Malatesta

“ Malatesta was a student of medicine, who had left the medical profession and also his fortune for the sake of the revolution; full of fire and intelligence, a pure idealist, who all his life—and he is now approaching the age of fifty—has never thought whether he would have a piece of bread for his supper and a bed for the night. Without even so much as a room that he could call his own, he would sell sherbet in the streets of London to get his living, and in the evening write brilliant articles for the Italian papers. ”

“ I should emphasize the fighting nature and the energizing effects of Malatesta’s kindness, so that he isn’t mistaken for one of those who, passive and resigned, guiltily indulge the tyrannical and wicked. He hated the bad as much as he loved the good; hate, he used to say, is often an expression of love, though love and not hate is the true factor of human liberation. His innate kindness was a weapon for fighting, an instrument of revolution, the leaven of rebellion. ”

“ Prove your courage by condemning Passanante to death!” On account of that manifesto, Malatesta and the other Italian refugees were expelled from Switzerland. From Geneva, he departed for Romania where he would stay for some time, painfully earning his meager bread giving French lessons, and he ill. He soon left for France. We met in Paris at the end of that year, 1879. He put himself to work as a mechanic. ”

“ So since then, Malatesta could live – together with his companion Elena Melli, with who 200
he had been together with since 1921, and with her daughter Gemma who he adored like his own daughter – only with the help of the comrades who were most nearly like friends and others who, though distant, took interest in him. This help never failed him, until the end, the modest bread that he needed; though it couldn’t be anything more than the help of poor people to a poor man. ”

“ A poor girl of 14 years who had met Gemma on the beach and went to visit her was called by the police and threatened in such a way that she became sick and bedridden with a fever. The youth of the place began to show a malhumor and Malatesta, to avoid other incidents or endangering people on his account, interrupted his cure almost before it began and took the train for Rome. The greatest fear of the government and the police was that Malatesta would find a way to escape and take refuge in another country. It is true that their intentions changed little by little. ”

“ His living personality is what has vanished, and however eloquent the testimony of his writings or the cold account of his accomplishments, these will only be an incomplete reflection of what we saw—we who lived a bit of his life and warmed ourselves by the passionate fires of his heart. The true Errico Malatesta continues alive and whole in our spirits and memories—but won’t this impression he made and the influence he held upon us eventually be dissolved by the corrosive efforts of time? ”

“ You know I told you and Orsetti that Nera Boccarini and Nobili understood each other. He's desperately in love with her."
"I don't believe it, all the same," answers Malatesta, shaking his head. "A man can't half kill a girl and show no compunction—specially not Nobili—the best-hearted fellow breathing. Nobili is just the man to feel such an accident as that dreadfully. How splendid Nera looked to-night! She quite cut out the Ottolini." Malatesta spoke with enthusiasm; he had a practised eye for woman's fine points. "Here, Adonis—I beg your pardon—Baldassare, I mean—where are you going?" ”

“ Malatesta had renounced the tranquility of pure intellectual work since the age of eighteen, when he began to neglect his studies and eventually abandoned them altogether to dedicate himself completely to propaganda, revolutionary agitation and to the fight, never turning back until his death. ”

“ In the confusion, Malatesta had barely time to escape from his palace in disguise. He was pursued from place to place by his enemies, abandoned by all his former friends, and, finally, by his own children. He at last fell ill of a languishing disease, at Bologna; and, nobody caring to afford him shelter, he was carried to the hospital, where he died. The only thing that detracts from the interest of this remarkable story is the fact, that the prophecy was made after the event. ”

“ What has tired you, Orazio?"
"I have walked from the gate here," answered Orazio, without unclosing his eyes.
"Go on, go on," is Malatesta's reply, "nothing like perseverance. You will lose the use of your limbs in time. It is this cursed air. Per Bacco! it will infect me. Why, oh! why, my penates, was I born at Lucca? It is the dullest place. No one ever draws a knife, or fights a duel, or runs away with his neighbor's wife. Why don't they? It would be excitement. Cospetto! we marry, and are given in marriage, and breed like pigeons in our own holes.—Come, Franchi, have you no news? ”

“ After reading a pair of recently published letters written at the time to Luigi Bertoni in Geneva,59 one can see that Malatesta was immediately passionate about this new initiative. According to him, it should serve above all as “cover for a more practical work,” in other words, a work of spiritual and material preparation of a revolutionary and insurrectionary nature. Apparently he saw in Italy the conditions indispensable to that work, conditions he felt were lacking after my trip to London in 1907. ”

“ These have the great merit of making one read him with appetite, even when they treat the less actual and impassioned questions, because Malatesta took from them the most human aspects which relate best to general interests, and at the same time relate to the specific interests of those in his audience, touching the most intimate strings of the soul and simultaneously conquering their minds with an coherently reasoned logic. ”

“ However, Malatesta was always the same. If there was a man in Italy, who after fifty years of constant fighting, could repeat the poet Giuseppe Giusti’s boast: “I have not flexed or hesitated,” it was him. His words in the meetings of 1920 were the same as all his past propaganda since 1872. That “petit-bourgeois” had for half a century combated the bourgeoisie, small and large, and for all of his life had earned his way as a laborer by the sweat of his brow. That “old counter-revolutionary” hadn’t done anything since he was a boy but propagate and prepare the revolution. ”

“ Malatesta’s emigration to South America had to be planned in concert with some other comrades. In Buenos Aires, he found other comrades who had actively militated with him in the files of the International: Agenore Natta, Cesare Agostinelli and others, some of them younger like Galileo Palla. Natta and Malatesta set up a small mechanic’s shop to get by, and Malatesta began his propaganda work anew, either amidst the numerous emigrated Italian workers, or among the indigenous element, whose language he was soon familiar with. ”

