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By Root 742 0

was here on the terrace, and she came inside and told us there were two men playing tag with guns. We weren’t surprised: they were kids, on both sides, whiling away the time with their weapons. Once—it was only in fun— two of them really did shoot, and a bullet hit the trunk of a tree in the driveway. My sister was leaning on the tree; she didn’t even notice, but the neighbors did, and after that she was told that when she saw men playing with guns, she must go inside. ‘They’re playing again,’ she said, coming in, to show how obedient she was. And at that point we heard the first volley. Then a second, a third, and then the rounds came thick and fast. You cquld hear the bark of the shotguns, the ratatat of the automatic rifles, and a duller sound, maybe hand grenades. Finally, the machine guns. We realized they weren’t playing any longer, but we didn’t have time to discuss it, because by then we couldn’t hear our own voices. Bang, wham, ratatat! We crouched under the sink—me, my sister, and Mama. Then Uncle Carlo arrived, along the corridor, on all fours, to tell us that we were too exposed, we should come over to their wing. We did, and Aunt Caterina was crying because Grandmother was out...”

“Is that when your grandmother found herself facedown in a field, in the cross fire?”

“How did you know about that?”

“You told me in ‘73, after the demonstration that day.”

“My God, what a memory! A man has to be careful what he says around you...Yes. But my father was also out. As we learned later, he had taken shelter in a doorway in town, and couldn’t leave it because of all the shooting back and forth in the street, and from the tower of the town hall a Black Brigade squad was raking the square with a machine gun. The former mayor of the city, a Fascist, was standing in the same doorway. At a certain point, he said he was going to run for it: to get home, all he had to do was reach the corner. He waited for a quiet moment, then flung himself out of the doorway, reached the corner, and was mowed down. But the instinctive reaction of my father, who had also gone through the First World War, was: Stay in the doorway.”

“This is a place full of sweet memories,” Diotallevi remarked.

“You won’t believe it,” Belbo said, “but they are sweet. They’re the only real things I remember.”

The others didn’t understand, and I was only beginning to. Now I know for sure. In those months especially, when he was navigating the sea of falsehoods of the Diabolicals, and after years of wrapping his disillusion in the falsehoods of fiction, Belbo remembered his days in *** as a time of clarity: a bullet was a bullet, you ducked or got it, and the two opposing sides were distinct, marked by their colors, red or black, without ambiguities—or at least it had seemed that way to him. A corpse was a corpse was a corpse was a corpse. Not like Colonel Ardenti, with his slippery disappearance. I thought that perhaps I should tell Belbo about synarchy, which in those years was already making inroads. Hadn’t the encounter between Uncle Carlo and Mongo been synarchic, really, since both men, on opposing sides, were inspired by the same ideal of chivalry? But why should I deprive Belbo of his Combray? The memories were sweet because they spoke to him of the one truth he had known; doubt would begin only afterward. Though, as he had hinted to me, even in the days of truth he had been a spectator, watching, the birth of other men’s memories, the birth of History, or of many histories: all stories that he would not be the one to write.

Or had there been, for him, too, a moment of glory and of choice? Because now he said, “And also, that day I performed the one heroic deed of my life.”

“My John Wayne,” Lorenza said. “Tell me.”

“Oh, it was nothing. After crawling to my uncle’s part of the house, I stubbornly insisted on standing up in the corridor. The window was at the end, we were on the upper floor, nobody could hit me, I argued. I felt like a captain standing erect in the center of the battle while the bullets whistle around him. Uncle Carlo became angry,