Curzio Malaparte

China is made of earth, of sun-dried mud. In this part of China everything is made from the earth: the houses, the walls around cities, and villages, the tombs scattered over the countryside. Even the people. There are hills below that appear to be piles of mud set out to dry in the sun, naked, without a single tree or bush. They crowd around the landscape like the coils of bulging intestines tossed on the ground outside butchers' shops, slowly unraveling. Sometimes we fly so low that we almost touch them. And then I notice that the wind has brushed some kind of pattern into the earth: a mysterious alphabet written in the mud, struggling to communicate something precise. But there is not a single animal or human being in the yellow desert below. Not a single village. Suddenly we are landing: Xian, the geographic center of China, where Chinese civilization was born, in the cradle of the Yellow River. In front of the terminal, three children are playing with a lump of earth: they are bundled up in jackets and brightly printed cotton trousers. I join them in their game until a young woman comes out of the terminal to call me in for dinner. One of the children grabs me by my overcoat, to keep me from leaving. So do the other two, clinging to me, asking me not to go. The young woman comes out again, and yells at them to stop. They let go, disappointed. One of them calls to me as I turn away: Come back soon! We eat quickly and then prepare to take off for Lanchow. My three new friends wave goodbye to me. The littlest one gives me a present: a pebble, a precious gift. In this part of China there are no stones. You have to go to Karelia to find stone, very far north; or to the Caucasus; or to southern Siberia, along the slopes of the Pamir, slanting toward the steppes of Central Asia. I put the pebble in my pocket, to take back home, to show what a precious gift I was given by a little Chinese girl: a pebble from the cradle of Chinese civilization. A civilization made of earth, a civilization without bones, without a skeleton for support. A civilization of assembled customs, which suddenly unravel, dissolving into thousands of separate gestures, thousands of calligraphic icons, thousands of smells, colors, flavors, thousands of different shades. And then just as suddenly they solidify again into tradition, memory, habit. It is this absence of stone, of solid, durable material, which makes China such an exquisite thing. Everything is reflected: an unimaginable number of movements, of patterns, thoughts, images, of which we see the copies in immense numbers, but never the originals. The originals were destroyed long ago. Here are the four elements out of which China is made: Earth, Wood, Porcelain, Silk. The most durable of these is Silk. I should add a fifth element: Poetry, which is the most durable of all.

One Sunday morning, instead of studying The Illiad, I escaped with Bino to Florence, to see what miracles the aviator Manissero would perform. Whether he would demonstrate the art of Daedalus or the folly of Icarus. We found the whole city festooned with banners on which was written:Today We Fly. They were everywhere: Via Cerretani, Via Cavour, Via Calzaioli, along the embankments. There was even one stretched across the Arno with an enormous red Today We Fly reflected in the yellow water like the famous In Hoc Signo Vinces of Ponte Milvio. We almost expected that Florence itself would lift off, with its towers, its statues, its red roofs, with its cathedral's nodding cupola rising slowly through the clouds like a balloon. Every window, doorway and marketplace was crammed with upturned faces, scanning the sky for some sign of the direction the wind might take, and whether there would come with it the smell of rain. We were most afraid of the wind from Bologna, proud enemy to the north. Almost as bad would have been the wind from the south, from Empoli, called the scirocco; or Petrarch's east wind from Arezzo, with its Grecian-accented gusts. But even a soft westerly breeze from Pistoia— even that sweet breath from the ballads of Cino, full of dolce stil novo— would have spelled disaster. Luckily the sky that Sunday was clear, and the air was still. The leaves on the trees around the parade ground stood at ease, and the outlines of the hills were crisp, sharply etched in the crystalline air. Just wait. Today we really will fly, said Bino with a smile. For overnight Today We Fly had become a catchphrase, fit for every occasion: for a straw hat rolling along the pavement; for a parasol blown around the corner; for a dress tangled up between the knees, or blown flapping like a flag around rounded hips. It was the happy time of the first aeroplanes, before the War when it was fashionable for women to wear enormous hairdos as wide as their dresses were narrow. And those gigantic wings of hair, which were the objects of so many of our teenage jokes, have remained braided together in my heart with the fluttering Today We Fly: maliciously good-natured mementos of my adolescence. We hurried over the parade grounds, and there was Manissero crouched in the cockpit of his machine: a contraption of woven reeds and papery cloth, with a motor so small it made you think a horsefly was pinned to the frame behind his shoulders. The crowd had assembled, holding its breath, waiting for the miracle to happen, when suddenly the leaves began to tremble, and the blades of grass of nod. A few tiny white clouds sprouted like windowsills on Monte Morello, and the women's wings of hair began to come untucked from their padded nests of false braids. Manissero jumped out of his cockpit at the first sign of this unfortunate breeze, waved amicably to the crowd with a gloved hand, and yanked off his leather helmet while a banner was unfurled above the grandstands: Because of Unsettled Weather, Today We Will Not Fly. It was hard to imagine anything more settled than the weather that day: a magnificent, paradisiacal Sunday in spring. But