The Lights of Alborada

GIANNI RIOTTA

The Lights of Alborada

Translated from the Italian by SHAUN WHITESIDE

To Anita the great dolphin To Michele the great helmsman

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Also by Gianni Riotta

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

When I was a child on the Island, feast days were announced by the Alborada. At the first light of ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, as our teachers taught us to call it, Orazio the sexton lit rockets full of black gunpowder. Their fuses were short and hemp-grey. The explosions rang out dry and crisp, without heat or smoke. One after another, like the beads of the rosary that the old women fingered during Vespers, in the cold of the church of San Noè.

The village lived by the bloody trade of fishing and the strenuous business of processing tuna, the silvery herds of the blue Mediterranean Sea, and it was too small – just a few houses lined up along the cliffs – not to be roused all at once by the sound of Alborada. The first explosion made us all jump, snug beneath the salt-stained quilts that our grandmothers had spent their evenings embroidering. The other reports slipped easily into our ears, but none of them rumbled in the same way. There was no fishing on a feast day, no nets to untangle or harpoons to hone to razor-sharpness, to strike the blue skin and the red flesh of the tuna. The women didn't have the bother of sheets to wash and wring in the irrigation ditch, or children to send to school, hoping that the holes in their shoes wouldn't get too big before the annual mattanza, the tuna slaughter, before the vital force of the tuna paid for the next year of our lives.

When the explosions brought the pyrotechnic volley to an end, Orazio began to ring the bells, short strokes through the morning air, which was clear but still grey. When the last bell fell silent the villagers would roll over in bed, the men relax and the woman begin to think about lighting the stove for a cup of coffee, when there was coffee, and when there wasn't, then a cup of substitute coffee made from barley or bitter chicory. Between Alborada and the first awakenings there lay a contented zone of Purgatory, of waiting. The feast day had arrived, and promised, in the poet's words, repose and fleeting joys suspended in a no-man's-land, a day free of the prison of duties, chores, labour. The village waited for the future, not yet awake but coddled and rebuked, like sleepy children by their mothers: ‘Wake up. I'll be back in five minutes with your caffé latte.’

I was the only one who stopped sleeping when the Alborada sounded. As the first report rang out I slipped from my quilt and wrapped myself in a yellow oilskin against the dew. I ran. I ran along the deserted cobbled alleyways, my heart pounding and swelling against my breastbone and my skinny ribs. I flew over nets the colour of raw raffia, missed by a few inches the harpoons and the rough metal anchors. I jumped from bollard to bollard, balancing over the icy waters of the harbour, I ran my hand along the booming black gate of the school, slipping over the cobbles outside the big tuna-processing plant, the building of yellow volcanic stone that held our lives and our luck. I headed for San Noè, and behind me, on Hangman's Hill, where the gallows had stood in the days of the Saracen Turks, goats browsed the salt-crunching grass. My feet scraped the coarse turf, I grazed my knees on the paving-slabs of the market and turned to run up the hill, gliding like a happy gull over the church square of San Noè.

My challenge was a simple one: to cross the village, leaving our house at the first blast, and kneel beneath the paternal figure of San Noè – St Noah – before Orazio's final fuse brought the Alborada to a close. Once there, I would pray to the patron saint of the Ark, the guardian for forty days and forty nights of our species and of the myriad varieties of plants and animals, to intercede for me too, and for my family and for the village. What blessing I was asking for, I couldn't say. Neither did I really understand that word ‘intercede’, but it seemed to me that my mad, childish running, to the detonations of the Alborada, were a sacred and essential rite to be repeated every year.

Orazio came down muttering like a lonely old man, and noticed me in the square. ‘This time too? You're completely mad. Have you prayed? Fine. Now go back to bed.’

