The Lights of Alborada. Gianni Riotta

The only memento I have of him, the only proof that our forty-day migration across the great continent was not a dream, a fabric of my imagination, is a souvenir that I am holding here. A pinch of sand. I look at it again, and it's as though I sense that he contained a seed of all the virtues that make the human soul magnificent, an ounce of every noble and dignified feeling, the Virtus and the Gratia that a father and mother would always hope to recognise in their children.

      It wasn't like that at the time. Then, he was an officer of the Allied army which had defeated my boys in Bir el Gobi and Bardia and which would shortly – I had no illusions on the matter – govern the whole world, the Europe of my youth and my mathematical calculations and the America that passed quickly before my eyes: the sharecroppers at work in the fields, the chain-gangs working their picks and shovels at the side of the railroad track, skinny soldiers in khaki uniforms, lined up under every railway awning kissing their emotional girlfriends goodbye. That army was a giant washed with white soap, ignorant of the ways of the world, tranquil in its decision to battle for freedom.

      I had spent my childhood in La Tonnara, looking on enchanted as the master-carpenter launched the gozzi, the brightly coloured fishermen's boats, with pretty names. Maria, Laura, sweet names that contrasted the harsh fates that awaited them, tossed about beneath Orion in the Sicilian Channel, fleeing storms in pursuit of swordfish and finally, when the summer heat prevailed again, hunting down the joyfully swimming tuna. The carpenter carved the wood, engraving with his gimlet, planing severely, shavings fell like snow on the sea, bright dots of sawdust in the December wind and then, when the Christmas fireworks were forgotten, glazed the skeleton, fixed the keel and the planking, painting with precise brushstrokes the colours of the rainbow: red, indigo, blue and yellow. The pungent smell of varnish filled my nostrils like a drug. I looked up, it was summer already, and the boat, or lovely Maria or Laura, was sliding into the water to feed a family.

      Here, in America, the steel ships were stamped in the morning, at the hour of the Alborada, and launched at Vespers. They were called liberty ships, and, however speedily the U-boats of our German allies dispatched them to the bottom of the ocean, where Thetis and the Nereides danced, the war still would be won by those housewives and unemployed blacks who built them, sisters and brothers of the sharecroppers bent over the cotton that I saw from my passing train.

      Now my memories run by me in fragments, the lieutenant and what I saw of the wagons and the locomotives, the stops on our forty-day journey and my recollections as a little boy, a vain nostalgia for another world, another sea. Far away, chaotic, terrible. A prisoner and yet at the same time a safe conduct for my guard, who said he had lost his first Italian quarry, I lived in a state of perfect, constant lucidity, every moment of my life present in the wide-open spaces of America. The colours of the tuna fishermen's boats poured over the grey steel of the liberty ships and I, a prisoner, saw my resignation and disappointment in Hereford Camp 1 making way for an obsessive, nervous awareness. I had to get to the coast, to New York. There I would escape the lieutenant's attention, before he had second thoughts and broke our agreement. If he tried anything smart, I would tie him up, I would smack him right between his courteous eyes and get away.

      Zita was a shore, Europe a coast, my memories drew me there, waves that had floated me over the barbed wire and beyond the guards, and would take me all the way to Italy to put a stop to Professor Barbaroux's wedding.

      I had probably gone crazy, afflicted for forty days by a form of early-onset dementia. Hunted down on the pier, I would calmly try to walk on the waters of the iron Atlantic. Dying, escaping, performing acts of madness, nothing seemed ridiculous or impossible to me. And in any case, when I had left for Africa with my regiment, hadn't I thought it impossible that Italy might lose the war, ending up divided and occupied? And yet that was what had happened.

      The lieutenant stared into my eyes, reading my thoughts. ‘You know Plutarch?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘The Life of Brutus?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Read it when you have a moment. And tell me what you think of it.’

      He handed me a green book, a Loeb. Plutarch, Greek text on the cover. Our train slipped through the night and I read about Brutus' youth, his rebellion against Caesar's hegemony. The ambush, Casca trembling as he struck the hero with his sword, Brutus taking his weapon and running it through the body of his adoptive father, and the conspirators lurching back in horror. Brutus strikes first, Caesar falls, he could have shouted – ‘Stand back, dogs!’ – his voice had once given heart to the legionaries below the walls of Alesia and aroused terror and respect in the barbarian forests. Caesar could have grabbed the sword from the cowardly Casca, and defended himself as he had in his fray with Vercingetorix. Instead, he wrapped his toga around him as a shroud and allowed himself to be felled. Only then did the terrorists take courage and strike, and when Antony shows the cloth to the crowd, every rip a dagger blow, like a Lucio Fontana canvas painted by political savagery.

      Then comes the war and the defeat of the democratic illusion. Brutus meditates on suicide, and before he dies he studies the firmament, praying to heaven with two lines, ‘Oh Jove, do not forget the man from whom this mischief flowed!’ The second line of Brutus' farewell to the world has not been passed down to us, the medieval copyists accidentally left it out. What might he have written?

      The lieutenant looked at me, and I lost myself in the muddle of my uncertainty. How could the boatwright's coloured vessels have subdued the democracy of the liberty ships?

      The lieutenant said, ‘That forgotten line that Brutus spoke – what do you think it might be? If we discovered it, in a dusty codex in one of your southern Italian abbeys, we'd understand which is more important, Luck or Bravery: I'm sure of it.’

      Thus began our forty days across America, ‘rich in Virtue and poor in Luck’, as the infantrymen wrote on their memorial at El Alamein. The lieutenant looking for his line of Brutus, me looking for a ship to save my shipwrecked love and my life itself by interpreting the dreams of Odysseus in the lost war.

       8

      The girls were sitting at the corner table of the coffee shop. The slimmest one was drinking black Coke from a frosted glass: she sucked gently on the straw, eyes fixed on a point straight ahead of her and then opened her red lips and sucked again. The fairest one struck her fingers lightly on the gleaming table, tap tap tap, the middle, ring and index fingers, then the middle one again in counterpoint, tap tap tap. She was wearing a skirt that bared her knees, soft and round. Last of all, in the shade, a glimpse of her, the smallest one. Not the prettiest, perhaps: she neither drank nor followed the rhythm of the big band brass section that blared from the Bakelite radio. Her hair was short, and hung in a fringe over her slanted, oriental eyes. She filled the space with her face and her hands and her breasts and her thighs, as though the air were water that could support her and make her float. As though, all of a sudden, she might swim: a little dive on her cork-soled shoes and away, with quick and lazy strokes up to the fan that flapped on the ceiling, slothfully stirring the hot air. The girl would brush the beer bottles on the highest shelf with her skirt floating, she would swirl out of the bar, away over the burning earth of Hot Springs in the dusty state of Arkansas.

      Her energy was apparent from her perfect stillness: like a swamp alligator, ready to strike from its motionless tree-trunk stability, descending with a whipcrack on its prey, and yet a moment before framed and lost in the hot mud. That was what the girl with the oriental eyes was like, or at least that's how I remember her now as I write about my first moment with her. Rather than trying to imagine her face again, I'm trying to feel the heat and emotion I felt then, which some of my gentle readers will have felt on at least one day of their lives, when they met their ‘twin soul’ as Plato would say, the other sexual half that we all have, from which we were parted at some time in the distant past. Today I feel that emotion again, in its entirety.

      I looked at her, I fully expected her to dive away and swim in an erotic crawl, free from gravity, in that banal café in the shadow of the wild Ozark