It Took Me a Lifetime to Be Twenty

With the exception of Giacomo Casanova’s autobiography, I have always been rather skeptical of authors who undertook to tell their own life histories. Many believe they have something worth being told. Their tales are almost always sweetened, rich in heroic, self-celebrative pages on their own intelligence and virtues. Any faint-hearted, dreary behavior or great defeats are substantially left out of the tale. The unfavorable episodes where there is a layer of meanness, a pinch of selfishness, the common, ordinary normality of man is canceled by the author, who is sure his or her readers will not be interested in this.

This skepticism was my approach to the draft of this book. I believed I would only find favorable, glorifying episodes, a personality who would be far from showing a minimum of humbleness. I was wrong. I found instead, and with great pleasure, immense narrative sincerity in the author. Relating both to favorable and unfavorable episodes. This honesty, I believe, links this volume with the Histoire de ma Vie, the nicest literal fresco of the 18th century, written by Giacomo Casanova. Doubtlessly, the prose is less metaphorical, and perhaps even less elegant than the that of the Venetian gentleman, but it is true evidence of a life lived in coherence with his own convictions, with the spirit of a man whose epitaph could be almost be summarized like this: a free man in his mind and works, whose great ego never damaged anybody. Luciano Roccia is a bit like Juventus, or – if you prefer – like Vittorio Sgarbi: you may like him or not like him, he can be loved or despised, but certainly will not leave you indifferent. And this, in a society rich in plain personalities, is a merit.

Luciano Roccia lives and acts as if he were immortal, as if he actually were twenty years old just now, even though he has already celebrated his seventieth birthday. It is the tale of a life, so rich in facts, adventures and episodes, that doubt arises – in those who read - that all which is narrated could occur in only one lifetime. I believe it superfluous to describe his personality here, leaving the reader to discover themselves. From the first pages will he or she will be able to understand to which extent curiosity has been important in the author’s life. Curiosity about women, about work, about life. This element, elevated to virtue, pushed him to never be content, with himself or with the others. A feature that – throughout the years – has turned into his daemon.

Yet, there is more. It is not only a witness, but a generous way to share his own experience. The triumphs and the defeats, the intuitions and the ruinous ideas. The approach in life to women, to friends. In one word – perhaps – a sort of stripping himself bare. But with no malice.

Venerando Monello

Dedicated to my father

Our life memories are usually written when we feel that we are at the end of your lives, and there is nothing left to do. Then, you read about the past, perhaps trying to live your life once again. Often, when doing so, you meet friends or relatives you have not seen for a long time, giving you the opportunity to savor again some remote emotions; to recall experiences.

Lately though, perhaps because of my age, I often, repeatedly, go over the same old stories, which raises protests from my companions, my children and – in general – my family, who tire of hearing again and again things that they know perfectly well. It was my family who, to silence me, suggested that I should write a book. This book, whose sole ambition is to be a testament: is my own. An extremely personal testament to describe how I lived during the time I have been on this earth.

This book tells the story of a child, of a boy and, finally, of a man. An immature man. A man who simply did not want to take the road to maturity.

While writing of those times, I recalled distant memories, such as my early childhood, and an adolescence spent at boarding school. I have again been with the many people I lived, worked, and traveled with; I even came across a letter of congratulations from Enzo Biagi, for my article published in La Stampa after my first journey to China in 1972, a time when the country was almost unknown.

Yet, I have not written everything. I have omitted some episodes which would seem so unlikely that they could not be real: some things – unless they are lived – cannot be believed. I also left out other interesting facts which are covered by professional secrecy. Other stories, either exhilarating or tragic, were removed out of respect, for both the people involved and my own consciousness.

We played with ants

At the age of two or three, we used to play with ants in the small kindergarten of Chiusa Pesio, under a huge mulberry tree which dominated the courtyard. My playmate was Ele, short for Elodia. Together, we would collect ants and – inevitably –torture them. We put them in the palms of our hands, and made them pass from one to another, from mine to hers and then, in order to create obstacles for them, we would spit on our hands, to see if they could manage to swim in saliva. Poor things. One day, I put an ant on my tongue and told Ele to touch hers to mine to see if, even like this, she could pass the ant between us, in spite of the usual difficulty of saliva. This was the first experience I can remember of a physical relationship with the other sex, excluding my wet nurse’s tits, which I sucked greedily.

