How I Lost the War Read online

  FILIPPO BOLOGNA

  HOW I LOST THE WAR

  Translated from the Italian

  by Howard Curtis

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  You see me the way I am now

  Alive and dead

  According to Professor Voinea

  The castle

  As little boys

  Fede was a good shot

  You should have seen the twins when they were little boys

  As riders, they were in the vanguard

  Roman salutes

  Either you eat your soup

  It’ll be like the day of judgement

  March snow

  Beelzebub

  Or you jump out of the window

  He couldn’t get over it

  Vanni had grown up without Fede

  Vanni had had time

  A name and a destiny

  Well, we wanted development

  And that name was Ottone Gattai

  That’s why we’ll win

  Petrol is still too cheap

  It was a piece of luck

  The Aquatrade Resort

  We’re coming to get you

  The scale model is in the town hall

  The wind is blowing hot and humid

  The first time I saw her

  Young man, don’t do what I did

  For Epiphany, we would play Monopoly

  Peasants were worse than their masters

  Paul Newman

  All of them except us

  Like eels

  What would you say to a cordial

  We’ve done so much for you

  New Year’s Eve with a bang

  Sheiks and gangsters

  The trouble is, I was born here

  Sadat Mawazini

  We are working for ourselves

  They’re cutting down the trees

  The whine of the chainsaws

  The serpent

  As citizens who love and respect

  When the snake dies, its poison dies with it

  Now my father

  I see the swollen bellies of the chub

  People shoot themselves in the foot

  The expropriation

  Not a line

  They were days of fierce clashes and uncertain outcomes

  I watch you sleeping

  There’s just Lea and me

  You haven’t looked me in the eyes since that night

  Your clothes are there

  I’ll go

  We’re almost there

  The reasons for the defeat

  Dead dinosaurs

  Water

  The smell of hay

  I waited so long for you

  The young woman was Lea

  What an idiot you are

  This isn’t NASA

  Time has passed

  The war is over

  Also Available from Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  Negritude begins at the Ombrone River

  Luciano Bianciardi

  A DOG HAD ENDED UP INSIDE.

  They had heard it barking for days. Weeks. A heart-rending moan, coming from under the ground. A sound so desperate, it made the night all the colder. It sounded like the weeping of a child walled up in a barrel. Gradually, the barking had grown weaker, until it was almost imperceptible, then had ceased altogether. The old men with faces as cracked as old pottery, cigarettes stuck in the sides of their mouths and ties worn only on Sunday, would say the pit. And they would say it as if uttering a magic word.

  A geologist, a small man no bigger than a sparrow, had hauled himself down into it with ropes. He had got to a certain point, then had come up again and said it was impossible to go any further. So they had thrown in a kind of saffron-coloured sulphur powder used as a reactant. There were those who could have sworn blind that the whole of the following day the water from the Ficoncella and Doccia della Testa springs had come out yellow. But there were also those who could have sworn blind that none of this was true.

