The Lights of Alborada

I looked at him in silence.

‘And when we're on 47th Street … ever been there? Most beautiful street in Manhattan, art galleries, bookshops and cafés full of German girls who have got away from Hitler. We'll go to the radio station there, you'll follow me meekly, I'll go in and get the permits released and you stay in the foyer. After they've stamped the receipt, mission accomplished, I open the door and, bingo!, you've gone. Except that I've got the documents validated, and you've made it through the bureaucracy. A free Italian in Manhattan, ties with Brooklyn, find yourself a mama to load you on to a Portuguese cargo ship, and you'll be in Naples before the feast of San Gennaro.’

I was fascinated by his perfect Italian, which was full of catchphrases and high-school-teacher Latinisms. I didn't reply. This time his smile was drawn, but convincing: it concealed real anxiety, perhaps even fear, for something he was about to lose.

I waited and looked out the window. It was no use. ‘We haven't got too much time, my friend. Look.’

He threw the door open abruptly and pushed me outside. Two compartments further along was a new and immaculate patrol of Military Policemen, soldiers so tall their heads grazed the lights in the ceiling. ‘Papers, papers, please, sir.’

The train slipped into a tunnel and my memory is full to the brim with that one shrill whistle.

7

My journey with the lieutenant lasted for forty days and forty nights. At the time I didn't realise that between our first meeting and its distant epilogue on the Atlantic coast, precisely forty dawns would pass, the time that the Bible assigns to the all-engulfing flood before the pale dove returns to Noah's Ark with its olive branch in its beak, after crossing the watery world, bearing witness to the end of divine wrath. Nor did I see the rainbow, an earnest of the covenant between man and God. But I did see the great Mississippi River and the Ozark forests, populated by fabulous snakes – ‘They can swallow a whole kid and spit out its horns,’ Sergeant Carraway confided to me. Aboard that long train I passed the dykes of the Tennessee Valley, the pink clay, the dark blue lakes and the trees that bend over the still water, so still that their leaves fall gently and stick perfectly to the surface. I ate in station coffee shops, creamy potato soup, watery black coffee, octopus ink, my grandmother used to call it, still caffeine-rich enough to keep me awake, eyes open to look at the clear sky. Not so the lieutenant: he slept, unconcerned with the dreams of Odysseus. For forty days and forty nights I saw him sleeping motionless like that, as though he just had to flick off the switch of a lamp to be dead to the world. We endured dangers and worries, passion and grief, each of which would have been enough to fill the whole lives of many human beings. And yet, as on that day with the Military Police, the moment the lieutenant closed his eyes, sleep settled on his mind like a black shroud. Who he really was and what drove him across the United States, eastwards today, westwards tomorrow, I didn't understand at the time. But even today, from the false and reassuring position of someone judging the past from the perspective of the future, the lieutenant, with his motives and intentions, still seems to be beyond my comprehension. The only memento I have of him, the only proof that our forty-day migration across the great continent was not a dream, a fabric of my imagination, is a souvenir that I am holding here. A pinch of sand. I look at it again, and it's as though I sense that he contained a seed of all the virtues that make the human soul magnificent, an ounce of every noble and dignified feeling, the Virtus and the Gratia that a father and mother would always hope to recognise in their children.

It wasn't like that at the time. Then, he was an officer of the Allied army which had defeated my boys in Bir el Gobi and Bardia and which would shortly – I had no illusions on the matter – govern the whole world, the Europe of my youth and my mathematical calculations and the America that passed quickly before my eyes: the sharecroppers at work in the fields, the chain-gangs working their picks and shovels at the side of the railroad track, skinny soldiers in khaki uniforms, lined up under every railway awning kissing their emotional girlfriends goodbye. That army was a giant washed with white soap, ignorant of the ways of the world, tranquil in its decision to battle for freedom.

I had spent my childhood in La Tonnara, looking on enchanted as the master-carpenter launched the gozzi, the brightly coloured fishermen's boats, with pretty names. Maria, Laura, sweet names that contrasted the harsh fates that awaited them, tossed about beneath Orion in the Sicilian Channel, fleeing storms in pursuit of swordfish and finally, when the summer heat prevailed again, hunting down the joyfully swimming tuna. The carpenter carved the wood, engraving with his gimlet, planing severely, shavings fell like snow on the sea, bright dots of sawdust in the December wind and then, when the Christmas fireworks were forgotten, glazed the skeleton, fixed the keel and the planking, painting with precise brushstrokes the colours of the rainbow: red, indigo, blue and yellow. The pungent smell of varnish filled my nostrils like a drug. I looked up, it was summer already, and the boat, or lovely Maria or Laura, was sliding into the water to feed a family.

