The next record had been put in the stack by mistake, it had nothing to do with the sky, just a sensual voice, like a saxophone in heat, that sang:
Up there at Capocabana, at Capocabana the woman is queen, and she reigns supreme…
I was disturbed by the noise of a distant engine, maybe a car going through the valley. I felt a hint of tachycardia and said to myself: "It’s Pipetto!" As if someone had shown up precisely at the expected moment, someone whose arrival had disturbed me nonetheless. Who was Pipetto? It’s Pipetto, I kept saying, but once again it was just my lips that remembered. Just flatus vocis. I did not know who Pipetto was. Or rather, something in me knew, but that something was simmering slyly in the injured region of my brain.
An excellent topic for My Children’s Library: The Secret of Pipetto. Perhaps it was the Italian adaptation of The Secret of Lantenac?
I racked my brain for the secret of Pipetto, and maybe there was no secret, except the one whispered to the world from a radio late at night.
9. But Pippo Doesn’t Know
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Other days (five, seven, ten?) have blurred together in my memory, which is just as well, since what that left me with was, so to speak, the quintessence of a montage. I put disparate pieces of evidence together, cutting and joining, sometimes according to a natural progression of ideas and emotions, sometimes to create contrast. What resulted was no longer what I had seen and heard in the course of those days, nor what I might have seen and heard as a child: it was a figment, a hypothesis formed at the age of sixty about what I could have thought at ten. Not enough to say, "I know it happened like this," but enough to bring to light, on papyrus pages, what I presumably might have felt back then.
I had returned to the attic, and I was beginning to worry that none of my school things remained when my eyes lit upon a cardboard box, sealed with adhesive tape, on which appeared the words ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE YAMBO. There was another, labeled ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE ADA, but I did not need to reactivate my sister’s memory. I had enough to do with my own.
I wanted to avoid another week of high blood pressure. I called Amalia and had her help me carry the box down to my grandfather’s study. Then it occurred to me that I must have been in elementary and middle school between 1937 and 1945, and so I also brought down the boxes labeled WA R, 1940s, and FASCISM.
In the study, I took everything out and arranged it on various shelves. Books from elementary school, history and geography texts from middle school, and lots of notebooks, with my name, year, and class. There were lots of newspapers. Apparently my grandfather, from the war in Ethiopia on, had kept the important issues: the one with the historic speech by Mussolini proclaiming the birth of the Italian Empire, the one from June 10, 1940, with the declaration of war, and so on until the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and the end of the war. There were also postcards, posters, leaflets, and a few magazines.
I decided to proceed using the historian’s method, subjecting evidence to cross-comparison. That is to say, when I was reading my books and notebooks from fourth grade, 1940-41, I would also browse through the newspapers from the same years and, whenever I could, put songs from those years on the record player.
Because the books of the period were pro-Fascist, I had assumed that the newspapers would be, too. Everyone knows, for example, that Pravda in Stalin’s day didn’t provide the good citizens of the Soviet Union with accurate news. But I was forced to reconsider. As breathlessly propagandistic as the Italian papers could be, still they allowed readers, even in wartime, to figure out what was going on. Across a distance of many years, my grandfather was giving me a great lesson, civic and historiographic at once: You have to know how to read between the lines. And read between the lines he had, underscoring not so much the banner headlines as the inbriefs, the also-noteds, the news one might miss on a first reading. One issue of Corriere della Sera, from January 6-7, 1941, offered this headline: BATTLE ON THE BARDIA FRONT WAGED WITH GREAT FEROCITY. In the middle of the column, the war bulletin (there was one each day, a bureaucratic listing of such things as the number of enemy aircraft shot down) stated coolly that "other strongholds fell after courageous resistance from our troops, who inflicted substantial losses on the adversary." Other strongholds? From the context it was clear that Bardia, in North Africa, had fallen into British hands. In any case, my grandfather had made a note in red ink in the margin, as he had in many issues: "RL, lost B. 40,000 pris." RL apparently meant Radio London, and my grandfather was comparing the Radio London news with the official news. Not only had Bardia been lost, but forty thousand soldiers had been handed over to the enemy. As one can see, the Corriere had not lied, it had merely taken for granted the facts about which it had remained reticent. The same paper, on February 6, ran the headline OUR TROOPS COUNTERATTACK ON NORTHERN FRONT OF EAST AFRICA. What was the northern front of East Africa? Whereas many issues from the previous year, when giving news of our first inroads into Kenya and British Somalia, had provided detailed maps to show where we were victoriously trespassing, that article about the northern front gave no map, yet all you had to do was go look in an atlas to understand that the British had entered Eritrea.
The Corriere of June 7, 1944, ran this triumphant headline over nine columns: GERMAN DEFENSIVE FIREPOWER POUNDS ALLIED FORCES ALONG NORMANDY COAST. Why were the Germans and the Allies fighting on the coast of Normandy? Because June 6 had been the famous D-day, the beginning of the invasion, and the newspaper, which obviously had not had any news of that event on the previous day, was treating it as though it were already understood, except for pointing out that Field Marshal von Rundstedt had certainly not allowed himself to be surprised and that the beach was littered with enemy corpses. No one could say that was not true.
Proceeding methodically, I could have reconstructed the sequence of actual events simply by reading the Fascist press in the right light, as everyone probably had then. I turned on the radio panel, started the record player, and went back. Of course, it was like reliving someone else’s life.
First school notebook. In those days, we were taught before anything else to make strokes, and we moved on to the letters of the alphabet only when we could fill a page with neat rows of straight lines. Training of the hand, the wrist: handwriting counted for something in the days when typewriters were found only in offices. I moved on to The First Grade Reader, "compiled by Miss Maria Zanetti, illustrations by Enrico Pinochi," Library of the State, Year XVI.