|
In
the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.
It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then
the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking
in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the
snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails.
The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the
wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the
wind came down from the mountains.
|
We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different
ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two
of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though,
you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was
a choice of three bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts.
It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts
were warm afterward in your pocket. The hospital was very old and very
beautiful, and you entered a gate and walked across a courtyard and
out a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from
the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions,
and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested
in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so
much difference.
The doctor came up to the machine where I was sitting and said: "What
did you like best to do before the war? Did you practice a sport?"
I said: "Yes, football."
"Good," he said. "You will be able to play football again
better than ever."
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the
ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make
it move as riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the
machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said:"
That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football
again like a champion."
|
In
the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby's. He
winked at me when the doctor examined his hand, which was between two
leather straps that bounced up and down and flapped the stiff fingers,
and said: "And will I too play football, captain-doctor?"
He had been a very great fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer
in Italy.
|
The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a photograph
which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the major's,
before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger.
The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very
carefully. "A wound?" he asked.
"An industrial accident," the doctor said.
"Very interesting, very interesting," the major said, and
handed it back to the doctor.
"You have confidence?"
"No," said the major.
There were three boys who came each day who were about the same age
I was. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer,
and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and
after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together
to the Café Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked
the short way through the communist quarter because we were four together.
The people hated us because we were officers, and from a wine-shop someone
called out, "A basso gli ufficiali!" as we passed. Another
boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk
handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face
was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy
and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line
for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old
family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South
America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then
we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterward. We only
knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going
to it any more.
|
We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage
across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get
any medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer
had been lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each
had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a
little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing
that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital.
Although, as we walked to the Cova through the though part of town,
walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops,
and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women
would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle
them to et by, we felt held together by there being something that had
happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.
We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and warm and
not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours, and
there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on
a rack on the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I
found that the most patriotic people in Italy were the café girls
- and I believe they are still patriotic.
|
The
boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had
done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very
beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which
really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the
medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a
little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders. I was
a friend, but I was never really one of them after they had read the
citations, because it had been different with them and they had done
very different things to get their medals. I had been wounded, it was
true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident.
I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes, after the
cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the things they
had done to get their medals; but walking home at night through the
empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying to
keep near the street lights, I knew that Ì would never have done
such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed
at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when
back to the front again.
|
The
three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk,
although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the
three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good friends
with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because
he would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never
be accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would
not have turned out to be a hawk either.
The major, who had been a great fencer, did not believe in bravery,
and spent much time while we sat in the machines correcting my grammar.
He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together
very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language
to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything was so
easy to say. "Ah, yes," the major said. "Why, then, do
you not take up the use of grammar?" So we took up the use of grammar,
and soon Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to
talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my mind.
|
The
major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed
a day, although I am sure he did not believe in the machines. There
was a time when none of us believed in the machines, and one day the
major said it was all nonsense. The machines were new then and it was
we who were to prove them. It was an idiotic idea, he said, "a
theory like another". I had not learned my grammar, and he said
I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool to have bothered
with me. He was a small man and he sat straight up in his chair with
his right hand thrust into the machine and looked straight ahead at
the wall while the straps thumbed up and down with his fingers in them.
|
"What
will you do when the was is over if it is over?" he asked me. "Speak
grammatically!"
"I will go to the States."
"Are you married?"
"No, but I hope to be."
"The more a fool you are," he said. He seemed very angry.
"A man must not marry."
"Why, Signor Maggiore?"
"Don't call me Signor Maggiore."
"Why must not a man marry?"
"He cannot marry. He cannot marry," he said angrily. "If
he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position
to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He
should find things he cannot lose."
He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while
he talked.
"But why should he necessarily lose it?"
"He'll lose it," the major said. He was looking at the wall.
Then he looked down at the machine and jerked his little hand out from
between the straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. "He'll
lose it," he almost shouted. "Don't argue with me!" Then
he called to the attendant who ran the machines. "Come and turn
this damned thing off."
|
He
went back into the other room for the light treatment and the massage.
Then I heard him ask the doctor if he might use his telephone and he
shut the door. When he came back into the room, I was sitting in another
machine. He was wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came directly
toward my machine and put his arm on my shoulder.
"I am sorry," he said, and patted me on the shoulder with
his good hand. "I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You
must forgive me."
"Oh-" I said, feeling sick for him. "I am so sorry."
He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very difficult,"
he said. "I cannot resign myself."
He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began
to cry. "I am utterly unable to resign myself," he said and
choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself
straight and soldierly, with tears on both cheeks and biting his lips,
he walked past the machines and out the door.
|
The
doctor told me that the major's wife, who was very young and whom he
had not married until he was definitely invalided out of the war, had
died of pneumonia. She had been sick only a few days. No one expected
her to die. The major did not come to the hospital for three days. Then
he came at the usual hour, wearing a black band on the sleeve of his
uniform. When he came back, there were large framed photographs around
the wall, of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been cured
by the machines. In front of the machine the major used were three photographs
of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not know where
the doctor got them. I always understood we were the first to use the
machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major
because he only looked out of the window.
|
|