"A Bell for Adano"

[fiefoe]

John Hersey's propaganda novel has some fine crowd scenes. I wouldn't have let the three soldiers who destroyed their host's precious art collection off so easily like the good Major.

• He was a good man, though weak in certain attractive, human ways, and what he did and what he was not able to do in Adano represented in miniature what America can and cannot do in Europe. Since he happened to be a good man, his works represented the best of the possibilities.
• * That is where we are lucky. No other country has such a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade, who understand the ways and have listened to their parents sing the folk songs and have tasted the wine of the land on the palate of their memories.
• Until there is a seeming stability in Europe, our armies and our after-armies will have to stay in Europe. Each American who stays may very well be extremely dependent on a Joppolo, not only for language, but for wisdom and justice and the other things we think we have to offer Europeans.
• Next you’ll be raising monuments, Major Joppolo, first to an unknown soldier, then to yourself. I don’t trust you men who are so sentimental and have too damn much conscience.”
  “Cut the kidding,” the Major said. There was an echo in the way he said it, as if he were a boy having been called wop by others in school. In spite of the gold maple leaf of rank on the collar, there was an echo.
• “I know my business, I know what I want to do, I know what its like to be poor, Borth.”
  Borth was silent. He found the seriousness of this Major Joppolo something hard to penetrate.
• This was not one of those impermanent-looking, World’sFair-architecture Fascist headquarters which you. see in so many Italian towns, buildings so up to the moment in design that, like airplanes, they were obsolete before they were ever finished... After all the poverty which had shouted and begged in the streets, this room was stiflingly rich.
• Zito thought quickly and said: “That, Mister Major, is Columbus discovering America.” <> Zito smiled because it was a beautiful lie. Major Joppolo did not discover for three weeks that the picture was really a scene from the Sicilian Vespers, that bloody revolt which the Sicilians mounted against a previous invader.
• Notes to Joppolo from Joppolo. And he read: “Don’t make yourself cheap. Always be accessible to the public. Don’t play favorites. Speak Italian whenever possible. Don’t lose your temper. When plans fall down, improvise…”
• * Cacopardo broke into furious Italian: “Fat one, you think only of your stomach. The spirit is more important than the stomach. The bell was of our spirit. It was of our history. It was hung on the tower by Pietro of Aragona. It was designed by the sculptor Lucio de Anj of Modica.” <> Craxi said in Italian: “People who are very hungry have a ringing in their ears. They have no need of bells.” Cacopardo said: “By this bell the people were warned of the invasion of Roberto King of Naples, and he was driven back.”
• Cacopardo the historian said: “He meant no offense. It is an old custom here. Once the important people make us kiss their hands, and later when the actual kissing became too much of a bother, it became the habit merely to mention the kissing, as if it had been done.”
• Town crier: Mercurio Salvatore stood before Major Joppolo in tawdry splendor. He wore a uniform of the eighteenth century, and looked as if he had been wearing it ever since that time...  the silk had long since fallen apart, and Carmelina the wife of Fatta had replaced it with sacking from the sulphur refinery which she had dyed purple with grape juice, but the purple had washed out in the first few rains, so that now Mercurio Salvatore was a walking advertisement of Cacopardo Sulphur.
• He took a deep breath. Blood and wind rushed into his throat, and his throat roared: “Well, you laughed. But you can see that Mercurio Salvatore is still your crier. The Americans are friends of Mercurio Salvatore. The Americans wish to be your friends, too. You have been expecting the Americans for some time, but did you expect the changes which would come after the Americans?
• Zito said: “Then Adano will not want your Liberty Bell. Adano would not like to have a crack, I am sure.” Major Joppolo said: “Then that’s out.” And he thought some more.
