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  PRAISE FOR

  THE YEAR OF OUR LOVE

  “A layered, riveting story of love and complicated friendship set against a tumultuous period in Italy’s history. Fresh and stylistic, with characters that will remain with you, this modern saga has a clear ring of authenticity. Caterina Bonvicini delivers a thoughtful, enthralling story full of twists and turns…not to be missed.”

  —Jan Moran, USA Today bestselling author of The Chocolatier

  “Caterina Bonvicini has created a vivid, engaging, and utterly convincing world in these pages…Few writers are able to capture so perceptively the human tragicomic yearning after happiness. The Year of Our Love is a book for these times: compassionate, funny, and dead-on accurate.”

  —Eleanor Morse, author of White Dog Fell from the Sky and Margreete’s Harbor

  “A deeply moving and memorable novel that captures love’s intensity and the losses that come with adulthood. In prose that is restrained but pulses with emotion, Bonvicini reminds us that the compromises we make in our youth can haunt us all our lives, and the people we love are often, in equal measure, the source of our distress and our only comfort.”

  —L. Annette Binder, author of The Vanishing Sky

  Originally published in Italian as

  Correva l’anno del nostro amore in 2014 by Garzanti, Milan

  Copyright © 2014 Caterina Bonvicini

  Published in agreement with Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency (PNLA)

  Translation copyright © 2021 Antony Shugaar

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  For information write to Other Press LLC,

  267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Bonvicini, Caterina, 1974- author. | Shugaar, Antony, translator.

  Title: The year of our love / Caterina Bonvicini; translated by Antony Shugaar.

  Other titles: Correva l’anno del nostro amore. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2021] | Originally published in Italian as Correva l’anno del nostro amore in 2014 by Garzanti, Milan.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020052812 (print) | LCCN 2020052813 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781635420623 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781635420630 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ4902.O68 C6713 2021 (print) | LCC PQ4902.O68 (ebook) |

  DDC 853/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052812

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052813

  Ebook ISBN 9781635420630

  a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TO

  RIC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Translator’s Note

  Part One: 1975–1984

  1: The Beretta

  2: The Bomb

  3: War in the Courtyard

  4: The Hanged Man

  5: Settling Accounts

  6: The End of a World

  Part Two: 1993–1994

  1: Judicial Indictment and Summons: RSVP

  2: Black Tie

  3: Fireworks

  4: The Present

  5: The Country that I Love

  Part Three: 2001

  1: The Best of all Possible Bourgeoisies

  2: A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare

  3: Hidden from History

  Part Four: 2005

  1: The Reactionaries

  2: Histoire D’O?

  3: Tarallucci E Vino

  Part Five: 2011–2013

  1: A Very Private Public Act

  2: An Act of Courage?

  3: Last Act

  4: The Rediscovered History

  Acknowledgments

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  An effective cinematic device is the flitting, sinister streak of a shadow, moving somewhere just outside of the central frame, purposeful and elusive. What such an image does—and what many forms of visual and verbal shorthand do—is to communicate telegraphically a hint at something that is stored in the reader’s or viewer’s brain. It’s economical and effective, because of all the things that don’t need to be said. All it requires is a pointed finger, widened eyes, and a full-body startle response.

  There is a dark, flitting shape, sinister and murderous, in Caterina Bonvicini’s The Year of Our Love. But for any reader wishing to gain an understanding of how the book reads in its original Italian, to an ordinary Italian reader, it is necessary to bear casually in mind what that shape was a reference to.

  The Year of Our Love begins in the Years of Lead. The Years of Lead and the Years of Berlusconi that followed, temporal and spiritual bookends of a sort, are shorthand for an Italian half-century that runs basically from 1967 to 2015, but that sinks its roots in the previous century and, in a sense, the previous millennium. But then the snarling creature flitting through the shadows in our suspense films and our fever dreams sinks its claws back tens of thousands of years, if not longer, in our limbic system and fight-or-flight synapses.

  A good starting point is the formation of the Italian nation, around the time of the American Civil War. Poets as early as Dante and Petrarch had been singing the anthem of Italian unity, but until the 1860s the peninsula was carved up into warring principalities, looming large among them the vast and militaristic Papal States. South of the Papal States lay the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (namely the island of Sicily and the mainland kingdom centered on Naples). When the industrialized North finally invaded the agrarian South under the putative leadership of Garibaldi, it was seen by many as very much an act of war, not liberation. A chaotic but serious resistance movement sprang up and lasted for years, characterized by the northern Italian press as “anti-unification brigands.” The repression of that uprising was savage. One French journalist at the time described “the extermination campaign, here in Europe, not unlike that being practiced against the Red Indian in America.” Summary execution by firing squad could be the penalty for disrespect of the new Italian king, queen, or flag. That was the queen we still memorialize when we order a Margherita pizza, with the green basil, white mozzarella, and red tomato sauce of the Italian flag, just to be clear.

