The Twenty Days of Turin Read online

  The

  TWENTY

  DAYS of

  TURIN

  Giorgio De Maria

  Translated by Ramon Glazov

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York / London

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Introduction

  The Twenty Days of Turin: A Report from the End of the Century

  I. Insomnia

  II. The Night of May the Eighth

  III. The Library

  IV. The Second Victim

  V. The Millenarists

  VI. An Interlude

  VII. The Voices

  VIII. The Headlines

  IX. The Messages

  X. New Gleanings

  XI. Taking Leave

  APPENDIX I: The Death at Missolonghi

  APPENDIX II: Phenomenology of the Screamer

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  IN A FAR-FLUNG CORNER of northwestern Italy, girdled by industrial haze, flanked by a crescent of jagged Alps, stands Turin, grandiose necropolis of a town. Baroque palaces, shaded neoclassical arcades, interwar military monuments and diverse hordes of bronze statues recall a history as the first capital of modern Italy and, in a fuzzier, earlier time, royal capital of the Kingdom of Savoy. It’s a museum city, famous for its eponymous Shroud, its Napoleonic trove of Egyptian tomb treasures, its streets where Nietzsche suffered his tragic mental collapse. At first glance, a quiet museum city—yet museums rarely come without an odor of death, or, in Turin’s case, a whiff of Armageddon. Nicknamed the “City of Black Magic” by its tolerant Italian neighbors, Turin has a long reputation for everything disquieting and spooky. Dozens of bookshops can still be found near its center selling witchcraft manuals, Satanism how-tos, UFO monthlies and the supposed confessions of ex-Illuminati. Walking along the River Po, you’ll see bridge after bridge daubed with bilingual End Times graffiti. (LORD JESUS IS COMING VERY SOON TO SAVE US WITH OUR FAMILIES, one reads, beside IL S. GESU STA ARRIVANDO.) By dread coincidence, Turin has also lent its Italian name to the Torino Scale, used by astronomers to grade the chances that a near-Earth object might “threaten the future of civilization as we know it.”

  Giorgio De Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin is a sinister, imaginary chronicle of the author’s home city as it suffers “a phenomenon of collective psychosis.” Written during the late 1970s, when Italy was tormented almost daily by terror attacks and police-state crackdowns, it balances apocalyptic fantasy with biting cultural observation. And while (we can all hope) the paranormal wrath he describes is pure invention, De Maria did not have to hunt far for scenes of a terrorized society. Wordless fear, determined amnesia and an aggressive impulse to look the other way are the story’s cornerstones, and at least as chilling as its bizarre violence.

  On its release at the end of 1977, the novel found early praise in L’Espresso and La Stampa, the latter hailing it as “a book dipped in the stream of cruel and timely metaphors.” But trying times lay ahead. In the 1980s, De Maria experienced a sudden, almost Gogolian, crisis of art and faith, leaving behind decades of combative anti-clericalism to become a fervently traditional Catholic. Devoting his pen to religious literature, he struggled with depression and would produce no further novels in his lifetime. Meanwhile, The Twenty Days of Turin, his fourth and final work, fell out of print when its small, artistically minded publisher—Edizioni il Formichiere, or Anteater Press—closed in 1983.

  Faced with these hurdles, The Twenty Days of Turin had a significant gambit against oblivion: it was a book that fueled nightmares, and its cult status has endured among a shaken but grateful Turinese readership. One of the novel’s major champions is scholar and critic Pier Massimo Prosio, whose Guida Letteraria di Torino remains the classic overview of Turin’s literary culture—a hyperproductive milieu that can boast Eco, Pavese, Arpino, Levi and Calvino among its famous names. In the third and current edition (2005) of his survey, Prosio judges The Twenty Days of Turin to be “one of the most forcible examples of this starchy, formal city’s capacity for stories of mystery and terror.” Following De Maria’s death in April 2009, Prosio wrote in the journal Studi Piemontesi: “As a storyteller, De Maria belongs to a rather peculiar and exotic tradition of Italian fiction, a writing that lies at the juncture of real and surreal, the blending of reality and imagination in a not impossible conspiracy.” That style, he added, found its “most favorable expression” in The Twenty Days of Turin, “a proper ghost story,* hallucinatory and distressing, in the vein of the great horror masters, especially Poe.” Equally, La Stampa’s obituary of the “reclusive and atypical” De Maria singled the novel out, many decades after it appeared, for its “image of a gloomy, disquieting Turin, stalked by demonic and violent underground forces which anticipate the reality of terrorism.”