I never paid him any heed. Orazio turned his bent shoulders towards me and went back into the church to prepare the altar. I waited for my heart to settle in my chest, and walked gently towards the pier. There, a rare school of flying fish, frantic dragonflies, beat the waves with the same energy that I felt had been freed in my soul. I had fulfilled my vow, delivered my request for some favour as yet unknown.

My father was no longer at home, he had disappeared out on the Indian Ocean, swallowed up by the waves along with a cargo of Arab carpets. My mother lived on his pension, and although we were poor, we weren't starving. Papa had left me the books that had belonged to my grandfather, a lieutenant of Garibaldi's in the fight for the liberation of Italy. Naval almanacs, atlases, chronicles of the military actions of Garibaldi's Redshirts in Europe and America. I read and read. Only during those hours, only while waiting on the pier, after the Alborada and before the village roused itself, did I know what my life would be like. My schooldays and my adolescence. A girl with a blue pullover and hair down to her shoulders, strolling on the beach to the sound of a guitar from a balcony, and the sad songs that our men had learned in Spain. Love, happiness, tenderness.

Can a child imagine life through an adult's eyes? We think it's possible, don't we? We relegate not only today's children, but ourselves as children, to a perennial refuge of childhood, as though toys and illusions were the only things that children knew. Whereas that isn't the case, or at least not for those of us who grew up on the Island. I knew very well, as I ran off through the echoing reports of the rockets and the steely strokes of the bells, what I wanted from my life. I wasn't only concerned with glory, with travel, the constant and amazing tasks that I would perform on tropical waters, taking vengeance for my father's shipwreck. The adventures I took for granted, the sure reward for those heroes who stood in brilliant colours on the covers of boys' story books. The disdainful Cesare kidnapped by pirates, General Desaix in the last charge at Marengo, my grandfather making coffee for Garibaldi, indolently serving him under Bourbon fire. ‘General, was this morning's blend to your liking?’ ‘Manes, if you don't watch out for those muskets, you won't be making any coffee for me at all tomorrow morning.’

Manes is my surname, Giovannino is my first name, but everyone's always called me Nino, Nino Manes, a man who – I was sure of it as I watched the crashing festive waves – was going to make his mark on history. And I craved love, too. My childish idea of erotic passion didn't go beyond the smutty remarks of the old men who picked up cigarette stubs from the pavement, or furtive glances darted at an innocent little bride, or the moist kisses of some platinum-blonde Hollywood diva. Those feelings satisfied my heart and my imagination. I would be able to paint like my father, whose oil-painted ocean dawn hung gleaming over my bed. With a steady hand I would outline the face of my lover to be. There were her round lips, her soft, sweet eyes, a hint of cheekbone, her cheerful smile and her forehead, covered with the fringe that was customary then among girls of marriageable age. I always imagined her in a blue sweater, on the seashore at night, and in my ears I heard a song that was fashionable at the time: ‘Barefoot on the beach with you …’ My heart beat like a sparrow pecking grain; love and the future were that sky-coloured jumper and that girl who was alive only for me. But how alive she was!

I returned home damp and confused, as though I had spent my first, premature night of marriage. Mama gave me an egg beaten with sugar and the Marsala my father had left behind. SOM, said the Indian-ink label: Superior Old Marsala. My mother had resigned herself, poor woman, to these excursions of mine, and I think she would have been amazed if I had missed a single one.

My last Alborada outing coincided with my sixteenth birthday. It was easy for me at that age to scamper from the meadow to the hill of San Noè, since my legs were long, and I had strong feet that could grip the cobbles and the grass. But my palpitations at the idea that I might not make it, the anxiety of slipping beneath Orazio's bells before the final stroke, sent me off at a frantic gallop. It was no longer a children's game. It was a flight from the present, from adulthood.