  Carlo Levi, writing after the Second World War but referring to his time in political house arrest in southern Italy in the years prior to the war (thus neatly bracketing the period), wrote about the persistence of the legend of that uprising:

  The myth of the brigands is close to their hearts and a part of their lives, the only poetry in their existence, their dark, desperate epic. Even the appearance of the peasants to-day recalls that of the brigands: they are silent, lonely, gloomy, and frowning in their black suits and hats and, in winter, black overcoats, armed whenever they set out for the fields with gun and axe. They have gentle hearts and patient souls; centuries of resignation weigh on their shoulders, together with a feeling of the vanity of all things and of the overbearing power of fate. But when, after infinite endurance, they are shaken to the depths of their beings and are driven by an instinct of self-defence or justice, their revolt knows no bounds and no measure. It is an unhuman revolt whose point of departure and final end alike are death, in which ferocity is born of despair. The brigands unreasonably and hopelessly stood up for the life and liberty of the peasants against the encroachments of the State. By ill luck they were unwitting instruments of History; they were on the wrong side and they came to destruction (from Christ Stopped at Eboli, translated by Frances Frenaye, pp. 139–40. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1947).

  One brigand told his judge, “Your Honor, if the world had one enormous heart, I’d rip it out of its chest.” Another brigand leader rode down into a southern town leading an army of three thousand men. They proceeded to loot, plunder, and feast, executing all the liberals and the lawyers, and melting down all the confiscated watches, as much for the gold as to simply stop time.

  Eventually, the uprising was put down, but a massive flow of southern Italian emigration to both North and South America ensued. Before long, this profound national trauma had largely been erased from the historical record—but never entirely forgotten.

  Then came Mussolini and the Fascist revolution, in part prompted by the trauma of the First World War. What people forget is that, while Hitler was in power for a dozen years, Mussolini held Italy in his iron group for a quarter-century. They also forget that Italy fought alongside the Germ
ans for part of the Second World War, then overthrew Mussolini, imprisoned him, and made a separate peace with the Allies in 1943. The Germans promptly invaded Italy, restored Mussolini to power, and occupied the country with savage ferocity for the rest of the war. That’s a somewhat simplistic description, but it definitely led to an insurrection of partisan forces battling the Germans with tactics and names that hark back to the southern Italian brigands fighting another northern invader seventy-five years earlier. Among the most noted Italian resistance forces were the Brigate Garibaldi—the Garibaldi Brigades—and if there is no connection between “brigand” and “brigades” then I am leaping to a facile conclusion. Let’s wait and see.

  After the war, in the ambiguity of Italy’s status as an occupied nation that had wanted to free itself from German occupation (after twenty years as an inspiration to a rising Hitler and a staunch ally and fellow collaborationist in the Holocaust), the occupying forces did their best to quickly forget the crimes of the Fascist party. US General Mark Clark, who led the Allied fight in Italy, once joked that the greatest disappearing act in history was the overnight evaporation of fifty million Italian Fascists.

  But not all Italians were willing to forgive and forget. La Volante Rossa—The Red Flying Squad—was an organization that systematically murdered, or executed, people considered guilty of collaboration with or leadership in the Fascist war and prewar crimes. Let’s remember those names, La Volante Rossa and the Brigate Garibaldi, because they appear again just twenty short years later, in the name of the Brigate Rosse—the Red Brigades.

  Which takes us to the Years of Lead and the grim slinking beast that lurks behind the story of The Year of Our Love.

  It was in the middle of the summer of 1964, when Pietro Nenni, the leader of the Italian Socialist Party, was trying to form a center-left coalition with Aldo Moro’s Christian Democrats, that the first ingot of those Years of Lead was cast. In the negotiations to form that ruling coalition, there had been discussions of the government takeover of Italy’s privately owned phone system. Powerful economic and political forces were opposed to such a move, the same kind of shadowy coalition that later resulted in military coups in Greece and Chile, among other places. July in Italy is an intensely vacation-oriented month, the run-up to the sacred monthlong holiday of August. July Sundays are when pretty much every family in the country is in a car heading for the mountains, the seaside, or a farm somewhere outside of town. That Sunday, at the command of a notoriously political military police general named Giovanni De Lorenzo, convoys of slow-moving military troop trucks, crowded with men, filled Italy’s highways, jamming traffic, ruining the holiday cheer, and sending a clear and cacophonous threat of further, if vague, disorders. Nenni withdrew his party’s proposals for a government takeover of the telecommunications infrastructure, doing so, the Monday after that fraught Sunday, with an explicit reference to “saber-rattling” on the part of the military. Clearly, there were fears of a right-wing coup.

