‘I haven’t been a good father to you and your brother. A good father would stay with his children, even if he went to jail. I would have come back to Italy and put up with my trial. But what should I say, Robespierre? I did what I thought was the right thing to do. Helping these people to build socialism. That’s what I fought for. And now I think it may not have been worth it. Now everything’s crumbling. I’m like an exile. Milena has passed away and I’m alone like a dog, without children, without a companion, without a country and without socialism. And you know what I regret the most?’ It was a sincere, stunned question. ‘That I can’t bring myself to be sorry. I can’t think that it was a mistake. It was right to try, and if you want me to speak with all sincerity, I’d say it wasn’t wrong, even now that Tito’s turning into Stalin. Perhaps I’m wrong, Robespierre. I know it wasn’t right for you and Nicola, I know you deserved a more normal father who would sacrifice himself for you. But here I had met Milena, I had fought shoulder to shoulder with her, we loved one another. Here there was a country to make, there was socialism, there was the revolution, you understand? A new society. And in Italy there was no such thing. If I had come back, I would have spent the rest of my life regretting that I hadn’t done my part here. There you are, I’ve told you quite openly, and perhaps now you will hate me even more than Nicola does. But it’s the truth, and now you’re grown up you’ll be able to understand. If I could go back, I would still make the same choice.’
Pierre saw himself again in Italo’s cellar, at the age of thirteen, next to Nicola, a thin and bony 21-year-old. His father was a vague, dark outline and a deep voice. During the war years, he had been a fairy tale character for him, a presence that visited him at night, before he went to sleep, in Aunt Iolanda’s stories and his own childhood fantasies. He imagined he was fighting against innumerable ruthless enemies, on the hills of a foreign land, like a warrior of old. His last tangible memory was the smell of his black leather jacket, that night. The smell of tanning. ‘Nicola, Robespierre, listen carefully. I can’t stay with you. I’ve come back here under cover, you understand? In hiding. Because if they discover that I’ve come back to Italy they’ll put me in jail. I have to go away again. But Aunt Iolanda will look after you, she loves you as though you were her own sons. I’ll always write to you. And one day you will come to live in Yugoslavia, in a better country, where the people are free and happy. But you can’t do that now, it’s too dangerous. I’ve come back to tell you this. Nicola, look after your brother, you understand? You’re the head of the family now.’
Pierre woke as though from a dream and clearly knew what it was that he wanted to say, what for days he had carried within him without getting to the bottom of it. He looked at Vittorio, sitting on the camp bed, enveloped in the same darkness as before. But he was no longer swathed in a mythical aura. He was just a man. And he was his father.
‘Nicola doesn’t hate you, dad. It was disappointment that made him like that. He admired you too much, and he felt betrayed. You understand? He went into the mountains with the partisans because you had taught him to be an anti-fascist. You were the one who brought him up that way. He joined the brigade for you as well. And he wanted you to see him, to admire him. And instead he took that bullet in the leg, and when the war was over you decided to stay here. He wanted to show you he was proud of what you had done. You were our hero. You were the one who had never bowed his head to the fascists. The one who had deserted so as not to kill innocent people. The one who had gone to a foreign country to fight the revolution that he hadn’t been able to fight in Italy. But you were also our father, Christ alive! And although you were fine as a hero, as a father you had abandoned us. They were hard years, of course they were. Aunt Iolanda bent over backwards to make the best of things. It was a stroke of luck that the bar came up. It was the Party that dragged us out of the shit, not you. You were far away. As far away as Ulysses. You can’t choose your parents. And you can’t not love them. Or hate them if they abandon you.’
Vittorio Capponi looked at his son. What he was looking for was a lesson, a lesson in life from a man half his age, whom he had abandoned one day to follow his fighting nature. At that moment he would have accepted anything at all, all the hatred in the world. He was ready, perhaps he had been for ten years.
Pierre screwed up his face, he made an effort, but understood that he would have to let the words flow.
‘And yet parents, before they are parents, are individuals. That’s what I think, I’ve taken a great deal of time to think about it. Perhaps I came here specifically to tell you that. For many years I wished I had a father like everyone else. A father who would have helped us, who would even have risked jail to take care of us. But the truth is that if you had made that choice, you wouldn’t have been you. You would have given up what you considered the right thing to do. And that would have made you a failure. A failure as a person, I mean. By making the choice you made, you failed as a father, but you followed your ideas, your feelings. So you taught us that living means believing in justice and building your own destiny, not having it imposed upon you by other people. And for that reason, in spite of everything, you’re a better person than many of the people I see in the bar, who have a house, a moped, L’Unità in their pocket, they have time to chat with their friends, and they don’t want to make any choices any more. Perhaps their children are graduates and postgraduates now, perhaps they have good jobs, but they will never know what I know.’
Two tears hung from his eyelashes. They stayed there, poised, they didn’t fall and they didn’t dry up. His father remained motionless; perhaps he had the same lump in his throat.
Pierre went on: ‘There, that’s what I came to tell you. That what has happened cannot be erased, but it’s too late to hate you and it’s too late for you to go on feeling guilty. It doesn’t do anyone any good.’
He gritted his teeth. Pierre hated sentimentality, he could only be sentimental with women, not among men, not between father and son.
He got to his feet, picked up his case and opened the front door. Radko slipped out, hungry for the morning air.
On the threshold the two men considered one another for a moment, embarrassed by the intimacy of their words.
‘You’ve said some important things, Robespierre.’
‘I’ve spoken the truth, dad.’
Vittiorio produced two envelopes from his shirt pocket and handed them to his son.
‘One letter for Nicola and one for Iolanda. I find it very hard to write in Italian, but I think they’ll manage to read it anyway. Talk to your brother and tell him I love him.’
Pierre nodded and didn’t say anything else.
They shook hands like old friends.
‘Good luck.’
‘You too.’
Finally they hugged.
When he had reached the top of the hill overlooking the house, his father’s whistle fetched back Radko, who had escorted him to that point.
Pierre turned around and saw him standing in the doorway, the old communist partisan exhausted by life. What he felt was not compassion. It would not have been fair; Vittorio had made his own choice and had not regretted it. He knew he had not said everything there was to be said, that he had held some things back, and for a moment his instinct told him to run back down there as well.
You’ve passed on your illness to me. I’ve made false papers to come here. Even I can’t accept the destiny they want to impose on me. I’ve got a job, a talent for dancing, a lover and no prospects. I can go on being a barman, dancing myself breathless, meeting my girlfriend in secret, while she still wants to do that. Is that all? Is there nothing else? Is that supposed to be enough for me? No, dad, it’s not enough, there’s got to be something else, perhaps somewhere else, perhaps in another world, just as there was for you. Perhaps that’s also why I’ve never managed to hate you. Because I’m like you too. I need more than the conversations in the bar.