GIANNI RIOTTA

The Lights of Alborada

Translated from the Italian by SHAUN WHITESIDE

To Anita the great dolphin To Michele the great helmsman

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Also by Gianni Riotta

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

When I was a child on the Island, feast days were announced by the Alborada. At the first light of ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, as our teachers taught us to call it, Orazio the sexton lit rockets full of black gunpowder. Their fuses were short and hemp-grey. The explosions rang out dry and crisp, without heat or smoke. One after another, like the beads of the rosary that the old women fingered during Vespers, in the cold of the church of San Noè.

The village lived by the bloody trade of fishing and the strenuous business of processing tuna, the silvery herds of the blue Mediterranean Sea, and it was too small – just a few houses lined up along the cliffs – not to be roused all at once by the sound of Alborada. The first explosion made us all jump, snug beneath the salt-stained quilts that our grandmothers had spent their evenings embroidering. The other reports slipped easily into our ears, but none of them rumbled in the same way. There was no fishing on a feast day, no nets to untangle or harpoons to hone to razor-sharpness, to strike the blue skin and the red flesh of the tuna. The women didn't have the bother of sheets to wash and wring in the irrigation ditch, or children to send to school, hoping that the holes in their shoes wouldn't get too big before the annual mattanza, the tuna slaughter, before the vital force of the tuna paid for the next year of our lives.

When the explosions brought the pyrotechnic volley to an end, Orazio began to ring the bells, short strokes through the morning air, which was clear but still grey. When the last bell fell silent the villagers would roll over in bed, the men relax and the woman begin to think about lighting the stove for a cup of coffee, when there was coffee, and when there wasn't, then a cup of substitute coffee made from barley or bitter chicory. Between Alborada and the first awakenings there lay a contented zone of Purgatory, of waiting. The feast day had arrived, and promised, in the poet's words, repose and fleeting joys suspended in a no-man's-land, a day free of the prison of duties, chores, labour. The village waited for the future, not yet awake but coddled and rebuked, like sleepy children by their mothers: ‘Wake up. I'll be back in five minutes with your caffé latte.’

I was the only one who stopped sleeping when the Alborada sounded. As the first report rang out I slipped from my quilt and wrapped myself in a yellow oilskin against the dew. I ran. I ran along the deserted cobbled alleyways, my heart pounding and swelling against my breastbone and my skinny ribs. I flew over nets the colour of raw raffia, missed by a few inches the harpoons and the rough metal anchors. I jumped from bollard to bollard, balancing over the icy waters of the harbour, I ran my hand along the booming black gate of the school, slipping over the cobbles outside the big tuna-processing plant, the building of yellow volcanic stone that held our lives and our luck. I headed for San Noè, and behind me, on Hangman's Hill, where the gallows had stood in the days of the Saracen Turks, goats browsed the salt-crunching grass. My feet scraped the coarse turf, I grazed my knees on the paving-slabs of the market and turned to run up the hill, gliding like a happy gull over the church square of San Noè.

My challenge was a simple one: to cross the village, leaving our house at the first blast, and kneel beneath the paternal figure of San Noè – St Noah – before Orazio's final fuse brought the Alborada to a close. Once there, I would pray to the patron saint of the Ark, the guardian for forty days and forty nights of our species and of the myriad varieties of plants and animals, to intercede for me too, and for my family and for the village. What blessing I was asking for, I couldn't say. Neither did I really understand that word ‘intercede’, but it seemed to me that my mad, childish running, to the detonations of the Alborada, were a sacred and essential rite to be repeated every year.

Orazio came down muttering like a lonely old man, and noticed me in the square. ‘This time too? You're completely mad. Have you prayed? Fine. Now go back to bed.’

I never paid him any heed. Orazio turned his bent shoulders towards me and went back into the church to prepare the altar. I waited for my heart to settle in my chest, and walked gently towards the pier. There, a rare school of flying fish, frantic dragonflies, beat the waves with the same energy that I felt had been freed in my soul. I had fulfilled my vow, delivered my request for some favour as yet unknown.

My father was no longer at home, he had disappeared out on the Indian Ocean, swallowed up by the waves along with a cargo of Arab carpets. My mother lived on his pension, and although we were poor, we weren't starving. Papa had left me the books that had belonged to my grandfather, a lieutenant of Garibaldi's in the fight for the liberation of Italy. Naval almanacs, atlases, chronicles of the military actions of Garibaldi's Redshirts in Europe and America. I read and read. Only during those hours, only while waiting on the pier, after the Alborada and before the village roused itself, did I know what my life would be like. My schooldays and my adolescence. A girl with a blue pullover and hair down to her shoulders, strolling on the beach to the sound of a guitar from a balcony, and the sad songs that our men had learned in Spain. Love, happiness, tenderness.

Can a child imagine life through an adult's eyes? We think it's possible, don't we? We relegate not only today's children, but ourselves as children, to a perennial refuge of childhood, as though toys and illusions were the only things that children knew. Whereas that isn't the case, or at least not for those of us who grew up on the Island. I knew very well, as I ran off through the echoing reports of the rockets and the steely strokes of the bells, what I wanted from my life. I wasn't only concerned with glory, with travel, the constant and amazing tasks that I would perform on tropical waters, taking vengeance for my father's shipwreck. The adventures I took for granted, the sure reward for those heroes who stood in brilliant colours on the covers of boys' story books. The disdainful Cesare kidnapped by pirates, General Desaix in the last charge at Marengo, my grandfather making coffee for Garibaldi, indolently serving him under Bourbon fire. ‘General, was this morning's blend to your liking?’ ‘Manes, if you don't watch out for those muskets, you won't be making any coffee for me at all tomorrow morning.’

Manes is my surname, Giovannino is my first name, but everyone's always called me Nino, Nino Manes, a man who – I was sure of it as I watched the crashing festive waves – was going to make his mark on history. And I craved love, too. My childish idea of erotic passion didn't go beyond the smutty remarks of the old men who picked up cigarette stubs from the pavement, or furtive glances darted at an innocent little bride, or the moist kisses of some platinum-blonde Hollywood diva. Those feelings satisfied my heart and my imagination. I would be able to paint like my father, whose oil-painted ocean dawn hung gleaming over my bed. With a steady hand I would outline the face of my lover to be. There were her round lips, her soft, sweet eyes, a hint of cheekbone, her cheerful smile and her forehead, covered with the fringe that was customary then among girls of marriageable age. I always imagined her in a blue sweater, on the seashore at night, and in my ears I heard a song that was fashionable at the time: ‘Barefoot on the beach with you …’ My heart beat like a sparrow pecking grain; love and the future were that sky-coloured jumper and that girl who was alive only for me. But how alive she was!

I returned home damp and confused, as though I had spent my first, premature night of marriage. Mama gave me an egg beaten with sugar and the Marsala my father had left behind. SOM, said the Indian-ink label: Superior Old Marsala. My mother had resigned herself, poor woman, to these excursions of mine, and I think she would have been amazed if I had missed a single one.

My last Alborada outing coincided with my sixteenth birthday. It was easy for me at that age to scamper from the meadow to the hill of San Noè, since my legs were long, and I had strong feet that could grip the cobbles and the grass. But my palpitations at the idea that I might not make it, the anxiety of slipping beneath Orazio's bells before the final stroke, sent me off at a frantic gallop. It was no longer a children's game. It was a flight from the present, from adulthood.

For my Alborada as a sixteen-year-old, in 1937, I had donned long trousers. And I ran like mad, striding fiercely, not really looking where I was going. For the last time, I slipped into the church square, a winner, and pumped my clenched fists triumphantly in the air. I turned a half-pirouette, looking around for Orazio so that I could win his approval – ‘I've done it, Orazio!’ – and instead what I saw was the most beautiful girl I had ever set eyes upon. The nimble sway with which she walked set the sleeve of a blue pullover, slung lazily over her shoulders, swinging back and forth with the elegant severity of a metronome. Bareheaded, she gazed out to sea, and the breeze mingled curls and wool. My startled agitation must have produced a crunch of gravel, and she turned around to stare at me with mocking curiosity.

‘Are you always running? You're in a terrible hurry at this time of the morning. What's your name?’

‘Nino. And you?’

‘Zita.’

And I never ran again.

2

During the fiercest war of the twentieth century twelve million soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. Former warriors, proud of their armies and their units, often convinced of the cause for which they had been recruited, spent their days behind barbed wire, vying with their fellow soldiers for a slice of bread in the mud or, when conditions were more humane, waiting restlessly for the next day, querulous and impotent. Twelve million human beings, a nation, scattered from the frozen steppes of Europe to Australia, where six hundred Japanese kamikaze fighters threw themselves against the machine-gun nests of the camp guards at Cowra, choosing bullets over the shame of detention. In Africa, the Italian lieutenant Carlo de Bellegarde escaped from a British camp in Kenya and, on foot and on a bicycle, covered over three thousand kilometres of jungle and savannah to reach Mozambique in two months. Prey to snakes by night and lions by day, he defended himself with a torch, waving it around to chase the beasts away. Two askaris, Ambekilili and Wakuru, captured him on the last bridge before freedom: ‘Bwana mkubwa, Bahati mbaya – Noble lord, a terrible misfortune!’ they said sadly.

In 1915 the men of my village suspended the tuna hunt, and they went to war. The ones who survived the eleven Isonzo Offensives returned and took up their nets again. We, their sons, set off for sun-scorched Africa, the merciless Balkans, eternal Russia. When the fate of the war turned for our lovely homeland, we were imprisoned in Nazi camps, or in Siberia, or across the sea. When we came home, our children listened to us complaining about vanishing shoals of bluefish, the declining tuna population, no more tuna hearts hanging to dry in the sun, no gleaming fillets in oil. We never talked about what had happened to us.

Ettore, my father's cousin, had served on a rickety banana boat that crossed the Red Sea. Cut off beyond the Suez Canal by the declaration of war, he and his crew crossed two oceans, the Indian and the Pacific, to be welcomed in triumph by the girls of Tokyo and ended up in a concentration camp when Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943. Ettore saw the flash of Hiroshima on the horizon, survived and came home with two pearl necklaces which he gave to his daughters. But he didn't say a word about his adventures.

Uncle Massimo was captured by the 6th Australian Division in Bardia, in Africa. They stole his Vetta watch, but he didn't hate them for it. ‘It's war, no point harbouring a grudge.’ He ended up in Yol, in India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They dragged him across three continents but they didn't break him. On the yellow sand of the camp he drew up a plan of escape to Manchuria, climbing mountains eight thousand metres high and then marching hundreds of kilometres to the Japanese bases in China. No one wanted to follow him (are you surprised?) and he set off on his own. When captured he was up to his neck in snow. The British colonel warmed him up with a bowl of soup, and then gave him permission, on his word of honour, to move around freely inside the camp as long as he never again tried to escape. He too kept mum about his adventures.

