Pushing Past the Night (3 page)

A Roman dawn in May 2004. Piazza del Popolo is beautiful. The light is warm, the air almost cold. A girl in combat boots with facial piercings sobs helplessly. Instinctively a woman embraces her, holds her close, and tells her, “It's a wonderful thing that they're giving this medal to your father. You should be proud.”

The day before, the President of the Republic had fallen and fractured his collarbone. There are concerns that he might not be able to present the medals of valor today. Not even the medals to commemorate the victims of terrorism, the gold medals that have taken an eternity to be conferred. The medals that send your mind back thirty years, that make you relive sudden pains for which you are never prepared, pains that never bother with formalities such as announcing their arrival. They just show up and tear you away from the present. And they drag you down to almost forgotten lands, lands that don't seem to belong in Italy. Lands that have been left untilled and hidden from view.

If you were to go to the trouble of turning the picture around, of trying to look back at Via De Amicis through the eyes of the young men aiming P38 pistols, you would see other young men in uniform. Young southerners standing in the middle of the street. Then you would see a bullet strike a twenty-two-year-old boy from Naples who has just arrived in the city. You would see him crumple and die. The next day, the newspapers carry his picture, the only picture of him on file. His name was Custrà, Sergeant Antonino Custrà.

You would have to keep looking, sift through the files, blow away the dust, and see past the bureaucratic rhetoric that designates the policeman as victim number 14 of the Years of Lead. And then you might see something else, something that might make you feel uncomfortable or ill at ease: you would see a young
widow fleeing the city, following the coffin of her husband, taking him home. She is not alone. Her belly is swollen. She is expecting a baby girl who will never know her father. But no one has ever looked that deeply. No one has bothered to take the journey from that day on Via De Amicis to the present decade, to the baby girl who became the girl wearing combat boots.

We are having breakfast. For my mother, it's the second time this morning. She got up at 5:30 a.m. so that she could make it to Piazza del Popolo on time. She did everything in silence, letting us sleep in, and she went out by herself. They were rehearsing for Policemen's Day in Rome. Together with the other widows, daughters and sisters, she walked in front of the honor guard. She stopped at the spot marked on the cobblestones with masking tape. She pretended she was receiving the medal from the hands of the president. She allowed it to be pinned to her chest. Then, to her dismay, she had to remove her jacket and give it to an official, who would not return it until the next morning, the day of the ceremony. A group of seamstresses at the presidential palace had to sew a piece of Velcro onto it for the decoration.

That is when they met, thanks to alphabetical order: Calabresi, Custrà. When my mother turned around, she saw the girl's eyes fill up with tears. It was her turn to pretend to receive the medal. But maybe she had been pretending for too long. She started to sob uncontrollably. “I looked around for a second, then broke protocol and before the eyes of an invisible president, of the deserted tribunal of honor, of the piazza that was not yet awake, I held her close and began to stroke her hair. Her name was Antonia Custrà. Her father was killed not far from yours. Via Cherubini and Via De Amicis are not that far apart. But they are separated by five years, from 1972 to 1977, by which time the city was no longer new to blood on the streets.”

Something clicks in my mind. All I can think about is that girl. I want to speak with her. She broke the bureaucratic spell. She brought memory back to life. And what she didn't do would be accomplished the next morning by the President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, and his wife, Franca. Ciampi was the grandfatherly figure who did more than any of his predecessors to restore trust in the Italian state. Because of the broken collarbone, he would not be able to attend the ceremony in the Piazza. But while the protocol men were busy designating a substitute to pin on the medals, the disappointed women who had gathered for the sunrise rehearsal were informed of a spontaneous decision. Forget about protocol. Two busloads of wives who had lost their husbands, along with children who either could not remember or had only vague memories of their fathers, went directly to the president's residence, the Quirinale Palace.

The president has decided that people are more important than ceremony. He appears with his arm in a silk sling, rather than wearing a tie, and his navy blue blazer is perched on his shoulders. He begins to speak impromptu. The state has never had such a human face. It has never felt so near. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi himself wants to pin the medals on, although he can only use one hand. All the while, his secretary-general shakes his head and dangles his eyeglasses from one ear in his trademark style. What a shame no journalists are present.

