History (23 page)

In these dreams of Iduzza's, personalities of international fame were encountered (Hitler with his little moustache, the Pope with his eye glasses, or the Emperor of Ethiopia with his open umbrella ) in a promis cuous social reel with her own dead : her mother all dignifi in a little violet hat, her father hurrying along with a briefcase, and Alfi setting off

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with an enormous valise. All of them mingled with barely glimpsed figures from the past: a character known as
Fischettu
and another called
M
o
n
u
mentu.
And amid such a throng, with a crazy and absurd frequency, a present tenant of Entrance B returned, God knows why, a man called
Il
Messaggero,
because, in former days, he had worked as a printer for that newspaper. He was an elderly man with Parkinson's disease, who appeared now and then in the courtyard, supported by his wife or by his daughters. He walked in fi and starts, dazed and expressionless as a dummy, and in reality, when Ida did meet him, she compassionately avoided looking at him; while the dream, on the contrary, photographed him in full light, with scientifi precision . . . And pupils, colleagues, and superi from the school, familiar faces or others almost unknown, frozen in her memory, peopled Iduzza's nights in myriads. The only person absent was her Ger man lover: neither then nor afterwards did he ever appear in the dreams of his lover.

More and more often, as the months passed, the air-raid alarm sirens were heard at night, usually followed, a little later, by the roar of planes through the sky. But these were transient planes, heading elsewhere; and the news of other Italian cities' being bombed did not shake the Romans from their trusting passivity. Convinced that Rome was a holy and untouchable city most of them allowed the alarms and the racket to go by without moving from their beds. And so also Ida had long since fallen in with this habit; except that the alarms, in her house, created a certain fuss all the same.

The chief guilt for this belonged to Blitz, who was always excited at the sound of the sirens; and from the living-room-study where he was shut up, he would begin a feverish, steady appeal to the family, and particularly to his master Ninnarieddu, not yet home . . . Only after the all-clear had sounded would he fi calm down, resuming the silent wait for his Ninnarieddu . . . But in the meanwhile, also Giuseppe would have waked up. And having perhaps mistaken the voices of the sirens for cocks' crow ing or some other signal of daybreak, and confusing Blitz's nocturnal waking with a morning waking, he would assume it was already time to get up, persisting in this illusion.

Then Ida, half rising from the sheets, to lure him back to sleep would sing the famous lullaby sung to her in the past by her father and then to Ninnarieddu, with the variation adopted for the occasion :

". . . there we'll buy some little shoes

To dance on the feast of San Giuseppino."

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The San Giuseppino lullaby, however, did not always suffice to send Giuseppe back to sleep. On some evenings, when the last verse was over, he would ask her, insatiably, to sing him the whole song again from the beginning; and after that, perhaps, he might ask for others, prompting her himself: "Ma, obbinge" ( the song of the orange) or else : "Ma,
sip"
( the song of the ship). It was a little Calabrian repertory, very ancient, handed down to her by her father. And in spite of her weariness, she would enjoy this little theater, where she could perform like a real and admired singer, postponing, at the same time, the hour of her nightly dreams. Sitting in the middle of the bed, her hair undone for the night, she would repeat meekly, by request:

". . . Orange of my garden

"And the ship turns, and the ship veers

She was, by nature, so completely tone-deaf that she could make no diff in notes, between one tune and the other. She set them all to the same music, a kind of shrill and childish chant, with strident cadences. And for this reason, she no longer dared sing in Ninnarieddu's presence. Now that he was grown and a fairly good singer in his own right, he wouldn't even listen to her, but would interrupt her immediately, with shushing, sarcasm, or whistling, if she accidentally hinted at some song while doing her housework.

Giuseppe, on the other hand, still ignorant and simple, didn't criti

her for her unstrung throat. And for that matter, any music, to Giuseppe, was a pleasure : even the tormenting notes of the radio in the courtyard, or the clanging of the tram. Any vulgar music, in his little ears, developed in fugues and variati of unknown freshness, precedent to all experience. And even simple isolated sounds (like colors) echoed in him through all their harmonics, as his ecstatic attention perceived even their intimate murmurings . . . And then when his brother Nino ( with his new voice, now acquiring timbre) walked around the house singing his cheap and common songs, Giuseppe, spellbound, panted after his every step : as his namesake Peppe, in the famous tale, ran after the royal band!

But even more than by notes, perhaps, Giuseppe was bewitched by words. Obviously words, for him, had a sure value, as if they were one with objects. He had only casually to hear the word dog, to laugh heartily, as if suddenly the familiar and comica presence of Blitz were there, before him, tail wagging. And at times it even happened that from a word he could already receive a presentiment of the thing denoted, even if it was un known to him, so that he then recognized it at fi meeting. One day,

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seeing the printed drawing of a ship for the first time in his life, he exclaimed, in a tremble of discovery : "Sip! sip!"

Tl1anks to his outings with his brother, the family of things had become enriched for him, developing in new, natural ramifi Articles of furniture and domestic objects became for him houses, trains. Towels, rags, even clouds were
lags
(Hags). The lights of the stars were grass, and the stars themselves were ants around a crumb ( the moon ).

He stretched out his hand towards the print of the
Hotel des lies Borromees
and to the others that decorated the living room, saying, dreamily : "Square . . . people . . ." and he had learned to recognize his brother in the great portrait hanging on the wall, before which he would name Ina in a low voice, with puzzlement and ecs like Dante contem plating the fi carved in the rock.

Now, if asked his name, he would answer gravely : "Useppe." In front of a mirror, seeing himself, he would say : "Useppe." And fi not only his brother but also his mother became used to calling him by this inedited name. Which then remained his for everybody, always. And I, too, from now on will call him Useppe, because this is the name by which I always knew him.

