I went into the piazza, and beside the Fascist Club I met some teachers who were looking for Avanguardisti to summon to an assembly, those with their uniform in order: they had to be there early the next morning. A trip to Menton was in the offing: a squadron of Young Falangists was due to arrive from Spain, and the Fascist Youth Movement of my home town had received the order to provide a guard of honour at the station in Menton: Menton had become Italy’s new border post for the past few months.
Menton had been annexed to Italy, but it was still off-limits to civilians, and this was the first chance I had to visit it. So I put my name down on the list, along with that of my schoolfriend, Biancone, whom I promised to notify.
Biancone and I got on very well, even though we were both different types; we always liked to be present where new things were happening, and to comment on them from a position of critical detachment. However, Biancone was more inclined than me to get involved in the regime’s initiatives and sometimes to imitate Fascist poses with a mimicry that bordered on caricature. Out of his love for a life full of action, he had gone to an Avanguardisti camp in Rome the year before, and had come back with the braid of a group leader. Something I would never have done, partly because of my innate incompatibility with leadership qualities, and partly out of my hatred for the city of Rome, where I had sworn I would never set foot as long as I lived.
The trip to Menton was a different matter: I was now curious to see that town, so near and so similar to my own, but which had become a conquered land, devastated and deserted; to be more precise, it was the only conquest we’d made during our war in June and was purely symbolic. We had recently seen a documentary in the cinema showing the battles fought by our troops in the streets of Menton, but we knew that it was all a charade, that Menton had not been conquered by anyone, just evacuated by the French at the time of France’s collapse and subsequently occupied and ransacked by our boys.
For this undertaking Biancone was the ideal companion: on the one hand, he was, unlike me, close to people in the Fascist Youth movement; on the other, our school companionship had made us similar in tastes, in our language, in our sarcastic curiosity about events, and by going places together even the most tedious circumstances turned into a constant exercise in observation and humour. I would only go to Menton if he came too; that was why I immediately sought him out.
He was not in the usual billiard halls; to go to his house I had to go up into the old town. Under the dark archways lamps that were daubed with blue emitted a fake light, which did not reach the edges of the alleyways and cobbled steps, but was reflected only on the streaks of white paint marking the steps. I guessed I was passing by people sitting in the dark outside their houses, on their doorsteps or astride straw-bottomed chairs. The shadows were padded, so to speak, with these human presences, which manifested themselves in chatter, sudden calls and laughter, though always in hushed, intimate tones, and also sometimes in the white of a woman’s arm or a dress.
From the darkness of an archway I finally popped out under the open sky: only then did I see, between the branches of a carob tree, that it was starless but clear. There the city finished its cluster of houses and started to dwindle into the countryside and to extend its untidy offshoots up the valleys. Beyond the walls of a garden the white shadows of the villas on the opposite slope let out only tiny slivers of light around the window frames. A road that was flanked by a metallic fence went halfway down the hill to the river, and there, in a little house topped by a terrace with a pergola, was where Biancone lived. In the calm air, filled with the sound of rustling reeds, I went closer, and whistled towards his house.
We met in the street, and Biancone was a bit surprised at my suggestion at first, because during that summer we had taken diligent care to avoid the Fascist Youth movement and its urgent attempts to enrol us for its ‘Youth March’, which seemed to epitomize the smug arrogance of that loud-mouthed institution. Now, however, the alarm was over, because the ‘Youth March’ was coming to an end, and in fact those Young Spanish Fascists were on their way to the final parade in front of Mussolini, in some city in the Veneto.
Biancone was immediately taken with my plan, and we talked excitedly about what we would do the next day, what would happen to our military conquests, and about the war. Of the latter we only knew the few things that had happened to our area during the days when it was just behind the front; and yet that was enough to give us the sense of the countries invaded by enemy armies. In June the order had come for immediate evacuation of the hinterland; we had seen the refugees passing through our town’s streets, dragging carts laden with their meagre belongings: burst mattresses, bags of meal, a goat, a hen. The exodus did not last long, but long enough for them to find their homes and farms devastated on their return. My father had started to go around the countryside to take stock of the war damage: he would return home weary and saddened by the new losses he had calculated and estimated, but which, in his heart of hearts, in his parsimonious farmer’s soul, were incalculable and pointless, like a human body that had been mutilated. There were vines that had been uprooted to supply posts for a billet, healthy olive trees cut down for firewood, citrus groves where mules tied to the trees had killed them off by gnawing away at the bark; but there was also – and here the outrage seemed to be turned against human nature itself, and was no longer the fruit of vulgar ignorance, but a warning about a latent, painful ferocity – vandalism inside houses: smashing everything, down to the last cup in the kitchen, into a thousand pieces, defacing family photographs, reducing beds to shreds, or – overcome by God knows what depraved perversity – shitting into plates and saucepans. On hearing such tales, my mother said she could not believe such things could have been done by our people; and we were unable to draw any other moral except this: that for the conquering soldier every land is enemy territory, even his own.
