Bridge and Door

Molteni is over sixty, corpulent, not particularly tall, with lively blue eyes, his voice is always low, mellow, the words he uses are surprising and recherché, they seem to flow easily to his lips without hindrance or pauses, as if they’d always been there, just waiting to be chosen and uttered.

No one ever interrupts Molteni. He always has all the time he needs to say what he wants to, and then some. He often takes advantage of the fact to indulge in digressions, ironies, tangents. He seems perfectly well aware of his powers of seduction which he uses without restraint every chance he has. Much the same uninhibited way that he uses his academic power. Molteni is a barone, an academic power-monger. Molteni doesn’t believe in anything. Molteni is intelligence in its purest state, he’s neither benevolent nor accommodating. He’s very cunning, he misses nothing that happens in the rooms that he frequents, he understands instantly which way the wind is blowing at a meeting, whether matters are going favourably for him or if instead they’re being derailed, if there’s someone who’s pushing things in another direction. He speaks slowly, he utters his words with the rhythm of an old diesel motor. He sounds to Ivo like the engine of an old fishing boat that turns over slowly but steadily, one bursting combustion after the other, clear and distinct from the one before. Words free of all accent, perfect pronunciation. Behind his old-man eyeglasses, Molteni eyes the female students with particular attention, often, during the exams, he lowers his lenses to observe them all the better as they turn to go. Ivo heard someone say that once Molteni murmured to one of his teaching assistants: The true difference is right there. During the exams, he’s exquisitely courteous, especially to the girls, he’s not stingy with his grades, he’s unlikely to flunk you, but then he’s unlikely to give you the impression that he’s impressed with you.

‘How many among you are going to be able to make a serious contribution to philosophical thought? One out of five thousand? One out of ten thousand? But is that a problem? Certainly not. As a teacher I think it would already be a great achievement if the school were able to shape you into “carriers of method”, active containers of knowledge, transmitters of thought. What we are building and training here are not so much new philosophers, something we care little or nothing about, but the very neurons of society. I was about to say, of all mankind . . .’

As he talks he sprawls half-reclining in his chair, with his right hand he tugs and twists his white beard while with his left hand he toys with a pen. One leg has been bouncing rhythmically for at least half an hour, incessantly. Molteni betrays disquiet and uneasiness. Perhaps he’s getting bored. He’s chilly and yet his gaze remains quite piercing. His teaching assistants sitting in the front row listen more attentively than do the students: that’s how it always is with power-mongers. They don’t exert their power on their students, over whom they have no sway other than their task of teaching, grading or flunking. The students know it and, unless they’ve already made up their minds to pursue a career in academia, they consider them as nothing more than shoals, momentary hindrances and, however intimidated they may be, they basically don’t give a damn about them. The barone, the academic power-monger, is chiefly important to the faculty, which is to say, to those like him and those who aspire one day to reach his position and his level of power and influence.

But there are times when the barone can be important to an entire culture, can be a crucial mainstay in the measurement of the state of a discipline. A barone, in other words, can be a great teacher, a master. Molteni has been a master and remains one, despite the fact that he has almost entirely stopped producing. Perhaps his writings have not withstood the test of time particularly well, because they sink their roots into a somewhat obsolete school of thought, both as viewed from the right and from the left, especially from the left. They situate him in the ranks of the reformists, the much-reviled Social Democrats, they’ve dubbed him a barone, they attribute to him, and it’s impossible to say that they’re wrong in this, a minimalist approach, a call for tactical retrenching, a gattopardesco attitude (evocative of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard) towards what might seem to be an uprising underway. These are things that might be tossed around in a student political meeting but no one has the nerve to proclaim them in his presence. His prestige still serves its purpose, then, even among the most extremist student leaders. The ones who shout themselves hoarse, until they’re red-faced, at political meetings and demonstrations, howling slogans into a microphone, simply smile nervously when they’re in Molteni’s presence, displaying dignified deference: they know that they won’t be able to go on being student leaders for ever, they know that they’re being watched, they know that the time will come to spend judiciously the social capital of renown and student power that they’ve accumulated. A scholarship, a grant, a position as teaching assistant or researcher. Their contact with Molteni, Molteni’s esteem and consideration are still extremely important things, essential. But he doesn’t respect anyone openly, he supports those who are useful to him, he helps some when it is convenient to him to do so, more out of a necessary exercise of power than out of any actual scholastic need. Molteni doesn’t believe in anything, everyone in academia knows this. He has attained the highest possible position, a summit from atop which he can look down with irony upon everything and everyone. And that is what he does regularly but never upon himself. Rumour has it that he’s arranged to assign a chair in German studies to his mistress. It’s the very least we can expect from a barone. The deference shown to Signorina Boccacci by Molteni’s teaching assistants would be enough to confirm the hushed allegations, but Ivo Brandani is just a student and no one tells students about this kind of thing. To them, these remain, and must remain, nothing more than vague rumours. Academia never washes its dirty laundry in public. Molteni was one of the most highly respected scholars of Marx, and therefore, also of Hegel, but in the last decade he’s blazed a path all his own, he’s discovered Popper, he’s broken away from the Marxist mainstream which meanwhile has become increasingly abstract, extreme and revolutionary. Ivo likes him as a public figure but is also enormously intimidated by him.

‘Our goal, here, in this school . . .’

‘Why doesn’t he call it a university? Or department? Why does he insist on calling it a school? We’re already done with school, this is university, which means that if you have to go to the bathroom, you don’t have to raise your hand and ask . . .’

‘. . . is precisely this: to scatter into the human environment a diffuse intelligence. In brief, not so much bodies of knowledge, as much as the ability to think. Many of you will wind up working for corporations, newspapers, many will teach school. You’ll work for publishing houses, in the public administration. Some of you will go into politics, many of you are already involved in it. All of you will need to know how to think. All of us, Peninsulars in the second half of the twentieth century, need for you to be able to think. It will be indispensable for us to be able to rely on people capable of thinking . . .

‘Then again,’ he adds suddenly, without anyone expecting it—to judge from the attitudes of his teaching assistants, this is the first time they’ve heard him say anything of the sort—‘we must admit that systematic philosophy is dead, done with, we haven’t needed it for the past hundred years or more. It was the mother of all bodies of knowledge, all the sciences. Now that each branch of scientific pursuit has been able for some time now to walk on its own two feet, the mother no longer needs to instruct or nurse her children. She is no longer needed and it’s just stupid to keep her alive merely because we have a building here with Department of Philosophy written on it, just because we have some endowed chairs and we’re paid to remain sitting in them. If we were serious people we’d just go ahead and padlock the front doors for the next hundred years. But we all need to make a living and you’re going to need the scrap of paper we issue. So we continue the way we always have done. But the substance is no longer there. Someone may object: “But what of the eternal questions of philosophy?” What questions of this sort are there that aren’t already arrant bullshit in their very formulation? “What exists outside of us?” In your opinion, is that a question that still has meaning when you cross the street, or do you take it for granted that the trolley arriving from the opposite direction has an existence of its own? Does it strike you as serious that we still ask questions such as: “What is the ultimate nature of reality?” And what can we see about that other one that rings more or less like this: “Is it possible to know this ultimate nature?”’ Laughter. ‘There’s nothing to laugh about. Our questions will speak to this issue and many others. But know that this year we shall not limit ourselves to establishing the principal problems of theoretical philosophy and expecting you to know how they have been treated by modern philosophy, that is, from Descartes to the present day. This year we shall also give our own answers, not so much to the questions, but about the questions. We’ll express a judgement on these. We’ll demonstrate that some of them are nowadays pointless and unsubstantial.’

The teaching assistants exchange glances, clearly agitated, they whisper in one another’s ears while Molteni continues, unwavering. From the seats a female voice can be heard, asking loudly: ‘What about Marx?’

Molteni breaks off. He’s not irritated, if anything he seems grateful to that voice because it gives him a chance to turn to the topic right away, without having to work his way up to it gradually by opening a whole series of doors. He knows that everyone calls him the Red Baron, or actually, he’s just one of the many red academic barons. His membership in the Party’s Central Committee is no secret. Ivo barely possesses a notion of what a ‘central committee’ might even be. His teaching assistants are agitated: Where is this class heading, today?

‘Are you asking about Marx, Signorina? Or perhaps, Signora, I wouldn’t know . . .’ Molteni has always been quite gallant and old-school with his female students. Officially gallant in their presence, but with his teaching assistants he sometimes chances to make lewd, vulgar observations. Which are then gossiped about, circulated. Everything that Molteni says is conveyed to others and so on. He knows it, he is indifferent, it forms part of his power, part of his status as a maestro.

‘. . . Ah, sure, Marx . . . Well, you see . . . Marx gave us the tools to understand what kind of world we live in, he told us which and of what nature the true laws are that govern our so-called societies, and therefore our lives. He revealed to us fundamental things about the true nature of our social consciousness. About History. Etc. But he’s still a systematic philosopher, his thought tends towards the interpretation of reality in all of its parts. And that would actually be the least of his shortcomings. The greatest of Marx’s shortcomings is that he pointed us to the wrong path by which to change the world. His mistake was to deceive us and, when all is said and done, to have paved the way for Capital. Some of you might know that I studied him for many years, and I have never regretted doing so. A substantial portion of this course will focus on Marx. Nonetheless, I should warn you this is not a Marxist course, nor is it a course in Marxism.’

The lecture hall is full of sweaters and fatigue jackets, scarves worn very long, jeans and suede desert boots, especially Clarks. Many, a great many are wearing suit and tie. Ivo has on a navy-blue blazer with shiny steel buttons, a white shirt, a tartan tie, over a pair of beige fine-wale Levi’s corduroys. The room smells of wet overcoats. The sky has been overcast and rainy for days. It seems like an ordinary rainy November, the usual punishment for a summer that was too beautiful, for the crystalline water in the inlets of the South, but nothing in comparison with the Novembers of despair he experienced until two years ago, when he was still gazing out of the oversized windows in a classroom of a parochial school run by priests, and all he saw was a dreary world with no future, exactly like the world on this side of those windows, a world made up of idiotic, priestly lessons, of which nothing now remains in his head, without so much as a glimmer of interest, for four or five hours every blessed day, all year long, for ever and ever. Even then there was the same odour of wet overcoats and, like here, it was possible to perceive a stench of young specimens of humanity with unwashed hair, foul breath, bacteria. Many of them have colds, they’re constantly sniffing and blowing their noses. This is a November for taking notes on the first lessons of theoretical philosophy, even though he knows that soon he’ll stop taking notes entirely, and then he’ll stop coming to lessons at all, except when he, Molteni, is there. A November to buy a raincoat at the used clothing store, to buy single cigarettes or at most in packs of ten. A November for going every night to the repertory movie house to watch, depending on the programme of the month, mostly Japanese films, such as Harakiri or even worse, like The Naked Island, beautiful and dispiriting. A November for seeing Clara, phoning Clara, having furtive sex with her, hiding somewhere, at her place when her folks are out, or in the car, when and if Father lends it to him. A November that brings with it, even now, after almost two years, a sense of liberation from school, but also the stunned bafflement of fall. A November in which the year actually begins, during which the usual pressure is brought to bear on him, more intense than the year before and progressively growing over the days and months and years to come. The important thing is for Ivo to feel unfailingly confused, wrong, inadequate, mistaken; the important thing is that he perceive himself as a piece of shit. That’s the way everyone wants him. In particular, that’s the way Father wants him, he works at it every day at lunch and dinner, without a break, like one of those jackhammers they use on his construction sites, as if that were his life’s one true mission, as if Big Sister and Little Sister didn’t exist and also need to be forged. Father is uninterested in them, Ivo has always been his objective, he is the element to be shaped, the one who constantly needs to be reminded of what a mistake it is to major in philosophy, especially if his father has a contracting business, if his father is a builder. A padre palazzinaro—an apartment-house-building father—he wishes he could tell him but he’s scared to.

It’s a pressure that arrives from all directions, and no kidding around. Once again, no kidding, there’s never been any kidding around, anywhere and with anyone. The Peninsula is narrow, poor in resources, Catholic, mountainous, full of people without a penny to their name—you can’t seriously believe that just because you’ve come along, the others are going to step aside and let you pass, right? You can’t think that they’re going to welcome you with open arms, that they’ll extend handclasps of friendship, that they tell you that you’re welcome, make yourself comfortable, as if you were at home, as if we were your fellow citizens, as if we were your brothers, your fathers, your teachers. As if we cared about you, about the quality of your life. Don’t harbour any illusions, you’re going to be whatever we want you to be. Already in elementary school, Schoolteacher Proia (may he burn in Hell) should already have made a fair number of things clear to you: Do you remember when he pressed the palms of both hands against your temples, in a vise-grip, and picked you up off the floor? Do you remember how you felt? It was as if your head were about to be crushed, a sort of electric shock. Do you remember the way he made fun of the kids who started crying? He’d pull up their smocks in the back and mock them, saying: ‘Aprons, aprons.’ What do you think Schoolteacher Proia was trying to tell you?

Ivo is going to take a while yet before he understands what Schoolteacher Proia meant and just what the content of that ancient and primary message really was (We will crush you), he experiences this November of cold feet in wet Clarks desert boots, trying to handle the pressure and stay afloat at the university, trying to keep something for himself, something he cannot tell anyone else, because he doesn’t know what it is.

‘To be like them, quite simply, isn’t possible. I live in a different world, a parallel universe, indeed decidedly off-kilter in comparison with the world in which they live. They don’t know anything about Elvis, nothing about Pink Floyd, the Stones (they don’tknow how wonderful “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is) nothing about Clifford Simak, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick. A piece by Coltrane, Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Roland Kirk means nothing to them (it just sounds like a symphony orchestra tuning up, Mother told him once). They don’t know how to go underwater, they know nothing about Kerouac, they haven’t read Ginsberg’s “Howl”, they don’t know anything about Ernesto Guevara (“What’s the name of that Communist they killed in Bolivia?”), nothing about anything.’

This is the first time in History that such a profound cultural gap has existed between generations. They, the fathers and mothers, fought the War, suffered hunger, ate black bread, lived as refugees and evacuees, rebuilt their Country. When the fathers were young men, they went to brothels. That was the only known way to get sex at the time, aside from getting married.

‘It seems to me that Big Sister has fallen on the far side of the watershed, on the opposite side of where I am . . . Under the Bernina Glacier there are two lakes, one is white, and the other one is darker, they call them the White Lake and the Black Lake, one beside the other, they’re separated by a morainic strip, the waters of the White Lake (or maybe of the Black Lake, I’m not sure . . .) wind up in the Adriatic Sea, but the waters of the adjoining lake go much farther away, they run downhill to the Inn River and, with the Inn, they flow into the Danube, and on from there into the Black Sea. Big Sister is only two years older than me but she’s flowing in a different direction from me . . . With every passing year we move further apart, we’ve reached a level of alien estrangement, but different and far more serious than what separated me from Father and Mother, because it makes me lonelier . . .’

They had all been Fascists. Father says: ‘We were all Fascists, even the ones who deny it now, the ones who drape themselves in the robes of the Resistance to anyone who will listen.’ Father says that many of those who were actually in the Resistance later made use of the fact to advance their careers in the political parties, in the cooperatives, in the labour unions, in the state-owned industries, in the newsrooms. Now everyone’s making money—after the poverty of the War Years and then that of the Postwar Years, they’re now obsessed with money. Even Mother, in her wonderful welcoming laziness, is a little tense, because the husbands of her sisters seem to be making more money than Father, they have new cars, big homes, flats in gleaming new buildings that were built in the past few years, beach houses, they go skiing in the winter, they travel.

Father always says: ‘If it hadn’t been for all of you.’

He says: ‘If it hadn’t been for all of you, I wouldn’t have had to break my back the way I do every day. If it hadn’t been for all of you by now I’d be a bush pilot in Africa.’

Well, fuck, why don’t you go? Go be a bush pilot in Africa, who’s keeping you? Go and bust your face in half, if you care so much. Don’t you understand that around this table that’s what me and the Sisters, that is Big Sister and Little Sister, think? It would be better to die of hunger, better to have to live on the street than to have you always here, pontificating, threatening, dealing blows. Get the hell to Africa, go on! Father always says that everyone, even people who live in shanty town, have TV sets, he says that they all watch Rin Tin Tin, he says that everyone has a car, everyone, even the ones who were born and grew up in rags, who deserved no better, even the ignorant cattle who talk about nothing but football, Father says that even they want a car and a television set and a refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner. That is, everyone wants what he already has or would like to have: ‘I don’t know how they do it. The only explanation is the two-bit fraud, overdue instalment payments, debts.’ So why did he bother going to school in the first place, if every turnip head, every illiterate, every moron can make the same amount as him, can aspire to have the same things?

‘What he doesn’t understand is that, even if I’d become an engineer, a surveyor, an architect, I’d have killed myself before I’d have gone to work for his company, for him, and wind up like Ortolani . . . Ortolani, a surveyor, sat all day long at his desk in the corporation offices, with his French magazines of “artistic nudes”, his Playmen in his desk drawer . . . What did all these adults who now expect us to become like them ever teach us? What did Father teach you? You can say that he taught you three things . . . The first thing, the most useful one, is that the knot in your tie shouldn’t be thought of as a knot but, rather, as a piece of “drapery” . . . The second is that when you drive a car, it’s best to assume that the other drivers are all lunatics and drive accordingly . . . The third is that if you have to deal with someone you’re afraid of, you need to remember that “he’s afraid of you, too”. This last item is the one I find least persuasive, even though it derives from having been Father at War, from having fought as an aircraft engineer on trimotor SM.82 bombers, from having been a boxer, from having taken on the dangerous local delinquents, in the bad old Fascist times of his youth in the outlying neighbourhoods he grew up in . . .’

