Excerpt from NOBILE'S AIRSHIP
Nobile took the morning train from Milan to Parma and Parma to Bologna. He changed for Florence while a shower fell on the tin of the train shed, and rode through Florence all the way to Rome. At his appointment with Mussolini he would ask for a rescue plane and a pilot - a precaution to wait in reserve on the support ship. His family was with him. It was a last vacation before his flight to the Pole. The bald hills outside Siena pitched and fell into olive groves but the General's mind drifted over the white quiet of the frozen sea. His daughter wandered from berth to berth, bursting through doors without knocking. His wife had sent back three cappuccini - this one too bitter, the last shy of foam. You'll be changed, she said to him now, and he turned to her. It was a long time since she had addressed him with anything other than an imperative. It was a long time before the other war still and this train they rode was still blameless and remarkable and the airships he built were said to be superior to planes. His wife was young still, but sheathed already in the resignations of an older woman. Nonsense, he told her. Nothing will change. He turned back to the window and coughed.
Bettina took a ride from a neighbor to Agrigento and the slow train to Palermo; from Palermo she took the ferry to Naples and the train from Naples up the coast to Rome. Ugo Lago met her at the station. He was afraid the sight of her would disappoint him, having lived among the women of Rome for months now, and initially it did; but he tried to hide it. He brought her to the offices of the Popolo d'Italia, where his friends pretended, as prearranged, that il Duce had been looking for him. They begged him to stay - said he couldn't be spared. He waved them off and swept her back into the sunlight and took her to every cafe in the city where the waiters knew his name. It was a warm, clear day with an inland breeze; he had a motorcar that belonged to his landlord, away in Florence. But Bettina was strangely unimpressed. Her boredom - her composure in the face of so much urban charm - rekindled Ugo's desire. He brought her to the apartment and pressed his case, tried romance, teasing, simple force. But still Bettina was resistant. She had undressed as soon as he closed the door, but placidly, as if alone. He had grappled with her until they were both slick and bruised. But Ugo Lago had nothing to show for it. They lay side by side with swollen lips and stared into the landscape of the plaster ceiling while an argument broke out in the street below. Bettina went to the window.
You've lost weight in Rome, she said, the dear droop of her ass turned to him. She was as sad and lovely as ever here, framed by the window and set against the urban facades.
You smell wrong, she continued. I don't think you're eating well. And your shoes are smudged. Also, you never notice when you've been insulted and I think you probably ought to know that you suck your thumb sometimes when you're dreaming - did you know that? It's sickening.
She slouched and stared into the street, scratched beneath one breast.
It's loud in Rome, she said. I prefer the country.
So in the morning he drove her out the Via Flaminia and on to Bolsena, where she swam in the lake while he sucked on olives. He had never learned to swim; he distrusted water when it gathered into a body. On the drive to Orvieto they found a lamb that had wandered astray - it walked with apparent purpose along the gravel fringe of the road. Ugo stopped and picked the lamb up and placed it in Bettina's lap, kicking, and she smiled at him for the first time since stepping off the train. Shortly they came to a farm with a herd of clean, mild sheep and a goat, a high stone wall and a pond where geese swam. There was a fragrant olive grove behind the stone wall and no door on the front of the house. Bettina held the bleating lamb in her lap and Ugo beeped his horn. They saw the farmer's head first; then he leapt up onto the wall and stood above them, looking down with unlikely assurance and a smile full of conspicuous charm. He was too young to be a farmer it seemed to Ugo, too tall, as dark as any Sicilian - darker than Ugo himself. How fast will it go, he asked, nodding at the car.
Since Bettina seemed to have lost her voice, Ugo Lago explained about finding the lamb. But the farmer said, Keep it. The lamb for a ride.
No, said Ugo, they were in a hurry; they had to get back to Rome; he was a journalist for the Popolo d'Italia - why was he rambling on this way? And what was he supposed to do with a lamb?
Suit yourself, the farmer said. He stood on the wall with his hands in his pockets. The goat stared and chewed and the geese paraded haughtily toward the near shore of the pond and Ugo poked Bettina until she opened the car door and set down the lamb. It began to sniff among the mint that grew by the road. Then she closed the door and they drove away while the farmer waved and smirked.
In a moment Bettina asked, Where are we now?
Her voice was weak. She had to repeat the question.
We're nowhere, said Ugo. Close to Orvieto. We'll be in Rome before dark, though.
She was warm and uncritical, if vaguely distracted, through the remainder of the week. That she never let him have his way only served to reinforce his affection for her. He took her to the station and kissed her with tears in his eyes and promised he would send for her again - to stay - just as soon as he had his promotion. It was said that his stories had caught the eye of Mussolini himself. She must be patient.
Fine, she said, impatiently. Now go back to work.
She touched his chest.
They need you there.
When he was gone she watched the train for Naples pull away, then waited for the train to Viterbo. From Viterbo she changed for Orvieto. No one heard a word from her for more than a month. Ugo Lago's fears ran from the improbable to the fantastic - kidnapping, violence, unaccountable detainment or unwitnessed death - and the tragic possibilities, remote as they were, fanned his passion. When the police coarsely suggested she might be unharmed and not so much missing as elsewhere, he told them, bravely, that he could live with that so long as she was alive and safe.
In April she married and sent a letter to Ugo and he cursed her in every cafe in the city where they knew his name and had met his girl. The next morning he begged his editor to give him the airship - begged for the story as fiercely as he had begged out of it the week before - and that evening he caught the last train to Milan.
It was a good story, but not a big story - a small story. Still, he would ride in the airship Italia the breadth of Europe and north to the Arctic, as far from Italy as it was possible to be. This was an Italian airship, an Italian commander - General Nobile - an Italian crew save a Czech and a Swede, and they meant to fly over the Pole and west to uncharted regions of Nicholas II Land. All heady material. But on the other hand, Nobile and half the crew had been to the Pole already, with Amundsen in '26, and before Nobile had been Byrd and before Byrd, Peary. The Pole was not the destination it used to be, nobody had heard of Nicholas II Land, and Commander Balbo had largely convinced il Duce that airplanes were the future - that the time of airships was over already. The rest of the world was so certain that Italy didn't belong in the Arctic without Nordic leadership that even the King hedged his endorsement in case of disaster. And coverage would be limited by the fact that Nobile could afford to carry the weight of only two journalists. It would be Ugo Lago, of Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia, and the Venetian Tomaselli, special correspondent for Corriere della Sera.
Still, there was a good band and half of Milan to see them off. The ground crew were dressed in folk costumes and aviator caps. At the General's signal they let the ropes slip through their hands and the band broke into Giovinezza. The airship rose and circled the city, then paraded, with its typical ponderous majesty, through the valley of Po. They flew east across the Gulf of Venice, over Trieste and north to Vienna. They threaded the valleys between the mountains of Sudentenland, flying dangerously low beneath storm clouds. The rain beat against the hull above them, competing with the strain of the engines, while head winds coerced the nose of the ship into a drunken duck and lunge. Everyone had something to do except Ugo and Tomaselli - there was no chance to file as report as Biagi monopolized the wireless for navigation. Ugo stood at the back of the cramped control cabin and watched the mysterious bulk of the mountains around them, dangerously abbreviated by the cover of fog. He wished for a fiery crash: a terrible, fantastic death for them all. Infamy. He would settle for nothing less than catastrophe.
From Marshall Klimasewiski, Nobile's Airship, (Yale Review, 1999).
