But beautiful above all else were the images, in magazines and publicity posters, of pure-blooded Italian girls, with their large breasts and soft curves, splendid baby-making machines in contrast to those bony, anorexic English misses and to the "crisis woman" of our own plutocratic past. Beautiful the young ladies who seemed to be actively competing in the "Five Thousand Lire for a Smile" contest, and beautiful also that provocative woman, her rear well defined by a seductive skirt, who strode across a publicity poster as the radio assured me that dark eyes might be pretty, blue eyes might be swell, but as for me, oh as for me, it’s their legs that I like well.
Utterly beautiful the girls in all the songs, whether they were rural, Italic beauties ("the buxom country girls") or urban beauties like the "lovely piccinina," that milliner’s assistant from Milan with her delicate half-powdered face, walking through crowds at a bustling pace… Or beauties on bikes, symbols of a brash, disheveled femininity, with legs so slim, so shapely and trim.
Ugly, of course, were our enemies, and several copies ofBalilla , the weekly for the Italian Fascist Youth, contained illustrations by De Seta alongside stories that made fun of the enemy, always through brutish caricatures:The war had him worried / so King Georgie scurried / for defense from things sinister / to Big Winston ,his Minister -and then there were the other two villains, Big Bad Roosevelt and the terrible Stalin, the red ogre of the Kremlin.
The English were bad because they used the equivalent ofLei , whereas good Italians were supposed to use, even when addressing people they knew, nothing but the oh-so-ItalianVo i.A basic knowledge of foreign languages suggests that it is the English and French who useVo i( you ,vous ), whereasLeiis very Italian, though perhaps influenced by Spanish, and at the time we were thick as thieves with Franco’s Spain. As for the GermanSie , it is aLeior aLow , but not aVo i.In any case, perhaps as a result of poor knowledge of things foreign,Leias the polite form ofyouhad been rejected by the higher powers in favor ofVo i-my grandfather had kept clippings that were quite explicit and rather inflexible on the matter. He had also had the presence of mind to save the last issue of a women’s magazine calledLei , in which it was announced that beginning with the next issue it would be calledAnnabella.Obviously, theLeiin this context was not an address to "you," the magazine’s ideal reader, but rather an instance of the pronoun "she," indicating that the magazine was aimed at women, not men. But regardless, the wordLei , even when serving a different grammatical function, had become taboo. I wondered if the whole episode had made the women who read the magazine laugh at the time, and yet it had happened and everyone had put up with it.
And then there were the colonial beauties, because even though Negroid types resembled apes and Abyssinians were plagued by a whole host of maladies, an exception had been made for the beautiful Abyssinian woman. The radio sang:Little black face / sweet Abyssinian / just wait and pray / we’re nearing our dominion / Then we’ll be with you / and gifts we’ll bring / yes we will give you / a new law and a new King.
Just what should be done with the beautiful Abyssinian woman was made clear in De Seta’s color cartoons, which featured Italian legionnaires buying half-naked, dark-skinned females in slave markets and sending them to their pals back home, as parcels.
But the feminine charms of Ethiopia had been evoked from the very beginning of the colonial campaign in a nostalgic caravan-style song:They’re off / the caravans of Tigrai / toward a star that by and by / will shine and glimmer with love.
And I, caught in this vortex of optimism, what had I thought? My elementary-school notebooks held the answer. It was enough to look at their covers, which immediately invited thoughts of daring and triumph. Except for a few that contained thick, white paper (they must have been more expensive) and bore on their covers the portraits of Great Men (I must have done some woolgathering around the name and the enigmatic, smiling face of a gentleman called Shakespeare-which I no doubt pronounced as it was spelled, with four syllables-seeing that I had gone over all the letters in pen, as if to interrogate or memorize them), the notebooks boasted images of Il Duce on horseback, of heroic combatants in black shirts lobbing hand grenades at the enemy, of slender PT boats sinking enormous battleships, of couriers with a sublime sense of sacrifice, who though their hands have been mangled by a grenade run on beneath the crackle of enemy machine guns, carrying their messages between their teeth.
Our headmaster (why headmaster and not headmistress? I do not know, but I could hear myself saying "Mr. Headmaster") had dictated to us the key passages from Mussolini’s historic address on the day he declared war, June 10, 1940, inserting, following the newspaper accounts, the reactions of the oceanic audience listening to him in Piazza Venezia:
Combatants on land ,at sea ,and in the air! Blackshirts of the revolution and of the legions! Men and women of Italy ,of the Empire and of the kingdom of Albania! Listen! An hour signaled by destiny is striking in the skies of our fatherland. The hour of irrevocable decisions. The declaration of war has already been delivered(cheering, deafening cries of "War! War!")to the ambassadors of Great Britain and of France. We are going to battle against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West ,who at every turn have hindered the advance and often threatened the very existence of the Italian people…
According to the laws of Fascist morality ,when one has a friend one marches with him wholeheartedly.(Shouts of "Duce! Duce! Duce!")This is what we have done and will do with Germany ,with her people ,with her marvelous armed forces. On the eve of this event of historic import ,we turn our thoughts to his Majesty the Emperor King(the multitudes erupt in great cheers at the mention of the House of Savoy),who ,as always ,has understood the spirit of the fatherland. And we salute the Führer ,the head of allied Greater Germany.(The crowd cheers at length at the mention of Hitler.)Italy ,proletarian and Fascist ,is on her feet for the third time ,strong ,proud ,and united as never before.(The multitude cries out in a single voice: "Yes!")The watchword is one word only ,categorical and binding for all.
