Into the War
Page 9
A group of fishermen was approaching the boats tied up to the jetty, carrying oars and nets. They were talking loudly, in that silence. By dawn they would have to be out at sea. They fitted the boats, set off, disappeared into the dark water, and you could still hear their voices in the middle of the sea.
The sense of their wakening in the dark, of their drab early-morning departure, of their rowing in the cold pre-dawn air, doubled the heaviness of my eyes and my shivering. I stretched out my arms as I shivered and yawned. And at that moment, as though it emerged from my chest, the roar of the siren sounded. It was an alarm.
I remembered then about the school, which we had left unguarded, and ran towards the town. These were times when, in our country, we did not yet know what terror was; going through the streets you barely saw the signs of this brusque, general awakening: voices in the houses, blacked-out lights going on and then instantly going out again, and half-dressed people on the threshold of the shelters looking up into the sky.
I got to the school – it was I who had the key – went in, went round the classrooms opening the windows, as I had been instructed. Opening wide one of the windows I heard the buzz: the airplane, both the child and king of that nocturnal world, was crossing the sky laden with bombs. I tried to see it with my eyes, and even more so I tried to imagine the man sitting up there in his cockpit, in the midst of the void, working out his route. It flew past; the sky went back to being deserted and silent again. I went back to our room and sat on the camp bed. As I leafed through the magazine, English cities ripped apart and lit up by tracer bullets went before my eyes. I got undressed and lay down. The siren sounded: the alarm was over.
Shortly afterwards Biancone arrived. He was spruced up, hair combed, chatty, as though the evening was just starting now. He told me how the alarm had ruined his love-making at the crucial point, and described improbable scenes of half-naked women escaping to the shelter. He was seated on his camp bed, I was lying down, and we continued talking for a bit as we smoked. In the end he, too, lay down; we wished each other good morning and sweet dreams; it was dawn.
However, I now could not get to sleep and lay tossing and turning in the bed. At that hour, my father would already have got up, fastened on his leggings, panting as he did so, and slipped on his hunting jacket full of hunting gear. I seemed to hear him moving through the house that was still half asleep and dark, wakening the dog, shushing his barks, talking to him and answering him. He would heat up breakfast on the gas both for himself and the dog; they ate together, in the cold kitchen; then he would sling a big basket over his neck and another one in his hand, and would go out of the house, with long strides, his white goatee beard wrapped in his scarf. Along the mule tracks in the countryside you could almost tell the time from his heavy footfall, accompanied by the dog’s jingling collar, and his constant coughing and bringing up catarrh, and those who lived along his route would hear him in their half-asleep state and realize that it was time to get up. With the first light of dawn he would reach his farm, wake the country people up and, before they were at work, he had already gone round all the terraces and examined the work done and still to do, and started to shout and swear, filling the valley with his yells. The older he got, the more his polemical attitude towards the world was crystallized in that early rise of his, in that being the first on his feet in the whole countryside, in that constant rant against everyone – his sons, friends, enemies – that they were a bunch of useless slackers. And maybe his only moments of happiness were these ones at dawn, as he went with his dog along the roads he knew so well, freeing his bronchial tubes of the catarrh that plagued him at night, and watching slowly as the indistinct grey gave way to colours in the rows of vines and between the branches of olive trees, and recognizing the sounds of the early-morning birds one by one.
So, with my thoughts following my father’s footsteps through the countryside, I fell asleep; and he never knew that he had had me so close to him.
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First published in Italy as L’entrata in guerra by Einaudi, Turin, 1954
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © The Estate of Italo Calvino, 2002
English translation and additional editorial material copyright © Martin McLaughlin, 2011
Cover: Detail from the Meeting of Etherius and Ursula and the Departure of the Pilgrims, from the St. Ursula Cycle, by Vittore Carpaccio (Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice, Italy/Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/ The Bridgeman Art Library).
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ISBN: 978-0-141-95934-4
1 These two later works can be read in English in The Road to San Giovanni, by Italo Calvino, translated by Tim Parks ( Jonathan Cape, 1993).
1 Calvino’s note was found amongst his papers and published posthumously in his collected Romanzi e racconti, ed. Claudio Milanini, Mario Barenghi, Bruno Falcetto, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–94), I, 316–7.
1 Under Fascism, it was obligatory for school pupils to be in one of the Fascist youth organizations. Male pupils of pre-military age, from about fourteen to eighteen, were enrolled in the Avanguardisti. Younger pupils (eight to fourteen) were in the Balilla, a kind of Fascist Scout movement.
2 The Unione Nazionale Ufficiali in Congedo d’Italia (UNUCI) is the Italian Reserve Officers’ Association.
1 In a number of stories, and so presumably also here, Calvino used three asterisks to denote his home town of San Remo (each asterisk probably corresponding to a syllable).
1 During the war, the UNPA (Unione Nazionale per la Protezione Anti-aerea) was the Italian Anti-aircraft Corps.
2 Lupa is Italian for she-wolf.