Chapter 129
TEO WAS RIGHT.
The DC/PSI coalition Francesca had been so worried about—which had been quietly backed by the U.S. government—won the majority of seats on La Maddalena’s City Council. This meant that, at least for the foreseeable future, the communists on the island would not be running the show.
Francesca was obviously disappointed, but her consolation prize was that Manzoni, who had always been considered a friend to the Americans, was out as mayor.
In his place was a lawyer named Alberto Bertini, who argued that La Maddalena’s future should not be dependent on the presence of any military power and urged the island’s residents to invest in safer and more sustainable industries that could support them in the decades to come.
Everyone on the tender was relieved with the results of the election, and they felt confident—maybe too confident—that they could manage Bertini.
Maybe they could have, but a few weeks after the election, CNEN announced that, without more funding from either the Ministry of Health or Sardinia’s regional government, they would have no choice but to discontinue their research program in La Maddalena.
Bertini was furious with all the entities, big and small, that refused to fund CNEN’s work.
He went to the press, giving interviews to any outlet that would talk to him, and in those interviews, he threw both the U.S.
Navy and the Ministry of Health under the bus.
“This situation is absurd,” he told Teo in an interview that ran on the front page of La Spedizione.
“Frankly, we don’t care whose responsibility this is, but if there are no guarantees for the safety of this community, the base must go. ”
This was the prevailing opinion down at the waterfront, where protesters now convened on a near-daily basis—so often that the command stopped issuing warnings for American dependents to remain at home.
The crowd seemed to be growing increasingly diverse.
In addition to members of the PCI and the PSI, there were kids from the DC’s youth organization, which was not nearly as centrist as its parent organization.
There was also this new group called the Partito Radicale, which I learned was an offshoot of the Italian Liberal Party and fundamentally opposed to the Italian establishment, including the Church.
Paul hated them, likening them to the Red Brigades, but everything I read about them made them out to be peaceniks, not terrorists.
Francesca had started going to the protests with some regularity, and if I walked along the lungomare, I often saw her mingling with a few other women her age and chanting slogans like Clean water is a basic human right.
Sometimes Bianca joined her, and occasionally, if he wasn’t teaching, I saw Bernardo.
In mid-March, Bertini addressed his newly elected City Council for the first time and argued it was unacceptable that the island did not have a radiosurveillance system.
Teo was in the room, and he wrote about the ways in which the new mayor was laying the groundwork for a more coordinated resistance.
“If the central administration continues to be unresponsive to this problem,” Bertini said, “it will be necessary to adopt energetic political actions to remove the U.S. installation.”
No one knew exactly what Bertini meant by “energetic political actions,” but lots of people liked the sound of it, and the intensity of the protests grew.