Corelli's Mandolin

  But now his spirit had been cast into the fire, and he knew that his temper was being assayed in the furnace of destiny. Was he going to be the man who saved Greece? The man who could have saved Greece, but did not? The man who could not have saved Greece, but who strove with the utmost effort to save her honour? That was it; it was a question above all of personal and national honour, because the important thing was that Greece should come through this trial without the slightest imputation of turpitude. When soldiers are dead, when a country is devastated and destroyed, it is honour that survives and endures. It is honour that breathes life into the corpse when evil times have passed.

  Was it not a form of irony to be so mocked by fate? Had he not selected for himself his role as ‘The First Peasant’, ‘The First Worker’, ‘The National Father’? Had he not surrounded himself with the pompous trappings of a modern Fascist? A ‘Regime of the Fourth Of August 1936’? A Third Hellenic Civilisation to echo Hitler’s Third Reich? A National Youth Organisation that held parades, waved banners, just like the Hitler Youth? Didn’t he despise Liberals, Communists, and Parliamentarianism, just as did Franco, Salazar, Hitler, and Mussolini? Hadn’t he sowed discord amongst the leftists, according to the textbook? What could have been easier, given their ludicrous factionalism and their eagerness to betray each other on the grounds of false consciousness and any one of a plethora of ideological impurities? Didn’t he denounce the plutocracy? Didn’t the secret police know the exact aroma and chemical composition of every subversive fart in Greece?

  So why had his international brothers deserted him? Why did Ribbentrop send him anodyne assurances that could not be believed? Why was Mussolini fabricating border incidents and diplomatic impasses? What had gone wrong? How had it occurred that he had risen to such heights by catching the currents of the times, only to find himself confronted by the greatest crisis in the modern history of the fatherland, a crisis engineered by the very people whom he had taken as his exemplars and mentors? Wasn’t it an irony that nowadays he could rely only upon the British – the Parliamentarian, Liberal, democratic, plutocratic British?

  Prime Minister Metaxas wrote down on a piece of paper the differences between himself and the others. He was not a racist. That’s not much. He was struck by a thought that should have been obvious; the others wanted empires and were engaged in building them, whereas he had only ever wanted the union of all the Greek peoples. He wanted Macedonia, Cyprus, the Dodecanese, and, by the Grace of God, Constantinople. He did not want North Africa, like Mussolini, or the whole world, like Hitler.

  So perhaps the others looked at him and considered that he lacked ambition, that he lacked the urge to greatness, that this indicated the absence of that essential Will-to-Power of the Übermensch, that he was a poodle amongst wolves. In the new world where the strongest had the right to rule because they were strongest, where strength was the indicator of natural superiority, where natural superiority gave one the moral right to subsume other nations and lesser breeds, he was an anomaly. He only wanted his own nation. Greece was a natural target, then. Metaxas wrote down the word ‘poodle’, and then crossed it out. He looked at the two words ‘racism’ and ‘empire’. ‘They think that we are inferior,’ he muttered, ‘they want us in their empire.’ It was disgusting and outrageous, it was exasperating. He enclosed the two words in a bracket and wrote the word ‘NO’ beside it. He stood up and went to the window to look out at the peaceful pines. He leaned on the sill and reflected upon the sublime ignorance of those dreaming trees, silvered by the moon. He shivered and then stood erect. He had made a decision; it would be another Thermopylae. If three hundred Spartans could hold out against five million of the bravest Persians, what could he not achieve with twenty divisions against the Italians? If only it were so easy to prepare oneself for the terrible and infinite solitude of death. If only it were so easy to deal with Lulu.

  6 L’Omosessuale (2)

  I, Carlo Piero Guercio, testify that in the Army I found my family. I have a father and mother, four sisters, and three brothers, but I have not had a family since puberty. I had to live among them secretly, like one who conceals leprosy. It was not their fault that I was made into a thespian. I had to dance with girls at festas, I had to flirt with girls in the playground of the school and when taking the evening passeggiata in the piazza. I had to answer my grandmother when she asked me what kind of girl I would like to marry and whether I wanted sons or daughters. I had to listen with delight to my friends describing the intricacies of the female pudenda, I had to learn to relate fabulous histories of what I had done with girls. I learned to be more lonely than it ought to be possible to feel.

  In the Army there was the same gross talk, but it was a world without women. To a soldier a woman is an imaginary being. It is permissible to be sentimental about your mother, but that’s all. Otherwise there are the inmates of the military brothels, the fictitious or unfaithful sweethearts at home, and the girls at whom one catcalls in the streets. I am not a misogynist, but you should understand that to me the company of a woman is painful because it reminds me of what I am not, and of what I would have been if God had not meddled in my mother’s womb.

  I was very lucky at first. I was not sent to Abyssinia or North Africa, but to Albania. There was no fighting to speak of and we were blissfully oblivious to the notion that the Duce might order us to invade Greece. It seemed more likely that we would eventually become involved in Yugoslavia, and that they would be as useless and cowardly as the Albanians. It was common knowledge that the Yugoslavs hated each other more than they could ever hate a foreigner or an invader.

  It soon became clear that everything was in chaos. No sooner had I settled down and made friends in one unit than I was transferred to help make up numbers in another, and then I was transferred again. We had almost no transport and we were made to march from the Yugoslav border to the Greek one and back again, seemingly at a whim of the High Command. I think I must have been in about seven units before I was finally settled in the Julia Division. There were a lot of reasons why the Greek campaign was a fiasco, but one of them was that personnel were moved around so much that there was no possibility of developing any esprit de corps. Initially I did not have time to make anyone a Jonathan to my David.

  But with the Julia Division I enjoyed every moment. No civilian can comprehend the joy of being a soldier. That is, quite simply, an irreducible fact. A further fact is, that regardless of the matter of sex, soldiers grow to love each other; and, regardless of the matter of sex, this is a love without parallel in civil life. You are all young and strong, overflowing with life, and you are all in the shit together.

  You come to know every nuance of each others’ moods; you know exactly what the other is going to say; you know exactly who will laugh and for how long over which particular type of joke; you acquaint yourself intimately with the smell of each man’s feet and perspiration; you can put your hand on someone’s face in the dark, and know who it is; you recognise someone’s equipment hanging on the back of a chair, even though his is the same as everyone else’s; you can tell whose stubble it is in the washing bowl; you know precisely who will swap you a carrot for your potato, a packet of cigarettes for your spare pair of socks, a postcard of Siena for a pencil. You become accustomed to seeing each other frankly, and nothing is hidden. Unless your desires are the same as mine.

  We were all young together. We would never be more handsome, we would never be more lean and strong, we would never again have such water-fights, we would never again feel so invincible and immortal. We could march fifty miles in one day, singing battle songs and lewd songs, swinging along together or trudging, limbs in unison, the cockerel feathers of our helmets black and glistening, tossing. We could piss together on the wheels of the Colonel’s car, as drunk as cardinals; we could shit unashamed in each others’ presence; we could read each others’ letters so that it seemed that every son’s mother wrote to all of us; we could dig a trench all night in solid rock in
the pouring rain and march away at dawn without ever having slept in it; on live-firing exercises we could lob mortar bombs at rabbits without permission; we could bathe naked and beautiful as Phoebus and someone would point at someone’s penis and say, ‘Hey you, why haven’t you handed that in to the armoury?’ and we all would laugh and make nothing of it, and someone else would say, ‘Watch out or there’ll be a negligent discharge,’ and the victim of the joke would say, ‘No such luck.’

  We were new and beautiful, we loved each other more than brothers, that’s for sure. What spoiled it always was that none of us knew why we were in Albania, none of us had an easy conscience about this rebuilding of the Roman Empire. We often had fights with the members of the Fascist Legions. They were vainglorious and useless and stupid, and many of us were Communists. No one minds dying in a noble cause, but we were haunted behind the eyes by the strange pointlessness of loving a life that had no reasonable excuse. My point is that we were like gladiators, prepared to do our duty, prepared to be stoical, but always perplexed. Count Ciano played golf, Mussolini conducted vendettas against cats, and we were in an unmapped waste, wasting time until the time ran out and we were thrown into mismanaged battle against a people that fought like gods.