“ In those years, 1891-92, Malatesta waged long, heated, and sometimes rough debates with anarchists who disagreed with him on the the broadest range of questions: organization, syndicates, morality, assassinations, and so on. At the time of the Capolago conference, Le Révolté criticized him bitterly as well. In London, violent manifestos were issued against Malatesta, Merlino, Cipriani, and others. In Paris some sheets entitled Il Pugnale (The Dagger) appeared in the same tone. Those discussions naturally had repercussions in Italy and continued for a while. ”

“ La Questione Sociale under the editorship of Malatesta was like a continuation of L’Agitazione. As was inevitable, in several issues it sustained an animated debate against L’Aurora, and the divergence of ideas assumed a personal character for a moment, due to the special temperament of Ciancabilla and maybe that of Malatesta. It was during this debate, and as an unintended consequence of it, that during a conference, in the heat of discussion, Malatesta was shot with a revolver and lightly wounded in the leg. But Malatesta energetically refused to give importance and continuity [?] ”

“ In action, Malatesta didn’t know divisions of tendencies. And if he much loved the comrades who understood his thought in its best expression, he no less strongly loved those who had the same passion of revolt, even when they were divided from him by some dissent about theory or strategy. He didn’t hesitate sometimes, to rudely show his disapproval of some his closest friends, when they appeared for a moment to subordinate the duty of solidarity with the rebels to considerations of uncertain opportunity and cold doctrinarianism. ”

“ Malatesta’s thought and actions cannot be fully understood without knowing what goodness was present in the propagandist and the militant. Despite the theoretical and practical quarrels that could at times separate him from others, he was truly the soul-brother of those who could be called — as Pietro Gori called them — the “heroes of goodness”: Elise Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Louise Michel, and others less known, including the entirely ignored majority of humankind, sometimes uneducated and almost illiterate, as were many we had known in the revolutionary world. ”

“ In Malatesta the man of studies was constantly defeated by the man of action. He truly had those “devils inside” that Bakunin — who he so resembled in that subordination of theoretical work to agitation — desired above all in his comrades, collaborators, and disciples. The great Russian revolutionary immediately saw that in him, since his first meeting in 1872 with the fiery young Italian ”

“ The trial over, they appealed their sentence and won the right to remain in provisional liberty, so Malatesta returned to Florence to continue editing La Questione Sociale. This appeared until August 4, 1884. At the summer’s end, Malatesta and some comrades from various parts of Italy went to Naples as medical volunteers, to care for those stricken by a cholera epidemic. The two anarchists Rocco Lombardo and Antonio Valdre died there, taken by the illness. The known anarchist Galileo Palla distinguished himself in a special way by his selflessness, energy, and spirit of sacrifice. ”

“ The ten dialogues of “In the Café” were printed anew, having been interrupted in 1897 in L’Agitazione, and he added four new dialogues—still not the last. A long debate took place between Malatesta and James Guillaume (writing from Paris) regarding syndicalism, focusing on its history and theory, in which both summarized unpublished memories and details about the first International and about Bakunin. The “cover” work obviously wasn’t any less serious and interesting that what was “covered.” But it was the latter which most interested Malatesta, and he dedicated himself to it in body and soul. ”

“ Since the beginning of November, 1926, all freedom had been suppressed, the government adopting the most draconian means and the bloodiest persecutions against all free men and enemies of fascism, the exodus of Italians who felt most menaced had intensified, or for who the Italian atmosphere was most unbearable. For a certain time, Malatesta was allowed to leave and the opportunity was offered to him by Swiss and French friends. ”

“ They weren’t exempt from ugliness and baseness either, of course, and were still certainly too few, but already enough to do honor to humanity and to inspire belief in the brightest of hopes for our future. Kindness, not weakness or blindness, is the best raw material for all constructive rebellions against tyrants and social miseries. Malatesta’s kindness was united with an inflexible and resolved character, which didn’t trail off in useless words, but which was felt in each one of its spoken or written manifestations as one feels the heat of the sun. ”

“ But even this was not outside of Malatesta’s will, not only because he had chosen that life to be de facto part of the working people in the midst of who and for who he fought, but because he had made it rule of conduct to not ask the movement and the party in which he served for the means to live. ”

“ The monarchic and bourgeois element of the Italian quarter in Alexandria organized a demonstration that ended in a chant of “Die, internationalists!” The internationalists held a protest meeting in return, but on the morning of the chosen day, the police proceeded to arrest various comrades. Malatesta was detained a little later in the day as he left a friend’s house for lunch. Some [there?] had been bribed by Italian police agents to finger suspicious types, and they prepared an ambush to eliminate him. In custody, Malatesta asked that he be handed over to Italy. ”

“ But the comrades of various countries, more worried about the internal movements of each one of their nations, sadly didn’t take the international project seriously, and so little by little the function of the “Bureau” of London ceased. Max Nettlau describes in his book the years of Malatesta’s life which follow in minute enough detail; his relationships with Kropotkin, Tcherkesoff, Tarrida of Mármol, E. Recchioni, Arnold Rollor, and more. He notes that in this period Malatesta began to feel the weight of age, together with the hazards of his profession. ”

“ No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame at least of the great Malatesta family—the house of the Wrongheads, as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in Lombard history. ”

“ One evening Malatesta unseen, save by his friend, scaled the prison wall, and made good his escape from Florence and Tuscany. He did not venture to seek sanctuary within his father’s castle, but, flying to the coast, boarded a vessel bound for Candia, a fief of Venice, and outside Duke Cosimo’s jurisdiction. Various tales are told of his future career—some affirm that assassins, in the pay of Duke Cosimo, tracked him to his doom, and others, that he fell, fighting against the Turks at Famagusta. ”