Pushing Past the Night (8 page)

Policemen's Day was one festivity that Mama would have preferred to skip. Too much sadness, too much ceremony, too many ritual expressions of solidarity. But we children would insist on going just for the salmon canapés, an absolute luxury. In those days, you couldn't find inexpensive salmon at the supermarket all year round. It used to be available only at Christmastime at our grandparents' house, and serving it to children was considered wasteful. So we were always the first ones at the buffet, and we would empty all the trays before the shocked eyes of the officials and directors. Mama would say nothing. Maybe she thought it was the least the state could do for us. At the Policemen's Day parade we would feel shy and enchanted at the sight of the Padovani girls, who were always dressed up, always perfect.
Their father, Vittorio Padovani, had been killed by terrorist machine-gun fire on December 15, 1976.

For years photographers used to wait for us outside the main door to our house and follow us around. My mother, her hair almost completely gray, would put on a pair of dark sunglasses and quicken her step, pushing the baby carriage with Luigi inside. I trotted behind her and tried kicking them away.

I remember the pressure of feeling different, of not being normal children. We didn't have the right to a first or last name. No, we were “the children of …,” a fact that weighed on our every movement, every game, every friendship with schoolmates. Our experience is captured perfectly in the words of Benedetta Tobagi, whose father had been killed seven years after our own, and also in the month of May. In
The Silence of the Innocent
, she writes: “I do not remember my childhood as normal. I had the persistent sense of a double life—one black, one white—of a heavy, suffocating parallel world that I couldn't share with anyone. A child's life is normally measured out in schools: kindergarten, elementary school, middle school. Mine was measured out by the ‘Tobagi affair' … Ever since I was little, I could remember someone always asking me whether I was related to Walter Tobagi. I remember once at elementary school, I must have been six or seven, I tried to pretend that I lived in a different world, that I still had my father next to me.”
*

In kindergarten I used to keep my distance from the sandbox. I looked at it from a distance. I didn't want to go near it. It was too dangerous: a place where sadness and humiliation had ambushed me. But it wasn't always like that. On one of the first days of kindergarden, we were all digging in the sandbox with
our shovels, in a circle, telling stories, showing off, as children do, with tales about what our fathers made us do at the beach. When it was my turn, I said, after hesitating for a moment, “Mine tells me to make castles.” An older boy interrupted me. “That's not true, you don't have a father!” I started to blush, to defend myself, to explain that I did have a father, but it was useless. “My mother told me: they shot your father and he's dead.” I left the sandbox in silence and never went back. And when my brothers went there, despite my attempts to dissuade them by claiming that the sand was dirty and filled with worms, I stayed close to the edge, leaning against the wall to make sure that pain—sudden and disguised as a child—would not attack them, too.

Once I started elementary school, I kept to myself. My brothers were still in preschool, so I had no one to look out for. I was alone. During afternoon recess, I didn't go to the playground with the other children, asking instead for permission to stay in the classroom. I always finished my homework before everyone else, went to the small library in the back, and stayed there to read until the school day was over—first comic books, especially
Mickey Mouse
, and then my favorite book,
Robinson Crusoe
.

I felt perfectly comfortable in this bubble of solitude, but it was obviously lined with sadness. The bubble was finally burst in a funny, even clever way by Rosario Carro, nicknamed Iaio, the youngest in a line of brothers who had grown up at the San Siro racetrack, where their father trained horses. One afternoon he stopped me at the door to the classroom and said, “Chief O'Hara, why don't you show us how you play soccer?” He caught me completely off-guard. He knew that there was an inspector in my life, but had turned him into a cartoon character and then turned me into that character. I tagged along after Iaio to play soccer, and he told everyone, “He's the son of a policeman, an inspector … Chief O'Hara, as my brothers say. His father is a guy that catches thieves.” At the end of the
afternoon, I took him aside, near a tree that acted as a goalpost, and asked him, “Do you know that they killed him?” I didn't want to pretend again and risk painful misunderstandings. He replied, “Of course I know. My brothers told me, but we don't have to go around telling everybody.” About ten years ago, I was passing by the racetrack—my grandparents still lived nearby. I stopped the car, went in, and asked for the Carro brothers. I was directed to a series of stalls where I could find them. They were all there. Iaio was walking a beautiful bay to the training track, and I went up to him and gave him a big hug.

