A fog lay on the water most of the way to Salerno, but I didn’t mind, sitting on the aft deck, my backpack stuffed with everything I would need for a week of travel. Holly, too, had a backpack—a battered “rucksack” that “had been her father’s, in the army.” She wore a pair of faded jeans, with a pink windbreaker over her T-shirt. She was reading Borges, the Argentine fabulist. In addition to Rilke—I felt isolated without it—I had brought Love’s Body, a book you didn’t read so much as reread, hoping to understand it better the second or third time around.
I had felt obliged to tell Grant that we would be gone for a few days. It was, in fact, a Thursday, so we could think of this as merely a long weekend. There had been no official work schedules at the Villa Clio, and I had been given assignments in a random fashion, then abandoned to my duties. Grant merely assumed I would accomplish my tasks in due course. In recent weeks, I’d been proofing articles for various English and American magazines: Grant churned these out at high speed, mostly because of his compulsive need to see his name in what he called “hard type.” And there was also the compulsion to express his opinion on a range of matters, from the nature of love to the follies of the British Labour Party. “I can write about anything,” he said, “as long as they don’t wish for more than two thousand words. Above two thousand words, you have really to know what you’re talking about.”
Grant seemed only mildly surprised by the news that Holly and I were going away for a few days. I had interrupted him in his study one morning, aware that he had probably been at his desk for several hours by the time I knocked. He nodded, then asked if the proofs of an article destined for Encounter were done. (I had finished those proofs several days before and passed them back to him—a surprising lapse of memory for Grant, who usually knew exactly where every project stood.)
I also told Vera about our excursion. Unpredictable as ever, she seemed happy for me. “What a brilliant chap,” she said.
I guessed (it was only a hunch) that she enjoyed the notion of rivalry between Grant and me. If one assumed that Holly posed a threat to her marriage, then it made further sense that she should want to see my prospects with Holly improving. On the other hand, my notions about marriage and relationships had been rerouted so many times in the past four months that I hesitated to assume anything. Perhaps Vera was merely being ironic?
I loved that foggy crossing, with the visual world diminished, and the universe of sound and smell raised to a fine pitch. In particular, I liked the way Holly’s scent mingled with odors of diesel fuel that swept the deck. The old ferry groaned and rattled, as though barely able to heave its load of travelers—mostly tourists—from the Marina Grande to Salerno, with stops at Positano and Amalfi.
We docked at the broken-down pier in Salerno at about four. The fog had burned off, and the city itself glowed above the harbor, a panorama of terraced buildings, their fading pink and biscuity facades soaked in late afternoon light. It had become turgidly hot and humid, and we made our way slowly toward the medieval Piazza Amendola, il centro. Along the via Mercanti, a narrow close overhung with vine-strewn balconies and terraces, we found the Casa di Fiori. Holly had been to this pensione before and assumed control, asking the elderly padrone for a large double room. She emphasized the need for two beds, and he nodded conspiratorially.
We followed him up a damp stairwell with pocked walls and various images of the Virgin Mary along the way. There was a lingering smell of burned olive oil in the passageway outside our room, and I could hear a man and woman arguing brutally in what sounded like German in the adjacent room.
“Due letti,” the padrone said, leading us into the large, mustard-colored room, with a view of the street from an iron balcony. The toilet, he explained, was down the hall, but we had a sink to ourselves, and a real wardrobe. A bulb dangled from a fraying cord in the plaster ceiling. The two single beds were pushed together, forming a double bed. The padrone pounded on the wall to still the arguing couple. “Tedesci,” he said, as if to explain their bad behavior.
Holly and I had dinner in the piazza, under a striped awning. She was frank in her conversation, telling me stories of her childhood, her parents, her younger brother, still a student at Cambridge, and her previous love affairs. Again and again, she spoke of her father, whose superior wit and charm filled the entire family circle with a beneficent glow. He was gentle, but authoritative. Some described him as charismatic, although she doubted that such a term applied. He appeared frequently on BBC television, where his opinions on mental health were eagerly sought.
The only subject not discussed by us that evening was Rupert Grant, though I brimmed with unasked questions. Why had she put herself in such a situation? Did she love him? How did she really feel about Vera? What did she hope to gain from this interlude on Capri?
