TRILOGY: ITALIAN BROTHERS VOLUME 1 THE CORPORAL by Andrej Koymasky (c) 2000 Written on October 21st 1995 and translated by the Author English text kindly revised by a friend
USUAL DISCLAIMER
"ITALIAN BROTHERS 1 - THE CORPORAL" is a gay story, with some parts containing graphic scenes of sex between males. So, if in your land, religion, family, opinion and so on this is not good for you, it will be better not to read this story.
But if you really want, or because YOU don't care, or because you think you really wnt to read it, please be my welcome guest.
PREFACE - Kind of a Preface
This trilogy was born, I should say, by accident, and it didn't even start out as a trilogy. At first, it was just a pile of notes, then a short story, then a longer one, then another story, and finally the third part, which connects the first two...
I spend part of my free time as a volunteer for an organization that gathers money for needy abandoned children. We do a little bit of everything. We gather waste paper, clean out garages and cellars, and do other similar things -- the kind of things that some of you may know, thanks to those photocopied paper ads that sometimes can be found taped to your mailboxes or posted on bulletin boards.
Using a wagon pulled by a bicycle, or a small truck borrowed from another volunteer, we go from house to house to pick up what people have prepared for us, or to take away old furniture and other things that people want to get rid of and are no longer in use.
An important part of our job, once we have gathered enough things, is to sort things so they can be best utilized. When we are going around picking up things, we have no way or time to be selective. The process is somewhat similar to that of a recycling center. And if we do our "value-added" job right, the money we can get from the sale will be remarkably higher. Sometimes, although quite rarely, we can also find some valuable objects, perhaps even antiques.
I guess you are thinking "But, what does all that have to do with the story we are about to read? Is it composed of recycled bytes?"
No, that's not it. This story... well, we will get to that -- please be patient and read a little more... or you can just skip all this and jump right to the story.
Are you still with me?
One of the volunteers (I don't know who) was asked to clean out the cellar or garage of some house (I don't know when or where, I really did try to find out more about it, but just couldn't get any information). The things gathered from that house were placed among other things gathered on that trip -- small old cabinets, old-fashioned and half-broken furniture, and other more or less useless things. Some were even quite nice, or interesting.
My job was to examine all the items, clean them, evaluate them, and sort them. Among the things gathered that day, I noticed a small chest of drawers. I dusted it, pulled out all the drawers and examined the content. There wasn't much, just things of little or no value at all. I emptied the drawers one after the other, threw away or put in the collection bin about three quarters of their content -- old ropes, paper napkins, yellowed newspapers, small boxes of rusted paper clips and so forth. I placed some interesting glass inkbottles (probably made around forty years ago) in the "old age" pile, and finally the drawers were empty. The chest of drawers was nothing exceptional, but not bad at all -- some antiques dealer would probably buy it for about fifteen thousand liras.
I tried to put the drawers back, but it wasn't as easy as I had thought. They were all of a slightly different height, sort of like a puzzle. So I placed the chest of drawers on the ground with its drawer slots facing upwards. Not to waste more time, I first measured the drawers, then the slot openings. And I noticed that inside the chest there was a small hidden wooden box, wide and flat, fixed right underneath the top of the chest. It measured about 15 by 15 inches and was a little more than one inch deep. Curious, I tried to detach it. I had to tinker with it for a while since I didn't know how to open it. There were no visible screws, hooks, nails, or hinges. But when I tried to make it rotate, it moved.
So finally the small box was in my hands, and two piles of paper tied with an old and discolored red ribbon, slipped out. At first I thought they were probably grandma's love letters or something like that. I pulled on the silk ribbon and the knot easily became untied.
As I had guessed, they were letters. The first thing I noticed was that they had very old stamps. I know something about philately. Once I collected stamps (well, who didn't do it as a child?), and therefore I recognized them -- stamps of the Lombardy and Venice under the Austrians, of the Papal States, of the Two Sicilies kingdom, but some of them with postmarks of the Piedmont and Sardinia kingdom, then the first stamps of the united Italy. I thought they might not be very rare, but anyway they must be of some value. I was happy, because we could earn more than what we had expected for the abandoned children. The second pile of paper was similar to the first. Then I noticed that all of the letters were addressed to the same person, and the handwriting on them was also the same.
This reinforced my idea that they could be love letters, a gallant epistolary. I sat down and opened one of them... The writing was clear enough, readable. The salutation read "My dear Samuele". I glanced at the signature, and it read "yours Enrico". I was somewhat disappointed. They were not love letters then, since the two were men... unless... it would be interesting if...
I started to read it. That first letter, chosen at random, told me little -- literary style of a little more than a hundred years ago (the date and the stamps confirmed that), elegant but not refined. Not really interesting content, "How are you, I'm fine" and so forth.
