La freccia e il cerchio
anno 8, numero 8, 2021
pp. 355-357

Massimo Bocchiola
Father, dear father…

da The Spider’s Stratagem (Strategia del ragno)
by Bernardo Bertolucci
colour, 1970

   Bernardo Bertolucci died in Rome last November. Although Strategia del ragno was the sixth movie he made, he had started to work at it before the fifth, The Conformist. The action is set in Tara, an imaginary town in the valley of the River Po whose name obviously hints at Gone with the Wind. Sabbioneta and Brescello, in the Mantua and Parma districts, are the places where most scenes were actually filmed.
   A village in the Wild West. The main street – the only one, probably. Maybe the wooden houses are just facades and nobody is around. A few tumbleweeds; some sand blowing in the wind of a featureless season. A rail- way station where trains hardly ever stop. A man on horseback is coming, we see him from behind; he wears a pistolero (gunman) hat and is likely to be clothed in dark, or in a poncho. The man has no name and nobody in the village will recognize him, but he’s been here before and now he’s back, seeking truth or revenge. Perhaps he already knows the truth, and so revenge could be his only goal – but we can bet that, if truth is to be looked for, the discovery of it will lead him to revenge.
   This is the one and only way in the Wild West. But elsewhere?
   A town in the Bassa, the low plains around the River Po. It is a small town, with some side streets parting from the main street, which in turn opens on the Piazza and a few minor squares, and is lined with some run-down pala- zzos from the Renaissance, some shops, a little boarding house. A railway station where trains hardly ever stop – yet one is stopping now, a man and a suitcase emerging from it. We see him from the front, his coat is open and the shirt unbuttoned as it was common in the late Sixties /early Seventies in this part of Italy. He is young, a giovanotto – an obsolete word, just like pis- tolero, so much so that it suggests a young man of some decades ago, just like pistolero suggests a skilled gunman of some decades ago.
   The name of the giovanotto is Athos Magnani. He is returning to a town which is supposedly his hometown, and yet he does not recall a bit of it. And he is seeking truth – he believes to be seeking only truth, that revenge con- cerns him not; but though he cannot recognize people or places, everybody knows him because he resembles so closely his father – yes, two peas in a pod – and he is called by the same name.
   His father was a hero. The townsfolk have honoured his memory with a bust in the Piazza, and almost everything here is named after him. He was an anti-fascist martyr, a conspirator who in 1936 (the year of the Conquest of Abyssinia, just before Antonio Gramsci died in jail and the Rosselli brothers were murdered) was preparing an attempt on the Duce’s life, but got killed himself by never-to-be-identified agents of the regime.
   We understand at once why Athos Jr. is unconcerned about revenge: to him, truth matters not for punishing the guilty, but for throwing light on the overwhelming shadow of his father – and hopefully getting rid of it. Great, but – wouldn’t that be a kind of revenge as well? And, again – wouldn’t that be the equivalent for a 1970 giovanotto to the shootout for an 1870 pistolero?
   Predictably, nobody around him cares for a different truth. Not Athos Sr.’s comrades, who are clearly concealing a secret; not Athos Sr.’s still beau- tiful lover, who promptly finds in the son the revenant of the father (of course she does). And not the townsfolk – the extras, hostile to risk anything that would deface the legend. In the Po Valley, just like everywhere (Wild West included), when the legend becomes fact, print the legend, even if the legend is vile. And this is not the case. This is a lovely legend, the pride and joy of
town.
  One can pity those who by the legend are wronged, but the wrong does not come only from the triumph or retribution of the antagonist. In fact, truth cannot be easily defined – and all too often, when not mathematically proved, it proves faith-related. Otherwise it’s a narrative, it’s fiction. So, now Athos is pretending to be here just in order to understand what happened on that night – yet a new version of the story, matching to the vulgate or not, would be a makeup anyway, because Athos was murdered (by the fascists or not) in the palchetto of a theatre during a performance, and this story evokes a short story by Borges where the main character has neither name nor coun- try nor political party, or has plenty of them, and is himself set to replicate the fate of President Lincoln.
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