Giacomo Sartori
trans. by Frederika Randall

from Anatomy of a battle

Just as the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl reached the southern slopes of the Alps it began to rain, and it rained without interruption for two days. It rained radioactivity on people’s heads, on trees, on houses, on lakes still dark with winter, on my father’s garden, fertilized exclusively with manure from mountain pastures. No one warned of the danger. The newspapers said there was nothing to worry about. Invisible radioactive particles came streaming down with the rain and contaminated all things. Then the sun came out, a magnificent late spring sun. In many ways those were like full-blown summer days; the rain seemed to have washed the air and disinfected it again, leaving it pure and sound. Instead everything was highly radioactive: people’s hair, highly touted vineyards, apple orchards where the buds were still pale green, the tiny salad leaves in my father’s garden. For a couple of days, as a newspaper here and there began to timidly pose the question, the authorities minimized the danger, saying the risk of contamination was practically nil. Then finally they acknowledged how serious the situation was, and forbade people to eat milk and fresh vegetables. The people in the hills didn’t understand much, but they followed the experts’ counsel. My father however maintained that his salad was just fine; he had always eaten it and that was why he had always been so fit. In his view these were just THINGS POLITICIANS INVENTED. From his vegetable plot at the bottom of the garden he therefore gathered fresh tufts of radioactive salad, and ate them at the start of his meal with a small amount of olive oil, and possibly a few drops of lemon juice, as he had always done. And also: radioactive radishes, the first, tiny, tender zucchini, peas and slender, crisp carrots. He had always been of the school, long before the dietitians arrived, that the more vegetables you ate, and preferably at the start of the meal, the better off you were.

In those days I was working at the Center to Combat Desertification at K., a small oasis at the desert’s edge. I had seized on the opportunity like an inmate who grabs an unexpected rope hanging down from the prison wall: to escape, in whatever direction, but to escape. I didn’t believe I could get away with it indefinitely, but for the moment I felt safe, and that was comforting. Mornings I took a jeep to a tract called an “experimental lot” some 10 kilometers away, to take samples of sand blown by the wind. Or rather, I merely had to open the appropriate instrument and empty its zinc samplers into the circular hole. The very first day, however, I realized that there were scorpions under the samplers. Pale, nimble scorpions that if you pointed a stick at them would arch their tails and aim their stingers. This business was not as simple as I had thought. I consulted the cart driver who with his scrawny horse was carrying a cistern of water to the first palmettas, and he mimed a reply suggesting that a scorpion bite usually led to death. The Bedouins cut off a finger or even a hand when bitten. I therefore handled the samplers with pincers, and when I leaned over, took great care not to brush my arms against the borders of the sandy pit. I was afraid, but scorpions were far less worrying than the anxiety I would be roused and seized in dark of night, or any other moment of the day. The scorpions, you might say, were the emblems of my newborn freedom.

My father would show everyone who came by the house how he ate the varicolored radicchio and all the other produce of his garden, and he would invite them with a smile both seductive and sarcastic to do the same. In truth he was quite pleased they thought he was crazy. They’d been cowards during the war, and now they were pissing their pants about some rumors floated by unspecified others for unknown purposes. They were pupils of the priests, state employees with guaranteed wages, shopkeepers who as soon as the wind had started blowing the other way had jumped ship, all of them TOADIES who for thirty years had voted Christian Democrat. He even drank the milk that couldn’t be sold in stores. He bought up a large supply, boiled it so it would not go sour, and he drank it in the morning mixed with his coffee. As he had always done.

The Center to Combat Desertification consisted of a single-storied rectangular pre-fab structure that sat atop a thick plinth of reinforced cement under full, blinding sun. In the courtyard at the center of the building a few weary plants clung desperately to the sand. On one side of the courtyard were the laboratories and the office of the project manager, on the other, rooms for the staff. Meals were eaten in a big, bare space that combined kitchen and dining hall. While we ate, the other technicians spoke of the many countries where they’d been. They spoke of customs, food, women, wars, diseases, horrifying car accidents. I had never been in any other country, and so I had nothing to say. There was one little fellow with a squeaky voice who had lived for many years in the north of India, and every time he spoke he began, “In India . . .”. But almost always a far more powerful voice overwhelmed his shrill tones, a wave engulfing breeze-borne ripples on the water’s surface. I realized that even had I had something to say I wouldn’t have been heard, because my voice was flat and uncertain and because I myself did not fully believe what I had to say was important. I was what you would call a weakling, and I always had been.

