1. The Omen
When he was killed it was not a “normal” day, in the sense that it was not unexpected. It had been a long time since no day was normal: the worst omens, sudden fears, anguish and even crying had become my parents’ traveling companions. No one could say since when. Or maybe yes, since the night my father came home upset: “Gemma, Pinelli is dead.”
And then, from the moment the first graffiti appeared on the city walls, pointing him out as the “murderer” commissioner. Since the morning that fierce press campaign began, charged with violence and sarcasm, based on threats, promises, challenges and even cartoons. Not long after I was born, the newspaper Lotta Continua portrayed my father with me in his arms, teaching me how to decapitate, with a small toy guillotine, a doll representing an anarchist.
However, it is the details that I have been instinctively collecting and cataloging over the years in my memory that make any given day a day announced. Provided. Almost expected.
My parents had been preparing for the outbreak of the tragedy for some time. Of course, they did it almost without knowing it, always with a certain amount of irrationality. Today, reviewing those moments, those moments of sudden lucidity or despair, it’s even hard for me to breathe, I can’t understand how they managed to survive. Together first. My mother alone, later.
Today I write, but I have spent years, practically forever, filing memories, speeches and confidences.
Of my mother. In very small doses. Suffering rekindles quickly, tolerating only short, quick forays; we can’t stay too long in that early 1970s territory, we risk doing it harm, so it’s better to curb curiosity.
From my maternal grandmother, Maria Tessa Capra. You can talk long and hard with her, she has navigated the entire central part of the 20th century, having been born at the dawn of the First World War and two years before the Russian Revolution. She has seen two wars, her home bombed, a husband imprisoned in Germany, she was widowed and lost one of her seven children, but she has never stopped fighting. You can only talk long and hard with her: there is no point in sitting on the sofa or in a kitchen chair and asking her a question about the past if you don’t have at least two hours of time. He likes to remember, he loves to do it, even though it may be painful. She has taught me the thaumaturgical and healing virtues of the word and the importance of sharing memory.
From my father’s friends, whom I have cautiously questioned over the years. Caution is the daughter of my prudence, which has always pushed me not to suddenly open certain rooms that may be too full to cope with.
Thus, with the passage of time, I have lined up six memories, six images, which symbolize his ordeal, his torment.
Grandpa. My maternal grandfather, Mario Capra, produced and sold fabrics. In the fiercest days of the press campaign, one Sunday, after lunch, she pulled away with my father and whispered to him: «Luigi, everything has become too dangerous, leave the Police, I have a job for you. You will work in Rome, you will leave behind this city and its demons, I promise you that you will earn even more ». My father, according to the grandmother, interrupted him, just when the grandfather was trying to win him over by being ironic about state salaries, and he was laconically clear: «Thank you, I appreciate your gesture of affection, but I can’t. It would be impossible for me. It would be a leak. Same as running away. What’s more: it would mean admitting that I am guilty. I will stay until the end, looking them all in the eye. My grandfather couldn’t sleep that night and he talked late with my grandmother in bed in the huge house opposite the San Siro racetrack:
“He has chosen his destiny and we will not be able to save him.”
The mail. For my mother, everything became agonizingly clear when the mailbox at home began to be always empty. Suddenly there was no more mail. When asked, the doorman replied: “I keep leaving letters, ask her husband.” She asked him and he denied it, said there was just less mail coming in, made some jokes that were lost to time, and then changed the subject. My mother began to be more attentive. One morning she found an excuse to go out first, she looked in the hole and saw a letter with the address written in a marker, but she didn’t pick it up. She left it there and waited. When she came out again later with the stroller, the mailbox was empty. She waited for night, and went out to meet her: “Was there mail this morning?” When he told her no, she understood everything and felt like she was dying inside of her. They were letters of insults, of threats, that he hid from her so as not to increase her fears. Over the years she would appreciate the love of that gesture that perhaps allowed them to enjoy a little more of a certain normality.
The note. There are stories from friends, repeated over the years, of his confidences, of the letters in which he explained the fear he felt, of the forebodings, but above all there is a little piece of paper that has always caused me tenderness, a symbol of his scarce defense capacity, even a certain ingenuity. It was a notation my mother found in her purse, in a corner torn out of a newspaper: she had written down a car license plate and, under it, 3-11-71. They have followed me, two young people on board, they have taken the license plate of my vehicle ».
The Omen. One morning, in Corso Vercelli, exactly one week before the murder, while holding me with one hand and pushing the pram with Paolo in it with the other, Mama looked at herself in the window of a pharmacy and thought: “I am a widow.” . She first tried to shoo away the idea, then she couldn’t resist and broke down sobbing in the middle of the street.
The gun. My father had a service weapon, of course. It was a small revolver. He kept it disassembled in a closet, hidden among the sweaters. One morning, while he was packing up the house, my mother missed him. When she asked him for an explanation, he replied that she had taken him to the police station and that she would stay there. At her insistence, he concluded: “Gemma, forget it, I don’t want to keep him here and I don’t want to take him with me, and besides,” that was a thought he repeated even to his friends, who were surprised by the fact that he wasn’t armed, “no.” It wouldn’t do me any good: if they shoot me, they’ll do it in the back. They will never have the courage to shoot me looking into my eyes. And even if I had time to realize it, I’d rather never have to shoot anyone.”
