I am going into town with Mamma for mass and we are joined by the lady from the villa a few kilometers away, who is always spewing venom about her tenant farmer, who steals part of her share. And since her tenant farmer is a Red, she has become a Fascist, at least in the sense that the Fascists are against the Reds. We come out of church and two officials from the San Marco unit have spotted the ladies, who are no longer terribly young, but who still have their figures-and besides, of course, soldiers catch as catch can. They approach under the pretext of asking for some information, since they are not from these parts. The two women treat them politely (after all, here are two handsome young men) and ask how it feels to be so far from home. "We’re fighting to restore this country’s honor, my dear ladies, the honor that certain traitors have tarnished," one of the two replies. And our neighbor comments: "How good of you, not like the gentleman I was just talking about."
One of the two smiles oddly and says, "We would be much obliged to know the name and address of that gentleman."
Mamma went pale, then red, but handled it welclass="underline" "Oh, well, Lieutenant, my friend is referring to a fellow from Asti who used to come around here in recent years, and now, who knows where he is now, they say he was taken to Germany."
"Serves him right," says the lieutenant, smiling, not pressing it. Mutual salutations. On the way home, Mamma, through clenched teeth, tells that thoughtless woman that in these times you better be careful how you talk because it doesn’t take much to get someone stood up against a wall.
Gragnola. He frequented the Oratorio. He insisted his name was pronounced Gràgnola, but everyone called him Gragnola, a word that brought to mind a hail of gunfire. He replied that he was a peaceful man, and his friends answered back: "Come off it, we know…" It was whispered that he had connections to the Garibaldini brigades up in the mountains-he was even a great leader, someone said, and risked more by living in town than by hiding out, because if he were ever discovered, he would be shot at the drop of a hat.
Gragnola acted with me in The Little Parisian, and after that he took a liking to me. He taught me how to play three-seven. He seemed to feel uncomfortable with the other adults there, and he spent long hours chatting with me. Perhaps it was his pedagogical calling, because he had been a teacher. Or perhaps he knew he was saying such outrageous things that if the others heard him they would take him for the anti-Christ, and so he could only trust a kid.
He showed me the clandestine broadsheets that were circulating on the sly. He would never let me take one because, he said, anyone caught with them got shot. That was how I learned of the Ardeatine massacre, in Rome. "Our comrades stay up in the hills," Gragnola used to tell me, "so these things won’t happen anymore. Those Germans, they should all be kaputt!"
He would tell me how the mysterious parties who made themselves known through those broadsheets had existed before the advent of Fascism, then had survived clandestinely, abroad, with their top leaders working as bricklayers, and sometimes they were identified by Il Duce’s henchmen and flogged to death.
Gragnola had been a teacher, I did not know of what, in trade schools, going to work every morning on his bicycle and returning home in mid-afternoon. But he had to stop-some said because he was devoting himself heart and soul by then to the Partisans, others murmured that he was unable to continue because he was consumptive. Gragnola indeed had the look of a consumptive, an ashen face with two sickly pink cheekbones, hollow cheeks, a persistent cough. He had bad teeth, limped, was slightly hunchbacked, or rather had a curved spine, with shoulder blades that jutted out, and his jacket collar stood apart from his neck, so that his clothes seemed to hang on him like sacks. On stage, he always had to play the bad guy or the lame caretaker of a mysterious villa.
He was, everyone said, a well of scientific knowledge and had often been invited to teach at the university, but had refused out of fondness for his students. "Horseshit," he later told me. "Yambin, I only taught in the poor kids’ school, as a substitute, because with this foul war I never even graduated college. When I was twenty they sent me off to break the back of Greece, I was wounded in the knee, and never mind that because you can barely tell, but somewhere in that mud I came down with a nasty sickness and I’ve been spitting up blood ever since. If I ever got my hands on Fat Head, I wouldn’t kill him because unfortunately I’m a coward, but I would kick his ass until it was out of commission for what little time I hope he has left to live, the Judas."
I once asked him why he came to the Oratorio, since everyone said he was an atheist. He told me that he came because it was the only place he could see people. And besides he was not an atheist but an anarchist. At that time I did not know what anarchists were, and he explained that they were people who wanted freedom, with no masters, no kings, no state, and no priests. "Above all no state, not like those communists in Russia where the state tells them even when they have to use the crapper."
He told me about Gaetano Bresci, who in order to punish the first King Umberto for having ordered the massacre of the workers in Milan, left America where he was living in peace, with no return ticket, after his anarchist group chose him by lottery, and went off to kill the king. After he did, he was killed in prison, with officials saying he had hung himself out of remorse. But an anarchist never has remorse for actions undertaken in the people’s name. He told me about legendary anarchists who had to emigrate from country to country, hounded by police everywhere, singing "Addio Lugano Bella."
Then he went back to bad-mouthing the communists, who had done in the anarchists in Catalonia. I asked him why he associated with the Garibaldini, who were communists, if he was against the communists. He replied that, number one, not all of the Garibaldini were communists, there were socialists and even anarchists among them, and number two, the enemies at the moment were the Nazi-Fascists, and it was no time for splitting hairs. "First we’ll win together, we’ll settle our differences later."
Then he added that he came to the Oratorio because it was a good place. Priests were like the Garibaldini, they were an evil breed, but there were some respectable men among them. "Especially in these times when who knows what’s going to happen to these kids, who until the past year were being taught that books and muskets make perfect Fascists. At the Oratorio, at least, they don’t let them go to the dogs, and they teach them to be decent, even if they do make too much fuss about jerking off, but that doesn’t matter because you all do it anyway, and at most you confess it later. So I come to the Oratorio and I help Don Cognasso to get the kids to play. When we go to mass, I sit quietly in the back of the church, because Jesus Christ I respect even if I don’t God."
One Sunday, at two in the afternoon when there were just a few of us at the Oratorio, I told him about my stamps, and he said that once upon a time he had collected them, too, but when he came back from the war he lost interest and threw them all out. He had twenty or so left and would be happy to give them to me.
I went to his house and was amazed by my windfalclass="underline" it included the two Fiji stamps I had gazed at with such longing in the pages of the Yvert and Tellier.
"So you have the Yvert and Tellier, too?" he asked, impressed.
"Yeah, but it’s an old one…"
"They’re the best."
The Fiji Islands. That was why I had been so fascinated by those two stamps back at Solara. After Gragnola’s gift, I took them home to put them on a new page of my album. It was a winter evening, Papà had come home the day before, but he had left again that afternoon, going back to the city until the next visit.