Pushing Past the Night (10 page)

In the most audacious and horrifying crime of the Years of Lead, the former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on March 16, 1978, as he was being driven to Parliament. Eight weeks later, after long and fruitless negotiations, his bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of a car in central Rome. What is often forgotten is that the gunmen also murdered five members of Moro's escort. Years later, on February 27, 2007, a TV special was broadcast titled
The Return of the Red Brigades
. In one part, the anchor, Claudio Martelli, interviewed the founder of the Red Brigades, Alberto Franceschini, at the scene of the crime on Via Fani in Rome. After decades of silence, the families of the fallen policemen wrote a letter to the columnist Corrado Augias of
La Repubblica
to describe their discomfort over that interview:

In his response, Corrado Augias may have finally given the family members the understanding they were seeking.

I
T TOOK A LEFT-WING PAINTER
to get me to stop reading
Robinson Crusoe
twice a year. He picked it up and said, “There are lots of other books where you're not alone on a desert island after a shipwreck. They're nice. You'll like them.” For security I took the novel back from him and continued to keep it next to my bed for years, but I accepted
Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca
(The Diary of Hurricane Johnny, an Italian children's classic),
Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and later on
David Copperfield
and the tales of an English veterinarian, James Herriot, that my grandfather gave me as a present.

At the time, I was already in elementary school, but the painter had first come into our lives while I was in kindergarten. He appeared one afternoon right before dark. We saw a man with a big headful of curls at the door and liked him instantly. We were always looking for a father figure. Nonno and our uncles did their part, but at sunset we were left alone with my mother. She would give us our baths, putting all three of us in the tub together, and we would splash around in the water. Then, when it was dark,
we would be overcome by sadness. For years the night brought us nightmares and tears. The painter said his name was Tonino. Studying him carefully, I noticed that his fingers were smudged with blue tempera. After a moment of hesitation, I jumped up and put my arms around him, saying, “Tonino is mine.” We sequestered him and he spent his time playing with us, wrestling and tickling us on the sofa.

He had come by to visit my mother, but she had barely enough time to give him the grilled cheese and ham sandwich that she had prepared. When he was on his way out, Luigi, who was almost three, asked him, “When are you coming back?” Caught off-guard, Tonino answered, “Tomorrow.” And just like that he started coming for one hour every evening, before going off to teach illustration at the Castello Sforzesco night school. He spent all his time with us on the living room rug. Mama would look at us while leaning against the doorframe and then make him something to eat.

He entered our lives slowly, with tact and delicacy. He started to take us to Parco Sempione in the broken-down red Spider he drove and then to the planetarium and the museum of natural history. Once he showed up with a huge roll of brown packing paper and crayons, and from that moment on we spent the afternoons lying on the floor coloring.

Before long my mother's parents asked her to come by their house, alone. They needed to speak with her, and asked her to take a seat across from them at the round table in the dining room. The first to speak, with concern, was my grandmother. She asked whether it was true that a “longhair” often came to her house. My mother, embarrassed, said yes, that there was a teacher, an artist, with somewhat long curly hair, whom she spent some time with. So was it true, Nonna asked, that the painter lived in a house with many other people? “We heard about it from the children.” The painter was living in a four-room apartment that he shared with a
computer programmer, Baldassarre Giunta, nicknamed Sino; a cartoon artist, Antonio Dall'Osso; and a changing roster of other artists, most of them Tuscans from Lucca. For us it was a magical place, full of drawings and colors, a place where you could open the refrigerator and grab whatever you wanted, certainly less orderly than our grandparents' house. The occupants of the house—who regularly paid their rent—adopted us and even today they never miss the sad or happy moments of our lives. At weddings they always send us a shipment of Tuscan wine, and on the walls of our house there are paintings by the Tuscan painter Giuliano Natalini.

After what had happened, it's not hard to understand my grandparents' attitude. At one point they burst out, “Well, Gemma, let's call a spade a spade. He's a long-haired painter and a Communist who lives in a commune. What do you see in him? Why are you dating him?” At first my mother tried to defend him, saying that he wasn't a Communist and that there was no commune. Then she snapped and said peremptorily, “Because he loves my children and makes them laugh. I have nothing more to discuss.”

My grandparents understood and made an effort to accept a person who was so unlike them. The next Sunday, they invited him to lunch. I remember a palpable tension that dissipated only thanks to the Piedmontese specialties being served,
bagna cauda
(a warm fondue-like dish of olive oil, garlic, and anchovies served with raw or cooked vegetables) and risotto, and to my mother's younger brother, Zio Attilio, who is completely bald today, but back then had a headful of curls. He broke the ice by saying something like, “They told me you were a longhair, but your hair's shorter than mine!”

Attilio was the good-luck charm of our childhood. He taught us to love bicycles and American music. He infected my brothers with his passion for motorbikes and enchanted us with his work as a fashion photographer. His studio was our refuge when we skipped school, and it was an amazing place. When you're
sixteen, going from high school teachers to fashion models is a leap you don't easily forget.