Here, in America, the steel ships were stamped in the morning, at the hour of the Alborada, and launched at Vespers. They were called liberty ships, and, however speedily the U-boats of our German allies dispatched them to the bottom of the ocean, where Thetis and the Nereides danced, the war still would be won by those housewives and unemployed blacks who built them, sisters and brothers of the sharecroppers bent over the cotton that I saw from my passing train.

Now my memories run by me in fragments, the lieutenant and what I saw of the wagons and the locomotives, the stops on our forty-day journey and my recollections as a little boy, a vain nostalgia for another world, another sea. Far away, chaotic, terrible. A prisoner and yet at the same time a safe conduct for my guard, who said he had lost his first Italian quarry, I lived in a state of perfect, constant lucidity, every moment of my life present in the wide-open spaces of America. The colours of the tuna fishermen's boats poured over the grey steel of the liberty ships and I, a prisoner, saw my resignation and disappointment in Hereford Camp 1 making way for an obsessive, nervous awareness. I had to get to the coast, to New York. There I would escape the lieutenant's attention, before he had second thoughts and broke our agreement. If he tried anything smart, I would tie him up, I would smack him right between his courteous eyes and get away.

Zita was a shore, Europe a coast, my memories drew me there, waves that had floated me over the barbed wire and beyond the guards, and would take me all the way to Italy to put a stop to Professor Barbaroux's wedding.

I had probably gone crazy, afflicted for forty days by a form of early-onset dementia. Hunted down on the pier, I would calmly try to walk on the waters of the iron Atlantic. Dying, escaping, performing acts of madness, nothing seemed ridiculous or impossible to me. And in any case, when I had left for Africa with my regiment, hadn't I thought it impossible that Italy might lose the war, ending up divided and occupied? And yet that was what had happened.

The lieutenant stared into my eyes, reading my thoughts. ‘You know Plutarch?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Life of Brutus?’

‘No.’

‘Read it when you have a moment. And tell me what you think of it.’

He handed me a green book, a Loeb. Plutarch, Greek text on the cover. Our train slipped through the night and I read about Brutus' youth, his rebellion against Caesar's hegemony. The ambush, Casca trembling as he struck the hero with his sword, Brutus taking his weapon and running it through the body of his adoptive father, and the conspirators lurching back in horror. Brutus strikes first, Caesar falls, he could have shouted – ‘Stand back, dogs!’ – his voice had once given heart to the legionaries below the walls of Alesia and aroused terror and respect in the barbarian forests. Caesar could have grabbed the sword from the cowardly Casca, and defended himself as he had in his fray with Vercingetorix. Instead, he wrapped his toga around him as a shroud and allowed himself to be felled. Only then did the terrorists take courage and strike, and when Antony shows the cloth to the crowd, every rip a dagger blow, like a Lucio Fontana canvas painted by political savagery.

Then comes the war and the defeat of the democratic illusion. Brutus meditates on suicide, and before he dies he studies the firmament, praying to heaven with two lines, ‘Oh Jove, do not forget the man from whom this mischief flowed!’ The second line of Brutus' farewell to the world has not been passed down to us, the medieval copyists accidentally left it out. What might he have written?

The lieutenant looked at me, and I lost myself in the muddle of my uncertainty. How could the boatwright's coloured vessels have subdued the democracy of the liberty ships?

The lieutenant said, ‘That forgotten line that Brutus spoke – what do you think it might be? If we discovered it, in a dusty codex in one of your southern Italian abbeys, we'd understand which is more important, Luck or Bravery: I'm sure of it.’

Thus began our forty days across America, ‘rich in Virtue and poor in Luck’, as the infantrymen wrote on their memorial at El Alamein. The lieutenant looking for his line of Brutus, me looking for a ship to save my shipwrecked love and my life itself by interpreting the dreams of Odysseus in the lost war.