A November for understanding once and for all how to behave inside this confused and echoing hellhole of students, hallways, bulletin boards and dust. He’s in his second year—the first year was a full-blown shock, a virtual catastrophe: flunked at his first exam, a D when he took it again in June, then a subsidiary subject, nothing much—but still, it’s complicated. You need to understand what courses to take and which ones to skip, what exams to work towards for June. The Bulletin Board is the most powerful symbol of the university, of the passage from a state of passive pupil—who is told things, who is instructed to write those things down in his notebook, the pupil who has to ask permission if he wants to go to the bathroom—to an active student who doesn’t have to ask, who is required to read the notices, who must gather information every day, either directly or through word of mouth, about new developments, lessons, bureaucratic procedures to be taken care of in the administrative office after hours spent standing in line, about exams and how difficult this or that course is, the books, the study notes and where to procure them—everything. Nothing is said explicitly and in such a way that it is sure to reach you, nothing is provided clearly, no one is obliged to inform you, for example, that the scheduled date for an exam has been moved: that’s something you’ll learn the same day of the exam, in the hallway, along with a mass of other candidates for that exam, each of whom has the problem of figuring out what day they’re going to have to show up. Every piece of information has to be torn loose with clenched teeth, you might say, like a piece of meat off a large body, shapeless and unknowable. Listening to Molteni’s opening lecture forms part of this work of orientation. And that’s not all: in the department it was quite an event, because Molteni counts, and how.

There is a buzz of perplexed confusion, verging on open disapproval, though expressed under their breath, a sort of muttering. It’s the late autumn of 1967, mimeographed documents from the universities in the North are circulating in the department, but what will later become the Movement does not yet exist. Ivo managed to lay his hands on a copy of one of these documents, but he has a hard time understanding this language to which he is unaccustomed, a language that is political but which has nothing to do with his idea of politics: the proletarianization of the technician, the right to study . . . Marx applied to the ‘process of formation of the intellectual labour force’.

. . . the university is a productive institution as well, in the sense that within it there takes place a process of exploitation of goods.

The input (a student, a graduate of one of various high schools) enters the transformation process with a value of x (which can be set by the market) and emerges (output: college graduate) with a value of x+y. The added value y is greater or lesser depending on whether or not the process is finished.

If the process is finished (output-graduate) the value of y is maximum. Both the range of opportunities and the level of pay the output will fetch on the market are broader and higher than at the beginning of the process . . .

In it, the university is denounced as a place of authoritarianism, paternalism, as part of the industrial process of standardization, a factory of consensus, as an initiation into subordination. Ivo’s generation hasn’t yet constructed anything that would allow it to openly dispute Molteni’s words, to insult him, to berate him as a barone and a Fascist. But that generation is maturing, and very quickly: every day they talk about things they weren’t talking about the day before. Molteni is no Fascist, but he’s certainly a barone and apparently to his own full satisfaction: as he goes on with his opening lecture he remains certain of the unassailability of his position, he’s unruffled, seems unconcerned, because the university is still an institution based upon an unquestioned, obvious, tacit Principle of Authority.

The professors are our class enemies.

For a teacher the university is a feudal landholding, for a student it is merely a part of the apparatus of repression . . . a form of violence . . . concealed beneath the semblance of the requirements of learning . . .

Molteni isn’t a courageous man, it would never occur to him to stand up against an auditorium in open revolt, but today he feels that he has nothing to fear. Today his power is still intact, and so he goes on speaking into the microphone with that soft and slightly hoarse voice that is so typical of him. He has read the political documents circulating among the students. His teaching assistants procured copies for him and he’s discussed them with them: he’s said that he’s generally in agreement with what he’s read. ‘Very well written, especially those from the northwest,’ he said. He added that there is no form of education that is not also a repression and standardization. ‘But our job is to ensure that it is not only that . . .’

. . . the students at the university must learn first and foremost to command and obey, they must unlearn any inclinations they might have to argue, they must understand that Science and Culture are the private property of the teachers and that in order to claim ownership of them they must submit to their oppression . . .

These words have already been uttered, already written, already mimeographed, they’re circulating, but they haven’t emerged yet, they still haven’t penetrated, it will take time before that happens, before they are transformed into slogans, into political practice. Smug and authoritative, Molteni goes on unruffled, always at the same pace, like a chugging diesel fishing boat engine. He’s accustomed to charming everyone who listens to him. Unlike many of his colleagues, he uses absolutely plain language, almost elementary, and he expects his students and teaching assistants to do the same. Of the many stories that are told about him there’s the one about him telling a student who was using complicated language during an exam: ‘Either start speaking in clear, simple Italian or you can leave immediately. I don’t teach in philosophese and I expect that when exam time comes, my students don’t speak philosophese.’ It is also said that, of all phrases, the one that annoys him most is ‘pregnant with meaning’ (‘Be careful not to say pregnant with meaning’ is the wisecrack everyone exchanges at exam time). There’s a story about a student who uttered that phrase and saw his grade book go flying out the window. Until the end of November of this year, it will be conceivable for a student’s grade book to be thrown out a window. Just two months later, such a thing will become unthinkable.

‘It’s too early right now for you to see it coming, but soon we will be in a time when many of you will renounce what they feel themselves to be today and everything they think, or believe they think. I know that it seems inconceivable to you, that it seems absurd. But history has a nasty habit of overturning conditions that seemed immutable. You’ll be left as naked as worms, defenceless, and with you the social classes whose interests it is your intention to defend—unless you succeed in renewing a body of thought that you see now as utterly perfect, but which is in fact riddled with holes, unless you succeed in breaking it away from its practical application which is proving to be the most glaring failure in all of modern history . . . Strive to become the intelligence of your world. If you are defeated, with nothing and no one to oppose it, capitalism will transform itself into an invincible monster, eager to destroy everything before it, including itself, including the planet on which we rest our feet. The World will burn, it will collapse, it will self-annihilate for an extra penny of profit. It will become necessary to build a new opposition, based on a renewed, flexible, astute body of thought . . . Just as it is no longer conceivable to have a philosophy that sets itself up as a system, that is, as a body of non-scientific thought that claims to offer a complete analysis of the world, likewise we cannot conceive of a political utopia that posits a radical refoundation of human relations, the construction of a new man, a society based on perfect equality. Positions like this one generate the governmental and political monsters that we know all too well, they engender the concentration camps, the gulags, the secret police, Stalin. Setting out to cure all of human society’s ills on the basis of a philosophical and political theory, however excellent it may be, admittedly useful though it is as a way to understand the world, means failing to cure any of them, means renouncing the chance to alleviate and reduce the effects of capitalistic greed in the very name of its abolition . . . Would you allow yourselves to be treated at a hospital that had a slogan engraved on its facade reading something along the lines of: ‘In this building we cure all diseases and recovery is guaranteed’? You won’t be able to change the world but you may be able to improve it, and more likely you can consider yourselves lucky if you just manage not to make it worse. All the same, allow me to express my very strong doubts: you will make it worse. Not now, not in the next few years, but later on, when your initial drive will have lost its impetus, when many of you will have gone over to the other side, then you’ll realize that the point of arrival will be much worse than the point of departure . . . As long as we’re on the subject, let me add, apropos of nothing in particular, that it wasn’t that way for our generation . . . We were Fascists and later, luckily, anti-Fascists, we even went to war, we took up arms to show our opposition, we did it too late but we did it, to those who were dragging our country into the abyss and so forth . . . Today I can say that the point of arrival of our trajectory is better than the point of departure . . . Close parenthesis. In any case, over the course of these lessons this year we’ll have an opportunity to re-examine in greater depth a number of these topics. This is only a first presentation, a series of summary points . . . I want to warn you not to expect a course of theoretical philosophy but instead a series of lectures on theoretical philosophy and its future, or perhaps I should say, its fate. Those among you who were expecting confident answers are still in time to switch to a different course . . .’

The teaching assistants exchange questioning glances, they understand and they don’t understand. He ought to be more cautious, more conciliatory, given the situation. None of the students today understands a word of what Molteni is saying, or why. But that’s the way he is, he’s tossing out lightweight provocations, he’s sniffing the air to see which way the wind is blowing, he likes taking a contrary stance, he likes putting people on their guard, in the final analysis, he likes teaching. Even today, that’s what he’s doing, even though the atmosphere in the lecture hall is anything but serene, even though no one dares to raise any substantive objections. The questions that follow are by and large practical in nature, and they’re answered by the teaching assistants.

Franco Sala is sitting next to Ivo and he says: ‘I can’t figure out what game Molteni is playing . . . He’s surely read everything that’s circulating, he must have thought it over, he can tell which way the wind is blowing . . . This is tantamount to a warning shot, it’s as if he were trying to tell us that in no case is he going to be on our side. He’s saying: “I’m a barone, an academic powermonger, but I’m also a teacher, and if you want me as a teacher, here I am, but you’re also going to have to accept me as a barone—and in any case, for now, this is the beginning of the course, because that’s what they pay me to do.” He’s a sly old devil, he gets on my nerves, but I respect him, I can’t bring myself to hate him . . . I don’t see the point of hating him . . . what do you say?’

Ivo knows that Molteni is important, but he doesn’t know much more than that, he doesn’t want to spout bullshit, he’s unsure of himself. Sala is cultured, well informed, ‘politicized’, but he’s also ironic, he wants to be friends with him, and Ivo is flattered by the fact that he’s already spoken to him on other occasions. Sala is well known, esteemed, respected. Ivo ventures to chime in: ‘I don’t know . . . It strikes me that he’s saying: “Don’t expect that this state of student unrest is going to change the curriculum of this course” . . . But it strikes me that his teaching assistants are surprised, too . . .’

‘He’s a provocateur, he’s enjoying himself, he’s just flexing his muscles in here. He thinks he’s untouchable . . . But he’ll learn his lesson. I would have expected him to be shrewder, more intelligent . . .’

‘Couldn’t it be that he’s just informing us about what’s going to be taught in this course?’

‘Sure, of course, that too. But still he’ll learn his lesson.’

‘Do you think he’s a Fascist, too?’

Sala gives him a look and replies, decisively: ‘Let’s get one thing clear, Ivo . . . He is a caryatid of the Resistance, he’s no Fascist. It would be a mistake to think that he is one. If he ever was one, he isn’t any more and never will be again. If you want to know what I think, I think he’s an invaluable teacher. But he’s the typical kind of figure that is so crucial to academic power, as a subalternate extension of capitalist power. And so, right here and now, to me he’s an enemy . . . The university needs to be turned inside out like a sock.’ Franco Sala always knows exactly what to say. He knows what’s happening.

But what really is happening?

. . . the university is a feudal structure controlled by the professors: Research is their heraldic crest.

. . . a continual process of indoctrination in which the student is forced to play an increasingly and purely passive and receptive role. A set of academic rituals . . . a continuous waste of time to which the student is forced to submit, because he is being asked to believe that this is the one true way to gain possession of Science and Culture, the same academic science and culture that exist only because there are people paid by the state to celebrate their academic rituals at the university . . .

More than two months have passed since Molteni’s opening lecture. From the end of Christmas holidays until the occupation, the course in theoretical philosophy might have involved four or, at the most, five lessons, all of them conducted by teaching assistants. Then the occupation interrupted everything. In the South of the Peninsula there was a major earthquake, in Vietnam the Tet offensive, the universities in the North have been occupied for some time now, even the students in middle school have been heard from. The odour of dust is everywhere. But it’s not the same odour of dust you can smell, say, in the countryside, on a dirt road, this is the stench of filth, that is, the odour of human sweat and foulness: there’s filth everywhere, on the floors and on the furniture, on tables and chairs, because here when you say furniture, you’re basically talking about tables and desks and chairs and stools. There are a few filing cabinets and a few blackboards. There are glass lamp globes hanging from the ceilings. There’s not much else in the department, Peninsular universities are squalid, barren, dirty, echoing, even when they’re not being occupied. Inasmuch as they are part of the public administration, they’ve always been like that. It’s just that now, with the occupation, the echoing is almost intolerable, the dirt and the waste paper are ankle deep. In the executive commission the decision is made that cleaning shifts should be organized, but then no one does, no one knows where the find the brooms, the rags. Many of these pieces of furniture are made of beechwood, and have metal inventory plates, or else they’re made of metal and plywood. Some of them have been stacked in piles, heaped in barricades, against the glass front doors. To get out, you have to follow a figure-S between the first and the second barricade. To get in you have to be identified by the sentries standing guard or someone that they know has to vouch for you. The idea would be to keep ‘Fascists and provocateurs’ from getting in, rumours are circulating that the Movement has been infiltrated by cops and agents: often at night people come rushing up breathless to announce that the Fascists are on their way, but so far the Fascists haven’t tried doing anything. They’re staying cooped up in the School of Law, which is like a protected nature reserve for a species that seems to be on the verge of extinction, but that’s not how it is. In there, the comrades are oppressed and in the minority, practically clandestine. No one seems to know why the School of Law is traditionally majority Fascist.

. . . the students enrolled in the departments of literature, philosophy, educations, law, and political science meet in a general assembly; the general assembly in turn is made up of various sub-assemblies articulated on the basis of shared cultural and professional interests, independent of the department in which the students are enrolled . . .

. . . the academic year is subdivided into two semesters. At the beginning of each semester, the teaching curriculum for the semester that is about to begin is done. With this end in mind, the assemblies are convened and, during the course of each, the students propose topics of study for potential groups . . .

. . . the study groups select the people with the technical expertise necessary for their work . . .

. . . the actual participation in the work of the group is a necessary and sufficient condition for receiving a passing grade on the student’s gradebook . . .

. . . the actual plan of studies, devised on the basis of seminars selected by the student, replaces the plan of studies currently obligatory for the individual degree courses, though leaving them formally in effect . . .

. . . the working students will be offered three options:

—actual and ongoing participation in the study groups that have been formed in the assemblies . . .

—the formation of independent study groups with full rights to choose their topic of study . . .

—individual preparation on the same topics that the study groups are working on, in coordination with the study groups themselves . . .

Continuous assemblies in the auditorium. Then there are seminars, committees, working groups. All of it begins with the assembly and all of it comes back to the assembly. The assemblies are run by those who already have political experience of some kind or other, who know the basics of democratic procedures, who know what a motion is, how and on what votes are taken and so on and so forth. In other words, the ones who take their places at the head of the Movement are those who already have some familiarity and contacts with politics and political parties: that is, the ones who were going to their Communist Party chapter up until just a few months ago.

But the Movement appropriates these leaders (and it continually creates new ones), leading them, in some cases by the scruff of the neck, in the direction it is naturally heading already. The power game inside the Movement, among the peers who lead it, possesses one fundamental rule that you have to follow adroitly if you want to stay afloat: whoever manages to outflank all the others on the left, and to do it at the exact right moment, wins the assembly of that day, gains that particular advantageous position, in that particular department, and that gives him the right to represent it in the central committees of the Movement, which already exist somewhere, if only in embryonic form.

Ivo is there, he’s present, he participates, he wants to understand, but he remains silent, he expresses no opinion, he’s cautious. He, like many others, has no experience with what is happening, knows nothing about it. Till now he always believed that politics was something that involved the parties, the parliament, and he’s always steered clear of it. In politics he’s always thought according to the things that he’s heard Father say, a former ‘not-particularly-fervent’ Fascist, and now a member of the centre-right Italian Liberal Party: the government should do as little as possible, personal initiative, business is the highest form of human labour, it creates wealth for the workers as well. Father hates the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, and the Communists, he doesn’t care for priests; Ivo feels the same way, but only out of imitation. But here, now, he’s glimpsing a way of thought that is different and new to him, reasonings whose meaning he often fails to grasp, new languages, new terminology. Are they Communists? Yes, no doubt about it. Are they right? Yes, I think they are.

The assemblies are interesting, Ivo takes part in them on a regular basis, but he almost always wonders: ‘What are they really talking about? Why can’t I understand practically a thing of what they’re saying? Why does it seem to me that I’m the only one who isn’t getting it? Why does everyone talk about democracy and then when it comes down to it the only ones who can say anything are those who are in agreement with the majority? How can the others be for or against something they don’t understand? Why does it seem to me so absurd and wrong, but at the same time so exciting and right? What am I doing here? Do I belong to this movement, or am I nothing but an observer?’

ALL POWER TO THE ASSEMBLY.

Every day in the auditorium the speeches come one after the other, numerous, in accordance with the new ritual of direct democracy, of the rejection of delegatory governance, meaning that there is apparently no intermediary between the Movement’s base and its top leadership. But everyone knows that the only words that matter are those of a special few, while most of the talking is strictly filler. It is never stated openly, but the assembly consists of waiting for the two or three speeches by the most important leaders. Ivo thinks that some of the ancillary speeches, apparently secondary and strictly delivered to distract the audience, are very interesting, indubitably more interesting and reasonable than the speeches they hear from the leaders, which are often verbose, larded with curse words and jargon, words used to make those listening feel ignorant and in order to dominate the assembly: if you don’t understand me you don’t understand shit. The things that Oreste says are almost always like that. And so when Ivo dares to ask him for a few clarifications, Franco Sala, who is also considered a leader, gives Ivo an ironic glance then replies: ‘Forget that. The meaning is always something different from what is being stated, they’re talking to each other, in code. These are nothing but overgrown, over-politicized high school students, they’ve read a book or two, and now they are engaged in “analysis”, but they have a high-school culture, something straight out of De Amicis. All this is a power struggle, Ivo. We’re petty bourgeois, like all, or nearly all revolutionaries. It’s a game, but one played in deadly serious. Or at least it’s serious to me . . .’