  To get there, you have to climb a road that was asphalted about twenty years ago, though I remember when it was still just rubble. It winds through the scrub, sometimes in wide curves, sometimes in tight bends, like the hem of a quilt, and keeps climbing steadily, never pausing for breath. Where the slope is at its steepest, near the big water tank that serves the village during periods of drought, it takes a sharp turn to the right. At first, the tank was one of our strategic targets, but then we thought better of it, because even if we’d tampered with it, the spa would still have had water, lukewarm water, admittedly, but water nevertheless. And the only ones to lose out would have been the poor devils still living down in the village, with the boilers hissing madly in the cellars like old people with emphysema. In front of the cabin belonging to the road- works company, the red one at the side of the road, there’s a small open space where you can leave your car. Then you can continue on foot. In fact, you have to. You go along a narrow path full of pools and puddles that leads into the woods. The path cuts through a clearing pockmarked with large stones that peek out from the grass like fragments of a meteorite that shattered to pieces millions of years ago. You pass what’s left of an old kiln, of which only the outer walls remain, overrun with brambles. The surface of the path is a bed of dried leaves that crackle underfoot. The path descends along the bank of a dried-up stream filled with crushed stones like the ribs of a fossil. The oak trees crowd in on either side. The branches of the trees intertwine, reaching up into the sky in a great weave of wood and leaves that swallows the light. The juniper bushes give off an intoxicating scent that seeps into the brain and reawakens lost memories. Every now and again the undergrowth rustles. A snake or a lizard slithering behind a rock. Or perhaps a rat. But nothing to be afraid of. You come to a clearing with a large beech tree in the middle. It’s been there for hundreds of years, and has a misshapen trunk which even five men forming a chain would not be able to embrace. It has grown all twisted on that shelf of land, next to a spring. The roots are excrescences covered with moss, exposed nerves that reach down, sinking into the water and the earth. It seems like the ideal place for a witches’ Sabbath. You can almost see the moon high in the sky and the figures of women dancing naked around the beech tree in the flickering light of a bonfire. Halfway along, the path rears up towards the ridge. The tracks of boar and roe deer show you the way. The trunks of the trees are peeled and muddied up to a height of a metre from the ground—the boar roll around in the muddy pools and then clean themselves by rubbing against the bark until it is worn down to the tender sapwood. Once you get to the top of the hill, you can stop and catch your breath. It seems to be a clearing like any other. But it isn’t. Not many people know this place. No one knows—and those who do know don’t want to—what’s beyond it. Where your steps are slowed to a trudge, where even light doesn’t penetrate.

  All you can do now is make your way between the thorns and nettles that watch over this place like guardians of a ruined temple.

  Rocks and loose earth all around. And in the middle, a hole.

  You see me the way I am now

  YOU SEE ME the way I am now, but my grandfather whipped the peasants. Although I can’t really see it myself. I still have a photograph in my wallet, a photograph of a distant time, long before things started the way they started and ended the way they ended. It’s an oval photograph, with the grain of the image fading to green, the green of copper roofs when they oxidise. There he is in his shiny boots and his fustian hunting jacket, with his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulders, his moustaches and his wide-brimmed hat, mounted on a white mare and looking straight in front of him. Without speaking or
moving, his belly held in and his chest out, the air trapped in his lungs, eyes full of pride, like a soldier on parade, and I seem to hear the thoughts buzzing angrily in his head as the photographer takes his time before pressing the shutter—Come on, young man, I haven’t got all day.

  They called my grandfather Sor Terenzio. I say grandfather, but in reality he was my great-grandfather. They say that, when necessary, he would pull up his sleeves and stir around in the whey to see if his tenant farmer had tried to cheat him by hiding a round of cheese at the bottom of the vat. There never was any, but you never know. My great-grandfather ate priests for breakfast. He ate them up and spat out the cassocks, or rather he cleaned his moustache with the cassocks. It is said that when he was dying, he chased away the priest who wanted to give him the last rites and in a thin voice ad-libbed, Priests and friars are not forgiving, they praise the dead and swindle the living. Those were his very words. Or at least I hope so.

  You see me the way I am now, but my great-grandfather whipped the peasants. He was a smart character, my great-grandfather. They had a great deal of respect for him in the village, perhaps because of all those whippings. As I’ve already said, I can’t see it. Though I wouldn’t be willing to bet that it didn’t happen. His initials are still there on a brass plate screwed to the front door—TERENZIO CREMONA. And you have to believe brass plates. The metal, if well polished, withstands the years, unlike men. With the passing of time, that robust, strapping man who went around on horseback and carried a double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder had given way to an old man with grey drooping moustaches and the sad eyes of a retired champion. On dismounting from his horse, he had lost his proud, masterly bearing, just as he had lost a beautiful wife who had died of peritonitis and a son who, like me, was called Federico Cremona.

