I can never really relax beforehand; I am always looking round for something to do, even if I will invariably end up winging it; when my tax card came in the post that morning, I thought I had found the perfect conversation piece.
“It’s been the running joke of my life here,” I said at the beginning of the lesson. “I applied for my tax card about seven years ago. Although I had the number, they never bothered to send me the card. Can you believe it? I’ve been waiting seven years for this. Christmas and birthday have come round earlier this year.”
Giovanni, who was one of my mature students, gave a wry smile as he appeared to catch my drift.
“Well,” he said, “it seems you have got your distintivo. You must consider it a great honour.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I am just a stranger in these parts. What’s a distintivo?”
Giovanni smiled at my little teaching gambit. “Don’t you mean foreigner?”
“You are right,” I said. “I do mean foreigner. I still don’t get it. What is a distintivo?”
Giovanni’s wife, Cristina, who had just come in with a pot of tea and whose English is much better than Giovanni’s, was laughing.
“He means your badge of honour,” she said. “It is a fascist symbol. What’s that got to do with Patrick’s tax code?”
“Cara mia,” said Giovanni, switching to Italian, “do you need to be reminded of the fact we are still living with the legacy of fascism.”
“Giovanni, you are not explaining yourself,” she said. “In English, please.”
“What’s so difficult to understand? You cannot deny it was the fascists who set up our bureaucracy.”
“Patrick is a foreigner. He will not grasp your history lesson unless you tell him the story. However, you can only tell it on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You promise not to bring Kant into it.”
By way of explanation Giovanni, who, as well as a historian, is also a professor of philosophy, began his story in his slow but nonetheless precise English. “It’s not really a story about fascism,” he said, “but rather how we southerners reacted to fascism and fascism became part of the continuing story of our psyche.”
Cristina laughed. “Stop being complicated. Tell us the story.”
“The story,” Giovanni began, “concerns a conductor at the time of the building of FT railway line before the war when the fascists were in their pomp. This was quite a good job for a man of the conductor’s background as the son of a simple countryman, or contadino.
One day, the conductor was walking through the train, checking people’s tickets when he came to a man sitting in a first-class seat.
The conductor looked at the man’s ticket. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This ticket is not valid. You will have to go into the second-class carriage.”
“Do you know who I am?”
The conductor looked at the man who was wearing a good suit. Sitting opposite him was a blonde lady wearing an expensive perfume. In those days, few women could have afforded such a perfume let alone the blonde dye.
The conductor, who was a stickler for the rules, stood his ground. “Signor,” he said, “you may be the pope’s cardinal for all I know, but we cannot have people with invalid tickets sitting in first class seats.”
Incensed, the man stood up and slapped the conductor. “I have never experienced such insolence,” he said. “I will report you to the station master.”
The woman looked away as the red-faced conductor left the carriage, humiliated and seething inside.
The conductor went home where his mother was preparing the evening meal.
He went to get the bottle of table wine and poured himself a glass. He sat down without speaking. His mother placed the beans and chicory and bread on the table.
“Why don’t you eat? Non hai fame?”
“I am not hungry.”
“Well, are you going to sit there like a deaf mute all evening? What’s eating you?”
When she learned what had happened, his mother threw up her arms in despair.
“Why did you do it?” she said. “Now you will never get anywhere.”
But the conductor, son of a contadino was what they call a testardo: stubborn as a mule.
“I have my pride,” he said. “I do not see why I have to suck up to the party.”
“Will you never learn?” his mother said. “How can you expect to get on if you always work against them? What about your sweetheart? How do you think she will feel when you ruin all your chances?”
The conductor held his tongue, but his mother, as mothers often are here, took more than a simple interest in his career; she was over-protective, a fact that he resented deeply. Although he deeply resented his mother for meddling, he also had respect for her point of view. After his father’s death, she had come into her own.
The conductor went to work as usual over the coming weeks. His mother, perhaps out of sensitivity, did not raise the matter again until, one evening, when she had cooked his favourite dish. A very simple dish, gnocchi dumplings made of flour and egg in a vegetable broth. She had found out that there was to be a meeting in the village to which the party bosses were invited.
“Figlio mio,” she said, “this is your chance. These people can make a difference to your future.”
