The Road to San Giovanni Page 6

  Good, this is exactly the moment I wanted to start my story from. For years I’ve been telling myself, not now, later, when I want to remember, all I’ll have to do is conjure up the relief I felt on untying my stiff boots, the feeling of the ground under the soles of my feet, the twinges from chestnut husks and wild thistles, the circumspect way feet have of settling on the ground when at every step prickles are sinking through wool into the skin, see myself stopping to pull the husks from the felt-padded bottoms of my socks which immediately pick up others, I thought all I’d have to do was remember this moment and all the rest would follow on naturally like a ball of wool unwinding, like the unravelling of those socks with their holes at the big toe and the heel, over other layers of socks likewise with holes and inside all the prickles the grass spikes the twigs, the vegetable dusting of undergrowth caught in wool.

  If I concentrate on this magnified detail I do it so as not to recognize how many holes there are in my memory. What had been night’s shadows earlier on are bright blurred stains now. Every sign is interpreted, like the crowing of the cocks in Baiardo breaking the dawn silence all together, which could be a sign that all is proceeding normally or that the village is already in a state of alert. Our squad has taken up position with the machine gun in the olive groves at the bottom of the hill. We can’t see the village. There is a pole carrying the telephone wire that links Baiardo to (I think) Ceriana. I remember the objectives assigned to us very well: to cut the telephone wires as soon as we hear the attack begin, to cut off the Fascists if they try to escape down the hill through the fields, to be ready to climb up to the villages to reinforce the attack as soon as we get the order.

  What I would like to know is why the broken net of the memory holds some things and not others: I remember one by one these orders that were never carried out, but now I would like to remember the faces and names of my companions in the squad, the voices, the dialect phrases, and how we managed to cut the wires without pincers. I even remember the battle plan, how it was supposed to unfold in various phases, and how it didn’t unfold. But to follow the thread of my story I’ll have to remember it all through my ears: the special silence of a country morning full of men moving in silence, rumblings, shots filling the sky. A silence that was expected but that lasted longer than expected. Then shots, every kind of explosion and machine-gun fire, a muddle of sound we can’t make sense of because it doesn’t take shape in space but only in time, a time of waiting for us stationed at the valley bottom where we can’t see a damn thing.

  I continue to gaze into the valley bottom of the memory. And my fear now is that as soon as a memory forms it immediately takes on the wrong light, mannered, sentimental as war and youth always are, becomes a piece of narrative written in the style of the time, which can’t tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them, thought we said them. I don’t know if I am destroying the past or saving it, the past hidden in that besieged village.

  The village is up there, near and unapproachable, a village where there wasn’t very much worth capturing in the end, but which for us nomads out in the woods for months had become the focus of notions of home, streets, people. A girl evacuee who the previous August (when we held Baiardo) had looked at me in amazement on recognizing me among the partisans. You see, memories of war and youth couldn’t help but include at least one woman’s glance, in the middle of the village besieged in its circle of death. Now the circle is just isolated shots. An occasional burst of fire still. Silence. We are on the alert, ready to cut off some lost enemy. But nobody comes. We wait. However things have gone, surely now one of our people will come to get us. We’ve been here a long time on our own, cut off from everything.

  Again it’s sound, not sight, that holds the reins of this memory: from the village comes a din of voices, singing now. Our boys celebrating victory! We head towards the village, almost at a run. We’re right by the first houses already. What are they singing? It’s not “Fischia il vento …” We stop. It’s “Giovinezza” they’re singing! The Fascists have won. Immediately we leap down through the olive terraces, trying to put as much distance as we can between us and the village. Heaven knows how long our lot have been retreating already. Heaven knows how we are going to catch up with them. We’ve been left stranded in enemy territory.

  My memories of the battle end here. Now all I can do is cast about for my memories of the flight over a carpet of hazelnuts along the dry streambed we try to climb up to avoid the roads, go back and make my way once again through the night and the woods (a human shadow ran across our path, seized by panic it seemed, we never found out who), sift through the cold ashes of the deserted camp trying to find traces of the Olmo squad.

  Or I could bring into focus everything I later found out about the battle: how our men ran into the village shooting and were pushed back leaving three dead. And immediately I try to describe the battle in a way I didn’t see it, the memories that have so far lingered behind vague shadows suddenly pick up speed and direction: I see the column opening up the way to the piazza while the others who went around the village are climbing the steps of the narrow streets. I could give them all their names, their places their gestures. Memories of what I didn’t see in the battle take on a more precise order and sense than what I really experienced, because free from the confused sensations that clutter my memory of the whole. Of course even here there are blanks I can’t fill. I concentrate on the faces I know best: Gino is in the piazza: a thickset boy commanding our brigade, he looks into the square and crouches shooting from a balustrade, black tufts of beard round his tense jaw, small eyes shining under the peak of his Mexican hat. I know that Gino had taken to wearing a different hat at the time but I can’t remember now if it was a bearskin or a wool cap, or a mountain cap.