It was 1942 and it had been one month since we arrived in Chiusa Pesio, where my father was born on May 1st, 1900. The war had just started and, after the first bombardments of Turin began, my father sent us to the village where my grandparents and all my father’s relatives lived.

We left Turin by train one night, with all the lights turned off for fear of the English aircraft, which were machine gunning any form of transport. It was a full moon and we could see, from our darkened compartments, the countryside sliding by as if in daylight. We could clearly distinguish the trees, the hills, the creeks, the lakes, and the ponds that the moon was reflected in. The farms in the countryside slid by quickly, and we could see small lights through their windows. On the train, there was silence, interrupted occasionally by weeping children. The grown-ups would only talk in a low tone, as if they were afraid to be heard by the machine gunners of the British Royal Air force. This is perhaps the first memory I have of my childhood.

It was necessary for us to leave Turin once our house was damaged during an air raid. Before the raid began, my mother led us to the shelter in front of the house. I remember the crying of children smaller than myself, which had been awakened suddenly and rushed out of the warmth of their houses. After a few moments, we heard the thunder of the bombs, as if a storm were approaching; followed by heavy silence. Many of the women were praying. Under the dim light of the lamps, I could see their lips moving as if we were in church; some of them were continuously making the sign of the cross, without my understanding why. After leaving the shelter at the end of the alarm, I saw our house devastated by an incendiary shell.

We did not know where to go, until my father took us to the University Hospital ward where he was the director, and where we spent a few weeks. The long corridors, the courtyards, and the paths of the Hospital of San Giovanni became my playground in those days. I ran around driving the nuns crazy; I snuck everywhere, into every hideout, from their rooms to the those of the sick people, to the mortuary chapels where the victims of the air raid were piled up. Dozens of coffins were waiting for them, stacked neatly in the park.

It seemed as if I were destined to be unafraid of anything, as even the dawn of my life was marked by chaos. The day I was born in 1939, January 12th, started with heavy a snowfall and my father almost had an accident while driving at full speed to take my mother – the victim of child labor – to the hospital. When he arrived to the maternity ward of Sant’Anna, the sky shook with thunder and lightning, a rather rare phenomenon during that time of the year. It was such an unusual occurrence that, twenty-four years later, during my State exam, Professor Cova (the gynecologist who helped my mother during my birth) reminded me of it. A few days after returning home, my mother’s attention was called to agitated yelling coming from the yard. It was our neighbor; she was calling out because my elder brother – perhaps jealous of sharing our parents’ affection with me – was trying to throw me down the garbage chute on the kitchen balcony. They barely managed stop him.

The first member of the opposite sex that I was seriously involved with was, without question, Anna Maria. We grew up together; we were the same age and used to bath together, naked, in the river. We were four or five years old and would look at our anatomic difference with curiosity and without shame. She liked to touch me there and was amazed at how it would transform and swell under her caresses. I liked her touch and, after the first time, there would be countless meetings that summertime, along the Pesio river.

The river flowed down from the valley and formed a small lake right in front of our houses, a sort of natural swimming pool where the families who had left the town because of the war would meet to spend some time in the coolness of the water. It was our ocean, all we children learned to swim in it. The vegetation was very thick along the river, especially the edible aromatic herbs that grew close to the spring. We children used to collect them and take them home. The one most sought after had a long hollow stem, which when used as a straw, gave water an especially sweet, thirst-quenching taste. Then, there was a bush of hard, spongy stems. We used to cut them into the shape of a cigarette, light them up to imitate the adults and, inevitably, end up coughing. Perhaps those bushes contained some special substance because, after breathing the smoke, we would become dazed for a few minutes. Smoking these bushes was my first experience with light drugs. I never repeated it after childhood.

In those days, the Pesio river was abundant with fish, and this plenty would often solve the issue of what to eat for dinner. Out of necessity I learned to fish with my hands at a young age, coming home almost every day with a fine catch, which my aunt would hastily clean and cook.

Anna Maria was my favorite playmate. She was a tomboy and the only girl allowed in our gang of boys. We would sneak away to a small cave along the riverside, playing doctor; I would examine her, carefully exploring her body, as I had sometimes seen my father doing to his patients. She liked it and often asked me to touch her, only in the cave at first and then wherever we happened to be. We met each other throughout the war years, and then for many of the following summers.

