The Girl on the Via Flaminia by Hayes Alfred

Author:Hayes Alfred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa

6.

From Porto Bardia to Tripoli. Between Barce and Derna the cliffs dropping to the sea. At El Aden the tanks burning.

The highway, and on one side of the highway, the desert, and on the other the mountains, and behind them, the English.

Is it bad, tenente?

Yes, bad.

Does it hurt much?

There was so much blood, and the blood had turned black, there on the edges of the bandage.

And they were on the truck, lying on the beds and the equipment evacuated from the field hospital, he and Volpini, and Volpini said jump jump when at Bir El Acroma the English had strafed the column, coming over, low, and you could see the flashes, intermittent, in the sunlight, short and fiery, and he jumped, limping grotesquely into the ditch as though the ditch would help. From December fourth to the twenty-third of December. See how he remembered the dates. How the dates clung. How the time was fixed. From December fourth to the twenty-third of December. The Retreat. And then it was Christmas Eve in Tripoli.

Again, again, again. Would it never stop? He had, he thought, firmly clinched himself on the present, denying it, denying those nineteen days, and yet it would not go away. The wound suppurated. The pus was there. The bandage black with blood. The memory did not heal.

No, he thought, lying in the darkness in his room, on the bed, turning his face to the wall, feeling the flush and the heat as though he were in fever, hearing the sounds of the celebrant bells and the guns firing, no, he thought, it was over, it was all part of the defeat, when his world fell to pieces, and nothing, nothing could possibly come of remembering any of it, Bardia or the burning tanks at El Aden, or the planes coming down again in the afternoon with their guns streaking and Volpini saying jump jump there at Bir El Acroma when he had jumped and the plane coming over and Volpini had jumped too late. Jumped, and the truck, in the disorderly column, veering off the highway, had gone over the twitching body there on the cement, Volpini, and he lay in the ditch. That was nothing to remember now for none of it was real except in his memory, and only this was real now: the dark streets, the Americans shooting drunkenly in the holiday night, the lire down, all the whores, and the indigestible bread.

He was Antonio, he thought: the African lieutenant was dead, in the desert, with Volpini, dead with the smoking overturned tanks and the German motorcyclists racing through the disorderly column, attempting order. What was it Volpini had said of the campaign? The temptation in the desert. But he had meant the empire. The invisible impossible bloody empire. An empire of sand and death and illusion. If Graziani had driven through to Suez it might have been different. If they had mounted the double attack, northern and southern. But the whole campaign, from the first, had been a scandal.

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