It is also tacitly well known that anyone who wants to represent a conciliatory, or, worse, party-based, political position cannot, de facto, speak: they will be drowned out by shrill whistles and catcalls, they’ll have the microphone yanked out of their hands, they’ll be threatened, intimidated, ignored. There are those who might complain that this isn’t democratic. Ivo is in agreement, in a democracy everyone has the right to speak, but he doesn’t dare to say a thing . . . To anyone who raises this objection they answer that the democracy being practised at the assembly is a ‘revolutionary democracy’, which necessarily can’t offer room for all the ideological positions, only those allowed by the revolutionary nature of the Movement . . . He manages to talk it over with Franco. Franco says: ‘What the hell do you care, we aren’t here to defend and reaffirm the rules of a bourgeois democracy . . . We don’t give a flying fuck about that . . . We’re doing something different, we’re B-L-O-W-I-N-G U-P the university, that is, one of the fulcrums of the system . . .’

The standard language of the Movement changes rapidly, neologisms coined just the day before spread like wildfire through all the assemblies and the committees in the various departments. These are regularly recurring words, used by everyone, often referring to vague concepts, and frequently possessing referents that transition from one meaning to another: an exam is a ‘taxable moment’. It takes Ivo a little while to figure out that taxes have nothing to do with it, but that they’re referring to the ‘accounting audit of the conventional cultural absorption, necessary for the grading and selection of students’. In the assembly and in the seminars, curse words and obscenities are also useful in stalling for the time needed to formulate the successive proposition: it is the liberation of language from all respectable bourgeois polish. There’s irony but not really all that much. Often their mockery of this or that academic celebrity becomes open, defamatory, and very aggressive, sometimes obsessively repeated. Molteni is one of their favourite targets, but in the words used to attack him it is possible to detect a residue of respect, of intellectual subordination.

Trying to be noticed in the assembly meant succeeding in overturning the paradigms of the day, instilling in all those listening the sensation that ‘they hadn’t understood a fucking thing’, saying that ‘the problem lies elsewhere’, that they were ‘clinging to retrograde positions’, that it was ‘necessary to raise the level of the clash’, etc.—it’s an arms race. The meaning, consistency, and truthfulness of what is said counts a great deal less than the tone and charisma of the person speaking. What counts are the kind of words and the way they are used, the linguistic stylemes. What counts are the physical appearance, the timbre and sonic level of the voice, the style of dress, the brand of cigarettes that are smoked. Trying to be noticed also means dressing in such a way as to be perfectly recognizable as comrades-in-the-Movement. The basic reference is the look used in the Cuban revolution ten years earlier, but there are also those who choose not to comply with that standard, those who insist on wearing their leather jackets, their cashmere sweaters. There are those who don’t give a damn and go on dressing the way they always have.

Ivo realizes that what counts most is one’s sense of timing in speaking up, the capacity to surprise and overwhelm, to outdo, to go beyond, to bring the assembly gradually along until it comes to these further convictions, with new watchwords. The one thing you can’t do is stop, you can’t say the same thing tonight that you were saying this morning, it will be obsolete. Being there means perceiving this incessant transformation, being inside it, sharing it, submitting to it but also contributing to it. The assembly and the Movement itself have a constant need for new tasks and objectives to attain and it is on these that they reconstruct themselves day after day. ‘But the mobilization cannot go on indefinitely,’ says Franco Sala, ‘sooner or later the journey will run out of energy and start to slow, therefore what’s needed are results, because in the end it will be the results that really matter.’

Stupidity & intelligence, conformism & originality, novelty & staleness—they all coexist in a continuous incredible miraculous daily contradiction. When he talks to the comrades, when he discusses the fate of the Movement, when, very rarely, he takes the floor in the committees, in the seminars (never in the assembly, he’s never had the nerve and he never will . . . ), Ivo uses the language of the Movement, he makes a show of having internalized the decisions and he complies entirely with the lexicon in use that day; only with Franco does he know that he can freely express his doubts. Ivo senses that revolution is not going to take place and deep down he doesn’t think he wants it to, but he too speaks of its as a desirable and possible event. He senses that all this will come to an end, but he also knows that the university will never be able to go back to being what it was before. It hardly strikes him as a minor achievement.

In the Movement everything seems to be the fruit of convictions and free individual choices, there is no apparent constraint, but Ivo quickly comes to understand that what really matters is the collective spirit, that is, the instinctive desire everyone feels not to be left behind, a yearning to belong, to be part of something, to share in the final analysis in the struggle against poverty and malaise and against a system of power that is both internal and external to the university. The motivations for being there and acting within the Movement, for running the risk of a fractured skull or even worse, need to be reconfirmed, implemented, bettered and bested on a daily basis—that’s something that the leaders know full well. And therefore, never a step back: ‘Always forward, always beyond until the point of dissolution is attained, until self-annihilation is finally reached, things that will happen soon . . .’ Franco Sala tells him at one point. For that matter, there’s the deadline of the June examinations; the February session was skipped and it’s clear that in June the exams are going to have to be held at all costs, at the cost of simply cancelling the academic year. ‘This will be a crucial moment,’ says Franco, ‘but this is just the end of February, it’s early to worry about that. First let’s see how things shake out, how the system reacts. Because they’re going to react, and how . . .’

One fine morning, Ivo goes with Franco to the Department of Architecture, which has been occupied since 2nd of February, the site of historic student-protest activities dating back five years. Today an assembly is going to be held with representatives from various departments, including the Movement from the Departments of Literature and Philosophy. Far from the deterioration and chaos of the university campus, the Department of Architecture strikes him as an Eden of privileged students very conscious of their attire, some of them wearing parkas, others in jacket and tie, loden overcoats, cashmere sweaters. For years the myth has been circulating throughout the university that the Department of Architecture is a place of emancipated women and loose morals. Ivo looks around, the young women in the Department of Architecture are every bit as pretty as those in Literature, but they look different: they don’t give the impression that they’re there to get a degree before getting married and starting a family, maybe with an idea of teaching, to round out their husband’s salary. These young women seem to be here because they’re interested in architecture. They look confident, many of them went to artistic high schools, they’re wearing miniskirts, their eyes are mascaraed, they really do seem to want to be professional architects. They intimidate him, he likes them a lot.

There are people stretched out on the lawn under the pine tree in front of the entrance, smoking and talking in the sunshine. Higher up, above the canopy, standing on ladders, there are students chiselling at the facade. They’re working according to an outline traced in chalk directly on the plaster by a major artist, the pictor maximus who sits on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Nude figures and bunches of grapes, an unfinished arcadia, strange in this context. But those who are working on that stuff belong to a different group, there are those who describe them as ‘situationists’, but very few people know what that means: they call themselves Birds. Over the past few days, they’ve occupied the lantern in the cupola of a Baroque church in the City of God. They climbed all the way up there, they perched on the spiralling architecture at a vertiginous height, they stayed there for more than twenty-four hours, like roosting pigeons, until they were forced down. Ivo doesn’t know who the situationists are either and doesn’t dare to ask anyone, not even Franco, but he liked their exploit, it seemed to him to have some meaning—there they were up there, in the chilly night, from the piazza below they were dark silhouettes smoking cigarettes, or maybe joints, clinging to Borromini’s capriccios. The Birds perform symbolic acts, totally off the beaten path, abstract. They get on many people’s nerves, but Ivo likes what they do. Franco disagrees: ‘Breaking into other people’s homes, making them choke on their dinner, strikes me as personal violence, or camouflaged frat-boy prankery.’ The Birds graze sheep in the rooms of the Institute of Architectural History, they’ve transplanted a fig tree into the patio outside the auditorium, they break into the homes of leading left-wing intellectuals who have openly endorsed the Movement and lay them waste. Ivo thinks that what they’re trying to show is that publicly endorsing costs nothing, if one risks nothing.

‘Violence, but not against people, against things, instead . . .’

‘It’s still violence,’ says Franco, ‘and violence is allowed only when it’s public and political, Ivo . . . They ruin dinner parties, evenings with friends, they terrorize families . . .’ Franco continues, talking to himself, but Ivo listens to him eagerly, because he teaches, points the way, understands things, and explains them without showing off: ‘. . . on the other hand, violence is there, it’s a necessary option, always present, it’s an integral part of everything we do and everything we make happen . . . You can’t eliminate it, because being nonviolent means being nonexistent in the terms by which we choose to exist . . . And these terms, even if they are by no means entirely clear, certainly don’t allow for mediation with the existing situation, at least so it seems . . . Violence is necessary, some of us don’t understand that but factory workers and farmers have always known it—necessary because the opposition cannot truly take shape without physical action, without manifesting themselves concretely in the space-time continuum . . . Likewise, no repression can exist without the concrete threat of coercion and physical violence . . . No one, at the Movement’s assemblies, openly states this . . . In fact, they say the opposite, we constantly emphasize that we’re the ones being attacked, brutalized and arrested, and in fact that’s the truth, by and large . . . But everyone knows that without a physical confrontation, the Movement wouldn’t exist in the same way, the things it states wouldn’t have the same political force . . . What we need is for there to be a dialectic of violence between the Movement and the system, a sequence of call and response that will lead to a genuine culmination . . .’

Then in a lower voice, speaking to himself: ‘Everything that has to do with humanity, even the most abstract thing, involves the body, Ivo . . . Politics is political only if it entails the potential transition from word to direct action on the body . . . Without the option of violence there is no politics . . .’ Ivo isn’t sure he understands. They’re sitting on the steps, in front of the Japanese Cultural Institute. It’s a horizontal building, modern, with faint Asian references. It is here that Ivo discovered Utamaro, Hiroshige and Hokusai: a show that Clara dragged him to see the year before and that bewitched him. Before then he thought he hated everything Asian. Chinese or Japanese, it was all the same to him. On the department facade were streamers and dazibaos that proclaimed a die-hard occupation. Before them were the green treetops of the pines and holm oaks standing on the prehistoric ridges of the River Valley, to the left was the Neoclassical building of the British Academy, further down was the Museum of Modern Art. A department for the privileged, if compared to the Literature and Philosophy Building, to say nothing of the Teaching College.

‘. . . words matter, and how . . . But I believe that the most important battleground is physical, spatial: on the one hand, the university space of the occupied departments and, on the other, the space of the city, the streets, the squares. Notice this: years later, the things we remember aren’t moments in the assemblies, political resolutions, but events of territorial conflict, contests for the conquest of symbolic extensions of space, which remain bound up with the names of the places where they occurred, where they were made to occur . . .’

‘Are you saying that the time has come to create opportunities for physical clashes?’

‘It’s what we’re doing, Ivo . . . This situation can’t go on for much longer . . . Sooner or later they’ll clear us out of the departments—we’ll fight back and they’ll step up the repression, we’ll react to that and so on . . . The comrades who have political experience know that it is only in violence that the true intentions of the state can be seen . . . In the leadership meetings, at this point, they’re openly saying that it’s going to be necessary to move on to a repressive phase, in order to assure that the Movement makes the hoped-for qualitative leaps . . .’

‘What qualitative leaps, Franco?’

‘The way I see it, these are the qualitative leaps . . . From an anti-authoritarian movement, generically opposed to the idea of the system, to a political movement with a revolutionary bent . . . From the struggle against the exploitation of intellectual labour and in favour of the liberation of knowledge, to the struggle for the proletarian revolution . . . In other words, we need to break out of the university and shift the field of battle onto a broader territory, principally in the factories . . . It means that it is necessary to seek connections with other subalternate subjects in society . . . The university, the condition of students, is a ghetto that will ultimately strangle us, if we can’t figure out how to emerge from it: that’s as much as I can tell you here, today . . . We’ll see how it turns out . . .’

‘Franco, can I ask you a question?’

‘Well of course.’

‘When you say “proletarian revolution”, are you talking about a proletarian revolution like, say . . . like, say, the storming of the Winter Palace? In other words, are you talking about something like that?’

‘Are you pulling my fucking leg? It’s obvious that the historical conditions of that kind no longer exist and will never exist again. However, you see . . . Beings Communists without aiming at a revolution makes no sense . . . So there’s no way to have a revolution? All right, but still, that is the objective of any Communist party, any Communist movement . . . We can’t say when the favourable conditions finally will exist, but it is there that we must arrive. Not today and not even tomorrow. But this is what it means to be a Communist . . . If we say it openly, we force the Party to come out into the open, to reveal its true nature . . . Et cetera, it’s not a simple matter . . . But this is the policy: prefigure a future that might give some meaning to the struggles of today, and I’m not talking about our struggles but the struggles of factory workers and the subproletariat. We don’t know what the future holds, in part because we still have to construct it, you see? . . . Let’s get going, or they’ll get started without us.’

Inside the building the setting is similar to that of the other occupied departments. The walls are covered with posters and streamers, slogans in shiny red paint or in spray paint. Everywhere is the reek of filth that Ivo knows all too well by now, here too crumpled paper litters the floor. There’s an intent to defile, to desecrate, in all this. He likes it. In the assembly, Franco has been shouting himself hoarse for fifteen minutes, the way he always does, and his voice is practically shot. His raucous voice, along with a number of other peculiarities of his in terms of language, have become the target of imitation and sarcasm, but at the same time they’re an unmistakable trademark. The meaning of what he’s saying is reasonably clear but, more than by his meaning, the assembly seems to be fascinated and, perhaps, captivated, intimidated, by the way Franco speaks. He seems to be aware of it, perhaps it’s something conscious, he tested it out in the first few days and then he carefully fine-tuned it. Everyone else constantly uses curse words, obscenities, meaningless phonemes: their purpose is to stall for time before adding some other formulation whose purpose is to intellectually intimidate the assembly, to grab it. Not Franco, his words are prepared, but simple. They come out of his mouth in a carefully reasoned sequence, punctual, moving: ‘. . . if we allow ourselves to be corralled inside this enclosure, where you could cut the paternalism with a knife . . . If we let them keep life and society and the ferocious contradictions of the world out of the things that they teach us and the things we talk about . . . If we accept that the reality in which we actually live is kept separate from the academic aura of the authoritarian bodies of knowledge, pre-packaged and dominant . . . Listen to me, comrades, if we allow the university to shape us in accordance with the standards that Capital requires in its current phase of restructuring . . . If we let them cage us in the industrial sector that produces the predictable proletarianized technicians who serve the system . . . In other words, if we allow all this, then we can call ourselves—not only already finished as a movement—but already dead as human beings!’

There is a lengthy burst of applause.

Ivo wonders whether he believes in what he says. Or whether for him the game of being a revolutionary leader is merely that, a game, conscious and temporary, before he goes on to dedicate himself to something completely different. Franco is pale, skinny, tall, always dressed the same way, in a black crew-neck sweater, a hand-knit red wool scarf, a rumpled jacket and, if it’s cold out, a heavy blue double-breasted peacoat over it. He wears wire-rim glasses and has his hair cut short, at a time when everyone else has long hair.

‘That question makes no sense, Ivo. Why, do you believe it? Do you believe in all the things you say? Surely Franco believes in it more than you do. And after all, what does it mean to “believe in it”? To be convinced of it, that’s what it means. But in this case, convinced of what? Of the possibility of revolution? Oh come on . . . He explained to you earlier, what that means . . .’

‘All around us, the society of the dead wants us, calls out to us, has no intention of giving us room. It needs us, we are the new recruits it yearns for . . . Fathers, professors, schoolteachers, priests and all the politicians, including the Communist Party!’ A pause, more applause. ‘Including the industrialists, including the police, the carabinieri, and the various institutions . . . In short, all these subjects, in practical terms, society as a whole, have no intention of kidding around, they’re not going to give up even an inch of their hold on us, their power over our generation . . . They already know how many of us are going to be fed into the machinery of the capitalist system as factory workers, how many as technicians, how many as executives and how many others will be left, physiologically, out on the street . . . The university is a sorting machine for the new non-proletarian recruits to the capitalist process of production . . . No one is going to give us any free gifts, everything we obtain we’re going to have to rip it out of their hands piece by piece!’ More applause, an extended wave; Ivo feels a shiver run down his back. Then Franco’s speech becomes more technically political: ‘With all their disagreements, the leadership of the Movement do have a shared Leninist vision, according to which there can be no revolutionary movement without a social class with a vital interest in building it, a class that will take hegemonic control and guide it to a successful outcome through the appropriate alliances . . . To manage the qualitative leap in our struggle we have already witnessed the growth of political formations unwilling to put up with the limitations of the traditional parliamentary left or the confines within which the Movement has thus far manifested itself but which remain solidly bound up with the university as a place for the shaping of consciences and, therefore, as a site for the production of extra-parliamentary political recruits in the embryonic state . . . What is needed are closer ties with those forces . . .’ And so on and so forth. Franco is reporting to the assembly the generic conclusions of the National Liaison Office. The speech ends in a burst of shouts and cheers. What had seemed like a routine assembly has taken a ‘qualitative leap’, even though no one seems to know in what direction. The objectives of the leaders who from this point on take turns at the microphone is to guide the assembly to take a vote on a unified motion which, however, remains to be drafted. A small group of leaders, deputy leaders and intellectuals of the Movement has already secluded itself in some lecture hall to draft the text of that motion, while another group is focusing on a less hasty counter-motion, one that calls for biding time for the moment. In any case, the assembly will vote for the motion advocated by Franco, but the group behind the counter-motion will make its presence felt all the same.

