«The date: I don’t know. Pavese had already been dead for two years, maybe three” writes Giulio Bollati in the first story-sketch of Memorie intime, just reprinted by Bollati Boringhieri in preparation for the centenary of the birth of the great publisher, long-time alter ego of Giulio Einaudi (they were the two unattainable Giuli, in editorial legend) and then at the helm from 1987, when it was acquired by his sister Romilda, of the publishing house founded in 1957 by Paolo Boringhieri. It is a book of short occasional writings, some of which appeared in magazines, but mostly remained unpublished; they are the ones that, for example, Ernesto Ferrero remembers in “The best years of our lives” when Bollati “handed them to him in silence” during work in the editorial office, “a gesture of family intimacy, like passing the bread, the salt”.
One of these concerns Italo Calvino, and it is a decidedly little-known, if not almost secret, page in the writer’s life. The title is Pablo (in the sense of Picasso) but it could also be, I don’t know, “A night in the lockup”.
It narrates a sort of trip of the Einaudi summit to France, to visit a Picasso exhibition and meet him: it was 1952, destination Lyon, we know this from a subsequent letter from Calvino. Bollati is driving, sitting with him in «a massive and important bottle green Alfa» are “Giulio” (Einaudi), “Italo” (Calvino) and a fourth passenger identified with only the initial of his surname.
We travel, they chat, it seems like a company trip like many others. As soon as you cross the border, however, an unexpected problem arises. The police burst into the hotel in Chambery where they were staying during the night and took away a stunned Calvino. Confusion, perhaps a bit of panic, the writer who dresses nervously (“He’s a bit agitated”, writes Bollati soberly), the gendarmes who obviously don’t give any clarification on the matter. What happened?
In the morning, Bollati runs to the police station with the camera, manages to see (and photograph) his friend sitting on a bench, “dozing”, but once again he is sent back without an explanation. At the hotel the other two seem a little annoyed by the mishap. In any case, they all rush to the consulate, which promises to take an interest in the matter in the necessary time, and not entirely surprisingly the unreachable G. reassures everyone by claiming that it is certainly a misunderstanding, and the best thing is to resume the journey. Leaving poor Italo where he is, on the cold bench of the police station? Well, it would seem so to him.
Bollati doesn’t remember well, but believes that there must have been at least a bit of discussion and therefore of waiting, because shortly thereafter someone, the consul or a commissioner, informed the three that the writer had been stopped because he was “undesirable”, having participated in the Congress of Partisans for Peace. It should be added for the sake of objectivity that, in a 1968 correspondence with a French diplomat, Calvino attributes the credit of having gotten him out of trouble to Einaudi, in front of a commissioner «astonished that a dangerous criminal was traveling in the company of the son of a President of the Italian Republic”; but the two versions can coexist.
As for the Partisans of Peace, already in ’52 it was an old story, which didn’t say much to the four: so much so that Bollati glossed over, recalling only that the organization had been created “in all probability” “by the Soviets, for propaganda”. And the severe gendarmerie, now softened, shows common sense, allowing Calvino, who had perhaps been there as a journalist (this is Bollati’s hypothesis) to return to Turin via Ventimiglia.
All’s well that ends well? In a sense. The writer is in fact sent back, we don’t know how, perhaps by train, and he goes away to his parents in Sanremo; the editorial trio immediately resumes their journey to go to “Pablo” (who however does not receive them).
A truly unfortunate trip, but also, if we like, a bit careless. As for the Partisans of Peace, their 1949 conference in Paris so aroused the suspicion of the French government that all foreign participants were declared undesirable, and in the following years no other meetings of the kind were authorized. It must be said that Calvino went there both as a journalist for L’Unità and as a militant. In fact, he had announced this to his parents in a letter dated April 1949, where he explained that he would be “delegated by the Michelin workers” in France, adding: “As you will have seen in L’Unità, the workers of the various factories in Turin have delegated in addition to own representatives also of writers and cultural personalities”.
However, he hoped «to have time to see Paris, in addition to the congress, which will certainly be interesting. I’ll try to stop there a few days after the end, if the paper leaves me.” He didn’t know that he was taking a certain risk, and right in the city where later, since ’67 – but times had changed a little and the memory of the Partisans of Peace had faded -, he would live for a long time. Of course, without ever again attracting the attention of the police.