Then there are the sudden, uncontrollable moments of pain. For the Calabresi children that feeling of being shipwrecked has a name:
Bambi
. Children have loved the Walt Disney film about a white-tailed fawn ever since it came out in 1942, but when we went to see it at the movies, in the mid-1970s, it turned into a catastrophe. We were at the Gloria Cinema, on Corso Vercelli, and we were enjoying the story until the moment that the hunter killed Bambi's mother. My mother started to cry in the middle of the theater. It was so sudden and unexpected that we started crying, too, overwhelmed by our feeling of loss. At the end of the film, we waited for everyone else to leave before getting up. We were embarrassed and for years we never spoke about what had happened.

F
RANCESCA MARANGONI
looks at me as if to say,
Do you think I'm crazy?
“Of course I've never seen
Bambi
. Nor did I ever take my children to see it.” We're seated on a bench in the Guastalla gardens, behind the State University, next to the Milan Polyclinic, where her father was medical director until the day in 1981 that the Red Brigades shot him.

For almost eight years, I've kept a clipping about her from
L'espresso
. In a long article titled “The Forgotten Victims Speak,” she describes the sudden pain that sometimes assails her, and the time she broke down in tears in a movie theater. She starts to tell me about it. “I was watching Bertrand Tavernier's
A Sunday in the Country
, a film about an elderly French painter who gathers three generations of his family at his country home near Paris. The classic situations occur: they eat, they argue, they fight. Toward the end, the prodigal daughter arrives, and in the final scene she dances with her elderly father. A farewell dance. She does so knowing that it may be their last moment together …” Francesca hesitates and bites her lip. Tears well up in her eyes
and she tells me, in a shaky voice, “It made me realize what I would never have. My own father would not be at my wedding and he would never see my children.” She is still crying, twenty-six years later, during the lunch break that she has set aside for me.

In a photo that her mother keeps on a table in the living room, the family is pictured during their last summer together, in England, in front of Leeds Castle. Her father is wearing a suede jacket. He's young. Francesca is a pretty sixteen-year-old in red jeans. You can see that they were close.

She refuses to wipe away her tears. “I have two children. One is seven, the other's four, and I've never had the courage to tell them. One day my oldest heard something from his cousin, so he asked me, ‘Did Nonno die because of a war?' He thinks there are good guys and bad guys and that in war the good guys always win. It's hard for me to explain to him that there was no war. Only some people who thought they were in a war, who had their minds made up that they were in a war, and one day they started shooting guns. But I don't have the courage to tell him. I can't find the words, so I change the subject. All of this is incredibly painful. Over the years I've had to develop a sense of distance.”

Francesca Marangoni works at the Marangoni Center for Transplant Coordination, a pavilion at the Polyclinic named after her father. She, too, is a doctor. “To tell you the truth, I had no vocation for medicine, but it was in the air. Everyone expected me to become a doctor. If I were to be reborn, I would want to be surrounded by books, by paper, not by the dead … but I know that he would have been pleased. The hospital was his life. And to think that it was a nurse, a head nurse, who gave his name to the ‘hospital column' of the Red Brigades …”

A few yards from where we're sitting, they planned out the death of her father, but she doesn't want to discuss former terrorists. She is upset by reports that some of them might become
civil servants or serve in Parliament. “At the very least, they should be condemned to public silence: we have nothing to learn from them. If they had to follow a series of steps to be reintegrated or rehabilitated into society, good for them, but that doesn't change anything. No one can bring back what they took away. I don't think they have any more right to rehabilitation than other criminals. But for my own peace of mind, I wanted to look the terrorists in the face: I went to the trial in the courtroom—which looked more like a bunker—at the San Vittore prison. The defendants' cage was like a circle of Dante's
Inferno
. It held the whole Walter Alasia cell, shouting, cursing, turning their backs on us, eating. Once they even started throwing food at us. In the middle of our lawyer's arguments one day, a couple started having sex in front of everyone. The police noticed and all hell broke loose. It almost makes me laugh to think about it today. The judge reprimanded them, demanding respect for the widow. One of their lawyers had the nerve to turn toward my mother and say, ‘But the signora is not offended.' She immediately retorted, ‘But I am offended!' In other words, they acted like complete jerks.

