Gianni Riotta - The Lights of Alborada

I returned home damp and confused, as though I had spent my first, premature night of marriage. Mama gave me an egg beaten with sugar and the Marsala my father had left behind. SOM, said the Indian-ink label: Superior Old Marsala. My mother had resigned herself, poor woman, to these excursions of mine, and I think she would have been amazed if I had missed a single one.

My last Alborada outing coincided with my sixteenth birthday. It was easy for me at that age to scamper from the meadow to the hill of San Noè, since my legs were long, and I had strong feet that could grip the cobbles and the grass. But my palpitations at the idea that I might not make it, the anxiety of slipping beneath Orazio's bells before the final stroke, sent me off at a frantic gallop. It was no longer a children's game. It was a flight from the present, from adulthood.

For my Alborada as a sixteen-year-old, in 1937, I had donned long trousers. And I ran like mad, striding fiercely, not really looking where I was going. For the last time, I slipped into the church square, a winner, and pumped my clenched fists triumphantly in the air. I turned a half-pirouette, looking around for Orazio so that I could win his approval – ‘I've done it, Orazio!’ – and instead what I saw was the most beautiful girl I had ever set eyes upon. The nimble sway with which she walked set the sleeve of a blue pullover, slung lazily over her shoulders, swinging back and forth with the elegant severity of a metronome. Bareheaded, she gazed out to sea, and the breeze mingled curls and wool. My startled agitation must have produced a crunch of gravel, and she turned around to stare at me with mocking curiosity.

‘Are you always running? You're in a terrible hurry at this time of the morning. What's your name?’

‘Nino. And you?’

‘Zita.’

And I never ran again.

During the fiercest war of the twentieth century twelve million soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. Former warriors, proud of their armies and their units, often convinced of the cause for which they had been recruited, spent their days behind barbed wire, vying with their fellow soldiers for a slice of bread in the mud or, when conditions were more humane, waiting restlessly for the next day, querulous and impotent. Twelve million human beings, a nation, scattered from the frozen steppes of Europe to Australia, where six hundred Japanese kamikaze fighters threw themselves against the machine-gun nests of the camp guards at Cowra, choosing bullets over the shame of detention. In Africa, the Italian lieutenant Carlo de Bellegarde escaped from a British camp in Kenya and, on foot and on a bicycle, covered over three thousand kilometres of jungle and savannah to reach Mozambique in two months. Prey to snakes by night and lions by day, he defended himself with a torch, waving it around to chase the beasts away. Two askaris, Ambekilili and Wakuru, captured him on the last bridge before freedom: ‘Bwana mkubwa, Bahati mbaya – Noble lord, a terrible misfortune!’ they said sadly.

In 1915 the men of my village suspended the tuna hunt, and they went to war. The ones who survived the eleven Isonzo Offensives returned and took up their nets again. We, their sons, set off for sun-scorched Africa, the merciless Balkans, eternal Russia. When the fate of the war turned for our lovely homeland, we were imprisoned in Nazi camps, or in Siberia, or across the sea. When we came home, our children listened to us complaining about vanishing shoals of bluefish, the declining tuna population, no more tuna hearts hanging to dry in the sun, no gleaming fillets in oil. We never talked about what had happened to us.

Ettore, my father's cousin, had served on a rickety banana boat that crossed the Red Sea. Cut off beyond the Suez Canal by the declaration of war, he and his crew crossed two oceans, the Indian and the Pacific, to be welcomed in triumph by the girls of Tokyo and ended up in a concentration camp when Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943. Ettore saw the flash of Hiroshima on the horizon, survived and came home with two pearl necklaces which he gave to his daughters. But he didn't say a word about his adventures.

Uncle Massimo was captured by the 6th Australian Division in Bardia, in Africa. They stole his Vetta watch, but he didn't hate them for it. ‘It's war, no point harbouring a grudge.’ He ended up in Yol, in India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They dragged him across three continents but they didn't break him. On the yellow sand of the camp he drew up a plan of escape to Manchuria, climbing mountains eight thousand metres high and then marching hundreds of kilometres to the Japanese bases in China. No one wanted to follow him (are you surprised?) and he set off on his own. When captured he was up to his neck in snow. The British colonel warmed him up with a bowl of soup, and then gave him permission, on his word of honour, to move around freely inside the camp as long as he never again tried to escape. He too kept mum about his adventures.

No one wants to listen to prison stories, so we just kept quiet. We behaved patiently, we waited like stoics, refusing to let ourselves be humiliated. And yet we were defeated. Benito Mussolini's wicked project was beaten back, the banners broken, strips of them sold as souvenirs. The most respectable kind of captivity, the bravest of lives as a prisoner, is still the mark of a battle lost. It's hard for a child to look into his father's eyes and know that this man was once young and handsome and defeated, a hostage of people who stole his chronometer, his rifle, his mother's letters, his identity, his victory and his future. We, the fathers, redeemed the honour of battle with our courageous conduct in the camps: but what about the sons? Who are the sons of the retreat, a generation without flags, avid consumers at the cinema of the exploits of the victorious Allied warriors at El Alamein, the Don, Sicily?

They listen to the stories and, puzzled and attentive, miss the moral. There's only one adventure they want to hear. Of all the escapes, real or imagined, dreamed up or frustrated by our jailers, one alone gives heart to the children born after the peace. They tell it to each other, changing or adding details and secrets every time they do so. Its protagonist is a maths student who became a fisherman. Perhaps, in this century, others will be delighted by the tale of his escape, which began in April 1944, at a bus stop in Hereford, Texas, in the great and powerful United States of America.

Four hundred thousand Germans and 50,000 Italians were imprisoned in that new continent. Only 2,200 of the Germans, veterans of Field-Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps, patient, silent and organised, tried to get away, all of them recaptured. Thirty-five of them died, killed while attempting to escape. The Italians too, apparently more serene, endlessly singing a single song, ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me … ’ escaped as quickly as they could, as permitted by the Geneva Convention. I got hold of the figures – the American War Department estimates that 604 Italians broke out. Rather more than the Germans, on average. Why? Where were they planning to go, setting off on foot from Texas, from the Mississippi, even from Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, digging tunnels, dressing up as priests, as labourers, eluding the patrols by hiding in haystacks? To reach a ship and be transported, clandestinely, to Europe, to Spain or Portugal, neutral countries? Or did they just want to escape the endless routine, dinner, roll call, reading, football, dinner and lights out? Where was a prisoner to go, on foot, without a word of English? The dream was the free ports, New York and Philadelphia, the only ones that allowed ships from non-allied countries to berth. The Americans had spread the rumour that Savannah, in Georgia, was open to foreign vessels as well, and thus managed to intercept the refugees who headed south.