Menelik

An irascible old carter refuses to change with the times, hauls his horse-drawn load down the middle of the road and will not yield to impatient motor traffic, no matter what. Falling asleep at the wheel is not a danger for him: the faithful horse knows the way; knows which inns to stop at, where his master, an old-time socialist, can numb his rage at life with more drink. His three sons move with the times and become truckers and hauliers. This is a betrayal. His anger increases. His long-suffering wife leaves him to go to live with her sons.

One day, he comes upon the scene of an accident. A truck has driven into the canal, the driver having fallen asleep at the wheel; his co-driver must also have nodded off in the oppressive heat. The old carter knows, before he is asked to lift the tarpaulin, whose bodies lie beneath. A year later the surviving son, an express delivery driver, is crushed in a collision with an artic trailer-truck. From now on, the old carter speaks with no human, only to his horse, venting his rage in curses and abuse rained down upon the poor animal's head, and then at times talking to him softly, as to a fellow Christian. Neighbours avoid the old man as a madman: one frightened young woman is convinced that the horse had seemed to her to turn his head and reply to the old fellow.

The end comes, as it must. One day, the horse hears his old master fall silent and begin to groan, speaking no more. Proceeding to a wider stretch where he may pull the cart around, he hauls master and loaded cart back to the town and pulls up at the presbytery. The parish priest, a man of hulking stature, climbs by means of the wheel spokes onto the cart. "It's me," he tells the old man. The old socialist's hostility has been reserved especially for the cleric who is just in time to hear the dying man whisper, "God forgive me." The priest notices that the reins have obviously been trailed along the ground for a long time and trampled by hooves; knowing both horse and master, he hears himself crazily asking the horse, "Menelik, what brought you here? Was he able to direct you, or was it your own idea?"

Don Camillo, for it is he, repairs first to the church to put the lights out and to make his nightly report to the crucified Christ, that is to say, to wrestle with his own conscience. It is the genius of his (Don Camillo's) creator that makes us, the reader, readily suspend disbelief and go along with the literary conceit that the Christ figure is actually replying though, of course, it is only Don Camillo's own reflective self: "Jesus," he says, "enlighten my wits, I've just tried to speak with a horse!" "A man has come to die in God's mercy, Don Camillo," comes the reply, "why give credit to a horse?" Don Camillo, fearing that the Lord may be mistaken, makes the excuse that he must have been thinking about the grey mare of Giovanni Pascoli's poem, who in like manner brought home his slain master (Pascoli's father) and who replied to the widow's anguished cry of her husband's name with a great neigh of confirmation. Just then, the horse outside whinnies and Don Camillo, the mighty priest of the Po plain, breaks down and cries as he has not wept since, as a child, he read the final lines of Pascoli's poem, 'La Cavallina Storna' (translated by Seamus Heaney as 'The Dapple-Grey Mare').

That last touch is more than a little sentimental, but serves to mask the searing sermon within the story: do not judge. Giovanni Guareschi's characters are the chief antagonists Don Camillo, a moral force in himself and one prepared to apply it with his own physical might where necessary, but one, too, of all-embracing compassion; and Peppone, town blacksmith, auto mechanic and communist mayor: headstrong, hot tempered, but with his heart in the right place. Peppone had been in the mountains with the anti-fascist partisans, and Don Camillo had attached himself voluntarily to the band as their unofficial chaplain, risking his own life in so doing. Ever after, the two, diametrically opposed in ideology, know that they share responsibility for the wellbeing of the community and, though affecting a disdain for one another in public, with much comic results, in private are quite literally prepared to die, one for the other.

Guareschi had a serious message: to the political camps in Italy, to work together for the post-war reconstruction. It should be remembered that the communist vote surged in Italy in the late 1940s and that a Eurocommunist-led coalition government would have emerged in the late 1970s, under Enrico Berlinguer, but for the damaging terrorist activities of the ultra-left Red Brigades.  

This writer had read all the Don Camillo editions he could lay his hands in the public library in the reading days of his youth and, in that Cold War era, enjoyed the comic comeuppances visited on the hapless Peppone by the wily Don Camillo – and consigned the books to happy memory. Decades later, during a spell in Germany, by chance while exiting the public library and gallery in Konstanz (a stylishly modern building behind a perfectly preserved Altstadt façade) before leaving rummaged in the retired-books box, where any volume could be picked up for €0.50. There was found The Little World of Don Camillo, the first volume in which the stories were gathered, in German translation, of course, and with the familiar ink-sketch illustrations by the author himself. Also there was the second volume, Don Camillo and his Flock, likewise in German translation. No hesitation.  

German is a language with a foundation in the iron etiquette of its people and lends itself, for that reason among many, exceedingly well to tongue-in-cheek humour, and so, to my ear, especially well to the archly mock-polite exchanges between Don Camillo and Peppone. I now read the stories over and over; their translator, named as Alfons Dalma, must have been an inspired interpreter. Each is a sermon in the Christian message: live the just life; see the other person's point of view; never humiliate; chip in. For anyone wrestling with historical-criticism's scepticism of the Gospels, Guareschi's gospel makes an excellent breviary; highly recommended, in any language.

Menelik? The first emperor of Ethiopia, traditionally believed to have been the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. A much later emperor, Menelik II, famously repulsed the imperialist ambitions of the Italians at the battle of Adowa in 1896, and so is a private joke of the old socialist in the story and an in-joke for the author, Guareschi, who had begun his writing career as a political satirist.

Guareschi's illustration for the dark story in which Don Camillo and Peppone rescue the nightly howling dog that has followed its master's murdered body downriver.

Guareschi's full-page illustrations: that on the left below shows how accomplished an artist he really was. The illustration to the right shows our two antagonists, and its whimsical style sets the lighthearted tone with which Guareschi masks the underlying seriousness of his message. Not shown here are the even more whimsical figures of the infant angel and infant devil whose thumbnail images, up to various escapades, head up each story and symbolise the everyday struggle of good and ill in our nature. Good always triumphs - a tonic for the morale.