About the Book
In the stories that follow, the methods of escape over the border are true, stories built up around. The characters are fictitious, but not too much. Most of them are young and there is a reason: in those times, the author was young himself. Let's see what happened in Fiume, in that town just flooded by Slavic people. White dove Nereo didn't try again to escape, unfortunately. The first failure and short stay in jail had scared him. He lived marginalized and marked, without a real job and without a real story. He had burned his magic moment on the crossroads he could not take. One has to give him credit for his hard skin and uncommon adaptability to live for the rest of his life in that country, living like a fish out of water. Behind the Arena Among those who remained there were also loved, wanted, they were not all necessarily hated and persecuted, but for some of them the contact with new people was equally deleterious, as we have seen in Nereo's history. So it was in the history of Gisella and Davor I saw Gisella walking, alone or together with friends, in that Pola where the Italian people's echo, after the bloodletting of the Exodus, was dying, reduced to a background sound in noisy Babel of dialects brought from the Balkans. I knew she had a boyfriend, or rather, her friends had warned me not to continue when I showed some interest in her. Then, all of a sudden, she was out of sight. I inquired. "She got entangled with a Serb, she went away." They said. The term "intrigue" is never used, among our people, to define clear love and marriage stories. There is always something murky. The island of "Bora" Attilio would certainly come back and take away his Gisella. Somehow, he will succeed. Maybe not by sea, as was his intention, and as it happened to Marco, when he met Mande. I saw Mande, Maddalena, in the small cinema of Korcula. She was beautiful, a dangerous beauty, for her, in the middle of others' mediocrity. She couldn't have whatever fate: her fate was reserved for something different, for better, or for worse. And Marco was coming, young heir to the seafaring traditions, who loved the sea and Dalmatia. The good wine island I heard my friends Dalmatians sing, and I sang with them, too, with a glass of Dalmatian wine in hand, "mummy give me a hundred liras, that to America I want to go," or "my love, give me that little handkerchief," and immediately after - "a small ship is in the middle of the channel" - the song of Mande, alternating dialects with ease, without discrimination, because with them you express warm words of good old songs. You bet bilingualism! Beautiful things can be said in any language. The need for escape, almost a moral duty, struck even those who had little to fear because of their nationality or language. There was always the threat of the ideology, of religion, of freedom of movement. Some chose to escape as a protest against the broken promises, the only way they could. See Nicola, for example, who wanted to escape but didn't have enough fuel for the engine of his boat, and then... The compass I ran into an old classmate in the port of Genoa, busy, I don't know on what business, maybe to find a boarding or something. - But you...? - I ran away, yes - he said before leaving me ask the question in full.