For my Alborada as a sixteen-year-old, in 1937, I had donned long trousers. And I ran like mad, striding fiercely, not really looking where I was going. For the last time, I slipped into the church square, a winner, and pumped my clenched fists triumphantly in the air. I turned a half-pirouette, looking around for Orazio so that I could win his approval – ‘I've done it, Orazio!’ – and instead what I saw was the most beautiful girl I had ever set eyes upon. The nimble sway with which she walked set the sleeve of a blue pullover, slung lazily over her shoulders, swinging back and forth with the elegant severity of a metronome. Bareheaded, she gazed out to sea, and the breeze mingled curls and wool. My startled agitation must have produced a crunch of gravel, and she turned around to stare at me with mocking curiosity.

‘Are you always running? You're in a terrible hurry at this time of the morning. What's your name?’

‘Nino. And you?’

‘Zita.’

And I never ran again.

2

During the fiercest war of the twentieth century twelve million soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. Former warriors, proud of their armies and their units, often convinced of the cause for which they had been recruited, spent their days behind barbed wire, vying with their fellow soldiers for a slice of bread in the mud or, when conditions were more humane, waiting restlessly for the next day, querulous and impotent. Twelve million human beings, a nation, scattered from the frozen steppes of Europe to Australia, where six hundred Japanese kamikaze fighters threw themselves against the machine-gun nests of the camp guards at Cowra, choosing bullets over the shame of detention. In Africa, the Italian lieutenant Carlo de Bellegarde escaped from a British camp in Kenya and, on foot and on a bicycle, covered over three thousand kilometres of jungle and savannah to reach Mozambique in two months. Prey to snakes by night and lions by day, he defended himself with a torch, waving it around to chase the beasts away. Two askaris, Ambekilili and Wakuru, captured him on the last bridge before freedom: ‘Bwana mkubwa, Bahati mbaya – Noble lord, a terrible misfortune!’ they said sadly.

In 1915 the men of my village suspended the tuna hunt, and they went to war. The ones who survived the eleven Isonzo Offensives returned and took up their nets again. We, their sons, set off for sun-scorched Africa, the merciless Balkans, eternal Russia. When the fate of the war turned for our lovely homeland, we were imprisoned in Nazi camps, or in Siberia, or across the sea. When we came home, our children listened to us complaining about vanishing shoals of bluefish, the declining tuna population, no more tuna hearts hanging to dry in the sun, no gleaming fillets in oil. We never talked about what had happened to us.

Ettore, my father's cousin, had served on a rickety banana boat that crossed the Red Sea. Cut off beyond the Suez Canal by the declaration of war, he and his crew crossed two oceans, the Indian and the Pacific, to be welcomed in triumph by the girls of Tokyo and ended up in a concentration camp when Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943. Ettore saw the flash of Hiroshima on the horizon, survived and came home with two pearl necklaces which he gave to his daughters. But he didn't say a word about his adventures.

Uncle Massimo was captured by the 6th Australian Division in Bardia, in Africa. They stole his Vetta watch, but he didn't hate them for it. ‘It's war, no point harbouring a grudge.’ He ended up in Yol, in India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They dragged him across three continents but they didn't break him. On the yellow sand of the camp he drew up a plan of escape to Manchuria, climbing mountains eight thousand metres high and then marching hundreds of kilometres to the Japanese bases in China. No one wanted to follow him (are you surprised?) and he set off on his own. When captured he was up to his neck in snow. The British colonel warmed him up with a bowl of soup, and then gave him permission, on his word of honour, to move around freely inside the camp as long as he never again tried to escape. He too kept mum about his adventures.

No one wants to listen to prison stories, so we just kept quiet. We behaved patiently, we waited like stoics, refusing to let ourselves be humiliated. And yet we were defeated. Benito Mussolini's wicked project was beaten back, the banners broken, strips of them sold as souvenirs. The most respectable kind of captivity, the bravest of lives as a prisoner, is still the mark of a battle lost. It's hard for a child to look into his father's eyes and know that this man was once young and handsome and defeated, a hostage of people who stole his chronometer, his rifle, his mother's letters, his identity, his victory and his future. We, the fathers, redeemed the honour of battle with our courageous conduct in the camps: but what about the sons? Who are the sons of the retreat, a generation without flags, avid consumers at the cinema of the exploits of the victorious Allied warriors at El Alamein, the Don, Sicily?