The promise. Four or five days before he died, probably on Friday the 12th or Saturday the 13th of May 1972, my father took me to my grandparents’ house. They were going to leave me there to sleep to go out to dinner that night. At the door, before he left, my grandmother received the following request: “Mom,” he called her that since she gained confidence in him, despite the fact that she was her mother-in-law, “promise me if something happens to me. ..». She tried to interrupt him, even put a hand over her mouth, but he said, gasping, Please, Maria, promise you’ll take care of Gemma and the children. She couldn’t help but nod, a lump in her throat, as he hurried away from her.
One might think that it is about the anguish of a family, six frames of a private and inaccessible film. For years, in order to understand, I went to the trouble of going to the full movie and found that the violence and threat level were unfortunately out there for all to see. But hardly anyone seemed to have foreseen the tragic consequences of that campaign of hate.
The curiosity to understand, to know what was said and written about my father, exploded when I was fourteen years old. During the first year of secondary school I began to miss school to go read the newspapers of the time in the Sormani library, a few meters from the Palace of Justice. I kept doing it for a long time, sometimes with breaks of a few months, at least until the end of the third year. I would arrive early in the morning, before the door was opened, to be among the first to enter. I would rush to order the microfilms and, to avoid queues and waiting, I often had the yellow application form prepared in advance. The first one I faced was the Corriere della Sera. I left from the massacre in piazza Fontana to get to the day of the murder. It was solitary and methodical work, in which my eyes left me, but which captivated me. I was immersed in another era, I lost the sense of time and the present. I completely forgot about school problems, about when I had to go to the blackboard, about Greek, about my classmates. It was a totalizing experience. Sometimes I was seized by the curiosity of a spectator, distant, as if the story did not belong to me, other times, on the other hand, anxiety made my mouth dry, left me without strength in my legs. Then I would get up, rewound the microfilm and walk a few dozen meters to the film library. A wonderful place, full of charm, with a collection of titles that seemed exceptional to me. You chose a movie, then waited at your place in front of the video for it to load on the VCR. He considered it something extraordinary, a privileged public service, worthy of a great avant-garde city like Milan. In order not to get out of the matter, or perhaps because I felt like a prisoner of those years, I asked for films from the seventies: Fellini, Truffaut, Kubrick. Always alone, always silent. To return to the present, at the end of each morning, I would go to the Luini bakery, behind piazza del Duomo. Panzerotti, a kind of pies with mozzarella and tomato, were my lifeline for years, the switch to rekindle my existence. I would buy two and eat them walking towards the Castello.
Over time I switched to leafing through the weeklies, led by L’Espresso, and only at the end did I tackle the collection of the weekly Lotta Continua. Needless to say, it was an amazing read.
Even today, when I read what they wrote, even if it is contextualizing everything, even in the face of an opaque and “enemy” State, phrases like this one from June 6, 1970 do not enter my head: “This easy-window Marine will have to respond for all. We are on his heels, it is useless for him to struggle like an enraged buffalo. Or a page like the one published on October 1, 1970, a week before the start of the defamation trial against Lotta Continua, which would soon turn into a trial against my father: «We have been too tender with the Police Commissioner Luigi calabresi. Someone who allows himself to continue living in peace, continue to carry out his police work, continue persecuting our colleagues. In doing this, however, he has had to reveal himself, his face has become familiar and known to the militants, who have learned to hate him. And the proletariat has already delivered its sentence: Calabresi is responsible for the murder of Pinelli and Calabresi will have to pay dearly for it».
The country was delirious and that young couple—at the beginning of 1970 my mother was twenty-three years old and my father thirty-two—was increasingly lonely. One afternoon she said to him, in a burst of enthusiasm: “But why don’t we go to Brera or the Navigli, where there is life?” He answered her, with a bitter smile: «I would like to go to Brera, but I would need an escort…». When I left the police station on time and my aunt Graziella babysitted us, they reserved a table in a remote restaurant or went to the movies, their great passion, always cautious to enter when the session had already started, so as not to be recognized . “They were an extraordinary couple, who lived more and more isolated from the city,” Antonio Lanfranchi, a Milanese businessman who knew them in those years, told me and who published one of the few obituaries that appeared in the Corriere della Sera that were not officials or family On May 18, 1972 he wrote:
“Antonio Lanfranchi cries for his friend Luigi Calabresi”. Arnaldo Giuliani, the then reporter from via Solferino, went looking for him and interviewed him, because of how surprising his gesture was. When he told me about this episode, one afternoon in September 2005, I found it hardly credible or, at least, exaggerated. So I went to verify it and, unfortunately, things happened like this: in memory of Luigi Calabresi, father of two children, with a third on the way, shot twice in the back, victim of a furious public lynching, only four were published spontaneous obituaries apart from the obligatory ones.