No one wants to listen to prison stories, so we just kept quiet. We behaved patiently, we waited like stoics, refusing to let ourselves be humiliated. And yet we were defeated. Benito Mussolini's wicked project was beaten back, the banners broken, strips of them sold as souvenirs. The most respectable kind of captivity, the bravest of lives as a prisoner, is still the mark of a battle lost. It's hard for a child to look into his father's eyes and know that this man was once young and handsome and defeated, a hostage of people who stole his chronometer, his rifle, his mother's letters, his identity, his victory and his future. We, the fathers, redeemed the honour of battle with our courageous conduct in the camps: but what about the sons? Who are the sons of the retreat, a generation without flags, avid consumers at the cinema of the exploits of the victorious Allied warriors at El Alamein, the Don, Sicily?

They listen to the stories and, puzzled and attentive, miss the moral. There's only one adventure they want to hear. Of all the escapes, real or imagined, dreamed up or frustrated by our jailers, one alone gives heart to the children born after the peace. They tell it to each other, changing or adding details and secrets every time they do so. Its protagonist is a maths student who became a fisherman. Perhaps, in this century, others will be delighted by the tale of his escape, which began in April 1944, at a bus stop in Hereford, Texas, in the great and powerful United States of America.

Four hundred thousand Germans and 50,000 Italians were imprisoned in that new continent. Only 2,200 of the Germans, veterans of Field-Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps, patient, silent and organised, tried to get away, all of them recaptured. Thirty-five of them died, killed while attempting to escape. The Italians too, apparently more serene, endlessly singing a single song, ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me …’ escaped as quickly as they could, as permitted by the Geneva Convention. I got hold of the figures – the American War Department estimates that 604 Italians broke out. Rather more than the Germans, on average. Why? Where were they planning to go, setting off on foot from Texas, from the Mississippi, even from Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, digging tunnels, dressing up as priests, as labourers, eluding the patrols by hiding in haystacks? To reach a ship and be transported, clandestinely, to Europe, to Spain or Portugal, neutral countries? Or did they just want to escape the endless routine, dinner, roll call, reading, football, dinner and lights out? Where was a prisoner to go, on foot, without a word of English? The dream was the free ports, New York and Philadelphia, the only ones that allowed ships from non-allied countries to berth. The Americans had spread the rumour that Savannah, in Georgia, was open to foreign vessels as well, and thus managed to intercept the refugees who headed south.

I, Giovannino Manes, am the hero of the story that the boys listened to. I escaped on April the 17th 1944, from Camp 1 in Hereford, for hardline Italian prisoners. We had decided not to collaborate with the Allies even after the armistice of September the 8th and the declaration of war on Germany. We were strange people, fascists, most of us, but communists too, and socialists and libertarians who refused to work the fields so as ‘not to help the capitalist economy’. We were confused, simple and pig-headed.

The sun was high over Texas, and the long road was dusty between the maize fields. I had fifteen dollars in my pocket, which I had got hold of by selling a guard some SS ‘medals’ carved from a tin of tomatoes. I knew a bit of English. The compulsory insignia, POW, prisoner of war, had been traced on my trousers in toothpaste rather than the regulation white ink, and clumsily erased, so I could not be identified by that. The plan was a simple one: get to New York, stow away on a ship and then land in Portugal and be repatriated by June the 24th. Not a day later. In my pocket I had, folded in its envelope, Zita's letter:

My dear Nino, Of all the things I've written to you over the years when you have been far away, and of all the things I would like to write to you, nothing grieves me more than the words I am about to write to you now. On June the 24th I am going to marry Professor Leonardo Barbaroux. He wanted to write to you himself, but I told him no, I must tell Nino.

We grew up in his house, Nino, I know. We spent the most beautiful hours studying mathematics and logic with him, when all of life seemed as simple as a theorem. And yet you joined up, and you know what Barbaroux thinks of war. We stayed on the Island, almost alone. You boys were away, and the women were at their wits' end. We went on studying, day and night, always on our own, until what happened happened, and I don't want to torment you. We're going to get married. I know it will hurt you, and I carry your pain within me. But war forces us into swift decisions, my darling Nino, we none of us know how long we will live, and where and how. Resign yourself to it. It's clear that it wasn't to be, after our magical encounter at the Alborada. Don't close yourself away. Leonardo says he'll write to you. Please don't suffer too much. Nino, my love, whom I have loved so very much.

Zita

When I received it, I put the letter in the pocket of my uniform, opened the wooden door of the barracks, headed for the latrine and threw up.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ asked Captain Righi, who had lost an eye in Bir el Gobi and had a bat-like sense of hearing.

I didn't feel ill. I felt empty, like a pot scoured by my mother after Sunday lunch, or Nana's marrows, which the children scraped clean of their pulp and floated down the Scutari stream. My long imprisonment – I had fallen into the hands of the Australians in January 1941, Lieutenant Beretta and I had been the last to surrender – had made me indifferent to emotions. Nothing happens directly to prisoners of war; every event, whether it aggravates or alleviates the punishment, is caused by someone else – the camp commandant suspending your mail, the mess sergeant giving you a particularly tasty dish. A prisoner has no power. Over anybody. The world happens to him. He has control only over his own thoughts, but it's a delicate, ephemeral art, a piece of hand-blown Murano glass. Many people lost it and remained mere shadows, playing football and eating, in a state of suspension for years.

Standing on that step, I understood that I had to control my thoughts or become a victim like Ferrucci, a friend from the battlefields, who had turned in on himself, grown melancholy, stopped responding to anything and spent the seasons staring at the tumbleweed blown into the desert by the Texan wind. He smoked and looked at the prairie, unable to feel pain or to decipher grief. After reading the letter, I could have run yelling towards the watchtower where the guards were posted, the ‘camans’ as we called them because they were constantly telling us to ‘Come on, come on.’ One idiot rookie would probably take fright and fire at my back, intending to kill me. That was what had happened to poor Lieutenant Giardina, in Africa, left by the French to die in pain with a bullet in his belly for taking a step too close to the wire. Some of the camans were trigger happy.

What choice did I have? Zita, my beloved, my innocent, my snow-white virgin, my betrothed, sweet blood of my heart, the lips I had kissed, the breasts I had stroked in the shade of the faraglioni, would be for ever the wedded wife of Barbaroux. He, Barbaroux, would possess her, love her, conquer her. It was for him, for Barbaroux, that she would give birth and smile, it was to him that she would read those mathematical studies, put his books in order and turn out the light, before slipping beneath the sheets, with him, with Leonardo Barbaroux.

We were the professor's favourite pupils. He was a mathematician and an anti-fascist, a friend of the genius David Hilbert who had withdrawn into voluntary exile, leaving his post so as not to be forced to swear loyalty to the Duce, Benito Mussolini. From a wealthy family – his father's company made the most precise telescopes of the day – Barbaroux had taken us to his bosom, his two shy village children, and sent us to university. Now I, who loved mathematics because it was free of the snares and paradoxes of the type that I had just spent a year avoiding – mines, tanks, machine guns, thirst and scorpions, and every day in the camp in Hereford, stupefying myself with masturbation, rotting my mind by gluing little models together, arguing over nothing – I was finally up to my neck in a contradiction that neither logic nor war had prepared me for. Barbaroux, who could have been Zita's father, was instead to be her husband. And she would be a rich and revered lady, and how people would smirk at me in the club! But thinking of their smiles didn't hurt me, I felt numb, anaesthetised. The fear I had felt in battle, the raging charges in the desert, the solitary humiliation of prison, had all vanished. Pain had turned me into a ghost, I felt as though I could pass through the barbed wire and fly home on the wind, unseen by anyone, not by poor Ferrucci with his dead eyes and his dead cigarettes, nor the camans in the Hereford watchtower. And my flight was the flight of a ghost, protected by a kindly god. I had to be in Italy by June the 24th, to prevent the marriage of Zita and Barbaroux. That was all.

And that was why I was leaning against the pole of the Hereford bus stop, in the dust and the wind, on that April afternoon in 1944. And when I saw the young American lieutenant coming towards me with an ironic smile on his lips, I thought, He's going to catch me now and put me back inside, but I'll escape again tomorrow.

3

The lieutenant leaned against the bus stop and, still smiling, rolled himself a thin, firm cigarette, tufts of blond Virginia tobacco sticking out at either end. He rolled a second one and held it out to me. I had never smoked in my life, always bartering my tobacco rations for stamps for my letters to Zita, but to say, ‘No, thank you’ might have scuppered my plan before it had even got under way. I nodded and allowed the man to light the cigarette in my mouth, although I didn't inhale.

The bus appeared around the bend of the aqueduct, followed by a cloud of dust and a dog that barked merrily in the hot air, with the resounding vigour of prairie strays. The driver braked, raising a cloud of dust from the beaten earth, and indolently opened the door. First aboard was a sprightly old woman, and out of soldierly habit I stepped aside for the lieutenant, who climbed the two steps and showed his papers.

‘What about him?’ asked the conductor, pointing to me. He looked me up and down unsympathetically. ‘Are you a GI?’

The lieutenant didn't answer yes or no, but just murmured, ‘Mmm,’ and dropped a few coins into a zinc basin. Then he stepped aside so that I could reach the free seats.

I tried to work out where he was going to sit, so that I could find a seat as far away from him as possible. Why had he paid for my ticket? Out of kindness? Never before had I encountered kindness on the part of an officer towards a raw recruit he didn't even know. Had he mistaken me for one of his men? In that case I should have had my papers with me as well. No point standing there brooding about it, better to pretend to sleep, wait till we reached the outskirts of a town, and then feign car-sickness and run off through the fields to jump an eastbound train.

During my transfer to Hereford, beneath the awning of a little station in Arkansas, I had met a hobo, the kind that travelled the freight trains. He'd told me how easy it was to jump aboard the slow convoy of wagons. He was originally from Friuli, his father had moved to the States from Udine and he spoke a mixture of Italian, German and English. ‘If tu jump ok, tu land ok. No be frightened, Italiano, if no kaputt, ok? If cop come, you know cop? If sheriff come, and hit you with electric torch, tu run for life.’

