He said, “When it’s all over, if we survive, I want to come back to this hotel for a week, after it reopens to tourists.” Michele didn’t answer. Diego said, “I’ll lie on the floor right here as I am now, in the middle of all those respectable rich people, who’ll think I’m mad.”
Michele was still looking out; he didn’t turn. Then he spun around and said hurriedly, as if it were about to slip his mind, “Diego, if you want bread my wife brought some. She gave it to a soldier who’ll give it to us.”
Diego asked, “Your wife came? Did she speak . . . ?”
Michele didn’t look him in the face; he kept his gaze on the ceiling. “Listen, Diego, for me there’s nothing more to do. Snakeskin sold me. Luciano told my wife. She’s down there weeping.” So Michele spoke; in his words was the simplicity of things long feared once they’ve happened.
Michele began walking up and down the hall, hands in his pockets, heavy-lidded eyes open, enormous. Sometimes others spoke to him and he looked at them in a daze, as if he had to return from boundless distances to get back to the subjects of their conversation. Maybe he was thinking of emptiness, as if to get used to not existing.
Diego followed Michele’s pacing from afar, as if worried that the others, in their ignorance, would disturb that walking death agony: a hint of their conversations—the conversations of living men—would be enough to make him suddenly desperate for lost life. He alone of them knew that that man was walking in the hallway toward death, now only a thousand, two thousand steps away. It was his death vigil: he was a dead man walking in his mortuary chapel, in that hallway with the flaking stucco ceiling roses and the faded imprints of mirrors above the marble hearths.
Watching Michele, Diego thought about him: an old companion, Michele, a good man, even with all his faults—not very courageous, not very in line with the party. They had argued often, because of that mania of Michele’s for pontificating and wanting always to be right, with the pompousness of the self-taught man.
Now Michele was walking along the hallway with his hands in his coat pockets, his big bald head pulled down between his shoulders, his big bovine eyes lost in space, as if bewildered by the enormity of what was about to be taken away from him. He was a poor, short, bald man, in an old overcoat, with a three-day beard, but Diego seemed to see in him, in those bovine eyes, in that slow, preoccupied walk, a threatening force of nature. Michele would continue to walk like that even after death; the next day he would enter, through the window, the rooms where the German officers were carousing, grown very large but still in his threadbare overcoat, hands in the pockets, bald head with the bovine gaze lost in space, and he would walk at that slow pace of his over the tablecloths stained with spumante, in silence, in front of the lighted Christmas trees, the sparkling iron crosses, the ostentatious nudity of breasts and buttocks, amid the terror of the German officers and the cries of the women. And so he would go on walking, even when the war was over, and the rich would not have peace in their houses or joy in their families, for that short, immeasurable man would enter through the windows to cross their rooms; and on the tables around which peace and war are decided and in all the places where people forbid or take away or lie, where they preach what is false and worship unjust gods, the shadow of that man killed at night on the dock would appear.
Some of the prisoners spoke of men hanged by the Germans; Diego saw Michele hanging from a lamppost at the port, his eyes enormous, his hands still in his pockets. And it seemed to him that it was all men who had killed Michele, all of them, an offense without limits that would take every joy from life, to be expiated forever and ever.
Above the ripples in the water where Michele had disappeared only his empty overcoat floated, arms spread like a cross. The bell of the red buoy in the middle of the harbor, stirred by the waves, tolled for his murdered comrade. Under the water the cable that kept the buoy anchored ended in a slip knot, with Michele’s head in it. But Michele’s head was floating, green with seaweed, the eyes wide; he gave a howl. The old father dressed as a hunter got up in the night and began to urinate, groaning, looming over all of them. The rivers overflowed; all men, bad and good, were submerged. The old man’s organs, weary because they had produced all men, now drowned the universe. Snakeskin alone fled over the earth in search of safety, rubbing his sweaty hands, damp from the putrid water in the hotel’s bidets. But every coffin was occupied by a dead man, whom he had murdered; the flood surrounded him on all sides, swept him away into a vortex.
The truck was late that evening, and they all said with relief that it wouldn’t come. Michele waited looking out into the dusk. Four tourist buses arrived instead, driven by German soldiers. The prisoners were agitated, wondering, hypothesizing. Immediately the marshal came up with the list and called them one by one. Michele and Diego were called together with the others, with the false names they had given; in fact the marshal mangled Michele’s name, as if he had never heard it.
The prisoners were divided into four groups and loaded one by one onto the buses. Diego and Michele again found themselves neighbors, still part of that crowd almost jealous of the injustice endured. Among the men’s anxious voices a name circulated whose origin no one knew: Marassi, Marassi. They’re taking us to Marassi. But the name almost reassured Michele and Diego; it meant leaving the anguish of approaching death, equivocal Snakeskin, the known places full of traps.
Diego felt Michele’s rough coat under his fingers, the blood returning to their veins. He said, “Did I tell you that Luciano is a liar? Did I tell you?” and Michele repeated, “What a liar, I’ll say!” with a smile that was already freer, as if he were appreciating a joke.