• * Little Ludovico, not having been outside the Church at seventeen minutes past seven on a Sunday morning for most of the years he could remember, rushed out into the sunlight without thinking to ask where the American Major would be found, or, for that matter, who the American Major was, and why there was an American Major in the town
• The service in the Church of Sant’ Angelo was taking a most unusual course. Having completed the supplication, Father Pensovecchio started reciting the Litany of Saint Joseph. It was the longest litany he could think of offhand, and he repeated the words without any sense of their meaning... Suddenly Father Pensovecchio broke off. He had had an idea. He beckoned again to the senior acolyte and whispered in his ear: “Have old Guzzo ring the bell.”
• He is so busy that he had to run all the way to church, and even then was somewhat late. But we are very glad to have him here.” Father Pensovecchio spoke with feeling. “We are glad that he is one of us. Because of this man, I believe that the Americans are my friends.
• This man was called by the people The Man With Two Hands, because of his continuous and dramatic gesturing... He possessed and exercised all the essentially Italian gestures: the two forefingers laid side by side, the circle of thumb and forefinger, the hands up in stop position, the sign of the cuckold and of the genitals, the salute to the forehead with palm forward, the fingertips of the two hands placed tip to tip, the fingers linked, the hands flat and downward as if patting sand, the hands up heel to heel and pulled toward the chest, the attitude of prayer, the pointing forefinger of accusation, the V as if for victory or smoking cigarettes, the forefinger on the chin, the rolling of the hands. 
• This was the first time Gargano had ever been called Two-Hands to his face. He did not under stand the reference.
• * “Democracy is this: democracy is that the men of the government are no longer the masters of the people. They are the servants of the people. What makes a man master of another man? It is that he pays him for his work. Who pays the men in the government? The people do, for they pay the taxes out of which you are paid. “Therefore you are now the servants of the people of Adano.
• * Probably you think of him as one of the heroes of the invasion; the genial, pipe-smoking history-quoting, snappy-looking, map-carrying, adjective-defying divisional commander; the man who still wears spurs even though he rides everywhere in an armored car;... But I can tell you perfectly calmly that General Marvin showed himself during the invasion to be a bad man, something worse than what our troops were trying to throw out... his deep bass voice (you’ve read about that voice in the supplements; it’s famous; one writer said it was like “a foghorn gone articulate”)
• Errante’s mule was a cautious creature, just as wary of ditches on the right as of ditches on the left. This was a quality in his mule of which Errante Gaetano often boasted to his friends. “Give me none of your lopsided mules,” he would say, “give me a mule with a sense of the middle.” <> This sense was going to be the undoing of his mule just now, because General Marvin’s face was beginning to grow dark, and some veins which have never been described in the supplements began to wriggle and pound on his forehead.
• Before the first of them reached the door, Major Joppolo said: “I wish to tell you that I will do all that is in my power to have this unjust order revoked.” <> And when the comic-looking officials of Adano went out of the door of the Major’s office, they were still sad but they were for him.
• Galioto Bartolomeo is so thin that you can count the several teeth of his mouth even when his lips are closed.
• “What’s this Major to you?” Schultz said. “If he can’t have any fun, what’s he to you?”
  Sergeant Trapani said: “Oh, nothing, I just hate to see a guy get in trouble when he’s trying to do right.”
  Schultz said: “Well, then, why don’t you let the order get lost in Captain Purvis’s papers? Don’t bother me, God, I feel awful.”
• * “You’d better come, he’s going to call on old Tomasino, who hates authority,” they shouted. <> “The mountain is going to Mohammed,” they shouted. And the crowd grew.
• Here Major Joppolo got angry. “Old fisherman,” he said, you will have to understand something. The people of Adano are hungry. They must have fish. Do you get that through your thick skull?”
• * “But Tomasino, you’ve just admitted that I was different from other men of authority. You could be different too. It is possible to make your authority seem to spring from the very people over whom you have authority. And after a while, Tomasino, it actually does spring from them, and you are only the instrument of their will. That is the thing that the Americans want to teach you who have lived under men who imagined that they themselves were authority.”