Our life at the time revolved around the Pesio river: the stems used as straws, the shrubs to be smoked. Anna Maria would smoke too. Afterwards, we would run to wash out our mouths, sucking on anise so that our parents wouldn’t be able to smell the smoke.

Ghindu was the nickname of a member of our gang. His father was at war, but in peacetime had been a miner; his family still kept some dynamite at home. At sunset, when the river was deserted, Ghindu, Anna Maria, and I used to light the fuses and then throw the dynamite into the water so they would explode at depth. We were mindless, unaware of the danger. This ‘poacher-fishing’ would provide us with several pounds of fish, which we would then share equally, as brothers do. We normally fished naked, hiding our clothes under a bush. One afternoon, while the three of us were in the water collecting the fish stunned by the explosion, Sandri, the village game warden and terror of the children, suddenly appeared. With his long moustache twisted upwards, the uniform of the municipal police, and his Alpine trooper hat, he would walk pompously, almost marching, up and down the village. He would always end up at the Caffè del Popolo, telling everybody about his military adventures during World War I, the war in Albany, and even his meetings with the valley’s poachers, who had tried to shoot him more than once. When we noticed his arrival, it was too late to get dressed, and we ran away, naked as we were. Ghindu ran away, while Anna Maria and I took shelter in the cave, which was hidden by a large bush. Sandri had spotted us from far away, and once he arrived at the river, he sat on a large rock and lit the pipe that was forever hanging from his mouth. We spent almost an hour shivering naked in the cave, hugging each other for warmth while waiting for the danger to vanish or, even better, for Sandri to get bored and leave. That night, we came home with no fish, but with heavy colds instead, which kept us in bed for several days.

I was the first one to recover, and immediately ran to see how Anna Maria was doing. When her mother opened the bedroom door, she found us in our usual intimate embrace. She was shocked for a moment, then gave her daughter a slap, inflicting another, more forceful one on me, threatening, Luciano, if you try to take it out again, I will cut it off!

Her tone was so resolute that I was really scared, and from then on I stopped playing with Anna Maria. When we had contests to see who could pee the farthest: I was too afraid Anna Maria’s mother would spring out of the blue and cut it off. For many years, every time I needed to pee, I would hide myself and make sure nobody was around.

On September 8th, 1943, the Germans arrived at the village. My father had studied in Leipzig and was fluent in German, so he was appointed by the mayor to act as interpreter. The Wehrmacht command decided to seize one floor of our house for their use, in order to direct the operations of the Nazi army deployed in the valley. At the time, my grandmother was seriously ill, and I remember the officers and soldiers taking off their boots and large hobnail shoes every time they entered the house, so as to not make any noise.

Eventually, after a few months, the Germans left. Civil war was starting and the partisan bands were forming. It would be an absurd, dangerous coming and going. The village was continuously crossed and occupied, by the Nazi-fascists first, and then by the partisans. The former would leave and be immediately followed by the latter. These takeovers were mainly at the expense of the locals. They were dark years - the gun battles were countless, both sides took no prisoners and executions were a daily occurrence; many Nazi-fascists fell into the partisan ambushes. I can still clearly remember the first execution I witnessed, although I was unable to tell who was executed and who the executioners were. I believe it was Nazi-fascists executing partisans, but it might have been the other way around. They brought almost all the village to the yard in front of the cemetery. My mother put her hand in front of my eyes but I could distinctly see, through her fingers, two young men fall like puppets under the bursts of the submachine guns.

One day, the partisans came to our house. My father was at the hospital in Turin, and we children were playing in the courtyard. They came and asked about my mother. After a few minutes, we heard yelling and so rushed inside. My aunt held us back, but we managed to see my mother being dragged away in the middle of the group of partisans; my old grandmother insulting and hitting them on all sides with her cane. Amongst the partisans, I recognized the brother of our nanny, Maddalena, who was trying to reassure my aunt and grandmother by telling them that nothing would happen. My mother had always been a sworn fascist; her brother Mirko was a pilot, journalist and war reporter, famous for escaping from the British in Africa by stealing an airplane. He was a hero of the Fascio. When Mussolini was arrested, the Party was dissolved and Italy fell into chaos; my uncle Mirko had been the director of the Giornale d’Italia, the official newspaper of the Fascio. He was a wanted man and certainly had no shortage of enemies. He and his entire family took shelter in our house. They arrived one night in an old FIAT 1500, overloaded with baggage, which my father hid under the porch and covered with brushwood. Yet it was inevitable: the village was small, and rumors ran fast. The partisans arrived after only a few weeks. They took the old 1500 and uncle Mirko with them. His wife, my aunt Marcella, remained with us. Her children, our cousins Maria Pia, Mario, and Marcello, would be our playmates for many months to come.