I'd stolen an old railway timetable from the American military canteen, its cover scorched by the flames from the kitchen – I had explained its disappearance by saying it had been burned to ashes – and had learned it off by heart from cover to cover, times, dates, places, Southern Thunder, Northern Arrow, Atlantic Sky Hawk, all the trains over there have wonderful, mythological Indian names.

I stretched out on the hard bus seat, resisted the temptation to watch the flat panorama passing by, the great expanses that had lain unseen beyond the camp fence, and closed my eyes. The less attention I attracted the better.

This was how I had escaped: I hid in the potato silos and didn't answer when the roll was called. The camans hunted for me all over the camp, then got bored and eased off. On the fifth day I joined a unit of navvies. Captain Righi winked as he pretended to count me, and I left the barbed wire behind. Exhaustion, emotion and my melancholy over Zita had now lulled me into a calm feeling of numbness: I can't imagine any prisoner of war has ever escaped with such absolute serenity, insensitive to fear.

In my sleep I heard the notes of the song ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me’ – Rosamunda, you are my life, there's joy in your kisses, the more I see you the more I love you, Rosamunda my darling – perhaps because that harmless little dance tune had become the anthem of the Italian prisoners. Yes, the fascists still sang ‘Youth, youth, in life and life's harshness …’ and, after September the 8th you might have heard ‘Brothers of Italy, heed Italy's call …’ and the wonderful chorus of ‘Avanti o popolo’, but ‘Rosamunda’ was the song of all the Italian prisoners, POWs as we had to write on our trousers and rucksacks, in big, clear letters. POW: and we had christened ourselves ‘povieri’, the poor POWs. I had rubbed out the three letters on my uniform, and was fleeing towards Zita, our meeting was sure to be stormy, violent, and at the time I had no doubt, my twenty-year-old beauty, but that it would bring me back to her, with love as always.

‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me’: who was whistling the tune on the bus? I woke up gently, not stirring. I half opened my eyes, the cheerful whistle came from close by, very close. ‘Tu sei la vita per me.’ I looked; the lieutenant was sitting there, still whistling and smiling. He had clearly worked out who I was, but I decided not to give him the satisfaction of catching me straight away. I would feign stupidity, to the last moment, even if it meant mooing like a mute. To get away again, at the first opportunity.

Bored of waiting, the lieutenant tapped me on the arm and whispered in Italian, ‘Hey, fella, wake up.’

I gave a start like a soldier told off by a superior, and saluted accordingly: ‘Don't understand, sir.’ The old trick of my language exams, if you speak in a low voice it dulls the sound of mispronunciation.

‘So where have you escaped from?’ he asked in Italian.

Who was he? His Italian was perfect, just like the English he had used when speaking to the driver. Even a hint of Tuscan, and Texan, just to make everything perfect.

‘Sir? I don't understand, sir.’

‘You got out of Hereford?’ he asked again in Italian. ‘Which camp? Hardline fascists, Camp 1?’

He even knew our internal divisions. I tried to say, ‘Respectfully, sir, I don't understand,’ but I always had problems pronouncing the word ‘fully’, and I heard the simplest words coming out of my mouth: ‘With all due respect, sir, I don't understand French.’

‘French, eh?’ he smiled. ‘You're a sly one. Fine, as you wish, if you don't understand, you don't understand. But you'll understand sooner or later.’

He let his cap fall over his nose, rested his shoes against the back of the chair and dozed off. The journey continued for two hours, the strangest two hours of my strange life. Who was I? A fugitive in the clutches of a meddling officer? Was I lost before I'd even begun? How was I going to get myself out of this? I knew I had to avoid any kind of violence that would mean being punished or, the greatest terror of all, being sent off to labour camp in Hawaii, with no way of contacting Zita.

The lieutenant was snoring, lost to the world, and we were already driving past the first houses of Amarillo when the old woman nodded to the driver.

‘Would you stop for a moment? I don't feel well and there's a lemonade stand over there.’

The brakes whistled, the lieutenant showed no sign of waking up and, unable to believe my luck, I leapt over his knees without touching him, nodded goodbye to the driver and walked past the kiosk, which was decorated with beautifully scented lemons. One of them had fallen into a ditch and I picked it up, like a talisman. The rind was fat and rough, ripe and yellow. I scratched the skin and the smell of my secondary school wafted out, sunny afternoons, a hand stuck through the fence to steal a lemon, the amazing fruit, a bit of sunlight in your fist, the juice sharp on your tongue after scoring a goal on the red clay pitch.

The lemons were stolen from Paulus, a Russian who had escaped from St Petersburg in 1917 – a baron too far on the left for Vladimir Ilyich – and who ended up cultivating the gardens of south Italy. The trees, the smell of Zita, Marseilles soap, Russia and the tuna fishing nets, the world seemed wonderful to me, full of exotic cities. As though wearing the Seven League Boots of the fairy tale, I would fearlessly travel the planet. I saw myself living in Amazonia, then in Petrograd and Hong Kong, and in Pittsburgh where they made the steel for the tuna harpoons.

It was as if, in Hereford Camp 1 (yes, the lieutenant was right, I was in number 1, with Tuimati, the tall, thin cavalry officer, with Berto, always writing on his wooden board, with Burri who drew pictures on empty sugar bags, and with Troisi, silent and elegant) I had left the prisoner Giovannino Manes, poviere, POW, prisoner number 8117125, 81 meaning captured in North Africa, 1 Italian and 7125 my arrival code. Now, once again, I was Nino Manes, and I could travel my life in those Seven League Boots, with Zita by my side. As if our life was not in fact determined by the belligerence of the Italian fascist regime, the tactical errors of General Graziani in Egypt, or the forces of production of President Roosevelt's United States. It was the caman Nick Carraway who had explained it to me: ‘Our black workers, the ones the Führer wants to exterminate, can build a liberty ship in a single day. The U-boat captains show great courage in trying to sink them. But do you know who defeats their daring? The black workers who, for a few cents, can get a ship seaworthy in twenty-four hours.’

I wondered what Carraway was doing now. He certainly wouldn't have expected me to escape. He was sure he had saved me for democracy, his democracy, a ship a day to defeat the Führer, assembled by black workers. In Texas those same workers didn't enjoy the right to vote for the upper-class president, although they still had great things to say about him. Carraway wouldn't have been pleased by my escape; basically he agreed with the theory of Colonel Rogers, the head of the camp: ‘Italians, bastards, greaseballs, wops, they sing and eat spaghetti with brilliantine sauce on it, they're slaves to the Krauts. They don't even know how to work. Save them for freedom? It would take ten generations.’ But I didn't care about Carraway or Rogers, I was going into Amarillo. I would have a bowl of soup at the coffee shop without speaking to anyone. I'd brought the Bible with me, a gift from the Quakers. I was learning English, and in the south people always respect the silence of a soldier reading the gospel, with its black cover and its pages edged with fiery red.

I sat down at a corner table, close to the door, and said, ‘Soup, please.’ I only needed a few words; on my way out I'd leave a big tip to distract the old waitress's attention from my accent. The soup was good, thicker than the soup in the camp, with bright carrots and barley floating in it, among big patches of sweet grease. Aromatic pepper, the bold flavour of Coca-Cola. The bread wasn't so good, dry, crumbly, nothing like our pure white loaves back home. And yet those crisp croutons were exquisite to me. It was as though I had worked to savour them, forging SS insignia in return for contraband dollars to pay the bill, risking the machine gun fire of the camans.

I wiped my face with my napkin, a piece of worn grey cloth, and started to read the Bible. The spirit of God moved on the face of the waters, those waters I was sure I would cross, as Moses passed through the Red Sea. After endless periods of exhaustion and cunning and luck, to be able to sail on the ocean of war to Zita.

The waitress had returned from the yard at the back, carrying a big bunch of flowers. There were bright petunias and daisies, early poppies with red petals like butterfly wings. One by one the woman took them and arranged them in a vase filled with fresh water. She was never content. Now she moved the stem of a rose, now she adjusted the green grass that swathed it. She was in pursuit of a certain effect, working with the shadows that the brilliant sun cast on the white wall. When the prospect seemed a happy one, she let the stems settle. Otherwise she barely brushed them as though caressing them, with hands that were scarlet from washing up too many dishes. I was distracted, I didn't like it, and for the first time since escaping the surveillance of the Hereford camans I was afraid. It was as though my fairy-tale journey, my Seven League footsteps to the sea, and the Bible, and those epic lines ‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the surface of the deep’ were not enough to protect me against being captured, nunc et semper, now and for ever. Only by being unaware and kind, like the coffee shop lady with her flowers, concentrating solely on my task, on both my lemon from long ago and the one that gleamed yellow on the dark table, only then would I truly succeed in escaping across two continents.

I'd finished the soup and the bread, I wanted a coffee and even, perhaps, to risk a bit of conversation in exchange for directions to the nearest railway station. There was no need to ask. The woman finally gave a nod of blessing to her geometrical bouquet, set the cup on the table and slipped my tip into her apron pocket.

‘I expect you're looking for the station, son. It's past the bridge, that sloping path takes you straight there. The Eastern Daylight Express'll be going through in half an hour. You got plenty of time.’

I smiled and murmured, ‘Thanks’ as though my tongue was burnt by the hot coffee, and got to my feet. On a shelf behind the bourbon bottles there was a black-framed photograph: ‘Tim McMurdo, Private First Class, Anzio 1944.’ The flowers were for that young soldier.

Outside the sun was dazzling. I walked along the dusty white path, ‘the voice of God moved upon the face of the waters’, and on that slow, blue river. The stones crackled under the soles of my new shoes, bartered with the storeroom guy – ‘Bums always wear good shoes,’ the hobo had advised me. I wouldn't stop at the station, but would carry on to the hill where the river formed a loop and the two-lane highway climbed to the east. The train would slow down and I would hop aboard a freight car. ‘Tu jump ok, tu land ok,’ putting my hope in the Spirit of the Waters.

I wondered how the lieutenant had felt when he woke up to find I had gone? Was he drunk? No, it was too early in the day for that, and there had been no booze on his breath. I was about to leave the wooden barracks of the station behind me when, at that very moment, just as brazen and clear as before, the song began again: ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me, nei tuoi baci c'è tanta felicità.’ The Spirit of the Waters seemed to mock me and the Atlantic coast suddenly seemed a long way away. And yet my heart didn't leap. I set my bag down and turned around: soon I would have a clearer idea of the intentions of the lieutenant who whistled ‘Rosamunda’, and discover why he was trying to keep me from escaping.

