A Trip to Mentone

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This story by Italo Calvino (translated from the Italian by Stuart Hood) originally appeared in the January 1955 edition of The London Magazine.

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It was September 1940 and I was almost seventeen. After supper I could scarcely wait to get out of the house and stroll through the streets although I had little else to do all day long. I suppose that in those days I was coming to enjoy life without realising it, for I was at the age when you are firmly convinced that whatever new thing you make your own has always belonged to you. My home town, now that the war had cut off its supply of tourists, seemed to have shrunk within its provincial skin. To me it seemed more familiar, more within my grasp. The evenings were lovely; the blackout seemed an exciting new fashion; the war, something familiar and distant. In June we had felt it at close quarters but only for a brief, bewildering span of days. Then it had seemed to end altogether. At last we had ceased to expect anything further. I was young enough to lead my life unaffected by the fear of being called up; both my temperament and my habit of mind made me feel untouched by this war that was going on. Yet whenever I indulged in fantasies about my future I could find no other setting for them – but then it was a war sans peur et sans reproche in which, to my joy, I felt that I was not only free but changed. Thus I experienced both the pessimism and the excitement of those days and lived in a state of bewilderment, wandering about the streets.

I walked down the Piazza Colombo and near the Fascist Headquarters, ran into some schoolmasters looking for avanguardisti – Young Fascists – for a parade. They were to see that their uniform was in order and report early next morning. There was going to be a trip to Mentone – a legion of young Falangists from Spain was due to arrive and the avanguardisti from my town had been detailed to form a guard of honour at the railway station at Mentone, which for some months now had become the Italian frontier post.

Mentone had been annexed by Italy but it was still closed to civilians and this was the first chance I had had of visiting it. So I had my name put on the list along with that of my schoolmate, Biancone, whom I undertook to warn for duty.

Biancone and I got on very well together although we were different types. He, too, belonged to that little handful of students at the lycée who had stood up for France against Germany during the period of ‘non-belligerency’. When everyone played truant to celebrate the German victories we formed a group of our own at the tail-end of the procession, silent and reserved. But these were spring mornings and it was too much fun to play truant, to go through the streets in bands holding up the traffic at our own sweet will with the girls among us in their spring dresses – it was something we could not disapprove of fundamentally although we disapproved of the motive for it. So we followed the procession which climbed the streets to a quiet little out-of-the-way villa which housed the German consulate, there to applaud the good-natured vice-consul dressed in white, who looked like Roosevelt, and to set the Alsatian barking. Some of our friends in the ranks of the enthusiasts would turn towards us with a pitying grimace and we would reply with a complacent sneer. From the doorsteps of their shops our fellow-citizens watched us with a worried hostile air and at a certain point the old Socialist father of one of our comrades suddenly started out from the pavement where he had been lying in wait, caught his son by the arm and dragged him away. ‘Get back to school! Get back to school, you lazy rascal!’ To which our comrade replied: ‘No, father, you mustn’t! I’ll explain later. I’m with the rest of them.’ And so they remained in the middle of the street, the old man with his finger raised and his loose bow-tie falling over his high-necked waistcoat and his son, overcome with shame, tugging and arguing in a low voice.

We were sorry for our friend, for we ourselves always liked to be there when anything new happened and to comment on it with critical detachment. But Biancone got more pleasure than I did out of being mixed up in Fascist affairs, out of imitating their posturings and caricaturing them now and again. The year before, because of his love of a life of excitement, he had been to an avanguardisti camp in Rome and had come back with corporal’s stripes – a thing I would never have done, partly because of my natural inability to behave like an NCO, partly because of my hatred for Rome, a city in which I swore I would never set foot as long as I lived.

The trip to Mentone was quite a different thing. I was anxious to see this little town, so near and so like my own, which had become conquered territory, ravaged and deserted – the only, the symbolical conquest of our June war. At the cinema we had recently seen a newsreel showing our troops fighting in the streets of Mentone but we knew that they were only pretending, because Mentone had not been taken by anyone – merely evacuated by the French army when the collapse came. We read in the papers about looting, which was blamed on the French colonial troops, but at that very time arm trucks were arriving post-haste from Mentone and drawing up in front of jewellers’ shops with officers of our own army come to sell gold and silver. Later on, once the gold rush was over, we learnt that our officers had given the troops a free hand – they had been kept in check up to now – and everything had been looted.

For this expedition the ideal companion was Biancone. For one thing, unlike myself, he was much more at home in Young Fascist circles, which were largely composed of children of the lower-paid black-coated workers – a class to which he himself belonged; for another, through being always together at school we had come to share the same tastes, the same vocabulary and the same scoffing interest in whatever was going on. Provided we were together, even the most boring situations became one long exercise in observation and wit. I would only go to Mentone if he came too, so I went off to look for him at once.

He was not in the usual billiard saloons. To get to his house you had to climb up through the old town. Under the dark archways the lamps with their daubing of blue paint gave out a treacherous light which did not reach as far as the other side of the alleys and steep, cobbled ways, but gleamed only on the white painted stripes which marked the steps. I was aware of passing close to people sitting by their doors in the dark, on the thresholds or astride straw-bottomed chairs. The shadows acquired, as it were, a velvet texture from these human presences which were revealed by bursts of talk, sudden calls and laughter, in which there was always a rippling note of intimacy. Now and again there was the gleam of a woman’s arm or of a dress.