It's our turn. My brother Luigi makes it just in time. He takes the airplane from Milan without realizing that the program has been changed. A quick-thinking policeman rushes him to the Quirinale from the airport. He's getting out of the car when we are already at the gate. Paolo and I tease him, telling him the ceremony was very nice but it's over now … teasing is how we always used to exorcise the tensions, powerful emotions, and stifling bureaucracy of state ceremonies. When we were children,
we used to invent games before official ceremonies. On Policemen's Day we would try to guess how many agents in the honor guard would faint in the next three hours. It was our way of surviving. A game, a joke we played before the hearings, the trials, the commemorations at police headquarters, where the bronze bust of Papà wore an expression that was too tense and severe. Before going into the Quirinale we joked that we would break protocol and say all sorts of outrageous things. It was also our way of holding Mama back from the abyss. When her eyes began to glaze over, to become distant, one of us would try to make her laugh, to return her to the present.

But this time it's Ciampi who surprises us, prompted by his wife, Franca, who is the first to break protocol. “My dear ladies, my husband is here for you. He cared too much about this ceremony, despite his fracture. He got hurt because he rushes around even when he shouldn't!”

The president jokes, smiles, becomes emotional. When our turn comes he asks us to speak, then he becomes serious, reaches out his hand and caresses my mother's face, and says to her the words that she has been waiting a lifetime to hear. Words that she had thought would never come. “We have rediscovered memory … It is an honor for me to give you this medal, even if it has taken far too long.” I have never seen her more serene.

After us comes Antonia Custrà. Today she isn't wearing combat boots. She has surrendered to protocol, but not for long. (As soon as she leaves the Quirinale she will put her jean jacket back on.) Accompanied by her mother, she gets emotional again. Ciampi can hardly believe their story. His wife covers her mouth when Antonia relates that she was born after her father's murder.

I remain behind to speak with her. I get her telephone number. At least once every month I think of visiting her. Then I am paralyzed by anxiety and I postpone it.

We leave Piazza del Popolo and Mama seems young again. She smiles and is at peace. We walk down Via del Babuino and she doesn't want to remove the medal from her blazer. She pats it as if she were a little girl with a new toy. Paolo teases her. “Mama, you look like one of those Soviet veterans who go to Red Square wearing all their medals.” She laughs and gets back at him with a retort of her own: “I don't care. Maybe I'm a bit of a veteran myself …” It's a special day, so she invites us to have an aperitif in Piazza di Spagna. I still have the bill. We three children decide to live it up: one negroni, one bloody Mary, and one martini at lunchtime. She refuses to follow our lead, preferring a fruit-flavored soft drink. The bill comes to fifty euros even. “Don't let it go to your heads, children. This is an exception. Medals only come once in a lifetime.”

I would never have believed that a medal could mean so much. I had always thought decorations were too bureaucratic, a cold stiff ritual. Now instead I can see that the award helped my mother and my siblings to turn a page, and gave them serenity, lightness, feeling.

We go to the Presidente restaurant, right below the Quirinale, and have our lunch al fresco. We are joined by my old colleague Angelo Rinaldi, with whom I used to talk late into the night after we had put the newspaper to bed. He appears with a beautiful bouquet of white flowers. Mama will never forget the morning of May 14, 2004.

T
HE MEETING
I
HAVE POSTPONED
for far too long takes place in Naples on a Sunday in January. My mind is made up. I have traveled five hundred miles to have pizza with Antonia Custrà. I took the plane from New York the night before, but first I stopped over in Milan, at the Palazzo di Giustizia, to pick up a folder of long-forgotten photographs. In it I discover the story of a group of youths who had never picked up a gun before that day; of the Neapolitan youth they killed; of the photograph that fifteen years later would land them all in prison; and of the little girl who was orphaned.

