'The Italian' A map of life
Advancement of Theseus and Elena
The place and the moment are two important incentives to read
El italiano
, the new novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (recently published by Alfaguara).
The place is the Bay of Gibraltar.
The British territory, La Línea de la Concepción, Algeciras ...
The moment: 1942, the year in which the initiative began to change in World War II.
"This place is a palimpsest of borders and characters, it is full of stories that are a wonderful raw material for a writer," explains Pérez-Reverte at the top of the rock. How to capture the essence of the enclave? The Gibraltar of 2021 looks like one of those boxes full of 20th century memorabilia that
are buried in the hope that someone will find them 500 years from now
. Village pubs, protected housing towers, quaint townhouses, old refinements of the Empire, casinos and Macau-style office buildings ... The ensemble has its charm, though only partly reminiscent of the 1942 Gibraltar portrayed by Pérez Reverte.
In
The Italian
, the Rock is more like the settings in
Empire of the Sun
or
100 Days in Beijing
than in the James Bond movies. Your Gibraltar is
a poor, claustrophobic and besieged territory
. The women and children have been evacuated and their place is taken by the British military who get drunk and represent Shakespeare to kill the nerves
before an imminent attack
. Spain, the country that surrounds them, is, in theory, neutral territory. But in that "in theory" is the key. Across the bay, in Algeciras, a group of elite divers from the Italian Navy prepares a strike against the rock.
"I thought there was more collaboration between Spain and Italy. There was a sympathy, a favoritism, but the forms were maintained. In reality,
Spain was never aware of that operation,
" explains Pérez-Reverte.
There is something that is important to clarify about
The Italian
: many of the events that the novel narrates are historical. Pérez-Reverte has investigated them for decades with interviews with the survivors of this harassment and their children. "I was lucky enough to access the minutes that the 10th Italian Flotilla, the reports, where the divers explained each mission.
They crossed the bay at night, swallowing sea water and breathing soda lime
. They took three hours, in darkness, dodging the explosions ... There is no fiction in the narration of their operations, "explains Pérez-Reverte.
However, the characters that star in its pages are perhaps
the most idealized of all his work
, the most attached to myths and classical gods. "In my books there are few love stories and when there are, they are bitter loves.
Here, love conquers life
. Without love this story does not exist. This novel is a story of love, war and the sea."
Three main characters support
The Italian
. Campello is a Gibraltarian policeman and is the most
Perez
-
Revertian
character in
the book: a contradictory man, phlegmatic,
brutal at times and chivalrous at other times
. Elena is a Spanish bookseller who sets the action in motion and
retains the mystery of the novel:
Elena will become a spy out of a mixture of love, spite, pride and culture. Theseus, finally, is an Italian diver who has the name of a Greek hero, like Elena, and who fights for a cause, perhaps the wrong one, but in moving brotherhood with his companions.
Together, the three build a series of
variations on the figure of the hero
, a central theme in Pérez-Reverte's novels. "
The hero that is being sold now is the hero of the NGO that saves whales. That has nothing to do with the heroes that I have seen,
" explains Pérez-Reverte. As in all his novels, the protagonists of
The Italian are not
only heroes. They kill, they fight for Mussolini, sometimes they are stupid and sometimes smart ...
Elena and Theseus are explained by opposition. "Theseus is not that hero who tells his story and is in a position of power: on the contrary, he is a naked and clean hero. He is masculine, serious, quiet, he does not have much culture ... Actually, he
is a guy who does gondolas
. He represents a Mediterranean masculinity and
even his sweat smells clean
. But in reality he is a man who just does his duty. It is Elena's gaze that makes him a hero. "
"Elena", continues the author, "yes she is a cultured woman who has been trained to recognize classical myths, to see Theseus as a hero".
Let us remember: "Theseus is the Greek hero who entered the labyrinth. Elena wove the thread that would rescue him."
And not just watch: as the action of
The Italian
progresses, Elena kicks in and becomes a hero herself.
Heroes even under the orders of the Axis?
"My readers already know that I do not make heroes who are white or black," replies Pérez-Reverte.
If they are heroes, it is not because of the cause they serve but because of some gesture of loyalty or courage, for a moment in which, faced with their antagonists, brave soldiers recognize each other as their peers and treat each other with nobility.
To explain it with a practical example. British soldiers from Gibraltar appear in
El italiano
crossing the Spanish border in search of prostitutes and drunkenness.
Her grotesque image will make Elena side with the Italians
, despite the fact that her family and her way of life had defied Francoism and her fascist allies.
"This book is, fundamentally, a tribute to the Mediterranean homeland, to the heroes and the gods, to
the classic memory of southern Europe
. When Elena sees a man dressed in black rubber on the beach, she projects 3,000 years of Mediterranean memory and turns him into Ulysses. But it is not only an idealization. In Cyprus I saw the Cypriots flee and I recognized Hector and Andromache ... Whoever reads, sees ", explains the novelist.
There are two other attractions in
El Italiano
: the incredible audacity of the operation that the Italian Navy designed to hit the rock. Very briefly, the attackers' plan consisted of sending from Algeciras (eight kilometers in a straight line from Gibratar) several teams of two divers mounted on manned torpedoes that would allow them to reach British waters and place their bombs on the hulls of the boats. enemy warships and swim away. Obviously, it is easier to tell than to do it.
"I wanted to
restore dignity to those Italians
who have been portrayed a thousand times in movies as cowards, as pathetic characters. Once I went to the cinema with my father and we saw
My Best Enemy
, a film in which the Italian was Alberto Sordi and It was a complete disaster. At the exit, my father stopped me and said: 'Don't be fooled, the story was not like that' "
The second incentive is the intrigue game played by the British, engaged in a desperate struggle to
discover an attack whose method was indecipherable to them
.
In this game, Campello, the Gibraltarian policeman, Teseo, the Italian submariner, and Elena, the Spanish bookseller, will have to cross paths on the penultimate pages of the book, as if they were in a scene from a classic movie that should not be starred by anyone else. Less than Vittorio Gassman and Ingrid Bergman.
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