Christmas 1963

Dear Stefano,

Christmas is coming and soon the shops in the city centre (and those in the suburbs, of course) will be packed with excited fathers ready to play their part in the annual comedy of generosity. They have been waiting with hypocritical joy for that moment when they can buy themselves their favourite toys: train sets, puppet theatres, archery sets and home ping-pong tables, while pretending they are gifts for their children. I’ll just be looking on, because this year it’s still not my turn. You’re still too little, and Montessori-inspired toys don’t really do anything for me, maybe because I don’t get any fun out of putting them in my mouth, even though the instructions say they can’t be swallowed whole. No, I must wait for two, three, maybe four years. Then it’ll be my turn, maternal education will be a thing of the past, the twilight of the teddy bear age will come, and it will be time for me, with the delightful, sacrosanct violence of paternal authority, to mould your social consciousness. And then, Stefano…

Then I’ll give you guns. Double-barrelled shotguns. Repeaters. Submachine guns, cannons. Bazookas, sabres. Armies of toy soldiers in full battle gear. Castles with drawbridges. Forts to besiege. Pillboxes, powder magazines, battleships, jets. Machine guns, daggers, revolvers. Colts, Winchesters, Rifles, Chassepots, bolt-action 91s, Garands, howitzers, culverins, longbows, slingshots, crossbows, swords, pikes, halberds and grappling irons; and Captain Flint’s pieces of eight (in memory of Long John Silver and Ben Gunn). Cutlasses, the kind preferred by Don Barrejo, and blades of Toledo steel capable of brushing aside three pistols and slaying the Marquis of Montelimar, or the Neapolitan feint, with which the Baron de Sigognac ran through the first bravo who tried to kidnap his Isabella; and then battle-axes, partisans, misericords, krises, javelins, scimitars and crossbow bolts and sword sticks, like the one that got John Carradine electrocuted when it touched the live rail, and it’s your tough luck if you don’t remember that. Cutlasses that would make Carmaux and Wan Stiller turn pale, finely chased pistols that Sir James Brook had never possessed (otherwise he wouldn’t have given in before the sardonic Portuguese’s umpteenth cigarette); and stilettos with triangular blades, with which, as the day was gently dying at Clignancourt, Sir William’s disciple slew the assassin Zampa, who had killed his own mother, the sordid old dame Fripart. And choke pears, one of those torture instruments crammed into the jailer La Ramée’s mouth as the Duc de Beaufort, the coppery hairs of his beard made even more attractive by lengthy brushing with a lead comb, galloped off joyfully looking forward to Mazarin’s wrath; and muzzles loaded with nails to be fired by men with teeth reddened by betel nut: and muskets with mother-of-pearl stocks, to be wielded astride Arab chargers with glossy coats and sinewy hocks; lightning fast longbows of the sort that made the Sherriff of Nottingham green with envy, and scalping knives, like the one used by Minnehaha or (since you’re bilingual) Winnetou. Small, flat pistols, to be tucked into a gentleman thief’s morning suit, or heavy lugers that make a bulge in pockets or armpits, in the style of Michael Shayne. And more rifles. Rifles, rifles like Ringo’s, like Wild Bill Hickok’s or muzzle loaders like Sambigliong’s. In short, weapons, my boy, lots of weapons, only weapons. That’s what you’ll be getting every Christmas.

I am surprised, Sir – they’ll tell me – you who campaign for nuclear disarmament and flirt with peace councils, you who go on marches and cultivate the Aldermaston mystique. That surprises you, does it? “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself” (as Walt Whitman said). But I’m not contradicting myself, I know what I’m doing.

It happened one morning, I had promised a friend’s son I would get him a present, and I went into a big department store in Frankfurt to ask for a nice revolver. Scandalized looks ensued. We don’t sell war toys, sir. Such froideur.

Mortified, I left and bumped right into two soldiers of the Bundeswehr who were passing by. I returned to reality. No one was going to fool me anymore, from then on, I would go solely by personal experience and to blazes with the pedagogues.