  I keep seeing him with that big straw hat that belongs to a memory of the previous summer.

  But there’s no time left for imagining details because the boys have to get out fast if they’re not to be trapped inside the village. Tritolo jumps forward from a low wall and throws a grenade as if he were playing a joke. Cardù is near him covering the others as they retreat, waving to them to say the way is clear now. Some of the bersaglieri have already recognized the Milan squad, ex-comrades of theirs who came over to us a year ago. And here I’m getting close to the point that’s been on my mind right from the beginning, the moment when Cardù dies.

  This imagined memory is actually a real memory from that time because I am recovering things I first imagined back then. It wasn’t the moment of Cardù’s death I saw, but afterwards, when our men had already left the village and one of the bersaglieri turns over a body on the ground and sees the reddish-brown moustache and the big chest torn open and says, “Hey, look who’s dead,” and then everybody gathers round this dead man who instead of being the best of theirs had become the best of ours, Cardù who ever since he had left them had been in their thoughts, their conversation, their fears, their myths, Cardù who many of them would have liked to emulate if only they’d had the courage, Cardù who carried the secret of his strength in that calm bold smile.

  Everything I’ve written so far serves to show me that I remember almost nothing of that morning now, and there would be other pages to write to tell of the evening, the night. The night of the dead man in the enemy village watched over by the living who no longer know who is living and who is dead. My own night as I search for my comrades in the mountains to have them tell me if I have won or if I have lost. The distance that separates that night then from this night I’m writing in now. The sense of everything appearing and disappearing.

  LA POUBELLE AGRÉÉE

  When it comes to housework, the only task I can perform with a certain amount of competence and satisfaction is that of taking out the rubbish. The operation involves a number of stages: removal of the kitchen bin and emptying of the same into the larger bin in the garage, then transportation of the said larger bin to the pavement outside the front door, where it
will be picked up by the dustbin men and itself emptied into their truck.

  The kitchen bin is a cylindrical bucket made of a plastic material which is pea-green in colour. Before taking it out one has to wait for the right moment, when it can be assumed that everything there was to throw away has been thrown away, that is when, having cleared the table, the last bone or peel or crust has slipped down off the smooth surface of the plates, and the same rapid gesture of expert hands has arranged those plates, after a first quick rinse under the tap, in neat columns in the racks in the dishwasher.

  Kitchen life is based on a musical rhythm, on a concatenation of movements, like dance steps, and when I speak of rapid gestures, it’s a female hand I think of, not my own clumsy sluggish movements, that’s for sure, always getting in the way of everybody else’s work. (At least that’s what I’ve been told my life long by parents, friends – male and female – superiors, underlings and even my daughter these days. They’ve been conspiring together to demoralize me, I know; they think that if they go on telling me I’m hopeless they’ll convince me there’s an element of truth to the story. But I hang back on the sidelines, waiting for an opportunity to make myself useful, to redeem myself.)

  Now the plates are all caged up in their little carriage, round faces astonished to find themselves standing upright, curved backs waiting for the storm about to break over them down there at the bottom of the tunnel where they will be sent off in exile until the cycle of cloudbursts, waterspouts and steam jets is over. This is the moment for me to go into action.

  Here I am, then, on my way downstairs already, holding the bucket by its semicircular handle, taking care that it doesn’t swing too much and spill its contents. The lid I usually leave behind in the kitchen: it’s an irksome accessory, that lid, it never quite manages to combine its two tasks of concealing the rubbish and of getting out of the way when you have some more to chuck in. The compromise one settles for involves keeping it at an angle, a bit like a mouth opening, trapping it between the bucket and the wall in precarious equilibrium, so that it winds up on the floor, with a dull bang, not unpleasant to the ear, like a vibration that’s been restrained, since plastic doesn’t vibrate.

  I ought to say that here in Paris we’re living in a one-family home (to use a less than attractive but understandable contemporary locution), or a pavilion (to put it in a French at once timeless and still rich with suggestive connotation). This so as to explain the different sense of my ritual gestures with respect to those performed by the condominium owner or tenant in a big block of flats who gets rid of his daily rubbish by emptying it from the family poubelle into the communal poubelle, which is usually located in the courtyard of the building and which at the appropriate time the porters wife will put out on the street thence to be entrusted to the care of the council refuse collection service. That transfer from one container to another, which for most inhabitants of the metropolis takes on the significance of a passage from private to public, for me in our house, in the garage where we keep the big poubelle during the day, is only the last gesture of the ceremonial upon which the private is founded – and as such is accomplished by myself as paterfamilias – my taking leave of the leftovers of things confirming their complete and irreversible appropriation.

