by Dino Buzzati
The terraces of the Fort were white – so too were the valley to the south and the northern desert. The snow covered the whole width of the glacis; along the crenellations it had laid a rim of white; it plunged from the gutters with a little hollow noise; every now and again for no apparent reason it detached itself from the sides of the precipices and terrible masses roared smoking down into the gulfs.
It was not the first snow but the third or fourth fall, and was a sign that many days had gone by. ‘It seems like yesterday that I arrived at the Fort,’ said Drogo, and so it did indeed. It seemed like yesterday and yet time had slipped away with its unvarying rhythm, no slower for the happy man nor quicker for the unlucky ones of this world.
Another three months had passed – passed neither slowly nor quickly. Christmas had faded from sight in the distance and the New Year had come, bringing mankind a few strangely hopeful minutes. Giovanni Drogo was already preparing to depart. He still had to have the medical inspection which Major Matti had promised him and then he would be able to go. He kept telling himself that this was a happy event, that in the city the life awaiting him was easy, amusing and perhaps happy, and yet he was not pleased.
On the morning of the tenth of January he entered the medical officer’s room on the top floor of the Fort. The doctor was called Ferdinando Rovina; he was over fifty with a flabby, intelligent face, an air of tired resignation, and wore not a uniform but a long dark jacket which made him look like some sort of magistrate. He was sitting at his table with various books and charts before him; he sat quite still and it was impossible to tell what his thoughts were.
The window looked out on to the courtyard from which there rose the sound of regular pacing to and fro because it was evening already and the changing of the guard was about to begin. From the window one caught sight of a part of the outer wall and the extraordinarily serene sky. The two officers saluted and Giovanni quickly saw that the doctor was fully informed of his case.
‘The ravens are nesting and the swallows are going,’ said Rovina jokingly, and he produced from a drawer a sheet of paper with something printed on it.
‘Perhaps you do not know, doctor, that I came here by mistake,’ answered Drogo.
‘My dear boy, everyone comes here by mistake,’ said the doctor gloomily. ‘That applies to everyone more or less – even to those who have stayed on.’
Drogo did not quite know what he meant and confined himself to a smile.
‘Oh, I’m not blaming you. You are quite right, you young people, not to moulder up here,’ Rovina went on, ‘there are far better chances down in the city. Sometimes I think myself that if I could …’
‘Why not?’ asked Drogo, ‘couldn’t you get a transfer?’
The doctor waved his hand as if he could not believe his ears.
‘Get a transfer?’ and he laughed heartily, ‘after being up here for twenty-five years? It’s too late, my boy, I should have thought of it sooner.’
Perhaps he wanted Drogo to contradict him again, but since the lieutenant said nothing he began to talk business. He invited Giovanni to sit down, made him give his name and surname which he wrote in the prescribed place on the form according to the regulations.
‘Well then,’ he concluded, ‘you suffer from a cardiac disorder, don’t you? Your system doesn’t stand up to the height, isn’t that it? Shall we say that?’
‘Yes, let’s say that,’ Drogo assented. ‘You are the best judge of these things.’
‘Shall we prescribe convalescent leave while we’re at it?’ said the doctor, winking.
‘Thank you,’ said Drogo, ‘but I don’t want to overdo things.’
‘Just as you like. No leave. At your age I had no such scruples.’
Instead of sitting down Giovanni had gone over to the window and every now and then looked down on the soldiers drawn up on the white snow. The sun had barely set; a blue shadow had spread over the walls.
‘After three or four months, more than half of you people want to get away,’ the doctor was saying with a certain sadness in his voice; he too was now wrapped in shadow so that it was difficult to see how he could write. ‘If I could have my time again I would do the same. Yet it’s a pity.’