“Somehow this message did not get through to the public. Throughout the trial, the terrorists were depicted wearing a halo of social commitment, as combatants rather than as losers who had waged an armed struggle to escape their bleak lives, people who were poor in ideas and spirit. The only one who made an impression on me was the cell leader, Vittorio Alfieri. He was always quiet and attentive, and today he is a free man, living in seclusion. After the trial, he wrote us a confidential letter of apology. I don't know what became of the others. I don't think that any of them are still behind bars and frankly I don't care. Luckily the people who murdered my father weren't famous enough to be on television, to give interviews, or to be covered in the newspapers. This was one indignity, at least, that I was spared.

“Once I ran into one of the defendants from the trial at a children's playground. I'd memorized his face. When I saw him again, I froze. I wanted to go up to him and say, ‘Look, I know who you are. I saw you in the cage.' That's all. But I regret to say that I never got up the courage to do it.

“I have the impression that society as a whole has only a superficial respect for us and for those who died, under the rubric, ‘the family's suffering.' But here at the hospital I find real traces of my father that go beyond the plaques and the commemorations. He is still alive in the memories of the many nurses who studied with him, and in the memories of some of his colleagues. They stop me in the corridors and tell me stories that fill me with emotion, and I feel as if he is near me.”

Francesca remembers clearly her father's bitterness when he came under fire at the hospital for testifying at the trial of nurses associated with the militant group Autonomia Operaia who were accused of sabotage. Some militant orderlies had pulled the plug on refrigerators containing blood for transfusions, so it had to be thrown out. They wanted to prove that the system didn't work and had to be brought down. For them the hospital was the symbol of a corrupt society, and Dr. Marangoni a criminal for enabling it to function. By throwing a wrench in the works, they thought they were releasing the social tensions needed to bring about the revolution.

Rather than praising him for his courage in standing up to the saboteurs, some hospital workers passed out leaflets attacking him. “That morning I had a test in classical Greek. I was in my first year of high school at the Liceo Classico Beccaria, and when I got back home he was very upset. He served on the committee that authorized thermal spa treatments, and his opponent had accused him of denying treatments to workers in order to curry favor with the bosses.” He had been receiving threats for some time. “I knew, but I didn't think that anything
would really happen. But one morning he explained to me that he wouldn't be accompanying me to school anymore. It was best not to take the same route every day. He was afraid they were going to kneecap him. He said, ‘Who knows whether I'll still be able to walk or ski?' They chose to go after him also because he was an easy target. If we had lived in the center of town, on a small narrow street where you couldn't loiter or hide, then maybe he would still be alive today.”

Instead their apartment was in front of the San Siro stadium, on a spacious street, and Luigi Marangoni was killed while he was driving his car through the gate to the road. His wife, Vanna, was looking out the window to see him off, as she did every morning. “It was my way of trying to protect him,” she told me a few hours after my conversation with her daughter. “That day I heard something popping, but it was Carnival, so I thought it was just firecrackers. Then I noticed that his car had stopped and that the exit was blocked by a white Fiat Ritmo waiting by the side of the road. Two people wearing berets and dark glasses jumped into the Fiat and took off. A little further up the road they picked up a third person. My husband's car wasn't moving. It was then that I said to myself, ‘It's happened. This time it's really happened.' I ran downstairs in my bathrobe and nightgown. The doorwoman tried to stop me: ‘Don't go out. They're shooting.' I told her, ‘Don't you understand? They're shooting at my husband!' When I was outside, I didn't see him, so I thought they'd kidnapped him, which gave me some hope. But when I got closer to the car I realized that he was slumped back against the seat. I opened the door, fell to my knees, and put my arms around him. He was covered with broken glass, and was losing a lot of blood from his neck. I placed my hand over his face so he could feel me, to give him some warmth, even though there was nothing left to do. I realized that our life together had just ended and I told him, ‘We
have to say good-bye.' I closed his eyes before they put him in the ambulance.”