At last I emerged from the darkness of an archway under the open sky, which I now saw for the first time through the leaves of a great carob tree, clear but starless. At this point the town ceased to be a pile of houses and began to scatter over the countryside and push unruly shoots up through the valleys. Beyond an orchard wall the white shadows of the villas on the opposite slope allowed only narrow beams of light to filter round the edges of the window-frames. A road with wire-netting running along one side came half-way down the hill towards the watercourse and there, in a little house crowned with a terrace and a pergola, lived Biancone. I approached through the stillness, which was filled with the whispering of bamboos, and whistled up at the house.

Biancone was lying on his bed reading a novel – by Guido da Verona I think, because books which you either could not get or else were vaguely under ban were always passing through his hands. He contrived to get them through his network of acquaintances, who in my eyes represented the nether depths of the town. He was the son of a civil servant who had come to live among us many years before, and the human relations he appeared to have cultivated embraced both the rank and file of the police and social strata which were either equivocal, subversive or beyond the pale of the law – a whole side of my native town with which I, the son of a family long been settled in the place and related to most of the professional and commercial bourgeoisie, had never even come into contact.

We met in the street. Biancone was a little surprised at my plan, because I was one of the students who had put up most resistance to wearing uniform and, on several occasions, had for this reason been faced with temporary expulsions from school and appeals to my parents from the head for greater strictness. Moreover that summer we had been at great pains to avoid the Young Fascists and their pressing efforts to enrol us for the ‘March of Youth’, which seemed to sum up all the dusty arrogance of that loud-mouthed organisation; but now the danger was almost past because the ‘March of Youth’ was drawing to a close and, as a matter of fact, the Young Falangists were coming for the final parade before Mussolini.

We could draw no other moral from it than this – that to the soldier bent on conquest all territory is enemy territory, even his own.

Biancone was quickly won over to my plan and we plunged into forecasts of what would happen next day, forecasts on the fate of our conquests and the outcome of the war. Of the latter we knew only that tiny part which had affected our immediate neighbourhood in the days when it had been on the lines of communication to the front – yet that was enough to give us the feel of a country invaded by an enemy army. In June the orders for immediate evacuation had reached the country districts. We had seen the refugees passing through the streets of our town, dragging handcarts loaded with their miserable possessions – torn mattresses, sacks of flour, a goat, a hen. The exodus was of brief duration but long enough for them to find their houses devastated when they came back. My father had begun to travel about the countryside to examine war damage. He came home tired and saddened by the fresh destruction he had had to survey and value – damage which, at the bottom of his heart, of his thrifty, country-bred nature, he felt to be incalculable and senseless like the mutilation of the human body. There were vines uprooted to provide stakes for bivouacs, healthy olive trees cut down for burning, lemon groves where the picketed mules had killed the trees by gnawing the bark. But there were other cases where the offence seemed to be a revolt against human nature itself, no longer the fruit of loutish ignorance but the sign of a latent and cruel ferocity – cases of vandalism in the houses. Thus in the kitchens they had broken every single cup into a thousand pieces, they had daubed the family portraits, they had reduced the beds to tatters or else – victims of who knows what unspeakable melancholia – had defaecated in the pots and pans. Hearing these stories, my mother said that she could no longer recognise the familiar face of our own people; we could draw no other moral from it than this – that to the soldier bent on conquest all territory is enemy territory, even his own.

Occasionally some of these stories plunged me into solitary rages, into fits of temper to which I could not give vent. To cure myself of them, with the flexibility of youth, I had recourse to cynicism. I went out, met my trusted friends and was calm, clear-headed, contemptuous. ‘Have you heard the latest?’ And those things which in secret had seemed so painful to me became wisecracks, boastful paradoxes, to be uttered with a wink, with a brief laugh, almost with pleasure and admiration.

We would talk quietly with Biancone in the dark street where he lived, lowering our voices now and again until we could scarcely hear what we were saying to each other; but we inevitably ended up by uttering the least permissible things at the tops of our voices. Biancone was not so tall as me but stronger and more muscular, with a face in which the features were proud and clear-cut – particularly the jaw, the cheekbones and the clean line of the brow. At variance with these features was a pallor which marked him out from the local youth, particularly in the summer. For in summer Biancone slept by day and went out at night. He did not like the sea or life in the open air and his sports were boxing and gymnastics. His face was marked and old. I thought I could read in it the bitter initiations he had undergone on his nocturnal wanderings, which I greatly envied him. But this face of his had an extraordinary facility for taking on expressions copied from Mussolini – thrusting out the lips, tilting the chin, making the thick-set neck rise stiffly from the shoulders and even setting in military poses when one least expected it. Thanks to these sudden attitudes and to his terse answers he was often able to confound his masters and get out of a scrape. His most striking characteristic was the way in which he combed his smooth black hair – in a strange style, like a helmet or the prow of a Roman ship, with a careful parting. It was a style he had invented himself and of which he was immensely proud.

We parted, having arranged to meet in time for the parade. Biancone went off to wind up his alarm clock; I to tell my parents when to waken me. ‘What do you want to go there for?’ asked my father, who failed to see anything interesting in a deserted town.

