Chapter XL
La Luna e i Falò

[La Lune e i Falò (The Moon and the Bonfires) 1950, is an account of three women in the Piedmont whose lives are interwoven with the Italian resistance to Fascism. These are seen through the eyes of a foundling who was raised on a farm by the River Belbo and who traveled as far west as California to seek his fortune. The chapter here presented deals with the narrator’s trek across the United States back East on his way to internment as a prisoner of war.—M. K.]

Several years ago—the War had already broken out in Italy—I spent a night which comes back to me every time I walk along the railroad tracks. I could already smell what was about to happen—the War, internment, prison-camp—and I was trying to sell the shack and go away to Mexico. It was the nearest border and I had seen enough poverty-stricken Mexicans in Fresno to know where I would be going. Then I dropped the idea because the Mexicans would not have known what to do with my cases of liquor, and then the War came. I let myself be taken—I was sick of trying to guess and run only to begin again the next day. It wasn’t until last year that I picked up the threads again in Genova.

The fact is that I knew it wouldn’t have lasted and my desire to do something, to work, to take risks, was dying on its feet. The life and the people that I had grown used to over the last ten years now frightened and irritated me. So I drove my truck out onto the state highways, into the desert; I got as far as Yuma, Arizona, as far as the forests of huge green trees. I had a compulsion to see something different that wasn’t the San Joaquin Valley, that wasn’t the same old faces. I knew that once the war was over, I would have to cross the sea again and that the life I was leading was ugly and temporary.

But then I quit heading down on the road south. The country was too big, I would never arrive anywhere. I was no longer that young man who had reached California with the railroad gang in eight months. So many places add up to no place at all.

On this night my pick-up truck broke down in open country. I had figured on reaching Station 37 by dark and sleeping there. It was cold, a dry dusty cold, and the landscape was empty. To call it landscape is to dignify it: as far as the eye could see was a grey stretch of spiny sand and humps of land that were not hills, and the telegraph poles by the tracks. I fiddled with the motor—nothing doing: I didn’t have a spare distributor cap.

Then I began to be alarmed. The whole day long I had encountered only two other cars: they were on their way to the coast. In my direction, not one. I wasn’t on a state highway, I had wanted to go by the back roads. I told myself, "I’ll wait. Someone will come by." Nobody did come by until the next day. It was lucky I had some blankets in which to wrap myself. "And tomorrow?" I said.

I had time to study all the stones in the roadbed, the railroad ties, some tufts of dry thistle, the fat trunks of two cacti in the hollow below the road. The stones in the roadbed had that color burnt by passing trains which they have all over the world. A small wind was scratching the road, it brought me an odor of salt. It was as cold as winter. The sun had already set, the horizon was disappearing.

I knew that in that level landscape ran poisonous lizards and centipedes and that here the serpent reigned. The howling of wild dogs began. They were not the danger, but they made me understand that I was deep in America, in the middle of a desert, three hours by car away from the nearest state highway. And night was arriving. The only signs of civilization were the railroad tracks and the telegraph poles. If only a train would pass. I had already climbed a telegraph pole several times and had listened to the buzzing of the current as boys do. That current came down from the north and was traveling toward the coast. I went back to studying my map.

The dogs went on howling, in that grey sea which was the plain—their voice broke the air like the song of a rooster—it made me cold and disgusted. It was lucky that I had brought a bottle of whiskey. And I smoked, I smoked to calm myself. When it was dark, truly dark, I turned on my dashboard light. I didn’t dare turn on the headlights. If only a train would pass.

So many old wives’ tales came to mind, stories of people who had set off here before the roads were even yet laid down, and they had been found in a hollow, just bones and clothes, nothing more. Bandits, thirst, solitude, the snakes—here it seemed very likely that there was a time when people must kill one another, since no one touched this earth except to lie in it. That thin line of tracks and road represented all of the labor that those people had invested. To leave the road, to set forth among the cacti, in the hollows, under the stars—could such a thing be possible?

The eruption of a dog’s barking, nearer now, and a rumble of stones made me jerk to attention. I turned off the dashboard; and then I turned it on again almost immediately. To get past my terror, I remembered that towards evening I had passed a small wagon full of Mexicans, drawn by a mule, which was bursting with bundles, with bales of stuff, with pots and pans, with faces. It had to be a family which was going for the season to San Bernardino or thereabouts. I had noticed the bony feet of the children and the mule’s feet which were dragging along the sand. Their dirty-white pants were blowing in the wind, their mule was stretching its neck, was pulling. When I passed them I thought those migrants would have done well to hole up into one of the hollows by the roadside. They surely would not reach Station 37 that night.

And these poor wretches, too, I thought, where do they have their home? Is it possible to be born and to live in a land like this? And yet they adapted themselves, they went in search of the seasons where the land was fruitful, and they managed a life which gave them no peace: half a year in the wine-cellars and the other half in the vineyards. These people had not needed to pass through the foundling home in Alessandria—the world had come to drive them from their houses with its hunger, with its railway, with its revolutions and its oil wells, and now they came and went, like tumbleweed, behind a mule. Those who had a mule were lucky. There were others who set off barefoot, without even a woman.

I climbed down from the truck’s cabin and stamped my feet on the road to warm them. The plain was desolate, dirtied by vague shadows, and I could hardly see the road in the night’s darkness. The wind was still whispering, frozen, along the sand and the dogs had fallen silent. I could hear breathing, shadows of voices. I had drunk enough so I wasn’t afraid any more. I sniffed that odor of dry grass and of salty wind and I thought about the hills around Fresno.

Then the train came. At first, it seemed like a horse, a horse drawing a cart along cobblestones, and I could already glimpse the flicker of headlights. At first I had hoped it was a car—or the Mexicans’ wagon. Then an uproar filled the entire landscape and sparks flew. Who knows what the snakes and scorpions have to say about that, I thought. It hurled me down onto the road, illuminating my car windows, the cacti, a terrified wild animal which leaped away; and it ran by rattling, sucking in air, slapping me. I had waited for it so long, but when the darkness resumed and the sand began its whimpering anew, I told myself that these people don’t leave one in peace even in the desert. Even if it weren’t until the next day that I must clear out, must hide in order not to be interned, I already felt the hand of the policeman like the pummeling of the train—This was America.

I climbed back into the cabin, I covered myself, and I tried to snooze as if I were on the corner of Bellavista St. I reflected that no matter how smart the Californians are, those four ragged Mexicans were accomplishing something not one of them could have imagined. Camping and sleeping in the desert—women and men—in that desert which was their home, where, maybe, they even had an understanding with the snakes . . . I must go to Mexico, I said, I bet that’s the country that will do right by me.

Later that night, a huge barking woke me with a jerk. The whole plain seemed to have become a battlefield—or a farmyard. There was a reddening light. I climbed down, benumbed and broken. Among the low clouds a slice of moon had emerged which seemed like a knife wound; it rendered the whole plain bloody. I stood watching it for a while. Truly, I was terrified.