And the two comrades understood that from now on, whatever their destination, blood, howls, exhaustion, they would have known the bloody taste of being alive and of sharing pain, like bread. A rough taste of life would accompany them, in the screaming underground passages of Marassi, in the desolate encampments of the north, until their return.
Anguish in the Barracks
This was how the illness began: he’d see the Frisian horse on the stairs, with a load of barbed wire, and think it contained a threatening and allusive meaning about his future. But even before, more than once, the sight of his cot had been enough to torment him, that uncomfortable skeletal cot, which seemed to want to announce something, something he didn’t understand, a message of despair, of impotence. Four, five, six cots, then his, then another two or three or four cots. They were thoughts that made no sense: he realized it.
And yet, one, two, three cots, maybe January, February, March, June, July, what had happened to him in July? Then that empty cot, why? August, September, October, November. Something ended in November: the war? life?
And then you had to consider that the first five cots belonged to the older men, soldiers who had responded to the draft order, some of whom hadn’t even stopped serving as soldiers on September 8th,* and now stood guard and went around armed; in the other cots instead were the draft evaders, the ones who’d been rounded up like him, and who swept and carried garbage. Then there was the mystery of that empty, folded-up cot, August, April? Where certainly something hoped for or feared was hidden, peace, death, but also something secret and hostile, which couldn’t be understood.
Or, starting at the back, the years of war: forty, forty-one, two, three, four, why was forty-four empty? And he was forty-five: what meaning was there in all that?
He lay on the folded-up cot, his back against the side bars, his feet on the chain that held it closed. Now he would think calmly, be logical: there was no reason to get so distressed, he had only to wait patiently for the business of his family to be resolved, for his father to be freed; then desert, return to the unit, for the moment try to get sick leave, a way out of military service, a legal means of “disengaging”; keep his eyes open in order not to be sent “upstairs” to the company that carried out the roundups, and at the slightest hint of a transfer to the north or the south be ready
for flight, hoping it would go as he wanted.
Only that: and then the cart for transporting the garbage had a ramshackle and friendly air, it taught you to see the lighter side of things, even if it was painful, because later everything would be resolved. Stop, he was back at the beginning: the illness of symbols, the way to madness.
* * *
The illness, if he thought about it, had begun in prison, the night after he was captured: the sound of the sea outside, like the buzz of airplanes, the hope and fear of a bombardment that would free them or bury them. But it was the sea in confusion, without rhythm, without outlet: life, a blind and chaotic thing. From then on, things and men were no longer themselves but symbols.
The prison cells, the dingy offices, the nervous faces of the German and Fascist officers, the grand, ravaged hotels crammed with the fearful throng of hostages, the barracks, finally, with its distressing geometry of stairways, corridors, and deserted dormitories, its obtuse and pale inhabitants, all strings in a net of despair that was tightening around the world.
Now the panes of the big window were square and painted dark blue, but the third one in the second row was missing, and the next to last had a big crack: and that was painful, terrible. Impossible to resist the temptation to follow the fly that moved from one pane to the next, and to wonder where it would stop. It was the same calculation that kept recurring. The end of the war and death. But which would arrive first?
The men in the barracks were united by a common cowardice, sluggish, ignorant minds, flat-nosed faces, obliged to use a vulgar language that humiliated themselves. Their conversations were about pay, about the good life they would have in the “republic,”* better than any other life possible then, and about the fact that life in the barracks and in particular in the depot company was better than in any other section. They magnified this love of theirs for the pay and the life of the company as if to convince themselves that they couldn’t live without staying in it.
The boy, caught in a roundup and living in their midst, felt that heavy breath of cowardice thicken around him, merging with a secret inclination of his, and the dusty climbing plant that as it grew covered the walls of the courtyard covered him, too, an insertion of solidarity between him and them, nailing him to those walls, to those cots.
Upstairs was the company of men who carried out the roundups, or rather unconsciousness. They had better rations, better pay, frequent leaves. They returned at all hours, carousing on the stairs; those on the floor below could often hear records of singing and music. Unconsciousness emanated from every word of theirs, from every gesture, a willed unconsciousness, maintained by necessity, strictly enforced, so that they wouldn’t think about what they were doing. Often they went out early in the morning, dutiful, some armed with machine guns; they returned in the evening or the next day; they never fought, nor did they encounter “rebels”; but they sacked chicken coops and always captured some haggard draft evader, who came to enlarge the company on the floor below.
The men upstairs were hated even by the older men in the depot company; their superficiality was regarded with rancor by men who spent hours calculating and discussing earnings and dangers; envy embellished their advantages with sinister predictions. Then in the dormitory discussions began about those in the mountains and the English, about who would arrive first, and how if those in the mountains arrived first maybe all their soldiers would be killed, but they weren’t doing any harm, and so it wasn’t right; and how if, on the other hand, the English arrived first, they would treat the soldiers better than the rebels, and would keep the soldiers to be soldiers with them and put the rebels in jail.
