A small detour. Dag will understand.
Red Funerals
It was April 1975, and Carlos -an Argentinian friend- had invited us to a convention of leftwing Latin American students in Italy. It would be in a few days, in Florence. I decided to go with Janette, my American girlfriend, also to do some sightseeing. Paolo, the boyfriend of my classmate Francesca, studied there, and he lent us the key to the house he shared with other students, near Palazzo Pitti.
Just as we were leaving Florence's train station we noticed a very dense atmosphere. It was not only April, it was also a hard moment of those "years of lead". Two days before two extreme left-wing kids had been murdered by Fascists in Milan. As we passed by the church of Santa María Novella, there was a march coming towards us, and the dress code of the time identified it as extreme left-wing. The green anoraks, the military boots, the dark scarfs and many hidden faces. “Almirante come Falvella/ con un coltello nella budella!”, said their strangely happy chant: Almirante (the national leader of the MSI neofascist party) like Falvella, (a fascist militant killed by the extreme left): with a knife in his tripe. The afternoon and the march had, in fact, a feeling of lead. On the way to Paolo's house we faced another group of anti-fascist marchers. Similar clothes, similar violent phrases chants. We also saw some small police trucks parked nearby.
We left our things in the students' house, and took a stroll by the Pitti gardens, Ponte Vecchio and the banks of the Arno river.
We went back to rest while, not far away, there were violent clashes between the police and the militants of the so-called "autonomous comitees", of the extreme left. The morning after, the papers told that in those clashes, a member of the Communist Party, Roberto Boschi, died by a bullet. Two hypothesis were inmediately held: according to one of them, Boschi had been murdered by police agent dressed in civilian clothes; according to the other, he died by the fire of the Autonomi. There was also an accused extremist, named Francesco Panucci. All versions noticed that Boschi had nothing to do with the riots and clashes. He lived nearby and went out to move his car, because some vehicles had been destroyed.
The Latin American students convention went on with all normality. We put a small stand with the political monographies written by our organization, ADELA, and they sold quite well. Janette was easily mistaken for a Mexican. And, as good Latin Americans, we ended up in discord.
It happens that one of the talkers was a militant of the Chilean MIR, a extreme left organization we held as politically corrisponsable of the military coup. His analysis was perfectly maniquean and concluded that the only answer was the violent uprising against Capitalism, with a motto I heard then for the first time: “La izquierda armada/ jamás será aplastada” (The Left/ on arms/ will never be crushed). He tried, with some success that the public -Italians, mostly- chanted it. Then I stood up and shouted: “¡La izquierda aislada/ jamás será escuchada!” (The Left/ isolated/ will never be heard), which was a motto that I invented as an inmediate response (and that I used, years later, in Mexico). Carlos started to discuss in Italian that it was very easy to speak about armed struggle from the European confort and with Christian Democratic subventions (a blow to OSLAI, the rival organization to ADELA), and stated that in Chile, like in the rest of the continent, popular and democratic coalitions were what was needed to get rid of dictatorships. There was a lot of yelling and some heated debate. At the end, like good Mensheviks, we of ADELA left the room. History would prove us right, but that afternoon we were clearly in the minority.
The same night the funerals of Rodolfo Boschi were held, with a ceremony in Piazza della Signoria, the historic heart of Florence. The square was full, thousands of people. Several young persons sat on a corner, in the stairs of the Loggia dei Lanzi. I was exactly below the statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa.
The coffin arrived, it was held high, covered by the red banner of the Party, with the hammer and sickle. It was impressing. A rain of carnations fell over it. There was an atmosphere of conmotion. Then the mayor spoke.
Florence was a left-wing city, governed by a Socialist-Communist coalition; the mayor was socialist. He talked about the good progressive young man killed by the Autonomi, and he directly blamed Panucci. He implicitly declared the police innocent.
Some whistling came from the zone I was sitting in. Inmediately we faced the very hard looks of men in their fifties with a red bandanna in their necks, the sign that they were old partigiani, who had resisted Fascism and Nazi occupation during World War II. Almost all partigiani were from the traditional wing of the PCI. A yelling debate started:
"It was not Panucci, it was the cops!" -said a young guy behind us.
“You shut up, don't be accomplices of Fascism!", answered an old partigiano. "You are de accomplices" "was the response.
The next uttered words were: "Imbecilles!", "Senile hags!", "Extremists sons of bitches!". The coffin with the red flag was still there, alongside the replica of Micheangelo's David. We decided to move away, but it was never more than words.
With time, it would be proved that it was a policeman in civilian clothes who killed Rodolfo Boschi. He was sentenced to 8 months in jail, for excess in the use of force. Panucci was sentenced, for minor crimes, to 10 years in prison. There must have been a lot of minor crimes.
The day after we took the train to Modena. But I won't tell what happened there
.
), and easy to stroll by and study (the qualities of the different waiting rooms, according to the level of the person who wanted and audience, for example). My wife developed a theory about the frescos: the Medicis wanting to make themselves be seen by the lesser classes as some sort of pagan gods. That's the kind of thoughts that arise from that visit.
