Luigi Meneghello amid the Mugo Pines of the Asiago Plateau

In I piccoli maestri (an English translation, by R. Trevelyan, The Outlaws, now out of print, was published in the 1960s), Luigi Meneghello recalls his time as a partisan on the Asiago Plateau in northern Italy. He and his fellow partisans, seeking to avoid the sweeps led by the Fascists and the Germans, are constantly traipsing through dripping woods and over barren summits. In the excerpt below, he describes a nearly surreal encounter with a pair of mugari:

 

It was raining in the forest, and Lelio and I had found a small hut made of logs and covered with branches; inside, it was like being in an oblong room under the stairs. On one side and on the other were planks forming two pallets, and on the floor a crude firepit. When we went in, the place was empty, but there were bundles of wood, a saucepan, and other objects. Around dusk, two men, one of them old, the other of indeterminate age, but younger, showed up. They were civilians, and we were dumbfounded to see them there.

“Are you rebels?” the man of indeterminate age asked us.

“Are we rebels, Lelio?” I said.

And Lelio said:

“More than ever.”

“And what are you?” I asked.

“Mugari,” said the man.

Mugari: those who herd livestock among the mugo pines? What surprises Italy is full of! Wild mugo pines.

“What are mugari?” I said.

“Mugo-pine people,” said the man.

They lit the fire, put a pot of what they said was coffee on it; then they started heating up some water in a saucepan (the water was in a small drum, because it was raining around there, but there was no drinking water) and from beneath the plank bed they took out a sack of cornmeal and started making polenta.

Then they took two enameled metal bowls, and from the pot they poured this coffee into them; they gave the two of us one of them and started eating out of the other. They dipped a slice of polenta into this coffee (barley or chicory) and ate in big gulps. Lelio and I started doing the same.

That was dinner.

“It could be better,” said the older man.

The younger man said:

“We usually have cheese in the evening, too.”

“We finished it last night,” said the other fellow. “We’re almost out of cornmeal, too.”

“And then?” I said.

“We’ll go down to get some more.”

“Where might down be?”

“In Lusiana,” said the man. “At home.”

“Do you go down on foot?”

The man laughed and said:

“Not by carriage.”

“How long does it take?”

“Seven hours down, nine or ten up, because we’re loaded down.”

They led this life in the summer months; they worked with the mugo pines, around twelve hours a day, one week of seven days and another of six. Saturday evenings they went down to Lusiana and Sundays they came back up with their loads. This was their day off, one day every two weeks.

“I like the working Sundays better,” said the younger man. “The Sundays we go down are harder.”

Both of them had families in Lusiana; one had four children, the other three.

I asked about the mugo pines again. I didn’t even know mugo pines existed before I came to the Plateau; they had fascinated me immediately. They aren’t real bushes and they aren’t trees; they are species of the crags on which groves of them are dotted, about as tall as a man. They seem soft, but they’re tough, and when you try to make your way through them it’s as if you were captured by an arboreal force that seems almost liquid. The mugo pine is a big tuft, intricate and alive.

“Exactly what work do the mugari do with the mugo pines?” I said.

“They cut them, don’t they?” said the man.

“For firewood?” I said.

The man laughed and said:

“You don’t know they’re for making charcoal?”

We had everything explained to us. The hard part of the work is that the mugo pine is tricky to cut; not hard, but tough—it’s like cutting a tire with a hatchet. And how much did they make? I don’t remember the numbers anymore, but there was a five—maybe the number of quintals a mugaro can cut in one day—and a ten or a twelve, the number of lire for a quintal or for a day. I know that the money was fairly good, and in fact these mugari were rather proud of it; in theory, in the months they worked, it was a little more (or a little less) than a schoolmistress’s wages, but what was awful was the savage, indecent piecework. The point was to use all of a man’s strength, and all of the hours in his day, and all of his days in a season, to accumulate quintals of mugo pine […].

