The Foundling Boy (21 page)

‘Are you sure your friend Stendhal saw them?’

‘I think he exaggerated a good deal, but does it matter?’

On the outskirts of Parma they saw a fine, shady grove of trees with a stream running through it.

‘Let’s stop!’ Ernst said. ‘We can sleep here.’

‘But I haven’t got a tent or even a sleeping bag.’

‘We don’t need them. It’s a warm evening.’

He lit a fire, and they toasted bread and sardines splashed with olive oil. Jean pulled apples and sugar from his haversack and baked them in the embers.

‘Delicious,’ Ernst said. ‘Only the French really know how to eat.’

‘Who says any different?’

‘My father. He and my mother only ever argue about that one subject. She’s from Alsace, it has to be said, so she’s a bit French around the edges.’

‘What do you mean, “a bit French”! She’s completely French, even if she was born before 1914.’

‘Of course she was born before 1914, on German territory, in Strasbourg.’

‘Ernst, you’re pulling my leg.’

‘Pulling your leg? I don’t understand.’

‘You’re getting on my nerves! Now do you get it?’

Ernst was laughing.

‘I get it. It’s something I do. Now, listen carefully—’

‘No. We’ve settled the Alsace question. French territory.’

‘In
Mein Kampf
—’

‘Oh, stuff
Mein Kampf.
Hitler’s a crybaby. You only have to stamp your foot and he’ll back down.’

‘Stamp your foot. Go on.’

Jean pretended to stamp.

‘There you are, all over. No more Hitler.’

‘Well done!’ Ernst exclaimed. ‘Peace is declared.’

‘And there wasn’t even a war. Do you want another baked apple?’

‘Not for me. Let’s get some sleep. We can wash in the stream.’

Ernst was fixated with washing himself whenever he encountered fresh water. He soaped his pink and white body and rinsed himself in cold water, whistling the
Horst Wessel Lied
. Jean followed suit. Night was falling. A hundred metres away, cars roared along the road to Modena. They kept the fire going, to keep the mosquitoes away, and lay down side by side on the bare earth, sharing Ernst’s sleeping bag as a pillow. Between the trees they glimpsed patches of black sky, glittering with stars.

‘I’m happy,’ Ernst said. ‘We’re living through a great time. The world is ours. We must defend what we have, but let’s do it with a song on our lips, and if we have to die, we’ll die so that our children can enjoy a golden age.’

‘I’d be obliged if you would note that neither of us has children, so far, and no one is attacking us.’

‘Ach, you filthy French sceptic! You’re well fed, you don’t belong
to an oppressed minority, and you have no idea what it’s like to hear your downtrodden brothers call to you for help when you’ve been disarmed and your hands are empty.’

‘Listen, Ernst, let’s talk about all that tomorrow. Tonight I’m ready to drop, and you’re aggravating me with your oppressed brothers. Go to sleep!’

At midday the next day they arrived in the centre of Bologna. For both of them it was their first great Italian city for art. Ernst stopped in a square to read his Goethe. ‘Venerable and learned old city …’ He wanted to climb a belfry to see the tiled roofs lauded by the poet. ‘Neither damp nor moss attacks them.’

‘What funny ideas he has, your Goethe! I wonder if anyone’s still interested in details like that.’

‘Goethe is a universal man. Nothing was alien to him. What does Stendhal say?’

Jean opened his little Beylian guide. ‘A few lines, no more. He went to two concerts here. He was introduced to some scholars. “What fools!” he writes. “In Italy you get either raw geniuses, who astonish by their depth and lack of culture, or pedants who haven’t the slightest idea.”’

‘Is that all?’

‘Absolutely all.’

Ernst appeared deeply disappointed. The levity of the French was incorrigible. He set about demonstrating as much to Jean, but Jean was not listening, half dreaming instead of the plump young man who dashed to hear eighteen-year-old singers and discuss music endlessly with other music-lovers, while Goethe, driven by sudden inspiration, shut himself away to rewrite
Iphigenia auf Tauris
.

That evening they wandered under the arcades, mingling with much less excitable crowds than those in Milan. The girls they encountered were in groups of four and five. Their teeth gleamed as they laughed. They smelt sweetly of soap, and their young,
sumptuous bodies seemed happy to be alive in the rediscovered coolness of the night.

‘They’re pretty,’ Jean said.

