Very quickly, a line was drawn between flight and everything else. I did what I could not to lose sight of everything else, but my self-image as a thing and as bystander sat awkwardly with the new consciousness of being a pilot which occupied my body like a pregnancy. I awaited the moment when it would become a straightforward aspect of my life, but that moment was slow to arrive, in part because I lived day and night in the airfield, an old airfield built in the Fascist style, and when I was not flying I was hobnobbing with the engineers or the people in the tower, sharing the maintenance work and helping out with the communications, and if there was a spare part to be picked up, a propeller to be taken somewhere or a radio to be repaired, I would climb aboard with the others and take off for Bolzano or Forlì. There were many advantages for me in this, because on one point there could be no doubt, everything was worthwhile, flight was a purely intellectual and cultural matter, the more you knew the greater were your chances of living, the more you knew, the better you would be at flying, and who could say in what sky, in what bank of clouds or in what emergency it would be of advantage to know, or to be able to pluck from your mind, how the camber of a wing was constructed, where the engine was positioned against the deckhead, where the rods ran which carried air to the navigation instruments, transforming that air, which already provided thrust and support, into meaning and orientation. But I must be more sincere: precisely because I had been a thing, I possessed a wholly natural insight into how things were made. I had an instinctive knowledge of the names of the parts, of how the parts were connected to the whole – to the entire whole – and although I had no idea where I had acquired this knowledge and vocation, I have always been ashamed of it, and continue to live with a deep sense of guilt and of waste on its account. Certainly, as Bruno would have agreed, instinct is fundamental, and there is no way it can be cultivated except through flying and more flying, if not in the skies then by “hangar flight,” that is, “flight talk” in the sheds and yards, and immersion in everything which has anything to do with flight. Flight, and here was another piece of knowledge acquired early, was totally unnatural, indeed for us it is the most unnatural thing of all, while fear of it is a healthy, sane emotion. Flight had revealed its unnaturalness at the very moment when it ceased being flight of the mind to become an experience of the body; it was undeniable that even shamanistic or mystic flight contained a physical element, even if it was not altogether easy to probe its nature, at least not for me, obliged as I was, by my own inadequacy, to fly with a metal extension, piloting what I had once been. I had to express myself in terms of drive, and found it oddly pleasing that the word “drive” could refer either to the control of the craft or to an attribute of character. To make flight “natural” it had been necessary to formalise it as far as possible, to draw up a complicated grammar of rules and exceptions, a body of procedures and precedents, corrected and emended over the decades in the light of errors and catastrophes, because errors in this grammar were paid cash, and at top prices. Every technical jargon, on its first appearance, distances itself from everyday language and received knowledge to construct its own lexicon of new words, mental images and autonomous spatial representations, and in so doing extends the limits of our knowledge and general language, and occasionally alters, at least in part, our style of living and dying. However, little by little, even a jargon used exclusively in one trade begins to give something back to vocabulary and common sense, probably at the moment of its maturity, or widest diffusion, or else at the beginning of its decline. It is as though it were freeing something which had been in custody inside it, hidden by its operation, perhaps ideas of behaviour or orientation, emotions, or journeys of the mind or of perception. It is like a slow return to the mother tongue. It was this something which, in the act of breaking with my aeroplane-nature, I began to call “the pilot’s lore”.
