Renato is visited by Carlo Miranda* and Gianfranco Cimmino.*
I go to see him every day. He accepts life among the patients calmly. He understands his incarceration as a special brand of human experience. But we are all concerned. Occasionally, when he is allowed to, we drive my car out into the country, have lunch at a little restaurant and speak of mathematics, war and women.
In 1938 Guccio Gucci (1881–1953) opens his first shop in Rome; his woman’s bag with bamboo handle is a hit.
In 1938 Italy wins the World Cup in football.
In September 1938 Mussolini abrogates the civil rights of Italian Jews.
In November 1938 a domestic version of the Nuremberg Laws comes into effect in Italy.
In 1938 King Vittorio Emmanuele III publicly supports Benito Mussolini in signing the Race Laws, according to which all Jews may be cleansed from the Government, the university, the army and other public services, and their rights to schooling and property ownership strictly limited.
In November 1938 Florian Tedeschi loses his job.
They know I am a Jew, he says. The night is balmy. The windows are open. The sea is murmuring. There is no moon.
At university they tell the professors Wear your black shirts, which does not appeal to most of them. Italian mathematics loses its finest people. Tullio Levi-Civita* is fired from the University of Padua, other universities fire Vito Voltera* Guido Fubini* and Beniamino Segre.* Enrico Fermi* goes to Stockholm in 1938 (with special permission from the Fascist government) to receive the Nobel Prize and does not return. Renato Caccioppoli is released from the asylum in 1943, organizes a railway strike and is nearly killed when strike-breakers disrupt the gathering. He takes part in meetings of the Italian Communist Party, sits often on the editorial board of Unitá, and with Unità’s editors, his friends Mario Palermo and Renzo Lapiccerello, he makes the rounds of the bistros, most often Gambrinus and out-of-the-way taverns where, until late into the night, with beer, grappa, cognac or Strega, he tries (with his friends) to work out what to do about the Nazis.
After the war, with many honours, as a member of scholarly academies and institutions, Caccioppoli returns to mathematics. He works on film. He plays music. He publishes. Sara Mancuso leaves him. He drinks. He drinks more. He often prefers to be alone. Occasionally, he goes to the opera with an old priest, to concerts of classical music, and then retreats again into his ravaged universes.
Into Euclidian realms and realms of his own. This is what he looks like:
On Friday, 8 May, 1959, around noon, he strolls along his favourite Via Chiaia, he has a short cappuccino and two grappas. He goes home. He waits for his best friend Giuseppe Scorzo Dragoni to arrive from Rome. Giuseppe is one day late.
That evening he shoots himself in the head.
The asteroid 9934 1985 UC is given the name Caccioppoli. Mario Martone makes a film about him. The Mathematics Department at the University of Naples is named Renato Caccioppoli.
Behind every name there is a story.
Frantic, on 14 December, 1938, Florian Tedeschi humbly requests to be received by the banker Pasquale Simonelli.*
Four days later Florian Tedeschi sits in a salon at Villa Simonelli and with a trembling hand he brings a cup of fine, nearly transparent Chinese porcelain to his lips. He quietly sips the black tea. Inanely, though maybe not, he says: My wife adores Gigli. And I, too, adore Gigli. Simonelli says not a word.
Simonelli is a large man, and what’s more, he’s portly. Next to him Florian is tiny. Florian is wearing a beige trench coat, rumpled and tattered, which he doesn’t take off while he sips Simonelli’s tea. Seven days later, Florian Tedeschi goes to Tirana where a job as an accountant awaits him at a large construction consortium. Everything is as it should be. Florian is not plagued by doubts. In 1938, of the 47,000 Jews then living in Italy, 10,000 are card-carrying members of the Fascist Party.
In early April 1939 Italy attacks Albania. The Albanian Parliament votes to be annexed to Italy. King Zog flees to Greece. In Naples Ada sells her furniture, bedding and rugs; she gives away their clothes. In May the family are reunited. Florian makes headway at his job. He is proud. He buys a new suit, Italian, a new trench coat, black, that he tightens with a belt. In Tirana they tell him You are being transferred to the Banca di Napoli. You are going to Vlorë. The climate is mild there and you can swim in summer. So, the Tedeschi family swim that summer.
Vlorë has many names which are differently spelt and pronounced, more names than Gorizia, and all of these names pour into the town on an inlet covered by a blue cloak of air, over which, at night, the mountains whistle. Aulon, Avlon, Avlona, Avlonya, Vallona, Valona, Vlona, Vljora, Vlonë, Vlorë. Olives, black and oiled like the eyes that open Haya’s first kiss with Ludovik, whose yellow shirt has a hole on the right shoulder. Ada’s vegetable pastries, lambs from Karaburun, cold yoghurt before leaving for school, where, as in Naples, there hang portraits of Vittorio Emmanuele and Mussolini, harapash, toasts with Falanghina. A new waystation on the journey, the route of which Haya cannot discern. Vlorë, like a pocket-sized Naples. An Italian school, Italian neighbours, Italian chocolate. A romantic trip to the island of Saseno where the troops are stationed (our troops, Florian says), the drip that jiggles on the tip of Ludovik’s nose, misted by Haya’s breath. Valona, fortified just like Gorizia. Her first visit to the theatre. Yet another language for the same departures, the same flights. Sea: det; touch: prekje; fear: frikë flag: flamur; Jew: çifut: war: luftë journey: udhëtim. Sadik Zotaj street, a bench beneath the window on which Haya kneels and waits, waits? Aron, a mohel from Corfu, arrives and circumcises Orestes, while Florian is off touring Banca di Napoli branch offices in the interior. Oh, yes, life is beautiful. It flows by the Tedeschi family, who find palms, sandy beaches and abundant fresh seafood in Valona to eat with Barilla-brand tortiglione. Many years hence, as so often happens in Haya’s old age, the past elbows into her wait like a blow, like a surfacing diver, breaking, transparent and wet, through an elusive wall (of memories), and Valona shimmers before her eyes, completely changed. The bygone decades have formed clusters of insights dwelling in the meanders, the warehouses, the hiding places of her consciousness, wrapped up in the ironed rags of logic, and now they start tumbling out of warped compartments, piling up, like rubbish, around her feet. She tries to bring order to this vast disarray, because after she retires from her job as a maths teacher at the Dante Alighieri Classical Secondary School in Gorizia, she has the time, yes, while she waits, she has the time to wonder How could I not have known? How could I not have seen?