“Tell me about your father,” she said.
In response, I explained that Salerno had peculiar resonance for me because of my father’s participation in the invasion, which came near the end of September, in 1943. He had been twenty, a shade younger than I was now. It was his first experience of battle, although he’d been well prepared during a four-month training period in North Africa, where mock invasions had been meticously staged. The army had constructed a fake town, like a Hollywood set, with wooden fronts and streets, high and low buildings. They went through all the motions, learning to leap out from cover, ready to fire; learning to expose as little as possible. They were lectured on the etiquette of occupation, too. Americans were not Germans, the officers said. They would not brutalize their victims.
My father had told me a little of this, and I had spent time in the Columbia library, reading accounts of the training, visualizing the Salerno landing itself. And now I was here. I was eating dinner, eating pasta, drinking wine, only hundreds of yards from where my father came ashore.
I told Holly that I once asked him if he thought that the Second World War was a necessary war, and he shook his head sadly. “You never know anything, as a soldier,” he said. He’d never heard of Salerno before. He’d had no particular feelings about Hitler or the Italian fascists. What he understood was that everybody else was doing what he was doing, and there was a general agreement that the war needed fighting. He also knew that if he didn’t go, he would have felt like a coward.
“How did he feel about your brother, and Vietnam?” Holly wondered.
I told her that my mother had opposed his going to Vietnam, but my father was largely silent on the subject, saying only that a man had to figure these things out for himself. He supported Nicky, and was proud of him. When I pressed him, he said that if we didn’t defend ourselves in Southeast Asia, we’d have to defend ourselves in California.
I pointed out the weakness in that argument, of course. American interests were hardly threatened by a civil war in a remote part of the Asian world. The Chinese were not even friendly with the Vietnamese, so collusion wasn’t the issue. If Vietnam fell, one did not expect the dominoes to continue falling. Our intervention could only have the effect of widening the war, destabilizing the region. Who knew what might happen in Cambodia, in Laos, in surrounding countries? We might truly antagonize the Chinese, forcing them to act more brutally than they otherwise might. I was just repeating the familiar arguments, having heard them so many times.
I knew that my brother’s and my father’s wars were unrelated, but I also understood that both were somehow connected to our primal urge to tear down the things around us—a feeling that overwhelms the child in the schoolyard who kicks over the block castle built by a friend, or built painstakingly by himself. I had firsthand knowledge of this urge. Indeed, there were days when I wanted nothing more than to bomb my own private Hanoi, to get rid of everything that annoyed, obstructed, or challenged me. I demanded an escalation of the emotional troops. I wanted to search and destroy anything that got in my way.
“Why don’t we go to the beach now?” Holly asked, after we had finished our espresso.
“Not now,” I said.
“You seem pensive,” she said. “Is it your brother? What was his name again?”
“Nicky,” I said.
“Were you just thinking about him?”
“A little,” I said.
“You never talk about him.”
“I guess.”
“Were you terribly close?”
“Not really,” I said. “I wasn’t a very good brother.”
She didn’t press me, and I was grateful. She understood that if I’d wanted to talk about Nicky in any detail, I’d certainly have done so. She had opened a particular door, but I had refused to enter that room.
We got back to the pensione early, and Holly said she needed to sleep. I, too, felt exhausted by the events of the past week and wanted to sleep, and the idea of sleeping near Holly was enticing, even without the prospect of lovemaking. I sat in a chair, the single armchair in the room, and read while Holly changed into her nightgown. Before long, she had curled up on her side of the double bed and fallen asleep.
Eventually, I crawled into the cool sheets, taking care not to disturb her. I listened to the rhythmical flow of her breathing, and slowly absorbed the scent of her, now so familiar. I felt a great longing for her, a wish to lie naked beside her. But I was glad for what I had now, however meager. I had her company and good will, and I was about to fall asleep with her only a short distance from me. Close enough to touch, if I dared. But I didn’t. She had clearly not invited me to reach across the slight divide between us. So I took care not to breach that gap. In fact, I rolled away from her to sleep, so that anyone looking down from above would have seen us as oddly Janus-faced: a single entity with opposing views of the world, and separate dreams.
