The Lights of Alborada

3

The lieutenant leaned against the bus stop and, still smiling, rolled himself a thin, firm cigarette, tufts of blond Virginia tobacco sticking out at either end. He rolled a second one and held it out to me. I had never smoked in my life, always bartering my tobacco rations for stamps for my letters to Zita, but to say, ‘No, thank you’ might have scuppered my plan before it had even got under way. I nodded and allowed the man to light the cigarette in my mouth, although I didn't inhale.

The bus appeared around the bend of the aqueduct, followed by a cloud of dust and a dog that barked merrily in the hot air, with the resounding vigour of prairie strays. The driver braked, raising a cloud of dust from the beaten earth, and indolently opened the door. First aboard was a sprightly old woman, and out of soldierly habit I stepped aside for the lieutenant, who climbed the two steps and showed his papers.

‘What about him?’ asked the conductor, pointing to me. He looked me up and down unsympathetically. ‘Are you a GI?’

The lieutenant didn't answer yes or no, but just murmured, ‘Mmm,’ and dropped a few coins into a zinc basin. Then he stepped aside so that I could reach the free seats.

I tried to work out where he was going to sit, so that I could find a seat as far away from him as possible. Why had he paid for my ticket? Out of kindness? Never before had I encountered kindness on the part of an officer towards a raw recruit he didn't even know. Had he mistaken me for one of his men? In that case I should have had my papers with me as well. No point standing there brooding about it, better to pretend to sleep, wait till we reached the outskirts of a town, and then feign car-sickness and run off through the fields to jump an eastbound train.

During my transfer to Hereford, beneath the awning of a little station in Arkansas, I had met a hobo, the kind that travelled the freight trains. He'd told me how easy it was to jump aboard the slow convoy of wagons. He was originally from Friuli, his father had moved to the States from Udine and he spoke a mixture of Italian, German and English. ‘If tu jump ok, tu land ok. No be frightened, Italiano, if no kaputt, ok? If cop come, you know cop? If sheriff come, and hit you with electric torch, tu run for life.’

I'd stolen an old railway timetable from the American military canteen, its cover scorched by the flames from the kitchen – I had explained its disappearance by saying it had been burned to ashes – and had learned it off by heart from cover to cover, times, dates, places, Southern Thunder, Northern Arrow, Atlantic Sky Hawk, all the trains over there have wonderful, mythological Indian names.

I stretched out on the hard bus seat, resisted the temptation to watch the flat panorama passing by, the great expanses that had lain unseen beyond the camp fence, and closed my eyes. The less attention I attracted the better.

This was how I had escaped: I hid in the potato silos and didn't answer when the roll was called. The camans hunted for me all over the camp, then got bored and eased off. On the fifth day I joined a unit of navvies. Captain Righi winked as he pretended to count me, and I left the barbed wire behind. Exhaustion, emotion and my melancholy over Zita had now lulled me into a calm feeling of numbness: I can't imagine any prisoner of war has ever escaped with such absolute serenity, insensitive to fear.

In my sleep I heard the notes of the song ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me’ – Rosamunda, you are my life, there's joy in your kisses, the more I see you the more I love you, Rosamunda my darling – perhaps because that harmless little dance tune had become the anthem of the Italian prisoners. Yes, the fascists still sang ‘Youth, youth, in life and life's harshness …’ and, after September the 8th you might have heard ‘Brothers of Italy, heed Italy's call …’ and the wonderful chorus of ‘Avanti o popolo’, but ‘Rosamunda’ was the song of all the Italian prisoners, POWs as we had to write on our trousers and rucksacks, in big, clear letters. POW: and we had christened ourselves ‘povieri’, the poor POWs. I had rubbed out the three letters on my uniform, and was fleeing towards Zita, our meeting was sure to be stormy, violent, and at the time I had no doubt, my twenty-year-old beauty, but that it would bring me back to her, with love as always.

‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me’: who was whistling the tune on the bus? I woke up gently, not stirring. I half opened my eyes, the cheerful whistle came from close by, very close. ‘Tu sei la vita per me.’ I looked; the lieutenant was sitting there, still whistling and smiling. He had clearly worked out who I was, but I decided not to give him the satisfaction of catching me straight away. I would feign stupidity, to the last moment, even if it meant mooing like a mute. To get away again, at the first opportunity.