Drogo listened without interest, so intent was he on looking from the window. Then he seemed to see the yellowing walls of the courtyard rise up into the crystal sky, with above them, higher still, solitary towers, crooked battlements crowned with snow, airy outworks and redoubts which he had never seen before. A bright light from the west still illuminated them and thus they shone with an inscrutable life. Never before had Drogo noticed that the Fort was so complicated and immense. At an almost incredible height he saw a window – or perhaps a loophole open on to the valley. Up there there must be men whom he did not know – perhaps even an officer like himself with whom he could be friends. In the abyss between bastion and bastion he saw geometrical shadows, frail bridges suspended among the rooftops, strange postern gates barred and flush with the walls, ancient machicolations now blocked up, long rooftrees curved with the years.
Against the dark blue background of the courtyard he saw in the light of lanterns and torches soldiers of great height and proud bearing unsheath their bayonets. On the brightness of the snow they formed black, immobile files, as if made of iron. They were very beautiful to see and stood like stone while a trumpet began to sound. The blasts spread through the air, gleaming and alive, and struck straight into the heart.
‘One by one you all go away,’ Rovina was murmuring in the dusk, ‘we will end up by being left by ourselves, we old ones. This year …’
Down in the courtyard the trumpet was calling, the pure sound of brass and human voice together. It shook once more, warlike and dashing. When it fell silent it left even in the doctor’s office an enchantment no words could describe. The silence became such that you could hear someone’s long pace crunch on the frozen snow. The colonel had come down in person to take the salute. Three trumpet calls of extraordinary beauty cleft the sky.
‘Who is there of you?,’ the doctor continued his recriminations. ‘Lieutenant Angustina is the only one. Even Morel, I bet he will have to go down to the city next year to be looked after. I bet he finishes by falling ill too.’
‘Morel?’ Drogo could not help replying if only to show that he was listening. ‘Morel ill?’ he asked, without grasping the last words.
‘Oh no,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s a manner of speaking.’
Even through the closed window they heard the steps of the colonel. In the dusk the lines of bayonets were silver bars. From impossibly far off there came the echo of trumpets – perhaps the first call sent back by the labyrinth of the walls.
The doctor was silent. Then he rose and said:
‘Here is the certificate. I’ll go now and get it signed by the commandant.’
He folded the paper and put it in a file, took down his great coat and a great fur cap.
‘Are you coming too?’ he asked. ‘What on earth are you looking at?’
The new guards were moving off one by one to the various parts of the Fort. The rhythm of their steps made a dull noise on the snow, but overhead flew the music of the fanfares. Then, strange as it might seem, the walls – already beleaguered by the night – rose slowly towards the zenith and from their topmost height, framed with patches of snow, white clouds began to rise like great birds sailing between the stars.
The memory of his native city passed through Drogo’s mind – a vague image of noisy streets in the rain, of plaster statues, of damp barracks, tuneless bells, tired and misshapen faces, endless afternoons, dirty dusty ceilings.
But here the deep mountain night was approaching with clouds flying up over the Fort, harbingers of wonders to come. And from the north, from the north invisible there behind the ramparts, Drogo felt the onset of his own destiny.
The doctor was already in the doorway.
‘Doctor, doctor,’ said Drogo, almost stammering, ‘I am all right.�
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‘I know,’ answered the doctor, ‘What did you think?’
‘I’m all right,’ Drogo repeated almost unable to recognise his own voice, ‘I’m all right and want to stay.’
‘Stay here in the Fort? You don’t want to leave any more? What has happened to you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Giovanni, ‘but I can’t leave.’
‘Oh,’ exclaimed Rovina coming up to him, ‘if you’re serious then I assure you I am glad.’
‘I’m quite serious,’ said Drogo who felt his state of exaltation change into a strange pain which was near to happiness. ‘Doctor, throw away that form.’
Chapter Ten
It was bound to come to this – had perhaps been destined long before on that distant day when, along with Ortiz, Drogo first came on to the plateau and the Fort appeared to him under the burden of the bright midday.
