The Lights of Alborada

To escape the lieutenant's tiresome lasciviousness, the two Military Police giants returned the documents with barely a glance, saluted him and gave me the look of contempt that the soldiers of the victorious army – people who have never known the dry mouth of fear during bombing raids – reserve for defeated warriors and prisoners to justify their impeccable uniform and the embarrassment of telling their girlfriends the story of a war spent punching railway tickets.

I looked out the window, and got my breath back. In the distance you could see the mountains through the mist, the fields dotted with cotton-pickers who, at the sound of the train whistle, raised their heads for a moment and immediately bent patiently back down to draw water from the channels of the majestic river. We passed by them, rattling over a bridge with a clatter of boards and bolts, the arteries of the country that was holding me back. I asked, ‘Which river is this, sir? The Mississippi?’

This time the lieutenant didn't smile, as he usually did. On the contrary. His face turned very grave. ‘The Mississippi? Ol' Man River? No, when we reach the Mississippi you'll recognise it all by yourself, have no doubt about that.’

5

The young waitress adjusted the belt of her white apron with small, sure, nervous movements and glanced around Restaurant 21 to check that none of the customers required her services. Captain Jim Cheever looked at the girl's hand with the serene greed of young men who have been forced to remain chaste for a long time. Unexpressed desire subsides, and the body is filled instead with a clear and formidable energy. ‘That's why Catholics demand celibacy of their priests,’ mused the Presbyterian Cheever. The mind is clear and clean, it moves with grace and warmth. The body, on the other hand, becomes aware of the erotic atmosphere that bathes it, as though your skin has become the vibrating antennae of a wandering dragonfly. Cheever was thinking about his new military mission, in that final – penultimate? – year of war. General Stan Matthews had summoned him, as a matter of ‘immediate urgency and discretion’, to Restaurant 21 in Manhattan, rather than, as protocol would have decreed, the Pentagon in Washington. Why such secrecy? And yet, as his mind reflected on the mission before him, his skin was aware that the waitress was a beautiful and desirable girl, a slender mulatto with chestnut eyes, happy to have a job, because the war kept the men at the front, giving her a paycheck, a weekly wage. Her hand ran back and forth across the embroidered linen, nervous of her new environment, sure of her feline beauty, and Cheever looked at her. He thought about the war, and his body was drawn to the girl, silent and distant. He tried to concentrate, worrying that the solitude and aridity of his mission in defence and on behalf of the United States of America might lead him into regretful sensuality. On those long afternoons in barracks, or at daybreak in tumbledown motels on the outskirts of town, he had learned to shoo away his erotic fantasies, irritating gadflies that they were. To stay prey to them was to unleash a wave of morbid longing, uncertainty about what to do, doubts about the future. And in wartime, Cheever couldn't afford to have doubts. ‘So,’ he thought, glancing at the mulatto girl who had suddenly moved, ‘the end of the war will let us return to doubt. Love, certainly, I'll go back to my old love, but doubt is more seductive to me than love. Being able to cultivate eccentric notions, without worrying that a mistake might cause the death of good, decent boys, or even the failure of the mission, and lead in a terrible chain of events to the total defeat of the army, the end of democracy. The luxury of uncertainty: that's what distinguishes peace from war.’

General Matthews came into the restaurant, stroking the revolving door with his gloved hands: such was the power that emanated from his well-trained torso that it appeared as if the magnetism of his body was moving the massive walnut door in a great surge of prestige and energy. He frowned, not noticing Cheever at first, and then recognised him, but his jaw didn't move: everything was as it should be, rendezvous accomplished, Cheever was there, plan obeyed, the strategic operations of the Allied Armed Forces operated according to pre-established protocols.

Matthews sat down and beckoned the girl over with a wave of his fingers, and Cheever was sorry that the general had sufficient authority to enter even his guileless reverie, summoning the docile mulatto girl whom he had courted in silence. He sat back down and concealed his disappointment even from himself, feeling ashamed, as boys will, of feelings that they will later recognise as the clearest they ever had in their lives, and saw after a moment's delay that a second officer followed in Matthews' wake. He was a major in the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the arrogant men of American espionage, and he said, ‘Good day, sir’ in a curious accent, neither French nor German, a low, guttural sound that Cheever had never heard before.

