That day the weather was uncertain, and the forecast was for a worsening during the day and evening. The rally in Piazza della Frutta, in Padua, was scheduled for the evening. We spent the whole day assembling the stage and finishing it. In the meantime, I had received news that Enrico Berlinguer had arrived at the end of the morning, by car from Genoa, where he had spoken the evening before, and that he was in his hotel room, at the Hotel Plaza in Corso Milano, preparing and refine his evening speech.
For us, who had set up the stage, there had been just enough time for a shower and to change clothes: and in the meantime, as companions began to arrive from more distant areas of the Veneto and the province, it began to a light rain falling.
The square is now full, it had gotten dark, the music was playing from the speakers: the secretary finally arrives, acclaimed by the crowd. A quick greeting also to me on stage, two years after the Fgci Congress in Milan, when I left the youth organization to gain experience in the Party. The local leaders speak, and among them Lalla Trupia, national women’s leader and candidate for the European elections. Berlinguer takes the floor.
The square alternates enchanted silences and explosions of consensus. That firm, clear, determined voice punctuates every word and sculpts the soul of the militants. It talks about the great general challenges, peace and workers’ rights. He speaks of Padua, aware of the problems that have been placed upon his knowledge of him. We, on the stage behind the secretary, do not feel the uncertainties and the slowing down of his words in the final part of the speech.
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The square, however, seeing the now suffering image of Berlinguer on the screen, is more aware than us – almost a metaphor of the separation between base and top – that something is happening, and begins to encourage the secretary out loud. «Enrico! Henry! Henry!» – many shout. I remember the last minutes of the rally with anguish: the awareness of something unimaginable, bigger than us, destined to impact everyone’s future was growing. We get agitated, behind Berlinguer who says his last words: «Everyone work, house by house, company by company, street by street».
The confusion is indescribable. Someone brings Giuliano Lenci, a doctor registered with the Party, closer. At the end of his speech, with the anguished square applauding and calling for him, Berlinguer was carried off the stage from behind. We run on foot to the hotel, near the square, where the secretary is accompanied by car. I’m in the hallway, and he’s inside the open room, where the Babinski test is being done. He is a stroke. The police are there. They’ve already spoken to the neurosurgery department. I went ahead before the ambulance arrived, to make sure with other comrades that everything was ready for the secretary’s arrival. The last image of Berlinguer is his arrival at neurosurgery. On a stretcher, now in a coma, a gasp comes out of his mouth, a small trickle of blood. He is taken to the operating room. I won’t see him again.
Two hours later, after having decided on the organization of the next few hours (I would have stayed at the Plaza, where Berlinguer’s family and the Party leaders would have arrived), it occurred to us that the images of the rally were being filmed. I looked for the Arci manager on the hospital telephone, and shortly afterwards we learned that the operator we had trusted had already sold the box on the market. We called the Party leadership who, through its channels, managed to get the film repurchased by RAI and embargo it. The images will only be seen after June 11th.
Over the next three days From the Plaza, we organized surveillance for Berlinguer’s family and the managers who had gathered, starting with Giancarlo Pajetta. It was about accompanying them to the hospital, waiting for news. But the reports were negative, and we all knew that it was now only a matter of days, or hours. In the evening, when the guests were resting in the hotel, we went to the Unity celebrations in the province, realizing the enormous impact that this event had not only on the Party, but on society.
Then came the end, June 11th. We knew it was coming. Everyone moved to the Civil hospital. I too set foot there, for the first time in those days. I remember, at the end of a long corridor before the intensive care unit where Berlinguer was after the operation, the frame of the embrace between the very tall Ugo Pecchioli and the shorter Pietro Ingrao, who burst into tears, each in the arms of other. And then the procession to Tessera airport which accompanied the coffin, between two uninterrupted lines of crowd, and the funeral in Piazza San Giovanni.
In a few minutes, June 7th, not only the life of a still young leader had taken place, but his most courageous attempt to rethink the left as a critical force of capitalism, beyond the communist and social democratic experiences of the twentieth century. That last Berlinguer, who forty years later is the most fruitful for thinking about a left of the new era.
