The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  Anyone who has tried to launch a small sailing boat or canoe through breakers will know how hard this is. And what happens when you fail. The force of the crashing wave makes the most powerful effort seem puny. There is a tremendous rush, thousands of pounds of weight unleashed at speed. Your boat is tossed back yards, if not overturned. Leaving you battered and discouraged.

  Garibaldi kept at it.

  Only after repeated, extremely taxing attempts did we finally get through the waves, row the anchors out far enough and then get them to grip. But as we were rowing back to the port, paying out the ropes, the very last, being thinner than the others and flawed, snapped. All our work was lost and we would have to start from scratch. It was enough to drive you mad. I now had to go back on board the boats and find more ropes, more anchors. The fishermen were sleepy and hostile. The only way to get what you needed was to slap them with the flat of your sword . . .

  Feeling sleepy, we rested a couple of hours in the hotel, then went for a swim. The water had a slimy feel, its surface so still it was dusty. We waded past children and their weary parents and swam out a couple of hundred yards to the breakwaters. Here the water was clearer and cooler. Turning, looking up and down the seashore and the endless sunshades, we were astonished to see San Marino still plainly visible to the south. Extraordinary to think of all the toil and territory there was between here and there.

  Now came a noise. A launch, passing just beyond the breakwaters, was blasting out an advertisement for coastal cruises. The message had to be loud enough to be heard by the folks on the beach. Where we were it was deafening. ‘Gente! Bagnanti!’ People! Bathers! A brash voice with a comically strong local accent conjured visits to caves, on-board fry-ups, a wide range of alcoholic drinks. Half amused, half dismayed, we swam back to the shore.

  Garibaldi also took a swim. It must have been around 5 a.m. Once again they struggled to get a boat through the waves. Once again they rowed a little way out to drop the anchors. In 1896 Domenico Piva, a retired colonel, published his account of events in Il Corriere del Polesine, a local newspaper. As a young man of twenty-three, he had rowed with the General. ‘Garibaldi tossed the anchors overboard, then dived in after them, following the rope down to the bottom to make sure they were properly fixed to the seabed. I was finding it hard to hold the boat in position and when he resurfaced he was quite far away. But he swam back to me without too much effort, sprang in, shook his long hair with one sharp energetic movement and put his clothes back on.’

  ‘This time it worked,’ writes Garibaldi in his memoirs. ‘The thirteen boats were roped together. The men split into groups and boarded.’

  Forbes was the last. Everyone was scrambling for a boat, to haul on the rope and get through the breakers. In these final frenetic moments the General asked Domenico Piva if he had any money, and when the young man said yes, ‘He asked me to go and buy some things for Anita. “She’s not feeling well. Get some sugar, some rum, some sardines, some lemons, and” – here he lowered his voice – “a few cigars for me. I’ll repay you as soon as I have some cash.”’

  We had also run out of money and consulted Google to find the nearest cash dispenser. Uncannily, it was in Via Anita Garibaldi. Ready for a celebratory aperitivo before dinner, we went back to the canal, walking the length of it, this time from inshore towards the coast. Where it crosses Piazza Garibaldi a row of old bragozzi had been rigged up and colourfully repainted, no doubt for the annual celebrations. Their sails, ketch-shaped, were raised in the still air. Rich maroon and orange. Static and exotic. The water was glassy in the bright sunshine. The whole thing seemed unreal, oriental. On his pedestal in the centre of the square, a handsome white-stone Garibaldi looks out over the painted boats. Virile, melancholy. ‘He surpassed the virtues of ancient Greece and Rome,’ claims the inscription.

  We drank an Aperol-spritz under a portico with a view of the statue in profile. It is the most moving of all the Garibaldi statues we saw, something to do with its balance of charisma and impotence. A sort of noble frustration. Immediately behind was a small merry-go-round, the kind of thing whose tinkling music drives you crazy on summer evenings. Fortunately it wasn’t running now. Fixed to the top of its marquee canopy was a shiny white horse, front hooves rearing. No doubt the creature spins with the carousel. ‘They had to leave their horses behind,’ wrote the Mayor of Cesenatico, Girolamo Gusella, in his account of events. ‘And with what sadness after all they had been through together. Garibaldi, much moved, kissed his horse on the forehead where it had a kind of white star, then gave it to a clerk who worked in the harbour office, Remigio Antonioli. He asked: “General, what am I supposed to do with this horse?” “Anything you like, just don’t let the Austrians get their hands on it!”’

