plastic laminate that covered the tables before everything was blown to smithereens . . . Here too these things have happened before, and more than once—it seemed that it was all over, but that seems not to be the case . . . Bombs in the streets and in cafes and pubs in multiple locations over the course of a single night, planned so as to cause the greatest possible number of deaths, explosive devices filled with bits of iron to do as much harm as can be . . . And yet we come back all the same, trustful that, mixed in with the great mass of tourists, it’s unlikely that anything is going to happen to us of all people . . . It’s the thought process of the gnu who crosses the crocodile-infested river with his herd and heads straight for the opposite bank, while the beast struggling along beside him, a gnu like him, has its throat ripped out by a 20-foot-long monster, dragged down into the water and drowned there, in the midst of all that mud, only to be eaten in due time . . . ‘The difference between you and us,’ they said after Atocha, ‘the difference is that we aren’t afraid to die and you are . . .’ That’s what they said after Atocha and I was reminded of those Fascist phrases carved into the wall in certain places in the City of God, certain posters of youth groups dedicated to the cult of death and dying for some fucking cause or other, because no one told them: Look, there doesn’t exist, there has never existed a cause for which it’s worth giving up your life . . . Or at least, nothing that has to do with politics . . . Maybe it’s worthy dying to protect the lives of your nearest and dearest, your children, your woman . . . But you, Brando, you don’t even have any experience of this, you’ve never been a father and you were a husband for too short a time . . . We are the apparently mild-mannered and civil and democratic ones, struggling to deal with an intolerable taedium vitae that drives us out beyond the borders of our countries in search of that nothing that is known as amusement, fun . . . We are the ones who don’t shoot and fight in the first person, but only through a third party, a powerful and well-organized military, we are the ones who would suck the last marrow from the bones of this planet all by ourselves if we weren’t forced to share at this point with the Chinese and the Indians and the Indonesians and the Brazilians, who until twenty years ago didn’t have a pot to piss in but who now want to join the party . . . Which is an annihilation party, a party to the death . . . And once we’ve devoured the earth and the sea and the mountains, we’ll have to rebuild everything in a fake version, and that will be a nice piece of business for someone, too . . . But in the meanwhile the jihad will continue as before, as it’s done for thirty years, five hundred, a thousand years, in fact, for thirteen hundred years . . . Shreds of human flesh and rivers of blood as well in the marketplaces of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen . . . In Egypt, in Morocco . . . And trains in the subway systems of the West will continue to explode while according to the law of the gnu, on the preceding train all that’s felt is a distant blast, a sudden rush of air . . . The gnus stampede and then reassemble, resume their daily march, the usual boundless quotidian mobilization towards their distant sources of income, the same income that allows them to come here, to this place that is inhabitable only in the fictional world of resorts, to absorb a massive and harmful dose of ultraviolet rays . . . Here they are, the gnus, the Westerners, who seem to have been hollowed out by peace . . . They want peace and more peace for ever . . . It’s not that they’re opposed to war, quite the opposite: they’re fine with war, as long as it’s far away and not too burdensome, as long as it guarantees peace at home and the security of our sources of energy and safety in the places where we holiday . . . When it comes to peace you can’t lodge any objections, Brandani, you’re a perfect product of it.

The headache continues. The Xanax, by now fully in circulation, let him sleep for a few minutes, his head thrown back. He woke up because someone touched him, maybe he’d started to snore. His mouth is gummy, he looks straight ahead, he takes a number of small gulps from the mini-bottle of water he purchased a short while ago.

What had it meant to live seventy years in peacetime? In what way were we different from our fathers and from our fathers’ fathers? Fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, tracking way way back in time, each of them had lived in their own world, and those worlds weren’t comparable to the one we lived in: there had never been such a long period of peace, never such a rapid acceleration of things, never before had this set of objects been so rapidly transformed into other objects, never such an accentuated state of instability . . .

He feels completely stoned, the Xanax, the reawakening, the headache, his belly full of air, and he abandons himself to a slow, distracted reflection, which strikes him as strangely lucid.

