‘Stop it, all of you! No one’s going to be shot here.’
The captain blanched. ‘Capponi, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Farina! Piras! I’ll have you court-martialled!’
The other soldiers looked on in astonishment. Shrugs, unease.
‘Captain, drop your gun.’
‘This is desertion, you’re crazy!’
‘Drop the gun or Farina will shoot you.’
The officer didn’t move, the weapon was pointed at his temple, his teeth were clenched with rage. His thoughts raced, paralysing his brain.
‘Captain, if you drop the gun we’ll let you go.’
He hissed, ‘Capponi, I always knew you were a fucking communist. And what do you think you’re doing? Eh? And the rest of you, what the fuck are you doing standing there like idiots? Do you want to get shot too?’
No one replied. Eyes met, but just for a second. No clues about what to do. They knew only that if they disarmed their comrades they would have to shoot them along with the others.
The line broke up; they went and stood, unsure what was going to happen.
The men against the wall stared wide-eyed at the scene.
‘Chuck the gun away.’
The officer’s jaw was locked so firmly that he couldn’t say a word. He took the weapon from its holster and let it fall to the ground.
Capponi picked it up and slipped it into his belt.
‘You can go,’ he said, turning back to the condemned men. ‘And so can you.’
He waved a hand and, incredulously, one after the other, they ran for the mountains.
‘Listen carefully, all of you. Anyone who wants to come with us, Farina, Piras and I are heading off to find the rebels. You do what you want, but as the captain said, if our men catch you, they might well shoot you, because you stood and watched. And you did the right thing, because killing people like these is a job for pigs.’
The three men picked up their rucksacks and put them over their shoulders.
‘Oh, one moment, Romagna, you got us into this situation, you’ve got to get us out of it.’
‘No, romano. It was Cavaliere Benito Mussolini who got us into this situation. Now it’s up to each of us to make our own decisions.’
‘And what about us, where are we supposed to go?’
Farina passed them with a box of ammunition he had removed from the truck they had arrived in. ‘You come into the hills with us.’
‘Where the bandits are? But they’ll shoot us!’
Capponi shook his head. ‘Don’t you worry, they won’t shoot us. You follow me.’
‘Yeah, don’t worry,’ he said. He headed towards the truck, cursing.
‘What are you doing? Are you going with them?’ asked one of the others.
The Roman shrugged. ‘What am I going to do here?’ He pointed to the captain. ‘I don’t trust him one bit. Whatever happens he’ll bang us in the slammer. And he’s just as capable of having us lined up and shot. Never liked him anyway.’
He picked up his rucksack again. ‘If my wife could see me now. Fuck the lot of you, your father and your —’ As he turned around he caught a sudden movement, the captain taking something out of the interpreter’s belt.
‘Oi!!!’
Vittorio Capponi fired first, and the captain fell flat, his skull shattered. A dark object rolled at his side.
‘It’s a hand grenade!’
They all threw themselves on the ground, hands over their heads, holding their breath.
Nothing happened.
After a while someone opened his eyes again.
Then he stretched his neck.
Finally he risked going over to it.
They were all frozen, looking at the spot where the officer’s body lay, and which could have sucked their lives away.
Someone thanked the Madonna del Carmine for making the Duce’s weapons so crap.
Someone else spat.
The interpreter sat where he was with his hands in the air. ‘Don’t shoot, ’Talians! Don’t shoot, me innocent!’ But no one paid him any attention.
Farina nodded to Capponi to move. ‘Come on, Romagna, let’s get going.’
The three of them set off up the path at a fair old pace, with the Sardinian in front as a scout.
The Roman, unconvinced, followed them, stumbling and turning around several times to look at the corpse, almost as though he expected to see it getting back up. The others said nothing. Dejected gestures. Finally, one at a time, they picked up their rucksacks and set off in Indian file behind the others.
II Free territory of Trieste, 5 November 1953
The architect and poet Carlo Alberto Rizzi left home at ten o’clock in the morning. His beard perfectly trimmed, tall, slim and as proud as though he were posing for an equestrian statue, he looked around for a moment, adjusted the tricolour flag bundled up under his duffelcoat and finally set off towards Sant’Antonio Nuovo, where the students would shortly be assembling.
The sound of distant voices, shouting and singing, carried on the wind. The city was demonstrating against General Winterton’s abuse of power, and for the restoration of Trieste and all the occupied territories. The processions had been organised the previous evening, and couriers had run from house to house in defiance of the checks by the Anglo-Americans who had occupied the city for nine years.
Nine years, during which Rizzi had sent letters to the papers, dispatched petitions to the authorities and declaimed fiery patriotic poems in theatres and cafés.
At the age of forty-six, Rizzi thought of himself as ‘a liberal of the old stamp’, and he grieved for his city, occupied by the Germans in ’43, by Tito in ’45 and by the Anglo-Americans shortly after that.
The great powers didn’t want the people of Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia to be able to choose their own fate, as Italians among Italians. Trieste had become a limbo, scornfully known as the ‘Free Territory’. Neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowclass="underline" the city and the northern territories assigned to the Allied military government and identified as ‘zone A’; to the south of the city boundaries, ‘zone B’ administered by Yugoslavia. The humiliating imposition was sanctioned by the so-called ‘Peace Treaty’ of ’47. But whose peace?
The streets of Trieste were patrolled by the police force of the AMG, whose riot squad had been nicknamed ‘Tito’s Fifth Column’ because of the violence with which it suppressed the demonstrations by the Italians. As to Zone B, Tito used an iron fist to eradicate every last trace of Italian identity.
It was time for them to regain their lost dignity. Perhaps that very day, 5 November, would be the day of truth.
Sleepless, incapable of interrupting his own ruminations, he had watched dawn rise from the window of his bedroom.
On 8 October hope had almost been rekindled, with the promised restoration of Zone A to Italy. But on 3 November, the thirtysixth anniversary of the liberation of Trieste, General John Winterton had forbidden any patriotic commemorative demonstration. Despite the prohibition, Mayor Bartoli had hoisted the tricolour on the roof of the city hall. Winterton had ordered it to be furled and confiscated, subsequently refusing to return it to the council.
On 4 November, the anniversary of the victory of the Great War, Rizzi had gone to the demonstration in Redipuglia, the first village beyond the ‘border’. In the military cemetery, a large crowd was commemorating the liberation from the Austrian yoke by demanding liberation from the Slavic one. Rizzi’s eyes had misted over at the sight of the delegations of the occupied cities: Zara, Cherso, Lussino, Isola. Unforgettable. That evening, returning to Trieste by train, the men and women had not gone home in dribs and drabs, but had filed through the streets in little processions, and then merged together in a large spontaneous demonstration. In the Piazza dell’Unità, by now more than a thousand people had stopped in front of the city hall and the Caffè degli Specchi. An English police officer had come out of the main entrance of the Prefecture, attacked and beaten the procession’s standard-bearer and torn the tricolour from his hands. At that very moment the riot squad had arrived, all black raincoats and rifles, and taken on the demonstrators. They, Rizzi included, had defended themselves by smashing up the chairs and tables of the café, using the legs as maces. During the chaos, Rizzi had, by some miracle, succeeded in recovering the standardbearer’s tricolour, which he now had about his person, folded up between his jacket and his coat.