Butcher, Remember

When Allied armies were slowly advancing up the leg of Italy in 1944, a partisan leader took over the little northern town of Crevacuore, some 50 miles from Turin. A longtime underground Communist, Aurelio Bussi was a carpenter by trade. He proved thoroughgoing in meting out justice. He ordered the summary execution of 80 townspeople, some Fascists, some not. He once dragged a local doctor away from his Christmas dinner to be killed, personally shot one man and his 16-year-old daughter. He was in a position to settle personal scores. One morning in July 1944, Bussi entered the home of Margherita Ricciotti, a pretty, 32-year-old brunette whose husband was away on military service. He had tried to win her favor before, and had had his face publicly slapped.

Death on the Pathway. This time Signora Ricciotti again rejected him. He left quietly, but later that morning, when Signora Ricciotti and her ten-year-old daughter Alfa left their house for the post office, they were stopped by three armed partisans and taken along the road to the local cemetery. There Bussi waited. "For you, my dear," he said, "this is the end."

He slapped her, then dragged her by the hair and pulled her up the road. One of his assistants grabbed the little girl, who was clinging to her mother's skirts. Said Alfa later: "I heard my mother crying and calling for me and then I heard a shot fired, several shots." That afternoon Bussi killed the mother's brother and his fiancee, told his comrades: "If you tell any stories, it will be your turn next."

For weeks thereafter little Alfa lived in a state of shock, screaming for her mother. Then she seemed to calm down. On the cemetery wall she scrawled: "Butcher, remember, one day I will kill you." Relatives sent her to live with an aunt, a fishmonger in Venice. "Poor thing," said the aunt, "she always had nightmares. She woke me up nights screaming, 'They're killing her, they're killing her!'" At twelve, Alfa wrote a poem: "I must live to kill the one who killed her. I must live for vengeance." When she was 16, Alfa got married. For a few weeks she seemed to have forgotten about revenge. But then it all came back. "I loved my husband," she said. "I wanted to have children and a normal life and to forget. But I could not. In spite of myself, when I was in his arms, I remembered my mother holding me tight on the cemetery road."

Death in the Doorway. By now Commissar Bussi was prospering: he got himself elected mayor of Crevacuore, and proudly displayed a gold medal given him by the government for his valor as a partisan. Then one afternoon a year ago, as he was eating pasta and wine, Bussi was summoned to his front door. As he stood there, wearing his napkin stuffed in his collar, Alfa fired six times, kept pulling the trigger even after her husband's 7.65-mm. pistol was empty. Then she stopped a passing car, went to the carabinieri post and said: "I have just killed the mayor. Here's the gun."

By last week, as 23-year-old Alfa Giubelli awaited a jury's verdict, all of Italy had taken up the case. Thousands of letters and wires praised her, and few condemned her. In jail she lost a dozen pounds, but her dreams had taken on happy endings: "I saw my mother, and she was content. I am not mad. I knew exactly what I was doing and had to do it. Now I have settled accounts." Italy's official Communist organ L'Unit`a huffed that she was guilty of "political assassination," and suggested she was a Fascist. But before the trial was over, it was Commissar Bussi and not Alfa Giubelli who in effect stood in the dock.

The six-man jury found Alfa guilty--not of premeditated murder, but of voluntary homicide. With good behavior, she will be free in October of next year. But many Italians seemed to be opposed to any penalty at all. When the verdict was read out, the crowd in the courtroom broke into an outraged roar: "Free her, free her!"

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