My grandfather had owned the record, but in those days I would not have understood the German.
And indeed I listened next to the Italian version, which was more a paraphrase or an adaptation than a translation:
Every evening
beneath the streetlamps glow
not far from the garrison
I waited for you to show.
Ill be there this evening too,
forgetting all the world with you,
with you, Lili Marleen,
with you, Lili Marleen.
When I must walk through the muck and mire beneath my heavy pack I feel unsure and tired.
Where will I go? What will I do? Then I smile and think of you, of you, Lili Marleen, of you, Lili Marleen.
Though the Italian lyrics fail to say so, in the German the streetlamp emerges from the fog: Wenn sich die spten Nebel drehn, when the late fog swirls. But in any case, in those days I would not have understood that the sad voice in the fog beneath that streetlamp (my concern then was probably how a streetlamp could have been lit during a blackout) belonged to the mysterious pitana, "the woman who sells by herself." That song must be why, years later, I took note of this passage from Corazzinis poem "The Streetlamp": Murky and scant in the lonely thoroughfare, / in front of the bordello doors, it dims, / and the good smoke that from the censer swims / might be this fog that whitens out the air.
"Lili Marleen" came out not too long after the giddy "Comrade Richard." Either we were generally more optimistic than the Germans, or in the interim something had happened, our poor comrade had grown sad and, tired of walking through muck, longed to go back to his streetlamp. But I was coming to realize that the same series of propagandistic songs could explain how we had gone from a dream of victory to one of the welcoming bosom of a whore as hopeless as her clients.
After our initial enthusiasm, we grew accustomed not only to blackouts and, I imagine, to bombings, but also to hunger. Why else would it have been necessary to encourage the little Balilla Boy, in 1941, to cultivate a war garden on his apartment balcony, if not so that he could squeeze a few vegetables from the most paltry of spaces? And why has the boy received no news from his father at the front?
Dear Pap, my hand is shaking some, but you will understand what I am saying. Its been so many days since you left home
and yet you havent told me where youre staying.
As for the tears that trickle down my cheek,
you can be sure theyre only tears of pride.
I still can see you smile and hear you speak,
and your Balilla waits for you, arms wide.
Im helping in the war, Im fighting, too,
with discipline, with honor, and with faith.
I want this land of mine to bear good fruit,
so I tend my little garden every day
(my own war garden!) and ask God each night
to watch you, to make sure my dads all right.
Carrots for victory. By contrast, in one of my notebooks I found a place where the headmaster had made us take note of the fact that our English enemies were a five-meal people. I must have thought to myself that I had five meals, too: coffee with bread and marmalade, a snack at ten at school, lunch, an afternoon snack, then dinner. But perhaps other children were not as fortunate, and a people who ate five meals a day could not but stir resentment among those who had to grow tomatoes on their balcony.
But then why were the English so skinny? And why did one of my grandfathers postcards feature (above the word Hush!) a crafty Englishman trying to overhear military secrets that some loose-lipped Italian comrade might let slip in some bar? How was such a thing possible if the entire population had rushed as one to take up arms? Were there Italians who spied? Had the subversives not been defeated, as the stories in my reader explained, by Il Duce with his march on Rome?
Various pages of my notebooks mentioned the now imminent victory. But as I was reading, a beautiful song dropped onto the turntable. It told the story of the last stand of Giarabub, one of our desert strongholds, where the exploits of our besieged soldiers, who finally succumbed to hunger and lack of munitions, attained epic dimensions. In Milan some weeks earlier, I had seen on television a
color movie about the last stand of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie at the Alamo. Nothing is more exhilarating than the topos of the besieged fort. I imagine I once sang that sad elegy with the emotion of a boy watching a Western today.
I sang that Englands final stand had begun at Giarabub, but the song must have reminded me of Maramao, Why Did You Die, because it was the celebration of a defeat-my grandfathers newspapers told me more: the Giarabub oasis in Cyrenaica had fallen, despite heroic resistance, in March of 1941. Using a defeat to electrify a population seemed to me a rather desperate measure.
And this other song, from the same year, that promised victory? "Blue Skies Are on the Way!" promised blue skies by April-by which time we were to lose Addis Ababa. In any case, people say "blue skies are on the way" when the weather is bad and they hope it will change. Why were blue skies supposed to be coming (in April)? A sign that during the winter, when the song was first sung, people had been looking forward to a reversal of fortune.
All the heroic propaganda we were raised on alluded to some frustration. What did the refrain "We will return" mean, if not that we looked forward to, hoped for, counted on a return to the place where we had been defeated?
And when did "The M Battalions" anthem come out?
Battalions of Il Duce, battalions of death created in lifes name, in the springtime begins the game, the continents will flame and flower! Well win with Mussolinis Lions, made strong by his courageous power.
These battalions of death they are life battalions, too, there is no love without hate, so the game begins anew.
The M we wear is red like fate, our tassels black, and as for death weve faced it with grenades in hand and a flower between our teeth.
According to my grandfathers dates, it must have come out in 43, and once again, two years after Giarabub, springtime was invoked (we signed the armistice in September of 43). Leaving aside the image, which must have fascinated me, of greeting death with grenades in hand and a flower between our teeth, why did the game have to begin again in springtime, why did it have to start over? Had it been stopped? And yet they had us singing it, in a spirit of incorruptible faith in final victory.
The only optimistic anthem that the radio offered me was the "Song of the Submariners": to creep through the ocean deep, laughing in the face of Lady Death and Fate But those words reminded me of others, and I went looking for a song called "Young Ladies, Keep Your Eyes Off Sailor Boys."
They would not have had me sing this at school. Apparently it was played on the radio. The radio, then, played both the submariners song and the warning to young ladies. Two worlds.