Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

by Patricio Pron

Genres: Literary Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

From the acclaimed Argentine writer, one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists: a bold, ambitious new novel about how art became politics and politics became crime during the cataclysm of the Second World War.

Pinerolo, Italy; April 1945. At a conference in support of Fascism, a writer disappears and is found dead at the bottom of a cliff. Thirty years later, a young man—a political activist or a terrorist, depending on your perspective—interviews survivors from the conference, to try to uncover the truth about what happened and its consequences. Who was the writer? What did he believe in? Why, shortly before his death, did he save a man who could have killed him? Where is his lost work? And what does any of this have to do with a teenager in contemporary Milan involved in a violent confrontation with the police?

Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets is a razor-sharp, completely original exploration of our most timeless concerns—guilt, betrayal, the legacy of earlier generations—and probes the question of what literature is: how it explains our times and irrevocably changes our lives.

Release date: May 5, 2020

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 304

Sample

Turin

November 1977

We grant to the young all the rights and authority that we deny and want to seize brutally
from the old, the dying, and the dead.
F. T. Marinetti, “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence”
 
A few yards ahead, the old professor’s back curves in such a way that it’s impossible to see the nape of his neck; the hollow in his jacket is due to that curvature and to his habit of leading with his head as he walks. Pietro or Peter Linden—also called “Pitz” and “Peeke,” though only by his mother—knows this is called “swan neck,” a deformity that can be corrected, because he had it as a child and his mother corrected it in the style of those times, by placing a stack of books on his head and making him walk around the house without the books falling. From behind, Pietro or Peter Linden can see only the tip of the old professor’s ears and, crowning his skull, a bit of white hair currently somewhat mussed by the wind. Winter seems to have come early and the city is subject to cold gusts— normal over much of the year—from the mountains surrounding Turin, which are already snowcapped. Pietro or Peter Linden knows the old professor well and doesn’t need more than one or two cues to identify him: the color of the jacket he’s wearing today, a leaden blue; or his hesitation when he extends his right foot, which Pietro or Peter Linden knows, because the old professor once told him in class (off the subject really) that it had had to be reconstructed after he got trapped in the collapse of a house where he and his wife were squatting in Milan during the last days of the war, which gave out when the building next to it, a school with some twenty-odd children locked inside, was hit by a grenade. This was enough for Linden to pick him out among the people gathered on the corner of Giuseppe Verdi and Gioacchino Rossino waiting for the traffic to thin enough to cross over to Corso San Maurizio and toward the river; a corner that Linden and the old professor had arrived at together—unbeknownst, of course, to the old professor— after leaving the university building and crossing the Via Fratelli Vasco, also together but with a certain distance between them. There Linden only had to pretend to be one of the students in order to follow the old professor from just a few yards behind. Further on, the arcades of the streets offered him refuge, as did the crowds at that time of day, rushing somewhat because the shops were about to close, but still too slow for Linden, who often had the impression that people never walk fast enough, so much so that he, who was willing to assume important risks in order to bring about a new world (one neither he nor his comrades could envision, and that possibly would expel them when it arrived, if that ever came to pass), has only two requirements that are, for him, nonnegotiable, and which he is sometimes surprised to find himself musing about with a malicious smile on his lips: one, in that new world there will be books, and, two, people won’t be allowed to stroll around, forced instead to move at a steady, rapid pace or stay home. In fact, adopting the slowness required to tail the old professor without calling attention to himself was the only difficulty that had arisen over the last eight days, in which Linden followed him from the university to his house every time on an almost identical route. The old professor hadn’t stopped or turned around even once, as if no shadow of a doubt hovered over him, as if he couldn’t conceive of the possibility that his words—some of his words that regularly appeared in a local paper or were formulated in the classes Linden had attended the previous year, which he’d found generally satisfying despite the professor’s numerous derogatory allusions to the factions and political cells (almost all violent, almost all made up of young people) of which Linden was first a sympathizer and later a member (though his position is still uncertain, and therefore following the old professor has, for him, the importance of a test)—could come back to haunt him. Linden particularly remembers something he’d said the year before, when he was interrupted by a handful of young men asking him to suspend class so that his students—barely five or six, including Linden—could take part in a demonstration beginning in the interior courtyard of the university, some students already shouting slogans and others piling up benches and tables so they could set them on fire if the police arrived. The police