At times, some of these stories would plunge me into lonely rages, twisted frenzies that found no outlet. To recover from them I would turn, with the fickleness of inclination of the young, to cynicism: I would go out, meet friends I could trust, and I was calm, clear, sneering – ‘Hey, have you heard the latest?’ – and the things that had in private seemed to torment me now became quips, retorts full of paradoxical bravado, to be said with a wink, with a brief laugh, almost with approval and admiration for those exploits.
That was the kind of thing Biancone and I said as we talked quietly in the dark street outside his house, lowering our voices every so often almost to the point of not being able to understand each other and conversely ending up by saying the most outrageous things very loudly, as always happened to us. I did not know whether Fascism was also for Biancone something he had to suffer, or rather a joyous opportunity to share the two different natures, the two different privileges, of his character: the facility with which he assimilated himself to the Fascist style, and at the same time the critical acumen which our precocious vocation towards opposition had nurtured in us. Biancone was shorter than me, but stronger and more muscular, with a face that had haughty, square features, especially in his jaws, jawbones and the clear outline of his forehead; these features of his were contrasted with the pallor that set him apart from the young people here, especially in the summer. The fact is that in summer Biancone slept all day and went out at night: he did not like the sea nor life in the open; and his favourite sports were wrestling and exercises in the gym. His was a lined face, that of an old man; I thought I could read in it the bitter initiations of his nocturnal wanderings, which I thoroughly envied him. But this face of his had a strange capacity to take on Mussolini’s expressions: sticking out his lips, raising his chin, keeping his solid neck erect with its straight nape, and also stiffening into military poses when you least expected it; with these reflexes and his lapidary replies he often used to confound our teachers and get out of trouble. His most obvious characteristic was the way he combed his smooth, black hair: a strange style like a helm
et or Roman ship’s prow, divided by a very precise parting. It was a hairstyle invented by him and of which he was very fond.
We said goodbye, agreeing to meet at assembly time. Biancone went away to wind up his alarm. I went off to warn my parents to wake me. ‘What are you going there for?’ my father asked: he could see nothing interesting about an empty city.
My father and mother had a permit to allow them to go to Menton once a week: they had been entrusted with the care of some gardens full of rare and exotic plants, which were the property of enemy subjects. They came back with their sample-holders full of diseased leaves; their visits only served to verify the progress made by the insects, weeds and drought in the abandoned flower beds. The beds would really have needed gardeners, work, expenditure, whereas all they could do was to help a particular precious exemplar, to fight against a fungus, to save a species from extinction. They persisted in those gestures of vegetal pietas at a time when already whole peoples were dying, mown down like hay.
The next morning I went out early; it was grey; because of the time, I thought, but also because of the clouds. Beside the Fascist Club there were still only a few Avanguardisti, all boys I knew but who were not really my close friends. They were buying loaves of bread with ham in a café that had just opened and were biting into them and pushing each other in the middle of the road. More continued to arrive, one by one, not in any hurry: they saw there was still time and went off again with a friend to buy food or cigarettes. None of my friends were there. Most of them were boys who, in that semblance of military discipline as practised by the Fascist Youth, moved with an aggressive nonchalance, like pirates, whereas I could never be spontaneous and free.
The deadline for the assembly had passed some time ago; the Avanguardisti were gathering in large groups along the street, but there was no sign yet of either the bus, nor our leaders nor Biancone. I was used to my friend’s late arrivals, which he always mysteriously managed to make coincide with the late arrivals of our superiors or with delays in the organization of ceremonies, perhaps because of that innate knack of his of identifying himself with those who told us what to do. But on this occasion I was really worried that he would not show up. I had approached some of the more reasonable and discreet types, but they were people I knew to be the least interesting: for instance, a certain Orazi, who was studying to be a technical engineer, and who looked around him with a calm, blue gaze, and spoke slowly about the short-wave radios he was building. Orazi would have been an excellent companion for the trip, but he had none of that spirit of discovery, that witty conversation that characterized Biancone’s company. I knew that for the whole of the journey he would only drone on about his radios, and the sights that would capture his attention would be mechanical or architectural curiosities or things to do with ballistics, which he would explain in great detail. So the trip to Menton no longer held any attraction for me. The fact is, I still had that need for friends that is typical of the young, in other words: the need to give sense to what they live through by discussing it with others; what I mean is that I was far from that manly self-sufficiency that can only be acquired through love and which is a mixture of integration with others and solitude.
Suddenly I heard Biancone talking behind me: he was with the others, joking, and had already entered into the morning’s spirit of mockery, as though he had always been there. As soon as Biancone arrived, everything took on another rhythm. The officers popped up, clapping their hands: ‘Come on, come on, quickly now, are you all asleep?’ The coach arrived, we started to form a queue and divide ourselves into groups. Biancone was one of the group leaders and was instantly told what his duties were. He called me with a wink into the squad he would command, and he jokingly threatened us with God knows how many laps of running as punishment for something or other. The window of the armoury opened and one by one each of us was quickly given a rifle and other accoutrements by a sleepy and irascible militia-man. We climbed on to the coach and set off.
