A Bell for Adano (26 page)

Any day would have been good for coming home, but this home and this day were best. They sang and shouted: “Coming home! Coming homel”

There had not been any advance notice of the prisoners’ release, except what Major Joppolo had given Tina, and she told no one. But somehow the word spread far ahead of their actual approach, like gusts of wind ahead of an oncoming cloud.

Women far up the town heard the murmur of their approach and instinctively knew what it was. They shouted to other women. Those standing on the sidewalk in front of the Palazzo saw them turn into Via Umberto the First from Via Favemi, and instead of rushing down the street toward them, they clutched their emotional throats and ran off to find their friends to tell them of this wonderful thing: the boys of Adano were coming home!

And then the women who had heard the murmur and the women who had stood there and actually seen the approach, and also the women that these others had summoned, all ran back to the sidewalk in front of the Palazzo and watched.

War is awful for men but it is not too good for women. In their bedsheets these women had ached for their men. The nipples of their breasts had hurt from wanting them so badly. There had been days when certain of these women did not get letters from their men, and then, in talking with their friends, had found that those others did get letters, and those had been bad days. Some had had their small ones, just old enough to talk, slip up to them shyly with frightened eyes and say: “Papa: where is my little father?” and there had not been any answer except in the pit of the stomach.

The women who stood on the sidewalk in front of the Palazzo had lived in daily dread that their men might be hurt, or worse. Women who had argued with their men, and been impatient with them when they had them securely, forgot the arguments and thought only of the nice things, the being waked up in the middle of the night by a man crawling clumsily into bed, the loud laugh with the head thrown back, the smell of a certain smoke, the sound of a certain kind of wine clucking out of the bottle.

And so the women stood there on the sidewalk in front of the Palazzo with their hands at their throats, or reaching vaguely for loose wisps of hair.

The men walking up the street saw the women standing there. They did not break into a run. Their happiness was terrifying; they walked slowly toward their women.

When the men had reached a place about five hundred yards from the women, the crowd of women started moving forward, slowly at first, the feet just shuffling on the sidewalk, then stepping forward as necks craned and eyes darted, then walking to be closer, and finally running and shouting wordless sounds.

The men did not break into a run. The women ran toward the men. There was equal happiness on both sides, it just happened that most of the men knew their women would be there, whereas some of the women were not sure that their men would be there. That was the difference. That is why the women ran.

There were among those women some who knew that their men were dead. They were just running forward in order to share the incredible happiness, or even the doubt, of the other women. Doubt was better than what they had.

One of the women in the crowd was Tina. She had been expecting this thing ever since the Major had spoken to her about it, and she kept herself very available. She was one of the women who had been brought out by the mere murmur.

She was dressed in her nicest dress, a blue thing that the gay sister had sent from Rome. Her hair had been combed until it shone and its blondeness looked almost real.

She ran forward with the others. Her eyes explored the crowd of men half lovingly, half fearfully. She pushed at the women in front of her and struggled for a better view.

You can be sure that Major Joppolo was down in the street. He wanted to be there to savor the happiness in Adano. But he also shared the specific curiosity which drove Tina forward. He too wondered whether Giorgio was there.

At the first murmur of the crowd, which he had easily heard through the French doors of his office, he had run down into the street, and he had walked rapidly down it toward the group of men even before the women started moving. Therefore he had just about reached the prisoners when the women started running.

When the prisoners saw the Major, some of them ran forward, shouting: “American! American!” They hugged him and some kissed him, and there were bread crumbs on his face when they got through with him.

Here was the final crazy touch of war. Men who for months had been chosen and trained and ordered to commit the worst of all crimes, murder, were now showering their affection on the very kind of man they had been out to kill.

The women came close. Some had recognized their men, and were screaming the names with trembling voices.

Now at last the men broke into a run. They had only about ten paces to go.

The two crowds mingled.

It was a crazy sight at first. The couples who had found each other embraced each other. Some laughed and some cried, some whispered and some screamed, some pounded and some caressed.

