HARVEY SACHS
257
partisan during the war. If people tried to tell him how to vote, he'd kill
them, he said. I sympathized with his apprehensions and, to a great
extent, with his political views, but I had the impression that he rather
fancied the idea of ending his adulthood as he began it, in the outback,
free to put bullets into people he disliked.
Two doors down, I was buttonholed by bilious, contemptuous Dr.
Uvetta, a retired bank manager who used to work in Turin but had
returned home to spend his declining years. He imprecated against anti–
Semitism-so far, so good-but then started in on his hatred of Mus–
lims, who are
all
fundamentalists and cowardly assassins, determined to
destroy poor little Israel and ready to stab anyone and everyone in the
back. He said that he was proud of being more of a racist than the
Nazis, as far as Muslims are concerned. Before I could reply, he started
on the Left. His daughter, who had been second in the entire province
on qualifying exams for teaching English and French, had to fight
"without a shadow of a hope," he said, against the "socialist–
communist scum who ride along on the crest of the waves created by the
post- 1968 reforms. They all deserve to be shot!"
Two men in their seventies, one Left, one Right, both ready to see
people they disagree with die in droves-or so they said. What an
opportunity for an outside observer to quintessentialize! But the banal
truth is that, like many other Italian males of their generation, they were
victims of their childhood disillusionment with the omniscient, strong,
protecting, stern, wise father-Mussolini-who had proved to be
wrong, weak, cowardly, cruel, and mad.
As a foreigner who fell in love with Italy in his mid-twenties and who
lived there for nearly a quarter-century, I try to avoid the pitfall of quin–
tessentialization by avoiding the terrain altogether. My guess is that if
one were
to
weigh all the positives against all the negatives, Italy would
COI11e out neither better nor worse than any other contemporary post–
industrial nation in the post-Christian world. When people ask why I
lived in Italy for so many years, I usually explain that most of Italy'S
positive
alld
negative characteristics were congenial to my nature, and
that I was willing to put up with those that weren't.
And yet, like other more or less voluntary expatriates all over the
world, I often ask myself how and why I ended up where
1
did. I was
thinking the other day, for instance, that in the beginning-in
my
begin–
ning, years before I'd heard of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Stendhal–
there were Mrs. Guarino, Miss Daponte, and Mrs. D'Arrigo. Mrs.
Olimpia Guarino, gray-haired and plump, was my second grade teacher
at Gracemount Elementary School in Cleveland, back in
J953-54.
