Pla, the Rhapsody, and the Moonlight Sonata: El Canadell

Music plays a certain part in my childhood memories of El Canadell.

At the time, the instrument considered most effective at getting people to dance, and the most widely used one, was the barrel organ. But this contraption and its metallic and rustic notes didn’t imprint themselves on my memory: they have left in my nose the unpleasant smell of the gas lamps that lit outdoor dances.

 All the same, in El Canadell there was something of good quality: the Genover family’s piano. It was played by the two older siblings of the family—usually with four hands: Maria and Xicu. On very still days—in the terrible morning sun or at sunset, in the gentle half-light—you could hear the piano from a long way away, and in El Canadell a kind of abeyance was occasioned: the people who were going by the Genover place automatically tended to start walking on tiptoe.

Maria and Xicu would sit at the piano. Seen from afar—they played in a ground-floor parlor that had a big window facing the street—they looked like two automatons. They played stiffly and as if corseted. They were fans of select music. Maria, in addition to the playing piano, sang vaporous, sentimental ballads. Xicu, with the practice book in front of him, never tired of doing finger exercises. Cheap music is usually enjoyable, and it’s surely for that reason that those who cultivate it tend to make too great a show of it. Those who play select music are more closed to things, more difficult, and fussier. But Xicu and Maria—or Maria and Xicu—didn’t need as much persuading as corresponded to the notes they played. When an acquaintance came up to them with a friendly and pleasant look and said to them, “Oh, Xicu (or Maria), play the Rhapsody! It’s so pretty,” you contemplated the reassuring sight of seeing them—no matter how little free time they had—go over to the piano, sit down in front of the keys, open the music book, and play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Before beginning, they looked at each other to confirm their cooperation in the performance: a serious look that turned into a weighty smile. Complete silence fell over the parlor. Everyone was concentrating. Everyone was making that face of feigned suffering that people are in the habit of making before refined music. And from the piano, with a brilliance slightly diminished by petty-bourgeois taste, came Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

This piece was quite the undertaking. It was hard to play. The furious parts gave the people—so they said—gooseflesh. But in the more contemplative moments—which perhaps coincided with an audience of greater refinement, an audience that made faces of solemnity rather than of suffering—there was another great piece: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. If the Rhapsody was a work for fingers and vigor, the Moonlight Sonata was a piece for feeling. Together they made a complete musical microcosmos.

In this way, I, as a teenager in El Canadell, found myself literally saturated with the Rhapsody and the Moonlight Sonata. And there’s nothing to be done about it now: this is the select music that will waft in my memory of those days for the rest of my life. It’s the music that will bind me to El Canadell for as long as I live—as I am bound to it by a distinctive smell, very sweet, of rice powders and patchouli, a taste for roast mullet with oil and vinegar, the novels of Paul Bourget, and the form—barely glimpsed—of the calves of a few hazy, indistinct young ladies of the time.

--Josep Pla, El quadern gris

Josep Pla, Cherries, and Sparrows

Cherry trees haven't set fruit yet--it's too early--but it's hard to resist posting a brief entry, premature though it may be, from Josep Pla's El quadern gris. It is dated 19 June 1918:

A delicious combination these June days: desserts based on cheese and cherries. The taste of cheese and that of cherries are, in my opinion, complementary on the palate. Too bad that the cheese in this country is so tasteless and mediocre. The best cherries aren't the first ones, the blanquelles, but the firm red ones with dense flesh that we call heart of dove or matapedra. The ones slightly pecked by the beak of a sparrow are especially delicious.

Josep Pla and the Gray Notebook

Josep Pla is the modern Catalan writer most widely admired by his countrymen (okay: and women). It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, that none of his work has ever been published in English. Some of the reasons for this neglect are obvious: Pla wrote non-fiction rather than fiction, his relative conservatism kept him, to an extent, on the margins of post-Franco Catalan literary and cultural life, dominated by the Left, and, above all, English-language publishers are notoriously hesitant to publish work in translation, regardless of the author’s political leanings or his preferred genre (exceptions are made for an occasional international celebrity). But it is perhaps also that in the United States and other English-speaking countries there is a puritanical streak, a prejudice against simplicity, against the delights of irony: literature must be work. Anything else is a mere entertainment not worth the serious reader’s time.

At least two of the precious few American publishers that bring out translations trumpet their Catalan lists; but until they publish something of Pla’s—anything—these boasts will be little more than hollow rodomontade. 

