2023-04-25 16:08:06
Carole Beebe, widow of the economist killed by the Red Brigades, tells Alessandro Portelli in the book “Under a metallic sun” published by Donzelli
Once upon a time there was an economics professor who as a boy had experienced the trauma of his father forced to emigrate to support his wife and children, and who to redeem his destiny decided not to become rich or successful, but to help fight unemployment . First with the study: «When I met him he was struggling with differential equations, because he was a landslide at math, but at the university he could not fail to understand mathematics»; then in collaboration with the union: «In his opinion he reacted to the decisions of others and asked for improvements, but he was not in the control room where decisions were made, and he said “the union must stay there, because it has the power to close the country, so it must use it to force reforms”.
Thus could begin the story of Ezio Tarantelli, the economist assassinated by the Red Brigades on the morning of March 27, 1985, at not even 44 years of age, narrated by his wife Carole, a US and Italian citizen who is now over eighty and has changed her life twice; the first by following her husband known in the USA in Italy, and the second by surviving her murder, together with her son Luca who was just 13 years old: «It was just the two of us left, from what the project was. Because when you get married or get together, then when you have a child, it’s a project… Then a total commitment was born afterwards, which Luca couldn’t have destroyed, even what’s left of the family… It was hard».
Carole Beebe Tarantelli, psychoanalyst and deputy for three legislatures (between 1987, when he was part of the independent Left group, and 1996), she told Alessandro Portelli, former professor of Anglo-American literature and one of the founders of the so-called “oral history”, and it came out Under a metallic sun, a book-dialogue whose title evokes the feeling felt by the woman at the news of being widowed. It was a beautiful day, but suddenly “the sun turned metallic, lost all its heat,” she recalls.
Ezio Tarantelli was killed in the courtyard of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce, in Rome, after having given a lecture, at the end of the “years of lead”, with the BR now almost disarmed; he was designated as a victim because he was considered «one of the main perpetrators of the attack on workers’ wages and on the history of political and material conquests of the proletariat in our country… it is no coincidence that he came out of that international den of anti-proletarian policies of imperialist oppression which is MIT ( the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ndr), one of the global centers of the economic and financial policy of large multinational capital”. And to think that, Carole reveals, during a phase of his studies in England, Ezio had had such tutor The Marxist economist Joan Robinson, che «lui adorava».
But for the terrorists, reality is only that represented by their own visions and symbols, and in the midst of the debate on the reform of the escalator (supported by Tarantelli to defeat inflation, an enemy of workers on a par with unemployment, but not in the launched by the Craxi government in 1984) chose it as a target. The abrogation referendum proposed by the PCI, the Communist Party, was set for the summer of 1985 for which the professor voted «always out of the box», as his wife says, that is out of the box, which means «outside the preconceived schemes»: «Ezio and a group of centre-left people were trying to see if the referendum could be neutralized by changing the decree; in fact he had to go to a meeting after the lesson… when he left the lesson they killed him ».
Against killers and instigators the victim’s wife had mixed feelings, “I was entering a path of resentment, of revenge…”, he recalls, but then changed direction: “There were points of contact with the assassins, in the sense that… we were critics of the system, I had done ’68 and organized the poor kids against the war in Vietnam, well… the Red Brigades weren’t aliens, okay? And basically I think that this saved me.
This, and then the meeting with other terrorists in prison (not those who shot Tarantelli) in the role of parliamentarian, together with other personalities who spoke of reformism to “a band of pseudo-revolutionaries who took notes”; a paradox, or “an enormous irony” as the woman whose life the Red Brigades changed for the second time says, and who she reacted by continuing to try to influence the surrounding world. For example through work in an anti-violence center against women; a commitment that has become “my channel of struggle, against the homicidal violence of the Red Brigades”. A story that contains many stories together, and can help interpret yet others.
The book
The volume of Carole Beebe Tarantelli “Under a 0 metallic sun. My life told to Alessandro Portelli» is published by Donzelli Editore (pp. 122, euro 24)
April 25, 2023 (change April 25, 2023 | 16:01)
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