  Over dinner I remembered the time I too had swum down a rope to fiddle with an anchor. Not at 5 a.m. But around 6.30. Early enough. And after a sleepless night too.

  ‘How come?’

  It had proved quite difficult to get a table along the canal. We had hoped to eat at the Osteria degli Inseguiti, but it was full. The customers lingered, at their ease. Everywhere was full. Restaurant after restaurant. August is high season. It seemed the whole town was at ease. No one felt the least bit harassed or pursued. A wonderful atmosphere that we couldn’t quite tune into. We crossed to the other side of the canal, away from the centre, and eventually squeezed into a place at the Osteria Pub Maraffa, where we were served tagliolini al limone by a diligent young recruit, constantly weaving back and forth among the tables.

  ‘I was nineteen. I and a friend had used holiday-job money to buy a second-hand sailing boat for 300 pounds. It had a tiny cabin with room for two sleeping bags. A so-called microcruiser. Just sixteen feet. We were sailing it along the south coast. On a shoestring. Boring old England of course. One evening we dropped anchor in Portsmouth Sound. Then we decided we should move the boat closer inshore. But when we pulled the anchor it wouldn’t come up. It was stuck. I tried to swim down at once. It was too deep. My ears were bursting. We studied our chart. No apps in those days. Sure enough we were in a place with big cables crossing underneath. Was there a danger of piercing something electrical? Should we throw away the anchor and a lot of rope? But if we did, how could we anchor the boat for the night? We consulted the tide schedules. Low tide would be at 6.30. The water should fall ten feet. So after an anxious night, I jumped in.’

  ‘Why you and not your friend?’

  ‘Good question. I don’t know. All I remember is how black it was. And the pressure of the water, holding my breath, pulling myself down the nylon rope, and how scary digging my fingers round the iron of the anchor. There was slime everywhere and something hard. I was terrified some mega electrical shock would blow me out of the water. Just before my breath was done, in a panic, I gave it a huge yank and it came free.’

  ‘We pulled the boats out through the breakers,’ Garibaldi remembers, ‘one by one, with everyone on board. Out at sea, we shared round the food that had been requisitioned from the municipal authorities. I shouted some instructions, to keep as close together as possible, and we set sail for Venice.’

  An hour later the Austrians rolled into town.

  We wound up our meal and headed back to the hotel. Crossing Piazza Ciceruacchio again, Eleonora noticed, high on the wall of the public library, something that had escaped us in the afternoon. It was floodlit now. A huge stone plaque, perhaps four metres by three, with a long list of names in four columns.

  They were the men in the boats. I took a photo and counted them back at the hotel. Three columns of fifty. One of thirty-eight.

  ‘Didn’t you say,’ Eleonora objected, ‘that we didn’t know their names?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I answered, ‘we’ll find out how they ended up there.’

  Endgame

  DAY 28

  2–3 August 1849 – 21 August 2019

  Cesenatico, Porto Garibaldi, Lido di Volano, Lido delle Nazioni, Comacchio

  Over his life
time tens of thousands followed Garibaldi. Like a pied piper. But for every disciple, however faithful, there came the moment of separation. The General didn’t play his tune – freedom, self-determination, Italy – to enchant or imprison. He bound no one and clung to no one. When you’d had enough, he let you go. Where you couldn’t follow, he went on. Or you woke one morning – in Montevideo, in Rome, in San Marino – and found him gone. You were bereft. When we woke up in Cesenatico we knew at once we’d lost him.

  We were overcome by a sense of deflation, a loss of impetus. We had nowhere to walk, no immediate goal. In a matter of moments, over breakfast, we changed our plans. The idea had been to chill at the beach for a couple of days, then home. Instead, like so many before us, we made a snap decision: we would try to catch him up. At least follow a little further in his wake. The wake of thirteen fishing boats with a hundred-mile voyage before them. Anita’s wake. We ransacked the internet. Did anyone run boat trips up the coast? To the Marina di Ravenna perhaps. Twenty-eight miles. Or better still to Porto Garibaldi. Forty miles. No. There were no boats going north. Only tours to the south, with fry-ups. And crossings to Croatia.

