Tristano Dies by Antonio Tabucchi Read Free Book Online Page B

crush the rebel head, the body goes too, just poor bastards on the run without a plan, it’s urgent to carry this out, and now they have. But someone led them there, otherwise how’d they find the shelter? Tristano knows this space, it’s also the headquarters, there are four rooms in that abandoned farmhouse, a kitchen on the main floor, where they meet, discuss their military actions, develop their plans, get their orders, and the adjoining room is where two soldiers from the Savoy Army sleep, two young soldiers, two sweet, inexperienced boys who are better off not seeing any action, who serve as sentries, the commander’s bodyguards; upstairs is a hayloft, where the peasants dry figs and chestnuts on straw mats, and then a room where the commander sleeps. The gunfire was downstairs. Tristano saw the flashes through the windows on either side of the sagging wooden door of that fairy-tale cottage at the edge ofthe woods. But why aren’t they coming out? It’s cold. It’s a cold dawn. Behind that rock, Tristano is afraid. Heroes aren’t afraid, but Tristano doesn’t know he’s a hero yet, he’s just a man, alone, clutching the submachine gun of a dead German, his hands frozen, his feet frozen, he can’t seem to think straight though his mind is racing, he keeps staring at that sagging door, now and then he looks around, barely glances, and doesn’t see a thing, all he knows is it’s growing lighter, soon it will be day. He thinks: how long since I heard the shots? – ten minutes – an hour? He’d slept in the shed near the woods where the peasants kept their pigs, he decided to sleep there that night instead of in the cave down by the stream where he usually slept with his comrades. Why? He can’t say why. Why, why, why …
    … because, because, because. You came here to find out the answers to Tristano’s life. But there are no answers to life, didn’t anybody tell you?… why write? Or are you one of those, the kind looking for answers, wanting to put everything in its place?… Okay, listen, one answer, one because, is that he’d met the American girl in the mountains, I already brought her up, this Marilyn that he immediately started calling Rosamunda, and sometimes just Guagliona, but not too often, when he gathered her hair at her neck, her hair that she wore in a braid during the day, and he’d say undo your braid, Mary Magdalene, undo your braid, Guagliona … You want answers to other whys, why he wound up in the mountains, and how, and when, and Daphne,whatever became of her … You’re far too curious, writer – what do you care? Besides, listen, it made sense, what else could he do, he was a drifter by then, a deserter, he’d returned home after Badoglio sent everyone home, and he had to decide if he would hide under the straw in the barn with the Germans raking or go find his king in Brindisi or somewhere around there … He didn’t like the idea of hiding under the straw – would you? – if you were him, would you want to go join a king who’d left the Italians to rot while he went off and ate orecchiette with turnip tops?… But in a way, Tristano did the same thing by going off to fight in the Resistance in the mountains, because the turnip heads came along after … but that’s all in hindsight, if you could call it sight because I’ve had my morphine … Did you know Frau gave me two doses? She’s like that: one day stingy, the next day giving me a double-dose, she gets emotional … she’s annoying, you’ve seen that tough mug on her, but inside … you ask me, she’s always crying on the inside instead of the outside, I don’t know how she does it, if it’s just her or because she’s German, sometimes the Germans do seem like they might be people crying on the inside instead of the outside, just read some of what they’ve written … we’re different, we seem to be sobbing on the outside but inside nothing’s changed … a matter of