by Joanna Scott
The story ends on the night of the victory celebration in Marina di Campo, though it took months and even years for Adriana to learn certain facts. She’s still not able to verify all of her suspicions. For example, she’s not sure where her uncle spent that night—whether he was in Portoferraio or Marina di Campo. And she’s not sure if Amdu Diop even participated in the celebration.
What she does know, even if she has no reason to think of it at the moment, is that Luisa’s nephew, Paolo, left for Marina di Campo with Lorenzo Ambrogi early in the evening on the twenty-third of June. Instead of returning to his home, he joined a group of men and boys in Piazza Alighieri. Though the celebration hadn’t begun, the carabinieri had already been warned to expect a crowd, and a military ambulance was stationed nearby. Although most Elbans didn’t plan to join the celebration, they shared the sense that history was about to move elsewhere. History would continue to follow the war, leaving the island of Elba behind.
The two warships anchored offshore were like massive guards waiting to take their captives away. The men loitering under the portico had heard different rumors about where the Ninth French Colonial Division would go next—up to Genova, some said, or to France. They smoked cigarettes and cast sly glances at one another, as though to acknowledge the innuendo hidden in their words.
Filippo, the pharmacist from Portoferraio, wasn’t there, but his friend Alonso Benassi was, along with the Pirelli brothers. They had come not to watch the Colonial soldiers celebrate their victory but to watch them leave. This group of Elban men, along with a few attentive boys, would wait all night, if necessary, for the satisfaction of bidding good riddance to the savages.
Later, Paolo would tell Adriana that he smoked a real Cuban cigar that night, which made him thirsty, so he stole a flask from a table in the piazza and drank half a liter of wine by himself, and then, feeling sluggish and bored by the conversations of the men, he found a quiet doorway to sit in and promptly fell asleep. He slept for hours and would have preferred to go on sleeping—his dreams were pleasant, full of drumbeats and the antics of masqueraders—but shortly after midnight he was knocked awake by the booming of an explosion, which at first he took for thunder.
Although Adriana never had the chance to visit Senegal, in the years following the war she searched for the scanty information available about the country. Later, when she was a young woman studying at university, she pored through more-substantial sources, reading privately, without supervision, until she came to consider herself something of an expert on West Africa. She knew the distance between Dakar and Saint-Louis. She knew the annual per capita income, the vicissitudes of the peanut crop, the frequency of drought, and the customs of the Wolof. She even managed to find an outdated copy of La Condition Humaine, the newspaper for the Senegalese Democratic Bloc, at a newsstand in Livorno in 1953, and she read for the first time about the country’s leader, Léopold Sédar Senghor.
Senghor was a poet, a Roman Catholic, and a Socialist. Adriana liked to imagine that Amdu would have been a member of Senghor’s party and supported the Federation of West Africa. With his education, he could have helped draft the new constitution. She was convinced that everywhere he went, he would have been appreciated. Sometimes she even conflated Senghor and Amdu—in her imagination, Amdu became the president of Senegal, and Senghor was the boy who had fled to La Chiatta to escape the war.
Yet no matter how much she learned about the country, the soldier named Amdu continued to elude her. Still, she was a determined girl, resistant to disappointment—spoiled, Amdu would have said—and she couldn’t completely resign herself to ignorance. Even though with time she was absorbed by other preoccupations and her memory of Amdu lost clarity, she never stopped hoping that he would become newly visible and available to her at some future point. As long as she couldn’t forget him, she couldn’t give up the idea that someday her limited knowledge would be supplemented.
She went on waiting for Amdu to return, if not in person then in the stories she would hear about him. And many years later, when she was going through her mother’s papers, she was sure she would find the letter Amdu had written to Giulia Nardi from his berth just hours before the Ninth French Colonial Division was scheduled to depart from Elba. That she never did find a letter she attributed to her mother’s efforts to protect her—Giulia would have thought that by destroying the letter and keeping its contents secret, she was sparing her daughter. But Adriana was already convinced that a letter existed.