This aspect did not bother the mugari; to us it seemed we were seeing the depths of cisalpine poverty. They, on the other hand, harped on the inconvenience of having to stop work to go down for cornmeal and on the dangers of the hatchets. Every once in a while these hatchets broke, because to cut mugo pines you have to go at it hard, and if you don’t get the angle just right the hatchet breaks: not the handle, but the blade. And every now and then even the most experienced mugari—chop and chop—take bad swings and break their share of hatchets, and when they were broken new ones had to be bought and then carried back up with the sack of cornmeal. The day a hatchet breaks you work, more or less, for the hatchet.

They did this work only in the summer months, but while it lasted the pay was good, and they considered themselves fortunate. That year there was the danger of the rebels and the Germans, and of getting shot […].

“And what do you do the rest of the year? What work?”

The answers weren’t very clear, but I think they meant: out of work.

In the morning (we had slept on leaves, under the plank beds), the mugari made coffee and gave us some, too, along with a little bit more polenta; then they left.

It had stopped raining; the sun had just risen, and the day was cool. I was at the door looking at the forest; Lelio, who always takes forever to get ready, was fiddling with the straps of his rucksack.

“Lelio,” I said. “This seems like an extreme, an odd kind of thing, but I don’t think it really is that much of an oddity. There must be a ton of Italians who live more or less this way.”

“I know,” said Lelio.

“This people of saints,” I said, “of transmigrants, of poets.”

“This people of mugari.”

“After the war,” I said, “if you forget these things, a person could call you quite the blackguard.”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” said Lelio.

He had almost finished his long, long preparations and was combing his hair with his hands. The forest, sparkling, was as if washed; we left, and a little bit later we had to go into the mugo pines, and for a good ways we had trouble clearing a path for ourselves. The mountain pine is springy and it seems to capture you.

 

Istrati and the White Slave Trade

Mediterranean (Sunrise) follows the young vagabond Adrien Zograffi as he sets sail from his native Romania. Aboard his steamer, he meets a fellow passenger from steerage, Moussa, a Romanian Jew who is traveling to Alexandria, Egypt, in an attempt to bring a wayward daughter, Sarah, now being pimped for little money by her boyfriend, back into the fold. 

Adrien and Moussa, both house painters, join forces, and together they travel the Eastern Mediterranean. In Cairo, penniless and hungry, they are bankrolled by the diabolical but persuasive Solomon Klein, who specializes in resupplying the brothels of Buenos Aires and the fleshpots of coastal Brazil. The two painters, working as itinerant decorators in the mountain villages above Beirut, are witnesses to and participants in the events that seal Sarah's fate.

 *

Mediterranean (Sunrise), a short novel, was one of Istrati's last, and its evocations of friendship, of Alexandria and Cairo and the Eastern Mediterranean at the dawn of the twentieth century, of prostitution, make it very nearly the equal of such early Istrati novels as Kyra Kyralina.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro, on rue Gay Lussac

On rue Gay Lussac I run into the Colombian who traveled in my berth when I went back to Peru in 1958 on the Marco Polo. We were great friends then, living in a small space, reading, smoking, and drinking together. Now, six years later, we go by each other like two strangers, without the energy to stop and shake hands. It's not just the fragility of friendship that surprises me, but the coincidence of having run into each other in Paris, of the two of us having again occupied, even if just for a few seconds, a small space. The infinite linking of favorable circumstances for this meeting to take place. Since we said goodbye to each other in Cartagena in 1958, every act of his life and of mine had to be directed, regulated with inhuman precision, for us to arrive simultaneously on the same sidewalk. Any minor mistake yesterday or a week ago or a year ago would have prevented this meeting. In life, in reality, we don't do anything but run into people. With some we talk five minutes, with others we go from one station to the next, with others we live two or three years, with still others we cohabit ten or twenty. But at heart we don't do anything but run into each other (how long doesn't matter), run into each other and always by chance. And always part company.

From Prosas apátridas

Istrati, on the Docks

The latest piece by Panait Istrati to appear on the usual bookselling sites is "On the Docks in Brăila," a translation of Istrati's 1929 novella "Dans les docks de Braïla." The novella, whose young hero is an apprentice in a metalworking workshop on the Danube, is thematically similar to The Thüringer House.

In the interests of transparency, it is perhaps necessary for us to acknowledge that the cover image is not entirely authentic. It does not show the grain-shipping port of Brăila at the dawn of the twentieth century, when the young hero of Istrati's novella was taking up his apprenticeship on the docks. It shows, rather, another grain-shipping port, it too on a great river, an estuary, but in another hemisphere and nearly one hundred years later.


