Free The Italians by John Hooper Page B

was not published until seventeen years after Pasolini’s death, by which time one of the appunti —number 21—had disappeared. Pasolini’s family has always denied it was stolen. But there has long been speculation that “Appunto 21” was made to vanish by someone because it contained embarrassing revelations about Eni and/or its executives. One theory is that the missing section contains the key to the death in 1962 of the corporation’s swashbuckling boss, Enrico Mattei, who was killed in a plane crash. Another hypothesis is that the disappearance of “Appunto 21” has something to do with the fact that Pasolini owned one of the very few copies of a pamphlet that claimed to reveal secrets about a later Eni president, Eugenio Cefis. The pamphlet disappeared from circulation immediately following its publication in 1972.
    Thirty-five years after Pasolini’s death and eighteen years after the publication of his strange, unfinished work, another hugely controversial—and inscrutable—figure, Marcello Dell’Utri, dropped a bombshell at a press conference ahead of the opening of that year’s antiquarian book fair in Rome. Dell’Utri, a bibliophile, advertising executive, politician and close associate of Silvio Berlusconi, said he had been offered part of the manuscript of Petrolio, prompting excited speculation that the typewritten sheets he had seen included the missing “Appunto 21.” Dell’Utri said he would put the pages on display during the book fair. But he never did. The only explanation he gave was: “The person who promised them to me disappeared.”
    That person—whoever he or she may have been—would have fit nicely into the cast of a play by the Sicilian author Luigi Pirandello. And the same could unquestionably be said of Marcello Dell’Utri, a fellow Sicilian, who in 1997 was put on trial, accused of colluding with Cosa Nostra. *
    Pirandello is a quintessentially Italian writer—perhaps the quintessentially Italian writer—forever gnawing away at the boundaries between reality and fiction, madness and sanity, past and present. The audience at a Pirandello play is repeatedly disconcerted and misled. Apparent certainties are undermined. Ostensible facts prove illusory. His works are, in short, very much like the experience of living in Italy.
    His Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore ( Six Characters in Search of an Author ) is probably Pirandello’s best-known work. But another of his plays is even more relevant in this context: Così è (se vi pare), variously translated into English as Right You Are (If You Think So) and It IS So (If You Think So) . It is a flat-out assault on the notion of objective truth. The play centers on the attempts, by a group of middle-class men and women in a provincial town, to find out about the newly arrived Ponza family, and particularly the elusive Signora Ponza.
    They are presented with two accounts: Signor Ponza’s mother-in-law, Signora Frola, claims Signora Ponza is her daughter and that the possessive Signor Ponza is cruelly keeping her shut up at home. Signor Ponza, on the other hand, says his mother-in-law is mad. He says her daughter was his first wife, who died, and that Signora Frola continues to delude herself into thinking that she is the mother of his current, second wife. Signora Frola insists that, on the contrary, it is her son-in-law who is crazy. He then appears to confirm that view, but afterward explains that he did so in order not to interfere with her fantasies. Finally, Signora Ponza is brought into the proceedings and declares that she is both Signora Frola’s daughter and Signor Ponza’s second wife.
    But, she says: “I am she who you believe me to be.”

CHAPTER 5
    Fantasia

Michele Misseri * : It was me. It was me. I killed Sarah with these hands. I ask God: Why didn’t he have me struck by lightning at that moment? Why did he let me kill that child?
Interviewer: Mr. Misseri, how can you be believed?
Michele Misseri: I have