The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

by Umberto Eco

  Utterly beautiful the girls in all the songs, whether they were rural, Italic beauties ("the buxom country girls") or urban beauties like the "lovely piccinina," that milliner’s assistant from Milan with her delicate half-powdered face, walking through crowds at a bustling pace… Or beauties on bikes, symbols of a brash, disheveled femininity, with legs so slim, so shapely and trim.

  Ugly, of course, were our enemies, and several copies of Balilla, the weekly for the Italian Fascist Youth, contained illustrations by De Seta alongside stories that made fun of the enemy, always through brutish caricatures: The war had him worried / so King Georgie scurried / for defense from things sinister / to Big Winston, his Minister-and then there were the other two villains, Big Bad Roosevelt and the terrible Stalin, the red ogre of the Kremlin.

  The English were bad because they used the equivalent of Lei, whereas good Italians were supposed to use, even when addressing people they knew, nothing but the oh-so-Italian Vo i. A basic knowledge of foreign languages suggests that it is the English and French who use Vo i (you, vous), whereas Lei is very Italian, though perhaps influenced by Spanish, and at the time we were thick as thieves with Franco’s Spain. As for the German Sie, it is a Lei or a Low, but not a Vo i. In any case, perhaps as a result of poor knowledge of things foreign, Lei as the polite form of you had been rejected by the higher powers in favor of Vo i -my grandfather had kept clippings that were quite explicit and rather inflexible on the matter. He had also had the presence of mind to save the last issue of a women’s magazine called Lei, in which it was announced that beginning with the next issue it would be called Annabella. Obviously, the Lei in this context was not an address to "you," the magazine’s ideal reader, but rather an instance of the pronoun "she," indicating that the magazine was aimed at women, not men. But regardless, the word Lei, even when serving a different grammatical function, had become taboo. I wondered if the whole episode had made the women who read the magazine laugh at the time, and yet it had happened and everyone had put up with it.

  And then there were the colonial beauties, because even though Negroid types resembled apes and Abyssinians were plagued by a whole host of maladies, an exception had been made for the beautiful Abyssinian woman. The radio sang: Little black face / sweet Abyssinian / just wait and pray / we’re nearing our dominion / Then we’ll be with you / and gifts we’ll bring / yes we will give you / a new law and a new King.

  Just what should be done with the beautiful Abyssinian woman was made clear in De Seta’s color cartoons, which featured Italian legionnaires buying half-naked, dark-skinned females in slave markets and sending them to their pals back home, as parcels.

  But the feminine charms of Ethiopia had been evoked from the very beginning of the colonial campaign in a nostalgic caravan-style song: They’re off / the caravans of Tigrai / toward a star that by and by / will shine and glimmer with love.

  And I, caught in this vortex of optimism, what had I thought? My elementary-school notebooks held the answer. It was enough to look at their covers, which immediately invited thoughts of daring and triumph. Except for a few that contained thick, white paper (they must have been more expensive) and bore on their covers the portraits of Great Men (I must have done some woolgathering around the name and the enigmatic, smiling face of a gentleman called Shakespeare-which I no doubt pronounced as it was spelled, with four syllables-seeing that I had gone over all the letters in pen, as if to interrogate or memorize them), the notebooks boasted images of Il Duce on horseback, of heroic combatants in black shirts lobbing hand grenades at the enemy, of slender PT boats sinking enormous battleships, of couriers with a sublime sense of sacrifice, who though their hands have been mangled by a grenade run on beneath the crackle of enemy machine guns, carrying their messages between their teeth.