Her son shrugged. “What can they do for me that they haven’t already done?”
“You must not be negative,” his mother said. “Look, what I’ve got here.”
“Where did you get this?”
“Never you mind.”
The conductor, who always had a tendency to jump to conclusions, said:
“You went to see the priest. What does the priest know?”
“It is nothing to do with the priest.”
The conductor snapped.
“Then it’s that miserable black shirt who works in the mayor’s office.”
His mother dug in her heels.
“Figlio mio, you know how things work here,” she said. “The secretary is a good man. He is prepared to do you a favour if we help his son find work in the railway.”
They argued back and forth, but if her son was a testardo, she could also be stubborn. “Salvatore, you must go to the meeting and present the distintivo.”
Against, therefore, his better judgment, and still bristling inside, the conductor went to the meeting to present his so-called distintivo, or badge of honour. It so happened that at the meeting that evening was the very man he had insulted on the train by refusing him his first-class seat.
He looked at the badge of honour. “What’s this?” he said.
“It is my distintivo, sir.”
“How old are you now?”
The conductor held his head in shame.
“You ask us to believe you marched with Il Duce,” said the party boss.
The hall was crowded and everyone was laughing. The party boss turned back to the man who everyone was laughing at. “How dare you come here and insult the memory of those who marched on Rome. Do you think Il Duce gives the badge to school children?”
Humiliated, the conductor left the party meeting.
When he got home; the conductor lashed out at his mother. “It was your idea,” he said. “If I had not shown my hand, I wouldn’t be in this pickle.”
“Well,” she said, “why didn’t you talk to them at the end of the meeting? You know as well as I do, everyone wants to get into the good books of the party bosses. One has to take one’s chance.”
“That’s right, old woman. I didn’t take my chance. What are you going to do about it? Buy me another distintivo?”
His mother, however, had a plan to rectify the situation. “You must go and see your boss,” she said. “Explain the situation. Get him to rubber stamp the distintivo. Then they can’t say you didn’t march with Il Duce.”
The conductor, however, was not convinced. “My boss will not do something like that. He does everything by the book.”
“Just like my son!”
“Anyway,” said the conductor, “how do you think he got where he is? – By being gentile with people?”
“Well,” said his mother, “if you continue to behave like such a sour puss, no one will want to be gentile with you.”
“Sarcasm was in both their voices. Being gentile was such a loaded concept,” explained Giovanni. “In English it might translate as nice and kind, but at that time and in that place it resonated with false sincerity.
With great reluctance, dragging his feet, the conductor went to see his boss, the station master. As one might expect, the station master kept him waiting while he talked to his secretaries and dictated letters to his superiors in Rome. When he entered the station master’s office, the conductor was already boiling over.
The station master made a big pretence of welcoming him.
“They tell me you are doing a good job,” he said. “We hear you are always on time and extremely diligent about checking people’s tickets.”
The station master made a show of going through his records.
“I have studied your case, however. My conscience dictates that I cannot sign the distintivo.”
The conductor left the stationmaster’s office. Once again, he had been humiliated. “What do I need the party for?” he told himself. “I will go home with my tail between my legs. But I can look myself in the mirror, even if I do not have the badge of honour.”
The conductor’s mother died a few years after this. The conductor himself got married and started a family. Over the next decade and through the long, hard years of the war, however, he received no promotion to a desk job, let alone a better line.
“The story does not end here, though,” said Giovanni. “After the war, my father’s position within the railway hierarchy was no better.
“An opportunity presented itself when the old station master came to see him. Togliatti and the communists were calling for “purification” of those who had been involved with the fascists.
“Salvatore,” he said, “you are a good man. But you must help me just as I helped you once before.”
“I’m sorry,” my father said. “We both know the truth.”
“What are you saying? I need your help. The Communists will lynch me.”
His old boss went down on his hands and knees to get him to sign the letter, but Giovanni’s father’s conscience would not be pricked. He refused to sign the letter absolving the old station master of his association with the former regime.
“I have studied your case,” he said. “My conscience dictates that I cannot sign.”
Giovanni was silent for a moment. “My father, as I have said, was a testardo, stubborn as a mule…” “Now perhaps you understand what I mean by badge of honour.”