  Federico had died one summer’s day. He had met with a death that was so stupid that only its banality makes it credible. He was coming home in the still light of sunset after spending the afternoon with his friends. He was fifteen years old, slim, with bright blue eyes. He was holding a ball under one arm and with the other was pushing the bicycle by the handlebars. The ball, held against its will between his arm and his side, rebelled against its master and came free of his grip. Federico made an uncoordinated move, the kind of awkward, innocuous move we all make from time to time. He tried to catch it in flight before it rolled down some steep slope, because then it would take hours to find. He lost his balance and fell. The black bicycle, a large man’s bicycle which he managed to ride even though he was not yet a man, fell with him. And when he fell, his head hit the pavement hard. He lay there on the ground. He had only a small cut on his temple, and all he felt at first was a little nausea. Then he began to feel bad. They carried him into his big house, which had so many rooms, you could lose yourself in it. They put him in a cool dark room with sheets that smelt of lavender and the curtains drawn and the only sounds filtering in being the voices of the children playing down in the street and the cries of swallows chasing each other frenziedly in the evening air. His mother watched over him night and day, day and night, moistening his lips, changing the cool cloths she placed on his forehead. The doctor came and, smoothing an eyebrow, said that he needed to be bled with leeches. His father was shut up in his study, smoking in silence. He didn’t talk to anyone because there was no need to talk, but if he had talked he would have said one word—Why? And Fede’s twin, my grandfather Vanni, had already understood. He had understood from his brother’s increasingly weak voice as he lay delirious in the dimly lit room, from his mother’s weeping, and from his father’s silent smoking in the study, surrounded by dusty papers.

  From all these things he had understood that he would have two bicycles, two tennis rackets, two rifles, two suits, two horses, two of everything, one too many and one too few. Two destinies and two lives, one of which was not his own.

  He had understood that he would continue to feel his brother the way a disabled man still feels his amputated leg, he would continue to see him, the way an old coat of paint can be seen under a new one, to be aware of him, as we are aware of the void left in a room by a piece of furniture that has been moved.

  He decided that he would not cry. He did not even cry on the day of the funeral, the day when the village ground to a halt, transfixed by the lugubrious pealing of the bells, and black-clad people came from all over, so many that they could not all get in the church and crowded onto the steps beneath that leaden early afternoon sun. So many people that when the black head of the procession reached the cemetery, the tail was still in the church.

  But Vanni decided, or rather vowed, that he would never again talk about Fede. Never. With anyone. And the only thing stronger than a pact between friends is a pact between twins.

  Alive and dead

  ON THE DAY of the Dead, when I went with my grandmother to visit my family’s household gods, while she changed the flowers and prayed under her breath, I would anxiously read the inscription on the tomb, which was too rhetorical to be genuinely touching.

  FEDERICO CREMONA 1920–1936

  Federico flower of strength and youth through a fatal fall you withered on a hot summer afternoon when you were still spreading your fragrance of life you are mourned by your beloved parents and your brother who could not live if not with you

  It made quite an impression on me, seeing that tomb with my name on it in the family chapel. I would try not to look at it, making an effort to lose myself in prayer, barely moving my lips behind my grandmother as she intoned the words of the requiem (Eternal rest grant them, O lord, and let perpetual light shine on them, may they rest in peace. Amen) but I couldn’t help myself, the tombstone summoned up distant thoughts that overwhelmed me, plunged into me, deep into my throat, like stones down a well. And the biggest one was the thought of seeing myself dead, walled up inside that furnace of ice-cold marble. And yet I was alive. Even though the stone said I was dead. But I was alive, standing there in front of myself dead. So was I dead or alive? I was both. Alive and dead. Dead and alive.