The circumstances of my sleep—in Salerno, with Holly beside me—made for an abrupt waking. I was at first disoriented, wondering where, and who, I was. But gradually the room dawned, and my situation clarified. I listened for a while to Holly’s deep, slow breathing, then turned toward her. Her hair was splayed on the pillow, and her cheek puffed out in a childlike way. I worked hard to suppress the urge to pull her toward me, to kiss her eyelids and lips, her neck, her breasts. I wanted to lie beside her and absorb her, and be absorbed.
It was not quite dawn, but I couldn’t lie there. So I dressed quietly and left, hoping to return before Holly was even awake. The beach at Salerno called, and what I’d been unwilling to confront some months before seemed possible now. The Allied landing area wasn’t ten minutes by foot from the pensione, but I hurried, hoping to get there before the sun rose, as had my father, twenty-seven years before this morning, though he had approached from the water.
Having read so much about this phase of the war and the landing, I wanted to see the actual place, in appropriate light, and imagine the events that had altered my father’s sense of the world. “Nothing was the same after Salerno,” he said, when I pressed him on the subject. An inarticulate man, he could go no farther. But he’d gone far enough for me to comprehend the crucial nature of that experience in war.
The training in North Africa had probably not prepared him for what happened, for the reality of the invasion. How could it? He would have known that the bullets shooting over his head in ground training were aimed to miss. Lurching from building to building in the Hollywood-style set constructed for training purposes, he could only have felt ridiculous. The enemy was not there. This was cowboys-and-Indians, for adults. And one could only guess what it might feel like to face the fire itself, the onslaught of mortars and gunfire, grenades and rockets. To see one’s friends wounded or dead. To face the fact of one’s own possible obliteration.
Despite his usual reticence, stories about the war occasionally slipped from my father. Once while camping in the Poconos, he had seemed in a mood to talk, so I pressed for details. He remembered sleeping in a smelly pup tent in North Africa, and that he and his comrades had been so exhausted every night that a blizzard of mosquitoes had not damaged their sleep. All you wanted was sleep, he said, and nothing got between you and your dreams. Did he dream about the war, I wondered? No, he said, laughing at my stupid question. Not war. Like everybody else, he dreamed about home.
The preparations for the invasion had seemed, he said, interminable. The red-powdery roads were crammed with staff cars and trucks overloaded with the thousand little and large things required of an army about to make a major invasion. Transports and amphibious landing crafts (called “ducks”) of different shapes and sizes accumulated week by week in various North African ports. Huge freighters came with their bellies loaded, disgorging equipment. I used to have a book filled with pictures of tank-landing craft and troop-landing craft, with the barges that ran up beaches and deposited their goods, then scrambled back for more. (My father once pointed out, in a book of military aircraft, the kind of enemy fighters that had strafed the harbors in North Africa, and he noted the Beaufighters and P-38s that had fended them off. Once the Allies had gained control of the skies, they could prepare their fleets in peace.)
One night my father and his platoon began to move, entering the transport ships, moving together like cattle onto flat iron decks, their canteens full of water that smelled of disinfectant, huddled beside lumps of equipment. They had, by now, become used to living off C-rations, and each had in his knapsack a quantity of bland but energy-filled biscuits, canned cheeses, meats, and candy bars. Cigarettes were passed around the deck by nervous sergeants, and even those who had never smoked before took up the habit, their hands trembling. Nobody knew what would really happen, or could visualize the landing, or could know in his heart of hearts how he might react under enemy fire. That was the great question. Would you wilt, losing your mind altogether? Or would you find the tension bearable?
The convoy assembled and moved forward, flanked by destroyers. Overhead, silvery balloons floated in the sky, these artificial moons designed to keep the dive-bombers from attacking. The radios went silent as the sea grew louder and louder, as if roiled by the events that loomed. In each soldier’s life, an invisible line would soon be crossed, a personal Rubicon. Life before action, and life after. That many of these men would die or go blind or lame was clear to everyone, but nobody talked about this. There were silly jokes about who looked scared and who didn’t. There were obscene jokes, too. The more outrageously obscene the better. And the laughter felt good to many, and they could put from their minds for a few seconds the reality that lay before them. And then a shadow fell over the men, as the hugeness of the occasion became apparent. In this covering shade, each soldier encountered a solitude that, quite suddenly, he understood was his most precious and permanent possession, and he began to master the difficult language of silence.