They listen to the stories and, puzzled and attentive, miss the moral. There's only one adventure they want to hear. Of all the escapes, real or imagined, dreamed up or frustrated by our jailers, one alone gives heart to the children born after the peace. They tell it to each other, changing or adding details and secrets every time they do so. Its protagonist is a maths student who became a fisherman. Perhaps, in this century, others will be delighted by the tale of his escape, which began in April 1944, at a bus stop in Hereford, Texas, in the great and powerful United States of America.

Four hundred thousand Germans and 50,000 Italians were imprisoned in that new continent. Only 2,200 of the Germans, veterans of Field-Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps, patient, silent and organised, tried to get away, all of them recaptured. Thirty-five of them died, killed while attempting to escape. The Italians too, apparently more serene, endlessly singing a single song, ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me …’ escaped as quickly as they could, as permitted by the Geneva Convention. I got hold of the figures – the American War Department estimates that 604 Italians broke out. Rather more than the Germans, on average. Why? Where were they planning to go, setting off on foot from Texas, from the Mississippi, even from Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, digging tunnels, dressing up as priests, as labourers, eluding the patrols by hiding in haystacks? To reach a ship and be transported, clandestinely, to Europe, to Spain or Portugal, neutral countries? Or did they just want to escape the endless routine, dinner, roll call, reading, football, dinner and lights out? Where was a prisoner to go, on foot, without a word of English? The dream was the free ports, New York and Philadelphia, the only ones that allowed ships from non-allied countries to berth. The Americans had spread the rumour that Savannah, in Georgia, was open to foreign vessels as well, and thus managed to intercept the refugees who headed south.

I, Giovannino Manes, am the hero of the story that the boys listened to. I escaped on April the 17th 1944, from Camp 1 in Hereford, for hardline Italian prisoners. We had decided not to collaborate with the Allies even after the armistice of September the 8th and the declaration of war on Germany. We were strange people, fascists, most of us, but communists too, and socialists and libertarians who refused to work the fields so as ‘not to help the capitalist economy’. We were confused, simple and pig-headed.

The sun was high over Texas, and the long road was dusty between the maize fields. I had fifteen dollars in my pocket, which I had got hold of by selling a guard some SS ‘medals’ carved from a tin of tomatoes. I knew a bit of English. The compulsory insignia, POW, prisoner of war, had been traced on my trousers in toothpaste rather than the regulation white ink, and clumsily erased, so I could not be identified by that. The plan was a simple one: get to New York, stow away on a ship and then land in Portugal and be repatriated by June the 24th. Not a day later. In my pocket I had, folded in its envelope, Zita's letter:

My dear Nino, Of all the things I've written to you over the years when you have been far away, and of all the things I would like to write to you, nothing grieves me more than the words I am about to write to you now. On June the 24th I am going to marry Professor Leonardo Barbaroux. He wanted to write to you himself, but I told him no, I must tell Nino.

We grew up in his house, Nino, I know. We spent the most beautiful hours studying mathematics and logic with him, when all of life seemed as simple as a theorem. And yet you joined up, and you know what Barbaroux thinks of war. We stayed on the Island, almost alone. You boys were away, and the women were at their wits' end. We went on studying, day and night, always on our own, until what happened happened, and I don't want to torment you. We're going to get married. I know it will hurt you, and I carry your pain within me. But war forces us into swift decisions, my darling Nino, we none of us know how long we will live, and where and how. Resign yourself to it. It's clear that it wasn't to be, after our magical encounter at the Alborada. Don't close yourself away. Leonardo says he'll write to you. Please don't suffer too much. Nino, my love, whom I have loved so very much.