With all those countries visited and known in their most hidden meanders, my colleagues spent hours every evening talking, while I holed up in my room to read.  I had set myself the task of reading all the literary classics. I had brought along old paperbacks with rough, yellowed covers, weighing little. Rousseau and Sophocles and Cervantes and Aristophanes and Lope de Vega and Dostoyevsky and most of Balzac and Lucretius and many others fit into a single suitcase. A pleiade of badly-dressed classics. 

My father loved danger with a tender, superstitious love, like all mountain climbers of a certain level. He had always loved the lashings of fear, the do-or-die stab to maintain possession of yourself as a huge rock went tumbling past, when you realized that if you put just one foot wrong it was 300 meters straight down.  Up there on the scree and the rock ledges he finally left behind the guttural talk of the workers he had to live with on building sites, forgot about how much my mother’s villa was costing, those huge costs that devoured his pay in a single bite, he forgot about all the hassles, forgot that this was not how he had intended to live his life. He thought only of his own breathing, of his own short, regular paces, of the meters up and down yet to be climbed. After fascism, his greatest love was the mountains. The mountains, like fascism, were hard and unforgiving, they demanded courage and unwavering dedication. You could die for the mountains, as you could die for fascism. That was part of the game, and anyway it was a good and dignified death. It was okay to be afraid in the mountains, but you had to know how to control your fear. To be afraid of an arbitrary danger like nuclear contamination was madness, he thought, it was utterly foolish. 

My father was firmly convinced that people, used to HAVING IT GOOD, had become TOO SOFT. Being too soft meant, for example, feeling cold, or hungry. He believed you should and you must resist hunger, cold and suffering. He believed those were things, if you had will-power, you could defeat. You must RESIST, you had to know how to resist: that was the secret of life. He believed people were terrified of radioactivity because they hadn’t fought the war, and were too soft. He showed he was not soft by eating great salad bowls full of contaminated greens. I was never an adolescent, because in our house there were adults and there were children, and nothing in between. When you played and laughed you were a child; if you were strained and nervous, an adult. At age thirteen my sister stopped laughing and found a fiancé, a genuine future husband; from one day to the next she began to behave like a sensible young lady just about to leave home. He was her same age, and yet they were as full of themselves as two mature adults who are merely waiting for the right moment to celebrate their marriage in meticulously-planned fashion. And my brother, too, a few years later, turned adult without any transition, like a grub that becomes an insect. In the course of one summer thick, tough hair sprouted all over him, and also a beard. Not a sprinkling of beard but a Norwegian seaman’s beard, which to make things perfectly clear, he allowed to grow. Now from early childhood he’d been accustomed to roll around on the ground and slam the villa’s heavy doors, and no one could believe that with that huge Norwegian seaman’s beard and in that irascible state, he was a mere fourteen years old. They all thought he was twenty, twenty-five, which made him seem even more surly, and therefore apparently even more mature. He didn’t have girlfriends because he was too busy learning: German, English, French, Russian, piano, electronics, statistics, artificial intelligence, applied botany, mineralogy and geochemistry, the history of music, cybernetics, quantum mechanics, archaeology. He learned at school, where despite his nerves and his ostentatiously superior attitude he was always and by a long shot at the top of the class, but above all he learned on his own because he was highly intelligent and good at everything. Only at the piano, in part due to short, stumpy hands like my own, did he make less progress than he’d have liked. His ideal, at least to judge by his hair style, was Mozart. 

The difference between adults and children, in my family, was that the latter hadn’t been through the WAR. Not having been THROUGH THE WAR, children were therefore children and presumably would remain so all their lives. Because the only way to know what war was, was to have FOUGHT it, and anyone who hadn’t FOUGHT THE WAR could not understand what life was about, and would never understand it. What my mother and father had in common, the one thing that from time to time softened their die-hard irreconcilability, was the war.