It will of course be our pleasure to identify the port in question--if we haven't already given it away--to anyone whose curiosity prompts him or her to ask us.

Departure for the Hereafter and Return

Nuto Revelli

Nuto Revelli (Cuneo, 1919-2004) took part in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union and survived the winter retreat from the Don. In the fall of 1943, not long after his return to Italy, Revelli became a partisan commander. After the war, he managed an iron-products warehouse and began the research, traveling the length and breadth of his province, for what would ultimately be eight impure books, impure in that they combine anthropology, oral history, sociology, and memoir (not to mention a subtle literary dialogue with the fictional work of his excellent countryman Beppe Fenoglio) but do not fit squarely into any one of these categories. Revelli himself, often called an oral historian, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a writer, invariably protested: by training, as he always reminded his audience, he was a geometra, a land surveyor.

In September 1972, as part of his research for Il mondo dei vinti (“The World of the Defeated”; Einaudi, 1977), Revelli takes the testimony of one Bartomoleo Garro. Garro, born in San Benigno, a hamlet in the outskirts of Cuneo, Italy, in 1922, is a peasant and tradesman. In 1945, Garro was a partisan in the Twentieth Brigade. His testimony, from which the excerpt below is taken, is titled “I Know the Fascists Who Shot Me”:

At ten o’clock on February 2, 1945—it was a Friday morning; it was Candlemas—the service in the San Benigno parish church started. Before the mass the priest had to give the big candle to the penitents and la paiütta, the small candle, to the faithful. I made it to the square in front of the church when the service had already started. In the church there were two hundred people, men, women, and children. While I was outside the church chatting with a few men, I see a motorcycle and sidecar with a Breda machine gun mounted on it. We scatter. I try to get through the door to the church, but the motorcycle stops in front of it and one of the Fascists shouts: “Don’t move, or we’ll shoot.” A truck with twenty armed Fascists shows up. They’re wearing heavy leather jackets, they’re from police headquarters, from the Cuneo police. They are commanded by a lieutenant, Frezza, a short and squat fellow, ’n tupun, a mole, about this tall.

When they came up, the Fascists opened fire on Dutto and a disbanded soldier: by some miracle, Dutto got away, but the soldier, a southerner, was killed.

The Fascists assemble all of us who were on the square in front of the church. Then they go into the church, grab some other young men, and bring them out. They make the women and children stay in the church. Then they go back into the church, call the priest. When the priest comes over, Lieutenant Frezza starts shouting: “You’re in cahoots with the rebels. You warned them of the danger by ringing the bells.” The priest had had the small bell rung not to signal the arrival of the Fascists but, as usual, to signal the start of mass. The priest says to Frezza: “Here we always ring the bell before mass.” “Go back to your place, go back to your church. I respect your vestments and the stole you wear. But these young men are for us to take care of.” Lieutenant Frezza comes over to my group; we’re lined up against the wall now. He asks us for our papers, wants to know where each of us spent the night. He kicks and slaps us.

Among us is a married fellow. Lieutenant Frezza pulls him out of the group. Another fellow has his papers in order; he was born in 1922. He pulls him out of the group. There are sixteen of us left. By my side is Bartolomeo Degiovanni, Trumlinot, born in 1926. “Speak up,” I say to him, “tell him what year you were born.” He answers me: “I don’t have the courage to speak up. The lieutenant is too furious.” So I intervene. “This boy is a youngster,” I say to the lieutenant. “He was born in 1926 and doesn’t have to report for military service yet.” Then Trumlinot takes heart and speaks up. “Lieutenant,” he says, “I don’t have to report yet; I haven’t been called up. As soon as I’m called up I’ll report.” Giorgis and Giacoma were born in 1926, too, and they speak up, step forward. They are safe. There are thirteen of us left, all sons of peasants, all innocent, in front of the firing squad.