Matthews nodded and the stranger sat down. The general took two large sips from the mint julep he had ordered, holding it as though he were going to snap the glass full of chopped ice, and turned to Cheever. ‘What are the latest missions? Are you aware of the situation of prisoners of war detained in America?’

‘I was involved with the U-boat raids, sir, anti-sub missions, particularly after 1942. A specialist in interception, anti-sabotage and code-breaking. I don't know much about prisoners, sir.’

‘Have you ever met Major Cafard?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You'll be working together. The major is part of the antiterrorist section of the OSS. He's just back from Europe. Now he's working at home again. He'll give you details of your mission. Listen to him carefully.’

Cafard: the name rang a bell with Cheever, but he couldn't remember why.

The major started listing figures in his gloomy accent, which sounded like the official language of the undercover war, English with a hint of occupied Europe. ‘About half a million Germans, most captured in Africa, are held in prisoner-of-war camps in the USA. The first arrivals are veterans of Rommel's Afrika Korps, convinced that the war was still theirs after the Desert Fox's brilliant campaigns. They still have tans, round sunglasses and tins of Bavarian butter. Tough guys. They thump the other prisoners at the slightest infraction. They've set up a Gestapo network throughout all the camps. All it takes to get on the wrong side of them is an anti-Nazi joke, an expression of resignation or a curse against Hitler. At night they throw a blanket over the unfortunates, and everyone in the room has to join in the punishment beating. Anyone who refuses ends up under the blanket himself. And their families back home are blackmailed, too. For most of the prisoners, a stay in the United States is their best chance of survival. They eat better than their compatriots, and they learn languages and trades in the classes and laboratories that we've set up. Some of them even take courses at American colleges, and receive degrees and diplomas. But a minority hang in there, fighting a pointless undercover campaign, terrorising their comrades.’

‘How can we control them?’ Cheever broke in, to lighten the feeling of unease that the man's accent provoked in him.

‘With infiltrators,’ Matthews replied. ‘By censoring their mail. Often we receive tip-offs from prisoners who have converted to democracy and want to isolate the Nazis. But the Gestapo are a constant threat. They're trying to organise a mass breakout to cover a unit of saboteurs who are capable of causing slaughter and terrorising our civilian population. It'll be a great propaganda coup in Berlin. We've set up special camps to keep the hardliners in place.’

A curious sense of menace overlaid Cheever's irritation with Cafard's accent, but he refused to be tempted into doubt. He took a sip of his coffee and listened.

‘Not many escapes. A few thousand Germans, just one among the Japanese and more than five hundred Italians. On United States territory –’ Major Cafard glanced at a card that had appeared in his hand as though by magic, checking that he had the precise figure ‘– 371,683 Germans and 50,273 Italians held in total. And it's the Italians who are giving us problems. They've surrendered. They've lost the war. They're fighting under our command in Europe, and yet they're still escaping. Only 0.5 per cent of German prisoners try to escape. Among the Italians the figure is 1.2 per cent, nearly three times more than the Germans.’

‘Any of them make it?’

‘Very few. They slip away. They try to disappear into the city. One Italian lieutenant, Montalbetti, walked two hundred miles through the desert. He had hidden in the camp for four days, and escaped when the guards gave up looking for him. We caught up with him on the border with Mexico, just because he'd lost his bearings and turned up at customs on the American side. Now lots of them are imitating his technique.’

Two hundred miles alone in the Texan desert. Cheever had hunted coyote and mountain lions – puma – with his father, in 1938. The hot air fills your mouth, your feet sink with a squeak into the dry turf. The only things that flourish there are scorpions, rattlesnakes and cacti. The coyotes will hunt down a mountain goat, the puma a deer that has come down from the forest; no human being with any common sense would be so presumptuous as to cross such an area. He wanted to request an interview with this guy Montalbetti who had chosen to risk ending up having his bones gnawed by the vultures rather than wait and go home comfortably once the war was over. Curious animals, the Italians. Now the Germans, devils on the battlefield, were biding their time. The other guys were escaping: why?

