The Opportune Moment, 1855

I

Madam, however strong my distaste at the thought of deferring to your whim after so many years, I have not found within myself the courage to resist it, and am left with no choice but to submit, albeit I do so at the expense of my repute. To oblige you means to confess to my love for you, that transient conflagration, that involuntary clouding of the senses, which renders less persuasive all that I have professed and proclaimed; and as much as you know it, in your selfishness you ask of me a sincerity which I could not show anyone else. For if in life I have resisted your God and his depraved demands, if I have resisted unfreedom and shallowness, if I have faced ridicule and human baseness always with calm and determination — I have lost my struggle with love; and what is more, my love has been embodied by you, a woman unworthy of true emotion. Still today, when I find in you nothing which would be worth attention, when I marvel at the fact that I ever could have loved you, still today a word from your mouth knocks me defenseless to my knees, returning me to the days of immaturity and youthful fumbling, to days past and past perfect, to the juvenile schoolboy who carried out directions and instructions he did not understand. But the schoolboy in the end revolted and made up his mind to submit only to that which appeared sensible and good to him, whereas the aging man takes pen in hand and hastens to satisfy your vanity.

You wish for me to “describe the novel of my life”—so long since we have seen each other! But my life, Madam, is no novel which you could have bound between covers and deposited in the library at the mercy of mold and your friends’ wrinkled fingers. My life is my work, which in spite of scorn and ridicule I have built in faraway Brazil; my life and my work are one and the same. My work, however artless, however fragile and unfinished, has been useful; my life has thus not been in vain.

Novel! The pages which I have decided in this way to make public are not, Madam, a recounting of actuality, but the memoirs of a stranger. You will soon comprehend why I speak of a stranger; but first, if you please, let us be clear what we mean when we say memoir, which the theory of literature so foolishly converts into the plural, as if one memoir were not enough, as if memory were but the murmur of a reed shaken in the wind, and by multiplying the murmurs something of note would result. I do not, Madam, have any intention of yielding to the canons of contemporary literature, which ask authors to make entertaining monstrosities of their private lives; nor do I intend to submit to those who style themselves literary critics, those Benedictines of vanity and slippery surface, who in books seek only sentences which enable them to emasculate the truth, to stifle light under the fashionable cover of modern psychology and literary science.

To be sure, trapped in snares, man grasps for compromise and libation. I am no more resistant than others: I too might have gravitated toward portraying some of the scenes which have shaken my conscience, as writers tend to do when they wish to draw attention to a thing which seems important to them to describe. They give form to their stories so as to inform about the thing; already the ancient Greeks believed that only in this way was it possible to reach man in the thinking realms of his soul. It is a cheap and embarrassing fraud — for what reason does one hearken more attentively to the artfully written than the unartfully spoken? — but it is what people, lamentably, demand; and the people of your world doubly so. So I too, in the vain belief that it would do my tale some good, might sooner or later have taken recourse to those ridiculous dodges on which readers in their folly so insist — to direct and indirect speech (how odd, to talk in indirect speech!), to allegories and hyperboles, intrigues and anecdotes, irony and persiflage, the anaphors and litotes in which you were so skilled. I might have taken recourse to all these trivialities in the name of my former love for you; and because it is what people, lamentably, demand. Fate and chance, however, have decided to save me from that; and should I perpetrate such dodges in this letter, which constitutes the introduction to my own story, be aware that it is unintentional.

My work is my life; but since life lasts years, while work only an instant, I shall attempt to specify the paths by which my thinking has proceeded. Then I shall leave the word to another.

I do not shun writing — merely literature. In writing is truth; in literature, lies. He who writes, probes his loins and finds words; he who writes literature, stacks them in heaps. Literature is a way to avoid facing writing, to declare a lie with impunity. Nothing terrifies writers of literature more than writing; and, wishing to escape it, they seek refuge in literature which weaves entanglements and entangles itself in foolish affairs. Words are to them as indifferent as bricks to the mason, characters are for them mere empty vessels into which they pour false passions and untrue emotions.

For only he who has lived his life can breathe it into words. I have lived through this and that and discovered the meaning of my existence. I also discovered its limits; limits, however, are flexible, whereas meaning is eternal.

