The Painted Altar

Chapter Twenty-Two

Plot reminder: 18-year-old Vincenzo has been conscripted to Mussolini's North African campaign, this just a couple of months after his wife, Ada, suffered a miscarriage.

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I gravitated towards Ettore Lo Bianco immediately, that very first day in provincial barracks. He, like me, was the sort who kept himself to himself. While the other boys engaged in loudmouthed bravado about how many girls they'd slept with or how we were going to kick those pompous British behinds, Ettore would just lay there on his bunk squinting his bespectacled eyes over some D'Annunzio or Croce. His was the gentlest of souls, the most unbound of minds. Poetry, ancient history, rennaissance art. When the whole damn mess was over, he said he was going to teach in a lyceum somewhere.

War sat heavily with him, like a priest's frock on a sinful man. Death and destruction were as much an anathema to Ettore Lo Bianco as staying silent to a dawn-woken bird. In Mussolini's Italy, conscientious objection was not an option however. Or rather, it was an option, just that one needed to equip oneself with a white flag.

It seemed nothing could separate Ettore and I, not even the hell on earth that was the battle of Tobruk. We slalomed our way through the explosions, our fallen brethren. Cowered behind the shelled-out husks of tanks, kept ourselves just beyond bullet range. The powers-that-be had thought Egypt was going to be a pushover, like the taking of Abissinia back in '36. In African sand our boots may have trodden, but this was very much a European war fought with European weaponry and fuelled by polarised European idealogies. One army which sought to defend democracy, the other intent on crushing it. There could only ever have been one winner.

I killed a man. Just one, but the weight of it feels like a thousand. Feels like a hundred thousand. The bullet spat from my rifle straight and true, and even before it penetrated its target I knew. I just knew. He was too far away for me to see clearly, and there was a veil of smoke from a shelled vehicle nearby, but I had the impression he was young. Little more than a kid, just like me. An Australian, his blond hair matted with sweat. The force of the bullet reared him upwards like a wave, flipped him backwards. The small fountain of blood which exploded from his chest was a vivid scarlet amidst the backdrop of desert beige and military green. It's an image which is forever fused behind my closed eyelids. There waiting in ambush every time I search the refuge of sleep. Every time I blink.

When Captain Terlizzi finally hoisted aloft the white flag, I felt a joyous rush of relief. Our platoon had fought with honour, but now surrounded on all sides by the Allies, surrender was the only valid option. "Ettore!" I called out through the smoke. "Ettore! Ettore!"  Ever louder, more desperate, thinking that some rogue final bullet had tunnelled its way through his heart. But oh, that second joyous rush of relief when at last the call was returned. "Vincenzo! I am here, where I've always been. Right at your side."

After I lifted him onto the back of that British lorry beside me, we slapped each other's shoulders, shared a smile. "It's over now Ettore," I promised him. "The worst is behind us."

And while that was true for most of the men, for Ettore the worst was only just about to begin. If war had sat heavily on him, then internment was some huge crushing force - as oppressive as that burning Kenyan sun which for the rest of '41  roared its fire into our very bones.  I watched Ettore slowly shrivel and dry like the the tomatoes which in our native Puglia are left to the mercy of the August sun. Watched as he paced the perimeter fence, gaze fixed longingly at the African scrubland beyond. A butterfly trapped in a net.

When they shipped us to England in the late winter of '42, the heavy skies and  almost constant drizzle came as a relief at first, like taking a shower after a long hot day spent working in the sun. But within a month or two, Ettore was lost in darkness once more. I could see it in his eyes, the slump of his shoulders. Nowadays, people might call it depression. Back then, the word hardly existed. We knew it just as sadness. Melancholy. The unremitting greyness of the English sky, somehow it had infected Ettore's soul.