As a boy, I numbered among my possessions a Guide des voyages aériens Paris-Londres, another of those mysterious objects which came into my hands God knows how, certainly not from my parents who were never in any condition to contemplate air travel; the pamphlet was in any case published in the Twenties when they would still have been children. It was a straightforward guide, at best a ‘Guide officiel,” as it stated on the cover, sold to the passengers on the first airline to make the crossing of the English Channel. For years I had been able to do no more than flick through the pages, spending hours over the photographs of cities, countryside and landscapes without understanding that those aerial views with captions like – “Un virage sur Paris!” or “La Plage du Crotoy” or “La Comté de Kent” – were not merely illustrations to a text I could not read, but were, on the contrary, the very subject of the guide. The aim of the guide was to teach people how to see, and through seeing, how to follow the geography along the route, from the initial turn over Paris after take-off at Ecouen, to the Lake of Enghien, the beach of Crotoy, the port of Boulogne, the Channel, then on to Ashford, Maidstone and finally the airport of London-Croydon. Pictures, in the days of my aeroplane-childhood, were not particularly frequent, so a book with pictures had to last; for me, the Guide, abandoned occasionally for brief periods, lasted me beyond my adolescence, when I was finally able to understand the text, whose opening passage ran: “The passenger who goes up in an aeroplane for the first time will receive one surprise after another. His vision of the world will be revolutionised. Very quickly vertical vision will take over from the horizontal vision to which he has been accustomed all his life. The air traveller is at times completely lost in the air. The eye requires to be completely re-educated, but this task can be accomplished in a very brief time. Very soon, once you are able to put a name to the towns, to recognise squares and buildings or walk above cities, the monotonous mosaic of the fields will acquire a vivid life of its own. Vertical vision is a novelty because it reduces everything – mountains, monuments and even the Eiffel Tower – to a surface. But this vision is rare and fleeting. More commonly, it is oblique vision which comes as a shock to the eye. In this case, houses, monuments and raised points present themselves to you under a cubic appearance. But you will quickly adjust to oblique vision, which is, in all truth, more complete than vision of the surfaces.”
As a pilot, I had the opportunity to test the truth of these lines, which for years I had commented on in silence, as though they were a psalm. The vision of any airman is not vision from above, vertical vision “est rare et fugitive,” in fact, for a pilot, vertical vision does not exist, to look down vertically below me, I would have needed a trap door or a porthole directly beneath my feet, like the bomb-aimer who sat in the belly of the plane precisely because he needed to correct vertical vision. Besides, the only way I had of flying vertically over any landmark on the ground was to fly round it in a circle, choosing that point as the centre of constant rotation, and keeping it continually within my sight range. A pilot’s real vision was, as the Guide had stated at the outset, a “vision oblique,” not a vision from overhead: “La vision à la verticale est rare et fugitive. Le plus souvent, c’est la vision oblique qui vous surprend. Alors les maisons, les monuments, les reliefs se présentent sous l’aspect cubique.” I have no way of saying how much that “cubique” owed to the painting styles in vogue this century, or how much it had influenced them. I was content with its metaphorical meaning and overall implication; it would have been sad if the price of flight were a condemnation to the “vision of things from above,” which is the property of the Divinity, and which would have induced in each of us a feeling not only of unworthiness, but also of downright embarrassment and dejection.
This was, however, a problem I became aware of as a pilot, but which previously, as a child-aeroplane, had not interested me in the slightest. The pilot’s vision was a relationship with the earth and a relationship of spatial depth, with the link maintained primarily by an optic thread, the visual pencil of the perspective in which your eye was only one of the vertices, determined by all the others. I learned to take my posi
tion from that vision and correct the trim. The extent to which that visual link was accurate and essential to piloting was something I tested every day in the final approach to landing. The illuminated rods at the sides of the runway changed colour depending on the point from which they were observed; if they appeared white, you were flying above the ideal glide path, if all red you were too low, and if you were at the correct level you saw the furthest off as red and those nearest to hand as white. From a distance, a genuine shining path presented itself to the eye; if I succeeded in coming in along that chromatic change, keeping the distant rods red and the nearer ones white, I would touch down at the correct contact point. All this in the best of circumstances.
Since the days I had ceased rubbing my cheek in puddles in face-to-ground landings, I had never again entered into such a necessary relationship with the earth. In spite of that, I began to wonder what I had gained and what I had lost in the passage from aeroplane to pilot. I had undoubtedly lost in terms of naturalness and joy; in the days of my thing-like nature as piece of metal, I used to close my eyes and roll in ditches, rattling like a tin can without a care in the world, whereas now, as a pilot, much more thought was needed. In order to execute a half-roll in the skies, I had to calculate speed and height, and while rotating head down I had to keep my eyes on the instrument panel, and that loop which might from a distance seem to display grace and elegance required control, forethought and preparation, not to mention discussions after landing to make out why it had not worked for me. Where I had, perhaps, gained was in my relationship with everything else, or that at least was my hope. But probably I had come too late, and my metamorphosis had occurred in an age I would like to term the “twilight of the pilot.” Aeroplanes, even ones which I piloted, were filled with electronic and automatic devices; it was clear to everyone that in the vast earth-air-earth system, the pilot, which was what I was girding myself to become, was to be considered the weak point, the point of breakdown. So I thought that I might perhaps have gained some sense of the complexity of the “pilot’s lore,” and so a more mature grasp of the variety of everything else, that left one lacerated with its tangle of plots, its nice choices, its polarities.