• On the seventh morning, the Sergeant made him repent for having forced his will on two young girls of the town. <> And so, day after day, the repentances went. And every day the crowd outside Sergeant Borth’s office in the Fascio grew, and the laughter got louder and louder.
• Well, I heard the other day that after the U.S. Army was around these Italian towns for a while there was going to be a pot on every chicken.” <> The Captain roared with laughter. Giuseppe, although he had no idea what the point was, laughed politely. The Major was horrified.
• Major Joppolo had made up his mind that Tina’s hair was dyed. But he didn’t expect her to talk about it. Tina sensed his embarrassment. “Oh, my hair is not natural, Mister Major. I dyed it because I was not satisfied. My dark hair was my Bronx. Every one had dark hair. I wanted something different.”
• “No, being a tax collector did not make you rich in New York. I was earning twenty dollars a week. That’s two thousand lira.”... “I did all right, too, only then they elected a man named LaGuardia, and since he was a different party from the previous man, a lot of people got thrown out, and I was one. I borrowed some money from my motherin-law -”
• The family of Tomasino and their guests spent the next five minutes on their hands and knees picking up the chicken feathers. When that was done Rosa said to Tomasino: “Sad one, put the girls to bed.” Tomasino led the little ones out without gentleness.
• The Major left. Captain Purvis tried to pick up where he left off, but pretty soon Tina came in with tears in her eyes and told Francesca in Italian what had happened, and Rosa came in and asked where the Major was, and Tomasino came back from putting the little ones to bed, and Captain Purvis ran out of finger talk, which parents can understand as well as daughters. And so he got up and left too.
• Chuck said: “Take a drink, have a think.”
  Polack said: “Get a stink, take a drink.”
  Chuck said: “Jeez, that’s hard, to think of somethin’ good enough for that goddam Major.”
• Lord Runcin clapped his snuffbox shut and stood up. “Well, Joppolo, sounds to me as if you were doing a wizard job here. Keep it up. If you have any troubles, just give me a buzz.” And His Lordship left, on the verge of a delicious sneeze which he had been saving in his nostrils for ten minutes.
• Major Joppolo said, and his voice was much softer: “I’m not Italian, boys. I’m American, and sometimes I’m not as proud of it as I’d like to be.”... The Major said: “I’m going to make this your punishment: to have this man’s unhappiness on your conscience, and from now on to keep his house as clean as if everything in it belonged to your own mother.
• * Then, in the heat of the day, they would tempt the Americans with cool-looking fruits, and would sell them for anywhere from ten to twenty times the proper prices. It got so bad that city people would buy what little fruit did reach the town market, and would take it out into the country to sell it to the foolhardy Americans. <> To stop, or at least to curb, the black market, Major Joppolo did three things: he put the town out of bounds to American soldiers, who from then on could enter only on business; he had the Carabiniers stop all foodstuffs from leaving the town; and he fined anyone caught selling over-price or under-measure three thousand lire - a lifetime’s savings for a poor Italian peasant
• “I wish I had thrown it away,” Lieutenant Butters said. “I didn’t have the guts. I put it in the courier pouch for Algiers. You know how much stuff we’ve been losing on that run. I thought maybe -”
• THERE was no better index to the state of mind of Adano than the activities of the painter Lojacono... Whenever the town was optimistic, Lojacono worked. When the town was blue, Lojacono was idle.
• The white-haired Lojacono suffered when he painted. First he suffered the pangs of creation, then he suffered when the people of Adano criticized his work. His work was beautiful and everyone in the town loved it, but for some reason they always criticized it first... But soon he warmed to the town’s happiness, and he did things he had never been able to do in his life, which had not been short.
• My boat has been named Tina since the girl was born. It will remain Tina. The leaves and the fruit which dangle from the name are good enough for me, even if they are not new. You would think that Christ had come again, with all this fresh paint.”