4

A big blue river ran along the valley floor, alongside the plateau, a vast river unlike anything I had ever seen at home. Not even the Stagnone lagoon, with its flashing shoals of silver ope fish and darting rainbow-coloured violette, was as vast and deep as that river. At the Stagnone, the Phoenicians had built a road across the sea, which time had sung beneath the mud: in ancient times the merchants had crossed the waves in high-wheeled carts as far as Mozia, an island of temples and shops, a trading centre, as famous then as Manhattan is now. And I, who had left the Island, was to return to the real Manhattan, to try and reach Zita in time. The river had distracted me, everything on this flight was a distraction, everything distanced me from fear and confusion. The lieutenant was standing in front of me, awaiting my reply to an unspoken question. He smiled as though there were something comical in my expression, and at the same time something reassuring and familiar, like someone spotting a friendly face from a long time ago among the harried travellers in a railway station.

I could have lied, or I could have run away, back down the slope. He was the same size as me, but I didn't even think of attacking him. Not because I was frightened, quite the contrary, his features were mild and aristocratic, fair hair, an elegant profile, and I felt I would have had the advantage if it had come to a fight. I was a street boy, and I'd seen vicious stone-throwing battles between rival gangs, when the whole sky is dotted with rocks and one of them would be enough to split your head open. I could have pretended to lower my head and broken his snobbish nose with a butt of my brow, his septum opening up in a discharge of blood and surprise, an easy blow to deliver, a bit like landing a rain-soaked leather ball in the net from a corner kick, the laces imprinting themselves on his forehead. In my mind I could hear my mate Volpe: ‘A surprise punch can deck an elephant, always get your attack in first.’

I was restrained by the caution of the fugitive: attacking a uniformed American officer could land me in front of a firing squad. Who would really come here in search of a young soldier who had escaped from a prison camp? They would have expected me to head south, towards Mexico, crossing the border under cover of a storm. Or else my thirst would lead me into a cactus-filled ravine, and my bones would bleach among the skulls of cattle. If I injured an officer, on the other hand, the FBI and the Military Police would hunt me down from county to county, and when they got their hands on me they'd lock me up in one of those camps there's no escaping from, the ones they were always telling tales about in Hereford. They're on the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska, log barracks surrounded by bears, three oceans away from home.

No risks. The lieutenant screened his green eyes with the nervous hand of a cavalryman, and stared at me curiously, without rancour. ‘Bella giornata – Beautiful day,’ he said in Italian. ‘The sunshine's nice. The train's about to arrive from behind the mountain. Isn't it time we introduced ourselves?’

The engine whistled, already past the ravines: time to surrender. We were two men on our own, in uniform, by a river that looped before disappearing from view, high on the banks. The lieutenant appeared to be unarmed, we were equals, the same age, and out of my mouth, unbidden, came the first words I had uttered as a free man since the Australian soldier had told me to get out of my bunker, waving the barrel of his Sten gun: ‘Out of the bloody pillbox, wop.’

‘I'm Nino Manes, an Italian logician. I'm going home. Our countries aren't at war any more. We're fighting Hitler together. We ex-prisoners are waiting to be released. I've got to go early, for personal reasons.’

‘You're going to Europe on your own?’

‘Yes, sir. I'm going back to Europe.’

‘On foot?’

‘No, sir. In half an hour the 12.30 Eastern Express will be passing this way. It stops in St Louis to pick up connections and tomorrow, at about six in the evening, it arrives in New York, Grand Central, 47th Street.’

‘So you think you're going to get to Manhattan by train, before sailing off for Europe, which is still at war, and sort out your affairs?’ His voice was ironic.

‘I understand that you find it amusing, sir, but that's exactly what I intend to do.’

I was speaking as a free man, as one equal to another. The lieutenant understood. ‘Okay. Then you ought to know that this train, whose times and destinations you know by heart, well done, is searched at every stop by patrols of Military Police. They don't miss a thing, they check the passengers' tickets and papers, paying particular attention to uniformed males of your age, even if the uniform is, how should I put it, as irregular as yours. Stopping a prisoner who's escaped from the camps is a rare treat as far as they're concerned: they'll get medals and promotions. When they get their hands on you, what are you going to say? “Gentlemen, the war's over, I'm going to Italy to sort out some unfinished business.” And they'll say, “Sure, my friend, we'll escort you, don't worry, can we get you a drink while we're at it?” Quit fooling. Follow me, or we'll miss your Orient Express or whatever the hell it's called.’

The lieutenant set off along the road, towards the station and the river, and I followed him. Prisoner? Travelling companion? I didn't know. For the whole of that autumn and winter I'd seen the desert wind form enormous balls of twigs and thorny brambles and drag them across the prairie, past the wire fence of Camp 1. Since June 1940 I had felt like them, blown about at random by the mistral and full of thorns, my life a barren prairie. What was changing now? Nothing but the abandonment of all desire, all wishful thinking and ambition. If I had managed to turn myself into an inanimate creature, an object that could move, one marked POW, then this was my miraculous metamorphosis, worthy of Ovid, into a tangle of twigs. The wind, warm as breath, was enough to blow me to Zita's feet, her fragrant lap, with all my thorns and all my questions. I wouldn't try to do anything, no act of daring, no strategy, I would be obvious, natural, I would allow nature to act upon me, driving me back to my home and my love. If they locked me in a cell, I would bang my head against the door until either the door or my skull split. If they forced me back behind what Carraway had taught me to call the accordion, the concertina, meaning the gleaming barbed wire, I would burst it apart with my chest, until something gave, whether it was my chest or the wire.

Now, half a century later, these reflections seem like the melancholy notions of a boy kept too long in a cage full of parrots. I wouldn't have thought that way if I'd been thinking realistically. If I'd accepted my situation with the wise fatalism of a grown man, I'd have gone mad, I'd have been broken, like so many of my comrades. Like Ferrucci, like Siviero, the radio ham who had managed, hiding under the blanket at night, to make a little radio out of Spam tins: each day he opened us up to the world, Stalingrad, the fall of Mussolini, the surrender of Italy. And after four years in the camp, they were still watching the stars at night and the tumbleweed by day, spent cigarettes in their mouths. ‘Good weather tomorrow, Ferrucci?’

‘What does it say on the radio?’

‘Only things about the war and Hollywood.’

‘Not the weather?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And what does it say?’

‘That spring's coming to an end.’

Neither Ferrucci nor Siviero replied to letters from home any more. I typed their letters for them, crammed with lies, and copied their signatures in pencil: for a few years those pious lies spared two pairs of old Italian parents from meeting their new son, the poviere.

If the wind rolled me in the wake of the lieutenant, I, like the tumbleweed, would be unable to resist. Rolling my way across the world, I would meet up with Zita once again, in time to stop a wedding which struck me – please forgive the impetuousness of a young man – as utterly obscene. Not that I hoped to persuade her to marry me. No one had ever seen Zita change her mind. I just wanted to interpose my body between Zita and reality, stop it, even for a moment, like the tiny grains of sand that stopped our gleaming Vetta chronometers in the desert. Tomorrow a craftsman will give them a good clean and the ticking of reality and the present will resume, but for a moment the sand exists and stops the measurement of time. I wanted to be like that sand. When I got depressed, spending a gloomy afternoon in silence beside Ferrucci, Sergeant Carraway would hold me out a piece of spearmint chewing gum and say, ‘Face facts: remember, Nino, you've got to face facts. That's the soldier's life. Face facts, Nino.’

I couldn't face facts any more, that was enough, thank you. I wanted to cut right through facts, and that was that. The lieutenant, unaware of my ruminations, went on ahead, leaving me to walk a few yards behind him as prisoners were regularly required to do, and whistling that poor song of ours, ‘Rosamunda’, of which he seemed so fond. Soon we were at the station, and from there on to the train. And as the prairie passed flatly in front of us, the Military Police patrol, in their spotless uniforms, appeared precisely on time. ‘Tickets? Documents? You, boy?’

That would have meant the end of my great escape, whatever my mystical intentions, if the lieutenant, holding out two gleaming identity cards to the Military Police, hadn't smiled: ‘Prisoner of war. Italian. I'm escorting him to Manhattan, New York, 47th Street, home of Allied Radio, Italian Service Unit. He's going to read bulletins for free Italy, and for the parts of the country that are still under the Krauts. General HQ's really keen on the idea. I'm hoping to get to Manhattan very soon. There'll be girls at the radio station, you know? Girls, chicks!’

To escape the lieutenant's tiresome lasciviousness, the two Military Police giants returned the documents with barely a glance, saluted him and gave me the look of contempt that the soldiers of the victorious army – people who have never known the dry mouth of fear during bombing raids – reserve for defeated warriors and prisoners to justify their impeccable uniform and the embarrassment of telling their girlfriends the story of a war spent punching railway tickets.

I looked out the window, and got my breath back. In the distance you could see the mountains through the mist, the fields dotted with cotton-pickers who, at the sound of the train whistle, raised their heads for a moment and immediately bent patiently back down to draw water from the channels of the majestic river. We passed by them, rattling over a bridge with a clatter of boards and bolts, the arteries of the country that was holding me back. I asked, ‘Which river is this, sir? The Mississippi?’

This time the lieutenant didn't smile, as he usually did. On the contrary. His face turned very grave. ‘The Mississippi? Ol' Man River? No, when we reach the Mississippi you'll recognise it all by yourself, have no doubt about that.’

5

The young waitress adjusted the belt of her white apron with small, sure, nervous movements and glanced around Restaurant 21 to check that none of the customers required her services. Captain Jim Cheever looked at the girl's hand with the serene greed of young men who have been forced to remain chaste for a long time. Unexpressed desire subsides, and the body is filled instead with a clear and formidable energy. ‘That's why Catholics demand celibacy of their priests,’ mused the Presbyterian Cheever. The mind is clear and clean, it moves with grace and warmth. The body, on the other hand, becomes aware of the erotic atmosphere that bathes it, as though your skin has become the vibrating antennae of a wandering dragonfly. Cheever was thinking about his new military mission, in that final – penultimate? – year of war. General Stan Matthews had summoned him, as a matter of ‘immediate urgency and discretion’, to Restaurant 21 in Manhattan, rather than, as protocol would have decreed, the Pentagon in Washington. Why such secrecy? And yet, as his mind reflected on the mission before him, his skin was aware that the waitress was a beautiful and desirable girl, a slender mulatto with chestnut eyes, happy to have a job, because the war kept the men at the front, giving her a paycheck, a weekly wage. Her hand ran back and forth across the embroidered linen, nervous of her new environment, sure of her feline beauty, and Cheever looked at her. He thought about the war, and his body was drawn to the girl, silent and distant. He tried to concentrate, worrying that the solitude and aridity of his mission in defence and on behalf of the United States of America might lead him into regretful sensuality. On those long afternoons in barracks, or at daybreak in tumbledown motels on the outskirts of town, he had learned to shoo away his erotic fantasies, irritating gadflies that they were. To stay prey to them was to unleash a wave of morbid longing, uncertainty about what to do, doubts about the future. And in wartime, Cheever couldn't afford to have doubts. ‘So,’ he thought, glancing at the mulatto girl who had suddenly moved, ‘the end of the war will let us return to doubt. Love, certainly, I'll go back to my old love, but doubt is more seductive to me than love. Being able to cultivate eccentric notions, without worrying that a mistake might cause the death of good, decent boys, or even the failure of the mission, and lead in a terrible chain of events to the total defeat of the army, the end of democracy. The luxury of uncertainty: that's what distinguishes peace from war.’