After my uncle, the partisans came to take mama as well. It was a time of retaliation and revenge, and often of sheer terror. Some would pay for their activities during the twenty years of Fascism, but many times people were punished for other crimes, reasons of personal interest hidden behind political justifications. Thus, innocent people, who had had no active part in the previous political situation, were treated cruelly. Women, whose only fault was having been involved with fascists or Germans, had their hair cropped, their bodies spread with cobblers wax, and were covered with chicken feathers. Then, they were forced to parade in the center of the village to be publicly scorned. Those who knew them watched these happenings in silence, looking down while the cropped women were marched by. It happened to my mother also, because of uncle Mirko, and also as she had never hidden her passion for fascism, quite the opposite. I remember her moving around the house afterwards for weeks, a scarf wrapped around her head and a gloomy expression on her face.

After September 8th, 1943, once the Repubblica di Salò was established, my mother dressed me as a young Figlio della Lupa and took me to watch a demonstration in support of Mussolini in the main square of Cuneo.

I remember a folktale my father would always tell me about the King of Italy’s visit to Cuneo in the early 20th century. Cuneo was famous not only as the largest province of Italy, but also because it had the highest percentage of population affected by goiter, an illness caused by the lack of iodine in the drinking water, which generated a peculiar chuckling sort of voice. It was said that the authorities of Cuneo, attempting to hide such negativity, decided to lock up, all the people affected by goiter, in the city cellars. Hearing that the King would be coming through, they let only bold young men, recruited from the neighboring provinces, parade in the square. The King, while crossing the streets of the town, heard strange noises coming from under the streets. He asked about these noises, and was told that they came from caged crows. They were, of course, the citizens of Cuneo with goiters who were muttering "Suma nui cui d’Cuni! Meaning, We are the ones from Cuneo!".

Winters, in those years, were particularly cold and filled with snow, but bad weather did not prevent men from going out and killing each other. We children used to go with our sleighs to the Colle del Mortè, a mountain pass where many soldiers had died during a Napoleonic battle. The name, which meant hill of death, had tragically come back to be current. Along the road which led to the pass, the partisans had installed a checkpoint to watch who had access to the valley. By going back and forth with the sleigh, we would pass without stopping under the bar, which was garrisoned by young armed boys. They usually came back down to the village on our sleigh.

One night, the Wehrmacht came back and a battle raged until the morning. The Nazis seemed to have the advantage; the partisans were falling, mown down by the German automatic weapons. In the village, it was said that the local commander took a few companions with him to go and look for reinforcements, leaving the two boys along the mountain pass with a machine gun to try and stop the advance of the Germans. He did not return, and the two boys, once the ammunition ran out, were inevitably overwhelmed and killed.

A cross was placed as a reminder of their sacrifice, but we children remembered them as our sleigh companions.

My father was affected by a leg disease which kept him in bed for several months; it was then that he taught us to read and write, because the schools were closed, occupied by the Germans.

One day, a group of partisans came to see my father in the middle of the night, carrying two injured Polish deserters, Wehrmacht soldiers who had left the Germans to join partisans. Papa treated them and hid them in the cellar for a few days. However, luck was not on their side. Perhaps someone ratted them out, because the deserters were taken and immediately shot by the Germans, who then arrested my father and took him to the prison in Cuneo. We spent the next few days in anguish, until we saw him coming back in a Wehrmacht car. Some days before, in Boves, a few miles from Chiusa Pesio, there had been a dramatic battle between the Germans and the partisans. The dead and wounded were countless of both sides. A major of the German army, injured by a bullet to the face, was rushed to hospital in Cuneo, and from there transferred to a specialist center in Turin. It was the university clinic directed by my father. The Germans wanted their major to be operated on by the director, but the director (my father) could not be found. The German authorities traced him to the jail and brought him to Turin, where he successfully performed a delicate surgical operation on the major. Thus, my father was freed and sent back home, to Chiusa Pesio.

It was an ironic destiny, though not unfair. My father had gotten into trouble for being a physician, yet being a physician would save his life.

