If You Believe

The men shouted and whistled when Ernestine took the stage.  Her theatre of operations was a raised platform where the Corporal stood when he gave the daily orders.  The single permitted oil lamp, entrusted to the oldest inmate, had been allowed onto the edge of the stage if Ernestine swore she wouldn’t knock it over.  As she eased into a rendition of the partisan classic Goodbye Beautiful, there were shouts of “Fascists go to hell!” Not everyone there was in agreement with the sentiment because they were not strictly political prisoners, but no fights broke out.  Everyone’s eyes were on Ernestine.  As the song went on she strutted the limits of the platform and clapped her hands to give her audience a marching beat for the song. She flicked the defiant flounces of her makeshift skirt at the men closest to her feet, whose rapt faces could have been worshiping the Madonna.  To calm things down she started into O Sole Mio but a melancholy hush came over the room so she wrapped it up early and launched into a flamenco pantomime of Carmen.  With roughly carved castanets and a seductive fan to hide the stubble on her chin, she flirted with her audience like the street walker she had been behind Milan Cathedral.  There was no response from the guards about the noise from the barracks.  It was no concern of theirs as long as the boisterousness didn’t break out of confinement. They were probably jealous when they heard singing and laughter from the barracks, though none of them would have entered to confront the thirty enemies of the state who were locked inside.

Marcello wasn’t attracted to Ernestine, she was too vulgar, but he went along with the rest of the men in clapping and showing appreciation.  The group had been there a couple of months and knew there was no other entertainment to lift them up.  Having Ernestine in their barracks was a stroke of luck as the others with no such diversions ended every night in sullen silence.  Once the men were locked in for the night, the officers and most of the guards took the short boat ride back to San Nicola, to their families, to life, and contact with the outside world.

During the day, the prisoners worked on the farm that occupied the entire raised hump of the island.  San Domino had been a penal colony since medieval times, so self sufficiency was a tradition.  Olive groves had been planted, along with figs, lemons, almonds, and hardy grapes that produced a rich Marsala wine.  Vegetables were grown in corners that were sheltered from sea spray.  A farmyard of chickens, pigs, sheep, and goats, needed looking after.  Once the prison staff and families had taken share of the well-tended bounty, a few leftovers made it onto the prisoner’s table.  Regardless of the meagre meals, working in the rain, wind, or hot sun, it was better than being cooped up in the barracks.  If conditions were right,  the turquoise sea and its emerald coves offered grouper, octopus, lobster and squid, but fishing missions were costly because a guard was needed for every prisoner.  Luckily the superintendent loved his seafood, but unfortunately he was sometimes so occupied with edicts and permissions that he would forget to assign resources, the good fishing weather would pass and nobody would get anything.  Even Mussolini hadn’t been able to undo generations of bureaucracy.  Attempted escapes were another matter.  If a man took off swimming he would be chased by soldiers in a six man boat and shot dead in the water before he got far.  The older guards boasted that nobody had successfully escaped either by swimming, by raft, or by boat, but the prisoners had no way of knowing if it was true.  People disappeared without a trace.  Newspapers were not allowed and what few letters arrived, came long after they were sent and were heavily censored.