In the morning I was out betimes; the air was grey. It is because it is so early, I thought – but because of the clouds, too. There were still only a few avanguardisti outside Fascist Headquarters; they were all boys I knew by sight but not intimately. They were buying long loaves of bread and smoked ham at a bar which had just opened and they took huge bites at them as they pushed each other about in the middle of the road. They kept arriving one by one, not hurrying because they saw there was plenty of time and going off again to buy food or cigarettes. There was not a single one of my school friends there; most of them were boys who were studying to be accountants, teachers or surveyors, or even – some of them – pupils from the high school, younger than I was or of the same age but kept back a class. It was their presence that worried me most; one of them I particularly disliked – Ceretti by name, with a baby face, a lock of hair falling in a fringe over his brow, the loutish expression and the little eyes peculiar to his type, which is easily moved to false laughter and to tears. This Ceretti was the noisiest and most foul-mouthed of the students and undisputed head of a gang composed of his schoolmates and hangers-on. He had for long been an enemy of mine and addressed me with contemptuous, threatening tone, confident in his heavy build, which – if you looked more closely – proved to be not so much robust as prematurely corpulent and badly developed. His fez he wore not set straight on his head but pushed back on to his shoulders and suspended from his chin-strap, which passed round his neck. He was another of those who moved with the aggressive ease of a freebooter amidst the display of military discipline which went with the Fascist Youth Movement, whereas I was never spontaneous or at ease.

It was already well past the time for the parade. The avanguardisti were gathering in thick clusters in the street but there was still no sign of a bus, of our officers or of Biancone. I was used to my friend’s late arrivals which, in some mysterious way, he always contrived to make coincide with the late arrival of his superiors or whoever was running the show – perhaps because of his natural gift for identifying himself with those at the head of things. But this time I was greatly afraid he would not come. I had joined up with some of the more sensible and level-headed ones but I knew that they were also the most colourless – like Orazi, for instance, who was studying to be an industrial engineer and who looked around with a calm, blue gaze and spoke in a slow voice of the short-wave wireless he had built. In Orazi I would have had an excellent companion for the trip but one hopelessly unused to that pleasure in discovery, that witty conversation, which Biancone’s company ensured me.

Suddenly I heard Biancone’s voice behind me. He was in the midst of the others, making jokes; he had already entered into the passing fashion of that morning’s jokes as if he had been there all the time. As soon as Biancone arrived everything acquired a different rhythm. Our officers suddenly appeared clapping their hands. ‘Come on! Hurry up! Are you all asleep?’ The bus appeared. We began to fall in and divide into squads. Biancone had command of one of them and was immediately immersed in his duties. With a wink he called me over into his squad, which he jokingly threatened to make double round the square an impossible number of times as a punishment for something or other. The window of the armoury opened and we had our rifles and equipment thrown out to us, one at a time, by a drowsy and irascible militia-man. We climbed into the bus and were off.

The bus ran along the coast road and our officers incited us to break into a song, which was soon lost by the wayside. The sky was still grey, the sea a glassy green. Near Ventimiglia we looked with inquisitive eyes at houses and great cement basins crumbled to pieces by the shell-bursts – the first we had seen in our lives. From the mouth of the tunnel there peeped out the famous armoured train, Hitler’s gift to Mussolini. They kept it there to prevent it from being bombed.

Bizantini, our commander, who was in charge of the party, was a gym teacher who lived in a constant state of excitement and pleasure over his importance in the new Italy, throwing out confused, exclamatory ideas on the virtues of the Fascist era, which had raised him from humble origins and a miserable existence to play the part of educating boys from high schools and lycées – ‘the ruling class of tomorrow’. A southerner, he had a passion for general concepts, an intense love of teaching and an admiration – although he kept it constantly in check – for humanistic culture in which he felt he shared as a member of the teaching profession; in terms of realism, however, he considered it a goal – albeit a necessary one – to be continually outstripped and made ridiculous by physical agility, by an aggressive spirit and uninhibited freedom of action.

Such was the philosophy and morality of Fascism, which he attempted to define for himself and to instil into the rulers of tomorrow by verbose speeches mingled with shouts and yells. We did not dislike him in the least, because he was a good man, honest and basically ingenuous – one who, in a milieu where everyone tried to speculate and grow fat on it, undoubtedly profited less than anyone else in spite of his loudly proclaimed, theoretical contempt for the scruples of conscience of people who held back from life. In his unpredictable outbursts of anger there was none of the madman’s hysteria, which is so common in those who exercise command, but the basic temperament of the peasant and emigrant – quick to take offence and quick to rebel.

Was Mentone Paris? There was a bleached shop-sign in a flowery style. Was France the past?

It was raining when we got to Mentone. The rain was falling even heavier and finer on the horizonless sea and on the shut and bolted villas. Through the rain there was the town on its cliffs. On the gleaming tar of the promenade army vehicles ran to and fro. In the rain-streaked windows of the bus there gleamed broken images and behind each one a world opened up for me to discover. In the tree-lined streets I recognised the misty cities of the north which I had never seen. Was Mentone Paris? There was a bleached shop-sign in a flowery style. Was France the past? There was no one to be seen except a sentry or two sheltering in their boxes and masons with cowls of sacking. A grey light, eucalyptus trees and the slanting wires of field telephones. We got out. It was raining. It looked as if we were going to have to form up in front of the station right away. Instead we got back into the bus and went somewhere else, to – I’m not sure what it was – a requisitioned villa, then on foot in the rain for a while until we came to a small villa of some kind which might have been a school or a police barracks, and there we left our rifles out of the rain in a row against the wall.

We gave off a smell of wet clothes. I was quite happy because my uniform had always retained a sad, dusty smell of the quartermaster’s store. Maybe it would go away now. No one knew when the Spaniards were due to arrive. There was no time-table showing the trains from France. Every now and then a platoon commander would come back shouting: ‘Fall in! Fall in with your rifles.’ And then once more: ‘Fall out!’ Sometimes it looked as if no one in the whole of Mentone had ever heard of the Spaniards, sometimes as if they were expected from one minute to the other – at ten past eleven, to be precise, as we were informed by a rumour which kept going round until five past eleven and then died away.