‘At the beginning of the conflict, in 1942, we were afraid of sabotage, by the Japanese in the west and the Germans in the east. Above all, infiltrations by commandos from the submarines. You know about the U-boat hunts, don't you?’ Matthews went on.

Cheever went back to the spring of 1942. The shell-covered beach at Shelter Island, the black rubber raft. They were chasing four German raiders, silently lest they alarm the few well-to-do people who wintered on the island. A single gunshot, one broken window, and terror would flood the bright lights and the headlines of nearby New York. Sixty miles away from the deer forest, on the alert for the roar of the backwash, panic could spread to Manhattan, jazz, the Apollo Theater and the ladies who danced in their satin dresses. On Shelter Island, a saw-toothed, tempered-steel German dagger slit the throat of his friend Tom, without a cry, without a movement, just a gurgle like that of an unplugged sink, the last sound of the voice that had, in 1939, seduced the whole class of graduating girls at Barnard College, up in Broadway. Perhaps, even now, those young women were wondering, over a drink at Baker House, ‘Where do you think Tom is now? We must go and hear him when the war's over,’ but Tom lay bleeding to death on the beach which, once peace had returned, would host happy family picnics by the rock pools. Cheever had finished off the Germans, two pistol shots muffled by his silencer, and captured the remaining member of the commando unit, a colossus who had been lamed by one of the shots. He could have killed him like a dog – who would ever have investigated? But Tom had died precisely because they didn't want to act like Nazis. A democratic officer didn't cut throats like an SS fanatic. So he had given him a slap and dragged him by one arm to the Ford, to take him to the investigation centre. In the darkness, the light of the 100-watt bulb … ‘Cheever, are you listening?’

‘Of course, General.’

‘We have precise information on the escape of a dangerous Nazi from a prisoner-of-war camp. An expert in sabotage. Like the one you captured on Shelter Island, he's off the U-boats. There's some confusion about his identity. Read this.’

The general handed him a grey file, and Cheever timidly opened it. The sheet of paper, the meticulous typing of the girls in Washington, the black stamps of the censor and the secret service, and the stout, white vellum suggested the hand of the Washington top brass, the only ones who could still afford to use such fragrant paper.

‘U-boat commander from 1940 to 1942,’ began Matthews. 'Six Allied sinkings in the Atlantic to his credit. His name is believed to have been Hans von Luck, Prussian Junker of aristocratic family, father a diplomat, speaks three languages, escaped from the camp in Amarillo, expert in sabotage and explosives, code-breaking, infiltrations of enemy camps, undercover operations. Sources in the Italian fascist camp in Hereford, Texas, tell us that Captain von Luck, disappointed by the way the war was going and the resignation of his fellow detainees in the USA, planned to organise a highly visible suicide operation. He trained the Italian subs at the Danzig base in 1940, and can rely on their solidarity. He's probably preparing an attack on the levees of the Tennessee Valley Authority, to flood a vast zone in the southern states, and spark the enthusiasm of the Germans. He plans to force Allied Command to increase checks and confiscations, concentrating men and resources on this side of the ocean. A massive manhunt in the south would have enormous propaganda value, and would be broadcast by radio to occupied Europe. Hitler's in desperate need of a psychological success.

‘Von Luck must be found straight away, Cheever, he must be arrested, neutralised or brought back to camp in chains. I didn't want to write this in the file that I've prepared, but another source assures me that he's armed, and heading to Washington to attack President Roosevelt,’ Matthews continued. ‘And we're not even sure of his identity.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘I mean that prisoners are identified by their Soldbuch, the paybook of the German army. But von Luck's Soldbuch wasn't found at the camp. He can hardly have taken it with him, it's far too dangerous. It's more likely that he's destroyed it. I'm worried that the escaped prisoner may not actually be von Luck.’

‘Tell Cheever your hypothesis, Major,’ ordered the general.

‘The prisoners are quite capable of preparing fake American documents, creating a new identity for themselves. So why not obliterate the old one? We'll be going after von Luck, but our true prey is someone else.’

‘And what about von Luck?’

