Private Angelo

by Eric Linklater

  Eric Linklater

  Private Angelo

  Introduced by Magnus Linklater

  Introduction

  Adventure was an important word in Eric Linklater’s vocabulary. It meant surprise, discovery, excitement, sometimes disappointment, but more often enjoyment, and all of these he relished as an escape from what he described, ‘in despair of a closer definition’, as ‘normal life’. He liked to recall his own past experiences as a series of adventures, full of light and colour, and to tell stories about them which became richer with age. The title he gave his rectorial address to Aberdeen University in 1945, the year he wrote Private Angelo, was ‘The Art of Adventure’ and in it he suggested to his young audience that sooner or later it would fall to most of them to be confronted with a choice between the routine and the unexpected. It was, he said, like walking out through a familiar door:

  There, on that doorstep, you are confronted with a momentous choice: you may regard life either as the general adventure or the general burden. That much of it is burdensome, no one can deny — the daily task of shaving is a nuisance, to listen politely to one’s elders is tedious, to pay one’s taxes an Egyptian load — but if from the beginning you think of life as a burden, you will immediately feel tired, and thereby suffer a disadvantage: you will lack energy that might have procured enjoyment. It is more profitable to see life as an adventure: not as something to be carried, but as something to be broken into.

  One of the great adventures in Eric’s own life was the six-month period he spent as the War Office’s official historian in Italy in 1944, following the Allied attack north from Sicily, through Naples and Rome to Florence. He saw scenes of terrible devastation and great suffering; he witnessed bravery and cowardice; but he also saw the Pope in the Vatican wearing red embroidered carpet slippers, and was introduced to King Umberto, and discovered the Uffizi’s greatest paintings only 2000 yards from the German forward positions, stored for safety in the Castello di Montegufoni where, memorably, he took advantage of his intimacy with one of the most famous pictures in the world and planted a kiss on the lips of the pregnant Venus, the loveliest of the Graces in Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’.

  These adventures he spoke and wrote of long after the anguish of war had faded into a dark and gloomy backcloth. But above all he remembered and cherished Italy and the Italians. Private Angelo is a celebration of a country and a people with whom he felt immediate and instinctive sympathy. That its central character is a self-confessed coward and its supporting cast is studded with thieves, cheats and black-marketeers, has not prevented it becoming, amongst Italians themselves, one of the very few books by a foreigner which is recognised, with admiration and affection, as presenting an authentic picture of their native character.

  Angelo himself, he who lacks il dono di coraggio, the gift of courage, is the universal soldier, like Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik. He witnesses scenes of great violence and horror, but he retains throughout a touching innocence which allows him to turn his experiences of war into a philosophy for peace. From the vantage point of his essential simplicity, he resolves for himself the moral complexities of war, to say nothing of the moral complexities of his own amorous nature, and from it constructs a testimonial to the virtues of common humanity. Angelo’s true ancestor is plainly Voltaire’s Candide.

  But if that sounds sententious, or even sentimental, then it is misleading. Private Angelo is wonderfully, gloriously, funny. It is shot through with wit and great good humour, full of wry observation and the warmth of what the Italians call commedia. In fact, its structure seems on occasion closer to the Italian commedia, or opera teatrale, than it does to the conventions of the novel. The plot, as such, is at best sketchy, at times positively unruly. But rather than search for the plumbline of a straight narrative, it is better to see each chapter as a dramatic set-piece, a theatrical scene, frequently opening with a duet which could easily translate onto the stage of a small Italian opera house — the Fenice in Venice would do very well. In one, for instance, Lucrezia, Angelo’s long-suffering fiancée, is talking of life and love and the absence of her beloved, with her sister Lucia. ‘Come tristela vita’ she sighs, as the two pluck hens in the green shade of a trailing vine, and one can almost hear the continuo as it leads up to a much-loved aria.

