I had come to the end of my elementary school years, which concluded with the death of Valente. The middle-school books were less interesting-Fascist or not, if your subject is the seven kings of Rome or polynomials, you have to say more or less the same things. But among my middle-school materials were notebooks called "Chronicles." Some kind of curriculum reform had taken place, and we were no longer assigned compositions on fixed topics, but were apparently encouraged to recount episodes from our lives. And we had a different teacher, who read all the chronicles and marked them in red pencil, not with a grade but with a critical comment regarding their style or inventiveness. It was clear from the feminine endings of certain words in those comments that the teacher was a woman. Clearly an intelligent woman (perhaps we adored her, because reading those red messages I sensed that she must have been young and pretty and, God knows why, very fond of lilies of the valley), who had tried to push us to be sincere and original.
One of my most highly praised chronicles was the following, dated December 1942. I was eleven by then, but only nine months had passed since the earlier composition.
Chronicle: The Unbreakable Glass
Mother had purchased an unbreakable glass. But it was actual glass, real glass, and I was dumbfounded, because when this event took place, the undersigned was only a few years old, and his mental faculties were not yet so well developed that he could imagine that a glass, a glass similar to the ones that went crash! when they fell (leading to a good cuffing) could be unbreakable.
Unbreakable! It seemed like a magic word. The boy tries it once, twice, three times, and each time the glass falls, bounces with a terrible racket, and remains intact.
One evening some family friends come by and chocolates are passed around (note that back then those delicacies still existed, and in great number). With my mouth full (I no longer recall the brand, Gianduia or Strelio or Caffarel-Prochet), I proceed to the kitchen and return with the famous glass.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I exclaim, with the voice of a ringmaster calling out to passersby to attend the show, "I present to you a unique, magic, unbreakable glass. I will now throw it to the ground and you will see that it will not break," and in a grave and solemn manner I add, "IT WILL REMAIN INTACT."
I throw it, and… needless to say, the glass shatters into a thousand pieces.
I feel myself turn red, I stare in shock at those shards that, struck by the light of the chandelier, are gleaming like pearls… and I burst into tears.
End of my story. Now I was trying to analyze it as though it were a classic text. I was writing about a pretechnological society, in which an unbreakable glass was a rarity, and people would purchase a single glass to try it out. Breaking it was not only a humiliation, but also a blow to the family finances. It was thus a story of defeat on all fronts.
My story, from 1942, evoked the prewar period as a happier era, when chocolates were still available, and foreign brands at that, when people received guests in their living rooms or in their dining rooms beneath a bright chandelier. The appeal I had made to my audience had not resembled Il Duce’s appeals from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, but had rather the ridiculous air of the barkers I may have heard at the market. I was evoking a gamble, an attempted triumph, an incorruptible certainty, and then, with a nice anticlimax, I reversed the situation and recognized that I had lost.
It was one of the first stories that was truly mine, not the repetition of schoolboy clichés nor the rehashing of some adventure novel. The drama of a promissory note not made good. In those shards that, lit by the chandelier, gleamed (falsely) like pearls, I was celebrating at the age of eleven my own vanitas vanitatum and professing a cosmic pessimism.
I had become the narrator of a failure, whose breakable objective correlative I represented. I had become existentially, if ironically, bitter, radically skeptical, impervious to all illusion.
How can a person change so much in the course of nine months? Natural growth, no doubt, one gets cleverer with age, but there was more: the disillusionment caused by broken promises of glory (perhaps I, too, still in the city then, was reading the newspapers my grandfather had underlined), and my encounter with the death of Valente, whose heroic act had resolved into that terrible image of rot-green stakes, the final fence separating me from the underworld and the fulfillment of every mortal’s natural fate.
In nine months I had become wise, with a sarcastic, disenchanted wisdom.
And what of everything else: the songs, Il Duce’s speeches, the oh-babys, and the idea of facing death with grenades in hand and a flower between our teeth? Judging by the headings in my notebooks, I spent the first year of middle school, during which I had written that chronicle, still in the city, then the next two years in Solara. Meaning that my family had decided to evacuate definitively to the country, because the first bombardments had finally reached our city. I had become a citizen of Solara in the wake of my remembrance of that broken glass, and my remaining chronicles, from the second and third years of middle school, were all remembrances of better, bygone times, when if you heard a siren you knew it came from the factory and you said to yourself, "It’s noon, father will be home soon," stories about how great it would be to return to a peaceful city, reveries about the Christmasses of yesteryear. I had taken off my Balilla Boy uniform and had become a little decadent, devoted already to the search for lost times.
And how had I spent the years from 1943 to the end of the war, the darkest years, with the Partisan struggle and the Germans no longer our comrades? Nothing in the notebooks, as if speaking of the horrid present had been taboo and our teachers had encouraged us not to do it.
I was still missing some link, perhaps many links. At some point I had changed, but I did not know why.
10. The Alchemist’s Tower
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I felt more confused than I had when I arrived. At least before I remembered nothing, absolute zero. Now, I still could not remember, but I had learned too much. Who had I been? The Yambo shaped by school and by the kind of "public education" carried out through Fascist architecture, propaganda postcards, street posters, and songs, the Yambo of Salgari and Verne, of Captain Satan, of the savagery of The Illustrated Journal of Voyages and Adventures, of the crimes of Rocambole, of the Paris Mysterieux of Fantômas, and of the fog of Sherlock Holmes; or the Yambo of Ciuffettino, and of the unbreakable glass? Or all of them?
I phoned Paola, bewildered, and explained my anxieties, and she laughed.
"Yambo, for me those are just blurred memories. I have an image of a few nights in an air-raid shelter, someone waking me up suddenly and taking me downstairs, I must have been four. But excuse me, let me play the psychologist: a child can live in different worlds, just as our little ones do; they figure out how to turn on the TV and they watch the news, then they listen to fairy tales and page through picture books of green monsters with kind eyes and talking wolves. Sandro is always going on about dinosaurs, which he saw in some cartoon, but he doesn’t expect to meet one on the street corner. I read him Cinderella at bedtime, and then he gets out of bed at ten o’clock, and without his parents noticing peeks at the television from the doorway and sees a marine kill ten gooks with a single machine-gun burst. Children are much more balanced than we are, they can tell the difference between fairy tale and reality just fine; they keep one foot here and one there but never get them confused, with the exception of a few sick children who see Superman fly, then attach a towel to their shoulders and throw themselves out the window. But those are clinical cases, and it’s nearly always the parents’ fault. You weren’t a clinical case, and you managed perfectly well between Sandokan and your schoolbooks."