The Aldo Moro assassination enters the novel through Casaubon’s belated, fragmentary awareness of political violence in Italy. Rather than recounting the assassination itself, the episode shows how his distance from home turns a major event into a misleading newspaper caption, and how his return confronts him with a changed political world that no longer fits his former certainties.

The News from Italy

Near the end of his stay in Brazil, Casaubon takes an airplane ride over the Amazon forest and picks up a local newspaper during a stop in Fortaleza. On its front page he recognizes a man he had seen for years drinking white wine at the Pilade’s Bar. The caption identifies him as the man who killed Moro. The brief report reaches Casaubon across the distance as a startling claim, linking a familiar face to a nationally consequential act.

The Caption and the Reality

After returning, Casaubon learns that the man was not Moro’s killer. The antiterrorist squad had raided the one-room apartment he shared with other survivors of 1968 and found three pistols and two packs of explosives under the bed. One tenant belonged to an armed group; the others, unaware of the apartment’s use as a safe house, had been financing it through their shared rent. All were jailed for a year. The correction does not make the discovery trivial: it replaces the newspaper’s false identification with a more complicated account of political violence, clandestine activity, and the unwitting involvement of people around it.

A Changed Political Landscape

Casaubon had left Italy feeling guilty, as if he were escaping just as the country approached a reckoning. Before leaving, he believed he could identify a person’s ideology from the tone of his voice. On his return he could no longer tell who stood on which side. Revolution had ceased to dominate the conversation; the unconscious had become the new point of reference. Self-described leftists quoted Nietzsche and Céline, while right-wing magazines praised revolution in the Third World. The disorienting aftermath of Moro’s assassination is thus set alongside a broader loss of political legibility: the labels remain, but their meanings and alliances have shifted.

Distance, Memory, and Political Uncertainty

The episode is narrated retrospectively by Casaubon, who recognizes how little he understood of the Italian events that unfolded while he was away. The newspaper’s error provides a compact image of that distance: a face he knows is made to signify a crime it did not commit, while the actual presence of weapons and explosives reveals a different, concealed connection to armed politics. The assassination is not presented as an event Casaubon witnesses firsthand; it is a point of reference through which the novel registers how political history reaches him belatedly, mediated by headlines, personal recognition, and the unsettling facts discovered after his return.