  Angelo himself, like Figaro, is ill-equipped for war. He freely admits that he lacks the dono di coraggio:

  Courage is a great gift indeed, a great and splendid gift, and it is idle to pretend that any ordinary person can insist on receiving it; or go and buy it in the Black Market. We who have not been given the dono di coraggio suffer deeply, I assure you. We suffer so much, every day of our lives, that if there were any justice in the world we should receive sympathy not reproof.

  War, he learns, teaches above all the art of survival. His patron, the Count of Pontefiore, survives by transferring his allegiances smoothly from Mussolini to the Germans, and then to the Americans for whom he conceives the warmest admiration, largely for their generous nature and their essential practicality; their greatest gift to Italy after the war is, in his view, the sewing machine. Angelo’s friend, Sergeant Vespucci, survives by villainy — plundering petrol, food, even army lorries, and disposing of them on the black market at inflated prices. He too is a kind of hero, achieving freedom from the tiresome constraints of ordinary life by breaking the rules that hold most of his fellow citizens back – a quality which, as the Count points out, might be of value to others:

  He plunders all nations without pride in one or prejudice against another. He despises frontiers — and what an unmitigated nuisance a frontier is! In bygone times any educated man was free to live or travel where he chose, but now it is only your rascals who claim such a privilege; and there is nothing international in the world but villainy. Sergeant Vespucci, who certainly deserves to be shot, might serve a better purpose if he were given the chair of philosophy in one of our universities.

  But it was, perhaps, the women of Italy for whom Eric, romantic by nature, conceived the greatest admiration. He spoke of seeing them in the uneasy months of the Germans’ slow retreat, emerging from the basements and the attics of the houses where they had sheltered, into the warm sunlight of the streets, and he recalls how vividly their pale oval faces and auburn hair reminded him of the madonnas he had seen so often on the canvases and frescoes of the Renaissance, faces from the hand of Ghirlandaio or Filippo Lippi. They seemed to him at the same time fragile yet immensely resilient, and in Private Angelo they are undoubtedly the stronger, and certainly the more sensible sex.

  Lucrezia, who survives the bombing of her little village by both sides, and rape at the hands of a Moroccan ‘goum’, is briskly down to earth when it comes to explaining to Angelo how, in his absence, she has acquired a child which is plainly not his. He has, after all, been away for three years: ‘Was it not more unnatural for you to become a soldier than for me to become a mother?’, she asks. She is often ahead of Angelo in his attempts to make sense of the world, and when he tells her that he may have acquired a measure of courage in the course of his experiences, she is unimpressed: ‘Courage is a common quality in men of little sense — I think you over-rate it. A good understanding is much rarer and more important.’

  In the end, as the sound of warfare dies away, it seems that the greatest survivor is Italy herself. Roughly wooed by the Germans, pulverised by the Allies in the name of rescuing her, she sometimes wonders who her friends are. As Angelo mildly puts it at one stage: ‘If our old friends and our new ones both remain in Italy, we shall soon have nothing left at all.’

  Out of the destruction, however, comes the rebuilding of ‘normal’ life, a process which, after the brutal adventure of war is a s
ufficient adventure in itself. Eric sees the strength of Italy and her ability to survive in the durability of the Tuscan landscape, the beauty of her art, the timelessness of her towns and villages, and above all in the good sense and amiability of her people. He applauds the pleasure they take in ordinary life, ‘doing nothing in particular to justify their existence, but nothing at all to perturb it … talking and gesticulating … contemplating eternity and abusing the present.’

  He dedicated his book to the Eighth Army, for he loved soldiers and enjoyed their company. But it is doubtful if the Eighth Army would have had much truck with Private Angelo or with his unconventional wisdom. Indeed, Angelo’s summary of the perils of war and the virtues of peace would have been regarded by the military hierarchy of any nation as positively subversive: ‘What have you learned, Angelo, while you have been away all these years?’ asked the Countess.

