The Poetry Of Toxic Love

Chapter III

Chapter III

My friendship with Vittorio D'Aiazzo had blossomed in Genoa, he was a commissioner at the Police Headquarters and my direct superior, I was an officer and then his adjutant deputy sergeant promoted on merit, after saving the life of a powerful minister, the honorable professor Nuto Marradi. On a day at the beginning of February 1957 Vittorio, myself and two of my colleagues had been given protection orders for the politician from the moment of his arrival at the airport in Genoa, around 10:00 am, until his return flight in the afternoon. A certain Aristide Maria Barani, previously an unruly ministerial employee and then anarchic-individualist in hiding, had had the ill-fated idea of killing him on that particular occasion; who knows how and from whom he had known about it.

We had awaited Marradi in the airport area where, as planned, the Alitalia DC3 on which he was traveling would stop the engines, and we had promptly approached the plane when the hatch of the disembarkation steps was opened. While the captain had asked the other passengers to remain in their seats until further notice, the minister had disembarked with the two agents of his personal security detail. At this point the lone attacker, dressed in a janitor's suit, had come running out from behind a tractor used to tow luggage with the Soviet Tokarev TT-33 caliber 7.62 in his hand, a big pistol which was not very precise but rather reliable when it came to jamming, and he had daringly thrown himself at him shouting: "Filthy lowlife thief!" Even though he not even close to the target, he had fired a first bullet which missed. Since I was rearguard in our small group and the closest to the shooter – I still remember the sequence as if it had been a dream – I had taken a shot at him with my service Beretta M34 caliber 9, which also missed so a lot of luck had certainly played a part, and had injured the man in the leg breaking it and making him collapse to the ground; then I had quickly kicked the weapon from his hand. Vittorio, unlike me, was at the front of our team and the closest to the minister apart from his personal security detail, so without my intervention he would probably have been hit by one of the anarchist’s subsequent shots.

The confused Aristide Maria Barani would not be given the maximum sentence, despite the attempted m******e, having been considered momentarily semi-infirm of mind at the time of committing the fact because, during hospitalization for the wound, he had been found to be suffering from a hangover: he must have been drinking to find courage and the alcohol must have led him to act without much construct; therefore he had failed not due of my enormous merit. A month later, however, my promotion to deputy sergeant had arrived from Rome thanks to Marradi’s direct intervention according to the rumor going around in the personal office at Police Headquarters.

It goes without saying that I had been very appreciative to that minister who revealed himself to be capable of grateful gestures; but the attacker had not misjudged him, the man had later actually turned out to be a "low-life thief". In 1967 he was involved in a sensational scandal, according to L'Unità and the other social-communist press after clandestine maneuvers of financial environments which were damaged by some of his policies. The same opposing force had also suggested that he had been able to scheme on several occasions even before that, having been a long-time Secretary of State who had been part of almost all the governments of the Republic, at the head of the most varied ministries from those of the center during the 1950s, to the center-right cabinet of 1960 supported externally by the neo-fascists, to some of the center after that and, from 1963, those of the center-left. What is certain is that he had become more and more powerful over the years. For the most recent wrongdoings at least, after the press had discovered them and denounced them to public opinion, he had been impeached by the Parliament meeting in joint session on the basis of Article 96 of the Constitution, concerning offences committed by members of the government: he was the only one, even though the opposition had expressed the suspicion that the culprits had been numerous and "all in the area of government".

Before the House and Senate had granted the judiciary authorization to proceed, Marradi had tried to flee abroad but had died in a plane crash while attempting that, and this had fueled the serious suspicion that he had been murdered by accomplices to silence him forever.

In 1968 the Italy of the Christian Democrat and then Christian Democrat-Socialist dominance had begun to be seriously contested, knock-on strikes had started and the so-called student movement had appeared: for all the protesters the center-left cabinets were to be considered nothing more than servants of the masters, and as far as the centre-right parties were concerned, liberals included, they were all simply Fascists.

The protest would trigger a formidable change in the population’s way of life, which until then had remained basically the same as in previous decades based on the strong values of Christian morality even, at least fundamentally, for declared atheists.

It was in this setting that the adventure I was about to face, flanked by my friend Vittorio, was developing during which the name of the late minister Nuto Marradi among others would also appear.