So a verdict was reached on the cold. So after that for a few days everyone’s been talking about the snow, because talking about it means judging the work of the snow shovellers, and hence of the communist city administration. And it doesn’t matter if we’re communists, everyone can see that the streets are in a terrible state, so everyone tries to have his say without blaming Mayor Dozza. Because basically no one wants to hand the victory to the reactionaries on the Carlino, which comes out every day with pictures of some snowblocked street or other under a scandalised headline.
‘I’ll tell you this, I’ve still got a good memory,’ says La Gaggia, laying out the fifteen cards. ‘The winter of ’27 was worse. I remember the arcades, they looked like tunnels with all the snow piled up on one side reaching up to the arches.’
Garibaldi shakes his head, folds up his cards and downs the last drop of grappa. Then he raises his eyes and his empty glass to Capponi, on the other side of the bar, too busy arguing with his brother to pay him any attention.
‘Never mind remembering,’ says Bottone excitedly. ‘In ’27 there were still people to sweep away the snow. Just try sweeping it up on Via Saragozza! You could build a whole San Luca arcade on the other side of the street!’
He strikes the table in front of Walterún, who can’t make his mind up whether or not to discard. ‘Come on, pal, this time we’ll thrash them.’
And sure enough, barely has the Pugliese laid his two cards on the table than Gaggia, Bottone’s partner, reveals four queens and gets off to a great start with twenty-eight points.
‘It’ll take a bit of nerve!’ says Bottone, throwing down a card in the suit of coins. ‘Tell me what the mayor has to do with snow in the street. No, really, spell it out for me. Does he choose the people who are supposed to do the shovelling?’
La Gaggia is about to speak, but Bottone is off. ‘No, because you’d think that everyone here’s a Party member. But in fact everyone knows that the snow shovellers are completely useless, they don’t want to lift a finger.’ He concentrates on the game for a moment, then he starts up again. ‘Where’s the surprise in that? Is there anyone left in the world who can do his job properly? No, all the decent people have retired, 5,000 lire a month and thanks very much, and then you’ve got these other blokes who are taking half a million to sit and warm their arses.’ His tone rises, his voice trembles, his clear eyes widen. ‘By God, they’re lucky we’re old,’ and here, as ever, his finger starts knocking on the table, ‘because if I had a button to launch an atom bomb and wipe out the lot of them, maybe a few innocent people would get killed as well, but I’d press it anyway, I can guarantee you that,’ he almost shouts, throws the king of cups on the table and finds himself trumped by Garibaldi with a Moor.
Bottone is one of the best tarocchino players in the bar. We all know that it’s almost impossible for him to make a mistake; the only thing is to hope that he gets nerves, because if he starts off on his talk about the atom bomb and the button, he can easily throw away his hand. And he delivers this speech at least once a day, on the most diverse themes, his finger knocking on the table and the atomic mushroom that will wipe out all injustice. That’s why Rino Gualandi is known to everyone as Bottone, or Button.
The only one who doesn’t pipe up about the snow is Walterún. Partly because he needs to concentrate on the cards, because he isn’t exactly a champion player, but more importantly because he spent seventeen years in Manfredonia, near Bari, and then thirty in Milan, where he was a labourer, and he only came here twelve years ago. So his opinion does count, but it just fills up the conversation, because it’s only as a matter of curiosity that he wants to know how much snow there was in the Piazza del Duomo in ’28.
Anyway, the weather — the past and the temperature — is a subject for old men, the ones who treat the Bar Aurora as a second home: tarocchino and chatter. The ones who are still working, meanwhile, are in the billiard room, talking about sport and women. But what’s important isn’t so much what they’re talking about, or who’s doing it, you must always respect the Rule: don’t speak under your breath, if you have to whisper in a corner go and confess to the priest, don’t come here, no one’s interested. Here we talk in threes, in fours, sometimes the whole bar all at once, because there are topics like cycling or politics that inflame people’s emotions and make them raise their voices. Then there are the rare times when someone takes offence and fails to show up for a while, we all remember those, and also the ones, even rarer, when someone gets a bit plastered and the fists fly, there’s a bit of pushing, a few slaps, and the more sober among us have to intervene. Like that time in ’48, when Stalin threw Tito out of the Cominform, and we were all here talking till daybreak, with the shutter half down.
The younger men, on the other hand, never talk about anything at all. They pretend they’ve just dropped by in passing, so they never take their coats off, even if they never go anywhere. But some of them do, like the filuzzi dancers, for example, show up looking like they’ve stepped out of an American movie, with their mackintoshes on and smoking their cigarettes without their hands, and you’d think they were about to order a whisky, and instead it’s always a Fernet or a Sambuca. Afterwards off they go to the dance hall, and some of them have routines that would put Fred Astaire to shame. We like it when they drop in to have a drop before going dancing, because we all feel a bit like those men with their towels over their shoulders who massage boxers before they go into the ring. Because Robespierre Capponi, known to everyone as Pierre, is the best dancer in the Party cell, in the quarter, perhaps in the whole of Bologna. And Nicola nags him the whole time, when he can’t get up in the morning because he got home late, but he also knows that we’re proud to have the Filuzzi King pouring our drinks, we’re proud to have him in our bar.
Nicola Capponi, known to us all just as Capponi, with that deep voice of his, it’s better not to wind him up. At closing time, he croaks something, gets out the sawdust and starts stacking the chairs. Then even the ones who have stayed until late get up and head for home, but almost regretfully, and you’d almost think that if they didn’t have to close the place we’d just stay there all the time.
Chapter 3
Agnano Allied base, Naples, 6 January
They’d brought him there shortly before Christmas. A present for the troops, the showpiece for the new recreation area. Then Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, back to the family, holidays; work had been suspended and he had been left there with only two armchairs, a table, the old jukebox and the picture of the president for company.
What a situation! The inactivity was really exhausting. Doubts and hypochondria racked his self-belief. Will I still be able to do my work properly? Will they be able to get me to work so far away from home? Will I still make people laugh, keep them interested with the news, move them? McGuffin had no answers. He consoled himself by thinking about past glories, and every now and again, to keep hope alive, he peeped out of the door, hoping that someone might pay him a little attention.
Fully assembled on 16 February 1953 in the factories of McGuffin Electric, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he had been one of the first deluxe models turned out by the company. At the end of the month the Bainton family had bought him in an electrical goods shop in Baltimore. From his very first beginnings, McGuffin had proved to be a truly extraordinary television set. On 5 March, after less than a month of life, he had delighted the master of the house with the sensational news of the death of Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin. Thanks to the internally illuminated tube, none of the members of the family had worn their eyes out following the interminable live broadcast of the sentence passed on Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, accused of spying for the Soviet Union and subsequently condemned to death. On the seventeen-inch rectangular screen, even grandmother Margaret, a half-blind octogenarian, had managed to make out the few images of the signing of the armistice in Pam Mun Jon, in Korea. It was 27 July. Less than a month afterwards, McGuffin had announced that Moscow possessed thermonuclear bombs like the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That had been his final scoop. Since then, nothing. He had been switched off one evening in mid-August, and never switched back on again.