We ate everything we had brought from home, standing under the little porch of this villa, which had perhaps been a barracks, watching the rain fall on the bare garden. Some people – particularly those from Ceretti’s squad – had managed to steal away between one ‘Fall in!’ and another and had bought cigarettes and lemonade. Apparently there were shops open in the neighbourhood.

At midday the sun came out and it stopped raining. They could not restrain us any more and we began to go off in twos and threes. Then they gave us half-an-hour’s break. Biancone and I went away on our own, scorning the despicable aims of those who looked for nothing better than a tobacconist or a billiard saloon, or the quite ridiculous ones of those who went in search of women. We walked slowly, looked at the chalked-out notices in French, at the timid signs of life from the few families – shop-keepers for the most part – who had returned to their homes, at the broken windows and the chalky convalescent faces of the houses hit by shell-fire. We had gone round by secondary roads which were almost in open country. A mason from the Veneto told us that the new frontier was five minutes away and we hastened towards it. There was the little valley of a watercourse, the Italian flag and the French one on the other side. An Italian soldier asked us in an unfriendly way what we wanted. ‘To have a look,’ we answered and looked in silence. There was France, the conquered nation, and here began Italy, which had always won and would always win. On the house which was the Italian frontier-post there was a yellowing poster of the film Rasputin with Harry Baur. It must have been the last film to be shown in Mentone; then the war came. Harry Baur had a thick black beard, which made him unrecognisable, and he was stretching out clawlike hands towards a bejewelled lady. The Czarina? A pity we couldn’t see the film. Off the road we found a place to relieve ourselves. We calculated whether the angle of the slope was enough to make our water reach the frontier.

As we arrived late for parade others were already coming away and there was an air of good tidings. ‘They’ve arrived! They’ve arrived!’ ‘Who? The Spaniards?’ ‘No, the ration party.’ Apparently a van had arrived with rations for all of us but no one knew where it was. There were neither officers nor parades. We went on wandering through the town.

The meal was at about five. A platoon of Young Fascist naval cadets from X had also arrived – a lot of gangling fellows whom we regarded as interlopers. With them had come the Provincial Secretary, and Bizantini presented the company for his inspection. The Provincial Secretary asked us if there had been enough to eat and informed us that we would spend the night there. I was overcome by a strong sensation of melancholy; among my companions enthusiastic voices were raised.

He was a young Provincial Secretary – a Tuscan, for it was said that our part of the world had been turned into a dependency of the Party offices in Leghorn. Thus our instinctive antipathy – the antipathy of a taciturn race for a race of chatterboxes – was sharpened into political aversion. So now I had only to hear his coarse voice talk of France and England and the ‘March of Youth’ to be filled with hatred; yet perhaps because of a lingering trace of conformism or because I was never quite honest with myself, I recognised – as did the others – that he was, after all, a nice person and easy to get on with. He looked like a professional footballer, with a face that was slightly vicious and a little worn and curly hair, already slightly grey, which he allowed to grow long at the back. He wore a uniform of khaki gaberdine with cavalry trousers and yellow boots. This seemingly military garb was in cut, material and lightness, in the scornful swaggering way it was worn, as different as might be from army uniform. Perhaps because of the clumsy way I wore uniform, because of the way I had to endure it – being predestined to belong to that section of humanity which puts up with uniforms instead of making them into a source of authority and pomp – I felt stirred by the front-line soldier’s moral indignation over the embusqués and the spivs, that moral indignation which has always a touch of envy in it.

Some of the avanguardisti – they were the sons of minor Fascist officials or civil servants – were old acquaintances of the Provincial Secretary and he was cracking jokes with them. This atmosphere of comradeship and cordiality gave me a subtle feeling of discomfort; I much preferred the accepted dull manner to which I was accustomed.

‘So you let them fail you?’ he asked Ceretti.

‘Yes – but in English and Greek,’ Ceretti replied with a boastful air. And since the Provincial Secretary had not seen the political point of his reply and had turned away to speak to other people, he repeated: ‘I have been kept back in English and Greek – yes, English and Greek’.

I went off in search of Biancone in order to comment on all this or rather to pick out and collate those details on which we would later pass comment at our leisure. But Biancone was not there. He had disappeared.

I found him again at sunset while I was walking, along a promenade lined with low spiky palms. I was sad by now. The slow beat of the sea on the rocks joined with the natural silence of the countryside and together they encircled the empty town, whose unnatural silence was broken now and then by isolated, echoing noises – a few notes on a trumpet, a song, the roar of a bicycle. Biancone came towards me with a great display of joy as if we had not seen each other for years and passed on to me such news as he had gleaned here and there. It seemed that a good-looking girl had been spotted in a grocer’s shop – she had been in a concentration camp in Marseilles – and now everyone was going there to spend a couple of lire and have a look at her. In another shop, apparently, there were French cigarettes to be had almost for nothing. In one street there was a French field-gun, broken and out of action.

His mood of joyous excitement was almost disproportionate to these trifling items of information. Besides I had not forgiven him for wandering away without me. We went on talking and there was some reference to the scenes of pillage these houses must have witnessed; he casually said yes, that there were houses broken into and that if you went in you saw everything pulled out and scattered on the floor, but although what he said sounded vague, every now and then certain very acute details would emerge.

‘So you’ve been in them?’ I asked.

Yes he had, he said. He had been going round with some of the others and they had gone into a few houses and hotels.