At this point, it would seem that no political approach aiming solely to obtain results within the context of the university can be allowed to gain a position. Such an approach must be opposed at all costs. The more ambitious leaders have sensed that in the Movement even the most delirious proposals will encounter neither obstacle nor opposition, provided it rings revolutionary. The race towards the most extreme formulation ensures the loyalty of the masses, the silencing of all dissent. Curse words are fundamental, no speech can do without them: they express the revolution’s bold contempt for any and all gods and any and all clergy or spiritual power other than that springing from the revolution itself. Foul language too expresses contempt, it’s practically a linguistic manifesto, but with the goal of erasing all differences between high and low language, between the burnished eloquence of the press, the TV, the bourgeoisie and academia on the one hand, and the actual spoken language of young people, the proletariat and ordinary people on the other. ‘It is obligatory to violate with determination the Catholic-televisual language of the bourgeoisie, shine a harsh light on its obscurantist hypocrisy.’ The things that remain beyond the pale are the sexist insult, the lewd double entendre and, above all, vulgar frat humour, which was abolished instantaneously from the very outset. In the Movement, irony, sarcasm and satire all manifest themselves in accordance with sophisticated, extreme protocols, in some cases invasive and destructive: on the wall-to-wall carpeting of the Department of Architecture sheep are allowed to shit, the offices of the ‘baronial’ potentates are smeared with balls of shit, scattered with bales of hay. The offices are ransacked, ravaged, the books have vanished from the shelves, the furniture has been dragged off to add to the bulk of the barricades at the department’s front entrance, that is, if they haven’t simply been carted off, looted. The barons themselves have simply vanished from circulation some time ago. The last time that Molteni set foot in the department he was greeted by a wall of jeers and catcalls, shrill whistles. As he hurried, lurching, down the stairs, everyone had been able to see that he was frightened—even he, sharp as he was, couldn’t really say what was happening, what was really in the air. At that moment, Ivo felt deeply uneasy and stepped away from the railing. ‘Fuck, though, that’s Molteni!’ Only a few young teaching assistants ever showed up in the department, took part in the work of the collectives or proclaimed their own personal solidarity with the Movement, their faith in the revolution, their always having been ‘on the other side’ when it came to power in the university. ‘These loyal revolutionary souls don’t understand two very basic things,’ says Franco, ‘the first is the self-image that they project when they participate in assemblies and seminars: dreary, opportunistic, capable of engendering only mistrust and dislike. The second thing they can’t understand is that baronial authoritarianism is strictly a secondary target and we don’t give a flying fuck about their solidarity . . .’

The declared objective is, ‘fucking hell, comrades’, the unification of student struggles and worker struggles, the shift of the epicentre of the revolt from the university to the factory. ‘Anyone who tends in this historical moment to ride the tiger, in the hopes that once the party is over he’ll be an unmarked striker and enjoy a personally advantageous position as a mediator between the student masses and the academic baronry, has reckoned poorly . . . And another thing, the party won’t come to an end all that soon, Ivo.’ Ivo can only nod his head, Franco’s lucidity and intellectual determination are stunning, he doesn’t feel up to it, but he’s flattered by the attention Franco is willing to pay to him and the second- hand prestige that this friendship confers upon him.

The questions that Ivo asks himself aren’t the same as those that Franco does; rather, they resemble the topics of Molteni’s opening lecture, when he was talking about the wrong path to changing the world. Ivo doesn’t know much about politics, about Marx he knows more or less what he studied in high school, lately he’s read Lenin’s The State and Revolution, he bought all of Das Kapital on the instalment plan, he’s read here and there, in a disorderly manner, like Che’s Bolivian Diary, Adorno, Lukács, he’s reading Marcuse, like everyone, he buys Communist journals, magazines and zines, Quaderni piacentini, Quaderni rossi, he forces himself to read the Monthly Review, periodically he even inflicts upon himself Marcatré—all according to regulation. He chose to major in Philosophy because he’s liked it ever since he first studied it in school, or actually since he had to study it for the whole summer of 1962 with Giorgio, the college student who was tutoring him and who was good at talking and explaining and smoking a cigarette all the way down to the filter without letting the ash drop. It was Giorgio who made him fall in love, for real and for the first time, with the history of thought. Ivo remembers very well, it was a summer dominated by St Thomas Aquinas’s Immovable Motor, and even now that’s how he still imagines it: an immense diesel engine, black, covered with grease, lost in the vast emptiness of space. Ivo hates non-understanding: ‘If there are men like me who have written important texts, I, inasmuch as I’m a man like them, must be capable of understanding them, just as they were capable of writing them.’ This is the impulse that drove him towards the Department of Philosophy and in the past few months, while Franco has been reasoning in terms of political practice, Ivo, consistent with the premise of his decision, asks himself questions that strike him as philosophical. Till now he has participated by saying nothing, observing, learning new things. He has seen (or anyway, he thinks he has seen) that in the Movement there has formed, spontaneously and in just a few days, a centralized group holding power. Around this small core various concentric and subordinate circles have stabilized, with different hierarchical positions, all the way to the outermost circle, that of the revolutionary unskilled labour, menial workers who are given orders and execute them with considerable docility. The leaders are with their subordinates, they show themselves where the various sentinels stand guard, they go to sleep in the occupied departments. But few among those who stand sentinel take part in the narrower meetings of the leaders. Officially these hierarchies don’t exist but they’re clearly visible and in fact everyone sees them, just as they see the sexual favours that the leaders receive from the female comrades. Power, the Eros of dominance, subordination, the struggle to be on top, all these things exist in the Movement exactly as they exist outside it, anywhere else, without exception.

‘It’s not cold today, I can go out wearing just a light jacket, the usual navy blue blazer, red knit tie, Levi cords, Clarks desert boots: I’m looking good, admit it . . . Marshalling point in the Oblong Piazza—there aren’t that many of us, but still a good number . . . We march off northward, keeping a healthy distance each from the other. We’re on the side of justice, there’s no doubt about that . . . The police entered the Department of Architecture and cleared everyone out, they beat the comrades who were inside with billy clubs, they hauled them into the police station . . . There were only a few of them, they didn’t put up a fight, and they were right . . . It’s the right thing to do, to demonstrate against everything that’s happening—Franco said it, they’re going to kick us out of the university, we need to show a reaction . . . He’s up ahead, in the front line right behind the protest streamers, arms locked with the other comrades in leadership . . . In the front line are the security crew and the Movement leaders, in the second line are the deputy leaders and so on, in order of prominence attained . . . The security crew has put together a cordon along the sides of the protest march—situation normal: all the shops up and down the street pull down their metal shutters . . . This is my first genuine demonstration, in the street, on the piazza . . . I came because it’s the right thing to do. In the procession I saw people you rarely run into at the department, these days, including students who usually don’t take part, but today they’re here . . . The sun is out, it seems as if spring has arrived, I feel good, a light breeze manages to worm its way between my jacket and shirt—it’s still a little chilly—button up the front . . . Clara isn’t here . . . She’s come into the department a few times with us but that’s it . . . She’s in her first year, newly enrolled. In the Department of Economics almost nothing’s happening, she’s bewildered, she hardly knows which way to turn . . . I try to explain things to her but I’m not comfortable indoctrinating, I’m not an indoctrinator—and especially because I don’t really know the doctrine . . . We’ve talked about the fact that the university is baronial, authoritarian, selective, the universal right to study, the rejection of delegatory political process, the idea of pure politics, without intermediaries, the power of the assembly, in other words, everything I’ve learnt in the past few months . . . She’s in agreement . . . We’ve talked about the Movement: being part of it is important, it makes you feel good, it makes you feel like you’re part of things, together with the others, the comrades . . . Maybe I’m turning into a Communist—and if so Father can go fuck himself . . . If he knew I was here, if he could only see me now . . . He knows all about the occupied departments, he reads the news in his newspaper . . . That newspaper is a piece of shit: the articles talk about bivouacs in the university departments, sex, orgies, they even went so far as to suggest we hold ‘black masses’ . . . What the fuck is a ‘black mass’? A nice headline on the front page . . . I’d never really considered the issue of truth in newspapers—that is, I assumed they told the truth . . . Or at least that’s what I thought about Il Messaggero. Mother reads it . . . Mother is Justice, Truth and Love, and so it can’t be anything other than a sincere newspaper, a good newspaper . . . Instead it turns out that’s not the case, things aren’t that way . . . Nossir: concerning everything that’s happened, things I’ve seen happen before my own eyes, completely different versions can be presented . . . I hardly ever used to read the newspaper and only the one I found at home and almost only local news, especially Avventure in città, “Adventures in the City”, in dialect, it made me laugh . . . Now I buy the newspaper, I read it. I started buying L’Espresso, L’Europeo too . . . I know that we have friendly newspapers and hostile newspapers . . . The friendly ones are few in number, Paese Sera in particular, two editions a day, occasionally three, just a few pages and the minute you touch one your fingers are smeared with black ink, the movie pages are good . . . I buy it every night . . . Piazza del Popolo, full of cars like always . . .’

POLICE OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY!

‘This piazza ought to be empty . . . This ought to be the piazza of the void and the nothingness, instead it’s a parking lot . . . Traffic blocked solid . . . Just think how they’re cursing us, the angry oaths . . . A complete traffic jam, it must be having ripple effects throughout half the city . . .’

‘Do you know who was in the department when they arrived?’

‘I don’t know, not many—who?’

‘I don’t know . . . Apparently some people hid in there . . .’

‘No, really?’

‘So they say, apparently they managed to phone out, last night . . . They don’t know how to get out, the Department of Architecture is cordoned off by lines of cops. If they catch them, they’ll beat them bloody . . . So they’re waiting for us . . .’

‘But what can we do? It’s not like we came here to beat other people up . . .’

‘Stop talking bullshit, Brandani, we’re going up to take back the Department of Architecture . . .’

THIS IS A PEACEFUL DEMONSTRATION!

‘Stay together in rows of eight, at regular intervals, don’t fall for any provocations! We’re not here to pick fights, we’re here to lodge a democratic protest against the police brutality at the university! The university belongs to the students! Today we must recognize that the struggle students have undertaken for a just, anti-authoritarian and anti-classist university is the target of a concerted, concentric attack from all of society’s institutions, including the press and the media, including the political parties, an attack that yesterday took concrete form in the violent police intervention and the clearing of the Department of Architecture! The university belongs to us and we are going to take it back!’

‘I haven’t walked down this street in years: there’s practically nothing here, just walls, the Ministry of the Navy, private homes . . . The Cinema Arlecchino, that old cinema with the strange, multi-colour marquee . . . I like the Cinema Arlecchino, as a cinema . . . I like all cinemas as cinemas, for that matter . . . Every day, a cinema, a movie, a promise of enjoyment . . . The sun rises, the air grows steadily hotter . . . There’s this nice mild breeze . . . They stopped the Red Ring Route, the finest trolley line in the city, to let us through. There’s a line of articulated trolleys waiting . . . Everyone is watching us, a few people applaud, but not many, all the others have mistrustful, pissed-off expressions on their faces: they have their lives to lead, they’re not occupying anything, they’re not engaged in the struggle, quite simply, they’re minding their own fucking business . . . They’re carrying on business as usual, moving from one point in the city to another for work, they’re out doing their grocery shopping: they’re plumbers professionals housewives couriers lawyers—proletarianized, exploited or else exploiters . . . As Franco likes to say: “What adventures await us, if we don’t procure them for ourselves?” And what about me? What kind of life awaits me? What do I want to do? What am I? Who am I? Will I become like them? No, this is simply not possible, because before that happens, I’ll hang myself, I’d rather jump in the river and drown . . . That is, unless Father, the Forger of All Things, doesn’t kill me first . . . The factory workers won’t do anything, their fate is to become members of the petty bourgeoisie. Marcuse wrote that. The affluent society redistributes income, you’re being exploited but you feel rich and you aim at rising into another class . . . That’s how they fuck you . . .’

‘So they really stayed in there all night long? In hiding?’

‘That’s right. Or so they say. Roberto’s in there, I heard . . . And a few others.’

‘How many of them are there?’

‘I don’t know how many, just a few . . .’

‘The tufa-stone ridge, beautiful, prehistoric, indifferent to everything: it’s been here for hundreds of thousands of years . . . It’s the erosion of the River that ate away at the hill, millennium after millennium, and that created these plateaus . . . Today at the base of the hill we can put petrol stations and it’s fine all the same . . . “Environmental aesthetics is something reactionary, bourgeois. When the proletariat takes power it will take from nature everything it needs.” Levelling archaic tufa-stone ridges, if necessary . . . It will bulldoze mountains, build gigantic hydroelectric power stations in futurist style . . . That’s what will happen at first, then the futurists will be considered degenerate art, they’ll all be purged, they’ll die of hardships and starvation in the gulags, or they’ll kill themselves, the new power stations will go up in neo-Gothic style . . . It will mean liberation from slavery to nature . . . “We need science to fight against nature,” says Franco . . . The German Academy, with a Doric colonnade, very tough, in the style of the Me-109, if you see what I mean . . . The British Academy, also neoclassical, but gentler, more graceful with Corinthian capitals, in the style of the Spitfire . . .’

‘Fuck, those are carabinieri cars!’

‘Where?’

‘There, at the corner!’

‘We’re standing still, packed too tight . . . The people in the back are pushing forwards . . . There are armed men on that truck . . . Fuck, that’s a machine gun. A machine gun! They showed up with machine guns!’

POLICE OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY!

POLICE OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY!

‘The carabinieri remain behind us, at the intersection, above the escarpment of the department, on the plaza, all I see is pigs . . . I can recognize them by their heavy blue-grey overcoats, they look as if they’d just returned from the retreat out of Russia . . . I’m too close. I’m too jammed in with the others, the march is getting squeezed together . . . Not much air, there’s no space. Everyone here is very aggressive, determined . . . The policemen up there are few in number, stumped, intimidated . . . Maybe they didn’t expect such a big march . . . Steel helmets, white bandoliers, billy clubs, pistols on their belts. Here among us there’s no one with a steel helmet . . . The comrades on the roof! Then it’s true, they hid in the department, they spent the night, flying a red flag . . . There’s Roberto, blond, tall and skinny, a second-rank leader, this is his moment . . .’

COMRADE POLICEMEN!

THIS STUDENT PROTEST MARCH HAS COME TO TAKE BACK THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE!

WE HAVE NOTHING AGAINST YOU!

LET ME REPEAT, WE HAVE NOTHING AGAINST YOU!

‘They’re starting! Up front they’re starting to throw. They’re throwing eggs at the policemen . . . They’re pulling back, most of all they don’t seem to want to get their overcoats dirty . . . They’ve run out of eggs, now those are . . . Those are cobblestones flying through the air! A rain of cobblestones towards the plaza in front of the department . . . The policemen pull back again! Very young. They’re just a few, frightened, the usual faces of peasants . . . They weren’t expecting. They weren’t expecting to be attacked . . . Everyone’s shouting something, everyone seems very excited, the girls are shouting too . . . The pale-faced pigs reacted, urged on by their non-commissioned officers, the cobblestones fly back where they came from . . . God! They’re falling on this compact crowd . . . Every cobblestone hits a head . . . Sharp-edged cubes of basalt, 6 inches on a side, super-heavy! They crack. They crack every head they hit, they sail down in search of human skulls to crack. They find them, they’re killing people! Blood on the ground, oozing out of foreheads, from the backs of cracked skulls, like so many open taps . . . There’s so much blood in a head . . .’

MURDERERS! MURDERERS! THE POLICE ARE MURDERERS!

‘The demonstration starts off, half of them surge ahead . . . They go towards the British Academy . . . This half is holding back . . . Avoid. Avoid the cobblestones, defend yourself . . . Comrades running up the escarpment, comrades who rip the boards off the benches in the gardens, they used them as clubs, policemen backing away . . .’

‘We’ve won! We’re taking back the department!’

‘That is, they’re taking back the department . . . Not me, they . . . I’m way back here because I’m wetting my pants . . . The cobblestones . . . I can’t do what they’re doing . . . I’m not here for this, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t want to do this. That is, Brandani, you’d like to do it, but you’re afraid . . . How do they manage to do it? My heart practically leaps up my throat, my legs go slack . . . Comrades, male and female, stretched out white as sheets on the ground, their heads shattered, their faces covered with blood that drips onto the ground, black dense dark drops . . . The Japanese Academy . . . Let’s get this girl inside . . . She’s bleeding like a fountain . . . I’m inside.’

‘Puh-rease leave.’

‘But can’t you see she’s badly hurt?’

‘Puh-rease leave. Puh-rease leave.’

‘Fuck you, are you deaf? Call an ambulance. Am-bu-lan-ce! Where is the telephone?’

‘Here are more of them . . . Girls especially, they’re being carried in in people’s arms, their clothing in disarray, their skirts hiked up, pale, blood on their thighs, on their stockings, on their garter belts . . . You lack. You lack the courage to fight alongside your comrades, your legs are shaking, you’re getting horny at the sight of the bare thighs of these poor wounded girls . . . You really are a piece of shit—do something . . . But what?’

‘Puh-rease leave.’

‘From the window you can see what a mess it is outside—there aren’t many policemen . . . That’s Franco . . . They’re ripping slabs of travertine off the top of that low wall . . . They’re throwing them. They’re throwing them down, onto the roof of the paddy wagons . . . Crashes. Shouts. Gunshots. Smoke. Sirens. How can he do it? How does he manage?’

‘Puh-rease leave.’

‘How do they do it? How do they keep from running away? Where do they get the courage to do what they’re doing? Why can they and I can’t? If Father could see me . . . The first blood to trickle down my forehead since the Accident with the Bicycle . . . I was full to the brim with blood, all that was needed was a tiny puncture and the blood spurted out like a fountain . . .’

‘I’ve got a handkerchief . . . It’s clean, here, hold it tight.’

‘It isn’t a deep cut, don’t cry, Beautiful Thighs, you aren’t badly hurt, Thighs of Splendour . . . I’m leaving, I have to leave . . .’

‘Puh-rease leave.’

