Gianni Riotta - The Lights of Alborada

I, Giovannino Manes, am the hero of the story that the boys listened to. I escaped on April the 17th 1944, from Camp 1 in Hereford, for hardline Italian prisoners. We had decided not to collaborate with the Allies even after the armistice of September the 8th and the declaration of war on Germany. We were strange people, fascists, most of us, but communists too, and socialists and libertarians who refused to work the fields so as ‘not to help the capitalist economy’. We were confused, simple and pig-headed.

The sun was high over Texas, and the long road was dusty between the maize fields. I had fifteen dollars in my pocket, which I had got hold of by selling a guard some SS ‘medals’ carved from a tin of tomatoes. I knew a bit of English. The compulsory insignia, POW, prisoner of war, had been traced on my trousers in toothpaste rather than the regulation white ink, and clumsily erased, so I could not be identified by that. The plan was a simple one: get to New York, stow away on a ship and then land in Portugal and be repatriated by June the 24th. Not a day later. In my pocket I had, folded in its envelope, Zita's letter:

My dear Nino, Of all the things I've written to you over the years when you have been far away, and of all the things I would like to write to you, nothing grieves me more than the words I am about to write to you now. On June the 24th I am going to marry Professor Leonardo Barbaroux. He wanted to write to you himself, but I told him no, I must tell Nino.

We grew up in his house, Nino, I know. We spent the most beautiful hours studying mathematics and logic with him, when all of life seemed as simple as a theorem. And yet you joined up, and you know what Barbaroux thinks of war. We stayed on the Island, almost alone. You boys were away, and the women were at their wits' end. We went on studying, day and night, always on our own, until what happened happened, and I don't want to torment you. We're going to get married. I know it will hurt you, and I carry your pain within me. But war forces us into swift decisions, my darling Nino, we none of us know how long we will live, and where and how. Resign yourself to it. It's clear that it wasn't to be, after our magical encounter at the Alborada. Don't close yourself away. Leonardo says he'll write to you. Please don't suffer too much. Nino, my love, whom I have loved so very much.

Zita

When I received it, I put the letter in the pocket of my uniform, opened the wooden door of the barracks, headed for the latrine and threw up.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ asked Captain Righi, who had lost an eye in Bir el Gobi and had a bat-like sense of hearing.

I didn't feel ill. I felt empty, like a pot scoured by my mother after Sunday lunch, or Nana's marrows, which the children scraped clean of their pulp and floated down the Scutari stream. My long imprisonment – I had fallen into the hands of the Australians in January 1941, Lieutenant Beretta and I had been the last to surrender – had made me indifferent to emotions. Nothing happens directly to prisoners of war; every event, whether it aggravates or alleviates the punishment, is caused by someone else – the camp commandant suspending your mail, the mess sergeant giving you a particularly tasty dish. A prisoner has no power. Over anybody. The world happens to him. He has control only over his own thoughts, but it's a delicate, ephemeral art, a piece of hand-blown Murano glass. Many people lost it and remained mere shadows, playing football and eating, in a state of suspension for years.

Standing on that step, I understood that I had to control my thoughts or become a victim like Ferrucci, a friend from the battlefields, who had turned in on himself, grown melancholy, stopped responding to anything and spent the seasons staring at the tumbleweed blown into the desert by the Texan wind. He smoked and looked at the prairie, unable to feel pain or to decipher grief. After reading the letter, I could have run yelling towards the watchtower where the guards were posted, the ‘camans’ as we called them because they were constantly telling us to ‘Come on, come on.’ One idiot rookie would probably take fright and fire at my back, intending to kill me. That was what had happened to poor Lieutenant Giardina, in Africa, left by the French to die in pain with a bullet in his belly for taking a step too close to the wire. Some of the camans were trigger happy.

What choice did I have? Zita, my beloved, my innocent, my snow-white virgin, my betrothed, sweet blood of my heart, the lips I had kissed, the breasts I had stroked in the shade of the faraglioni , would be for ever the wedded wife of Barbaroux. He, Barbaroux, would possess her, love her, conquer her. It was for him, for Barbaroux, that she would give birth and smile, it was to him that she would read those mathematical studies, put his books in order and turn out the light, before slipping beneath the sheets, with him, with Leonardo Barbaroux.

We were the professor's favourite pupils. He was a mathematician and an anti-fascist, a friend of the genius David Hilbert who had withdrawn into voluntary exile, leaving his post so as not to be forced to swear loyalty to the Duce, Benito Mussolini. From a wealthy family – his father's company made the most precise telescopes of the day – Barbaroux had taken us to his bosom, his two shy village children, and sent us to university. Now I, who loved mathematics because it was free of the snares and paradoxes of the type that I had just spent a year avoiding – mines, tanks, machine guns, thirst and scorpions, and every day in the camp in Hereford, stupefying myself with masturbation, rotting my mind by gluing little models together, arguing over nothing – I was finally up to my neck in a contradiction that neither logic nor war had prepared me for. Barbaroux, who could have been Zita's father, was instead to be her husband. And she would be a rich and revered lady, and how people would smirk at me in the club! But thinking of their smiles didn't hurt me, I felt numb, anaesthetised. The fear I had felt in battle, the raging charges in the desert, the solitary humiliation of prison, had all vanished. Pain had turned me into a ghost, I felt as though I could pass through the barbed wire and fly home on the wind, unseen by anyone, not by poor Ferrucci with his dead eyes and his dead cigarettes, nor the camans in the Hereford watchtower. And my flight was the flight of a ghost, protected by a kindly god. I had to be in Italy by June the 24th, to prevent the marriage of Zita and Barbaroux. That was all.

And that was why I was leaning against the pole of the Hereford bus stop, in the dust and the wind, on that April afternoon in 1944. And when I saw the young American lieutenant coming towards me with an ironic smile on his lips, I thought, He's going to catch me now and put me back inside, but I'll escape again tomorrow.

The lieutenant leaned against the bus stop and, still smiling, rolled himself a thin, firm cigarette, tufts of blond Virginia tobacco sticking out at either end. He rolled a second one and held it out to me. I had never smoked in my life, always bartering my tobacco rations for stamps for my letters to Zita, but to say, ‘No, thank you’ might have scuppered my plan before it had even got under way. I nodded and allowed the man to light the cigarette in my mouth, although I didn't inhale.

The bus appeared around the bend of the aqueduct, followed by a cloud of dust and a dog that barked merrily in the hot air, with the resounding vigour of prairie strays. The driver braked, raising a cloud of dust from the beaten earth, and indolently opened the door. First aboard was a sprightly old woman, and out of soldierly habit I stepped aside for the lieutenant, who climbed the two steps and showed his papers.