Chapter 63
PAUL AND I HAD APPARENTLY entered into a tacit agreement that we would not discuss what had happened at Bar Fiume. But this did not stop me from telling Francesca all about it at my next lesson. When I was finished, I thought she was going to have a stroke right there in the kitchen.
“What exactly did Afonso say?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “And Paul wouldn’t tell me. So I guess it was bad.”
“I’ve never liked him. He was the same year as Bianca in school. Always in trouble.”
“What does he do now?”
“He tells people he’s in real estate, but I don’t think he’s sold so much as a monolocale since he got his license.”
“I wouldn’t think he and Teo have much in common.”
“Oh, they don’t. But on an island this small, it hardly matters.”
“That’s kind of nice,” I said.
“Except that I’m sure Teo wants to kill Afonso right now.”
“Well, he shouldn’t. It’s not worth it. Paul will get over it, or he won’t. But it has very little to do with Teo.”
“Maybe,” said Francesca, but she didn’t seem convinced.
We had barely gotten settled out on the balcony when a young woman, whom I immediately recognized as Bianca, came barreling into the apartment.
“Accendi la radio,” she said, then went to the living room, where Francesca and Bernardo had one of those integrated consoles that combined a turntable, an AM/FM radio, and an eight-track player. She turned on the radio, and while she fiddled with the dial, Francesca and I came in from outside.
“Cosa sta succedendo?” asked Francesca.
“C’è stato un attentato a Brescia,” she said as she found the station.
For a few minutes, we listened to the program in silence.
Of course, I barely understood a word, but I knew just from watching the women’s body language that it was bad.
Francesca covered her mouth with her hand, and at one point, she whispered, “Oddio.” Finally, she sat down in an armchair, as if she couldn’t take this news—whatever it was—standing up.
I didn’t want to interrupt, but I had to ask what was going on.
“Someone set a bomb off in the middle of a big antifascist rally in Brescia,” said Francesca. “The rally was in a piazza, and there were hundreds of people there, so there are many, many people who are presumed wounded or dead.”
“Guardateli mentre cercano di dare la colpa alla sinistra,” said Bianca. “Come se piazzassimo una bomba al nostro comizio.”
I looked to Francesca for a translation, and she hesitated before saying, “Bianca is worried they will blame it on the left.”
“Wait,” I said. “Doesn’t antifascist equal left?”
Francesca acknowledged that this was largely true.
“Why would the left do something like this at their own rally?”
“They wouldn’t,” she said with a bitter laugh. “But they’ll point the finger at them anyway.”
It’s funny, I didn’t even know who the they was we were talking about.
I probably assumed the Carabinieri, although I now realize the situation was much more complicated.
During Italy’s “Years of Lead,” it was not uncommon for neofascist terrorist organizations to plant bombs in public places, then use left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Brigades as scapegoats.
What’s worse is that the explosives in the bombs could often be traced back to the U.S.
government, because somewhere along the way the CIA had decided that giving C-4 out to neofascists wasn’t much different from making campaign contributions to the DC.
The goal, like I’ve said, was keeping the communists out of power through any means necessary.
It’s probably good I didn’t know all this at the time.
If I had, I might have packed my bags. All I really knew, standing there in the middle of the Moriaris’ living room, was that Francesca and Bianca were hurting and that nothing I could say would make them feel any better.
So I kept quiet and we listened to the rest of the radio program.
Eventually, Francesca introduced me to Bianca, but there was a limit to what we could say to each other, since she didn’t speak English and my Italian wasn’t much better.
I tried to throw a couple of compliments Francesca’s way, telling Bianca that her mother was very intelligente and also very simpatica, but none of us was in the mood to muddle our way through a bad conversation, so we rescheduled the lesson, and I bade them goodbye.