  According to Professor Voinea

  ACCORDING TO the work of Professor Voinea of the University of Bucharest, a man who spent his life studying biographical recurrences within generations of the same families, the possibility exists that cases of inter-generational mesmerism can occur. It may well be that, because of mysterious forces which work on the bodily fluids, some ancestors can be reincarnated—partially or totally (the literature is divided on this point)—in their descendants. Again according to the theories of Professor Voinea, there are two types of destiny—the dominant and the recessive. Just like character, human destiny, too, may be transmittable genealogically. And this transmission may be regulated by laws that are still unknown but may not be all that dissimilar from the Mendelian laws that govern heredity. The professor’s team did tests on a family of traditional peasants in the Carpathians going back six generations and observed some astonishing recurrences of the same biographical situations at a distance of decades. For example, if the grandfather in the family had been cuckolded, it was quite likely that his grandson would also be cuckolded, but not the father, this unfortunate circumstance being a recessive characteristic and therefore likely to skip a generation.

  Or again, if one of two brothers was destined to be a failure, and the other a success, it was very likely that their grandchildren would get everything from the former rather than the latter, it being established beyond doubt that a predisposition to failure is dominant compared with a predisposition to success.

  I found this article in a scientific magazine of my father’s, one of those which are kept in the toilet as a source of inspiration. I’ve read it many times and thought about it a lot. Professor Voinea is a pioneer in this field, and it may be that this particular case study is too limited to be elevated into a law, but I must say that his theory exerts a certain fascination over me, being as I am the scion of an ancient line. And it isn’t just a question of similar names, or tombsto
nes. It’s all about blood, not marble. Because sometimes, especially at night, I can feel my ancestors’ stale blood slowing my circulation, waking me, and summoning me to great enterprises.

  I think it’s Federico’s unquiet blood, that dead twin’s degenerate blood, that boils in my veins, urging me to struggle, motivating me towards rebellion, sarcasm and revelry.

  The castle

  I HAVE TO SAY IT NOW and get out it of the way. I live in a castle. Or rather, I lived in a castle. With its merlons, its tower jutting proudly over the red roofs, its pigeons, its walls and all the minimum requirements a castle has to have to be called a castle. Living in a castle means living in a state of constant anachronism, which cannot be cured by any temporal remission, and which couldn’t help but produce some displacement—however minimal—of my psyche in contrast to the Cartesian axes of history. Being born in a dead place, seeing the light of day in the dark, opening your eyes in an enclosed space, waking up in a sepulchre—that’s what living in a castle means. There’s nothing magical, nothing princely, in the scowling faces of the ancestors who peer down at you from their soot-darkened portraits. Or in being the only male. The last scion, the repository of a name, a history, a tradition. The tenderest shoot at the tip of the branch, the one most susceptible to the cold—all it takes is an April frost, and it’s goodbye harvest. We’re counting on you to perpetuate the race, my forefathers admonish me severely as I hurry down the dark corridors, past galleries of dirt-blackened portraits, with my head lowered to avoid my kinsmen’s inquisitive looks. Please remember, the voice of the flesh of your flesh follows you from room to room, that you have our future in your hands. Not just in my hands, I have your future in my gonads. So don’t count on me.

  But how do you get to build a castle in the twentieth century? The century of speed, of the masses, of total war, man walking on the moon and the great leap forward? Only a necrophiliac—or a reactionary—could conceive of a building that was already dead at the dawn of the most modern century in history. Because a castle isn’t only a building, it’s also a concept. A concept that had been dead and gone for centuries, sunk in the recesses of history along with that absurd chivalric society that once inhabited its rooms. Try for a moment to emerge from the pettiness of your apartment blocks, the dreariness of your terraces, the pretentiousness of your detached houses, and imagine living in a castle. There’s nothing romantic, nothing fairytale about it, get that out of your heads. It’s like living in the dried-up cocoon of a chrysalis. It’s horrible. And yet it’s sublime. And there’s no contradiction at all, because you can’t help but feel horror and ecstasy for dying forms. Any painter of still lifes would know what I’m talking about.