When you feel lucid, don’t trust it . . . And all this in peacetime. There’s never been such a long period of peace. Yes, certainly, in my lifetime there have been countless wars, but all of them outside of the borders, with an involvement that was political, and therefore symbolic, more than anything else, or military, but limited. The Cold War: Korea, Vietnam, participation in invasions of Islamic countries, apparently distant, where we Peninsulars were always protected and safely in echelon behind the American superpower . . . We fought those wars speaking their language, the language of the Americans: My name is Cocciolone . . . The voice of that captured Italian aviator in Iraq. All this took place, but it wasn’t war-war, with draft levies, mobilization orders, fanfares, armies marching off, bombing raids. No one ever bombed our cities again, no one ever destroyed a Mantegna chapel of ours again . . . Already the destruction of a Mantegna chapel is a sufficient argument in favour of the universal abolition of warfare, forever . . . War had no effect on us except in terms of opinion, as a topic for political action, it never affected us directly and personally, forcing us to make life-or-death decisions, no one forced us to depart for the front, to fight against our wishes, to obey irrevocable orders: let the enemy kill you, or we’ll do it for him. People like me are creatures of peacetime, specific organisms, with special adaptations, like those insects you find in caves, blind but with no idea that they are blind, white due to the lack of light, and yet convinced that the world is all right there. We have no idea what it means to fight for the fatherland, in fact, we have no idea what the fatherland even is, we feel nothing towards the fatherland, if it weren’t for a vague sense of pride that surges up inside us when someone says pizza-mandolin-mafia-devil-horns . . . The Germans until not long ago referred to us as traitors: Lotte’s father, for instance . . . There’s never been a true external enemy, it was of no interest to us, it didn’t affect us, as long as we were left in peace, as long as they didn’t drop the Bomb, like they were about to do in 1962, I was sixteen years old, I was a virgin, I would have been burnt to death even before I began to live, before I had a chance to make love with Clara, they would have deprived me of one of the few moments in my life worthy of having lived . . . In these seventy years of peace the enemy, when there was one, has almost always been personal, never national. Can you say that you’ve had enemies, Ivo? I don’t think so: you have enemies if you count for something, if you act, if you try to carve out a space for yourself, but me? In my inertia, I never managed to make any . . . Could I consider De Klerk to have been an enemy? No, not even him: to him, I didn’t even exist, I was just a toy, he wanted to have fun with me and then, perhaps, crush me . . . He did crush me but it was no fun for him. I’d hate him, if I had it in me . . . Peacetime is nothing but a silent war of all against all. Nothing apparently ferocious and in any case, not at my level: war among people at my level is never a serious matter, it almost never entails genuine annihilation, even though in corporations there are people who kill themselves out of stress and humiliation, or else they submit until they can’t take it any more and one fine day they go into work with a handgun and unleash a bloodbath . . . Now that capitalism no longer has anything or anyone capable of standing up to it, you find metal detectors everywhere, they’re no longer needed to prevent terrorism, instead they’re to stop workplace murders . . . Peace is a war of all against all: there isn’t much physical violence but the struggle is malevolent and cruel, in the need to clear a space for oneself, in the fight to obtain even a tiny sliver of the available resources, or a smidgeon of power, for those who desire it . . . A war without heroes, waged with weapons like lines of cocaine, glasses of alcohol, antidepressants, anxiety medications, chain-smoked cigarettes . . . There are few official heroes, few monuments, all of them intentionally anti-rhetorical and therefore nearly all of them stunningly ugly . . . In Italy the heroes are all anti-mafia, anti-Camorra, anti-crime, anti-racket, and therefore cops, carabinieri, magistrates, here and there witnesses without fear, someone who might have stood up against the shakedown, who invoked an imagined state monopoly on violence in contrast with the territorial control of the mafia, and they have therefore of course been rubbed out . . . Plus a few mercenaries who went to Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, for money, a few professional soldiers, volunteers and overpaid, who believed in the fairy tale of Everyone-Just-Loves-Us and Peninsulars-Are-Good-People, while someone was parking a 2,000-kilo bomb right under their ass. I, the cowardly Ivo Brandani, if I faced a shakedown from some protection racket, I’d have paid and said nothing, if I were a witness to a mafia murder I’d have kept my mouth zipped, if I was a judge in the South I’d have requested a transfer, if I was a soldier I would never ever have gone into combat . . . If I’d been on that subway car in The