TWENTY-TWO

Pagliacci

We can only laugh at the ordeal Ettore inflicted on the university’s administration, following the desertion of their “appointment by exceptional merit.” Despite Carrelli’s note to the Magnificent Rector, written within a few days of Ettore’s stunt, it wasn’t until August 16 that the university formally acknowledged his disappearance, confirming to the ministry that no salaries had been drawn since February. A replacement position in theoretical physics was requested and expeditiously approved by the minister to “support the teaching of the important discipline.” A “removal order,” however, was needed before they could begin getting through the red tape for a replacement. This was only signed, reluctantly, on December 6, quoting “abandoning office for more than ten days without justification” as the case for Ettore’s removal.

Hilariously, the removal order was not accepted by the Court of Accounts, whose final approval was necessary to unblock the money allocated by the ministry. In Kafkaesque style, the court requested that Ettore himself sign an acceptance of his removal, confirming in writing that he had disappeared “without justification.” The ministry and university countered in bureaucratic deadpan, stating that such a document, while of unquestionable value and importance, regrettably could not be provided. Wonderfully, they substantiated their declarations, not with an official police report, but with two newspaper clippings (one suggesting that Ettore disappeared to seek spiritual improvement). This was deemed acceptable by the Court of Accounts, but the decree still wasn’t validated until September 1939 and even then committed finances only for a temporary replacement, lest Ettore return. That the war broke out in the middle of these shenanigans didn’t help, but it’s still extraordinary that Ettore’s position in Naples was only readvertised circa 1950, more than ten years after his disappearance.

Martin Eden’s body would never have been retrieved: “The lights of the Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming confidently, as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away.” A well-timed jump and Ettore would have joined the food chain long before anyone had a chance to find his body. What a simple explanation: Why, then, all this insistence on mystery, the belief that the body would necessarily have been restituted by the sea if he did commit suicide?

The leading “suicide theorist” is Bruno Russo, the man who produced by far the best documentary on Ettore (featuring the unique interview with Giuseppe Occhialini at the end of the last chapter). We have arranged to meet at Café Caprice near Piazza Duomo in Catania, and the city feels like an oven by 10:00 am when I leave the hotel. The day before, a 45° C heat wave triggered a state of emergency in Sicily, Calabria, and Puglia, with raging fires, power outages, and people collapsing everywhere. Blissfully unaware, I first spent too long on the beach and then climbed Etna, possibly with mild sunstroke. Now I feel awful, but it’s too late to cancel.

I arrive at the café with Russo’s book on Ettore in hand and do a few laps hoping to be recognized. A waiter approaches me, and I say I’m looking for a friend. He replies, smiling, “Maybe he disappeared,” using the same verb everyone uses with respect to Ettore. I wonder if it’s a jest—Ettore’s picture is on the cover of the book. In fact, it’s the picture edited from the photo of his father’s wake that Fabio had shown me.

Finally someone comes toward me: “Professore Magueijo?” It’s “Professore Bruno Russo.” He cuts an odd figure, with a straw hat over a wet handkerchief falling on his forehead. He has a tumbled mop of wild gray hair and is wearing an incongruous combination of sandals and shorts with a formal shirt. At his suggestion we sit down inside, where the air conditioning should keep us cool; almost at once the lights go out. Waiters bring candles to the tables, making it look ridiculously romantic, but the temperature climbs ruthlessly, and soon we’re both sweating profusely.

God, I hate people with a theory. They are all exactly the same. They all ridicule other people’s theories on the grounds that they’re based on a “biased selection of the data” or on “data that’s clearly fake”; whereas, of course, their own theory is not. They all dismiss some facts and overemphasize others; then accuse everyone else of doing precisely that. They all recite a carbon copy of the same speech. In Russo’s case, suicide acts as the editor of reality. Ochiallini considered himself a clown after his exchange with Ettore on suicide: He had high standards. The same modesty is sadly not present in Professor Bruno Russo.

His conversation reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni films: reams of pretentious, French-imported, intellectual bullshit. He’s one of those people who can’t chat. When he takes the conversational floor, he keeps it for a quarter of an hour in a speech organized like a lecture. Things happen for three reasons: First [five minutes], second [five minutes], and third [final five minutes], and you’re expected to reply in the same format. Interruptions are not tolerated. If something catches your attention, he brushes it aside until his lecture is finished, after which he says, “Tell me!” By which point you’ve totally forgotten, or couldn’t care less, about whatever it was.

We talk about Ettore’s personality and his passions outside science. He plays down Ettore’s enthusiasm for Pirandello. For him, instead, Ettore’s interest in Schopenhauer is the imperative clue to everything. A long lecture on pessimistic philosophy inevitably ensues, under extreme heat! Fucking metaphysics in 45 degrees Celcius, 113 Fahrenheit. . . .

Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, in the words of Russo, revolves around the scalene triangle of life, pain, and will. Life is equated with pain because it is also identified with will: blind, irrational will. But wanting something entails its absence and, thus, unrealized desire, which causes pain. Each desire come true only incites new unsatisfied desires, “unquenchable will” leading to further, inexhaustible pain. Thus man, by living and willing, is sentenced to eternal suffering. Worse: As an individual, he is condemned to a war without truce against other individuals, as their unsatisfied wills clash interminably, in a world full of strife and suffering. Is there any salvation on offer, then?

