“Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won’t stop. We’re in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen.”

“And who gains by it, in the end?”

“It’s too soon to say. We have to see who can best exploit the falsifications, their own and those of the others: whether it’s the police or our organization.”

If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino