They Shall Begin Again

by Giacomo Papi

  “Move to the side. Like this, yes, but a little bit more in profile.”

  “Like this?”

  “Now turn your head, please. Don’t be so stiff, with more nonchalance. We won’t shoot you, you know.”

  She reddened. She realized she had made a gaffe. I didn’t know what to say—I was thunderstruck looking at her—I must have looked like an idiot with my mouth wide open in wonder. She stepped up to the camera and started to count out loud with her fingers. On ten, her father shot the picture. I still have it. It’s that one hanging there. You see that idiotic expression? To this day it embarrasses me. For the following week I did nothing but think of her. As soon as I had some free time, I would run to the piazza, sit at the café in front of the shop, hoping to see her. I hated my fellow soldiers, I envied those who had yet to take their photographs. And at that point I made the most stupid mistake I ever made in my life. I got in line again. I have four photographs of myself in uniform and I look like an idiot in all of them. She seemed excited and happy each time. She always altered something slight, a small detail. She would make me sit differently and add a different prop to the set, always coming up with something original. Her father didn’t notice.

  I thought about her throughout the war. She wrote to me every day until it was over. Each week I received seven letters from her. I didn’t realize how beautiful they were. You know, in wartime you spend a lot of time waiting. And if things go badly, you die. The most vivid memory I have from the war is the red of blood on snow. It turns to pink, cold pink. I despised the freezing steel of the weaponry that we had to dismantle with our cold, aching fingers. Her letters were the thread that kept me attached to life. At first her phrases were generic, somewhat sentimental, typical of the style of the time. Then she let herself go. She would invent riddles or would tell me about incredible adventures. She forbade me from writing her back. She didn’t want her father to find out. Before I left for the war, she liked to dress me and put me in pose. During the war she pretended to have a boyfriend in combat. I was her last doll.

  In springtime, many leaves of absence—including mine and that of many other soldiers—were postponed. It was a difficult time. I was supposed to only have served two more weeks. I fantasized about taking a train and going to get my picture taken again. Instead, in May, I fell ill. I had a very high fever, with shivers and cold sweats. An epidemic. They called it “the three-day fever.” I got better, but my leave was revoked.

  Summer ended and the fall came. We fought along a river with only swollen, frozen water separating us from the enemies. We waited for days on end under incessant rain that turned the earth to mud and caused the rivers to overflow. Final combat was postponed on account of the bad weather. Weather and time converged: the more dreadful it was outside, the later the battle would take place. There was only the countryside, the rain, and endless waiting. People said that the enemy was adrift and that the Empire was crumbling. But we, too, were falling to pieces. We received new recruits, but food was scarce and that strange fever came back. This time it was brutal. After two days, people started to spit up black blood and die.

  We waited for further orders. We were so focused and dazed we didn’t notice that it was an epidemic, even though we had to bury more than one body per casket. There was a shortage of everything, even wood for the coffins. Generals shifted around soldiers and army vehicles, people and soldiers traveled by mule, on motorcycles, in trucks, on three-wheelers, bicycles, or by foot. All of a sudden any means of transportation was fair game. Sounds from the Front grew louder each day, and at night grenades exploded and bombings increased, but it was as if things happened just for the heck of it, to pass the time, to keep the men warm, while they waited for the rain to cease.

  One day, the skies cleared. The ground dried. Soon after, the command to attack arrived. We had to cross a stream to reach the river to get farther up north to join the other brigade. But the stream was no longer a stream. Two of our men were swept away by the water and drowned right in front of our eyes. Me and four other soldiers managed to overcome it and met up with the others. We crossed the river on a bridge of ships. Bullets shot all around us and grenades dropped into the river only a few meters away from us, like giant hailstones.

  The enemy was truly in the outs. Everything was falling apart, but it took forever for it to fall apart entirely. The enemy army was disbanding, all the living soldiers were dispersing, withdrawing, fleeing, and leaving the dead, wounded and forgotten to hold their posts. Every so often we would run into some deserters. They would almost always surrender without even shooting. Once, though, things went differently. I think the deserters must have been Hungarian. No one had informed them that they had lost. We found them in a vineyard where they had found refuge in a bombarded farmstead. It was the morning of the last day of October. There was an exchange of fire and I was shot in the leg. They took me behind the lines. I was in the military hospital for two months and I didn’t partake in any of the celebrations. Finally, truce was reached in November.

  Her letters kept coming, punctual, every week, seven letters in seven days. In some of her letters she pretended we were married and already had kids. She imagined her life as an adult and forced me to fantasize about it with her.

  I was discharged in early 1919. I had to walk with crutches and the wound hadn’t completely healed, but I was alive and I loved her. What more did I need?

  They told me about the epidemic upon my return. In the battlefield it had seemed just like one of the many effects of war, but instead, it had destroyed everything. It didn’t even have a precise name. In Italy they called it grippe or the Spanish influenza, in Spain it was known as “the soldier of Naples,” in France it was called the “fièvre de Parme,” in London it was named the “Flanders fever,” in Ceylon people knew it as the flu “of Bombay,” and the Poles gave it the name of the “Bolshevik flu.” In just a few months it claimed the lives of twenty million people, many more than the actual casualties of war, and it infected many more.