Some of the women with dead husbands embraced the first men they reached, just to taste a little of this sensation that they had wanted so much. But the men rejected them and went looking for their own.

You could begin to see the ones who were not going to find their men at all. They darted faster and faster from couple to couple, repeating the name, asking, looking two and three times at faces already seen just to make sure. The faces of these women went paler and paler and finally they began to cry. Curiously most of these women did not scream, but cried silently; the tears just coursed down their empty faces.

Tina did not have to dart from couple to couple. Major Joppolo happened to be standing close beside her when she found out.

A young man left his woman. He went over to Tina and stood before her and shook his head. That was all he had to do, Tina knew.

Major Joppolo forgot all the injunctions about behavior in public which he had put down in Notes from Joppolo to Joppolo. He stepped forward and took Tina’s hand. Her hand was cold and loose in his, and she did not seem to realize that he was there.

“What happened?” Tina asked the young man.

He said: “I will tell you later, Tina. Please not just at this moment.”

Major Joppolo said to the young man: “We will have lunch together, at the Albergo dei Pescatori.”

The young man did not question Major Joppolo with his eyes at all. He said: “Bring Tina at twelve o’clock. I will tell her everything then.” He kissed Tina on the. cheek.

The kiss made Tina start crying. She buried her face in her hands and shook silently.

The crowd did not break up for a long time. The men stood right there in the street and told many of their experiences. Couples melted into quartets and quartets into laughing circles, and the women who did not find their men went off alone. Fathers held sons in their arms for the first time. A few men hurried off with their women in a desire to become fathers as quickly as possible. Idlers and curious men who had stayed behind began to mix with the crowd. Laura Sofia the maiden lady circulated in the crowd, hoping that the hunger induced in men by war might be in her favor, but she had no luck.

Major Joppolo did not hurry Tina. He let her cry until the tears were all gone and her sobs grew dry and awful. He touched her all the time, with a hand on her shoulder or the back of a hand against her bare arm, just to let her know that someone was there.

Finally the Major took Tina home. A little before twelve he went back to get her. By that time she was all right. Her eyes were red, but she was in control of herself.

They went to the Albergo dei Pescatori. Giorgio’s friend, whose name was Nicolo, was already there with his girl. Nicolo had changed into civilian clothes. A few minutes after Tina and the Major joined Nicolo and his girl, Captain Purvis came in. Since he and the Major usually had lunch together, it was quite natural that he should join the group, though the Major regretted it later.

For a time they ate silently. Tina asked Nicolo how things had been and Nicolo said they had not been bad, and Captain Purvis asked the Major where he had been hiding this new quail and he tried to flirt ûwhi t her a little, and the Major made some polite advances to Nicolo to try to cover up his embarrassment over Captain Purvis. But on the whole the conversation was either nonexistent or meaningless.

It was not until the fruit came on that Tina said: “Nicolo, tell me what happened.”

Nicolo had been waiting for her to urge him. “It isn’t very nice, Tina,” he said. “War isn’t ever very nice.”

“I know,” Tina said. “Tell it to me just as it happened.” Nicolo said. “I will have to tell it that way, Tina. That is the way I remember it and I couldn’t lie to you about it. It didn’t happen nicely.” Major Joppolo said: “I guess it never seems very nice.” Nicolo said: “It never does.”

Captain Purvis, who did not speak Italian, said: “What the hell is all this wop talk about? Let me in on the good news. “

Major Joppolo decided it was best to ignore the Captain. The Captain started trying to make eyes at Nicolo’s girl.

Tina said: “Did he ask for me, Nicolo?”

Nicolo said: “I’d better begin at the beginning.”

Tina said: “All right.”

Nicolo looked Major Joppolo straight in the face: “You will see that what happened to Giorgio was a very complicated thing. It was all tied up with what we Italians felt in this war, and I guess with what any man thinks about a war, or even about a game that he thinks he must win. You will see, it was complicated.”