Marcello had already picked out Gabrielle in the group of men and stared at him, enchanted by his nose, his throat, his ears, and the tilt of his head.  Like a crow being watched, the young man must have felt the attention because he turned, fixed his lapis lazuli eyes on Marcello and winked at him.  There was hope of a reconciliation.  Gabrielle was jealous because he had caught Marcello embracing a fellow inmate, a foppish, sensitive young man who called himself a poet.  Gabrielle eventually admitted he was hurt because the poet made him feel inferior.  He couldn’t read or write, and believed that Marcello would drop him for someone more intelligent.  Marcello had explained that this was nonsense, that it wasn’t book learning that had attracted him to Gabrielle, nor the fact that he had the Valentino good looks of a matinee idol.  The younger man was not as tall as Marcello, and was trim, almost wiry.  He kept his dark hair slicked back with water, but by breakfast it had dried and fell over his eyes as often as he pushed it away.  When dressed and ready for the day, he could have been mistaken for an eager Blackshirt, itching to go out and crack skulls.  His habitual scowl made it look like he was ready to fight anyone who spoke to him.  Society wanted a masculine image so that’s what he gave them.  He had told Marcello in confidence that everything had changed when he was a child and was belittled by his father at the beach for wearing a towel as a skirt, another as a turban, and a third as a shoulder wrap.  From that day on, his father, and even his older brother had called him girlie and faggot.  To avoid further humiliation he took pains to dress like a masculine man and tried to behave like one.  Although Gabrielle’s good looks formed part of the attraction, it had been his stated and steadfast belief love existed, that had pulled Marcello toward him.  Looking into Gabrielle’s eyes it was obvious his past had wounded him.  This was not a surprise given where they were.  Apart from their personal dramas, all of the men in detention had been hurt by how their country had treated them.

The men on the island had not started out as rebels, but the government had put the screws on anyone who disagreed with them.  Since homosexuals were not likely to produce nurseries of fascist babies, they had to be confined to a sort of Devil’s Island, before their perverted vices spread.  According to Il Duce, all Italian men were to be husbands, fathers, or soldiers.  Homosexual men were none of these, so with other anti-social elements like the socialists, communists, and anarchists, they were to be kept out of circulation.  The political prisoners were housed on nearby San Nicola, which was closer to the prison personnel and traffic of everyday life, while the so-called ‘ladies’ were put on San Domino as if they were lepers who were corrupted by vices more dangerous than political dissent. San Domino had been used in the previous century for Libyan prisoners who hadn't appreciated the Italians liberating their country.

Gabrielle was not the only illiterate man in the bunch, as many of the young men from Sicily who had been arrested had been raised as shepherds and had never been to school. The institution allowed Marcello to teach as they had checked on his credentials and found he was an assistant professor of literature at the University of Florence.  His quiet life in academia had taken a disastrous and rapid decline, going from the worshiping questions of eager students to a peasant's life on a miniscule Adriatic island.  It was a difficult transition for most of the men whether they were from Rome, Naples, Sicily, or the psychiatric institute outside Turin that had been Gabrielle’s last port of call.  Not only were they confined to barracks for a third of the day, but when they were first allowed outdoors, they soon learned that walking half an hour in any direction would land them in the sea.

Once Ernestine’s impromptu cabaret was over and the light was extinguished by the keeper, the men settled down for the night. Most slept on straw mats but some had found ways to pay the camp carpenter to make them a cot from wooden poles and discarded sail canvas.  Marcello had one of these real beds because he had outside resources.  His mother and father had cut off contact when he had bluntly told them he wasn’t interested in marriage, but he had an uncle with connections in the penal system, who would send Marcello money,  though the amounts had diminished the longer he was incarcerated.  Tonight Marcello lay face to face on the floor with Gabrielle on his crunchy straw mat. 

“What will happen to us?” he asked. 

There was a twitch like a shrug from Gabrielle’s shoulders. “How the hell should I know,” he said, in a raspy whisper.

Marcello hadn’t met Gabrielle when he was a lad with a fine strong voice, but once the Black Shirts got their batons and castor oil into him, he sounded like an old man who had smoked a lifetime of cigarettes.  Rather than dwell on its tragic causes, Marcello found the ruined voice appealing because it gave his friend a tough and cocky edge.  Gabrielle liked to play the hard man; acting like nothing bothered him, not the hardest of labour, or the rudest prod from a guard’s rifle butt.  He didn’t say much but he was always ready for a fight to defend himself.  Marcello had intervened a few times to save snarling combatants that included Gabrielle, from being dragged off to solitary. Although Gabrielle had made himself immune to emotion, Marcello had caught glimpses of the pearl that was in the man.  Perhaps thinking he had spoken too harshly, Gabrielle added, “I only hope to get out of here alive.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve got no say in that.  But maybe I can help you make your life better when we do.”

“I don’t need no help,” Gabrielle said, and pulled slightly away from his friend.

