Pushing Past the Night Read Online Free

happens to me …” She tried to stop him. She even put her hand over his mouth, but he still managed to tell her, “Please, Maria, promise me that you’ll take care of Gemma and the children.” All she could do was nod, with a lump in her throat, while he was hurrying away.
    You might think that this is only the suffering of one family, six frames from a home movie. But there is an entire film to see, and for years I have made it my mission to watch it from start to finish, in the hopes that I might one day understand. Although the brute violence of the threats was plain for all to see, almost no one seems to have realized the tragic turn that this campaign of hatred would take.
    My curiosity to know, to find out what had been said and written about my father, took root when I was fourteen years old. In my first year of high school, I started to skip class to check out the newspapers in the periodicals room of the Sormani Library, a few hundred yards from the courthouse where the trials of my father’s murderers would take place. I spent a lot of time there, with an occasional break every few months, at least until the end of my first year of high school. I would get there early in the morning and wait for the main entrance to open so that I would be one of the first to go in. I would rush in with my microfilm requests: to avoid lines and long waits, I often prepared the yellow request slips ahead of time. First I would read through back issues of Italy’s top mainstream newspaper, the
Corriere della Sera
. I started with its coverage of the Piazza Fontanamassacre, which triggered the series of events leading up to my father’s death, and got as far as the day of his murder. It was a solitary and methodical task that left me exhausted, with my eyes aching, but hooked. I immersed myself in another era, completely losing my sense of time. I would erase all thoughts of school, quizzes, homework, and my classmates. It was an all-consuming experience. Sometimes I felt like a bystander, as if I were observing the events from far away and they had nothing to do with me. Other times the anguish would make my mouth dry and my legs numb. Then I would stand up, rewind the microfilm, and move to the next room, the video room, an amazing, fascinating place with an exceptional collection. You would choose a movie, then wait at your chair in front of the video screen for the clerk to load it into the VCR. It was an extraordinary public service, a fitting symbol of a great modern city like Milan. To stay in historical context, or maybe just because I was a prisoner of those years, I would ask for films from the 1970s, by directors like Fellini, Truffaut, and Kubrick. I would always watch alone, always in silence. At the end of every morning, to return to the present, I would take a walk to the Luini bakery, on the other side of the Milan cathedral, the Duomo, where I would order fresh
panzerotti
with tomato and mozzarella: for years they were my lifesaver, the switch that turned my life back on. I would get two and eat them on my way home, on a route that took me past the ancient fortress of the city, the Castello Sforzesco.
    As I got deeper into my research, I started to check the magazines, starting with the left-leaning weekly
L’espresso
. Ultimately I got to
Lotta Continua
, which published diatribes written by my father’s most virulent critics, some even calling for his murder. It was a jarring experience, to say the least.
    Even today when I read what they wrote, even when I try to put things into perspective and acknowledge their sense that the “enemy” state was too opaque, I still can’t stomach sentencessuch as this one, from June 6, 1970: “That American lackey with the broken window will have to answer for his crimes. We know where he lives.” Or this article from October 1, 1970, one week before
Lotta Continua
was sued for libel by my father (a lawsuit that quickly