by Erri De Luca
Caia gave no reply to those who asked her what those insults were. She kept her eyes closed. Someone had already started to tease her, saying that of all the ideas for how to spend the rest of the evening, this was one no one had thought of and they could make the rounds of the pizzerias with this new gimmick. Daniele adjusted his shirt. His knuckles were scraped from the first punch and everybody told him he had done the right thing, and he went over to Caia, who finally loosened up and smiled at him. She said nothing, but took him by the arm and led him outside. The beach—they were all going to the beach to make a bonfire, and they would have to look for me to ask for the guitar, for I was no longer there.
I was invaded by a rage I had never felt before, a whiff of heat in my nostrils, a wrath that had made me explode with Daniele in the melee and that had not subsided. It was growing stronger and filling me. Caia’s scream had inflamed my nerves, like a whiplash to my spinal cord, more the strike of a snake than a man. Never was I so quick to act. I did something perfectly serene and awful: I followed the Germans. I followed them from a distance. In my ears I heard the buzzing of flowering, as when insects swarm on a tree in bloom.
They stopped at a bar and drank for an hour, without singing. I waited for them and followed them all the way to a pensione outside the center of town. I didn’t know why I was doing that, I was obeying the whiff of heat but without tension, careful not to be seen. I turned around and rejoined the group on the beach. They were in a circle singing, facing the fire, already hoarse. For the first time they took notice of me. Someone had told Daniele that I too had thrown myself into the melee. They greeted me with a genuine welcome and one of them said that the team was now complete and they could go pick a fight at some bar. Caia had regained her cheerfulness, and was singing. She invited me to sit beside her. When they started to sing a new song she said, talking directly to me, “You were brave to defend me. No one has protected me in a long time, and I am grateful to you for having done so. In one part of my anger there was the reassurance that you were there. They were singing the anthem of the SS, you don’t know it, I do. I heard it for the first time when the first Germans arrived and my father was carrying me in his arms and holding me tight. I did not hear it again during my childhood. I can’t tell you I’m sorry for what happened because I’m happy it happened.”
The music covered her words. Daniele was singing his most popular song, strumming chords with his skinned knuckle. Ignited by her eyes on me, I replied calmly, “I don’t know what you shouted, but your voice seemed to come from a height, from a place far above our heads. In a kind of hallucination I saw you standing in a burning house, shouting at the sky, not at the earth. All I did was follow Daniele, who jumped up to defend you.”
“I saw, but what you’re saying isn’t so. You got up first and pushed the one who was coming at me, then Daniele got involved.”
The sequence of a brawl always has more than one version, so I don’t know whether her memory was more accurate than mine. I happened to add, while the others were singing the refrain, “Chaiele, I have been ready for this for a long time. I have been waiting all my life for the chance to protect you.”
When you stood up, I watched you at first, saw you get angry, and without understanding why, I obeyed you by getting angry too. When you spoke German to those people, I was already at your disposal. You were speaking to them but with my body in between. You were talking and I was ready to throw myself at them. These things I couldn’t tell you.
“I never knew how my father died, but tonight I peeked into a room of the past. It may have been you who showed me how he died, jumping up to protect his wife the way you did with me. I saw many things tonight and I was afraid for you. I still am.”
I unconsciously rubbed my nose with the back of my index finger and hastily stopped. I said to myself, “No, no,” and Caia understood “Nu, nu,” an interjection in the language of her family.
“Nu, nu … you know that too, you, mine.”
“Oi, Chaiele, we will not see each other again.”
“Nu, Tateh, we will see each other again and again, without this boy who served us as a bridge and who bent like a bow over the span of our ages.”
The music of the circle of voices droned on even though Daniele had stopped playing. What remained was the center, a bush of embers reflected on the hands, in the eyes. Somebody fell asleep, the others talked in twos and threes, Caia and Daniele. They were going to leave together for the city, then he would take her to the train station. I left them. For once I said good night to all of them, one by one, shaking hands, exchanging a kiss or two. Some were leaving the next day, Daniele and Caia soon after. In a few days I would be left alone. I went to the pensione where the Germans were. It was late, everything was quiet, the street empty.
I looked at the little garden behind the gate. In front there was a car with a German license plate. I wondered how to hurt them and a host of ideas came, stupid ones and criminal ones, all jumbled together, and I eliminated them one by one for want of means. I stayed there about twenty minutes and no one passed by to shatter the dark with a flashlight. Few streets on the island were illuminated. I went home and fell asleep, placidly mulling over the most horrendous thoughts that had ever entered my head.
I did not hear Daniele come home.