Bored of waiting, the lieutenant tapped me on the arm and whispered in Italian, ‘Hey, fella, wake up.’

I gave a start like a soldier told off by a superior, and saluted accordingly: ‘Don't understand, sir.’ The old trick of my language exams, if you speak in a low voice it dulls the sound of mispronunciation.

‘So where have you escaped from?’ he asked in Italian.

Who was he? His Italian was perfect, just like the English he had used when speaking to the driver. Even a hint of Tuscan, and Texan, just to make everything perfect.

‘Sir? I don't understand, sir.’

‘You got out of Hereford?’ he asked again in Italian. ‘Which camp? Hardline fascists, Camp 1?’

He even knew our internal divisions. I tried to say, ‘Respectfully, sir, I don't understand,’ but I always had problems pronouncing the word ‘fully’, and I heard the simplest words coming out of my mouth: ‘With all due respect, sir, I don't understand French.’

‘French, eh?’ he smiled. ‘You're a sly one. Fine, as you wish, if you don't understand, you don't understand. But you'll understand sooner or later.’

He let his cap fall over his nose, rested his shoes against the back of the chair and dozed off. The journey continued for two hours, the strangest two hours of my strange life. Who was I? A fugitive in the clutches of a meddling officer? Was I lost before I'd even begun? How was I going to get myself out of this? I knew I had to avoid any kind of violence that would mean being punished or, the greatest terror of all, being sent off to labour camp in Hawaii, with no way of contacting Zita.

The lieutenant was snoring, lost to the world, and we were already driving past the first houses of Amarillo when the old woman nodded to the driver.

‘Would you stop for a moment? I don't feel well and there's a lemonade stand over there.’

The brakes whistled, the lieutenant showed no sign of waking up and, unable to believe my luck, I leapt over his knees without touching him, nodded goodbye to the driver and walked past the kiosk, which was decorated with beautifully scented lemons. One of them had fallen into a ditch and I picked it up, like a talisman. The rind was fat and rough, ripe and yellow. I scratched the skin and the smell of my secondary school wafted out, sunny afternoons, a hand stuck through the fence to steal a lemon, the amazing fruit, a bit of sunlight in your fist, the juice sharp on your tongue after scoring a goal on the red clay pitch.

The lemons were stolen from Paulus, a Russian who had escaped from St Petersburg in 1917 – a baron too far on the left for Vladimir Ilyich – and who ended up cultivating the gardens of south Italy. The trees, the smell of Zita, Marseilles soap, Russia and the tuna fishing nets, the world seemed wonderful to me, full of exotic cities. As though wearing the Seven League Boots of the fairy tale, I would fearlessly travel the planet. I saw myself living in Amazonia, then in Petrograd and Hong Kong, and in Pittsburgh where they made the steel for the tuna harpoons.

It was as if, in Hereford Camp 1 (yes, the lieutenant was right, I was in number 1, with Tuimati, the tall, thin cavalry officer, with Berto, always writing on his wooden board, with Burri who drew pictures on empty sugar bags, and with Troisi, silent and elegant) I had left the prisoner Giovannino Manes, poviere, POW, prisoner number 8117125, 81 meaning captured in North Africa, 1 Italian and 7125 my arrival code. Now, once again, I was Nino Manes, and I could travel my life in those Seven League Boots, with Zita by my side. As if our life was not in fact determined by the belligerence of the Italian fascist regime, the tactical errors of General Graziani in Egypt, or the forces of production of President Roosevelt's United States. It was the caman Nick Carraway who had explained it to me: ‘Our black workers, the ones the Führer wants to exterminate, can build a liberty ship in a single day. The U-boat captains show great courage in trying to sink them. But do you know who defeats their daring? The black workers who, for a few cents, can get a ship seaworthy in twenty-four hours.’

