Free Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri, Katherine Gregor Page A

they wished to pretend they were Italian. A few of them had been sent to Dachau for dodging the SS draft. They cared little or nothing about Communism: it had no bearing on their peasant, Catholic reality. They were all believers, some of them deeply religious, and had vowed not to endanger human lives. When the road worker Giovanni Postal was blown up because of a faulty fuse, many of them wept in their homes: the death of an innocent man was the worst thing that could have happened to them, both personally and to their cause.
    For years, they’d had gatherings, though not, as Italian journalists insinuated, in secret underground lairs or foreign consulates, but in the timber
Stuben
of their houses, and in taverns. They had been collecting explosives for years, carrying them through the Brenner Pass and the old smuggler trails; they’d hidden them in haylofts, in workshops, buried them in manure. They’d practiced with explosives on minor but symbolic targets: for example, the equestrian statue of the Duce at the hydro-electric plant in Ponte Gardena, which was still standing sixteen years after Mussolini’s death.
    When they had started to prepare the great Night of Fires, each one of them was entrusted with the task of identifying targets in the area he knew best, in other words, near his own house. After stuffing the pylons with explosives they would take precautions so that when the pylons fell they would neither claim human victims, nor damage the neighbors’ orchards. They were men who understood what hard work meant, and for whom an act of protest wasn’t worth destroying a vine or ruining a peasant.
    Contrary to what Italian newspapers wrote, the components of that first generation of bombers were not members of the secret service, nor veterans in search of action fifteen years after the end of the war, nor anti-Communist idealogues. They were not pan-German, or Neo-Nazis, or paramilitaries. All this did come, but later. It came along with the Neo-Fascists, the secret service, the corrupt Carabinieri of General De Lorenzo, and brought bloody attacks against barracks and customs houses, and people killed, but this time not by error. At that point, though, the first generation of bombers—the
Bumser
, as they were subsequently called almost affectionately—these people who had been careful about preserving orchards, were all already dead or in prison.
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    The
Bumser
were down-to-earth people but, when it came down to it, they trusted in human beings. The conspiracy strategy was simple: if someone was arrested he could simply keep quiet and not mention any names. In other words all you had to do was respond to the interrogators with silence and the organization would be saved. It wasn’t hard.
    Before that, none of them could have imagined those interrogations. Before that, none of them could have imagined the blows, the deprivation, the fluorescent lights straight in the eyes, the scalp naked because hair had been forcefully pulled out by the handful, fingernails wrenched out, teeth falling out, cigarettes extinguished on the skin, salt water down the nose, electric shocks to the genitals. Before that, none of them had heard of the “hot box,” a technique perfected by the OAS in Algeria, and which Italians were now applying diligently, always with successful results. Before that, none of them could have imagined that uniformed representatives of the Democratic and Republican government would reduce them to a “subhuman, subconscious state in which you would do and say anything just to make whatever it is they’re doing stop, and you’re no longer a person but just a thing,” as one of them said after he was freed.
    Some prisoners managed to let people on the outside know about the torture they were enduring, by means of notes written on toilet paper. The Minister of the Interior, Scelba, inventor of that special police corps that frightened Gerda, was asked