Loe raamatut: «The Lights of Alborada»

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.