Sebastian O’Kelly - Amedeo - The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia

The senior port official, an elegant young man in robes of white silk, sat under a lean-to on the beach, where he questioned the new arrivals. He acknowledged their responses with a bored nod, and then waved them through. The stranger waited until he was the last before he approached. He stood before the low writing table, looking down at the young man, who sat on cushions and a carpet laid over the sand. He was neither a Yemeni nor a Muslim, he announced, but an Italian officer who had been fighting against the British. He was the equivalent of an amir al-alai , a colonel, who had commanded eight hundred horsemen, and he now sought refuge from his enemies in the Yemen. The official silently studied the figure in front of him. Dressed in miserable clothes with no possessions, or proof of identity, he looked like thousands of other desperate Arabs along the coast struggling to survive in difficult times. The hands were rough and callused, the weatherbeaten face scarred down the right cheek and, though his blue-grey eyes shone brightly, the whites were yellowed with malaria. But something about him, perhaps the quiet intensity with which he spoke or the levelled eyes which held his own with no sign of fear, made the young official hesitate to dismiss him. He invited the stranger to sit and tell him more, and ordered an underling to bring them tea.

To the prisoner, that interview felt like months ago, although he knew it could not have been more than two or three weeks. But for all the outside world would be aware, he could remain in the dungeon for years. All his efforts to evade the British seemed so futile now. Had he surrendered with the others, at least the enemy would have recognised his rank and kept him alive. But fortune had abandoned him and every day in the semi-darkness he was growing weaker. The glands of his groin were swollen from coping with the suppurating bullet wound to his ankle. It would not be long before gangrene set in. He had often faced death before, and he was resigned to it. In his pain and misery, it was not even unwelcome.

During the long, uninterrupted hours in the stifling cell, the prisoner’s mind wandered back to the years before the war. Already they had the unreality of a dream. Receptions and balls in Rome and Turin, Budapest and Berlin merged one with the other in a blur of shimmering silks and assorted uniforms. Loud, laughing faces of half-remembered friends – well-born army officers like himself, society women and some of Italy’s new movie stars – flashed past as though taunting him. He had been feêted then as one of Italy’s star sportsmen; the great hope of the Italian riding team in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The prisoner’s fevered mind lurched again and he felt as giddy and nauseous as he had once in Budapest when the champagne had flowed and he had been carried around the mess of the Hadek Hussars, hailed as the ‘Conqueror of Abyssinia’. And then suddenly he was standing before the diminutive figure of the Italian king at one of those awkward royal receptions for carefully chosen young people at the Villa Savoia in Rome. Vittorio Emanuele III, who had known him since childhood, was explaining in his hesitant, didactic manner the origin of the term steeplechase ‘when English lords used to gallop madly across fields from one village campanile to another’. The next moment he was being led by the arm through the scented gardens of the Castello in Tripoli by Italo Balbo, the governor of Libya, who was worried that the Duce’s new alliance with Nazi Germany would be the ruin of them all …

The odour of the shared bucket assailed the prisoner’s senses, ending his reverie and the hours of waiting in the semi-darkness resumed. His past life in fashionable society, once the fulfilment of all his ambitions, had long since been left behind, and he looked back on it now, feeling nothing, almost as though it were someone else’s.

Deeper emotions welled up inside him when his mind turned, as it always did, to the two women who loved him. Guilt mingled with longing when he thought of Khadija. He closed his eyes and saw her again standing uncertainly at the entrance to his tent, the kerosene lamp highlighting her features and casting deep dark shadows in the folds of the white shammah wrapped around her head and shoulders against the night cold. He had buried many men that day, including some of those who were closest to him. Through reddened eyes, he watched as Khadija approached his bed and, saying nothing, she pulled off his riding boots. In that moment of tenderness, when happiness and life itself seemed so fleeting, he had taken her into his arms.

He was her chief, Khadija used to tell him, and in those days he had been the all-powerful comandante , one of the most promising young officers of the Duke of Aosta, the viceroy of Africa Orientale Italiana. But after the British had defeated the Italians, extinguishing the Duce’s African empire, he had had nothing to offer her, yet she had stayed at his side. He became just a shifta , a bandit, inexplicably fighting on with a handful of his ascari after the rest of the Italian army had surrendered. Khadija was seldom far from his side, firing her ancient Austro-Hungarian carbine at the British lorries as they heaved their way up the mountain roads of Eritrea. ‘ Ay zosh! Ay zosh! Up! Up!’ she would shout in Tigrinian, as the ragged band closed in to loot and kill. Her fighting with the men brought them good fortune, she would say as she curled up beside him on the straw mat of their tukul. He would watch her fall asleep, covering her naked shoulders with an old blanket and then kiss the intricate braids in which she wore her hair. In the darkness of the dungeon, the prisoner’s eyes filled with tears.

He had always tried to be honest with her, he would convince himself. From the beginning, she had known that one day they would part and that at home waiting for him was another woman; a woman whom he also loved and had asked to be his wife. Khadija would bow her head and say that she understood, but in her heart she did not stop hoping that he would never leave.

The prisoner had no idea what Beatrice Gandolfo’s feelings were for him now: whether she was still waiting for him to return, or had found someone else, or even married, he had no idea. His name had not been among those killed in action, but nor had it been on the lists the British passed to the Red Cross of Italian officers interned in prison camps throughout India, Kenya and South Africa. He was simply missing – disperso – in the void left by the collapse of Africa Orientale Italiana. Whatever Beatrice – Bice – had decided, he would not, could not, reproach her. They had known each other all their lives and the bond between them, cousins as well as lovers, was too strong to be broken.

Bice’s older sisters had always made more fuss of him than she ever did, when he stayed with them in Naples or went bathing at the Gandolfos’ summer house at Vietri. It was they who demanded to know the latest scandalous gossip surrounding Edda Ciano, the Duce’s chrome-blonde daughter, or what the royal princesses were wearing or whether he was really stepping out with the movie star Elsa Merlini, as the magazines reported. Still only in her teens, Bice would follow him intently with her dark brown eyes, smiling slightly but saying little. And when she did speak, it was as though she were gently teasing him, as if she were ten years his senior and not the reverse.

No one seemed to understand and accept his weaknesses and absurdities quite as she did. And he remembered the day, while they were sailing a little boat off the Amalfi coast, when he realised – and the thought had appalled him at first – that he was falling in love with his young cousin. Bice had swum over to the sheer rockface of the shore and, ignoring his words of caution, had climbed up to a high ledge. She looked down at him in the boat, smiled and then dived into the sea, and her long, reddish blonde hair, so unusual in a southern Italian, streamed towards him under the water.