“Yes, the Beast of Via San Gregorio, the Soap Maker of Correggio, the Monster of the Via Salaria...”
“Ah, well, don’t be sarcastic. Perhaps not the cases immediately after the war, but for the rest it’s more convenient, as they say, to see just one story dominated by a single virtual figure who seemed to direct the traffic from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, even though no one could see him. Skeletons can always appear at night,” he said, pointing to the silent hosts around us, “and perform their danse macabre. You know, there are more things in heaven and earth, etc. etc. But it’s clear, once the Soviet threat was over, that Gladio was officially consigned to the attic, and both Cossiga and Andreotti talked about it to exorcise its ghost, to present it as something normal that happened with the approval of the authorities, of a community made up of patriots, like the Carbonari in bygone times. But is it really all over, or are certain diehard groups still working away in the shadows? I think there is more to come.”
He looked around, frowned: “But we’d better leave now, I don’t like the look of that Japanese group coming in. Oriental spies are everywhere, and now that China’s at it, they can understand all languages.”
As we left, I took a deep breath and asked him, “But you’ve checked it all out?”
“I’ve spoken to well-informed people and I’ve sought the advice of our colleague Lucidi. Perhaps you don’t know he has links with the secret services.”
“I know, I know. But do you trust him?”
“They’re people used to keeping their silence, don’t worry. I need a few more days to gather other cast-iron evidence — cast-iron, I say — then I’ll go to Simei and present him with the results of my investigation. Twelve installments for twelve zero issues.”
That evening, to forget about the bones at San Bernardino, I took Maia out for a candlelight dinner. I didn’t of course mention Gladio, I avoided dishes that involved taking anything off the bone, and was slowly emerging from my afternoon ordeal.
16
Saturday, June 6
Braggadocio spent several days that week putting together his scoop and the whole of Thursday morning hunkered down with Simei in his office. They reemerged around eleven o’clock, with Simei commending him, “Check the information once again, thoroughly. I don’t want any risks.”
“Don’t worry,” replied Braggadocio, radiating high spirits and optimism. “This evening I’m meeting someone I can trust. I’ll do one last check.”
Meanwhile the news team were all busily arranging the regular pages for the first zero issue: sports, Palatino’s games, letters of denial, horoscopes, and death notices.
“No matter how much we invent,” said Costanza at one point, “I’ll bet you we won’t manage to fill even those twenty-four pages. We need more news.”
“All right,” said Simei. “Perhaps you can lend a hand, Colonna.”
“News doesn’t need to be invented,” I said. “All you have to do is recycle it.”
“How?”
“People have short memories. Taking an absurd example, everyone should know that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March, but memories get muddled. Take a biography recently published in Britain that reexamines the whole story, and all you have to do is come up with a sensational headline, such as ‘Spectacular Discovery by Cambridge Historians: Julius Caesar really assassinated on Ides of March,’ you retell the whole story, and turn it into a thoroughly enjoyable article. Now, the Caesar story is something of an exaggeration, I grant you, but if you talk about the Pio Albergo Trivulzio affair, here you can produce an article along the lines of the Banca Romana collapse. That happened at the end of the nineteenth century and has nothing to do with the present scandals, but one scandal leads to another, all you have to do is refer to rumors, and you’ve got the story of the Banca Romana business as if it happened yesterday. I bet Lucidi would know how to pull a good article out of it.”
“Excellent,” said Simei. “What is it, Cambria?”
“I see an agency report here, another statue of the Madonna crying in a village down south.”
“Terrific, you can turn that into a sensational story!”
“Superstitions all over again—”
“No! We’re not a newsletter for the atheistic and rationalist crowd. People want miracles, not trendy skepticism. Writing about a miracle doesn’t mean compromising ourselves by saying the newspaper believes it. We recount what’s happened, or say that someone has witnessed it. Whether these Virgins actually cry is none of our business. Readers must draw their own conclusions, and if they’re believers, they’ll believe it. With a headline over several columns.”
Everyone worked away in great excitement. I passed Maia’s desk, where she was concentrating on the death notices, and said, “And don’t forget, ‘Family bereft—’”
“‘—and good friend Filiberto shares the grief of beloved Matilde and dearest children Mario and Serena,’” she replied.
“You have to keep up with the times — the new Italian names are Jessyka with a y or Samanta without the h, and even Sue Ellen, written ‘Sciuellen.’” I gave her a smile of encouragement and moved on.
I spent the evening at Maia’s place, succeeding, as happened now and then, in making a cozy love nest out of that bleak den piled with precarious towers of books.
Among the piles were many classical records, vinyl inherited from her grandparents. Sometimes we lay there for hours listening. That evening Maia put on Beethoven’s Seventh, and she told me, her eyes brimming with tears, how ever since her adolescence, the second movement would make her cry. “It started when I was sixteen. I had no money, and thanks to someone I knew, I managed to slip into a concert without paying, except that I had no seat, so I squatted down on the steps in the upper balcony, and little by little I found myself almost lying down. The wood was hard, but I didn’t feel a thing. And during the second movement I thought that’s how I’d like to die, and burst into tears. I was crazy then, but I went on crying even after I’d grown up.”
I had never cried listening to music, but was moved by the fact that she did. After several minutes’ silence, Maia said, “He was a fruitcake.” He who? But Schumann, of course, said Maia, as if I had become distracted. Her autism, as usual.
“Schumann a fruitcake?”
“Yes, loads of romantic outpouring, what you’d expect for that period, but all too cerebral. And by straining his brain he went mad. I can see why his wife fell in love with Brahms. Another temperament, other music, and a bon vivant. Mind you, I’m not saying Robert was bad, I’m sure he had talent, he wasn’t one of those blusterers.”
“Which?”
“Like that bumptious Liszt, or the rambunctious Rachmaninoff. They wrote some terrible music, all stuff for effect, for making money, Concerto for Goons in C Major, things like that. If you look, you’ll find none of their records in that pile. I dumped them. They’d have been better off as farm hands.”
“But who do you think is better than Liszt?”
“Satie, no?”
“But you don’t cry over Satie, do you?”
“Of course not, he wouldn’t have wanted it, I only cry over the second movement of the Seventh.” Then, after a moment’s pause, “I also cry over some Chopin, since my adolescence. Not his concertos, of course.”