Methodically, Bruno located the farewell lunch villa, partly modified, repainted at some unspecified time, then abandoned. I like museums, but I also like places seemingly without history, or more precisely, for which there was a history, but an unknown or forgotten one. My boyhood was filled with such houses, built with an eye for a space and design which defeat had ridiculed, abandoned after the war, silent houses with no tale to tell, where something had happened, but no one could say exactly what. “Condemned,” is the beautiful French expression for those walled-up doors and windows.
Ah yes, flying low along the coast, Bastia already in view, the tower operator a woman, who speaks the only kind of aeronautical English comprehensible in Corsica. I do a couple of rolls. I am happy. No, myths have nothing to do with it. Flight was inextricable from myth as long as it was not humanly feasible. After the invention of the aircraft, there remains only one thing in the world with which flight is really connected, and that is childhood. Pilots do not have feathered wings, they are not angels, much less heroes; they are child-adults, latent children, well looked after in their maturity, carefully preserved inside one of the professional guises life has assigned them, but tied to childhood by the elastic of the sling peeping out of their pockets. As to whether there is some special relationship between childhood and death, I wouldn’t know.
1545 HOURS THE FOLLOWING DAY, BASTIA PORRETTA, RUNWAY 16–34. WIND CALM.
We are at the holding point of runway Sixteen, Bastia Porretta. I have omitted the weather report because it is a bit complicated. There are different types of cloud over the northwest Mediterranean, with their bases at different altitudes, but things are looking better now than a few hours ago. We await clearance for take-off. Last night, we slept in Erbalunga, where the II/33 pilots were billeted in their Corsica days. I went with Bruno for a walk along the seafront; a pleasant, healthy breeze was blowing after the heat of the day. At dinner, in an old trattoria in the harbour area, he declared himself satisfied with the place and the wine, satisfied, and more than a little drunk, so much so that he allowed himself to talk about his wife and daughters, as well as about his plans for the future. At a certain point, he changed tone and glanced behind him; do you think that this Saint-Exupéry, if he lived nearby, would have dropped in here to eat? I started laughing, said I’ve no idea, perhaps he did, could be, maybe he sat in that very seat facing the fishing boats, maybe he smoked or stared at the night, who knows what was in his mind?
Now, at the holding point of runway Sixteen, Bruno looks over at the control tower as though expecting clearance to arrive with a wave of the hand rather than over the radio. This morning I took him along to the old airport at Borgo, a dozen or so kilometres further up the road. Behind the barracks of the Armée de Terre, we came across the old grass airstrip which ran from the lagoon to the hill. A grass airstrip is in no way different from a grass field, and yet it can be clearly seen that this was once a runway. In the thin sunlight and the fresher air, we walked its full length, from one end almost to the other. It was still possible to make out, in the undergrowth, the beaten earth taxiways. On one side, there was a little metal ruin, a rusted, open turret, with traces of the original white and red still visible.
“India Golf India Oscar Mike, cleared for line-up and take-off, One Six. Then turn left.”
After take-off, we proceed in a wide, leftward curve, gaining enough height over the sea to allow us to overfly the hill. Then we turn the nose northwest. At one in the afternoon of 31st July 1944, Gavoille had already put out calls to all Allied radar stations in the northern Mediterranean. No one had seen them. Those who were with Gavoille in the operations room were to recall the frantic tones with which he demanded information, the increasingly implausible hypotheses he put forward to explain the late arrival, until time marked the limits of the Lightning’s self-sufficiency. Of waiting of this kind, when it had been the turn of Mermoz over the Atlantic, Saint-Exupéry had said: “I know nothing more tragic than these delays. A companion does not land at the expected time. There is silence from another who was due to arrive, or send a signal. And when ten minutes have passed, a period of waiting which in our day-to-day lives would scarcely even be noticed, suddenly everything grows tense. Fate has made its entry. It holds men in its thrall. Sentence has been delivered on them. Fate has made its judgement, and we can only hold our breath.” Towards evening, someone, after attaching a passport photo of Saint-Exupéry to the page, wrote in the squadron log-book, “Non rentrée.”