‘A pity you weren’t there,’ he said. The fact that he had gone off without me now seemed an unpardonable act of treachery. But instead of showing that I was hurt, I preferred to suggest to him excitedly: ‘But we can go back to them together.’ He said that it was dark now and that we wouldn’t be able to see where to put our feet amid all the rack and ruin.

When we were all gathered in the dormitory which had been improvised for us, with palliasses spread out on the floor of a gymnasium, these visits to the looted houses were the general topic of conversation. Each one reported the extraordinary sights he had seen in the neighbourhood and mentioned the names of places everybody seemed to know – such as ‘at the Bristol’ or ‘at the green house’. At first I had thought that these expeditions were adventures embarked on only by that small circle of enterprising spirits which formed a little group of its own. But gradually I saw that even people like Orazi, who had stood listening on one side, began to say their say too. My loss seemed to me past all remedy. I had spent the day disagreeably without penetrating the secrets of the town and tomorrow they would wake us early, we would be drawn up at the station to present arms a couple of times and then put back on the bus and the vision of a sacked city would vanish for ever from my ken.

Biancone passed close to me carrying a pile of blankets and said to me in a low voice: ‘Bergamini, Ceretti and Glauco have got the swag.’

I had already noticed – without paying much attention to it – a certain amount of rummaging among the mattresses and now that Biancone had tipped me off I remembered seeing a tennis racquet being flourished in Bergamini’s hands, remembered, too, wondering casually where on earth it had come from. I could not see the racquet any more but at that very moment Bergamini, lifting the blanket off his mattress, revealed a pair of boxing gloves which he quickly pushed back out of sight.

At that moment a wheezing, whistling cuckoo call arose in the dormitory and Ceretti rolled about on his palliasse in his joy at having got the cuckoo clock he had been struggling with to work.

‘But how will they get all this stuff home?’ I asked Biancone. ‘You can’t hide a cuckoo clock under your jacket.’

‘He’ll throw it away. What else do you expect? He only took it to make a noise.’

‘As long as he doesn’t make it go off all night and keep us from sleeping,’ I said.

‘There, boys,’ said Ceretti that very minute. ‘I’ve wound it up. It will go off every half-hour from now on.’

‘Chuck it into the sea! Chuck it into the sea!’ And four or five of them, with their shoes already off, threw themselves on to his palliasse, on top of him and his clock. They fought on until the clock had stopped.

Soon, when the lights had gone out, the din died down too. In a dormitory next to ours were the naval cadets from X with whom we had not mixed perhaps because they were older than us, perhaps because of long-standing local jealousies or perhaps because they seemed to belong to a sort of dockside proletariat whereas most of us were students. Even when the rowdiest of us had suddenly passed from ragging to sleep the cadets went on kicking up a row, moving about and playing tricks on each other. They had a way of calling to one another – probably it had originated that day – which for them was charged with comic possibilities incomprehensible to other people. It was ‘O bêu’, which I suppose meant ‘Oh, you ox’, a cry which they emitted like the lowing of a cow, prolonging the semi-yowel in a kind of shepherd’s call. One of them, lying in bed, uttered it in a bass voice and all the others laughed. For a little it seemed as if they had at last fallen asleep and I was trying to snatch at what was left of my slumbers when another voice began far off: ‘O bêu’. To the protests and threats which some of us yelled in return they replied with fresh outbursts of shouting. I wished we could have gone into their room in a determined body and set to with our fists, but the more warlike spirits – that is to say, Ceretti and his henchmen – were sleeping as if all were peaceful and we sleepless ones were few and unsure of ourselves. Biancone, too, was one of the sleepers.

What with the thought of my companions’ loot and irritation at the din, I continued to toss and turn between the rough army blankets. At this period an aristocratic distaste set its stamp on much of my thinking and both my attitude to Fascism and my way of opposing it were aristocratic. That night Fascism, the war and the vulgarity of my companions were for me one and the same thing and I considered them all with the same distaste, feeling that I must endure them without hope of escape.

Thus when next morning I saw the cadets file through the garden, tall and thin, slack and unresponsive to discipline, whereas we were drawn up and Bizantini was inspecting our rifles, I still looked at them with resentment. When we protested at their behaviour during the night Bizantini went even further than we did. He had adopted the local animosity between the two towns out of professional rivalry with the youth organization at X and launched out with: ‘So you saw what they are like? That’s just the kind of detachment you could expect them to send from X. Do you think they represent youth – boys who have never played games, boys who haven’t grown straight, lanky things with one shoulder up and the other down?’

He was exaggerating but he was not altogether wrong. They were certainly not athletic types but, to tell the truth, neither was I – so far as that went I was on their side and did not agree with Bizantini’s ironical remarks.

‘They are half-starved – stevedores and navvies,’ said Bizantini. ‘They come here to get the couple of lire they earn without having to work for it.’

The more he talked the more I felt my recent rancour fade and, in its place, the moral code on which I had been brought up asserted itself again – a moral code which condemned those who despise the poor and people who must work for a living.

‘When you think of all that the regime does for the people,’, Bizantini went on.

The people, I thought. Were these cadets the people? Was the people well or badly off? Was the people Fascist? The people of Italy. … And what was I?

‘—yet they don’t care twopence for the Fascist Youth or for anything.’

‘Nor do I – nor do I!’ I whispered to Biancone, who was close beside me.

‘Ah but the Provincial Secretary saw it,’ Bizantini went on. ‘He noticed right away that we have got nothing but students here, nothing but well-trained boys with sound roots and a good up-bringing.’

The column of cadets had gone off into the distance. Bizantini went on with his speech and I with my thoughts. Perhaps we would spend another day in Mentone and I wanted Biancone to come with me to see the looting. ‘As soon as they let us away,’ I said to him softly, ‘let’s go off together.’ Biancone, who was expressionless even when standing at ease, winked at me.