  Our headmaster (why headmaster and not headmistress? I do not know, but I could hear myself saying "Mr. Headmaster") had dictated to us the key passages from Mussolini’s historic address on the day he declared war, June 10, 1940, inserting, following the newspaper accounts, the reactions of the oceanic audience listening to him in Piazza Venezia:

  Combatants on land, at sea, and in the air! Blackshirts of the revolution and of the legions! Men and women of Italy, of the Empire and of the kingdom of Albania! Listen! An hour signaled by destiny is striking in the skies of our fatherland. The hour of irrevocable decisions. The declaration of war has already been delivered (cheering, deafening cries of "War! War!") to the ambassadors of Great Britain and of France. We are going to battle against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West, who at every turn have hindered the advance and often threatened the very existence of the Italian people…

  According to the laws of Fascist morality, when one has a friend one marches with him wholeheartedly. (Shouts of "Duce! Duce! Duce!") This is what we have done and will do with Germany, with her people, with her marvelous armed forces. On the eve of this event of historic import, we turn our thoughts to his Majesty the Emperor King (the multitudes erupt in great cheers at the mention of the House of Savoy), who, as always, has understood the spirit of the fatherland. And we salute the Führer, the head of allied Greater Germany. (The crowd cheers at length at the mention of Hitler.) Italy, proletarian and Fascist, is on her feet for the third time, strong, proud, and united as never before. (The multitude cries out in a single voice: "Yes!") The watchword is one word only, categorical and binding for all. It has already taken wing, stirring hearts from the Alps to the Indian Ocean: Victory! And we will win! (The crowd erupts in deafening cheers.)

  It was in those months that the radio must have begun playing "Victory," echoing the word of the Chief:

  Steeled by a thousand passions, the voice of our nation rang clear! "Centuries, Cohorts, and Legions, attention, the hour is here!" March onward, young men!

  Who holds us back

  or blocks our track,

  we’ll knock them aside!

  Slaves never again!

  Our hands won’t be tied

  like prisoners by our own sea!

  Victory, victory, victory!

  We will triumph in the air, on land, at sea!

  The highest powers say

  it’s the watchword of the day:

  Victory, victory, victory!

  At any cost: nothing will stand in our way!

  Our hearts are eager to obey

  even to our last breath.

  And our voices swear today:

  Victory or death!

  How might I have experienced the beginning of a war? As a great adventure, undertaken at the side of my German comrade. His name was Richard, as the radio informed me in 1941: Comrade Richard, welcome … I learned how I, in those glorious years, might have imagined my comrade Richard (the song’s rhythm obliged us to pronounce that name like the French Richard, rather than the German Richard) from a postcard, on which he appeared alongside an Italian comrade, both in profile, both masculine and decisive, their gaze fixed on the finish line of victory.

  But my radio, after "Comrade Richard," was already playing (by this point I was convinced it was a live broadcast) a different song. This one was in German, a sad dirge, almost a funeral march that seemed to me to keep time with some imperceptible rhythm in my gut, sung by a woman whose voice was deep and hoarse, mournful and sinful: Vo r d e r Kaserne / Vor dem großen Tor / Stand eine Laterne / Und steht sie noch davor…

  My grandfather had owned the record, but in those days I would not have understood the German.

  And indeed I listened next to the Italian version, which was more a paraphrase or an adaptation than a translation:

  Every evening

  beneath the streetlamp’s glow

  not far from the garrison

  I waited for you to show.

  I’ll be there this evening too,

  forgetting all the world with you,

  with you, Lili Marleen,

  with you, Lili Marleen.

  When I must walk through the muck and mire
beneath my heavy pack I feel unsure and tired.

  Where will I go? What will I do? Then I smile and think of you, of you, Lili Marleen, of you, Lili Marleen.

  Though the Italian lyrics fail to say so, in the German the streetlamp emerges from the fog: Wenn sich die späten Nebel drehn, when the late fog swirls. But in any case, in those days I would not have understood that the sad voice in the fog beneath that streetlamp (my concern then was probably how a streetlamp could have been lit during a blackout) belonged to the mysterious pitana, "the woman who sells by herself." That song must be why, years later, I took note of this passage from Corazzini’s poem "The Streetlamp": Murky and scant in the lonely thoroughfare, / in front of the bordello doors, it dims, / and the good smoke that from the censer swims / might be this fog that whitens out the air.