  People thought that it was the same epidemic that had struck in May. At the end of October, during the days of victory, it was most deadly. It took the lives of the healthiest of men, young people, pregnant women and children. Doctors were called to the front lines and no one was left at home to take care of the sick. Authorities did not allow overcrowding. In order not to bring down troop morale, the epidemic was put on low alert, but the authorities closed down schools, universities, cinemas and theaters. Piazzas and streets were disinfected, as were public offices, grocery stores and trams. The price of disinfectants skyrocketed. You could smell Lysol, phenol, sublimate and taurine everywhere. Quinine sold like hot cakes—on the black market too—even though its main properties were helpful in fighting malaria. Newspapers ran advertisements for ointments, syrups and pocket spittoons, because it was illegal to spit on the sidewalk and people who sneezed could be fined. But the contagion could not be stopped. The influenza traveled through the air, and it was impossible to stop people from breathing. When the truce was announced in November, people gathered in the streets anyway.

  At the peak of the epidemic, even Mass and funerals were prohibited. Cemeteries ran out out of free space and the few caskets that were left were purchased by the Carabinieri, but they couldn’t find anyone to dig the graves. There were too many deaths; gravediggers couldn’t keep up with it all and farmers who stayed behind refused to help for fear of infection. The dead were removed in different ways: they were loaded onto any means of transportation, even butchers’ wagons, but no one knew how to dispose of them. “Like dogs,” my mother kept repeating when I came home, “Like animals.” My world was collapsing. But just as the fever came, it suddenly vanished.

  I only thought about her. I hadn’t received a letter from her in a month. Initially I blamed the post office—after all, with victory came chaos—but as the days went by, I only grew more agitated. I set off one morning. I still could not walk very well and my mother wasn’t h
appy I was leaving. On the train, I tried coming to terms with the fact that she might be dead, but as soon as I reached the city I was hopeful again and rushed to the studio. There was still a line in front of the doorway. It was the final contingent, young kids being called into an ended war were going to get their picture taken. The only thing I could do was get back in line. No one dared to ask me about my street clothes or my crutches. They were scared to hear about the effects of war.

  While I stood in line I fantasized about seeing her all grown up. The notion of showing up in this way was theatrical: I was the wounded soldier, the romantic hero from a novel, and I liked it. Instead, when my turn came, I walked in and the universe shattered around me. She wasn’t there. I stood and stared blankly at her father who was showing me where to sit. I was so crushed that I didn’t know what else to do except follow his orders. I was in the middle of a studio that was falling apart, for parts had been lost since the last time I was there. I started to cry. I posed, and like an idiot, I started to cry. That man, who in the meantime retreated behind his camera, finally noticed me. He pulled his head out from underneath the sheet.

  “Do you want me to photograph you crying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “As you wish, lieutenant.”

  He went back under, and after several seconds he shot the photo. The flash blinded me like a small bomb and made me react.

  “I came to propose to your daughter, Signore.”

  He looked me up and down, surprised, starting at my face and moving down to my crutches and then back up again, until his eyes met mine. It seemed like the first time he looked at someone directly without the protection of his camera lens.

  He looked at me very sternly.

  “Are you the boy she wrote letters to?”

  “Yes, Signore. My name is Serafino Currò.”

  The man turned to stone. After a few seconds he put his hand over his mouth and started to speak, forcing himself to keep a steady voice.

  “My daughter died on the 31st of October, 1918, at eleven in the morning. The fever took her from me. Just like my wife, just like everybody else. She fell ill at the beginning of October, but then things started to look positive for her, I thought she was getting better. Then it came back, and her lungs couldn’t keep up.”

  “My most sincere condolences, Signore. She was a special girl.”

  “That she was, lieutenant.”

  We stood there, staring at each other. We were alone. The man moved.

  “But now, if you will excuse me, there are still a lot of people out there.”

  I left without saying goodbye or asking anything else. My life, with the news of her death, all the years that I had lived and all the ones yet to come, had suddenly been consumed by nothingness. I felt like my existence was nullified, that I was in a place where nothing could ever begin again because everything had ended. Naturally, life went on. It always goes on. It doesn’t give a shit about anything. But, for me, it became another life. I didn’t feel it connected to what came before or to the future that was about to come. It was as if I had slipped into someone else’s life.

  I met the woman who would become my wife, and I think we were happy together, Victoria and I. When my son was born, I loved him with unconditional love, the purest love, where you lose sight of yourself. But I still felt, every damn second, like I was living my life around an absence, the absence of her, a hollow existence capable of surviving around its own void. Her father told me that she died on October 31st, but her last letters dated to Christmas. There was only one explanation: she had written me in the time between when she first fell ill and her relapse, inventing future days, fleeing from death by stretching out the love as far as she could.”

  “And you saw her again, Serafino?”

