How i lost the war, p.19
How I Lost the War, page 19
I’ve slipped inside like a cat under a door. I have to stay calm, I have to stay calm. I have to be careful not to come out, not to find myself out again because I wasn’t ready, perhaps I’m still not ready, no, I wasn’t ready, not yet I say, if only I’d waited a bit, not too long, just a bit, everything would be easier for me. Slowly, slowly, you move on top of me, and it’s you who are moving, it’s you who are turning around me, I am a planet and you are a satellite around me. And now at last I summon a bit of courage, the blood swelling my veins beats faster, flows through my body, swells the tissues, my heart, too, beats faster, my breathing becomes more resolute, yes yes, it must be like this, I’m doing it—I’m making love with you again.
I wasn’t ready, but I’m doing it all the same, and it keeps getting better, I heard a moan, yes, I can’t have been mistaken, it really was a moan, your moan, like the moan of a hungry cat, it’s unmistakable, I’d recognise it even in a harem with a thousand women moaning, and it means that I’m readier now than I was before, I summon my courage, my body is becoming stronger now, my sinews are tightening, my muscles becoming more supple. Now you’re moving quickly on top of me, and you cling to my neck, you move your hand over my face like a blind woman, I throw my head back and abandon myself to you. I’m yours, Lea, take me.
Little waves overflow from the tank—the volume our bodies occupy as they make love. We could find a formula that expresses us, you and I making love are equivalent to the quantity of water in the tank minus what overflows. Yes, you and I making love are the equivalent of this material, we are the water overflowing, and the water overflowing is the equivalent of you and me making love. This water sustains us and drives us, from top to bottom it’s equal to the weight of the water displaced. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Archimedes, in my opinion it’s more to do with you, Lea. It’s more to do with you, and with me, too. And now your body is breathing inside me, there, it seems to me that I’ve stopped thinking, it seems to me rather that I’m swimming effortlessly in the hot water that has given birth to your beauty. I throw my head back and rest it against the travertine edge of the tank and you gasp and sigh on top of me, there are no stars on this night of love, no moon, no fireflies, there is only you.
But something’s wrong.
I feel something.
At the back of my throat.
Oh God, there’s something at the back of my throat.
Wait, Lea, wait, there’s something. Stop a second. Let me see.
I recognise the taste, like rust … I feel as though I have a red-hot poker down my throat.
It’s blood. Blood.
Only blood. All blood. Blood running down from my nose into my throat, flowing down and filling my mouth, and my stomach, so much blood I can’t swallow it. And you are moving ever more quickly on top of me. And the water is overflowing from the tank.
Stop, Lea. Stop. I may be dying, I’m dying inside you. Apart from when I had to change the flowers with my grandmother in the family chapel and I read my name on the tombstone, I never died before now. I’m dying like Fede that summer’s day, the circle of life is closing, Lea, the wheel of time is winding down, the ring of the chain no longer holds, it’s breaking, I’m dying, Lea, and with me my story also ends and with it all the stories that have gone before me.
“Stop, Lea, I’m dying.”
“What?”
“I’m dying.”
“Me, too, don’t stop, I’m nearly there … ”
“Stop, Lea, I beg you. Stop.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stop.”
I can’t swallow my blood, there’s too much of it, I feel like vomiting, my stomach is full of blood. It’s a hot bitter froth, like the gall that’s boiling in my throat. I feel as if I’m choking. I’ll choke to death if you don’t stop.
I pull my head up and now the blood starts to come out of my nose. And it doesn’t come out like the way it used to when I was a schoolboy and the sun reappeared in March. It comes out with a rage that seems like the revenge of a jealous god. A god who is jealous of you. It comes out with incredible pressure, it gushes in the darkness and turns the water red, even though there’s little light and I can’t see clearly, with the eyes of my soul I know that the water is turning red, like the Trasimeno and the Arbia, it’s turning this little tank red after the battle of our bodies. I’m soiling your face and hair and lips with blood. It’s horrible to see your angelic face spattered with blood, my blood, it’s like seeing the Madonna spattered with mud, it’s an outrage, it’s the last thing I’d want to see. The haemorrhage doesn’t stop, and neither do you.
“Keep going, I’m nearly there.”
You gasp, still on top of me.