Biancone had heard of a villa nearby – an interesting one according to those who had been there but one which he himself did not yet know. A bird was singing in the garden. A drop of water fell into a pool. The grey leaves of a big aloe bore the record of names, villages and regiments scratched with the points of bayonets. We walked round the villa, which seemed to be shut, but in a verandah with broken panes we found a French window off its hinges. We went into a drawing-room with easy chairs and sofas all in disorder and covered with a hail of little fragments of china. The first looters had searched for silverware in the cabinets and had scattered the services of china in all directions; they had pulled the carpets out from under the furniture, which had been left higgledy-piggledy as if after an earthquake. We went through rooms and corridors, which were dark or light according to whether the shutters were open or closed – or even removed altogether – and continually we discovered objects supported by chance or strewn on the floor and trampled underfoot – pipes, stockings, cushions, playing-cards, flex, magazines and lamps. As he went along Biancone pointed everything out. He did not miss a single detail. He saw what went with what. He bent down to lift the broken stalk of a wine-glass or a piece of torn wall-paper as if he were showing me the flowers in a hothouse and he laid everything back as he had found it with the light and scrupulous touch of the detective examining the scene of a crime.

By a marble staircase, dirty with footsteps, we climbed to the upper floors. The rooms were overflowing with veils. They were mosquito nets of tulle – canopy-shaped. There must have been one hanging over every bed and the first-comers had torn them and pulled them down. Now all that frilled and folded tulle covered the floors, the beds, the chest of drawers, with a mantle swollen and contorted like a mist. Biancone greatly enjoyed the sight and passed through the rooms parting the veils with two fingers.

In one of the bedrooms we heard a scuffling noise; what appeared to be a great beast was trampling about under the layers of tulle. ‘Who’s that?’ It was Duccio, one of our squad; he was about thirteen, fat and squat and red in the face.

‘What a lot of stuff there is!’ he said, out of breath. He was going through a chest-of-drawers. He was taking the things out of the drawers and if they were no use to him he threw them on the ground – otherwise he stuffed them into his blouse. He had thus made himself an almost spherical hump and still he was stuffing scarves, gloves and braces under his jersey. He was as swollen and full-breasted as a pigeon and showed no signs of stopping.

We left our comrade to his work and continued on our tour of the villa. In the attic we went through a skylight on to a little terrace on the roof. From there we looked down on the garden and the green zone round about, on Mentone and the olive trees and the sea in the distance. There were some rotting cushions. We put them against an aerial mast and lay down to smoke in peace in the sun. The sky was swept clean; the white shreds of cloud sailed over the aerial like twisted flags. From down below voices would come amplified by the emptiness of the streets; we recognised them. ‘That’s Ceretti after something. That’s Glauco getting angry.’ Between the little pillars of the balustrade our eyes followed our comrades as they came into sight here and there in the town – a group turning off at a crossroads, shouting, a couple of them appearing somehow or other at a window and whistling and then, through a loophole overlooking the sea, there were our officers, all in high spirits, coming out of a bar with the Provincial Secretary. On the sea there was a gleam of the sun.

We did not want to waste the afternoon among the distant and isolated villas but meant to keep to the blocks of flats in the town where each landing opened up new worlds, each door revealed the secrets of a life. The doors of the flats had been forced and on the floors were scattered the contents of the drawers emptied by people searching for money or jewels. By rummaging in the layers of clothes and rubbish you could still find an occasional object of value. By now our companions were going through each house methodically, snapping up anything worthwhile that remained. It should be explained that they hardly ever bent down to search as we had seen Duccio do. When they saw something interesting – something which caught their eye – they took it, falling on it with a yell before the others could get there. Then if it was a nuisance or they found something they liked better they probably threw it away. ‘And what have you found?’ they asked us and I snarled ‘Nothing’ through my teeth, torn between the desire to show my disapproval and a last trace of childish shame at being different. Biancone, on the other hand, indulged in long explanations. ‘What’s that? Just you wait and see. You know where the road bends? Fine! and the half-ruined house? Go round the back and climb the outside stairs. What is there? If you want to know go and look.’

It wasn’t that his jokes always came off – because he was well-known for pulling people’s legs – but they gave him a knowing air.

The excitement of the chase had seized everyone. When I met Orazi all laughter and excitement and he made me feel his pockets, then I knew that there was no one who could understand Biancone and myself. But there were two of us – we understood each other and this would always be a bond between us. ‘Feel that! Feel that! Do you know what they are?’ ‘Bottles?’ ‘Valves! I’ll make myself a new wireless set.’ ‘Congratulations.’ ‘Good hunting.’

Going from one house to another we went into one in the old and poor quarter. The stairs were narrow and the rooms, to judge by their dilapidated state, seemed to have been looted years before and left to rot in the wind off the sea. The plates in a sink were dirty; the casseroles a mass of fat and perhaps spared only for that reason. I had gone into this particular house with a group of other avanguardisti. I noticed that Biancone was not among them. ‘Have you seen Biancone?’ ‘We don’t know,’ they said. ‘Why? He wasn’t with us.’

We had mingled with various groups which every now and then split up or joined with others and I could not tell at which point, thinking I was following the group Biancone was in, I had taken a different path.

