Valsesia
OCTOBER 1944
He feels the pain before opening his eyes; he knows he must escape, but he’s almost intoxicated by the pain running through his entire body: his right side is paralyzed; he knows he should open his eyes and locate the wound, try to treat it if possible, but thinking about the origin of the pain terrifies him, so he remains still, with his face against the ground, which he starts to perceive as damp; he’s not sure if it’s the ground’s own dampness or something else, nor does he know the height from which he’s fallen. He continues to wallow in the pain, hearing the last orders given in German and, from a distance, a few orders in Italian; when he finally opens his eyes, he sees only darkness around him and he tells himself he must have lost consciousness for just a few moments; but then he sees the sky through the leaves of the bushes and branches he pulled down on his fall, which are partially covering him, and he realizes the sun has already started to come up.
* * *
—
Someone descends along one of the walls of the ravine toward him; their impatient panting, their muttered curses with each misstep, dragging with them dust, rocks, bits of bush and branch, make him think the task is difficult and unrewarding; the footsteps stop several meters above his head, and then he hears a shout he doesn’t understand from the mouth of the ravine and, from even closer, above his head, another voice responds “Tot” and adds in a whisper: “Bald.” The first word, the man knows full well, means “dead”; the second, “soon.” The footsteps head up the ravine with difficulty; when he opens his eyes again, minutes or perhaps hours later, the man discovers that it is already day and that he is alone. Intoxicated by the pain, which feels like the equivalent of some very strong liquor he’d never tried before because of his youth and obliviousness, or maybe just luck, he finally overcomes his resistance and runs his eyes over his body, which he still doesn’t dare to move: the only thing he sees is his right leg twisted at a grotesque angle; the pant leg is tattered and stained with blood; at the height of his tibia something sticks out that looks like, and is, a bit of bone: when he sees it, he loses consciousness again.
* * *
—
Before opening his eyes he feels the pain, but that pain is already part of a story and, as such, has meaning; in the distance he hears shots, a brief succession that makes him realize that the Germans are executing the partisans they’ve captured. He’s surprised they’re doing it there, in the forest; usually they shoot them in the main squares of the cities and towns, to dissuade the population and terrorize them. He doesn’t hear screaming, but does hear a braying. It could be La Petacci, one of the mules the group used to transport weapons and supplies, enjoying, finally, the freedom she must have always longed for, especially during the forced marches through the mountains and the forest: if he could call her without attracting the attention of the Germans who are still around, he could get the mule to carry him; but then he’d have to think of where to go, and he can’t. When he opens his eyes, even before glancing again at his broken leg, he chooses one of the branches around him that he can use to make a splint and some sort of crutch to use if he can’t find his rifle. In order to do so, he relies on knowledge that predates the war and his entrance into what, as you’re fully aware, the fascists call “the rebel delinquency”: before all that, and after, though he doesn’t know it and can’t even imagine it yet, he is, and will be, a carpenter.
* * *
—
As he stands up, the pain is unbearable, and he lies back down, as he once saw a newborn foal do.
* * *
—
He accepts the fact that he won’t be able to scale the walls of the ravine; in the last few hours his right leg has swollen up despite the tourniquet he made and, although it’s no longer bleeding, he can’t put any weight on it: the pain is so intense that it’s giving him visions, flashes of situations and conversations that took place before the war, and before he joined it, a year all in all, not much but also not something to be written off easily. The visions make him think for a moment that he’s somewhere else, in some other moment. Maybe he’s starting to run a fever, but the decision he makes isn’t a product of that: he decides to follow the ravine. He can’t know where it will take him except in general: it will lead him downward, toward the valley, where there’ll be doctors and hospitals, but also the German authorities and their Italian allies, and he can only expect he’ll fall into the hands of one or the other. In his moments of lucidity his preferences are obvious; in other moments, his desire to be somewhere else is all he needs to continue on, sometimes dragging himself and other times, less and less as the hours pass, on foot, with his weight on his left leg, using his rifle as a crutch.
* * *
—
Sometimes he wakes himself up, believing he’s answering a question he’s been posed, by mumbling out a reply to a nonexistent listener.
* * *
—
At midday he stretches out under an apple tree growing in a dry riverbed. Who could have betrayed them, he wonders, how did the Germans find them, in these convoluted mountains where they themselves—who know them as few do—still occasionally get lost? Who could have betrayed them just when they thought they’d eliminated the mole and moved to a place he couldn’t know about, higher up in the mountains; how did it all start for him?
