Karlo Kowasov

Carlo Covasso, known to Jacopo Belbo as Uncle Carlo, is a decorated, severely disabled veteran and local tax official whose encounter with a partisan commander turns an arrest into an act of recognition. Belbo’s account of his uncle’s wartime conduct offers a concrete counterpoint to the novel’s later web of invented conspiracies: in this memory, political conflict is real, but so is a code of honor that briefly binds adversaries.

Identity and Background

Covasso came from a farming family in Piedmont and inherited the family house and land. The property was cultivated by Adeline Canepa, a tenant farmer who gave half the produce to its owner. The arrangement left both sides feeling exploited, and the households lived in close proximity despite their hostility. Covasso’s authority over the land was thus part of a daily relationship structured by unequal interests, not an abstract political divide.

He enlisted in the Alpine troops in 1914 and rose from lieutenant to captain. During a battle on the Carso, a soldier beside him mishandled a grenade. Covasso was so badly wounded that an orderly initially thought he was dead: he lost an eye and an arm, and his aunt believed surgeons had fitted a metal plate in his skull after part of it was lost. He received a silver medal and the title of cavalier of the Crown of Italy; after the war, he secured a steady post in public administration.

Covasso eventually became head of the tax office in the town where the family property stood. His war decorations, government position, and disability marked him publicly as a veteran and servant of the state. He lived in the ancestral house alongside Canepa and his family, a proximity that kept their political and economic antagonism in view rather than allowing it to recede into a distant dispute.

Family, Work, and Political Division

During the air raids of 1943, Belbo’s mother evacuated the family from the city, and eleven-year-old Belbo stayed at Covasso’s house with his aunt Caterina. Covasso continued working through the regime changes. He was a public servant under Fascism, then ran the tax office for the Badoglio government after Mussolini was removed, and, following the September 8 armistice, collected taxes for the Fascist Social Republic. Belbo describes him as moderately Fascist: a man whose commitment to duty and the state placed him on the government’s side, even as governments changed around him.

Canepa, by contrast, was ardently anti-Fascist and believed himself oppressed by the dictatorship. Each year he had to declare his income to Covasso, who knew how much produce Canepa had taken from the land and refused to forgive even a cent. Canepa tried to soften the encounter by approaching Caterina with a few dozen eggs, but Covasso was incorruptible. Canepa answered this power imbalance with slanderous rumors about his landlord and neighbor. The two men met in the house and garden every day without greeting one another; their communication passed through Caterina and, after the evacuees arrived, through Belbo’s mother. Covasso, in his gray double-breasted suit and bowler, returned at six each evening with his copy of La Stampa, walked erect like an Alpine soldier, and ceremoniously doffed his hat to Canepa’s wife while ignoring Canepa himself.

The domestic routine gives the political antagonism a precise, almost ritual form. Covasso’s stiffly maintained public dignity and Canepa’s grievance coexist at close quarters, and neither man can simply leave the other behind. Their conflict is serious, but Belbo’s later account will show that it does not exhaust the identities either man carries.

Arrest and Recognition

After the area passed under the control of the Social Republic, Canepa boasted of contacts with partisan groups forming in the mountains and promised vengeance against local Fascist representatives. The children heard stories about the partisans but had not yet seen them. One day they descended into town without uniforms, wearing blue kerchiefs and firing into the air. Residents locked themselves indoors. Caterina assumed they would spare Covasso because Canepa claimed to know them. Instead, around eleven in the morning, an armed squad entered the tax office, arrested Covasso, and carried him away without saying where he was going. Caterina feared that a blow from a rifle butt would kill him because of the metal plate in his head; Canepa, arriving with his family, denied having informed on him but felt responsible for having talked too freely about his partisan connections.

The arrest leads Covasso outside town in a truck to the partisan commander Mongo, a former Carabinieri sergeant major who had lost a leg fighting the Fascists and the SS. Mongo stood with a gun in one hand and a crutch in the other. Covasso, apparently acting by instinct or according to an old chivalric ritual, snapped to attention and identified himself by rank, Alpine division, disability, and silver medal. Mongo responded in kind, giving his own former rank, regiment, command, and bronze medal. Their exchange of military credentials redirected the encounter: they recognized one another first as wounded soldiers, before returning to the political charge that had brought Covasso there.

The two men recalled battles and positions they had shared in the First World War, including the fighting around Pordoi and Sasso di Stria. On the same impulse, the one-armed major and the one-legged commander stepped forward and embraced. Mongo explained that Covasso had been arrested because he collected taxes for the Fascist government that collaborated with the invaders. Covasso answered that he had a family and drew a salary from the government in power; he had not chosen that government and asked what Mongo would have done in his place. Mongo replied that he would have acted similarly, while asking Covasso at least to collect the taxes slowly. Covasso agreed to do what he could, adding that he had nothing against the partisans: they too were sons of Italy and valiant fighters.

Mongo ordered his men to give Covasso a bicycle, and Covasso rode home with one arm, appearing to have returned from a picnic. His arrival interrupted the family’s two hours of fear and confusion. He found Caterina still distressed and asked why she was agitated; to him, the drama his family had endured seemed out of proportion to the resolution he had reached. Canepa did not show his face for several months afterward, leaving the household feud unsettled even as Covasso’s life had been spared.

Belbo’s Memory and the Story’s Significance

Belbo tells this episode years later as the single heroic deed of his life. Covasso’s encounter with Mongo gives the childhood story its reversal: the partisans arrive as a threat, but the men who have been political enemies discover a shared history and a mutual language of military honor. Their agreement does not erase the differences between their positions. Covasso continues to explain his service through family obligation and public employment; Mongo remains a partisan commander who has arrested him. The reconciliation is limited and practical, expressed in the request to slow tax collection and Covasso’s promise to try.

Belbo later remembers those wartime years as a time of clarity. A bullet was a bullet; the opposing sides seemed visibly distinct, marked by red or black, and a corpse could not be dissolved into an ambiguous story. That recollection stands against the slippery disappearance of Colonel Ardenti and the proliferating conjectures of the present-day Plan. Covasso’s episode belongs to a history in which danger was immediate and the lines of conflict appeared legible, even though a sudden recognition could cross them.

The story also supplies the image of a bond enduring above factions and parties. Belbo wonders whether Covasso and Mongo’s meeting might count as spiritual knighthood because both were moved by the same ideal of chivalry. The episode does not establish a secret order or hidden historical continuity; its force lies in the witnessed action of two injured men who recognize each other across political allegiance. In the novel’s contrast between lived memory and fabricated connections, Covasso’s return on a bicycle is an unambiguous event, remembered as a rare instance of courage and choice.