Just before dawn, the rhythm of life abruptly shifted, and the troops disgorged into amphibious landing crafts. Before the men quite knew what was happening, the first great wave had begun to roll. The invasion of Italy was really underway. Into the pearl-haze of dawn, with nobody talking, and with the moon behind them, they poured themselves into action, becoming an army—a real army—at last.
I stood on the beach now, looking at a sea that ran in smooth, expansive waves without whitecaps. The sun was only beginning to rise, and it surprised me how easily I could see them approaching: my father and his comrades in the Fifth Army. The ducks massed on the horizon, arriving in droves, running up from the sea onto the broad, moon-whitened beach. Bulldozers worked frantically, pushing wet sand into mounds that became ramps for trucks to land on. An advance phalanx of specially-trained men were digging for mines on their bellies, clearing the way for troops and trucks and tanks.
I remember asking my father about the noise of battle. Was it loud? Was it bearable? He considered my question, then explained that if a shell burst within twenty feet of you, it was too loud to hear. But you could hear the popping sound of the .88s, fired from the nearby hills, and the machine guns rattling from the dunes. He remembered star shells lighting up the skies, and tracers that zipped across the beach. He heard a loud whoosh once, the explosion of a surf mine, and he saw a dozen or so bodies floating shoreward, but he never saw any blood. He was sure of that. He also remembered seeing a case of .50-caliber shells floating by him, the case gone green from contact with sea water. “It’s funny,” he said, “but it’s only bits and pieces you remember, and it’s never the important things. Not the worst things, either. Thank God you forget those.”
It must have felt better to get onto firm land, where the men gained control of their movements. But quickly a new reality would have overwhelmed them, as they made their way on their bellies toward the city itself, over sand, with intermittent, deadly splashes of dirt and dust, as shells burst and the air thickened with smoke and the sharp smell of cordite. My father probably heard wounded men crying out, in pain so fresh and fierce that it quickly seemed remote, like somebody else’s pain. I had experienced that only once, in infinitely less exaggerated circumstances, when an ax cut into my leg at summer camp, and I had to get thirty stitches. The real pain didn’t come for hours, seeping in gradually. By the time the pain would have arrived for these soldiers, many would have died already or been dosed on morphine.
I once read an account of this invasion in a book of letters by soldiers to their friends and families. One of them described the stretcher-bearers, and how brave they were, carrying the dead or badly wounded to first-aid stations, the canvas of each stretcher soaked in gore. They remembered men walking through the fog of battle without arms, with an eyehole blasted away, an ear or chin removed. They saw men without legs, crawling. They saw things that nobody should ever have to see or remember—like children with their guts blown away or young men twitching in the sand, moments from death, begging for their mothers. Or dead mules in the road, their hash of furry intestines blackened by flies.
My knees weakened, and I knelt in the sand as the day brightened, with a red sun tinting the water. I believed I had seen something there, in Salerno. Heard and smelled it, even tasted it. And it would never leave me. It would become part of who I was, making it far more possible for me to connect to my father when I went home. He had been only nineteen when he went to war, and when he landed on Salerno, he was barely twenty. I’d never before quite understood what that meant. (As Napoleon once said, to understand a man deeply, you have to know where he was at the age of twenty.) The experience at Salerno would surely have framed his life in ways beyond calculation. It would have determined everything that came after.
I also realized, as I knelt there, that my feelings about Rupert Grant had shifted, however slightly. He acted like a general, but he had never known war, not as Nicky had, or my father. There was nothing wrong with this, of course. I myself had never experienced battle. But Grant’s world was so purely aesthetic, a maze constructed to hide some mythical beast that frightened him. He had created a dazzling thing, employing his talents to the fullest, and yet those around him scarcely understood what he’d done, or what their part in his fantasy might be. On one hand, it was difficult not to admire a man with the power to summon a vision and declare it his. But there was a limit to this vision. I felt that I was only beginning to see through and around the construction.