The Pillars of Hercules

            With fascists in the Italian government for the first time since the war, I was interested to see whether the trains would be running on time. But even in Christian Democratic times they had nearly always been punctual. Italians told me that in the era of Mussolini, who boasted of railway promptness, the trains were often late. These days Italian State Railways were so eager to please they printed Buon Viaggio in big blue letters on each square of toilet paper—under the circumstances creating a rather puzzling and ambiguous impression of farewell.

In the recent Italian election, the neofascists of the National Alliance Party had helped Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! party win a majority. The Minister of Transportation was the neofascist who had called Mussolini “the greatest statesman of the century.” Another party in Berlusconi’s coalition was the Northern League, which was pledged to regaining parts of Slovenia and Croatia and creating a Greater Italy once again. Rijeka in Croatia had once been the Italian city of Fiume. An Italian minister flew to Trieste and, directing his comments at Slovenia, screamed, “On your knees!”

It was so much like old times that I would not have been surprised to see a gesticulating politician call for another invasion of Ethiopia. I hated noticing politics, but this verged on surrealism and could not be ignored. It was the anticommunist element in Italian fascism, and the protection of the Vatican—in habitual collusion with Fascists—that allowed Klaus Barbie and other Nazis to be spirited to Bolivia. There “Klaus Altman” formed The Fiancés of Death, an underground organization for smuggling drugs and arms, and committing the occasional murder. After many years Barbie was caught and extradited to France, to the annoyance of the neofascists.

Having left Bari, I was in a noisy compartment, with a priest and several old women and some businessmen, on my way to Ancona via Foggia and San Benedetto del Tronto. It was such a crowded train these passengers had no choice but to join this priest and his evil eye in this compartment.

“If Jesus came on earth to save souls, huh, why didn’t he come sooner in world history?” a hectoring woman asked the elderly priest. “Eh? What about all the others before him, for all these thousands of years?”

“Good question,” the priest said.

Some other people were chattering about politics, so I asked about the neofascists. What did they actually stand for?

“I’m not sure,” one man said. He was middle-aged, tweedily dressed, possibly a lawyer, and was headed to Ancona. I addressed the question to him because he had the kindliest demeanor. “No one is sure. The neofascists say they have broken with the past.”

And yet I had the feeling they idolized Mussolini. After all, the party was formed by old-line fascists. But I hesitated to say this.

“What’s on their minds—race, imperialism, or immigration?”

“Probably all three. They also talk about the work ethic and crime and lazy people and wasted taxes.”

The man sitting beside him was blunter. He said, “They want a police state.”

Later on, a young man handed me a leaflet in a train station. The message on it was that the neofascists were intent on suppressing personal freedom, democracy, the press and to limit rights generally.

At Foggia, some people got off, two nuns got on. One with the meaty face and bulldog jowls of J. Edgar Hoover took a nip of brandy from beneath her robes and poured the whole thing into a glass of orange juice. She then glugged it down. Her black-robed companion, a dead ringer for the singer Meatloaf, quaffed a similar drink. It was 11:30 in the morning. They told the rest of the people in the compartment that it was the feast day of Santa Maria Antigua and with that they began saying the rosary very loudly in loud auctioneering voices for the next half hour. After the last Hail Mary the nun who looked like Meatloaf burst into tears. The other nun comforted her until she said, “I am all right now,” and changed her seat.

I was reading the Bari newspaper which had a story describing how Italy’s birthrate was the lowest in Europe. That was quite funny. The pope had recently denounced condoms as sinful.

The very fat woman who had joined in the nuns’ loud rosary took out a magazine and a sandwich. It was a health magazine called Sta Bene; the sandwich was mozzarella and ham. She read and munched all the way to Pescara.