Hanged Icarus
“Pani – Bobbe – Pum – Tina!”
My mother said these were my first words (obviously, along with “ma-ma”): “Aeroplani (airplanes) – Bombe (bombs) – Pum (boom) – Cantina (basement).” I was in Milan. It was 1944. I was just eight or nine months old. The bombing happened mostly at night. The airplanes, hundreds of them, came from England, then from the South of France, and then from Puglia, where the Mediterranean Allied Air Force had made its base camp near Foggia. The first bombings on Milan happened in June 1940, the last on April 13, 1945. Almost five years of “bobbe,” just sporadically in the first two years, and then it just rained fire. At least 2000 died in the city. One of the “bobbe” fell on the building where we lived. My mother and I were in the “tina,” and we survived, but we did not have any place to live. My father was not around. He was a fugitive. The Fascists were looking for him because he had refused to fight for Mussolini. He was almost fifty years old. I will talk about him in a bit.
My mother and I were among 3,000 displaced Milanese. We took refuge in a house we had in the countryside in Veneto, where I was born, and that is where I stayed until the end of the war. That place was witness to Fascist raids, the Nazis passing through, and then the arrival of the Allied troops; in these three moments, rape victims and corpses, impossible to calculate the number, were left behind among clods of earth in the wheat fields and vineyards.
In that place, I have one of my earliest memories. I was almost two. Figures in motion and confused, strident noises, all float in a fog that wasn’t only part of my childhood imagination but also real, created from the growing humidity from the Adige River during the winter months. The image in my memory is a wooden man hanging strangled by a rope from the branch of a giant bare oak tree with his arms raised. Around the wooden man, real men of flesh and blood in black uniforms were dancing and laughing, drunk. The wooden statue was life-size and naturalistic, the portrait of a young man. Before, it hung on a wall of our home, and the Nazis had taken it down and decided to give it a hanging. I was in my mother’s arms behind a closed window. The statue had been sculpted about ten years earlier by a close friend of my father, a Tuscan sculptor who had escaped to Switzerland when his studio in Milan was destroyed in the bombings. The statue represents Icarus as he falls. The artist’s name was Marino Marini, a name that later became famous. In mythology, Icarus is punished and falls to his death for having challenged human limits and having risked the impossible. He symbolizes escape toward absolute freedom. In my childhood, I saw this symbol of the boldest of forbidden dreams be punished a second time by being hanged from the branches of a tree and derided by the Nazi demons.
I now look from an infinite expanse of time at my baby face, my eyes wide open behind the window, staring at the dance of vampires around a wooden statue, and I see how lucky I was. I was not a Jewish child. Nor am I, at the beginning of this twenty-first century, a Ukrainian child, a Palestinian one or Yazidi, Syrian, Yemeni, or even Kurd. I am not Malian or even an Ethiopian child from Tigray. I was not and I am not even… or… My baby eyes did not have to see my mother or my sister raped, or my father or brother burnt alive.
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Years have passed. Many. My father left that statue to me, and I’ve brought it along with me in my countless moves, transfers, and divorces to new homes. If I could paint and wanted to do a self-portrait, I would paint myself from behind, walking, with the wooden Icarus over my shoulder and a suitcase in my hand. My entire life, I have been bound to that statue by an umbilical cord. Admittedly, Icarus’ dream is tragically blind; it’s intoxicating and magnificent but also stupid. In many of the choices I’ve made, I have identified myself with his ingenuous but arrogant stupidity.
I’ve never lived far from that piece of wood that Marino brought to life to be then spat on by the Nazis in front of my eyes. When they drunkenly spat at Icarus, who died two times, swinging in the fog, they spat on culture and art, which the wooden statue symbolized. Once, in a moment of difficulty, I tried in vain to sell Icarus and free myself of him. Luckily, I did not.
Now, he is always before my eyes.
I look at one of his hands the Nazis broke. I listen to the radio: news from Ukraine. News from Palestine. New wars rage beside us. Others, too far and forgotten.
