A Brilliant Darkness

But we’re close to the end: Shall we step back down a few notches in lunacy? Something akin to an answer is expected, after all. So let me tell you the Majorana fable closest to my heart. A Vote of Silence. I’m an atheist, but still I find it irresistibly beautiful.

One evening in the 1960s, the novelist Leonardo Sciascia was having dinner at a Roman restaurant with Emilio Segrè and writer Alberto Moravia, among others. The conversation touched upon the atomic bomb and Segrè, in good Basilisk style, boasted of his participation in the Manhattan Project. It was at the height of the cold war, with the phantom of global destruction hanging over the world, and such lightheartedness was even more pathetic than irresponsible. Sciascia, who had the hot blood of all Sicilians, shouted verbal abuse and attempted to physically assault Segrè. Moravia had to restrain him lest Emilio end up with his spectacles crushed into his nose. And it was during this mealtime incident that Sciascia—an antinuclear activist—first conceived the notion that scientists are evil. From direct contact with a Dr. Strangelove.

As Sciascia read about the politics and science behind the making of the atom bomb, he developed his views further. As he learned more about those who made the bomb and their dilemmas of the soul—or lack thereof—he became convinced that scientists like Fermi, Segrè, and Oppenheimer were actually clinically mad. But then he stumbled upon Ettore. Immediately Sciascia realized that he was different. Ettore had a soul. His life wasn’t just science without any padding of humanity. Sciascia began collecting documents on Ettore’s life obsessively. He speculated that Ettore being a Sicilian—a nation that copiously produced artists and writers but no scientists—may have had something to do with it. Sicilians are superstitious and despise science. A Sicilian scientist had to be different from the others.

Some time later, Sciascia was reading a newspaper while relaxing at a café. His mind was fluttering away when he came across an article reporting that one of the pilots who dropped the bomb had subsequently joined a monastery. And that’s when he had his sudden vision, his burst of insight! Of course that’s what happened to Ettore. In 1938 he’d seen what the world was coming to, and unlike the others he couldn’t shake off responsibility. He cherished his freedom and didn’t want to be a mere robot programmed to inaugurate the nuclear nightmare. So he’d sought refuge at a monastery.

Unlike other Ettorologists, Sciascia never claimed to have holy fire spewing from his ass; indeed, he rejected the label of “theory,” deeming his views on Ettore “a mixture of history and invention.” Ettore, in his mind, became symbolic of the scientist who refuses to give up choice, who repudiates being a cog in a political mechanism.

“I have no doubt that Majorana would have participated in the Manhattan Project.” This is Professor Francesco Guerra’s opinion.

“Out of curiosity. He’d have wanted to know if the physics of a chain reaction really was possible.” I suppose this is why scientists look so deranged to the rest of the world; and the man in front of me is the nicest person one can think of.

I have no doubts that Ettore would never have participated in the Manhattan Project. Even before moral issues are brought into the picture, he could never be part of a group. Any group. It just wasn’t in his nature.

Maria Majorana explained long ago how the family repeatedly petitioned the Pope for information on Ettore, always receiving no reply. Certainly if Ettore did join a monastery (as suggested by several clues gathered by the 1938 search party), that must have left a paper trail, which may eventually resurface from that black hole called the Vatican. And Sciascia himself found a scent of Ettore at a monastery in Basilicata.

The first glass of wine I ever drank was in the grounds of a Carthusian monastery near Evora, Portugal. My uncle had a friend who worked at the attached farm, and we were invited for lunch. Befittingly for a vineyard that produces some of the best nectar in the world, the only drinks available were tap water and wine. My uncle asked that I be given water (I was seven or eight) but when the meal arrived this offended the farmers’ aesthetical sense so much that they insisted on supplying me with a robust glass of wine.

None of this veneration of the sublunar world is permitted on the other side of the wall, in the monastery itself. A vow of silence is observed. One of my earliest memories is the sound of their bells tolling at three or four in the morning calling the monks to their prayers. The monks are divided into brothers and fathers (or choir monks); the brothers are allowed meager contact with the outside, but the fathers are totally detached from it. Choir monks spend their days in spiritual exercises: praying, meditating, and studying.

It was in one of the monasteries of this order that Sciascia found the evidence he didn’t need for what he was happy to see as a metaphor. “Perhaps someone in this place was able to avoid betraying life by betraying the conspiracy against life,” he writes, describing his visit.

He finds the peaceful and tidy cemetery, row after row of past monks orderly arranged in their final launch pad to Heaven; but no inklings as to Ettore’s location. A Dutch monk shows him around, insisting that the order has no famous writers or scientists to boast of. This contradicts the story that led Sciascia there, a friend who visited in 1945 and vividly recalled being told that there was among the choir monks a famous scientist.

