The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [241]
They fell silent, lay again on their packs, relapsing into their private thoughts. Minetta's weariness colored his reverie, made him sad. He thought of Italy, which he had visited with his parents when he was a child. Very few memories remained; he could recall the town in which his father was born and a little of the city of Naples, but the rest had become clouded.
In his father's village the houses tumbled down a hillside in a network of tiny alleyways and dusty courtyards. At the foot of the hill a little mountain stream lashed over the rocks and raced along vigorously into the valley below. The women would carry their laundry down in baskets in the morning, and wash the family clothing on the flat rocks of the bank, kneading and slapping and scrubbing with the ancient absorbed motions of peasant women at work. The boys in the town would fetch water every afternoon from the same stream and carry it up the hill, moving slowly, their small brown legs cording with labor as they toiled up the footpath to the town.
Those were about the only details he could remember, but they stirred him. He seldom thought of the town, and he had forgotten almost all the Italian he once knew how to speak, but when he was moody or reflective he would remember things like the heat of the sun between the walls of the alleyways, or the acrid fermy odors of the dung on the fields.
Now, for the first time in many months, he brooded about the war in Italy and wondered if the town had been destroyed in bombardments. It seemed almost impossible to him; the little houses of rock and plaster must remain forever. And yet. . . He was very depressed. He had seldom thought of returning to that village, but now, transiently, it was what he wanted most to do. Jesus, that place all ruined, he thought. It made him very sad. For a few seconds his mind held in montage all the wrecked towns, the corpses on the road, the perpetual muted thunder of artillery over the horizon; it even contained a place for this patrol on an island in another ocean. Everything's being smashed all over the world. The magnitude of the idea was too great; his mind veered away, careened back giddily to the rock on which he was sitting, absorbed itself once more in the wretchedness and fatigue of his body. Aaah, it's all so big you get lost in it. There's always some goon on top of ya. Despite himself, he pictured his village destroyed, the cold shattered walls standing like the upraised arms of dead soldiers. It shocked him, made him feel guilty as though he were imagining the death of his parents, and he tried to shut out the fantasy. He was enraged at the waste. Again it seemed impossible that the women should not be washing laundry on the rocks. He shook his head. Aaah, that fuggin Mussolini. But he was confused; his father had always told him Mussolini had brought prosperity, and he had accepted it. He could remember the arguments between his uncles and his father. They were so goddam poor they needed a guy who could run things, he told himself now. He remembered one of his father's cousins who had been a big shot in Rome, and had marched with Mussolini's army in 1922. All through his childhood, Minetta had heard tales of those days. "All a the young men, the patriotists, they fight with Mussolini in 'twenty-two," his father had told him, and he had dreamed of marching with them too, of being a hero.
Everything was mixed up. His mind could see no farther than his eyes. He was hemmed by the dense palpable mesh of the jungle. "Aaah, that fuggin Mussolini," he said again, as if to relieve himself.
Goldstein