Marcello knew Gabrielle well enough that he recognized the first instinctive negative reaction.  The young man almost always said no to things before he said yes.

“I mean learning how to read and write.  You should come back to class.”

Gabrielle had taken a few lessons and was not the most cooperative of students.  In the end he stopped showing up. Marcello guessed it was because he didn’t want to look stupid in front of the other men. .

“It’s all nonsense.  I don’t understand any of it,” Gabrielle said. .

“You will, but you have to try.  Otherwise the other guys will think you really are a donkey.”

“Who says I'm a donkey?” Gabrielle propped himself up on one elbow, ready for an inquisition.

“Nobody yet.  But they will if you don’t help yourself.”

Gabrielle lay back down and gave a deep sigh, as if he’d been told he had to carry the weight of the world.  Marcello wondered if it might be a mistake to lead the man out of his ignorance.  Maybe he had been happy that way, though given behavior, the opposite was true.

The next day they found themselves up an ancient olive tree following instructions from below about which of the higher branches to cut off with the small curved hand-saws that were counted when they were handed out, and recounted when they were collected.  A tool like that would make a mess of a guard’s neck if caught from behind, but the guards were reasonably secure in the knowledge that if a prisoner committed such an atrocity, there was nowhere to run. Impetuous reactions to authority were futile and often fatal.

“I’ve done mine,” Gabrielle said quietly enough that the guard below them didn’t hear.  He hooked his saw on his belt and climbed through the branches toward Marcello who lagged behind on his half of the tree.  He had not grown up doing physical labour and his meticulous professorial habits made him consider every twig from all angles before he cut it off. He had his legs braced wide apart and his free hand held tight to a strong branch.  The tree vibrated as Gabrielle got closer and Marcello heard his rasping breath.  The smaller man’s shirtless body made contact with Marcello’s sweaty back and a hand reached around to squeeze the flesh between the older man’s legs. Marcello didn’t move, and just before Gabrielle pulled away, he thrust his pelvis several times against Marcello’s backside in a demonstration of male dominance.  The lithe young man worked his way around to the front of his teacher and onto branches that gave him the height advantage.  The gold cross with the word amore engraved on the back that was always around Gabrielle’s neck, glinted in the sun as he leaned forward and planted a passionate exploratory kiss on the other man’s mouth.  Marcello accidentally dropped his saw and for a moment thought the dizziness of the moment might make him lose his grip.

“Hey!  You two!” the guard on the ground shouted. “A little less wanking and a lot more sawing!”  The guards were already accustomed to displays of affection between the men and except for outright explicit acts, let most of it pass.  For the men, who had been persecuted by the outside world for showing affection to each other, it was a relief to be honest about their feelings and not be ridiculed for them.  Since all of the men there had been arrested for indulging in homosexual behavior, any protests of innocence or disinterest in other men, were met with skepticism.

Though malicious and jealous tongues couldn’t refrain from using nicknames like the Simper Sisters or the Priest and his Choirboy, the two men were recognized as a couple.  Gabrielle with his dark looks, sullen behavior, and proud arrogance, was far from a golden choirboy. He might have been innocent once but that had been corroded by his father’s beatings. After he left home for Milan, things didn’t get much better.  He was tricked and robbed straight away but eventually found work in a bakery so he could afford a dormitory bed instead of a place in the bushes around the San Siro hippodrome. At four one morning, he had just come out of an unlicensed cafe on his way to start his bakery shift, when a group of drunken blackshirts surrounded him and asked him who he was and where he was going. The illegal cafe he had just come out of was known to be frequented by transvestites, so they took him for a degenerate.  His responses of “Go to hell” didn’t please them so they beat him. He was unable to go to work and refused to go to the hospital so ended up losing his job. For a few days he drank too much red wine and got into fistfights with anyone who tried to help him.  One morning he woke up in hospital, but when he tried to leave and was not allowed, he became violent and took a few swings at the medical staff.  They injected him with something to calm him down and after a few days he was shipped off to a psychiatric institution.  It took a while for him to learn that he was being held there not only because he was anti-social, but was an apparent degenerate.  It was the guards in the political wing in the psychiatric hospital who had ruined his voice, insisting that they give him names of his friends and others like him, or they would continue with the baton and castor oil treatments.