Never, Madam, have I longed to be a writer, to be one of those who substitute words for deeds, who take recourse in the world of rhetoric so as to conceal their cowardice, too weak and impotent to face it with open visor, too hypocritical to admit to it, even if but fleetingly, if only inadvertently. Words! My love for you was boundless; remember that September day when I told you — with trembling voice, tears in my eyes — My love for you, Julia, is boundless. How much stronger would my love have been had I recited my confession in Alexandrines instead of in a few simple words? What a shallow creature is man! No, my love could not have been stronger; and had your reply been otherwise, I would have died of happiness on the spot. But it is likely and tragic that my love might have seemed stronger to you had I arrayed it in verse and — how monstrous a word! — informed you of it thus. Words, words, words! In the depths of night sometimes I plunge into a mad dream: that one day people will do without words and speak with one another using nothing but the gaze of their eyes in infinite love and kindness, in the mutual understanding of free beings.

II

I was born the day the Spanish revolt was suppressed in the bloody storming of Trocadéro. My mother was in the service of a Genovese attorney who got her with child. After she had given birth, he sent her back to Pisa, where she had come from, with a promise to provide for his illegitimate child. And he kept his promise: My mother regularly received money from him for my upbringing and studies. Even later, however, he did not express any desire to meet me.

I have never concealed my bastard origin; on the contrary, I find in it further evidence of how ridiculous it is to divide people into classes — and how ridiculous are those who dream of installing a classless society by diktat, in the foolish belief that it is enough to declare a law for people to renounce the feeling of social exclusivity. Even at the cost of a million lives, one cannot hope to stop the vain aristocrat from filing his nails and admiring himself in the mirror; the upstart twit from setting stock in the twittishness to which he owes his wealth; the semi-literate scholar from holding up his semi-literate martinetism as a thing to be admired. Remake the world? Did we learn nothing from the French Revolution? There is only one way to create not an egalitarian but a fraternal society, and that is to join forces with those who think the same way and voluntarily build a new world, far away from the old one, a world without a past, without hatred, and then — perhaps! — sheerly by virtue of its existence, its peace-loving nature, and its dignity, it will, step by step, influence others to think the same. Perhaps that is what the Quakers were dreaming of when they set out for the New World. But their aspiration was futile from the outset because they brought with them their own God, a God even more merciless than the one their fathers had worshiped. Their aspiration was futile from the outset because their aspiration was to live freely in slavery. And in the slavery of the mind to which they so stubbornly clung, they murdered the natives and had slaves of the body shipped in from distant lands. The number of slaves you have reflects the number of times that God has looked upon you with pleasure — that was their credo.

After studies in Pisa and Perugia, I received my degree as a healer and veterinarian, and moved to Genoa. There, as you know, I enrolled in a course of philosophical studies, which I finished in Lyons. Four years later, fate blew me to Geneva, and a year after that to Vienna, where I met you. Of the year and a half I spent there, you know as much as I. From Vienna I went first to Tunis with the vague intention of forgetting Europe, but the dismal living conditions there forced my early return to Italy. I settled down in Cuneo and opened a veterinary practice. The following months, I admit, I suffered in agony; your decision seared me like a red-hot iron. Why were we not able to find a way to each other, despite my willingness — and, dare I say, your inclination toward me? What was it that kept us apart? What is it that makes a person so obstinate, so aloof? Why is it that people are not closer to one another? Why are the natural aspirations of humans so often frustrated by the rules and automatic behaviors to which we accede like unresisting puppets, filled with sawdust and slavishly submissive? Why is it that people are not able to listen to one another, that every conversation is nothing but the affectation of opinion, the result of mindless, ingrained reflexes which have absolutely nothing in common with either reason or emotion? I speak here not of social conventions, which are in and of themselves unimportant, but of people’s scant longing for liberty. Why is it that people are so afraid of freedom?

Ah! Why write about freedom to someone who has lived only for herself? You lack neither feeling nor intelligence, of that I have had the possibility to persuade myself many times. But of what use to you is feeling and intelligence? Often we have spoken together of the century of light, what the French call les Lumières, the Germans die Aufklärung, the English the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau…The first enchanted you, the second disturbed you, the third moved you. But! You, Madam, should have wanted the Encyclopédie in your library and the Penal Code in the public reading room, bread for all, but a ball gown only for yourself, free love in books, but a husband in life. You profess a dignfied life, but you fear death.