General Matthews came into the restaurant, stroking the revolving door with his gloved hands: such was the power that emanated from his well-trained torso that it appeared as if the magnetism of his body was moving the massive walnut door in a great surge of prestige and energy. He frowned, not noticing Cheever at first, and then recognised him, but his jaw didn't move: everything was as it should be, rendezvous accomplished, Cheever was there, plan obeyed, the strategic operations of the Allied Armed Forces operated according to pre-established protocols.

Matthews sat down and beckoned the girl over with a wave of his fingers, and Cheever was sorry that the general had sufficient authority to enter even his guileless reverie, summoning the docile mulatto girl whom he had courted in silence. He sat back down and concealed his disappointment even from himself, feeling ashamed, as boys will, of feelings that they will later recognise as the clearest they ever had in their lives, and saw after a moment's delay that a second officer followed in Matthews' wake. He was a major in the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the arrogant men of American espionage, and he said, ‘Good day, sir’ in a curious accent, neither French nor German, a low, guttural sound that Cheever had never heard before.

Matthews nodded and the stranger sat down. The general took two large sips from the mint julep he had ordered, holding it as though he were going to snap the glass full of chopped ice, and turned to Cheever. ‘What are the latest missions? Are you aware of the situation of prisoners of war detained in America?’

‘I was involved with the U-boat raids, sir, anti-sub missions, particularly after 1942. A specialist in interception, anti-sabotage and code-breaking. I don't know much about prisoners, sir.’

‘Have you ever met Major Cafard?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You'll be working together. The major is part of the antiterrorist section of the OSS. He's just back from Europe. Now he's working at home again. He'll give you details of your mission. Listen to him carefully.’

Cafard: the name rang a bell with Cheever, but he couldn't remember why.

The major started listing figures in his gloomy accent, which sounded like the official language of the undercover war, English with a hint of occupied Europe. ‘About half a million Germans, most captured in Africa, are held in prisoner-of-war camps in the USA. The first arrivals are veterans of Rommel's Afrika Korps, convinced that the war was still theirs after the Desert Fox's brilliant campaigns. They still have tans, round sunglasses and tins of Bavarian butter. Tough guys. They thump the other prisoners at the slightest infraction. They've set up a Gestapo network throughout all the camps. All it takes to get on the wrong side of them is an anti-Nazi joke, an expression of resignation or a curse against Hitler. At night they throw a blanket over the unfortunates, and everyone in the room has to join in the punishment beating. Anyone who refuses ends up under the blanket himself. And their families back home are blackmailed, too. For most of the prisoners, a stay in the United States is their best chance of survival. They eat better than their compatriots, and they learn languages and trades in the classes and laboratories that we've set up. Some of them even take courses at American colleges, and receive degrees and diplomas. But a minority hang in there, fighting a pointless undercover campaign, terrorising their comrades.’

‘How can we control them?’ Cheever broke in, to lighten the feeling of unease that the man's accent provoked in him.

‘With infiltrators,’ Matthews replied. ‘By censoring their mail. Often we receive tip-offs from prisoners who have converted to democracy and want to isolate the Nazis. But the Gestapo are a constant threat. They're trying to organise a mass breakout to cover a unit of saboteurs who are capable of causing slaughter and terrorising our civilian population. It'll be a great propaganda coup in Berlin. We've set up special camps to keep the hardliners in place.’

A curious sense of menace overlaid Cheever's irritation with Cafard's accent, but he refused to be tempted into doubt. He took a sip of his coffee and listened.

‘Not many escapes. A few thousand Germans, just one among the Japanese and more than five hundred Italians. On United States territory –’ Major Cafard glanced at a card that had appeared in his hand as though by magic, checking that he had the precise figure ‘– 371,683 Germans and 50,273 Italians held in total. And it's the Italians who are giving us problems. They've surrendered. They've lost the war. They're fighting under our command in Europe, and yet they're still escaping. Only 0.5 per cent of German prisoners try to escape. Among the Italians the figure is 1.2 per cent, nearly three times more than the Germans.’

‘Any of them make it?’

‘Very few. They slip away. They try to disappear into the city. One Italian lieutenant, Montalbetti, walked two hundred miles through the desert. He had hidden in the camp for four days, and escaped when the guards gave up looking for him. We caught up with him on the border with Mexico, just because he'd lost his bearings and turned up at customs on the American side. Now lots of them are imitating his technique.’

Two hundred miles alone in the Texan desert. Cheever had hunted coyote and mountain lions – puma – with his father, in 1938. The hot air fills your mouth, your feet sink with a squeak into the dry turf. The only things that flourish there are scorpions, rattlesnakes and cacti. The coyotes will hunt down a mountain goat, the puma a deer that has come down from the forest; no human being with any common sense would be so presumptuous as to cross such an area. He wanted to request an interview with this guy Montalbetti who had chosen to risk ending up having his bones gnawed by the vultures rather than wait and go home comfortably once the war was over. Curious animals, the Italians. Now the Germans, devils on the battlefield, were biding their time. The other guys were escaping: why?

‘At the beginning of the conflict, in 1942, we were afraid of sabotage, by the Japanese in the west and the Germans in the east. Above all, infiltrations by commandos from the submarines. You know about the U-boat hunts, don't you?’ Matthews went on.

Cheever went back to the spring of 1942. The shell-covered beach at Shelter Island, the black rubber raft. They were chasing four German raiders, silently lest they alarm the few well-to-do people who wintered on the island. A single gunshot, one broken window, and terror would flood the bright lights and the headlines of nearby New York. Sixty miles away from the deer forest, on the alert for the roar of the backwash, panic could spread to Manhattan, jazz, the Apollo Theater and the ladies who danced in their satin dresses. On Shelter Island, a saw-toothed, tempered-steel German dagger slit the throat of his friend Tom, without a cry, without a movement, just a gurgle like that of an unplugged sink, the last sound of the voice that had, in 1939, seduced the whole class of graduating girls at Barnard College, up in Broadway. Perhaps, even now, those young women were wondering, over a drink at Baker House, ‘Where do you think Tom is now? We must go and hear him when the war's over,’ but Tom lay bleeding to death on the beach which, once peace had returned, would host happy family picnics by the rock pools. Cheever had finished off the Germans, two pistol shots muffled by his silencer, and captured the remaining member of the commando unit, a colossus who had been lamed by one of the shots. He could have killed him like a dog – who would ever have investigated? But Tom had died precisely because they didn't want to act like Nazis. A democratic officer didn't cut throats like an SS fanatic. So he had given him a slap and dragged him by one arm to the Ford, to take him to the investigation centre. In the darkness, the light of the 100-watt bulb … ‘Cheever, are you listening?’

‘Of course, General.’

‘We have precise information on the escape of a dangerous Nazi from a prisoner-of-war camp. An expert in sabotage. Like the one you captured on Shelter Island, he's off the U-boats. There's some confusion about his identity. Read this.’

The general handed him a grey file, and Cheever timidly opened it. The sheet of paper, the meticulous typing of the girls in Washington, the black stamps of the censor and the secret service, and the stout, white vellum suggested the hand of the Washington top brass, the only ones who could still afford to use such fragrant paper.

‘U-boat commander from 1940 to 1942,’ began Matthews. 'Six Allied sinkings in the Atlantic to his credit. His name is believed to have been Hans von Luck, Prussian Junker of aristocratic family, father a diplomat, speaks three languages, escaped from the camp in Amarillo, expert in sabotage and explosives, code-breaking, infiltrations of enemy camps, undercover operations. Sources in the Italian fascist camp in Hereford, Texas, tell us that Captain von Luck, disappointed by the way the war was going and the resignation of his fellow detainees in the USA, planned to organise a highly visible suicide operation. He trained the Italian subs at the Danzig base in 1940, and can rely on their solidarity. He's probably preparing an attack on the levees of the Tennessee Valley Authority, to flood a vast zone in the southern states, and spark the enthusiasm of the Germans. He plans to force Allied Command to increase checks and confiscations, concentrating men and resources on this side of the ocean. A massive manhunt in the south would have enormous propaganda value, and would be broadcast by radio to occupied Europe. Hitler's in desperate need of a psychological success.

‘Von Luck must be found straight away, Cheever, he must be arrested, neutralised or brought back to camp in chains. I didn't want to write this in the file that I've prepared, but another source assures me that he's armed, and heading to Washington to attack President Roosevelt,’ Matthews continued. ‘And we're not even sure of his identity.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘I mean that prisoners are identified by their Soldbuch, the paybook of the German army. But von Luck's Soldbuch wasn't found at the camp. He can hardly have taken it with him, it's far too dangerous. It's more likely that he's destroyed it. I'm worried that the escaped prisoner may not actually be von Luck.’

‘Tell Cheever your hypothesis, Major,’ ordered the general.

‘The prisoners are quite capable of preparing fake American documents, creating a new identity for themselves. So why not obliterate the old one? We'll be going after von Luck, but our true prey is someone else.’

‘And what about von Luck?’

‘He's dead. Or he never got to America, he went missing at sea, and someone else has his Soldbuch in his pocket. There's a lot of confusion during prisoner transfers. And the registers are kept in order by the senior prisoners, we haven't got enough of our own men for the job. The escaped man could be an officer, but not von Luck.’

Cheever understood. ‘When am I off?’

‘Tonight. Cafard will be in charge of the mission. Will you be able to make it?’

‘I'll have a shot at it, sir.’

Then he looked at Cafard and corrected himself. ‘We'll have a shot at it, sir.’

This reassurance wasn't enough for General Matthews, who leaned over the restaurant table. He pushed the glasses aside with his massive hands, and pressed his torso breathlessly forward. ‘Get him, Cheever. Get him. Once the war's over I don't want to find myself with a fanatical Nazi wandering about the States blowing up dykes and massacring innocent schoolchildren. I don't want him to organise a terrorist resistance network in the German quarters of New York. Get him before he shoots the president, get him, whether he's German or Italian.’

