Belbo’s guilt over his wartime and political passivity

Belbo’s guilt over his wartime and political passivity is less a record of proven betrayal than a conviction that he never earned the right to know what he would have done. His remorse gathers around missed tests of courage: a childhood gang confrontation he watched from the rear, the possibility that he might have joined the resistance and died on a hill, and a later decision to stay out of trouble with the police. Because he cannot turn these absences into evidence of either bravery or betrayal, the past remains open—and keeps returning.

The Unmade Choice

Belbo tells Casaubon that, had he been twenty in the 1950s, he might have written a poetic memoir; instead, he was born too late and could only read books already written. The alternative he imagines is not literary recognition but death on a hill, shot while taking part in a struggle. When Casaubon asks which side would have shot him, Belbo rejects the joking escape from the question. The uncertainty matters more than any verdict: Belbo says he knows more in the present, but did not know then what he would have chosen.

His remorse does not arise simply from believing that he chose wrongly. He says that a person can spend a lifetime obsessed by remorse because there was never an opportunity to prove that the right choice would have been made. Belbo calls himself a potential traitor and asks what truth such a person is entitled to teach others. Casaubon challenges this self-accusation as neurotic, arguing that a person could be potentially guilty of any number of things unless remorse rests on something specific. Belbo’s answer, however, is not an account of an actual betrayal. His torment is precisely the absence of a decisive act that could settle the matter.

The Childhood Pattern

The novel gives this adult uncertainty an earlier shape in Belbo’s memory of the Alley Gang and the Canal Gang. At their first face-to-face confrontation, the groups drew close, snarled, and stopped; their leaders negotiated instead of fighting, divided their territories into zones, and allowed occasional safe-conduct passes. The anticipated battle never happened. Belbo stayed farther back than the others, and later tells himself that he did not rush forward because the confrontation seemed laughable. He recognizes that this was not the explanation he gave himself at the time: then, he simply felt like a coward.

Belbo subsequently recasts the incident as a missed Opportunity. In hindsight, he believes he would have risked nothing by charging with the others and that doing so might have made his later life better. He describes the missed chance in absolute terms, comparing it to a first failure of sexual potency that supposedly determines every experience afterward. The comparison makes a single childhood hesitation feel permanent: the failure is not a wound inflicted by the confrontation, but the conviction that the moment to prove himself has passed.

A month later, when the gangs met again in a field and began throwing clods of earth, Belbo did stand in the front line. A clod concealing a stone split his lip. He ran home crying, and his mother removed pieces of earth from inside the wound with tweezers from her toilet case. A lump remained beside his lower-right canine, still perceptible to him when he runs his tongue over it. Yet this physical trace cannot serve as proof of courage. Belbo insists that he received it through heedlessness, not bravery; the body retains a mark, but the mark does not resolve the moral question. He ends the recollection by turning from the scar to writing, which he says cannot redeem him when the literature is bad.

Memory, Flight, and Witness

Belbo’s account of childhood returns after another retreat. Casaubon recalls that Belbo had spoken of running away and had invested the memory with a kind of heroism, bathed in the “glorious light of memory.” Yet that memory came back only after Belbo had run away again—this time unheroically, though perhaps wisely—with Casaubon both accomplice and witness. The recurrence binds the childhood story to the present: the remembered escape does not stand apart as a finished episode but becomes a lens through which Belbo reads his later conduct.

The possibility of wartime courage remains hypothetical, while the repeated act of withdrawal is something Belbo can actually remember. That imbalance helps explain why reassurance does not silence his remorse. Casaubon can judge that a retreat was sensible, and Belbo can recognize that events might not have required heroism; neither can supply the missing proof of what Belbo would have done under a real test. The earlier gang confrontation, in which violence itself failed to arrive, has the same structure: the occasion closes without forcing a choice, leaving Belbo to judge the self who did not act.

The Police and Their Mutual Remorse

Belbo’s sense of cowardice surfaces again when he and Casaubon decide not to tell the police what they know about Ingolf and the Cathars. Belbo argues that the information would make no difference, that the story may have been delirium, and that Ardenti’s disappearance could have had many explanations. He imagines alternatives involving Rakosky: an Israeli secret-service agent settling an old score, a man sent by someone the colonel had cheated, a former Foreign Legion associate with a grievance, or an Algerian assassin. The missing briefcase, whose color they cannot establish, is part of the same uncertain account. Belbo’s speculation offers reasons to treat the matter as inconclusive, but it does not keep him from recognizing the decision as another flight.

Before parting, he anticipates Casaubon’s judgment that he has run away again, as he did on Via Larga. Casaubon denies the accusation and says they did the right thing. The reassurance does not end Belbo’s unease. Casaubon reflects that he did not feel cowardly, having learned to lie to the police as a matter of principle, but that a guilty conscience can poison a friendship. He did not see Belbo for a long time afterward. In his account, the estrangement takes the form of reciprocal remorse: he was Belbo’s remorse, and Belbo was his.

The guilt therefore operates between the two men as well as within Belbo. Their different judgments of the same decision—Belbo’s shame and Casaubon’s principled self-assurance—do not cancel one another. Instead, the friendship becomes a witness to the unresolved act, carrying the strain of what each thinks the other has failed to do or failed to feel.

What Remorse Can and Cannot Prove

Belbo’s self-accusation is powerful because it refuses the comfort of a clear moral verdict. He does not claim that he actually betrayed anyone, and his childhood scar cannot establish that he acted bravely. Nor can later hindsight recreate the choice he never made. He treats the lack of proof not as innocence but as an enduring deficit, asking whether a person who might have been a traitor can legitimately teach truth to others.

The narrative sharpens this conflict by placing Belbo’s retrospective explanations beside the circumstances that undermine them. He can now describe the childhood encounter as laughable, but remembers that he felt cowardly at the time. He can call his later retreat wise, while still expecting Casaubon to name it another escape. His remorse is thus neither a settled confession nor a simple misunderstanding to be corrected. It is the continuing judgment of a person who believes that a decisive moment passed without revealing what kind of person he was—and who keeps finding that uncertainty repeated in later choices.