“In the days following, he heeded the advice of Graziani, who took him up with him on training flights and remarked that the two years of inactivity had made him rusty; he recommended that, since the crucial controls of American planes differed considerably from Italian ones, he do a spot of ground practice with a Baltimore, no more than taxying along the runway, and this Buscaglia did with great humility and application. Then one evening when, even though it was still light, the airfield had closed down for the night and the officers were already at dinner, a lieutenant presented himself at the officers’ mess to tell the base commander that Squadron-leader Buscaglia would like him to go and witness his take-off. Since it had been agreed that each pilot prior to solo take-off was required to carry out a stated number of dual-control flights, which were Graziani’s responsibility, the base commander turned to the wing commander, who turned to Graziani, who replied without hesitation that it would be better if the squadron-leader undertook further sessions. The lieutenant was ordered to report this to the squadron-leader, and he went off to do so. In the distance, the rumble of engines being started up could be heard, but no one paid much heed, often the mechanics worked overtime, especially in the long, light evenings of late August. Then there was the unmistakable roar of engines at full throttle. Then a sudden, dreadful silence. Graziani dashed out of the mess, the others after him, the mechanics were already running at full pelt across the vineyards in the direction of a black cloud on the far side of the airfield. The lieutenant said that he had relayed the order to Buscaglia who was already seated in the Baltimore with the engines racing, that he had clambered up onto a wing to tell him not to fly. Buscaglia had thought it over for a few seconds, then said, ‘Pull down the hatch, I’m going to have a go, I’m taking off.’ He had taxied up to the beginning of the runway, opened up the engines, raced down three hundred metres on full power until the wheels lifted slightly off the ground, the plane seemed suspended in mid-air, pitched on its nose, slewed over on one wing, which broke off, causing the petrol to ignite. Buscaglia had had the strength to climb out of the cockpit, he even got free of the enveloping flames, then collapsed to the ground, unconscious. In the infirmary, the medical officer immediately informed Graziani of the seriousness of the situation and later, when Graziani was admitted to the room, Buscaglia looked at him from between his bandages and broke down; he wept, prayed to God, begged to be helped to recover again. He was transferred to the British hospital in Naples, but during the night his condition deteriorated and he died at dawn.”
The elderly gentleman fell silent, swept his hand over the table, the movement causing his elegant tie-pin to sparkle in the reflected moonlight. Neither he nor I would have been able to say precisely how that light had changed, evening had fallen on the airfield with slow, cat-like steps, obscuring little by little the horizon and our faces. “I hope I haven’t bored you with all this chatter,” he said, and I replied “Not in the slightest.” “You see,” he added, “I still fly, I’ll continue flying until the medics tell me to stop and I’m over seventy already, I fly in the same planes as you, but I’m never going to forget that big three-engined, turreted beast with leopard spots. Isn’t it funny, it must be a feeling peculiar to this century, I doubt if anybody experienced it before. In that metal belly, I knew terror, I felt pain in every part of my body, I saw people I loved die, it was my youth, months like years, years like decades, everything so intense, so unreal. I still fly and when the sky has a thick ceiling of cloud, I burst through it and soar away, it’s a different world above the clouds, it’s like squatting in the attic, peering down at your house; the sky above the clouds is a magnetic memory, everything is still imprinted on it, as though on the silver salt paper they use in photographs, and anyway where would be the sense if everything that once existed had just disappeared for good, don’t you think? I can’t bring myself to believe that above the clouds, in the headquarters of all that has occurred at least once, I won’t some day be aware of a shadow drawing up close to me, a paunchy, resolute shadow, a shadow with a duty to perform, and that duty is the iron cylinder sticking out from its underbelly; you can tell they are hard at work in that shadow, you can tell from the machine-gunner in the upper section, back turned to the nose and attention fixed on the tailplane, you can tell from the blinds drawn over the windows in the cockpit. I would turn on the radio and call them, using the number painted on the fuselage, they wouldn’t reply, perhaps on account of the radio silence imposed when on a mission, or perhaps because I have already made it home from my mission while theirs is still underway, just look at how intent, serious and concentrated they all are. I would draw up wing to wing, and it might even seem to me that they have slowed down just to make it easy for me to do so, I would make a sign to the gunner but he, with no show of fear, wouldn’t turn his head, how could he miss me? I would switch on the radio and call them again, using their names this time, and since the blinds prevent me from seeing who is in charge, I would use all the names they might reply to, names which come back to me one by one, and then gently from the silence of my loudspeaker I would hear a crackle, a syllable, a word, but so low, so distant that it would be impossible to make anything out, I would be so pleased to have established contact, so overcome with emotion that I would yell into the microphone – ‘Repeat! Repeat!’ and do you know what would come down the radio waves? Do you have any idea, my dear sir, what would emerge from my on-board radio? It would be a crooning voice, an old Italian swing number, and I’d recognise the voice, I know that voice I would say, of course I do, it’s the singer Di Palma, don’t you hear him . . . what a voice!
