Our only privilege is to dream. Dreaming is necessary to us, because our life is outside the barbed-wire enclosure, and we have no way of getting there except in our dreams. Only through them can we maintain a hold on reality and remember that we are still alive. After futile days, measured by ounces of food and numbers of cigarette butts, dreams offer us the only real activity we know. Dream we must, for in our dreams we recover forgotten values and find new ones we had never known before; we detect the errors of our past and catch a glimpse of the future.

Let us sit outside the hut and project the visions of our desire upon the open sky. Let us dream, with clear heads and open eyes; let us write our own plot and scenario and be directors, actors, cameramen and spectators of our own imaginary story.

I don't know how I came to this place and there is no use my trying to find out, since dreams are not furnished with information bureaus. All I know is that the square where a man in semi-military uniform with a knapsack over his shoulder is walking, is the one in front of the station of my native city, Parma.

But I do know one very important thing, I am that man. I caught a glimpse of myself as I leaned over to catch my reflection in the fountain at whose center the statue of Vittorio Bottego, the explorer, flanked by two bronze savages, is wondering whether it was really worthwhile to penetrate the upper waters of the Gino and the Juba.

Against the light I see the whole city in profile. Directly ahead, seeming to enfold me in a huge cement embrace, is the great birthday-cake monument to Giuseppe Verdi. [This monument was demolished after the Anglo-American occupation, partly because it was damaged, but largely to celebrate the new freedom.] The composer takes no notice of me. From the bas-relief of the central altar he continues to look nervously toward the station, as if he were awaiting the arrival of the suitcase in which he packed his suit and hat. Obviously, he is tired of playing the part of an allegorical figure, stark naked and with an uncomfortable broad-brimmed laurel wreath on his head.

The Operas--of both sexes--ignore me also, standing on pedestals at the foot of every column of Ximenes' architectural effort and restraining with their cemented immobility the bronze irritation of the Master. Only the chorus from Nabucco, a solitary gentleman standing apart from the others in the semicircle, whispers something in my ear. (The sun makes the dew on the rooftops glitter, and there is gold dust in the air.) Yes, old Nebuchadnezzar, you were right to speak of the gentle air of one's native land ...

~~~~~

I enter the still sleeping city and my footsteps on the deserted cobblestones awaken a sign which had been asleep, leaning against a column.

PEDESTRIANS SHOULD KEEP TO THE SIDEWALKS, it grumbles ill-humoredly.

I beseech it to calm down, to let me enjoy the sun. For such a very long time I have dreamed of walking down the middle of a sunlit street. After all, I'm just back from an internment camp.

"Yes, but you've come back on foot and so, as far as I'm concerned, you're a pedestrian and have to obey the regulations!"

~~~~~

I am walking between the trolley rails, across the silent, deserted square. As I proceed toward the beginning of the narrow street which leads to the outskirts of the city, someone calls out:

"Giovannino, aren't you even going to say hello to your old cafe? Pick a wicker chair out of the heap and sit down. Half an hour from now the waiter will be here to open up. Then, later on, you'll see the proprietor, the barmaid, the blond cashier and your friends. Let's have a bit of a talk while you're waiting. If you could have heard half the things your friends have said about you ..."