were already deployed, forming a wall erected on Via Po and on Giuseppe Verdi, and seemed willing to breach the courtyard at the slightest provocation. The old professor just looked at the young men and said: “I will not allow this class to be interrupted for political reasons.” One or two students joined the interlopers and started down the stairs toward the courtyard, but Linden didn’t follow them—at that point he didn’t know that he would soon be one of them, that he would soon be advancing with them to a confrontation with history, that one of them would be his supervisor in his future cell, that another would convince him of the right moment to challenge the State, and that another, who usually hosted the political meetings that Linden didn’t yet attend but soon would, would be murdered by the police a few years later in a confrontation—so he was one of the few present to hear the old professor mutter to himself: “We thought we were fighting for something too, but we were fighting only for ourselves and to preserve our youth, and we lost it,” and that utterance had stayed with Linden in the same way other entire phrases of the professor’s newspaper articles had, in which he usually advocated for greater firmness in the clashes with the younger generation and a return to values that are essentially religious and constitute a way of life similar to that of the professor’s parents and grandparents. The professor, like everyone in his generation, had had to turn his back on those values because he’d had to take part in two world wars that annihilated his parents’ and grandparents’ way of life, the framework in which those values seemed useful and convenient. Perhaps, thinks Linden as he passes the Via Gaudenzio Ferrari—the old professor’s back just a few yards ahead, sunken with the weight of his head and his indifference to the shop windows he passes—those values were conceived to prevent wars and the world that would result from them, but most likely they contributed to both, and thus became not exactly obsolete but useless for anything beyond a certain continuity of the existing state of affairs that, in Linden and his comrades’ opinion, must be changed. The Italian Republic’s status quo requires heightened confrontation, thinks Linden, and more—and more compelling—means of containing the State’s powers, though it’s possible that an increase in violent resistance contributes, as a justification, to the State employing increased force to avoid or repress it. Linden doesn’t consider himself capable of determining what must be done, he is only interested in “doing.” Behind that is both political conviction— the Italian situation must change, and it doesn’t much matter what replaces it—and a feeling of personal inadequacy that isn’t visible but which manifests itself in his blond hair, which makes him stand out on the Via Rossini (though there are quite a few blonds in Turin), and in his surname, both of which embarrass him because they reveal his German heritage—in other words, at least a part of him is related to those who caused the ruin of Italy in the war years—though the facts are more complex. He is not one of the Italians his age who were born of consensual (or not) relations between Italian women and Wehrmacht Germans, but rather his parents met years after the war, in Milan, when his mother was in her church choir and went on one of those endless tours that the German Evangelical Church organized regularly in those years to “strengthen ties” between the recent enemies and, more specifically and covertly, so that the Germans might be forgiven for the tragic events of the past, of which they were first perpetrators and then victims, or always victims in a way. His surname is actually that of a Swiss cabinetmaker who arrived in Turin some sixty years back, to work in the industry. Linden wonders if those facts are as important to him as the ones surrounding the escalation of violence in Italy that began on March 15, 1972, when the rhetoric became more radicalized, as did the methods of fighting the State. In turn, the State radicalized its response to the discontent and this wider vision of the political, because aren’t radicalization and rejection political? Isn’t it clear that, on that occasion, the old professor (now walking barely a few yards in front of him) was wrong, and that, if his class continued, it would mostly be for political reasons? That the existence of a separation between political protest and the way knowledge is transmitted is, actually, a political problem? Lin- den is now reaching the Corso San Maurizio along with the professor and a fistful of other people he is indifferent to and to whom he devotes only the minimum attention required to not compromise his shadowing. He feels it is essential to seek out all means necessary to unify politics and experience, reflection and action; pursuits— including the artistic—and, for lack of a better word, life. Linden slows down deliberately and hides behind two women headed home with their groceries—tomatoes, bread, onions, something that looks like basil or maybe mint, bloody meat that’s soaked through its wrapping paper and is starting to imprint a liquid stain on one of the women’s bags—because the Corso San Maurizio is a wide street with few people this time of day. If the old professor were to turn around—though he hadn’t done so up to that point and gave no indication he would, possibly ever: that is how sure Linden is of his stealth and of the legitimacy of his actions, surrounding him like some sort of padded wall distancing him from danger—he could recognize him as they crossed, slowly, in a route punctuated by the buses and cars lining the avenue, parked in the middle of the street, their drivers honking and shouting at the pedestrians who invariably move too slowly, particularly the two women returning home with their