In my family the Second World War was not considered a catastrophe. Anyone who hadn’t been through it had actually missed a marvelous opportunity, for it had been tough, very tough, but also fantastic. During the war there hadn’t been real coffee or enough to eat, but what little there was had a unique and absolutely unforgettable flavor. During the war friendships were as strong as steel; the words loyalty and devotion meant something; attraction and love were blistering hot; a laugh was a real laugh; every instant was profound and moving, never to be repeated. And above all, a man who was brave and bold could show what he was worth, while the rest revealed themselves as the craven cowards they were.

During the war the planes flew low over the tiny hamlet where the family villa stood and fired their machine guns, my mother used to tell us. But it was whimsical and harmless machine gun fire, at least to judge by her descriptions, a cross between a brusque admonition and a kite’s joyous recoil. It was only later that I learned the bombings had razed whole city neighborhoods and left hundreds of people dead. 

My mother used to tell us about a well-off neighbor who would complain that because of the war all she had to eat was chicken. “Chicken, chicken, chicken,” she would sigh, unaware that other people who didn’t have a nice full hen house would have sold their souls for a leg of chicken. “Chicken, chicken, chicken,” my mother would imitate her, laughing her wild, infantile laugh, stripping off the mask of polite decorum that even she had finally come to believe in. To my mother “Chicken, chicken, chicken” meant people who had no idea of their own good fortune. But “Chicken, chicken, chicken” also meant how much she’d laughed during the war, what a good time they’d had.

On my father’s tongue the word WAR signified the longed-for day of reckoning, when a person’s value would be finally weighed. “WAR’S COMING DOWN!” he would warn, in tones that suggested presentiments that couldn’t not come to pass. “WAR’S COMING DOWN!” meant: “I want to see you, you pipsqueaks, on the day everyone gets the place they deserve.” “War’s coming down!” meant that fortunately the present disorder and injustice would not last forever.

During the war there had been BOMBINGS, AIR-RAID SHELTERS, THE GERMANS, and FOOD RATIONING. Every term that referred to war was as turgid and as powerfully-scented as a ripe apple. Words that had to do with the present were as limp as a half-deflated balloon, they had a permanently soiled, spoiled, air about them. 

The invisible presence of the war left me with a voracious appetite for images, and every time I come across a television documentary about the first or second world war my eyes bite into each frame like beasts that have finally found something to eat. No war movie, no meticulously reconstructed American documentary, no special effects, ever have the hypnotic and disturbing effect of the simplest documentary footage shot in black and white on the battle field or even behind the lines. In such footage, people are naive and unaware of their fates, they are light and fragile, stupid and genuine, as we are in life. Time unreels in slow, linear fashion with incomprehensible flourishes; it’s only when you analyze things after the fact, in that arbitrary order into which we organize and rank events, superimpose them on the grid of History, that a meaning can finally be traced. The present— and all the more so when we are dealing with events outside everyday life— is always indecipherable and vaguely absurd. Watching that footage I can purge words of the bogus content I’d strung together as a child, when I filled the mould with inadequate materials, with blades of straw that stuck out and left gaps. Watching the footage I discover a truer flavor to match to each word; I finally construct my own experience, am reborn. 

Our problem was that we hadn’t fought the war. We were guests who’d arrived when the meal was over, when the most interesting company had already left. However we tried, we were always short of something, and we dragged our inadequacy behind us like a lame leg. We didn’t know then, and perhaps we don’t know it sufficiently even now, but all our actions were but a strenuous effort to defend ourselves from the war, and from fascism camouflaged behind the war. My sister’s ultra-traditional engagement was a way to soften the exclusion she faced because of her irremediable wrong, not having been through the war. And my brother’s demented will to learn was his recourse for not having been through the war.

People were tossing fruit and vegetables in the trash bin, they didn’t even feed them to their animals. My father prepared alluring bowls of salad for my mother’s guests and challenged them, well knowing they wouldn’t dare, to eat along with him. He reveled in that longtime pleasure of his, railing at the Christian Democrats and singing the praises of fascism before those simple, neck-tied faces, a pleasure now somewhat abused and a bit predictable.

