The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (9 page)

My first time in the Cerignola area had been from August 1944 through March 1945. It was April when I saw it again, April 1964. The countryside was green with grain and the weather pleasantly warm. Cerignola seemed bigger. A nice-looking hotel operated next to the building that had been the local Red Cross. A door or two from the hotel was where the bar had been, with the finger-pistol-packing
mamma mia
waitress. I wasn’t sure now which door it was. Shops open for business. People of all ages were in the streets. No children begged us for cigarettes or candy or offered their sisters for sale. The streets seemed unusually wide, and I noticed iron grillwork on balconies of recent apartment buildings.

Foreigners seldom visit Cerignola, and we were curiosities. I got into a discussion with some young men and suddenly realized we were circled by at least a hundred onlookers. “Who,” I shouted involuntarily in English, “are all these people?” and they moved off slowly as if they understood from the volume of my voice that I didn’t want my every word a public matter. A comic-looking old man stared at my wife, his lower lip quivering as if he were about to break into tears of resentment. In a tobacco shop, a man went into rapture when he found I could speak Italian, wretched as my Italian is, all 300 words of it. Everywhere we walked, people trailed us. The owner of a delicatessen said he remembered me. I was the soldier who got into a fight with another soldier over a dog. No, I wasn’t.

I wanted to find two places. One was the squadron area where we had lived for eight months, and the group headquarters nearby. The other was a field somewhere south of a town called Spinazzola. What kind of a field? Just a field, with tall grass, slanted uphill from the road. An empty field.

To go anywhere on our own in Italy during the war, we hitchhiked. What a discouraging time, standing beside a dirt road as truck after truck went by, empty, the drivers staring past us down the road. Some drivers laughed as they passed. They were bitter, resentful at finding themselves in this drab land with little to break the boredom but some awful Italian booze. They expressed their frustration by refusing us rides. Some even slowed down, and we would run to the truck only to have it pull away from us. That was the driver’s idea of fun. And we turned bitter at them and made obscene gestures when we were sure they weren’t giving us a ride. We stood with our thumbs out and the trucks went by for hours. After a while, even the road seemed bitter. We swore at the drivers under skies I remember the color of winter. I’ve never been able to tolerate those British war novels that see war as an adhesive force binding us all together in our common cause.

Once I hitchhiked a long way to see a friend. We had been in training together for over a year in the States. I was well along with my missions and feeling the strain. Each flight seemed tougher as my imagination worked overtime on the danger during the long periods of bad weather when we were grounded. I don’t know how many rides it took to get to my friend’s base, but when I finally arrived we chatted about old friends in training, who had been killed, who got to stay in the States. I’d made arrangements to be away from the base for a night and stayed over. The next morning I started home. I picked up a ride early in an ammo truck. It was hooded, something like a covered wagon. I yelled “Cerignola” at the driver, he yelled what I heard as “Cerignola” back, and I piled in. The opening in the back was small, and I only glimpsed the landscape as we bounced along the miles. When I got out, I was in a town I’d never seen, miles off-course. Some American fliers were walking about, and I saw one I’d known slightly in training. He told me I was in Spinazzola. Where was Cerignola? He didn’t know. Lord, I was lost in the Italian countryside. What if I didn’t get back? Would I be court-martialed? I bought a carton of cigarettes in a small PX and started out of town.

Spinazzola is a hill town, and I walked out of it down a long dirt road lined with shade trees. The road ran out before me through hills of grass, and I walked a long time. What if I was scheduled to fly tomorrow and wasn’t there? I thumbed the army vehicles that came by and none stopped. I considered lying down in the road to stop someone, but that was no thought to have in those days. Someone might just run over me and keep going. “You should have seen me flatten that fly boy lootenant.”

