Death in Sardinia Read Online Free PDF

more than death itself.
    He was hoping to be conscious at the exact moment at which he went over to the other side. From time to time he would wonder whether his comrades who’d been blown sky high by German mines had had the time to realise anything. He’d made it back from the war alive, but there had been many occasions when he could easily have died. He’d been lucky. It was almost though he was protected by a star in the heavens. In 1941, shrapnel from a British torpedo had breached the wall of the submarine he was in. He’d heard it hiss a centimetre away from his temple and lodge itself in the side of the ladder. He’d gone and dug it out. Inside one of the metal curls a greenish strand of seaweed had got stuck. Wrapping the splinter in a handkerchief, he’d put it in his pocket. He must still have it somewhere.
    To take his mind off his beating heart he started thinking about the war, and he remembered the time he was trapped with five of his men in a field of maize under the sudden fire of the German artillery.
    They spread out and hit the ground. The earth was shaking violently. They had to prop themselves up on their elbows with bellies raised, tongues pressed hard against palates to keep from biting them, hands over the ears to protect their eardrums from the explosions. The clods of dirt thrown into the air by the mortar shells kept raining down on them without cease. Staccioli and Bordelli were lying next to each other. With each blast they pressed their faces into the ground, and between explosions they exchanged glances and cursed the Nazis. Before exploding, the mortar shells whistled through the air. There was a moment of hell, with grenades falling around them one after another, the earth flying up into the air as if catapulted.
    Bordelli closed his eyes and kept his face pressed to the ground until silence returned. All of a sudden he heard a dull thud, like a boulder hitting the ground. He turned towards Staccioli.
    ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, but Stacciolo couldn’t hear anything any more. An unexploded shell had fallen on his neck, and his face was buried in the ground. Bordelli just looked at him for a few seconds, suppressing the absurd desire to talk to him. Then he yanked off his friend’s dog tags, not bothering to pull the chain over his head. If the shell had done what it was supposed to do, there wouldn’t have been a shred of either of them remaining.
    Very few were as lucky as he. Capo Spiazzi died in the Veneto three weeks before the end of the war because of a moment’s inattention. It was a dark night and, lost in thought, he’d lit a cigarette while standing in front of a window. The German sniper aimed a couple of inches above the flame and hit him square in the forehead. Bordelli heard the glass shatter and ran to see what had happened, and found Capo Spiazzi sprawled across the floor, face up and eyes open. The cigarette had remained between his lips, still lit.
    Giannino had died, too. Of gangrene. Bordelli had tried to stop the infection with the tools he had available. He poured two big glassfuls of cordial down his throat, tied a tourniquet of string very tightly just under the knee, then put a plank under his leg and amputated his foot with a hatchet. It took two consecutive, decisive chops. As a disinfectant he used some twenty tablets of sulphamide ground to a fine powder.
    But it was no use. Giannino lived only three more days. As he was dying he kept saying his right foot hurt, the one that had been amputated.
    The inspector felt his heart start to grow calmer. He lay down on his back and, looking into the darkness with eyes open, continued to wander randomly through his memories.
    He remembered Cayman’s broad smile. They called him that because of some silly resemblance he supposedly had with the animal. The war had reached Cayman during his third year of studying philosophy at university. He shamed everyone with his vast culture, but one was always sure to