A Soldier of the Great War (47 page)

"It would take a million years to cover all that ground," Guariglia protested.

"Not if we go individually," Valtorta said, his eyes focused on the clouds at the top of the cone, thirty kilometers distant. He started to load his pack. "You don't fight wars that way, but this isn't exactly a war. With so many individual patrols on the volcano, they won't be able to elude us."

"What if one of us finds a dozen of them," Alessandro asked.

"Shoot them. We'll all close in on the sound of firing."

"You may not arrive for an hour."

The lieutenant dropped loads of ammunition in the side pockets, and cinched them up.

"What are you worried about? You have a lot of ammunition and a good rifle. Keep a distance; you'll be all right."

"They'll scatter."

"We'll be closing in. We'll pick them up one by one, or drive them into the clear."

"The smart ones will lie down and wait for us to pass," Guariglia said, "and then escape into the valley."

"I don't think so," Alessandro said. "I think that, like hunted animals, they'll seek the deep forests or they'll run for the heights. The colonel must be a hunter."

"He is," the lieutenant confirmed. "Are you?"

"No, but I used to have a hunt horse. Sometimes we'd chase game, and, when we did, by evening we always found ourselves deep in a forest or high on a hill."

 

S
TILL EARLY
in the morning, Alessandro and Guariglia, who had left together to proceed to adjoining sections, happened upon a farmhouse surrounded by barns, a mill, and a cistern. Two women were doing laundry at a sluice where the water flowed as plentifully as in the Alps. At the sight of the heavily armed soldiers they froze
like deer, but were reassured when Alessandro asked to see the men. "Only my father is here," the younger one said, and then put her hand to her mouth as if she had written her own death sentence.

"Don't worry," Guariglia told her. "All we want is to eat and take a bath."

She ran into the orchard to get her father.

"Why so much water," Alessandro asked the other woman.

"We sell it."

"Will you sell some to us?"

"Why not?"

Within half an hour Alessandro and Guariglia were floating in a huge cistern as the father of one of the girls harangued them about patriotism and the king. He was a veteran of the African wars. He had seen other soldiers walking through the fields, and he suspected that Alessandro and Guariglia were hunting for the deserters on the volcano. Though he insisted that they bathe and eat for free, they refused to answer any of his questions for fear that he was other than what he seemed.

"How do we know," Guariglia whispered, with ice-cold water dripping from his mustache, "that he won't shoot us in the pool, like Euripides?"

"He's been playing with our rifles, Euripides," Alessandro answered, motioning toward the farmer, who was fondling the weapons, "and he hasn't shot us yet, has he? Besides, only old soldiers fool around with rifles that way." Then Alessandro dived for the bottom. In complete darkness, he swam downward until the pressure against his eardrums was unbearable. He turned about and surfaced as fast as he could, releasing from his aching lungs silver bubbles of air that preceded him on the way up, until he broke the surface with a gasp.

"How deep is it?" he asked the owner.

"I don't know," the old man said. "It's part of the mountain. Sometimes it bubbles, but not often. We drink it. We've never had
a line long enough to reach the bottom. When I was young, my father brought in a reel with a thousand meters of wire on it. The sinker never hit anything. May I look at the bayonets?"

"Sure," they said, nervously.

He unsheathed the bayonets and watched the light glint off their oiled blades.

"He's a moron," Guariglia said under his breath, treading water.

"I can't argue with that," Alessandro answered.

When they got out they shaved with hot water and put on their newly washed, wet uniforms. Then they went to a loggia where they propped the rifles on their packs and sat down to eat. The women, whose husbands had been in the north for years, and who had been peeking at the two soldiers as they swam, had worked themselves into a frenzy. As if afflicted by a disease of the nerves, they made strange, unmistakable, and yet obscure gestures with their lips, tongues, jaws, eyes, hands, and fingers.

The old man sat at the table with Alessandro and Guariglia, declaiming about the Austrians and the Africans. Slamming his fist down now and then, he failed to notice that his daughter's eyes were glazed, or that his daughter-in-law stood behind him for a few seconds, placed both her hands on her breasts, touched her tongue to her nose, closed her eyes, gyrated her pelvis, and moaned like a wolf.