I mentioned my father before. When he was twenty, he had fought in what they led him to believe would be the last war in Europe. The first and final world war. He spoke little of it with me. He didn’t want to. Now, I regret not having pressed him. He avoided any account of the great slaughter in which he fought and from which he miraculously escaped. He never spoke to me of the long lines of men cut down as if a scythe were harvesting grain like I read in books, or of his comrades writhing as they burned alive, their bodies reduced to dust, or of men’s hands fumbling to stuff innards back into their bodies, or of the people who covered their mouths with handkerchiefs or stuck wet bread in their mouths to protect themselves from phosgene. Used for the first time against the Italians in 1916, phosgene gassed 2500 men in a single day, choking them in an excruciating death. The day was June 26th. The Italians immediately started to produce the gas themselves, manufacturing and using circa 13,000 tons in 1917 and 1918.
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My father never mentioned any of this to me. He only told me of one episode in detail. I was a teenager, and the story was the only one he ever told me. I listened more with my imagination than with my ears.
My nineteen-year-old father, instead of going to the University as he wanted, was enlisted, trained for six months in Caserta in the Bersaglieri corps, then assigned to the Karst as an officer. He commanded a platoon of Arditi, the elite special force formed in January 1917 along the lines of a similar Austrian corps. They were men trained in assault and surprise attack techniques against fortified positions, using hand-to-hand combat and various weapons. My father, a young Sicilian, led a group of men, many twice his age, some who were convicts plucked out of prison, many who spoke only in strange dialects. He led them in combat in attacks and often to their death. My father told me he managed to earn their respect by always charging first in attack. Bullets luckily saved my father from any mortal blows. Shrapnel wounded his eye, but as soon as they stitched him up, he was back fighting. This is the episode he told me: He was in Caporetto. My father’s platoon was among the troops left to protect the retreat of civilians and the army. During that retreat, all sorts of things happened. My father saw multitudes of Italian soldiers waving white handkerchiefs, shouting, “Long live Germany,” throwing themselves into the arms of the advancing Wurttemburgs. Those starving peasants sent to slaughter, he told me, had forgotten not only their pride but even their names.
An officer tried to get his men to come back, threatening them with his pistol, but they ran away, scared as dogs. The officer pulled the trigger, shouting, “Cowards!” He shot in the air because he couldn’t bring himself to shoot them in the back. Then, out of shame and pain, he inserted the gun in his mouth. Right then, three squads of the Italian cavalry appeared in perfect formation, their flags waving, galloping in the opposite direction. Fools. The officer leading the charge rode next to a monk in a gray habit. They galloped toward a Jager battalion. Desperate bravery. The Germans’ lightweight machine guns fired. A fury of men and horses falling and turning back. A vomit of blood and muck. Hoofs kicking to the sky. In the night, the terrifying glow of fires painted the darkness. The entire earth was in flames and, at times, shook, cracking and then breaking open into craters when the munitions depots blew up. The roads teemed with peasants and soldiers. Wagons, carts, vehicles of all kinds. There were thousands unable to move or pass. Loaded wagons tumbled into ditches with their horses tethered to them, neighing as their mouths filled with dirt. Wide-eyed children. Abandoned homes and lost soldiers wandering in search of food and loot. Scavengers.
In a field covered with frost, a bull galloped furiously in the white clumps, dragging a broken chain that bounced, cutting the air and drumming up fragments of muddy crystal. Then, the rivers: gutted bridges, bridges loaded with people, bridges made of boats, soldiers on bridges, howitzers unwilling to cross the bridges, and the carcasses of mules in the whirling water under the bridges.
My father’s platoon was one of those left behind to protect the clamorous retreat. They were the human shields. The bridges behind them would be blown up, so they were stuck there shooting until their ammunition ran out and then left to die. My father had placed his men in a cone-shaped sinkhole to hide. They had nothing to eat. Only mud to drink. At sunset, they would climb up to the edge and, in the darkness of night, they would bury the bodies. The bodies under their feet. They didn’t need light; there were fires everywhere. They were surrounded, and they wondered when a 105 mortar would hit their hole. When their ammunition ran out, my father ordered his men to damage their weapons before they ended up in enemy hands. One dawn, they spotted above them through the smoke and fog Austrian soldiers with their shotguns and machineguns aimed down at them. They were surrounded like poor little mice. My father ordered his men to throw down their (unusable) arms and surrender. He had his damaged gun in his hand and clutched it tight. Above, a soldier shouted at him in German. It was clear he wanted my father to throw down his gun. But my father told me he had no intention of dropping the gun, a useless piece of metal.