8

The girls were sitting at the corner table of the coffee shop. The slimmest one was drinking black Coke from a frosted glass: she sucked gently on the straw, eyes fixed on a point straight ahead of her and then opened her red lips and sucked again. The fairest one struck her fingers lightly on the gleaming table, tap tap tap, the middle, ring and index fingers, then the middle one again in counterpoint, tap tap tap. She was wearing a skirt that bared her knees, soft and round. Last of all, in the shade, a glimpse of her, the smallest one. Not the prettiest, perhaps: she neither drank nor followed the rhythm of the big band brass section that blared from the Bakelite radio. Her hair was short, and hung in a fringe over her slanted, oriental eyes. She filled the space with her face and her hands and her breasts and her thighs, as though the air were water that could support her and make her float. As though, all of a sudden, she might swim: a little dive on her cork-soled shoes and away, with quick and lazy strokes up to the fan that flapped on the ceiling, slothfully stirring the hot air. The girl would brush the beer bottles on the highest shelf with her skirt floating, she would swirl out of the bar, away over the burning earth of Hot Springs in the dusty state of Arkansas.

Her energy was apparent from her perfect stillness: like a swamp alligator, ready to strike from its motionless tree-trunk stability, descending with a whipcrack on its prey, and yet a moment before framed and lost in the hot mud. That was what the girl with the oriental eyes was like, or at least that's how I remember her now as I write about my first moment with her. Rather than trying to imagine her face again, I'm trying to feel the heat and emotion I felt then, which some of my gentle readers will have felt on at least one day of their lives, when they met their ‘twin soul’ as Plato would say, the other sexual half that we all have, from which we were parted at some time in the distant past. Today I feel that emotion again, in its entirety.

I looked at her, I fully expected her to dive away and swim in an erotic crawl, free from gravity, in that banal café in the shadow of the wild Ozark Mountains. It's certainly possible, even likely, that my memory has been falsified by my forty-day journey, and by what I later experienced with her. The reality was probably quite different. An ordinary Italian fool, defeated in the desert sand, broken in the Bardia winter, was seeing beautiful young girls for the first time in years, was free to observe them without hierarchy or hindrance. A prisoner of war spends his time thinking about women, forgets what women are really like. In the camp, I would wake with a vision of Zita before my eyes, summon the patience to stand in the queue for the latrine, keep a firm grip on my memory of those hours of mathematical analysis on the creaking wooden table because Zita and her perfume and her flesh existed beyond the sea and, in darkness when I was in the Texan sun, in light while I slept in the breathless night of the camp, she too trod the planet with feet that I would greedily have kissed in the shadow of the faraglioni.

That was how I had lived, as a free man and a prisoner, until she had decided to marry Professor Barbaroux, and then my fate too had been captured, along with my future as a POW. No one could possibly bear that two-fold imprisonment, knowing that one was a prisoner in the present and the future, without paying the price of madness or resignation. So I had escaped, into the great concentration camp of real life and the jokes it plays, vaster and more cruel than Hereford.

The lieutenant's voice rang out in a singsong: ‘Here we are in Hot Springs, in Arkansas. This is where the wounded and the convalescents of America come to regain their lost health. Europe cripples them in war, the springs restore them. No one will notice us here. We can rest. We've a long way to go before we get to New York.’

He got up and winked at the table of girls. ‘What kind of GIs are we if we don't cat around? Chastity will get us noticed.’

The three girls gave the lieutenant a chilly welcome, edging up to let him sit down. The most spirited of them shook his hand and started to chatter.

I was left alone at our table. A prisoner or free man? I couldn't work it out, but I wasn't willing to lose my only true feeling of independence: my pain over Zita and the decision to cross the USA in captivity, all for her.

The coffee was good, the apple tart fragrant. From the back of the gleaming wooden room came the notes of a song that one of the girls was singing in a low voice, accompanying the radio. One of the songs in vogue that spring, with the kind of sweet refrain and sentimental words that made girls cry. ‘I heard that lonesome train whistle blow …’

Better to stay and look at the light outside the door, Main Street shining in the sulphurous dust of the springs. Then I felt the smallest girl's hand on my thigh, just where I had traced the three letters POW with toothpaste, then rubbed them out as I prepared to escape. The fabric was worn away by washing with the regulation fatty yellow soap and hours flapping on a line over the prairie, a banner of forgotten poverty, while we sat on a step with a letter clutched in our fists and our eyes lost somewhere beyond the water tower. It was as though the girl's hand was Zita's, and the soft veil of military beige heightened its warmth, its gentleness, its life.