‘But not very fit!’ Ernst remarked. ‘I can’t see any of them running the hundred metres.’

‘Who’s asking them to?’

‘Me! You have a completely retrograde conception of women, Hans, as if they exist for enjoyment, for the pleasures of the
pleasure-seeker.
In Germany women are our equal. Their womb is the nation’s future.’

‘Ernst, you are a sad sack. I don’t suppose your Goethe wrote anything about Italian women either.’

Ernst was silent. Goethe did not talk about women. He took no risks, unlike Stendhal. He was not a man to die from a badly treated dose of the clap. Ideas, poetry above all! And health! ! Ice-cream and cake vendors were calling out their wares on street corners, and the Bolognese were outside to sample one of the last fine summer evenings, deserting their stuffy houses with shutters closed on narrow streets that shook disagreeably at the passage of a tram. Behind bourgeois parents skinny little maids from Emilia-Romagna, bareheaded and dressed in black with white aprons around their waists, attempted to restrain children who shouted and squabbled. There were no beggars to be seen; they were forbidden. From this spectacle Jean drew a number of conclusions: that Italians liked to live in the street, where they could use loud voices and expansive gestures; they all knew each other and loved to lavish magnificent Signors, Signoras and Commendatores on each other. They were satisfied. Business was doing well. An order reigned of which they were proud. In Ethiopia their legions had reconquered an empire. Many of them loved to recite Gabriele d’Annunzio’s poem, Mare nostrum. In Lombardy they were cold and prim, but the closer one got towards more human latitudes, the warmer they were and the more hospitable
and curious about strangers. Ernst, on the other hand, felt uneasy at this loquacity, this good-humoured self-indulgence, this nation that sang so well individually and so poorly as a choir. The Hitler Youth had tried to forge closer ideological and military relations with the Fascist Balillas.
9
Without success: Balilla leaders considered the Nazis johnny-come-latelies at the party, absolute beginners as Fascists.

Around midnight Ernst and Jean reclaimed their bicycles from the garage that was looking after them and pressed on towards Tuscany. They found the road hard going, stopped at a village, found a barn to sleep in, and set off again early. Alone, either of them would have taken three days to make it over the mountains, but together, riding in relay to lessen the airstream, they reached the Tuscan border in a day. Late afternoon had plunged the clean, ordered, garden-like landscape into silence, and it lay resting there in its dense, handsomely dark ochre soil on which trees wrapped in white ruffs stood out. As they came closer they identified the trees as olives, being harvested by women with poles. In sheets stretched out below, children gathered up the olives that were then taken away by men with heavy basket-weave hoppers on their back. Workers called to them to offer them bread moistened with oil, tomatoes and onions, and a light, graceful, flower-scented white wine.

‘If people get kinder and kinder the further south you go,’ Ernst said, ‘what must they be like at the equator? There must be a limit.’

‘Why don’t you go and find out! I’ll wait here.’

‘Don’t be an idiot. Every country has its south.’

‘Even Germany?’

‘Even Germany. The Bavarians are our Italians.’

Jean still thought of himself as a Celt. He was wary of the south, believing it would soften him. Yet these Italians were bursting with pride. They seemed cheerful and welcoming, laughed easily, offered everything they had to impoverished passing strangers. What if Albert was wrong? What if the country luxuriated in Fascism the
way Poppaea Sabina luxuriated in her bath of ass’s milk? Ernst was a Nazi. Didn’t he laugh all the time? Jean needed some explanations.

They asked if they could sleep in a barn. After supper they were shown to a double bed into which they fell, snoring like pigs, to be awoken the next morning by a fine male voice singing a popular song.

‘Why don’t we help them?’ Ernst suggested.

They picked olives all day, with their backs aching and their legs weak from the pitcher of white wine being urged on them too often.

‘I bet you,’ Jean said during a brief pause, ‘that your Goethe never picked an olive in his life.’

‘What about Stendhal?’

‘Nor him, as far as I know. But maybe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries it wasn’t thought good taste to speak of the fruits of the earth. Having said that, I grant you that just this once Goethe and Stendhal stand shoulder to shoulder.’