Incident, I wouldn’t have done anything to stop Tony Musante . . . We, the organisms adapted to Peacetime, in fact, produced by Peacetime, don’t give our lives for the fatherland, we don’t sacrifice our existence for a civic battle, for a political ideal: those few, those very few who still do it are, in the final analysis, misfits . . . But there were years in Peacetime when the struggle was harsh and political. There was sharp conflict between different ideological affiliations, ‘between opposing extremisms’, at the outset, then it was between opposing parties, and then between opposing interest groups, and finally between opposing financial groups. There was a great deal of violence, but it wasn’t war, no one was forcing you into it, even though you might wind up as a victim by pure chance: I never got into scuffles with right-wingers, never with the police, for me the violence was only private, trading punches between individuals for contingent and trivial motives, issues of supremacy, of self-defence . . . Only the thrust of fear, those few times that I found myself backed into a corner, ever drove me to violence, or the force of anger, when you’d gladly kill the man you have before you with your bare hands, for the sheer hatred that you’re experiencing . . . Even our political struggle, the one I took part in, as it later became clear, was actually pretty much unfounded. There were apparent differences, but all it took was a single decade and what prevailed over it all was the unifying blanket of what high school you attended, which university you went to, the Desire-to-Be-Part-of-the-Ruling-Class, the battle for ideas became the battle for power, for money, for positions . . . Over time the various political projects proved to be nothing more than bickering over principles, because in time it became clear what the common destiny was going to be: grab yourself a slice, large, small or minuscule, of power & revenue, whatever the initial ideological capsule you set out in . . . Those who failed to understand were killed, or they wound up in jail or lived the life of a veteran, an outsider, in a world that was progressively alien to them . . . Let’s see, in the early ’70s, describing the full 360 degrees, working anticlockwise, we encountered: right-wing terrorists, ultra-right-wing extra-parliamentary terrorists, Fascists, monarchists, Liberals, Christian Democrats, Republicans, Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, ultra-Communists, extra-parliamentary Communists, Communist terrorists: a crowding and a clutter that would later lose all reason for existence because already by the early ’90s no one knew anything about them any more: what the fuck had the PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity) ever been?

And yet Ivo Brandani could easily describe, one by one, with considerable exactitude, all of those subtle nuances, because he is a native of the Postwar years who has lived in Peacetime, when political Multiplicity reigned over all, that is, something that seems inconceivable today.

To think about it more carefully, Peacetime was most of all the polio vaccine, the availability of electric power, water that came out of a tap without giving you typhus, dairy products free of brucellosis, increasingly curable diseases, the sexual revolution, medical clinics, family physicians, divorce, abortion, the Pill, lots of colour movies . . . It was also bikinis & sand, beach umbrellas, lounge chairs, beach buckets, sandals—such friendly, tame objects, dedicated to the pleasure of Being by the Water. The girls . . . at first they used to wear those pastel-coloured capri pants with the narrow ankles and the slit, do you remember? Pedal pushers with a side slit. Capri sandals, shoulderless white lace tops. Brigitte Bardot . . . just thinking about her still hurts . . . Then miniskirts and later bell-bottom pants . . . Peace was making love at night on the beach . . . Peace was youth, holidays, Father stuck in the city working and for a little while relaxing his grip on me . . . It was school, American-style pants, girls going out at night, trips without a penny in your pocket, pergolas in the summer, parties on Saturday afternoons . . . Peacetime was work, then the Renault 4, paved roads everywhere, trains & planes, ships. Nursery schools were Peacetime, as was the family doctor, mopeds when they first came out and then the ones that no longer spewed oil all over you . . . Peace had been the Alfa Romeo GT Veloce, the Volkswagen, the Flying Dutchman . . . Peacetime was the university and everything that happened there. And everything that happened afterwards and after that . . . Peacetime has been my whole life. We, natives of peace, don’t realize the way that non-war has shaped us and made us different from everyone who’s lived before us . . . Peace, peace, peace, for us filter feeders, who will never know anything about ourselves, because that is exactly what peace turns you into, it doesn’t test you, except in the very worst part of you, it cooks you for the rest of your life, slowly, and when you get to the end—and it won’t be long now—you’re still asking yourself the same questions you were at the beginning, when you wondered whether you too would be capable of piloting a Sacred Spitfire in