On San Domino, the two men slept together on Gabrielle’s floor mat, though sometimes in the early morning Marcello moved back to his cot for relief from the cold and fleas. If possible they ate meals together and tried to get on the same work details, though some guards, knowing there was a connection between them, often separated the two. Gabrielle began to behave as if Marcello belonged to him and in his terrier-like way to defend him if he thought it necessary. He was insecure, jealous, and paranoid.  He wasn’t an intellectual and for Marcello that was a good thing.  He had witnessed enough bickering over insignificant differences of opinions to last him for life, and Gabrielle was like a strong breeze who blew away the fog of debate.  He understood simple things that were more nourishing than a thousand books, and one of those things was love.  There was jealousy and minefields lurking in everyday conversation, but Marcello was as hooked as a big-mouthed grouper who had thought he was safe under his ledge of rock.  

Nobody wanted to be on the tiny island, but when Italy declared war on Britain and France, the penitentiary space on San Domino was needed to lock up a new batch of dissidents and Jews, so the men on San Domino were pardoned as if nothing had happened. There was an unexpected melancholy and nostalgia among the prisoners because they would be going back to lives of ridicule and ostracism, if they weren’t sent directly to the trenches. On the small boat that took them from San Domino over to San Nicola to be processed before being put on the ferry for the mainland, Gabrielle and Marcello sat together holding hands.  “I’ll try to write,” Gabrielle said “but you know me.  More ink on my hands than on paper.”

Marcello put his arm around his friend’s shoulder.  They were both on the verge of tears because they wanted to stay together but circumstances were about to tear them apart.  Ernestine was a heartbreaking distraction because her crying verged on a funeral wail as she clung to the arm onto the strongest of the men in the group as if he was the only life ring in the ocean. There were tears in the eyes of many as they said their last goodbyes, while others were grim-faced with clenched jaws, anxious about returning to the remnants of their lives.  Once their small boat landed on San Nicola the two men were separated.  Gabrielle’s group was led away first and he stumbled slightly as he looked back at Marcello one last time.  Involuntary tears wet Marcello’s cheeks as he watched his friend and a man who had touched his heart, walk away.   When he lost sight of his friend he stood up straight and put his shoulders back.  He’d survived before without Gabrielle so he must try to remember the reality of that time, and tell himself it was possible to go there again. He knew it wasn’t true. Once a man knew something, once he’d opened Pandora’s box, he couldn't stuff the contents back inside and pretend he didn’t know them. 

There was an amnesty for the less radical political prisoners on San Nicola, so the ferries were crowded, which meant the two men ended up on different boats.  It was better that way.  Travelling back to the continent together and having to repeat another farewell the next day, would tear Marcello’s heart out.   There was talk of jumping ship as the ferry came within sight of the mainland.  Most of the now-pardoned men expected to be collared by the military as soon as they set foot on land. The guards back at the prison had gleefully teased them that the army would knock some sense into their perverted brains. Everyone knew if a man remained disobedient and defiant during his military training, he would be given the usual punishment for treason, death by firing squad.  The family would be told that their son died in unfortunate circumstances.

Marcello was not taken into custody on arrival, probably because of his age and status. He imagined the regime had other plans for him, because although he was not in the bloom of youth, his skills could be useful to Mussolini’s bureaucracy.  Perhaps they would wait until he got registered and settled somewhere before making him an one-way offer of work as a government clerk in Ethiopia.  At least it would keep him away from the threat of a European war.   He had no idea what had happened to Gabrielle.

Marcello was allowed to return to Florence where he had been arrested the year before. There were no young men on the streets, only women, children, and old men who were left behind to dodge the slick black sedans of the powerful. Schools still needed teachers but since Marcello was banned from official institutions, he called on some of his female contacts from the university to help him find enough private students to pay rent on a room and to exchange lessons for meals.  He thought about Gabrielle every day, what he was doing, where he was, how he was eating, and a rush of tenderness would come over him as he imagined the young man, with dark chopped hair hanging across his forehead, resting his head on his friend’s shoulder as he fell asleep.