Zita

When I received it, I put the letter in the pocket of my uniform, opened the wooden door of the barracks, headed for the latrine and threw up.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ asked Captain Righi, who had lost an eye in Bir el Gobi and had a bat-like sense of hearing.

I didn't feel ill. I felt empty, like a pot scoured by my mother after Sunday lunch, or Nana's marrows, which the children scraped clean of their pulp and floated down the Scutari stream. My long imprisonment – I had fallen into the hands of the Australians in January 1941, Lieutenant Beretta and I had been the last to surrender – had made me indifferent to emotions. Nothing happens directly to prisoners of war; every event, whether it aggravates or alleviates the punishment, is caused by someone else – the camp commandant suspending your mail, the mess sergeant giving you a particularly tasty dish. A prisoner has no power. Over anybody. The world happens to him. He has control only over his own thoughts, but it's a delicate, ephemeral art, a piece of hand-blown Murano glass. Many people lost it and remained mere shadows, playing football and eating, in a state of suspension for years.

Standing on that step, I understood that I had to control my thoughts or become a victim like Ferrucci, a friend from the battlefields, who had turned in on himself, grown melancholy, stopped responding to anything and spent the seasons staring at the tumbleweed blown into the desert by the Texan wind. He smoked and looked at the prairie, unable to feel pain or to decipher grief. After reading the letter, I could have run yelling towards the watchtower where the guards were posted, the ‘camans’ as we called them because they were constantly telling us to ‘Come on, come on.’ One idiot rookie would probably take fright and fire at my back, intending to kill me. That was what had happened to poor Lieutenant Giardina, in Africa, left by the French to die in pain with a bullet in his belly for taking a step too close to the wire. Some of the camans were trigger happy.

What choice did I have? Zita, my beloved, my innocent, my snow-white virgin, my betrothed, sweet blood of my heart, the lips I had kissed, the breasts I had stroked in the shade of the faraglioni, would be for ever the wedded wife of Barbaroux. He, Barbaroux, would possess her, love her, conquer her. It was for him, for Barbaroux, that she would give birth and smile, it was to him that she would read those mathematical studies, put his books in order and turn out the light, before slipping beneath the sheets, with him, with Leonardo Barbaroux.

We were the professor's favourite pupils. He was a mathematician and an anti-fascist, a friend of the genius David Hilbert who had withdrawn into voluntary exile, leaving his post so as not to be forced to swear loyalty to the Duce, Benito Mussolini. From a wealthy family – his father's company made the most precise telescopes of the day – Barbaroux had taken us to his bosom, his two shy village children, and sent us to university. Now I, who loved mathematics because it was free of the snares and paradoxes of the type that I had just spent a year avoiding – mines, tanks, machine guns, thirst and scorpions, and every day in the camp in Hereford, stupefying myself with masturbation, rotting my mind by gluing little models together, arguing over nothing – I was finally up to my neck in a contradiction that neither logic nor war had prepared me for. Barbaroux, who could have been Zita's father, was instead to be her husband. And she would be a rich and revered lady, and how people would smirk at me in the club! But thinking of their smiles didn't hurt me, I felt numb, anaesthetised. The fear I had felt in battle, the raging charges in the desert, the solitary humiliation of prison, had all vanished. Pain had turned me into a ghost, I felt as though I could pass through the barbed wire and fly home on the wind, unseen by anyone, not by poor Ferrucci with his dead eyes and his dead cigarettes, nor the camans in the Hereford watchtower. And my flight was the flight of a ghost, protected by a kindly god. I had to be in Italy by June the 24th, to prevent the marriage of Zita and Barbaroux. That was all.

And that was why I was leaning against the pole of the Hereford bus stop, in the dust and the wind, on that April afternoon in 1944. And when I saw the young American lieutenant coming towards me with an ironic smile on his lips, I thought, He's going to catch me now and put me back inside, but I'll escape again tomorrow.