‘Sure. Sure, I’m leaving . . . If I turn right that will take me to where the fighting is going on, where my comrades are . . . Instead I turn left towards the main avenue, I take to my heels . . . The carabinieri paddy wagons . . . They’re still parked here, they didn’t wade into the fray . . . Now I’m going to get shot, I can smell the reek of burnt rubber . . . Running away down the hill, breathless, it’s a miracle I can stay on my feet . . . Run away, run away, run away. Away from here . . . Away from this stuff I don’t know how to do, away from the battle, away from courage, away from my comrades, away from my female comrades’ bleeding thighs . . . There, I head uphill towards the Bridge . . . Lines of stopped trolley cars, traffic blocked solid . . . To walk along at a brisk pace, beyond the parapet the water of the River coming slowly, indifferently downstream . . . It was this same indifference that it cut through the plate of Pleistocenic tufa stone upon which the City rests . . . That was before all this happened, before I was put to the test, the way I was today . . . I ran away. Ran away. I did. Not the others, me alone. I ran away . . . The test was a failure . . . I can’t stop myself, I just want to go home. Home. That’s where my bedroom is, the Swedish furniture, there’s my bed, the bedspread dotted with flowers, I’ll shut myself in, I’ll lower the blinds, I’ll lie down, I’ll go to sleep . . . I’ll walk home . . . There’s the Drinking Fountain Where I Beat Up Nasini—the water in this city is ice cold . . . It’s dripping down my shirt, onto my tie . . . I want to shut myself up in my room, lock the door behind me, stretch out on my bed, put on a record . . . Street fighting’s not for me . . . I wasn’t really certain that I was a coward. I was almost convinced I wasn’t one, but until today I never really knew for sure . . .

‘The Moto Guzzi Trotter is hard on your ass, no rear suspension, you have to look out for potholes, the seat vibrates directly against your prostate: I have a prostate, after all, just like the one they removed on Grampa Paolo . . . The usual cops out here, paddy wagons, tour buses full of officers . . . This tall, horrible, intimidating, Fascist colonnade . . . Franco says that the idea of culture that the university still transmits has remained unchanged since they first built this crap . . . “It’s something empty, bourgeois, for privileged morons—but high school’s even worse,” he says . . . “Classical high school pumps you full of an idealistic and obscurantist vision of culture, of the world and of relations between human beings and social classes. And that’s the hard core of our formation—you see all these people who are here? Me, even you, we’re all impregnated with this humanistic & metaphysical crap—just so much bullshit . . . We grew up in the cult of emotions, we chose to major in Philosophy in compliance with the culture that inculcated us, stuff that was perfect for building the false consciousness that we’re going to use for the rest of our lives, in the management of that thin slice of power of which we are shareholders inasmuch as privileged members of the bourgeoisie, or in as much as we are petty bourgeois busy climbing the social ladder even now . . . To the children of the proletariat, and I’m talking about the few who even attend, high school teaches them to forget the only thing that a factory worker really needs, class consciousness . . .’ The other day, these were Franco’s deductions, out front of the university campus . . . It’s late . . . This pergola-covered galleria has always given me a strange impression, from the very first day I set foot in here . . . The Bronze Statue, the Fountain . . . A nightmare of lines leading up to the teller windows of the various secretaries—in order to enrol I had to come back two or three different times and each time I was missing something: a form hadn’t been filled out, the processing fees . . . A hellish stack of bills to pay, the people from the agencies that simply step up to the front of the line and shove a packet ahead of everyone else . . . The floor is filthy, but so are the floors in public offices everywhere . . . There they all are, the piazza is full of them . . . The steps in front of the department, black with people, dotted with patches of red . . . The crowd is black, it’s always black, but here there are little flags . . . They’re all males, or nearly all, they have beards, long hair. The long hair of our Italian males—curly, kinky . . . My hair seems like lint, the kind of fine hairs you find under the bed when no one cleans . . . Dark heavy jackets, here and there green parkas . . . Black attracts, it relieves you of all individual chromatic responsibility . . . And yet if I asked each of these guys what was his favourite colour, not many of them would tell me “black” . . . Here there’s also red, a lot of red: black and red and olive drab—these are the colours of the Movement . . . There’s a hell of a lot of people inside the university, today . . . And a hell of a lot of police outside . . . A national assembly of the Movement, even middle school students came, kids from Bertazzi especially, which would have been the natural school for me to go to, if Father & Mother hadn’t decided to send me to that fucked-up religious boarding school. Who knows why they sent me there? Maybe because Big Sister had a bad time at Bertazzi? She always said that it was too difficult: ‘The principal is a Communist, he goes everywhere with L’Unità in his pocket, folded specially so you can read the name, the teachers are too demanding and what’s more, they’re all Communists,’ Big Sister used to say . . . Just imagine what kind of an opinion my folks must have gathered about Bertazzi: that wasn’t the kind of school to send any son of theirs, especially now that Father had made money and we were all so utterly respectable . . . I had to put up with that shitty school for five years . . . A bunch of people on the department steps . . . Italian tricolour flags outside of Law! Are they Fascists? Are the Fascists here too? The police at the front gate must have let them in . . . They’ve always been in cahoots, the Fascists and police—no daylight between them. The tricolour flag at this point is strictly a Fascist thing . . . Better. Better to climb up on the steps, if I can do it. Here on the right, a construction site . . . There’s a bit of room . . . Long greasy hair, everywhere, and they’re all standing here: Why? There’s no one that I know . . .’

‘What’s happening?’

‘The Fascists! They want to get in here. There’s Almirante and even Caradonna. They’ve holed up at the School of Law, but now you’ll see they’re coming . . .’

WE URGE THE COMRADES TO REMAIN TOGETHER!

COMRADES, DON’T GIVE IN TO PROVOCATIONS!

‘It’s true, Almirante is there, supervising operations . . . Distinguished . . . Elegant, in his overcoat, a member of the parliament of the Italian Republic, hat on his head, it seems that he finds being here vaguely distasteful . . . Caradonna, there he is now! If he’s here it means they’re planning to beat us up . . . Slovenly, he gesticulates . . . Those flagpoles, all identical, long and thick as shovel handles . . . Those are just clubs for hitting people. Nasty. These Fascists here are nasty, scary too . . . These aren’t Fascists from the nice part of town, these are lower-class thugs, ex-cons, older men . . . These aren’t students, they’ve never been students in their lives—they’re here because they’re paid to be here, they’re professionals . . . My legs start trembling. What. What should I do? Should. Should I move? But where? There’s not much room . . . For some time now, everywhere I go blood seems to flow . . . I hate blood.’

FASCISTS OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY!

‘Here they are, they’ve ripped the banners off the poles . . . They’re pale, their faces are cold and old. They’re afraid & they’re brave, there are a lot more of us than there are of them. It’s all organized . . . Here they come. Here they come at a run . . . The blows to the head that the comrades up front are taking! The blood, here we go again, with blood oozing down faces. Comrades passing out, female comrades screaming . . . They’re beating up women—Communists, and therefore whores . . . Blows with flagpoles, insults, they’re shouting at them. They’re shouting “Whore!” at them. But I. I’m not beating anyone up, I don’t want to beat anyone up, I don’t want anyone to beat me up. Too afraid . . . Once again breathless and once again this terror of seeing blood ooze down my forehead—I need to keep it far away, my head, far away from hard objects, metal, rock, sharp edges . . . Because it can get fractured, you can feel the hard bone against other hard things, hard objects . . . But they’re not afraid, the Fascists and the comrades aren’t afraid . . . I’m afraid, they aren’t . . . Here. Here there’s a space, I can get away from this mess . . . The comrades are fighting back, they’re converging in this direction . . . Here they come, marching fully armed out of the department, clubs, army helmets, motorcycle helmets, hard hats . . . Look, there’s Franco!’

‘Stay together! Don’t let yourselves get isolated! Be careful, don’t become a straggler, or these guys will kill you!’

‘He’s in charge, like always. He commits himself in person, like always. Cool, like always. Courageous, like always. He reasons, like always . . . Out in front . . . It’s a horrible mess with clubs and dust . . . A few seconds of fury, crashes, shouts . . .’

FASCISTS OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY! FASCISTS OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY!

‘These guys are common criminals, who-knows-who hired them, thugs paid to hurt us, and I mean hurt us badly . . . It’s the whole front steps of the Literature Building, crowded with students, lunging forwards . . . The Fascists can’t take the weight, they’re retreating . . . They’re taking to their heels! They’re running away!’

FASCISTS-WRONGDOERS-BACK-INTO-THE-SEWERS!

‘They’re giving ground, but they’re not leaving, they’re retreating towards the School of Law. Fascists . . . This is going to turn ugly! Almirante unruffled, off to one side . . . With his overcoat, hat on his head . . . Caradonna will take of directing his men . . . Down off the steps, Ivo, head for the holm oaks . . . A bunch of kids, roaming around here, come from high schools all over the city, look how young they are . . . Is that what I looked like just three years ago? Was I that little? They’re scared but they’re not as scared as I am . . . I’m here without being here, I’m taking part without doing anything, saying anything, helping in any way—I’m always there and I’m never there. “You’re not the only one, there are lots of other comrades who show up regularly but don’t get involved. It’s because you’re gaining consciousness,” says Franco, “until yesterday you were just another apathetic student, today you’re building a political position all your own, you’re taking part in your fashion . . . But don’t turn into a fanatic on me, that’s not who you are . . .” What does he think he knows about my real nature? He doesn’t know that I’m crazy like Father, but you can only see the craziness when it’s very hot, or when I’m feeling humiliated, when I have no escape route—at times like that I could even kill . . . I’m a rude beast, I’ve always got into fistfights, on the street, when I was a boy, when I used to go the parish afterschool. Even then I was afraid but I knew how to fight back . . . “That’s right, exactly. It’s because you’re only capable of private, ancestral, biblical violence, an eye for an eye . . . You only know to conceive of violent action as a way of settling your personal rage, violence as a vendetta, instead of as a civil, political act.” The fact that I don’t lunge into the fray, that is, I don’t have the slightest intention of doing so, it’s not because I’m wetting my pants in fear, it’s that I’m not pissed off enough . . . And do you believe it? I’ve seen many comrades who enjoy themselves in the clashes, have no problems, don’t seem to be either pissed off or anything at all—as if were a chore to be got out of the way, to be done carefully, maybe, to avoid getting hurt too badly . . . Father is capable of cold, silent, murderous rage, but also hot, fanatical, out-of-control fury, which is what he saves just for me . . . Franco doesn’t seem pissed off, or even emotional, ever . . . And yet there he is, with a hard hat on his head, a lead pipe in his hands . . . Almirante has vanished: he unleashed his men and now he can leave, unseemly to let himself be seen together with his thugs . . . From here, from beneath the holm oaks, you can see the entrance to the School of Law, the Fascists have entered the building and they’ve barricaded themselves inside . . . A group of comrades with helmets and clubs who want to break down the front door . . . It’s a medieval siege . . . The besiegers lunge towards the doors, trying to break them down with the lumber from the construction site . . . The people inside, under siege, looking down from windows and terraces, toss objects over to keep them from breaking in . . . They throw things down. They throw things down that are heavy enough to kill you: chairs, desks, beechwood cabinets all fall to the ground . . . Even filing cabinets. Metal filing cabinets! How can it have come to this point? What is the basis, what are the reasons for all this hatred? The people under siege are grey-faced, pallid, bewildered by fear . . . They didn’t expect their adversaries to fight back so fiercely . . . These are professional hitters, head-crackers accustomed to brawls, but now they’re shitting their pants—they figured they were dealing with a bunch of mama’s boys with no fight in them, incapable of lashing back, maybe they just didn’t realize how many of us there were . . . The comrades are trying anyway, to knock down the doors . . . They’re under a hail of furniture! They’re going to get themselves killed! They have. They’ve hit him square on! Oreste! A bench! Right on the back! It plunged straight into his back, falling vertically. Slicing like a blade. He’s on the ground! He’s dead! A shout . . . A shout goes up from all of us . . . He can’t have survived that, it’s impossible! They grab him by his legs and arms, rapidly, four or five guys drag him away from there . . . He’s white in the face, like a dead man . . . Shouts explosions screams sirens . . . Cheers, someone shouts that the police are arriving . . . Here they are, they’ve entered the university campus . . . They’re not charging, they’re not swinging their billy clubs . . . They head straight towards the School of Law, and there are a lot of them . . . The siege has been interrupted, the besiegers are regrouping, they collect tables to hold over their heads, for protection. The pigs are arriving . . . They’ve come to save the Fascists’ asses! They’re here to rescue the Fascists, to help them get away scot-free . . . The applause continues, hard to say whether ironically or not . . . Just as well, the clash was too ferocious primitive unbearable . . . Oreste is dead, he can’t be anything but dead, as hard as he was hit. It’s like he snapped in two . . . The clashes with the Fascists—the age-old hatred has once again risen, we’re taking on old feuds our fathers failed to settle.’

‘Have we lost our minds? We’re applauding the police now?’

‘Get out of here, Ivo, leave . . . The comrades are organizing who-knows-what protest march . . . They never seem to get enough . . . The entrance is still being guarded by about a million cops . . . Get your Moto Guzzi Trotter—there it is, right there, the ass-busting Trotter.’

‘This huge rectangular piazza, today . . . The comrades arrested, the ones who are still behind bars, the other ones who’ve been released but are still looking at a trial and maybe jail time. Let’s have a demonstration of solidarity. What they did, we all did, we could say . . . Yes, but I didn’t do it . . . We’re all guilty—only I’m not . . . All the same, I stand with them, united against repression . . . “We need repression, it serves our purpose,” says Franco. Anyway, they’re putting us in the thick of things, and then some, the national elections are going to be in less than a month . . . “That’s not anything that concerns us,” many say, “we’re beyond that.” Or perhaps, “elsewhere”. Some of them talk about “voting tactically” for the Communist Party . . . If you ask me, the Communists don’t want our votes, that is, officially they don’t want them. I’m going to be voting for the very first time . . . Pothole! The Trotter isn’t made for vertebrates . . . The demonstration starts out from the university campus and runs all the way through the centre of the city . . . They’ll break some plate-glass windows before they get here: the central office of some bank or other, a few shops . . . No thanks, been there, done that . . . But Franco is one of the comrades who might be looking at jail time: on 1st March they arrested him, charged him, and released him. So now here I am . . . Down there is a pretty sizeable group of cops . . . And it’s a sunny day, spring has sprung, I’ll chain my two-wheeled beast here, among the other bikes . . . Hmmm, is this a little too close to the piazza? Oh well, what the worst that could happen? It’s a demonstration outside the Hall of Justice, against the attorney general, there are no physical targets . . . Still, there’s just a little too much of a police presence . . . The gardens are full of comrades: streamers-megaphone-slogans, the whole contraption is already operating . . . I wonder where the Movement finds the money—it’s not a lot of stuff, but still someone has to pay for it, just passing the hat isn’t going to do it . . . Or is it?’

FREE THE ARRESTED COMRADES!

‘There’s a row of campaign posters standing perpendicular: modular structural tubing, galvanized sheet metal wired in place . . . From here you can’t see a thing, you’d have to venture further in, but at the centre of the gardens there is this huge monument to the founder of the fatherland . . . So I move further over, onto the pavement in front of the Hall of Justice . . . There we are in the front line, there’s a relaxed atmosphere, if it hadn’t been for those guys down there, in rank and file behind the hedges below the Hall of Justice, they’re in camouflage jumpsuits, armed . . . Who the fuck are they? What do they want? Better get out of here, Brandani . . . A few of the ones who were arrested still have bandaged heads, they’re off to one side, they’re uneasy, worried, solidarity is a fine thing, but they don’t want to be painted as recidivists . . . Several of them have been gone for weeks—word is that in the past few days on the ski slopes there were a lot of bandaged heads. That they weren’t proletarian was a well-known fact but, for the love of Christ, going to recuperate in a ski resort . . . Franco, on the other hand, is here, in the front line . . . He looks serious, concerned, in a jacket and tie, he knows there’s a chance he’ll wind up behind bars . . . They’re using the megaphone to harangue the crowd with a sort of summation against the prosecuting attorney who’s been assigned to the investigation . . . He gives me a hug.’

‘Ciao, Ivo.’

‘The piazza is full of comrades, no one is acting aggressive, there are only a few streamers, flags, banners, many of them have friends who’ve been caught up in the investigation, no one wants a clash . . . Except for maybe a few assholes among the ones who came down through the whole centre of town throwing rocks through plate glass windows . . . No one is moving, everything’s cool . . . Don’t be tense, Ivo, today nobody here is tense . . . In a little while we’ll leave.’

‘. . . this is no laughing matter, Ivo, these guys are playing for keeps . . . Even though they say they’re being pressured to drop the case. On 1st March we kicked up such a ruckus that they’re going to remember it for a long time. But the wounded officers, the burnt paddy wagons . . . Did you know that they caught me on the trolley?’

‘I know. They stopped all the trolleys on the Ring Route and rounded up everyone under age thirty that was riding on them, something that not even the Gestapo in 1943 . . .’ Franco goes on: ‘They have a bunch of photos, they charged me on the basis of the photos. You know the slabs of travertine we threw onto the paddy wagons? They also got me while I was helping to overturn a car. Then we set it on fire too, but I had already moved on. Property damage, I don’t remember exactly what the legal terminology is . . . This is the moment of repression, the Movement is weakened, fragmented, the elections are coming up—that’s the crucial point. Whether they want to present themselves as a law and order government or as appeasers and mediators. You know that Oreste came out alive. He’s in a cast from head to foot, everything but his legs, actually, but he can walk. He was so lucky . . . There’s too many cops here, I don’t like the smell. I’m slipping out of here, Ivo, if they pick me up again, I’m fucked, ciao.’

‘Ciao, Franco, I’ll give you a call . . .’

‘The plain-clothes cop out front is putting on an armband, he must be an officer detective . . . He’s saying something, the bugler is lifting his horn . . . I’d better get to one side, these guys are about to charge . . . There they are! Get out of here! Out of here! Out of here!!!’

REJECT ALL PROVOCATIONS! THIS IS A PEACEFUL DEMONSTRA . . .

