The Naked Truth

Old wartime buddies in the Italian underground, Subbiano's two top Communists made a fine team; tough Mayor Sabatino Cerofolino had the brawn and wily Party Secretary Italo Nofri had the brain. But Italo Nofri also had a wife Bruna, whom he called "the prettiest girl in all Subbiano." Despite the fact that her husband and his friend had succeeded in converting a majority of her fellow villagers in the little Apennine town to Communism, Bruna remained an ardent Roman Catholic. She even insisted that their son be sent to study in a Catholic school, and despite his own deep convictions. Italo was proud of the honors the boy won at school.

Italo Nofri had once planned to be a priest himself, and when he turned to Communism, it was because he believed implicitly that it "would bring peace and social justice to our country. To me," said Italo Nofri, "Stalin was like God." Other Communists, he was soon to find, felt differently. Hearing the official assault on the Red deity after his death, Nofri was at first indignant, then puzzled, then racked with worry. At last he decided to leave the party.

Man with a Camera. Nofri's comrades, including Mayor Cerofolino, stormed and threatened, but true to his decision, Nofri joined the Christian Democrats and began to campaign actively against "Marxist corruption and confusion." On Mayor Ce-rofolino's motion, the party denounced Nofri as an "outcast and traitor." Cerofolino himself was put on the spot by his party superiors for "failure to maintain rank-and-file discipline."

One day soon afterward, Bruna Nofri was surprised by a sudden visit from Mayor Cerofolino, who came panting into her home to tell her that her son had been injured in an automobile accident. At the mayor's promise to take her to the injured boy, Bruna frantically hurried out with him. But instead of finding her son in the lonely cottage to which Cerofolino took her, she was set upon by the brawny Communist, stripped of her clothes and photographed naked. "Get that husband of yours back into the party," warned Cerofolino, "or everybody in town will see these pictures."

Woman with a Letter. In the weeks that followed, the tormented Bruna told no one of her experience. Mayor Cerofolino was re-elected to office, but by a much smaller majority, and Nofri's anti-Communist campaigning grew stronger than ever as he spread the news around of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's reign of terror. Last month Bruna got a letter warning her for the last time to put a stop to her husband's anti-Communist activity. Desperate, she showed Italo the letter. Italo went straight to the public prosecutor.

Last week, in the 14th century courtroom of nearby Arezzo, Subbiano's Mayor Cerofolino was tried behind closed doors, found guilty of blackmail, coercion and moral turpitude, and sentenced to two years at hard labor and the loss of his civil rights for 20 years. "None of this," growled ex-Mayor Cerofolino, "would have happened if Nofri had stayed in the party." That night the Communist Party at Subbiano, which had prepared a riotous welcome home for Mayor Cerofolino, went on a rampage around town instead, and stormed the house of the Nofri family. A special squad of carabinieri has been guarding the house ever since. "It's not easy," said ex-Communist Italo Nofri, "but it shows what Communists are really like."

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