combat, of keeping yourself from turning and running for your life when an Me-109 came barrelling straight at you . . . Still, I learnt a few things about myself all the same: I’m a non-hero, a non-courageous person, a non-dominant, someone who doesn’t believe in things, who doesn’t believe in anything, who has never believed in anything, not even when it seemed to me that the opposite was true . . . I’m someone-who-gives-up, someone for whom nothing really matters, if not staying alive in the most comfortable conditions imaginable . . . That’s what I’ve discovered about myself, as a specific organism produced by Peacetime. Others, a very few, weren’t like me: they fought. Some died and killed others, but they believed and even if nowadays they’re held in contempt by everyone, I respect them. They weren’t acting out of personal self-interest, they were acting out of their own convictions and many of them served decades in prison, in some cases without having killed anyone. Incapable of accepting Peacetime, they acted as professional revolutionaries once did, killing and getting themselves killed, filled with faith in the advent of the Era of Justice . . . The Era of Justice will never come and no one ever really yearned for it . . . Here, capitalism was always fine with everyone: for the bosses, because they were the bosses; for the workers, because in the second half of the twentieth century prosperity had washed over them too; while in the East the societies that emerged from the Revolution slowly imploded . . . Being terrorists was useful to the ego, it compensated for their desperation, it kept them from sliding into the nothingness of a lack of purpose, it indemnified them for the impending failure, of youth . . . Deep down you’ve always admired them, Brandani . . . They had put themselves to the test, they had learnt what they were really made of and they’d paid a very high price for that privilege . . . The struggle for/against a Communism that no one wanted was useful to everyone as a by-product of the war . . . Long before the years of blood there had been a watershed phase, which served to mark the distinction between our culture of little kids, children of the War, and their culture as fathers who came from a remote historical elsewhere and who had fought in that War. Between the two worlds, right at the very summit of the crest that marked the watershed, was where we were, poor assholes who believed . . . It was the transition from a hierarchical authoritarian democracy, along the lines of ‘you’ll be what we want you to be and shut up about it,’ to a democracy based on civil liberties and money, just like in America . . . It took us forty years and now here we are, we live in a present that is the achievement of that project: the democracy of money, the full and unreserved acceptance of the state of things . . . Here we are in the full culmination of capitalism, all ideological models, all affiliations, all discordant hopes are dead . . . Everything that was based on a different promise has fucked off . . . The idea of a just world—no one knows what that might turn out to be—has gone bad, rotted, dissolved once and for all . . . It took decades but in the end the process came to completion and here we are in the super-Westernized West . . . All of us, the comrades from back then, swept away or drifted over to the other side—but is there really another side?—even the ones who wanted to burn everything down, in fact, especially them . . . And yet, in the phase that came after 1968, during that horrible Afterwards that stretched on for ten years or so, or maybe fifteen, during the bloodbath of the clash with the State, something changed all the same, the country tried to improve: certain elements of that initial political promise did filter into society, that is, into all of us, and they remained . . . Something changed, and all the Afterwards after that was nothing but an effort to dismantle, piece by piece, that something new, because the only thing that mattered was to widen the gap towards this modernity, towards this stuff that can no longer be defined any differently than money in its pure state . . . A more just world, my ass . . . A richer world, no doubt about it, just look at these people: every one of them, compared to what we were sixty years ago, possesses unimaginable wealth and for all I know, feels poorer than we did . . . Even 1968 was nothing but one last demonstration . . . The political outcome of a cultural revolution that started up in the ’50s and lasted ten years or so, the amount of time it took for the petty-bourgeois Baby Boomers like me to grow up and look one another in the face . . . Look one another in the face, and say to themselves: What the fuck do we have in common with these people? Were we different from our parents? Sure, of course we were . . . Everything they told us at school, in church, everything that was officially important, everything that was imposed upon us as not-open-to-discussion, meant nothing to us . . . That was the real revolution . . . It was in the air as a lifestyle issue for the whole decade from 1958 to 1968 . . . That was the birth—something absolutely new in the history of the West—of the Youth Movement . . . We were different, and we knew it . . .