Marcello was not a crippled old man, so if he forgot to give the Roman salute to a group of blackshirts who passed in the street, he would be accosted, asked for documents, and grilled about why he was not at the front defending his country.  Luckily they didn’t always understand the details of his military exemption, because if they did, a beating would have been in order.  When grilled about his occupation, he told the truth, that he was a teacher, and in his mild reasonable way he would explain to his would-be tormentors, that all good Fascists needed their ABC’s.

In the year after the release from San Domino, Italy invaded Egypt, helped the Germans bomb London, and invaded Albania on the way to Greece where they got stuck in the face of unexpected resistance. Marcello was surprised there were enough able bodies to cover so many fronts, and wondered how long it would be before men of his age were called up. There was no word from Gabrielle but that would have been impossible because they did not know where each other was, or even if they were still alive.  Gabrielle would probably have been shipped off to a foreign country to bolster the supply of young men to throw at the enemy and he would come to a sad end in a muddy trench somewhere.  Reading between the lines of Mussolini’s propaganda, it seemed like the Italian army rarely came out victorious, and in their defeats and retreats, paid a high price in human lives. Many of the quiet haunted streets of the city would stay that way because the men were never coming home. Marcello kept his opinions to himself.  A casual remark to the mother of one of his students could land him on a list of late army conscripts or in another prison with conditions worse than San Domino.

For the next three years, he hung onto enough students to survive the daily battle for food. He had eaten much better when he was in San Domino.  Gabrielle was often on his mind, and he allowed himself the folly of believing that by keeping the young man in his thoughts, he was keeping him alive. When elements of the Italian government decided to cooperate with the Allies, the Nazis swept down like uninvited wolves from the north to defend Italy from itself and the game changed. 

Marcello had been on the other side of the Arno, walking to a student’s house on the San Miniato hill, when he heard and then saw the American bombers. He stared at them like they were a noisy flock of geese, but when insect-like projectiles began dropping from their bellies, he turned and ran to his destination. From the window of his employer’s flat, he could see that the bombs had landed close to the railway station, not far from his flat.   

When his lessons were over and he had made his way down to the Ponte Vecchio, he saw that the city was in turmoil.  He walked home, toward the fire trucks and smoke, and when he got to his street, saw that half of his apartment block had been blown away.  Tables, mattresses, dressers, and kitchen sinks hung out of one face of the building.  Luckily his room was on the undamaged side, so in the confusion he dodged the firemen who were soaking down smoldering timbers, and dashed up to his room to collect his belongings. When he returned to the street he realized he had no idea where he would go.  He had no close contacts in the city who would be willing to give him shelter, and he wasn’t sure he could sleep in a city that was under bombardment.  The pundits had said the city was immune to bombs because of its artistic heritage, but not for the first time, the smug traditionalists had been wrong.  It was not safe to stay and it was not safe to leave.  The Nazis controlled all of the roads in and out of the city and they would not be so forgiving of his military exemption as the Italian police.  Familiar with the outskirts of the city from past years of frequenting outlying parks in a search of willing men, he found a way out of Florence without passing any roadblocks.  After a two day walk into the hills, diving off the road whenever he heard vehicles approaching, he stopped at an estate in Frescobaldi territory and was hired in exchange for room and board.  Billing himself as a simple agricultural worker, though a particularly well spoken one, he was put to work in the vineyards.  His time working on the farm of the prison island proved to be an asset, though he didn’t explain to his employer where he had learned about agriculture.  Often the days and nights were interrupted by the rumble of man-made thunder rolling up through the valleys above the Pontassieve railway junction whenever the allies bombed it.   