I feel as if I’m going. I don’t have any strength. I can’t even breathe, I have to do something, I have to decide if I want to live or make love with you.
I have to choose—me or you.
With my last ounce of strength, I take you by the shoulders and push you away.
Now we are looking at each other in silence, panting in the corners of the tank, like two exhausted boxers in the corners of the ring. I hear your heavy breathing. I get my breath back. Time passes. I don’t know how long we stay there like that. The haemorrhage slows down. The blood has almost stopped running. There, it’s stopped completely.
’ll go
“I’LL GO,” she says.
We’re all sitting round the fire and she is trying to revive the embers with a little stick from the tent. I see the flames dancing in the corners of her eyes.
“I’ll go,” she says again.
No one says anything. Because they all know that when Lea says something, that’s it.
“Go where?” Conti asks.
“Into the hole,” Lea replies. “I’ll go.”
The flames of the fire light their dark faces.
“You could barely fit a dog in there,” Sante says.
“If Beelzebub went in,” Lea says, “so can I.” And she says it slowly, as if talking to the insane.
“That’s just a story, Lea,” I say. “I don’t even know if it’s true.”
“You always told me the story, didn’t you? And that’s enough for me,” and she makes a little pause in the middle, as if, between one sentence and the next, she has swallowed a hazelnut she had in her mouth. “I’ll avenge poor Beelzebub,” she goes on, her eyes still fixed on the flames.
“Beelzebub was your grandfather’s dog, right?” Palombo asks.
“My grandfather’s twin brother,” I say, “but I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Bien,” Antoine says, “nous savons que le tunnel conduit sous la station thermale. Mais nous ne savons pas où. Comment tu veux le faire?” He’s already accepted the fact that Lea’s decision is final.
“Do you have a plan?” Tito asks.
“I’ll go down into the hole and carry on until I’m right underneath. If there’s a way in, there must be a way out. And I’ll find it. I’ll turn off that damned tap once and for all. I’ll take with me the charge we stole from the warehouse in the travertine quarry. I’ll put it in the underground cellars, in the spa’s central pump. And boom! With the pressure that’s under there, the water will sweep everything away. Gattai, his damned spa and this absurd war.”
“I can’t let you go,” I say. “If anything happened to you, I’d never forgive myself.” I sound like a character in a film.
“We have to try,” Garrone says. “We’ve lost the war, there’s no getting around that.”
“À la guerre comme à la guerre,” Antoine says, taking a solid swig from his flask of brandy.
“What if we surrendered?” Palombo says. “We put up a good fight. That’s all that counts, isn’t it?”
“We’re not going to surrender,” Garrone says. “Let her try.”
I look at Lea, sitting in silence, waiting for a reaction from me. Not approval or permission, what she wants at this moment is freedom.
We’re almost there
WE’RE ALMOST THERE. Lea is about to go down into the hole. She is walking a few metres ahead of me across the bleak clearing. It’s a mild night, with a full moon that falls on the earth like marble dust. There is so much light that the olive trees provide shade. A timid hare runs across the white clearing. She is walking ahead of me, walking like years ago, when we were young lovers camping on the island of Giglio and I watched her climbing like a doe between the myrtles and the broom. Except that, compared to then, this time I’m not the one who lets her go in front of me to enjoy the sight of her lovely arse. No, this time she’s the one who goes in front, and that’s it. She’s the one who doesn’t wait for me, who has stronger lungs and legs than me. She’s the one who decided who goes in front and who behind. She’s the only one. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. We’ve been walking since one in the morning. Without exchanging a single word. All I can hear is her steps rustling lightly on the ground. Her boots crushing the dried branches. And my heavy legs and head, crammed with dark thoughts. The moon is high in the sky and down in the valley the pale ridges shine like the crests of waves breaking offshore. We’ve already left the ruined kiln behind us, and now we’re crossing the field filled with large stones that look like meteorites. In a while, we will enter the wood and reach the pit, the hole, the target, the origin and end of all things. The hole which a psychoanalyst would say symbolises my mother, and with her all the vaginas in the world, the hole that could swallow Lea and our mission, the hole that could mean victory or defeat.
