But, however much we said ‘We’ll do this and that! You’ll see what fun we’ll have!’, and however much we felt we had planned and anticipated everything imaginable in the days leading up to that Friday, nevertheless I expected something more from that night, something I could still not articulate: a new revelation, though as yet I did not know what it would be, the revelation of the night. For Biancone, on the other hand, everything seemed cheerily routine and predictable, and I also pretended that it was the same for me, but, in the meantime, in my imagination, I could feel the unknown time of night foaming like an invisible sea around each of our vague projects.
That Friday I went out after dinner, and it was still just an evening like any other. I was carrying my pyjamas with me and a pillowcase to put over the pillow of the camp bed where I would sleep. I also had a magazine with pictures, because, amongst the many activities planned, we would also spend some of the time reading.
The school was a big stone building, with a corrugated iron roof. It rose high above the road, in a rather unfortunate position, and you reached it by three sets of steps. It had been built by the regime, but it did not reflect at all the stiff architecture of that time: it breathed an air of bureaucratic predictability which the lukewarm Fascism of my town tried to maintain as far as possible. Even the bas-relief on the façade, which actually showed a Fascist Scout and Girl Guide sitting on either side of the words ‘Town School’, seemed to be inspired more by a pedagogical sobriety that smacked entirely of the nineteenth century.
It was a moonless night. The school building still reflected a vague brightness. I had arranged to meet Biancone there, but of course he was not on time. Beyond the school, in the darkness, there were houses and fields. You could hear the sound of crickets and frogs. I could no longer muster my enthusiasm for the whole thing, the enthusiasm that had brought me thus far. Now, wandering back and forth beneath that primary school, on my own, with my pyjamas, a pillow case and an illustrated magazine in my hand, I felt out of place and embarrassed.
I was standing there waiting when suddenly a flame shot up, licking my back. I jumped: the magazine I was holding under my arm had caught fire; I dropped it, and even before I could get frightened, I realized it was one of Biancone’s tricks. Flat against the wall, he was still holding in his hand the match with which he had crept up on me in the dark. He was not laughing. As always, he had an impeccably official look about him as he said:
‘Excuse me, you UNPA people, you haven’t by any chance seen a fire around here?’
‘Yes, a fire that I hope burns your bum!’ I began swearing, and with my heel I stamped out the blazing magazine. ‘What kind of trick is that?’
‘It was not a trick. It’s an inspection. My dear chap, the UNPA means a life full of danger: one must be ready for anything. However, I’ve seen that you keep guard well. Well done. Bye. I can now go off, then, and see to my own business.’
I told him not to play the wise guy, that we had to go up and see our guardroom and dump our stuff.
But the school doors were closed. If you flattened the bell with your hand, you could only hear a distant drrring sound; if you knocked, you heard nothing but the echoes of empty corridors.
‘There’s nobody there! The caretaker woman lives out in the country!’ said a voice behind us, perhaps alarmed at our hammering on the door. We turned round and, up there on a wall, amid the shadows of bean plants, was the outline of a man; he was pouring from a watering can a liquid that we recognised from its smell as liquid manure. He was a vegetable gardener, taking advantage of the nocturnal hours to fertilize his plants without disturbing his neighbours with the stench.
‘But we demand entry! We are the UNPA!’
‘Who?’
‘The UNPA!’
In a little cottage, a tiny light suddenly went out. Biancone nudged me, satisfied with this proof of our authority. ‘See what it means?’ he said quietly, ‘We’re the UNPA.’
‘The caretaker’s in the country because she’s afraid of the alarms,’ said the plant-waterer in the dark above us, ‘but she’s not far away: if you go up that road, at the top you’ll see a one-storey house. Call out “Bigìn!” and she’ll answer.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Not at all. By the way … seeing you are from the UNPA, can we keep that blue light there, or is it forbidden?’
‘That’s fine, fine,’ we replied grudgingly, ‘it’s a bit too bright, but you can keep it …’
Biancone said quietly to me: ‘That stink: will we tell him?’
‘What?’
‘That it’s forbidden. It’ll attract enemy war planes.’
‘Don’t be silly, come on,’ and we went up the cobbled street that climbed into the countryside.
From the few houses there emerged thin shafts of blue light and muffled sounds: voices raised, the clatter of dishes, children crying. The night outside was the reverse of the night at home: we were now the unknown footsteps echoing in the street, the whistled tune that those who haven’t fallen asleep try to follow as it moves away and dies out.
There was a light at the caretaker’s house. In order to establish a tone of authority, Biancone shouted out: ‘Lights! Lights!’, but here the light stayed on.
‘Bigìn!’ we shouted again, ‘Bigìn!’
‘Who is it?’
‘The key! We want the key to the school!’
‘Who are you?’
‘We’re the UNPA! Lights! Hey, that light!’
A shutter opened, the light flooded the full square of the window without anything to screen it, and opened up the coloured vista of a kitchen with its copperware and enamel jugs and cups hanging on the walls, and Bigìn said: ‘Oh, stop pestering me!’ In her hand she held a knife dripping red drops, and half a tomato. She slammed the shutter, the darkness returned and we stood there blinded.
Bigìn came towards us beneath a low pergola. There was a rack made of reeds on which she slowly placed the tomatoes in order to cover them with salt. She was a small, dark woman, whose high chignon hairstyle gave her an imposing air. She stayed there beneath the pergola and continued salting the tomatoes in the darkness, with confident actions, as if she could actually see.
She was suspicious of us; either that or she didn’t want to move. ‘Are you really the people from the UNPA?’
‘Of course, look: we’ve even got our pyjamas,’ said Biancone, as if this was a completely logical response, and he unrolled from his package a pair of pyjama trousers with coloured stripes, holding them out in front of himself as if trying to prove that they were exactly his size.
The caretaker did not seem to find anything to object to in that bizarre proof of identity. She merely said: ‘But why isn’t the teacher there, Belluomo?’
Belluomo was a young man, the primary schoolteacher, who presided over this very business of guard duty.
‘Because we’re here instead. It was he who sent us.’
Finally the caretaker left her tomatoes and dried her hands on her apron. We said to her not to worry, all we needed were the keys; but no chance, she insisted on coming to show us everything herself, because we didn’t know the place. ‘Have you got a torch?’
‘No, we can see in the dark, we UNPA people.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve got one,’ and from the pockets of her huge apron she took out a small, battery-operated torch, made of tin, and shone a cone of light, which started to move in front of her feet like the tip of a stick, before she took a step.
So we went down that cobbled hill, between little walls sheltering kitchen gardens and vines, the two of us following our slow-moving caretaker.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ I said to Biancone, ‘that you were taking me to spend the night in the country.’
Without saying anything Biancone disappeared.
The caretaker spun the torch round. ‘Where’s he gone, the other chap?’
&
nbsp; ‘How should I know?’
Biancone suddenly jumped down from a little wall, almost landing on the caretaker. He had two bunches of grapes in his hand. ‘Here, eat this,’ he said, throwing one of them to me.
‘A fine way to behave!’ said the caretaker. ‘If the owner sees you, he’ll take a pot shot at you!’
Now, suddenly, we were the night-time fruit thieves, the ones my father always threatened to shoot with his salt-rifle, while my childish legal-minded imagination tried in vain to give them a face. Suddenly the lawlessness of the night took on once more that distant image from my childhood years.
‘Fine way to behave!’ the caretaker repeated.
‘Hey, a chicken coop!’ said Biancone, turning to me. ‘Eh, what do you say?’
In the moonless sky the soft shadows of bats could just about be made out. Dark moths fluttered around the caretaker’s torch. A toad crossing the road stopped, dazzled by the light. ‘Hey, be careful or you’ll crush it!’ No chance; it slipped away between her feet.
We came to a point where the countryside ended and you could sense the expanse of town roofs down below. ‘Now she’ll jump on her broom and fly over the city,’ I thought. But the caretaker was already leading us to the school door and opening up.
Without switching on the light, she took us along the corridors and stairs. We passed a succession of classroom doorways and wall charts. The caretaker looked around apprehensively, as though fearful of leaving us in charge of those rooms and objects which cost her so much labour to clean and put in order.
She made us climb many stairs and opened our lodgings up for us, then disappeared. As we took possession of the room, we heard her clacking along the corridors grumbling, first on one floor, then on another. ‘What’s she doing? Locking everything up? Or does she want to stay the night too and keep guard?’
All of a sudden, down on the ground floor, the main door creaked on its hinges and the lock slammed shut.
‘Has she gone?’
‘And she’s not left us the key? She’s closed us in! The witch!’
We went to look at the windows of the ground floor, but those without iron gratings were too high off the ground, not so much that you couldn’t jump down, but high enough not to allow you to climb back up.
We got onto the phone to see if we could find that Belluomo guy, who must have had a key as well. We woke his mother at his house, but he wasn’t there; in the other schools, where there must have been people mobilized like ourselves, there was no response; at the Young Fascists’ Hall and at the Fascist Club, nothing. We disturbed or woke up half the town and we then ended up finding him in a café, where we were phoning to ask if we could bet on the billiards matches over the phone.
‘Oh, yes, I’ll come right away,’ said the poor wretch.
While we were waiting for him, we did a tour of the school, going into the classrooms and the gym, but we found nothing interesting, and could not switch on the lights, since the blackout blinds for the windows were nearly all missing. We went to stretch out on our camp beds, to read and smoke.
The magazine that Biancone had half burned was full of photographs of English cities, seen from the air, with bombs falling on them in clusters. We did not know what it meant and we leafed through the pages absent-mindedly. Then there was an account of the whole story of King Carol of Rumania, because there had been a coup d’état at that time and they had changed king. The article was amusing, especially for us, who were not used to reading about court or political intrigues in the newspapers. I read it out loud to Biancone. There was the story of La Lupescu, which we commented on with laughter and shouts of excitement, not so much for the story in itself as for that name: Lupescu, which sounded so softly feral and full of dark shadows.2
‘La Lupescu! La Lupescu!’ we shouted, standing up on our camp beds.
‘La Lupescu!’ I shouted, along the echoing corridors and leaning out of the windows, watching the dark mantle of night, which I had not yet succeeded in wrapping round myself.
Biancone had found two gas masks. ‘These are for us!’ We instantly struggled to put them over our faces. Breathing was difficult, and the inside of the masks had an unpleasant smell of rubber and of storage, but they were objects not totally unfamiliar to us, because, right from when we were children at school, it had been drummed into us as an article of faith how useful gas masks were in defending oneself from any (or rather from probable) attacks from asphyxiating gas. So, with our heads transformed into those of enormous ants seen through a microscope, we communicated in inarticulate grunts as we wandered around half-blind through the hallways of the school. We also found some helmets, of the old kind, from the First World War, some hatchets, and torches with blue blackout filters. By now our UNPA outfits were complete; we armed ourselves to the teeth and filed along the corridors on parade, singing a marching tune: ‘Un-pà! Un-pà!’, which, however, sounded through the gas masks as a confused ‘Uhà! Uhà!’
‘U-e-u!’ mooed Biancone, wrapping himself in a huge window curtain and making sinuous movements.
‘Uh! Uh!’ I answered him, raising the hatchet as if in a war cry.
Biancone made a sign saying no. ‘U-e-u!’ he enunciated slowly again, emphasizing his lascivious hip-swaying.
‘Ah!’ I enthusiastically understood. ‘Lupescu! La Lupescu!’ and we started to act out some scenes from a gas-masked version of the life of King Carol and his lover.
The bell rang. It was Belluomo. We signalled to each other to keep quiet. Without making a noise, we went down to the classrooms on the ground floor. Belluomo was still ringing the bell and knocking. We had left open the ground-floor windows, from where we had previously studied our escape route. We popped our heads out of two different windows, with our gas masks, our helmets, and anti-mustard-gas gloves on, Biancone with a hatchet in his hand, I with the hose from a pump. Belluomo was a young man, low in build, blond, skinny in his uniform, that of a First Lieutenant in the Young Fascists, with his safari jacket and boots. Fed up with ringing the bell and not seeing any sign of life nor any lights on, he made as if to leave. Biancone struck the window sill three times with his hatchet. Belluomo turned round towards the window and saw the outline of someone looking out. ‘Hey!’ he said, ‘Is that you, Biancone?’ We stayed silent. He lit his torch and pointed it towards the window sill. ‘Oh!’ He had lit up the gas mask and hatchet. ‘Hey, what have you got there? Are you crazy?’ Just at that moment he heard a splash of water. From a high window a jet of water was cascading down, spreading out onto the pavement. I had connected the pump to a tap.
People were passing by on the street and they stopped when they saw all that commotion. Belluomo had immediately turned his light towards my window. He was in time to see my gas mask appear, my gloved hands withdrawing the hose and disappearing.
He re-directed the strip of light towards the first window, but there was no one there any more. The passers-by had gathered round him. ‘What is it? Gas? Gas attacks?’ He did not want to say it was probably a trick, as that would look as if he was losing face; and, in any case, he was not even quite sure what was going on; he was a fussy type of guy, with no sense of humour.
‘There! Up there!’ said a passer-by, and pointed towards a third-floor window. He had seen one of those silent gas mask ghosts. Belluomo tried to reach it with the light of his electric torch. It disappeared. ‘Hey! You idiots! Come down!’ Another ghost appeared on the fourth floor. ‘What’s going on?’ asked the passers-by. ‘Is there a gas attack in the school?’ And Belluomo replied, ‘No, it’s nothing …’ We continued appearing and disappearing from those windows. ‘Is it manoeuvres?’ people were asking. ‘It’s nothing, nothing, move along, move along,’ and he sent them away. We had had enough fun and stopped.
This Belluomo guy had no authority at all. He was a good sort, it has to be said, or at least he did not have enough memory or enthusiasm to be vindictive with us. ‘Hey,
what have you been up to? Are you mad? This is really a bit of craziness,’ he started to reproach us, with his plaintive tone and weary insults, but already you could tell that the little amount of feeling there was in him was quickly evaporating, because in his head everything tended to be played down and made little of. Our spectacular mockery of his authority and of our duties was completely wasted on him: he treated us with that familiar tone of annoyance that is typical of the primary teacher who cannot keep discipline. So, after a few nagging reproaches, he proceeded to hand over the equipment, which, in any case, we had already tried out on our own, and to explain our duties to us. He led us up to the attics and showed us the boxes of sand for spreading, in case we had to neutralize incendiary bombs.
He was much more assured of himself and seemed to have gone back to being aware of his authority. He handed over the key, warning us not to leave the building unguarded for any reason.
‘Yes, sir, yes, sir, we’ll do as you say … We’re now going out together in search of women,’ Biancone said to him, in his unflappable manner.
Belluomo opened his mouth, frowned, shrugged his shoulders and wandered off grumbling. He had gone back to being gloomy and unhappy.
Shortly afterwards we went out. It was after midnight. That warm darkness without stars or wind continued. Almost nobody was around in the streets. In the main square, beneath the blinking traffic light, there was the outline of a smallish man, the little point of his cigarette glowing. Biancone recognized him from his stance, with his hands in his pockets and his legs akimbo. He was a friend of his, Palladiani, a great night-bird. Biancone whistled the tune of a song which must have held some special meaning for them; the other man continued humming the rest of it, as though in a sudden burst of euphoria. We went up to him. Biancone wanted to scrounge a cigarette off him, but Palladiani said he didn’t have any and actually managed to scrounge one off Biancone. In the light of his match I noticed the pale face of a young man who had aged before his time.
He said he was waiting for a certain Ketty, who was well known to Biancone: she had gone to a party in a big house, and now must have been on her way back. ‘Unless she decides to stay there,’ he said, suddenly laughing and humming a foxtrot tune. He also mentioned how, seeing some girl called Lori with another called Rosetta, he had made a suggestive remark to her which I didn’t understand but which Biancone clearly appreciated a lot. Then he asked us, ‘And have you heard the new tricks to play in the blackout?’ ‘No,’ we said, and he explained them to us. We were very enthusiastic about them, and instantly wanted to put them into practice. But Palladiani, because of some mysterious commitments, said goodbye and went off singing to himself.
Into the War Page 7