In the morning I found a note: “Wake me, I’m coming fishing with you.” It was hard to rouse him from a sleep that doubtless had scarcely begun. He got up grunting, panting from the effort of trying to understand that it was dawn, that we were going fishing, and that it was he who had asked me to come along. We started off barefoot on stone damp with dew. He was coming because he had to tell me, couldn’t wait: “You knew that Caia is Jewish?” I replied with a curt no, the way you discard in a game when it’s not the right suit. “She told me last night, or rather tonight, that is, just a little while ago, since I came to bed at three o’clock. That’s why she got mad at those Germans. They were singing Nazi anthems. I’d never seen her so tense, so fierce. I really liked seeing her standing there all alone against that table of Germans. I thought they were insulting us and she was defending us, then I heard the noise behind me and I found myself grappling with one of them. I learned later that you threw yourself on one of those animals. Only tonight talking with her did I understand why that uproar broke out. I knew nothing about Caia. It seems she lost her parents during the war.”
Daniele wanted me to share his surprise and I was sorry not to, sorry to remain aloof when he had come to me as a friend and confided in me. But I couldn’t say anything about what had happened to Caia and me, or what was percolating in my head. Not wanting to appear cold and wanting to reciprocate with a confidence, I told him I had fallen in love with her.
“I guessed as much but it seemed to me absurd for you to have any expectations. However, later on I did see you talking together. Not even to you did she say anything about her family, so you can’t have been very close. In any case, I won’t say anything to the others. I told you because I think you have a right to know. She came here among us this summer and turned everybody’s head, including a few adults. She could at least have confided in you. You ran the risk of getting your head bashed in last night. Instead she kept everything to herself.”
There was something reproachful about his remarks and I took it badly that Daniele should criticize her for my sake.
“Caia spared us. She suffered things that can never be told adequately. She didn’t want to tell us, boys on a summer holiday on an island, who know nothing about Jews or Germans. We’re too young. She was also too young, but they took everything from her. All of us, not just me, even the adults, are too young for her. She learned that she should say nothing. She talked with you tonight because you defended her better than anyone else, giving her courage and justification. She thanked you by telling you what kind of abyss lay below her anger. It’s not fair for us to reproach her.”
Daniele did not agree. Over the course of one summer he had
observed a lovely girl, a bit capricious, who had danced and had been kissed by many and who, contrary to appearances, carried within herself a deep ache and a dark secret, and by sheer chance, because of a brawl, opened up to one person. “Better if she had told me nothing.”
Really, Daniele? Is it really better that even at the very end we should not get to know someone we have had the chance to meet? We can identify the fish in the sea and the stars in the skies, but we should know nothing about the people on earth?
“No, that’s not what I think; as a matter of fact, I’m grateful to her.”
Even in this Daniele was generous. He was capable of correcting himself and yielding to someone else’s opinion.
“She made me feel more grown up, she honored me with her trust. But what a girl! Too complicated for me. I’m used to this beautiful island, to fishing boats, guitars, vacations. And out of nowhere, someone’s devastated life erupts in this blissful sleepy place, someone who seems to be like us.”
“Yes, Daniele, she seems to be like us, yet she can’t even tell us about her life.”
The rock under our feet ended and gave way to the beach. We boarded the boat and Daniele, exhausted, stretched out under the morning sun, falling soundly asleep on the wooden planks as though on a bed. Uncle started to grumble, “What’s the point of coming here if you need to sleep? What the devil do you do at night?” His plural “you” included me, even though I was wide awake and preparing bait. What annoyed him was to be unable to speak to his son, whose sleep he found disrespectful. He associated me with him in his reproach and he may have been right. I explained that it had been a farewell party, many were leaving today, but that did not placate him.
“In that case, stay home in bed. In the boat we fish.”
There were many lines to pull up and a need for arms and hands so that Daniele was awakened. Uncle noticed Daniele’s skinned knuckles.
“You got into a fight last night?”
“With some drunk Germans, but it was over very fast and nobody got hurt,” Daniele answered to end the discussion.
Uncle was not in an indulgent mood. “Surely you know, you who are so mature and grown up, that brawling is a criminal offense, that you can tarnish your record for a scuffle in the street.” He was angry. He reprimanded us for the way we lived on the island, for turning into savages; the vacation was too long, we were destroying ourselves with all that freedom. “If the police had come by, you would have been in deep trouble.” He vented his ill humor on both Daniele and me. In the meantime Nicola had started to retrieve the first float and handed the line to Uncle, knowing that would calm him down.
He stopped grumbling and began pulling up the cable and soon felt the weight at the bottom, a resistance, and the fight to capture the grouper began. Once the fish came on board, all other concerns faded and all thought was focused on the sea, on the hooks, on the laborious retrieval of the rig’s cable over a difficult shoal. Daniele’s hands were bleeding slightly, the salt doubtless making his scraped knuckles burn in the sun, but he paid no attention to them; his palms, no longer used to handling the cable, surely burned even more.
I was a good day; Nicola took home a fine grouper for his family, good humor was restored. Uncle asked Daniele for a few details about the fight and was relieved to hear that we hadn’t been clobbered. Daniele didn’t say a word about Caia.
