Pushing Past the Night (13 page)

Luigi's feelings are sharper, more raw. He has always been very direct in telling Paolo and me, “The difference between us is that he never held me in his arms.” Mama remembers the leap she felt in her belly when she received the news of the murder and she understands him. “When I see his anger, I feel exactly what I felt that day.” Every now and then he hurtles into my mother's home in a fury. Like the time he learned that Adriano Sofri was at the Palio of Siena, a traditional horse race in medieval
costume, at the window where the government officials were seated, being welcomed and introduced as a celebrity by the mayor. Or the time he was holding a page torn out of a magazine with a picture of Sofri in a boat on the pond in Rome's Villa Borghese gardens, with his son and granddaughter. “Here's the difference, don't forget it: our father didn't get this chance to become a grandfather.” At that point, my mother took him aside and tried to console him.

On April 27, 1990, the Third Court of Assizes of Milan, presided over by Manlio Minale, entered into chambers. Five days later, on May 2, the sentence was read. I remember the paralyzing wait. We couldn't help it. The energy needed to keep up any pretense of normality was gone, and we spent the last two days alternating between the sofa and the bed. I was sleeping in the same bedroom as Paolo and I remember that afternoon, prostrate, immobile, as if we were undone by the summer heat. Later that afternoon, someone attempted a joke, but in the end it was impossible to break the tension. We were all waiting for the telephone to ring, and we all raced to it every time it did. Finally our lawyers notified us that the sentence was about to be read, so we rushed to the courthouse. When we realized that the defendants had been convicted, my mother started to cry. I asked her why. I thought it must have been the memories. She caught me completely off-guard. “For Bompressi's daughter. Today she has lost her father.”

The time arrived for the Court of Cassation to confirm the verdict. Mama was inflexible with the lawyers. “We are not coming to Rome. It's the court of final appeal and it's better for a widow and orphans to be outside the hall, to avoid putting any emotional pressure on the judges.”

After the many trials were over, the time began for the long and heated debates over whether to grant clemency. My family's
position has always been the same, and we have repeated it to every President of the Republic: we will accept any decision taken in the general interest, but we ask that the sentences themselves be respected. It would be unacceptable to grant a pardon that resembled a new instance of justice, that could be interpreted or presented as a reparation or acquittal.

We take no pleasure in the incarceration of the convicts: it never gave us back anything, nor has it ever been a source of consolation for us. What matters are the sentences, the state's commitment to seek the truth, to do justice. At home we have always been irritated when someone has asked us to approve or deny parole or a pardon. We reject the medieval notion that the victim's relatives should decide the fate of the convict. The responsibility for the decision lies not with the family but with the courts and Parliament, on the basis of the legal code. These are not private matters. Justice is the duty of the state. Despite my family's position of absolute neutrality, we are often cited as if we were in favor of clemency by representatives of every part of the political spectrum fighting for the release of convicts. From the right, I remember getting a telephone call from a group of Forza Italia members of Parliament. They had been asked to sign a document that was supposed to end the wrangling between the Ministry of Justice and the president's office over whether to grant clemency to Bompressi. They wanted to know whether it was true, as they had heard from their coordinator, that my family had approved the text. I said that it was not, adding that it was not right to lay at our door the responsibility for decisions that would be unpopular with the electorate.

From the left, I remember being invited to the headquarters of the Democratic Party of the Left. The justice adviser very politely proposed to me a type of exchange. He said that the time had come to allow the clemency to go forward, just as the time
has come to rehabilitate the figure of my father. Each of us could do his part. We left each other respectfully, but I told him that I didn't see a moral equivalency between the two, and above all that granting clemency was not our responsibility.