My childhood was strongly, exclusively warlike: I fired makeshift blowpipes from among the bushes, I squatted behind the few parked cars around in those days and fired my repeater, I led bayonet charges, I threw myself into the bloodiest of battles. At home, nothing but toy soldiers. Entire armies, deployed in extenuating manoeuvres, operations that lasted weeks, extremely long cycles in which I mobilized even the remains of my teddy bear and my sister’s dolls. I organized bands of adventurers, I had my few faithful minions call me “the terror of Piazza Genova” (now Piazza Matteotti); I disbanded the “Black Lions” to merge with a more powerful gang, within which I then organized a pronunciamiento with disastrous results. When I was evacuated to Monferrato I was forcibly recruited by the Stradino gang and subjected to an initiation ceremony consisting of one hundred kicks in the backside and three hours of imprisonment in a chicken coop. We fought against the Rio Nizza gang, who were filthy dirty and really scary. The first time I was afraid and ran away, the second time I was hit on the lip by a stone and to this day I have a sort of nodule inside that I can feel with my tongue. (Then the real war came along, the partisans would let us hold their Sten guns for a couple of seconds; not that we wanted them anymore after we saw a few of their dead with holes in their foreheads. But by then we were becoming adults and we’d roam along the banks of the Belbo to catch eighteen-year-olds making love, unless we were in the throes of our first religious crises.)

From this orgy of wargames there emerged a man who managed to do eighteen months of national service without touching a gun while devoting the long hours in the barracks to a rigorous study of medieval philosophy; a man who has been guilty of much iniquity but who has never been guilty of the sad crime of loving weapons. A man who understands the value of armies only when he sees soldiers slogging through the mire of Vajont to rescue the victims of the disaster, a serene and noble vocation. And I think I owe this profound, systematic, cultivated and documented horror of war to the healthy, innocent and platonically bloody release afforded by childhood games, just as you come out of a western film (after an epic brawl of the kind where the walls of the saloon collapse, tables and big mirrors are broken, someone shoots at the piano player and windows are smashed) feeling cleaner, well disposed and relaxed, ready to smile at the passer-by who bumps into you or to rescue baby sparrows fallen from the nest – as Aristotle knew well, when he required tragedy to wave the red banner of blood before our eyes to purify us with the divine purgative of catharsis.

I imagine, instead, Eichmann’s childhood. Lying face downwards, that look of death’s bookkeeper on his face as he puzzles over his Meccano, following the instructions in the manual, avidly opening the multicoloured box of his chemistry set, sadistically arranging the tools of his Young Carpenter set with its tiny plane and twenty-centimetre saw on a piece of plywood. Beware the boys who construct model cranes! In their cold and twisted minds these junior mathematicians are repressing the atrocious complexes that will trouble their mature years. In every little monster working the points of his toy train set I see the future commandant of the death camps! And look out if they like to collect model cars, those perfect facsimiles that the ghastly toy industry offers them complete with boots that really open and windows that roll up and down – scary stuff. A terrifying plaything for the future sergeants of an electronic army who will hit the nuclear button without batting an eyelid!

You can already spot them now. Property speculators, the Rachmanist landlords who specialize in midwinter evictions, men whose personality was formed by that infamous game, “Monopoly”, which accustomed them to the idea of property trading and the free and easy sale of share packages. These latter day Pères Grandet acquired their taste for accumulation and stock exchange coups with bingo cards. Bureaucrats of death brought up on Meccano, moribund bureaucrats whose spiritual death began with the files and the stamps of the Little Post Office…

And the future? What will happen to children when the industrialized Christmas brings them American dolls that talk and sing and move, Japanese robots that jump and dance thanks to a seemingly inexhaustible battery, radio-controlled cars whose workings will always be mysterious…

