Into the War Read online

  Martin McLaughlin, 2011

  An Unpublished Note by Calvino on Into the War

  This book deals both with a transition from adolescence into youth and with a move from peace to war: as for very many other people, for the protagonist of this book ‘entry into life’ and ‘entry into war’ coincide. Here the war is something that people know little of as yet: the setting is the first period of Italy’s intervention in what would become known as the Second World War; and the protagonist is a boy who is privileged in many respects, untouched by the trauma of more pressing problems, and who – perhaps for this very reason – still knows little about himself. However, the facts narrated already contain a large part of the future, prefigured and implied; and already there is at work in those facts, in their stop-start rhythm, the eternal interaction between the movement of collective history and the maturing of individual consciences. What I wanted to represent here was precisely the work of the conscience, its hard-fought moral advances in adolescence; and all this perhaps with an implied polemic against the more habitual image of adolescence in literature today.

  This might have been the theme for a novel, had it not been for the necessity felt by us contemporary writers – whether this is a method or a limitation – to write by isolating a particular aspect in order to study it down to its core. In this way the book gradually structured itself into three separate pieces of narrative, which have in common the protagonist, the period and the place, as well as more or less the same mixture of memory and imagination, but each of them has an autonomous development and is modulated according to its own state of mind and its own rhythm. One cannot – as is well known – transform such tales into a novel simply by placing them alongside each other. For that reason, instead of following the chronological order of the facts narrated, it has been decided to leave the three stories [in the 1954 edition] in the order in which they were written, which is also the order in which the artistic thrust of each is best placed: the most evocative, bold and sincere story first [‘The Avanguardisti in Menton’], the most compassionate and moralistic one next [‘Into the War’], and lastly the one that is most compromised by elements of fun and emotion [‘UNPA Nights’].

  The book can also be considered – to use an image from war that is appropriate to the subject-matter – as an incursion that the author has carried out into the territory of ‘the literature of memory’, which is to him basically foreign territory. The raid was carried out in order to pit himself – like an enemy who does not fear hand-to-hand combat – against autobiographical lyricism, and to seek out in that land, too, the paths towards that narrative of morality and adventure which is dear to his heart. Just like anyone who carries out incursions, he hopes to come back laden with booty, and not to enrich his enemy with his own spoils.

  Italo Calvino, c. 1954

  A Note on the Text

  The note on the previous pages was probably written around the time of the first publication of the trilogy, in 1954, and the reader will notice that in that edition the order of the stories reflected the chronological order of their composition: first ‘The Avanguardisti in Menton’, second ‘Into the War’, third ‘UNPA Nights’.1

  As for the text, Calvino’s discomfort at writing this autobiographical material is evident in the substantial cuts that he made in this trilogy between this first publication as a single volume in 1954 and the slightly shorter version printed in his collected short stories (Racconti, published by Einaudi in 1958), where the order of the stories reflects the chronological order of the facts narrated in them: the latter is the definitive version, found in the 1974 and subsequent editions, and the one on which this translation is based. In the 1958 Racconti, the three tales appeared in the section significantly entitled ‘Difficult Memories’. In the first tale to be written, ‘The Avanguardisti in Menton’, he made no fewer than ten major cuts over the first twenty-two pages of what is a twenty-five page story in the original Italian. Perhaps this was because it was the author’s first full-scale autobiographical tale, and, in this first venture into ‘the literature of memory’, Calvino felt he was initially too expansive about close friends. Two of these major deletions were lengthy descriptions of his best friend, Biancone (his real name was Duilio Cossu); two gave more details about the enthusiastic Fascist schoolboy Ceretti; and he also excised other passages describing individual characters: Captain Bizantini, the Tuscan Federal Commander, a cartoon-like anecdote about the Fascist leaders Starace and Bottai, and a passage on the protagonist’s own pessimism about the outcome of the war.

  In the second tale written, the title story ‘Into the War’, nine passages were altered for the 1958 version, but these occur only over the first four pages of a fourteen-page story, most of them concerning his aristocratic friend, here called Jerry Ostero (in real life Percivalle Roero di Monticello), and Ostero’s brother, who was killed at Tobruk. He also cut a couple of allusions to his father and the fact that he had left the rich tobacco fields of Yucatán to come back to Mussolini’s Italy, as though it were a promised land.

  Since, in the final tale, ‘UNPA Nights’, Calvino felt the need to excise just one passage about a peripheral character (the night-bird Palladiani), it seems as if he had gradually adapted to this autobiographical mode, i.e. not writing too many details about family and friends that he would later have to eliminate. However, the fact that, in the midst of this pruning of excessively personal memoirs, he retained the long closing passage describing his father reinforces its significance for the author as an act of literary pietas, making it a sequence that he was keen to retain, a literary settling of his debt to Mario Calvino.

