Читать книгу Memories Of Our Days - Chiara Cesetti - Страница 17

1 Chapter XIII

At the newsroom

What Fosco and Rudi feared was true.

Despite the speakers pleading to end the political meeting peacefully, an extremist fringe had headed off to the city centre.

Rudi was at Piazza del Duomo when the first nationalists arrived. They were mainly young students and army cadets who were getting agitated trying to understand what they could do. The police was keeping an eye on them trying to avoid aggressive actions. The group went ahead. Rudi followed it all along the way. At Piazza Cavour other protesters joined in. The most rowdy people were shouting –To the Duomo , to the Duomo- and all the people were restless not knowing exactly what was going on.

One of his colleagues got scared by what was happening and warned him that a group of socialist protesters was about to get there too.

-They are coming, they are coming- he shouted all excited.

-Who?-

-The other ones, the other ones…-

-Where?-

-Over there, over there, from Via Mercanti…-

It was happening what Rudi feared. The police themselves, despite all their efforts, did not manage to break up the protesters. The clash was inevitable .

Truncheons, rocks and gunshots left several wounded and a dead person on the ground. Rudi was trying to keep at a distance without missing out the events.

At the end of the toughest clashes, the nationalists won but people were not satisfied and the bustling crowd headed off this time to the newsroom headquarters Rudi and Fosco worked for.

What happened inside and outside the newsroom headquarters was just horrible. Journalists found it difficult themselves to report what happened.

Only the day after the two young men realised the dreadful mess that they had made: they used the clubs and flammable liquids to destroy everything.

Back at home Giovanni read the news on the newspaper. Before breaking it to the family, he tried to get in touch with Rudi. That was the only way to reassure Giulia completely.

Rudi himself contacted him on a public phone. After reassuring him that he was fine, they agreed that he would have written a letter explaining all the events he had witnessed.

The series of news that referred daily to these kinds of events started to worry Giovanni.

In the village too there were some small groups of people with a different views that were expressing their dissatisfaction but the disagreements never went beyond the mere oral level. After Ada’s death, the family life got its routine made of daily events related to work and some little worries. Violent riots like what happened in Milan did not predict anything good. The worries about the future for everyone added onto the distress of everyday life.

Rudi’s letter arrived. He wrote about the newsroom headquarters could carry on its work among many difficulties, about how worried he was about the events happening in the city where the Arditi* formation of the shock troops, led by Benito Mussolini, was becoming more and more popular..

*Note: Arditi was the name adopted by the Royal Italian Army elite special force of WW1