  Porto Garibaldi

  We made for the station. We would travel by train and bus and intercept him where he touched land. We walked quickly, noticing an elementary school called 2 agosto 1849, laughing at a poster advertising ERMES, a clairvoyant, ‘Expert in bringing back a lost love.’

  Our train, to Ravenna, due at 11.15, was late. The platform was an oven. The woman at the ticket office had no idea when the train would come. Or if it would come. At 11.45 it was officially soppresso. Cancelled. The next was at 13.15. The woman at the ticket office now thought there might be a replacement bus. At 12.00. But there might not. Buses were not her responsibility.

  We waited on the plaza outside. With others. Suddenly a man was shouting. He was standing beside an old Opel Vectra opening and slamming the passenger door. He had been robbed, he cried. He was beside himself, running round and round the car, looking up and down the street. He had brought his wife to the station, he said, and parked (illegally) right outside. Returning to the car, he had found the back tyre flat. Being a practical fellow – a rough, paunchy man, in his sixties – he had set about changing the wheel. When he was done, he had found his wallet, his phone, the car keys, all gone from the front seat. He’d been tricked.

  Everyone sympathized. Now he wanted to borrow a phone to call his mechanic. He asked me. I feared it might be another trick. He would run off with my phone. Or I would lend him my phone, and the bus would come and we would miss it. Nevertheless, I gave him the phone. He began a long argument with his mechanic. The bus didn’t show up. ‘Back to modernity,’ Eleonora muttered. At every moment the General was slipping further away.

  ‘The sun was well up when we left Cesenatico,’ he writes in his memoirs. ‘The weather had brightened and the wind was favourable. If I hadn’t been saddened to see my Anita in such a terrible state, suffering terribly, I would have said we were through the worst and on our way to safety, in short lucky: but my dear companion’s torments were too much, and likewise my regret that I could do nothing for her.’

  If there was one exception to Garibaldi’s rule of glorious independence, it was Anita. He was attached to Anita in a way he would never be attached to anyone else. It was nearly the death of him.

  The main problem was water. My poor woman had a desperate thirst, an obvious symptom of whatever was wrong inside. I was thirsty myself, worn out with all the effort, and we had very little water. The whole day we followed the coast north with a good wind behind. The night too was going to be a beauty. There was a full moon, the sailors’ friend, but I who had so often contemplated the moon with awe and worship, felt uneasy as I watched it rise. It was more beautiful than ever, but for us it was haplessly too beautiful. The moon proved fatal for us that night.

  Having given up on the bus, we bought sandwiches and a litre of water and sat on a bench in the shady gardens opposite the station. Almost at once we felt threatened. Unshaven men of various ages and ethnicities shifted from bench to bench. They made phone calls, went to speak to other men on other benches. Drugs, Eleonora thought. We moved to a bench nearer the thoroughfare. We couldn’t relax.

  ‘The fishermen had told me,’ Garibaldi goes on, ‘that the Austrian navy had a squadron off the Goro promontory [at the southern tip of the Po delta, fifty miles from Venice]. However, I had no definite information. In the event, the first ship we saw was a fast brig, the Oreste, I think. Towards sunset, they saw us.’

  We finally boarded the 13.15 train at 13.23. It was the end of our purity. We were on wheels. Motorized. The landscape flew by. Flat and dull. Marshy and industrial. We couldn’t touch it. We couldn’t smell it. Twenty miles, a good day’s walk, was covered in twenty minutes. In Ravenna we rushed to the bus station and bagged seats up front, by the driver. The destination was Porto Garibaldi, a little fishing village known until 1919 as Magnavacca – literally, in dialect, Eat Cow, but apparently derived from the Latin Magnum Vacum or Magno Vacuum, Great Emptiness. The coast is flat and barren. Inland are marshes, then seven miles of lagoon. The bus raced north along a strip of land, on a dead-straight road, planted all down the middle with flowering oleanders and maritime pines.

  In reply to our questions the driver assured us we would be fleeced in Porto Garibaldi. He was a jovial man, a Tuscan he immediately insisted on assuring us, though it was already clear from his accent. ‘They have so few tourists here now, the ones they do get they fleece.’ A century ago, he explained, people from Milan had built holiday homes here. Then when the roads got faster they went to the prettier and healthier places further south. Cesenatico. Rimini. With fewer mosquitoes. ‘And of course, since it’s poor here, the government has sent us all the scum.’

