that my memory has been falsified by my forty-day journey, and by what I later experienced with her. The reality was probably quite different. An ordinary Italian fool, defeated in the desert sand, broken in the Bardia winter, was seeing beautiful young girls for the first time in years, was free to observe them without hierarchy or hindrance. A prisoner of war spends his time thinking about women, forgets what women are really like. In the camp, I would wake with a vision of Zita before my eyes, summon the patience to stand in the queue for the latrine, keep a firm grip on my memory of those hours of mathematical analysis on the creaking wooden table because Zita and her perfume and her flesh existed beyond the sea and, in darkness when I was in the Texan sun, in light while I slept in the breathless night of the camp, she too trod the planet with feet that I would greedily have kissed in the shadow of the faraglioni.
That was how I had lived, as a free man and a prisoner, until she had decided to marry Professor Barbaroux, and then my fate too had been captured, along with my future as a POW. No one could possibly bear that two-fold imprisonment, knowing that one was a prisoner in the present and the future, without paying the price of madness or resignation. So I had escaped, into the great concentration camp of real life and the jokes it plays, vaster and more cruel than Hereford.
The lieutenant's voice rang out in a singsong: ‘Here we are in Hot Springs, in Arkansas. This is where the wounded and the convalescents of America come to regain their lost health. Europe cripples them in war, the springs restore them. No one will notice us here. We can rest. We've a long way to go before we get to New York.’
He got up and winked at the table of girls. ‘What kind of GIs are we if we don't cat around? Chastity will get us noticed.’
The three girls gave the lieutenant a chilly welcome, edging up to let him sit down. The most spirited of them shook his hand and started to chatter.
I was left alone at our table. A prisoner or free man? I couldn't work it out, but I wasn't willing to lose my only true feeling of independence: my pain over Zita and the decision to cross the USA in captivity, all for her.
The coffee was good, the apple tart fragrant. From the back of the gleaming wooden room came the notes of a song that one of the girls was singing in a low voice, accompanying the radio. One of the songs in vogue that spring, with the kind of sweet refrain and sentimental words that made girls cry. ‘I heard that lonesome train whistle blow …’
Better to stay and look at the light outside the door, Main Street shining in the sulphurous dust of the springs. Then I felt the smallest girl's hand on my thigh, just where I had traced the three letters POW with toothpaste, then rubbed them out as I prepared to escape. The fabric was worn away by washing with the regulation fatty yellow soap and hours flapping on a line over the prairie, a banner of forgotten poverty, while we sat on a step with a letter clutched in our fists and our eyes lost somewhere beyond the water tower. It was as though the girl's hand was Zita's, and the soft veil of military beige heightened its warmth, its gentleness, its life.
No one ever touches a prisoner's body except to inflict violence, or some kind of punishment. The responses of the camans to a vague gesture of protest, the rough jostling of your comrades as you queue for an egg, the acrid stench of disinfectants, the thorny blankets and, when you're in transit, the hardness of the benches, the bumps of the wagons, the steel needles of the vaccine that welcome you to the camp.
Months without seeing, or speaking to, or breathing the air of a woman. There were the girls employed at the camp orderly office, resolute and cheerful Texans. They considered the Italian men with a certain fascination. Certainly they despised us – ‘Happy go lucky!’ they called us – but then some of them fell in love with the lieutenants and sergeants with their glistening hair. The Italians sang, they were nice, they didn't kiss as though they were chewing gum, and when it was dark they knew the names of all the stars, or if they didn't know them they knew how to name them passionately after Mary, Lucy or Joy. After the war, many American girls went to join their heartthrobs in Naples, and emotional nuptials were celebrated.