When Florence was about to fall to the Allies, the retreating Germans blew up all of the bridges across the Arno except the Ponte Vecchio.  It was too narrow for tanks and Hitler had visited there, so it was spared. Once it was certain the Allies had liberated the city, Marcello returned, and saw that the buildings at the ends of the ruined bridges were now piles of bricks, splintered timbers, and chunks of stone.  Civilians picked their way across the Arno on what rubble remained of a few bridges, hoping it was better on the other side and finding it wasn’t. There seemed to be as many displaced local people from the bombs as there were others like him who had fled the city when it became too dangerous, but had now come back.  They hoped to resume their lives, but for many of them like Marcello, life would be even more difficult than the first time he had re-established himself there.    

He slept rough for a few nights but food was more scarce than ever.  It might be better to go to Rome instead of staying in Florence. The Germans were still propping up Mussolini in Milan but the Americans had arrived in Rome. Although the capital had its own problems, it had been liberated earlier, so Marcello hoped it would provide more opportunities. Florence had thrown him out, taken him back, and then thrown him out again. He had no contacts in Rome to pave his way but instincts told him that the centre of the fallen empire was the right place to rebuild his life.  No matter how good agricultural work was for his body and soul, he needed a large city with enough students to support him. Just before he had left the vineyard, with entreaties to stay, he had noticed he was greying at the temples, and had acquired crows-feet and frown lines.  People who worked directly with the land and sea aged quickly and his vanity suggested he might slow the process by getting back indoors.  He wasn’t raised on physical work and his body ached in places he hadn’t known about, but essentially he was a man who enjoyed intellectual pursuits, and so much of agricultural work was repetitive and mind numbing. If he thought about the influence of the Gutenberg press, he could easily snip off one of his fingertips while pruning vines. 

Instead of searching for private students, Marcello first presented his documents and curriculum to a private girls school and was hired immediately.  The president of the school was rather surprised that the professor like him hadn’t gone to the university for work, but Marcello had decided to stay out of that rarefied realm for the moment. He was offered accommodation by the school as many of their former instructors were never coming back.  He had not forgotten about Gabrielle but the young man was more of a long-ago dream than an active thought. Still, he didn’t give up hope.  Just as Gabrielle’s native instinct had told him that love existed, Marcello tried to hold onto the same faith and trust that good would come out of the bad.

Rome was a chaotic place.  The streets were busy with American supply trucks, and shops were swept out and doors flung open as if a long winter had just passed.  It was noticeable that the women outnumbered men in the city but soon there were gangs of drunken Yankees cat-calling in the streets, vendors hawking services to people who had no money, and more honking car horns than Marcello had heard in years.  If he wanted to stay longer in Rome he would have to find a room that was not on the thoroughfare that cut through the renaissance palaces on its way from the Lateran church to the Vatican. Wandering into the narrow streets of the old quarter was the only way to escape the increasing traffic noise.  A few cafes had opened on the Piazza Rotonda where on a Sunday, Marcello would treat himself to a real coffee, something that had not been available through most of the war.

There were a few tourists in front of the Pantheon, American GI’s in their khakis who didn’t have much idea where they were, knowing only that under the portico there was welcome shade.  A few pathetic beggars had set up camp at the base of the massive columns and muttered incomprehensible tales of woe to  the people who passed by them to enter the Pantheon.  They were a sad lot, and some seemed to be missing limbs.  The few men gathered there looked like they hadn’t bathed in months but if they were ex-soldiers they were used to living in makeshift conditions. Dirt was of little consequence in the struggle to stay alive. 

Marcello tipped his tiny espresso cup upside down over his mouth to get the last drop of bitter liquid onto his tongue. After sitting for a while in front of his empty table, reluctant to go back to his room, but aware the waiter had asked him three times if he wished to have something else, Marcello reluctantly made his way across the cobblestone square. Just before he ducked down the Via Minerva that skirted the Pantheon, he thought he heard a voice called his name.  It was not a shout, but a whisper, and it wasn’t his whole name but the abbreviated version ‘Marce’, the name mother used to call him.  He stopped and turned around to see who had called but nobody seemed to be looking for him. He was hearing things. His ears were ringing because he was hungry.  Shaking his head, he walked away when he heard the voice again calling “Marce!”  It was weaker this time, and with a tinge of desperation.  He knew very few people in Rome, and none of them would be whispering at him from the Pantheon.  He walked back a few paces so he could see if someone was hiding behind one of the columns and playing a joke on him.  In the gloom he noticed one of the seated beggars waving a stick at him. 