all it took was this delicate breeze, this perfumed zephyr from Pistoia, to spoil everything. We returned to Prato with heavy hearts, and I took up my study of the abandoned Illiad, quiet and discouraged. Thursday morning the rumor began to spread that the following Sunday, if the weather was favorable, Manissero would attempt to fly from Florence to Prato and back: thirty kilometers round trip! By Saturday, Via Magnolfi, the Corso, Via del'Oche, Via Firenzuola—all the streets of Prato were crisscrossed with white banners carrying those fateful words: Today We Fly. By noon Sunday rivers of people from the surrounding the countryside were flooding into the city through its five gates, and by three o'clock the cathedral square was awash with a restless and noisy crowd, pale, perspiring, noses in the air. I stood among them with my classmates, all of us impatient, barely kept in check by the stern gaze of our principal and the softer reprimands of the teachers. We began to hear a new word: Velivolo! dancing above the buzz of the crowd. But that name for aeroplane, recently coined by d'Annunzio, seemed too delicate for the gaping mouths of dumbstruck farmers: it was still fresh, still smelled of varnish, and was as sweet and sharp in the mouth as mint candy. Velivolo! Suddenly a white wing appeared in the blue sky and the reed-and-paper bird grew larger, came closer, hovered over the cathedral square. A cry, only one, but from a thousand throats; a cry more of fear than joy: then sudden silence, bursting with anguish. Manissero was perhaps two hundred meters above our heads, and it seemed miraculous. Miraculous not just because he was flying, but because he was flying over Prato, in the virgin sky of Prato! which only the kites of children had dared to caress until today. As long as the flying was over Florence, things were fine: certain facts, in Florence, are understandable, are legitimate, and fit within in the logic of history. But over Prato! Over Prato where for centuries now nothing miraculous had happened. Not on the ground, and not in the sky. Especially not in the sky. Over Prato! Where it seemed that miracles had become impossible, caught as we were between the historic pride of Florence and the ancient jealousy of Pistoia. Sacrificed, reduced to poor relations, robbed not only of everything that we had, which would have been bad enough, but of everything we might have wanted to have. Yet here was Manissero flying in our sky, in the neglected sky of Prato. And he was flying, or so it seemed, better than he might have flown in the sky of Florence. Better than in any other sky in Tuscany! After a moment, though, the suspicion began to grow that he might fly as far as Pistoia. Everyone held their breath, balanced on one foot, hearts stopped between beats: The treacherous sky of Pistoia! Some us took out our keys, ready to rattle them against such a betrayal. The rest of us set our lips to whistle in defiance. But Manissero veered to the right, and after a wide turn over Prato he headed back toward Florence. The city detonated with joy. I lost myself in the crowd, beyond thought, proud citizen of Prato to my bones. It wouldn't be too much to say that all of us, that day, felt we held a piece of sky in our hands. That night, in my dreams, the Achaean army, assembling beneath the walls of Troy, came to a halt, astonished at what lay before them: stretching from tower to tower immense white banners on which great red letters spelled out: Today We Fly. And then Troy, the city of Priam— which from a distance resembled nothing more than Prato— detached itself gently from the earth, hovered with its banners snapping in the breeze, and drifted away into the clear sky, swinging gently from side to side. Maddened Achilles ran along below, commanding: Stop! Stop! And from the buzz of his accent you might have thought he was from Pistoia. Beloved Priam, from the top of the Trojan gates. answered sweetly: Too Late. Too Late. And his voice had all soft accents of Prato, taking flight.

IV So it did not come as a surprise—a relief, almost—when we heard the tac-tac-tac of machine guns and the thud of grenades rising up from the woods below. The Germans were advancing again through the tangle of bomb-shattered branches, clearing a path with axe-blows, foreheads crushed beneath the overhang of great steel helmets, gleaming eyes fixed dead ahead. The rest of that day was bitter, and many of us fell forever headlong in the grass. But toward evening the voice of battle began to diminish, and then from the depths of the forest we could hear the song of the wounded: the serene, monotonous, sad-hopeful song of the wounded, joining the chorus of birds hidden in the foliage as they welcomed the return of the moon. It was still daylight, but the moon was rising sweetly from behind the forested mountains of Reims. It was green against a white and tender sky… A moon from the forest of Ardennes, a moon from the country of Rimbaud, of Verlaine, a delicate green moon, round and light, entering the room of the sky from behind a screen of branches as if stepping delicately out of the earth, rising up from the grass, causing the tree-branches to blush transparent and sweet. Like startled birds, we had settled again around Jaco: I can't stand it any more, he smiled. Don't let me suffer. But now his smile was tired: a tired smile in a face clenched like a fist. Jaco's suffering gnawed away at us, sinking into our bones. There is nothing so terrible, or so sweet, so touching, as that animal, man, when he gives over to death. I felt my shirt sticking to my back. My face and the faces of the others were beaded with sweat, like the sweet face of Nazzareno Jacoboni. And little by little I became aware that everyone had slowly turned toward me, pinning me down with their eyes. Along with Jaco's terrible, unbearable suffering, something else was sinking into us, little by little, something which was not ours. Something strong, strange, insistent, was