bags, and with Troisi, silent and elegant) I had left the prisoner Giovannino Manes, poviere, POW, prisoner number 8117125, 81 meaning captured in North Africa, 1 Italian and 7125 my arrival code. Now, once again, I was Nino Manes, and I could travel my life in those Seven League Boots, with Zita by my side. As if our life was not in fact determined by the belligerence of the Italian fascist regime, the tactical errors of General Graziani in Egypt, or the forces of production of President Roosevelt's United States. It was the caman Nick Carraway who had explained it to me: ‘Our black workers, the ones the Führer wants to exterminate, can build a liberty ship in a single day. The U-boat captains show great courage in trying to sink them. But do you know who defeats their daring? The black workers who, for a few cents, can get a ship seaworthy in twenty-four hours.’
I wondered what Carraway was doing now. He certainly wouldn't have expected me to escape. He was sure he had saved me for democracy, his democracy, a ship a day to defeat the Führer, assembled by black workers. In Texas those same workers didn't enjoy the right to vote for the upper-class president, although they still had great things to say about him. Carraway wouldn't have been pleased by my escape; basically he agreed with the theory of Colonel Rogers, the head of the camp: ‘Italians, bastards, greaseballs, wops, they sing and eat spaghetti with brilliantine sauce on it, they're slaves to the Krauts. They don't even know how to work. Save them for freedom? It would take ten generations.’ But I didn't care about Carraway or Rogers, I was going into Amarillo. I would have a bowl of soup at the coffee shop without speaking to anyone. I'd brought the Bible with me, a gift from the Quakers. I was learning English, and in the south people always respect the silence of a soldier reading the gospel, with its black cover and its pages edged with fiery red.
I sat down at a corner table, close to the door, and said, ‘Soup, please.’ I only needed a few words; on my way out I'd leave a big tip to distract the old waitress's attention from my accent. The soup was good, thicker than the soup in the camp, with bright carrots and barley floating in it, among big patches of sweet grease. Aromatic pepper, the bold flavour of Coca-Cola. The bread wasn't so good, dry, crumbly, nothing like our pure white loaves back home. And yet those crisp croutons were exquisite to me. It was as though I had worked to savour them, forging SS insignia in return for contraband dollars to pay the bill, risking the machine gun fire of the camans.
I wiped my face with my napkin, a piece of worn grey cloth, and started to read the Bible. The spirit of God moved on the face of the waters, those waters I was sure I would cross, as Moses passed through the Red Sea. After endless periods of exhaustion and cunning and luck, to be able to sail on the ocean of war to Zita.
The waitress had returned from the yard at the back, carrying a big bunch of flowers. There were bright petunias and daisies, early poppies with red petals like butterfly wings. One by one the woman took them and arranged them in a vase filled with fresh water. She was never content. Now she moved the stem of a rose, now she adjusted the green grass that swathed it. She was in pursuit of a certain effect, working with the shadows that the brilliant sun cast on the white wall. When the prospect seemed a happy one, she let the stems settle. Otherwise she barely brushed them as though caressing them, with hands that were scarlet from washing up too many dishes. I was distracted, I didn't like it, and for the first time since escaping the surveillance of the Hereford camans I was afraid. It was as though my fairy-tale journey, my Seven League footsteps to the sea, and the Bible, and those epic lines ‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the surface of the deep’ were not enough to protect me against being captured, nunc et semper, now and for ever. Only by being unaware and kind, like the coffee shop lady with her flowers, concentrating solely on my task, on both my lemon from long ago and the one that gleamed yellow on the dark table, only then would I truly succeed in escaping across two continents.
I'd finished the soup and the bread, I wanted a coffee and even, perhaps, to risk a bit of conversation in exchange for directions to the nearest railway station. There was no need to ask. The woman finally gave a nod of blessing to her geometrical bouquet, set the cup on the table and slipped my tip into her apron pocket.
‘I expect you're looking for the station, son. It's past the bridge, that sloping path takes you straight there. The Eastern Daylight Express'll be going through in half an hour. You got plenty of time.’
I smiled and murmured, ‘Thanks’ as though my tongue was burnt by the hot coffee, and got to my feet. On a shelf behind the bourbon bottles there was a black-framed photograph: ‘Tim McMurdo, Private First Class, Anzio 1944.’ The flowers were for that young soldier.
Outside the sun was dazzling. I walked along the dusty white path, ‘the voice of God moved upon the face of the waters’, and on that slow, blue river. The stones crackled under the soles of my new shoes, bartered with the storeroom guy – ‘Bums always wear good shoes,’ the hobo had advised me. I wouldn't stop at the station, but would carry on to the hill where the river formed a loop and the two-lane highway climbed to the east. The train would slow down and I would hop aboard a freight car. ‘Tu jump ok, tu land ok,’ putting my hope in the Spirit of the Waters.
I wondered how the lieutenant had felt when he woke up to find I had gone? Was he drunk? No, it was too early in the day for that, and there had been no booze on his breath. I was about to leave the wooden barracks of the station behind me when, at that very moment, just as brazen and clear as before, the song began again: ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me, nei tuoi baci c'è tanta felicità.’ The Spirit of the Waters seemed to mock me and the Atlantic coast suddenly seemed a long way away. And yet my heart didn't leap. I set my bag down and turned around: soon I would have a clearer idea of the intentions of the lieutenant who whistled ‘Rosamunda’, and discover why he was trying to keep me from escaping.
A big blue river ran along the valley floor, alongside the plateau, a vast river unlike anything I had ever seen at home. Not even the Stagnone lagoon, with its flashing shoals of silver ope fish and darting rainbow-coloured violette, was as vast and deep as that river. At the Stagnone, the Phoenicians had built a road across the sea, which time had sung beneath the mud: in ancient times the merchants had crossed the waves in high-wheeled carts as far as Mozia, an island of temples and shops, a trading centre, as famous then as Manhattan is now. And I, who had left the Island, was to return to the real Manhattan, to try and reach Zita in time. The river had distracted me, everything on this flight was a distraction, everything distanced me from fear and confusion. The lieutenant was standing in front of me, awaiting my reply to an unspoken question. He smiled as though there were something comical in my expression, and at the same time something reassuring and familiar, like someone spotting a friendly face from a long time ago among the harried travellers in a railway station.
I could have lied, or I could have run away, back down the slope. He was the same size as me, but I didn't even think of attacking him. Not because I was frightened, quite the contrary, his features were mild and aristocratic, fair hair, an elegant profile, and I felt I would have had the advantage if it had come to a fight. I was a street boy, and I'd seen vicious stone-throwing battles between rival gangs, when the whole sky is dotted with rocks and one of them would be enough to split your head open. I could have pretended to lower my head and broken his snobbish nose with a butt of my brow, his septum opening up in a discharge of blood and surprise, an easy blow to deliver, a bit like landing a rain-soaked leather ball in the net from a corner kick, the laces imprinting themselves on his forehead. In my mind I could hear my mate Volpe: ‘A surprise punch can deck an elephant, always get your attack in first.’
I was restrained by the caution of the fugitive: attacking a uniformed American officer could land me in front of a firing squad. Who would really come here in search of a young soldier who had escaped from a prison camp? They would have expected me to head south, towards Mexico, crossing the border under cover of a storm. Or else my thirst would lead me into a cactus-filled ravine, and my bones would bleach among the skulls of cattle. If I injured an officer, on the other hand, the FBI and the Military Police would hunt me down from county to county, and when they got their hands on me they'd lock me up in one of those camps there's