‘He's dead. Or he never got to America, he went missing at sea, and someone else has his Soldbuch in his pocket. There's a lot of confusion during prisoner transfers. And the registers are kept in order by the senior prisoners, we haven't got enough of our own men for the job. The escaped man could be an officer, but not von Luck.’

Cheever understood. ‘When am I off?’

‘Tonight. Cafard will be in charge of the mission. Will you be able to make it?’

‘I'll have a shot at it, sir.’

Then he looked at Cafard and corrected himself. ‘We'll have a shot at it, sir.’

This reassurance wasn't enough for General Matthews, who leaned over the restaurant table. He pushed the glasses aside with his massive hands, and pressed his torso breathlessly forward. ‘Get him, Cheever. Get him. Once the war's over I don't want to find myself with a fanatical Nazi wandering about the States blowing up dykes and massacring innocent schoolchildren. I don't want him to organise a terrorist resistance network in the German quarters of New York. Get him before he shoots the president, get him, whether he's German or Italian.’

Matthews seemed very old to Cheever, his face wrinkled, tired and melancholy. He repeated the words, ‘before the war is over’, as though afraid he wouldn't see that day. As though catching the only fascist at liberty in the United States of America was not a military matter, like guaranteeing the safety of the dykes, the schoolchildren of Tennessee and Franklin Roosevelt. No, it was rather as if putting that U-boat commander behind the barbed wire of the Amarillo camp was the strategic key to the final victory, a magical challenge to the fate of the world.

‘Get him, Cheever, get him. For all our sakes.’

6

What did Ulysses dream of during those nights on his plank bed on board his ship when the bright and friendly stars of the Mediterranean lit the unknown way before him? Did he draw up battle plans for fighting monsters? Or did he ask himself questions about his destiny, did he try to find a solution to the traps of Fate that had left him on his own, his comrades gone, the final mystery still to be solved, the doubt that lay within him? What is the hero's true adventure? Blinding the Cyclops, escaping Sirens, seducing goddesses, or is the challenge one of finding inner clarity, the truth about oneself, being accepted and understood as part of the nature of the world and the things that are in it? Perhaps Odysseus' bosun wasn't seeking his course up there, beyond the pulsating Pleiades and the Great and Little Bears, doubting his own vision, rubbing his salt-crusted lids, but wise in the knowledge that bound him to the heavenly vault? Faithful to his course, he would return home. Then, whatever bitterness might be hidden in his homeland, not even Father Zeus, not even Nux, the night that awaits us all, will be able to overcome us.

Back in barracks in Turin, rolled up on the deck of the rusty steamer that had brought me to Africa, in the watches of Bardia, lying on the soft sand of the desert, I had wondered about Odysseus' dreams as I went to sleep. Sleeping is hard in wartime. Even when you're completely worn out and you want only to plunge yourself silently into the darkness, you are held back by the anxiety that you might have made a mistake, and that you would die before dawn for that tiny mistake, perhaps you'd broken a little branch on patrol, forgotten about sentry duty, or miscalculated the trigonometry of the enemy's artillery camp. Or, worse, that that same mistake might cause the deaths of the men whom fate had entrusted to you. It's hard for a serious-minded officer to sleep in wartime.

Sometimes I tried to remember Zita, the professor, to meditate on logic and my sins, like Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1911. Nothing worked. Sensuality was depressing. If it was sated, I was drained of energy, while if it was the object of my contemplation, it led to a painful comparison between my two lives, the happy one of earlier times and the present, piled with my comrades on a haystack that the British General Wavell was about to set alight along with our little fortress. It was then, at five o'clock on a freezing morning in December 1940, two weeks before the Australians caught me, that I dreamed the dreams of Odysseus. Wasn't he perhaps like us, a soldier in a war who had tried everything he could think of to avoid fighting, feigning madness and sowing his fields with grain? Perhaps he wasn't our sainted protector, the leader who stormed Troy, but simply one who gave his own name to a poem about the desperate, proud, shrewd, legendary need to return home. Thinking about Ulysses gave me courage – he had landed in Ithaca, after all, so why shouldn't I? On the afternoons spent on the liberty ship that took me to America, on the train that loudly crossed the new continent, bringing us prisoners to Hereford, I meditated upon Odysseus. He knew that power required violence, and abstained from it. He didn't like Agamemnon, he wanted to sail and live in the sun without any trouble. He won the war, he routed the suitors because he had to, but then he went to dwell far away, in search of peace.