He approached with slow curiosity. It couldn’t be one of his students as the man was too old for that.  Anything could have happened to his old colleagues from the university after he left and there had been purges of fascists once Mussolini was gone.  He stood over the man who had signaled to him, and noticed right away a cloth-covered stump where the bottom half of one of the man’s legs should be. 

 “I don’t have anything to spare,” he said, patting his pockets.  “But perhaps you could tell me how you know my name.”

The small man, almost a waif, drowning in the layers of coats he was wearing, looked up at Marcello with watery blue eyes. His mouth opened and closed but he seemed not to be able to form words.  “Marce,” he said again, and one of his dirty hands with its black fingernails scrabbled at the grimy collar of his undershirt until a finger caught a long dirty silver chain around his neck.  Marcello expected to be shown the man’s dog tags and hear some sad tale he was helpless to change. When the man found the object that was hung on the chain, Marrcello leaned forward to look. Though the long chain was worn and dirty silver, the small, almost stubby cross, was of simple unadorned gold.  When Marcello touched it, he instinctively turned it over, and saw on the back, almost worn off by time, the word amore. At first he thought the beggar might have stolen the cross from its original owner and was trying to sell it, but when the beggar reached out and put a dirty hand over Marcello’s, he looked at the man’s dirt-streaked face, his well formed nose, and his lapis lazuli eyes with their ring of darker blue, and he recoiled in shock.  The man with one leg tucked the cross back into his shirt.

“Is it you?” Marcello asked.

The man smiled.  His two front teeth were missing.  “I’ve seen some hard times,” he said.

"You're alive," Marcello said.

"I seem to be," the man, his friend, his love, smiled a gap-toothed smile.

“Where have you been?”

“Russia.”

“What happened to your leg?”

“Russia.”

By then everyone knew that Mussolini’s ill-advised adventure to help Hitler conquer the Soviet Union was only attempted because Il Duce wanted a good seat at the table when the spoils of a Nazi victory were handed out. The Russian campaign killed 30,000 Italians and a further 54,000 died in captivity, staggering numbers that were cold symbols of individual young men, sons of mothers, who had met obscenely early deaths thanks to one man’s ego.  Gabrielle was one of the lucky 34,000 wounded. 

Marcello helped Gabrielle to stand up and hugged him, but not like he would have liked to.  Others were staring at them and he could see the fleas jumping off Gabrielle's coat, so he took him home, cleaned him up, saw to his truncated leg, even kissing the wound.  Under increasing scrutiny and with daily hints from the headmaster, Marcello found a place on a quieter street nearby where the two men could live in peace. Gabrielle was more gaunt than he had ever been, but as he put on weight his sense of mischief returned.  He still held a grudge against the outside world, but he had always been like that.  As his health improved he returned to smoking cigarettes in quantities that made up for the missing years.  Marcello earned enough for both of them to get by, but Gabrielle wasn’t comfortable having someone else paying his way.  He had always been good at numbers, and Marcello's lessons in reading and writing were useful when he found a job at a large cafe where he could sit on a high stool at the entrance and process payments.  Not only did he savour the independence of having his own money but his self esteem was righted by the knowledge that after months of barely getting by on the street, the cafe owner, a veteran of the first war, trusted him with the day's takings.  Marcello eventually coaxed his friend into a prosthetic leg, but when they were at home, Gabrielle put his metal leg and cane aside and allowed himself to be waited on like one of his cafe clients.  He told Marcello that he had dreamed of such a life, the life of a Pasha, during the freezing nights on the Russian steppe when he thought he would die.  Whenever it was time to go out and Gabrielle had strapped on his leg, the men embraced each other at the door like it was their last moment together.  They clung to each other, each for his own reasons, united by love, neither wanting to be the one to let go.