The lock is very indicative. He explains that in his memory the things of the “before” and not those of the “after” have remained, since, he writes, at that moment “we were all taken by what we had lived, while the future had not yet a face, and not we would never have imagined a future that would slowly fade these memories as has happened in these thirty years “. The ending contains something personal and collective at the same time, a reflection that concerns the act of remembering itself. Ten years later, in a totally different social and political climate – Pasolini died in 1975 and Aldo Moro, both barbarously killed in 1978 – Calvino resumes in So many stories that we have forgotten, the thread of one’s memory. The article that appears in “La Repubblica” has a narrative attack: “It was a rather cold spring”. It still revolves around the question of remembrance and memory. He makes a comparison between yesterday and today, between 1945 and 1985. The first things that come to Calvino’s mind in this parallel are precisely those that in his opinion have been forgotten: the importance that the family had then in a situation of ferocious lacerations, since the historical event called the Resistance is first and foremost part of a private history, even before it is public. Seen four decades later, that struggle appears to him as “a sum of individual stories” without which collective history would not exist, since what we call “collective history” is composed of many local, separate, incommunicable, different stories “. An observation that allows us to understand how Calvino’s and Fenoglio’s narratives are not a rhetorical epic of the Resistance, but the story of individual, strange, bizarre and human stories, as in the case of the writer of Alba, fairytale and imaginative in the pages of Sanremo. The political and collective epic is such only if seen from “large centers and at the level of military and political commands”, the only ones, writes Calvino, who could have “an overall history”. He then adds two annotations. The first concerns the “many silent deaths no less exemplary than others and of which nobody has remembered”; the second, the “many equally silent lives of people who perhaps did important things during the Resistance and in the aftermath of the Liberation resumed their former life, without claiming any special role, without being part of the commemorative official, without talking to nobody”. If he were capable he would like to be able to explain how these cases “few or many that are, are the most representative of the spirit of the Resistance”.
The article is extensive and touches on other important issues, however the main question is indicated in the final: “The Resistance lends itself poorly to doctrinaire interpretations, its reality was of simple and humble and dark people like the Italians of the time; and all the exceptional personalities who took the lead could do so only if they knew to recognize that its value was there, down to earth “. It then makes a certain impression to read these sentences today in a writer considered as intellectual and mental as Calvino, wrongly considered far from real life; to talk about the Resistance use the expression “simple and humble people”.
I remember a battle it appears in the “Corriere della Sera” on April 25, 1974 and is a real story that in the author’s intentions should have appeared later in a book entitled Required steps, a sort of “memory exercises”, as Esther Calvino defined them in presenting with the title The road of San Giovanni in 1990 what remains of that book never finished. Of the story, as the notes to the Meridian of Novels and short stories (volume III) there are cassated parts that had not entered the spaces set by the newspaper; yet to reread it today as it appeared in volume it seems perfect. This is an important story because it fixes in a narrative form the relationship that Calvino maintains with the memories, he who had claimed to be interested only in an autobiography without I. The debut of the text dedicated to the clash of Baiardo, in which the partisan Santiago – his battle name – participated on 8 September 1943, is eloquent: “It is not true that I no longer remember anything, the memories are still there, hidden in the gray ball of the brain, in the damp bed of sand that settles in the bottom of the torrent of thoughts … “. They are images that mobilize literary references and more, images and metaphors of memory, which mingle with the memories of that day, in which the partisan detachments of Garibaldi had gone to conquer the village clinging to a mountainous relief defended by a department of republican targets. .