  "Lili Marleen" came out not too long after the giddy "Comrade Richard." Either we were generally more optimistic than the Germans, or in the interim something had happened, our poor comrade had grown sad and, tired of walking through muck, longed to go back to his streetlamp. But I was coming to realize that the same series of propagandistic songs could explain how we had gone from a dream of victory to one of the welcoming bosom of a whore as hopeless as her clients.

  After our initial enthusiasm, we grew accustomed not only to blackouts and, I imagine, to bombings, but also to hunger. Why else would it have been necessary to encourage the little Balilla Boy, in 1941, to cultivate a war garden on his apartment balcony, if not so that he could squeeze a few vegetables from the most paltry of spaces? And why has the boy received no news from his father at the front?

  Dear Papà, my hand is shaking some, but you will understand what I am saying. It’s been so many days since you left home

  and yet you haven’t told me where you’re staying.

  As for the tears that trickle down my cheek,

  you can be sure they’re only tears of pride.

  I still can see you smile and hear you speak,

  and your Balilla waits for you, arms wide.

  I’m helping in the war, I’m fighting, too,

  with discipline, with honor, and with faith.

  I want this land of mine to bear good fruit,

  so I tend my little garden every day

  (my own war garden!) and ask God each night

  to watch you, to make sure my dad’s all right.

  Carrots for victory. By contrast, in one of my notebooks I found a place where the headmaster had made us take note of the fact that our English enemies were a five-meal people. I must have thought to myself that I had five meals, too: coffee with bread and marmalade, a snack at ten at school, lunch, an afternoon snack, then dinner. But perhaps other children were not as fortunate, and a people who ate five meals a day could not but stir resentment among those who had to grow tomatoes on their balcony.

  But then why were the English so skinny? And why did one of my grandfather’s postcards feature (above the word Hush!) a crafty Englishman trying to overhear military secrets that some loose-lipped Italian comrade might let slip in some bar? How was such a thing possible if the entire population had rushed as one to take up arms? Were there Italians who spied? Had the subversives not been defeated, as the stories in my reader explained, by Il Duce with his march on Rome?

  Various pages of my notebooks mentioned the now imminent victory. But as I was reading, a beautiful song dropped onto the turntable. It told the story of the last stand of Giarabub, one of our desert strongholds, where the exploits of our besieged soldiers, who finally succumbed to hunger and lack of munitions, attained epic dimensions. In Milan some weeks earlier, I had seen on television a

  color movie about the last stand of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie at the Alamo. Nothing is more exhilarating than the topos of the besieged fort. I imagine I once sang that sad elegy with the emotion of a boy watching a Western today.

  I sang that England’s final stand had begun at Giarabub, but the song must have reminded me of Maramao, Why Did You Die, because it was the celebration of a defeat-my grandfather’s newspapers told me more: the Giarabub oasis in Cyrenaica had fallen, despite heroic resistance, in March of 1941. Using a defeat to electrify a population seemed to me a rather desperate measure.

  And this other song, from the same year, that promised victory? "Blue Skies Are on the Way!" promised blue skies by April-by which time we were to lose Addis Ababa. In any case, people say "blue skies are on the way" when the weather is bad and they hope it will change. Why were blue skies supposed to be coming (in April)? A sign that during the winter, when the song was first sung, people had been looking forward to a reversal of fortune.

  All the heroic propaganda we were raised on alluded to some frustration. What did the refrain "We will return" mean, if not that we looked forward to, hoped for, counted on a return to the place where we had been defeated?

  And when did "The M Battalions" anthem come out?

  Battalions of Il Duce, battalions of death created in life’s name, in the springtime begins the game, the continents will flame and flower! We’ll win with Mussolini’s Lions, made strong by his courageous power.

  These battalions of death they are life battalions, too, there is no love without hate, so the game begins anew.

  The M we wear is red like fate, our tassels black, and as for death we’ve faced it with grenades in hand and a flower between our teeth.

  According to my grandfather’s dates, it must have come out in ’43, and once again, two years after Giarabub, springtime was invoked (we signed the armistice in September of ’43). Leaving aside the image, which must have fascinated me, of greeting death with grenades in hand and a flower between our teeth, why did the game have to begin again in springtime, why did it have to start over? Had it been stopped? And yet they had us singing it, in a spirit of incorruptible faith in final victory.