One day two secretaries came to Camp 1, where the hardliners were kept, and sat down on our benches. They stretched out their nylon-clad legs on the freshly swept floor, forcing us to climb over their calves and gleaming heels. Perhaps it was a bet, perhaps it was indifference, or perhaps one of them was in love with one of the prisoners. Then they left, in their best regulation posture, and Fefe, the funniest one of all of us, Fefe who had seen his Captain Urbani in Africa sodomised in an act of reprisal by Moroccan guards, French Souaves, stretched himself out on a bench groaning, rubbing himself on the wood and whimpering while we laughed.
I didn't see the hand that drew its fingers across my leg as though drawing a tattoo. I kept my eyes on the sulphurous road, and felt the blood stirring inside my pants. But before the sense of excitement, which ran free and strong, I felt tenderness and compassion for my skin, recruited in Rome, battered by sea-storms, tanned in two deserts, leathery skin that knew the corrosive sand and the tough showers and the hasty thread of the Venetian nurse who sewed me up. ‘Christ alive, it's just a scratch, the poor guy in the bed next to you hasn't got legs to mend.’
And now, just below the white marks of that scar, sharply drawn by British shrapnel, like the footprints of a steel-footed sparrow, the girl's hand lingered. Almost imperceptibly she tightened her grip, and the shiver that followed did more to open me up than the sudden explosion of a grenade, a cry for help, a barked command. It pierced my resignation as a prisoner, it cut through the pain at my abandonment. However my hunting season might have gone, I still had a heart. Was that good or bad news?
Recalling her now, the girl, H.S., that was her name, seems liquid to me. At night, when the cold mistral splits the shutters of my bedroom and wakes me, I find myself thinking about her once again. Her diaphanous weightlessness fills my empty mind. I run through our days, few in number but crucial in our lives, and H.S. ethereally expands, like a piece of origami, the beautiful swan with the sinuous neck that she folded out of paper after making love. Like the few poetic words she prayed to her Buddha. In the pockets of her silk trousers she had a little Buddha of Happiness, who crossed the world smiling, his bag of suffering held tightly on his back. ‘He gives me my courage,’ she said.
We made love immediately after our meeting in the coffee shop. There were two rough rooms upstairs, and the lieutenant, with a wink, had gone ahead of me. She took me by the hand, and when she did so her hand didn't seem to touch me.
I wasn't a great Casanova, and twelve hundred nights of war had done nothing to sharpen my skills as a seducer. I lay on the little bed, a basic affair like the one on which I slept next to Ferrucci, and kept my hands behind the back of my neck. She opened my khaki shirt, one button at a time, and exposed my chest. I was lean, God knows, muscular, smooth, strengthened by privations and effort, my body was like a weapon. H.S. took off her clothes with a single prima donna movement, a tunic that weighed no more than a scarf, and was suddenly naked on top of me. I can't recall, scouring my memory, whether she rested on my crotch or my thighs, or whether she floated around me like a hummingbird. She rose to lick me and – I had to do something, or at least that was what they had told me on the Island – I sought the buckle of my belt with trembling hands.
‘Let me,’ said H.S., and unhooked it by herself. She moved her body as though merely rearranging her hair, a brief shadowy movement and I was inside her.
They still come to me on nights when the mistral blows. Why are memories so weightless? Even the tragic ones, even the painful ones? If I think of Bardia, when I fell into the hands of the Australians, at the age of twenty, all I hear is the machine-gunner whimpering, ‘Do we surrender, Manè? Do we surrender or do I fire, Manè?’ I don't remember when I had fired all the rounds in the magazine, in accordance with military regulations, ‘Fire to the last round before surrendering’, and I really did fire the last cartridge, yes, sir, I, the student of the socialist Professor Barbaroux, fired until the barrel of the Breda was red hot and we were out of ammunition. I remember none of that. I only remember the silence, what could be sweeter than silence, what could be harder to reassemble in the memory? And my gunner lying face down on the sand, arms open, motionless and cruciform. I saw the sand thrown up by gusts of wind, one, two, three, and I didn't see the enemy. Faceless and nameless: they would acquire faces