Dear Madame. No, no—he should address her as Singora. Sinora. How do you spell signora? He can’t send a proposal of marriage that is full of mistakes. But truly, it feels good to hold a pen in his hand once again. And it feels good to be back in his upper bunk, soon to be on his way home. How easy it has been to resume his life as a soldier. He remains in a state of shock, according to the medic, who didn’t question Amdu’s claim that he has no memory of the time between the launch of Operation Brassard and his return to the marina. He is sorry to have to bend the truth a little, but it is for everyone’s good. Now no one has to waste time on a court martial, and Amdu can go home on medical leave.
As much as he has come to appreciate this island of dreams and is eager to return in style someday, he longs to be at home. He isn’t sorry to give up the military life. He has to agree with the lieutenant general that he is cut from a different cloth and will never successfully move up through the ranks of the Tirailleurs.
In the story he would like to tell about himself, he is still a nobleman—a jambur, in Wolof—but he would also admit once and for all that he is something of a coward. A few enlisted men grumbled that they saw him running from the battlefield. If he was nicked by a sniper’s bullet, he deserved it, they said. Probably the men complaining are the same troops he ran from in the orchard. Surely at least some of them are still alive. He learned from his friend Khalam that the captain in charge of the battalion was killed later that first night by mortar fire. They found his body, but he had no face left, Khalam said. Or perhaps it was Moussa who told him this. Moussa, whose holy ancestor had preached that all faithful followers were assured a place in heaven despite their sins. Anything is endurable as long as there’s heaven at the end, Moussa insists, following his ancestor’s belief, and Amdu agrees. They are good friends, Moussa and Amdu. Amdu could be the good friend of anyone—African or European, Christian or Muslim or Jew. Even the men who disapprove of him would come to like him if they spent time with him.
It must be acknowledged, however, that he neglected his duty while he lived like a prince in a stone palace by the sea. He has no excuse. With chagrin, he’d have to say that he enjoyed himself. He listened to a young girl play the piano. He fed pine nuts to the birds. He brought a dog back to life. He lived at La Chiatta like a member of the family, like a brother to the girl and a beloved son of the signora. And though he can’t see into the future, he can deduce the logical progression of the sequence that began with the first night of the liberation. Follow the sequence through time, into the bright, clean rooms of La Chiatta, away and back again, to what is most easily understood as destiny but that Amdu recognizes as the inevitable point when everything falls into place and the pattern, no matter how complicated, becomes clear.
Dear Madame-Signora, your daughter is a child. God willing, someday she will be a woman in need of a husband. No—he’d better not suggest that the girl would need anything. She would want a husband? Or she would receive many proposals from many men, and she would have to choose. That is better. Amdu Diop will distinguish himself as the most farsighted suitor, offering himself and his respected name ten years in advance of their actual engagement.
It is possible that during the interim, rumors about Amdu will reach Madame-Signora and her daughter. As much as he has been praised for his good heart, he is considered by some to be less than reasonable. True, he used to exaggerate his potential—he even, pardon his blasphemy, believed himself to be something of a saint. But he is done with all that.
In the years to come he will work to the best of his abilities, no more and no less. In his conversations with God he will no longer trade his future talents for current miracles.
To all the good people of the island of Elba he wants to say that he is sorry for whatever went wrong with an invasion that was planned and initiated on their behalf. No one should ever suffer needlessly. But don’t believe that the loved ones you have lost will never be recovered. The ashes will give up the dead. The sea will give up the dead. Death will give up the dead, all sins will be forgiven, and heaven will welcome anyone who wants to live. There’s happiness ever after for you. Everything’s forgivable, amen.