  *

  The translator wishes to thank the following people for their expertise in helping solve a number of problems: Luca Baranelli, Mario Barenghi, Guido Bonsaver, Sarah Chalfant, Esther Calvino, Cathy McLaughlin, Mairi McLaughlin, Elisabetta Tarantino.

  Martin McLaughlin, 2011

  Into the War

  The 10th June 1940 was a cloudy day. It was a time in our lives when we weren’t interested in anything. We went to the beach in the morning all the same, myself and a friend of mine called Jerry Ostero. We knew that Mussolini was to speak in the afternoon, but it was not clear whether we would be going to war or not. On the sand nearly all the beach umbrellas were closed; we walked along the shore exchanging predictions and opinions, with sentences left trailing, and long silent pauses.

  A bit of sun came out and we went on a catamaran, just the two of us and a girl with blondish hair and a long neck who was meant to flirt with Ostero, but in fact did not flirt at all. The girl was Fascist in her opinions, and normally would counter our talk with a lazy, slightly scandalized hauteur, as though dealing with opinions which were not even worthwhile refuting. But that day she was uncertain and vulnerable: she was just about to leave, and she did not want to. Her father, an edgy man, wanted to remove his family from the front before the war broke out, and had already rented a house in a little village in Emilia Romagna from September. That morning we continued to say how good it would be if we did not go to war, so we could relax and go swimming. Even the girl, with her neck craned forward and her hands between her knees, ended up by admitting: ‘Oh yes … oh yes …’ and then in order to dismiss such thoughts: ‘Well, let’s hope that this time, too, it’s a false alarm …’

  We came across a jellyfish floating on the surface of the sea; Ostero went over it with the boat so that it would appear beneath the girl’s feet and frighten her. His trick did not work, because the girl did not notice the jellyfish, and simply said: ‘Oh, what? Where?’ Ostero showed off how coolly he could handle jellyfish: he brought it on board with his oar, and dropped it bellyside up. The girl squealed, but not much; Ostero flung the creature back into the water.

  As we left the beach, Jerry caught up with me, quite full of himself. ‘I kissed her,’ he said. He had gone into her changing booth, demanding a farewell kiss; she did not
want to, but, after a brief struggle, he had managed to kiss her on the mouth. ‘I’m almost there now,’ said Ostero. They had also agreed they would write to each other over the summer. I congratulated him. Ostero, who was easily excited about things, slapped me powerfully and painfully on the back.

  When we saw each other again around 6 p.m., we were at war. It was still cloudy; the sea was grey. A line of soldiers was filing past, heading for the station. Someone applauded them from the terrace overlooking the promenade. None of the soldiers looked up.

  I met Jerry with his officer brother, who was on leave and in civvies, looking elegant and summery. He made a joke about how lucky he was, going on leave the day war was declared. Filiberto Ostero, Jerry’s brother, was very tall, slim and bent slightly forward, like a bamboo stick, with a sarcastic smile on his blonde face. We sat on the terrace near the railway and he talked about the illogical way some of our fortifications near the border had been built, and about the mistakes made by headquarters in repositioning the artillery. The evening was drawing on; the thin outline of the young officer, curved like a comma, with his cigarette lit between his fingers without him ever bringing it to his lips, stood out against the cobweb of railway wires and the opaque sea. Now and again a train with cannons and troops on board would manoeuvre and then set off again for the border. Filiberto was unsure whether to give up his leave and go straight back to his company – driven also by the curiosity to check his glum tactical forecasts – or go to see a girlfriend in Merano. He and his brother discussed how many hours it would take to drive there. He was a bit afraid that the war would finish while he was still on leave; that would be quite funny, but harmful for his career. He got up to go to the casino to gamble; he would decide what to do depending on how his luck turned out. Actually, he said: depending on how much he won; in fact, he was always very lucky. And off he went with that sarcastic smile on his tense lips, the smile with which his image comes back to us even today, after his death in Tobruk.

  The next day there was the first air raid alarm, in the morning. A French plane passed overhead and everyone stared up at it with their noses in the air. That night, another alarm; and a bomb fell and exploded near the casino. There was chaos around the gaming tables, women fainting. Everything was dark because the power station had cut electricity from the whole city, and the only lights to remain on above the green tables were the internal lights powered in-house, under the heavy lampshades which were still swinging to and fro because of the blast.

  There were no victims, we discovered the next day, except a child in the old town, who, in the dark, had spilled a pan of boiling water over himself and had died. But the bomb had all of a sudden wakened and excited the city, and, as happens, the excitement focussed on a fantasy target: spies. All the talk was about windows seen lighting up and going dark at regular intervals during the alarm, or of mysterious characters lighting fires on the seashore, or even of human shadows in the open countryside making signals to aeroplanes by waving a pocket torch towards the starry sky.

  Ostero and I went to see the bomb damage: the corner of a block of flats had collapsed, not much of a bomb really. People gathered round and made comments: everything was still within the parameters of things that were possible and predictable. There was a bombed-out house, but we were not yet inside the war, we did not know yet what it was.