After I’d walked for well over an hour, I sat down to rest by a field of grass. I was tired, dreamy, the way we get without enough sleep, and I watched the wind move in waves of light across the grass. The field slanted and the wind moved uphill across it, wave after wave. The music and motion hypnotized me. The longer the grasses moved, the more passive I became. Had I walked this road when I was a child? Something seemed familiar. I didn’t care about getting back to the base now. I didn’t care about the war. I was not a part of it anymore. Trucks went by and I didn’t even turn to watch them, let alone thumb a ride. Let them go. I would sit here forever and watch the grass bend in the wind and the war would end without me and I would not go home, ever. Years later in psychoanalysis I would recount this, and the doctor would explain it as a moment of surrender, when my system could no longer take the fear and the pressure and I gave up. If that’s how to lose a war, we were wrong to have ever won one. Years after the war, I would try to do that day justice in a poem and would fail miserably. I wouldn’t even spell “Spinazzola” right, and my editor wouldn’t catch it.

I got a ride shortly after I left the field of waving grass and in a short time was on foot on the outskirts of Canosa. I knew where I was now. Canosa was off-limits, so I couldn’t pass through. I had to skirt the town, across barren farm land, and halfway across the field no one had planted for years, I met a woman, perhaps thirty, and her daughter, maybe eight. The woman was dark and beautiful, her face strong, handsome, and brown, her eyes and hair the same heavy black. She wanted me to sell her a pack of cigarettes from the carton I’d bought in Spinazzola and I refused. I still don’t know why I didn’t give her the carton. What the hell, I could get more. That day haunted me, came back unexpected when I sat in a class, or later when I was at work in the aircraft company, or when I fished or drank in a tavern, came back welcome to remind me how harmonious and peaceful we can feel, came back unwelcome to remind me how we learn little from our positive experiences, how we slip back too easily into this ungenerous world of denial and possession. I’ve made far worse mistakes than refusing that woman cigarettes, but no mistake came back so often. After being bitten by a dog or stoned by Italian boys my lack of generosity could have been understandable. But after the field of grass?…

Do you understand? I’m not sure I do. I had to find the field again. I had to find Spinazzola and retrace that day. If you need a reason, say I am a silly man.

We talked money in the streets of Cerignola, and in a matter of minutes we had a car, a driver, two assistant drivers, all young men, and we were shooting off at far too fast a speed toward Canosa. I wondered if it would be there, Spinazzola, the road leading out, the field of grass. At least some of it was true: there, to our right as we neared Canosa was the field where I’d made the mistake. Was that woman still lovely? Probably not. Probably fat and lined. Italians let themselves get old as if time were a natural thing. In Canosa, an old man in a horse-drawn wagon blocked the road. Our young driver and his assistants screamed “
cornut
’” as he mumbled bitterly at them and his balky horse.

A few miles later, Spinazzola came at us, riding high on a hilltop and glowing white and gray like a tourist come-on brochure. I always have the same feeling when I see those hill towns: I’ll go there and never leave. Yet, from this vantage I couldn’t remember it. Did I have the name wrong? Maybe there were two Spinazzolas. But in the town, I recognized it immediately.

My wife and I walked about Spinazzola. Down at the end of the town we found the old dirt road lined with windbreak trees leading downhill away into the uninhabited countryside below. And there, near where the road led out of town, was an old
cantina
. Inside, marvelous, old crude wood tables and benches, warm, dim, comforting light, a friendly old man who offered us
fagiuoli
. But we wanted only wine. Wìne, and the feeling one gets in a
cantina
, like you want every friend you ever had to be there with you.

I hope the
cantine
never die in Italy, but I’m sure they are being replaced by the plastic bars with the ugly, expensive chrome coffee machines, the ridiculous pastries that look unique and all taste alike, and the awful excuses for liquor that look like various colored skin astringents sitting in bottles some decadent child designed. We sat there and drank wine, and the
cantina
became very much like that field of grass I still had to find.

I found it. It was a lot farther than I’d remembered and I was surprised I’d walked so far that day nearly twenty years before. It must have been five miles out of town. I saw it just for a moment as we sped by in the car and I didn’t ask the driver to stop. I didn’t even mention it to my wife at the time, and that was unusual because we were fond of sharing our intimate affections for places. Back in Cerignola, I told her I’d seen it. It was still there and long ago something, important only to me, had really happened. Whatever it was, I didn’t accept completely the psychoanalyst’s explanation of it. It obviously had much truth to it, but it was maybe too pat. Whatever, by now I was old enough to know explanations are usually wrong. We never quite understand and we can’t quite explain.