The first entry of El quadern gris (The gray notebook), Pla’s diary, appears below. The diary has been translated into Spanish, French, and perhaps Serbian, so it isn’t entirely inaccessible to those who don’t read Catalan (one suspects that these translations may well be of little consolation to the vast majority of English speakers, but there’s nothing stopping you from learning to read Catalan; go ahead and give it a shot; you’ll be glad you did).

Josep Pla

8 March 1918

Since there’s so much flu around, they had to shut down the university. Since then, my brother and I have been living at home, in Palafrugell, with our parents. We are two idle students. I see my brother, who is a great fan of playing soccer—even though he has broken an arm and a leg at it—only at mealtimes. He is doing his thing. I don’t miss Barcelona and much less the university. I like life in the village, with the friends I have here.

At dessert time, at lunch, a big dish of burnt cream and a delicious, spongy, golden-brown pound cake with a light sprinkling of powdered sugar appear on the table.

“You know you turn twenty-one today, don’t you?”

Indeed: it would be absurd to argue: I turn twenty-one today. I take a look around. My father is eating in silence, in a state of absolute normality. My mother seems no more agitated than usual. Since only saints’ days are celebrated in this country, the presence of the pound cake and the cream make me wary. I wonder if they were really made to celebrate my birthday or to remind me that the total on the bottom line after the first years is altogether negative, downright paltry. This finishing touch, I think, is so natural. Having children in the form of mystery, of vagueness, must be unpleasant. My frivolity, all the same, is so great that not even the problems of conscience posed by the sweets is enough to keep me from finding the pound cake extraordinarily tasty and the cream literally exquisite. When I help myself to seconds, the indifference becomes visibly greater. Twenty-one!

Family! An odd and complicated thing. . . . 

By mid-afternoon it starts raining—a light, vaporous, steady drizzle. There’s no wind at all. The sky is gray and low. I hear the rain falling on the ground and on the trees in the yard. It makes a muffled and distant sound, like the sea in winter. A cold, bitter March rain. As the day wanes, the sky goes from gray to a gauzy white—pallid, unreal. Above the village, weighing on the tiled roofs, is a heavy silence, a palpable silence. The sound of the falling water spins it out into a indistinct music. I see, wafting above this patter, my obsession of the day: twenty-one years old!

Seeing the rain fall, in the end, makes me drowsy. I don’t know what to do. It’s clear I should study, go over my textbooks, to get these boring law studies out of the way. Not a chance. I may often have trouble resisting the temptation to read papers I find in the street, but in front of this sort of book my curiosity gets put under lock and key. 

I decide to start this diary. I’ll write in it—just to kill time, any which way—whatever occurs to me. My mother is a very tidy woman governed by an obsession with keeping the house in a frosty order. She likes to tear up papers, burn old pieces of junk, sell to the ragman everything that, for her, is of no immediate practical or decorative use. It will be enough, then, if these papers are rescued from her admirable housekeeping virtues. If they aren’t, don’t think, in any case, that there’s anything to be sorry about. . . .

Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Berlin, Digging through Junk

An entry dated 2 November 1977 from Julio Ramón Ribeyro's La tentación del fracaso: 