Philosophy? La belle affaire! Those whom today we call the light of humanity were perhaps flares rather than torches; we can become them only individually and only so long as we are willing to live our truth in spite of the idols to which the dull crowd, which we call society, kowtows.

Can human truth be concealed in books? Essays! Tracts! Treatises! Libido sciendi, you say; to which I reply to you: Libido dominandi. Writing books is but another way to enslave one’s fellow man, to force one’s will on him, to outwit one’s smallness and pettiness, to postpone the last sleepless night before death. Even the last of the botanists, occupying himself with the mystery of nature, sooner or later begins to see himself as an expert of the universe with the conviction that he has grasped something, and that something he shall call order; and he shall force his order on the entire world. Doxa, Madam, leads his steps, not epistémé. In the works of philosophers and scientists alike, we find each time the same thing, the desire to rob the reader of his free will in the name of this or that idol, of the freedom of the human interior in the name of the freedom of the more supreme and orderly. No, Madam, although I concede that in books I have found ideas, incentives, embryos of my later opinions, never in them have I found a recipe for happiness. Science and philosophy cannot lead to freedom. Freedom is the fruit of passion, not of reason; passion is a gift of nature, not of civilization. Freedom springs from our innocence, which science has taken from us.

For two and a half thousand years scholars have perfected their theories, seeking for ever more knowledge, promising a better world — and the world is ever more incomprehensible and painful. Why? The answer is so simple, we refuse to accept it: because they’ve never rid themselves of their prejudices, because they recognize only that which enters into their “natural order,” which they inherit from generation to generation. Certainly this order may allow an exception, a deviation, an anomaly, but to allow the slightest disturbance of the “natural character” of things is out of the question. Ah! What is natural about the fact that man starves, murders, sponges from the misfortunes of others, mates only with the consent of the community, submits to idols? Yes, man is starving and murdering, they say; let us enact a reform that he starve only should it have a higher meaning, and murder solely when it contributes to the Ideal. Let us enact that he may divorce and remarry — what freedom! — that he may choose between this or that idol — what progress! Look around you: as if the growth of human hatred were proportional to the number of proposed reforms. Wars, poverty, confusion, and despair. It is necessary, say the political philosophers, for us to reorganize the state, the church, the administration, the trades, science. Let us reorganize! And let us hide from ourselves the fact that two and a half millennia of reform have brought nothing — and that it is high time we replaced reorganization with disorganization. Even without the study of political philosophy you may come to this realization; just suppress the prejudices within yourself. You ask, what does disorganization mean? I reply: to open new paths to human passions. Let us awaken in people an aversion to life in marriage, in domestication, in the city, in civilization; and they will feel a vertiginous bliss at the fact that they may dwell freely with their loved ones anywhere on earth where the soil will feed them. Freedom will replace enslavement, solidarity will replace murdering, envy, and hatred. Is freedom any less passionate than death?

Humanity has succeeded in learning nothing more from history. Et pour cause: the revolts against society that have taken place in history have been led in the name of God — a different one, better, purer, more reliable. Man has been sacrificed on his bloody altar. Peasant uprisings? To be sure, hunger drives wolves from the woods. Toss them a bite to eat and they will lick your hand.

The French Revolution? Which one? The one which gave birth to the Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? No, I cannot identify even with that. Sovereign nation! Inviolable and sacred ownership! Rights one, two, three. Rights! By what right does anyone mean to grant me rights?

Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains, says Rousseau. To be sure. And what next? The enthronement of a new order, the tyranny of the mob. Bloodthirsty fools who grasp hold of any excuse because they lack any reason; cutthroats who claim they intend to dispatch the enemies of the people, and murder the best of their ranks; thieves who plunder public property in the name of the national estates; firebrands who talk of home defense and devastate the land. The only ones of that time who were not hypocrites were the drunkards: they declared that they were thirsty and tapped every keg in sight. Let us respect the drunkards for their forthrightness and arm ourselves against the murderers whose slogan is revolution. Let us respect the drunkards for their unsteady step; he who staggers, murders not.