In the larger bookstores in Italy, there is always a shelf dedicated to the Years of Lead. Some of them are bigger than others. Almost all the books are written by former terrorists and, despite their many nuances, tell essentially the same side of the story. Invariably they defend their youthful decision to take up arms against the state, in the delusional belief that in Italy the time was ripe for a revolution. There are also books that reconstruct
the main terrorist crimes. But there is almost nothing that tells the story of the victims, the people who died, of the lives they led. Recently some room was found on the shelf for a slim, delicate memoir by Agnese Moro, the widow of Aldo Moro, the former prime minister kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978. It practically screams out from the shelf, so different is its voice from the other volumes. Since its publication, it has been joined by one book that collects testimony from the families of the slain or wounded, and another that tells stories from those years originally heard on a television program. But there is still far too little of that other voice.

“The only thing people remember is his name, which they almost always get wrong. Nothing about him, nothing about us. I would be happy if the few times that my father is mentioned—almost always in relation to the famous photo—they could at least get his name right. His first name was Antonio, not Antonino, and our last name is Custra, not Custrà. I've never understood who changed his name and who added the accent, but there it is every time I've seen it for thirty years now.” I realize that I have been making the same mistake. Her manner of speaking is remarkable. She's changed. Now her hair is blond, not black. She's very thin, and rather than combat boots she's wearing designer boots.

“My mother was twenty-three years old. They had married in September 1976 and been living in Milan for a few months. She couldn't fit in and she spent most of the day at home cooking or on the phone with her family in Naples. I was conceived during their honeymoon in Germany, where an aunt lived. My father was happy. He was the seventh child, the first boy after six sisters, and he wanted to have lots of children. He didn't become a policeman to escape unemployment, unlike almost everyone else back then. He had graduated from high school and
for a couple of years he even studied engineering. They offered him a desk job but he liked being out on the street. He died on May 15 after being in a coma for one day, and I was born on July 1.”

Antonia speaks quickly, directly, without trying to soften the impact of the things she is saying. There is no sugarcoating the sharp edges of her story.

“A part of my mother died with my father. She is still with us, but for thirty years she's been a ghost. She's absent, afraid of everything. She never goes out, never buys anything, never takes a trip, never goes to a restaurant. She returned to Naples with my father's remains immediately after he was murdered. She went to live in San Giorgio a Cremano with her mother. Since then there have been three of us: me, her, and my grandmother. For years my grandmother dealt with everything; then she got sick and it became my turn. I'm the man of the house. I do the shopping, buy the clothes, pay the bills. When I was twenty-one, I wanted a little independence, a job that would get me out of the house.

“I was registered with the state as the daughter of a victim of terrorism. They summoned me to Naples city hall for a job. I had to take a test. I was majoring in sociology at the university and I had studied classical Latin and Greek in high school. I was happy that the state remembered me, and curious to see what kind of a job I was being offered. I arrived at the Palazzo San Giacomo for the interview. They showed me to a lobby and made me wait there. I couldn't believe how filthy it was. Litter strewn all over the floor, bags of trash in the corners. It was really disgusting. Then a city employee arrived with a broom. He handed it to me and said, ‘Show me if you know how to sweep. Then you have to pick up those bags: that way we can see whether you're strong enough.' I was speechless. I remembered my classical studies and I looked at him inquisitively. He knew right away
what I was thinking and said, ‘There's an opening for a street sweeper. We've decided to allow women to apply, too.' I felt awful. This was all the state had to offer me. But I didn't bat an eye. I took the broom and got the job. I became the first woman street sweeper in Naples. I did it for two years. A group of other girls started around the same time as me. People weren't used to it, and the insults were fast and furious. I swept downtown, in Piazza del Plebiscito, and the guys would tease me, follow me around, and whistle at me, saying, ‘Hey, you really know how to ride that pole …' I'm proud of what I did and I never hide it. I always say, ‘I started out as a street sweeper.' By the end, everyone knew me. I was meticulous. I cleaned as if it were my own house. I used to personalize my blue uniform. Christmastime I would wear red and hang ornaments on my cart and around my bucket. Then I filled in an application for the Ministry of the Interior and got an office job with the railway police. The first person to take an interest in me was Gianni De Gennaro, the national police chief. I met him on the morning of the medal ceremony. He asked me how I was doing. ‘Not too well,' I said. ‘I work in a dark, gloomy office that handles health claims. To be honest, I feel like I'm suffocating.' He smiled at me, nothing more, and six months later they transferred me to the Interregional Office of the Ministry. I know that I have him to thank for it.”