XXVI. VIA RICCOLI

Gramsci is scheduled to depart on the morning of 31 October 1926. After a change of trains in Milan, he is to continue on to Genoa where a driver will pick him up and take him to Val Polcevera. There, on the direction of the highest authority, he is to meet Comrade Humbert-Droz. Gramsci does not know him and is not sure what he wants. Is he to be spied on? Will they be giving him a lecture all the way from Moscow?

‘We are very worried,’ Gramsci wrote on 14 October in the name of the Politburo of the PCI to the larger sister party in Moscow. ‘Comrades, in these last nine years of world history, you have been the organizing and propulsive element of the revolutionary force in all countries . . . But today you are destroying your work. You are degrading, and run the risk of annihilating, the leading function which the CPSU won through Lenin’s contribution.’ He had named those who had by now been discredited, Comrades Zinoviev, Trotsky and Kamenev, ‘they have been among our masters’. At the end, he had even added a warning: ‘We like to feel certain that the Central Committee of the USSR does not intend to win a crushing victory in the struggle, and is disposed to avoiding excessive measures.’

Gramsci is sitting up straight in his seat and watching the Umbrian landscape blur past, vast yellow fields, pines. A few days after his letter, Trotsky and Kamenev are expelled from the Politburo and Zinoviev is ousted by Bucharin as the chair of the Comintern. Gramsci had sent his letter to Palmiro Togliatti, but does not know if Palmiro kept it to himself or showed it to someone else. Bucharin perhaps? Togliatti had not allowed Gramsci’s letter to be read before the plenary session of the Central Committee, Stalin still knows nothing about it. But who had Togliatti showed it to? Bucharin? Someone else had to have read it, otherwise Gramsci would not be sitting in a train to nowhere to meet Humbert-Droz.

Nevertheless, Giulia is safe. ‘Here it is winter already,’ she’d written him shortly after arriving in Moscow. ‘When I think of Rome, I become quite sad . . . In Rome today it is the 15th of September.’ She’s recovered from the birth well. Giuliano. They call him Julik. Gramsci tries to imagine him, he thinks of a smaller version of Delio, but he hadn’t known Delio in the first months either, and in any event it was pointless for they would have their own personalities.

He opens the newspaper, sees photographs of pompous parades, the march on Rome had been celebrated for the fourth year in a row, the fascists continue to celebrate. Earlier that day, Mussolini had arrived in Bologna, waving to all the people on the streets, a military band played, fascists in sharply creased uniforms marching before him, behind him, in strict blocks, with arrogant faces. Gramsci sees a photograph of one of Mussolini’s speeches, it will look exactly the same in Bologna, in Naples, in Turin, throughout the country it will constantly be staged in exactly the same way. He puts the newspaper down, reads in a book by Benedetto Croce, takes a few notes, thinks about Humbert-Droz again—whom he imagines with a very thin moustache and a tall top hat, even though he knows full well that no communist would appear at a secret meeting in a top hat—and then dozes off, sees Giulia for a moment, heavily pregnant and in a deck chair, she is on summer holiday in Trafoi, just a few kilometres from the Swiss border.

Gramsci wants to get off the train in Milan, elbows his way to the door with his luggage but is blocked by a police officer. Gramsci is brusque, he must catch his connection, he does not want to discuss a thing, he is a parliamentarian, they cannot simply do whatever they want with him. The officer places his hand on Gramsci’s underarm and says quietly: ‘Mr Deputy, I know who you are, and I suggest you travel back to Rome. It’d be the best!’ The man’s voice sounds confidential, even trustworthy, and Gramsci is tempted to believe him. But how can he trust him? What does he know about this officer? What does he know about why he’s being warned? He only knows that he is in danger. The laws still apply to him, but what are they worth?

An attempt on Mussolini’s life, Gramsci learns. Shots. Fired by a fifteen-year-old. Was he hit? Is he wounded? Is he dead? Through the window, Gramsci sees the police on the platform. They have mixed in with all the people departing and arriving and are controlling what’s getting off the train, this mass, this crowd, and, with forbidding faces, stopping particular people. A small boy tears himself from his mother’s hand and runs away. Nevertheless, Giulia is safe, as are Delio and Julik. Thanks to Eugenia’s insistence, Giulia left on 7 August. Moving to Moscow any later than that would have been too difficult and they wouldn’t have been safe for too much longer in Italy. When Gramsci came back to Italy two years ago, he knew that it could cost him his life. He came knowing as much, but today he is too exhausted to die. Today he is keeling over unconsciously, without a final thought, without a final word.

On Via Riccoli, near the Palazzo Re Enzo, the shots missed the Duce. The perpetrator, Anteo Zamboni, a child almost, is dead. An infantryman from Mussolini’s bodyguards, Carlo Alberto Pasolini, detained him but by then it was too late: screams. Punches. Shots. Fascist lynch law in the open street.

‘Please stay seated,’ the policeman says. ‘Do not get close to the window. It’d be the best for you. Travel back to Rome.’

Gramsci nods, and, when a few minutes later the train leaves again, sinks back, almost in relief.

 

The fascists take revenge. For days. They plunder, they set fires, they even destroy the flat of the great bourgeois intellectual Benedetto Croce in Naples. It is the moment they have been waiting for. At last, they can carry the terminally ill constitutional state along with the young Zamboni to the grave. At last, the course of violence agrees with them. On 5 November, passports are declared invalid. Whoever attempts to leave the country illegally will be shot. Anti-fascist newspapers and parties are banned and dissolved.

Gramsci is finally to go abroad, the Party decides, it has become too dangerous for him. The fascists will not miss the chance to bring all thought and expression under their control, to bring the whole country into line. Against his will, Gramsci’s acquaintance, Esther, wants to bring him with her to Switzerland but he hesitates to leave the Passarges’ flat.

‘I can only leave when circumstances are clear,’ he insists.

‘But they are clear.’

‘I do not want the workers to feel like they’ve been abandoned.’

‘They won’t think that. They can see what the fascists are doing. They did not stop before entering Croce’s flat. And he’s not even a communist.’

Gramsci himself doesn’t believe in his immunity any longer, but he wants to speak out against Mussolini in Parliament on 9 November and attack the proposed legislation to reinstate the death penalty. He will not be able to stop it. Nonetheless, he wants to hold out. For optimism’s sake. A few days more, then he will follow Giulia to Moscow. In mid-November perhaps. One week. Six days. On 10 November, he will flee.

On the evening of 8 November 1926, at ten-thirty, uniformed fascists break into the Passarges’ home and, in violation of parliamentary immunity, arrest Deputy Antonio Gramsci. Excep-tional measures, they say. Carla Passarge stands silently in the kitchen door; she is holding the porcelain funnel for the filter coffee in her hand as if she meant to delay Gramsci’s detention by means of a few cups of brewed beans. The uniforms do not look at her. Gramsci spends the night in the jail of Regina Coeli, oh heavenly goddess, as if the holy mother of God actually cared about the few poor sinners sitting there.

The first thing Gramsci hears upon waking the next morning are the seagulls. He can see them through the narrow window of his cell. They seem somewhat unreal, sailing high above the jail with their yellow, sceptical eyes. Just a few metres away, the Tiber flows lazily and indifferently by. Up until noon, the men standing on its banks will be casting their hooks into the water and hoping for a good catch.