  From that summer Monday in 1964 through the seismic social changes of the sixties and seventies and on into the eighties, when Silvio Berlusconi stepped onto the national political stage, Italy struggled through a nightmarish gauntlet of darting, obscure, shadowy plots and maneuvers. Much was unclear, tension was high, and life was vaguely—and occasionally, suddenly and violently—turbulent.

  There is a classic Italian novel by Elio Vittorini, published in 1942 but written in the years just prior to the Second World War and first published in installments in 1938 and 1939, called Conversazione in Sicilia. It has been published in English with the strangely pluralized title Conversations in Sicily. It opens with these coy, censor-proof lines: “I was, in that winter, in the grip of abstract furies. I won’t say which, that’s not the story I’m here to tell you.”

  Caterina Bonvicini also did not set out to recount the story of the Years of Lead. But that story keeps butting in, in various permutations, in various shadowy lunges and prowls. Much like the frenzied times of Italian unification and the fraught years of Mussolini’s quarter-century dictatorship, the two-decade span of the Years of Lead was a time of violence and obscure plots, of lives lived in the lowering shadow of “abstract furies.”

  A shorthand for those years refers to the Red Brigades and the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. But in fact it was much more a titanic struggle between two worldviews, a progressive left-wing revolutionary movement and a repressive right-wing reactionary force. It is sometimes calculated that five hundred or so people were murdered in the Years of Lead, and that the headcount falls about equally to the “red-flag” radical Communists and the “black-flag” Neofascists. Things became so tense and deranged that there was actually a splinter movement called the Nazi-Maoists.

  There are references in this book to the Italicus train bombing, to the Bologna train station bombing, the Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican, Sardinian kidnappers and the Sicilian Mafia, the Red Brigades and Silvio Berlusconi. A famous cover design of a German newsweekly in this period showed an appetizing bowl of spaghetti with a black revolver instead of sauce and meatballs. (The largest flow of tourist visitors to Italy has always been Germans, who in the Years of Lead looked at their neighbor to the south much as we now view Mexico: sunny, cheerful, exciting, with good food and cheap vacations, but also worrisome, dangerous, chaotic, and possibly fatal).

  There is not enough room here to tell the tale of the Years of Lead. It is a sprawling saga, vast and chaotic, and perhaps in a sense Italy’s third great schism, after the two earlier times of chaos marking Italy’s birth in the 1870s, then its rise as a colonial empire and thunderous downfall under Mussolini. It was a hallucinatory revolt of starry-eyed revolutionaries who had grown up listening to stories of anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters battling against foreign—German—occupying armies. From there to the belief that Italy in the 1970s had been occupied by American multinationals like Esso and IBM seemed like a small and logical step. The Red Brigades were not the only revolutionary group of that era, but they are the name that has survived, largely because of their kidnapping and murder of the head of the leading political party, the Christian Democrats, and a former prime minister and international statesman. Aldo Moro was killed in the spring of 1978, roughly midway between the 1974 Italicus train bombing referenced on this page and the 1980 Bologna train station bombing described on this page.

  These are minor, passing references to “abstract furies,” and they are not the story Caterina Bonvicini is here to tell you. But I feel confident that any story of Italian lives stretching from the 1970s to the present day is a story told with this sleek panther prowling somewhere in the anti-camera del cervello, the waiting room of the mind.

  The events of those years were horrifying and relentless: a bombing in an agricultural bank in Milan in 1969 killed nearly twenty and wounded almost a hundred, seemingly planned for the Friday afternoon when the bank lobby would be thronged with farmers come to town for the weekly fair. Three days later, an Italian anarchist being questioned in connection with the bombing, and who almost certainly had had nothing to do with it, fell or was pushed out of a fifth-floor window in Milan’s police head-quarters. Many assumed the man, Giuseppe Pinelli, had been killed by his questioners. Nearly three years later, the police detective in charge of questioning the anarchist, Luigi Calabresi, was shot and killed in retaliation for his suspected role in Pinelli’s death. Thirty years later, Italian playwright Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for a career that included a 1970 play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, based tacitly (not explicitly) on Pinelli’s death, one of the many “abstract furies” of the time.

  Bombings followed bombings, shootings proliferated, judges and politicians were kidnapped and murdered, civilian airliners were shot mysteriously out of the sky, bank administrators were murdered by Mafia hitmen, gray eminences of finance were, variously, poisoned by arsenic-laced espressos in their prison cell (Michele Sindona) or else found hanging by the neck under a bridge in London, with heavy rocks in the pockets of their pinstripe suits (Roberto Calvi). The bridge, by the way, bore the sinister name of Blackfriars, literally the “Dark Brothers,” irresistibly evocative to the Italian newspaper-reading public.