Existentialist Nightmare

THE SHORT CUT (302 pp.)--Ennio Flaiano--Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3).

Rotting corpses, noisome reminders of Mussolini's sordid victory, littered the Ethiopian bush. It was treacherous country at best, full of crocodiles and hostile tribesmen--certainly no place for an Ital ian soldier to go wandering. But the lieu tenant had a bad tooth. He had to get to an army dentist, and a short cut through the bush would cut his traveling time in half.

A couple of hours later the lieutenant realized that he was lost. Trying to retrace his steps, he came to a pool where a pretty native girl sat bathing herself--and found her as easy to conquer as her country.

During the night, when the lieutenant got up from their bed among the boulders to fire at what he took to be a marauding animal, he accidentally wounded the girl.

Sure that he could find no doctor in time to save her life, he shot her through the head, buried her under some stones, and in the morning went on his way. From that moment the world became one long night marish finger, trained accusingly on him.

Conscience Makes Cowards. Like American Paul (The Sheltering Sky) Bowles and French Albert (The Plague) Camus, Italian Ennio Flaiano has found Africa a fertile field in which to cultivate an existentialist viewpoint. The unnamed lieutenant who narrates The Short Cut feels that he was the victim of events; even his murder of the Ethiopian girl seemed a deed to which he was driven by forces beyond his control. But his conscience worked against him, carried him into a feverish world where he became convinced that his victim had given him leprosy. When his careful inquiries about the disease aroused a doctor's suspicions, he took off into the bush again, fearing the army would clap him into an isolation ward.

As things turned out, it was not leprosy at all, even though the sores looked real and the girl had worn a leper's turban. "Disgusting poultices" applied by the dead girl's father soon "cured" the lieutenant; but Author Flaiano applies no explanatory poultices whatever to readers tricked for 160 pages into shivering with the lieutenant over a phony case of leprosy.

All Innocent. The Short Cut retells an old existentialist moral tale. In it, every man is a hell unto himself, enslaved by uncontrollable events, victimized by his own exaggerated moral interpretations of them. After weeks of living in the bush, The Short Cut's hero drags himself back to camp only to. find that nobody has heard about his disease, nobody has reported the shooting of the native girl, and everybody, including himself, is booked for home.

The moral: "We are all innocent." Tacked on to an arbitrary, symbol-burdened plot, Author Flaiano's cheerful conclusion will probably not convince even determined existentialists.

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