What else have the reforms brought us? Compulsory school attendance? To what end? So the mob can appropriate the philosophy of the bourgeoisie? Love of property, respect for order, and hatred for everything that transcends them, for everything more true and real? Since when did education ever make a man more human? Better, more perceptive, more insightful? Is not the worst ignorance woven from nonsensical shreds of knowledge filtered by this or that institution, church, state, revolution, monarchy, timocracy, democracy? Compulsory school attendance is the best way there is to multiply the ranks of fools. Do not force anyone to go to school; either he will enroll himself or he will do without it. Do not give people compulsory rights. Do not give them rights or obligations. Give them freedom.

Why should I sacrifice to the idols of my time, my generation, my nation? I sacrifice only to one god: my own. You ask, how can I distinguish it from the idols? Quite simply: idols are the work of society, my god was chosen by my conscience. My god does not assign me any obligations other than to sleep, to wake, to work, to eat, to drink, to excrete, to love, to think. To the idols one must sacrifice one’s conscience and one’s will. You will recognize them easily, they declare as a virtue the most wretched quality of which a human being is capable: obedience. And it doesn’t end with that! The sacrifice of your life is not enough for them; they want you to sacrifice the lives of others as well. Here in the name of a bloodthirsty god, there for the honor of the king, today on the altar of homeland, tomorrow in the name of race or civilization. Idols change names the way you change slippers: yesterday one was called Prussia, today it is named Germany; yesterday it required the death of a Bavarian, today it requires the death of a Frenchman. Sometimes it is called Nation, at other times Reason or the Will of the People. The idols have tens and hundreds of names; the most honest of them is What would the neighbors say? They have tens and hundreds of names, however only one desire: to beat you down, to destroy you, to dispatch you, to bring you to naught, to turn you into nothing.

III

At that time I also began to contribute regularly to anarchist newspapers—Protest and The Atheist—and issued my first proclamation. It ended with the words: “Once we establish our free settlement, we will be able to say that anarchy is neither a just nor an unjust idea, but simply a fact.” Yes, I was in a hurry to put my ideas into practice, to give form to a word which only recently appeared: socialism. Not as it is pursued today by communists, but as a reflection of the origin of the word — socius, partner, comrade, friend, companion, with whom together I face fate. Anarchy in interpersonal relations, love as the expression of a fait social, the abolishment of hierarchy, the denial of God, freedom for all, a common lot — that is socialism. How simple, how innovative! Simple, for we need only free ourselves of our habits and prejudices; innovative, for everything begins anew. To people who say, I wish I could start my life over again, yet not lose my memory of the past, I reply: Become anarchists!

Yes, I was in a hurry to put my ideas into practice. Only the reality of things can persuade those who despite their awareness of the malignancy of the society in which they live are not capable of conceding that another world is possible. I was in a hurry to realize at the expense of propaganda; thus it happened that the people who left for Brazil did not have a clear idea of the project. Many of them, as was gradually revealed, had not even read my articles, or had interpreted them in the light of the political lines of the newspapers which had reprinted them without my knowledge. Filled with clairvoyant disgust at society, I had overestimated those in it; I did not imagine that people who all their lives long had been abused and besotted by society could fail to feel the same deep revulsion. At one point I had had a regular column on cases illustrating the tragic impact of the rules to which society submitted: the suicide of lovers whose surroundings denied them free choice, the murder of a vagrant whom the estate owner believed to be a thief, the strangling of a terrified woman by an officer who feared that her weeping would wake the inhabitants of an enemy village, the violation of a young lady for maintaining a relationship with an enemy soldier — in the nineteenth century! — children sold by their own parents, robbery, rape, and torture in wars and insurrections, corrupt courts, financial frauds, political hypocrisy. I had assumed it would be enough to point out the mechanisms of evil, and underestimated the slowness with which people — especially women — shed their prejudices. Yes, Madam, the greatest enemy of everything new is woman, bound by the mental chains of matrimony or whatever other trap in which she seeks the feeling of safety, protection from the uncertainty of centuries and millennia of belittling existence.

