‘Listening Station’? You will recall I had planned to find and speak with the Russians while I was in Italy, half expecting to come across a tall rusting metal radio tower in a secret clearing within some wood with a small concrete building beside it. On this occasion however, I was bicycling towards the outskirts of the Italian city of Via Reggio, and had passed beyond the old harbour with its fishing boats and superyacht construction yards, when I came upon this improbable but highly visible encampment which was located between the city's football stadium and the thickly wooded coastal area to the south –
With the flags of Cuba and the revolution, are these Latino or Russians, I asked myself, looking down at the brown colours of the dried leaves emerging against the tarmac deadness of the road, before raising my eyes again to look along the line of red flags hanging besides the road.
And then back to read the banner which proclaimed an appeal for the palliatus of the poor and weak, 'PROLETARI POPOLI OPPRESSI DI TUTTO IL MONDO UNIAM…'. Palliatus, that is both their protection and their covering, in challenge to those powers, who vie for their care: the health systems, the religious systems, the judicial and criminal systems, and, apparently, or was it simply improbably, the political systems. And are the people here Latino or Russian, I asked myself in the flickering shadows of this transition time from the place of the fashion shops, elegant arcades, and wide broadwalks of the city, and its polite and well behaved people – sur le plage sous les parés – besides the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea.
And am I (are we), I was further asking, Against the System. It was 1968 during the year of Revolution that I had also spent part of the summer in Italy in Rome and Florence, but that was no feulliton, the beer and pizza parlours of those cities were the summit of my cultural selection, and I was unprepared for the actions of those who were trying to change the world in Paris and Bonn and London.
‘The world obligingly changed itself’ commented Tony Judt in his memoir (New York Review of Books blog – Revolutionaries) upon the false impression that any of us had done something to make it happen. But I am still unwilling to accept the fact of his death (see Obituaries) on August 7th
…And as equally unprepared as I was for José Saramaga’s last June. ‘Where is the Left?’ the Portuguese master had asked in his blog for 1st October 2008 (see The Notebook, which contains a year of his posts 2008/2009 ). ‘The left has no fucking idea of the world it's living in’, he had told a reporter from a South American newspaper not long before. That comment, like Judt’s, was not well received either.
During these confusing, and sometimes contradictory, transition times at the listening station – ‘In short,’ Saramaga added some time after, ‘We learn as we go along, through the words we speak.’