  It must be said, however, that the big poubelle, despite being undeniably our own private property, having been purchased in regular fashion on the open market, already looks, in terms of its shape and colour (a dark green, military-uniform grey), like a piece of official city equipment, and proclaims the role that the public sphere, civic duty and the constitution of the polis play in all our lives. Our choosing it was not in fact the result of the arbitrariness of aesthetic taste, or of our experience in its practical use, as happens with other household objects, but was dictated by respect for the city’s bylaws. Wisely, these laws prescribe the features and dimensions such poubelles must have in order that their daily deployment along the city streets not be offensive to the eye (uniformity tends to pass unobserved), or to the sense of smell (the lid, as long as the rubbish is not overflowing, ought to close around the top of the drum with its profiled edge, in such a way that neither the wild leap of the cat in heat nor the methodic sniffing of the dog can knock it off), or to the ear (replacing the old metal version, the soft plastic muffles any clashing sounds, thus protecting the townsfolk’s sleep when in the uncertain light of dawn the dustbin men get down to the business of pulling off the lids and dragging away the bins to tip them up into their ghostly trucks).

  It’s no accident that the exact name of this kind of container, the name used by the customer who wishes to buy it in a general store and by the shopkeeper who sells it to him, is the poubelle agréée, which is to say a pleasing dustbin, something approved and acceptable (with the implication: approved by prefectorial regulations and by the authority that is made outwardly manifest in them and that is inwardly present in the individual consciences of the citizens, thus founding the basis of our social contract and of the expediencies of good living). One should remember at this point that in the expression poubelle agréée it is not just the adjective that bears the seal of paternal metropolitan bureaucracy, but the substantive that comes before it. Poubelle, a common noun describing an object, recalls the proper name of a person: it was a Monsieur Poubelle, Prefect of the Seine, who first ordered (in 1884) the use of these containers in the hitherto polluted streets of Paris.

  With the result that when I empty the small bin into the big one and lift it up by its two handles to carry it out of our front door, though still functioning as a humble cog in the domestic machine, I am nevertheless already taking on a social role; offering myself as the first link in a chain of operations crucial for collective cohabitation, I am confirming my dependence on the institutions without which I would die buried under my own rubbish in the snail shell of my individual existence, at once introverted and (in more than one sense) autistic. Such is the departure point for proper clarification of the reasons that make my poubelle truly agréée: acceptable in the first place to me, even if not pleasant, as one has to accept the unpleasant without which none of what pleases us would have any sense.

  I do recall other ways of getting rid of rubbish: having lived in big apartment blocks, I know the dull sound the contents of a bin make when they rush through the vertical disposal ducts, plummeting down and down to the dark vaults at courtyard level: a procedure that combines an agile exploitation of gravity – the first beneficiaries of which were doubtless the prehistoric lake dwellers – with the system, adopted even earlier by the cavemen, of heaping things up in remote ravines, and one that brings with it the well-known drawbacks of evil-smelling accumulations whenever the shaft gets blocked.

  Going further back in time, the San Remo of my childhood springs to mind, and I see the dustbin man with his sack on his back walking up the hairpins of the drive as far as the villa to collect the rubbish from the zinc bin: our genteel lifestyle seemed guaranteed for all eternity by the availability of cheap labour.

  Meanwhile, in the endless residential suburbs of individualistic, prosperous, democratic, industrial civilization, thousands of identical little people came out of identical little houses, each complete with little garden and garage, to place thousands of identical bins in line on the pavements: an Anglo-Saxon image that goes back to the dawn of the society of the masses, but which in my memory is associated with my first trip to America, when I was still living in a fluid, floating bachelor anarchy in which household duties were certainly the last thing on my mind, and it was Barolini who spoke to me then of the rule of taking out the “garbage can” every day as being one of the key elements underpinning domestic life in Croton-on-Hudson. (The father of an exemplary American family – the family was American, not him – he had immersed himself in his role late in life and tended to observe himself from outside as he acted his part.)

  “The garbagio,” he would say in his Anglo-Veneto, as if to impress his chore firmly in his mind,
“I mustn’t forget to take out the garbagio.” The voice of my dead friend has been coming back to me ever since I became a father myself, and likewise of a foreign family, not in a green suburb of New York but in a densely populated suburb at the gates of Paris (but can it really be Paris? I look out from a little house more Londonish than Parisian onto a secluded courtyard that people call the Square, more maybe because of the vague sense of disorientation it inspires than because of the green you see condensed in stunted lilacs along the walls) ever since I too started putting out the “garbage can”, or poubelle agréée, in front of the gate.

  It was no doubt his obedience to Christian precepts which brought my friend to accept this rule quite happily. And me? I would like to be able to say, with Nietzsche, “I love my destiny,” but I can’t do that until I have explained for myself the reasons that lead me to love it. Carrying out the poubelle agréée is not something I do without thinking, but something that needs to be thought about and that awakens the special satisfaction I get from thinking.