The undergrowth bars our way, slowing us down, but Lea keeps going regardless. She overdoes it, angrily pushing aside the branches and fronds, oblivious to the fact that as they spring back they hit me in the face and I have to cover myself with the back of my hand in order not to lose an eye. Here is the dry bank of the stream, here is the large beech tree opening its arms in the middle of the clearing. No witches dancing naked, only the open eyes of a screech owl glowing in the darkness. I feel as if we’re in a documentary film with no plot or characters.
Don’t go, Lea, don’t go. You still have time. Do you remember when you told me you liked my teeth? And that August bank holiday when we quarrelled and then made up and ate fish on the shores of the lake, do you remember? And that photograph I took of you leaning against a wall near the large painted wheel of a cart? Do you remember? I’d like to shout it out with all the breath I still have in my lungs. But not a sound emerges from my mouth.
And Lea is there, on the threshold of the hole. The cone of light from the torch illumines the edge of the pit. Lea turns. She looks at me with those eyes that send shivers down my spine. Her slender legs, the belt with the steel snap hook round her waist. The acetylene torch, the knife tied to her calf, the rucksack with the explosive—the equipment is all ready. Lea ties the rope to a solid oak branch with a bowline knot. She snaps the steel hook shut. Then she pulls hard, to make sure the knot and the rope will hold—it would support an ox.
She looks at me the way a mother looks at a child about to go off to summer camp. She comes softly towards me and plants a little kiss next to my ear. She runs her hand through my hair, gently, without passion. I’d like to tell her a whole lot of things, things that don’t come to me at the moment, things I didn’t say when it was the moment. Things it’s too late to say now. So this goodbye of ours passes in silence, with all the gravity of a farewell. There’s barely time for a last, irrevocable look. Lea plunges into the hole, the light of the torch is swallowed by the darkness, loose mould rushes into the void, the rope goes taut under the weight of her slender body. And she is no longer there.
It isn’t true that machines are digital and life analogue, not always. Discrete states, on and off, zero-one, that’s how machines function. Yet human beings also function that way. A minute earlier, Lea was with me, a moment later she’s no longer there, if you make love to a girl, a moment earlier you’re a son, a moment later, a father. Son-father, healthy-sick, alive-dead. Even life works in binary terms.
Seeing Lea go down into that hole isn’t like seeing a wife go into the kitchen to make dinner, or a diver throw herself off the springboard and vanish in a cylindrical splash, and nor is it like seeing a pretty girl vanish round the corner. Dinner will soon be on the table, the diver will come back up in a moment, you’ll see the girl again somewhere else.
Lea, though, has gone down below, she’s gone down and that’s it. She’s disappeared in the most horrible way. As soon as she disappeared into that hole, I felt more alone than I’ve ever felt in my life, not even when I was five years old and lost my mother at the supermarket did I feel so alone. I’m not scared, I don’t feel pain, or sorrow. I feel alone. Alone. A solitude so great that it swallows everything else. I’ve been caught in a blizzard of solitude on the edge of that hole, it descends over the world and covers everything, my thoughts, my heartbeats, the hills, the woods and even the moon.
I lean over the edge of the hole, but there’s only darkness and silence, and nothing else.
“LEA! LEAAAAA! LEAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
There, the cry I had stifled in my lungs comes back up again. So it really was me who came with you to this place, who saw you disappear down below. Because for a moment I’d been afraid that the sad young man walking across the clearing two steps behind that beautiful girl wasn’t me. The young man who was walking with his eyes lowered and his arms dangling, who should have held himself straighter. I swear that when I saw him reflected in the pool at the foot of the beech tree I wondered who the young man with you actually was.
So that young man was me, yes, now I’m sure of it, it was really me, even if sometimes I have difficulty recognising myself. But yes, it’s mine, this voice weeping in the night. This voice which has come after having abandoned me, which comes back and rends the darkness, makes the moon tremble, makes the birds fly away and the leaves fall.
My voice cries out your name.
But you have gone, my Lea has gone, like a star swallowed up by a black hole.
The reasons for the defeat
THE REASONS FOR THE DEFEAT were many and varied.
Usually when you win you win for one reason only, when you lose, on the other hand, you lose always for more than one reason. It was above all a question of gross errors of judgment, scarcity of material, poor fighting skills, naivety about strategy, perfunctory reading of Sun Tzu, lack of staying power in the medium to long term, motivational crises, plus, let’s admit it, my weak leadership abilities, but above all, general and widespread human failings. Perhaps, when you come down to it, the way of revolution is simpler than it seems—shoot all those in uniform and then, only then, those wearing hats. That was Sante’s plan at the beginning, and although I found it a bit rough and ready at the time, I’d totally reinstate it today.