Franco and I had discussed it at length. He had no doubts, as usual: ‘In the free western hemisphere nothing takes place without the consent of the powerful. In fact, many of the things that apparently take place in opposition to capitalism are actually created by capitalism. And so it’s quite likely that the Youth Movement of those years was actually the product of the invention of a Market Movement, that is, a generation for which specially designed products were now available. The young petty bourgeois who was responsible for 1968 is merely a consumer, though a new and different one, created by the Market. What happened in 1968, Ivo, is nothing other than a product of what was called at the time “neo-capitalism”. At the time, that was what is was being called, do you remember that? In other words, it was neo-capitalism that was intolerant of the old hierarchic and authoritarian societies. It was more useful to have a more fluid and open world. What was needed was an egalitarian society, they needed freer individuals, both in terms of behaviours and consumptions. All this originated long before, in America, during the transition from a hierarchic and authoritarian society to a fully consumer society. Here that transition is taking place well behind the United States, where the youth revolt is anti-Communist and explodes several years earlier: when the European Revolt of 1968 bursts into flames, the American revolt is already over, it’s already been transformed into some-thing else. For us, at the beginning it was anti-authoritarianism, then there was an adherence to or, rather . . . a fundamentalist appropriation of Marx: we took what we found, there was nothing else on offer that possessed such a powerful concept of justice, such a robust revolutionary praxis. Those of us who knew anything about politics were either Fascists or Communists, they came out of the youth federations of those parties. The Fascists were disqualified from the start . . . The ones who were capable of taking on leadership positions in those early years, that is, in ’66 and ’67, came out of Communist education and militancy, and that was the direction in which the Movement was steered. There were no other outlets outside of the twin contexts of Communist revolution / hippie revolution: Lenin & Mao, or Spinello & Pink Floyd. Who even gives a damn about these things now? Our political platform was a historical objet trouvé. We overlooked the horrendous contradictions between Marxist liberation theory and the Communist practice of oppression. We chose to do without a radical critique of actually existing Communism, we turned our backs on the Soviet tanks in Prague, no one got unduly fussed. A decade of struggles, transformations, innovations came into the world already infected, it was a disease that later showed all the virulence of which it was capable . . . It was a historical loop in which capitalism produced a powerful opposition force to itself. That opposition was needed in order to transform and rejuvenate society. A great number of youthful individuals, us, were raised in the enjoyment of capitalism’s opulence without believing in its values . . . With the help of the market, we constructed an apparently alternative culture that seemed new and dense to us, even though it was actually riddled with holes. No one sat down at a drawing board to plan all this, even though, in the referential interplay between the world and its representation, a number of minds did apply themselves actively to the verbal and visual narrative of “our” youthful imaginary universe. The Revolution of ’68 was fabricated by a capitalism in search of new structures and new outlets: we were juvenilized by this continuous dribbling between reality and market . . . The classical thesis is that at the end of the ’60s a redistribution of income became necessary. Here in this country there was the immediate admonition of 12 December 1969, when someone blew up that bank in the City in the North—that was when it became clear that this was no laughing matter, that the game was turning ugly. We wanted to belong to a different country, a country that bore our imprint as well. But that’s not the way it went. It was just the usual take-it-up-the-ass-and-keep-pedalling, or pick up a gun and shoot, nothing that had anything to do with the old trinity of Civilization, Progress and Socialism.’