. . . I’ve got a date with the moon tonight,
Just out of town when the sun goes down,
I’m glad that she’s no lady
And for sure she’ll not be late.
So forget the film, and forget the show,
And you won’t see me at the bar,
You’re on your own tonight, my love,
And let me tell you why.
’Cause I’ve got a date with the moon tonight,
At nine o’clock in a shady spot
Bee bibbity baw, bee bibbity bow
Ba ba, beebbity bow . . .”
FIVE
Reaching Dewpoint
ONE MORNING, WHILE airborne, you lost your way, as people do in life, without ever being quite aware that they are lost but drifting bit by bit into a zone where their bearings are gone; first the countryside was not what you expected, then the river which ought to have come into view did not, and finally the heat haze which hung over the Po valley crystallised into a more unyielding, impenetrable opaqueness. Any minute now I’ll be out of this, you thought, and the minute passed, then another, one by one the windows of the plane turned frosty white and you came to realize that there was no way out of that hot, daytime mist. It is not the case that people lose their way on the instant, the process will be underway over time, you had, in reality, already got lost earlier, at the last checkpoint, when you called Air Traffic Control confirming your position as the spot where you ought to have been as per flight plan; pure nominalism, the victory of the plan over reality, since you were nowhere near there. At that point, you made a descent to a lower altitude, following closely a railway track, but when the line came to a halt in a little village, you were reduced to flying low over the village station in an effort to make out its name, but the name, glimpsed as you flashed by at speed, was of no great help; wherever you were, you were lost and climbing once more into the haze, you lost your bearings more comprehensively until you found yourself where you are now, which is to say, you have no idea where. The last sure position was Abeam Boa, a nautical point on the map a dozen or so miles to the east of Bologna, on the longitude of various tiny huddles of houses – Budrio, Medicina or San Lazzaro di Savena, who could say?– the one indistinguishable from the other; the village name not being written on the house roofs; no one ever heeded Rodchenko when he proposed that the roof become a heaven-facin
g façade which would offer aviators something more than the monotony of rows of tiles. This occurred in the Thirties, but the roof-façade never caught on after that, roofs have remained uniform, as uniform as the villages which do not carry names on their roofs, and as a result you were lost, and lied about your fix to Air Traffic Control.