We were going along the Riviera and the officers urged us into a song, which soon died out. The sky was still grey, the sea a glassy green. Near Ventimiglia we looked with curious eyes at the houses and cement ponds which had crumbled under the explosions: they were the first bombed-out homes we had seen in our lives. From the entrance to a railway tunnel the famous armoured train, Hitler’s gift to Mussolini, was sticking out; they kept it under there to prevent it from being bombed.
We approached the old border at Ponte San Luigi, and Captain Bizantini, who was leading us, started to stir up national pride over this business of Italy’s borders moving. But the conversation quickly dwindled into an embarrassed silence, because, in that initial period of the war, the topic of our Western borders was delicate and embarrassing even for the most avid Fascists. For our entry into the war at the moment when France collapsed had not taken us to Nice, but only to that modest little border town of Menton. The rest would come our way, they said, at the peace settlement, but by now the idea of a triumphal entry with full pomp had faded, and even in the hearts of those who had least doubts there was the worry that that disappointing delay might go on indefinitely; and the feeling spread that Italy’s fate was not in Mussolini’s hands but in those of his powerful ally.
By the time we got to Menton it was raining. The rain was coming down heavily in thin showers over the horizon-less sea and the villas that were all locked and bolted up. In the midst of the rain was the city sitting on its rocks. Military motorbikes ran across the shiny asphalt of the promenade. On the rain-streaked windows of the coach gleamed fragmentary images, and behind each one a whole world opened up for me to discover. In the tree-lined avenues I recognized the misty cities of the North I had never seen: was Menton Paris? There was an Art Nouveau shop-sign: was France the past? There was nobody to be seen except for the odd sentinel sheltering in his garret, and builders using bags as rain hoods. And greyness, eucalyptus trees, and the oblique lines of field-telephone wires.
We got out; it was raining; it seemed that we were immediately to form ranks at the station, but instead we all got back on the bus again and went to another place – I don’t know what it was: a villa that had been requisitioned, maybe – then a walk for a bit in the rain, up to a kind of smaller villa that was empty, which could also have been a school or a gendarmes’ barracks, and there we left our rifles in a row, leaning against the wall, out of the rain.
Our clothes gave off a damp smell: I was quite happy, because my uniform had always kept its depressing, dusty smell of the depot, which maybe this time would go away. Nobody knew when those Spaniards were meant to arrive, as there was no timetable for the trains coming from France, so every so often a group leader would come back shouting: ‘Assembly! Assembly with rifles!’; but then, again, we would hear: ‘Dis-miss!’ At times it seemed that no one in the whole of Menton had ever heard anything about the Spanish, at other times it was as if they were expected any minute; in fact, at one point they were arriving at ‘ten past eleven’, as we were assured by a rumour that continued to circulate until five past eleven, and then petered out.
We ate everything we had brought from home, standing up, under the little portico of the barracks-villa, watching the rain pouring onto the empty garden. Between one assembly and another some people had managed to find a way of escaping, going around the town and buying cigarettes and orangeade. It seemed that there were some shops open nearby, catering specifically for the builders.
At midday the sun came out and it stopped raining. They were unable to keep us there any longer and everybody headed off in small groups, so they gave us half an hour of leave. Biancone and I went off on our own, rejecting as too pathetic the pursuit of merely a tobacconist or a billiard hall, and as too unlikely the search for women. We walked slowly, looking at the French slogans which had been cancelled out, the timid signs of life from the few families who had been repatriated – shopkeepers, mostly – and broken windows, the houses which had been
hit and which had a plastery, convalescent look. We ended up on a series of minor roads, halfway into the countryside. A builder from the Veneto told us that the new border was five minutes away and we hurried off in that direction. There was a valley with a stream, the Italian flag and, in the distance, the French flag. An Italian soldier asked us in hostile terms what we wanted, and we replied: ‘Just looking.’ And we looked, in silence. Over there was France, the defeated nation, and here Italy began, Italy which had always won and would always win.
As we returned late to the assembly point, some people were coming away and there was apparently good news: ‘They’re here! They’re here!’ ‘Who? The Spanish?’ ‘No, the people bringing lunch.’ Apparently a van had arrived with food for all of us. But nobody knew where it was: where we were there were neither officers nor assemblies. We continued roaming round the town.
In a bombed-out square covered with earth, a monument had survived: a female figure in a long skirt was bending down towards a young girl coming towards her; at the side of this scene was a cockerel. It was the monument to the 1860 plebiscite: the girl was Menton, and the woman was France. So our scepticism triumphed over easy targets: on the one hand, we mocked the Roman eagles on our uniforms, and on the other, that little scene out of a reading book; the whole world was stupid and only the two of us were witty and clever.