Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets by Patricio Pron

Author:Patricio Pron [Pron, Patricio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978

A couple of years ago someone insisted on seeing me. Someone like you who said he wanted to know everything about the conference in Pinerolo. I didn’t meet with him, but what he said reverberated inside of me for some time. He told me there was documentation about what had happened in Pinerolo and that documentation was available in a local archive in Salò. One day, months after his call, I visited the archive and discovered he was right, a large part of the conversations that took place during those days was secretly recorded. Not only the official conversations that had to be used by the press and the cultural authorities of the Italian Social Republic and, to a lesser extent, by the other European fascist governments, but also the private conversations that had taken place during the meal and in the hotel hallways over the brief hours the conference lasted. Even though the reports were signed with pseudonyms and code names that, I imagine, were used by the participants in their role as informants to the secret police, I had the feeling I could recognize some speaking styles, certain intonations and word choices. However, I didn’t recognize myself in my own conversations, which seemed like they’d been formulated by someone else; I didn’t blame the informants for that, just my own memory, which obviously modified, altered, or obliterated events. The hours I spent in that archive were unusually intense, though I doubt that was visible to anyone who happened to glance over at me, a man sitting in a chair in a corner of the reading room. When the light from the large windows grew slanted, I remained there in the darkness, sitting with my legs curled around the chair’s legs because I’ve always sat that way, for as long as I can remember. Reading a more realistic, and therefore more real, version of my life than the version I could recall, learning something about the past and the way we remember it. I’m not mentioning this so that you’ll draw any particular conclusion about me, as I’m not at the center of this story, but so that you’ll understand the official surveillance that went on at the conference. And you should be aware of something I only learned from those reports: Borrello had opposed the government a few years earlier, in other circumstances, in the framework of another attempt by the republic’s authorities to discipline writers who shared their ideology.

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