Meanwhile down there on the edge of the desert the windy season had arrived. Sand lodged in your eyes, your mouth; it was pointless to worry about scorpions. Often the pits were overwhelmed at night and I had to take apart the instruments and remount them. Sometimes in that brownish inferno of wheezing storm I could see something moving, perhaps only bits and pieces in the wind, an optical illusion. I tasted the sting, waited as, from one moment to the next, the agonizing stab came. Would it hit me on the hand, the side of my knee, my ankle? I had to remain calm, there was no other way. But I also knew that the chances I’d make it were minute; it was hard enough just to keep my jeep on the track without getting lost. When I returned to the Center I would shower, but the sand stuck in my ears and ground under my teeth all day long. And even my room was not entirely sealed; in the morning there were sleepy, sinuous tongues of fine sand under the window and near the door. And also in the sheets, in my clothes, on the bathroom shelf: always traces of gritty dust. But it didn’t bother me; when I’d finished the weighing and other laboratory tasks, I would lie on the bed and read by the neon light on the plasterboard ceiling. I read those little books smelling faintly of damp cellars. Systematically. My colleagues couldn’t account for the fact I kept yawning, although I slept so much. Their pleasures came from eating and talking, drinking the bad wine that cost a fortune and planning excursions in off-road vehicles for the weekends. They felt alive, couldn’t imagine that I spent my nights reading. The boss, a pompous rake with a long career in equatorial fornication (and, however, stern communist convictions) eyed me at length with pursed lips. No one believed in this Combat of ours against Desertification, but given the excellent salaries, they pretended to. 

The audience that gratified him the most was just the one my mother liked to invite, her RICH FRIENDS as he called them, who out of political opportunism or personal interest voted for the ruling Catholic party, the Christian Democrats. Superior, but worldly, they laughed when he sang the praises of fascism; he was odd but appealing, they thought. He would then up the ante, reminding them, digging into each one’s personal past, of their mutual youthful love of fascism. He would raise his voice, turn bright red. My mother would roll her eyes, nostrils quivering. She too maintained that UNDER MUSSOLINI WE WERE MUCH BETTER OFF THAN WE ARE NOW but she knew that my father’s purpose was not to reevaluate the regime but to spoil the evening.

One of my father’s favorite targets was always my mother’s great uncle the neurologist. He was held to be one of the town pillars of anti-fascism, invited to all the Resistance celebrations, he wrote books and prefaces to books, presided over meetings and conventions. He was brilliant and highly cultivated, accustomed, despite the polio that had left one leg shorter than the other, to hold the floor and to seduce. Every time he came to dinner my father never failed to hint that he, too, had conspired with fascism in order not to lose his university professorship. Finally one day he accused him outright: before escaping to Switzerland at the end of the war, he too had a Fascist party card, and so he was no better and no worse than many others; he too was a turncoat. After that my mother’s elderly relative came only when my father wasn’t there.

Some evenings, however, I couldn’t take being alone, and tagged along with my colleagues; in the oasis nearby was a huge hotel with phony oriental-style décor. Until a certain hour it was empty; then the merrymakers of the day came swarming off the coaches and took possession of the deck chairs and the pool with shrieks and screams. The water was dirty but in the evening looked bright and clear. When the time came they went to eat roast chicken, which arrived frozen and often spoiled: this was one of the rock bottom cheapest tours offered by European agencies. Then the desultory mudejar reappeared in the little garden, fatigued from the day and weakened by the diarrhea that dragged on from previous days, stupefied to think they would have to get up before daybreak to watch the sun rise over the dunes. Only a few small groups of the hardiest men continued to drink and talk. Sometimes the tour was a collective honeymoon, and so everyone belonged to a pair of newlyweds. The younger technicians maintained it was almost impossible to screw in such conditions. The older ones complained that this was the only place in Africa without any whores. In truth, there were prostitutes, as everywhere, but in a tumbledown shack with iron cots and no sheets, bedcovers soaked with sperm, not really suitable for westerners. I, to tame a ravenous itch in the groin, had been there.