This is also why the first and most important rule to which we must accede if we wish to overturn the order of things is the freedom of women. Woman’s standing in society is the most monstrous demonstration of men’s smallness and foolishness — and women’s as well. Man scorns woman deeply, and the acts of courtesy which he shows her are the expression of a hypocrisy which has as its goal to conceal the slavery in which he keeps her. The ideal woman? Bon mots and tittering turns of conversation, to cover up her dullness and intellectual impotence, embroidering family initials on handkerchiefs and singing at the piano, because after all even she has the right to amusement — why, from time to time, even a dog is allowed to bark with no apparent reason. Once or twice a week we may take her out in the streets; and there, in the anonymity of the crowd, let her go ahead and parade her canary-like incomparability, let her shimmy and shake, our flunky, our prettified lackey, a savage whom we keep for our amusement. Her clothing is the denial of common sense, fashion makes of her a primitive social creature from a colonial exhibition: feathers on her head, golden amulet around her neck, face sprinkled with magic powder, painted lashes, earlobes laden with metal hoops, feet misshapen by ritual footwear, pores cloyed with the most ill-sorted oils and scents. And in all this she takes pride: in the brains of slaves vanity is the manifestation of social existence.

And I speak only of Europe! Look at other worlds, look at Africans, look at American Mormons, look at Muslims! A man has several wives, but a woman only one husband. Polygyny yes, polyandry no. A father has the legal right to kill his daughter if she displeases him, but not his son; he may kill his sister if she displeases him. Infidelity is punished by stoning, as custom demands. Walk through the streets of Tunisia! A woman in public may not expose so much as a centimeter of her body, not a single hair, not a single flash of the eyes. Veiled from head to toe she hurries through life like a disgrace to the human race which must be buried while still alive. Streets full of walking mummies! A veil and several layers of fabric protect her from rotting, and still she must cook and bear children for her man. And in all this she takes pride: in the brains of corpses mummification is the ultimate form of visibility. And in all this her man takes strength and delight: the more dead my woman, the greater my god!

I do not demand the equality of women; I am talking about freedom. Equality is nothing but another reorganization of the society of men, a new reform: let us allow women to be like us, let us allow them to be murderers, strategists, politicians, irresponsible and selfish beings longing for power. Tell a woman that she may kill, press a rifle into her hand — and she will become as bloodthirsty and contemptible a creature as man. Equality for women? Our erstwhile canary becomes a sheep. She ceases to warble and begins to bleat; then will we be closer in our dullness and unfreedom. This is what is called for today by those who subscribe to the new doctrine, the new idol, which they call feminism.

No — let us not give women equality, let us allow them freedom. The day when woman becomes free will be the dawn of a revolution whose consequences we can hardly imagine. Free woman means the end of religion, of which in her nonfreedom she has been the most fervid supporter. Free woman means the end of wars which mow down men. Free woman means the end of a society in which the strong oppress the weak, the end of prostitution, physical or moral, the end of violence. Free woman is the harbinger of a new humanity, the first step toward the triumph of humanity over man.

The wish is father to the thought? Perhaps. I admit that I have never been a good prophet. But as long as woman is different from man, my hope persists. Man has fizzled at everything he has ever undertaken; let us give a chance to woman.

And before all else: let us abolish marriage! Freed of its tyranny — pedantic or condescending, cruel or feeble, indifferent or loving — woman will acquire consciousness of herself. Marriage! Rousseau is right a hundred times over! If I could rid humanity of a single plague (locusts, religion, cholera, pestilence, private property, wars, government, parliaments, or national revivalists), I would choose marriage — font of unfreedom, hypocrisy, and stupidity.

IV

Free man is dangerous. At least so believe the police, the courts, and the lackeys of society. I have been followed and spied on. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Why? What do I write? Why? The first search of my home produced nothing: a few manuscripts of unfinished articles. But have I called in my articles for the overthrow of the government? Not at all, Your Graciousness, I am against all forms of violence. The second search was more thorough: a scalpel was discovered in my veterinary bag. What’s this? You are against all forms of violence and you secrete weapons in your apartment? Three months’ imprisonment and a liberating verdict with qualification: henceforth I am required to report to the police any and all journeys beyond the city borders. My guardian angels go round to the local farmers and breeders: if we were you, we would entrust our animals to more qualified hands. You never know what to expect from an anarchist. I am practically without work, money is dwindling.