“Drop it, Lieutenant!” his men begged him.
Impatient, the Austrian soldier had started to descend, shouting his order, his voice getting angrier and angrier, pointing his rifle at his head.
“But…” my father told me in his only autobiographical confidence ever to me, “An officer who throws down his gun is cowardly. The whole situation wasn’t cowardly because we had defended ourselves, fighting like beasts, and nothing else could be done, but the gesture was cowardly. Vile.”
He was ready to die so as not to perform that “vile” gesture. The Austrian soldier’s finger was about to pull the trigger when a voice above shouted something in German. The solder froze. It was the voice of the enemy officer, wrapped in a coat with a fur collar, who had watched the entire scene. He was the same age as my father. He came down the slope, leaning on a cane with an ivory handle, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he asked my father when he reached him. My father shook his head. Then he “had an intuition,” he told me, and he asked his Austrian peer, “Latine loqueris?”
The Austrian officer smiled. They sat down on two rocks and started to speak in Latin, both recently having finished their classical studies (the curriculum was tough in those days both in Catania and Linz), telling each other of their plans after the war and comparing their favorite poets. I did not ask my father which poets they discussed since I was too stunned listening to this story. After a long chat, the Austrian officer took my father prisoner with “honors of war,” which meant that he did not have to make the “vile” gesture of handing over his broken pistol. A few days later, my father was shoved into a train headed to the Celle concentration camp, a few dozen kilometers from Hannover. In that funereal place, even if dozens of prisoners died each day of cold and hunger, the officers somehow organized the “People’s University of the Celle Concentration Camp.” In January 1918, Granata, an officer, held a conference entitled “Fedor Dostoyevsky’s Novel: Crime and Punishment and its Influence on Modern Criminal Law.” And that was the end of my father’s tale. Nothing else.
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Apart from this unique glimpse, my father had deliberately excluded his experience of the two wars -- one war on the front line, the other fleeing Fascism - from his conversation. By only telling me that one account of his youth on the front, he wanted to erase the horrors for me and communicate a sense of honor and respect and the value of culture even in the most tragic of moments. I have no reason to doubt the truth of his story; I always felt it had come out of ancient, obsolete codes of chivalry.
I try to imagine a similar situation today where two young officers fresh from the completion of their studies, one Russian and the other Ukrainian, who do not know each other’s languages (difficult, yet not impossible), meet and find a common language, rooted in their common ancient identities. Perhaps they would use Staroslav, the language coined by the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius? A literary language that created the works of great Bulgarian writers from the IX and X centuries. It’s absurd to even imagine the scene. It is grotesque when bestiality takes over everything, and culture is reduced to nothing.
People talk about International Humanitarian Law. What does it say exactly? Essentially, it imposes forces at war to always make a distinction between the population and their civil interests on the one hand and military targets on the other. A civil population, individual citizens, or civil targets must not be targets of military attacks. In these days of the first quarter of the 21st Century, is Netanyahu aware of International Humanitarian Law? The opposing forces must treat prisoners of war and anyone deprived of their freedom humanely, protecting them from all forms of violence, particularly torture.
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I’ve read about the war I was born into, the war that taught me my first words and showed me Icarus hanging. When my mother passed away, I found, among her letters, one letter from a cousin her same age. He only had a third-grade education and worked at the Pirelli tire company. I knew he was very kind and that my mother was very fond of him when she was a girl. He died in 1943, the same year she married. He was 25 years old. I took that letter with me. It was written on the banks of the Don one night; his handwriting bears the hallmarks of despair where language and his thick nearly incomprehensible dialect blurred together.