To retrace it all, we arrive at the conclusion that for Calvino the narrative aspect is intertwined continuously with what we can call metanarrative: remembering and at the same time reasoning about the act of remembering. A thought torments the writer: for years he has kept in the depths of his memory the memory of that battle and now, who must recall the images and sensations of that moment, he realizes that “the pierced memory network holds certain things and not others “. Moreover, he is not sure if in doing so he is destroying or instead saving the past, “the past hidden in a besieged country”. The memories of that conflict in focus, and of the following escape seem to be covered by the “sedimented crust of the speeches of the post, which bring order and explain everything according to the logic of past history”. The vivid memories of the path that turns down emerge, and then the moment when the commanders order the partisans to take off their shoes so as not to make noise on the path as they approach the country manned by the fascists. The question that arises in this 1974 text is entirely analogous to what Primo Levi will ask himself more than twenty years later in the initial chapter of his latest book, The submerged and the saved. Writes the author of If this is a man: “Human memory is a wonderful but fallacious tool”; and a little further on: “The memories that lie in us are not engraved on stone; not only do they tend to erase over the years, but they often change, or even grow, incorporating foreign features “. I find it extraordinary that two of the most important writers of the memory of Italian literature of the twentieth century, and not only, ask themselves the problem of remembering starting from their experience as a partisan, one, and a deportee, the other, in two different but similar contexts concerning the event of the Second World War. A convergent reflection that I do not have space here to deepen as I would like, but which seems to me decisive when it comes to returning, as they both did, episodes of one’s past experience.
Calvino reflects in the metanarrative form that is his own, free to recreate the knotting and unraveling of memories in a story, subjecting everything to the process of reflection a posteriori, while Levi deconstructs the very idea of the testimony of the victims with a subtlety and extraordinary intellectual honesty. Both support their argument and narrate on that uncertain ballerina foot that Freud talks about, perhaps not by chance, in his study The man Moses and the monotheistic religion, or on the laughable, yet very important point of contact with reality itself. I believe that these reflections by Calvino made on the occasion of April 25 are significant precisely because they are conducted through the literary imagination, the same tool that fielded the witness Primo Levi, not only in his latest book published in life, but also in works such as The truce is The periodic system. In the last part of his account of the battle of Baiardo, the ex-partisan, who had gone to fight the republican army that day, comes to touch the important point of his reflection on the memory of the past. He expressly speaks of the “memory of the imagination” which, he says, is the same one he had that day of 1944, and pulls “things he had imagined at that time” out of the ball of the brain. Everything revolves around one of the dead in the assault on the village, the partisan Cardù, named with his only surname. The imagination-remembrance does not concern what happened when Cardu protects the retreat of his companions, and not even the moment of his death, but later, when the republican bersaglieri recognize him among the fallen in the clash. When Calvin together with the other partisans has already fled.
Cardù was a republican who had deserted and passed among the partisans: “the best of them had been the best of ours, Cardù who when he left them returned in their speeches and thoughts and fears and legends, Cardù that many of them would have liked imitate if they had had courage, Cardù with the secret of his strength in his swaggering and peaceful smile ”. The memory of the imagination is the very force of literature, as Beppe Fenoglio taught us with his stories of the civil war and with A private matter. And it is to this that Primo Levi himself uses to reconstruct what the Lager was for the young Turin chemist. The memory of the imagination belongs to literature, but not only to her, also to science, for example, to mathematics, physics, chemistry. The big difference is that the writer uses the natural language, or the tool we use to communicate, to understand each other, and this simple fact becomes decisive. Calvino, the most enlightened of the Italian writers of the twentieth century – more than Sciascia and more than Levi – is also the writer of the check, of the possibility of failure that also borders on its opposite: the almost infinite potential of reality. He says it at the end of the story: “Everything I have written so far helps me to understand that I remember almost nothing of that morning, and even more pages would be left to write to say the evening, the night. The night of the dead in the enemy country watched over by the living who no longer know who is alive and who is dead. On the night of me, I’m looking for companions in the mountain who tell me if I have won or if I have lost. The distance that separates that night then from this night when I write. The sense of everything that appears and disappears ”. A finale that makes us understand how much memory and how much imagination it takes to make present and alive on April 25th. Not only his, but every April 25th.