Fear is composed of liquids in the act of drying up, you stared at the altimeter, you grabbed at the map, searching wildly for those dark-coloured areas in shades ranging from warm yellow to dark brown, where the mountain peaks are clustered; if you were off course to the northeast, Monte Venda should be there, if to the north, the Lessini mountains and the Pre-Alps should make an appearance, but you would hardly have time to see a cliff face emerge from the whiteness in front of the windscreen. It was the first time you had got lost in a plane and, not having yet acquired expertise in instrument flight, you celebrated the event with a phrase produced spontaneously by the mind, the phrase ran, “I do not want to die,” a phrase which came so naturally that of its own accord your voice spoke it aloud, as though it were the voice of another person reproaching you for exposing him to such a situation. In order to cheat death I must climb, you immediately thought, it is senseless to plough blindly forward. And climb I do, in spirals around the vertical axis of my present position; if I manage to hold perfectly the centre of the rotation, if I do not waver on the first or second loop, I am safe. You read on the map the heights of the most likely peaks, adding another thousand feet for safety, and started to climb towards the five thousand mark. In the opaque darkness of the sky, in the infinity of space, slowly drifting upwards in fibrous mist, you closed yourself inside the safety cylinder of your circling flight. All around, everything prickled with invisible menace, with each circle you reduced the radius to reduce the threat, or that was your hope, but each circle was never-ending. Fog is infertile cloud, so Aristotle held, place no trust in that all-permeating, all-enveloping substance, water of that sort is only humidity, not impregnating rain which sows life in the fields and swells the course of the rivers. Fog is a backdrop, fog lurks; on fields, in the space between earth and sky, fog is sterile, the trusty crony of crime. Unconscious crimes, indifferent to the fog, but crimes nonetheless.
Such were the thoughts in your mind as you kept an eye on the instruments, variometer five-hundred-feet climb-rating, sixty knots for the steep ascent, turn-and-slip indicator with ball centred and needle tilted for two-minute turn. And yet, when you are not flying, you are fond of fog, when a fog descends on the city, you respond first to its scents and changing noise patterns, you feel yourself irresistibly drawn by the night and the mists, like a dog called to heel by its master’s whistle. That apart, what did you know about fog, pilot? – that it is born of a coincidence, a coincidence of dew temperature and air temperature, temperatures which you studiously avoided asking the meteorological office to check before take-off. You could, of course, do so now, you could ask Air Traffic Control Board if they had any information on the mist, on how widespread it was, on what height it reached, but then you would have to clarify other matters with the Board, so you put it off. Board: philosophically, a concept not amenable to definition, but merely to clarification; Board, one and indivisible but distinct from all others; Board, intelligible and loveable in and of itself alone. Even the Air Traffic Control Board could be understood in these terms; in the last analysis it is the disembodied voice grasped in the mist, the unseen voice speaking from earth, the reversal of the higher and lower orders, with us poor mortals wandering lost in the skies and the Immortal at peace on Earth, a pursuing eye in the dark inside the luminous dial of the radar tracers. Eye for eye, Board for Board, there is nothing to be seen here, you caught yourself muttering nervously to yourself; the mind was protecting itself from terror by generating a brand of nonsense which resembled the “white vision,” that gentle flooding of light which those who pass through death but make their return claim to have witnessed at the last moments, the ultimate analgesic with which the mind gives you its final embrace even as it extinguishes itself and prepares to depart.
Outside the windows, the fog seemed to come to life in thick, darting, smoky forms; it took you some time to realize that these were not crags, trees or bodies looming out of the darkness, about to collide with you, but swirls and empty volumes of the humid mass; you leaned over towards the instrument panel, you looked upwards in the futile hope that the light of the sun might dilute that glutinous brightness, but instead, as you climbed, the opaqueness, growing ever darker, turned a gloomier grey. The pitching and rolling of the plane increased, there were sudden updrafts and downdrafts and a yawing from side to side, swinging the aircraft around without allowing it to bank, sending it into a flat roll around an imaginary vertical pivot bored through from the top, as though it were a fish on a skewer. You rammed down your foot the moment you heard the propeller roaring as it bit into the air at a different tempo, you rammed down your foot to regain balance. Had you any idea where you were? Clear of the fog, certainly, but not in the open sky; you had gone directly from fog to cloud without as much as glimpsing a patch of blue, and there you were in the heart of a cloud, a cumulus to judge by the turbulence shaking the plane and by the dark surroundings, as livid grey as a bruise. And just how much did you know then about a cumulonimbus, pilot?– that it held everything inside it, strong rising and falling air currents, rain and hail, the prospect of instant ice; that a cloud of this sort is produced when the air freezes to dewpoint, and the idea of dew as a thermic reference point, the idea that dew was related to events of might and menace so much greater than itself, dew which has always been consolation, relief, comfort . . . well, it was not easy to credit. In summer, you had been able to fly round a storm because you had seen it in good time, some miles off you had made out this congested, cylindrical squall stretching from earth to sky, as humid and opaque as a jelly fish, sometimes so precise and fixed in mass that it is possible to circumnavigate it, flank it with one wing, keeping it to the east, since virtually everything in our skies moves from west to east. But this time you had blundered into cloud without knowing where it came from, and not imagining where that sky might end.