One evening, shortly before writing a letter to the newspaper
Il Foglio
, explaining that the time was ripe for granting a pardon to Sofri, Silvio Berlusconi invited me to dinner at his home on Via del Plebiscito in Rome. His political adviser Gianni Letta was also at the table. The prime minister had just arrived from Brussels and he had a stomachache. The only thing he ate was yogurt. He took two tablespoons of an antacid and explained to me what he had in mind. He spoke to me about the importance of symbolic gestures, about the need to detoxify the climate around the judicial system, and he asked me whether my family and I were open to agreeing on a gesture of clemency. He mentioned that he had met my father and he spoke of him with great respect and esteem. But I told him that this was not feasible, that you couldn't ask it of my mother, that if he thought it was right to take a step in this direction then we would respect his decision, but that we did not want to be involved. I remember that he took it badly, tapping his fingers on the table and rubbing his jaw. Then his chef Michele's gelato arrived and he forgot all about the acidity in his stomach. I said good-bye to him and took the stairs. Letta accompanied me to the courtyard and said, “You've done the right thing. This time I do not agree with him, and he knows it.”

Then came the medal, and more important, the words of President Ciampi: “We have rediscovered memory.” “Better late than never” is what we said in my family, and we truly meant it. It might be commonplace, but it fits the occasion. I can't bear the malcontents, the conspiracy theorists, the people who say, “After all this time …” My reply is that we should accept it for what it is, in its most obvious aspect. The medal, like the
commemorative stamp, was an important recognition. And the plaques on Via Cherubini and at the offices of the province of Milan will be, when they are finally in place. All our lives we thought it was unjust not to remember him at the place where he was killed, and not to recognize his sacrifice with a medal. Now there is one. Mama held it in her hand. The president pinned it on her jacket. This is what matters. Not being able to appreciate this would be a terrible loss. You have to try not to remain stuck, mummified, repeating the liturgy of mourning ad infinitum. That is not how you commemorate the deceased. We wanted to keep Luigi Calabresi alive, redeem his memory, clear him of the mud, and give him justice. So to see his smiling face on the stamps, on the envelopes, at the tobacconist, at the post office, on police calendars—I even found his face at a Chinese restaurant in Milan!—is a victory. And we are not interested in—and are indeed irritated by—arguments such as “They only did it in order to …” “In order to what?” “It's a maneuver to keep you quiet, to sugarcoat the pill, to then grant a pardon to Sofri and company.” That's certainly possible, but we cannot pretend not to see that, even if this is the case, the government's first thought was for us, the rehabilitation of his memory. And are these things not real, visible, concrete? So we accept them rather than ruin everything with conspiracy theories. Mama's smile on the morning of the medal was real. The peace of mind it gave her compensated for many bitter moments. To ruin everything, to poison these gestures, would have been stupid, unproductive, and above all ungenerous.

After the trials, I never saw Sofri, Bompressi, or Pietrostefani again.

It's the summer of 2002 and I am visiting Paris as a correspondent for
La Stampa
. The French elections are taking place, and will be won by President Jacques Chirac's Union for a Popular
Movement. The soccer World Cup is being played in Japan and Korea. One afternoon I have a coffee on the terrace of the
Le Monde
building with the French correspondent for my paper, Cesare Martinetti, and a reporter who writes for
Il Giornale
of Milan. The latter invites us to watch the match on television at his house that night. I accept immediately and thank him. I have no desire to stay at the hotel by myself. Cesare jumps up. “Unfortunately, we can't. We have a previous engagement.” Somewhat naively, I insist that he's wrong, that we have nothing scheduled for that night, and that I would be very happy to go. Cesare adopts a stern tone that I have never heard him use. “I'm afraid we cannot, I assure you.” I take it badly. We go down to the street and for a while neither of us speaks. Then he explains. “In that house, on the armchair in front of the TV set, you would have found Pietrostefani, the man convicted of organizing your father's murder. He plops himself down and doesn't move. I didn't want you to have to go through that.” He's right. That evening we don't watch the match. We stroll along the Seine deep into the night, conversing about the trials and about my father.

