CONTENTS

1) The Non- Camillo Books (Introduction)

2) Early Family Stories

3) Later Family Stories
- Introduction
.
- "The Pullover"
- "Passionaria..."
- "...All Began"
- "...Blackface"
- "Suspense"
- "Vacation..."
- "Ladies..."
- "Jo's Nose"

4) Drawing Room Farces

5) Notes from Prison Camp

Get my bicycle ready," I said the next morning to Jo. "Check the tires and if necessary feed them some air. I have to go to Fidenza to mail something."

Our domestic assistant gazed at me, astonished and indignant. "With all the machines you have tucked away in the garage, you want to make a thirty-kilometer trip, fifteen there, fifteen back, on a bicycle?"

"Very good arithmetic."

"Oh dear," she tittered. "I'd forgotten you were hung up on bicycles."

"It's not just me," I answered. "If you look at yesterday's Corriere, you'll see that in America there are sixty million bicycles in use, six million of which were sold this year. They calculate that in ten years, bicycle sales will rise to ten million per year. The phenomenon is so important that the Government has budgeted 180 million dollars per year for the next twenty years for building pathways reserved for bicyclists."

"I read all about it," she said. "The Americans are an unfortunate lot. The minute the news got out that the celebrated Dr. White had recommended that Eisenhower take up cycling to improve his heart condition, the whole nation jumped on bicycles."

"And went on the bottle too," Margherita added perfidiously. "Evidently this doctor also proclaimed that whisky was a powerful agent for dilating the blood vessels, hence very good for clearing up circulatory congestion. Naturally there have been a lot of silly old men quaffing down whisky as if it were mineral water, thereby ruining stomach and liver to the point where they could only drink orange squash ..."

"We were talking about bicycles, not alcoholics," I interrupted her, very salty, since it makes me angry to hear underhanded remarks about people of my acquaintance, particularly if they happen to be me.

Jo started to laugh. "Look at him, so anti-American, and here he is, behaving exactly like an American--Americans being the sort of people who, if you explained the healthful qualities of clay, would take up drinking juice made of bricks and tiles in the morning."

"What do you mean, American!" I shouted. "The bicycle is a European invention. It was born in Paris a year after the Bastille fell and is without question the most important product of the French revolution. And now, not only in America but also in Europe, the bicycle is having a triumphant renascence, because last year they sold 900,000 bicycles in France alone."

"You've already made your speech about bicycle sales and there's no point in repeating it," Jo said firmly. "What I find laughable is that, suddenly because there's a boom in bicycle sales abroad, you have to make a thirty-kilometer trip just to put a letter in the box. Give me the letter--I'll take it in the car."

"That won't do," Margherita said. "You don't have 'smoker's leg,' he does."

"Now what sort of foolishness is this 'smoker's leg'?" the girl asked.

"You know, he's a comic writer and invents charming diseases like 'athlete's toe' and 'laundress's knee.' Still, I don't know what he finds so amusing about the fact that, given the poor circulation of blood poisoned by nicotine, one of his legs doesn't work any more and eventually will have to be amputated."

Jo shook her head. "Wouldn't it be simpler if he quit smoking? It doesn't seem to me that the ideal cure for 'smoker's leg' is a thirty-kilometer bicycle trip, particularly when he suffers acutely from 'writer's fanny.'"

"There's no such disease!" I protested indignantly.

"Wait to say that until you've done the thirty kilometers by bicycle," she answered. "Come on, forget the bicycle. What car do you want me to get out--the Bianchina, the Millecento, or the Millecinquecento?"

"No! I want my bicycle!" I shouted furiously, stamping the foot attached to my "smoker's leg" against the pavement angrily.

"Okay," Jo said going out. "But you've got a couple of screws loose, I'll say that."

I didn't take offense. Jo doesn't understand. Jo is a representative of the Prosperity Generation for whom the automobile is the machine created as a substitute for the legs in all instances except dancing. The Prosperity Generation might even be symbolized by a motorized centaur: that is, a being who is human from the head to the waist and automobile from the waist down. Jo's way of thinking doesn't surprise me. Even I, twenty-eight years ago, when I bought my first car, was prey to the sacred fury that today besets millions upon millions of Italians.

It had been a few years since I had moved to Milan, and life was marvelously simple. If, for example, Margherita told me to go buy something at the drugstore, all I had to do was walk down the stairs from our fifth-floor apartment, cross the street, go inside the drugstore, all of fifty meters from the door of my building, and then come home. It took four minutes.

