Pushing Past the Night (4 page)

She promised to take me out for pizza, but first she wants to take a walk along the Caracciolo seafront, and then to go a little further. We enter the Borgo Marinari neighborhood. She stops, looks at me, and says, “My mother doesn't like to talk about my father. She suffers a great deal, so I don't ask. I didn't follow the trials because I was too little and later I was afraid they would be too painful. For years I've been trying to avoid facing the facts. So I don't know anything about what happened that afternoon in Milan. I want you to tell me about it, starting with the killer's
name.” She catches me off-guard. This is the last thing I was expecting. I start to think I've really put my foot in it, that maybe I have no right, but the silence between us grows heavy and I can't hold back now.

“The boy that pulled the trigger is named Mario Ferrandi, from Milan. He was twenty-one years old at the time.”

She interrupts me right away. “Is he still in jail?”

“No, but I don't know where he lives. I only know that he used to work for a big drug rehabilitation center in Bologna.”

She's pensive, chews her lips. We walk for a little while, then I start to tell her what I found in the 236 pages that the investigating magistrate, Guido Salvini, wrote about Ferrandi and twenty-four other defendants in his sentence of September 15, 1990. I try to make her see that the judiciary did an excellent job in uncovering every detail of her father's death, that at least one of the government's bodies had done its duty.

There were two trials. At the first, which ended in 1982, three minors—none of whom was directly responsible for the death of Antonio Custra—were convicted. They were three high school students who had participated actively in the riot. One of them, Walter Grecchi, was sentenced to fourteen years for aiding and abetting a homicide, but objectively speaking his crime was to have thrown a Molotov cocktail. He served three and a half years. While awaiting trial on appeal, he fled to France, where he still lives. His name is on the list of people wanted for extradition that the Italian Ministry of Justice has submitted to the French government on two different occasions. His mother begged for him to be pardoned and allowed to return to Italy, but she died without any hope of seeing her dream fulfilled. Antonia remarks, “I remember her writing to us, too. And to think that others who threw Molotovs are in Parliament or serving as government ministers.” For a moment, we almost laugh.

I show her the famous picture of a boy in a black ski mask crouching and firing a .22-caliber Beretta.

“Is that Ferrandi?”

“No, it's Giuseppe Memeo. He's not the one who killed your father. Here he's only eighteen. It was the first time he'd held a gun. But in 1979 he shot and killed a jeweler and a secret service agent. The jeweler's teenage son was wounded in the shoot-out, leaving him partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.

“At the moment the picture was taken, the boys were fleeing and your father had already been shot. It's the final scene. They're in front of 59 Via De Amicis, where there's a big copy shop. If you look at the photo carefully, on the opposite side of the street, partly hidden by a tree, you can see another photographer, Antonio Conti. He kept the pictures he took that day hidden inside a book in his bedroom for twelve years. Those pictures were ultimately the key to solving the murder. On October 31, 1989, while the world was changing and the Berlin Wall was about to crumble, Judge Salvini, on a hunch, ordered a search of Conti's home. Thirty negatives from that afternoon were found, providing a trove of additional evidence.

“Using pictures shot by three different photographers, the investigators were able to piece together fifteen sequences that pinpointed each person and his actions. You can see the youths with weapons—one carrying a pistol, another a rifle, a few with Molotovs—advancing toward the third police battalion of the Celere division, which formed a line halfway down the street. Molotovs are thrown, followed by gunshots. Memeo is the first to shoot. The others follow his lead. One guy runs ahead of the pack, staying on the sidewalk to the right and taking cover behind cars. He makes it to within 100–130 feet of the police. He's wearing a light-colored ski mask with a pom-pom and low-cut boots. On the wall behind him is the freshly painted slogan ‘Every
crime is political.' You can see him shooting even while he's retreating. He is the one who fired the fatal shot. His name is Mario Ferrandi, nicknamed the ‘rabbit' because of his buckteeth. He did not realize he was your father's murderer until 1986. The newspapers reported erroneously that Custra had been struck by a 6.35-caliber bullet. Instead it was a 7.65 caliber, so when Ferrandi appeared before the judge, he started babbling that he'd been carrying a 7.65 caliber and had only fired two shots without aiming, so he couldn't be the killer. (His defense attorney was Gaetano Pecorella, who in those days specialized in red extremists. Pecorella later became an attorney for Silvio Berlusconi—as well as one of his Members of Parliament—and for one of the Neo-Fascist defendants in the Piazza Fontana trial.)

“Ferrandi was ultimately incriminated not only by the revolver but also by his boots and the ski mask with the white pom-pom: ten years later everyone still remembered his outfit. In the meantime, he had broken his ties with terrorism. He had still found the time, before then, to kill a drug dealer and carry out his share of kneecappings and bombings. Sad to say, many people would still be alive today if Ferrandi, Memeo, and the other rioters had been arrested immediately. One of them, Marco Barbone, was carrying a sawed-off shotgun and shot a passerby in the face—a news vendor who died from complications of the gunshot wounds. Barbone later murdered the journalist Walter Tobagi, “guilty” of having conducted some of Italy's best investigative reporting into domestic terrorism. Corrado Alunni, another rioter, was also carrying a weapon that day. He became the leader of one of the most violent terrorist groups, Prima Linea, responsible for dozens of political assassinations. Prima Linea was actually born that afternoon on Via De Amicis, in a baptism by fire that no one could extinguish.

