Into the War

by Italo Calvino

  I could not bring to mind my memories of boyhood trips to France. Now Menton gave me the impression of a weary, monotonous town. Our column was going along the avenues, heading for the mess; the rumour was that the Spaniards were not coming until the next day and that we would have to spend the night there. I felt that I had seen the whole of Menton by now, and I felt disappointed by it. And I was fed up with that company and that mixture of relaxation and discipline that held us in its grip; I could not wait to get away. We passed by big grey Art Nouveau buildings all boarded up. What was missing were those insignificant details, like the colours of paint on the walls around shops or the different bodywork of their cars that give a sense of a life that was different from ours though very close to us: the sense of a France that was alive. This was a France that was dead, it was an Art Nouveau sarcophagus that the Avanguardisti were marching through, chanting ‘The Roman Anthem’, while the sight of a hotel’s minarets and oriental domes, or the Pompeian-style decorations on a villa, gave it the feeling of a theatre with its lights out, with scenery discarded and in disrepair.

  The mess began about five. A group of Young Fascist Sailors from *** 1 also arrived, a bunch of beanpoles, that we glared at as intruders. The Federal Commander had also come with them, and Bizantini presented our group. The Commander asked if the mess had been sufficient, and announced that we would be spending the night there. I was seized by a powerful sense of melancholy; my comrades raised cries of enthusiasm.

  He was a young commander, from Tuscany. He wore a uniform of khaki gabardine, with cavalry twill trousers and yellow boots; but this outfit, military in appearance, was in its cut, material, lightness, and in the arrogance with which he wore it, the furthest thing you could imagine from the army’s uniforms. And perhaps because of my awkwardness in the way I wore my uniform, because it had been forced on me, and because I was predestined to belong to those human beings who have uniforms imposed on them and not to those who use them as an instrument of authority or for pomp, I felt myself moved by the moralism, the always slightly envious moralism, of the regular troops against shirkers and bullies.

  Some of the Avanguardisti from my home town, sons of small-time local leaders or functionaries, were old acquaintances of the Commander, and he joked along with them; as far as I was concerned, this atmosphere of comradely complicity made me feel slightly uneasy, and I far preferred the flat peremptory tone that I had become used to accepting. I went to look for Biancone in the crowd, in order to comment on these events, or rather to collect and pick out together the details which we would talk about later at our ease. But Biancone was nowhere to be found; he had disappeared.

  I came across him again at sunset while I was wandering along the seafront with its low, prickly palm trees. I was already gloomy. The slow beating of the sea against the rocks mingled with the natural stillness of the countryside and enclosed in a kind of circle the deserted city and its unnatural silence, which was broken now and again by isolated noises echoing through it: the ta-ra-ra of a trumpet, a song, the roar of a motorbike. Biancone came towards me making a great fuss, as if we had not seen each other for a year, and he told me the news that he had been picking up: a beautiful girl had apparently been sighted, in a grocer’s store – she had been in a concentration camp in Marseilles – and now all the Avanguardisti were going there to buy a few lire’s worth of goods just to see her; in another shop it seemed that French cigarettes could be bought, for almost nothing; in one street there was a broken, abandoned French cannon.

  Biancone had a euphoric mood that was really too expansive for the insignificant news he had; and I had not forgiven him for having gone off without me. Continuing his discussion, he mentioned the scenes of devastation those houses must have witnessed in June, and incidentally, he said, yes, there were some houses that were wide open and you could go in and see everything that had been wrecked and scattered on the floor. But in his talk, which seemed to be rather generic, every now and then some very precise details stood out. ‘But were you there too?’ I asked. Yes, he had been there, he told me; going around with some of the other lads, he had gone into a couple of houses and hotels that had been destroyed. ‘Pity you weren’t there,’ he said. His going away without me now seemed an unforgivable piece of treachery. But instead of showing I was hurt, I preferred to make an enthusiastic suggestion: ‘But we could go back there together …?’ He said it was now dark, and we would not be able to see where we were treading in the mess of those places.

