Читать книгу The Lights of Alborada - Gianni Riotta - Страница 10

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.’

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.