Photograph by Paolo Ventura, “War Souvenir” (2006) / Hasted Hunt / Contrasto

At a certain time in the morning, the prisoners’ wives began to arrive and started gesturing, their faces turned up toward the windows. From the top floor, the prisoners leaned out to ask and answer questions; and it was as if the women’s hands on the ground and the men’s hands up above were trying to reach across those metres of empty space and touch. There was nothing about the big hotel, recently demoted to a barracks and a prison, that could give concrete shape to the inmates’ loss of freedom—no iron bars or high walls. The only visible manifestation of their anguish was the short yet insurmountable vertical distance between those with their feet in the hotel garden, who were still in charge of their own destiny, and those who had been brought to the hotel as though it were a country from which there was no return.

Every now and then, one of the prisoners at the window would turn to the hallway behind him and call out a name: “Ferrari! Ferrari! Your wife’s down there!” The man summoned would push his way through to the already crowded window, and start smiling wanly and making gestures that were intended to signal resignation.

Diego never went to the window; his family was far away, scattered by the war. He’d had enough of the endless seesawing of predictions and suppositions, of good and bad news, that the coming and going in the hotel garden conveyed to those above. His nerves were in shreds. He longed to let himself drift—whether toward disaster or toward the miraculous salvation that he still hoped for. He longed for summers spent stretched out on the sand at the water’s edge, like the many summers of sand and sea in his past, summers that had brought the lazy and unenterprising man to this point, to his first useful summer, which was now coming to an end.

But time was a web of tense nerves, a puzzle that could be reshaped into a thousand patterns, all of them meaningless. Forlornly, the prisoners, most of whom had been captured by chance in the streets, paced the linoleum of the hotel’s bare rooms, where only the white lips of the basins and the bidets grinned, blocked with foul water.

When Diego had been transferred to the hotel, the day before, from a prison in the fort, where he had spent a day and a night with other men who had now perhaps been killed, it felt like being exhumed—finding himself in the spacious hotel, with the warmth of these men all around him, ignorant and easily optimistic. He had laughed and joked, meeting up with men he knew; Michele, the comrade with whom he had been captured, was also among the prisoners in the hotel. The two men had rejoiced at finding each other safe, at being reunited, after a twenty-four-hour separation during which each had feared for the other’s fate. Diego had felt moved but also encouraged as he ran his hand over the roughness of Michele’s overcoat and the smoothness of his big, bald head, which came up to Diego’s chest. Michele had cackled nervously, revealing his few teeth, and asked, “What do you say, Diego, will we put one over on the Nazis?”

Diego had said, “I say we’ll do it. We’ll put one over on the whole of the Third Reich, we will.”

“Even on von Ribbentrop?”

“Even on von Ribbentrop. Even on von Brauchitsch. Even on Dr. Goebbels.”

And they’d crouched down beside a cold radiator to dispel their anxiety with laughter and jokes (they didn’t yet know that several of those who’d been captured with them had already been executed), and Diego had felt the happiness of someone who has just been released after years in jail.

The prison where he’d been held was an old fort on the harbor, where the German anti-aircraft artillery was now installed. His cell had been used at some point as a detention area for German soldiers. On the walls were graffiti written by German homosexuals: “Mein lieber Kamerad Franz, I am shut up here and you are far from me”; “Mein lieber Kamerad Hans, my life was happy when I was near you.”

There’d been about twenty of them in that cramped cell, stretched out on the ground in a row. An old man with a white beard, dressed in hunting clothes—the father of one of the other prisoners—would get up every so often during the night, stepping over the bodies, and urinate, with considerable effort, into a can in the corner. Rust had worn holes in the can, and soon the old man’s urine would flood the cell floor, like a river. Inhuman barked orders, as if issued by men who were half wolves, echoed through the fort at each changing of the guard.

The iron bars of the cell window looked out over the cliffs; the sea roared all night as it coursed through the rocks, like blood in the arteries and thoughts in the spirals of the brain. And each man thought endlessly of the corner he should never have turned, the corner that had brought him here: for Diego, it was the street corner that he and Michele had gone around to avoid the cordon, and which had put them face to face with a group of Germans in full battle gear, stopping passersby in the middle of the road three metres away, as if in the opening scene of a film.

The chain of sensations and images circled around in his mind like a rosary, telling him over and over that things couldn’t have gone any other way, as he lay enclosed in the cell with German homosexual graffiti on the walls and the old man constantly urinating in the dark—or now, as he sat beneath the peeling stucco of the top floor of the hotel, suspended between life and death, while the men around him lay face down as if struck by vertigo.

Each day, a certain number of them were selected: either for life or for death. In the morning, the sergeant and Snakeskin would appear with a bundle of documents in their hands: those who got their documents back were free to leave. They’d hug their wives and walk off arm-in-arm across the hotel lawn, trailed by the envious eyes of those left behind.

In the evening a lead-gray van full of armed soldiers would come to a halt outside the hotel. The sergeant and Snakeskin would call out other names, and one or two men would be driven off, surrounded by those helmeted soldiers. The next day, their women would turn up below the windows asking for them, and then go from one military office to another, pleading with the interpreters: no one knew where the men had been taken. Other women spoke of shots heard in the evening, down in the evacuated area near the harbor.

For Diego and Michele, too, there were only these two alternatives: freedom or death. Either their documents would be recognized as valid—and in that case they really had put one over on the whole Reich—and they would be able to talk about it in the hideouts of an evening amid the laughter of their comrades; or it would be the lead-gray van, disappearing among the ruined houses by the port, Snakeskin having turned them in.