Arturo Pérez-Reverte and a WWII novel: “Only fools believe that those on their side are all good”

Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte defined his new book Italian as a story of “sea, love and war”, as he explained to the press during a conference next to the lighthouse from which we can see the Strait of Gibraltar, scene of the novel, published at Alfaguara, who arrives in Argentina in October.

The protagonist, by name Theseus Lombardo, is an Italian diver who Elena Arbues, a twenty-seven-year-old bookseller finds herself on a faded beach between sand and water. By deciding to help him, you will embark on a life-changing adventure through a spy plot in the land of borders.

The look of Helen It is she who grows like a hero for Teseo, a cultivated and lucid vision contextualized in the books he has read. Little by little, the bookseller will become the real heroine of this story based on real events. Theseus Lombardo, the Italian in his novel, is not a hero, but just a soldier doing his duty.

The protagonist belongs to the group of divers who dove into the water hidden in the darkness of the night and bypassed the port’s safety nets, he explained. Perez Reverte to the Spanish press.

These actions, “of a very Latin audacity”, said the writer, signified the triumph of the individual against the military apparatus of the English: “They were able to do what the English were unable to imagine.

Italian It is based on real facts: the attacks of Italian divers, during World War II, against British ships anchored in Gibraltar which sank twelve ships in different attacks for a year and a half. “The English didn’t know where they came from, they thought they were submarines. The Italians attacked in pairs, they left Algeciras by boat, approaching they threw themselves into the water and mounted torpedoes, which were very difficult to control, like wild horses, which is why they were called pigs (‘pigs’). They arrived, underwater, invisible, at the hulls of enemy ships, got rid of the explosive warhead, attached it to the ship, programmed it to explode after three hours and fled ” , described the author.

Among these episodes, the one featuring the group Big bear, composed of combat divers who, with sophisticated underwater equipment, submerged in the sea and infiltrated the port of Gibraltar to sink the British warships which docked there on their voyages. And they sank or damaged fourteen Allied ships between 1942 and 1943.

The protagonist of Italian, like all the novels of Pérez-Reverte, is far from “a compact and bright hero”, something he called “extremely boring, because life is full of nuances and black and white is a lie”, insisted the writer, who pointed out that all heroes are ambiguous and that at this point in his writing career, everyone knows their heroes are “on any side”.

The author of the saga of Captain Alatriste he challenged that “stupid habit of believing that those on my side are all good and those on the other are all bad.” Only fools, idiots, undocumented migrants or bad guys play with this type of manipulation ”.

The story entered the author’s mind when he was only eleven years old and his father took him to the cinema in Cartagena to see a film by Vittorio de Sica set in WWII, featuring Alberto Sordi, in which he recalled that “the Italian soldiers were left as disorganized, thugs, while the English were serious, efficient, even condescending towards their enemies”.

“When I left the cinema, my father said to me: ‘ArturoDon’t believe it, the Italians did some very brave things, and he told me about the adventure of manned torpedo attacks in Gibraltar. It is the story of how individuals defeated the entire military machine of the Empire. These Italians who were made fun of in the movies were actually humble Latinos who could do daring things, ”said the writer.

Source: Telam.

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