Alessandro and Guariglia did not know quite what to think. From the way their mouths hung open and their eyes popped, the old man thought they were totally mesmerized by his account of the war in Eritrea, and that he was inspiring them with the will to fight.

The one who moaned like a wolf threw open the kitchen shutters and, still holding on to them so that she could close them if her father turned around, let her blouse drop to her waist. Alessandro and Guariglia cleared their throats, sighed, whistled, and stabbed their veal chops.

"That's right!" the old man shouted. "Those fucking Turks! We knew what to do with them!"

When the meal was just about over, the daughter-in-law turned briefly, stuck a huge Sicilian bread into her dress, and hopped into the kitchen.

"Now what, boys?" the old man asked.

"Maybe we should sleep. We were up all night," Alessandro offered.

"And waste daylight? My God! When I was in the corps, we marched for weeks on end, every night, and fought through each day. Go out there! Get those bastards!"

"If we sleep, we'll be better fighters!" Guariglia begged.

"Bullshit!" the old man shouted, jumping to his feet. "And God bless you!" He brought their rifles and packs. The three of them left together and walked up a hill that led to the volcano. The farmer blessed and congratulated them again, and departed for his fields.

Alessandro and Guariglia walked a short distance and then turned to look back at the house. In the windows of the upper storey, the two women were doing a rather strange dance.

"They're naked," Guariglia stated.

"I can see that."

"Let's go back."

"He's watching."

Guariglia turned.

"He's waving. The son of a bitch is waving. He's going to watch us like a dog, until we disappear."

"He's devoted to a cause."

"Wait a minute," Guariglia said. "Who's that?"

From the side of the compound, within their view but just out of the farmer's sight, a soldier with a rifle plodded up to the house. His knocks on the door made the women run from the windows as fast as greyhounds.

"Who is it!" Guariglia shouted.

"You know who it is," Alessandro answered. "Look at him standing there tucking in his shirt and arranging his hair. Who else could it be? Who else
would
it be?"

"I'm going to kill him," Guariglia said.

Then they separated and began to zigzag up the side of Aetna. By now the sun was high, their uniforms were dry, and they were so hot that they craved altitude if only because they knew that the wind on the heights would be cold.

 

A
LESSANDRO'S PACK
was too heavy. He had to carry 150 rounds of ammunition, probably far more than he would need, heavy clothing, enough food to last for a few days, and water. This, combined with the weight of boots, belts, clips, leather pouches, rifle, bayonet and sheath, pistol, pistol ammunition, and the many miscellaneous items that had accumulated in his pack and pockets, weighed almost as much as he did.

At four in the afternoon he halted in a clearing of young chestnut trees. Even before summer was over, the leaves were beginning to yellow—not, as elsewhere, from the heat, but from the cold at high altitude. At several thousand meters, the gradually receding forest seemed more appropriate to Northern Europe than to Sicily, and so dark and well watered that it looked like a wood in medieval France, or the Villa Borghese at the beginning of December. In their sweet alarmed chatter, the birds seemed to be saying that they had never before seen a man, although that could not have been true, because the peasants came to Aetna to gather chestnuts. Perhaps the birds had never seen a soldier.

Alessandro dropped his pack and rifle, and without the weight on his shoulders he felt like an angel drawn skyward. He sat down. For many hours he had labored up the mountainside, through forest, scrub, vineyard, field, and over black lava runs that scuffed his boots and bruised his ankles. His uniform had darkened with his
own sweat, and the part of the pack that rested against his back was wringing wet.

Twice he had passed Guariglia, though no one else, and they had remarked that they would never find anyone, because with their eyes stinging and their heads bent forward with the weight on their shoulders, they did not have the freedom to observe. "Undoubtedly," Guariglia had said, "they hear us and they see us."

An ice-cold stream in the middle of the clearing was just deep enough to flow over Alessandro as he pushed himself down in the middle of it. The breeze was cool and he knew that the night would be frigid, but he would find Guariglia, hunt for the first time, and they would roast their dinner over a fire.

