The Dark Heart of Italy (14 page)

In 1988, Leonardo Marino, the
crêpe
-
seller on the Tuscan coast,
came forward with his version of events. Marino claimed that Sofri
had ordered the killing of Calabresi after the rally to commemorate
Serantini, the murdered Anarchist. Sofri and his two ‘accomplices’
were sensationally arrested in 1988, starting twelve years of trials,
retrials, arrests and releases until that final verdict in October 2000.
Partly because of the paucity of evidence against the former members
of
Lotta Continua,
the imagery of the case became vital. Sofri was
endlessly described as ‘too intelligent,’ as ‘arrogant’ and insufficiently
contrite for the obscene rhetoric of the early
1970s
. Just as the case
was opening,
Gemma
Capri, the widow of Calabresi, published a
book entitled
Calabresi, My Husband.
The timing was, to say the
least, cynical. Elegant and blonde, she was present throughout each
trial and retrial
.

From the outset, Sofri has shown an almost aesthetic disdain for the
legal pontificating. Writing of his first trial, he says: ‘The process has
been diverted by gestures and tones closer to an
autodafé
rather than
a civil trial. Suddenly tears and sweat, imprecations and furores …
have overpowered and replaced the confrontation of the facts.’ Sofri
accused the judicial circus of being in ‘bad taste’ (‘demagogic and
windbag-
ish’). Relying on their intuition, people had, said Sofri, been
taken in by the ‘fat and crying’ pentito, Leonardo Marino
.
2

Sofri was, however, apologetic about the tone of his and others’
writings from decades ago:

As another witness at the trial explained it: ‘We were at war, it was
the perverse logic of the era
.’

As with the Piazza Fontana trial, there weren’t simply individuals
on trial, but an entire diaspora of former colleagues and ‘extremists’.
Lotta Continua
was a sort of cradle for an intellectual caste in Italy
which has now, years later, graduated into the media and parliament.
Former
Lotta Continua
members are regulars on cultural cha
t-
shows, they work as TV anchormen, as senators and academics. The
Lotta Continua lobby (many of whom were also accused by Marino
in 1988, before charges were dropped) have thus fought to clear not
only Sofri’s name but also, by association, their own. And Sofri
himself is second to none in terms of media manipulation and
contribution: his by-line appears so regularly in newspapers and
magazines that anyone who didn’t know otherwise would think he
was the country’s most famous journalist, rather than its most
famous ‘murderer’
.

It would be too strong to say that Sofri has willed himself into this
position, but in stubbornly and repeatedly requesting not liberty, but
justice, he must have been conscious that he would become a secular
martyr. Sofri finds himself in prison, wrote one journalist in October
2000, the day after the closure of his case, ‘for not having doffed his
cap to the bureaucratic cast of the judiciary’. By now, in the autumn
of 2000, Sofri is the only one of the four accused of the crime still in
prison. The pentito Leonardo Marino was almost immediately
released. Of the other accomplices, one (Giorgio
Pietrostefani
)
escaped to exile in France after the Venice trial of 2000 (from
where he has been interviewed by the press, but untroubled by
extradition); and another (
Ovidio
Bompressi
) also went into hiding,
subsequently handed himself in, and was then confined to house
arrest on medical grounds
.

Sofri, on the other hand, has cast himself as the niggling point of
clarity and honesty, refusing the fudge of exile or illness. The case is
now only Sofri’s. It has become, in his words, a case not about ‘my
future life, but rather about the past, more dear and vulnerable …
this affair risks hijacking not only my material existence … but that
of my own soul
.’

Sofri has an almost boyish face: he’s very relaxed, very witty. He asks me to give him the ‘tu’, the informal address. He has a loud voice, and adds
capisci?
, ‘understand?,’ to the end of every sentence, projecting himself as the earnest professor he might, in other circumstances, have been. Deprived of any recording device, I have to transcribe his polysyllabic words at the speed of light.