‘Biancone,’ I shouted down the stairs. ‘Biancone,’ I cried along a length of corridor. I seemed to hear voices but I did not know whence they came. I opened a door and found myself in a craftsman’s room. There was a joiner’s bench on one side and a work-table, perhaps for a cabinet-maker or wood-carver, in the middle of the room. Still lying on the floor there were shavings, splinters of wood and cigarette-ends, as if he had stopped working a few minutes before. And on top of it all, scattered and broken, were the hundreds of articles the man had made – frames, little boxes, chair-backs and I don’t know how many umbrella handles.

Evening was coming on. In the middle of the room hung a lampshade with a pear-shaped counter-weight but no bulb. By the light of the setting sun, which came through the little window, I looked at a cupboard on which the sort of dummies you get in a shooting gallery, I suppose – or in a puppet theatre – were drawn up in line. Their wooden heads were carved with a naive and barely indicated vein of caricature; some were already painted but the majority were still plain wood. Of these heads only a few had shared the fate of everything else in the room and been knocked off their shoulders. The majority were still there with their lips arched in an expressionless smile and their round eyes staring. In fact it seemed to me as if one or two of them were moving, nodding on the stub which served them as neck. Perhaps they were shaken by the draught from the window – perhaps by my unexpected entry.

Or had someone passed there a little before and touched them? I opened another door. There was a bed, an undamaged cradle, a gaping wardrobe. I went into another room. On the floor there was a sea of letters, cards and photographs. I saw a photograph of an engaged couple. He was a soldier; she, small and fair-haired. I squatted down to read a letter: Ma chérie… It was her bedroom. There was little light. With one knee on the floor I was deciphering the letter and looking for the second page, having finished the first. A troop of naval cadets entered, eager, straining like hounds. They swarmed round me. ‘What is it? What have you found?’

‘Nothing – nothing,’ I muttered. They groped with hands and feet in the layer of paper and went out again with the same eager air.

I fell into a melancholy train of thought. I wasn’t suited to live under Fascism but Fascism would win. It was the worst people who won wars.

I could not see to read any more. From the window you could hear the noise of the sea as if it were in the house. I went out into the open. It was getting dark. I set out towards the place where we had to parade. Along the road there were more of my comrades walking along with their blouses deformed by humps and such things as were less easily concealed wrapped up in improvised parcels. ‘What have you got?’ they asked.

We had to parade at a hotel which had been converted into Fascist Headquarters. The brightly-lit corridors were like a fair. Each one was displaying his booty, boasting of it without any further fear of our officers and trying to discover the best way to conceal it so as not to be too conspicuous when we got back to Italy. Bergamini made his tennis racquet disappear into the folds of his trousers and Ceretti covered his chest with inner tubes for a bicycle, over which he then pulled a jersey and looked like Punch. In the midst of them I saw Biancone. He had some women’s stockings in his hand and was taking them out of their cellophane wrappings to display them, unrolling them in the air like snakes.

‘How many have you got?’ they asked him.

‘Six pairs.’

‘Silk?’

‘You bet.’

‘That was a find. Who will you give them to? Will you make a present of them?’

‘A present? I’ll go whoring free for a month.’

So there you were – Biancone too. Now I was alone. The others were cursing because they had passed by any number of times and only Biancone had contrived to unearth the stockings. ‘The stockings,’ he said, ‘but what about the tartan scarf and the cherry pipe?’ He was a marvel, Biancone. He knew what he was about. Wherever he put his hand he struck gold.

I went to congratulate him and perhaps I was sincere. After all I had been a fool to take nothing – the stuff didn’t belong to anyone now. He winked at me and showed me his real finds, the ones he really treasured and didn’t show to the others – a pendant with the portrait of Danielle Darrieux, a book by Léon Blum and finally a moustache curler. That was it – all you needed was to do things with a sense of humour, like Biancone. I had not been up to it. The Provincial Secretary, too, was amusing himself by reviewing the booty. He was prodding the boys’ tunics and making them pull out all sorts of things. Bizantini followed him, nodding and laughing, for he was pleased with us. Then he called us together, making us come round him without forming us into ranks, to tell us what had been arranged. There was an atmosphere of high spirits and excitement for they all had a lot of stuff on them.

‘Our Spanish comrades,’ said Bizantini, ‘are due to arrive at half-past nine tonight. At a quarter to nine we parade here to get ourselves ready and pick up our rifles. Then we’ll leave and tonight we’ll be home again. As for the stuff, you’ll see that we’ll manage to hide it either in the bus or on ourselves and no one will say anything. The Provincial Secretary has given us his word – he’s very pleased with you. Don’t let us forget, boys, that this is a conquered town and we are the conquerors. Everything is ours and no one can say a word to us. Now we’ve still got an hour and a quarter. You can go out again without making too much din or fuss – just as you have up to now – and go after anything you want. I say this,’ he added in a louder voice, ‘that any lad who is here today and takes nothing away with him is a bloody fool – yes, a bloody fool – and I would be ashamed to shake hands with him.’

A murmur of applause followed his last words; by now I was shaking with excitement. I was the only one of the lot who had not taken anything. It was not that I was less wide-awake than the others or slower off the mark, as I had suspected shortly before. My behaviour was courageous, almost heroic. Now it was my turn to be excited, more excited than they were.

Bizantini was still talking, giving useless advice to the impatient avanguardisti. I was near a door. There was a key in the lock, a hotel key with a big tag with the number and the words Hotel d’Angleterre. I took the key out of the lock. There – I would carry it off as a memento, a key from Fascist Headquarters. I let it slip into my pocket. That would be my booty.

