Non torna mai nessuno da quaggiù
Nobody Ever Comes Back from Down Here. An epistolary novel of a nameless war
Whoever goes to war always dies, nobody ever comes back from down here: the name may come back, the surname, the uniform, the eyes, the nose, the chin and a body less soft than before, but the war has got inside.
The book
A clerk who used to keep the loading registers of ships in transit has become a soldier in a war that has no name, no place and no legible date: the first letter is damaged exactly where the date was written. He writes to his wife, and the letter says what a letter can say. But in parentheses, on the same sheet, he writes down what he will never send her: that he shot an unarmed man to take his boots and his cigarettes, that he discovered he liked it, that the man she remembers already died on the station platform the day he left. The two scripts run side by side through the whole book, and they are two different truths.
The soldier volunteers, or "nolunteers", for a suicide mission: five numbered men, One, Two, Three, Four and Five, must cross woods and gorges to blow up a bridge. One is the sergeant who wanted to be a priest as a boy and who went home as a messenger of death without letting his father recognise him; Two the twenty-year-old student, agile as an ibex; Three the thief who hopes glory will cancel his court-martial; Five the small businessman who went bankrupt, with a sunken ship on his conscience. Between marches the narrator plays chess with pebbles and beer caps, listens to Chet Baker on a cheap radio, and keeps writing in his notebook during his turns on watch.
Captured, disarmed, stripped even of his pencil, he waits for the sentence crouched over a flat stone, until the enemy officer, a man exactly like him, instead of having him shot offers him his own civilian clothes, an out-of-tune piano in a storeroom and a trumpet. The bridge blows up all the same, behind him, as he walks home dressed as a civilian with all the letters in his pocket, so that his wife can decide whether he is still the man she loves.
It is a book about war written without a single battle told in full: war is what gets inside, and the parentheses are the place where the author, in the line of Remarque and Céline, lets it speak without rhetoric. The book is published in Italian only; the quotations below are English renderings, with page numbers from the 2021 Italian edition.
Quotations
Translated from the Italian. Page numbers refer to the 2021 edition.
If soldiers could turn into flies and cross the distance between the two camps, nobody would ever pick up a rifle again against someone who listens to the same music.
I have understood why we won: because there were more of us, our prayers made more noise. And because they killed the chaplain on his way to the latrine.
For you I began to die there on the platform; for me you began to die there on that train. And the rest was only one of the ways life has of passing.
Hope is like a drug that keeps you from feeling pain, but you get used to every drug. To despair is to dis-hope; so hope was born first, and then despair.
The writer's excellence: to kidnap you and carry you into his world and make you live in there, and make you despair, rejoice, swell with pride; die, no. That can only be done here.
There are volunteers, there will also be nolunteers, only the word hasn't been discovered yet, and if you say it they take you for a crank.
Words matter: if you use the wrong ones too often they can change your head, your intentions and your acts.
History books are written by the whore's whores.
If you knew how ugly war is, and do you know why it is ugly… because you can come to like it.
Letters from a dead man, because I am dead, and I have known I was dead since I shot the defenceless enemy.
A man without memory will make the same mistakes he made before memory formed.
He reads what I read; I am him, he is me. By chance he is standing and I am the prisoner.
Anyone is everyone, if circumstances change.
It isn't a piano, it's a whole life, because something, just something, has not gone slack and the note has stayed silver. There are few of them, like joys… but by God it was beautiful.
Destruction does not need calculations as careful as construction.
I am bringing my wife all the letters… a line of ink that describes me, a drawing with many shadows and a few right lights. You will decide whether I am still the man you love.
Structure
- Lettera uno — Letter one
- E si va — And off we go
- La sosta — The halt
- In tasca — In my pocket
- Sosta breve — Short halt
- La morte — Death
- Frammento — Fragment
Where to read it. In Italian on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) · Goodreads · Apple Books. Italian page: Non torna mai nessuno da quaggiù.
How to cite
The author
Lucio Freni is an independent Italian writer based in Rome. His books span noir, dystopian satire, philosophical grotesque and epistolary fiction, and include Benzina, Cronache dal Sistema, Il libro del Nulla, Non torna mai nessuno da quaggiù and È tutta colpa di Dio. All titles are published in Italian. Author record on Wikidata.