Peace is a home match, war an away game. You fight outside your comfort zone. And being outside your comfort zone creates fear. Because beyond that barrier, you won’t meet only the enemy, you will also meet yourself. And it might be an ugly encounter. Going to war with someone is a bit like going on holiday, I mean, it’s for sure that you’ll have a chance to get to know people. And it’s only now that we have fought and lost the war that I can say I really got to know my friends. And myself, too, unfortunately.
I’m not saying that everything we did was wrong, no, what we did is in the history books, the kind that don’t get written. And this is even more to our credit. If, on rainy days, our children and grandchildren are patient enough, and compassionate enough, to listen to us we’ll tell them all about it. Perhaps historical perspective will make everything clearer and it will be possible to speak of this guerrilla war as a social seedbed, a human experiment, a piece of avant-garde situationist theatre, or whatever. Of course, it depends on whether you’re judging the man or the work, but let’s leave these tricky questions to retired soldiers, doctors propping up the bar and other scientists of history, who have the deluded idea that they can treat the past as an exact science, forgetting that there was a day in which the past was the present, and as such, impossible to see clearly. In any case, it was absurd to think that a gang of student partisans could prevail over the bureaucracy of thermal capitalism. It was absurd to think that a partisan war could defeat Nazism without the militaristic swagger of the Allies. Especially if we take into account our total lack of awareness. We thought we were fighting a local war, without realising that it was global, we still believed in the plots of the old Westerns, the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other, Indians against the Seventh Cavalry, rich against poor, servants against masters, the just against the wicked … We were under the impression that we were fighting a thermal guerrilla war, but we hadn’t understood. None of us had understood that before you wage a war, you have to understand it, to study it. The old categories by which we fought were unfit for purpose, patriotism and heroism as unusable as rusty muskets. We needed to grasp the new criteria of war, rewrite Sun Tzu and his stratagems, revise the rules of engagement and overcome the old outdated conventions. In the era of elite standardisation, symbolised by the phrase ‘exclusive for everyone’, it wasn’t possible to separate the civilians from the military, you couldn’t export democracy, all you could do was import dictatorship. We had committed the sin of ortsightedness—none of us had seen straight. The one winning strategy with which to fight and win a true glocal war like ours was not to contain the entrifugal thrust of the global within the centripetal thrust of the local. Desistance was the winning strategy. Desist desist desist. There is no other way. Desist from the fight in order to win the war. Unfortunately I realised it too late, only taking stock of the situation when it was already all over. It wasn’t Sun Tzu we should have looked at, but Mahatma Gandhi, he was the keystone. Desistance is the one practicable path to revolution. Only by practising desistance can we really bring the capitalist enemy to his knees. Because while we desist, the war ontinues by itself, just as the day continues while you’re downloading a film from the Internet. Outwardly mild desistance doesn’t arouse uspicions, but is a thousand times more effective than any terrorist act. You just have to desist from desisting, that’s the concept. Surrender to consumerism, conformism, tourism, celebrity culture, soft-centred liberalism, ipartisanship, the high cost of living, expensive petrol, inflation, globalisation, privatisation, centralisation, payment by instalments, surrender to everything. Surrendering will lead you to ultimate victory, I’m certain of that. You just have to consume as much as possible, stop recycling, throw an object away even if you could mend it, take your car even for short distances, and when possible, even more than one car per person, leave the lights on and the heating and the air conditioning, perhaps with the windows open out of contempt for the Carnot cycle, start the dishwasher without waiting for it to be fully loaded, take a bath instead of a shower, never drink water from the tap but only expensive mineral water, possibly from a fjord, and other acts of that nature. Apparently innocuous acts, which seem to be on the common agenda, but actually undermine the system and hasten the end. Erode society from within, dismantle the great Meccano by putting one screw in your pocket at a time, waste resources and devastate the planet without seeming to, produce wealth in the short term and poverty in the long term, gather today in order to sow tomorrow. It’s the hen I want, or rather, the chicken, roasted, I really don’t know what to do with the egg. Only in this way will we pave the way to disaster and lay the foundation for a future rebirth.