Amdu, who is used to believing whatever he wants to believe, believes that he has found his future place in life at La Chiatta. Now he must convince the residents of La Chiatta that he is worthy. In his long absence, they might forget his charms and remember him only as a representative of the Allied division that brought both freedom and atrocity to their island. Experience is full of contrary influences, and proximity tends to strengthen persuasion. While he is off in Africa studying to be a doctor, another man might arrive at the palace by the sea and try to persuade the madame-signora and her daughter that he is superior to Amdu.
He can only hope that they will be patient and wait for him.
To the famiglia Nardi, he wants to say: vi ringrazio—merci beaucoup. He wants to say that as unlikely as it might seem, the twisting, turning chain of events leads invariably to his return. He wants to assure them that he isn’t foolish or insincere or easily distracted. He is Amdu Diop, the grandson of a general. He wants to sign the letter with love.
Alone in her bedroom on the last night the Ninth French Colonial Division spent on Elba, Adriana Nardi found herself imagining Amdu as a child—first as a pudgy infant holding his toes, the disk of his thick, coarse hair looking like a plate balanced on the top of his head, then as a toddler running bowlegged across a courtyard, then as a young boy climbing up onto the rim of a well while his mother screamed at him to get down, then as an older boy who demonstrated for all the weary adults around him what it really meant to be alive. A boy with strong, knobby legs and thin arms that could bend backward like a bow around the double joints of his elbows. A boy who liked to jump like a rabbit across the room.
Though he was a soldier, Amdu hadn’t finished growing. Adriana imagined what he’d look like as a man—a head taller than her uncle Mario, with a black cap of a beard on his chin, a narrow chest, long limbs, and feet as wide as palm leaves. Then she imagined him as an old man, with a gray mist of hair, his shoulders stooped. She pictured him with spectacles for reading, looking up as she entered the room, looking over the rims of his glasses so for a moment he seemed to have four eyes.
She’d left her shutters open to let in the cool night air. Later, she would remember hearing the noise of the soldiers celebrating across the island in Marina di Campo, though she must have made this up, since the sounds couldn’t possibly have traveled that far. But when she thought back to that night, her memory distorted time and distance. She heard the soldiers celebrating and she quietly hummed along to the music of Pino Solitario’s accordion.
Though it would seem strange to someone else that a soldier she had hardly known should have filled her thoughts so completely, it didn’t seem strange to her at all. Just the fact that he was so different from anyone she’d ever met would have been enough to keep her interested. And yet there was more—the effect of him, her confidence that she was absolutely right to be impressed, the sense of belonging in the world that he inhabited, the plain admiration she felt, even if she didn’t know him well enough to know what, in particular, she admired.
She had given up the notion that Amdu Diop had some sort of miraculous or magical power. But she didn’t soon forget the pleasure of his company, and as the hours passed that night—June 23, 1944—and she drifted toward sleep, she found it comforting just to think about him and to let her memories get mixed up with her ideas about the past and the future. Over and over, she reviewed every minute of the short time she’d spent with him. She pictured him in his own home with his family—his mother and father and sisters. She imagined him studying in a library. She imagined coaxing him to jump off the highest rock at Viticcio.
Although she would have been suspicious of an interest in her that went beyond what she considered appropriate, she felt entitled to claim him as her own. Even if she didn’t adequately know him, she knew what she felt.
During the course of her long life, Mrs. Rundel spoke about the liberation of Elba on several occasions, sometimes in response to related stories she’d read or heard and sometimes in reply to questions put to her in conversations. But she spoke to her husband at length about Amdu just a few separate times, and only once when her children were present—the previous night, when they had all gathered at a restaurant for her seventieth birthday.
She knew her family loved to hear her stories about Elba. Since she had ordered an appetizer of calamari, she told them about the giant squid she’d once seen stretched out on the quay in Portoferraio. She went on to describe the dangerous rocks at Viticcio. Her children had visited the island when they were young, but she hadn’t taken them to Viticcio. They would be shocked to see the rocks where she had learned to dive, she said.
Her daughter reminded her that she’d said the same thing before.
“It’s amazing I survived,” she added.
