The Lights of Alborada. Gianni Riotta

they will ever get to humiliate a white man.

      So: to remember those moments I have to make an effort of reason, I have to use thought as a compass. If I close my eyes and look out the window on to the unlit gulf, both within and without, and then open my lids, nothing changes, the darkness enfolds me. Of the girl, H.S., I am aware of the lightness with which she unhooked my belt, the sparrow's flutter with which she settled on my chest, and the lightness with which she made love to me. Of my capture, I see sand flying suddenly from the crest of a dune, then again, every second, and the machine-gunner embracing Mother Earth and praying as he awaits a Mediterranean divinity, while the enemy advances cautiously and victoriously towards us, certain prey in the desert.

      We are all prey to memories, which we cannot alter, and which wait for us like bookkeepers, precise collectors of debits and credits. Are they worth more than real events? No, what matters is the story we forge for ourselves in our memories. At Camp 1 my gunner – ‘Do I shoot, Manè? Do I shoot?’ – never spoke to me again, he didn't want to poison our battling past with our captive present. Ciao, and that's that. So I can't tell you if the girl was as graceful as I remember, or whether I only perceived her carnality, her taut skin, her slanting oriental eyes. I was sure, and I still am, that H.S. was the most beautiful creature that the Lord God had ever put on earth. The privilege of finding her and the perennial bitterness at losing her will be the last memories to abandon me in the few days I still have left. In 1944 I didn't think that way, I was young. And yet when the girl circled about me, my body tensed and I thought, ‘You're happy now, remember, remember, remember.’

      You might think it wise for a boy to be so precisely aware of his states of mind of sorrow and happiness. But I bitterly regret it. It's true: rare among human beings, I possess a precise memory of happiness, a lucid awareness of having perceived vivid joy. But searing within me I also feel the regret, the emptiness that comes afterwards.

      Perhaps the girl was carnal, her womanly ardour certainly was. And perhaps I was innocent, my eccentric escape for love certainly was. That lightness means everything to me: it is, and will remain, my life, the life of Giovanni Manes.

      The next memory, a flash after her hands on my belt, is the mocking blond head of the lieutenant: ‘Still here? What a fuss you Italians make!’ And he starts singing Puccini, to my horror, in the purest Italian: ‘Oh! Sweet kisses, oh languid caresses, and I, trembling, unveiled those beautiful forms …’

      We paid the girls. I hadn't even asked her name, if weightlessness has a name. We took a bus at six o'clock, perhaps a day later we would make it to Nashville and from there to Baltimore, Washington and New York. The sun was high, the wooden footpaths deserted. The lieutenant and I the only ones who walked them, in our light shoes, in silence, drained by love after so much solitude. My head was bowed in confusion when I felt a gentle touch on my arm. A dark-coloured car was coming towards us. The lieutenant pushed me maternally into a grocer's shop full of dried-up vegetables. He picked up the bowl that was used to weigh the green, green peas, and plunged it into the big brimming sack. As soon as the car had passed he led me to the next shop, through the door and into the post office. ‘They're after us,’ he said gently.

      ‘But aren't your documents in order?’

      I looked at him uncertainly. What had gone wrong with his perfect plan?

      ‘It's better to stay out of trouble.’

      The flight from shop to shop couldn't go on for ever: the Buick stopped to check the crossroads that led to the bus stop, where two Chicanos were waiting.

      The lieutenant set off in the opposite direction, but that part of the world was a papier-mâché chessboard, white, black, white, a few moves and checkmate. Reflected in the glass of the barber's shop, I saw our pursuers' car heading straight towards us. The air filled with a mechanical hubbub: a farmer's truck, fully laden with crisp bales of yellow hay. It braked in front of us, and the right door opened. The driver was the girl, H.S. Barely moving, she beckoned us in. Lying on the truck floor, we slipped by, invisible to the street. I looked up, and in the rear-view mirror I glimpsed two officers, at the wheel, a mean-looking dark-haired man with a thin moustache, beside him an uneasy-looking adolescent. Leaving a trail of yellow dust behind us, we headed into the desert light. A haggard coyote barked a warning, but didn't bother to follow us. He hobbled away, one of his legs stiffened by an ancient trap.

       9

      They reached the prisoner-of-war camp in Amarillo, north of Texas, at about three in the afternoon. Colonel Downing brought them into his study with a great display of energy. ‘Gentlemen, I won't waste your time. There's no point in my repeating the life story of the man you're after. I know that General Matthews has already outlined it for you. He escaped from this camp ten days ago. He changes languages the way he changes shirts. He's pleasant and stylish. Everyone here loves him. Read the report by our inside informer: I haven't yet had a chance to pass it on to the general.’

      He handed them a sheet of thin paper, with holes typed in it corresponding to the letters ‘e’ and ‘o’. Out of respect for his rank, Cheever let Cafard take the sheet first, but Cafard handed it to him without so much as a glance.

      ‘Our agent, Dieffe, maintains that Lieutenant Commander Hans von Luck is heading for the Atlantic coast …’ Cheever was still reading, and Cafard mockingly questioned the colonel. ‘How can your agents, locked away in a camp, tail a fugitive many miles away?’

      ‘Don't underestimate the Nazis, Major. They have undercover radios, they use secret codes.’

      ‘The Italians have a radio that we haven't managed to confiscate. I'd never heard that the Germans had one, too.’

      ‘They can prepare any kind of fake document. Look.’

      Downing, irritated by Cafard's incredulous tone, opened the box and took out half a withered potato. He handed it to Cheever by way of reply: carved into the tuber was the security stamp of the American Military Command, the precious mark that guaranteed members of the armed forces free transit across the United States.

      ‘You want a hunting licence? A passport? A few fresh potatoes and they can reproduce the whole fucking Washington bureaucracy, you bet they can.’

      ‘Can we interrogate this …’ Cafard tried to find the right phrase for a moment, feigning uncertainty, and Downing wondered, ‘Is this bastard having me on?’

      ‘… this agent of ours?’

      Cheever, disciplined and embarrassed, handed him the perforated sheet of paper, which Cafard stuffed into his pocket.

      ‘Ah, no, that's out of the question. Are you kidding me?’ Downing saw himself regaining his advantage, and used it skilfully. ‘What did you have in mind? Call him into the main barracks and expose him in front of his comrades? Within a few hours the Gestapo inside the camp would have him in the blanket. I hope you know what I mean by the blanket?’

      Colonel Downing smiled grimly: tough cops from the spy department, you talk and talk, and then all of a sudden you drop the psychological warfare in favour of actual violence.