  It took us a few moments to grasp what our helpful driver meant by this. Behind him a local man was nodding his head. ‘The authorities here have no power,’ he said. ‘They can’t defend themselves.’ Gradually, it dawned that they were referring to immigrants. There were lots of immigrants, doing the menial jobs. What we had to do, though, he said, was see Comacchio. Four miles inland from Porto Garibaldi at the northern tip of the lagoon. A beautiful old borgo, a little Venice, all canals, where you could eat eels. ‘Nothing but eels,’ the driver laughed. ‘Eels are wonderful,’ the local protested. ‘I drank eel broth in my baby’s bottle.’

  When I said we had come to see the place where Garibaldi landed, they couldn’t agree where it was. ‘After all, Porto Garibaldi was named after him,’ the local man said. ‘It’s at Lido delle Nazioni,’ the driver thought. ‘Where the famous hut is.’ That was five miles to the north. But I had read a new biography of Anita, in which the author claims they landed at Mesola beach, just beyond the Lido di Volano, a further six miles north.

  ‘Is there a bus that goes up there?’

  As soon as they had seen us [Garibaldi recounts] the brig manoeuvred to approach. I signalled to the other boats to steer a diagonal course moving closer to the coast and out of the line of the moonlight. But it made no difference, the night was so bright, brighter than I’ve ever seen it, that the enemy not only kept us easily in view but started firing off cannons and rockets, partly to alert the other ships in the squadron.

  I tried to steer between the enemy ships and the coast, turning a deaf ear to the cannonballs coming our way. But the other boats, frightened by the noise of the explosions and the growing number of enemy ships, dropped back and, not wanting to leave them to their fate, I turned back with them.

  Lido di Volano

  The Hotel Ariston in Porto Garibaldi is right opposite the bus stop. We just had time to cross the road, leave our bags and drink an espresso before the bus to Lido di Volano arrived. Since there was only one bus every two hours, we had to be on board. It’s a long ride into a coastal dead end. Volano is the last of Comacchio’s seven lidi – beaches – strung one after the other up to the Po delta. The little ce
ntres are seedy, rundown. Much of the land is reclaimed, with long stretches of pine trees on duny ground. After the sixth, Lido delle Nazioni, we were the only travellers on the bus. The smell of the air, as we got down in Volano, was briny and forlorn.

  I leave it to you to imagine what my position was in those wretched moments. My poor woman, dying. The enemy following us from the sea, driven with the energy of the easy victory. Us landing on a coast where there was every chance of finding more and more numerous enemies, not just Austrians, but papal soldiers too, in proud reaction after the fall of the Republic. All the same, we landed.

  Where? Where exactly? We followed a narrow lane through dull low bushes and leaning pines. Grass poked through the asphalt of empty car parks. A garish and ramshackle stabilimento appeared. Flags of all nations, buckets and spades, bike hire. A large recent sign, six feet by six, celebrated, in Italian and Slovenian, but above all in bureaucratese, the European Union’s funding of a bike track around the top of the Adriatic. €3,514,000. No signs indicated where the track was. Then we were on the beach. Beyond three rows of sunshades, the gritty grey sand stretched mile after mile around a vast bay. To the left, in the distance, scores of tiny white sails stood out against the dark promontory of Goro. Where the Austrian navy had lain in wait.

  4 August, Birch von Dahlerup, commander of the Austrian naval squadron in the Adriatic, off the Venetian coast, to Ferenc Gyulay, imperial minister of war, in Vienna

  A few minutes ago I received a report from Schiffsleutenant Scopenich, stationed off Goro; he says that on the night between 2 and 3 August his ships identified a convoy of more than twenty boats proceeding from Comacchio towards Venice. Assuming at once that this was a desperate move on the part of Garibaldi and his band, the commander of the brig Oreste fired cannon at the boats and chased them with launches. Most of the boats, which were in fact packed with Garibaldi’s troops, were captured. From the prisoners’ accounts it seems the notorious Garibaldi, with his wife, a doctor, a priest and a handful of officers, had landed somewhere between Magnavacca and Volano, where launches were immediately sent to intercept them.