• * And this shows the purpose of the criticism: it was not so much that the people did not like what Lojacono was doing, as that they wanted to know exactly what was in his mind. In future, showing off his boat, Agnello would be able to say: “You can see how fast the porpoise is going by the way the Mister Major is leaning forward. And do you see how white his skin is? That is because of the symbolism in the Mister Major’s skin.”
• Tomasino turned on her: “Girl, by the same reasoning which made your mother force me to go to the Mister Major against my will, I now order you to go to him also.” <> Tina lowered her head and said: “Well, if you order me…” Agnello said afterwards that he thought by the way she said this, she really wanted to go all along.
• After the trucks, his mind focused for a few moments on the figure of Gargano, Chief of the Carabinieri, who was directing traffic about half way down the Via Umberto the First. Errante said to himself: “Even if Gargano can talk three times as fast as anyone else - once with his mouth, once with his left hand, and once with his right - I do not like him.”
• Well, I heard that they belong to a little motor ship that has a cargo of sulphur and some other stuff this town really needs. I just thought that maybe one of these weeks when your floating dry dock isn’t too busy, you could raise her and the town would have the cargo and you’d probably have to drop your job and be mayor, you’d be so damn popular.”
• “He doesn’t want it, this Major of ours wants it, that’s what makes me mad. Old Runcin seems to think I’m a one-man shopping service, and he goes around recommending to people to write me all their screwy things they want.” “Well, what does this guy want?” “Jesus, Ham, he wants a bell.”
• Then Gargano told, or rather acted out, the story of how Errante Gaetano’s cart had blocked traffic on Via Umberto the First. Gargano the Two-Hands leaped and swore and shook his two fists at Errante, and he made Zito act as the mule, and he attacked Zito fiercely, and then he reeled back from sham blow after sham blow. He did not ask anyone to act out the part of Errante, but let his own dodging and staggering give the idea. <> He painted a terrible picture of the unknown but possible consequences of Errante’s holding up the procession of amphibious trucks. He himself seemed to die several times as he imagined the deaths of American boys which resulted from the bone-headedness of this cartman.
• he peered into the camera. <> His muffled voice came out from under the cloth. “Even upside down you are ugly. Usually I like faces much better upside down, but not yours. You are ugly right side up and upside down.
• So the Major went and breathed deeply in various points of the harbor. His final breathing point was alongside the motor ship Anzio. “And now,” he said, “who is for going back to work?” <> All but two of the workmen reported back to work. One was the stranger, who had disappeared. The other was the lazy Fatta. He had had enough for one day.
• His story was nicely told and his audience was just right. The Navy has a quick sense of tradition. All the folderol -saluting the quarter deck, the little silver buck to mark who should be served first in the wardroom, still calling the captain’s court of justice going before the mast, the marvelous poetic orders like: “Sweepers, man your brooms: clean sweepdown fore and aft” -these things made Navy men able to grasp the idea of the bell, and be moved by it.
• Commander Robertson went on: “There’s a reason why the Corelli’s in on this invasion. You see, the Navy thinks about that kind of thing. There was something about Captain Corelli, the guy it was named for, he did something in the last war over here in the Mediterranean. Italy was our ally then, you know.”
• * The men did not break into a run. The women ran toward the men. There was equal happiness on both sides, it just happened that most of the men knew their women would be there, whereas some of the women were not sure that their men would be there. That was the difference. That is why the women ran. <> There were among those women some who knew that their men were dead. They were just running forward in order to share the incredible happiness, or even the doubt, of the other women. Doubt was better than what they had.
• * When the prisoners saw the Major, some of them ran forward, shouting: “American! American!” They hugged him and some kissed him, and there were bread crumbs on his face when they got through with him.
• Some of the women with dead husbands embraced the first men they reached, just to taste a little of this sensation that they had wanted so much. But the men rejected them and went looking for their own.