At the end of the day they said goodbye to the farmer and his wife and son. It was time to get on to Florence. But they must have drunk too much white wine, and had to stop to sleep at the roadside. Finally, at midday the following day, they arrived at Florence and made straight for the Arno and Ponte Vecchio, greeting them with shouts of admiration. Muddy water of a handsome cream colour flowed either side of its enormous pillars. Ernst reached for his Goethe, then looked up, crestfallen.

‘What’s the matter?’ Jean asked.

‘I cannot tell a lie. These are the four lines he devotes to Florence: “I hastened through the city, saw the cathedral and its baptistery. Here again there opened to me a quite new world in which I did not wish to linger. The Boboli gardens are delightfully situated. I left as precipitately as I arrived.” What about your Stendhal?’

It was Jean’s turn to burst into laughter.

‘He’s no better. Listen: “Florence, situated in a narrow valley in the middle of bare mountains, has an unjustified reputation.”’

‘Ah, you reassure me. Might they both be mistaken?’

‘Definitely.’

They spent two days in Florence, staying in a noisy and dirty small hotel. The Uffizi and the Duomo aroused their admiration, but no one addressed a word to them. They agreed that Florence was much too secret a city for the time they had to devote to it. In truth, Goethe and Stendhal had had the same impression, the first dreaming only of the Rome of the Caesars, the second only of opera.

‘We’ll come back,’ Ernst said. ‘Another time, when we have the key to Florence. I’m afraid that for now we’re wasting our time.’

‘You could be right.’

Eight years later Ernst was to pass through Florence again, after the battle of Monte Cassino. Standing in a truck, all he saw was Italians with their backs turned, the fires that had broken out in the wake of the shelling of the city, and the bombed Ponte Santa Trinità. He would never know Florence. He thought about Jean then, wondering what the great cataclysm had done with his companion from his first visit to Italy. In the pitiless mess of war, those who were forsaken looked vainly for their former brothers and encountered only the face of the enemy.

After Florence Goethe and Stendhal’s routes had diverged. One had gone on via Perugia and Terni, the other had headed for Rome via Viterbo. Jean observed that Stendhal had overtaken the German. Ernst declared that it was not worth coming to Italy just to do everything as fast as you could. Besides, Goethe had talked to everybody, soldiers, carriers, smugglers and gendarmes, while Stendhal had only sought out the devotees of bel canto. The two young men halted at the roadside to discuss again at length the merits of their respective guides. In fact neither was being entirely sincere. Ernst found Goethe heavy and pontificating, and Jean was uncomfortable at Stendhal’s pursuit of pleasure, which seemed too similar to his own. Had he been more sure of himself, he would have
recognised in the little consul of Civitavecchia, so mischievously caricatured by Alfred de Musset’s pencil, an equal in sensitivity and a fellow enthusiast.

Their one point of agreement was that, as they continued south, their haste gradually left them both. They pedalled with hands loosely gripping their handlebars, casual, relaxed, eyeing up girls who refused point-blank to notice them. How could they attract the attention of these fabulous Italians who paraded slowly across the shimmering road in front of them, their legs bare, in black skirts and white blouses?

‘Have you ever made love?’ Ernst asked.

‘Yes, once. Or rather, lots of times, but the same night, with the same girl.’

‘And you didn’t try with someone else straight afterwards?’

‘Who else? It’s not that easy.’

‘Next year I’ll invite you to one of our summer camps. They’re mixed. We never have that problem, on condition that we restrict ourselves to girls from our race.’

‘What race?’

‘The Aryans, of course. Poor Hans, you really are an idiot. Didn’t anyone ever tell you you were an Aryan?’

‘I can tell you that I don’t even know what it is.’

Ernst demanded that they stop, on the shore of the lovely pale green waters of Lake Bolsena, while he explained what Aryanism was to his ignorant Celtic friend. Jean also learnt that ‘his’ prime minister was Jewish. Later, when he was better informed, he regretted not having pointed out that Ernst’s Hitler was also a little Jewish. Generally his friend’s theory seemed flimsy and fairly absurd. At school, for rhetoric, he had had a teacher called Monsieur Pollack, a charming man who had shown unflagging kindness towards his class of little blighters, all of them grossly ignorant. Monsieur Pollack had also fought at Verdun, for which he had been awarded the Légion
d’Honneur. In what way could he possibly fit the description Ernst gave, apart from the fact that he was bald and had a curved nose and large ears?

‘Your theory doesn’t stand up,’ Jean said. ‘I know a Jewish teacher —’