He emerged from the stream, shook off the water, dressed, and went to sit on his pack. A long way in the distance, the sea was illuminated by the hot afternoon light. Something about the color blue, placid and cool, far away, in a silent dazzling band below the horizon, allowed Alessandro to give up all care and let the moment have its way.

He leaned over, grasped his rifle near the base of the bayonet, and pivoted it around to rest it against the fork of a sapling, ready and within his sight. At sea a ship moved slowly across the strip of blue, the white speck of its wake becoming a thread that eventually disappeared. Alessandro picked up a chestnut and smelled it. It made him think of Rome in autumn, of looking down the Via Condotti from the Piazza Trinità dei Monti at dusk, when the fires began to blaze in restaurants along the Tiber and a darkening orange sky silhouetted the royal palms on the Gianicolo. He regretted not having taken his mother to see the views of Rome that he had come to know as he was growing up. Never would she see them again, and never had they seen them together, because she walked slowly, and he had not had the patience to walk slowly with her.

Suddenly, he was thrown forward as if he had been butted from behind by a bull. He flew over half the clearing and was about to
smash headlong into a fallen log when he was turned in the air away from it. Whatever had launched him was clinging to him still, and for its own convenience had rotated him belly up so that he now saw nothing but blue.

As they landed, and as all the air left Alessandro's lungs, he received a tremendous blow to the face. He had no chance to move, no opportunity to respond. In split seconds, he tried to comprehend. Then an enormous, balding, blue-eyed man pulled back, left him, and casually walked over to the rifle. After he took it from the forked sapling and removed the sheath from the bayonet so forcefully that it flew into the air, he twirled around and came at Alessandro.

His own bayonet, with which he himself had killed a man, was moving toward him like a routing hound, but more swiftly and more surely. The man guiding it seemed unperturbed, as if he were about to stick a shovel in a pile of earth before sitting down to have his lunch.

Alessandro watched the oiled silver point and sucked in his breath. He had a choice. He could think, now I'm going to die, and this is the last thing I'm going to see, or he could find himself a tenth of a second to one side of the blade, just having escaped and not knowing quite how.

Though he had no balance or strength, his muscles exploded and he flew to the side. The bayonet went into the soft forest floor and cut a clay-colored gash in the underside of the fallen log.

Alessandro somersaulted backward into the brush and rolled down the hill, his flesh torn by rocks and branches. To encourage gravity, he pushed with his legs and arms whenever he touched anything, windmilling recklessly down the slope until he found himself, breathing like a whore, at the bottom of a little grassy knoll.

He had a clear line of sight all the way up to where he had been, miraculously far away, and he cocked his head to see if he were being pursued. The breeze didn't even move the leaves, and
the balding blond man was disappearing straight up a lava run at disheartening speed, carrying Alessandro's pack and rifle.

Without thinking, without at first even standing up, Alessandro set out after him.

 

H
E WANTED
neither to lose him nor to be observed, so he kept to the edge of the lava run, among bushes and trees. The cuts on his face still bled, the black dust that he breathed settled in the open wounds, and he turned his ankle half a dozen times, but eventually he got his breath and stopped bleeding.

He had to move quietly because he was so close. The deserter was in the center of the lava, making his way steadily up, as even in his pacing as a mountain guide. Alessandro followed him for two hours, a hundred meters to his right and a few meters behind, and in all that time the deserter did not look back once, but as the sun began to set and a shadow covered the east he stopped and scanned everything below him on the mountain. Alessandro fell flat against the rocks.

The deserter stood straight and tall, backlit by the sun. As the evening breeze came up it caught his hair and made it flash wildly, as if he were wearing a golden helmet. He was standing amid fields of yellow grasses that still showed a tint of green where the hillocks rose and the ground was uneven. Beyond him, the sky was empty. It was getting cold, and Alessandro could clearly see the outline of his rifle and bayonet slung over the deserter's shoulder, tight against the side of the pack that had food, water, ammunition, and warm clothing.