‘They’re charging . . . Sons of bitches . . . Here they come. They’re coming straight at us, heading for the bulk of the comrades, grouped in the centre of the gardens . . . Get out of here, Brandani, run, run . . . A premeditated attack, this time they’re planning to do some damage . . . Christ, enough’s enough, I don’t want anything to do with this mess any more . . . The campaign billboards! They’re blocking the way for everyone trying to run . . . People are getting jammed up against them! Someone’s going to get hurt on that sheet metal . . . They’re breaking through, girls tripping and falling on the fine gravel, dust . . . This way. Towards this side of the piazza, it’s quiet here, people are standing outside the cafes, enjoying the show . . . None of the comrades is able to fight back, but now they’re ripping the legs off the metal chairs at the Bar del Teatro, two guys at a time, they’re ripping them off at the base, now they’re swinging them like clubs . . . But they can’t take the impact . . . A running retreat down the street . . . The pigs are stopping to club the comrades in the gardens, they’re taking their time about it, the others are running in all directions . . . There we go again, faces covered with blood . . . Again . . . I’m getting out of here, my moped is parked at the corner . . . If they decide to make a barricade they might burn it . . . I have to get it out of here . . . I don’t have anything to do with all this craziness, it’s not for me, I’m scared of it . . . Again. Again I’m breathless, my legs turn to jelly, my heart is pounding against my clavicle . . . There it is, the Trotter, right in the middle of a herd of policemen all suited up. Back in the piazza the beatings are continuing . . . The comrades are forming a defensive line further up . . . Here come the cops in camouflage jumpsuits! The street is clear, shop doors locked, shutters rolled down, I’ll get out of here this way . . . I stop, now I can stop, no one’s after me. Better head back there, act like I don’t have anything to do with this, get my moped and get out of here . . . I’m wearing a jacket, jeans and a beard, they might let me through . . . These guys are heading towards me . . . The first one is kind of old, he must be an officer of some kind, they’re not wearing helmets, nothing . . . He looks like a reasonable sort . . . Walk normally, Ivo, you’re an ordinary citizen . . . What the fuck is this guy doing? Christ, a handgun! He’s waving a gun! He’s aiming it at me!’

‘I’ll kill you all, you sons of bitches . . . I’ll kill you . . . Hey, who are you? Come here, you bastard, come here . . .’

‘He’s moving slowly, he’s fat, he’s wheezing, white as a sheet, his lips are blue . . . If I run he can’t catch me, but he’s waving a gun! This guy’s going to. This guy’s going to kill me . . . There’s another one right behind him . . . He’s putting a hand on his shoulder, he’s restraining him . . . Better not. Better not run . . . You remember Rex, if you ran he’d chase you, he’d jump up and put his paws on your shoulders, from behind, he’d knock you down . . . Never run . . . An open apartment-building door, that’s what I need . . . Way down there the comrades are putting cars sideways, they’re throwing cobblestones in this direction . . . An apartment-building door left ajar . . . I dart in, I close it behind me . . . I have to get out of here, those guys could come in, the officer with the handgun, he’ll kill me! Lift, top floor, then I’ll come down the stairs and see what I find . . . Sixth, down I go, fifth fourth third, a notary’s office . . . Pebbled glass door, open . . . The waiting room is full of comrades, male and female, terrorized by this unprompted, criminal police charge . . . There are people who just happened to be in the street too, some aren’t even students. No one here has any problem with us being here. A notary who’s a comrade? There’s a window overlooking the street, let’s take a look . . . They’ve gone past, now it’s the barricade at the end of the street that they’re interested in . . . If I stay here, they’ll catch me when they go door to door . . . It was a planned assault, they want to make us pay for 1st March! Franco was right, as usual: “They’re going to make us pay for this, sooner or later. They can’t let us just get away with it. We won. They’re going to ask the minister to give them a free hand and they’ll pay us back every cent, with compound interest.” There’s no one around the parking area—I’m leaving, going down the stairs . . . No problem. Walk nice and slow, look around curiously . . . There, that’s right, mind your own fucking business . . . Those guys. Those guys at the end of the street are setting fires . . . Unlock the chain, get on the Trotter, pull the choke, pedal, depress the choke, there it’s started . . . Away, wind on your face . . . Away away. Today they could have. Today they could have killed me. No one would have done anything to that guy, they wouldn’t even have put him on trial . . . He would have retired, a beach house somewhere. He’d be on the water’s edge catching clams, I’d be in my grave. These guys can do whatever they want to you, no one’ll touch them . . . Wind . . . They can legally murder you . . . Wind on my face! I, Ivo Brandani, officially declare that I’m scared, that I want to live, that I need time to become a fish, according to plan . . . This is the last time anyone’s going to see me at a demonstration . . . Never again . . .’

That day, what Ivo had foreseen did in fact happen. After the clashes, all the students who had taken refuge in apartment buildings, in lobbies, in courtyards, on apartment-building terraces, in the garbage rooms, in the basements, in the spaces under the staircases, in a circumference of 500 yards from the piazza were swept up for hours and the students beaten bloody, one by one, methodically, to make sure no head remained uncracked. Two hundred of them were taken into custody and conveyed to the police station, their details noted down, and not released until quite late at night. A few of them were actually charged.

In the weeks that follow, things relax. But what’s happening in Paris is important, in fact, unprecedented. Impossible to imagine that such things might happen here, in Paris they know something about barricades. Here everything grows smaller and eventually dwindles and extinguishes itself, the Movement still exists, but so do final exams. Negotiations with the faculty to agree on the political passing grade. Ivo disagrees with it.

‘If you do one thing, you can’t do the other . . . If you’re going to start a revolution, you can’t expect the powers that be are going to stamp it APPROVED.’

‘Wrong, Ivo, in part because, and you know this perfectly well, we haven’t started and we’re not about to start any revolution . . . The Movement declared it from the very start, it’s already there in the November platform: the political work in the in-depth groups, in the committees, in the seminars would be considered study to all intents and purposes, for the purposes of the final exam as well. If you want to take the traditional exam, go right ahead. We certainly wouldn’t try to stop you . . . That is, actually, I couldn’t say about that: if you show up all alone to take your exam, you’re sure to find someone who will call you a scab, they might even beat you up . . .’

Franco maintains that this issue of the political grade on the exam is a key point, that it’s an official recognition on the part of the university as an institution of the cultural, ‘that is, legal’, value of the struggle and that it sanctions the principle of student self-determination on the topics and the subjects to be studied. The faculty has different views, but on the whole it is willing to negotiate.

‘Basically, the political struggles have blocked all teaching, we can’t make the working students lose the year . . . That’s not all: their grades can’t endanger their grade point average, which is important for their scholarships—so high grades . . .’

The state of tension is still high, there are few people in the department. In early June the police clear the building once again. Bob Kennedy is assassinated, shot, just like Martin Luther King, in April.

‘American imperialism and capitalism—which are the same thing—won’t tolerate backpedalling. They’ve physically eliminated anyone who constituted a threat, real or perceived. Let it be a lesson to us all,’ says Franco in the assembly, ‘we should never forget that capitalism will stop at nothing in order to defend its own interests. That’s not a slogan, comrades: things that have happened in and around America have once again demonstrated that that’s exactly the way things stand. It is necessary for the Movement to conduct an in-depth analysis of the situation of the Peninsula within the American sphere of influence. In any case it’s always a good idea to understand that there will be no tolerance on the part of the Americans for any shift in the political configuration of the country. In other words, for Christ’s sake, this is Yalta, comrades! Anyone who forgets that is making a serious error . . . It’s important to understand that, if in Vietnam the anti-imperialist forces succeed in opposing the American aggression, it’s not only because are they relegated to an outlying area of the Western Empire but also because they are being massively supported by the two largest social-imperialist powers: Russia and China. Here in Italy, the situation is completely different, any modification of the existing equilibrium will be met with an unrestrained reaction . . .’

And so on. Ivo had never really given it any serious thought, but ever since he’s read the movement’s holy scriptures, this seems to be an uncontestable truth to him: we are an American colony. Negotiations with the faculty arrive at an agreement over the protocols for the political grade, even though not all the professors accept the terms. Ivo sees Summer drawing closer and Real Life opening out before him, as it does every year. He’s sick of politics. In Paris they’ve evacuated the Sorbonne. De Gaulle called in the tanks, then he won the early elections. People in France don’t want to even hear about revolution. In the return to normality, Ivo senses a subtle and unconfessable sweetness, even though the situation at the university really is changing.

‘In a certain sense, we’ve won,’ says Franco.

Yes, it’s true. In a certain sense, they’ve won.

In the end he manages to wheedle a politically negotiated B+ out of Molteni. He showed up for the exam saying: ‘I studied, and I want to take the exam. But I won’t take a different grade from the rest of my comrades.’ Molteni replied flatly: ‘No, if you want to take a real exam, then you have to be willing to take a real grade.’ Ivo was struck dumb. Making this preliminary statement seemed to him to be a good idea: he’d make a good impression on Molteni without having to give up being thought a member of the Movement. Molteni’s determined answer confused him, he stammered something incoherent and blushed violently. In short, he gave up the idea and got in line for his politically negotiated B+. All he had to do was hand his grade book to a teaching assistant, who gave it back to him at the end of the morning with a grade and a signature. There was a wave of euphoria and embarrassment among the students: getting a grade on a university exam without having had to study. Ivo decides that it was an inevitable but slightly depressing outcome. Like many others, he missed the opportunity to attend Molteni’s lessons, to absorb his teachings. He buys a few books to fill that void but it’s not the same thing—Molteni writes differently from how he talks, more complicated, a little woolly: ‘He’s a talking genius,’ someone told him.

The Movement has demonstrated unexpected strength, it’s changing the face of the university, wrote the political analysts in the newspapers. The majority of the commentators add ‘for the worse’, naturally. Ivo Brandani knows that it isn’t true, but all the same, he’s confused, bewildered: so far the access to knowledge that he’d naively expected from his university studies has eluded him. It’s been denied him, pilfered, and postponed to some date yet to be determined. All the same, it’s been an important year, but not in the sense that he was expecting at the beginning, something much bigger than him dragged him with it in a very different direction, he saw and learnt many things, all together, about himself and about the others. He needs to digest them, he needs some time off. He saw the mechanisms of dominance and submission at work, even among his comrades. He saw the force of the collective spirit in action, he watched the establishment of power groups, he saw the struggle to dominate within the Movement, he saw the duplicity, he saw the cynicism of a few exploiting the naivety of others. He saw a few work very hard but with an eye to their future academic careers. The university system immediately expressed interest in the most brilliant and dangerous leaders. They understood it immediately. He knows comrades who are preparing to head north: they’re going to where there are factories ‘to keep from being ghettoized inside the university’. It’s called ‘political work’—this is the first time that Ivo has heard this expression—and there are some who seem determined to devote themselves to it body and soul from now on. The Birds set out on foot in the opposite direction, they’re heading south, towards the territories devastated by the earthquake. Two different ways of going in search of so-called reality. For Ivo it has been a year of massive initiation, a sort of school from which he has the sensation he has learnt nothing, because at the end of June he’s more confused than he was before. He doesn’t feel the impulse to devote himself to politics, that’s a temptation that never so much as grazes him, but his intentions are no longer very clear to him. ‘Can I go back to studying philosophy as if nothing had happened?’ Events have overwhelmed him and crushed him underfoot, but he’s secretly still convinced that the world is waiting to carry him in triumph, it’s just a matter of time now.

The Movement turned him inside out like a glove, it shocked him, it filled him with doubts. For the first time in his life, he’s taken part in something, he’s entered a network of interpersonal relations, he heard speeches and conversations that covered a broad spectrum of views, he read new books and essays, but he lost Molteni. In July, last session of exams. After the political B+ in Theoretical Philosophy, Ivo takes a supplementary exam and gets another B+. He’s increasingly perplexed: ‘What am I doing here, amid all these philosophers? What do I really care about philosophy?’

Clara, on the other hand, has no doubts, in spite of the Movement, and she’s been charging straight ahead. She takes two exams, gets an A and an A+, she’s planning to take a third. They see each other practically every day, in the car, in the early afternoon, when Father usually takes a nap and Ivo takes the Fiat 600, or occasionally the 1800, and parks it not far from where she lives. Clara arrives punctually and they talk, they kiss, they feel each other up. It’s hot out. For sex, things are a little different, more challenging, the opportunities are more infrequent: at her place when her folks aren’t home, in the car at night parked somewhere, in Clara’s little beach house, secretly. Every time it’s like starting over from scratch, there’s a thrill of discovery that twists his gut with anxiety. Clara doesn’t have problems of any kind, if anything, Ivo has them. She’s confident, he’s much less so, but Clara drives him literally crazy—there’s only her body her smell her hair her breath her mouth, there’s only her. If they can’t manage to see each other, then there are long evening phone calls that piss his Father off, when he finds him on the phone in the hallway, sitting on the floor for hours. ‘Go on, go on, after all it’s me that’s paying. What the heck do you care?’ This coming summer Ivo wants to go camping in the south. Clara makes an improbable, strange suggestion: a trip to Scotland, alone, just the two of them. Why Scotland? She doesn’t know what to say: ‘Because Scotland is Scotland. I don’t know, to travel, instead of sitting parked in one place, baking in the sun, to have a destination, to get out of the heat of this year, to be alone just the two of us, because getting there in a Fiat 500 will be fun . . . Did you know that this year everyone’s going where you want to go? The whole Movement is going to the Archipelago, Ivo. A nightmare. I don’t want to talk about politics all summer . . .’ ‘Get away from the sea, the water, the Summer, the Sacred aquatic Summer? Lose a whole Mediterranean Summer? All right . . . If that’s what Clara wants, it’s fine with me . . .’ It’s the thrill of having her all to himself. ‘OK, let’s go.’ Ivo doesn’t have much money, Clara is going to have more money than him, during the year she’s helped out in a legal firm, doing some typing. They’ll leave around July 20th or 25th, one week after the exams. They’ll take the car as far as Calais, then ferryboat, then London, then Edinburgh, Glasgow, then up north, who knows where.

Meanwhile Ivo, with great effort, is reading Georg Simmel in German, his essays on aesthetics. He forces himself to do it because Molteni has always urged them to read the authors in their original language and because he wants to take advantage of the five years he spent studying German in school while all the others his age were learning English. Simmel, like all German culture from the years between the World Wars, is fashionable. Franco recommended him, though not this book, which hasn’t been translated yet. He ordered a copy from the German bookstore, the volume includes a very brief essay, Brücke und Tür (Bridge and Door), four or five very dense pages that sweep him away. Simmel is no walk in the park, but he’s not as challenging as many German philosophical authors, he thinks he can understand it, he applies himself, he studies it, he is struck by it, fascinated. In Bridge and Door he finds something unexpected, something that leads him to think, it’s a very simple formulation, which strikes him as the basic conjunction of the human activity of thinking and that of doing, practically a definition of what it means to be human beings in the world:

In an immediate sense just as in a symbolic sense, in a physical as well as a spiritual sense we are, at each moment, the ones who separate what is connected and connect what is separate.

The activity of connecting/separating coincides with thinking, it is thought, Ivo says to himself and he continues with his speculation: ‘When we think, all we are doing is continuously disassembling and reassembling data until we find some meaning, some sense—philosophy is incessantly that . . . It is in an argumentative way, sometimes even only intuitive, approximate, poetic . . . It is almost always gratuitous, because it can’t actually be falsified. Science too is a continual dismantling/reassembling/acquisition of data, but in the sense of exactitude, reproducibility, making something a common heritage . . . Between science and making there is technology and prior to this is the will to make. Now then . . . Only in technology, in a concrete creation, does the activity of philosophical thought materially find completion—connect what is separate and vice versa: “Only for us the are banks of the river not merely in different places but ‘divided’.” And the activity of scientific thought is to define the physical conditions in which what is thinkable is also possible . . .’

Perhaps it’s Father’s incessant pressure, his own secret need to do as Father wishes, that makes him read Simmel’s words as a revelation. He convinces himself that the highest, most abstract form of thought, and at the same time the most concrete and visible, accessible, useful one, is that of the pontifex, that is, the builder, the maker of bridges, the overcomer of dis-continuities, real & undeniable. He had read somewhere that the pontifex was an authority who was at once spiritual, administrative and technical . . . The very existence of the City of God is based on the human capacity to see the two banks of the River as divided and therefore the determination to re-unite them with a passageway, a contrivance, a technical invention capable of giving concrete form to the unifying philosophical intuition. The Ancestral Bridge was a territorial singularity so powerful that it was capable of transforming itself into a city and subsequently into the capital of a great empire . . . Ivo Brandani isn’t giving the slightest thought to the possibility of becoming an engineer, of changing his major: ‘It would be a nightmare to work with Father. He wants me to work for his company, he does everything he can think of to get his paws on me so he can continue his process of demolition . . . But I’ll never be there for him.’ For his part, Father doesn’t know that he’s already demolished his son. The wounds that he has inflicted on him are critical, but they’re still hidden, they can’t be seen. They’ll emerge later, it won’t take much to reveal them. Perhaps even now—in that secret malaise, in the feelings he has of being inadequate and cowardly, in the slight but constant weakness of his spirit—it is possible to read the first signs of them.

They leave Edinburgh, they take the A90 and head for the Highlands. They want to continue north, arrive where the land ends and the Ocean begins, but right now they don’t really know where they’re going, it’s early afternoon, they’ve slept late, they never seem able to get up a little earlier, they always seem to get up at the very last minute, when most of the morning is already gone. It’s a long, uncomfortable, youthful trip, and it’s a lot of fun. The Fiat 500 runs like a clock, Ivo soon learns to drive on the left side of the road, Clara has a harder time with it, for now she lets him do the driving. They passed through London. They found a bed-and-breakfast on Marylebone Road, the owner was a skinny man with yellow teeth, the toenails on his sandal-shod yellow feet, a yellow face. Tours of the conventional sights: British Museum, Tate Gallery, National Gallery, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Tower of London, etc. Once they’re done with this, they didn’t know where to go, nothing else occurred to them. After a couple of days they left for Cambridge, which they really liked. Clara noticed that the parks were full of chicory. ‘Doesn’t anyone pick it?’ It was cold and rainy. ‘What the fuck are we doing here? Do you know?’ she said. All they have to keep warm is a sweater and a jeans jacket each. Then the weather improved and they got on the highway heading north. Edinburgh made no particular impression on them.

