I don’t know if yet, but in the seventies of the last century there was a basketball pitch in the Parco Sempione in Milan, high on an embankment, a rectangle of battered pink concrete, spotted with holes and patches, peeling backboards, skeletal baskets by the lack of retinas. Little boys who came a bit everywhere played it, mostly children of wealthy local people but also many poor suburbs, different clothes, with differently cut hair, with cool shoes for each and ramshackle the other, but all only eager to play and confront each other. on that field where only the game mattered.
And one day, far away, towards the Castle, a demonstration of the Italian Communist Party was gathering that would culminate in a rally of Enrico Berlinguer. The playful world of the kids was quietly separated from the one over there, which resounded with slogans and orders of the order service, but from the gathering they began to break away and walk towards the pitch handfuls of red-flagged demonstrators, until it occupies it intervening between the teams of the kids in the game. One of these asked: “Sorry, we’re playing, why don’t you let us play?” He answered a thug with a big stick who pretended to justify a flag with a hammer and sickle: “We have the defect of being many, and therefore we are here.” As a backup, a colleague with a flagsticked stick: “Enrico must speak: he won’t play.”
At which another of those kids, naive or unconscious in not submitting to the intimation, took the ball and dribbled running towards a basket tried a shot. Instead, he met the slap of one of the brutes, who tugged violently until he seized the ball. At that point one, and only one among that group of occupants, disgusted by that spectacle, erubescent and with quivering veins in my neckhe exploded: «But they’re kids! But are you crazy? »; and furiously, fumbling in his pockets and pulling out a piece of paper, he added: “Assholes! This is the PCI card! I’m ashamed! ”And he tore it up in the face of the slapper. He remedied a pile of blows. Enzo Tortora said: “I was a liberal because I studied, I am radical because I understood”. I am anti-communist because I wanted to play. And the Communist I liked was the one who tore up the party card.