The machine gun is adjusting the elevation; it is making us its target. I have the feeling the volleys won’t hit me, maybe they’ll hit me in the right arm because I’m the last one in the row. Lieutenant Frezza shouts: “You’re all criminals, all bandits. You go out at night and thieve and kill and now you want to be spared.” Then he orders his men to open fire. I hear five bursts, don’t see anyone standing around me anymore. I’m still standing. “I’m alone,” I think. All the others have fallen onto the snow and they are shouting and crying. Lieutenant Frezza orders his men to open fire again; someone with a Sten fires at me. I fall forward; I’ve taken a bullet to the chest. I hear moaning, I hear separate shots from the machine gun. They are the deathblows. Finally, a complete silence. A Fascist shouts: “Lieutenant, this one’s still alive.” When I fell forward I hit my chin; I have blood in my mouth. I try to get up to catch my breath, but when I put out my hands to push myself up I see Frezza near me with the machine gun. I hear a shot—bang—and fall back down. I black out. The lieutenant tried to shoot me in the temple just as I was moving, so the bullet went in beneath my right ear and came out beneath my left ear. I feel people touching me, I hear friendly voices. I hear people saying: “Bring the holy oil.” My poor mother was at mass and knew I was up against the wall. Now that the Fascists have opened the door to the church and taken off, my mother runs out to see the tragedy, too. The poor woman, my face is so bloody she doesn’t recognize me.

Little by little, I come to; I see my mother, who is crying, kiss me. There are some people who say to carry me off, to get me help. But nobody moves. They’re afraid the Fascists will come back; the massacre has left them in shock. I stay there two hours, with two or three of the bravest people by my side. Then a good man, Giovanni Gallo, goes to get na siviera, a ladder to use as a stretcher, and he puts me on it. But no one dares pick up the other end of the stretcher. So Gallo runs to get a handcart, puts me on it, takes me to the Oggero family’s barn right there by the church. I hear people praying, I hear the priest saying: “He going to die any minute now, he’s dying, he’s dying.” I hear people whispering, people saying: “If the Fascists come they’ll burn the house.” Everybody is afraid. I can’t talk. My jaw is fractured and my tongue is burned. But I say to myself: “No, no, I’m not dying.” And I make a sign with a finger. With a finger I say: “No, no, I’m not dying.” I am alive. “Run and get a doctor,” says someone.

Before coming, the doctor from Tarantasca, Vezzosi, wants Lieutenant Frezza’s permission. He calls him, says to him: “One of the victims of the execution in San Benigno is still alive. I’ve been asked to go to his aid. May I treat him?” Lieutenant Frezza says to him: “Go ahead and treat him, heal him. Since the bullets didn’t kill him I’ll come later to see him hang.”

Doctor Vezzosi says I have to be admitted to the hospital right away. But no one dares take me. Finally, a good fellow with a family, Bartolomeo Fantino, Trumlin, puts me on his cart. Ahead of the cart is the old civil guardsman of San Benigno and behind it, on bicycles, are my father and my uncle.

By the time we make it to the Santa Croce Hospital in Cuneo it’s dark; it’s seven o’clock. The doctors look at me, treat me. A Fascist stands guard over me. During the night my chest wound starts bleeding again. I’m losing blood out my back, I’m bleeding to death. The Fascist on guard stops them from giving me a transfusion. They give me oxygen. I come to.

After seventeen days in the hospital, Doctor Delfino and the nuns advise my parents to get me out. They have found out that the Fascists are planning to arrest me. My father turns up at three in the morning. He takes me to the stables of the Tre Muletti Inn, where they cover me with straw. When the curfew is over, they disguise me as a nun; my head is all wrapped in white. They put me on a break, one of the closed ones of the kind the nuns use to go out and collect money. My father sits next to me, and there’s a woman driving the break. We make it past the checkpoint, leave Cuneo.

In San Benigno I keep hidden. Doctor Vezzosi comes to treat my wounds every day. After a month, Doctor Vezzosi and Doctor Toselli have to operate on my jaw because I can’t close my mouth anymore. They strap me down to the kitchen table and operate on me! Then I get a little better, so I spend the days hiding between the stacks of meliàs, of corn, in the country.