B
ENEATH THE PORTICOES
of Via Valdonica, in the center of Bologna, the pedestrians lower their voices. Instinct tells me to hold my breath. The air is thick, almost motionless. The street is narrow, as if the overwhelming sadness and the senseless act that provoked it were still there, trapped between the narrow walls, beneath the vault, unable to blend with the sky. You cannot help but look around in search of the bicycle of the professor, of Marco Biagi, who was gunned down on March 19, 2002. Walking on these stones seems to be almost sacrilegious, but every day his wife and children, who still live here, do just that, courageously. They did not run away. Despite the polemics, the insults, the lack of understanding.

The story of Marco Biagi's murder is a story of madness. But it is also a cautionary tale about the power of language. About the lighthearted, then careless, and finally irresponsible use of words. About the web that can be woven from insinuations, remarks, writings, graffiti, leaflets, malicious sentences, and stubborn silences, a web that is strong enough to trap a person's life.
It does not take a mastermind to do this. All it takes is the collusion of petty, apparently guiltless behavior by the many. It is through just such complicity that the identity of a center-left professor was distorted so badly that he came to be seen as a negative symbol of the center-right government.

Marco's wife, Marina Orlandi, understood exactly what was happening, as did he. Together they looked for a way to break out of this web and end this complicity. They wept over the attacks on his reputation and the death threats. They appealed for and even demanded protection. The government responded by ignoring the request, closing the door in his face, and treating him with frosty toleration. The conclusion was preordained. Marco Biagi, an adviser to the Ministry of Labor, was condemned to death by the terrorists, for the crime of trying to reform the Italian labor laws. The same destiny had befallen his predecessor, Massimo D'Antona, who was shot to death in Rome three years earlier, on May 20, 1999.

I knew about D'Antona from an insider, the Minister of Labor's spokesperson, Caterina, who later became my wife. In the evening, she would talk to me about this Massimo D'Antona, who was writing the Labor Reform Act, about the file folders he would bring with him from his house on Via Salaria, about the last time she had seen him at the ministry. Then I remember the morning of May 20, the immediate sense that the demons had returned to strike at the center of Rome. Not far away from Via Salaria, on Via Po, is the head office of the magazine
L'espresso
. I called there immediately and blurted out to the editor in chief, Giampaolo Pansa, “It's happening again. They're back. We've seen this all before.” His answer was succinct. “I have the same sensation.”

Rainfall at the commemoration. Feelings that I know all too well. Uniformed men every morning and every night waiting for Caterina to kick-start her moped or park it downstairs. It was in this period that she spoke to me about Marco Biagi, who was
completing D'Antona's work in the days after the murder, to bring it to the Council of the European Union in Brussels. According to schedule. A posthumous homage to D'Antona and his life's work.

Marina Orlandi remembers every moment. “On the day that D'Antona was killed, Marco was in Rome. He, too, was working for the Minister of Labor, Antonio Bassolino, in the Massimo D'Alema government. My husband phoned and told me, ‘I won't be coming back to Bologna today. I'll see you on Friday.' It was Wednesday. I begged him to come home immediately. I cried and shouted. He told me no, that he had to finish preparing the document, that they wanted it ready for the press conference. I couldn't talk him out of it. So I asked him at least not to participate in the press conference. I didn't want them to see him. He respected my wish; at least he agreed to that. I remember the anguish that began then. At night I would get up and look out the windows. For a few days, I saw a white minivan parked downstairs in the small square. It became the symbol of my fear, of our fragility.”

But the precautions were useless, well outmaneuvered by an ideological hatred that even today contaminates any attempt to revise Italian labor law.

“My husband was not right-wing. He was a Socialist, but he chose to continue working at the ministry when the government changed and Roberto Maroni of the Northern League became his new boss. From that moment on, his life became harder and harder, and he was slowly but surely isolated: he was working for the enemy. Life in Bologna became difficult for us. Marco's atrocious suffering in the last months of his life stemmed from the depiction of him as a person other than who he really was. He would say, ‘They've cordoned me off from polite society.'”