ABSTRACT
In one of my favourite passages of Pavone’s A Civil War, Pavone reports an almost Homeric moment of Weltschmerz in which the love for one’s mother unites two Italian boys fighting on opposite sides. In this anecdote, a young Fascist officer carried a moribund partisan he had shot in self-defence (or so we are told) to the roadside to die. In a letter the Fascist later wrote to his mother, he told her:
He asked me if I was going to hurt his mamma too, and, albeit incredulous when I said no, he asked me about you, Mummy, and if I received any letters from you at all – then he asked me to show him a photograph of you. He had none of his Mother and he wanted to see the face of his mamma in your face one last time.