Sidnet Bechet in 1922

Digging through some old junk of mine just now, I come across a package of old records and among them one--a Sidney Bechet--I bought in Berlin exactly twenty years ago, that is, in November of 1957. And as I play it I see my poor pension on Reinikendolfern Strasse (I'm not sure if that's correctly spelled), the then "French quarter" of the former capital divided into zones by the occupation forces. And at the same time I remember--what was her name? Hélène? Barbara, Gisella? A name of that sort, the first girlfriend I had in that city, my first German lover. And everything about her. Her face, her body, her hair, her freckles. A story that could fit in twenty lines. One night I go to a neighborhood bar and put records on the jukebox while I drink a glass of alcohol that I think was called Escorial. Two girls are drinking something at a nearby table in the almost empty bar. When one of them gets up to choose a record, I approach--an unusual thing, because I've never made that kind of approach--and ask her if she wants something in particular and if she wants to dance. All this in a rather primitive German, but in any case better than that I know now. The girl chooses a record and accepts the dance. And taking her in my arms was all it took for me to realize that she was expecting nothing but that and much more, not because of me, but because it was her habit or for some other reason. We danced for a long time, I bought her an Escorial, and then I accompanied her to the bus stop. We made a date for the next day in the same bar. She came alone and after a few drinks we went to my pension. We went in covertly, because the landlord was a fat and lame and irate-looking old man. The next morning--we'd overslept--someone knocks on the door. It was the maid coming to clean the rooms. Hélène or Gisella barely had time to cover herself with a towel and hide behind the door, while I pulled the covers up over me. The maid started sweeping and tidying the room and suddenly saw the hidden intruder. I was lost, I told myself then, she's going to shout at her to get out, she's going to call the landlord, and finally he's going to kick me out of the pension. But I was wrong. I hadn't counted on the solidarity created between women in some instances. The maid put her finger to her lips to tell me to be quiet. She gestured to the girl to get dressed while she went out to look down the hall. After a little while she came back and signaled to her that she could go now, but quickly. And Gisella or Barbara went without being seen. From then on she came to my room several times, always around midnight, after we met at the neighborhood bar. She would leave at dawn, before the landlord woke up. But he must have suspected something or maybe the maid ended up giving us away, because one day when I got back to my pension the lame old fat man was waiting for me in my room, he'd put my suitcases in the middle of the floor, and in the midst of shouts, ordered me to leave the establishment. Which I immediately did, since I didn't have any other choice, and I moved to my friend Hernando Cortés's pension. Because of this incident I lost contact with my girlfriend. I didn't know where she lived; our next date was at the door to the pension, a pension where I was no longer staying, and I racked my brains thinking of a way to find her. At last a kind of light came to me: I remembered she'd told me she worked in a neighborhood record store. One evening I set out to go to all the Reinikendolfern record stores. And at last, after several awkward situations, I managed to find her. But a strange thing: she didn't recognize me or refused to; trying to dialogue with her was futile. Why? I'll never know. So that I wouldn't look bad in front of the owner, who was watching us, I bought a record, the Sidney Bechet record I'm listening to now. I moved again, to another Berlin neighborhood, and I didn't see her anymore.

Dreams of Eça

"Last night I woke up dreaming about Eça de Queirós and lay awake for an hour remembering his novels. I think I remembered them all, even though I read them when I was between fifteen and eighteen. I remembered odd details: for example, that two of them, The Relic and The Illustrious House of Ramires contain in turn other novels, written by the protagonists of the main novels. I remembered the similarities between many of his works and those of Flaubert, whom he admired so much. I remembered his excellent journalistic reports, mainly those from London and from Paris, and the letters of Fadrique Mendes. And his stories, many of them unforgettable, such as 'A Blonde Girl's Eccentricities,' 'The Treasure,' and 'The Deceased Man,' which my father once read to us. And also his lives of the saints, his least good work even though it was his last. This confirms for me the indelible nature of the readings of adolescence and their influence on you. I would have to reread his work now to see if it is as good as it is in my memory. In any case, for me he is still a great novelist, unfairly forgotten. I don’t think I’ve ever seen his name or one of his books mentioned in a magazine or a literary article in France, and I haven’t seen translations of his books into French, either. Temptation to write a short, remonstrative article about him." 

This entry from Julio Ramón Ribeyro's diary, dated 2 November 1976, has inspired the publication of Fario's latest translation, of Eça de Queirós's brief tale "O tesouro."

One would also quite like to publish a translation of Ribeyro's excellent diary. His work, alas, unlike Eça's, is not yet in the public domain. And when it is (in another fifty years, perhaps) one is not much more likely to be in a position to publish it than the three rancid brothers of "The Treasure" are to make safely off with the chest full of doubloons they chance upon in a cave in the forest of Roquelanes.

Like So Many, Like You Yourself

La tentación del fracaso, the published diary of the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro, comes to an abrupt end in 1978, even though Ribeyro apparently went on keeping the diary until his death in 1994. According to his estate, the unpublished pages are kept in a safety-deposit box in a bank in Paris and will be released, as a "reward," only to a publisher that undertakes to bring out all of Ribeyro's work. Until that unlikely day, then, readers eager for more of Ribeyro's diary must settle for three entries that appeared in an anthology of Ribeyro's work published by Fondo de Cultura Económica. One of these entries, an account of a visit to Bordeaux, is translated into English below:

Bordeaux (Pessac)

