The Foundling Boy

by Michel D

  ‘There’s nothing to see at Parma,’ Ernst said.

  ‘Yes, there is. Some Correggios, especially a fresco of a Madonna blessed by Jesus in the library, which moved Stendhal to tears.’

  ‘Stendhal? That sounds like a German name.’

  ‘No, he was from the Dauphiné. His real name was Henri Beyle.’

  ‘Is he your god?’

  ‘I don’t have a god yet. To be honest, I’m utterly ignorant, as I discover every day. Three months ago I didn’t even know Stendhal’s name.’

  ‘I didn’t know it two minutes ago.’

  ‘You’ve got an excuse. What’s your name?’

  ‘Ernst. In French it’s Ernst. What’s yours?’

  ‘Jean. How do you say it in German?’

  ‘Hans. If you like I’ll call you Hans and you can call me Ernst.’

  ‘Okay. Shall we make a start?’

  Riding with Ernst was a pleasure. He kept up a steady pace without the slightest exertion and produced an unbroken stream of conversation. Very soon Jean knew that his father was a philosophy professor at Cologne, and that as he was on the point of leaving, his father had played a rotten trick on him.

  ‘As it happens, I’d packed a copy of Mein Kampf in my satchel—’

  ‘What’s Mein Kampf?’

  ‘What? Don’t you know? I can see you really are an ignoramus. Have you ever heard of Adolf Hitler?’

  ‘A bit. My father says he’s a warmonger, and Léon Blum says at the next elections the socialists will cut him down to size.’

  Ernst again burst into laughter. His cheerfulness appeared to be indestructible.

  ‘Is your father a socialist?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. A pacifist socialist. He fought in the last war and lost a leg.’

  ‘That’s uncanny! My father fought in the last war too, he’s a social democrat and he lost his left arm in the forest of Argonne. Maybe they both shot each other? Who knows.’

  ‘Yes, who knows. What about your Mein Kampf?’

  ‘In a book that he wrote in prison, Hitler spelt out his whole programme step by step: how he’ll annex Austria, take back Dantzig, remake Poland’s borders, and gather into one great Reich the German minorities who have been oppressed since the Treaty of Versailles. And he will do it, I guarantee it. Your Léon Blum can’t have read Mein Kampf.’

  ‘And I urge you to notice that your Hitler hasn’t yet accomplished his programme.’

  ‘Yes, he has. The first point. And only this year – France has a short memory – he remilitarised the Rhineland.’

  ‘That’s true, I’d forgotten. Well, let’s see what happens next. It’s nothing to gloat about, nobody tried to stop him. So what about this Mein Kampf?’

  ‘Well, I was sure I’d packed it in my satchel. But my father took it out and replaced it with a copy of Goethe’s Italian Journey. I was beside myself with fury. I almost rode back to Cologne, but on the endpaper Papa had written, “To my dear boy, for him to dream now and then.” So I said to myself, All right, this is my holiday. When I get back from Italy I’ll have plenty of time to study Mein Kampf in the evenings at my Hitler Youth meetings.’

  ‘You’re a Nazi?’

  ‘Of course, like every boy my age. What about you?’

  ‘Me? I’m not anything. I don’t care and I don’t understand their blasted politics. I sit my exams and when I have a few hours free I row at Dieppe Rowing Club.’

  ‘Rowing? I’d like that. But you French weren’t all that brilliant this year at the Olympics, were you? What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want. In cycling the medals all went our way: road race, team road race, team pursuit, 1000 metres time trial, sprint and tandem sprint.’

  ‘All right, all right. Don’t get cross, Hans. Cycling’s a great sport. What about rowing?’

  ‘Only two bronzes.’

  In the middle of the day they stopped at a small trattoria in a village that dozed at the side of the main road. Three steps led down to a low, vaulted room invaded by flies. Workers, their chins stuck out pugnaciously, sucked large forkfuls of spaghetti in tomato sauce, wiping their mouths with pieces of bread they then chewed slowly, with dreamy expressions on their faces.

  ‘Watch how they do it!’ Ernst whispered. ‘It’s a special technique. When we’ve worked it out, we can order some. It’s not expensive and it’s nourishing. Before we do, we can try some polenta. It fills you up, and I’m famished.’