  ‘That before the war I was better off than I realised: there is one thing. That soldiers can suffer much and still survive, but are not always improved by their suffering: there is another. That if men are as cruel at home as they are abroad, then their wives have much to complain of … and finally, that if living at peace were as simple as going to war, we might have more of it.’

  M.L.

  March 1992

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘THE TROUBLE with you, Angelo,’ said the Count severely, ‘is that you lack the dono di coraggio.’

  ‘That is perfectly true,’ said Angelo, ‘but am I to blame? Courage is a gift indeed, a great and splendid gift, and it is idle to pretend that any ordinary person can insist on receiving it; or go and buy it in the Black Market. We who have not been given the dono di coraggio suffer deeply, I assure you. We suffer so much, every day of our lives, that if there were any justice in the world we should receive sympathy, not reproof.’

  With the back of his hand he rubbed a tear from his cheek, and turned away to look through the tall window at the splendid view of Rome on which it opened. In the westering sun the walls of the buildings were the colour of ripe peaches; the domes of several churches rose serenely, firmly round and steeply nippled like the unimpaired and several breasts of a Great Mother whose innumerable offspring, too weak to drain them, had even lacked sufficient appetite to use them much; while in half a dozen places, within easy reach of sight, Victory in a four-horsed chariot drove superbly through the golden air. Soft green foliage clothed the river-bank, and somewhere a military band was playing a gallant march. How beautiful was Rome, how beautiful all the land of Italy!

  Sitting behind his handsome large table – inlaid with intricately patterned brass about its flanks and furnished with a brass inkstand as big as a couple of flower-pots, with a statuette in bronze of the Wolf and the Twins, and a signed photograph of the Duce – seated in state though he was, the Count felt a softening of his heart, and his hands which had lain flat and severe upon the table half-rose, half-turned their palms, in a little gesture of understanding and sympathy; a gesture like the prelude to a softly acquiescent shrug. Angelo was a good-looking boy. True, he was very dirty, his ill-made uniform was sweat-stained and caked with dust, his left knee showed through a long rent in his breeches, his right boot was tied with string to keep a loose sole in position, and he stank a little; but his black hair curled and the bones of his face were as comely as if Donatello in his prime had carved them; he had eyes like his mother’s, and in his voice the echoes rose and fell of hers.

  With the fingers of his left hand the Count played a small tune upon the table and thought of Angelo’s mother when she was seventeen. His estate of Pontefiore, in the Tuscan hills between Siena and Florence, had always been renowned for the prettiness of its peasant-girls and the excellence of its wine, but in a year when the vintage was better than anyone could remember, and the girls – or so it had seemed to him, in the flush of his own youth – were more enticing than ever before, Angelo’s mother had stolen all the light of the sky and left in shadow every other prospect of pleasure. Her lips and her long fingers and the suppleness of her waist! The round of her hips and the white of her knees when she stooped with a lifting skirt over the washing-trough with the women and the other girls; and then, when she turned to speak to him, the darkness and the laughter in her eyes! And how short, how tragically brief, had been their time together.

  Desolation like a sudden storm enclosed him in its hail and darkness when he thought of those vanished years. He, like Angelo, was now in need of sympathy, and for a moment his impulse was to rise, embrace him, and let their tears flow in a common stream of sorrow.

  But as he moved, restless in his chair, his glance encountered the Duce’s portrait: the autograph, the massive jaw, and the unyielding mouth. Though the Duce had lately been dismissed from his high office, and his Grand Council dissolved, the Count still kept the portrait on his table, for it was signed Your friend Mussolini, and he prided himself on loyalty. How often had those piercing eyes inspired him! They inspired him still, and with an effort, with reluctance, he dismissed his tender thoughts. Stiffening his muscles and sitting bolt upright, he cast out sadness like a recognized traitor, and instead of tears forced into his eyes the atrabilious gleam of the eyes in the photograph. Not only was he Count of Pontefiore, Angelo’s patron and once the lover of his dead mother; he was also Commanding Officer of the 914th Regiment of Tuscan Infantry, the Sucklings of the Wolf. He was Angelo’s Colonel, and when he spoke it was in a colonel’s voice.