Drogo has decided to stay; what keeps him there is a longing, but more than that alone – for perhaps the heroic cast of his thoughts itself would not have sufficed. For the time being he thinks he has done something noble, and is genuinely surprised to find himself a better man than he had thought. Only many months later, looking around him, will he recognise the paltry ties which bind him to the Fort.
Suppose the trumpets had sounded, suppose he had heard martial songs, suppose disturbing messages had come from the north – if that had been all there was to it Drogo would have left just the same; but he had within him dull sluggishness born of habit, military vanity, love for the accustomed walls which were his home. Four months passing with the monotonous rhythm of routine duties had been enough to entrammel him.
He had got used to guard duties, which the first few times had seemed an unbearable burden; little by little he had learned the rules, the turns of speech, the whims of his superiors, the topography of the redoubts, the sentry-posts, the corners out of the wind, what the trumpets said. He derived a special pleasure from his mastery of the routine and savoured the growing respect of soldiers and N.C.O.’s; even Tronk had noticed that Drogo was serious and painstaking and had almost come to like him.
He had got used to his colleagues – he now knew them so well that even their most subtle hints did not take him unawares; and in the evening they sat together chatting about what went on in the city – of events which by their very distance had become of exaggerated importance. He had got used to the good and comfortable mess, the welcoming fire in the anteroom always lit day and night; the attentions of his batman – a good creature called Geronimo – who had little by little learned his particular wishes.
He had got used to the trips every so often with Morel to the nearest village, a good two hours on horseback through a narrow valley which by now he knew by heart – an inn where there were new faces to be seen at last, lavish dinners and the fresh laughter of girls with whom one could make love.
He had got used to the wild races up and down the level ground behind the Fort where on free afternoons he vied with his comrades in dashing horsemanship, and to the patient games of chess in the evenings which Drogo often won; but Captain Ortiz told him: ‘It’s always like that, the new people always win to begin with. It happens to them all – they think they are really good but it’s really only a question of novelty; then the others learn our system too and one fine day we can do nothing right any more.’
Drogo had got used to his room, to reading quietly at night, to the crack in the ceiling above his bed which looked like a Turk’s head, to the dripping of the cistern – become friendly with time – to the hollow his body moulded in the mattress, to the blankets which in the early days had seemed so inhospitable and were now gently expectant, to the movement now instinctive and precisely measured by which he put out the oil lamp or laid his book on his little table. He now knew how to place himself in the morning as he shaved before the mirror so that the light would fall on his face from the correct angle, how to pour water from the ewer into the basin without spilling, how to open the wayward lock of a drawer by holding the key down a little.
He had got used to the creaking of the door when it rained, to the point where moonlight fell through the window and its slow shifting with the passage of the hours, to the hubbub every night in the room beneath his at half past one precisely when the old wound in Lieutenant-Colonel Nicolosi’s right leg awoke mysteriously and interrupted his sleep.
All these things had now become part of himself and it would have hurt him to leave them. But Drogo did not know, he did not suspect, that his departure would have been an effort nor that life in the Fort would swallow up the days one after another, one exactly like the other, at a giddy speed. Yesterday and the day before it were the same; he could no longer have distinguished one from the other. Something which happened three days before or three weeks before seemed equally distant. Thus unknown to him time fled on its way.
But for the time being here he is, cocksure and heedless, on the ramparts of the fourth redoubt on a pure frosty night. Because of the cold the sentries kept pacing up and down without pause and their steps crunched on the frozen snow. A great moon of extraordinary whiteness lit the world. The Fort, the crags, the rocky valley to the north were flooded with wonderful light – even the curtain of mist which hung in the extreme north shone with it.
Down below in the room set aside for the orderly officer, in the heart of the redoubt, the lamp had been left burning; the flame shook slightly and rocked the shadows. Shortly Drogo had begun to write a letter; he had to reply to Maria, Vescovi’s sister, his friend’s sister, who might one day be his bride. But after completing two lines he had got up – even he did not know why – and had climbed on to the roof to look out.
This was the lowest stretch of the fortifications corresponding to the deepest point in the defile. Here in the ramparts there was the gate through which the two states communicated with each other. From time immemorial the massive, ironshod portals had not been opened. And the guard for the New Redoubt went out and in every day by a postern, barely wide enough for one man and guarded by a sentry.
It was the first time Drogo had mounted guard in the fourth redoubt. As soon as he came out into the open he looked at the overhanging rocks to the right, all encrusted with ice and gleaming in the moonlight.
Gusts of wind began to bear little white clouds across the sky and shook Drogo’s cloak, the new cloak which meant so much to him.
Without moving he gazed at the barrier of rocks before him, the impenetrable distances of the north, and the ends of his cloak rustled like a flag and assumed wild forms. That night Drogo felt he possessed a proud and soldierly beauty, upright on the edge of the terrace with his fine cloak shaken by the wind. Tronk at his side, wrapped up in a wide greatcoat, seemed no soldier at all.
‘Tell me, Tronk,’ asked Giovanni with an assumed air of concern, ‘Is it only an impression or is the moon bigger than usual tonight?’
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ said Tronk, ‘It always gives that impression up here at the Fort.’
Their voices echoed afar as if the air were made of glass. Tronk, seeing that the lieutenant had nothing more to say, went off along the edge of the terrace bent as always on checking the routine.
Drogo remained alone and felt almost happy. He relished with pride his determination to remain, the bitter pleasure of leaving the little assured happinesses for something which a long time hence might perhaps prove to be good and great – and underneath there was the consoling thought that there was always time still to leave.
A presentiment – or was it only a hope? – of great and noble events had made him stay up here, but perhaps he had merely postponed things; at bottom nothing was settled. He had so much time before him. All the good things of life seemed to await him. What need was there to exert onself? Even women, these strange and loveable creatures, he looked forward to as a certain happiness, formally promised him by the normal course of life.
How much time there was before him! A single year seemed immensely long a
nd the good years had barely begun – they seemed to form a long, long series of which it was impossible to see the end, a treasure still intact and so great that one might tire of it.
There was no one to say to him: ‘Watch out, Giovanni Drogo.’ Life seemed to him to be inexhaustible – the illusion was obstinate although youth had already begun to fade. But Drogo had no knowledge of time. Even if he had had before him hundreds and hundreds of years of youth that, too, would have seemed no great thing to him. And instead he had at his disposal only an ordinary simple life, a short human youth, a miserly gift which could be counted on the fingers of two hands and which would slip away before he had even got to know it.
What a long time there was before him, he thought. And yet – so he had heard tell – men exist who at a certain point, strange to say, begin to wait for death – death, which everyone knows about but which is quite absurd and cannot possibly concern them. Drogo smiled to think of it and as he did so, urged on by the cold, he began to walk up and down.
At that point the ramparts followed the slope of the valley and so formed a complicated staircase of terraces and platforms. Below him, pitch-black against the snow, Drogo saw the various sentries by the light of the moon; their methodical pacing made a creaking noise on the frozen ground.
The nearest of them, on a lower terrace ten yards or so away, feeling the cold less than the others, stood motionless with his shoulders leant against a wall so that it looked as if he were sleeping. But Drogo heard him singing a lament to himself in a low voice.
It was a succession of words, which Drogo could not make out, strung together by a monotonous and unending tune. Speaking, and worse still, singing on duty was severely forbidden. Giovanni should have punished him but instead took pity on him, thinking of the cold and the loneliness of the night. Then he began to descend a short staircase which led on to the terrace and gave a slight cough to put the soldier on his guard.
The sentinel turned his head and seeing the officer corrected his posture but did not interrupt his lament. Drogo was overcome with rage – did these men think they could make a fool of him? He would give him a taste of something.