Not really. Unless you count negation of life as a solution. A Buddhist element now comes into the equation, as asceticism—the nirvana—is envisaged as, if not deliverance, at least the best man can hope for. If one is stricken by the abhorrence of being, and repudiates the world, the will, and all desires, then there’s a glimmer of hope.

Is suicide then approved as a form of negating life? You will be thrilled to learn that Schopenhauer’s answer is no, except when suicide is achieved by starvation. Suicide as a desperate emotional act is condemned (as an acknowledgement that the will is still throbbing.) But if deliberate death results from a negation of will, including the will to eat, then suicide is fully endorsed. Wonderful stuff, I think. Just what I needed to hear, in sweltering heat, drenched in sweat.

Yet the conversation gets still grimmer, “deep” in the intellectual Francomerde sense of the word. The café is walled in mirrors and someone takes a flash photo, making Russo jump with a start. I repress some laughter. He talks about the obscure spiral, illumination by death, suicide as the essence of existence. Unsurprisingly, his best-loved physicist is Ludwig Boltzmann, who hanged himself in the beautiful bay of Duino, near Trieste, while his wife and daughter were having a swim. I consider exhibiting my impeccable credentials: I was born in a region with one of the highest rates of male suicide in Europe. People think Sweden holds the record, but they only have the reputation (Ingmar Bergman is in part to blame). In fact, Alentejo’s suicide rate in some categories is about twice that of Sweden’s.

Nothing to be proud of, and come to think of it, I doubt Russo would have been overwhelmed. The Alentejo tradition is to hang yourself from a cork tree—not very classy. Besides, motive-wise, I imagine he’d be more interested in the Swedish variety of suicide: existentialist, first-world, well-fed (so that starvation can be an actual choice), driven by the abstract and the conceptual.

With great difficulty I finally steer the conversation into the concrete world only for derision to be poured all over me. He accuses everyone who looks at reality—the logistics of Ettore’s disappearance—of trying to write a giallo, a thriller, which for such an exalted intellectual is like a venereal disease.⁶⁶

“Laughable, laughable . . . that story of the passport he took with him, so that he couldn’t have committed suicide. How do they know that he took it? Because they couldn’t find it afterwards. Now I don’t know how it was in 1938, but I can tell you that when I visited Majorana’s house in Rome there was a mess, but such a mess . . . that I can’t see how anyone can rule out that the passport has been there all along.”

He also finds “laughable” the claim that Ettore was a happy person—allegro. “One day you crash a car, the next day you’re allegro.” I tell him that it sounded like a hell of a party. He snorts. He won’t admit any coloration other than dark on Ettore. It occurs to me that he’s the one who is being simplistic, who is trivializing behind a veneer of existentialist intellectualism. But he prides himself on being the only author to have made a proper “map of [Ettore’s] existential path,” of his “free choices.”

“There is coherence in people you can’t avoid. Do you love the sea and then go on vacation to the mountains? Of course not: People are just not like that. Ettore had an obsession with the sea all his life, since he was a child. His life was meant to terminate in the sea.”

Out of boredom I decide to play a little game: to pretend I have a theory. I’ll edit the facts, accuse all others of doing what I’ve done, and claim I’m the only one who has accounted for a complete reality. The theory: that Ettore was a closet homosexual (something that only Pietro mentioned seriously). I disregard the evidence to the contrary. I then emphasize Ettore’s religiosity (feelings of guilt, need for redemption, conservative morals, etc.) and his attachment to a domineering mother (I throw in some Freudian fakes for good measure). And presto: There you have another theory—the Ettore-is-a-poofter-in-the-closet theory.

Of course it’s a joke, but he takes me seriously. He lists the full arguments against it: that Ettore was attracted to women, the letters to Gastone Piqué, and so on. I argue that the facts he mentions are obviously a cover-up. But where is your evidence? It would have been destroyed. But how? Blah, blah, blah. . . . This goes on for a while (I’m enjoying playing Ettorologist) when he finally shouts in exasperation:

“Then why don’t you say that Ettore was a pedophile? Or that he was sexually attracted to ninety-year-old women?”

I nearly piss myself laughing. And he smiles too, for the first time. By this point I know I shouldn’t like this guy, but I’m warming to him. I switch off my tape recorder; he relaxes and becomes quite a reasonable person. He forgets his existentialist agenda and we talk about the making of his excellent documentary, the remarkable interviews he so timely caught. By the time we part, the stiffness in our earlier conversation is gone. God, I hate people with a theory. They’re such nice human beings otherwise.

The fact is that all Ettore theories explain only a subset of the data, but that has to be the case for any consistent theory, because the data is self-contradictory. So either you ridicule all theories—suicide, flight to Argentina, reclusion in a monastery, kidnap by aliens—or you embrace self-contradiction. I prefer the latter. There’s nothing wrong with inconsistency when that’s the only way to capture reality.

Russo’s suicide theory is not ridiculous, but it is just a theory and therefore limited. It’s undeniable that suicide was not alien to Ettore’s psyche. Many years before those stark days in 1938, while walking with his friend Gastone Piqué along Via Cavour, Ettore reportedly sighed,” How sad it must be to live if one is very sick! I can’t conceive that one continues to live if one is so ill.” With his severe ulcer, these feelings could have resurfaced. But more serious are his tempestuous relations with the family, his mother in particular. Most suicides I have encountered are acts of raw revenge on those left behind. No one says so, out of charity.