The disconnect between Tonino and my grandparents was repaired so thoroughly over time that I came to see it as a model for the way Italy could be if the fences and barricades between people were to fall. They influenced each other and learned to appreciate each other, but without surrendering their guiding principles, although with the changing of the seasons they began to see eye to eye in a few areas.

We lived our lives experiencing the best of two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. We children took turns spending weekends and holidays with my grandparents, who were textile manufacturers: we went skiing in Courmayeur or hiking in Switzerland. For Easter vacation, they would take all three of us to Venice. Nonno always had a late-model Lancia. They taught us the importance of the work ethic, saving, and charity, and how to recognize a fabric blindfolded. With Mama and Tonino, who came to live with us in 1976, we traveled instead in a Fiat 127. We drove up and down Italy to discover beaches and monuments, and little by little all three of us started to breathe again, and to no longer feel threatened and lost. My brothers started to call Tonino Papà. I did not. It took me several more years, but when I did, it was because I was truly convinced that he had become our father.

Children have always been Tonino's passion. With Bruno Munari, one of Italy's greatest designers, he used to organize workshops for kids to encourage their creativity. Among his many accomplishments, he designed the peace flag—the rainbow standard that in recent years has invaded the Italian streets.

Tonino taught us how to fish, how to use a camera, how to row, to swim, to draw, to recognize the stars and the right wind for flying kites, to build sand castles, to make surfaces for playing marbles, and above all to never give up, to never take anything for granted, to fight for the things that you love.

He got up at night when we cried and invented grandiose methods for fighting our sadness. Every morning he came to wake us up with a puppet show of imaginary characters. He told little stories and made jokes. The morning became a time of the day that was not to be missed. He never tried to push Papà Gigi to the side. He sustained us during the trials and always encouraged us to keep his memory alive.

In December 1982, in a small church that overlooks the Gulf of Tigullio in Liguria, my mother and Tonino were married, and two years later our fourth brother, Uber, was born. With his arrival, our story turned another page: in the city records and on the mailbox there were now three last names, sometimes making it very difficult to explain things. It wasn't always easy, especially for Uber, whose life was weighed down by a heavy and never-ending story. He was little, still in nursery school, when one night before going to bed he said, “Mama, I don't know what to do. I love my brothers and I'm sad that their father is dead, but if it hadn't happened I wouldn't have been born.” During his first year of high school, one of his teachers organized an assembly about Adriano Sofri, who had been convicted of instigating my father's murder, but had gone through multiple trials with varying outcomes. The only speaker invited was Guido Viale, the former leader of Lotta Continua. My brother asked why the opposite side wasn't represented, and he was told, “Why, do you want those poor guys to go to jail?” He came home and asked for everything to be explained to him, to be given all the details of the story. Uber wanted to take the floor at the assembly, so that at least one voice would remember Luigi Calabresi, even if Uber wasn't his son. We thanked him, then my mother asked him to stay home that day, so that he would miss the assembly. We never felt that he was different from us. Now we were four and our stories blended into one.

And so Sunday after Sunday, year after year, we learned all the ordinary things that should belong to a shared heritage: that there were two Italys, each with its relative merits, and with good people on both sides. We learned that people from the right, the left, and the center could join together in laughter, affection, good conversation, debate, discomfort, and sadness. I quickly realized that our family was a little different, in a good way that defied stereotypes. For example, when my mother and I went to an art opening at a “leftist” gallery, we might be greeted by a brief chill in the air. We never worried because after a while the climate would change. Other people would start to see us as individuals rather than symbols, regard us with compassion, and maybe even start to question some of their own assumptions.

I've always compared what happened to a shipwreck. Suddenly you lose everything; you find yourself tossing about in dark and deep water. Sometimes the disaster could have been predicted because of an approaching storm, but there are also sudden leaks in the boat, icebergs, killer whales. While the shipwreck that befell my father should have been foretold—a glance at the papers from those years tells you everything—some dramas are still unexpected and unpredictable.

The most telling aspect of this image is the aftermath: you can be adrift for years or for your entire life. You can end up on a desert island and choose to remain there. Many victims of terrorism talk about their experience lucidly, saying that they could never again turn the page of the calendar, that their pain and anger has chained them to that moment. It's hard to break away from it of your own will. Some people choose an island that allows them to survive. Many run as far away as they can get.

We have to thank my mother for having had the courage to allow Tonino to help her, and fate, for bringing us into a large extended family. My mother is the fourth of seven children. Her
sisters and brothers never let us down. We called one set the “Carlos,” a name that identified eight people: my oldest uncle, Carlo; his wife, Carla; and six children. In their midst you were diluted, you became part of something bigger, and differences were erased. The only problem is that they are all blue-eyed blonds or redheads. We were like dark spots: you could pick us out immediately. Then there were our African cousins, born at the source of the Blue Nile, as they used to say, the children of two courageous doctors, Gigi and Mirella, who helped to found a hospital in Gulu, in northern Uganda. They captivated us with stories that lasted for hours, about playing games in the savannah, about zebras and giraffes.