No one ever touches a prisoner's body except to inflict violence, or some kind of punishment. The responses of the camans to a vague gesture of protest, the rough jostling of your comrades as you queue for an egg, the acrid stench of disinfectants, the thorny blankets and, when you're in transit, the hardness of the benches, the bumps of the wagons, the steel needles of the vaccine that welcome you to the camp.

Months without seeing, or speaking to, or breathing the air of a woman. There were the girls employed at the camp orderly office, resolute and cheerful Texans. They considered the Italian men with a certain fascination. Certainly they despised us – ‘Happy go lucky!’ they called us – but then some of them fell in love with the lieutenants and sergeants with their glistening hair. The Italians sang, they were nice, they didn't kiss as though they were chewing gum, and when it was dark they knew the names of all the stars, or if they didn't know them they knew how to name them passionately after Mary, Lucy or Joy. After the war, many American girls went to join their heartthrobs in Naples, and emotional nuptials were celebrated.

One day two secretaries came to Camp 1, where the hardliners were kept, and sat down on our benches. They stretched out their nylon-clad legs on the freshly swept floor, forcing us to climb over their calves and gleaming heels. Perhaps it was a bet, perhaps it was indifference, or perhaps one of them was in love with one of the prisoners. Then they left, in their best regulation posture, and Fefe, the funniest one of all of us, Fefe who had seen his Captain Urbani in Africa sodomised in an act of reprisal by Moroccan guards, French Souaves, stretched himself out on a bench groaning, rubbing himself on the wood and whimpering while we laughed.

I didn't see the hand that drew its fingers across my leg as though drawing a tattoo. I kept my eyes on the sulphurous road, and felt the blood stirring inside my pants. But before the sense of excitement, which ran free and strong, I felt tenderness and compassion for my skin, recruited in Rome, battered by sea-storms, tanned in two deserts, leathery skin that knew the corrosive sand and the tough showers and the hasty thread of the Venetian nurse who sewed me up. ‘Christ alive, it's just a scratch, the poor guy in the bed next to you hasn't got legs to mend.’

And now, just below the white marks of that scar, sharply drawn by British shrapnel, like the footprints of a steel-footed sparrow, the girl's hand lingered. Almost imperceptibly she tightened her grip, and the shiver that followed did more to open me up than the sudden explosion of a grenade, a cry for help, a barked command. It pierced my resignation as a prisoner, it cut through the pain at my abandonment. However my hunting season might have gone, I still had a heart. Was that good or bad news?

Recalling her now, the girl, H.S., that was her name, seems liquid to me. At night, when the cold mistral splits the shutters of my bedroom and wakes me, I find myself thinking about her once again. Her diaphanous weightlessness fills my empty mind. I run through our days, few in number but crucial in our lives, and H.S. ethereally expands, like a piece of origami, the beautiful swan with the sinuous neck that she folded out of paper after making love. Like the few poetic words she prayed to her Buddha. In the pockets of her silk trousers she had a little Buddha of Happiness, who crossed the world smiling, his bag of suffering held tightly on his back. ‘He gives me my courage,’ she said.

We made love immediately after our meeting in the coffee shop. There were two rough rooms upstairs, and the lieutenant, with a wink, had gone ahead of me. She took me by the hand, and when she did so her hand didn't seem to touch me.

I wasn't a great Casanova, and twelve hundred nights of war had done nothing to sharpen my skills as a seducer. I lay on the little bed, a basic affair like the one on which I slept next to Ferrucci, and kept my hands behind the back of my neck. She opened my khaki shirt, one button at a time, and exposed my chest. I was lean, God knows, muscular, smooth, strengthened by privations and effort, my body was like a weapon. H.S. took off her clothes with a single prima donna movement, a tunic that weighed no more than a scarf, and was suddenly naked on top of me. I can't recall, scouring my memory, whether she rested on my crotch or my thighs, or whether she floated around me like a hummingbird. She rose to lick me and – I had to do something, or at least that was what they had told me on the Island – I sought the buckle of my belt with trembling hands.

