"Forse è la tarda primavera del ’44. Forse è l’estate o assai prima. Non conosco i luoghi. So che fu vicino a Boves, nel Cuneese, dove allora burned the partisan struggle. One officer, a tall, thin - seems young - every morning, shortly after dawn comes out on horseback, alone from the barracks of San Rocco (so called). Hovers between the farms (names not known): Roof Graglia, the chapel of the spreader, Lady of the Angels - this is similar to one of my country - the bed of a river, Plaster (for some reason it strikes me as ...). The officer always ends up to a meadow, dismounts, lies down on the grass. The horse pasture ...
One morning the young officer does not return to barracks of San Rocco. The body - later - will be found I do not know by whom, or maybe it is dragged away from the river, the Gesso. A
sun was already high when the barracks of St. Rocco will riderless horse that triggered the search of angry Germans. Most will never find the body.
Nuto Revelli, in a beautiful book, The dispersed of Marburg, tells how, years later, he learned that a lone rider, faceless and disappeared into thin air. And he began the journey to give the shadow a name, a home, long uncertain whether it was a German or more away, a Pole, a Ukrainian.
What was the research impossible in the infinite sea of \u200b\u200bthe disappeared in the war of worlds? And chasing the shadow of millions?
I think it is the desire to give a face to the enemy: we take up arms and kill. And we know nothing of the other who is killed. Most of the time killing not even see his body. In the camp of the enemies were reduced in number and even a skeleton. Prolificherà a new institution: the mass grave, a grave where the bodies are huge ossified made equal to each other. I never knew how they were recognized and named in the tomb of the three hundred Ardeatine.
Who is the enemy? Where you from? I never thought that the turbines would lead the war against the partisans in the valleys of Cuneo even, perhaps, a Ukrainian. The waves pulled us ...
The 'lost' Revelli, at dawn, every day, going out on his horse: he alone and his horse, is lying on the grass, let's leave that to breath in the morning. The mornings of spring are very sweet. There are gunshots. Instead then, suddenly, there will be. It will face the unknown knight and other unknown before him. Wars are a cross between unknown. After all, why should we plead guilty? Kill symbols. Abstractions of power. Then the enemies take over abstract face when they become corpses. The thrill of the huge war cemeteries. Why are we so upset? We stare from those crosses. Revelli
labors for years to give a face to that lost on horseback which was a passion or obligation that led to that confrontation absolute about life and death?
I wonder if we are not reaching a threshold where all the faces fade away. And there is only a machine that makes the lonely war. It seems to say that you want from me? I got to do that?
do not know why the history of the Marburg Missing hit me and dragged that detail: all the human being, there is a lawn, a horse and the rider lying on the lawn. We are just after dawn: then a great silence.
I seem to catch even a despair and impotence. Who would recognize in a never-ending war so that young Marburg lined up under the swastika? Maybe those morning, solitary rides in the rolling countryside of Cuneo were searching for an even control of life: a room where you can find a self, like an island.
I think the path that pulled me also by the impact of war, I am an enemy of the unknown knight, who came to the contrast in the belief that the island in which withdrawal was impossible, did not exist. This is the path that story in these pages.
The lawns always enchanted me, silent in their absolute spend. Today the lawns of the city where I live are mixed race and the tumult of breathlessness. The island does not exist. And it is right. Why ask save yourself? And then I can not ride a horse. "
(From" I wanted the moon, Pietro Ingrao, ed. Einaudi, 2006)
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