If we could go back to the time of Mussolini, but without Mussolini, so many things were built back then, one man was saying on RAI 1 before the vote, with a chubby belly and denim coveralls, leaning on his little fiat. Fortunately, over the course of the election campaign such statements became fewer and farther between, a different sort of nostalgia awoke, nearer and dearer than Mussolini’s highways, which turned out not to be of such high quality. Il Duce was replaced by La Dolce.
Not Il Duce, but La dolce vita! supporters of the eponymous movement wrote on the walls. We had money and youth to spend, said an Italian woman from the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, while licking her gelato, and it was like a line from a film. The economic miracle of the ’50s lasted into the ’60s, there were enough TVs, washing machines, Vespas, little Fiats, Fellinis, Lollobrigidas, Mastroiannis, and Celentanos to go around.
In the referendum, Italy finally chose that decade which no one had dared choose in Prague, Paris or Berlin. “Italy Saves the ’60s,” shouted headlines in the Corriere della Sera and most of the major newspapers the following day. “Vita Brevis, Dolce Vita longa!”
The sixties were a film most likely created in the studios of Cinecittà, but who doesn’t want to live in the movies? An Italy of sky-blue Vespas, an Italy of nights, raincoats, impossible divorces in Italiano, Fontana di Trevi. The Italy of Via Veneto, of terraces and legends of the private birthday party of the young Countess Olga di Robilant in early November of 1958, where the dancer Aïché Nana performed a sudden striptease and several leaked photos inflamed the imagination of the nation. The phrase was coined, and the ’60s were ready, invented, and in high demand.
That sweet life, La dolce vita, was possible at least in one country.
I’ve always thought, and as I grow older I think it more and more often, that one day we’ll all go live in the Italy of the ’60s, perhaps not exactly in Palermo, but somewhere there in Tuscano, Lombardia, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Calabria . . . It’s enough just to hold these names on your tongue, the melting gelato of the names, with their soft l, gna, and m, and with the occasional nut of the r.
Once, as a young man, I found myself in a little square in Pisa, and since then I’ve known what the thing I’ve always wanted looks like . . .
It was one of those nights that you realize is not meant for sleep. You sink down into the unfamiliar streets. After a few blocks the noise has died away completely. Then you discover a piazza, with a little fountain and a church in the corner. And with a little group of friends, a few guys and girls, who have come out to shoot the breeze in the coolness around midnight. You sit down on a bench at the other end of the square, you listen to their voices, and if anyone had asked you at that moment what happiness is, you would point silently toward them. Growing old with your friends on a square like this, chattering and sipping your beer on warm nights, in a quadrangle of old buildings. Unperturbed by the lulls in the chatter, followed by waves of laughter, you don’t want anything more or less in the world, besides to preserve that rhythm of silence and laughter. In the inescapable nights of the coming years and old age.
That kind of Europe is what Gaustine and I were dreaming of, it seems to me, with small chatter-filled squares. Its mornings are Austro-Hungarian, its nights are Italian. The gravity and grief are Bulgarian.
14.
The new map of Europe would look like this.
In the end, in the referendum people chose the years when they were young. Today’s seventy-year-olds were young in the 1970s and 1980s, in their twenties and thirties back then. The aging chose the years of their youth, yet the young, who were not even born then, would have to live in those years. There was a certain injustice in that—choosing the time the next generation would live in. As happens in all elections, actually.
Whether the young were entirely innocent is another question. Exit polls indicated that the majority of them voted, in even greater numbers than the old, for the decades of the previous century, which they had no memories of. Some kind of new conservatism, new sentimentality, imposed nostalgia passed down from generation to generation.
The empire of the 1980s took shape as the largest and most powerful bloc, like a spine running through the center of Europe, encompassing what had been Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Poland. They would be joined by Greece as well, that poorer version of Italy.
The northern alliance of the 1970s was the other major grouping, with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Here the only southern exception was Portugal. But what could be better for the northerners from the ’70s than having their very own southern colony and warm beaches on the other end of the Continent? Hungary also joined this alliance, as the “happiest barracks” in the socialist era.
The 1990s, which came in second in most countries, a second-place dream and in some sense the bright future of the empire of the ’80s, were actually not to be discounted in the least. Here were the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, still intoxicated with their post-1989 independence. Slovenia and Croatia also ultimately chose the final decade of the twentieth century, with the special clause to be included in it only after the end of the Yugoslav Wars. This was a good choice for both liberally and the nationalistically minded voters, as they each saw horizons for development. Here, in that somewhat fragmented and agitated nation of the ’90s, the Irish tiger lent a hand (or rather, a paw). More new immigrants were expected, coming from other countries. The empires of the ’70s and ’80s would end up dropping anchor here, sooner or later. In the end clearly everyone would come together at the point of 1989.
The concentration into only three or four main temporal alliances, all from the second half of the twentieth century, no less, was interpreted as a promising step toward future unification. For some time, however, all citizens had to remain within the borders of their country and the respective decade that had received the largest number of votes. The mixing of time periods was to be avoided, at least in the beginning, until things stabilized and got going.
After that the borders would be opened. Actually, there was sharp disagreement on this point. One group, known as the diachronists, supported the restarting of time and allowing for its natural progression after the first few chosen years. The other camp of synchronists, however, demanded that countries remain in their chosen decades for a longer period. The process of resetting the clocks was slow and unwieldy, and it was not at all clear how long it could be sustained . . .
Pandora’s box with its evils of the past had already been opened . . .
15.
They searched for him everywhere, including in the ’70s and ’80s . . . They rummaged through the ’60s, where he liked to linger, but there was no trace of him. Not in the clinics or the communities of the past. Doctors from Heliostrasse and Lord knows where else called me. I, in turn, tried calling him several days in a row and after he stubbornly refused to pick up, I finally took a train from the monastery to Zurich.
It was a nice day, invisible birds called from the crowns of the trees. One woman was sitting in the sun and had opened up a book. A woman reading on a balcony. The world was still the same.
Gaustine had disappeared, of course. This was not an unusual occurrence, as far as my experience with him was concerned, but still it struck me as quite strange and to some extent irresponsible in a moment like this. Perhaps he had sensed the ticking time bomb in this whole unleashing of the past? Perhaps he felt the atomic guilt of the physicists from the ’30s? Perhaps the past had sucked him in again? Or perhaps his disappearance would be short-lived, a temporary tumble into another time, from whence he would resurface very soon. For a moment I thought that he had decided to put an end to himself.