  I am not a cynic, but I do know that history is the propaganda of the victors. I know that if we win the war there will be shocking stories of British atrocities, volumes written to show the inevitability and justice of our cause, irrefutable evidence compiled to reveal the conspiracies of Jewish plutocrats, photographs of piles of bones found in mass graves in the suburbs of London. Equally I know that the reverse will be true if the British win. I know that the Duce has made it clear that the Greek campaign was a resounding victory for Italy. But he was not there. He does not know what happened. He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it. He ought to know that the truth is that we were losing badly until the Germans invaded from Bulgaria. He will never acknowledge this because the ‘truth’ belongs to the victors. But I was there, and I know what was happening in my part of the war. For me that war was an experience that shaped the whole course of my thought, it was the deepest personal shock that I have ever had, the worst and most intimate tragedy of my life. It destroyed my patriotism, it changed my ideals, it made me question the whole notion of duty, and it horrified me and made me sad.

  Socrates said that the genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, but the remark is left unexplained in the text because the people to whom it was addressed were either asleep or drunk when he said it. It sounds like the kind of thing that aristocrats say to each other at parties, but I can illustrate its perfect truth simply by relating what befell during that campaign in northern Greece.

  Let me begin by saying that I, Carlo Piero Guercio, upon joining the Julia Division, fell in love with a young married corporal who accepted me as his best friend without ever once suspecting that he constituted the entire population of my most fevered dreams. His name was Francisco and he came from Genoa, complete with a Genoese accent and an understanding of the sea that was of no possible use in Epirus. There was no doubt at all that he should have been in the Navy, but the skewed logic of the times decreed that he should volunteer for the Navy, get posted to the carabinieri, but find himself in the Army. He had arrived via a regiment of Alpini and a regiment of Bersaglieri, not counting two days with the Grenadiers.

  He was an entirely beautiful boy. His skin was darker than mine, like that of a southerner, but he was slender and smooth-skinned. I recollect that he had only three hairs in the centre of his chest and that his legs were completely hairless. You could see every sinew of his body, and I used to wonder particularly at those muscles that one only sees on particularly fit individuals; the parallel tracks down the back of the forearm, the ones at the side of the abdomen that curve and taper to the groin. He was like one of those elegant, lanky cats that give the impression of immense but casual strength.

  I was attracted most of all to his face. He had a black and misbehaving forelock that fell about his eyes. These were very dark, set in the slavic fashion above prominent bones. His mouth was wide, composed into a permanent, ironical, and lopsided smile, and he had an Etruscan nose that seemed inexplicably to have fallen a little crooked at the bridge. His hands were large, with slender spatulate fingers that I could only too easily imagine lingering upon my body. I saw him mend a tiny link on a filigree gold chain once, and I can testify that his fingers had all the immaculate precision of an embroiderer. He had the most delicate fingernails imaginable.

  You will understand that we men were often naked together in one context or another and that I knew and memorised every last detail of every part of him; but I rebel against the charges of perversion and obscenity that would be made against my memory, and I will keep these recollections to myself. To me they are not obscene; they are precious, exquisite and pure. In any case, no one would know what they mean. They are for the private museum that each of us carries in our heads, and to which not even the experts or the crowned heads of Europe are permitted access.

  Francisco was a man of impetuosities, ludicrous jests, and complete irreverence. He made no secret of respecting no one, and could entertain us by mimicking the cockerel antics of the Duce and the antic Prussianisms of Adolf Hitler. He could reproduce the gestures and intonations of Visconti Prasca and deliver absurd speeches in the Prasca manner, full of extravagant optimism, wild plans, and obsequious references to the hierarchy. Everybody loved him, he never got promotion, and nor did he care. He adopted a wild mouse and called it Mario; part of the time it lived in his pocket, but when we were on route marches we used to see it poking its whiskers out of the top of his backpack and washing its face. It used to eat the peel of fruit and vegetables and was annoyingly fond of leather. I still have a little round hole at the top of one of my boots.

  We soldiers knew next to nothing about what was going on in the centres of power. We received so many orders and counter-orders that there were times when we did not obey any of them at all, knowing that they were likely to be countermanded almost immediately. Albania was a sort of holiday camp without any amenities, and we assumed that these orders had the sole purpose of attempting to keep us busy and were of no serious import.

  However, it seems clear in retrospect that an invasion of Greece must have been the ultimate intention; there were clues everywhere, if only we had seen them. In the first place there was all that propaganda about the Mediterranean being the ‘Mare Nostrum’ and the fact that all our roadbuilding, which was supposedly for the benefit of the Albanians, produced nothing but highways towards the Greek border. In the second place the troops started singing battle songs of unknown provenance and anonymous composership, with words like ‘We’ll go to the Aegean Sea, we’ll seize Piraeus, and if things go right we’ll have Athens too.’ We used to curse the Greeks for sheltering the ruritanian King Zog, and the newspapers were always full of alleged British attacks on our shipping from Greek waters. I say ‘alleged’ because nowadays I don’t believe they really happened. I have a friend in the Navy who told me that as far as he knew none of our ships had been lost.

  I also don’t believe any more that story that the Greeks killed Daut Hoggia. I think that we did it and tried to blame it on the Greeks. This is a terrible thing for me to say because it shows how much I have lost my patriotic faith, but the fact is that I now know the Greek version of the events, which I got from Dottor Iannis when I went to see him about a bad toenail. It turns out that the man Hoggia was not an Albanian irredentist patriot at all. He had been convicted over twenty years of the murder of five Muslims, cattle-theft, brigandage, extortion, attempted murder, demanding money with menaces, carrying forbidden weapons, and rape. And this is the man that they tried to fool us into thinking of as a martyr. We were never told that the Greeks had arrested two Albanians for this man’s murder, and were waiting for an extradition request. In
any case I wonder now how the entire Italian nation could have been so naïve, and I wonder why we were supposed to be so concerned about the Albanians when we had just taken their country and it had become obvious to all of us that they were only interested in murdering each other. The two men who murdered the ‘patriot’ Hoggia apparently poisoned him and then cut off his head, which is mild indeed by Albanian standards.

  A great many things caused me to lose faith, and I commit to paper here an account involving Francisco and myself which demonstrates clearly that it was our side that started the war, and not the Greeks. If we win the war these facts will never come to light, I know, because these papers will be suppressed. But if we lose there may be a chance that the world will learn the truth.

  It is hard enough to live at peace with yourself when you are a sexual outsider, but it is even harder when you know that in the line of duty you have carried out the most abominable and filthy deeds. Nowadays I frequently have intimations of impending death, and below you will find my confessions of a guilt for which I have already received absolution from a priest, but which will never be forgiven either by the Greeks or by the families of the Italian soldiers concerned.

  7 Extreme Remedies

  Father Arsenios ruminated bitterly behind the iconostasis; how was he supposed to go out amongst the people, comforting the sick and the dying, arbitrating in disputes, disseminating the Word of God, advocating the reunion of Greece, when it seemed indubitable that he no longer had any respect? He pondered briefly the romantic possibility of disappearing; he could go to Piraeus and work as a clerk; he could become a fisherman; he could go to America and make a new beginning. He entertained an ephemeral image of himself, liberated from his grotesque folds of lard, singing bawdy rebetika in the brothels of Athens, swigging kokkinelli and charming the young girls. Conversely he envisaged himself retiring to a hermitage in the mountains of Epirus, being fed by the ravens, and attaining a splendid sainthood. He thought about the miracles that might be performed in his name, and hit upon the unpleasant notion that he might become the patron saint of the obscenely fat. Perhaps he could write great poetry instead, and become as famous and respected as Kostis Palamas. But why stop there? He might be another Homer. Behind the iconostasis he began to rumble in his deep bass voice, ‘It vexes me to see how mean are these creatures of a day towards us Gods, when they charge against us the evils (far beyond our worst doomings) which their own exceeding wantonness has heaped upon themselves.’ He faltered and stopped, furrowing his brow; was the next bit about Aegisthus, or was it the bit about Athene having a conversation with Zeus? ‘My child,’ protested Zeus, the cloud-compeller, ‘what sharp judgements you let slip between your teeth …’