  The only optimistic anthem that the radio offered me was the "Song of the Submariners": to creep through the ocean deep, laughing in the face of Lady Death and Fate… But those words reminded me of others, and I went looking for a song called "Young Ladies, Keep Your Eyes Off Sailor Boys."

  They would not have had me sing this at school. Apparently it was played on the radio. The radio, then, played both the submariner’s song and the warning to young ladies. Two worlds.

  The other songs, too, made it seem as if life were running on two different tracks: on one, the war bulletins; on the other, the endless lessons in optimism and gaiety that our orchestras offered in such abundance. Was war breaking out in Spain, with Italians dying on both sides, while our Chief passionately exhorted us to prepare for a larger, bloodier conflict? Luciana Dolliver sang (such an exquisite flame) don’t forget my words, my darling one, you don’t know what love is, the Barzizza Orchestra played oh baby how I love you, I’ve been dreaming of you, you slept, I stood above you, you smiled then in your sleep, and everyone was repeating Fiorin, Fiorello, l’amore è bello when you’re by my side. Was the regime celebrating beautiful country girls and productive mothers by imposing

  a bachelor tax? The radio gave notice that jealousy had gone out of fashion, that it had become uncouth.

  Was war breaking out, and did we have to darken our windows and stay glued to the radio? Alberto Rabagliati whispered that we should turn the volume way down low to hear his heart beat through the radio. Had our campaign to "break the back of Greece" got off to a bad start, and had our troops begun dying in the mud? No worries, one does not make love when rain is falling.

  Did Pippo really not know? How many souls did the regime have? The battle of El Alamein was raging beneath the African sun, and the radio was intoning that’s how I want to live, sun on my face, singing happily, full of bliss. We were going to war against the United States and our papers were celebrating the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the airwaves were bringing us beneath Hawaiian skies you’ll watch the full moon rise and dream of paradise. (But perhaps the listening audience was not aware that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii o
r that Hawaii was a U.S. territory.) Field Marshal Paulus was surrendering in Stalingrad amid stacks of bodies from both sides, and we were hearing I have a pebble in my shoe, and oh it’s really killing me.

  Allied troops were landing in Sicily, and the radio (in the voice of Alida Valli!) was reminding us that love is not that way, love won’t turn to gray the way the gold fades in a woman’s hair. Rome was experiencing its first air raids, and Jone Caciagli was twittering night and day, hand in hand, you and I away from everyone, till the rising of tomorrow’s sun.

  The allies were landing at Anzio and the radio could not get enough of "Bésame, Bésame Mucho"; the Fosse Ardeatine massacre took place, and the radio kept our spirits high with "Baldy" and "Where Is Zazà Now"; Milan was being tortured with bombardments, and Radio Milan was broadcasting "The Dandy-Girl of the Biffi Scala"…

  And what about me, how did I experience this schizophrenic Italy? Did I believe in victory, did I love Il Duce, did I want to die for him? Did I believe in the Chief’s historic phrases, which the headmaster dictated to us: It’s the plow that makes the furrow but it’s the sword that defends it; We will not back down; If I advance, follow, if I retreat, kill me?

  In a notebook from fifth grade, 1942, Year XX of the Fascist Era, I found one of my in-class compositions:

  Topic: "O children, you must remain for the rest of your lives the guardians of the new heroic civilization that Italy is creating." (Mussolini)

  Treatment: Here along the dusty road a column of young boys advances.

  They are the Balilla Boys, proud and robust beneath the mild sun of early spring, marching with discipline, obeying the terse commands imparted by their officers; it is those boys who at twenty years of age will set aside their pens in order to take up muskets to defend Italy against its insidious enemies. Those Balilla Boys who can be seen marching through the streets on Saturdays and hunching over their school desks studying on other days, will at the proper age become faithful and incorruptible guardians of Italy and its civilization.