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My dear Giannina,
Tonight, I must stay awake. Tomorrow morning, a convoy carrying wounded leaves for Belgorod with the last of our division’s gas tanks. The rest of us will walk. I will hand this letter to a truck driver. If it can get across the ice, if it can pass through the fire of the 6th Russian Army, if it does not turn to dust from the T-34s, if the letter arrives in Italy, if it is not confiscated by the Fascist censors, if... then you will receive my most loving greetings and best wishes for your wedding. You have no idea how much I wanted to be there, but Signor Mussolini stopped me. We are nothing but jerks in this putrid war. We walked for hours today. I don’t know with what strength. They told us seven trucks with weapons, food, men, and mules would come. But they never arrived, and all radio communication was cut off. So, we looked for the trucks and found them. They had run out of fuel in the night, in the middle of a storm. They were all dead. Soldiers of ice. Mules of ice. We laid the men on the snow in the positions where they were. They were curled up like fetuses. Impossible to bend their knees. Impossible to bury them. Frozen earth does not break. Impossible to unload the dead mules. Because of the terrible pain from the cold, the poor animals kicked the wooden platforms of the trucks, smashing them. Their legs, imprisoned in the wood, were broken, snapped, and the frost had fastened them onto the truck bed. Forgive me for talking about these terrible things. I shouldn’t, not with you.
Remember when we went up the Resegone peak above Lecco? We were starving. And the absent-minded cook at the mounting refuge dropped a piece of soap in the risotto. The risotto looked creamy. Look how cheesy, how much Parmesan he put in it, you said! But then, everyone vomited it up. We puked and laughed so hard!
You will have a son. Tell him to keep a sharp eye on who will command. Italians do not know how to choose. I did not study, as you know, but this war has educated me very well about my dismal destiny. I’ve learned living is not important. Only living well counts. This life I’m living is shit. But I promise you, my beautiful, intelligent cousin and friend, I will die well. I mean, when I die, I will think of good things, a beautiful world for your child, for example. Farewell.
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See, Mr. Putin. My mother’s young cousin, a worker, died by the River Don. Frozen in the winter and decomposed in the mud in spring. Without a grave. He died knowing he was just a piece of meat in a war that he never chose.
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Mr. Putin. I was struck by the image of Putin when he spoke at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. With the microphone in his hand, pacing, awkward because of the extra padding of the bulletproof vest hidden under his Loro Piana parka, Putin cited the Gospel of St. John. Truly disturbing. He is not a Tsar like everyone writes or says just because it sounds good; what Tsar are they referring to? Boris Godunov? No. Certainly not to Peter the Great since Putin has nothing in common with him (all you have to do is read Saint-Simon’s extraordinary description of Peter in his Mémoires). Mr. Putin has nothing in common with Peter’s nephew either (so marvelously described in Von Sternberg’s The Scarlett Empress and so idiotically – albeit with style – through Tony McNamara’s eyes in the recent TV series The Great). And Mr. Putin does not even come close to the Tsar who was put to death with his family in 1917, Nicholas II, known as “Bloody Nicholas,” “the crowned hangman,” as well as “Vile Nicholas” and “Saint Nicholas II Emperor, martyr, and great bearer of the Passion.” I recently learned that Nicholas II was the second wealthiest head of state in history. His fortune was calculated to be worth around 250 billion dollars today, a fortune that has been surpassed only, as I read, by Musa I, the Emperor of Mali, who in the fourteenth century possessed double that wealth. No. I think it is wrong to call Putin a tsar.
However, I do not think Mr. Putin can be defined as a President either, as banners at the Luzhniki Stadium called him. I believe he is essentially a Lord or master who is the head of a group of “lords” and who in the 21st century represents, “L’État, c’est moi,” in the most literal sense of the expression: possessing the thoughts, voices, and riches of his great country. As well as owning the souls who have died having no idea they were ever owned.
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Unlike most of my fellow countrymen, I am not an expert in International Politics, and therefore, I will refrain from proposing explanations for the how and why of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and what followed. Let alone will I attempt any reckless interpretations of this transversal war between the United States and Russia with China watching from the side of the ping pong table with trembling Europe, united only in appearance and damned scared. All this is at the cost of the flesh of Ukrainians and young Russian soldiers who have been sent to kill and die themselves. I just look, as I always have (but now, with even more bitterness of my many years), the fruits of history. Those poisoned fruits, but not only.
