74
ALBERT
J.
GUERARD
For a moment I thought I caught the eye of a girl whose hair hung in
matted threads. It was a soft unformed face without burns or scars,
also without passion or malice. She looked at me and saw nothing.
I was only an alien object in her field of vision, on the screen of a
repudiated world.
In the morning I awoke with a pain beneath the shoulder blades,
nauseating as from a blow. My back was flat on the cold stone floor.
I lay beneath a great monument, and the stone effigies in repose of
some Sigismund or other and his pious chaste wife: a magnificent
porphyry tomb. I might even have slept between them, one more
sacrilege, one more alien intruder in the long scroll of unfaith. On
the granite pediment and the rough stone pillar nearby I began to
make out writings, the names of tourists, numbers of soldiers too, and
the slogans of the various wars. And I was waking too, shaking now
with cold, to last night's stench and the bodies strewn like corpses,
or huddled against each other, or accepting a pillar's embrace. In this
gray dawn the cathedral with its shattered windows and bricked up
doorways was itself a ruin, not the fortress and sanctuary
it
had seemed
by night of indestructible stone.
We left Bari behind. On the third day we took one of the tramp
trains, scrambled with a hundred others into an empty freight car
while the engineer was making his bargains. The train crept all
afternoon through the green and silver countryside, stopping twice
to take on olives and for three hours in a small city to sell. At ten
o'clock under a piercing searchlight we reached the end of the line:
Mantegna, the borders of a closed city-state. The tracks ran under
the barbed wire and into concrete blocks. The next morning we went
around the city on foot. We had camped with the others in the field.
All night we could hear the loudspeakers proclaiming the city's
independence, and its devotion to democratic principles.
And then the Zone of Interdiction. I wonder why people would
enter a Zone, not singly but as one of a group, not blundering but of
free will; and so elect to die? There are swifter and less painful
deaths, if that is what one is after.
To
be
precise: After Mantegna, the little closed "republic" we
had to walk around, I had my first real look at one of the Zones-a
good look, since our coughing old plane overflew it at less than a
thousand feet. It was madness to fly so low, since the Zone was over
