cracked from chin to where it farts, between his legs hung his entrails; his heart and all around it showed, and the sad bag that makes shit from whatever is swallowed. . He looked at me, and with his hands opened his chest, saying ‘See how I rip myself apart. See how mangled is Mahomet,’” poor Prophet, and the painter from Modena has represented him thus, his chest open, which must have aroused the wrath, almost 600 years later, of the so-called Islamists whom the zealous carabinieri had arrested in the noble basilica, sincerely believing they were thwarting an attack of the most odious kind, against Art and civilization — once again the Italian alarm was false, the terrorists were simple tourists they had to release a few days later, the church hadn’t blown up, the impious fresco was still in place and the torn-apart Prophet still prey to demons, until the end of time in the Christians’ hell, and now the train is starting off again from Bologna, little by little the train advances along the platform headed for Florence, the longest part is over, the longest part was crossing the long plain of the Po just as in the war you had to cross the open space between two hills, chased by the shelter you’ve just left, hurried on by the one you’re going to reach, running all the while expecting the bullet that’s going to stop you or the shell that’s going to hurl you head over heels launch your limbs your things your guts into the skies split you in half like the Prophet in the shifted earth that dirt of reddened clay where here an eye stuck out, a stray, gelatinous ball, useless in its skull, bound to the mud to nothingness by an absurd filament a trace of brain, there a hand the chance of the explosion left it three whole fingers but not its arm not its shoulder not the head and this extremity with its vanished ring finger lay near a gurgling torso and still as you ran you wondered stupidly what use could a hand be without an arm to jerk off with and without a face to shave, in those leaps of unexpected male humor that make you survive, and yet you ran hard enough to shit in your pants the shells the tanks on your heels just as now the train runs in the dark barely a thousand kilometers away from the slopes that I hurtled down with the Serbs and then the Bosnians hard on my taiclass="underline" soon the civil gentleness of Tuscany, soon Florence then the direttissima line straight to Rome, the suburbs of Bologna stretch out, long grey intestines pierced by the tracks and the train as if by a spear, Dante understood men, sacci merdae forever, just as you see them in hell, cut up, dismembered, opened up by an explosion in war, spread apart, in pieces, scattered like an infantry man by a grenade — like the grenade I exchanged in Trieste in 1993 in a bar for three bottles of vodka, I had a grenade in my bag, I don’t remember why I’d taken such a risk at the border, the bar owner had talked to us about the “Yugoslav conflict” and what with one thing leading to another we made a deal, he was very happy to have the little khaki object, a deadly pear of a pretty green color and we, we were delighted to have obtained three transparent bottles, we were going to open ourselves up and spread our souls rather than our entrails, Andi and Vlaho and I drank straight from the unhoped-for bottles, we got completely plastered, the alcohol made me lose my balance in the violent wind, in Trieste they affix ropes in the streets so that children old people and drunkards can hold on to them when the bora blows, and it blows from the very mouth of the devil up to a 120 kmh, no kidding, that night despite the improvised handrail I fell down in the force of the gale, I fell down, down, down and Vlaho and Andrija along with me, we laughed like anything when Andrija threw up in the wind and splattered us, Vlaho, me, and a female passerby who wondered for a fraction of a second what these wet smelly drops could be that were suddenly speckling her jacket, before she saw, understood, retched and began running and stumbling away, Andrija didn’t need to wipe himself off the wind was so strong, he was a Triton, a fountain spitting out a huge spray of puke that flew back and lapped all over the walls, all over us as we laughed, all over our friendship well-sealed in all fluids, in the stupidity of fluids, in our souls and bodies torn apart by alcohol and war, in blood the debris of life against death like throwing up against a wall, a wall of rifle bullets and Orthodox knives our enemies at the time and now I’m heading towards Rome the Catholic, Rome that Andrija and Vlaho have never seen, never have you seen the chains of Saint Peter in Monti or Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain, neither you Andrija farmer from Slavonia even though you’re an ardent believer, nor you Vlaho from Split, nor the little clean-shaven crazy Muslim I killed with my own hands with a knife, with pleasure the way you have a drink, I recognize him, in a rage after unbearable injustice, between the shaky noises from the train, my bayonet an improvised knife in his young Bosnian throat, the joy of his innocent blood bubbling onto my hands, just as Andrija vomited in Trieste in the wind, so vomited the blood of the Serbs eaters of children, or not, what do the reasons for killing matter they’re all good reasons in war, after that over-the-border drinking binge between two fronts we went back to Croatia to go to Bosnia, came back to the Slovenians who had made such trouble for us on the way out, much more than the Italians whom we could soften up with my French identity papers and a few pretty banknotes, German of course, from the standpoint of the Europe to come, sitting on weapons and currency like a grandmother on her savings, I was being paid to fight I forget the salary, there are things you didn’t do for money, not for the price of a train ticket or the distance in kilometers, I fidget in my seat it’s time to go to the bar time to stretch my legs time to take a break in these travels, maybe the only advantage of first class is that the restaurant car is often quite close, I get up, the countryside is still just as dark you can’t see a thing outside that’s all the better these landscapes say nothing important to me — the little decapitated Muslim, Andrija killed by the shore of the Lašva, Vlaho the easygoing cripple, all of us lined up in our terrible shirts that might as well have been brown, neck cut but no sun, no Apollinaire’s soleil cou coupé, my pleasure as I sliced the flesh that palpitated with despair of an innocent madman, that salutary vomit on the coat of the haughty lady in Trieste, last acid trace of a disappearing man, that camouflage outfit that brings together soldiers and chaplains, I’ll drink them all in one gulp between Bologna and Rome, on the tracks that are so straight, guided, constrained by the rails to another fate, or my own, like the locomotive engineer the only kind of driver who can’t decide the route of his machine, forced by metal like one’s hand in war towards the victim’s throat, he can’t deviate, he knows his job, he knows where he has to go, I stumble in the train, with the blade you ignore the slight resistance on the cartilaginous rings of the trachea, asphyxia in blood, the pink and red bubbles of air in his bubbling spray and that reflex of the condemned man, that movement of hands to neck, followed by that contortion of the whole body, it overjoys the one cutting that artery and that vena cava, that pleasure of the executioner, content, he observes the immense puddle grow even bigger beneath the inert head I’m passing through another first-class car, the train seems to have emptied out in Bologna, the restaurant car looks like a provincial brothel, the same red velvet, in Muslim villages I saw handsome male virgins have a sudden rapist’s rage in their dark eyes, after coming they would have massacred anyone approaching their prey like hyenas, they wanted to keep for themselves the woman they’d just tortured, giving love in pain a Biblical gesture of an infinite childlike solitary beauty, some cried as they finished off their own victims, who knows where their mothers’, lovers’ remains were hidden to whom they sent telegrams just as ardent as my own, they wrote letters that no one can ever read since they contain the disappeared gazes of those farm girls torn apart in the mud, sometimes it was funny, Andrija was a champion at making us laugh he had no equal to put a daisy in an ass dripping with cum, shouting