Once I had the car, however, the project became infinitely complicated. Having negotiated the stairs from the fifth floor to the ground floor, I had to trek about a kilometer to the garage on Via Noë where I kept the Millecento. There, having solved the reasonably complex problem of extricating the Millecento from the pile of other cars, I would seat myself behind the steering wheel and aim toward the drugstore. But inevitably the street would be so packed with bicycle vans, carts, vendors, and knife-sharpeners that I would have to drive over to a square about half a kilometer away to park the car. I walked 500 meters to the drugstore, bought whatever it was, walked 500 meters back to the car (total: one kilometer) parked in the square, and drove to the garage on Via Noë. Then I walked home. Sum total: three kilometers on foot and three kilometers by car to make a trip of 100 meters.

At this point one of you people is bound to say: "Regardless of what things are like now, it's clear that in 1938 you were a first-class idiot."

That's not so. In 1938 I was a normal person, but I'd just conquered the automobile. This was a fabulous achievement thirty years ago for a peasant from the Valley near Parma who had drifted into Milan with nothing but a tattered umbrella and unlimited stubbornness. I had conquered the automobile and it was unthinkable not to use it for my most minor movements. Here I had the car; of course I had to use it. Otherwise why buy it in the first place? I had promoted myself from miserable worm-pedestrian to auto-owner. An auto-owner, to earn his new title, must perform all movements in his automobile. What about those three kilometers on foot, you ask? The answer is, I didn't walk them in the capacity of worm-pedestrian but rather as an auto-owner on his way to claiming his automobile. I would have fallen back into the routine of miserable worm-pedestrian if I had condescended to negotiate the 100-meter trip on foot. Also we are talking about 1938, when the auto-owner was a phenomenon, a loner. These days the auto-owner sends a representative to the Senate, there are reams of publications to keep him apprised of everything happening in the realm of automobiles; there are books to inform you of your rights and privileges as an auto-owner. Today the auto-owner possesses pride, dignity, and class-consciousness. Also, a car is representative of Prosperity; it's the tangible proof of the achievement of Prosperity and therefore must be used everywhere and at all times. An auto-owner who does not use his car at all times and everywhere must feel like a slave who, once liberated, orders his chains welded to his wrists and ankles again and walks around thus shackled.

How many people are sincerely persuaded that as soon as they are seated behind the steering wheel of their cars they automatically become "somebody"? Millions and millions of parvenu auto-owners in Italy, all of whom feel naked if they have to walk anywhere. Like the supreme commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who is suddenly demoted to latrine orderly.

That's the way things are and people risk their lives in the defense of their status as motorists. But there's nothing to worry about; after a certain length of time, a motorist comes to realize that even if he's not behind the wheel of a car, he's still a respectable human being. He becomes aware that an automobile used when it's not necessary is a pain in the neck. He might even reach the point of hating cars, which are actually respectable pieces of machinery when used properly. But look at what is happening in the United States, where they've come to have a car for every single inhabitant, young or old, male or female: they've suddenly rediscovered the bicycle. Just like the man who runs through every conceivable style of raincoat and suddenly rediscovers the umbrella.

To make a long story short, I reached Fidenza on my trusty Dei in the same amount of time it takes the racer Adorni to ride from Bologna to Piacenza. Unfortunately, however, the kilometers going back seemed considerably longer (about 2,500 meters longer), and just as that wretch Jo had predicted, "writer's fanny" set in with a vengeance. But I went on undaunted, churning away at the pedals. Soon a little diesel pickup passed me on the right and slowed down to keep up with me.

"Now if I were you I'd throw the damn bike in the back here and get inside," the driver said, hanging her head out the window.

I shook my head violently.

"Well, at least grab a hold, then," the girl said.

I didn't give her the answer she deserved because a cubic inch of breath is worth a cubic inch of gold in certain situations. A bicyclist who grabs hold of a truck is about as low as the hunter who kills a cat and takes it home like an African pelt.

"Your wife ordered me to pack you into this truck even if I have to use force," Jo shouted menacingly.

"Beat it!" I shouted back. "Go on, move off and leave me some room to breathe!"

I pulled around behind the pickup, grabbed onto one of the pinions, and threw myself into the chase body and soul. The diesel's process of combustion was less than tidy and it belched out a dense, sticky black smoke. Hence it's not surprising that Margherita, on seeing me arrive, greeted me with the cheerful cry: "Hail, Blackface!"

I found that touching and, dismounting from the bicycle, I thought about Italy in Africa and felt like a remnant of the Empire.