My father was no longer at home, he had disappeared out on the Indian Ocean, swallowed up by the waves along with a cargo of Arab carpets. My mother lived on his pension, and although we were poor, we weren't starving. Papa had left me the books that had belonged to my grandfather, a lieutenant of Garibaldi's in the fight for the liberation of Italy. Naval almanacs, atlases, chronicles of the military actions of Garibaldi's Redshirts in Europe and America. I read and read. Only during those hours, only while waiting on the pier, after the Alborada and before the village roused itself, did I know what my life would be like. My schooldays and my adolescence. A girl with a blue pullover and hair down to her shoulders, strolling on the beach to the sound of a guitar from a balcony, and the sad songs that our men had learned in Spain. Love, happiness, tenderness.
Can a child imagine life through an adult's eyes? We think it's possible, don't we? We relegate not only today's children, but ourselves as children, to a perennial refuge of childhood, as though toys and illusions were the only things that children knew. Whereas that isn't the case, or at least not for those of us who grew up on the Island. I knew very well, as I ran off through the echoing reports of the rockets and the steely strokes of the bells, what I wanted from my life. I wasn't only concerned with glory, with travel, the constant and amazing tasks that I would perform on tropical waters, taking vengeance for my father's shipwreck. The adventures I took for granted, the sure reward for those heroes who stood in brilliant colours on the covers of boys' story books. The disdainful Cesare kidnapped by pirates, General Desaix in the last charge at Marengo, my grandfather making coffee for Garibaldi, indolently serving him under Bourbon fire. ‘General, was this morning's blend to your liking?’ ‘Manes, if you don't watch out for those muskets, you won't be making any coffee for me at all tomorrow morning.’
Manes is my surname, Giovannino is my first name, but everyone's always called me Nino, Nino Manes, a man who – I was sure of it as I watched the crashing festive waves – was going to make his mark on history. And I craved love, too. My childish idea of erotic passion didn't go beyond the smutty remarks of the old men who picked up cigarette stubs from the pavement, or furtive glances darted at an innocent little bride, or the moist kisses of some platinum-blonde Hollywood diva. Those feelings satisfied my heart and my imagination. I would be able to paint like my father, whose oil-painted ocean dawn hung gleaming over my bed. With a steady hand I would outline the face of my lover to be. There were her round lips, her soft, sweet eyes, a hint of cheekbone, her cheerful smile and her forehead, covered with the fringe that was customary then among girls of marriageable age. I always imagined her in a blue sweater, on the seashore at night, and in my ears I heard a song that was fashionable at the time: ‘Barefoot on the beach with you …’ My heart beat like a sparrow pecking grain; love and the future were that sky-coloured jumper and that girl who was alive only for me. But how alive she was!
I returned home damp and confused, as though I had spent my first, premature night of marriage. Mama gave me an egg beaten with sugar and the Marsala my father had left behind. SOM, said the Indian-ink label: Superior Old Marsala. My mother had resigned herself, poor woman, to these excursions of mine, and I think she would have been amazed if I had missed a single one.
My last Alborada outing coincided with my sixteenth birthday. It was easy for me at that age to scamper from the meadow to the hill of San Noè, since my legs were long, and I had strong feet that could grip the cobbles and the grass. But my palpitations at the idea that I might not make it, the anxiety of slipping beneath Orazio's bells before the final stroke, sent me off at a frantic gallop. It was no longer a children's game. It was a flight from the present, from adulthood.
For my Alborada as a sixteen-year-old, in 1937, I had donned long trousers. And I ran like mad, striding fiercely, not really looking where I was going. For the last time, I slipped into the church square, a winner, and pumped my clenched fists triumphantly in the air. I turned a half-pirouette, looking around for Orazio so that I could win his approval – ‘I've done it, Orazio!’ – and instead what I saw was the most beautiful girl I had ever set eyes upon. The nimble sway with which she walked set the sleeve of a blue pullover, slung lazily over her shoulders, swinging back and forth with the elegant severity of a metronome. Bareheaded, she gazed out to sea, and the breeze mingled curls and wool. My startled agitation must have produced a crunch of gravel, and she turned around to stare at me with mocking curiosity.
‘Are you always running? You're in a terrible hurry at this time of the morning. What's your name?’
‘Nino. And you?’
‘Zita.’
And I never ran again.
During the fiercest war of the twentieth century twelve million soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. Former warriors, proud of their armies and their units, often convinced of the cause for which they had been recruited, spent their days behind barbed wire, vying with their fellow soldiers for a slice of bread in the mud or, when conditions were more humane, waiting restlessly for the next day, querulous and impotent. Twelve million human beings, a nation, scattered from the frozen steppes of Europe to Australia, where six hundred Japanese kamikaze fighters threw themselves against the machine-gun nests of the camp guards at Cowra, choosing bullets over the shame of detention. In Africa, the Italian lieutenant Carlo de Bellegarde escaped from a British camp in Kenya and, on foot and on a bicycle, covered over three thousand kilometres of jungle and savannah to reach Mozambique in two months. Prey to snakes by night and lions by day, he defended himself with a torch, waving it around to chase the beasts away. Two askaris, Ambekilili and Wakuru, captured him on the last bridge before freedom: ‘Bwana mkubwa, Bahati mbaya – Noble lord, a terrible misfortune!’ they said sadly.
In 1915 the men of my village suspended the tuna hunt, and they went to war. The ones who survived the eleven Isonzo Offensives returned and took up their nets again. We, their sons, set off for sun-scorched Africa, the merciless Balkans, eternal Russia. When the fate of the war turned for our lovely homeland, we were imprisoned in Nazi camps, or in Siberia, or across the sea. When we came home, our children listened to us complaining about vanishing shoals of bluefish, the declining tuna population, no more tuna hearts hanging to dry in the sun, no gleaming fillets in oil. We never talked about what had happened to us.
Ettore, my father's cousin, had served on a rickety banana boat that crossed the Red Sea. Cut off beyond the Suez Canal by the declaration of war, he and his crew crossed two oceans, the Indian and the Pacific, to be welcomed in triumph by the girls of Tokyo and ended up in a concentration camp when Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943. Ettore saw the flash of Hiroshima on the horizon, survived and came home with two pearl necklaces which he gave to his daughters. But he didn't say a word about his adventures.
Uncle Massimo was captured by the 6th Australian Division in Bardia, in Africa. They stole his Vetta watch, but he didn't hate them for it. ‘It's war, no point harbouring a grudge.’ He ended up in Yol, in India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They dragged him across three continents but they didn't break him. On the yellow sand of the camp he drew up a plan of escape to Manchuria, climbing mountains eight thousand metres high and then marching hundreds of kilometres to the Japanese bases in China. No one wanted to follow him (are you surprised?) and he set off on his own. When captured he was up to his neck in snow. The British colonel warmed him up with a bowl of soup, and then gave him permission, on his word of honour, to move around freely inside the camp as long as he never again tried to escape. He too kept mum about his adventures.
No one wants to listen to prison stories, so we just kept quiet. We behaved patiently, we waited like stoics, refusing to let ourselves be humiliated. And yet we were defeated. Benito Mussolini's wicked project was beaten back, the banners broken, strips of them sold as souvenirs. The