I was in the kitchen of the main wing, which because we had just enough wood for the fireplace was the only heated room in the house. The light was dim. Not because the blackout meant much in Solara (who would have ever bombed us?), but because the bulb was muted by a lampshade from which hung strings of beads, like necklaces one might offer the primitive Fijians as gifts.
I was sitting at the table tending my collection, Mamma was tidying up, my sister was playing in the corner. The radio was on. We had just heard the end of the Milanese version of What’s Happening in the Rossi House, a propaganda program from the Republic of Salò that featured the members of a single family discussing politics and concluding, of course, that the Allies were our enemies, that the Partisans were bandits resisting the draft out of sloth, and that the Fascists in the north were defending Italy’s honor alongside their German comrades. But there was also, on alternate evenings, the Roman version, in which the Rossis were a different family, with the same name, living in a Rome now occupied by the Allies, realizing in the end how much better things had been when things were worse, and envying their northern neighbors, who still lived free beneath Axis flags. From the way my mother shook her head, you could tell that she did not believe it, but the program was lively enough. Either you listened to that or you turned the radio off.
But later-at which point my grandfather would come in, too, having held out in his study until then with the help of a foot warmer- we were able to tune in to Radio London.
It began with a series of kettledrum beats, almost like Beethoven’s Fifth, then we heard Colonel Stevens’s winning "Buona sera," with his accent reminiscent of the dubbed voices of Laurel and Hardy. Another voice we had grown accustomed to, thanks to the regime radio, was that of Mario Appelius, who concluded his exhortations to victory with "God curse the English!" Stevens did not curse the Italians, in fact he called on them to rejoice with him in the defeat of the Axis, talking to us evening after evening as if to say, "See what he’s been doing to you, your Duce?"
But his chronicles were not only about battles in the field. He described our lives, people like us, glued to the radio to listen to the Voice of London, overcoming our fear that someone might be spying and get us thrown in jail. He was telling our story, the story of his listeners, and we trusted him because he described exactly what we were doing, all of us, the local pharmacist and even-Stevens said-the cop on the corner, who knew the score and was biding his time. That was what he said, and if he was not lying about that, we could trust him about the rest. We all knew, even us kids, that his report was propaganda, too, but we were drawn to an understated propaganda, without heroic phrases and calls to death. Colonel Stevens made the words we were fed each day seem excessive.
I do not know why, but I saw this man-who was nothing but a voice-as Mandrake: elegant in his tailcoat, his neat mustache only slightly more grizzled than the magician’s, able to turn every pistol into a banana.
After the colonel finished, the special messages began, as mysterious and evocative as a Montserrat stamp, for the Partisan brigades: Messages for Franchi, Happy is not happy, The rain is past, My beard is blond, Giacomone kisses Muhammad, The eagle flies, The sun also rises…
I see myself still adoring the Fiji stamps when suddenly, between ten and eleven, the sky starts buzzing, and we turn out all the lights and run to the window to await Pipetto’s passage. We heard it every night, at more or less the same time, or that was how legend had it by then. Some said it was an English reconnaissance plane, some, an American plane that came to drop packages, food and arms for the partisans in the mountains, perhaps not far from us, on the slopes of the Langhe.
It is a starless, moonless night, we cannot see lights in the valley nor the silhouettes of the hills, and Pipetto is passing above us. No one has ever seen him; he is only a noise in the night.
Pipetto has passed, everything has gone as usual again this evening, and we return to the radio’s last songs. Out in that night bombs might be falling on Milan, packs of German shepherds might be chasing the men Pipetto helps through the hills, but the radio, with that saxophone-in-heat voice, is singing Up there at Capocabana, at Capocabana the woman is queen, and she reigns supreme, and I picture a languid diva (maybe I had seen her photo in Novella). She glides softly down a white staircase whose steps light up at the touch of her feet, surrounded by young men in white tailcoats who tip their top hats and kneel adoringly as she passes. With Capocabana (it was actually Capocabana, not Copacabana), the sexy singer is sending me a message every bit as exotic as that of my stamps.
Then the transmissions end, with various anthems to glory and revenge. But we must not turn it off now, as Mamma knows.
After the radio has given the impression of falling silent until the next day, we hear a heartfelt voice come through, singing:
You’ll come back
To m e …
It’s written in the stars, you see,
you’ll come back.
You’ll come back,
it’s a fact
that I am strong because I do
believe in you.
I had just listened to that song again at Solara, but there it was a love song: You’ll come back to me / because you are my heart’s one dream, / its only dream. / You’ll come back, / because I / without all your languid kisses / won’t survive. So the song I had heard all those evenings had been a wartime version, which to the hearts of many must have sounded like a promise, or an appeal to someone far away who in that moment might have been freezing in the steppes or facing a firing squad. Who was airing that song at that time of night? A nostalgic employee, before closing down the broadcast booth, or someone obeying an order from a higher-up? We did not know, but that voice carried us to the threshold of sleep.
It is nearly eleven, I close my stamp album, it is bedtime. Mamma has prepared the brick, an actual brick, by placing it in the oven until it is too hot to touch, then wrapping it in woolen cloths and slipping it under the covers, where it warms the entire bed. It feels good to rest your feet on it, especially as it relieves the itching of chilblains, which in those years (cold, vitamin deficiencies, hormonal tempests) made all our fingers and toes swell up, and sometimes turned into agonizing, suppurating sores.
A hound is baying from some farm in the valley.
Gragnola and I talked about everything. I would tell him about the books I was reading, and he would discuss them passionately: "Verne," he would say, "is better than Salgari, because he’s scientific. Cyrus Smith manufacturing nitroglycerin is more real than that Sandokan tearing his chest with his fingernails just because he’s fallen for some bitchy little fifteen-year-old."
"You don’t like Sandokan?" I asked.
"He seemed a little fascist to me."
I once told him I had read Heart by De Amicis, and he told me to throw it away because De Amicis was a fascist. "Didn’t you notice," he said, "how they’re all against old Franti, who comes from a poor family, and yet they fall over each other trying to please that fascist teacher. And what are the stories about? About good Garrone, who was an ass-kisser, about the little Lombard lookout, who dies because some wretch of a king’s officer has sent the kid to watch for the enemy, about the Sardinian drummer boy who gets sent into the middle of a battle, at his age, to carry messages, and then that repulsive captain, who after the poor kid loses a leg throws himself onto him with open arms and kisses him three times over his heart, things you would just never do to a kid who’s just been crippled, and even a captain in the Piedmontese army ought to have a little common sense. Or Coretti’s father, stroking his son’s face with his palm still warm from shaking hands with that butcher, the king. Up against the wall! Up against the wall! It’s men like De Amicis who opened the road to Fascism."