Enzo laughs bitterly: “Si, and Moro was a capitalist lacchè, io so. He was just a strumento in a suit and tie in the hands of Agnelli and the Americans. Ma, behind the tie, there was an uomo. Ah, if he hadn’t written those letters, to his wife, to his grandson … we’d only have seen the strumento, probably, and not the uomo. That’s why his friends panicked: they can say that he wrote those words under coercion, but everyone knows that’s not true: they weren’t dictated by a carceriere, they came from the bottom of the heart of a pover’uomo who was going to die. And you’re agreeing with his friends who abandoned him: you want to forget his letters so you can forget that your Red Brigade friends killed a vecchietto who loved his grandson. Va bene!”
Bianca’s eyes are shining. After a diatribe like that, her only option is to go for broke, with added lyricism if possible, but not too much because she knows that all politicized lyricism tends to sound religious, so she says: “His grandson will get over it. He’ll go to the best schools, he’ll never go hungry, he’ll get an internship at UNESCO, at NATO, at the UN, in Rome, in Geneva, in New York! Have you ever been to Naples? Have you seen the Neapolitan children who live in houses that the government—the government run by Andreotti and your friend Moro—have allowed to collapse? How many women and children have been abandoned by the Christian Democrats’ corrupted policies?”
Enzo snorts as he fills Bianca’s glass: “So two wrongs make a right, giusto?”
At this instant, one of the three young men stands up and tosses his napkin on the floor. With the lower part of his face covered by his scarf, he walks up to the table of card players, waves a pistol at the bar owner, and shoots him in the leg.
Luciano crumples to the floor, groaning.
Bayard is not armed, and in the scramble that follows he cannot reach the young man, who walks out of the bar, escorted by his two friends, the smoking gun in his hand. And in the blink of an eye, the gang has disappeared. Inside, it is not exactly a scene of panic, even if the old woman behind the bar has rushed over to her son, screaming, but young and old alike are all yelling at the tops of their voices. Luciano pushes his mother away. Enzo shouts at Bianca, with venomous irony: “Brava, brava! Continua a difenderli i tuoi amici brigatisti? Bisognava punire Luciano, vero? Questo sporco capitalista proprietario di bar. è un vero covo di fascisti, giusto?” Bianca goes over to help Luciano, lying on the floor, and replies to Enzo, in Italian, that it almost certainly wasn’t the Red Brigades, that there are hundreds of far-left or far-right factions who practice gambizzazione with shots from a P38. Luciano tells his mother: “Basta, mamma!” The poor woman lets loose a long sob of anguish. Bianca does not see why the Red Brigades would have attacked Luciano. While she tries to stanch the bleeding with a dishcloth, Enzo points out that her being unsure whether to attribute this attack to the far left or far right indicates a slight problem. Someone says they should call the police, but Luciano groans categorically: niente polizia. Bayard leans down over the wound: the bullet hole is above the knee, in the thigh, and the amount of blood loss suggests that it missed the femoral artery. Bianca replies to Enzo, in French, so that Simon realizes she is also speaking to him: “You know perfectly well that’s how it is—the strategy of tension. It’s been like that since the Piazza Fontana.” Simon asks what she’s talking about. Enzo replies that in Milan, in ’69, a bomb in a bank on the Piazza Fontana killed fifteen people. Bianca adds that during the investigation, the police killed an anarcho-syndicalist by throwing him through the police station window. “They said it was the anarchists, but afterward we realized it was the far right, working with the state, who planted the bomb in order to accuse the far left and justify their fascist policies. That is the strategia della tensione. It’s been going on for ten years. Even the pope is involved.” Enzo confirms: “Yeah, that’s true. A Pole!” Bayard asks: “And these, er, kneecappings, do they happen a lot?” Bianca thinks while she improvises a tourniquet with her belt. “No, not really. Probably not even once a week.”
And so, as Luciano does not seem to be at death’s door, the customers disperse into the night, and Simon and Bayard head toward the Drogheria Calzolari, guided by Enzo and Bianca, who have no desire to go home.
7:42 p.m.
The two Frenchmen move through the streets of Bologna as in a dream. The city is a theater of shadows, furtive silhouettes dancing a strange ballet to a mysterious choreography: students appear suddenly and disappear again behind pillars; junkies and prostitutes loiter under vaulted porches; carabinieri run silently in the background. Simon looks up. Two handsome medieval towers stand over the gate that used to open on the road to byzantine Ravenna, but the second tower leans like the one in Pisa, only more steeply. This is the Severed Tower, the Torre Mezza, placed when it was taller and more menacing by Dante in the last ring of Hell: “As when one sees the tower called Garisenda from underneath its leaning side, and then a cloud passes over and it seems to lean the more.” The star of the Red Brigades decorates the red brick walls. In the distance police whistles can be heard, and partisans chanting. A beggar accosts Bayard to ask him for a cigarette and tells him that there must be a revolution, but Bayard doesn’t understand and walks obstinately on, even though the succession of arches, street after street of them, seems endless to him. Daedalus and Icarus in the country of Italian communism, thinks Simon, seeing the electoral posters stuck to the stone walls and wooden beams. And, of course, among this crowd of ghosts there are the cats, who, as everywhere in Italy, are the city’s true inhabitants.
The window of the Drogheria Calzolari shines in the greasy night. Inside, professors and students drink wine and nibble antipasti. The boss says he’s about to close, but the lively atmosphere suggests the opposite. Enzo and Bianca order a bottle of Manaresi.
A bearded man is telling a funny story; everyone laughs, except for one man in gloves and another holding a bag; Enzo translates for the two Frenchmen: “There’s this uomo, he goes home, at night, he’s completely drunk, but on the way, he meets a nun, with her robe and her hood. So he throws himself at her, and he beats her up. And once he’s given her a good kicking, he picks her up and says: ‘Ma, Batman, I thought you were tougher than that!’” Enzo laughs, and so does Simon. Bayard hesitates.
The bearded guy is talking with a young woman in glasses and a man that Bayard immediately identifies as a professor because he looks like a student, but older. When the bearded guy finishes his glass, he pours himself another from the bottle on the counter, but does not fill the young woman’s and the professor’s empty glasses. Bayard reads the label: Villa Antinori. He asks the waiter if it’s any good. It’s a white from Tuscany, no, it’s not very good, replies the waiter in excellent French. His name is Stefano and he is studying political science. “Here, everyone’s a student and everyone’s political!” he tells Bayard, and adds a toast: “Alla sinistra!” Bayard clinks glasses with him and repeats: “Alla sinistra!” The bar owner looks worried and says: “Piano col vino, Stefano!” Stefano laughs and tells Bayard: “Pay no attention to him, he’s my father.”
The man in gloves demands the release of the philosopher Toni Negri and denounces Gladio, that far-right organization funded by the CIA. “Negri complice delle Brigate Rosse, è altrettanto assurdo che Trotski complice di Stalin!”
Bianca is outraged: “Gli stalinisti stanno a Bologna!”
Enzo goes up to a young woman and tries to guess what she’s studying. He gets it right first time. (Political science.)