The story behind the famous photo is shocking. There were actually five photographers on the street that day, four men and one woman. Unfortunately, the terrorists were able to track down
four of them before the police did. Two of the photographers were at the main entrance to number 59: Paolo Pedrizzetti and Paola Saracini. In the sequence of images that was used at the trial, Memeo, after firing his gun, noticed the photographers to his right and retreated. Pedrizzetti managed to escape, making it through the front door and up the stairs to the top floor of the building. He delivered his roll of film to the newspapers and then to the police. As a result of his actions, he was subject to repeated threats by the terrorists. Saracini, in contrast, was too paralyzed by fear to move. Memeo shoved his pistol in her face and forced her to open her camera to expose the film to sunlight. She fell to her knees while the boy in the black ski mask continued firing at the police. The third photographer, Antonio Conti, captured this scene from the other side of the street. He originally told the police that his roll of film had been “violently yanked” from his camera by the protesters, who had attacked and threatened him. But as it turns out, not only was he a relative of one of Italy's leading militants, he was also considered a sympathizer within terrorist circles, and he hid the photos to protect them. No one cast any doubt on his version of the facts until 1989.

The fourth photographer, Dino Fracchi, was able to save his images of the three high school students fleeing the police with revolvers in their hands. He published them, an action for which he paid dearly. One month later, someone set fire to his Milan studio, destroying it and forcing him to live abroad for a period.

“The fifth photographer was Marco Bini. He was wearing a white raincoat that concealed his Zenith camera, and he was able to take shot after shot in the midst of the battle. A few days later, however, he received death threats and was forced to give up his film rolls.”

“I have never been to Via De Amicis or to Milan. I reject that city and I don't have the courage to go there. But is there any indication on the street of what happened?” Antonia asks.

“Nothing,” I reply. I had been there the day before, stopping at the point where the police had lined up. I went to the corner from where the shots had been fired and the doorway where two of the photographers had been standing. The copy shop is still there. It's been renovated and is very nice, but there is no remembrance on the outside wall of what happened there.

“What a shame. Anything that would make people remember would be welcome. There is a middle school named after Papà in Cercola, not far from the house where he was born. It was a happy day when they inaugurated it, seven or eight years ago.

“Maybe I should go to Milan. I should read the transcripts of the trial and finally keep my appointment with sorrow. It might help me to get over, to articulate, the grief weighing down on me. I never read detective stories. I'm also wary of the news. I keep my distance from the newspapers, with all their death and violence. The fact that I never knew exactly what had happened filled me with rage, a rage that has no outlet. My mother did tell me—now I remember—that she had gone to the trial and seen the faces of the boys in the cage. She felt sorry for them. I would have murdered them, in the sense that I would have screamed all my rage in their faces.

“Twice a week I see a psychologist. I go from anorexia to bulimia: I have an emptiness I can't fill that leaves me helpless. I lost both my father and my mother. I have to pay the psychologist myself. The state has never taken any interest in providing this kind of assistance. It's not about the money. It's just that they never thought it was their job to support the widows and orphans economically, psychologically, or emotionally. No one has ever assumed this responsibility.”

We go for a bite. She doesn't want pizza, so she orders two salads. I try to speak to her the way my mother always spoke to us: about the future, the importance of living again, the
destructive power of grudges that devour everything—love, passion, energy.

She looks at me tenderly and replies, “I know you're right, but I can't help thinking what my life would have been like if I had had a father, if I had had brothers and sisters I could play with and confide in. My parents would have had a lot of kids and my mother wouldn't have been the way she is today. Sometimes I obsess over it so much that I can't take it anymore. I fall apart. I'm not at peace. I am alone with too much anger at what they took away from me and all the things I could have had but did not.”

I
n the spring of 1972, I had just turned two. Our memories don't normally go back that far. They get erased. Some impressions may remain, like a spin on the merry-go-round, fish in an aquarium, a ride on a motorbike, a scolding from your parents, a joke by an uncle.

I have two memories from that period. The first is from Sunday, May 14. It's a vague memory of a wonderful feeling, and the only real, palpable recollection that I have of my father. The second is from the morning of Wednesday, May 17, the day of his murder. It's sharp, detailed, precise.

It's as if I had put all my childhood thoughts in a box, a special place I had created where they could survive intact the oblivion of time and maturity. For years I kept them inside me. To avoid ruining them, I took them out gingerly, in the dark, at night, before falling asleep. Then one day I shared them with my mother, but I was already in high school, and it was not until the trials that I spoke openly about my memories of the day that my father died. At one point, however, I realized that my telling
and retelling of this memory was destroying it, like the copy of a film that's been seen too many times: the image deteriorates and whole frames are lost. So I ran for shelter and filed them away in an attempt to save them. But maybe it was already too late, and today they've lost some of the overwhelming force they wielded over me for more than twenty years of my life.

But the first memory has resisted and it reminds me that I am his son.

They shot my father at 9:15 a.m., while he was opening the door of my mother's blue Fiat 500. He had just left the house after going back twice, first to smooth an unruly lock of hair, then to change his tie. He had gone out wearing a pink tie, then came back to take it off and put on a white one. When my mother looked at him quizzically, shaking her head and poking fun at him, he explained, “I like this one better: it's the color of purity.” She closed the door without giving his words a second thought. She was waiting for a woman who was scheduled to arrive at any moment. They had never met, but the woman was supposed to start coming twice a week to help her out at home: there was too much work, what with two children and a third on the way. She arrived late, out of breath. “My apologies, signora, but there's pandemonium down on the street: someone shot a police inspector.”

In the book that she wrote in 1990, my mother recalls that moment: