Interviews From The Short Century

Introduction

Tertium non datur

As I walked briskly along Corso Venezia towards the San Babila theatre on an autumnal day in Milan back in October 1976, I was about to conduct my very first interview.

I was sixteen years old, and together with my friend Alberto I was hosting a radio show for young people called “Spazio giovani” on one of Italy's earliest privately owned stations, Radio Milano Libera .

These were incredible times, when it seemed as though anything could happen, and frequently it did. Marvellous times. Horrible times. These were the anni di piombo [the Years of Lead], the years of youth protest, anarchy, strikes in schools and demonstrations that inevitably ended in violence. These were years of hope, filled with a cultural fervour so vibrant and all-consuming that it drew you in and threatened to explode. These were years of young people fighting and being killed, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right. These were simpler times: you were either on one side or the other. Tertium non datur.

But above all, these were times when every one of us felt, and often knew, we had the power to change things. To – in our own small way – make a difference .

Amid all the chaos, excitement and violence, we were actually pretty laid back, taking things as they came. Terror attacks, bombings, the Red Brigades...these were all part and parcel of our youth and adolescence, but overall they didn't worry us excessively. We had quickly learned to survive in a manner not too dissimilar to that which I would later encounter among those living amid conflict or civil war. They had adapted to such extreme living conditions, a bit like we had back in the 1970s.

Alberto and I really wanted to make a difference. Whereas today's kids are engrossed in selfies, Instagram and smartphones, we poured our boundless enthusiasm and utterly carefree attitude into reading everything in sight and going to concerts, music festivals (it was that magical time when rock music was really taking off) and film clubs.

And so it was, armed with a dictaphone and our heads full of dreams, we made our way hurriedly towards the San Babila theatre on that sunny October afternoon more than forty years ago.

Our appointment was at 4pm, an hour before the matinée performance was due to begin. We were led down to the basement of the theatre, where the actors had their dressing rooms, and waiting for us in one of them was the star of the show and my first interviewee: Peppino De Filippo.

I don't remember much about the interview, and unfortunately the recordings of our radio show must have got lost during one of my many moves.

What I can still remember clear as day is the buzz, that frisson of nervous energy that I felt – and would feel plenty more times in my life – before the interview began. I say interview, but really I see an interview as a meeting ; it's a lot more than just a series of questions and answers.

Peppino De Filippo was coming to the end – he died just a few years later – of what was already a legendary career acting on stage and screen. He greeted us without getting up from his seat in front of the mirror, where he was doing his make-up. He was kind, courteous and engaging, and he pretended not to be taken aback when he found himself confronted with a couple of spotty teenagers. I remember the calm, methodical way in which he laid out his stage make-up, which looked heavy, thick and very bright. But the one thing that really sticks in my mind is the profound look of sadness in his eyes. It hit me hard because I felt his sadness so intensely. Perhaps he knew that his life was drawing to a close, or maybe it was proof of the old theory about comedians: they might make everybody else laugh, but they are themselves the saddest people in the world.

We spoke about the theatre and about his brother Eduardo, naturally. He told us how he had born into show business, always travelling around with the family company.

When we left after nearly an hour in his company, we had a full tape and felt a little fuzzy-headed.

That wasn't just my first interview; it was the moment I realised that being a journalist was the only career choice for me. It was the moment I felt for the first time that strange, almost magical chemistry between and interviewer and their subject.

An interview can be a formula to get to the truth, or it can be a futile exercise in vanity. An interview is also a potent weapon, because the journalist can decide whether to work on behalf of the interviewee or the reader.

In my opinion, there is so much more to an interview. It’s all about psychoanalysis, a battle of minds between the interviewer and the interviewee.

In one of the interviews you will read in this book, José Luis de Vilallonga puts it very nicely: “It's all about finding that sweet spot where the interviewer stops being a journalist and instead becomes a friend, someone you can really open up to. Things you wouldn't normally dream of telling a journalist.”

An interview is the practical application of the Socratic art of maieutics: the journalist’s ability to extract honesty from their subject, get them to lower their guard, surprise them with a particular line of questioning that removes any filters from their answers.

The magic doesn't always happen; but when it does, you can be sure that the interview will be a success and not just a sterile question-and-answer session or an exercise in vanity for a journalist motivated solely by a possible scoop.

In over thirty years as a journalist, I have interviewed celebrities, heads of state, prime ministers, religious leaders and politicians, but I have to admit that they're not the ones towards whom I have felt genuine empathy.

Because of my cultural and family background, I ought to have felt on their side, on the side of those men and women who were in power, who had the power to decide the fate of millions of people and often whether they would live or die. Sometimes the destiny of entire populations lay in their hands.

But it never happened like that. I only felt true empathy, that closeness and that frisson of nervous energy when I interviewed the rebels, the fighters, those who proved they were willing to put their (often peaceful and comfortable) lives on the line to defend their ideals.

Whether they were a revolutionary leader in a balaclava, hiding out in a shack in the middle of the Mexican jungle, or a brave Chilean mother waging a stubborn but dignified fight to learn the horrible truth about what happened to her sons, who disappeared during the time of General Pinochet.

It seems to me as though these are the people with the real power.

Grotteria, August 2017

*****

The interviews I have collated for this book appeared between 1993 and 2006 in the publications I have worked for over the years as a reporter or correspondent, primarily in Latin America and the Far East: the weekly magazines Panorama and L’Espresso , the dailies Il Tempo , Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica , and some for the broadcaster RAI.

I have deliberately left them as they were originally written, sometimes in the traditional question/answer format and sometimes in a more journalistic style.

I have written introductions to each interview to help set the scene.

1

Subcomandante Marcos

We shall overcome! (Eventually)

Hotel Flamboyant, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. A message has been slipped under my door:

You must leave for The Jungle today.

Be at reception at 19:00.

Bring climbing boots, a blanket,

a rucksack and some tinned food.

I have just an hour and a half to get these few things together. I’m headed for the heart of the Lacandon Jungle, which lies on the border of Mexico and Guatemala and is one of the least explored areas on Earth. In the present climate, no ordinary tour operator would be willing to take me there; the only man who can is Subcomandante Marcos, and the Lacandon Jungle is his last refuge.

*****

That meeting with Subcomandante Marcos on behalf of Corriere della Sera ’s weekly magazine, Sette , remains to this day the proudest moment of my career. Even if I wasn’t the first Italian journalist to interview him (I can’t be certain that the likeable and ubiquitous Gianni Minà didn’t get there first, if I’m honest), it was definitely long before the fabled insurgent with his trademark black balaclava spent the next few years ferrying the world’s media to and from his jungle hideaway, which he used as a kind of wartime press office.

It had been nearly two weeks since my plane from Mexico City had touched down at the small military airport in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of the state of Chiapas, at the end of March. Aeroplanes bearing Mexican Army insignia were taxiing on the runway, and various military vehicles were parked menacingly all around. Chiapas was approximately a third of the size of Italy and home to over three million people, most of whom had Mexican Indian blood: some two hundred and fifty thousand were descended directly from the Maya.

I found myself in one of the poorest areas on Earth, where ninety per cent of the indigenous population had no access to drinking water and sixty-three per cent were illiterate.

It didn’t take me long to work out the lie of the land: there were a few, very rich, white landowners and a whole load of peasant farmers who earned, on average, seven pesos (less than ten US dollars) a day.

These impoverished people had begun to hope of salvation on 1 January 1994. As Mexico entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada, a masked revolutionary was declaring war on his own country. On horseback and armed (albeit mostly with fake wooden guns), some two thousand men from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) were occupying San Cristóbal de las Casas, the old capital of Chiapas. “ Tierra y libertad! ” [“Land and freedom!”] was their rallying cry.

We now know how that decisive first battle ended: the fifty thousand troops sent in with armoured cars to crush the revolt were victorious. But what about Marcos? What became of the man who had evoked memories of Emiliano Zapata, the legendary hero of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910?

*****

It’s seven o’clock at the reception of Hotel Flamboyant. Our contact, Antonio, arrives bang on time. He is a Mexican journalist who tells me he has been to the Lacandon Jungle not once, but dozens of times. Of course, the situation now is very different to how it was a year ago, when Marcos and his comrades enjoyed a relatively quiet existence in the village of Guadalupe Tepeyac, at the entrance to the jungle, equipped with phones, computers and the internet, ready to receive American television reporters. Life for the Mexican Indians has remained constant, but for Marcos and his fellow revolutionaries everything has changed: in the wake of the latest offensive by government troops, the leaders of the EZLN have been forced to hide in the mountains, where there are no phones, no electricity, no roads…nothing.

The colectivo (a strange cross between a taxi and a minibus) hurtles between a series of hairpin turns in the dark. The inside of the vehicle reeks of sweat and my clothes cling to my skin. It takes two hours to reach Ocosingo, a town on the edge of the Jungle. The streets are bustling and filled with the laughter of girls with long, dark hair and Mexican Indian features. There are soldiers everywhere. The rooms in the town's only hotel have no windows, only a grille in the door. It feels like being in prison. A news item crackles over the radio: “A man has revealed today that his son Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a thirty-eight-year-old university professor from Tampico, is Subcomandante Marcos”.

A new guide joins us the next morning. His name is Porfirio and he’s also a Mexican Indian.

It takes us nearly seven dust- and pothole-filled hours in his jeep to reach Lacandón, a village where the dirt track ends and the jungle proper begins. It’s not raining, but we're still knee-deep in mud. We sleep in some huts we encounter along our route, and it takes us two exhausting days of brisk walking through the inhospitable jungle before we finally arrive, completely stifled by the humidity, at Giardin. It’s a village in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve that is home to about two hundred people, all of whom are either women, children or old. The men have gone to war. We are made to feel welcome, but few people understand Spanish. Everybody here speaks the Mayan language Tzeltal. “Will we be meeting Marcos?” we ask. “Maybe,” Porfirio nods.

We are woken gently at three in the morning and told that we need to leave. Guided by the light of the stars rather than the moon, we walk for half an hour before we reach a hut. We can just about make out the presence of three men inside, but it's almost as dark as the balaclavas that hide their faces. In the identikit released by the Mexican government, Marcos was described as a professor with a degree in philosophy who wrote a thesis on Althusser and did a master’s at Paris-Sorbonne University. A voice initially speaking French breaks the silence: “We’ve got twenty minutes. I prefer to speak Spanish if that’s OK. I’m Subcomandante Marcos. I'd advise you not to record our conversation, because if the recording should be intercepted it would be a problem for everybody, especially for you. We may officially be in the middle of a ceasefire, but they’re using every trick in the book to try and track me down. You can ask me anything you like.”

Why do you call yourself “Subcomandante”?

Everyone says: “Marcos is the boss”, but that’s not true. They're the real bosses, the Zapatista people; I just happen to have military command. They've appointed me spokesperson because I can speak Spanish. My comrades are communicating through me; I’m just following orders.

Ten years off the grid is a long time. How do you pass the time up here in the mountains?

I read. I brought twelve books with me to the Jungle. One is Canto General by Pablo Neruda, another is Don Quixote .

What else?

Well, the days and years of our struggle go by. If you see the same poverty, the same injustice every single day... If you live here, your desire to fight and make a difference can only get stronger. Unless you’re a cynic or a bastard. And then there are the things that journalists don’t usually ask me. Like, here in the Jungle, we sometimes have to eat rats and drink our comrades’ piss to ensure we don't die of thirst on a long journey...things like that.

What do you miss? What did you leave behind?

I miss sugar. And a dry pair of socks. Having wet feet day and night, in the freezing cold...I wouldn't wish that on anyone. As for sugar, it's just about the only thing the Jungle can't provide. We have to source it from miles away because we need it to keep our strength up. For those of us from the city, it can be torture. We keep saying: “Do you remember the ice creams from Coyoacán? And the tacos from Division del Norte ?” These are all just distant memories. Out here, if you catch a pheasant or some other animal, you have to wait three or four hours before it's ready to eat. And if the troops are so famished they eat it raw, it’s diarrhoea all round the next day. Life's different here; you see everything in a new light... Oh yes, you asked me what I left behind. A metro ticket, a mountain of books, a notebook filled with poems...and a few friends. Not many, just a few.