‘There’s a very strong, virulent civil violence in Italy,’ he says. ‘It’s abnormal, monstrous, grotesque. Italians wallow in the fact that they are
bravi
ragazzi
, good people, measured and antique … But there’s an endemic violence between neighbours which lurks like a kind of fever under the skin.’ The Italian words he uses to describe this atmosphere are
una
disponibilità
alla
riscossa
, which means more or less ‘a disposition for revolt’. ‘In the 1970s,’ he says, ‘there was an atavistic, militant tension, a belief that there was a moral need for thought and action. Many felt that the Italy that emerged from the Second World War was divided into two parts, Catholics versus Communists, all that Don Camillo stuff. And many saw the history of anti-Fascism as a kind of incomplete emancipation, another example that everything in this country remains either half-done or betrayed.

‘But that notion of a “creeping civil war” is a beautification of the case. Both sides – the state and elements of the far right, and the blundering criminality of the left – just fed on themselves.
They fatally believed their own rhetoric, so what culminated was an
imagined
civil war, a
simulation
of a civil war. The
anni di piombo
were just the usual Italian struggle, the usual fratricidal/patricidal goings-on within city-states, a sort of multiplication of opposing views from the peripheries, from the bell-towers. My case, for example, is a storm in a teacup. I’m not saying it’s not horrible, but it’s not part of some epic encounter between two sides. My case shows simple personal hatred, denuded, revealed in its full horror: it’s nothing more than the exultation of hate and grudge.’

Sofri is blunt and cynical. I ask him about the new trial for Piazza Fontana. ‘The danger is that the trial might confirm an idea which I don’t share, namely that there might be possible a degree of clarity about the Piazza Fontana bombing. This late recognition of what the “counter-information” of the left was saying at the time is strange. For the togas to talk about “a slaughter of the state”, using exactly the same words as we did back then, sounds a little false. Those were our slogans of extremism. And the fact that it is based upon very dubious
pentiti
takes something away from the case …
pentitismo
is, as we all know, a very slippery mechanism …’

Sofri throws out grandiose concepts in every sentence, sometimes following them up later in the conversation, sometimes leaving them hanging dislocated in the air. His range of reference is bewildering, peppered with the leitmotif of Italian cerebrality, the suggestive subjunctive. He swaps languages without pause.

Why is it, I wonder, that no historian or court or journalist ever seems able to unearth the truth, or even a convincing interpretation, about Italian history? ‘I think,’ he replies, ‘that things are actually much more simple than that.
Dietrologia
[conspiracy theorising] is an air that you breathe in Italy. It’s the result of paranoia and jealousy, and it simply exalts an intricate intelligence. It’s like Othello with Desdemona’s handkerchief: one innocent object can spark off endless suspicions. It’s a game which people play, almost to show off. I prefer not to see a conspiracy which exists than to see one where it doesn’t.

‘I don’t say that there aren’t many dark or dodgy things: people
always say football matches are fixed because probably very often they are!’ He guffaws. ‘And there is a type of wretchedness about the Italian state, with its tricks and deceits and dirty businesses. But here a rationalist would cry. When one says things, with evidence and facts, you’re not believed. When something’s so obviously
verosimile
it can’t be the
verità
, it would be too simple: it would be too obvious, too easy, so it can’t be true …

‘Look at my case. I’ve never said that it’s inconceivable that the far left had something to do with the murder of Calabresi. I’ve simply asserted with frankness that I was never, never in any way responsible. It’s the stuff of madmen. When we spoke of the “general encounter” for the autumn of 1972, we meant the possibility of renegotiating a whole host of communal contracts, not that some killing would be the spark for armed revolution.’

