2023-09-01 20:23:50
by ROBERTO SAVIANO
The new preface by Roberto Saviano for the Laterza re-edition of the biography of the anti-fascist leader written by Giuseppe Fiori, which comes out in bookstores on 8 September
I’ve always been hungry for ideas embodied, not ideas discussed, written, debated. Of ideas that become body, struggle, human creation. Lussu all this together and Giuseppe Fiori becomes the witness in this book that I read in the burning age of truth and eager for examples. Fiori has the instinct of the fairy tale when he tells biographical stories but at the same time – and here is his rare value – he practices a philological rigor, he does not want anything he writes to be poorly documented and at the same time he does not allow anything that writing can be boring.
These are years, ours, not very suitable for those who were many things, all together. These are years in which one thing is enough: writers, politicians, soldiers, actors, priests, electricians. These are years in which complexity and articulation have left the building, or rather: they have been banished from it. this is why, unfortunately, in our building – that of immediacy and univocality, that of let’s get moving, I have to do… – there are no apartments for Emilio Lussu.
Lussu was a military man, a highly decorated fighter, a writer, a politician. This is what Lussu certainly was. But there’s more. Lussu was a Sardinian autonomist, but maybe not. He was a war interventionist, but maybe not. He was an inclusive statesman to the point of airing hypotheses of compromise with the fascists (in order to annihilate their violent charge), but maybe not.
One could trace in his so changing and sudden polychromy the sign of a contradiction, if not even a schizophrenia of intentions. But not so. it is precisely that, for us, complexity has fallen out of our pockets. We lost it along the way and never found it again. We scrapped it for a slogan, for a sentence without commas or subordinates, for a tweet, for an Instagram story. Then, however, it happens that some stories come back, bringing with them the enormous and fabulous articulation of which humans are capable, bringing with them the protagonists of an era in which political thought agitated the days but also the nights, and he tackled with a balentes attitude on questions of form and substance.
The story of Emilio Lussu returned, as often happens, after various editorial rounds. We remember editions in 1985, 2000, 2003, 2010, and finally, today, Laterza republishes it in this edition which gives us back a picture of crucial narrative and symbolic value. Attention – the story of Lussu’s life seems to tell us – that men are made to unfold over many lives, to be many things with equal conviction, to feel walls and crevices, to explore, to try, to weave destinies like colored beads on a necklace whose length unknown, but whose colors we can mix as we please.
Lussu was born in 1890 in Armungia, a small piece of land just over fifty kilometers from Cagliari, in the Gerrei mountains, where he demonstrates his courage and darts by riding and shooting at a distance. That’s how he earns respect around here. He shoots deer, fallow deer, mouflon and wild boar with a dry ball, that is, with an arquebus loaded with a single ball, and those who are discovered with a shotgun loaded with two balls are downgraded. Sometimes he shoots himself on a knife blade from fifty yards away and you have to be good enough to cut it in half.
His house, in the Cannedu district, is dominated by a twelve-metre nuraghe. Not, as Giuseppe Fiori points out, a parish church, which instead happened in many other places in the district. He was therefore somewhat guided by that mysterious Nuragic star of which very little is known even today: not by the beacon of religious faith, but by the dim and disturbing light of the mystery, which spreads an ointment very different from that of the acquired truth, namely that of research, curiosity and exploration.
Emilio Lussu leaves for the war, completing his studies with several stumbles not because he is slowed down by inactivity but, on the contrary, animated by a generative energy and, from the point of view of curricular completion, certainly dispersive. He wants to do many things, Lussu, and he wants to do them all together. fervent interventionist, only to then return to his convictions when he lived through the conflict, washed the blood off his uniform and saw his fellow soldiers fall like skittles by virtue of reckless orders, dropped from above with no regard for the human cost. Classist orders, we would say today, and he thought then, when even as an officer he earned in the trenches and in the open field, in addition to medals for bravery, the respect and admiration of his soldiers by already laying the foundations, in his life experience, for that process of democratic legitimization, the enemy of all authoritarianism, not at all obvious in the twenty years that were approaching.
right here, under arms, that Lussu made his own an image of Italy, and of his own Sardinia, much more organic and representative than the one up to then – first in the period of childhood and adolescence, then in that of the studies, between insular and continental Italy – he had been able to know.
Patrick, so to speak, son of patricians, will address the class question starting from the bottom, siding with those of his compatriots – where homeland means Sardinia – four out of ten illiterates, sent to war without regard for the countryside they are emptied of one hundred thousand men out of nine hundred thousand inhabitants, where those who remain suffer the attack of malaria and tuberculosis and agriculture collapses under the weight of war needs that leave the land by now vague, arid and deserted. So that, returning from the war, Fiori reports, the Sardinians had nothing to sow but decorations… but they didn’t sprout, they didn’t bear fruit. While in the army, Lussu meets Camillo Bellieni, with whom he will found the Autonomist and Federalist Sardinian Action Party in 1921, while later, in 1937, he will complete Un anno sull’Altipiano, in which bitterness and very deep critical spirit converge his military chronicles.
