Into the War by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino [Calvino Italo ]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141959344
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

UNPA Nights

As a boy, I was a bit of a slow developer; when I was sixteen, given my age, I was rather behind in many things. Then, all of a sudden, in the summer of 1940, I wrote a three-act play, had a love affair and learnt to ride a bicycle. But I still had not spent a night away from home when the order came round that, during the holidays, high-school pupils were to go on night duty once a week with the UNPA.1

The school buildings in the town had to be protected whenever there was an air raid. However, there had not been any air-raids up until then, and this UNPA business seemed just another formality, like so many others. For me it was something new and exciting; it was September, nearly all my schoolfriends were still away, either on holiday or hunting in the hills, or they had been evacuated in June and had not yet come back. Only Biancone and I were left in town: I would wander around during the day bored out of my mind, and he would wander around all night, having a tremendous time – or so it seemed. These shifts with the UNPA had to be done in pairs. Biancone and I, of course, made sure we enrolled together: he would take me to all the places he knew; we were going to have a great time. We were assigned the primary school building and a shift on the Friday night. A room with two camp beds and a telephone was our guard room there at the school; our task was always to be ready, in case of air-raid alarms; we could also make inspections nearby: in other words, go out as much as we wanted, but just one of us at a time, because they were going to phone to check up. Naturally, we instantly thought that we could also go out together if we squared it with those in charge, and that we could use the telephone in the early hours of the morning primarily to play tricks on people we knew.

But, however much we said ‘We’ll do this and that! You’ll see what fun we’ll have!’, and however much we felt we had planned and anticipated everything imaginable in the days leading up to that Friday, nevertheless I expected something more from that night, something I could still not articulate: a new revelation, though as yet I did not know what it would be, the revelation of the night. For Biancone, on the other hand, everything seemed cheerily routine and predictable, and I also pretended that it was the same for me, but, in the meantime, in my imagination, I could feel the unknown time of night foaming like an invisible sea around each of our vague projects.

That Friday I went out after dinner, and it was still just an evening like any other. I was carrying my pyjamas with me and a pillowcase to put over the pillow of the camp bed where I would sleep.

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