Paris, 19 November 1981

It’s my fate always to end up in the most awkward, foolish, and ridiculous situations. Of all the invitations I’ve received lately (Madrid, Antwerp, Belgrade, Grenoble) I finally accepted one from the University of Bordeaux. And it’s the only one I shouldn’t have accepted, because everything, or nearly everything, was deplorable. To start, when I got off the train, it wasn’t the professor who had invited me who was waiting for me, but a short little student who didn’t know me and whom I spotted in the crowd by sheer chance, since she was holding up a sheet of paper saying RIBEYRO. She had me get in an ancient car and drove me to the university campus, telling me the professors from the Latin American section were waiting there to take me to the auditorium where I was supposed to give my talk. But nobody was waiting for me, so the girl took me to a kind of university cafeteria, where there were twenty or so students drinking and chatting, and she left me after saying something like “this is the Peruvian writer who’s going to give a talk.” The students looked up, glanced at me, and went on chatting. I stayed there not knowing what to do, my briefcase in one hand and the folder with my talk in the other. Now and then the students turned their gaze my way and gave me another look, with a mix of curiosity, surprise, suspicion, and irony. Finally, the professor who had invited me (an exiled Chilean) showed up, apologized—he had been teaching a class—and showed me a cardboard box sitting on a table. “Your books,” he said to me. “We ordered them from Gallimard. So you can give the buyers a dedication.” Since it was already one o’clock, he raised his voice: “Let’s go to the auditorium; it’s time for the talk.” Nobody moved from his seat, so he added: “Are you coming or not?” Some ten students got up and headed for the auditorium. On the way, another ten or so students who were in the hall joined them, and we went into a big room with stepped desks and chairs, as in an amphitheater. On the dais or stage were only a table and chair. No microphone, ashtray, or pitcher of water. The twenty or so students took their seats, but widely spread out rather than near each other, which heightened the impression of emptiness. “Let’s wait a while and see if more people come.” I sat there in front of the people, then, but without doing anything; we were silent, looking at each other, waiting for the metteur en scène to come back. I finally decided to light a cigarette and look over my notes. The professor, who had managed to recruit three or four more students, finally came back, introduced me, and I began my talk. I said what I had to say without much eagerness or enthusiasm, and I finished at just the right time, because it was already two in the afternoon, I hadn’t eaten, and my stomach was bothering me. Moderate applause, scattering of the students, disappearance of the professor, who told me to wait five minutes for him, and once again alone in a hall at the university, dying of hunger and not knowing what to do. Luckily, a French Peruvianist who knew me and had read my books happened by and took me to his office while we waited for the Chilean. It took him an hour to come (I think he had gone to teach another class) and he told me he would take me to eat lunch. It was already half past three in the afternoon. I thought we would go to a traditional Bordeaux restaurant, where I could at least indulge in a good local wine, but no, the Chilean was taking me to his house. On the way he stopped at a grocery store. “We’ll have steak and fries,” he said. I went with him to get the food and, on the way, since it looked as if he were going to get an ordinary wine, I begged him to let me offer the wine. Shame on Bordeaux: on the shelves were wines of terrible quality. I got the most expensive one (barely twenty francs) and we went to his place. A twenty-story building in a kind of suburb of Bordeaux. A small apartment. We went into a living room/dining room/kitchen, where his wife was watching television and his children (two years and ten months) were playing on the floor. Huge efforts to swallow the steak (it usually gets stuck in my throat; that’s why I eat only filet), the children were making a hellish racket, I find out that the professor isn’t a professor but what they call a vacataire and is very badly paid and that at six in the evening I have to go to a bookstore to sign my books and at nine at night to a meeting of the Túpac Amaru Association to give another talk. It’s already five in the evening, I’m falling over, the husband and wife disappear, and I end up babysitting the two kids and I worry because I’m afraid they’re going to split their heads open. At six my host reappears (he had been on the phone) and tells me that he has to go teach a class but that the owner of the bookstore will come by to pick me up. He comes by at half past six, has me get in a 2CV, and we head for the center of Bordeaux. We make it to the bookstore, a tiny and wretched den, and there isn’t anybody, apart from three friends of the bookseller, who are there for other reasons. The bookstore is called Dehors (get out) and beneath the sign is a little piece of paper saying “Julio Ramón Ribeyro book signing” in such a way that the whole could be read like this: “Get out, Julio Ramón Ribeyro…” On a table is the huge box with my books. The bookseller and his friends disappear into the back of the shop, from which music is coming. I’m alone and I take a look around the shelves: I realize I’m in a shop for anarchist and trade unionist books: shelves and tables are teeming with books, magazines, pamphlets, and flyers of this sort. What the hell am I doing here, freezing cold, to top it off, since there’s no heating, to the point that I have to put on my coat? Finally, a girl shows up, buys a book, and I sign it for her. By eight at night nobody else has come, except for a few anarchists who talk with the bookseller about something having to do with the passing out of tracts and propaganda. The bookseller decides to close, telling me: “Bordeaux is a dead city. Nothing is going on here. The bourgeoisie isn’t interested in culture.” When I ask him what we’re going to do and where I’m going to sleep, he tells me that we’ll go manger un morceau (grab a bite) before going to the meeting of the Túpac