I wondered what Carraway was doing now. He certainly wouldn't have expected me to escape. He was sure he had saved me for democracy, his democracy, a ship a day to defeat the Führer, assembled by black workers. In Texas those same workers didn't enjoy the right to vote for the upper-class president, although they still had great things to say about him. Carraway wouldn't have been pleased by my escape; basically he agreed with the theory of Colonel Rogers, the head of the camp: ‘Italians, bastards, greaseballs, wops, they sing and eat spaghetti with brilliantine sauce on it, they're slaves to the Krauts. They don't even know how to work. Save them for freedom? It would take ten generations.’ But I didn't care about Carraway or Rogers, I was going into Amarillo. I would have a bowl of soup at the coffee shop without speaking to anyone. I'd brought the Bible with me, a gift from the Quakers. I was learning English, and in the south people always respect the silence of a soldier reading the gospel, with its black cover and its pages edged with fiery red.

I sat down at a corner table, close to the door, and said, ‘Soup, please.’ I only needed a few words; on my way out I'd leave a big tip to distract the old waitress's attention from my accent. The soup was good, thicker than the soup in the camp, with bright carrots and barley floating in it, among big patches of sweet grease. Aromatic pepper, the bold flavour of Coca-Cola. The bread wasn't so good, dry, crumbly, nothing like our pure white loaves back home. And yet those crisp croutons were exquisite to me. It was as though I had worked to savour them, forging SS insignia in return for contraband dollars to pay the bill, risking the machine gun fire of the camans.

I wiped my face with my napkin, a piece of worn grey cloth, and started to read the Bible. The spirit of God moved on the face of the waters, those waters I was sure I would cross, as Moses passed through the Red Sea. After endless periods of exhaustion and cunning and luck, to be able to sail on the ocean of war to Zita.

The waitress had returned from the yard at the back, carrying a big bunch of flowers. There were bright petunias and daisies, early poppies with red petals like butterfly wings. One by one the woman took them and arranged them in a vase filled with fresh water. She was never content. Now she moved the stem of a rose, now she adjusted the green grass that swathed it. She was in pursuit of a certain effect, working with the shadows that the brilliant sun cast on the white wall. When the prospect seemed a happy one, she let the stems settle. Otherwise she barely brushed them as though caressing them, with hands that were scarlet from washing up too many dishes. I was distracted, I didn't like it, and for the first time since escaping the surveillance of the Hereford camans I was afraid. It was as though my fairy-tale journey, my Seven League footsteps to the sea, and the Bible, and those epic lines ‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the surface of the deep’ were not enough to protect me against being captured, nunc et semper, now and for ever. Only by being unaware and kind, like the coffee shop lady with her flowers, concentrating solely on my task, on both my lemon from long ago and the one that gleamed yellow on the dark table, only then would I truly succeed in escaping across two continents.

I'd finished the soup and the bread, I wanted a coffee and even, perhaps, to risk a bit of conversation in exchange for directions to the nearest railway station. There was no need to ask. The woman finally gave a nod of blessing to her geometrical bouquet, set the cup on the table and slipped my tip into her apron pocket.

‘I expect you're looking for the station, son. It's past the bridge, that sloping path takes you straight there. The Eastern Daylight Express'll be going through in half an hour. You got plenty of time.’

I smiled and murmured, ‘Thanks’ as though my tongue was burnt by the hot coffee, and got to my feet. On a shelf behind the bourbon bottles there was a black-framed photograph: ‘Tim McMurdo, Private First Class, Anzio 1944.’ The flowers were for that young soldier.

Outside the sun was dazzling. I walked along the dusty white path, ‘the voice of God moved upon the face of the waters’, and on that slow, blue river. The stones crackled under the soles of my new shoes, bartered with the storeroom guy – ‘Bums always wear good shoes,’ the hobo had advised me. I wouldn't stop at the station, but would carry on to the hill where the river formed a loop and the two-lane highway climbed to the east. The train would slow down and I would hop aboard a freight car. ‘Tu jump ok, tu land ok,’ putting my hope in the Spirit of the Waters.

I wondered how the lieutenant had felt when he woke up to find I had gone? Was he drunk? No, it was too early in the day for that, and there had been no booze on his breath. I was about to leave the wooden barracks of the station behind me when, at that very moment, just as brazen and clear as before, the song began again: ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me, nei tuoi baci c'è tanta felicità.’ The Spirit of the Waters seemed to mock me and the Atlantic coast suddenly seemed a long way away. And yet my heart didn't leap. I set my bag down and turned around: soon I would have a clearer idea of the intentions of the lieutenant who whistled ‘Rosamunda’, and discover why he was trying to keep me from escaping.