Last night they ate at a steak house (they mentally italicized the new, all-too-English terms). The pork chop was stringy, the chips had been fried more than once. Cheap, and not worth it. The beer churned the food into a clump in their stomachs. When they went back to the bed-and-breakfast they put a coin into the radio in the room, lay down in the bed to smoke a cigarette and drink a mini bottle of whisky specially purchased to neutralize the after-effects of the steak house. On the radio they heard a piece of music Ivo had never listened to before; he found it breathtakingly beautiful. It’s Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, Clara says. Ivo was a little drunk, in a strange state of mind, a sort of expectation, of ultimate tenderness about something, about the two of them being there, beneath the Northern rain. A sense of farewell, or of departure, something he couldn’t really say. He felt like crying, the music helped him. Clara said: ‘My brother has a jazz version by Miles Davis. Do you know it?’ ‘No,’ Ivo replied and, from the way he said it, Clara realized that right then and there he was about to start crying, she asked him, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘Nothing, I don’t know, I had whisky, it’s this music . . .’ She threw her arms around him, they made love until very late.

They woke up in time for breakfast, then back to bed and then they rushed out just before noon, to keep from having to pay for another night’s stay. Now they’re on the A90 heading north, a little bit fucking-randomly, distractedly, as they’ve been doing till now.

Clara is at the wheel, she’d asked him if she could drive.

‘Let’s say you get tired or something happen, maybe at night, I have to be capable of driving,’ she told him. It makes Ivo nervous, but Clara does pretty well, the real problems are going to be turns at intersections.

‘In a little while we’re going to come to a bridge. There’s a bridge over the Firth of Forth,’ says Ivo, bent over the roadmap. The road curves to the right, climbs imperceptibly, narrows, and then before them loom the spidery, towering piers of a huge suspension bridge. Now the road is already rising high over the houses, over the water, the deck runs a couple of miles in length. Two huge suspension cables rise towards the top of the piers, the whole thing is extremely light, the immense stays are almost invisible against the perennially threatening clouds of this part of the world. The sun illuminates the landscape with dappled patches of gold. Clara starts across the bridge at low speed, she’s cautious, uncertain, she too wants to see the Forth. Ivo looks to the right and not far off he sees another bridge, also made of metal, with a strange, antiquated appearance. It seems to be made of three enormous latticed cantilevers made of light steel. It’s a red, extremely long, enigmatic bridge, with high rail lines, also in latticed steel, supported by immense stone or brick piers. He is captivated by it. A bolt from the grey.

By this point, the road bridge they’re crossing rises to a higher elevation than the other one, which practically vanishes behind the guardrail of the opposite lane. On the map, it’s marked as the Rail Bridge, while the one they’re crossing is marked as the Road Bridge.

‘Let’s go take a look at that bridge from close up, come on.’

Clara is hungry, she doesn’t object: ‘Maybe we could get something to eat, too. Tell me which way to go.’

‘Turn off here, right away, the first left we come too. There’s a roundabout. Then we need to go towards the bridge. I’ll tell you the way to go, just turn.’

They turn off the A90, take a couple of roundabouts the wrong way round, head into a small town, with the bridge looming over all, incredibly tall, in the background. Along the downhill road everything is so very British: stone houses, one or two stories tall, clean, closed in on themselves, kept as if life were going to go on for ever. On the map it says that the village is called North Queensferry.

‘We need to find Main Street, which takes us straight down to the water, that is, to the root of the bridge.’

It’s like going in search of that place where you supposed a distant iron rainbow touches down to earth, find out what’s there, in that exact spot. At the end of the road you can see the railroad bridge lifted high into the air, red latticework girders set atop gigantic pylons made of yellow brick—a gap in the clouds allows the sun to illuminate the scene like a spotlight in a theatre. Seen from this angle it’s all much more massive, the bridge appears as a tangle of trusses and trellises and enormous riveted pipes, painted red with black patches of rust.

‘It looks like a dinosaur,’ says Clara.

Yes, the backs of three dinosaurs in single file, holding each other by the tail as they cautiously cross the water. Ivo says nothing. He feels an inexplicable swell of emotion, very much like what he felt the night before. They walk the length of Main Street, until they find themselves in a small circular plaza that overlooks the water of the Firth of Forth, where piers and stone structures adjoin the muck of the seabed, left uncovered by the low tide. A long slipway to haul vessels into and out of the water, a stone wall behind which they see implements for catching some kind of mollusc, or crustacean, who can say. Maybe traps for crabs. On the left the structure of the bridge looms over everything else, crushing it, there’s a small stone lighthouse, right under the shoulder of the Rail Bridge, completely overwhelmed by its size. There the bridge already soars high overhead, the railroad tracks must be 150 feet high, the fog gradually swallows up the rest of the bridge as it marches courageously out into the Firth of Forth. Immense strides through the dank air redolent of the scents of water, mud and seawood uncovered by the low tide, an air that grows chillier, the piers low over the water, it’s as if the monster were dipping its frozen steel paws directly into the mouth of the river.

‘Come on, let’s park . . .’ says Ivo. Clara puts the car in reverse and finds a spot along the road, there’s no one around, the bridge looms over the village, intimidating the people so that they tend to say indoors. They get out of the Fiat 500, they head towards the shore, the water hasn’t gone out with the low tide, they see only seaweed and puddles and repellent silty muck, they can smell the reek of the wet, the slime, a northern thing that runs like a chill down their spines, like a blade of ice.

‘It’s cold,’ Clara says, in fact, and goes back to the car to get a jacket for herself and one for Ivo. ‘We came dressed too light for these fucking places . . . Still, look how pretty it is here . . .’

Ivo sits down on a bench, opens his guidebook, leafs through it and finds a substantial, well-thought-out deck about it. This is a major, famous bridge. Clara sits next to him, lights a cigarette while he reads aloud.

The gigantic railroad bridge over the River Forth, inaugurated in 1890, is considered one of the wonders of nineteenth-century technology. The first railroad bridge built entirely of steel, it was begun in 1883, after a storm had caused the collapse of the bridge over the mouth of the River Tay, in Dundee, while a railroad train was going over (seventy-five people died).

The disaster had called into question the use of iron in the construction of bridges. In order to counter the thrust of the wind, the designers of the new bridge, the engineers Fowler and Baker, conceived of an enormous steel structure with latticework elliptical girders. Steel had been banned by the British Board of Trade from use in bridge construction until 1877. The chief source of concerns about the use of steel in place of iron had to do with problems of corrosion that had been noted in railroad bridges in Holland, but the problem wasn’t really with the steel itself, so much as an inability to use it properly and to protect effectively against corrosion. Still today, the girders of the Rail Bridge are repainted on an ongoing basis by a community of technicians who have been working on this bridge alone for over seventy years.

To solve the problem of wind pressure, the engineers con-ducted a series of experiments: three wind speed gauges were set on the bridge of the castle of Inch Garvie which stands on a neighbouring island. For two years the instruments recorded data, and in the end the wind pressure was found to be much greater than that predicted for the design of the Tay Bridge. A different structural conception was therefore required. Fowler and Baker designed three large latticework piers that supported parabolic girders with spans of more than 650 feet, joined by latticework sections extending over 325 feet, resulting in overall spans of 1,700 feet (at the time the longest in the world), for a total length of 8,296 feet. To build the Forth Bridge, 54,000 tons of steel were used. The sections that were subject to the greatest strain were formed of circular tubes with average diameters of approximately 12 feet, made of inch-and-a-quarter-thick steel. The sheet steel, bent and perforated, was first assembled for testing in the workshop, then disassembled and transported to the construction site. The on-site assembly had to proceed symmetrically to avoid any imbalances during construction. Each span is formed of two cantilevered sections 680 feet in length and, between them, a 350-foot girder. The measurements were so precise that there was only a miscalculation of a little over 2 inches, due to the slight contraction of the steel due to the fact that the actual temperature on the construction site was 55°F instead of the expected 59°F. They were obliged to light fires to lengthen the structure so that they could fasten the last bolts connecting the main spans. Up to 200 trains still run each day over the Firth of Forth Bridge.

The structural conception behind the Firth of Forth Bridge in a renowned picture from the time.

The Firth of Forth Bridge.

He shows her the photo of the structural demonstration of the bridge. She laughs. He concentrates on what he sees, he’s bewitched by it. He seems to realize that the conceptual grandeur of that object, the simplicity of the underlying conception, the grandiose sweep of its construction, were clear indications of the unheard-of determination to transcend that was so intrinsic to the bridge. It seems to him that this conception goes beyond all and any ‘possible metaphysics’, that it thumbs its nose at such things and that Homo faber is the highest form of existence. He is impressed by the photograph of the demonstration of the structural principles on which the bridge is based, so simple that they strike him as sublime: a titanic problem solved by a simple act of conceptual transference from the small to the gigantic. Those gentlemen with beards, hats and three- and four-button jackets, the clothing with the rumpled, dirty appearance that all humans seem to wear in the photographs of that time. He observes the photo closely: starting from the ropes that run under the two piles of bricks at the far ends of the tableau vivant, he follows the forces in the bifurcation and realizes that the arms of the two load-bearers are under traction, while the wooden staffs braced against the chairs are under compression. He understands that the spinal cords of those two gentlemen must also be under compression. It is all so clear, the third gentleman sitting in the middle is obviously doing nothing, he’s simply sitting there, a few feet off the ground, on his little plank settee. Behind the backs of this tableau vivant is a schematic diagram of the bridge. But more than in the design, the Rail Bridge appears beautiful to him in reality, where it exists in an unexpected yet natural fashion: nothing looks superfluous in the solid and reciprocal interbolting of the parts to support the light railway roadbed and nothing else. It’s a railway bridge after all. Ivo reaches into his bag for a pencil and a piece of paper, sets the guidebook on his knees with the piece of paper on top of it and draws a horizontal line interrupted by two vertical segments: the water surface of the Firth of Forth. Above this line he draws a second parallel line, which is where the train will run. ‘Here is the first conceptual step: conceiving the two banks of the Forth as two separate entities, but not “in different places”, conceiving them, that is, as something that can be re-unified, as the interruption of a continuum whose completion can be conceived.’

Clara smokes in silence and looks in the other direction, at the Road Bridge, the suspension bridge they just drove over: ‘It’s nice too, though . . .’ Then Ivo sketches a simple trilithic construction made of vertical elements supporting a horizontal girder. It looks like a sort of millipede. This, according to the illustration in the guidebook, was how the Firth of Tay Bridge was built, further north, over the Tay Estuary, ten or so years earlier. ‘It collapsed almost immediately, it plunged into the water with all the passengers. Just imagine the disaster . . . But it did help to show that the force of the wind can be much more destructive than anyone could believe at the time . . . They built this bridge on the strength of that hard lesson.’ He writes on the piece of paper: ‘The Promethean faith of Homo faber knows no obstacles.’ Then he corrects the word ‘faith’ to ‘energy’ and adds: ‘What can the philosopher do compared with all this?’ Upon the trilithic sketch of the Tay Bridge he overlays, working with care and relying on the funny photograph of the structural demonstration, several lines that summarize the shape of the bridge he has before his eyes: ‘Not everything that might seem to bring to synthesis two opposites really does so, and, above all, it’s not always sufficiently solid to successfully withstand all forms of attack. This bridge is a construction that defines the solution to an age-old tension.’ And underneath he reiterates: ‘The Rail Bridge resolves in its way the age-old tension between two banks. The same is done, in a completely different way, by the Road Bridge: the solution is technical, the problem is philosophical.’ This is followed by another hastily jotted note: ‘What the fuck am I doing with my life? How can I relegate myself to the sidelines from the very start? How can I return to the world? How on earth could I have failed to understand anything about the reality of humanity we endlessly chatter about?’

He sits there for a long time gazing at the Bridge, then he starts pacing back and forth on the stone wharf, every so often glancing at the structure which from that point appeared to him in a vertiginous perspectival foreshortening against the first hint of a smoky, faded sunset, which at these latitudes might last hours. It’s a sensation that he’s never felt before, it’s as if the sight of that thing is somehow unbearable to him, as if it had made up its mind to reveal to him, like it or not, something that he’d never learnt before, something simple and decisive. Then he sits back down on the bench of the overlook and murmurs: ‘The year 1882, you get that? A mile and a half long . . . You understand?’

Clara is no longer listening to him. He leafs through the guidebook in search of indications for a place to eat, a restaurant, a pub, a bar, anything. The wind has picked up and it’s chilly. Ivo slips on his cotton jacket, zips it up to his neck, raises the lapels, and puts on his wool cap. Clara is out of patience, on edge, chilled to the bone and with low blood sugar. She says: ‘What are we going to do?’ ‘Just wait a second,’ he replies to her, ‘just a couple more minutes.’ ‘I’m cold, I’m going to go wait in the car. No, better yet, I’m going to go find a place to eat.’ ‘Sure. I’ll be there soon.’

He sits there for another half hour. He gazes upon an object that declares in an absolutely clear and powerful fashion the reasons for its existence, that asserts the indisputable fact of its being, in that singular point in the world, engaged in the incessant effort to hold together the shores of that stretch of water. Simmel wrote that it is man’s task to connect what is separated and separate what is connected, because only human beings are capable of seeing the two banks of a river as two discontinuous things that can be rejoined. That act of essential rationality is there, before him, in all its structural power, in all its geometric clarity. He observes the distinct internally converging torsion of the great arches in tubular steel, he understands in a wholly natural way, because the bridge tells him so, which part of the structure is load-bearing and which part is borne as a load. ‘No one wonders why the Rail Bridge exists, no one wonders what it is and what it’s for, because it justifies itself in virtue of the self evidence of its function.’ He is reminded of Simmel’s words. He doesn’t remember them exactly, but here they are now.

The bridge takes on an aesthetic value when it accomplishes union of the separate not just in reality and for the satisfaction of practical aims, but renders it immediately visible . . .

The simple dynamics of the movement, in the reality of which the ‘purpose’ of the bridge is exhausted from time to time, have become something visibly enduring . . .

Now he too can feel that his blood sugar is low, he feels weak. Or perhaps it’s the emotion, but he’s sweating and the chill freezes the sweat to his skin. He goes on jotting down notes, his hands are trembling. ‘Clara must be starting to lose her temper. We’d better find a place to get something to eat, maybe we can stay here overnight, I don’t feel like driving any further today. I’d better get going . . .’ He heads back to the car, he gets behind the wheel, seeking shelter from the wind. He doesn’t see Clara, who knows where she’s gone. The idea of driving now, on the wrong side of the road, to who knows where, bothers him, it exhausts him. It would be better to go, before it gets dark. The sight of the bridge has upset him and his agitation, alongside the difficulty of driving on the left, has been transformed into anxiety. His hands are still trembling, even if the tremor has lessened. His body must have found sugars somewhere: he’s hungry, he’s tired, but he feels better. In just a short while his mental landscape has changed and it has transformed the actual scenery around him. No longer the stern and tranquil austerity of Scotland, no longer the comfortable silence, the absence of traffic, the wisdom of heavily used objects, preserved over time exactly as they were in their miserly and slightly pinchbeck austerity. All this changes into hostility, menace, dreariness, and squalor. Ivo starts to reckon with the harsh lesson that the bridge has taught him, the emotional effort leverages the drop in blood sugars and suddenly he’s sleepy. He leans his head against the door frame, heaves a deep sigh and falls asleep instantly.

‘Someone once said that life is a “disease of matter”. I disagree. If there is such a thing as a disease of matter it’s what we call the force of gravity . . .’ With these words, Leandri starts his lesson. He captivates him instantly.

Young, probably forty, tall and powerfully built, resolute, with the face of a man apparently without doubts other than technical ones, a man apparently without any nagging thoughts of the political or existential sort, the bronzed skin of someone who does sports, of someone who’s probably a member of an athletic club on the River, someone who probably boats, someone who often goes to construction sites, someone who cares about maintaining the healthy & efficient appearance of the manager of a technical studio that operates on an international level, supplying everything that’s needed to undertake and complete major projects around the world.

‘The owner of the studio is his father-in-law,’ his fellow students immediately told him.

‘Who’s his father-in-law?’

‘Bottini,’ they replied.

‘Ah . . . and who’s Bottini?’

‘What do you mean “who’s Bottini”?’

‘. . . this applies to everything that exists on the surface of this planet. In fact, everything that is affected by the presence of this planet, the curvature of space generated by its mass. Immediately clear your minds of the phrase “curvature of space”. Since you’ve all taken physics already, otherwise you wouldn’t be here, you also know who Einstein is and what his theories state. But we don’t need Einstein. The universe we’re going to be examining belongs to Newton. It’s simpler than Einstein’s universe, or Bohr’s and so on, but it’s not simple. In fact, if you’ll bear with me as I take a brief tangent, nothing, at least in the profession you have chosen, will be simple, because every problem demands thought, method, expertise, mind, brain, cunning, exactitude and approximation. No problem can be solved without thinking, unless it forms part of the fundamental actions that our body performs without relying upon the mind, like walking, swallowing, speaking . . . Careful: the mind, not the brain. Get someone to explain the difference to you. We’re not engaging in psychology here, we’re building things. Things that serve a purpose, that need to stand up, often for a very long time, things that might be gigantic, massively heady, enormously expensive . . . All right then . . . Now, we were saying that this disease of matter exists: it’s called weight and it can be determined with Newton’s fundamental equation of physics. Universal gravitation. It depends on the mass, the square of the distance from the planet Earth, but in an inversely proportional manner, and so on and so forth. I expect that you know these things to perfection. I don’t intend to go back over them . . . Therefore, I will not be answering questions that have to do with the discipline of physics, only those concerning the science of construction . . .’

