Читать книгу The Lights of Alborada - Gianni Riotta - Страница 8

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!’

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.’