These were our last hours in Mentone. I walked towards the sea by myself. It was dark. The cries of my comrades reached me from the houses. I fell into a melancholy train of thought. I wasn’t suited to live under Fascism but Fascism would win. It was the worst people who won wars – people like Bizantini and Ceretti. One by one Abyssinia, Spain, Albania and France had fallen to Fascism until eventually Germany would swallow us all up, good and bad, and enslave the whole world. Lonely and saddened by these thoughts I made my way towards a bench. Then I saw that someone in sailor’s uniform was sitting on it. It was one of the cadets from X. I sat down. He remained with his chin on his breast.

‘Tell me,’ I said, without knowing yet what to say to him, ‘aren’t you going into the houses?’ He didn’t even turn round. ‘In my heart of hearts,’ he said softly, ‘I’m kicking myself for it.’ ‘Haven’t you taken anything?’ I said to him. ‘I’m kicking myself for it,’ he repeated.

‘Tell me, didn’t you take anything because you can’t find anything or because you don’t want to?’ ‘I’m kicking myself for it,’ he said again. Then he got up and went striding off with his arms dangling at his side through the jagged shadows of the palms. Suddenly he began to sing, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Live while youth remains.’ Was he drunk?

I sat down on the bench, took the key from my pocket and began to look at it. I would have liked to be able to give it a symbolical meaning. Hotel d’Angleterre – then Fascist Headquarters; now it was in my hands. What could it mean? I began to wish passionately that it were a terribly important key – such an important one that the Fascists would go mad if they couldn’t find it, that they wouldn’t be able to shut some room containing invaluable secret loot or documents on which their personal fates depended.

I rose and went back towards Headquarters. There were a few avanguardisti in the corridors packing their trinkets. The NCOs were counting the rifles and deciding how to draw up the squads. Biancone, too, was among them. I went along the corridors, pretending to be bored, and ran my hand along the walls and doors, whistling a sort of dance tune. When I got my hand near the key I quickly took it out of its lock and put it in my blouse. The corridors were full of doors and almost all of them had their keys outside with their gilded numbers hanging down. My blouse was full by now. I could see no more keys about. No one had noticed me. I went out.

In the doorway I met others coming in.

‘Well, what are you taking home?’

‘Me? Nothing.’

But they read a smile on my lips.

‘Ah yes, we know – nothing,’ they said.

I walked round the garden. I must have had a score of keys. They made a noise like so much scrap-iron. Now I had my load too, I thought.

‘What are you carrying?’ asked someone who was passing. ‘You’re making a noise like a cow with a bell round its neck.’

I sheered off. The garden had pergolas and summer-houses covered with untended creepers and I thrust my way into them. I was beginning to realise what I had done. For one reason or another my incomprehensible gesture might be discovered quite soon. Suppose some officer or Party official needed to lock something up in one of these half-empty rooms?

And suppose my companions either now or later – in the bus or in Italy – forced me to show what I had in my blouse? All those keys with the numbers of the Hotel d’Angleterre could only have been stolen from Fascist Headquarters. How could I justify it? It was clearly a gesture of contempt and rebellion or sabotage. Behind me the ex-Hotel d’Angleterre loomed with all its lit and shuttered windows from which there emerged vague, blue gleams of light. I had sabotaged Fascism in conquered territory.

I ran forward. I had seen a sheet of water gleaming. There was a pool in the middle of a flower-bed, surrounded with rocks and in the centre a dry spout. I pulled the keys out of my jacket one by one and let them fall into the water, sinking them quietly so that no splash should be heard. A muddy cloud rose from the bottom and cancelled the gleam of the moon. After the last key had sunk I saw a glinting shadow pass through the water – a fish, perhaps an old goldfish coming to see what on earth was going on.

I got up. Had I been a coward? Putting my hands into my pockets, I discovered that I still had one key, the first I had taken; it was still there. I felt myself in danger once more and happy. My companions were returning for the parade and I went with them. The train with the Spaniards on board arrived after we had been drawn up for an hour in the station square. Bizantini roared ‘Present arms!’ Under the canopy of the station there were weak black-out lamps. The Young Falangists formed up in that zone of light and we were very far away at the other end of the square. They were tall and robust with faces that looked snub-nosed, like boxers – red berets pulled over one eye, black jerseys rolled up to the elbows, little haversacks fastened to their belts. A wind was blowing in sudden little gusts. The lights wavered. We held our rifles at the ‘present’ before the youth of the Caudillo. From time to time odd notes, odd snatches of a march of theirs reached us; they had been singing it ever since they arrived. It sounded like ‘Arò – arò – arò’. There were a few broken commands from their officers and they formed up in column marking off with outstretched arms. A hum of voices reached us – muffled calls. ‘Sebastian! Habla, Vincente!’ Then they marched off, reached their waiting buses and climbed in. They left as they had arrived, without glancing at us.

When the time came for us to leave, laden like smugglers, we filed past Bizantini, who looked over each one of us to see that we weren’t too conspicuous and dismissed each one with a resounding slap on the jacket or a kick in the pants. I passed, too, slim and thin in my empty jacket. I stared up at Bizantini. He kept a serious face and said nothing. Then he went on to make a joke with the next boy.

The bus was running back along the coast road. We were all tired and silent. The darkness was pierced every now and then by the headlights of convoys. The houses along the coast were dark, the sea deserted, silvery and threatening. There was a war on and we were all caught up in it but now I knew that it would shape our lives for us. My life, too, but how I could not say.

.

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Italo Calvino, born in 1923, fought as a partisan in the Ligurian mountains during the war. He started writing in 1945, was ‘discovered’ by Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini and published his first novel in 1947.

Stuart Hood was a Scottish novelist, translator and former British television producer.

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