My father was a mild and rather shy person, but when he spoke of fascism two hard lines appeared at the sides of his mouth. He could not tolerate those who had repudiated their past, or even pretended not to remember; he was full of hot-blooded animosity toward those who lacked the courage to be truthful. About everything else he was quite tolerant, but when it came to fascism and politics in general he nursed a ferocious grudge. He hated the Christian Democrats, he hated the Social Democrats, he hated the Americans, who according to him had infected us with money-fever, he hated the Germans, who in his simplified picture of things had dragged Mussolini into the war, he hated state employees with guaranteed wages, he hated the Pope, priests, Catholic journalists, labor unionists, the carabinieri, the forestry inspectors in their well-pressed uniforms who lorded it over the mountains where he worked. His grudge was dense and compact, like mud that had sedimented over time and then set permanently. 

When he pronounced the word FASCISM there was dignity and respect in it, not thundering Mussolinian rhetoric. His love for fascism was unquestioning, he who was born the year of the March on Rome, but he had never loved il Duce unconditionally; in his opinion the man talked too much. My father believed in actions, in facts, not words. He instinctively distrusted those who talked profusely, despised worthless politicians and attorneys, and entertained ruthless prejudices against teachers, for example my mother and many of her friends. Elegant phrases and nicely expressed ideas were suspect, made to conceal fraud or something shady. His fascism was inspired by a deeper and more insidious thing than abstract ideology; it was a discipline and style of life, a religion. 

When he spoke of fascism his arguments were quite rational. It was obvious that he was partly right to say that in our province nearly everyone had sung the praises of Mussolini for years and years, that the great majority had been members of the Fascist Party or belonged to the Gioventù Littoria, and that the Resistance had been made up of a limited number of very small bands. It was clear, too, that he wasn’t entirely wrong to maintain that even elsewhere around Italy resistance had been a fairly restricted phenomenon, connected largely to the wish of the communist base to take power by whatever means. But his face, which looked like it was about to crack open, and the wild surges of his voice, betrayed no hint of rationality. I understood that only much later, only when I reflected on my own experience and that of my friends in the armed struggle: his rationality and his hatred were two immiscible liquids: the hatred floated atop the rationality and prevented it from seeing the light.

A good fascist, he believed that the most important virtue was courage. All through his youth he had demonstrated his courage in the mountains. At eighteen he volunteered to fight the war, just as his father had done in his time. When the following year they finally accepted him, he fought at the front lines from the first day to the last. He then volunteered again to fight for the Republic of Salò, well knowing this was a losing battle. After the war he displayed his courage day by day by keeping faith with himself, refusing any type of hypocrisy, and working like a mule without ever taking a holiday. Now he showed his courage by eating radioactive produce.

It was just in those days that we learned from sources close to the embassy that grain contaminated in the nuclear accident had been re-routed to Africa. There was said to be an unspoken agreement to transfer large stocks of highly radioactive cereals and powdered milk into the cargo holds of so-called food aid supplied by rich countries. For a few days this news revived my indignation and combative spirits. I would have liked to do something concrete, distinguish myself sharply from the amused discomfort of my boss, the big fornicator so indulgent toward the disintegrating Soviet Union, and from the cynicism of my other colleagues. I could feel waves of rage swelling in me like rapid attacks of fever, and they reminded me of my past: I loathed those people speculating with the lives of the hungry, taking advantage of a catastrophe to get rich. But there were no newspapers there, no television, nobody thought the way I did; there was only sand, and dogs that howled all night. And above all I was too uncertain, too upset by an irrevocable decision I was not proud of, that frightened me and shamed me. I waited anxiously for the moment when I got down from the jeep and the rough waves of sand would take me in, blinding and befuddling me, so that at last I could no longer think about anything. At night I lost myself in my books. When I finished one it seemed I remembered almost nothing, as after a dream that stays entangled in sleep, but nevertheless, I lay awake and read. 

Giacomo Sartori is an agronomist specializing in soil studies. He is the author of seven novels and four collections of stories as well as poetry and texts for the stage and an editor of the literary collective Nazione Indiana. His novel I Am God was translated into English by Frederika Randall and published by Restless Books.