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pretext for arresting many antifascists. They wouldn't have shot
Romolo, they wanted to force names out of him under torture.
Courage apart, Romolo didn't know any names; he had nothing to
reveal. He refused to explain how that sketch of a
piazza
in Como
happened to be in his pocket, for fear of compromising the stranger
who was to have given him the false identity papers there. So he kept
silent, except for repeating that he wasn't an assassin.
If
he had con–
fessed at once that he was trying to cross the frontier with a false
passport, perhaps they wouldn't have tortured him, perhaps they
wouldn't have sentenced him to twelve years of imprisonment, the
first three 'under special custody.' Romolo might still be alive, were
it not for me."
"It wasn't your fault."
"No, but it was because of me that he died, aged twenty-eight,
guilty only of being my brother. With several police warrants out
against me, it would have been senseless to return to Italy. I could
try to help him only from abroad. But I could do nothing to prevent
the inhuman tortures inflicted by the police. I came to know about
them only much later. After the sentence, it was a little easier for
him to receive books, and he worked out a serious plan of study:
history, economics, philosophy, literature. But for some reason,
I can't think why, he was not allowed to learn French. When I
managed to send him the Italian classics he had asked me for, I
remember his writing to me, not long before the end, 'With the
greatest Italian poets for company and all the time in the world to
read them, I am really to be envied and you must not worry about
me.' Just think, he guessed at my despair for him and was trying to
console me. His lungs had been destroyed by floggings, cold, and
hunger, and shortly after that he died of tuberculosis."
"You have always kept that sketch of the Procida jail in your
room in Rome. You never thought of going to Procida?"
"I was determined that when I returned from exile I would not
go back to Abruzzo without Romolo's ashes. In October 1944, in
Rome, I made inquiries at once. But a few days before Christmas I
was told that in 1941 Romolo's remains had been thrown into a com–
mon grave. So I no longer had any reason to go to Procida; there
was nothing for me to bring back."
"A few days before that Christmas we were married, and you
didn't tell me."
He became silent for a while, then he answered, "The loss of