  They devoured two portions of polenta each. Jean thought he might choke and asked for some wine. He was served with a red Bardolino that was as thick as shoe cream. When they had finished eating, they staggered outside and wobbled several kilometres down the road before stopping next to a field.

  ‘I suggest we have a lie-down,’ Ernst said.

  ‘I think that may be preferable. My legs feel like cotton wool.’

  They fell asleep in the shade of a hedge and were woken up by an elderly farm labourer with his dog, cursing them. Ernst could only laugh. The man had a stick, which he raised. Jean grabbed it from him and threw it over the hedge. The old man picked up a stone. The dog barked furiously. Ernst pulled out a flick knife.

  ‘No!’ Jean said. ‘We should go.’

  ‘I’m going to teach the old fool how to behave.’

  ‘No! Get on your bike.’

  They rode away, pursued by the old man’s curses and youths armed with sticks who came running from a neighbouring field.

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen that in Italy,’ Ernst said. ‘They’re usually so welcoming.’

  ‘It was bad luck.’

  ‘Never mind! In an hour we’ll be in Parma.’

  They arrived at Parma at the end of the afternoon. Unluckily the library was closed, and there were no Correggio frescoes to be seen.

  ‘Are you sure your friend Stendhal saw them?’

  ‘I think he exaggerated a good deal, but does it matter?’

  On the outskirts of Parma they saw a fine, shady grove of trees with a stream running through it.

  ‘Let’s stop!’ Ernst said. ‘We can sleep here.’

  ‘But I haven’t got a tent or even a sleeping bag.’

  ‘We don’t need them. It’s a warm evening.’

  He lit a fire, and they toasted bread and sardines splashed with olive oil. Jean pulled apples and sugar from his haversack and baked them in the embers.

  ‘Delicious,’ Ernst said. ‘Only the French really know how to eat.’

  ‘Who says any different?’

  ‘My father. He and my mother only ever argue about that one subject. She’s from Alsace, it has to be said, so she’s a bit French around the edges.’

  ‘What do you mean, “a bit French”! She’s completely French, even if she was born before 1914.’

  ‘Of course she was born before 1914, on German territory, in Strasbourg.’

  ‘Ernst, you’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘Pulling your leg? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re getting on my nerves! Now do you get it?’

  Ernst was laughing.

  ‘I get it. It’s something I do. Now, listen carefully—’

  ‘No. We’ve settled the Alsace question. French territory.’

  ‘In Mein Kampf—’

  ‘Oh, stuff Mein Kampf. Hitler’s a crybaby. You only have to stamp your foot and he’ll back down.’

  ‘Stamp your foot. Go on.’

  Jean pretended to stamp.

  ‘There you are, all over. No more Hitler.’

  ‘Well done!’ Ernst exclaimed. ‘Peace is declared.’

  ‘And there wasn’t even a war. Do you want another baked apple?’

  ‘Not for me. Let’s get some sleep. We can wash in the stream.’

  Ernst was fixated with washing himself whenever he encountered fresh water. He soaped his pink and white body and rinsed himself in cold water, whistling the Horst Wessel Lied. Jean followed suit. Night was falling. A hundred metres away, cars roared alo
ng the road to Modena. They kept the fire going, to keep the mosquitoes away, and lay down side by side on the bare earth, sharing Ernst’s sleeping bag as a pillow. Between the trees they glimpsed patches of black sky, glittering with stars.

  ‘I’m happy,’ Ernst said. ‘We’re living through a great time. The world is ours. We must defend what we have, but let’s do it with a song on our lips, and if we have to die, we’ll die so that our children can enjoy a golden age.’

  ‘I’d be obliged if you would note that neither of us has children, so far, and no one is attacking us.’

  ‘Ach, you filthy French sceptic! You’re well fed, you don’t belong to an oppressed minority, and you have no idea what it’s like to hear your downtrodden brothers call to you for help when you’ve been disarmed and your hands are empty.’

  ‘Listen, Ernst, let’s talk about all that tomorrow. Tonight I’m ready to drop, and you’re aggravating me with your oppressed brothers. Go to sleep!’

  At midday the next day they arrived in the centre of Bologna. For both of them it was their first great Italian city for art. Ernst stopped in a square to read his Goethe. ‘Venerable and learned old city …’ He wanted to climb a belfry to see the tiled roofs lauded by the poet. ‘Neither damp nor moss attacks them.’

  ‘What funny ideas he has, your Goethe! I wonder if anyone’s still interested in details like that.’

  ‘Goethe is a universal man. Nothing was alien to him. What does Stendhal say?’

  Jean opened his little Beylian guide. ‘A few lines, no more. He went to two concerts here. He was introduced to some scholars. “What fools!” he writes. “In Italy you get either raw geniuses, who astonish by their depth and lack of culture, or pedants who haven’t the slightest idea.”’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Absolutely all.’

  Ernst appeared deeply disappointed. The levity of the French was incorrigible. He set about demonstrating as much to Jean, but Jean was not listening, half dreaming instead of the plump young man who dashed to hear eighteen-year-old singers and discuss music endlessly with other music-lovers, while Goethe, driven by sudden inspiration, shut himself away to rewrite Iphigenia auf Tauris.

  That evening they wandered under the arcades, mingling with much less excitable crowds than those in Milan. The girls they encountered were in groups of four and five. Their teeth gleamed as they laughed. They smelt sweetly of soap, and their young, sumptuous bodies seemed happy to be alive in the rediscovered coolness of the night.

  ‘They’re pretty,’ Jean said.

  ‘But not very fit!’ Ernst remarked. ‘I can’t see any of them running the hundred metres.’

  ‘Who’s asking them to?’

  ‘Me! You have a completely retrograde conception of women, Hans, as if they exist for enjoyment, for the pleasures of the pleasure-seeker. In Germany women are our equal. Their womb is the nation’s future.’

  ‘Ernst, you are a sad sack. I don’t suppose your Goethe wrote anything about Italian women either.’

  Ernst was silent. Goethe did not talk about women. He took no risks, unlike Stendhal. He was not a man to die from a badly treated dose of the clap. Ideas, poetry above all! And health! ! Ice-cream and cake vendors were calling out their wares on street corners, and the Bolognese were outside to sample one of the last fine summer evenings, deserting their stuffy houses with shutters closed on narrow streets that shook disagreeably at the passage of a tram. Behind bourgeois parents skinny little maids from Emilia-Romagna, bareheaded and dressed in black with white aprons around their waists, attempted to restrain children who shouted and squabbled. There were no beggars to be seen; they were forbidden. From this spectacle Jean drew a number of conclusions: that Italians liked to live in the street, where they could use loud voices and expansive gestures; they all knew each other and loved to lavish magnificent Signors, Signoras and Commendatores on each other. They were satisfied. Business was doing well. An order reigned of which they were proud. In Ethiopia their legions had reconquered an empire. Many of them loved to recite Gabriele d’Annunzio’s poem, Mare nostrum. In Lombardy they were cold and prim, but the closer one got towards more human latitudes, the warmer they were and the more hospitable and curious about strangers. Ernst, on the other hand, felt uneasy at this loquacity, this good-humoured self-indulgence, this nation that sang so well individually and so poorly as a choir. The Hitler Youth had tried to forge closer ideological and military relations with the Fascist Balillas.9 Without success: Balilla leaders considered the Nazis johnny-come-latelies at the party, absolute beginners as Fascists.

  Around midnight Ernst and Jean reclaimed their bicycles from the garage that was looking after them and pressed on towards Tuscany. They found the road hard going, stopped at a village, found a barn to sleep in, and set off again early. Alone, either of them would have taken three days to make it over the mountains, but together, riding in relay to lessen the airstream, they reached the Tuscan border in a day. Late afternoon had plunged the clean, ordered, garden-like landscape into silence, and it lay resting there in its dense, handsomely dark ochre soil on which trees wrapped in white ruffs stood out. As they came closer they identified the trees as olives, being harvested by women with poles. In sheets stretched out below, children gathered up the olives that were then taken away by men with heavy basket-weave hoppers on their back. Workers called to them to offer them bread moistened with oil, tomatoes and onions, and a light, graceful, flower-scented white wine.

  ‘If people get kinder and kinder the further south you go,’ Ernst said, ‘what must they be like at the equator? There must be a limit.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and find out! I’ll wait here.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. Every country has its south.’

  ‘Even Germany?’