He leaves no doubt as to his contempt for the judiciary: ‘full of ambition, symptomatic of the Italian delirium for omnipotence. Judges seem to think they are almost literary critics, re-evaluating novels. Or else they pretend to be the “good guardians”. It’s a monstrous deformity. We in
Lotta Continua
worked very much in the light of day, in fact sometimes with too much ostentation and pretension. Ours was an experimental adventure. Not an adventure in the sense of dangling yourself off a bridge with elastic tied to your ankle, not in that sense of extreme sports … ours was a communal interpretation of the world, a mixing of languages, an exciting crossbreeding of cultures. It all culminated in an extraordinary mimesis, a humane, though almost virtuoso, imitation of those around us. We were social, almost becoming others.’

He describes the typical trajectory of bourgeois children feeling the gravitational pull of the workers. ‘We could use their language, learn their customs, appreciate and participate in their struggles. In the end, we realised it almost deprived us of our own identities. We realised we had to start taking things seriously. It all changed when women suddenly declared they were feminists … a few people did try to continue the mimesis, a kind of psychological transvesticism …’ He laughs again.

‘I now cull my political ideas from the same places as everyone
else, from television and newspapers. That’s one of the strange things, that people outside live as if they were in prison, stuck in front of the television. Most of my articles I have to write from memory, because it’s not like there’s a massive library here. But I get fucked off [‘
incazzato nero’
] when people say I’m more free than them, because I can sit here with my thoughts. Prison is abominable – a torture, a physical torment, a sexual mutilation. We’re like scavengers on society’s rubbish …’

Leaving the prison, I go to a bar to read the day’s papers. In one, it being the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Franco, one of the Spanish dictator’s maxims is quoted: ‘one is the master of what one doesn’t say, and the slave of what one does.’ The phrase, despite its provenance, seems apposite for Sofri. He is a talker, a man who loves words, especially – say many – his own. In fact, Sofri is frequently accused of pompousness, of arrogance, of a yearning to be the protagonist; he’s an intellectual, according to a friend, who enjoyed the 1970s’ engagé game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’. And yet it’s very rare to meet anyone who doesn’t express ‘reasonable doubt’ about Sofri’s conviction. At most some say he’s guilty verbally, guilty of having been incautious with his words. He has been convicted simply for talking too much, for boasting and provoking. He is, I realise, a very literal prisoner of his own past, a slave of the words he had spoken.

A few months later: December 2000. With an election expected in spring, the political exchanges are getting worse. Two bombs, one allegedly Anarchist, quickly followed by the Fascist reply, have sent shivers down the spine of the body politic. ‘Something strange is happening,’ admits the Secretary of the Democrats of the Left: ‘terrorists are shooting again … there’s a return to a situation of tension …’ Everyone describes a sense of déjà-vu, a sense of disbelief that, years after the
anni di piombo
were thought to have petered out, these bombs are still being prepared and planted. It seems absurd and surreal. As one dismayed journalist writes:

The first device was found on 18 December, placed a few metres away from Piazza Fontana, amongst the steeples of Milan’s gothic
duomo
. It was left in a black bag next to a public passageway, timed to go off at three a.m. The Anarchist trail is immediately under suspicion, particularly since the explosive used (called ‘Vulcan 03’ or ‘quarry dust’) was used in other, recent Anarchist bombs. The bomb is later claimed by a group called
Solidarietà
Internazionale
. The response from the right is swift. On 22 December, a former ‘black’ terrorist decided to enter the offices of
Manifesto
, the ‘Communist daily’ as it calls itself, in Rome. On the fourth floor, shortly after midday, he asked for directions, explaining ‘I’ve got to deliver a package to
Manifesto
’. His bomb, however, exploded before he reached his target, lacerating his legs and giving him multiple fractures. Doors were blown off hinges, and one photograph the next day showed a poignant image: one sole, dusty shoe, that of Andrea Insabato, the bomber, upon a mound of glass, papers and masonry. By chance Insabato was the only one hurt, but – as
Manifesto
wrote the following day – ‘If the bomb hadn’t exploded before expected, it could have been a slaughter’.