It has already taken wing ,stirring hearts from the Alps to the Indian Ocean: Victory! And we will win!(The crowd erupts in deafening cheers.)
It was in those months that the radio must have begun playing "Victory," echoing the word of the Chief:
Steeled by a thousand passions ,the voice of our nation rang clear!" Centuries ,Cohorts ,and Legions ,attention ,the hour is here! "March onward ,young men!
Who holds us back
or blocks our track ,
we’ll knock them aside!
Slaves never again!
Our hands won’t be tied
like prisoners by our own sea!
Victory ,victory ,victory!
We will triumph in the air ,on land ,at sea!
The highest powers say
it’s the watchword of the day:
Victory ,victory ,victory!
At any cost: nothing will stand in our way!
Our hearts are eager to obey
even to our last breath.
And our voices swear today:
Victory or death!
How might I have experienced the beginning of a war? As a great adventure, undertaken at the side of my German comrade. His name was Richard, as the radio informed me in 1941:Comrade Richard ,welcome… I learned how I, in those glorious years, might have imagined my comrade Richard (the song’s rhythm obliged us to pronounce that name like the FrenchRichard , rather than the GermanRichard ) from a postcard, on which he appeared alongside an Italian comrade, both in profile, both masculine and decisive, their gaze fixed on the finish line of victory.
Butmyradio, after "Comrade Richard," was already playing (by this point I was convinced it was a live broadcast) a different song. This one was in German, a sad dirge, almost a funeral march that seemed to me to keep time with some imperceptible rhythm in my gut, sung by a woman whose voice was deep and hoarse, mournful and sinful:Vo r d e r Kaserne / Vor dem großen Tor / Stand eine Laterne / Und steht sie noch davor…
My grandfather had owned the record, but in those days I would not have understood the German.
And indeed I listened next to the Italian version, which was more a paraphrase or an adaptation than a translation:
Every evening
beneath the streetlamp’s glow
not far from the garrison
I waited for you to show.
I’ll be there this evening too,
forgetting all the world with you,
with you, Lili Marleen,
with you, Lili Marleen.
When I must walk through the muck and mire beneath my heavy pack I feel unsure and tired.
Where will I go? What will I do? Then I smile and think of you ,of you ,Lili Marleen ,of you ,Lili Marleen.
Though the Italian lyrics fail to say so, in the German the streetlamp emerges from the fog:Wenn sich die späten Nebel drehn , when the late fog swirls. But in any case, in those days I would not have understood that the sad voice in the fog beneath that streetlamp (my concern then was probably how a streetlamp could have been lit during a blackout) belonged to the mysteriouspitana , "the woman who sells by herself." That song must be why, years later, I took note of this passage from Corazzini’s poem "The Streetlamp":Murky and scant in the lonely thoroughfare ,/ in front of the bordello doors ,it dims ,/ and the good smoke that from the censer swims / might be this fog that whitens out the air.
"Lili Marleen" came out not too long after the giddy "Comrade Richard." Either we were generally more optimistic than the Germans, or in the interim something had happened, our poor comrade had grown sad and, tired of walking through muck, longed to go back to his streetlamp. But I was coming to realize that the same series of propagandistic songs could explain how we had gone from a dream of victory to one of the welcoming bosom of a whore as hopeless as her clients.
After our initial enthusiasm, we grew accustomed not only to blackouts and, I imagine, to bombings, but also to hunger. Why else would it have been necessary to encourage the little Balilla Boy, in 1941, to cultivate a war garden on his apartment balcony, if not so that he could squeeze a few vegetables from the most paltry of spaces? And why has the boy received no news from his father at the front?
Dear Papà ,my hand is shaking some ,but you will understand what I am saying. It’s been so many days since you left home
and yet you haven’t told me where you’re staying.
As for the tears that trickle down my cheek ,
you can be sure they’re only tears of pride.
I still can see you smile and hear you speak ,
and your Balilla waits for you ,arms wide.
I’m helping in the war ,I’m fighting ,too ,
with discipline ,with honor ,and with faith.
I want this land of mine to bear good fruit ,
so I tend my little garden every day
( my own war garden! )and ask God each night
to watch you ,to make sure my dad’s all right.
Carrots for victory. By contrast, in one of my notebooks I found a place where the headmaster had made us take note of the fact that our English enemies were a five-meal people. I must have thought to myself that I had five meals, too: coffee with bread and marmalade, a snack at ten at school, lunch, an afternoon snack, then dinner. But perhaps other children were not as fortunate, and a people who ate five meals a day could not but stir resentment among those who had to grow tomatoes on their balcony.
But then why were the English so skinny? And why did one of my grandfather’s postcards feature (above the wordHush! ) a crafty Englishman trying to overhear military secrets that some loose-lipped Italian comrade might let slip in some bar? How was such a thing possible if the entire population had rushed as one to take up arms? Were there Italians who spied? Had the subversives not been defeated, as the stories in my reader explained, by Il Duce with his march on Rome?
Various pages of my notebooks mentioned the now imminent victory. But as I was reading, a beautiful song dropped onto the turntable. It told the story of the last stand of Giarabub, one of our desert strongholds, where the exploits of our besieged soldiers, who finally succumbed to hunger and lack of munitions, attained epic dimensions. In Milan some weeks earlier, I had seen on television a
color movie about the last stand of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie at the Alamo. Nothing is more exhilarating than the topos of the besieged fort. I imagine I once sang that sad elegy with the emotion of a boy watching a Western today.