What Gavoille failed to discover that afternoon, he failed to discover for the rest of his days, and it was to remain a mystery to everyone else. Of all the possible or probable accounts, I preferred Gavoille’s own, which with time became an obsession; he never abandoned the quest. In the early stages, he believed there had been a failure of the oxygen supply. When they reached a certain altitude, the pilots opened the cylinders and took their first breath of paint-scented air from Massachusetts or Ohio. Saint-Exupéry, big and bulky as he was, consumed more oxygen than the others, he might have had some problem, he had once before forgotten to switch on the oxygen supply, he might have lost consciousness and fallen forward against the control column causing the plane, with its engines on full throttle, to go into a dive, to disintegrate as it plunged at speed through the air, and to end up in the sea. Then, towards the end of the Seventies, Gavoille, by now General René Gavoille (retired), who had never ceased asking at the foot of his articles on Saint-Exupéry if anyone had seen or heard anything, received from the Côte d’Azur recollections and eye witness accounts. The Côte d’Azur must have been beautiful that day in ‘44, even more beautiful than it is now to Bruno and me as, after a hundred miles of open sea, we catch our first glimpse of it under a sky of high cloud fleeing eastwards. Each morning the war had something to offer, and that morning too there was the spectacle of a Lightning flying very low from the mountains, from the valley to the north of Biot, flying low and fast, pursued by two German fighters: a stream of white smoke was coming out of the starboard engine of the Lightning, then the plane went over on one side, did a somersault over the water and disappeared. Several people described the same scene to Gavoille, each in full agreement over place and time – shortly after mid-day. Others simply remembered having seen a plane of the Lightning type crash into the sea, and Saint-Exupéry’s was the only one to have disappeared that morning in the northwest Mediterranean. The following day, the trainee-pilot Robert Heichele, who was twenty years old and who was to die in action two weeks later, wrote to a friend of his that he had shot down a Lightning on the 31st July 1944. He and Sergeant Hogel, on board their “Big Nose” FW 190, had intercepted it between Logis and Castellane, along Napoleon’s highway. “It was flying some two thousand feet above us,” said Heichele in his report, “so we were unable to attack it; to our astonishment, it turned and started a descent, it seemed to be coming towards us. I did a climbing spiral and took up firing position one hundred and fifty feet from its tail. I fired but missed. I executed a barrel roll, regaining a good position, fired once more but the shots passed in front of the plane. He attempted to shake me off by going into a nose-dive, I pursued him and when I was thirty metres from him, unleashed another volley. I saw a trail of white smoke emerge from his starboard engine; the plane flew low along the coast then plunged into the sea.”
It may be that I prefer this version because it is the least mysterious, less in keeping with any hypothesis of suicide, pilot error or accident, or perhaps because it is the most aeronautical, or perhaps because more than any other it lends itself to falsification, if it could be shown that Heichele had never existed and that his letter was a forgery. Be that as it may, the sea is the same sea here underneath us, so close it could be touched, the sea off Saint-Tropez, Saint-Raphaël, Antibes, the sea whose surface I am skimming at top speed. Bruno taps his index finger on the altimeter beside him, and when I fail to take notice taps the altimeter on my side, when you fly like this, you’ve got to be careful, th
ere’s an optical illusion that makes you think you are higher than you are, better take your eyes off the water and fix them on the instrument panel. Bruno does no more than tap his finger on the instruments, because he is sure he taught me all this years ago. Bruno is still Bruno.
On the phone, René Gavoille had a calm, alert voice. I spoke to him before setting off, he said: “That morning, he was not supposed to be flying, it was pure chance, I stayed in my bed because we had been up late the night before, he got up early, he hardly ever slept at night, he went to the officer in charge and obtained permission for take-off. He shouldn’t have been flying, my orders were precise, but such is destiny. It was the only time I wasn’t there, a sortie he was not supposed to be on, a useless mission, considering the dangers involved and the imminent landing in Provence. He went over Savoy and took his photos. On his way back, when he had already been hit, he gave in to another of his surges of emotion and passed one more time over the places of his boyhood and adolescence. He lies there, in that sea. You can imagine what happens when an aeroplane doing four hundred kilometres an hour crashes into the water.”
I pulled at the control column, I have gained sufficient height, I dipped my wings twice or three times in salute. Bruno is calmer now. Nice and Menton appear on the left. We do not speak, but then we hardly ever speak in flight. Each of us is already thinking of Genoa and Milan, of Venice and of the almost straight line which will take us to Venice and home. At night-fall, after landing, we will take long, elastic strides to shake off the fatigue of the controls. We will smile, reunited once again with our shadows.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446476895
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First published in Italy with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra by Giulio Einaudi editore, Turin, 1994
First published in Great Britain in 1996
by The Harvill Press,
84 Thornhill Road,
London N1 1RD
First impression
© Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., 1994
English translation © Joseph Farrell, 1996
Daniele Del Giudice asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781846553820
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