beneath his right collarbone. If he keeps his right arm still, the pain is constant but it does not move: it does not lunge out and devour his very consciousness of what remains unhurt. He hates the pain as he hates the soldiers. The pain is the soldiers in his body. He picks up a stone with his left hand and tries to throw it. In throwing it he inadvertently moves his right shoulder. The stone goes crooked and only hits a wall.
Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little. Build a barricade of words, no matter what they mean. Speak so that he can be aware of your presence. Speak so that he knows that you are there not feeling his pain. Say anything, for his pain islarger than any distinction you can make between truth and untruth. Dress him with the words of your voice as others dress his wounds. Yes. Here and now. It will stop.
There is no judge.
When the soldiers are twenty yards away, two women climb up the iron bars, which are meant to prevent people or animals falling under the tram, onto its side. As they emerge into view as targets at point-blank range, they scream at the soldiers: Shoot us! Why don’t you shoot us? Several rifles point at them but nobody fires. They stand upright, straddling the broken tram windows. They continue to scream at the soldiers.
Figli di putana!
And then:
Castrati! Castrati!
The boy in the street stares up at them from behind. The heel of one of them protrudes through a large hole in her stocking. On the ankle of the second, who is without stockings, is a smear of blood.
Castrati! Castrati!
More women are climbing the bars to join the first two.
An officer notices a man on a sixth-floor parapet, further down the street, behind the barricade. The man is gesticulating. The officer orders a section of soldiers to fire at him.
The man on the parapet sees the soldiers bring their rifles to the shoulder and aim at him. If I jump, he thinks, they will kill me before I hit the ground. He jumps.
To the officer the young women swearing and prancing on the tram are sluts whom he will later have arrested. But for some of the soldiers, sons of peasants or workers from other cities, they evoke childhood memories. The women’s voices show that their rage is solemn and passionate, precluding all answers. For these soldiers the women on the tram seem to have attained, whatever their actual age, the authority of elders; their rage is inseparable from judgement; before such rage one must ask for pardon.
The soldiers are ordered to advance. This order re-establishes the sense of manhood they were for a moment in danger of losing. Obediently they move forward, rifles at the ready: some to round up the men, others to drag the women off the tram.
Castrati!
Cowards!
The words concentrate into a yell. It is not a yell of fear but of total refusal. They are like women yelling on behalf of the stillborn.
I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything, I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent. Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here, despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer’s desire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.
Between 6 May, when martial law was declared in Milan, and 9 May one hundred workers were killed and four hundred and fifty wounded. Those four days marked the end of a phase of Italian history. Socialist leaders began to lay more and more stress on parliamentary social democracy and all attempts at direct revolutionary action—or revolutionary defence—were abandoned. Simultaneously the ruling class adopted new tactics towards the workers and the peasantry; crude repression gave way to
Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little. Build a barricade of words, no matter what they mean. Speak so that he can be aware of your presence. Speak so that he knows that you are there not feeling his pain. Say anything, for his pain islarger than any distinction you can make between truth and untruth. Dress him with the words of your voice as others dress his wounds. Yes. Here and now. It will stop.
There is no judge.
When the soldiers are twenty yards away, two women climb up the iron bars, which are meant to prevent people or animals falling under the tram, onto its side. As they emerge into view as targets at point-blank range, they scream at the soldiers: Shoot us! Why don’t you shoot us? Several rifles point at them but nobody fires. They stand upright, straddling the broken tram windows. They continue to scream at the soldiers.
Figli di putana!
And then:
Castrati! Castrati!
The boy in the street stares up at them from behind. The heel of one of them protrudes through a large hole in her stocking. On the ankle of the second, who is without stockings, is a smear of blood.
Castrati! Castrati!
More women are climbing the bars to join the first two.
An officer notices a man on a sixth-floor parapet, further down the street, behind the barricade. The man is gesticulating. The officer orders a section of soldiers to fire at him.
The man on the parapet sees the soldiers bring their rifles to the shoulder and aim at him. If I jump, he thinks, they will kill me before I hit the ground. He jumps.
To the officer the young women swearing and prancing on the tram are sluts whom he will later have arrested. But for some of the soldiers, sons of peasants or workers from other cities, they evoke childhood memories. The women’s voices show that their rage is solemn and passionate, precluding all answers. For these soldiers the women on the tram seem to have attained, whatever their actual age, the authority of elders; their rage is inseparable from judgement; before such rage one must ask for pardon.
The soldiers are ordered to advance. This order re-establishes the sense of manhood they were for a moment in danger of losing. Obediently they move forward, rifles at the ready: some to round up the men, others to drag the women off the tram.
Castrati!
Cowards!
The words concentrate into a yell. It is not a yell of fear but of total refusal. They are like women yelling on behalf of the stillborn.
I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything, I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent. Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here, despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer’s desire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.
Between 6 May, when martial law was declared in Milan, and 9 May one hundred workers were killed and four hundred and fifty wounded. Those four days marked the end of a phase of Italian history. Socialist leaders began to lay more and more stress on parliamentary social democracy and all attempts at direct revolutionary action—or revolutionary defence—were abandoned. Simultaneously the ruling class adopted new tactics towards the workers and the peasantry; crude repression gave way to
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