While Uncle was grousing about the consequences of a brawl, I was elsehere. My thoughts went back to that pensione, to the need to find a way to attack without delay. What could I do? Throw rocks at the car, puncture the tires, break a window? The stupid pranks of delinquents. I was writhing in my impotence while my hands were busily occupied with fishing, aware that there was little time, for the Germans could suddenly take off. I had to decide on something that very day. Nothing came to mind, for which I reproached myself, but I told myself that I had never before thought of doing harm to anyone, and then I started all over again. There was a calm on the sea and inside of me as well, a calm that rippled up from below. On the way back Nicola said the wind was blowing up from the south.
As we left the fishing area, rockets celebrating a saint’s day were exploding in the sky. The island was announcing the day of its protector with blasts as well as bells. Shots were fired into the air, exploding high up with a single powerful burst. To thank the saints on their name days we aim our antiaircraft battery at them. It may be a salute, but it’s still a barrage against the sky.
A fantasy more than an idea came to me: a bunch of rockets going off in front of the pensione. I imagined the shock, the flight, the arrival of firemen. The thought of firemen sent a jolt through me. As we reached the shore, I jumped off the boat. I had found a way to strike. Fire, Feuer. That word had remained in Nicola’s head: Feuer, fire, easy and violent. I had found it. The urge to act accelerated my thoughts and arranged them into a plan. I knew at once that I had to obtain a rubber tube. I cut it from the garden hose. I went to the pensione and saw that the foreign car was not there, but that was normal at that hour, noon. I brazenly asked if they had any rooms available. They had none. There would be some in three days. I had time.
From the moment I decided on fire, all objections were banished from my thoughts. The only thing that mattered was to succeed. I didn’t care about being caught. I had become a guard, watching the enemy. I was no longer a boy. I got hold of a demijohn. I would fill it at night with gasoline siphoned from the tank of my father’s car; at that time he was vacationing with us. I had seen Nicola do this on the boat. I succeeded on my first try without even getting any gas into my mouth. I was carrying out the actions of a plan, they came to me easily, effortlessly. I knew that a single match might not be enough to ignite the gasoline, so I put aside a whole box and a newspaper. Now I could strike at my choosing. I would do it after Caia and Daniele left so as not to implicate them, even marginally. I needed to be alone in my room the night I went out with a fire in my pocket. They were not to know. This was my thing, mine alone, sprung from the body of a boy during one brutal summer of love and rage.
There was a festival on the island that day, it was Caia’s last evening. We were to go to the fair together and walk around the stands.
First I went to the fishermen’s beach. Nicola was getting the boat ready for the next night. For him there were no holidays, he would rest during the winter when there are days the sea doesn’t want anybody on its surface. I gave him a hand. The other fishermen were already at the fair in their clean shirts, their only holiday attire. Nicola felt like talking to me, selecting words from both Neapolitan dialect and Italian.
“You’re growing up. In one summer you’ve become a man. I heard on the boat that Daniele’s fists were flying. Were you there too?” Yes, I said. “It’s good to stand up for yourself, not let yourself be insulted. I can’t hit anybody. As a boy, yes, but not since the war.” I asked him if he had ever had enemies.
“I was in a place where the enemy was us. We were the enemies of a people who had done nothing to us and we were armed to occupy their territory. We were allies of the Germans against those people and we were wrong to be there. I was ashamed to make war against those people. When it was over and we lost, my shame disappeared all at once. My allies were that family who received me and hid me, bless them wherever they may be. I understood nothing about enemies.”
But at that time he had enemies, didn’t he? Didn’t he wish them dead?
“When the Germans began losing, I saw them run away and die, and when I saw the slain body of an enemy, it was no longer an enemy. It wasn’t anything. When we are corpses we are all alike. Even enemies die crying for help. They too burst open when they’re shot, and the hatred, if you really had it inside of you, is no longer there. I saw dead enemies and I felt nothing. There are no enemies, it’s all a mistake and you realize that once they’re dead.”
His voice was calm. I was flattered by his confidences. I was calm too, carefully weighing the words that came out of my mouth. The choice
of fire had settled my nerves.
Nicola had seen enemies die and on seeing them had discovered that his body was emptied of hate. I understood that he had arrived at some conclusion, but he could not pass it on to me. His experience was not enough, was not able to save me from my own, or avert it. It was not for me to contradict him with arguments or attribute to him enemies he had known before me and better, people who had participated in the massacres of defenseless victims and who continued to enjoy their vacations in good health and without consequences. That was my conclusion, my premise. He continued to be tormented by the consequences. His words could tell me in advance how I would feel afterward, but they could not stop me.
I had wanted to break open Caia’s secret; it had taken complete hold of me. I had taken her mourning as my banner. I had covered all the stations of love, from a kid with a crush on an older girl to a father who returned to protect her. From that fantasy of Caia’s about her tateh, I realized that was how I really felt: like a father who comes back to find his daughter after many years, an emigrant who can once again embrace his child. Among the similarities she kept discovering between her father and me, the only one I shared was that particular emotion of a diffuse, mature love, now somber with anger.