* * *
—
The first action consisted of robbing a carabinieri station to get weapons and ammunition before heading into the mountains; they used a small pistol they bought off a Jew trying to cross into Switzerland with his family in the autumn of 1943; everything happened so quickly that he couldn’t remember anything about the incident, except the fear in the faces of the carabinieri and the fear he felt himself, which would have been greater, in fact boundless, and would have completely impeded his ability to carry out the action if he had known—as he would later discover during target practice at an abandoned windmill at the foot of a small stream, the Torrente Pellice—that the lever on the bolt that sends pressure from the trigger to the hammer was broken, so the gun didn’t work, it was useless.
* * *
—
Maybe it had always been broken, and had circulated among the members of the family as a private joke until the joke aspect was lost and all that was left was the delivery of the object as an expression of good wishes and the desire to protect; or the bolt’s lever broke over time with use, though it looked like the gun had hardly been used; or the Jew disabled it as a precautionary measure, to keep from being killed or robbed with the gun after selling it; or the lever came loose some other way: anything is possible.
* * *
—
In addition to the pain, his other most pressing problem is thirst, which has glued his tongue to his palate, and heat; and also birds, of which there are many in that part of the forest, and which give off sounds that seem to him warnings or censure.
* * *
—
The laughter of the partisans during that target practice was hysterical, as was his own; ever since then he carried the weapon with him as some sort of amulet, but he no longer has it: he must have lost it in the fall down the ravine or before that as he fled, when he heard the first shouts.
* * *
—
He remembers the laughter and the jokes and the weapon that the political leader of his brigade then put in his hands, a rifle from World War I that someone took with them when they deserted the army. Later he had a 9-caliber Beretta and after that a Mauser, but the morning of the attack he could only grab a rifle that someone had left as they ran off.
* * *
—
He chews on some gentian root as he’s seen his comrades do to bring down a fever; later he brings a fistful of bilberries to his mouth, but they aren’t ripe and are unbearably bitter; they do calm his thirst for a f
ew hours, though.
* * *
—
He sees the town first; its lights bounce off the cloud cover that’s formed over the valley at dusk; it could be Borgosesia, Quarona, or Varallo, he doesn’t know; he sees the house somewhat later, to his right and closer than the town: a whitewashed brick construction, a wooden shed beside it, weeds invading everything, there’s also a patch of land that was part of a vegetable garden; it all looks abandoned; he takes a step toward it, and then he feels a push, or he slips and falls again, onto rocks and pebbles and dust and branches that he can’t count or distinguish from each other, down to the foot of the ravine; and there, finally, he once again loses consciousness.
* * *
—
Before opening his eyes he smells a deep mustiness that surprises him: he opens, or thinks he opens, his eyes quickly only to discover that he is in a dark, possibly underground room; but when his eyes get used to the darkness, he sees a thread of light slipping beneath the door and others between the wall’s planks, which makes him realize he isn’t underground. He is lying on a wool blanket, in one corner of the room; to his right he finds only a bare wall, to his left there is a narrow but unusually long wooden table: he cannot determine whether there is anything on it, and soon loses interest in trying. Someone has taken off his shoes and cut off his right pant leg at knee length. He sees a clean bandage and a splint and thinks that someone must have set his bone while he was unconscious; for a moment he holds his breath, wondering if the pain will return, but he doesn’t feel much: the intoxication of the pain has already passed. The man tells himself that, given the angle of the light coming through the wooden planks of one wall, it must be approaching evening, but he can’t know what day it is and how much time has passed since his fall in the ravine during the attack; he should figure that out, he thinks: figure out who dressed his wound and, eventually, determine if it’s someone trustworthy who can direct him back to the mountains and his group of partisans. Perhaps the group no longer exists, he tells himself, and he feels fear and hatred run through him, depleting him. Fear and hatred are not the same thing, he tells himself, although he knows that they are. He looks around but doesn’t see his rifle, he knows he needs it or will need it in the immediate future; he tries to stand up, but collapses back onto the blanket: he didn’t put weight on his wounded leg, wasn’t able to because of the chain that someone, perhaps the someone who dressed his injury, was using to hold him there.
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 17