In flying, there were things to which I felt attracted by instinct, and many others – meteorology and orientation, mechanics and the aeroplane – with which I was familiar through having been part of them; there was also geography which I loved as an art of location, and in that vision, be it oblique, cubic or whatever, space became representation. It became possible to experience the continuity which linked the plain to the mountains, the rivers to their dissolution in the deltas, the cities to their attrition in the suburbs, and even the history of human settlement presented itself as an immediate perception of necessity and decay; in flight, geography and history were united in the simultaneous portrayal of the perfect chaos to which we belong.
But there was yet more, even if I only came to understand it much later; flight, unnatural and artificial as it may be, had been the final landfall, the last refuge wherein by instinct or routine one could travel through the infinite multiplicity of variables while maintaining trim, flight was an extreme dimension of probability, as narrow as the tiny margin of lateral or vertical tilt permitted to an aeroplane if it is to remain airborne. It had been possible to plough or cultivate this margin like a strip of land in the desert, the “pilot’s lore” took this as its subject, its abiding subject, because this was also the subject of everything else. Except that the nature of everything else was changing, it was no longer sufficient to locate balanced wisdom at the extremes; the active part of government, of drive seemed no longer, or not exclusively, taken up with infinite, complex, unpredictable variables but with an eruption of afflictions as open as wounds or sneering mouths. The “pilot’s lore” had a pliability, a suppleness and a complexity which derived from the dimensions involved, from the natural element on which it worked, the omnipresent, ever elusive air with its terrifying laws. It demanded foresight and yet, at the same time, of its essence, of the nature of navigation, it needed total adaptability to circumstances; but in each of these contexts, whether dealing with clouds, route or some symptom of breakdown, in all this liquidity and multiplicity there was for each question one point around which that lore had to harden or solidify in an instant decision, one gesture which excluded all others. In the world of everything else, this moment was becoming obsolete and I, in that world, had transformed myself from aeroplane to pilot precisely at the time of the twilight of the pilot, when not even the best of men could succeed in both keeping open the wounds and patching up the pain.
FOUR
Pauci Sed Semper Immites
AT DUSK, I used to sit at one of the tables in the old terrazza bar, scarcely a terrazza at all, more a slightly raised flooring of cracked tiles with a railing round the side; from there the whole deserted runway could be seen, the green of the grass clashing so stridently with the sea that only the hour and the season made the effect plausible. I killed time listening to the barmaid complain about her son who spent all his time in the hangars with the mechanics instead of giving her a hand, and in reply I sang the praises of the same mechanics and put up a stout defence of the highly educational value of their company. She paid no heed to me as she finished winding up the faded awning, locked the glass-panelled door from inside and went on her way in the company of those few who were still hanging about after the completion of the schedules, which was when the airfield closed down. Having spent the day flying, I stayed on, with a beer and a manual; in the last flickering light, in the peace which preserved the memory of the flights, I despaired over the mistakes I had committed and over all the things that were still beyond me. That evening my despair was related to the double three sixty, a landing procedure for planes with engine trouble, consisting of a twin-spin, spiral descent with engines switched off, executed while losing so many feet in the first spin and the same number in the second, all the while keeping the aeroplane, which was no longer engine-driven, at the speed of maximum efficiency, the speed at which it would travel furthest, and at the same time mentally dividing the runway into three segments, deciding in a split second where to touch down with the wheels and then touching down at exactly that point. I would never get the hang of it.
“Do you really think it’s that hard?” asked the elderly gentleman, sitting down at my table, “you should have seen what they made us do, believe me, nothing ever changes, the figures are still the same, this three and sixty of yours was attempted by Lindbergh in training at Brooks Field, San Antonio, that must have been, let me see, 1923 or ’4, the figures are like dance steps, looping, tonneau – one, two, three, pas de deux, pas glissé, pas floré – always the same, by the way are you a dancer? listen, it’s important to be able to dance, I was pretty good at the Cuban Eights, which is not all that difficult, granted, but what a dance step to try in the skies. The same’s true of the wing loop, which I used to do with a plane not exactly built for aerobatics. You know the one I’m talking about, the old Seventy-nine, the most famous of all Italian three-engined warplanes, a great hulking, ten-thousand-kilo beast.”
