“Only the truth, I swear – clown artist journalists”, by Antonio Padellaro (ed. Piemme)
[…] At L’Unità, my disagreements with the DS leadership, or rather, with Piero Fassinowho was the secretary of the time, inevitably arose from the daily column of Marco Travaglio, «Bananas», dedicated to the exploits of the assailant Silvio Berlusconi. It is an excerpt from “Only the truth, I swear – journalists, clown artists”, by Antonio Padellaro (ed. Piemme) taken from the Dagospia website.
Whenever Labor wrote something against Berlusconi, not in line with some mess of the left, the next morning, come what may, the telephone rang and an apprehensive female voice spelled out my impending doom: «I’ll pass you by Fassino».
At the beginning, not knowing the Fassinian metabolism, I subjected myself to painful conversations during which the leader of the Italian left said the most unpleasant things about my direction.
Crushed by the weight of the guilt I had taken on towards the working masses and the weaker classes, I didn’t say a word. Then, I learned that Fassino suffered from low blood pressure. So, as soon as he woke up from the sleep of the just, he combined the black mood of morning hypotension with anger at Marco’s ribaldry. Explosive mixture that I paid for.
I devised a banal stratagem. Whenever the Fassino he was furious, I told him that I couldn’t answer at the moment and that I would call him back. In fact, this was what I did in the late afternoon when I was sure that the pressure had re-established itself at acceptable values.
Generally, Piero responded without being aware of the reason that had triggered him in the early morning. Indeed, he showed a certain cordiality and at times he even inquired about my state of health. He remembered the millionaire in City Lights who, drunk, hugged the tramp at night Charlot and during the day, when he had sobered up, he mistreated him.
Come and go, however, the little game no longer held up until a Fassino with regular pressure ordered me without much preamble: «You have to hunt Labor». I replied with one of the few phrases I’m proud of: “Do something simpler, fire me, so you appoint another director who will then fire Travaglio.”
And while I was saying it I was grinning: like hell I’m doing you this favor. In fact, aware of the mess that would arise, he didn’t try anymore.
I was raised, like Pope Bergoglio and Mario Draghi, by those sons of good nature of the Jesuit fathers. Who beat the Salesians by whom Fassino was raised three to zero on the matter (but also Travaglio). After all, there are quite a few left-wingers who went to school with priests. The left was incubated by priests (I said incubated, eh).
With the exception of Massimo D’Alema, who grew up in some Siberian gulag. He hated it too Labor but he never called to complain. Perhaps because when Marco was invited to the Unity parties he was a great success and filled the tents. The militants adored him precisely for his caustic, irreverent interventions. Unlike the political class who didn’t want to know about it. They stopped calling him when he wrote that the left had entered Palazzo Chigi with patches on their asses and had come out wearing fine shoes.
In my case it was different. As director of the Unit, invitations to parties were almost obligatory. Then, one day, in an interview I confessed that I had never voted for the heirs of PCI. This created a certain uproar but luckily no one looked into it further, otherwise it would have turned out that I had given my vote to that tasteless semolina from the secular front.
Not to the Republicans and, once, even to Betti’s Garofano Craxi. I kept this to myself otherwise they would have kicked me out on the spot.
They kicked me out anyway, after about a year. After having kicked out Furio Colombo who had revived the fortunes of a failed newspaper with no more readers. […] He was kicked out of a property that was intolerant of the too much freedom he had taken with respect to a bigoted and tri-recitant left. I took his place but after less than a couple of years a new editor arrived: Renato Soru, the creator of Tiscalithe man who had brought the internet to Italy in an industrial dimension, the one who had hit the stock market.
It was Walter Veltroni, at the height of his success as demiurge of the Democratic Party, who asked him to put in a lot of money to balance the newspaper’s budget which, despite its success on the newsstands, was burdened by previous debt. It will be the former mayor of Rome who will say goodbye to me in an interview with Corriere della Sera: he announced that he would look favorably on a woman as director of L’Unità (coincidentally he had already chosen Concita De Gregorio).
Since I had no intention of changing sex, I packed the boxes. Soru he came to see me because, so he said, he wanted to meet me in person. Actually to hunt me better. He is the classic silent Sardinian who alternates long pauses with deep silences. He wanted to walk me to the door but he couldn’t find the right words to do it. He procrastinated illustrating pharaonic relaunch projects in which, he swore, I would have a fundamental strategic role. We went to have a coffee at the bar opposite, sitting at a table everything became easier. I told him that I considered my time at the Unit to be over and that I was working on a new project. He miraculously found his speech again and, as if relieved by the nuraghe that weighed on his stomach, he almost squeezed me into a grateful embrace. […]
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