Returning - Renzo Novatore

Dear Libertario,

Twenty-two months have passed since the day that the most brutal and slimiest of all monsters tried to crush me between its filthy and bloody jaws.

Yes, I too was destined to be transformed into a humble tool of bestial slavery; I too was destined to sacrifice (O sacrificial animals…) on the altar of the stupidest, most grotesque of all human phantasms; I also was destined to be transformed into a “piece of human material”…

But I don’t believe in destiny.

Nor do I believe in fatality. No! I only believe in the capacity of my power! And only in its name did I respond in a refined anarchist way, with a superb and scornful “NO.” And I took off…

I walked with infinite joy on the paths of Sorrow.

I always had danger as my companion, like a dear brother. On my lips, I always had the smile of the highest, strong beings; in my calm eyes, the fascinating vision of the heroic tragedy that only true lovers of free life understand.

I was alone… but I knew that a daring phalanx of the coherent and bold remained hidden in the shadows, living the same life as me. Ah, how much love I felt for this nameless group…

What did it matter if many of them languished for so long in the depths of a damp cell? They didn’t submit! They lived; we will live at the margins of society as true rebels, as intransigent Iconoclasts, not caring what the final tragedy might be.

And it is to this handful of conscious “dark protestors,” oh dear Libertario, that I send through your columns—after deeply thanking you and all the groups of anarchist comrades and socialist friends for the greatest moral and material solidarity given to me during my illegal wandering and my…legal imprisonment—my most fervent and fraternal greetings, saying to them: “Be proud of your actions, because only through disobedience and revolt is a brilliant ray of human beauty born!”

A salute to you, oh anarchists of the deed!

A salute to you, oh human brothers!



from Il Libertario # 732, September 25, 1919, La Spezia, Italy