Russia is synonymous with evil today, but I would like to remember its sweet fruits too. Ever since I was a boy, I have traveled along the roads of that immense country. I have walked in the streets and on the bridges of its cities; I have crossed steppes, gone over rivers, climbed into carriages and trains, and been in Siberia. Russian writers took me there. Thanks to the magic they’ve cast, I can declare myself Russian. Without Russian literature and poetry, I would feel blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. I would be deaf not only in one ear but both, and life would be much more painful if it weren’t for Russian music. At its sound, I cannot help but call myself Russian. It has nourished me and continues to nourish me.
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Speaking of music, not a day goes by without hearing about Wagner. Not the composer from Leipzig (musically sublime as he was humanly sleazy) but the CHVK Vagner (“Private Military Company Wagner”). This private military procurement agency employed by Mr. Putin and which at some point in the war in Ukraine staged an unfinished rebellion did its job well in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali, and so on wherever there have been riches to steal and human beings to kill and rape. Its creator, Mr. Yevgeny Prigozhin, was worthy of a starring role in some of the most extreme scenes in the TV series Gomorrah (Prigozhin’s involvement in it would make it even more violent.) A close friend of Putin, Prigozhin, had already been convicted at the time for robbery, fraud, and the prostitution of minors. Several Russian journalists who investigated his activity in Africa were murdered. On the field, Mr. Dimitriy Utkin acted as Wagner’s commander. He was the former head of Prigozhin’s private security detail. Both of them, today, as I reread these lines I’ve written, have been slaughtered. One does not rebel against the master. The unfortunate Prigozhin certainly did not have the profile nor the helmet of the soldier of fortune as designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Not that the mercenaries who swept Italy far and wide for centuries were any less destructive than Prigozhin and Utkin; after all, Petrarch declared the mercenary companies “... a pestilence more horrendous than the plague itself, a disaster more serious than an earthquake.” And Petrarch could not imagine the terrifying storm unleashed on Rome 150 years later when the colorful German companies of the landsknechts (14,000 of them) together with Spanish companies (another 6,000), and the companies of three other Italian “Condottieri” (mercenaries) destroyed and killed everything and everyone, women and children included, for eight days and eight nights.
Italians with beautiful, bombastic names captained most of the mercenary companies of these massacrers; Italians are Wagner’s ancestors. They called themselves “Condottieri” from the word “Condotta” (“conduct”), which was the contract stipulated with the people paying them to go forth and destroy. Much time has passed since then, and yet...
... “Executions and torture are characteristic of the ever-present Wagner Company.” But why Wagner? Apparently, because Wagner was the composer Hitler loved most (and also, I may add, so did the American commanders in Apocalypse Now who napalmed the Vietnamese with their helicopters). A few years ago, on the day of the celebrations of the Fathers of the Fatherland, Putin conferred four decorations of the Order of Courage (“For the dedication and courage shown during the rescue of people”) on Dimitry Utkin.
Perhaps someone already pointed this out; if so, I missed it. I’m referring to the paradoxical oxymoron (and the sinister lack of irony) of sending Nazis to de-nazify a place.
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On October 20, 2001, UN Assembly Resolution 44/34 went into force. In 21 articles, it prohibits and condemns the “...recruitment, use, financing and training” of mercenaries.
In 2020, the Institute for Analysis of International Relations calculated that contractors’ earnings, the so-called PMCs (“Private Military Companies”-in English, because Americans were the forerunners of the boom in privatization of military forces) amount to $400 billion a year, so much for the UN Resolution. On the other hand, three UN Resolutions were passed in 2014 to end the conflict in Syria (where Wagner showed up again). A total failure: “The warring parties have acted with impunity and ignored Security Council demands, civilians have not been protected... Across Syria, children can no longer study because schools have been destroyed or because it is dangerous to reach them. Parents are terrified that the very schools are targets of attacks… millions of Syrians remain without aid... a UN Resolution that is not implemented is of no use to a mother who no longer knows what to feed her children...”
As if that were not enough, I saw with my own eyes another failure of UN Resolutions (819, specifically) when I studied on the field and then shot a film about the massacres in Bosnia.
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My poor Icarus, who wanted to fly towards freedom, a new world, hope, a new light, and instead was fished out of the ocean where he lay hidden. He was strung from a bare oak tree. Hanged. Why won’t you dare and fly again?