slowly being born within us. Jaco stared at me, even he now stared at me, expecting something, and I felt a new idea forming inside me, and inside the others. I can't go on, said Jaco. I looked away to the green moon hanging behind the trees: It had taken on the round shapeliness of a fragrant leaf: a laurel leaf, perhaps, or sage, or mint, a great green leaf, transparent with evening daylight. The sun had not yet settled into the forest, and his last warm rays struck the trunks of the trees leaving some of them wounded, bleeding. Others—the oaks, the beeches, poplars and birches— reflected the light in a strange way, as if they were made of glass. That glassy light, which the sun, just before it sets, draws from the earth's waters, drinks from its grass, from its leaves, from the trunks of its trees, to slake its thirst. All of them stared at me, but I was not aware of what I was doing. I felt my hands moving, but I did not know what I was doing until I found myself standing and saw them looking up at me, and Jacoboni smiling at me strangely, and felt something cold and smooth in my hands. And finally I was aware that I was standing with a rifle in my hands. I closed my eyes, and fired. I fired with my eyes closed, one shot after another. And then, when the echo of the shots had melted into the woods, there was a great silence. With my eyes still closed, rifle still in hand, I turned and took a few steps. Suddenly I heard:Murderer! Murderer! It was the voice of woman, terrible, the voice of a sister, desperate, the voice of a mother, of a lover. And at that moment nothing could have been more terrible than that voice of a woman, that voice of a mother, of a sister, of a lover, crying: Murderer! I opened my eyes and saw one of the girls running toward me, her hands like claws, as if she intended to tear me apart. She screamed again:Murderer! and then stopped abruptly a few paces away, filthy, disheveled, with a great bewilderment, spreading across her face, a wondrous pity. I stood in front of her, rifle in my hands, tears in my eyes. And they were certainly a marvelous thing, those tears, not only for her, but for me as well. My mother . . . My mother was lying on her back, her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be asleep; Even her hand, abandoned on the sheets, had dozed off. I fell silent, looking at the moon rising inch by inch over the olive trees of Settignano. It gave me great solace, that moon and those trees. That bright silver moon over silvery trees, that moon in the shape of an olive leaf, clean and transparent, shining like a vein of silver, pulsing through green marble in the incensed darkness of a church.

I The whole of human history … The whole of human history seems to be the story of men who kill, and of men who are killed; of murderers who light their cigarettes with trembling hands, and of poor, unlucky kids staring into the eyes of those who bring them their deaths. But history is not about murderers, after all. It is just the story of some poor kids. The whole history of the world is just the story of millions of poor kids overwhelmed by the fear of death, or by the fear of bringing death to others. My mother had closed her eyes and was breathing softly. Every so often, her right hand, abandoned on the white sheet, would shift slightly, opening and closing like the hand of a sleeping baby. The nurse came into the room just then, as I had begun to tell the story of Jaco. She opened the door as slowly as possible, but I felt her presence behind my shoulders bending over the bed, looking at my mother. She is sleeping, said the nurse. Don't wake her. I didn't turn around, but continued my story in a low whisper. When I got to the part about the grenade, I heard the nurse tiptoeing out, closing the door behind her, silently. The grenade exploded a few feet away, while Jaco was helping to carry two wounded soldiers down the hill to the hospital tent. By the time I got to him, he was stretched out on the grass, breathing heavily. Everyone around him had been killed. He watched as I approached, and when I was close, he smiled. He had just been promoted to lieutenant, even though he had not yet turned nineteen. Six months ago, when we were getting ready to leave Italy, Ercolani had taken me aside and said:Look out for Jaco. He's like a brother to me. Make sure nothing bad happens to him. I was irritated:War isn't a game. It doesn't play by the rules. If something bad happens to him, tough luck. But from that day on, I kept my eye on Jacoboni: he was about the same age as me, but seemed much younger. In any event, he turned out to be a good officer: he did his duty like all the others, like a good kid. He took war seriously, convinced he would go home in one piece, back to his family in Monterotondo, near Rome. And it was perhaps because of this that he smiled as I sat down next to him. I saw right away that it was hopeless. The grenade had torn open his abdomen and his intestines were cascading down his leg past his knees and coiling onto the ground. We were surrounded by the dead: hundreds of them in the forest around us. Most were Italian, but there were a few Germans: they had advanced this far before we had finally pushed them back. Their dead lay alongside ours. It began to rain. The rain on the oak leaves made a soft music, like women whispering. Every so often, it would intensify as it darted here, and there through the trees, rising and then fading away. The green reflection of the forest washed everything the color of water, gave an extraordinary lightness to things: to the solid trunks of the trees, to the bodies lying in the grass. Glimpsed through the branches of the trees, the sky appeared light and remote: A sky made of silk, luminous and pure, serene, scrubbed of clouds and fog. The rain was coming from who knows where. Or maybe it was not even rain, just the memory of some rain falling from the depths of past summers, falling from some childhood summer long ago.