‘Let me,’ said H.S., and unhooked it by herself. She moved her body as though merely rearranging her hair, a brief shadowy movement and I was inside her.

They still come to me on nights when the mistral blows. Why are memories so weightless? Even the tragic ones, even the painful ones? If I think of Bardia, when I fell into the hands of the Australians, at the age of twenty, all I hear is the machine-gunner whimpering, ‘Do we surrender, Manè? Do we surrender or do I fire, Manè?’ I don't remember when I had fired all the rounds in the magazine, in accordance with military regulations, ‘Fire to the last round before surrendering’, and I really did fire the last cartridge, yes, sir, I, the student of the socialist Professor Barbaroux, fired until the barrel of the Breda was red hot and we were out of ammunition. I remember none of that. I only remember the silence, what could be sweeter than silence, what could be harder to reassemble in the memory? And my gunner lying face down on the sand, arms open, motionless and cruciform. I saw the sand thrown up by gusts of wind, one, two, three, and I didn't see the enemy. Faceless and nameless: they would acquire faces and names only in prison. Not in war, just being the enemy was enough, they fired and we fired back. Finally the outlines come, the target shooting – mortal targets – assumes the guise of humanity, they strip us of our watches and pile us up in open railway carriages, so that the indigenous people can spit on us, the only chance they will ever get to humiliate a white man.

So: to remember those moments I have to make an effort of reason, I have to use thought as a compass. If I close my eyes and look out the window on to the unlit gulf, both within and without, and then open my lids, nothing changes, the darkness enfolds me. Of the girl, H.S., I am aware of the lightness with which she unhooked my belt, the sparrow's flutter with which she settled on my chest, and the lightness with which she made love to me. Of my capture, I see sand flying suddenly from the crest of a dune, then again, every second, and the machine-gunner embracing Mother Earth and praying as he awaits a Mediterranean divinity, while the enemy advances cautiously and victoriously towards us, certain prey in the desert.

We are all prey to memories, which we cannot alter, and which wait for us like bookkeepers, precise collectors of debits and credits. Are they worth more than real events? No, what matters is the story we forge for ourselves in our memories. At Camp 1 my gunner – ‘Do I shoot, Manè? Do I shoot?’ – never spoke to me again, he didn't want to poison our battling past with our captive present. Ciao, and that's that. So I can't tell you if the girl was as graceful as I remember, or whether I only perceived her carnality, her taut skin, her slanting oriental eyes. I was sure, and I still am, that H.S. was the most beautiful creature that the Lord God had ever put on earth. The privilege of finding her and the perennial bitterness at losing her will be the last memories to abandon me in the few days I still have left. In 1944 I didn't think that way, I was young. And yet when the girl circled about me, my body tensed and I thought, ‘You're happy now, remember, remember, remember.’

You might think it wise for a boy to be so precisely aware of his states of mind of sorrow and happiness. But I bitterly regret it. It's true: rare among human beings, I possess a precise memory of happiness, a lucid awareness of having perceived vivid joy. But searing within me I also feel the regret, the emptiness that comes afterwards.

Perhaps the girl was carnal, her womanly ardour certainly was. And perhaps I was innocent, my eccentric escape for love certainly was. That lightness means everything to me: it is, and will remain, my life, the life of Giovanni Manes.

The next memory, a flash after her hands on my belt, is the mocking blond head of the lieutenant: ‘Still here? What a fuss you Italians make!’ And he starts singing Puccini, to my horror, in the purest Italian: ‘Oh! Sweet kisses, oh languid caresses, and I, trembling, unveiled those beautiful forms …’

We paid the girls. I hadn't even asked her name, if weightlessness has a name. We took a bus at six o'clock, perhaps a day later we would make it to Nashville and from there to Baltimore, Washington and New York. The sun was high, the wooden footpaths deserted. The lieutenant and I the only ones who walked them, in our light shoes, in silence, drained by love after so much solitude. My head was bowed in confusion when I felt a gentle touch on my arm. A dark-coloured car was coming towards us. The lieutenant pushed me maternally into a grocer's shop full of dried-up vegetables. He picked up the bowl that was used to weigh the green, green peas, and plunged it into the big brimming sack. As soon as the car had passed he led me to the next shop, through the door and into the post office. ‘They're after us,’ he said gently.