  My own introduction to the book came through the mountaineer and music journalist Luca Signorelli, who first read it shortly after its release. He was seventeen; his brother Andrea was fifteen. Their chief pursuits at the time were truancy, hard drinking, playing Black Sabbath albums and devouring French science fiction comics. They knew only vaguely who De Maria was. What professional critics thought of his work, or anyone else’s, didn’t interest them. Had some well-meaning elder suggested to them that The Twenty Days of Turin was “literature”—or (a thing more insufferable to their teenage tastes) “magical realism”—they might never have opened it. But like all wickedly memorable novels, it had a cold-caller’s talent for snaring readers early, before they understood the finer writerly merits of what was scaring them to death. “Back then it felt as if your own backyard was taking some kind of twisted center stage,” says Luca. Most of the original De Maria fans I’ve chanced into, from cartoon animators in Turin to ski shop proprietors in Courmayeur, were no older than the Signorelli brothers when the book was printed. Andrea Signorelli himself is now the front man of thrash metal group Braindamage. As an extreme mark of devotion, he lives in an Art Nouveau house in the same exact location as the book’s first terror victim. He’d dreamt of settling there, he admits, ever since he read The Twenty Days.

  Forty years on, the novel’s fantastic elements have only crept closer to daily existence. Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others. The Library does not accept conventional printed books. “There’s too much artifice in literature,” the youths claim, “even when it’s said to be spontaneous.” They demand only “true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people.” The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar: diary entries on public display, crowdsourced amateur content, a new space promising emancipation to users who previously thought they were alone, even the infectious optimism that start-up founders brandish while pitching their disruptions. Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties.

  Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying (“pages
and pages just to indicate, to a poor elderly woman, that her skin was the color of a lemon and her spine was warping”). This collection of personal horrors—which De Maria often juxtaposes with images of garbage dumps and overflowing sewage—swells to mountainous proportions: “It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.” Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.” Paranoid that anyone around them, friend or foe, might have read their unguarded confessions, the diarists are drained by an unnatural insomnia that sleeping pills cannot cure. Every night, they shuffle across the streets of Turin in a fugue state, congregating in squares, unable to speak to or recognize their fellow sleepwalkers. As they are crudely slaughtered in each other’s full view, the insomniacs remain too atomized to react to the violence or describe the predatory entities responsible. And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life. What is posted, alas, can never be unposted.

  Being prototypical Turinese, De Maria’s characters live under a code of repressed dignitas, a shell of stiff-upper-lip politeness—evoked locally in the phrase “la tradizione sabauda”—which both buffers and imprisons them. Tact is everything in their shy, buttressed world, while mortification is a fate worse than death. This leaves them especially vulnerable to the Library when it emerges to feed on their loneliness, and spells their doom as long as a fear of embarrassment exists. Profiled alongside his novel by La Stampa in 1978, De Maria remarked on these anxieties: “I want to say that Turin is not a neutral city. Even if you don’t outwardly know anyone and no one knows you, you always get the impression you’re being watched.”

  The narrator of The Twenty Days of Turin is an unnamed salaryman who lives alone, playing classical recorder and researching the insomniac massacres that struck his city a decade earlier. His attempts are rebuffed by fellow citizens who refuse to speak about the events and find their mention impertinent: some are even members of a Millenarist sect that accepts the killings as God’s will. Ironically, very much like the Library’s patrons, the protagonist himself is a lonely misfit searching for other individuals who share his forbidden interests. Though he befriends two similarly inquisitive characters—the generous attorney Segre and the part-time occultist Giuffrida—his quest ends in personal disaster.

  De Maria, who began writing macabre fiction during the 1950s, shared certain vital details with his doomed narrator. “Earlier, I’d wanted to be a musician,” he told La Stampa’s interviewer. “I have a piano degree from the Conservatorio. It was reading Kafka, reading The Trial, that forever converted me to literature: an epiphany, pure and simple . . .”

  From his house on Corso Galileo Ferraris, De Maria would host salons, reading new material to guests and showing off his skills as a concert pianist. A frequent face at these evenings was Emilio Jona, who became one of De Maria’s closest friends. Jona was Jewish, a friend of Primo Levi and a confirmed leftist in his politics. In 1958, alongside De Maria and other musicians and writers, including Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, he formed the Cantacronache, an influential avant-garde music group that sought to revamp and politicize the Italian folk song. “Giorgio’s personality was sparkling, lively, completely anti-conformist,” Jona recalls. “He was witty and entertaining.” Jona made a curious contrast to the other regular of De Maria’s soirees: philosopher and belle-lettrist Elémire Zolla. Unlike his two companions, Zolla was both a Catholic and a far-right thinker in the anti-modern tradition of Julius Evola. A prolific author, he would later become known for printing original essays by Jorge Luis Borges, and for his divisive preface to The Lord of the Rings, which endorsed Tolkien through a lens of reactionary Italian esotericism. His friendship with Jona and De Maria was possible at a time when Turin’s intellectual culture wasn’t viciously divided over politics.