  When we were all together again in the dormitory (it had been hurriedly kitted out in a gym, with straw mattresses stretched out on the floor), the visit to the bombed-out houses was the topic of all general conversation. Everyone was talking about the extraordinary sights they had seen around the town and quoted names that seemed to be familiar to everyone else, such as ‘at the Bristol’, ‘at that green house’. These explorations had seemed to me at first to be an experience restricted to that small circle of the most enterprising lads, who formed a band on their own; but gradually I saw others talking about their experiences, even guys like Orazi, who had initially remained aloof and just listened. My loss seemed to me to be irrecoverable: I had wasted that day in a grumpy mood, without even grazing the secret of the city, and the next day they would wake us early, line us up at the station for a couple of ‘Present arms!’, and then all back onto the coach again, and the vision of a looted town would disappear from my sight forever.

  Biancone passed close to me, carrying a pile of blankets, and said in a whisper: ‘Bergamini, Ceretti and Glauco have got swag.’

  I had already noticed, in the midst of the mattresses, some commotion which I couldn’t really understand: and now that Biancone had put me on the alert, I remembered having seen shortly before a tennis racquet being spun in Bergamini’s hand, and wondering at the time where it had come from. Now I could no longer see the racquet, but just at that point Glauco Rastelli, who was folding down the blanket on his mattress, revealed a pair of boxing gloves, which he instantly hid beneath it again.

  Biancone had already got in under the covers and was leaning on his elbow, smoking. I went over to sit on his mattress. ‘We’re in a good team,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘a top gang, our fellow-henchmen!’

  ‘We weren’t like that when we were fifteen.’

  ‘Ah, those were different days!’ said Biancone.

  Just then a ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’ sound wheezed and whistled in the dorm; and Ceretti rolled over on his mattress in delight at having succeeded in making the cuckoo clock he was struggling with work.

  ‘But how’ll they ever get all this stuff home?’ I asked Biancone. ‘He can’t hide a cuckoo-clock under his jerkin, can he?’

  ‘He’ll chuck it away. What do you expect him to do with it? He only took it to muck about with.’

  ‘As long as he doesn’t make it go cuckoo all night, and lets us sleep,’ I replied.

  ‘Hey, guys,’ Ceretti himself then said, ‘I’ve now wound it up; from now on it’ll go off every half-hour.’

  ‘Chuck it in the sea! Get rid of it!’ And four or five of them, already without their boots, flung themselves onto his mattress, on top of him and his clock. They continued fighting until the clock was stopped.

  Soon, once the lights had gone out, the carry-on also died down. I could not get to sleep. In a gym-hall adjoining ours were billeted the Young Fascist Marines from ***. We had not felt like fraternizing with them, possibly because they were older than us, or because of ancient rivalries between different parishes in the town, or perhaps more because of class differences, since they apparently belonged to a kind of harbour-area proletariat, whereas the majority of us were students. Even after the wildest of our lot had suddenly gone from making a racket to sleeping, these young sailors continued to raise merry hell, moving about and playing tricks on each other. They had a dialect call of their own, probably invented that same day in God
knows what circumstances, and it was hugely funny for them, though mysterious to others: ‘O bêu!’, meaning, I think, ‘Oh moo-cow!’, a cry they emitted like a cow mooing, dwelling on that vowel that was half e and half u, perhaps mimicking a shepherd’s call. One of them, lying down, would shout it out in a low voice, and all the others would roar with laughter. For a while it seemed that they had finally fallen asleep, and I was trying to grasp onto sleep myself, when another voice further away in the distance would start up again: ‘O bêu!’ And at the protests and threats which some of us shouted at them, they would reply with fresh waves of yells and cries. I wanted a group of us to march into their room and give them a doing, but the most belligerent amongst us, in other words Ceretti and his gang, were sleeping as if it was all quiet, and the insomniacs among us were too few and indecisive. Biancone was also amongst those who were sleeping.

  Between my thoughts about my looting comrades and my irritation at that racket, I continued to toss and turn under the rough military blankets. In those days, an aloof resentment shaped many of my thoughts; and the way I considered and opposed anything to do with Fascism was also aloof. That night Fascism, the war and the vulgarity of my comrades were all of a piece for me, and I bundled everything up into the same feeling of disgust, and I felt I had to put up with everything without any hope of escape.

  So I still looked at them with resentment, those young marines, when I saw them the next morning, filing by in the garden, thin, lanky youths, with a lazy step that was indifferent to orders, while Captain Bizantini inspected our arms as we lined up on parade.

  When we protested about their behaviour the night before, Bizantini added his own recriminations; he shared our local animosity, out of hierarchical rivalry with those in the Young Fascist movement from the main town, and started to say:

  ‘Yes, you see, a fine example of young sailors they’ve sent from ***! Do you call that youth? They’re kids who’ve never done any sport: hunched over like hooks, gangly, look at their lop-sided shoulders!’

  He was exaggerating, but he was not totally wrong. They certainly were not athletic types, but, to tell you the truth, neither was I, and in that sense I was on the same side as them against Bizantini’s sarcasm.

  ‘Tramps, harbour porters, navvies! They come here to pick up the few lire per day without working …’ And the more he talked, the more I felt my recent anger against them subside, and in its place there resurfaced the morality in which I had been brought up, which was to oppose those who despise the poor and working people.

  ‘With all the regime does for the people …’ Bizantini went on.

  The people …, I thought. Were these young sailors the people? Were the people well or in a bad way? Were the people Fascist? The people of Italy … And as for me, who was I?

  ‘… they couldn’t give a damn either about the Young Fascists or anything!’

  ‘Nor me! Nor me!’ I whispered to Biancone, who was standing beside me.

  And Bizantini went on: ‘Oh, but the Commander has taken it on board, he noticed it at once: that we’ve brought lads who are all students, all well turned out, solidly built, well-educated boys …’

  ‘Bullshit,’ I said in a whisper to Biancone, ‘shit.’

  ‘He said he would make sure we’re prominently seen by these Spaniards … by the Caudillo’s young men.’

  The line of young sailors had disappeared; Bizantini was going on with his speech, while I followed my thoughts: maybe we would spend another day in Menton and I wanted Biancone to come with me to see the looted houses. ‘As soon as he lets us go,’ I said to him under my breath, ‘let’s go off together.’ He, impassive even when standing at ease, gave me a wink.

  The captain continued to spout out his philosophy, and was now comparing education in Mussolini’s time with education in the past: ‘The fact is that you have been brought up under Fascism and you don’t realize what that means! For example, last night, here in Menton, if there had been some of those old teachers from days gone by, you have no idea what a fuss they’d have made: “For goodness’ sake, they’re just boys, how can you make them sleep outdoors, and there are no beds, and whose responsibility is it, and the families …” Ha! Fascism instead says: at the double, no problem, let’s get on with it. Roman education, just like Sparta. No beds? Sleep on the ground, all soldiers together, for God’s sake! Right turn: march!’

  So the captain revealed himself for what he was, the most naïve of all of us: with a bunch of hairy boys and shirkers who could not wait to ransack a town, he got all emotional, like a grandmother, excited by the big adventure of making us spend a night away from home! And the rank and file of Avanguardisti responded to his ‘One-two! One-two! N-two …’ with raspberries, belches and farts.

  Biancone had heard about a villa nearby: according to those who had been there, it was interesting, but he had not seen it yet. In its garden a finch was singing, and drops of water were falling in a pond. The grey leaves of a huge agave were covered with the names of people, cities, regiments, carved with bayonet-tips. We wandered around the villa, which seemed closed, but on a veranda with broken windows we found a French door that had been unhinged. We went into a sitting room with armchairs and sofas in disarray, covered in a shower of tiny bits of broken crockery. The first looters had searched for silverware in the cupboards and flung out the china dinner services; and they had pulled away the rugs from under the furniture which had stayed overturned, as though after an earthquake. We went through rooms and corridors that were dark or illuminated depending on whether the shutters were closed or open or, indeed, pulled off, constantly bumping into things that were sitting haphazardly on ledges or scattered on the ground and trampled: pipes, socks, cushions, playing cards, electric wire, magazines, chandeliers. As he proceeded, Biancone would point to every item, not missing a detail, connecting one thing with another, and he would bend down to pick up the stem of a broken glass, a strip of upholstery that had been torn off, as though he were taking me to see flowers in a greenhouse, and he would then put everything back where he had found it, with the light, careful hand of an inspector investigating the scene of a crime.

  We climbed to the upper floors up a marble staircase that was filthy with footprints, and found rooms a-flutter with veils.

  These were pyramid mosquito nets: there must have been one suspended over every bed; and the first looters had ripped them down and dragged them to the ground. Now all that tulle, with its drapes and flounces, covered the floors, beds and chests of drawers with a mantle of gauze that was puffed-up and twisted. Biancone enjoyed this vista very much, and he moved through the rooms parting the veils with two fingers.

  In one of those bedrooms we heard a rustling sound: something like a big beast was kicking underneath the covering of tulle.

  ‘Who goes there?’

  ‘Who goes there?’

  It was Duccio, an Avanguardista from our squadron, about thirteen years old, fat and squat and red in the face.

  ‘There’s a lot of stuff, have you seen?’ he said, out of breath: he was going through a chest of drawers.

  He took out things from the drawers. If they were no use to him, he chucked them on the floor; if they were of use, he stuck them in his hunting jacket: sock-suspenders, socks, ties, brushes, towels, a jar of brilliantine. Through cramming so much stuff into his jacket he had given himself an almost spherical hump, and he was still sticking scarves, gloves and braces under his jersey. He was swollen and puffed up front and back like a pigeon, and showed no sign of stopping.

  We no longer paid him any attention: we had heard a quite distinct noise, as of someone hammering, echoing from the floor above. ‘What can that be?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Duccio, ‘it’s Fornazza.’

  Following the sound, we reached the floor above, in a kind of attic, where our comrade Fornazza, who was as tall as Duccio, but was thin and dark-skinned, with thick curly hair, was atta
cking an old chest of drawers with a hammer and screwdriver.

  ‘What are you doing?’ we asked.

  ‘I need these handles,’ he said, and he showed what was in his hand. He had already unhinged two of them.

  We left our comrades to their work and continued our tour of the villa. In the attic we went out through a skylight onto a small roof terrace. From there we had a view over the garden and the green area all around, and Menton, and the olive trees, and, in the distance, the sea. There were some rotting cushions and we placed them against the pole of the radio aerial, and we stretched out in the sun to smoke in peace.

  The sky above was clear, with a few white wisps of cloud flying around the aerial like twisted flags. From below came the sound of voices amplified by the emptiness of the streets, and we recognized them. ‘That’s Ceretti on the hunt, the other one is Glauco getting angry.’ Through the little columns on the balustrade we could see Avanguardisti and Young Fascists popping up all over the town: a group of them turning at a crossroads; two appearing somehow at a window of a house, sending out a whistle; and through one of the gaps we watched our officers emerging from a bar near the sea, all euphoric around the Commander. On the sea there were reflections of the sun’s rays.

  ‘So why don’t we go for a bathe?’

  ‘Coming?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  We ran downstairs, headed downhill and went to the beach. On the other side of the promenade, on a strip of sand and stones, a group of half-naked labourers were eating in the sunshine and passing around a bottle.

  We stripped and stretched out on the beach. Biancone had white skin covered with moles, while I was dark-skinned and thin. The sand was dirty, full of seaweed shaped like dark, prickly bullets and rotting grey beards. Biancone could already see clouds approaching the sun, discouraging the idea of a swim, but I ran and dived in and he was forced to follow suit. The sun really did disappear and swimming in that water the colour of fish was a bit miserable, as was seeing above us the cliffs over the railway embankment and the silent town of Menton. A soldier with his rifle and helmet came out to the end of the pier and began to shout. He was shouting at us: it was a prohibited area, we had to come back to the shore. We swam back, dried ourselves, got dressed and headed for the mess.