Mongke

Mongo is the partisan commander in the hills around the unnamed town where Carlo Covasso lives, a former Carabinieri sergeant major who lost a leg fighting the Fascists and the SS. When his men arrest Covasso as a representative of the Fascist regime, Mongo discovers that the disabled veteran before him is also an old military adversary and comrade. Their recognition leads not to punishment but to a release, and Casaubon later invokes the episode as an example of bonds that can endure across political factions. Mongo’s remembered story also stands in sharp contrast to the novel’s later movement from uncertain connections to an imagined universal conspiracy.

Identity and wartime position

Mongo is a nickname, described as customary at the time and said by many to have been taken from Flash Gordon. His formal identity is Sergeant Major Rebaudengo, a former member of the Royal Carabineers. He has lost one leg in the first fighting against the Fascists and the SS, but continues as commander of the Badoglian brigade Bettino Ricasoli and, in the narrator’s account, commands all the partisan brigades in the surrounding hills.

Before Mongo appears in the town, the children hear stories about the partisans but have not seen them. Adelino Canepa boasts of connections with the groups forming in the mountains and promises vengeance and exemplary punishment. The rumors give the partisans an uncertain reputation: they are distant figures in popular tales, yet their arrival may suddenly bring violence into ordinary life. Mongo’s later treatment of Covasso complicates the fearful expectations surrounding them.

Covasso’s arrest and recognition

When the partisans descend into town, they are not yet in uniform; blue kerchiefs identify them, and they fire into the air to announce their presence. Residents lock themselves inside. Covasso’s family initially assumes that Canepa’s claimed friendship with the partisans will protect him. Instead, around eleven o’clock, an armed squad enters the tax office, arrests Covasso, and carries him away in a truck. His wife, Aunt Caterina, fears that a blow from a rifle butt will kill him because a metal plate in his head makes him especially vulnerable.

The arrest is meant to teach the town a lesson. Mongo’s men have apparently heard Canepa’s talk and identify Covasso as a local representative of the regime. Taken outside town, Covasso finds himself facing Mongo, whose war medals shine as he stands with a gun in one hand and a crutch in the other. Covasso instinctively snaps to attention and introduces himself by his rank, Alpine Division service, disability, and silver medal. Mongo answers in kind, giving his own rank and name, identifying himself as commander of the Badoglian brigade, and naming his bronze medal.

Their exchange of military recollections establishes a shared past more powerful in the moment than their opposing positions. Asked where he fought, Mongo names Pordoi, hill 327. Covasso replies that he was at hill 328, in the third regiment, at Sasso di Stria. The two men then recall other battles and episodes, including the battle of the solstice, the cannon on Five-Finger Mountain, and the bayonet attack on Saint Crispin’s Eve. The dialogue turns the confrontation into recognition: one man has lost an arm, the other a leg, and they step forward and embrace.

Release and cross-faction solidarity

Mongo explains that the partisans were told Covasso collected taxes for the Fascist government serving the invaders. Covasso replies that he has a family and earns his salary from whichever government is in power; he did not choose the government. Mongo says that he would have acted as Covasso did in his place, but urges him at least to collect the taxes slowly and take his time. Covasso says he has nothing against the partisans and calls them fellow sons of Italy and valiant fighters.

The two veterans understand one another because they share a conception of the Fatherland, despite their opposing military and political circumstances. Mongo orders his men to give Covasso a bicycle, and Covasso returns home. Canepa, whose claimed partisan connections had helped bring suspicion upon Covasso, does not show his face for several months. The result is a striking reversal: the arrest is real, and the partisan commander has authority to punish, but personal recognition and a shared patriotic identity turn the encounter into a negotiated release.

Memory, interpretation, and the Plan

Casaubon recounts the episode while reflecting on whether it qualifies as spiritual knighthood. He does not claim that it does; instead, he draws from it the more cautious conclusion that bonds can endure above factions and parties. Mongo’s scene supplies a concrete human instance of connection: it arises from shared experience, recognition, and a practical act of clemency, not from an abstract theory that every event must conceal a single design.

That distinction matters in the novel’s later account of the Plan. Casaubon describes how he, Belbo, and Diotallevi trained themselves to connect everything with everything else, at first treating their associations as parody, until the habit of pretending to believe became difficult to distinguish from belief. Their invented Plan draws historical fragments into a seemingly irrefutable web, and its readers come to identify pieces of their own muddled mythologies within it. Casaubon’s later formulation—that a secret society might exist to spread the rumor of a universal plot—exposes the self-referential shape of conspiracy thinking. Mongo’s place in that widening field is therefore not evidence of a hidden organization; he is a historical partisan commander whose story shows how an actual bond across factions can be made to resemble one more connection in an all-encompassing pattern.

Thematic significance

The account of Mongo’s meeting with Covasso turns a potentially simple opposition between partisan and regime official into a scene of mutual recognition. Their shared military past does not erase the political difference between them: Mongo’s men have arrested Covasso precisely because he has served the government they oppose. Yet their exchange gives each man a way to see the other as more than a representative of that government or that resistance. Mongo releases Covasso but does not ask him to abandon his family or salary; his request is to slow the tax collection, a limited accommodation rather than a conversion.

The contrast with the Plan’s logic is equally important. In the later conspiracy, every coincidence can be recruited as proof, and every fragment is made to confirm the rest. In the wartime memory, the connection between Mongo and Covasso is particular and intelligible: both are veterans, both bear the bodily consequences of combat, and both remember the same battles. Casaubon’s reflection preserves the meaning of that solidarity without claiming it reveals a secret history. Mongo’s episode thus marks the difference between bonds grounded in shared circumstances and a totalizing explanation that turns all circumstances into evidence of a plot.