I had not noticed the elderly gentleman before the bar shut, but now as the sun set slowly behind the row of trees, we were the only two left in the little airfield. The man fiddled with an eye-catching tie-pin which, together with the handkerchief peeping out of the top pocket of his woollen summer jacket, gave him an air of ironic composure. He started up again: “You know what I used to do? I would set off flying so low as to be almost skimming the ground, ripping along at four hundred kilometres an hour, pull back, heavily at first then gradually releasing the control column, make the plane trace a parabola in the sky, take it right up to the top of the ascent, the point where it stopped climbing, and that’s where you had to manoeuvre, not a second too soon nor a second too late if you wanted a perfect circle, just at the moment when you felt yourself hanging like a salami from the rafters and your mouth had gone bone dry
and you were staring at an anemometer which was touching zero and the engines were spluttering because they couldn’t climb any higher, then I’d grab the handle on the left and slam down the pedal on the same side and the Seventy-nine would turn on its left wing and go careering in a nose-dive towards the earth. At that point, it was time to cut out the other two engines, the speed climbed madly, I jammed on the trim crank to reverse the descent and pulled at the control column, by God you should have seen me pull! With a long circular, descending arc, the plane found level flight, skimmed over the eucalyptus trees and came down low and smooth on the fields. The first time I tried it, I came near to killing myself, but I wanted to celebrate ‘my’ Seventy-nine. ‘Your plane is here, Martino,’ said my CO. I left the crew behind, except for my flight engineer, and the two of us went up together, but when we were in the middle of that loop, our hearts were in our mouths, I can tell you, it was a beautiful spring morning in ’42, I’ll never forget the date, I was twenty-three and already a flight-lieutenant. A torpedo-bomber, that was what they called the plane and that was its speciality, so the plane and the airman were given the same name; I was a torpedo-bomber. The Seventy-nine, the aircraft, a right jewel, a wonderful three-engined Savoia Marchetti, great for taking anything the anti-aircraft guns could throw at her, a mean-looking machine, one of those that make you think of corsairs, and we were a bit like pirates ourselves, forced to fight a hit-and-run war by the inequality of resources, by the circumstances and by those thick-skulled idiots who, in the best Italian tradition, sent us into that war in the Mediterranean and left us to get by on our wits, with no back-up either. A right jewel, I was saying, a wonderful three-engined job, spotted like some Mediterranean version of a leopard, a hump just above the cockpit for the machine-gunner, one gun facing forward and the other facing the tail, two tubes peering out of that hump, or ‘devil’s hunchback’ as somebody nicknamed it, the rudder was emblazoned with the cross of Savoy and I’ve lost count of the number of times we huddled in a rubber dinghy after ditching in the sea, watching that cross and the three Fascist symbols in the disks on the upper part of the wings go down last. The whole lot would finally sink, Savoy cross, Fascist insignia and all, but it would remain afloat for hours before this happened. A magnificent machine, a right jewel, there’s no other word for it, it gave you goose pimples to pilot her, apart from the machine-guns on the look-out in the turret, there was another in the fuselage to fire through the side doors, but the masterpiece, the real warhead, was the thousand-kilo torpedo neatly hidden underneath the belly of the plane. To get down to wave level, to release and place the torpedo in the side of a cruiser was a complicated exercise of instinctive mathematics. You had to come down low on the sea, not to avoid the radar because we didn’t even know the British had such a thing, but to take advantage of the curve of the earth and to make ourselves visible only at the very last moment, six people to each plane, two pilots, one gunner, one radio operator, one photographer – the photos were very important and if you want I’ll tell you why – and one engineer. The life expectancy of each torpedo-bomber – aircraft and man – was three missions, maybe four, but if you think about the fire power of the battleships, the odds were stacked against you making it back from a fifth mission. That didn’t stop us all being proud of being torpedo-bombers, we would have been glad to be torpedo-bombers for the whole of our lives, but we were all young and innocent. We were still in our twenties, every one of us, as good a group as you would find anywhere, believe me, all united by fear and worries of various kinds, but a great group. The squadron-leader was twenty-six, a hero he was; when it seemed he was dead, we took his name and called ourselves the Buscaglia Group, the most amazing aero-aquatic circus ever seen in the Mediterranean war.”
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