The aircraft was buffeted by gusts of wind from below which raised it onto its side only to let it fall with a dull thud against fresh layers of rising air, as though it were dropping into the furrow of a wave so hollow that the sea itself seemed to have run dry. You had instinctively reduced velocity when you felt the plane twist and turn, you had already lost all sense of direction long before, and after all those climbing turns and that turbulence you had less idea of bearing than ever; you could no longer delay making contact with Air Traffic Control. Hand on microphone, gaze fixed on the blackness of the sky, you worked out what to say. In reality, the words had already shaped themselves in your mind into one natural, grand sentence: “Treviso radar, I do not want to die. I repeat, I do not want to die.” Aeronautical jargon, however, leaves no space for wishes, not even for heart-felt wishes, only for positions and directions, although this might well turn out to be an advantage, considering that the terror of being lost in the midst of those clouds was now more or less equal to the fear of having to admit as much to Air Traffic Control. To discover where you are, or to be located again from the ground, all you have to do is own up to your present, miserable condition without wasting a second searching for the aeronautically most accurate, and least humiliating, formula. Call Air Traffic Control, call at once, while you dither, things at this end are getting out of hand, any time now you will fall prey to those illusory sensations which until now you have only read about in the handbooks you flick through last thing at night, before dropping off. You refuse to give in, you simply refuse to face the fact that you are lost, you are still putting the final touches to the words, you fail to notice that the plane is falling on one side, until finally you switch on and declaim in the most impersonal, flat tone you can manage: “Treviso radar, India Echo November is no longer in Victor Mike Charlie. Requ
est a Quebec Delta Mike.”
If your aim was to take cover behind a wall of words, you have carried it off. Treviso radar is the authority you are calling, a military authority as it happens, India Echo November is the abbreviated name of this poor machine lost in the skies, Victor Mike Charlie, VMC, are the initials for Visual Meteorological Conditions, so you are no longer flying in meteorological conditions of visibility. They might believe that you were not to blame for ending up in fog and cloud, that the state of the sky, the cosmos around you, just happened to alter, that visibility was snuffed out, that previously excellent conditions faded as inexplicably and suddenly as lights fail in a house. (Away from flight and the present situation, in the domain of everything else, you would have detested such a use of words as a way of hiding behind “objectivity” and “putting on a brave front”; for years you had heard people speak in this style, using words as though they were precious stones. Through objectivity, that is through omissions, they managed to attribute to things a plausibility they could never possess, making them appear the opposite of what they really are.) The Quebec Delta Mike, QDM, you requested is a dated term of the old Q code, the code used by Faggione and Buscaglia. Nothing in the world is more conservative than aeronautical and maritime jargon, QDM, qudimike, an old term much loved by pilots, a term redolent of home comforts but it is untranslatable because these are not initials but three letters which codify and seal the following, life-saving question: be kind enough to inform me of the direction I must follow if I am to reach my destination, destino in Spanish, the only language in which the geographical goal coincides with the completion of the individual, personal adventure.
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