The Germans had deployed some half a dozen Könistiger tanks along the valley which gave access to the village, at the arrival point of the electric cableway which connected Cuneo. They pointed the tank guns towards the wooded hills which surrounded the village; where the partisans were hiding.

One morning, a German tank crewman who was searching the hills through his binoculars, saw some strange movements and, thinking the partisans were about to attack, sounded the alarm. The woods were immediately bombarded with shells. When it started, my mother was in the garden with my sister, who was sleeping in her cradle. She took all of us with her down to the house’s cellars. When the firing at last stopped, we went back to the garden and discovered that a large splinter had pierced the cradle. Shorty afterwards, it was discovered that the strange movements on the hills were nothing but a mushroom picker, who, nobody knows how, survived the shelling. The sole victims of the Nazis that day were my sister’s cradle and the famous porcini mushrooms of Chiusa a Pesio, which did not grow in the cratered portion of the woods for many years.

When my sister Gabriella was born, my mother became depressed. She could no longer manage with all the family commitments, mainly because she had a son like me: a born troublemaker. My behavior gave her reason to send me away with Maddalena, our nanny, who would return to her village every summer to help her parents with the fieldwork. That is how I came to spend a couple of months on the Calcagno farm in Pianfei, a small village on the border with Chiusa Pesio. I would help Maddalena and her parents as much as my age would allow , doing the least burdensome tasks. I slept on a straw mattress in the stable with the cows, some calves and two sheep, which I would take to pasture in the morning. I was also tasked with feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs.

Michele, Maddalena’s brother, was a partisan hiding in the woods. He would come home from time to time to procure some food and help his parents in the heaviest chores. He arrived, in secret, early in the morning, carrying his submachine gun. In the farm yard, there was a stack of wood with a pit dug underneath it, where Michele would hide if any strangers arrived. One day, I could not resist the temptation of taking, and aiming, the submachine gun Michele had left leaning against the wall. I pulled the trigger and a bullet burst out. Luckily enough, it did not hit anybody, but the noise echoed in the valley. Michele snatched the weapon out of my hands, cursing in the local dialect, and ran off into the woods. A few minutes later, the Carabinieri arrived to ask for information about the shot they heard, and of course nobody had any answers.

I was sent back home, but I did not stop getting into trouble. One night, back from Turin, papa brought my brother and I a new pair of shoes. Happy with the present, which replaced my old wooden clogs, I proudly wore my new shoes the next day. At lunchtime, after playing for a whole morning, they were virtually destroyed. My father took off his belt and taught me to take better care of things. From that day onwards, I got into the habit of taking my shoes off every morning when leaving the house. I went around barefoot all day; in the evening, I would come home and my shoes were as good as new, always perfectly clean. My father no longer needed to take off his belt. Well, at least not because of the shoes; other reasons to give me a good thrashing were not overlooked.

Perhaps I was not the only troublesome one in the family. The last winter of the war, in 1944, was particularly hard. The wood and coal stove, which we used for heat, was filled continuously. One night, papa was trying to stoke up the fire with a long iron tool, which became almost white-hot. Once he finished, papa leant the iron tool against the wall, without paying much attention.

My sister Gabriella picked it up and started to whirl it around. Without doing it deliberately, she thrust it into my eye. It was a tragedy. My howls of pain filled the house, followed by the desperate cries of my aunt and of the rest of the family. After tending to me first he then took me to an old medical officer, but he could not do much for my eye either. A specialist would be needed. I was taken, in the middle of a snowy night, to an ophthalmologist in Cuneo who was a friend of papa. We rode in an old carbide-fuelled car, a replacement for gasoline, which could not be found at that time. My eye was swollen shut and in pain, but through my other eye I could see my father crying in despair, because he felt responsible for what had happened. I was lucky though, the specialist realized immediately that at the moment of impact, my eye had instinctively shut. The tool had hit my eyelid, which was burnt, but had protected the eye. It took me just a week to recover.

I was a bed wetter and my aunt, to break my habit, as she would say, would hang the wet bedclothes on my balcony in the morning, which faced the village square. She told me that she would do it until I stopped, but I continued, undaunted. I would always dream that I had gotten up, gone to the toilet and peed in the bathroom, or that I went to the yard and urinated against a tree. In reality, I was wetting my bed. I stopped only after the war,