groceries and Linden, behind them. Linden lifts his head to not lose sight of the old professor, who is walking a few yards ahead and has almost made it across the corso and is now stopping for a moment in front of the window of a chocolate shop and hesitating, meditating it seems, on what he sees and perhaps whether it’s necessary or appropriate to buy a box of bonbons, maybe not the biggest and most expensive but a small, modest one he can carry in his pocket unnoticed, but he resists and continues walking slowly, passes the Via Santa Giulia, approaching the street- car stop at a steady pace—streetcar number 16, a route Linden isn’t familiar with—and then turns onto Corso Regina Margherita, presenting Linden with the same difficulties as on Corso San Maurizio, which he attempts to resolve by hiding behind someone; but the women with their groceries have already turned on Santa Giulia and Linden’s lost sight of them, so he makes a decision—a risky one—that he’d already made once before when trailing him another day, the second or the fourth time, and he passes the old professor decisively. The professor doesn’t realize, he doesn’t know he is being overtaken by a former student, someone who remembers a situation when he stated he wasn’t going to let his class be interrupted for political reasons; which is to say, for different political reasons than those he often defends in the press and in his classes, proposing a return to order and tradition, or to what he under- stands as tradition, which is basically the idealized version of the times that followed the revolution brought on by someone being nailed to a cross somewhere in Palestine. Linden crosses the street and takes shelter at a newspaper stand; he buys a couple of papers and then, on impulse, merely because his hand slides over in that direction, he buys a postcard of the Mole Antonelliana that he has no one to send to. He could have sent it to his father, if his father hadn’t died a few years earlier, on the outskirts of a hospital located, in turn, on the outskirts of Milan, a hospital that seemed to Linden, the only time he visited, nothing more than a place to deposit old or crazy people and everything they had lived through, everything they’d seen or done during the war years. Linden watches the old professor pass the newspaper stand on the opposite side of the street, and he follows him with his gaze until the glass of its display case is interrupted by a column and the professor disappears from view; he stands there, watching him pass, and only emerges from this trance when the newspaper vendor, who thinks Linden has forgotten something or simply doesn’t dare to put his next request into words, suggests, with a strong accent from Trieste—the accent of someone displaced, thinks Linden— that perhaps he is looking for something else, and from the depths of the counter pulls out some pornographic photographs that look like they could have been taken decades earlier, possibly before the war, reminding Linden of something he can’t put a finger on, some sort of childish shame at his first stammering manifestations of desire for and curiosity about women, so he hesitates before saying he isn’t interested, that he’s just killing time, and he heads out onto the street, but not before hearing the Triestine murmur “faggot” behind his back: when he turns, he sees the man looking at the photographs himself, with an incomprehensible expression. The professor is already about halfway across the Ponte Rossini and, to avoid a man with a briefcase rushing in the opposite direction, suddenly swerves directly toward Linden, who dodges him and crosses the street only to keep walking behind the professor, who crosses Dora Firenze and then continues along Via Reggio to Via Pisa. There the old professor does something he hasn’t done on any of the previous days, while Linden trailed him, wondering where the scheduled action would be carried out (at the bridge, which offers good escape routes, or at the old professor’s home, or some point in between): he goes into the bookstore on the corner of Reggio and Pisa, which paralyzes Linden, who wonders whether to go in as well or wait outside, and in that case where, because the bookstore is one big window and it’s hard to come up with a hiding place that isn’t visible from inside; but then, as he slowly approaches the bookshop, he sees the old professor emerging and he understands; he gets what he’d gone in there to do and why he left immediately, and Linden makes a mental note and then continues to follow the professor, who doesn’t again vary from his regular route. He walks along Via Reggio and takes a left on Via Parma, and heads even more slowly, because he seems exhausted by the walk, to number 49, where he stops and pulls a key out of his briefcase’s back pocket and inserts it in the door of a building that—unbeknownst to Linden and the old professor, who, unlike Linden, won’t live to see even the most immediate changes on the street, in the city, the country—will be demolished in a few years to make way for one of those modern, functional buildings that will spring up all over the neighborhood when the residents of the old palaces decide that times have changed and they have to find new homes and other ways of life. This is really the only thing Linden and his comrades want, even though they may end up regretting it: a new era, in which art and life have reunited after decades of a manifest mutual lack of under- standing, a mutual disdain resulting from a time one could encapsulate in the figure of the old professor—and that, in fact, is what Linden and those who’ve assigned him this task of shadowing, which is finally nearing an end, do. The professor struggles with the lock, arduously opening one of the doors of the building’s grand entrance, slips inside, and disappears from Linden’s sight for the last time.