4

A big blue river ran along the valley floor, alongside the plateau, a vast river unlike anything I had ever seen at home. Not even the Stagnone lagoon, with its flashing shoals of silver ope fish and darting rainbow-coloured violette, was as vast and deep as that river. At the Stagnone, the Phoenicians had built a road across the sea, which time had sung beneath the mud: in ancient times the merchants had crossed the waves in high-wheeled carts as far as Mozia, an island of temples and shops, a trading centre, as famous then as Manhattan is now. And I, who had left the Island, was to return to the real Manhattan, to try and reach Zita in time. The river had distracted me, everything on this flight was a distraction, everything distanced me from fear and confusion. The lieutenant was standing in front of me, awaiting my reply to an unspoken question. He smiled as though there were something comical in my expression, and at the same time something reassuring and familiar, like someone spotting a friendly face from a long time ago among the harried travellers in a railway station.

I could have lied, or I could have run away, back down the slope. He was the same size as me, but I didn't even think of attacking him. Not because I was frightened, quite the contrary, his features were mild and aristocratic, fair hair, an elegant profile, and I felt I would have had the advantage if it had come to a fight. I was a street boy, and I'd seen vicious stone-throwing battles between rival gangs, when the whole sky is dotted with rocks and one of them would be enough to split your head open. I could have pretended to lower my head and broken his snobbish nose with a butt of my brow, his septum opening up in a discharge of blood and surprise, an easy blow to deliver, a bit like landing a rain-soaked leather ball in the net from a corner kick, the laces imprinting themselves on his forehead. In my mind I could hear my mate Volpe: ‘A surprise punch can deck an elephant, always get your attack in first.’

I was restrained by the caution of the fugitive: attacking a uniformed American officer could land me in front of a firing squad. Who would really come here in search of a young soldier who had escaped from a prison camp? They would have expected me to head south, towards Mexico, crossing the border under cover of a storm. Or else my thirst would lead me into a cactus-filled ravine, and my bones would bleach among the skulls of cattle. If I injured an officer, on the other hand, the FBI and the Military Police would hunt me down from county to county, and when they got their hands on me they'd lock me up in one of those camps there's no escaping from, the ones they were always telling tales about in Hereford. They're on the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska, log barracks surrounded by bears, three oceans away from home.

No risks. The lieutenant screened his green eyes with the nervous hand of a cavalryman, and stared at me curiously, without rancour. ‘Bella giornata – Beautiful day,’ he said in Italian. ‘The sunshine's nice. The train's about to arrive from behind the mountain. Isn't it time we introduced ourselves?’

The engine whistled, already past the ravines: time to surrender. We were two men on our own, in uniform, by a river that looped before disappearing from view, high on the banks. The lieutenant appeared to be unarmed, we were equals, the same age, and out of my mouth, unbidden, came the first words I had uttered as a free man since the Australian soldier had told me to get out of my bunker, waving the barrel of his Sten gun: ‘Out of the bloody pillbox, wop.’

‘I'm Nino Manes, an Italian logician. I'm going home. Our countries aren't at war any more. We're fighting Hitler together. We ex-prisoners are waiting to be released. I've got to go early, for personal reasons.’

‘You're going to Europe on your own?’

‘Yes, sir. I'm going back to Europe.’

‘On foot?’

‘No, sir. In half an hour the 12.30 Eastern Express will be passing this way. It stops in St Louis to pick up connections and tomorrow, at about six in the evening, it arrives in New York, Grand Central, 47th Street.’

‘So you think you're going to get to Manhattan by train, before sailing off for Europe, which is still at war, and sort out your affairs?’ His voice was ironic.

‘I understand that you find it amusing, sir, but that's exactly what I intend to do.’

I was speaking as a free man, as one equal to another. The lieutenant understood. ‘Okay. Then you ought to know that this train, whose times and destinations you know by heart, well done, is searched at every stop by patrols of Military Police. They don't miss a thing, they check the passengers' tickets and papers, paying particular attention to uniformed males of your age, even if the uniform is, how should I put it, as irregular as yours. Stopping a prisoner who's escaped from the camps is a rare treat as far as they're concerned: they'll get medals and promotions. When they get their hands on you, what are you going to say? “Gentlemen, the war's over, I'm going to Italy to sort out some unfinished business.” And they'll say, “Sure, my friend, we'll escort you, don't worry, can we get you a drink while we're at it?” Quit fooling. Follow me, or we'll miss your Orient Express or whatever the hell it's called.’

