The Italian is not allowed to travel in his own country unless he carries with him a carte d’identité issued by the police authority of his regular abode. Without it, no hotel is allowed to take him in. (He will even be turned away by hospitals.) Leaving the country is a near-impossibility. The authorities issue no passports for abroad. A twenty thousand lire fine and a minimum of three years in prison is the punishment for anyone caught trying to cross the border without a passport.
Further, Italy has the concept of a so-called citizen “of ill repute”. A citizen of this kind has no personal freedoms. He is under constant supervision. The police tell him when he may leave his flat. A police commission is empowered to tell him where he has to live — anywhere in Italy, or the colonies. The police, and they alone, determine his day, his work, his constitutional, his siesta, his sleep. Mussolini’s explanation for this measure goes: “We remove these individuals from normal society in the same way as doctors isolate patients with infectious diseases.”
To extend the dictator’s simile: one would suppose that the isolation of someone struck down with anti-Fascism would be sufficient, and let the healthy do as they please. Alala! Not so! Every public event — whether of a scientific, sporting, or even charitable nature — must give at least one month’s notice to the prefect of police. He must approve the time and place. He is allowed to ban the event. A commission advises him on the course to take. And who sits on this commission? The secretary of the Fascist League of the province in question and next to him the “Podesta”—the commandant of the garrison! Professors, civil servants, students and high school pupils are disbarred from associating in any way — not even for scholarly purposes. (Neither czarist nor contemporary Russia has laws like that.) Not even a memorial service may be held without police permission. The police reserve the right to determine place and time of any public meeting. And it isn’t hard to imagine that where the police, for certain reasons, finds itself unable or unwilling to ban something outright, it will still set a time and a place that will make the meeting impractical or ineffectual in advance.
You understand why my host goes in fear of his janitor. The janitor has become, by police practice, a sort of conduit of opinion. The law is aware of citizens “generally regarded as of ill repute”, and the catspaws of these laws are unable to walk into buildings and listen and hear the sources of this ill repute for themselves. They rely instead on tale-bearers. From the time of Metternich, janitors have been the eyes and ears of the police.
The Italian citizen goes in fear of the newspaper vendor on the corner, the cigarette seller and the barber, the porter and the beggar, the neighbour in the tram, and the conductor. And the cigarette seller, the barber, the neighbour, the traveller and the conductor are all afraid of one another. When I asked my friend, in a café in Milan on the day of Nobile’s arrival, not expecting a serious reply and really only to break his gloomy silence: “What do you think of Nobile then?” he promptly replied: “I take no interest in politics.” “You mean the North Pole?” “No,” he insisted, “in politics.” And he opened his newspaper and immersed himself in an article about military manoeuvres.
I have been browsing in Mussolini’s speeches, and the following passage caught my eye: “I want you to be convinced that in Fascist Italy every minister and every secretary of state is nothing but a soldier. They will go wherever their commander orders them, and when I tell them to stay, they stay.” I look up, and catch a familiar face. Two tables away from me, with a floppy red and white necktie on his chest, a sleekly pomaded head craning forward to listen, a thin cane on the chair beside him, a hand with flashing pink nails dangled over the chairback, a cowardly smile that he thinks is engaging — there is the friend of my hotel. He has picked up that we are talking in a foreign language. What an important moment. In return for two lire fifty he will tell the police about it. Alala!
Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 November 1928
25. Where the World War Began
The World War began in Sarajevo, on a balmy summer afternoon in 1914. It was a Sunday; I was a student at the time. In the afternoon a girl came round. Girls wore plaits in those days. She was carrying a large yellow straw hat in her hand, it was like summer coming to call, with hay, grasshoppers and poppies. In her straw hat was a telegram, the first special edition I had seen, crumpled and terrible, a thunderbolt on paper. “Guess what,” said the girl, “they’ve killed the heir to the throne. My father came home from the café. But we’re not going to stay here, are we?”
I didn’t manage to be quite as deadly serious as her father who had left the café. We rode on the back platform of a tram. Out in the suburbs there was a place where the tram brushed past some jasmine bushes that grew close to the track. We drove along, jingle-jangle, it was like a sleigh-ride in summer. The girl was light-blue, soft, close, with cool breath, a morning on an afternoon. She had brought me the news from Sarajevo, the name was visible over her, picked out in dark red smoke, like an inferno over a clueless child.
A year and a half later — strange how durable love could be in peacetime! — there she was again, at the goods station, surrounded by smoke, platform two, music was blaring out, wagons screeched, locomotives whistled, little shivering women hung like withered wreaths on green men, the brand new uniforms smelled of finish, we were an infantry company, our destination secret, but thought to be Serbia. Probably we were both thinking of that Sunday, the telegram, Sarajevo. Her father hadn’t been to a café since, he was in a mass grave.
Today, thirteen years after that first shot, I am seeing Sarajevo. Innocent, accursed city, still standing! Sorry repository of the grimmest catastrophes. Unmoved! No rain of fire has descended on it, the houses are intact, girls are just going home from school, though plaits are no longer in fashion. It’s one o’clock. The sky is blue satin. The station where the Archduke arrived, Death waiting for him, is some way outside the city. A wide, dusty road, part-asphalted, part-gravel, leads off to the left into the city. Trees, thickly crowned, dark and dusty, leftovers from a time when the road was still an avenue, are now irregularly sprinkled along its edge. We are sitting in a spacious courtesy bus from the hotel. We drive through streets, along the river bank — there, that corner there is where the World War began. Nothing has changed. I am looking for bloodstains. They have been removed. Thirteen years, innumerable rains, millions of people have washed away the blood. The young people are coming home from school; did they learn about the World War, I wonder?
The main street is very quiet. At the top end of it is a small Turkish cemetery, stone flowers in a small garden for the dead. At its lower edge an Oriental bazaar begins. Just about the middle of it, facing one another, are two big hotels, with café terraces. The wind browses indifferently through old newspapers and fallen leaves. Waiters stand by at the doors, more to verify than to assist the tourist trade. Old policemen lean against the walls, recalling peace, the pre-War. One has whiskers, a ghost of the old double monarchy. Very old men, probably retired notaries, speak the army German of Austrian days. A bookseller deals in paper and books and literary journals — mostly for symbolic purposes. I pick up a Maupassant from him (although he has Dekobra in stock as well) for a night ahead on a train without a wagon-lit. We get to talking. I learn that literary interest has ebbed in Sarajevo. There is a teacher who subscribes to a couple of literary weeklies. (It’s good to know that such teachers still exist!)