Our company of improvised aid-workers was first on the scene: the poor souls had been buried alive for more than an hour. For us this was the second first-aid operation — we were first, but not really operational!
An enormous earth-moving machine arrived and we set to work at once. After hours of gruelling work, we were literally drained when, all of a sudden, we heard shouting from down below: it seemed to be women’s voices, and the appeals were desperate. ‘Hurry up with those bloody shovels! Get a move on with the bulldozer! We’re suffocating down here.’ Untrained bunglers though we were, the urgency of the impending tragedy spurred us on, but we only succeeded in throwing heaps of rubble over one another. To make matters worse, groups of curious individuals gathered around the collapsed building, each one lavish with advice but unwilling to lend a hand.
I somehow got into a cavity in the middle of the debris outside a jammed door. I shouted to them to pass me down a pickaxe or sledge hammer. I was handed the implement, raised it up, flexed my muscles and brought it down with all the force I could muster. The door fell in cleanly and a half-naked girl appeared out of the dust: when she caught sight of me, she leaped forward, laughing, crying and shouting, then gave me a hug and a big kiss on the mouth. The woman behind her pushed her out of the way, and she too gave me a full, open-mouthed kiss, sticking her tongue down my throat and spinning it around like a roller, leaving me quite out of breath. Thank God my first-aid companions were there to pull me away from the entrance and generously take my place, receiving in their turn the passionate hugs and kisses offered in grateful recompense by the liberated women. Something of a traffic jam was created by the pushes and changes-of-guard among the helpers, each one anxious to claim his portion of the gratitude. One late-comer, desirous of his fair share of kisses, came on the scene just as a naked German soldier was exiting: he gave him a slobbering, double dose of lips-on-the-mouth, with the accompanying movements of the tongue. The violated victim mechanically went for his holster to pull out his gun: luckily for the kisser, the enraged Teuton was completely naked!
My tale was met with gales of raucous laughter which rose and fell with a rhythmically perfect crescendo, reaching its peak with the scene of the naked women emerging to freedom, offering their liberators their gift of tits, mouths and round buttocks. The finale of the German soldier, mouth filled with Italian tongue, was greeted by the audience with extremely warm applause. Among the spectators was a corporal who howled with laughter throughout and exploded with delight at the closing sequence. When I first heard his laugh, I was taken aback. It was such an absurd guffaw that I thought he was having me on, so much so that I turned towards him and threatened: ‘Watch out, Mr Corporal, because if you carry on yelping like a coyote, I’ll come over and stuff my tongue so far down your throat that you’ll drown.’ He replied with an even more riotous burst of laughter, so I concluded that that must be his natural laugh. At the end of the performance he got up and came over to me. From his awkwardness and from the fact that he was not able to look me in the eye, I realised he was blind. ‘I can’t thank you enough for these side-splitting laughs you’ve given us. We blind people devour these fantastic images.’
I was overcome with embarrassment, I had no idea what to say but he rescued me from my awkwardness with another guffaw: ‘For God’s sake, it occurred to me that if I could tell stories the way you do, I could pass myself off as some kind of Homer for these shitty times.’
Later, he himself told me how he had lost his sight. During a bombing raid in Turin, a shower of debris had struck him full in the face. ‘And to think that my nickname was Bellosguardo, ‘Handsomeface’. In a few days I have to undergo another operation which hopefully will restore my sight, at least partially. I’m from Brindisi and have no relatives or friends here in the North. I’ve to go to the hospital and wait my turn, on my own, like an abandoned dog, and blind into the bargain. Who makes me go through with all this? The only friends I have are here in the barracks, so I’ll just wait until they come for me.’
A short time later, I found out that they had given Bellosguardo a job as switchboard operator, and I went to visit him in his office. He recognised me immediately from my voice, and made a great fuss over me. He then asked me to take him to the canteen. I took him by the arm, and on the way over he said to me: ‘I needed to talk to you privately, and over there in the office there’s always at least one person eavesdropping. This morning with Giovanni, the recruit who’s looking after me, I popped out of the barracks … I can come and go as I please. I had an appointment in Milan for a series of preparatory tests for the operation. Once we were inside the city walls, Giovanni alerted me to the fact that there were three or four armoured cars and a much bigger number of trucks carefully concealed among the plane trees and beeches in the park. I might be wrong, but something major is about to take place!’
Bellosguardo was not in the slightest wrong. The Yugoslavia veterans, too, had got wind of the same thing when they took to their heels, for they had sensed that the Germans and the overlords in the Republic of Salò were setting a trap.
The first warning arrived exactly one day later when we discovered that all leave, including leave already requested and granted for those who had exams to do, had been cancelled. No exit from the barracks! That same day, the parade call was sounded: everyone on the parade ground in rows of three, every company to be in readiness for review. ‘Look up there on the turrets,’ muttered one of the sergeants, ‘the Germans are positioning heavy machine guns.’
The regimental band, too, was being lined up when around a hundred SS men, armed as though for battle, came running in. The band struck up the regimental march, and from somewhere at the back German and Italian officers came forward, followed by a company of the Black Brigades. In the middle of them was Mussolini … yes, Mussolini himself, in uniform as in photographs from years before. He was pinched and drawn as he paraded before us, giving an occasional salute with his outstretched arm. Close up, he appeared even more emaciated and tired. He carried out the inspection, then mounted a podium hurriedly prepared with some planks, and addressed us through a microphone. There was no emphasis in his tone: ‘The cities of Germany are being attacked every day and every night by enemy bombers. The civilian losses are huge, but there are also reports of losses among the units which succeed day after day in bringing down hundreds of the attackers’ aircraft. The German anti-aircraft force is foremost among these heroic combatants. You will, all of you, have the great honour of joining with them to inflict a sacred lesson on the enemy, and of displaying the most tangible solidarity with an allied nation and with the German people!’
‘They’ve stuck it up us and no mistake,’ was the semi-audible comment of the commander of the battery, while the SS and the Black Brigades applauded and screamed the usual hosannas exalting death and glory. The faces of several men were lined with tears.