• * Nicolo said: “The artillery was bad. They say you stop living for a moment when you sneeze. When a shell goes off near you, you have the same kind of paroxysm, and when you come out of it, you know you have been dead for a moment. You can’t go on dying like that many times a day, day after day, and be the same. Think what it would be like if you sneezed twenty times an hour, twenty-four hours a day, for days and days on end. Even that would be terrible, and there is hardly any fear in a sneeze.”
• he said that in a war a man’s honor was not measured by medals, because they were given out unjustly, but by the amount he could do for his nation. He said that killing two Germans helped rather than hurt Italy (perhaps, as things have turned out, we should have killed more) and that the best thing we could do would be to preserve ourselves for our country’s next battle. So we slipped into a bivouac and picked out two Germans and killed them in a quiet way which Giorgio showed me, and we got back to Sicily.”
• Nicolo said: “Tina, I have been beside many men who died in this war and no one of them ever mentioned a woman when he died. Men do not talk that way when they die. They talk about their stomachs and they swear, but they do not mention the names of women.
• I am ashamed of myself, and the shame I feel and the awful shame the drunks feel and all Italian soldiers feel - we were weak, Tina - the shame will hurt our country for many years. Our only chance is to remember men like Giorgio. If we couldn’t go down fighting the way he wanted us to, we can remember the ones like him who did.”
• Lojacono said: “Sometimes I think you are a ridiculous little man. The big things come from the little things. I am not finished. There is something about officials that makes them poke their noses, which are usually asleep on their faces, into unfinished matters.”...
• “In the chin, there will be strength, in the ears, alertness, in the fix of the hair, neatness, in the cheeks, a sympathetic warmth. You will like it,” the old man said. “So will he.”...
• The painter said: “You will not see the big things until you have seen the portrait for some time, just as you did not recognize them in the man until you got to know him. Why list them? You know what they are as well as I do.”..
• The old man said: “There is only one big thing, really. All the others are tied up in it. It is the wish, which is visible in this man’s face, that each person in this town should be happy.
• Another of Tomasino’s helpers said: “Sconzo liked parties. Except for his nose he was handsome.” Agnello and Merendino were just as dead as Sconzo, but their deaths seemed less terrible since they were not missing, as Tomasino put it. That is why the men talked about Sconzo as they went in, and not about the other two.
• Then he turned to the woman and said: “I hope you will not hate the Americans because of this thing. Please try to remember in your grief that the reason the children were out there, running into danger, was that the Americans have been generous with them, too generous. If the Americans did not throw candies to them, they would not keep on running beside the trucks and begging. Sometimes generosity is a fault with Americans, sometimes it does harm. It has brought high prices here, and it has brought you misery. But it is the best thing we Americans can bring with us to Europe. So please do not hate the Americans.”
• * At the head of the procession there were three carts. The first two carried the bodies of Agnello and Merendino. Their coffins were small dinghies such as the fishermen used to get out to their boats, with the tops planked over. The third cart, which was for Sconzo, carried a dinghy which was not planked over, but was filled with flowers.
• Gargano grabbed one of his own ears with one hand and pointed at an ear in the picture with the other: “In the ears there is alertness.”
  Saitta the street-cleaner said approvingly: “In the fix of the hair there is neatness.”
  And finally old Bellanca remembered enough of his coaching to say. “In the cheeks there is a sympathetic warmth.”
• if he had planned a farewell speech, he couldn’t have done better. <> “Children of Adano,” he said, “I am sorry to have to tell you that there are no caramels here.” There was a brief wail of protest... Marco son of Manifattura, one of the smaller ones who had been cheated, said: “Because he was selfish.” “Marco is right. Marco says that the Calvi boy was killed because he was selfish. Marco, you are exactly right. That is what Gargano wanted to tell you, isn’t it, Gargano?”... And then the Major added: “I want you to be happy together. I want all of you to have as much as you can of what you want, without hurting anyone else. That is what I want in Adano.”
• “Yes,” the Major said. He looked over the hills across the sea, and the day was as clear as the sound of the bell itself, but the Major could not see or think very clearly. “Yes,” he said, “eleven o’clock.”