I know the Fascists who shot me. I run into some of them on the streets in Cuneo. When I see them I avoid them. One time I ran into the one who was driving the sidecar motorcycle and I insulted him. He wanted to lodge a complaint against me. “I was already sentenced once,” he said to me. “You’re not going to sentence me, too. Be careful, or I’ll get you sent to jail.” Well! After the Liberation the trial of the Fascists from San Benigno lasted four months. Frezza was sentenced to life in prison, but he was released almost immediately. Now, he’s better off than me.^[1]

---

[1] After the Liberation, Bartolomeo Garro reconstructed the massacre of San Benigno in a few pages of notes. He titled these pages “Departure for the Hereafter and Return.”

The Davai Road

In La strada del davai (Einaudi, 1966) Nuto Revelli takes the testimony of forty veterans of the Italian campaign in the Soviet Union. Giuseppe Castellino, born in 1916, a peasant with a third-grade education, fought in the western Alps, in Italy's Balkan campaign, and on the Don, where, in January 1943, not far from Valuyki, he was taken prisoner. In November 1945, after two years in a prison camp in Central Asia, he is finally nearing his home in Roccadebaldi, a small village in the province of Cuneo.

In Turin, at the garrison mess hall, they refuse us a meal. They want the vouchers. I still have an image of the Madonna the priest gave me in Milan and three apples. I offer the orderly the image, but he’s not all that interested in it; he wants the voucher.

We sit there for a long time. The orderly yawns; he wants to go to bed. We haven't eaten; we're not sleepy. A major pretends not to see us, not to hear us. He goes on reading his paper undisturbed.

“Good grief,” I say, “so many bombs killed so many good people. At least one of them could have landed here.”

The major finally looks at me. “Where are you coming from?” he says to me.

“Captivity.”

“I know. But where from?”

“Russia.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No, we don't have vouchers.”

Then he tells the orderly to bring us something to eat. Vegetable soup, a few noodles with a little rice, beans, stuff of no substance, for rearing, not for fattening.

In the morning the mess hall closes. We wait in the lobby for the first train.

On the trip people ask where we are coming from. But I’m already stuffed, and I say only: “You hardly need to ask. Just look at us.”

A long transfer in Fossano because the bridge over the Stura is destroyed. I get off on my own. But then I can’t get back on the train. Battista Basso, the cowherd who winters in Crava, helps me. He pulls me up, while the train waits for me.

I get off in Magliano. It’s November 4. I set my rucksack down by the tracks, sit down on it. Then I go to wash my face. Finally, I go back to sit down on my rucksack, and I stay there a long time.

Gallo, the railway hand, takes a good look at me. “Ma ses Castlin?” he says to me. “Castlin,” I say to him. “T’lü seti che l’è spusase tua sorela?” [“But are you Castellino?” “Castellino.” “You know your sister got married?”] I keep quiet; I don’t say anything else.

An hour later the stationmaster comes to talk to me. He wants me to call the car rental man Dogliani. But I don’t want to.

My rucksack is empty, but heavy. The stationmaster keeps it in left luggage, gives me a receipt. “Send for it later,” he says to me.

I start walking. First stage, two hundred meters, to the Canetta farmstead. There I stop. Second stage, three hundred meters, to the Carleveri church. I have only one thought in mind: what will I find at home?

I have trouble walking. I run into my uncle who is on his way to Morozzo by bike. I raise a hand, stop him. “Ciao barba,” [Hello, Uncle] I say to him. Then I go quiet, out of breath, so weak I am. He has gotten fat. Then the watchman Giulio comes up and stops to talk.

I set out again, alone. I run into a villager, who goes with me for a while. “They said Candela is dead, then that he’s alive,” he tells me several times. I listen; I know the story; I don’t want to say anything either about the dead or about the living. I say only: “Sarà pru, sarà pru.” [So it is, so it is]

At the Pasquero tavern I go in like a wretch. “I have no money,” I say first thing. “Am I not capable of giving you something?” replies the innkeeper, and he offers me a vermouth.

I drink, and the innkeeper sees my feathers are drooping, the way it is with sick hens. Then he takes out my glass, moves it to one side the way you do with TB patients.

