Lawyer Enzo Paroli hid Telesio Interlandi, Mussolini’s favorite director. In “Gamblers” (in the library from Tuesday, January 11 for Mondadori) Virman Cusenza reconstructs a story on which Sciascia also began to work
“A rare encounter, one of those that change your life. On the one hand, a brilliant journalist, Telesio Interlandi, Mussolini’s favorite director, feared by most for his uncompromising racist campaigns, arrested and mysteriously released from prison. On the other hand, an esteemed lawyer who is a son of art, Enzo Paroli, socialist and anti-fascist: he would have all the requisites for the halo that would facilitate his ascent into the new order of things after the Liberation, but he prefers to live on the edge of danger. He alternates flashes of normal life in the law firm with clandestine escapes with the sister of the worst squad in the area. But his real secret is his daily forays into basement which he used as a shelter, saving the number one plague of the moment: the superlatant Interlandi and his family ».
What drives an anti-fascist to save the life of one of the most hateful characters of the regime? It is a question that questions the human soul, and it is no coincidence that it has inspired important books. It seems the plot of Salamis soldiers by Javier Cercas, the last great civil book to have sold millions of copies all over the world, which tells how, when the war was over – and lost – a republican saved and protected Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Falangist leader (of course we are talking about another civil war, the Spanish one). Coming to Italy, one cannot but remember In via della Mercede there was a racist, the beautiful book that Giampiero Mughini dedicated to Telesio Interlandi. The story of the rescue of Interlandi by Enzo Paroli Leonardo Sciascia wanted to tell it; but the disease did not give him time. Fortunately, an important journalist, Virman Cusenza, for a long time director of the «Messaggero», had access to the dossier in which Sciascia had accumulated papers and notes. And he wrote – as an Italian and a Sicilian – the book that Sciascia had only dreamed of. The title is Gamblers. Story of Enzo Paroli, the anti-fascist who saved Mussolini’s journalist, Mondadori sends him Tuesday 11 January in the bookshop.
Like all great events, this one also speaks of us. Is one cross-section of Italian history in the crucial years of the civil war. A courageous lawyer, born of a founding father of the Socialist Party and whose anti-fascist faith he shares, up to going to jail in his place, decides to take on the defense of a well-known director who orchestrated the regime’s anti-Semitic propaganda and, with its newspapers, it was the most advanced phalanx. To the point of being disliked even by the hierarchs. «Today we have a few more pieces of truth – writes Cusenza – to understand what may have convinced him to hide the fugitive, even in his own home for eight and a half months (with his wife and child), to avoid a trial with a probable death sentence or a blast of machine guns in the street: al point of personally running the risk of ending up in jail, losing the profession if not the same life in the face of a more than possible retaliation at the hands of the most zealous executioners of the moment. Difficult to understand, after more than seventy years, if we stick to the more usual behavior among men. And the time that has passed only amplifies the exceptional nature of the gesture made in that context. According to Tolstoy, the more the temporal distance from a fact increases, the more the protagonists’ actions appear to be dictated by necessity rather than by free choice. And instead in this case we are witnessing the triumph of an act that still appears to us to be completely free and therefore out of the ordinary. Not only is the gesture made by the lawyer Enzo Paroli complicated to understand, if not by making an effort of identification that most find it difficult. But it is also exceptional compared to the very recurring “sense of justice” opportunistically ridden over the centuries. It is about that overturning thanks to which a leap is made that produces miraculous effects for those who become protagonists. I help the winner by unloading yesterday’s won and thus absolve my conscience, acquiring merits that can be spent in front of the community that gladly recognizes them to me, in order to free itself from uncomfortable feelings of guilt. What’s better than this shortcut to comfortably and save the page? Paroli chooses the opposite way: more inaccessible and not at all profitable. And it is for this reason that his gesture still does today a man to be rescued from oblivion».
Not surprisingly, the exergue of the book is a passage from Metastasio, which says: “Without pity justice becomes cruelty … And pity without justice is weakness”.
All this obviously does not cancel the horror of anti-Semitism, and the responsibilities of the fascists in persecuting the Jews. Indeed, it is useful to remember that, if the raid of the ghetto of Rome was the work of the Nazis, it was unfortunately the Italian fascists who hunted down the Venetian Jews, including children in kindergartens and old people in hospices. Nor can it be said that Interlandi is the Italian Céline; because if Journey at the end of the night in spite of the author’s hateful ideas, the defense of the race remains a great book from the literary and journalistic point of view, fortunately there is not much left. What remains is if anything the gesture of human pity that reconciles enemies of the civil war. The same spirit that is found in the last letter of Lieutenant Pedro Ferreira, sentenced to death by the Resistance, who thanks Lieutenant Barbetti for trying to save his life. And also in the letter from Captain Balbis, one of the heroes of Martinetto – the shooting range where the leaders of the Piedmontese Resistance were shot -, who at the supreme moment raises the theme of reconciliation: “May my blood be used to rebuild unity Italian…”.
The book of Cusenza, built with the step of the great investigation, it is full of details, news, curiosities, reflections, which it is right to leave to the reader. This conclusion, on the other hand, must be anticipated: «Those who do good can quickly forget, as indeed those who do evil, choosing or not choosing to take on a responsibility, see the case of Pilate. But whoever receives good, like evil, has the duty to remember. And Sciascia remembers with him, with Paroli, an extraordinary gesture that undermines the comfortable dividing lines that throughout the post-war period, and even beyond, will allow the clever theorists of opposite and irreconcilable worlds, of barricades and iron curtains, to erect walls underneath. which maybe dig tunnels. To never admit, in public, that the fruits of the convenient separation will be shared secretly with the presumed enemy. A solar gesture of solidarity, one of those that once had to be common and frequent in Interlandi’s Sicily, instead originated in the misty mists of Lake Garda. Where the gray and apparently uniform curtain confuses men and things, and helps to discover their similarity, affinity and, in the end, the profound common identity that is hidden in them ».
January 9, 2022 (change January 9, 2022 | 22:16)
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