The lieutenant leaned against the bus stop and, still smiling, rolled himself a thin, firm cigarette, tufts of blond Virginia tobacco sticking out at either end. He rolled a second one and held it out to me. I had never smoked in my life, always bartering my tobacco rations for stamps for my letters to Zita, but to say, ‘No, thank you’ might have scuppered my plan before it had even got under way. I nodded and allowed the man to light the cigarette in my mouth, although I didn't inhale.
The bus appeared around the bend of the aqueduct, followed by a cloud of dust and a dog that barked merrily in the hot air, with the resounding vigour of prairie strays. The driver braked, raising a cloud of dust from the beaten earth, and indolently opened the door. First aboard was a sprightly old woman, and out of soldierly habit I stepped aside for the lieutenant, who climbed the two steps and showed his papers.
‘What about him?’ asked the conductor, pointing to me. He looked me up and down unsympathetically. ‘Are you a GI?’
The lieutenant didn't answer yes or no, but just murmured, ‘Mmm,’ and dropped a few coins into a zinc basin. Then he stepped aside so that I could reach the free seats.
I tried to work out where he was going to sit, so that I could find a seat as far away from him as possible. Why had he paid for my ticket? Out of kindness? Never before had I encountered kindness on the part of an officer towards a raw recruit he didn't even know. Had he mistaken me for one of his men? In that case I should have had my papers with me as well. No point standing there brooding about it, better to pretend to sleep, wait till we reached the outskirts of a town, and then feign car-sickness and run off through the fields to jump an eastbound train.
During my transfer to Hereford, beneath the awning of a little station in Arkansas, I had met a hobo, the kind that travelled the freight trains. He'd told me how easy it was to jump aboard the slow convoy of wagons. He was originally from Friuli, his father had moved to the States from Udine and he spoke a mixture of Italian, German and English. ‘If tu jump ok, tu land ok. No be frightened, Italiano, if no kaputt, ok? If cop come, you know cop? If sheriff come, and hit you with electric torch, tu run for life.’
I'd stolen an old railway timetable from the American military canteen, its cover scorched by the flames from the kitchen – I had explained its disappearance by saying it had been burned to ashes – and had learned it off by heart from cover to cover, times, dates, places, Southern Thunder, Northern Arrow, Atlantic Sky Hawk, all the trains over there have wonderful, mythological Indian names.
I stretched out on the hard bus seat, resisted the temptation to watch the flat panorama passing by, the great expanses that had lain unseen beyond the camp fence, and closed my eyes. The less attention I attracted the better.
This was how I had escaped: I hid in the potato silos and didn't answer when the roll was called. The camans hunted for me all over the camp, then got bored and eased off. On the fifth day I joined a unit of navvies. Captain Righi winked as he pretended to count me, and I left the barbed wire behind. Exhaustion, emotion and my melancholy over Zita had now lulled me into a calm feeling of numbness: I can't imagine any prisoner of war has ever escaped with such absolute serenity, insensitive to fear.
In my sleep I heard the notes of the song ‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me’ – Rosamunda, you are my life, there's joy in your kisses, the more I see you the more I love you, Rosamunda my darling – perhaps because that harmless little dance tune had become the anthem of the Italian prisoners. Yes, the fascists still sang ‘Youth, youth, in life and life's harshness …’ and, after September the 8th you might have heard ‘Brothers of Italy, heed Italy's call …’ and the wonderful chorus of ‘Avanti o popolo’, but ‘Rosamunda’ was the song of all the Italian prisoners, POWs as we had to write on our trousers and rucksacks, in big, clear letters. POW: and we had christened ourselves ‘povieri’, the poor POWs. I had rubbed out the three letters on my uniform, and was fleeing towards Zita, our meeting was sure to be stormy, violent, and at the time I had no doubt, my twenty-year-old beauty, but that it would bring me back to her, with love as always.
‘Rosamunda, tu sei la vita per me’: who was whistling the tune on the bus? I woke up gently, not stirring. I half opened my eyes, the cheerful whistle came from close by, very close. ‘Tu sei la vita per me.’ I looked; the lieutenant was sitting there, still whistling and smiling. He had clearly worked out who I was, but I decided not to give him the satisfaction of catching me straight away. I would feign stupidity, to the last moment, even if it meant mooing like a mute. To get away again, at the first opportunity.
Bored of waiting, the lieutenant tapped me on the arm and whispered in Italian, ‘Hey, fella, wake up.’
I gave a start like a soldier told off by a superior, and saluted accordingly: ‘Don't understand, sir.’ The old trick of my language exams, if you speak in a low voice it dulls the sound of mispronunciation.
‘So where have you escaped from?’ he asked in Italian.
Who was he? His Italian was perfect, just like the English he had used when speaking to the driver. Even a hint of Tuscan, and Texan, just to make everything perfect.
‘Sir? I don't understand, sir.’
‘You got out of Hereford?’ he asked again in Italian. ‘Which camp? Hardline fascists, Camp 1?’
He even knew our internal divisions. I tried to say, ‘Respectfully, sir, I don't understand,’ but I always had problems pronouncing the word ‘fully’, and I heard the simplest words coming out of my mouth: ‘With all due respect, sir, I don't understand French.’
‘French, eh?’ he smiled. ‘You're a sly one. Fine, as you wish, if you don't understand, you don't understand. But you'll understand sooner or later.’
He let his cap fall over his nose, rested his shoes against the back of the chair and dozed off. The journey continued for two hours, the strangest two hours of my strange life. Who was I? A fugitive in the clutches of a meddling officer? Was I lost before I'd even begun? How was I going to get myself out of this? I knew I had to avoid any kind of violence that would mean being punished or, the greatest terror of all, being sent off to labour camp in Hawaii, with no way of contacting Zita.
The lieutenant was snoring, lost to the world, and we were already driving past the first houses of Amarillo when the old woman nodded to the driver.
‘Would you stop for a moment? I don't feel well and there's a lemonade stand over there.’
The brakes whistled, the lieutenant showed no sign of waking up and, unable to believe my luck, I leapt over his knees without touching him, nodded goodbye to the driver and walked past the kiosk, which was decorated with beautifully scented lemons. One of them had fallen into a ditch and I picked it up, like a talisman. The rind was fat and rough, ripe and yellow. I scratched the skin and the smell of my secondary school wafted out, sunny afternoons, a hand stuck through the fence to steal a lemon, the amazing fruit, a bit of sunlight in your fist, the juice sharp on your tongue after scoring a goal on the red clay pitch.
The lemons were stolen from Paulus, a Russian who had escaped from St Petersburg in 1917 – a baron too far on the left for Vladimir Ilyich – and who ended up cultivating the gardens of south Italy. The trees, the smell of Zita, Marseilles soap, Russia and the tuna fishing nets, the world seemed wonderful to me, full of exotic cities. As though wearing the Seven League Boots of the fairy tale, I would fearlessly travel the planet. I saw myself living in Amazonia, then in Petrograd and Hong Kong, and in Pittsburgh where they made the steel for the tuna harpoons.
It was as if, in Hereford Camp 1 (yes, the lieutenant was right, I was in number 1, with Tuimati, the tall, thin cavalry officer, with Berto, always writing on his