Matthews seemed very old to Cheever, his face wrinkled, tired and melancholy. He repeated the words, ‘before the war is over’, as though afraid he wouldn't see that day. As though catching the only fascist at liberty in the United States of America was not a military matter, like guaranteeing the safety of the dykes, the schoolchildren of Tennessee and Franklin Roosevelt. No, it was rather as if putting that U-boat commander behind the barbed wire of the Amarillo camp was the strategic key to the final victory, a magical challenge to the fate of the world.

‘Get him, Cheever, get him. For all our sakes.’

6

What did Ulysses dream of during those nights on his plank bed on board his ship when the bright and friendly stars of the Mediterranean lit the unknown way before him? Did he draw up battle plans for fighting monsters? Or did he ask himself questions about his destiny, did he try to find a solution to the traps of Fate that had left him on his own, his comrades gone, the final mystery still to be solved, the doubt that lay within him? What is the hero's true adventure? Blinding the Cyclops, escaping Sirens, seducing goddesses, or is the challenge one of finding inner clarity, the truth about oneself, being accepted and understood as part of the nature of the world and the things that are in it? Perhaps Odysseus' bosun wasn't seeking his course up there, beyond the pulsating Pleiades and the Great and Little Bears, doubting his own vision, rubbing his salt-crusted lids, but wise in the knowledge that bound him to the heavenly vault? Faithful to his course, he would return home. Then, whatever bitterness might be hidden in his homeland, not even Father Zeus, not even Nux, the night that awaits us all, will be able to overcome us.

Back in barracks in Turin, rolled up on the deck of the rusty steamer that had brought me to Africa, in the watches of Bardia, lying on the soft sand of the desert, I had wondered about Odysseus' dreams as I went to sleep. Sleeping is hard in wartime. Even when you're completely worn out and you want only to plunge yourself silently into the darkness, you are held back by the anxiety that you might have made a mistake, and that you would die before dawn for that tiny mistake, perhaps you'd broken a little branch on patrol, forgotten about sentry duty, or miscalculated the trigonometry of the enemy's artillery camp. Or, worse, that that same mistake might cause the deaths of the men whom fate had entrusted to you. It's hard for a serious-minded officer to sleep in wartime.

Sometimes I tried to remember Zita, the professor, to meditate on logic and my sins, like Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1911. Nothing worked. Sensuality was depressing. If it was sated, I was drained of energy, while if it was the object of my contemplation, it led to a painful comparison between my two lives, the happy one of earlier times and the present, piled with my comrades on a haystack that the British General Wavell was about to set alight along with our little fortress. It was then, at five o'clock on a freezing morning in December 1940, two weeks before the Australians caught me, that I dreamed the dreams of Odysseus. Wasn't he perhaps like us, a soldier in a war who had tried everything he could think of to avoid fighting, feigning madness and sowing his fields with grain? Perhaps he wasn't our sainted protector, the leader who stormed Troy, but simply one who gave his own name to a poem about the desperate, proud, shrewd, legendary need to return home. Thinking about Ulysses gave me courage – he had landed in Ithaca, after all, so why shouldn't I? On the afternoons spent on the liberty ship that took me to America, on the train that loudly crossed the new continent, bringing us prisoners to Hereford, I meditated upon Odysseus. He knew that power required violence, and abstained from it. He didn't like Agamemnon, he wanted to sail and live in the sun without any trouble. He won the war, he routed the suitors because he had to, but then he went to dwell far away, in search of peace.

My head banged hollowly against the wooden bench, and my thoughts and dreams became confused. What, in the end, did Odysseus dream about? His strategy for returning home, or the path to self-knowledge, the only voyage that everyone undertakes, even if they don't move an inch?

‘Cigarette?’

I opened my eyes. In front of me I saw the soft face of the lieutenant in his American uniform.

What language had he spoken? Italian? In English, his officer's English, clipped, staccato, without the Texan drawl that I had learned to recognise in the speech of the camans? Or had he just held out a cigarette?

I took it, thanking him with a nod. The lieutenant got to his feet and gently closed the door of the compartment. He turned the knob, and came back to sit down. His uniform fitted him more comfortably now, it looked more like the gym kit of an adolescent athlete than the uniform of an officer in the most powerful army that had ever gone into battle in all the history of the world.

He took a single, intense drag. ‘My friend, when are we going to start playing, you and I?’

His voice was deep and persuasive, the voice of a schoolmate to whom you could confide your concerns and anxieties. I could have told him about my torment, I could have told him all about Zita and the professor, my escape, the war we had lost, and even asked him about the dreams of Odysseus, he might have known something about their nature. I opened and closed my mouth, as tuna do on the point of death, and not a word emerged. My life was beginning over again that day, and I didn't know it. The lieutenant brushed back his long, fair, feminine hair. ‘You're an escaped Italian prisoner, I'd say, from Hereford Camp. I don't know how much money you've got, or what kind of papers you're carrying, but you've got one hell of a lucky streak if they haven't spotted you yet. Take a look at your trousers: you can still see the letters POW that you've tried to hide. What trick did you use? Toothpaste? Bicarb? I've seen them all. Listen, you've only got one choice: as I said when the Military Police came round, I'm going to New York. The armed forces have organised a radio station on 47th Street. Boogie-woogie, you know? Datadatadadadatata. It broadcasts in several languages including Italian. It reaches your country, both the parts that have been liberated and the parts still occupied by the Germans. But I didn't tell the MP everything. I was accompanying an Italian prisoner to New York, a goddam raw recruit. In civilian life this bastard was an actor. Beautiful voice, great diction, already famous. My mission? To escort him across the mighty United States, God bless them, and set him down in front of a microphone so that he could use that lovely instrument, that lovely bel canto voice of his to convince the people of Italy of the soundness of our cause.’

He fell silent for a moment. ‘Of the Allied cause.’

‘Where did you learn Italian? You've got a Tuscan accent.’

They were the first words I'd spoken in my own language, and I knew he'd got me.

‘My father was the American consul in Florence, then a diplomat at the Court of St James in London, and that's how I learned my languages. I know half a dozen, including Hungarian, which is so difficult that it counts as four. Listen to me. I'm in trouble too. Not as much trouble as you, but in trouble nonetheless. And since we both speak the lovely tongue of your lovely country, give me a hand. This actor I was escorting, a little fascist who probably never fired a gun in his life, slipped through my fingers, as though plastered from head to toe in brilliantine. He used to keep that stuff in a little green tin, Linetti, two drops on the tips of his fingertips and off he went. I show up at the train station to give him his travelling document and he's gone. Vanished. I should have called the Military Police and given them a report, but I'm about to be transferred to Washington, to military headquarters, and then everything'll be fine. If I confess, who knows what's going to happen. They might send me off to the Pacific to fight my way through the jungle as a punishment. We've won the war, what's the point of stirring things up? Communication between Hereford and New York isn't good. I'm your luck, and you're mine. Luck, you know, fate. Did you go to high school? You did? Ananke, fate: that's me, my friend. Now we're heading for New York. You think the Military Police are going to stop us? Don't worry, I'm sorted for travel documents, and so are you, so we'll escort each other. If you say no, we're finished: you in a cell, me in Japan.’

I looked at him in silence.

‘And when we're on 47th Street … ever been there? Most beautiful street in Manhattan, art galleries, bookshops and cafés full of German girls who have got away from Hitler. We'll go to the radio station there, you'll follow me meekly, I'll go in and get the permits released and you stay in the foyer. After they've stamped the receipt, mission accomplished, I open the door and, bingo!, you've gone. Except that I've got the documents validated, and you've made it through the bureaucracy. A free Italian in Manhattan, ties with Brooklyn, find yourself a mama to load you on to a Portuguese cargo ship, and you'll be in Naples before the feast of San Gennaro.’

I was fascinated by his perfect Italian, which was full of catchphrases and high-school-teacher Latinisms. I didn't reply. This time his smile was drawn, but convincing: it concealed real anxiety, perhaps even fear, for something he was about to lose.

I waited and looked out the window. It was no use. ‘We haven't got too much time, my friend. Look.’

He threw the door open abruptly and pushed me outside. Two compartments further along was a new and immaculate patrol of Military Policemen, soldiers so tall their heads grazed the lights in the ceiling. ‘Papers, papers, please, sir.’

The train slipped into a tunnel and my memory is full to the brim with that one shrill whistle.

7

My journey with the lieutenant lasted for forty days and forty nights. At the time I didn't realise that between our first meeting and its distant epilogue on the Atlantic coast, precisely forty dawns would pass, the time that the Bible assigns to the all-engulfing flood before the pale dove returns to Noah's Ark with its olive branch in its beak, after crossing the watery world, bearing witness to the end of divine wrath. Nor did I see the rainbow, an earnest of the covenant between man and God. But I did see the great Mississippi River and the Ozark forests, populated by fabulous snakes – ‘They can swallow a whole kid and spit out its horns,’ Sergeant Carraway confided to me. Aboard that long train I passed the dykes of the Tennessee Valley, the pink clay, the dark blue lakes and the trees that bend over the still water, so still that their leaves fall gently and stick perfectly to the surface. I ate in station coffee shops, creamy potato soup, watery black coffee, octopus ink, my grandmother used to call it, still caffeine-rich enough to keep me awake, eyes open to look at the clear sky. Not so the lieutenant: he slept, unconcerned with the dreams of Odysseus. For forty days and forty nights I saw him sleeping motionless like that, as though he just had to flick off the switch of a lamp to be dead to the world. We endured dangers and worries, passion and grief, each of which would have been enough to fill the whole lives of many human beings. And yet, as on that day with the Military Police, the moment the lieutenant closed his eyes, sleep settled on his mind like a black shroud. Who he really was and what drove him across the United States, eastwards today, westwards tomorrow, I didn't understand at the time. But even today, from the false and reassuring position of someone judging the past from the perspective of the future, the lieutenant, with his motives and intentions, still seems to be beyond my comprehension. The only memento I have of him, the only proof that our forty-day migration across the great continent was not a dream, a fabric of my imagination, is a souvenir that I am holding here. A pinch of sand. I look at it again, and it's as though I sense that he contained a seed of all the virtues that make the human soul magnificent, an ounce of every noble and dignified feeling, the Virtus and the Gratia that a father and mother would always hope to recognise in their children.