  ‘You are a soldier and it is your duty to be courageous,’ he said loudly. ‘The illustrious regiment in which you have had the honour to serve, and I the honour to command, is even now fighting with the most glorious courage in Calabria. By this time, perhaps, your comrades have slaughtered the last of the English invaders or driven them into the sea. And you, you alone deserting and disgracing them, have run away! You have run all the way from Reggio to Rome!’

  ‘The last time I saw my comrades,’ said Angelo, ‘they were all running away. I looked over my shoulder once or twice, and they were running as hard as they could. But none of them was so swift and determined as I, and therefore I am the first to arrive. But if you will have a little patience, I am sure that you will presently see your whole regiment here.’

  ‘Silence!’ cried the Count. ‘No one in my presence shall ever deny, or even dispute, the indomitable valour of my gallant men!’

  He struck with an ivory ruler the gleaming surface of the table, and then, frowning a little, leaned forward and asked, ‘Is it really as bad as that?’

  ‘Quite as bad,’ said Angelo. ‘It has taken us a long time to lose the war, but thank heaven we have lost it at last, and there is no use in denying it.’

  ‘It is treason to say that.’

  ‘It is common sense.’

  ‘You are still a soldier,’ said the Count, ‘and you have no right to talk about common sense. You are subject to military law, and since by your own confession you are guilty of cowardice and desertion – well, my friend, you know the penalty for that?’

  ‘Death,’ said Angelo in a gloomy voice.

  ‘If I do my duty, you will certainly be shot.’

  ‘The English have been trying
to shoot me for the last three years. In Cyrenaica I had the greatest difficulty in avoiding their bombs and bullets and shells. I had to run hundreds of miles to escape being killed. And now, after three years of that sort of thing, I come to see you, my patron and Commanding Officer, and almost the first thing you say is that you too want to murder me. Is there no difference at all between friend and foe?’

  ‘There is a great deal of difference,’ said the Count, ‘but a soldier’s duty is the same wherever you go.’

  ‘It is, however, only a very good soldier who always does his duty.’

  ‘That is worth bearing in mind,’ said the Count thoughtfully. ‘I am not eager, you must realize, to have you shot, for it would create an awkward precedent if, as you say, my whole regiment is now on its way to Rome. And yet, if I were openly to condone your cowardice, and wholly ignore the fact of your desertion, I should bring myself down to your level. I should stand shoulder to shoulder with you in dishonour.’

  ‘It would be a new experience for you,’ said Angelo. ‘During three years of war you have never stood shoulder to shoulder with me or with any of your men.’

  The Count replied a trifle haughtily: ‘It is perfectly true that while you served with the regiment in Africa, I commanded it from Rome. But it is quite absurd for you to refer to the fact in so unpleasant a tone of voice. For you cannot deny that I set you a splendid example, since I have never abandoned my post, nor ever, in three years of war, run a single yard. And who else in the regiment can make such a boast?’

  ‘I give you my word,’ said Angelo, ‘that I was speaking with perfect respect. I made a short and simple statement of fact, and I can’t see why that should be regarded as unfriendly criticism.’

  ‘You are old enough to realize,’ said the Count, ‘that a statement of fact is nearly always damaging to someone. And furthermore,’ he continued in an animated voice, ‘you should ask yourself what would have happened if, as you appear to think proper, I had indeed commanded you in the field. I myself can perceive three possibilities. I might have been killed; I might have been seriously wounded or taken prisoner, and in either case debarred from further service; or I might have been dismissed from the Army for incompetence. And a pretty pickle you would be in to-day, if any of those things had occurred! You wouldn’t be standing before an old friend who is devoted to your welfare, but confronting a total stranger who didn’t care what happened to you!’