Curt, authoritarian, a simplifier. ‘A Fascist,’ Ivo thinks automatically. But he knows he’s wrong: Leandri is only a Christian Democrat. It’s a rumour that’s going around in the Department, it’s taken for certain. Among other things, he’s a consultant for the Ministry of Transportation as well as the Ministry of Public Works. An accomplished structural engineer, Leandri is obnoxious, off-putting, but he’s a very precise storyteller, he knows how to capture his audience. But when he writes down a formula, when he begins a demonstration, when he sets out a mathematical procedure, everyone frantically takes notes, because he moves very quickly, too quickly, it’s hard to follow all the various steps. Maybe mathematics bores him, it’s as if he’s trying to get through it in a hurry. It seems as if the only part of the discipline that he likes is the intuitive side, upon which he can construct a lecture made up of imagery, analogies, metaphors. For that matter, in the past two years, Ivo has learnt that here, anyone who teaches a course involving maths—all the courses in the two-year cycle of engineering either are mathematical or strongly entail mathematics—goes very fast: if you’re with it, you’re with it, if you’re not, there’s the door. They’re not interested in explaining, transmitting knowledge, they’re interested in weeding out. But by now we’re in the third year, the bulk has been completed, anyone who’s sitting in this lecture hall has already been through a harsh selection process and has passed. That means Leandri can afford to teach a genuine lesson, to abandon himself to his showmanship and flair.

‘If philosophy needs to avail itself continuously of metaphors taken from the physical world,’ thinks Ivo Brandani, ‘to explain the physical world, images of some other kind are needed . . . Of whatever kind, but only provisionally, only in the brief intervals between one mathematization and the next . . . Philosophical images, but, far more often, biological ones . . .’

‘In other words, it is inside this force field generated by the planet that we spend our entire lives and everything that exists is subjected to it from its very first instant of existence. In short, that is, everything is a slave to gravity. We should make a distinction here . . . I mean to say that what I just said isn’t true. That is, it isn’t true that everything is a slave to gravity. For example, most insects, bacteria and viruses aren’t: their mass is so tiny that they practically don’t possess weight. Beneath a certain size, molecular cohesion is stronger than gravity . . . There is a boundless world of creatures that have no notion of gravity. All that matters to them is molecular cohesion: think of the surface tension of water and the insects that walk on it, as if it were a mattress. To them, that’s the dominant force, the one that allows spiders to walk on walls. If you don’t know these things, go and read about them. This isn’t a biology class . . .’

Arrogant, authoritarian, but a good teacher. A clear-minded Fascist, or actually a clear-minded Christian Democrat.

‘It is necessary to understand that everything that exists, let’s say above a certain size, is a response to gravity. Or perhaps we should say, it’s also a response to gravity. The shape and size of our bones are responses to gravity, for instance. The shape of hills and mountains are, too. So are women’s breasts.’

The students are all males, a universal burst of laughter. ‘Fascist and sexist,’ thinks Ivo.

‘Walking is an expedient that allows us to make use of gravity for our own ends. A succession of forward falls. A table, a chair, these are anti-gravity devices. Chairs allow us to remain suspended at a certain elevation off the ground in a position that does not place inordinate strain on our internal structure, in such a way that it transfers a part of our weight to a substitute structure, the seat and the legs of the chair. A table is nothing other than a system for keeping objects within reach. Gravity has an ordering effect, it gives us a way of keeping objects still in a given place. The force of gravity is a powerful antidote against chaos. It produces planetary orbits, it holds together the solar system. The idea of an orderly universe, and I couldn’t say whether or not such an idea is exact, though I suspect it’s mistaken, is something we derive from the phenomenon of the curvature of space, something that occurs in the presence of a mass. Look, these are challenging concepts, and luckily they are of no particular concern to us, that is, not entirely. Without gravity, as even children know, we’d float in the air like astronauts. Water wouldn’t stay in its glasses, the sea would fly away. Our faeces would wander freely at nose-height (more laughter). So this is its ordering effect. Without gravity, the very idea of the world as we know it would no longer make sense and our entire way of thinking would vanish. Everything is determined by gravity. The science of construction is the discipline that allows us to fight against gravity effectively. I mean to say: certainly not to annihilate it but to turn it to our advantage—that, yes. To study the way in which gravity attacks a physical being, the way in which it strains and stresses it, depending on the shape it possesses . . .’

He stops, turns to the blackboard, picks up a piece of chalk and does a three-dimensional sketch of a table, a crude axonometric projection. A rectangle with its four legs, drawn with a single chalk line. The audience is captivated, enthralled, drawn in, attentive, intimidated.

‘How simple these kids are, compared to the philosophy students . . . They were already engineers before they started studying engineering, maybe when they were little, from birth . . . Is it an inborn aptitude? I think so . . . I used to play with my Erector Set, I had a toy truck and an electric train, I’d build bridges, I made the Bridge Over the River Kwai, with toothpicks . . . Approxi-mately, it was the one from the movie, which had a stunning resemblance to the Firth of Forth Bridge . . . I was Homo faber myself, but then I turned my back on it all, I derailed, I imposed a different, strange, useless trajectory upon myself . . . A man, Homo sapiens, is something other than a philosopher, than a professor of philosophy . . .’

‘. . . now then, we started by speaking generically about a body subject to its own weight, and now we have introduced the concept of structure. Pay close attention, because it’s fundamental. What is a structure? You all know the answer, that is, you can guess at it, you quasi-know it, that is, you think you know. Actually, this too is a very complex concept and it can be applied to an infinite array of disciplines. There is the structure of matter, of cells, the structure of a discourse, physical structure, economic structure, social structure, the geological structure of a given place. For each of these examples, the term actually has a different meaning. Here too we won’t venture any further, we won’t expatiate on the profound meaning of the word, which might be stated as a form endowed with meaning. But here I’m speaking in approximations . . . Let’s stay with the table: a table is a structure for supporting any object whatsoever provided it does not exceed a given weight and a certain size. If it weighs more than the limit, the table will break. If the table is too small with respect to the object, the object will fall. Let us imagine that this table is made of only five elements: four legs and a wooden top. The whole of these elements, connected to each other in a certain way—not in just any old way —is a structure, it’s the table-structure. A set of elements assembled for a purpose that each of the elements, alone, would be unable to fulfil. Each of the elements is indispensable to the whole, and therefore we are in the presence of an isostatic structure. But erase that word, just pretend I never said it. We’ll explore it later. Right now, let’s imagine placing at the centre of this table a weight of, let us say, ten pounds. Or let’s make it twenty. Now, pay close attention: the science of construction allows me to determine how this structure is strained under a given load, how the strains are distributed, in what directions, with what effects, and how it all is unloaded onto the floor. Moreover, it tells us what amount of sinking we should expect and at what points in the structure. And it tells us what kind of deformations it will suffer. And so on. Last of all, it will tell us the load limit above which the table will break. Therefore it gives us indications and methods for structural design. There, these are more or less the contents of the science of construction.’

‘They dress differently, many of them are slobs, with dirty hair, and a slight reek. The scratchy wool jacket. Under the jacket they wear the grey crew-neck sweater. Clarks desert boots, certainly, but more often loafers with the curled-up toe. All the same. They come to class with a briefcase, they look like so many office clerks. Here’s the well-dressed student, the son of a builder, upper class from head to foot: navy-blue blazer, beige trousers, light-blue shirt, Saxone loafers. He has a car, he doesn’t take the bus. The others—there are plenty who live here, away from home, and others who are commuters—take public transport. They get up every morning at five, many of them also have jobs: already we work ourselves silly, they do that, plus come and go. They don’t care about politics, no one here cares about politics, it’s not for them, they don’t understand it, they’ll never understand it. They’ll vote according to their own self-interest, or else in line with faint laissez-faire convictions, in any case, centrist or right wing. They’ll do other things, we’ll all do other things, we’ll build things, that is, concrete things, houses, bridges, dams, engines, automobiles, aeroplanes, electric power stations. I’m for bridges, I want to make bridges. I know that there are companies already keeping an eye on those with a good average in the first two years, some of the students actually get a contract for a sort of pre-hire: they’ll pay for the last three years, they gobble them up early. Franco is merciless, and I can’t say he’s wrong: he says that engineers are fundamental to the process of production, innovation, and accumulation of capital.’

‘The engineer is responsible for the design, the conception, the worker is responsible for the work, while all that remains to Capital is to decide what to do. Capital needs invention, but it tolerates the capacity to invent only in the field of technology. It needs proletarianized technicians willing to do anything and capable of thinking only in engineering terms . . . Therefore what an engineer needs first and foremost, more than specialization, which remains admittedly important, is a forma mentis, a mindset . . . They must be domesticated, tamed from the very beginning. They must feel the bit and the master’s hand patting them on the head. They must learn from this point on to say yes . . . How the fuck did it occur to you to become an engineer, Ivo? You’re as necessary as bread, so they stay on you . . . No politics, for you the world is only a set of technical problems, one after the other, for the rest of your lives . . . You’re oil in the gearings of Capital. Have you ever wondered why you’re the only ones who’ve never had a Student Movement?’

‘Have you ever looked at a bridge, Franco?’

‘Oh come on now, give me a break with these damned bridges. All right, you’ll build bridges. What can I tell you? What are we supposed to tell each other? You have a philosophical mind, you know that. You chose to become an engineer. I don’t understand it, it’s a move I don’t follow.’

‘It may also be a sequence of technical problems, but at the base of any technical problem, there’s a philosophical question. But a question that demands a concrete answer . . . This is a calling, Franco. A true calling . . . It’s being among things, among people who talk to each other in order to communicate, not to prevail, not to show off, to prove how good, how clever they are . . . Let me say it again: it’s a calling, not a job, an intellectual activity, etc. It’s a CALLING, I want to follow this calling. The other day I went to my first science of construction class . . .’

Franco experiences the typical distaste that intellectuals feel towards technicians. It’s an age-old thing, it goes back to the classical concentration in high school, it’s the basis of the whole humanistic mystification, the prevalence of the emotional values—because that’s what’s going on here, Ivo tells himself—over all others.

‘It was Franco who talked to me about high-school imprinting . . . And now he clearly shows that he’s in it up to the neck.’

‘Ah how wonderful! I can just imagine the pleasure you felt! I’ll bet you jacked off under your desk . . .’

Vulgar mockery, not something he’d expected from him. Ivo ignores it: ‘There’s a guy people say is good who teaches it. His name is Leandri, a lively Neapolitan.’

‘Lively?’

‘Yes. When he worked his way up to the concept of structure he said: Look, there are dozens of meanings corresponding to this term. He listed a few, then he turned around, sketched a table on the blackboard, and said: “We’re interested in this type of structure.”’

‘So what?’

‘Don’t you find that fantastic? Isn’t this conceptual closure wonderful, so sharp and clear, so devoid of sophistries: we are engineers, therefore the structure that interests us is of this type, that is, phy-si-cal. We don’t give a crap about all the rest. Exactly the opposite of philosophers, to whom the only interesting thing is the concept itself of structure, the innate idea, it’s function in the process of gaining knowledge etc., etc. . . . Engineers don’t give a damn about that . . . There are worlds different from yours, and they’re not necessarily worse, Franco.’

‘They’re going to bend your spine, Ivo . . . And you won’t be so happy then . . .’

At the end of September 1968, after a brief personal struggle during which he stopped studying for his philosophy exams, Ivo changed his major to Engineering. He’d convinced himself that technical action is a form of a philosophical action but without magnificent robes, without the systematic pretence, the metaphysical aspirations. He decides that technical thinking is a continual verification of the capacity of thought to transform the world and that it will allow us, in the long run, to triumph over the dictates of nature. To him, the human race is essentially a species of builders: Homo sapiens is such only if he is Homo faber, that is, only inasmuch as he is a fabricator of what we need to live contrary to nature. He talked it over at length with Franco, with Clara, even with Mother. But not with Father. Father, for his part, thought that he finally had him clutched in his fist.

The first two years of the course of engineering, full of mathematical analysis, physics, mechanical engineering, chemistry and so on, is terrible ordeal. Ivo realizes that he has a mental limit beyond which there is no way out for him. He feels he is the only one who can’t understand, he can’t grasp and he can’t retain more than a certain amount, his capacity to intuit the concepts visually no longer works; beyond that limit, which more or less coincides with the differential equations, and not even them, he is unable to construct any usable image. He manages, he has no idea how, to cram into his brain mathematical procedures that he intimately fails to understand, he struggles tremendously, he accepts shameful grades and, in the end, he barely clears the two-year requirements.

Ivo looks back, he’d really worked incredibly hard. Mathe-matical analysis 1 and 2, physics, mechanics, graphical statics, science of construction, technical physics. During his first two years of engineering, it seemed to him that he’d come from a distant and mist-shrouded planet where the art of disputation still thrived, where they still sought after truth as if there was such a thing outside of the logical and mathematical verities. His betrayal of his origins had been total and extreme, a lunatic negation. Here those who teach take no interest whatsoever in those who learn, no one cares who you are, all that matters is what you prove that you can do. Do you or don’t you know how to solve a differential equation? Do you know how to calculate a system’s nodal stresses? Do you know how to state a problem mathematically? If you do, good. If you don’t, so long. If you can’t keep up, it’s been good to know you. This is the famous first two years of engineering: it’s designed to weed out those who are going to go on (that is, to being hired for a position in a Corporation) and, at the same time, to shape the mind and personality, to encourage their eventual anxiety for social climbing, with appropriate rewards and punishments. The professor of engineering is well aware of his duties and he performs them using the authority of his position rather than any charisma, which for that matter is almost always non-existent. Ivo sees their cultural mediocrity, in some cases, their paltry humanity, yet he acknowledges their function, their strength.

‘Let the Movement go ahead and occupy the other departments. There’s no point in doing it here, these aren’t genuine professors, to protest against them, to defy them would do no good, they are mere functionaries, colonels, they’re sorters, they’re just like those military physicians who approve or deny admission to the pilot’s academy on the basis of physical fitness . . . Most of them aren’t inventing anything new, they’re just transmitting things that are generally known, they provide you with a technical & ethical foundation for your future role . . . In other departments, they say that they’re trying to shape you, to educate you, here they just want to cut you to size. You’ll be a member of a team, of a group of technicians, often international groups, you’ll use technology to exploit other people’s money, transforming that money into works of engineering, and you might be doing the same thing with political decisions . . . You’ll provide support for all this, for every step of the way, you yourself will be a part of the substrate of the world, in the sense of a substrate of life . . . You’ll help to ensure that philosophers can fly in the aeroplanes that will take them to the conferences where they can discuss matters concerning the existence of a world outside of ourselves, or free will, or whatever the fuck they feel like discussing . . . In order to do so, you’ll take as a given the existence of reality, you will decide what is the best solution, you’ll make use of the partial truths that underlie every technical solution. You will make it possible for priests and nuns, bishops and popes, missionary friars and Orthodox fathers, Muslim imams and Buddhist holy men, for every other adept of revealed truths, every worshipper of the notions of spirit, guilt and sin, to make their way over all the rivers, to travel down all the roads, to cross over all the oceans necessary for the propagation of their faiths, you’ll build their temples, and in those same temples they will reliably rail against technology and science . . . But that’s fine the way it is . . . The world needs men like Captain MacWhirr, who is in command of the Nan-Shan and takes on the titular storm in Conrad’s Typhoon: stubborn, “without imagination”, but good at their jobs, competent at the things they do . . . The ridiculous “creativity” of those who consider themselves artists—those who insist on “feeling themselves free”, “unwilling to accept outside impositions”, who see their work as the product of free will, instead of binding constraints—that’s not for the engineer . . . The last thing he needs is freedom, he wouldn’t know what to do with it . . . An engineer needs constraints, he asks you for them—if you gave him total freedom, the engineer couldn’t even begin to think, he’d just go on holiday. His bond with reality is foundational and indestructible, at the cost of the destruction of the engineer himself . . .’

Ivo thinks at some considerable length about this, but his gaze is substantially elsewhere: deep down, it doesn’t really matter to him what it means to be an engineer; right now all that interests him is to reach the point of being able to understand the Firth of Forth Bridge, he cares about gaining the ability to design a bridge so that it will stay up, that makes it possible to ‘connect what is separate’. Even so, it isn’t easy, many of his fellow students seem only to have lived thus far with the goal of facing the challenge of this department and defeating it. Now he envies all the grinds back at school who always got good grades in the scientific subjects and who here shower sparks of brilliance. He can’t stand them but he tries to befriend them; he wants to study with them, but none of them wants to waste time with a guy who has a hard time absorbing even the simplest notions, who is constantly asking for clarifications, who digs his heels in on a mathematical formula unless every step of it is explained to him. The problem of mathematics arose immediately, and dramatically: he was forced to take private tutoring from a professor who helped him to reinforce the fundamentals that he was lacking. During regular lessons, Ivo made notes on the passages that were still unclear to him and submitted them to his tutor, going over the procedure with him step by step, until he reached the final result. The result! This word became practically mythical for him. ‘There are fields in which you can arrive at an unequivocal, transmittable, shared result!’

‘Objective,’ he ventures to think.

At the first exams they flunk him, or he gets very low grades. At engineering they write ‘Rejected’ on his grade book. One time, the professor of Analysis 2 actually boomerangs the grade book across the room, with contempt. ‘Don’t worry,’ a student tells him, ‘it’s not like he has it in for you. He does this a lot, and he’ll keep doing it until the day that someone seriously loses it, gives him a nice hard head-butt and smashes in his nasal septum, then he’ll finally stop . . .’ ‘Political consciousness in the nascent state,’ thinks Ivo, ‘an impulse of authentic anti-authoritarian rebellion.’ ‘Tovarich,’ he replies to him.