The Sardinian question explodes intermittently, like the bombs on the Karst, and finds its voice in the bloody repressed protests of the miners, in the sorrows of shepherds and peasants mortified and exploited by a landed and entrepreneurial bourgeoisie who condemns them to eternal servitude, exasperating their own revenues and minimizing costs to the detriment of workers. And so the use of kissing the hand towards the master ceases, the laborers go on strike, the hired shepherds, for the first time in Europe, agree not to milk the cows anymore. Behind them is Lussu, the captain, the lieutenant by merit of war, born and raised under the Nuragic star, son of that same abortive nation of which Bellieni will speak later, the idolized leader of those rebels with very black eyes who with sardonic contempt he industrialist Ferruccio Sorcinelli now defines rosso-mori. it is always with these that Lussu unfolds the dialectic, with those who work with hoes, have calluses on their hands and broken backs: he feeds their fervor by giving them the contours of a lawful and furious dissent, he speaks to them because he knows their words and is skilful narrator, having inherited from father Giuannicu, an expert hunter, the disposition to magnify the story, to dust the ordinariness with myth, making it eternal.
Upon his entry into Parliament in 1921, he sat with thirty-five fascist deputies, coarse-mannered scum who goes around armed with a pistol and has no qualms about giving sound beatings to political opponents, when not busy planning their assassination. He too will remain a victim of that climate of violence, when he is wounded by a graduate of the royal guard just after the March on Rome. And the honorable Lussu even lets himself be tempted by the hypothesis of a compromise, when the Duce, relying on what he believes to be the common origins of the National Fascist Party and the Sardinian Action Party, that is, fighting origins, will send in Sardinia as the new prefect one of its negotiators, General Asclepa Gandolfo, who will speak of Lussu as a generous and exalted soul and who will address the fighters telling them: You are anti-fascists above all because the fascists of your country are scoundrels.
Rather than letting himself be tempted, Lussu will imagine a fascism stolen from the fascists and transformed, thanks to the very different islanders’ demands, into a different political creature, because the Psd’A, adhering to Fascism but retaining its characteristic programmatic ideals, would have achieved in ten years that none of us would have dreamed of achieving in fifty; because he would have fulfilled his dream of island renewal and moralization of public life; because, with the guarantee of its leaders, it would have condemned and repressed all violence… and freedom of thought and propaganda would have been guaranteed to every minority; … because, in other words […] fascism would have become sardist. All of this is the result of a cultural preparation which, by his own admission, would still require some time to reach complete maturity: in Lussu there are the character, the determination, the openness necessary to look beyond with a good dose of shrewdness, but there is also a political and historical vacuum to fill. Thus Mussolini’s general will be able to drag along a clique of sardists, who from here are called fasces, a piece of the PSD’A in a black shirt, while Lussu, head of the delegation in conversation with Gandolfo, will abandon the negotiation, having finally come to his senses.
So Lussu doesn’t know yet that it will be the fascists who will attack his Cagliari home and that, just to repulse, armed with a rifle, one of them who climbed onto his balcony, he will have to serve prison time, during which he will fall ill. The assault in Piazza Martiri is one of the scenes that Fiori tells with the greatest epic charge, these are pages that every teacher and professor should read in the classroom when he senses that the class is getting bored listening to the story of those who fought against fascism: they would see waking up the boys in a flash listening to the story of the Rossomori knight.
And then, again, Peppino Fiori talks about deportation and confinement. I never had the pleasure of seeing the faces of my new judges. I was not called to defend myself… I was sentenced to the maximum sentence for activities carried out when the law had not yet been invented. They didn’t even give me a day off to give me time to prove myself dangerous to the Regime again.
He therefore rejects fascism after having known it, after having experienced its effects on his own skin, and in 1929, after having escaped from confinement together with Carlo Rosselli and Francesco Fausto Nitti, reaching first Tunis by motorboat and then Paris, he founded in Montmartre the Justice and Freedom movement with, among others, Carlo Rosselli, Gaetano Salvemini, Alberto Tarchiani and Alberto Cianca. He takes part in the Spanish Civil War on the anti-Franco front. He never stands still, Lussu. He is never hidden: he has the habit of exposing himself because this is the task of a man who thinks, to expose himself, and not to crawl, to protect himself, to give himself to prudence. This forces him to continuous and daring escapes, especially with the advent of the Second World War. After that, in 1945, he became minister of post-war assistance in the first government of national unity chaired by Ferruccio Parri, while for De Gasperi minister without portfolio in charge of relations with the Consulta. Then he enters the direction of the Italian Socialist Party, before joining the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, and it seems that he has come a long way from the avant-garde of the Sardinian veterans’ movement to the peaks of national politics.
But it is always a veteran. Of a balente in a suit and tie who took life from one side to the other, if he turned it over in his hands, he made it available, in a very large part; he multiplied it, because one was not enough for him. She teased her, always with the utmost seriousness.
September 1, 2023 (change September 1, 2023 | 20:21)
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