Freedom, My Dream: The Autobiography of Enrico Arrigoni

383 Pages·2012·1.03 MB·English

by  Enrico Arrigoni

F r e e d o m :
M y D r e a m
the autobiography of
Enrico Arrigoni
Freedom: My Dream
Enrico Arrigoni
Libertarian Book Club
121 Fifth Ave. #172
Brooklyn, NY 11217
second edition
Ardent Press
Introduction & Youth 7
Autobiography 14
Spain 231
A Visit to Montjuic 234
On My Way to Madrid 236
On the Jarama Front 245
On the Guadalajara Front 248
An Italian Prisoner 253
Following the Footprint of the
Glorious Army of Mussolini 254
An Interview with Federica Montseny 258
Conversing with Diego Abad De Santillán 262
When the Moon Shines It is a Night of Tears in Madrid 267
The Revolutionary People of Barcelona in Arms 270
The Party of Falsehood And Gallows 280
On the Aragón Front 284
For La Mancha and the South 287
Catastrophic Revolutionarism 295
On the Andaluz Front 300
The Incurable Anarchists Faith among Creators 309
On the Front of Malaga 312
Freedom under the Anarchists in Catalonia and Now 321
The War on the Sea of Spain or the Unknown War 327
On the Front of Teruel 335
Again on the Guadalajara Front 336
Anarchist Simplicity of Mind 337
Behind the Bars of the Counterrevolution 343
Postscript: The Libertarian Book Club 382
A note from the editors:
This edition of Enrico Arrigoni's Freedom: my dream is based on
the original from the Libertarian Book Club. In preparing it, our
aim has been double. We wanted an improved text that the in-
terested general reader could engage without too much trouble;
and we wanted to retain as much as possible of Arrigoni’s style.
These two aims were to some extent in confl ict, and the pres-
ent text is our attempt at a graceful compromise. Spelling errors,
many grammatical inconsistencies, and other obvious mistakes
have been silently emended. But we have left Arrigoni’s charm-
ing mixed-up syntax, his occasionally obscure or archaic wording,
and, what is perhaps his stylistic signature, the idiosyncratic use
of the ellipsis (…) to signal or produce critical distance, irony,
dramatic pause, and other, more subtle, usually humorous, eff ects.
Like other polyglots, Arrigoni’s intelligence shines through in his
twists and turns in creating an English prose that retains traces of
the many other languages he spoke.
Another approach would have been to republish the text in an
edition identical to the Libertarian Book Club's fi rst edition, with
annotations (especially for the fi nal section of Spanish war report-
ing). We did not do so because our aim is not principally archival;
it is to get this entertaining, moving, and (we think) timely book
into the hands of as many readers as possible.

rIntroductionq
T
hrough the centuries the misery of the masses has been
described by philosophers, princes, priests, poets, and
other types of humanitarians, but how many of these people went
through this misery themselves? In these pages a real proletarian who
in his childhood and youth lived through the bitterness of that misery
will speak.
But please, let not goodhearted readers start inundating these
pages with their tears, because the author will describe with a smile
his sparse meals and infi nite hours of toil since he was nine years old;
at the time of his youth, and in the environment in which he lived,
neither he nor the miserable masses were conscious that they were
the victims of wickedness of men.
Alas! Human beings had lived like that for centuries, millen-
nia, and misery was believed to be natural, our destiny, the divine will,
and not the will of men or the malevolence of the Gods, even though
we were assured from the pulpits that our suff erings were the punish-
ment of the Divinity because our ancestors some six thousand years
ago had eaten an apple against the will of God. In our childhood, in
our innocence, it never occurred to us to ask the agents of the Divin-
ity what fault was it of ours if our ancestors felt like eating that apple
anyhow since at the time we were not even born?
In 1894, the year I was born, Pozzuolo Martesana, a small vil-
7
Freedom: My Dream
lage in the fertile Lombardy plain, just thirteen miles from the city of
Milan, was inhabited mostly by peasants who lived very poorly, as few of
them owned the land they worked. Among them were my grandparents
on my father’s side. If I was born the son of a tailor instead of a peasant
it was purely accidental, as my father, when still a boy, went to eat some
delicious cherries from a tree that, ah! didn’t belong to his father’s fi eld.
Surprised by the owner, to escape his fury, he came down from the tree
a little too fast, and a rusty nail cut his leg very badly, rendering him un-
able to push a spade to till the soil. To earn a living, he became a tailor.
And here, dear reader, don’t think that I am accusing God of maliciously
planting there that rusted nail in order to punish him.
Pozzuolo Martesana was a village of three short streets, three
priests and two churches, one not in use for lack of sinners, I suppose.
There were also various nuns whose main work was to be our second
mothers, who as soon as we started to walk took care of us children
during the day. In this way they would free our real mothers for mak-
ing more children, the philosophy at that time for poor people being:
the more children the better, as they were a kind of insurance against
old age for the parents. My father and mother insured themselves
with twelve children.
Although our village population was less than 3,000, we had
the privilege of having a doctor, who was also the doctor of another
village two kilometers away, the means of transportation being a bi-
cycle the doctor used all year round and under all weather conditions.
His fee for a visit or small operation was the fantastic sum of twenty
centimos of a lira, equal to four cents of the dollar... when the patient
had that much, which was very seldom. However, paying or not pay-
ing, everyone received the same service.
There was also a midwife, who took care of all the births at
home, in our case in the room where we all slept, seven or eight of
us, which was also our kitchen where we cooked and ate our meals.
Besides the doctor and the midwife, there were two teachers,
if I remember well, our education stopping at our ripe age of nine
8
Childhood
with the third elementary class, since nine-year old boys and girls were
considered old enough to go out in the world and earn their living.
I matured so fast that at the age of fi ve I became a salaried
working boy, serving the priest every morning at his fi rst mass at six
a.m. My parents considered it a great honor for the family, while I
considered it a tragedy to have to get out of bed so early every day...
The salary? One lira a month, twenty cents of the dollar at that time,
which I dutifully contributed to the support of the family, the lira
buying fi ve pounds of rice or bread, for which I only sacrifi ced two
hours of sleep every morning, sixty hours of work a month, plus a
dozen hours extra of work on Sunday, a third of a penny an hour. But
the blessings of the priest were free.
However, although I was small and at fi ve or six years of age
my mind still knew nothing of... class struggle, don’t imagine even for
an instant that I was a total idiot. I had the feeling that for the two hours
of sleep daily I was sacrifi cing to the Adoration of God Almighty, for
one lira a month, that I was underpaid, even if the word exploitation
had not yet dawned in my young mind. And so, soon after I became
engaged in the service of the Divinity and the priest, I began to think
of how I could increase my benefi t. Not being short of imagination,
the fi rst extra benefi t I started to enjoy was this: during the Mass one
of my important and sacred functions was to pour the blood, I was told,
of Christ on the fi ngers of the priest, while he continued to mumble
Latin, then he drank it. Now the ampoule with Christ’s blood was
behind the altar out of sight of both the priest and the congregation,
and I had to go there, pick up the ampulla, come in front of everybody,
pour the... blood on the fi ngers of the priest, and while he was drink-
ing it I would return the ampoule behind the altar. Now in seeing the
priest drink with so much gusto the... blood, I got the curiosity to taste
it myself. It was delicious! Real sweet! And from that moment when
I was pouring it on the priest’s fi ngers I would try to hold back some
of it at the bottom of the ampulla to drink myself behind the altar. But
9