It wasn't like that at the time. Then, he was an officer of the Allied army which had defeated my boys in Bir el Gobi and Bardia and which would shortly – I had no illusions on the matter – govern the whole world, the Europe of my youth and my mathematical calculations and the America that passed quickly before my eyes: the sharecroppers at work in the fields, the chain-gangs working their picks and shovels at the side of the railroad track, skinny soldiers in khaki uniforms, lined up under every railway awning kissing their emotional girlfriends goodbye. That army was a giant washed with white soap, ignorant of the ways of the world, tranquil in its decision to battle for freedom.

I had spent my childhood in La Tonnara, looking on enchanted as the master-carpenter launched the gozzi, the brightly coloured fishermen's boats, with pretty names. Maria, Laura, sweet names that contrasted the harsh fates that awaited them, tossed about beneath Orion in the Sicilian Channel, fleeing storms in pursuit of swordfish and finally, when the summer heat prevailed again, hunting down the joyfully swimming tuna. The carpenter carved the wood, engraving with his gimlet, planing severely, shavings fell like snow on the sea, bright dots of sawdust in the December wind and then, when the Christmas fireworks were forgotten, glazed the skeleton, fixed the keel and the planking, painting with precise brushstrokes the colours of the rainbow: red, indigo, blue and yellow. The pungent smell of varnish filled my nostrils like a drug. I looked up, it was summer already, and the boat, or lovely Maria or Laura, was sliding into the water to feed a family.

Here, in America, the steel ships were stamped in the morning, at the hour of the Alborada, and launched at Vespers. They were called liberty ships, and, however speedily the U-boats of our German allies dispatched them to the bottom of the ocean, where Thetis and the Nereides danced, the war still would be won by those housewives and unemployed blacks who built them, sisters and brothers of the sharecroppers bent over the cotton that I saw from my passing train.

Now my memories run by me in fragments, the lieutenant and what I saw of the wagons and the locomotives, the stops on our forty-day journey and my recollections as a little boy, a vain nostalgia for another world, another sea. Far away, chaotic, terrible. A prisoner and yet at the same time a safe conduct for my guard, who said he had lost his first Italian quarry, I lived in a state of perfect, constant lucidity, every moment of my life present in the wide-open spaces of America. The colours of the tuna fishermen's boats poured over the grey steel of the liberty ships and I, a prisoner, saw my resignation and disappointment in Hereford Camp 1 making way for an obsessive, nervous awareness. I had to get to the coast, to New York. There I would escape the lieutenant's attention, before he had second thoughts and broke our agreement. If he tried anything smart, I would tie him up, I would smack him right between his courteous eyes and get away.

Zita was a shore, Europe a coast, my memories drew me there, waves that had floated me over the barbed wire and beyond the guards, and would take me all the way to Italy to put a stop to Professor Barbaroux's wedding.

I had probably gone crazy, afflicted for forty days by a form of early-onset dementia. Hunted down on the pier, I would calmly try to walk on the waters of the iron Atlantic. Dying, escaping, performing acts of madness, nothing seemed ridiculous or impossible to me. And in any case, when I had left for Africa with my regiment, hadn't I thought it impossible that Italy might lose the war, ending up divided and occupied? And yet that was what had happened.

The lieutenant stared into my eyes, reading my thoughts. ‘You know Plutarch?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Life of Brutus?’

‘No.’

‘Read it when you have a moment. And tell me what you think of it.’

He handed me a green book, a Loeb. Plutarch, Greek text on the cover. Our train slipped through the night and I read about Brutus' youth, his rebellion against Caesar's hegemony. The ambush, Casca trembling as he struck the hero with his sword, Brutus taking his weapon and running it through the body of his adoptive father, and the conspirators lurching back in horror. Brutus strikes first, Caesar falls, he could have shouted – ‘Stand back, dogs!’ – his voice had once given heart to the legionaries below the walls of Alesia and aroused terror and respect in the barbarian forests. Caesar could have grabbed the sword from the cowardly Casca, and defended himself as he had in his fray with Vercingetorix. Instead, he wrapped his toga around him as a shroud and allowed himself to be felled. Only then did the terrorists take courage and strike, and when Antony shows the cloth to the crowd, every rip a dagger blow, like a Lucio Fontana canvas painted by political savagery.

Then comes the war and the defeat of the democratic illusion. Brutus meditates on suicide, and before he dies he studies the firmament, praying to heaven with two lines, ‘Oh Jove, do not forget the man from whom this mischief flowed!’ The second line of Brutus' farewell to the world has not been passed down to us, the medieval copyists accidentally left it out. What might he have written?

The lieutenant looked at me, and I lost myself in the muddle of my uncertainty. How could the boatwright's coloured vessels have subdued the democracy of the liberty ships?

The lieutenant said, ‘That forgotten line that Brutus spoke – what do you think it might be? If we discovered it, in a dusty codex in one of your southern Italian abbeys, we'd understand which is more important, Luck or Bravery: I'm sure of it.’

Thus began our forty days across America, ‘rich in Virtue and poor in Luck’, as the infantrymen wrote on their memorial at El Alamein. The lieutenant looking for his line of Brutus, me looking for a ship to save my shipwrecked love and my life itself by interpreting the dreams of Odysseus in the lost war.

8

The girls were sitting at the corner table of the coffee shop. The slimmest one was drinking black Coke from a frosted glass: she sucked gently on the straw, eyes fixed on a point straight ahead of her and then opened her red lips and sucked again. The fairest one struck her fingers lightly on the gleaming table, tap tap tap, the middle, ring and index fingers, then the middle one again in counterpoint, tap tap tap. She was wearing a skirt that bared her knees, soft and round. Last of all, in the shade, a glimpse of her, the smallest one. Not the prettiest, perhaps: she neither drank nor followed the rhythm of the big band brass section that blared from the Bakelite radio. Her hair was short, and hung in a fringe over her slanted, oriental eyes. She filled the space with her face and her hands and her breasts and her thighs, as though the air were water that could support her and make her float. As though, all of a sudden, she might swim: a little dive on her cork-soled shoes and away, with quick and lazy strokes up to the fan that flapped on the ceiling, slothfully stirring the hot air. The girl would brush the beer bottles on the highest shelf with her skirt floating, she would swirl out of the bar, away over the burning earth of Hot Springs in the dusty state of Arkansas.

Her energy was apparent from her perfect stillness: like a swamp alligator, ready to strike from its motionless tree-trunk stability, descending with a whipcrack on its prey, and yet a moment before framed and lost in the hot mud. That was what the girl with the oriental eyes was like, or at least that's how I remember her now as I write about my first moment with her. Rather than trying to imagine her face again, I'm trying to feel the heat and emotion I felt then, which some of my gentle readers will have felt on at least one day of their lives, when they met their ‘twin soul’ as Plato would say, the other sexual half that we all have, from which we were parted at some time in the distant past. Today I feel that emotion again, in its entirety.

I looked at her, I fully expected her to dive away and swim in an erotic crawl, free from gravity, in that banal café in the shadow of the wild Ozark Mountains. It's certainly possible, even likely, that my memory has been falsified by my forty-day journey, and by what I later experienced with her. The reality was probably quite different. An ordinary Italian fool, defeated in the desert sand, broken in the Bardia winter, was seeing beautiful young girls for the first time in years, was free to observe them without hierarchy or hindrance. A prisoner of war spends his time thinking about women, forgets what women are really like. In the camp, I would wake with a vision of Zita before my eyes, summon the patience to stand in the queue for the latrine, keep a firm grip on my memory of those hours of mathematical analysis on the creaking wooden table because Zita and her perfume and her flesh existed beyond the sea and, in darkness when I was in the Texan sun, in light while I slept in the breathless night of the camp, she too trod the planet with feet that I would greedily have kissed in the shadow of the faraglioni.

That was how I had lived, as a free man and a prisoner, until she had decided to marry Professor Barbaroux, and then my fate too had been captured, along with my future as a POW. No one could possibly bear that two-fold imprisonment, knowing that one was a prisoner in the present and the future, without paying the price of madness or resignation. So I had escaped, into the great concentration camp of real life and the jokes it plays, vaster and more cruel than Hereford.

The lieutenant's voice rang out in a singsong: ‘Here we are in Hot Springs, in Arkansas. This is where the wounded and the convalescents of America come to regain their lost health. Europe cripples them in war, the springs restore them. No one will notice us here. We can rest. We've a long way to go before we get to New York.’

He got up and winked at the table of girls. ‘What kind of GIs are we if we don't cat around? Chastity will get us noticed.’

The three girls gave the lieutenant a chilly welcome, edging up to let him sit down. The most spirited of them shook his hand and started to chatter.

I was left alone at our table. A prisoner or free man? I couldn't work it out, but I wasn't willing to lose my only true feeling of independence: my pain over Zita and the decision to cross the USA in captivity, all for her.

The coffee was good, the apple tart fragrant. From the back of the gleaming wooden room came the notes of a song that one of the girls was singing in a low voice, accompanying the radio. One of the songs in vogue that spring, with the kind of sweet refrain and sentimental words that made girls cry. ‘I heard that lonesome train whistle blow …’

Better to stay and look at the light outside the door, Main Street shining in the sulphurous dust of the springs. Then I felt the smallest girl's hand on my thigh, just where I had traced the three letters POW with toothpaste, then rubbed them out as I prepared to escape. The fabric was worn away by washing with the regulation fatty yellow soap and hours flapping on a line over the prairie, a banner of forgotten poverty, while we sat on a step with a letter clutched in our fists and our eyes lost somewhere beyond the water tower. It was as though the girl's hand was Zita's, and the soft veil of military beige heightened its warmth, its gentleness, its life.

No one ever touches a prisoner's body except to inflict violence, or some kind of punishment. The responses of the camans to a vague gesture of protest, the rough jostling of your comrades as you queue for an egg, the acrid stench of disinfectants, the thorny blankets and, when you're in transit, the hardness of the benches, the bumps of the wagons, the steel needles of the vaccine that welcome you to the camp.

Months without seeing, or speaking to, or breathing the air of a woman. There were the girls employed at the camp orderly office, resolute and cheerful Texans. They considered the Italian men with a certain fascination. Certainly they despised us – ‘Happy go lucky!’ they called us – but then some of them fell in love with the lieutenants and sergeants with their glistening hair. The Italians sang, they were nice, they didn't kiss as though they were chewing gum, and when it was dark they knew the names of all the stars, or if they didn't know them they knew how to name them passionately after Mary, Lucy or Joy. After the war, many American girls went to join their heartthrobs in Naples, and emotional nuptials were celebrated.