I have been accused of rabble-rousing, subversion of the state — but also of reactionism and conservatism! As gradually there was more and more talk about the Fraternitas settlement, the attacks in the press increased, from irony and bourgeois sarcasm in the pro-government dailies to charges of cowardice and fatalism on the part of self-styled revolutionaries. “When the throat of the proletariat is gripped by hunger, when revolution is a matter of life and death, those who leave on the eve of the battle are cowards and deserters.” I have never responded to such attacks: why try to explain that if I belong to no army and I am my own commander, then to speak of desertion is meaningless? Let the communists sacrifice themselves on the altar of the proletariat, if they believe that they will liberate man by doing so; I shall try to liberate man without regard for the proletariat. The working class is but one more idol, the proletariat merely a crippled progeny whose fore-bears are called hatred, vengefulness, and lack of imagination, the spore of bourgeois thinking, from which they allegedly seek to be emancipated. Program? The dictatorship of some to the detriment of others. The communists are simply continuing the work of the puritans: Proletarians of all countries, unite, workers against bourgeoisie, conscious against unconscious, believers against unbelievers, healthy against sickly, obedient against disobedient. Along with the nationalists and the puritans, the communists are the fiercest enemies of the human race and the greatest threat of the new century; I thank nature that I will not be in it long. Mark my words: sooner or later they will all begin to exterminate one another, for they have the same goal, to destroy man in the name of the organization of humanity, in the name of a new arrangement, in the name of a final order. Babeuf! Blanqui! Once upon a time hatred for man was a reflection of hatred for humanity. Today we are more progressive: there has been born a new hatred, a hatred out of love for humanity. The happiness of man is not a right but a requirement — the communists teach us that. You do not want to be happy with us? Die! Serve God, serve the nation, serve humanity, the desire of all who are inferior is to serve—anything but freedom. A free man is inscrutable; he might refuse our services. You do not want me to serve you? Die!

I know that even among anarchists there are today many who perceive hatred as the reflection of a more lively, just, and generous love of life, who believe that there can be no love of freedom without hatred of those who rob us of it. I have never shared this view: the freedom of society leads through the freedom of the individual; I do not believe that man can attain freedom at the cost of killing, even if it is a matter of doing away with tyrants.

If someone should want to murder me, I shall defend myself. First I shall attempt to dispose of him without greater violence; but should he be stronger than I, I shall attempt to kill him. My life as a peace-loving man is more valuable than the life of a murderer. Individual defense is permissible, as it corresponds to the laws of nature. However, defense through aggression in the name of “higher interests” submits to the same logic as war, returning us to the civilization we seek to overcome. Hence I have always been against anarchistic violence, whatever form it may take: violence and war are one and the same.

Yes, I deny the necessity of any form of war, both aggressive and so-called defensive, or, as they say nowadays, patriotic. A free man has no patrie. A free man, apart from his freedom, has nothing of his own. My pacifism has nothing in common with God and with all those who appeal to Thou shalt not kill. I do not believe in a higher order which would forbid me to kill. And if I did think God existed, I would have to come to the conclusion that he wants war — because it goes on. Which would give me sufficient reason to damn him, instead of bowing to him. And due to my peace-loving nature — forgive me this cheap irony — I would end up in hell. But the injunction of respect for one’s neighbor is human, not divine. And should we forget respect, there remains common sense. Wars waged “for rational reasons” are either the greatest hypocrisy or the ultimate idiocy. Were people to have a little more rationality in them, war today would be a forgotten word.

V

The attacks in the press at least had the advantage that they also spread information about my project. People, it seems, do not have great trust in journalists: in spite of the criticism and ridicule, the project began to attract many more people than I had originally anticipated. In Piemont, Tuscany, Liguri, Lombardi, and Savoy in France, there suddenly sprang up groups of activists who organized lectures, charitable markets, and raffles. The oddest assortment of objects began coming in to the editor’s office: tawdry trinkets, books, quilts, clocks, hunting arms, armchairs, pictures; someone arrived in a wagon loaded with boards and netting; countryfolk sent hens, hares, geese, pigs, goats. For the most part they were people who had no intention of leaving; they wanted merely to express their sympathies and help the settlers.

But the number of true prospects was increasing also, and not only among workers and craftsmen. Among the candidates were an Austrian officer, an agricultural engineer, a Siennese pharmacist, scions of the finest families in France were applying…but also pimps offering “women accustomed to men in great quantities”(!). In the first year, while I was still considering an appropriate place to establish the settlement, I received more than four hundred applications, roughly a quarter of which came from married couples or families with children: all told, nearly seven hundred settlers! The Society for the Establishment and Development of the Fraternitas Free Settlement was created in Lyons, followed by the Society for a New Life, which eventually took over all the bookkeeping; the Society for Free Socialism was created in Genoa, and branches of an association called Far From the Capital in Le Havre and Paris.

Where was I to locate my experimental settlement? Experiments such as this were doomed to failure in Europe; the pressure of the surroundings was too great, too present, communication with the outside world too easy and seductive. Canada was a land of hunters, farmland was expensive. In the United States there was no place for a free-thinking group of people: the land belonged in equal parts to Pistol Petes and Puritans, who shared the same fetish: In God we trust. I considered French Polynesia for a time, but the conditions there were too harsh. Then I concentrated on Central and South America, Mexico, Venezuela, and finally Brazil. The climate and agricultural potential were not ideal, but at least they were decent. The Brazilian government was favorable toward immigration and made us a very advantageous offer: exemption from taxes and customs fees for three years, plus an interest-free loan payable over six years, in return for a commitment of at least 5,000 permanent settlers on the territory provided during that time.

I set out for Brazil that same year. I arrived on the site of the future settlement during the rains, but despite the inclement weather I was enchanted. For the first time in years the image of your face in my memory began to dissolve. For the first time in years I felt free once again. Suddenly I was seized by the awareness that a solution was within reach. Had the civilized world ever been closer to extinction than now? European civilization! Paris and its extravagant sophisticates, Vienna and its diligent informers, London and its Salvation Army brass bands, Amsterdam and its pudgy gold dealers, Rome and its papists! Was it not the opportune moment to quit this world burdened with misfortune and misery, caked in oozing ulcers, pallid and exhausted, and show it that the path it has been following thus far is only one of many possible? Or is there only one world possible and will people be forever slaves, no matter what we call them? What does your Encyclopédie have to say to that?

VI

Last night I had a dream about you. I was myself — an old man — you were still young. So beautiful! So foreign!

All our ideas about death are childish. Some believe that man does not die; others, that death is nothing, for if we do not live, death does not exist. But, on the contrary, that answers nothing, if death exists only in life, it means merely that life is mortal, death immortal. Death, in its immortality, is ironic, more ironic than life itself.

Take for instance a mother’s first act after giving birth: quieting the child’s anxiety, lightening the burden for the life she has just brought into the world. A newborn cries through his first weeks and months of life. How come? In anticipation of what awaits him? A clairvoyance, which he will later lose, at the instant we force on him the illusion we ourselves have lost, the illusion of safety, the illusion of eternity? Which he will lose until the moment he reaches maturity and sees through it, definitively and irrevocably?

The parents’ role? To encourage their child to live, to ease his fear, to soothe him, calm him, arrange the home for him along the pattern of intestines, arouse in him the idea that he is still in the safety of the womb, persuade him that the surrounding world is only scenery, a stage set at which we gaze peacefully from our hiding place in the darkness of the audience. Any parent who prematurely reveals to his child that the human theater is played once and for all, that no one will mend the ragged costumes, and that the blood flowing from the boards is real, will be morally condemned by other parents: How could he be so inhuman? The parents’ secrets protect the child — and excuse the parents.

I lay in bed in an unknown room, imbrued with sweat; you were holding my hand and smiling. I felt no desire, just joy and peace. One thing alone clouded my happiness, drops of sweat, flowing into my eyes, which forced me to blink and prevented me from seeing you more clearly. Wanting to rid myself of this veil of tears I shook my head, but succeeded only in sending a sharp pain down my spine. The sound of voices came from the next room, men’s and women’s. They sounded unnatural, quarrelsome and shrill. I realized that we were in a hotel room and the voices were actually coming from the corridor or the lobby. Then you spoke, with a kind smile and tenderness in your eyes, but your voice sounded like the voices of those outside: unnatural, quarrelsome, shrill. You said: Where will we go now?

VII

To justify life! The optimists — those affable, rosy-cheeked, smiling people — believe that everything is in perfect order. All the horrors of the world, all human spite and folly, all that is a natural part of life. How pessimistic! The pessimists on the other hand — those gloomy, petulant, bilious, obstinate individuals — believe that life should be better, that it could be something other than spiteful and foolish. How optimistic!

