Il mondo migliore

Il mondo migliore is the promise of a just and happy future that Salinas and his comrades used to give meaning to their struggle—and to defend acts that the promise itself should have made impossible. The ideal offers a language of solidarity and dignity, but in the soldiers’ account it also becomes a warrant for violence: if the future is important enough, even a child’s death can be recast as a price paid on behalf of millions. After the war, that justification meets its sharpest challenge in the memories and unanswered questions of a former soldier.

The Ideal and Its Promise

Salinas defines the desired world as one in which the weak would not have to suffer because of other people’s cruelty, and everyone would have the right to happiness. It is not presented as a private fantasy. He says that he and his comrades believed such a world could be made, and believed they knew how to make it. Their conviction gave the struggle direction: they were fighting, they say, to do what was right.

The ideal’s appeal lies in its breadth. The men claim to fight not for money, a field to work, or a flag, but for the possibility that millions might live decently, die with dignity, and escape being trampled or mocked. The promised beneficiaries are distant and numerous; the people who suffer in the course of the struggle are immediate and specific. That contrast gives the ideal its emotional force while also setting up the moral danger in how it is used.

How the Promise Licenses Violence

Salinas’s explanation turns on the claim that no better world can simply be handed over: things must be destroyed before something new can be built, and the fighters must be willing both to endure pain and to inflict it. In his account, once people have begun killing, there is no return to what came before. The conflict is described as something the others began, leaving his side with no alternative but to continue. Violence is thus narrated as necessity rather than choice, even as the men continue to assert that they know what is right.

The most brutal consequence is stated without qualification. Asked whether fighting for justice could mean shooting children, Salinas answers that it could if necessary. He argues that once the logic of struggle is accepted, age and allegiance cease to matter: old people and children, friends and enemies, can all be swept into the destruction required to prepare the ground. The image of breaking or plowing the earth makes this logic tangible. It suggests labor undertaken for future growth, but here the ground must be broken through suffering, and the promised harvest is invoked to make the damage bearable.

The justification expands until individual deaths seem negligible beside the millions said to be waiting for a decent life. Salinas asks what one child—or ten, or a hundred—could mean against that immense future. This arithmetic does not erase the victims; it reveals the mechanism by which the ideal protects the fighters from confronting them. The dream serves as a defense against horror: whenever the cost becomes unbearable, the promised reward restores purpose. In that defense, a vision of universal happiness becomes a means of discounting particular lives.

The Postwar Test

The conversation begins from a disagreement about whether the war is over. Salinas’s interlocutor insists that it is not over for them, and later the postwar setting makes that distinction concrete: the country has moved forward at extraordinary speed, forgetting the conflict, while a whole world of people remains unable to leave it behind. The former soldier identifies himself among those left inside the war. For them, nothing has ended, and the little girl is regarded as a danger.

The lingering conflict is not only a matter of private memory. Salinas’s death sits uneasily with the surviving group, and the men decide that the girl must somehow be eliminated. They assign this task to the Count of Torrelavid. The account shows how the claim of collective necessity survives the battlefield: under the cover of a new political and social order, people who still think in wartime terms make another child a target. The supposed future of the many continues to outweigh the safety of one vulnerable person.

The postwar speaker then turns the ideal back on its defender. Salinas and his comrades won the war, he observes, and asks whether the result is the better world they promised. The former soldier says he has never asked himself that question; the reply is that he has asked it a thousand times and is afraid to answer. The exchange breaks through the appearance of settled belief. Victory has not resolved the moral problem, and the ideal cannot be judged only by the intentions the men once attached to it.

Memory, Accountability, and Self-Deception

The former soldier’s challenge links Salinas’s moral language to a particular wartime killing at Mato Rujo. He asks why the soldier was there fighting after the war had already ended, and why he killed a man he had never seen without allowing him the right to a trial. The account does not let the abstraction of historical necessity stand alone: it puts beside it an act, a place, a dead man, and the absence of legal judgment. The former soldier argues that Salinas had begun killing and could no longer stop, making continued violence look less like a route to justice than a momentum its participants could not master.

He also offers a darker explanation for the soldier’s attachment to the better-world ideal. In his view, the man repeatedly turned the dream over in his mind to avoid thinking about the day someone brought him his father’s eyes and about the other dead who filled his memory. The aspiration to avenge those deaths, he suggests, was the real reason the man fought. This is an accusation made within a confrontation, not a neutral account of the soldier’s inner life; its force lies in challenging the noble explanation with the possibility that the promised future concealed a personal grievance and unbearable grief.

The novel places that challenge against the earlier scene in which Manuel Roca warns that he and the others will go to prison if they touch him. Salinas laughs, draws a pistol, and tells Roca that no one will ever know; Roca, he says, will disappear, abandoned by his friends while Salinas’s own associates are occupied. The threat turns the postwar argument over justice into an immediate question of impunity. A movement that claims to fight for a just world protects itself by anticipating silence and the absence of a trial.

The ideal therefore remains unresolved rather than simply disproved. Its definition—protection for the weak, happiness for everyone, and dignity for millions—stands in direct opposition to the means defended in its name. Salinas’s confidence that the fighters knew how to build such a world is countered by the postwar question of what their victory actually produced, by the memory of the dead, and by the persistence of violence after the fighting should have ended. Il mondo migliore is at once their sincere political hope and the story they use to survive, justify, or evade what they have done.