One day two secretaries came to Camp 1, where the hardliners were kept, and sat down on our benches. They stretched out their nylon-clad legs on the freshly swept floor, forcing us to climb over their calves and gleaming heels. Perhaps it was a bet, perhaps it was indifference, or perhaps one of them was in love with one of the prisoners. Then they left, in their best regulation posture, and Fefe, the funniest one of all of us, Fefe who had seen his Captain Urbani in Africa sodomised in an act of reprisal by Moroccan guards, French Souaves, stretched himself out on a bench groaning, rubbing himself on the wood and whimpering while we laughed.

I didn't see the hand that drew its fingers across my leg as though drawing a tattoo. I kept my eyes on the sulphurous road, and felt the blood stirring inside my pants. But before the sense of excitement, which ran free and strong, I felt tenderness and compassion for my skin, recruited in Rome, battered by sea-storms, tanned in two deserts, leathery skin that knew the corrosive sand and the tough showers and the hasty thread of the Venetian nurse who sewed me up. ‘Christ alive, it's just a scratch, the poor guy in the bed next to you hasn't got legs to mend.’

And now, just below the white marks of that scar, sharply drawn by British shrapnel, like the footprints of a steel-footed sparrow, the girl's hand lingered. Almost imperceptibly she tightened her grip, and the shiver that followed did more to open me up than the sudden explosion of a grenade, a cry for help, a barked command. It pierced my resignation as a prisoner, it cut through the pain at my abandonment. However my hunting season might have gone, I still had a heart. Was that good or bad news?

Recalling her now, the girl, H.S., that was her name, seems liquid to me. At night, when the cold mistral splits the shutters of my bedroom and wakes me, I find myself thinking about her once again. Her diaphanous weightlessness fills my empty mind. I run through our days, few in number but crucial in our lives, and H.S. ethereally expands, like a piece of origami, the beautiful swan with the sinuous neck that she folded out of paper after making love. Like the few poetic words she prayed to her Buddha. In the pockets of her silk trousers she had a little Buddha of Happiness, who crossed the world smiling, his bag of suffering held tightly on his back. ‘He gives me my courage,’ she said.

We made love immediately after our meeting in the coffee shop. There were two rough rooms upstairs, and the lieutenant, with a wink, had gone ahead of me. She took me by the hand, and when she did so her hand didn't seem to touch me.

I wasn't a great Casanova, and twelve hundred nights of war had done nothing to sharpen my skills as a seducer. I lay on the little bed, a basic affair like the one on which I slept next to Ferrucci, and kept my hands behind the back of my neck. She opened my khaki shirt, one button at a time, and exposed my chest. I was lean, God knows, muscular, smooth, strengthened by privations and effort, my body was like a weapon. H.S. took off her clothes with a single prima donna movement, a tunic that weighed no more than a scarf, and was suddenly naked on top of me. I can't recall, scouring my memory, whether she rested on my crotch or my thighs, or whether she floated around me like a hummingbird. She rose to lick me and – I had to do something, or at least that was what they had told me on the Island – I sought the buckle of my belt with trembling hands.

‘Let me,’ said H.S., and unhooked it by herself. She moved her body as though merely rearranging her hair, a brief shadowy movement and I was inside her.

They still come to me on nights when the mistral blows. Why are memories so weightless? Even the tragic ones, even the painful ones? If I think of Bardia, when I fell into the hands of the Australians, at the age of twenty, all I hear is the machine-gunner whimpering, ‘Do we surrender, Manè? Do we surrender or do I fire, Manè?’ I don't remember when I had fired all the rounds in the magazine, in accordance with military regulations, ‘Fire to the last round before surrendering’, and I really did fire the last cartridge, yes, sir, I, the student of the socialist Professor Barbaroux, fired until the barrel of the Breda was red hot and we were out of ammunition. I remember none of that. I only remember the silence, what could be sweeter than silence, what could be harder to reassemble in the memory? And my gunner lying face down on the sand, arms open, motionless and cruciform. I saw the sand thrown up by gusts of wind, one, two, three, and I didn't see the enemy. Faceless and nameless: they would acquire faces and names only in prison. Not in war, just being the enemy was enough, they fired and we fired back. Finally the outlines come, the target shooting – mortal targets – assumes the guise of humanity, they strip us of our watches and pile us up in open railway carriages, so that the indigenous people can spit on us, the only chance they will ever get to humiliate a white man.

So: to remember those moments I have to make an effort of reason, I have to use thought as a compass. If I close my eyes and look out the window on to the unlit gulf, both within and without, and then open my lids, nothing changes, the darkness enfolds me. Of the girl, H.S., I am aware of the lightness with which she unhooked my belt, the sparrow's flutter with which she settled on my chest, and the lightness with which she made love to me. Of my capture, I see sand flying suddenly from the crest of a dune, then again, every second, and the machine-gunner embracing Mother Earth and praying as he awaits a Mediterranean divinity, while the enemy advances cautiously and victoriously towards us, certain prey in the desert.

We are all prey to memories, which we cannot alter, and which wait for us like bookkeepers, precise collectors of debits and credits. Are they worth more than real events? No, what matters is the story we forge for ourselves in our memories. At Camp 1 my gunner – ‘Do I shoot, Manè? Do I shoot?’ – never spoke to me again, he didn't want to poison our battling past with our captive present. Ciao, and that's that. So I can't tell you if the girl was as graceful as I remember, or whether I only perceived her carnality, her taut skin, her slanting oriental eyes. I was sure, and I still am, that H.S. was the most beautiful creature that the Lord God had ever put on earth. The privilege of finding her and the perennial bitterness at losing her will be the last memories to abandon me in the few days I still have left. In 1944 I didn't think that way, I was young. And yet when the girl circled about me, my body tensed and I thought, ‘You're happy now, remember, remember, remember.’

You might think it wise for a boy to be so precisely aware of his states of mind of sorrow and happiness. But I bitterly regret it. It's true: rare among human beings, I possess a precise memory of happiness, a lucid awareness of having perceived vivid joy. But searing within me I also feel the regret, the emptiness that comes afterwards.

Perhaps the girl was carnal, her womanly ardour certainly was. And perhaps I was innocent, my eccentric escape for love certainly was. That lightness means everything to me: it is, and will remain, my life, the life of Giovanni Manes.

The next memory, a flash after her hands on my belt, is the mocking blond head of the lieutenant: ‘Still here? What a fuss you Italians make!’ And he starts singing Puccini, to my horror, in the purest Italian: ‘Oh! Sweet kisses, oh languid caresses, and I, trembling, unveiled those beautiful forms …’

We paid the girls. I hadn't even asked her name, if weightlessness has a name. We took a bus at six o'clock, perhaps a day later we would make it to Nashville and from there to Baltimore, Washington and New York. The sun was high, the wooden footpaths deserted. The lieutenant and I the only ones who walked them, in our light shoes, in silence, drained by love after so much solitude. My head was bowed in confusion when I felt a gentle touch on my arm. A dark-coloured car was coming towards us. The lieutenant pushed me maternally into a grocer's shop full of dried-up vegetables. He picked up the bowl that was used to weigh the green, green peas, and plunged it into the big brimming sack. As soon as the car had passed he led me to the next shop, through the door and into the post office. ‘They're after us,’ he said gently.

‘But aren't your documents in order?’

I looked at him uncertainly. What had gone wrong with his perfect plan?

‘It's better to stay out of trouble.’

The flight from shop to shop couldn't go on for ever: the Buick stopped to check the crossroads that led to the bus stop, where two Chicanos were waiting.

The lieutenant set off in the opposite direction, but that part of the world was a papier-mâché chessboard, white, black, white, a few moves and checkmate. Reflected in the glass of the barber's shop, I saw our pursuers' car heading straight towards us. The air filled with a mechanical hubbub: a farmer's truck, fully laden with crisp bales of yellow hay. It braked in front of us, and the right door opened. The driver was the girl, H.S. Barely moving, she beckoned us in. Lying on the truck floor, we slipped by, invisible to the street. I looked up, and in the rear-view mirror I glimpsed two officers, at the wheel, a mean-looking dark-haired man with a thin moustache, beside him an uneasy-looking adolescent. Leaving a trail of yellow dust behind us, we headed into the desert light. A haggard coyote barked a warning, but didn't bother to follow us. He hobbled away, one of his legs stiffened by an ancient trap.

9

They reached the prisoner-of-war camp in Amarillo, north of Texas, at about three in the afternoon. Colonel Downing brought them into his study with a great display of energy. ‘Gentlemen, I won't waste your time. There's no point in my repeating the life story of the man you're after. I know that General Matthews has already outlined it for you. He escaped from this camp ten days ago. He changes languages the way he changes shirts. He's pleasant and stylish. Everyone here loves him. Read the report by our inside informer: I haven't yet had a chance to pass it on to the general.’

He handed them a sheet of thin paper, with holes typed in it corresponding to the letters ‘e’ and ‘o’. Out of respect for his rank, Cheever let Cafard take the sheet first, but Cafard handed it to him without so much as a glance.

‘Our agent, Dieffe, maintains that Lieutenant Commander Hans von Luck is heading for the Atlantic coast …’ Cheever was still reading, and Cafard mockingly questioned the colonel. ‘How can your agents, locked away in a camp, tail a fugitive many miles away?’

‘Don't underestimate the Nazis, Major. They have undercover radios, they use secret codes.’

‘The Italians have a radio that we haven't managed to confiscate. I'd never heard that the Germans had one, too.’

‘They can prepare any kind of fake document. Look.’

Downing, irritated by Cafard's incredulous tone, opened the box and took out half a withered potato. He handed it to Cheever by way of reply: carved into the tuber was the security stamp of the American Military Command, the precious mark that guaranteed members of the armed forces free transit across the United States.

‘You want a hunting licence? A passport? A few fresh potatoes and they can reproduce the whole fucking Washington bureaucracy, you bet they can.’

‘Can we interrogate this …’ Cafard tried to find the right phrase for a moment, feigning uncertainty, and Downing wondered, ‘Is this bastard having me on?’

‘… this agent of ours?’

Cheever, disciplined and embarrassed, handed him the perforated sheet of paper, which Cafard stuffed into his pocket.

‘Ah, no, that's out of the question. Are you kidding me?’ Downing saw himself regaining his advantage, and used it skilfully. ‘What did you have in mind? Call him into the main barracks and expose him in front of his comrades? Within a few hours the Gestapo inside the camp would have him in the blanket. I hope you know what I mean by the blanket?’

Colonel Downing smiled grimly: tough cops from the spy department, you talk and talk, and then all of a sudden you drop the psychological warfare in favour of actual violence.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.