I set out for home again. I go by a young fellow from my village. His back is turned to me; he’s putting an edge on his sickle. “You need a hand?” I say to him. Silence. I ask again, this time louder. But he keeps working. I call him by name: “Lorenzo.” Finally, he recognizes my voice, takes me to his house, gives me a glass of wine, a cigarette. So I start coughing; I vomit. Lorenzo goes to let my family know, my mother, my father, my brother, who was in Russia with the Fourth Baggage Train and who made it through the retreat.

Day after day of confusion follows. People come from everywhere; the courtyard looks like a bicycle depot. Everyone wants to know, but after half an hour I have no more strength. They ask me: “How was it there?” and I say only: “Look at me.” The nights are long; I never sleep. The night of the eighth, the eve of the feast of the Madonna, my father promises me a special dinner, a bell pepper stew and polenta, for the next day.

I go to the garden to pick the peppers; I eat a lot of them raw while I am picking them. That way, my stomach swells like a balloon, just the way it did in the camps in Russia.

“Al Ninot,” I say to myself then, “I’m an old hand, I know how to save my skin.” I struggle back in; I stretch out on the table, throw up.

When my mother comes up I’m more dead than alive. But then it’s all over.

I’m idle for days and days, watching everybody else working. I gain a kilo a day. A month later I can’t see the tips of my shoes. But I have no strength. Finally, I deflate.

You can’t be in the country and not do anything. So, little by little, out of necessity, I start working again. But the fever torments me.

The war. I’ll go to the bridge over the Stura, which is high, sooner than go through my war again. If my wife gives birth to a son I’ll strangle him sooner than have him live like me. We have a “government,” an unjust society. I can’t work; I’m more dead than alive. I have a War Cross that doesn’t do me any good. I’m unfit for work for two years. But no war pension.

I don’t want to hear of the Germans; they have little to do with me. I’d like to take our people who want communism to Russia to eat a little of the “quota” bread; they’ll teach them there.

The few of us from Russia are in bad shape. TB or chronic disease. The men who are in fairly good health have another weakness; they’re alcoholics.

Injections keep me on my feet. Chronic nephritis, a contracted kidney, malaria, palpitations that send me running off and my wife who shouts: “Ma cos’eti, cos’eti,” [What’s wrong? What’s wrong?] and I feel myself dying. That’s what war is.

Back in Italy

On 17 March 1943, at half past five in the morning, Nuto Revelli's troop train pulls into the station in Tarvisio, Italy. Behind him are six months of fighting in the Soviet Union, the catastrophic winter retreat from the Don. In a cafe in Udine, Revelli, in bad shape after the long ordeal, catches sight of himself and laments that only his boots say that he is perhaps an officer.

But Revelli is one of the lucky ones. The Cuneense, the Alpini division that recruits from his home province of Cuneo, has been annihilated, its men killed in combat, frozen to death, or taken prisoner and sent to PoW camps from which few will ever return. The local Fascists have the division parade through the streets of the city of Cuneo. Revelli and his parents, who live in an apartment overlooking the parade route, close their shutters, unable to bear the farce: shirkers from the rear, from the baggage train, officials from the home front, green recruits, some with their mules, posing as members of the annihilated division.

As an officer, Revelli, as the local Fascist officials are quick to let him know, has not yet discharged his duty to the Nation:

Third reminder from the Fascist federation. Until today I have held out to avoid scenes. But my father insists and I promise to do as he wishes.

I know what to expect. The high-ranking shirkers have by now instructed the few survivors of the Russian front. I'm the last one. To me, too, they'll say a good Italian shouldn't talk with enthusiasm about the Russian people and with hatred about the Germans...
*
At the local Fascist headquarters, Sclocchini, a poor little fellow "unfit for service" talked to me about patriotism, about slandering the German armed forces, about the sympathy of the home front.

I asked the Fascist official, the Fascist shirkers, not to bother me. I paid my share in this damned war, I more than paid for my Fascist youth camps. The lies, the patriotic rhetoric: they nauseate me. Let the Fascists from the home front go see the Germans up close. Let them get to know the Germans the way we got to know them on the Russian front. There's still time. Today, the Fascists should be at least at Belgorod, on the front line, to stop the "red hordes." Instead, they're in Cuneo, holed up like marmots.

My voice quavered a little as I spoke. Then I slammed the door behind me.