Amaru Association and that I’ll sleep in the house of a friend who lives by the train station, so I won’t have to worry about heading out the next day. We go out the back of the bookstore, where I see a girl putting on records and a series of microphones. “What is this?” I ask. “Our free radio,” he says. We start walking the streets at that cold hour. “We’ll see a bit of old Bordeaux,” my guide tells me. Empty, sinister, dark streets of a gloom that breaks your heart. I want only to go into an old Bordeaux tavern and have a bit of cheese with a good wine. “There aren’t those taverns here,” the bookseller says to me. “Only snack bars where nobody drinks anything but beer.” When I’m about to fall over in despair and anxiety, my guide leads me into a crêperie where, naturally, they serve only crêpes and cider, a drink I can’t stand. With no choice, I eat a bit of crêpe and listen absentmindedly to the bookseller, who is talking to me about local politics, which I know nothing about. When we leave the restaurant, I suggest taking a taxi to the Túpac Amaru Association, but he is against it, saying it’s right nearby. Another walk through even colder streets, empty and ghostly. My guide yells at me about some real estate speculation the mayor Chaban Delmas is mixed up in. We finally make it to the association. It’s a bar, a kind of tiny café-chantant. A bar, eight or ten little tables, and a lit stage with a standing microphone, as if for a singer. Behind the bar is a single person: the Chilean vacataire. As in the bookshop, there’s no heating. I don’t take off my coat. We wait a bit. Nobody comes. The Chilean goes to the phone several times, apparently in search of an audience. I see that the huge box of books, which I saw at the university and then at the Dehors bookshop, is following me, is now in this bar, as full as it was at first. At around half past nine the girl who bought the book up shows up with her mother and father, and they take a seat at one of the little tables. Later, three pretty students turn up and sit at a table on the other side. Then a mestizo comes in with a girlfriend. The bookseller and the Chilean are talking behind the bar, while I pace the floor in a state of utter exhaustion, followed by the gazes of the four cats in attendance, who are not even talking with each other and are just watching me. Since I can’t take it anymore I tell the Chilean we should start. “Of course,” he says to me, and speaking to the four cats he says in French: “The Peruvian writer J. R. R. is going to talk to you now about the contemporary Peruvian novel.” And to me he adds in a whisper: “You have to speak in French; I don’t know these people.” It’s too much for me now. I’m standing up in the middle of a shadowy bar, eight people are at three little tables separated from each other, I don’t know where I’m going to put myself in relation to them (whether on the musicians’ stage, behind the bar, or at a table), and I have to give a talk in French on the Peruvian novel, a topic I already went over at the university! I start by saying I’m not going to give a talk and would they please get closer together so I can sit by them and at least chat. But nobody moves. So I decide to take a seat at a table, too, as far from the others as they are from each other, and I then begin the most absurd performance any man of letters or conference speaker has ever given. I ask for questions, not about literature, because I get the feeling these people don’t know what it is; let them ask me whatever they want to and however they want to, but nobody opens his mouth. They go on looking at me in stupefaction. After a long, long silence, the Chilean makes up his mind and asks me to explain to him why Chile has great poets and Peru doesn’t. I have to explain to him that Peru has had and has great poets, that the Nobel Prizes for the poets Gabriela Mistral and Neruda have a relative value. I mention César Vallejo, César Moro, and Martín Adán, but since I get the feeling he hasn’t heard of them I decide not to bring up Westphalen and the good poets of later generations. Another very long silence ensues. I expect the Chilean professor to go on asking me questions, but my having contradicted him or objected to the relevance of his earlier question has silenced him. Since I don’t know what to do, it occurs to me to ask questions myself and, to say something, I ask why the place is called Túpac Amaru and if anybody knows who Túpac Amaru was. The people look at each other, and finally one of the three pretty girls raises a finger and says: “He was a Peruvian leader.” “A leader, yes,” I say, “but a leader of what?” Neither she nor anybody else can answer. So I talk a bit about Túpac Amaru’s uprising, about his personality, about the meaning of his act as far as its being a precursor of our independence. I interrupt myself because a black guy opens the door to the café-chantant, peers in, and asks if there’s music. “It’s a talk,” says the Chilean. The black guy, without responding, shuts the door and disappears. Enough. I’m not going to go on talking any longer. I tell the Chilean: “I think that’s enough for now. I’m tired.” The audience seizes the chance to take off. Suddenly, I find myself alone with the Chilean (since even the anarchist bookseller has left without a word) in that dark, freezing, sinister bar. “Take me to the hotel, please,” I tell him. “I have to be up early tomorrow.” But my adventure hadn’t ended: “It won’t be a hotel; you’ll be staying at my house.” I picture the drive to the Bordeaux suburb, the couch they will surely give me, the trouble of finding a place to stay, and I sink exhausted into a chair. I remember, besides, that I haven’t been reimbursed for the travel expenses. It’s fine that I don’t get paid anything to give one or two talks, even if I talk to a wall, but let it at least not cost me money to put myself through these ordeals that take everything out of me and give me nothing back. There must be a telepathic channel of communication, because the Chilean asks me how much the ticket cost me. When I tell him the amount and show him the ticket, he starts. I see him dig around the cash register at the bar, count banknotes, reach into his pocket, pull out more banknotes, count again. “Let’s go home,” he says at last. “We’ll sort this out in the morning, before you leave.”