But as Sciascia follows the monk through the austere citadel he admits:

“I have no wish to ask questions, to verify. I feel implicated, compelled to respect a secret. . . . On the threshold, as I take my leave, the Carthusian asks:

“‘Have I answered all your questions?’

“ . . . I asked but a few. . . . But I answer:

“And it’s true.”

Could Ettore have guessed what was about to befall the world? Almost certainly yes, and this merely adds another stratum to the crisis that hit him from 1933 to 1937 and finally unwound itself in those stormy days in March 1938. Ettore had a tradition of spotting what the other Panisperna Boys couldn’t and they did achieve the fission of Uranium in 1934, having inflicted cancer on the poor goldfish of their pond. Ida Novak, in Germany, understood it in 1934, so why not Ettore? But unlike Novak (who was a chemist), Ettore would also have been aware of the prospect of a chain reaction and the formidable energies that could be released.

Whether he foresaw Armageddon is another matter. But he was so depressed in those years—possibly, or even probably, for other reasons—that any human extrapolation he’d make from such a discovery would have to have been pessimistic. I don’t believe that the bomb was the cause of Ettore’s depression, but I do think that it was one among many culprits. Enough to turn the wildest epicure into a monk, if you want my opinion.

The ending of the film I Ragazzi di Via Panisperna re-creates Sciascia’s vision almost to the letter. Recall that in the film Ettore withdraws from the world, becoming a peasant at a bucolic Sicilian farm south of nowhere. Fermi visits him ostensibly to beg his assistance. He’s carrying a notebook, “Uranium” embossed on its cover.

When they meet the scenario is surreal. We see Ettore ambling through the dilapidated farmhouse, hefty chandeliers hanging from the branches of a palm tree that grew embedded in a neoclassical reception room. Birds fly freely indoors. Ettore receives Fermi warmly, but replies to his requests for help with “I don’t occupy myself with that anymore.” His statement echoes an utterance from Arthur Rim-baud, the teenager who changed poetry forever but never wrote another verse after he turned twenty.

Ettore then mentions Galileo’s classic “Il Mondo Mobili,” which proposed that the Earth orbits the sun and led to his troubles with the Inquisition. “I like Galileo because he was afraid,” says Ettore (what could he have been thinking when he said this?). Fermi responds with the banality that the truths discovered by Galileo are universal facts and would always have been found, if not by Galileo, then by someone else. Ettore sniggers:

“We only find what we want to find.”

A bewildered Fermi leaves his uranium notebook next to a pile of loquats and they part forever.

That night, Ettore can’t sleep. The scene is almost mystical, flooded by Sicilian a cappella songs, with their Arabic inflexions and extraterrestrial rhythms. Amid nightmarish flashbacks of his mother forcing her Ettoronzo to perform circus tricks before visitors, he sweats and is delirious, then gets up flushed and distraught. With a violent sweeping gesture he makes space on a messy desktop and opens Fermi’s notebook. Effortlessly, he solves the enigma of uranium, and then—predictably—he burns his work.

After Ettore vanishes in March 1938, Fermi travels to Naples and learns from Carrelli that two days before evaporating, Ettore had drawn five months of salary from the university cashier. Among Ettore’s belongings, spread out by Carrelli on a table, Fermi recognizes “Il Mondo Mobile.” Lost in its pages is a picture of Ettore. At the gates of a monastery.

From the picture Fermi locates the monastery, where he meets a monk well acquainted with Ettore. But Ettore, the monk says, has left.

“Have I arrived too late?”

“We can’t measure the time of God with our laws.”

The monk gives off a clear whiff that he knows Ettore’s whereabouts but won’t talk. Before Fermi takes his leave the monk gives him a book. It’s his uranium notebook, which Ettore had asked the monk to return to its rightful owner, should he ever visit.

Soon afterward, Fermi moves to the United States with his family. As they cross the Atlantic, one night Fermi is so upset he’s insomniac. He goes out to deck to watch the sea, and Laura joins him. Fermi invokes Ettore’s memory, praising his gifts. Laura observes:

“Ettore had exceptional qualities. But in other ways he was handicapped. He lacked the most basic common sense. He couldn’t have ended up in any other way.”

“So you too believe that he committed suicide?”

“I want to doubt, but can’t.”

And then Fermi’s final words, closing the film, drop out:

“Ettore wanted to disappear. But even in that, he was a genius. He wanted to disappear leaving us the uncertainty of not knowing whether he’s dead or alive. So that, whatever happened to him, effectively he is alive. We’ll always feel as if he’s looking over our shoulders, judging us in everything we do. Imposing on us the impossibility of ignoring our conscience.”

A shame that, in reality, Ettore’s shadow didn’t prevent Fermi from helping to build the bomb. As Pirandello so characteristically put it, “The dead are the pensioners of remembrance.”