  However, I could not get out of my mind the death of that child scalded by the boiling water. It was an accident, nothing more: the child had bumped into the saucepan in the dark, a few yards from his mother. But the war gave a direction, a general sense to the idiotic irrevocability of that chance accident, which was only indirectly attributable to the hand that lowered the lever switching off the current at the power station, to the pilot whose plane buzzed invisibly in the sky, to the officer who had outlined his route, to Mussolini who had decided on war …

  The city was constantly criss-crossed by armoured cars heading for the front, and by civilian cars full of evacuees with their goods and chattels tied onto the roof. At home I found my parents perturbed by the orders for immediate evacuation of our towns in the lower Alpine valleys. At the time my mother constantly compared the new war with the First World War, to imply that in this one there was none of the family trepidation and upheaval of emotions of the other one, and how the very same words – ‘front’ and ‘trench’ – sounded unrecognizable and strange. Now she remembered the exodus of refugees from the Veneto in 1917, and the different climate then, and also how this ‘evacuation’ of today sounded unjustifiable, simply imposed on people by a cold order from above.

  As for my father’s views on the war, he only said things that were beside the point, since he had lived in America for the first quarter of the century. He had always been someone who was out of place in Europe and out of touch with the times. Those mountains had been familiar to him from childhood days, and had been the setting for his exploits as an old hunter, but even that changeless landscape, he now saw, was in turmoil. He was anxious to know who was affected by the evacuation orders: which of his old hunting companions, people he knew in every remote village, and which of the poor farmers who constantly asked him for advice to appeal against taxes, and which of the greedy complainants whose disputes he was called upon to settle, walking for hours on end to establish irrigation rights for a thin strip of land. Now he could already see the abandoned terraces going back to seed, the dry walls crumbling, and the last families of wild boars – every autumn he would hunt them with his dogs – now leaving the woods, terrified by the cannon’s roar.

  For the evacuees, the newspapers proclaimed, the Fascist government and state assistance had prudently arranged board and lodging in villages in Tuscany, as well as transport services and refreshments, so that nobody should want for anything. In the primary school building in our town a shelter-point and human sorting office had been set up. All those who were enrolled in the Fascist Youth Movement were called up for service there, in uniform. Most of our school-friends were away, and so anyone could pretend not to have received the call-up. Ostero invited me to go with him to try out a new car his family had to buy after their own car had been requisitioned by the army. I said to him: ‘What about the assembly?’

  ‘Well, we’re on holiday, so they can’t suspend us from school.’

  ‘But this is for the refugees …’

  ‘And what can we do about them? They should be looked after by those who were always shouting “War, War!”’

  But as far as I was concerned, this ‘refugee’ business held an appeal for me, though I could not have explained the reason for it precisely. Perhaps it was to do with my parents’ sense of morality: my mother’s civic morality, which stemmed from the first war and was both interventionist and pacifist at the same time, and my father’s ethnic, local morality, his passion for those villages that had been neglected and oppressed. And as with the child scalded by boiling water, so now in the image of a lost crowd of people which the word ‘refugee’ conjured up in me I recognized a genuine, ancient fact, in which I was in some way involved. Certainly my imagination found more food for thought there than in the armoured cars, warships, aeroplanes, the illustrations in Signal magazine, all that other aspect of the war on which people’s general attention was concentrated, as well as my friend Ostero’s bitter technical irony.

  Refugees were being offloaded from an old bus, by the school steps. I went along in my Avanguardista1 uniform. At first glance, the sight of all those people clustered around and their shabby appearance, as though hospital-bound, made me as anxious as if I was arriving at the front line. Then I saw that the women, with their black kerchiefs on their heads, were the same ones I had always seen gathering olives and tending their goats, and that the men were the same as usual – our typically reserved farmers – and I felt I was in a more familiar environment, but at the same time an outsider, cut off. For the fact is that these people had made me feel uneasy even before. I was di
fferent from my father, and so it seemed like a reprimand if I watched them, say, saddling up their mules, opening the furrows in a vineyard with their spades in order to water them, without ever being able to have a rapport with them, or even thinking of being able to help them. And they were still the same for me now, except they were a little more agitated, these people – the mothers and the fathers – intent on their worrying task of handing down the children from the bus, with their old folk sat on the steps, trying to keep the families close together and separate from the others. And what could I do for them? It was pointless thinking of helping them.

  I went up the steps and had to go slowly, because in front of me on each step was an old lady, in black skirt and shawl, with her arms outstretched and her dry hands dotted with dark sores like diseased branches. Children were held in parents’ arms in faded yellow bundles, out of which stuck heads that were as round as pumpkins. A woman who had been ill during the journey was vomiting, holding her forehead; her relations gathered around her motionless, staring at her. I felt no love for any of these people.