  “Yes. Two days ago. I saw her. I was crossing the street at a crosswalk not far from here. As soon as the light turned green, people started to walk in both directions and I saw her coming towards me from across the street, as beautiful as she was the first time I laid eyes on her, her footsteps barely touching the ground, bouncing into the sky. She walked towards me, her yellow eyes dancing around and I froze up like an idiot, staring at her like I had stared at her a hundred years ago in her father’s studio, stock-still in the center of the road like an old imbecile, trying to meet her eyes, hoping that she would recognize me in the body of an old man. I was hoping she would say: “Is that you, Serafino, how are you?” and I would answer: “It is I. How are you?” and maybe we would stop and look at each other, old man and young girl, separated by a white strip of paint on the asphalt, while people around us made it to the other side of the road. Maybe the light on the crosswalk would turn red again and cars would drive past and around us, and maybe someone would ask who those two in the middle of the street were and cars would honk their horns and we would start to laugh at the thought that our wedding day had come one century later, despite death. Instead she turned around and saw me, and for a second, maybe, she asked herself why I was looking at her in that way. But she didn’t recognize me. The red light flashed. Cars drove past again. I just stood there thinking that after one hundred years, she had come to look for me here, in this city, because she thought that maybe she’d find me. And I stood there, in the middle of traffic, my heart beating like a drum and cars shooting past, and I laughed, cried, and breathed, and I realized that, deep down, love is only a human scar.”

  “But it can heal, if you live through it.”

  “You live through it anyway, even if you never experience it.”

  His story was over. Maria fell asleep. She slept like a rock, only slightly bothered by the wafts of hot air rising from the street. Sweat dampened her skin and hair and wet the sheets. The moon, rising pink over the buildings, soon turned pale. Serafino looked out from the balcony. The crowd had not yet dispersed. But now that Maria was finally resting, he needed to leave the house. The telephones weren’t working. He would have to go to the hospital to look for Adriano or another doctor. The girl would go into labor any minute now. She needed a doctor. He would be back before she woke up. Maybe she wouldn’t even notice he was gone.

  Thirty-four

  In her dream she was a child and had wet her pants. It was summertime, it was hot and there was a party going on in the garden because she heard many voices. Her mother would surely get mad at her when she found out that she was wet, and that the sheets were wet too, but this time it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t remember the feeling of needing to pee, and couldn’t recall the pleasurable sensation of letting go either, that warm trickling feeling. In her sleep she touched herself between her thighs and felt droplets in her pubic hair, she had been a bad girl. But she didn’t have hair down there, this must have been a mistake, because that’s something that only big girls have and so it must have been a big girl who wet her pants. But what was a big girl who wasn’t her mother doing in her bed? Her mother was in the garden, at the party. And she, Maria, needed to see who it was, she needed to open her eyes, even though she was frightened. It was dark. The open window framed the moon, so pockmarked that it looked perforated. Where was she?

  Serafino. She had the sensation that her stomach was enormous. Yes, of course, she was pregnant, she was the big girl, only she didn’t understand why she was all wet. It took a huge effort to sit up in bed, her palms on the damp sheets, and a second later her legs and bed were soaked. The warm liquid came out from inside her and dripped down all over. Her body was like a badly corked bottle. She smelled water in the air, a light and gentle scent that she had never smelled before, the scent of a bed that a tiny princess has slept in for a hundred years. She felt no pain. She was full of wonder. Suddenly she understood that her water had broken. She never imagined that an expression could be so apt. The moment had come and she wasn’t ready. How does one give birth?

  After the initial gush, the liquid was now trickling. How long could a baby survive without water? Once, as a child, she knocked over a gold fish bowl w
hile playing. She found the fish gasping for air on the floor but hadn’t managed to save it.

  She didn’t want to be alone. She called out, at first softly, and then louder.

  “Serafino … Serafino.”

  No one answered. She tried to focus on what they told her to do. She needed to stay calm and take deep breaths. Even her mother had managed to give birth, but in a hospital, for fuck’s sake, in a hospital and not alone, not in the dark and not in a world full of dead people. All she could do was wait.

  Adriano stopped by a bench, opened the bundle he had in his hands and put his dirty clothes back on. His underwear, socks and pants were three days old. He couldn’t show up at the hospital naked. He still couldn’t understand what part of the city he was in. He stopped to ask someone. The man said that they were in the outskirts of the city. It was impossible to get to the center by foot and it was impossible to find a means of transportation now. There were twenty-four hours left before the wave would hit, and the roads were already flooded with heaps of trash. A slimy carpet of garbage caked the asphalt. He saw people running up to a stand that was selling water. Cups of tap water were being sold like crazy, for ridiculous prices. He got in line and, after several minutes, finally drank. The flavor was disgusting, but he was dying of thirst. Someone touched his back. It was a tall man whom he had never seen.

  “Are you stupid?”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know where that water comes from.”

  “No, I don’t know, what water is it?”

  “It comes from the river, idiot. You paid money to drink water from the river that runs right there behind those trees.”

  “There where?”

  “Can’t you see it? Behind those trees you can have all the rat’s piss you want.”