Then, when the war was over, many of them would return to Sicily, to Calabria, to Puglia, to houses left twenty months ago by some of the men, by some fifteen, as far away as if they were at the end of a very long dark tunnel in which a mole moved slowly, digging to reunite them: the war. At that point, the men began to conjecture about when the war would end, and they all agreed that it would last for many years more; and the mule driver with the yellow face came out saying that it would never end, but the end of the world would come first, and he fantasized a whole story in which Jesus Christ and Noah’s dove emerged from his incomprehensible howling.
A majority of the older men were southerners, hardened by years in the army into a dull astuteness, accustomed to letting themselves be tossed about from Africa to Russia with a sort of wary fatalism. The northerners among them had learned to use their locutions and repeated them with exasperating monotony. The boy who had been rounded up became enraged listening to them join in the incomprehensible discussions. If I stay much longer with them, he thought, I’ll understand their whining. I, too, will get in the habit of saying “Fuck, signor lieutenant,” and “Your sister’s a real piece of ass.” That thought was enough to make him shudder, get up from the cot, and wander through the corridors and storerooms.
But the helmets lined up in piles were as useless and stupid as the mule driver with the yellow face.
* * *
The soldiers’ favorite conversations were about the goods they had carried off on September 8th and about how they’d managed to steal them, to keep them safe from the officers and the Germans, and about the money they had made selling them. The mule driver with the yellow face, who on September 8th hadn’t carried off even a blanket, was silent, ashamed, while a former waiter from San Remo recounted how he had escaped to France with ten gold pounds in a jockstrap. But envy was transformed into hatred toward the officers who’d been able to make off with the regiments’ cash and hadn’t shared it with the soldiers. “When the next September 8th comes,” everyone said, “we’ll keep a sharper eye out.” And they made plans and castles in the air about the goods they’d carry off on the second September 8th, on the millions they’d make.
Their life was like that: a succession of gray years, like a marching column, and every so often a September 8th, a breaking of ranks, a free-for-all, a scramble, knapsacks loaded up with stuff from the government, and then a return to ranks, to wait for another September 8th, to repeat the game. The boy who had been rounded up was lying on the uncomfortable folded-up cot, and the conversations of the soldiers were dusty above him, like the spiderwebs on the ceiling.
His memory moved to other men, other conversations, conversations of men sitting around fires, men whose soles were tied on with wire, whose ripped pants were sewed up with wire, whose faces bristled with wire in their beards, men with iron equipment in their hands: men with submachine guns, men with machine guns, men with sniper guns. Every so often the name of one of those men echoed in the solders’ conversations, with an accent of mystery, of legend, of fear: only for him those names had a face, a voice. He would have liked to shout in the soldiers’ fearful faces: “Yes, I know Lungo! And Bill! And Mingo! And the Zanzara! I know them all! Two weeks ago I was sitting by the fire with Mingo, whom you dream of at night. I was sharing a cigarette with Strogoff, the one who came all the way down here to the city to free the prisoners, scaring you for a month. I ate frittelle with the Sheriff, who has no more rifling in the barrel of his gun because of shooting at you! At the battle of Baiardo I carried ammunition to Bufera. I’m one of them!”
He would have liked to shout all that. I’m one of them. But then, if he was one of them, what was he doing there? And with violent momentum memory frenetically revived scenes and sensations to reawaken something that was asleep in him, force him out of his torpor.
The roadway below, with the line of Germans ascending warily, and the pounding of the machine-gunner’s heart against the gunstock, waiting, and every shrub flowering with eyes in ambush. Then a dense crackling that gives the go-ahead, a gilded dust that rises on the roadway, on the Germans, who fall down, rush off the road, commands shouted by the hoarse voices of the unit leaders encountering German curses, with the Venetian and Lombard voices of the bersaglieri, bursts of gunfire, ta-boom, hand grenades, ragged partisans sweeping over the road to plunde
r the tanks dripping with blood.
On sentry duty at night, you enter the big hut for a moment, to light a cigarette in the half-spent coals, while your comrades are snoring on the straw and scratching themselves in their sleep; then, outside, you wait for a shooting star to make a wish, always the same one, while in the distance, relentlessly constant, the cannons rumble on the front.
At night, when the lights in the barracks were lit and only the guards remained in the cold dormitories, the boy who’d been rounded up thought of the cold mist that rises every evening in the mountains, of the Fascist prisoners, barefoot, with a laugh of fear between their teeth, who would like to make themselves useful, scrub potatoes, fetch water or wood: Let them come with us for wood, let them come into the forest, in the mist, let them advance into the mist that will muffle the shot.
Other men, other conversations in the mountains, men who walk, go hungry, shoot, but not for obligation or pay, or amusement at what they do, men who have become bad by dint of being good, men who now, at night, around the chestnut fire, sing songs learned in jail, serious as if they were singing church hymns. And conversations of old men about the war in Spain, about strikes where soldiers fired shots, conversations of a secret life and jails, conversations of men who suffer from the law and want to remake it, not like dogs on a chain, not like him now.
And memory would drink up the recollections, as soon as they appeared, with fear almost, as if they could be seen by the others, by the officers, betray him, report him, “the rebel.” The barracks, enormous monument of injustice become law, still loomed over him with its stone stairs, its peeling doors, its shabby offices, its Frisian horses, condemning those imprudent surges of memory.
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