Major Joppolo said: “I will understand. My mother and father came from Florence. “

Surprisingly Tina took the trouble to say: “He will understand. “

Nicolo said: “I don’t know whether I understand myself. It began in the battle for Beja, in Tunisia. It was a -kind of infection, like something a soldier gets in his bowels, only it was in the heart. Our hearts went all watery, and we were through with the war, although we were still supposed to be fighting. It was the artillery.” Tina said: “Did he ask for me, Nicolo?”

Nicolo deliberately kept himself from being too sympathetic. He said: “You’d better let me tell it from the beginning, Tina. It’ll be better that way, I promise:”

She said: “All right.”

Nicolo said: “The artillery was bad. They say you stop living for a moment when you sneeze. When a shell goes off near you, you have the same kind of paroxysm, and when you come out of it, you know you have been dead for a moment. You can’t go on dying like that many times a day, day after day, and be the same. Think what it would be like if you sneezed twenty times an hour, twenty-four hours a day, for days and days on end. Even that would be terrible, and there is hardly any fear in a sneeze.”

Captain Purvis said: “Cutie, how would you like to dance the dance of the sheets?” But Nicolo’s girl was listening to the story. The Captain said: “Goddamit, I’m going to have to start taking lessons in dago, I can see that. Pass me the vino, will you, Major?”

Nicolo said: “We all changed, except Giorgio.” Tina gasped a little when she heard the name. Nicolo said: “Giorgio used to argue with us. He said we had to go on fighting until we were consumed, and he talked about our honor, and he used to say that even if war made you think that men were just animals, you had to remember that animals often fight each other to the death. I remember he often used to say: `Have you ever tried to figure out what makes two dogs fight each other?’“ Nicolo turned to the Major and said: “Have you ever thought about that, sir?”

The Major said: “No, I hadn’t.”

Nicolo said: “It is worth thinking about “

Tina said: “Did he ever talk about me?”

Nicolo ignored her. He said: “It makes war a little more sensible if you think about the dogs. Anyhow, Giorgio was tenacious, and I used to admire him for it, though I always argued with him. I thought we ought to give ourselves up. He was so tenacious that he made me help him kill two Germans and we put on their uniforms and came back to Sicily on a Siebel ferry. We had to be careful to pick two Germans just the right size for uniforms. Giorgio made me do it with him because he said otherwise we would be taken.”

Nicolo’s girl spoke for the first time: “Tell Tina about the night before you left Tunisia.”

Nicolo said: “Oh yes, just before we killed the Germans I wanted to back out. I was afraid. I tried to tell him that killing the Germans was dishonorable, and he said that in a war a man’s honor was not measured by medals, because they were given out unjustly, but by the amount he could do for his nation. He said that killing two Germans helped rather than hurt Italy (perhaps, as things have turned out, we should have killed more) and that the best thing we could do would be to preserve ourselves for our country’s next battle. So we slipped into a bivouac and picked out two Germans and killed them in a quiet way which Giorgio showed me, and we got back to Sicily.”

The Major said: “Didn’t you have any trouble on the Siebel barge? Do you speak German?”

Nicolo said: “Giorgio spoke a little German, but anyhow we got in with an engineer unit they were apparently trying to save, and they just herded them on the ferry and us with them, and no questions asked. “

Major Joppolo said: “Were you attacked on the way across?”

“We came by night. It was only a ten-hour trip. The Germans got quite a bit across by night without being attacked.”

Captain Purvis said: “Major, you going to sit here jabbering dago with these people all afternoon? How about cutting me in on this pretty little squiff here?”

The Major said: “He’s telling a story, Captain.”

The Captain said: “My pants aren’t hot for him, the hell with him, what I want to know is, where you been hiding this little piece?”

Major Joppolo ignored the Captain and the Captain took some more wine.

Nicolo said: “The ironic thing was that the Siebel barge landed us just down the beach from Adano here.” Tina said: “Why didn’t you come home? Why couldn’t he have come home to me then?”