"That's quite enough, old cafe. All I care about is what they've been thinking at home. I was imprisoned for the sake of my family, not that of my friends, and it's for their sake that I've returned."

~~~~~

I go on down the quiet, shaded street, and my footsteps on the deserted cobblestones awaken an echo that was fast asleep beneath an ancient arcade.

"Tap ... tap ... tap ...  Hello there, Giovannino! I know your step. You've walked for so long on yielding sand that you've forgotten that your footsteps have a distinctive pattern. Now it's exactly the same as it was before, when you used to emerge at dawn from the printer's and go home, walking, just as you are now, over the deserted cobblestones. All this time I've kept the sound of your footsteps in a crack in the wall. Tap ... tap ... tap ... Do you hear?"

At the edge of the city I come out onto the broad, sunny boulevard.

"Stop, Giovannino," whispers a horse-chestnut tree. "You used to lean against me when you were waiting for her, don't you remember?"

"Giovannino, I'm your bench," murmurs an old stone seat. "Sit down and tell me about yourself, and about her. And I'll tell about both of you ... "

There are still three miles to go, across country, before I get home. And so, without stopping, I answer:

"Goodbye, Youth, goodbye ... "

Here is the dusty, white road, with the telegraph poles all in a row. There is a festive whispering in the air.

"Welcome home, Signor Giovannino!" say the hedge, the trees, the grassy ditch.

All these are good, old-fashioned, country things, which address me respectfully. They speak to me as I pass and try to persuade me to linger. They want to give me something, but they are afraid. They knew me when I was a child; they made me presents of violets, blackberries, and round, flat stones. One day an elm tree gave me a baby bird and a ditch gave me a dragonfly that seemed to be made of glass. But now I am grown up and wear a mustache; they no longer dare offer me a plum or an acacia leaf to make into a whistle under my tongue. Just to show my appreciation, I take a blade of grass to chew.

Chewing the blade of grass, I walk on. Around the next curve I shall suddenly see my own house; when it hears my voice it will wake up abruptly and gaze with astonishment out of all its windows. Just at the curve, there is a wayside shrine, with a bench in front of it, and someone calls from very far away: "Giovannino!"

"Old Grandmother Giuseppina, why have you left your peaceful, grass-covered tomb and come so far? I would have come to you, Grandmother Giuseppina, bearing the flower I gathered in that desolate, distant land. I have it right here, pressed in my wallet, Grandmother Giuseppina; I would have brought it to you and told you the whole story."

"I know, Giovannino, but I didn't have the patience to wait, and so I came to meet you."

"Have you been waiting so long, Grandmother Giuseppina?"

"Ever since you went away. For months I've been talking about you with this kind Madonna. She knows you just as well as I, from the time when you passed by here day after day, as a schoolboy, with your bag of books over your shoulder. Give her your flower. My grave has flowers of every description growing on it. There's even a red poppy, which I'll give you if you come to see."

"I'll come, Grandmother Giuseppina."

I lay my dried flower in the box standing on the shelf in front of the Madonna, and the corolla re-opens and takes on as bright a color as if it had been picked just a minute ago.

"Goodbye, Giovannino. Don't gulp too much cold water. And better put your cap back on."

Hobbling along with the aid of her cane, Grandmother goes back across the fields, by the same way she came. Now my house is in sight.

"Don't run, Giovannino," calls back Grandmother Giuseppina. "You're too weak to exert yourself."

In a minute I shall shout something or other, I still don't know what. And my voice will sound like the chorus of La Scala.

~~~~~

And so Giovannino has finally come home. But at this very moment he finds himself in a dilemma. The last scene is of capital importance. It would be a complete waste of time to have suffered for months and months, with only sentimental illusions to sustain him, and then to ring down the curtain on a fiasco. The matter requires thought.

His first idea of making a loud noise is quickly discarded. By so doing he would inflict a rude shock upon good people who need to be quietly awakened from the bad dream which has for so long held them in thrall. Making gentleness his aim, Giovannino edges his way to a point just below the bedroom window, and in a faraway, positively dreamlike voice, calls the name of his better half. A moment later a blind goes up, and a sleepy face looks out. There she is!

After a moment of total and utter surprise, her half-shut eyes open as wide as headlights. Her head is withdrawn, and there comes a loud shriek:

"He's here!"

What happens next is something like the French Revolution. The first shriek is answered by a second, and the second by a third, each one farther away than the last. Then comes a shriek from nearby and one from still nearer, inaugurating the Reign of Terror.

Padlocks creak, chains rattle, doors slam: there are dull thuds, meows, barks, ringing bells, crackling words and ear-piercing shouts. Albertino bursts out of bed and, catching his foot in his nightshirt, rolls down two flights of stairs. His dear mother tries to catch him, but slips on a ball, inadvertently grabs the leg of the table holding the goldfish bowl and falls to the floor in a splash of water, while the slimy little fish tumble down the neck of her dressing gown, their tails flailing madly.

The cat is quick to take advantage of this state of affairs and throws herself upon the slimy prey. Giovannino is faced not by his wife, but by a seething mass of hair, fish and catcalls. Meanwhile his old father, unable to adjust his eyeglasses, is groping his way toward the door. Finding a knob before him, he turns it and stumbles into the china cupboard. The crash of china awakens Giovannino's mother and, because she imagines there must be an earthquake, she calls out that everyone's first thought must be not for her but for the children.

The baby girl, whom all have forgotten, climbs out of her crib and onto the floor. She finds the bell which opens the front door and pushes the button so often that it seems as if all the express trains of Central Europe were arriving together.

"No, no," sobs Giovannino, before the smoking ruins of his family. "This will never do!"

Everything is wrong, everything must be done over. He must backtrack, like a moving-picture reel, rewound from the end to the beginning.

The baby girl regains altitude and goes back to bed. The old father emerges from the china cupboard, the fragments of china resume the shape of plates, cups and saucers, and leap up to the shelves. The table leg straightens, the goldfish fly into the bowl, the wife reconquers the dignity of an upright position, Albertino rolls upstairs and the window closes. Giovannino's words reenter his mouth, letter by letter, and he falls upon the grass, holding his head between his hands.

"Lord help us! How hard it is to come home!"

(1944)