‘Anyone I don’t see going back will catch it from me!’
Giglia passes him, calmly going towards the fire, with that strange smile of hers. ‘Keep away!’ he mutters to her.
He’s a perverse creature, is Dritto, but he has an instinct for command; he knows that the fire is his fault, caused by the irresponsibility to which he listlessly gives in; he knows that he will certainly be in serious trouble with his superiors, but now he is a leader again, his nostrils quivering as he directs the evacuation of the hut in the middle of the fire, dominating the confused rushing to and fro of the men caught by surprise while resting, who would have lost all the material as long as they saved themselves.
‘Upstairs!’ he shouts. ‘There’s still a machine-gun there and two haversacks of ammunition!’
‘Can’t get up there!’ they reply, ‘the floor’s all on fire.’
Suddenly there is a shout: ‘The floor’s falling in! All outside!’
Now the first explosions can be heard – some grenades which had remained in the straw. Dritto shouts, ‘All outside! Keep away from the hut! Take the stuff some way off, particularly the explosives!’
Pin, from his observation post on a mound, sees the fire break out into sudden bursts like fireworks and hears shots, even bursts of machine-gun fire, as the ammunition belts fall into the flames and explode, one cartridge after the other; from a distance it must sound like a battle. Sparks fly high into the sky, the tops of the chestnut trees seem tipped with gold; a branch first looks gilded then suddenly goes incandescent; the fire is spreading into the trees, it may soon burn up the whole wood.
Dritto is making a list of missing material: a Breda, six belts of ammunition, two rifles, lots of grenades, cartridges and a sackful of rice. His career is over: he will never command again; they may shoot him; yet his nostrils are still quivering, he goes on apportioning jobs out among the men, as if this were a routine evacuation.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’ll tell you later. Let’s get out of the woods. Come on.’
The detachment, loaded with weapons and baggage, moves off through the meadows in single file. Mancino is carrying the cooking-pot on his back with Babeuf perching on top of it. Pin has charge of the other kitchen things. Now a rumour begins circulating among the men: ‘The Germans have heard the shots and seen the fire, we’ll soon have them on our heels.’ Dritto turns an impassive yellow face towards them
‘Silence! Not a word from anyone! Come on, walk!’
He might be organizing a retreat after an unsuccessful engagement.
Chapter Eight
The new camp is in a barn, where they are all crowded up on top of each other; the roof has fallen in and lets the rain through. In the morning they scatter to sun themselves among the rhododendrons on the rocky slopes around, lie on the frosty bushes and take off their shirts to look for lice.
Pin likes being sent off by Mancino on errands to places nearby, to fill pails for the cooking-pot at the spring, or gather wood among the burnt trees with a little hatchet, or fish out watercress from the stream for the cook’s salads. Pin sings as he goes, looking at the sky and the clear morning world and the mountain butterflies of strange colours meandering over the meadows. Every time he keeps Mancino waiting impatiently while the fire goes out and the rice gets sticky, and each time he is cursed in every language under the sun when he arrives back, with his mouth full of strawberry juice and his eyes dancing with the fluttering of the butterflies. Then Pin becomes the little boy of Long Alley again, starting rows which go on for hours and draw the men away from the rhododendrons to collect round the kitchen fire.
But when he wanders along the paths in the mornings Pin forgets the old streets with their stagnant mule-urine, the odour of male and female in his sister’s unmade bed, the sour smell from the squeezed trigger and smoke from the red, burning open gun-barrels, the swish of the belt during that interrogation. Now Pin has discovered all kinds of coloured things; yellow and brown mushrooms growing damp in the earth, red spiders on huge invisible nets, hares all legs and ears which appear suddenly on the path then leap zigzagging out of sight.
Yet a sudden fleeting thought is enough for Pin to get caught up again in the sickness of the hairy, ambivalent charnel-house of humanity; and, with eyes screwed up and freckles clustering, he watches the crickets making love, or thrusts pine needles in the puffy backs of little toads, or pees on an ant heap and watches the porous earth sizzle open and hundreds of little red and black ants scurry away through the mud.
Then the world of men draws him again, that world of incomprehensible men with their opaque looks and angry mouths. And he goes back to Mancino, the little man whose laughter is getting sourer and sourer, and who never leaves his cooking-pots to go into action but stays there while the hawk in a foul mood flaps its clipped wings on his shoulder.
But the most amazing thing about Mancino are his tattoos: he has them on every part of his body, tattoos of butterflies, sailing ships, hearts, hammers and sickles, Madonnas. One day Pin saw him while he was shitting and discovered he even had a tattoo on one of his buttocks: a man standing up seemed to be embraced by a woman on her knees.
Cousin is different; although he seems to be forever complaining and hinting that he is the only one who really feels the strain of war, he still goes round by himself with his tommy-gun on his shoulder, and every time he returns to camp sets off again a few hours later, always with that reluctant air of his as if he is only doing it because he has to.
Whenever there is a mission to be carried out, Dritto looks round and says: ‘Who wants to go?’
Then Cousin shakes his big head as if he were the victim of an unjust fate, loads his tommy-gun on his shoulder, and goes off sighing; with that gentle face of his looking more than ever like the mask on a fountain.
Dritto sprawls among the rhododendrons with his arms behind his head and his gun between his knees, feeling sure that measures are being taken against him at brigade headquarters. The men’s eyes are heavy with sleep above their matted beards; Dritto tries not to look at them as he feels their glances are full of silent resentment against him. But they still obey him, as if by mutual agreement, to avoid drifting to disaster. Yet he listens to everything, and every now and then gets up to give an order; he does not want the men to get out of the habit of thinking of him as their leader; if they do, even for a moment, he will have lost them.
The burning of the hut has never worried Pin; it was a wonderful fire and the new camp is surrounded by lovely places to explore. But he’s a little frightened of going near Dritto; he wonders whether Dritto will try and put all the blame for the fire on to him, for distracting his attention by his singing.
Now Dritto is calling him: ‘Pin, come here!’
Pin goes towards the sprawling Dritto, not daring to bring out any of his usual jokes; but he knows Dritto is hated and feared by the others and feels rather proud to be near him at that moment, almost as if he were an accomplice.
‘D’you know how to clean a pistol?’ asks Dritto.
‘Well,’ says Pin, ‘you take it to bits and I’ll clean the parts.’
Everyone is a little nervous of Pin, as they never know what he will say, but Dritto senses that today Pin will not mention the fire or Giglia or any of those things, so the boy is the only member of the band he can be with.
He spreads out a handkerchief and puts the pieces down on it as he dismembers the pistol. Pin asks if he can help to take it to pieces and Dritto shows him how. Pin enjoys sitting there talking to Dritto like this, in low voices and without either saying anything disagreeable to the other. He compares Dritto’s pistol with his own buried one and talks about the parts that are different or better in both. And Dritto does not make the usual comment, that he doesn’t believe Pin has a buried pistol; perhaps they all believe it, anyway, and only said they didn’t to make fun of Pin; Dritto seems a nice man when Pin talks to him like this, and when he’s explaining how the pistol work
s he becomes enthusiastic and no longer looks obsessed by evil thoughts. Even pistols, when talked about like this, no longer seem instruments for killing people, but strange enchanted toys.
The other men lie about looking angry and abstracted; they take no notice of Pin wandering round them and do not want to sing. It is bad when discouragement seeps into the men’s bones like damp from the earth, and they no longer trust their leaders and feel they are already surrounded by Germans with flamethrowers among the rocks and rhododendrons and that they will have to flee from valley to valley and die one by one in this never-ending war. They begin discussing the war – when it started and who wanted it and when it would end, and if things would be better then or worse than before.
Pin does not know the difference between when there’s war and when there isn’t. He seems to have heard people talking about war ever since he was born, only the bombings and the black-out came later.
Every now and again aeroplanes pass over the mountains; you can look at their undersides, without escaping into tunnels as you have to in towns. Then far away towards the sea there is a deep roar of bombs dropping, and the men think of their homes which are perhaps in ruins at that moment and tell each other that the war will never end and how they can’t understand who wanted it.
‘I know who wanted it! I’ve seen them!’ a man called Carabiniere suddenly says. ‘It was the students!’
Carabiniere is even more ignorant than Duke and lazier than Long Zena; his father was a peasant who, realizing he would never get his son to wield a spade, said to him: ‘Join the Carabinieri’; so the son joined and was given a black uniform with a white bandolier and carried out his duties in town and country without ever realizing what he was doing. After the 8th of September1 he was told to arrest the parents of deserters, then one day he heard that he was going to be deported himself as he was for the King; so he escaped. First the partisans had wanted to make him dig his own grave, because of those parents of deserters he had arrested; then they realized that he was just a poor wretch and had sent him to Dritto’s detachment, as no one wanted him in any of the others.
‘In ’40 I was in Naples and I know!’ says Carabiniere. ‘It was the students! They carried flags and placards and yelled “Malta and Gibraltar” and that they wanted five meals a day.’
‘Shut up, you were a Carabiniere,’ the others shout at him; ‘you were on their side and you went around delivering the red arrest warrants.’
Duke spits violently and touches his Austrian pistol. ‘The Carabinieri are all pigs, swine and bastards!’ he says between his teeth. In his part of the country there is a long history of struggle with the Carabinieri, of Carabinieri shot and killed by wayside shrines.
Carabiniere protests, panting and waving his big peasant hands in front of his tiny eyes and low forehead.
‘Us Carabinieri were against them! Yes, sir, we were against the war the students wanted. We tried to keep them in order! But we were twenty to one against, so they had their war!’
Mancino is standing a little way off, looking as if he’s on tenterhooks; he is stirring the rice in the cooking-pot; if he stops stirring for a second it will stick. Meanwhile he can hear snatches from time to time of what the men are saying; when they talk politics he always wants to be right among them, for they know nothing, he thinks, and need him to explain everything. But now he can’t leave the cooking-pot, and gives little hops of desperation, wringing his hands; ‘Capitalism!’ he shouts now and again, ‘Exploitation by the bourgeoisie,’ as if suggesting ideas to the men, who refuse to listen to him.
‘In Naples in ’40,’ explains Carabiniere, ‘there was a great battle between students and Carabinieri! And if we Carabinieri had defeated them there wouldn’t have been a war! But the students wanted to burn down the town hall! Mussolini was forced to make war!’
‘Poor old Mussolini!’ jeer the others.
‘To hell with you and your Mussolini!’ shouts Duke.
From the kitchen comes Mancino’s voice, bleating: ‘Mussolini! Imperialist bourgeoisie!’
‘The town hall, they tried to burn the town hall! So what could us Carabinieri do? If we’d put them in their places, though, Mussolini would never have started the war!’
Mancino, torn between his duty to the cooking-pot and his longing to go and talk about revolution, is bleating away until finally he attracts the attention of Long Zena and signals to him to come over. Long Zena thinks he is being called to taste the rice and decides to make the effort to get up. Mancino shouts: ‘Imperialist bourgeoisie, tell ’em it’s the bourgeoisie making war for its markets!’
‘Oh, shit,’ says Long Zena and turns his back on him. Mancino’s speeches always bore him to death; he can’t understand them, he knows nothing about the bourgeosie or communism, and he is not attracted by a world in which everyone has to work, he prefers one in which everyone is out for himself and is working as little as possible.
‘Free enterprise,’ yawns Long Zena, flopping down among the rhododendrons again, and scratching himself through the holes in his trousers, ‘I’m for free enterprise; and everyone being free to get rich by his own efforts.’
Carabiniere is now explaining his conception of history; there are two forces struggling against each other, the Carabinieri, who are poor unfortunates trying to keep order, and the students, the big-shots, the cavalieri, the lawyers, doctors, commendatori, those with salaries undreamt of, even by the Carabinieri, and who still aren’t satisfied and send the Carabinieri to fight the wars in order to get more.
‘You don’t understand anything!’ shouts Mancino, who cannot hold out another moment and has now left Pin to look after the cooking-pot. ‘Imperialism is caused by over-production!’
‘Back to your cooking!’ they shout at him. ‘And make sure the rice doesn’t stick this time too!’
But Mancino is now standing in the middle of them, his little body enveloped in the big sailor’s jerkin with its shoulders covered with hawk’s droppings, waving his fists in an endless speech about capitalist imperialism, arms traffic and the universal revolution that will take place when the war is over, in England and America too, and the abolition of frontiers by the International and the Red Flag.
The men lie sprawled among the rhododendrons their thin faces covered with matted beard, their hair all over their foreheads; they wear odd pieces of uniform, all tending in colour towards a dirty grey; firemen’s or Fascist or German tunics with the badges torn off. All of them are there for different reasons – many are deserters from the Fascist forces or freed prisoners, some are still boys, impelled by an obstinate impulse, a vague longing to go against things.
They all dislike Mancino because he vents himself in words and arguments, not in shooting; to them his arguments seem useless, as he talks about enemies they know nothing about, such as capitalists and financiers. It’s rather like Mussolini expecting the Italians to hate the British and the Abyssinians, whom none of them had ever seen, and who live beyond the ocean. And the men pull the cook in among them, play leap-fog over his little curved shoulders and hit him on his big bald head, while the hawk turns nasty and rolls its eyes.
Dritto, still a little way off, now intervenes, dangling his machine-gun against his knees. ‘Go and see to the food, Mancino.’
Dritto does not like discussions much either; or rather he only likes to talk about actions and weapons, about the new small tommy-guns which the Fascists are beginning to use and how he would like to lay his hands on one; but what he likes more than anything is giving orders, getting the men into position under cover while he himself jumps up to fire short bursts.
‘Go on, the rice is burning, can’t you smell it?’ shout the men at Mancino, pushing him away.
Mancino calls on the commissar for support: ‘Hey, Giacinto, why don’t you say something? What d’you think you’re doing? They’re right to call this the Fascist detachment, you can’t even talk politics here!’
Giacinto has just returned from headquar
ters, but has not yet said if there is any news; all he has done is shrug his shoulders and mutter that the brigade commissar would be passing before nightfall on inspection. After hearing this the men throw themselves down among the rhododendrons once more; now the brigade commissar will soon be here to arrange everything, and it’s useless to worry. Dritto also thinks it’s useless to worry, the brigade commissar will tell him what his fate is to be; and he too stretches out again among the rhododendrons, though more apprehensively, tearing up little bits of shrub in his fingers.
Mancino is now complaining to Giacinto that no one in the detachment ever talks to the men about why they are partisans and what communism is. Giacinto has lice clustered thick on his hair-roots, and all over the hairs on the lower part of his stomach little white eggs are sticking to every single hair; Giacinto goes on cracking eggs and lice between his thumb-nails with a little click, in a gesture that has now become mechanical.
‘Well,’ he begins in a resigned voice as if he does not want to disappoint anyone, even Mancino, ‘each of us knows why he’s a partisan. I was a tinker and used to go round in the country and my cry could be heard a long way off and the women would come and bring their broken cooking-pots for me to mend. I used to go into their houses and joke with the maids and was sometimes given eggs and a glass of wine. I used to repair the pots in a field and there were always kids all around watching me. Now I can’t go round the country any more because I’d be arrested; and then the bombing has messed everything up too. That’s why we’re partisans; so we can be tinkers again and so eggs and wine can be cheap, and so we can’t be arrested any more and there’ll be no more air raids. And then we want communism too. Communism means there won’t be any more houses where the door’s banged in your face, so you’re forced to enter by the chicken run at night. Communism means going into a house and, even if they’re having soup, being given soup even if you are a tinker; and if they’re eating panettone at Christmas then they’ll give you panettone. That’s what communism means. For example: here we all are so full of lice that they almost drag us about in our sleep. Now I’ve just been to brigade headquarters and seen they have insect powder there. Then I said, “Fine communists you are, you don’t send this to our detachment.” So they said they’d send some. That’s what communism means.’