A second letter was signed "your cousin Enrico" and he sent his greetings to Samuele's wife. No, absolutely not a love story! The third one started to get a little more interesting. One sentence caught my attention, "You know well how we Garibaldians are made, or at least how I am made. Even if the shirt we are wearing is no longer red to other people's eyes, it always remains red for our hearts..."
I decided to open all the letters and order them by date. If I was lucky, the epistolary of a Garibaldian could earn us a good deal of money. In all, there were thirty-seven letters that spanned twelve years. After they were in order, I started to read them. And after a short while, I stopped, took the entire pile of letters, wrapped them in a piece of newspaper to protect them, and put them in my bag. I would read all the letters at home where it was quiet. The content was starting to seem rather interesting.
The reason why I made this decision was a sentence in one letter, "The passionate nights I spent in your bed in our youth, remain a very pleasurable memory, and not just for you..."
A Garibaldian, and moreover, gay! I was excited. I was not really amazed - based on the statistics on human sexuality, among a thousand men around fifty had to be gay.
But the thing was that for me, for us, for everybody, the heroes of our history were asexual beings in some ways, almost angel-like. Nobody can really deny that they had sexuality, but nobody thinks much about it, especially when it comes to love between two people of the same sex... For Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci to admit in writing that they were gay was somewhat rare. But who can possibly dare to write and publish a serious book saying that Pier Capponi or Masaniello could love, spend hot nights in the arms of a man, or several men, even though in these cases it was really so? Artists, well, everybody knows they are strange, but never national heroes!
At home, I read all the letters and the picture that emerged was exactly what I had guessed -- Enrico was a gay man, and a brave Garibaldian. Good.
First I went and photocopied all the letters, around one hundred pages. Then I read them again, underlining some passages, taking notes, trying to have some idea about who this Enrico could have been, and also, the many people that appeared in his letters.
And then the idea occurred to me to write a story, to give life, faces, words and emotions to not only the main personages that the letters sketched out with brush strokes, but also their surroundings, to take those shreds of story that Enrico's letters partially revealed, and to complete it. It would be a novel, sure, and therefore for the most part, it would be the result of imagination and maybe fantasy, but it would be based on real facts, lived by that unknown (at least to me then) Enrico.
But why? Because it seemed to me that it was just fair to express, to reveal, aside from the literary invention, some trivial truth, and also something that possibly was never thought about and certainly never said before -- we gays also contributed to the unity of Italy, not more, but not less than the other heroes, with our love, with our blood, with our limitations, with our ideals, exactly like all the others.
I have no intention to "besmirch the memory of our national heroes" as some conventional thinkers (who knows why they are called "thinkers" anyway?) will for sure accuse me of doing. I just want to be able to say in a certain way that "I was there too!" Yes, I was there too, and I experienced the same contradictions and heroism as you did; I poured the same tears and blood, red like yours; I made same mistakes as you did; and like you, I loved, suffered, hoped, enjoyed, yelled, got scared, and did heroic acts.
As I was writing, I understood one more thing -- I was not really interested in presenting the historical truth or verifying the real historical authenticity of the characters. No, it was sufficient to say that these things, or something similar, could easily have happened. So, little by little, I parted from those letters and what they narrated. It would no longer matter even if the letters had never existed. What I was writing now existed on its own. The truth it presented was internal, not external. I took inspiration from the characters that existed in these letters and changed them, mixed them up, and made them completely different.
And I felt free.
Yes, what I wrote is a novel, complete fiction from the beginning to the end. Or rather, they are three separate stories because the interconnections of the lives and facts required it. The thread that connects the three stories is him, the man that I called Enrico before. The Enrico of my stories never existed, and yet he is all the Garibaldian Enricos (you can call them some other names if you like) who loved somebody of their own sex. And not just Enrico, but also all the other characters. And not just the Garibaldians, but also all those who were not able to be inflamed by that great ideal of building our nation.
Well, this kind of a preface is concluded. Now it is up to you to read what I wrote, and I hope that you will agree with me -- "Yes, I was there too!" Garibaldians were splendid people, as each and every one of us is capable of being, when we are able to love.
Andrej Koymasky
NOTE - The trilogy title "Italian Brothers" came from the Italian national anthem, written by Mameli in that period, which begins with the following words:
Italian Brothers, Italy woke up, With Scipio's helmet, She girded her head...
CONTINUES IN CHAPTER 1
In my home page I've put some of my stories. If someone wants to read them, the URL is
http://www.geocities.com/andrejkoymasky/
If you want to send me feed-back, please e-mail at
andrejkoymasky@geocities.com