  ‘Even Germany. The Bavarians are our Italians.’

  Jean still thought of himself as a Celt. He was wary of the south, believing it would soften him. Yet these Italians were bursting with pride. They seemed cheerful and welcoming, laughed easily, offered everything they had to impoverished passing strangers. What if Albert was wrong? What if the country luxuriated in Fascism the way Poppaea Sabina luxuriated in her bath of ass’s milk? Ernst was a Nazi. Didn’t he laugh all the time? Jean needed some explanations.

  They asked if they could sleep in a barn. After supper they were shown to a double bed into which they fell, snoring like pigs, to be awoken the next morning by a fine male voice singing a popular song.

  ‘Why don’t we help them?’ Ernst suggested.

  They picked olives all day, with their backs aching and their legs weak from the pitcher of white wine being urged on them too often.

  ‘I bet you,’ Jean said during a brief pause, ‘that your Goethe never picked an olive in his life.’

  ‘What about Stendhal?’

  ‘Nor him, as far as I know. But maybe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries it wasn’t thought good taste to speak of the fruits of the earth. Having said that, I grant you that just this once Goethe and Stendhal stand shoulder to shoulder.’

  At the end of the day they said goodbye to the farmer and his wife and son. It was time to get on to Florence. But they must have drunk too much white wine, and had to stop to sleep at the roadside. Finally, at midday the following day, they arrived at Florence and made straight for the Arno and Ponte Vecchio, greeting them with shouts of admiration. Muddy water of a handsome cream colour flowed either side of its enormous pillars. Ernst reached for his Goethe, then looked up, crestfallen.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Jean asked.

  ‘I cannot tell a lie. These are the four lines he devotes to Florence: “I hastened through the city, saw the cathedral and its baptistery. Here again there opened to me a quite new world in which I did not wish to linger. The Boboli gardens are delightfully situated. I left as precipitately as I arrived.” What about your Stendhal?’

  It was Jean’s turn to burst into laughter.

 
‘He’s no better. Listen: “Florence, situated in a narrow valley in the middle of bare mountains, has an unjustified reputation.”’

  ‘Ah, you reassure me. Might they both be mistaken?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  They spent two days in Florence, staying in a noisy and dirty small hotel. The Uffizi and the Duomo aroused their admiration, but no one addressed a word to them. They agreed that Florence was much too secret a city for the time they had to devote to it. In truth, Goethe and Stendhal had had the same impression, the first dreaming only of the Rome of the Caesars, the second only of opera.

  ‘We’ll come back,’ Ernst said. ‘Another time, when we have the key to Florence. I’m afraid that for now we’re wasting our time.’

  ‘You could be right.’

  Eight years later Ernst was to pass through Florence again, after the battle of Monte Cassino. Standing in a truck, all he saw was Italians with their backs turned, the fires that had broken out in the wake of the shelling of the city, and the bombed Ponte Santa Trinità. He would never know Florence. He thought about Jean then, wondering what the great cataclysm had done with his companion from his first visit to Italy. In the pitiless mess of war, those who were forsaken looked vainly for their former brothers and encountered only the face of the enemy.

  After Florence Goethe and Stendhal’s routes had diverged. One had gone on via Perugia and Terni, the other had headed for Rome via Viterbo. Jean observed that Stendhal had overtaken the German. Ernst declared that it was not worth coming to Italy just to do everything as fast as you could. Besides, Goethe had talked to everybody, soldiers, carriers, smugglers and gendarmes, while Stendhal had only sought out the devotees of bel canto. The two young men halted at the roadside to discuss again at length the merits of their respective guides. In fact neither was being entirely sincere. Ernst found Goethe heavy and pontificating, and Jean was uncomfortable at Stendhal’s pursuit of pleasure, which seemed too similar to his own. Had he been more sure of himself, he would have recognised in the little consul of Civitavecchia, so mischievously caricatured by Alfred de Musset’s pencil, an equal in sensitivity and a fellow enthusiast.

  Their one point of agreement was that, as they continued south, their haste gradually left them both. They pedalled with hands loosely gripping their handlebars, casual, relaxed, eyeing up girls who refused point-blank to notice them. How could they attract the attention of these fabulous Italians who paraded slowly across the shimmering road in front of them, their legs bare, in black skirts and white blouses?