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Italy
11 November 1945

This is the second letter I’ve written you today. The first was this morning from Nice and now I’m writing you again, this time from Italy. A charming little village on the Italian Riviera called Bordighera. I arrived this evening too late to pick up a truck so I took a room in a hotel and tomorrow I will be back on the road. If everything goes well, I will rejoin my company (what a joyous prospect!) tomorrow. The English let me pass without difficulty and waiting for a lift (eng) I got into conversation with the soldier on guard. He asked me why I am so nervous (CHECK DICT) I told him that I have decided (in common with him) on the field to jump the barrier and take the first train for Grenoble. But all my money was already changed into Italian money and there was not there, under my hand, anyone who could change it back. And up came an English ambulance, which gave me a lift to here. So here I am in Italy. There’s already a stupid barrier, the frontier, between us. It’s not the sea, but it’s still a frontier…..Love, eternity,heart and body, lots of body

Oh I know that you love me darling. And that you will love me forever. For we complete each other. For there is a law of nature, a harmony: a woman receives milk in her breasts when the baby is born, there are some weak little animals that in order to defend themselves receive a skin in harmony with the surrounding nature that makes them almost invisible to rapacious eyes. I have received you in order to live. I breathe through you, I see through you. Without you, I die. With you there is eternity, without you, emptiness.. I love you darling. I love you because you are you……

You, my wife, my loved one, my sister – the mother.

We must make a child, darling. Listen to me, I swear we must make a child. I can’t see a child pass in the street without my heart breaking. And if I want a child so much it’s because I want you to be pregnant. I want you to be a mother because of me.  I want to love you as a child’s mother. I want it from the depths of my being.

PS. 12 Nov. I am sending you this letter from the NAAFI at Milan.

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