An hour later back on the nineteenth floor of the building. Noblesse oblige. My host makes an effort to coddle me. “Just as well there’s a guest room,” he says to me as he takes me to it, but it’s clear I have been given the master bedroom: because of the big bed, the pictures, the books, the papers, and the personal items I realize it immediately. His wife has whipped up a Spanish omelette and a salad and put out cheeses. There’s a little wine left over from lunch. We talk about his life, his problems. A delightful individual, I tell myself, and, besides, understand him, Julio Ramón: he’s an exile, he can’t go back to his country, his two children were born abroad, he dreams all the time of Chile, he’ll never get used to living in a city in the French provinces, he’s a déraciné like so many, like you yourself, although for other reasons. Appreciate him and thank him. The world is certainly complicated.

Back in Italy

On 17 March 1943, at half past five in the morning, Nuto Revelli's troop train pulls into the station in Tarvisio, Italy. Behind him are six months of fighting in the Soviet Union, the catastrophic winter retreat from the Don. In a cafe in Udine, Revelli, in bad shape after the long ordeal, catches sight of himself and laments that only his boots say that he is perhaps an officer.

But Revelli is one of the lucky ones. The Cuneense, the Alpini division that recruits from his home province of Cuneo, has been annihilated, its men killed in combat, frozen to death, or taken prisoner and sent to PoW camps from which few will ever return. The local Fascists have the division parade through the streets of the city of Cuneo. Revelli and his parents, who live in an apartment overlooking the parade route, close their shutters, unable to bear the farce: shirkers from the rear, from the baggage train, officials from the home front, green recruits, some with their mules, posing as members of the annihilated division.

As an officer, Revelli, as the local Fascist officials are quick to let him know, has not yet discharged his duty to the Nation:

Third reminder from the Fascist federation. Until today I have held out to avoid scenes. But my father insists and I promise to do as he wishes.

I know what to expect. The high-ranking shirkers have by now instructed the few survivors of the Russian front. I'm the last one. To me, too, they'll say a good Italian shouldn't talk with enthusiasm about the Russian people and with hatred about the Germans...
*
At the local Fascist headquarters, Sclocchini, a poor little fellow "unfit for service" talked to me about patriotism, about slandering the German armed forces, about the sympathy of the home front.

I asked the Fascist official, the Fascist shirkers, not to bother me. I paid my share in this damned war, I more than paid for my Fascist youth camps. The lies, the patriotic rhetoric: they nauseate me. Let the Fascists from the home front go see the Germans up close. Let them get to know the Germans the way we got to know them on the Russian front. There's still time. Today, the Fascists should be at least at Belgorod, on the front line, to stop the "red hordes." Instead, they're in Cuneo, holed up like marmots.

My voice quavered a little as I spoke. Then I slammed the door behind me.