The lieutenant set off along the road, towards the station and the river, and I followed him. Prisoner? Travelling companion? I didn't know. For the whole of that autumn and winter I'd seen the desert wind form enormous balls of twigs and thorny brambles and drag them across the prairie, past the wire fence of Camp 1. Since June 1940 I had felt like them, blown about at random by the mistral and full of thorns, my life a barren prairie. What was changing now? Nothing but the abandonment of all desire, all wishful thinking and ambition. If I had managed to turn myself into an inanimate creature, an object that could move, one marked POW, then this was my miraculous metamorphosis, worthy of Ovid, into a tangle of twigs. The wind, warm as breath, was enough to blow me to Zita's feet, her fragrant lap, with all my thorns and all my questions. I wouldn't try to do anything, no act of daring, no strategy, I would be obvious, natural, I would allow nature to act upon me, driving me back to my home and my love. If they locked me in a cell, I would bang my head against the door until either the door or my skull split. If they forced me back behind what Carraway had taught me to call the accordion, the concertina, meaning the gleaming barbed wire, I would burst it apart with my chest, until something gave, whether it was my chest or the wire.

Now, half a century later, these reflections seem like the melancholy notions of a boy kept too long in a cage full of parrots. I wouldn't have thought that way if I'd been thinking realistically. If I'd accepted my situation with the wise fatalism of a grown man, I'd have gone mad, I'd have been broken, like so many of my comrades. Like Ferrucci, like Siviero, the radio ham who had managed, hiding under the blanket at night, to make a little radio out of Spam tins: each day he opened us up to the world, Stalingrad, the fall of Mussolini, the surrender of Italy. And after four years in the camp, they were still watching the stars at night and the tumbleweed by day, spent cigarettes in their mouths. ‘Good weather tomorrow, Ferrucci?’

‘What does it say on the radio?’

‘Only things about the war and Hollywood.’

‘Not the weather?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And what does it say?’

‘That spring's coming to an end.’

Neither Ferrucci nor Siviero replied to letters from home any more. I typed their letters for them, crammed with lies, and copied their signatures in pencil: for a few years those pious lies spared two pairs of old Italian parents from meeting their new son, the poviere.

If the wind rolled me in the wake of the lieutenant, I, like the tumbleweed, would be unable to resist. Rolling my way across the world, I would meet up with Zita once again, in time to stop a wedding which struck me – please forgive the impetuousness of a young man – as utterly obscene. Not that I hoped to persuade her to marry me. No one had ever seen Zita change her mind. I just wanted to interpose my body between Zita and reality, stop it, even for a moment, like the tiny grains of sand that stopped our gleaming Vetta chronometers in the desert. Tomorrow a craftsman will give them a good clean and the ticking of reality and the present will resume, but for a moment the sand exists and stops the measurement of time. I wanted to be like that sand. When I got depressed, spending a gloomy afternoon in silence beside Ferrucci, Sergeant Carraway would hold me out a piece of spearmint chewing gum and say, ‘Face facts: remember, Nino, you've got to face facts. That's the soldier's life. Face facts, Nino.’

I couldn't face facts any more, that was enough, thank you. I wanted to cut right through facts, and that was that. The lieutenant, unaware of my ruminations, went on ahead, leaving me to walk a few yards behind him as prisoners were regularly required to do, and whistling that poor song of ours, ‘Rosamunda’, of which he seemed so fond. Soon we were at the station, and from there on to the train. And as the prairie passed flatly in front of us, the Military Police patrol, in their spotless uniforms, appeared precisely on time. ‘Tickets? Documents? You, boy?’

That would have meant the end of my great escape, whatever my mystical intentions, if the lieutenant, holding out two gleaming identity cards to the Military Police, hadn't smiled: ‘Prisoner of war. Italian. I'm escorting him to Manhattan, New York, 47th Street, home of Allied Radio, Italian Service Unit. He's going to read bulletins for free Italy, and for the parts of the country that are still under the Krauts. General HQ's really keen on the idea. I'm hoping to get to Manhattan very soon. There'll be girls at the radio station, you know? Girls, chicks!’