  In 1958, De Maria debuted his writing in Il Caffè, one of postwar Italy’s top literary magazines. The published piece was a long story describing the 1995 assassination of a fictional “Pope Benedict XVI.” It proclaimed his enduring interest in unreliable narration, alternate timelines and topsy-turvy parallel universes. Despite the work’s anti-clerical sentiments, Zolla contributed a short, humorous note of introduction to be run alongside it, sponsoring De Maria as a new author to watch. The note concluded:

  This is one of his long stories, or better put, one of his accidentally recorded digressions. De Maria’s too fond of explaining his philosophical system in Piedmontese dialect, which will be an obstacle to introducing him. And that’s an add-on obstacle to his scorn for the written word. His biography? He plays the piano and perhaps one day he’ll see the publication of a “History of Godawful Music” from castrati to present-day keyboard thumpers. He graduated with a thesis on the shadiest heretical sects of the Middle Ages. He’s tried to adjust himself to employment within various nationwide firms without success, because to a certain point his bosses could no longer manage to support the presence of a man so utterly harmless and insensible to the beauty of “human relations.”†

  Old-souled yet iconoclastic, De Maria was a paradoxical radical who epitomized Theodor Adorno’s quip, “One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.” Mass culture, like organized religion, at once unnerved and fascinated him. Raising his children without a TV set, he seldom visited the cinema but listened keenly to secondhand descriptions of movies his acquaintances had seen. While writing songs for the Cantacronache in the early 1960s, he became interested in the new style of jukebox rock sung by Italy’s urlatori, or “screamers.” As innocuous as these urlatori seem today, De Maria heard a dark and painful undercurrent to their music. The resulting analysis (included in this volume as “Phenomenology of the Screamer”) shows his gift for drawing fearful meaning from mundane sources. Its account of “inward petrification,” neurotic voyeurism and futile outbursts of “primordial, barbaric desires” suggests an early origin for the horror themes that would find full expression in The Twenty Days of Turin.

  Much as Zolla presents him, De Maria held a picaresque series of day jobs. After serving as a wool merchant, he was employed by Fiat in the 1950s. “Because he was a nonconformist and a leftist, he was transferred as punishment from Turin to Brescia—this despite his first wife being the daughter of a Fiat executive,” Jona recalls. “Giorgio was very absentminded and sloppily dressed and he’d get his jacket smudged with grease in no time when he ate. He told me that when his dossier finally came to light, one thing they cited as evidence of contempt for the company was that he regularly came to the office with streaks of talcum powder on his suit.” Following termination at Fiat, De Maria became a theater critic for the Communist newspaper L’Unità, and—­notwithstanding his aversion to television—also worked at the network broadcaster RAI-TV. Under commission, he wrote a teleplay (Prova d’appello) portraying a lethal dystopian game show. RAI-TV canceled the program but was forced to pay De Maria by a 1975 court ruling.

  Pondering his late friend, Jona mentions the strange, oracular quality that ran through his stories of that era: “He described the [worker and student revolt of] 1968 before it happened; he prophesized the suicide attempt of one professor who couldn’t stand the fall of his academic empire; he dreamed up, long before the big strikes at Fiat, a sexually motivated factory uprising.”

  Jona, trained in law, happened to double as De Maria’s family attorney. De Maria fictionalized him in The Twenty Days of Turin as the urbane legalist Andrea Segre—perhaps the story’s most valiant figure, who embodies the better values of old-school Turin. “I was among the first to read the typewritten manuscript and the verdict I gave was entirely positive,” Jona writes. “I recall that a character, the attorn
ey Segre, was to some extent a portrait of me, and this is why, according to Giorgio, in honor of our friendship, he wasn’t killed off.”

  De Maria’s retreat into religion startled his old comrade, though the two stayed on good terms. “I recall that he publicly read out a kind of hilarious little tale describing this transition, and it was massively amusing to listeners who were unaware that he was truthfully recounting his conversion . . . His writing definitely lost its sting and irony, becoming flatly Catholic, but to a point, in his personal relationships, he retained some of his old contrariness.”

  Echoing his personal struggles, De Maria’s fiction is filled with incidents of mental breakdown and talent cut short. The narrator of The Twenty Days of Turin treats his recorder as a reflection of his psyche, and it comes as an ill sign when he finds his usual joy in playing Bach has suddenly evaporated: “I placed my hands on the instrument without any certainty and breathed out foolishly like someone puffing into a blowgun.” Another piece in this volume, “The Death at Missolonghi,” depicts a shadowy force that robs Lord Byron of his writing ability. Decades before “impostor syndrome” became a household phrase, De Maria wrote this bleak description of private creative death:

  It happens at times that men can outlive themselves and persevere, like wraiths, by carrying out the actions they have always carried out; their souls are mute but not their voices, and their hands and feet do not stop moving. Seeing them in the street or riding in the saddles of their chargers, no one would think that their minds had lost their hum, that the blood in their veins was heatless and spent; nor do the women they still hold tight to their bosoms ever imagine such a tremendous absence . . . And in the city there’s no lack of them . . . Often even, the more the vacuum inside them is pierced, the more grandiosely they act, giving shows of themselves, fashioning great spectacles of gaiety, dauntlessness and brio. There’s never a Carnevale in Venice where their masks don’t make an appearance. And if times and manners continue to slide as they do now, it shall not be long before these walking husks will form great crowds, whose presence no one will be able to evade.