Stefano, my boy, I will give you guns. Because a gun isn’t a game. It’s the cue for a game. From this you will have to invent a situation, a set of relationships, a dialectic of events. You’ll have to imitate the sound of gunshots and shout bang, bang, and you’ll find out that a game is as good as what you put into it, not for what you find ready-made. You’ll imagine destroying the enemy, and you’ll satisfy an ancestral drive that no tedious civilization will ever blunt, unless it turns you into a neurotic in line for the company Rorschach test. But you’ll end up convinced that destroying the enemy is a convention of play, a game among other games, and so you’ll learn that it is extraneous to reality, whose limits you’ll learn through play. It will rid you of anger and repressions, and you’ll be ready to receive other messages, which contemplate neither death nor destruction. The important thing is that death and destruction will always strike you as fantasy elements, like fairies and the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, which we have all known and hated without this leading to any irrational hatred of German shepherds. But maybe this isn’t the whole story, nor will it be the whole story. I won’t allow you to blaze away with your Colts only to let off steam, or to purify your primordial instincts through play, leaving the pars construens, the communication of values, until later. I shall try to give you ideas even as you shoot hunkered down from behind an armchair. For a start I won’t let you fire on the Indians. I’ll teach you to fire on the gun runners and whisky traders who are destroying Indian reservations. And you’ll shoot at the slaveowners of the South, so it’s understood you’re Lincoln’s man. I will not teach you to fire on Congolese cannibals, but on ivory merchants, and in a moment of weakness maybe I’ll teach you how to make a stew out of Mr Livingstone, I presume. We’ll play Arabs against Lawrence, who has never struck me as a fine model of virility for well brought up youngsters, and if we play at Romans we’ll be on the side of the Gauls, who were Celts like us Piedmontese and cleaner than that Julius Caesar – a man you will soon learn to look upon with mistrust, because you can’t take away the freedoms of a democratic community and then, by way of a posthumous tip, leave people a few gardens in which to stroll. We’ll side with Sitting Bull against that repugnant individual, General Custer. And we’ll be on the side of the Boxers, of course, and on Fantômas’s side rather than Inspector Juve’s, as the latter was too much of a cop to refuse to beat up an Algerian if the occasion demanded it. But I’m joking: I’ll certainly teach you that Fantômas was a baddie, but as I’m no accomplice of that corrupter of innocent kids, Baroness Orczy, I won’t be telling you that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a hero. He was a dirty Vendean who caused problems for the good Danton and the purest of the pure, Robespierre, and if we play that game you can take part in the taking of the Bastille.

They’ll be great games, just think, and we’ll play them together! Ah, you wanted us to eat cake? Come on then, Monsieur Santerre, let the drums roll, tricoteuses of the world unite and let those needles rip! Today we play the decapitation of Marie Antoinette! But this is perverse pedagogy! Who said that? You, sir, who are making a film about the hero, Fra Diavolo, a brigand if ever there was one in the pay of the landowners and the Bourbons? Ah, a fine education you’re giving these children! But you, have you ever taught your son to play at being Carlo Pisacane, or have you allowed elementary schoolteachers and the poetaster Mercantini to pass him off in the eyes of our children as a kind but idiotic blond whose works are to be learned by rote? And you, you who have been an anti-Fascist from birth we might say, have you ever played at partisans with your son? Have you ever crouched down behind the bed pretending to be in the valleys of Piedmont and shouting look out, a roundup, a roundup, shoot, shoot the Nazis?! You give your son building blocks and send him with the maid to see racist films that glorify the destruction of the Indian nations. So, dear Stefano, I’ll give you guns. And I’ll teach you some very complicated war games, in which the truth is never on one side only. You’ll let off steam, in the years of your youth, your ideas will get a little muddled, but you will gradually form certain convictions. Then, as an adult, you’ll think that it was all a fairy tale: Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sandokan, the rifles, the cannons, hand-to-hand combat, the witch and the seven dwarfs, armies against other armies. But if, by chance, when you’re grown up and the monstrous figures of your childhood dreams are still around, witches, goblins, armies, bombs, national service, maybe, after having developed a critical attitude towards fairy tales, you will have acquired a similar approach to reality.

So, for this year, Merry Christmas. I’ll buy you a game of little concentric circles that will, perhaps, initiate you into the mysteries of topology.