Her son said, “You always say that.”
“Or even that I learned anything at all in those provincial schools,” she continued. She laughed when she thought about how she had believed the rumors that there were diamonds on the volcano called Volterraio. She’d spent hours digging on the slopes and never found anything better than pyrite and quartz. “Diamonds, no.” The German soldiers had started the rumors.
Her son wanted to hear about the German soldiers and the occupation. her daughter wanted to hear about the liberation. Adriana recounted the history as simple summary, but she included the story of spending the night hiding in a cabinet—a story she knew she’d told them before. Then Robert urged her to tell the children about the Senegalese soldier.
“What Senegalese soldier?” Max, her son, asked.
Anna said she’d recently seen a film about Senegalese soldiers who were bombed by the French military in their own camp after returning to West Africa after World War II. It was based on a true story, Anna said. And was it really true that the Senegalese went to Elba? Certo—of course—Adriana found herself surprised that this wasn’t common knowledge. Of course the Senegalese went to Elba. And one of them came to stay at La Chiatta.
Over a dish of sea bass and potatoes, she told her children the story of Amdu Diop. Robert filled in, gently adding details that his wife managed to leave out. But he didn’t remind her to tell the children what Amdu had written in his letter. He couldn’t have reminded her, since, after all these years, she still had never mentioned it to him. How could she tell him about the contents of a letter that she had never read?
Say your body has been in the world for seventeen years, four months, three days, and five hundred and twelve minutes. Say you’ve already sealed the letter you just wrote and addressed the envelope and placed it for safekeeping in the empty leather box that once held a pair of field glasses. You buckled the lid closed to keep the letter safe from the prying eyes of your comrades and you asked one of the boat pilots ferrying soldiers from shore to deliver it to whatever trustworthy Italian he could find.
Say you’ve already had a good long piss and even briefly admired the invention of the urinal. Lying on a thin mattress in the berth of a warship, staring at the ceiling, you admire the pattern of bolts holding the steel plates in place. You pretend that the ceiling is the sky, the impressions in the bolt heads are stars, and the rust streaks are the tails of comets. You pretend that there’s a fresh night breeze blowing through the cabin and that the coughs and sighs of your exhausted comrades in their bunks are
the sounds of the nocturnal life along the Saloum River—wild dogs, monkeys, fruit bats, tree frogs.
The surface of your skin is the place between what you are and what you’re not. You feel the air with your fingertips, then you entwine your fingers and feel the fact of your hands. You try to identify the varying sensations that come with being yourself, from your head to your bare toes. On your scalp you feel a slight itchiness and wish that you had borrowed a bar of the honey-colored soap you washed with at La Chiatta. On your face you feel chalky dust settling—just to think about it makes you sneeze, and the one sneeze feels so satisfying that you do it again. Achoo! You feel the thump of the foot that the irritated soldier beneath you has kicked against the bottom of your bunk in response to your loud sneezes. He is telling you to shut up!
You feel your biceps bulging when you press the palms of your hands together. You feel the hollow of your deep-set navel. Between the ridges of your hips you feel a tightening sensation that reminds you of a tortoise withdrawing into its shell, as though your self-awareness were a shadow crossing the path, giving your body reason to hide. Yet the same shadow rouses your penis into action—you feel it stiffening and, along with your awareness of pleasure, you feel a new eagerness to finish whatever it is you’ve started. You don’t want the pleasure to end, but you can’t wait until you’ve reached the culmination. Never and until. Wanting and wanting. Life is never less than interesting. You can’t think of a time you’ve ever been bored. Doesn’t it feel fine just to be in the midst of something that deserves to be completed?
He, Amdu Diop, knows himself to be the proud inhabitant of a strong, healthy seventeen-year-old body. Above all, he feels safe inside himself, as though his skin were as thick as the ship’s armor plating. If he were running a race, he’d be running his fastest—not to win, but to reach the finish line in the shortest time possible.
