A young Italian aviator in the cobalt blue skies of Abyssinia, the negus Haile Selassie, the war... The novel
A Magical Flight
, by Giovanna Giordano (Perisfera, 2022), opens with the pilot Giulio Giamo, called Mosquito ―because he lands everywhere and is silent―, arriving in Africa in his airplane, a Caproni Ca 133, a light bomber and transport device, baptized
New Life
.
Giamo lands in Eritrea in June 1935, on a secret mission shortly before the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.
And he will experience that conflict and the next, World War II, when in 1940 the Italians attack - from the so-called Italian East Africa - British Somaliland, Sudan and Kenya and the British counter-attack (with the Gideon Force) until they defeat the invaders and put the deposed Selassie back on the throne in 1941.
More information
They Were Brave Too: Bold Italians of World War II
But all that, although it constitutes its historical framework, is not what is important in this surprising and moving novel with echoes of Saint-Exupéry and his immortal
The Little Prince.
.
And it is that the aviator Giulio, "postman from the sky", is not only a poet (cut on the pattern of the sentimental French pilot, not his compatriot D'Annunzio), but he finds an Africa full of wonders, beauty and fantasy (and baobabs and snakes).
And with characters as extravagant and unforgettable as the crazy Meleku, jester of the negus who dreams of flying;
the black mermaid Tigist, the lovers Amalik and Tsahai (she wears blue dragonflies as earrings) or the philosopher captain Beba Mondio (demoted for being unmartial) and her thoughtful talkative parrot Papamundo (“running away is a shame, but it saves lives”).
On the bad side, Captain Huracán, who sports a tattooed skull and another painted on his plane and sings
Faccetta nera
at the top of his lungs .
“Saint Exupéry?
Certainly we cannot forget his books, nor the adventures of the Baron of Münchhausen, nor the story of Lucian of Samosata about the trip to the Moon, nor, of course, Icarus”, Giordano responds with pleasant irony on the windy terrace of a Barcelona hotel. , 60-year-old writer, born in Milan, although she is from a Sicilian family and lives in Messina.
"Everything that flies suggests the importance of lightness," continues the author, as disconcerting, unclassifiable and bewitching as her novel.
“A moment ago, for example, I saw how all the paper napkins on the table flew.
We must try to maintain lightness like the aviator in
The
Little Prince , and like everything that wants to be crushed by the gravity of the world, not only physically but morally and spiritually."
There is also something of magical realism in the book, and of Italo Calvino, of that catalog of wonders that is
The Invisible Cities
.
“And directly from Marco Polo, and from Giovanna Giordano, who sees wonder even in paper napkins that fly away”, laughs the novelist.
“At the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, where I teach Aesthetics, they call me Professor
Maraviglia
”.
The writer, who wears a hat with colored stones and a long Ethiopian necklace, clarifies that she does not want to give the impression of a childish woman.
“I know pain and as I know it I transfigure it”.
A Caproni 133 plane like the one in the novel 'A Magical Flight'.
Why did you decide to set your novel in the Abyssinian War?
“Dostoevsky says that even in prison, life can seem beautiful;
in war too.
Poetry and beauty can be found in the Trojan War, and also in the Abyssinian War.
Where there is drama, there is the possibility of growing wonder, enthusiasm and the will to live.
All wars, especially colonial wars, are abominable, but in reality war is just a frame in my book, the protagonists are the landscape, animals and love.
My aviator does not carry bombs but letters.”
Saint-Exupéry was a war pilot, but he started as an airmail, precisely.
“All the greats are in our literary DNA,” says Giordano, who describes his novel as a “classic book, even if it seems eccentric and isolated;
its protagonist, innocent,
The author has thoroughly documented herself to write
A Magical Flight,
she has met colonial war veterans, aviators, soldiers and the Duke of Aosta's radio operator, as well as Ethiopian survivors;
and she has traveled, two months, alone, by camel and canoe, sleeping in precarious places and out of hand, with fleas and even with a frog (“
che è rimasta rana
”, he points out) to the African settings of the novel.
He notes that on the trip, during which he visited Rimbaud's house in Harar and was given a bottle of water by the Keeper of the Lost Ark in Axum, he has risked his life "three times".
One is when with an Ethiopian driver they got into an old minefield on the Somali border.
The other two are not revealed: "Let's keep a bit of a mystery."
As part of her African adventure, the novelist has taken to the skies of the area in small planes to contemplate the perspective of her pilot, Giulio de Ella.
He explains that one of his sources has been his own grandfather, Gaetano Giordano, who was
vice federal
, deputy secretary general in Gondar, "African Camelot", and later was a prisoner of the British in Kenya.
There he coincided with the Duke of Aosta, who before dying in captivity, in addition to confirming that his white horse had "committed suicide" due to the pain of separating from him, told him to look for an old love of his in Messina.
“My grandfather found her years later and went to visit her with my father, who was a child.
He received them stretched out on cushions smoking opium.
Giving him the message, greetings and a kiss from Amadeo of Savoy, he muttered dismissively, as if making an effort to remember, 'ah, yes, the Duke of Aosta', while, contradicting the pose, a large tear rolled down his cheek. expensive.
In every family there is an ancestor who triggers the possibility of a story”.
Interestingly, the novelist, who has even studied the Caproni engines,
Il Falco Tricolore,
the legendary Italian fighter pilot from the African skies who, based in Eritrea, fought the English at the controls of his Fiat CR 42 biplane fighter. Visintini, whom Hugo Pratt honored in
A Faraway Sky
, crashed into Mount Bizen near Nefasit, on February 11, 1941 at the age of 27 and with 17 victories.
Italian troops in Abyssinia in 1936.
How are Italians seen and how is the war remembered in the places you have visited?
“I thought they would mistrust and remember with hatred, but it has been surprising to see that some women cried when they heard me speak because it reminded them of their old Italian loves.
And there are families of the former Ascaris, the native soldiers of the Italian army, who still live on the pensions that the Government of Italy maintains for them.”
And in Italy? Has his book opened wounds?
“Some fascist says I am a communist because I speak of the Graziani massacres, and some communist says the opposite for speaking well of an Italian aviator.
As Pirandello says:
Cosí è (I saw it stop),
so it is if you think so.
The historical distance gives justice and balance to my book.
Let us remember that we now shake hands with the Germans.
The actions of the parents should not fall on the children.
Commenting that in Barcelona it is not that they have good memories of the Italian aviators, who mercilessly bombed the city, Giordano exclaims "what sons of bitches pilots!", and emphasizes again that his is a postman "and a
fly white”;
come on, a green dog from the Regia Aeronautica – the Italian air force – who considers that “to love is to be fools together” and that “in Africa everything seems sublime, although nobody knows why”.
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