Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
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and balls in Rome and Turin, Budapest and Berlin merged one with the other in a blur of shimmering silks and assorted uniforms. Loud, laughing faces of half-remembered friends – well-born army officers like himself, society women and some of Italy’s new movie stars – flashed past as though taunting him. He had been feêted then as one of Italy’s star sportsmen; the great hope of the Italian riding team in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The prisoner’s fevered mind lurched again and he felt as giddy and nauseous as he had once in Budapest when the champagne had flowed and he had been carried around the mess of the Hadek Hussars, hailed as the ‘Conqueror of Abyssinia’. And then suddenly he was standing before the diminutive figure of the Italian king at one of those awkward royal receptions for carefully chosen young people at the Villa Savoia in Rome. Vittorio Emanuele III, who had known him since childhood, was explaining in his hesitant, didactic manner the origin of the term steeplechase ‘when English lords used to gallop madly across fields from one village campanile to another’. The next moment he was being led by the arm through the scented gardens of the Castello in Tripoli by Italo Balbo, the governor of Libya, who was worried that the Duce’s new alliance with Nazi Germany would be the ruin of them all …
The odour of the shared bucket assailed the prisoner’s senses, ending his reverie and the hours of waiting in the semi-darkness resumed. His past life in fashionable society, once the fulfilment of all his ambitions, had long since been left behind, and he looked back on it now, feeling nothing, almost as though it were someone else’s.
Deeper emotions welled up inside him when his mind turned, as it always did, to the two women who loved him. Guilt mingled with longing when he thought of Khadija. He closed his eyes and saw her again standing uncertainly at the entrance to his tent, the kerosene lamp highlighting her features and casting deep dark shadows in the folds of the white shammah wrapped around her head and shoulders against the night cold. He had buried many men that day, including some of those who were closest to him. Through reddened eyes, he watched as Khadija approached his bed and, saying nothing, she pulled off his riding boots. In that moment of tenderness, when happiness and life itself seemed so fleeting, he had taken her into his arms.
He was her chief, Khadija used to tell him, and in those days he had been the all-powerful comandante, one of the most promising young officers of the Duke of Aosta, the viceroy of Africa Orientale Italiana. But after the British had defeated the Italians, extinguishing the Duce’s African empire, he had had nothing to offer her, yet she had stayed at his side. He became just a shifta, a bandit, inexplicably fighting on with a handful of his ascari after the rest of the Italian army had surrendered. Khadija was seldom far from his side, firing her ancient Austro-Hungarian carbine at the British lorries as they heaved their way up the mountain roads of Eritrea. ‘Ay zosh! Ay zosh! Up! Up!’ she would shout in Tigrinian, as the ragged band closed in to loot and kill. Her fighting with the men brought them good fortune, she would say as she curled up beside him on the straw mat of their tukul. He would watch her fall asleep, covering her naked shoulders with an old blanket and then kiss the intricate braids in which she wore her hair. In the darkness of the dungeon, the prisoner’s eyes filled with tears.
He had always tried to be honest with her, he would convince himself. From the beginning, she had known that one day they would part and that at home waiting for him was another woman; a woman whom he also loved and had asked to be his wife. Khadija would bow her head and say that she understood, but in her heart she did not stop hoping that he would never leave.
The prisoner had no idea what Beatrice Gandolfo’s feelings were for him now: whether she was still waiting for him to return, or had found someone else, or even married, he had no idea. His name had not been among those killed in action, but nor had it been on the lists the British passed to the Red Cross of Italian officers interned in prison camps throughout India, Kenya and South Africa. He was simply missing – disperso – in the void left by the collapse of Africa Orientale Italiana. Whatever Beatrice – Bice – had decided, he would not, could not, reproach her. They had known each other all their lives and the bond between them, cousins as well as lovers, was too strong to be broken.
Bice’s older sisters had always made more fuss of him than she ever did, when he stayed with them in Naples or went bathing at the Gandolfos’ summer house at Vietri. It was they who demanded to know the latest scandalous gossip surrounding Edda Ciano, the Duce’s chrome-blonde daughter, or what the royal princesses were wearing or whether he was really stepping out with the movie star Elsa Merlini, as the magazines reported. Still only in her teens, Bice would follow him intently with her dark brown eyes, smiling slightly but saying little. And when she did speak, it was as though she were gently teasing him, as if she were ten years his senior and not the reverse.
No one seemed to understand and accept his weaknesses and absurdities quite as she did. And he remembered the day, while they were sailing a little boat off the Amalfi coast, when he realised – and the thought had appalled him at first – that he was falling in love with his young cousin. Bice had swum over to the sheer rockface of the shore and, ignoring his words of caution, had climbed up to a high ledge. She looked down at him in the boat, smiled and then dived into the sea, and her long, reddish blonde hair, so unusual in a southern Italian, streamed towards him under the water.
Had fate been different, they would have shared their lives and had children, and together grown old. That she would never know what had happened to him was his saddest thought. When the fighting between the British and Italians finally came to an end, someone in Eritrea, maybe even one of the enemy officers who had pursued him, would confirm that he had still been alive several months after the fall of Asmara. But nothing more. She would never know of the dungeon on the other side of the Red Sea, which had cost him so much to cross. Here he would die and be buried and quickly forgotten as the crazed Ahmed Abdullah al Redai. And then no trace in this world would remain of the man he had been.
NAPLES, AUGUST 1935
Amedeo Guillet rested his arms on the railings of the ancient steamer, taking care not to mark his olive-grey uniform, and looked towards the crowd. Ever since he had come aboard, two hours before, they had been slowly gathering, milling about in the shade under the palm trees in the piazza and beneath the glowering grey walls of the Maschio Angioino, the Angevin castle on the city’s waterfront. A dense mass was waiting expectantly at the point where the tree-lined avenue that led from the railway station entered the square, and it was there, too, that the attention of those looking down from the balconies seemed to be concentrated. Tall carabinieri, in full dress uniform of bicorn hats, distinctive white cross belts and swords, were standing together, with studied insouciance, indifferent to the excitement around them. But with Naples reinvigorated by its afternoon siesta, the sense of anticipation in the crowd carried to the quayside where the passenger ships were docked.
Amedeo was surprised at the multitude. Troop ships had been embarking all summer, yet the city seemed determined to see off the last with the same enthusiasm as it had done the first. Every so often the crowd’s steady murmur was ruptured by youths chanting ‘Eià!, Eià!, Alalà!’, the supposedly ancient Greek war cry that the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had popularised with the early Fascists. Or one of them would bellow: ‘For whom, Abyssinia?’ ‘A noi! To us!’ came the resounding reply. A noi!’ It was the latest gimmicky catchphrase put about by the propagandists of the regime. All of a sudden, a ripple spread through the crowd. A second later a roar greeted the arrival of a column of marching men. Amedeo watched as figures began scurrying across the piazza towards them, drawn like iron filings to a magnet. Flowers were thrown to the soldiers or pressed into