I am aware of the extent of the commitment which I have taken upon myself: people who in good faith set out across the ocean and whose way back is now closed view me rightfully as the coauthor of their fate. Yes, I should have expressed myself more circumspectly, paid more attention to recruitment and various instructions which were issued under my moral aegis — many of them, as I have bitterly come to realize over the years, in conflict with my deepest-held convictions. Some fools even published some sort of Regulations under my name — as if anarchy could regulate something! Yes, I let myself be carried away by my visions and succumbed to the superficial enthusiasm which dominated after my first proclamations.

However, the short-lasted duration of the settlement is not proof of the project’s unattainability — only people without imagination could think so. If the first experiment fails to produce the expected results, it must be repeated. Galileo spent many an evening observing the chandelier in the Pisa Cathedral; why should it be any different with anarchy? Can people live together without laws? Experience has shown that yes: a group of people, including those with no clear concept of anarchy, lived together for nearly three years — and notwithstanding the aforementioned Regulations, with no preordained rules. As long as voluntary labor held up, there was plenty of food and trust alike. And if people began to suffer from hunger, it was not because it was impossible to assure the influx of provisions, but the fault of the self-appointed managers. If the people did not get bread, it was because no one mended the granary roof, damaged by torrential rains. If the livestock trampled the bean fields, it was because the cattle run was shoddily constructed. And if the settlers were overcome with indifference, it was due to lack of faith; some of them lost trust and infected the others, refusing to fetch water or to go and work in the field. The idiotic principles of parliamentarianism squeezed out anarchy. The settlers adopted an absurd system of referenda, squandering time in assemblies which begot nothing but ridiculous promises and individual ambitions. They then dictated to others their rights and obligations…And then — only then! — the diseases we know so well began to creep into the settlement like a plague: restriction of freedom, spying, envy and jealousy, disrespect for women, theft, and, finally, murder.

Yes, I arrived late. The delay on the sea — four and a half months instead of two! — was the final spitefulness of fate; had the ship landed five or six weeks earlier, I might have been able to achieve something yet.

What to add? Never, not even after our breakup, had I felt greater hopelessness. For three days I wandered the deserted settlement, trying to understand. I addressed myself to the police in Curitiba, the farmers from Guaragi and Imbituva, no one knew a thing; I returned to Paranaguá in the hope that I would run into some settlers, in vain. The only thing I mined from my journey was a journal given me by the police officer charged with the investigation. The whole affair had long since ceased to interest him, assuming it ever had. In his eyes the Europeans who came to Brazil were nothing but rogues and beggars, and the Casa Fraternidade was further evidence of the fact that Europeans would have done better to conduct their experiments at home and not make extra work for the Brazilian police.

In the end I tarried six years in Brazil; there was no reason to return, nor anywhere to return to — I had lost my practice in Cuneo. I lectured in São Paulo on socialism at first, then set out with a puppet theater across the Rio Grande do Sul. I lectured six months at the Agricultural School in Porto Alegre, and for three years ran the agronomic center in Bahia. Some longtime friends tracked me down there and persuaded me to return to Italy to help them run a Collective Agricultural and Industrial Cooperative in Lombardy. It exists to this day, perhaps it is even prospering.

For several years I attempted to build a new anarchist settlement in Venezuela. However, it quickly became clear that my reputation and name would henceforth be an obstacle to similar projects.

Since then I have eked out a living. Nothing that would interest you.

Oh, yes, I have a son, he lives in Brazil. He, too, longs for a world that is not a prison. Today he, too, has a grown-up son; so he has someone to whom he can pass on his despair. Nothing new under the sun. In our youth we live in expectation of better tomorrows, in old age that time seems to us happier than the tomorrows that never came. We have forgotten how hopeless hope can be, how unbearable the waiting. Disappointment has become commonplace for us. We are accustomed to it. In reality we are better off than our sons.

Well then, Madam, what more could you want from me? Regret? Repentance? A humble return to the human fold?

The world is pure madness. Man is born in chains. Into a world of hatred and evil. Searching his way in the cold toward the rot. Few yearn to become killers, but few refuse to kill. Evil winds through history without end. Wagons along muddied trails. I do not know whether to understand evil makes a man more clairvoyant. I do not know whether it makes him stronger waiting for death. I know only this: I await my own calmly, resigned and without regret.