My head banged hollowly against the wooden bench, and my thoughts and dreams became confused. What, in the end, did Odysseus dream about? His strategy for returning home, or the path to self-knowledge, the only voyage that everyone undertakes, even if they don't move an inch?

‘Cigarette?’

I opened my eyes. In front of me I saw the soft face of the lieutenant in his American uniform.

What language had he spoken? Italian? In English, his officer's English, clipped, staccato, without the Texan drawl that I had learned to recognise in the speech of the camans? Or had he just held out a cigarette?

I took it, thanking him with a nod. The lieutenant got to his feet and gently closed the door of the compartment. He turned the knob, and came back to sit down. His uniform fitted him more comfortably now, it looked more like the gym kit of an adolescent athlete than the uniform of an officer in the most powerful army that had ever gone into battle in all the history of the world.

He took a single, intense drag. ‘My friend, when are we going to start playing, you and I?’

His voice was deep and persuasive, the voice of a schoolmate to whom you could confide your concerns and anxieties. I could have told him about my torment, I could have told him all about Zita and the professor, my escape, the war we had lost, and even asked him about the dreams of Odysseus, he might have known something about their nature. I opened and closed my mouth, as tuna do on the point of death, and not a word emerged. My life was beginning over again that day, and I didn't know it. The lieutenant brushed back his long, fair, feminine hair. ‘You're an escaped Italian prisoner, I'd say, from Hereford Camp. I don't know how much money you've got, or what kind of papers you're carrying, but you've got one hell of a lucky streak if they haven't spotted you yet. Take a look at your trousers: you can still see the letters POW that you've tried to hide. What trick did you use? Toothpaste? Bicarb? I've seen them all. Listen, you've only got one choice: as I said when the Military Police came round, I'm going to New York. The armed forces have organised a radio station on 47th Street. Boogie-woogie, you know? Datadatadadadatata. It broadcasts in several languages including Italian. It reaches your country, both the parts that have been liberated and the parts still occupied by the Germans. But I didn't tell the MP everything. I was accompanying an Italian prisoner to New York, a goddam raw recruit. In civilian life this bastard was an actor. Beautiful voice, great diction, already famous. My mission? To escort him across the mighty United States, God bless them, and set him down in front of a microphone so that he could use that lovely instrument, that lovely bel canto voice of his to convince the people of Italy of the soundness of our cause.’

He fell silent for a moment. ‘Of the Allied cause.’

‘Where did you learn Italian? You've got a Tuscan accent.’

They were the first words I'd spoken in my own language, and I knew he'd got me.

‘My father was the American consul in Florence, then a diplomat at the Court of St James in London, and that's how I learned my languages. I know half a dozen, including Hungarian, which is so difficult that it counts as four. Listen to me. I'm in trouble too. Not as much trouble as you, but in trouble nonetheless. And since we both speak the lovely tongue of your lovely country, give me a hand. This actor I was escorting, a little fascist who probably never fired a gun in his life, slipped through my fingers, as though plastered from head to toe in brilliantine. He used to keep that stuff in a little green tin, Linetti, two drops on the tips of his fingertips and off he went. I show up at the train station to give him his travelling document and he's gone. Vanished. I should have called the Military Police and given them a report, but I'm about to be transferred to Washington, to military headquarters, and then everything'll be fine. If I confess, who knows what's going to happen. They might send me off to the Pacific to fight my way through the jungle as a punishment. We've won the war, what's the point of stirring things up? Communication between Hereford and New York isn't good. I'm your luck, and you're mine. Luck, you know, fate. Did you go to high school? You did? Ananke, fate: that's me, my friend. Now we're heading for New York. You think the Military Police are going to stop us? Don't worry, I'm sorted for travel documents, and so are you, so we'll escort each other. If you say no, we're finished: you in a cell, me in Japan.’