Since the schools had closed, his excursions with Nino had ended, because Nino now slept every morning till past noon, having been out late at night. However, his mother had made up her mind to take him sometimes ( choosing the proper hours ) to a poor, lonely little park, not too far away. She would take him in her anns, trying to hide her face against his little body: frightened, as if along the way there were a risk of encountering the bogey-man. And after reaching the park, while he played on the ground, she remained alert, sitting on the edge of the bench, ready to go off in fright if anyone approached her.

But these outings took place, for the most part, at siesta time, when the heat drove all living creatures indoors; and only once did an intruder, a woman, come surprisingly to sit beside her on the bench. She was a little old thing, so shrunken and wrinkled she seemed by now destined to terres trial immortality, like the papyri in the sands. And she looked like a beggar, but she must have worked somehow at the fish market, to judge by the pungent odor of dried fish which emanated not only from her shop ping-bag, but also from the many skirts she wore, gypsy-style, one over the other; they seemed steeped in it, even underneath, in every fold. She stared at the child, and asked Ida : "Is he yours?"

And while Ida looked at her sullenly, without answering, she re-

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marked, on her own, with a cruel compassion : "Poor little thing. He's too much alive, small as he is. He won't stay long in this world."

Then, addressing him, she asked : "What's your name?" With his trusting little smile, he answered her: "Useppe."

"Ah, Peppino. I had a little baby, too, just like you, little like you, and her name, too, was Pina. She had lively eyes like yours, only hers were black."

And taking a walnut that stank of dried fi from beneath her skirt, she made him a present of it. Then her decrepit shoulders shuddered as she said : "It's chilly, here in the shade." (It was July, with a temperature of ninety-nine degrees.) And like a lizard seeking the sunshine, she went off, trotting, as she had come.

Another time, in that same little park, while Useppe was sitting as usual on the dusty gravel, the color of a boy's jersey made him think he recognized his brother walking along the opposite sidewalk. Then, as if lifted in a fl of exultation, shouting "ino! ino!" he promptly stood up towards that vision and took a few steps by himself! And as Ida rushed over to help him, afraid he would fall, he realized his mistake meanwhile and displayed an amazed, bitter face to her, like a pilgrim in the desert who had followed a mirage: without even noticing, under the impact of his double emotion, that in that moment, with nobody helping him, he had taken the fi steps of his life.

From then on, day after day, almost entirely by himself, he learned to walk. And his explorations of the house took on a new, intoxicating dimen sion. He often banged against the furniture, or fell; but he never cried, even though he not infrequently hurt himself, so that his body, like a hero's, bore the wounds of his feats. When he fell, he would lie silent for a while on the floor; then he would grumble slightly and pull himself up again; and a moment later he would be laughing, happy as a fl sparrow unfolding its wings.

Ninnarieddu gave him a tiny red-and-yellow ball, explaining to him that these were the colors of the
Roma
( the football team ) and that consequently the ball was also named Roma. That was the only toy he possessed, besides the walnut the old woman had given him, which he himself from the very beginning had jealously excluded from the category of foodstuff considering it a distinguished and special walnut. In the house they called it
Lazio,
so that it wouldn't be confused with the ball
Roma;
and Useppe, with
Roma,
and
Lazio,
held genuine tournaments, in which Blitz often joined and, on the luckiest days, also Nino.

To tell the truth, Nino had become more of a vagabond than ever; and during the few hours he spent at home, mostly he slept, so blissfully that not even those constant family tourn could trouble his sleep.

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His nights, according to his own declaration, were ail employed in a kind of patrol duty, undertaken by the Young Fascist musketeers, hand-picked and volunteers, like him, to check the wartime regulations, and especially the blackout. Every time a forbidden glow fi from some window or crack, they would shout in chorus from the street the menacing warning : "Light! Liiight!" And in this connection, he told of his amusement in shouting, instead of
Luce,
"Duce! Duceee!" deliberately, enjoying the rhyme, while standing under the windows ( carefully blacked-out, to tell the truth ) of his Greek teacher, suspected of anti-Fascism.

This was the most innocuous of the various exploits, half-comical, half brigandish, that he boasted of then : which could, however, also be part fi Genuine, certainly, was his delight in roaming around on those nights of darkness, perhaps alone, with no aim or plan : especially during the alarms, when restrictions and prudence drove everyone inside. Then, the deserted city appealed to him, like an arena, where he was the torea dor, excited by the roars of the sirens and the planes, as he fl ted the general rule. As if it were all a game, he amused himself in eluding, with his agility, the surv of the armed patrols, which he sometimes chal lenged, whistling songs at intersections. And if he tired of running around, he would go and sit on a column or on the steps of a monument to smoke a cigarette and hold up the lighted tip towards the sky, deliberately, as the aerial squadrons passed, insulting in a loud voice those invisible pilots with the dirtiest Roman obscenities, and concluding: "And now shoot me! Bomb me! Go on, shoot!"

Actually, he now felt a kind of inner rage, and he began to grow impatient at merely drilling during the day with the squads and platoons of kids. He would really have liked it if one of those night pilots, as in an adventure comic, had responded to the provocation of his lighted cigarette, landing with his parachute there before him, to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Or if the suspended menace of those nights had become fl turning into a raging bull, against which he could prove his daring and his invulnerable unconcern. Leaping around the beast, running beneath his hoofs, and fl over him, and pricking him on all sides; and giving him no rest, darting in front of him, then reappearing at both sides almost simultaneously until he was multiplied in the animal's pupils, crazing him, as if not one Nino were against him, but a hundred. And in this whirl of his madness, pierce his chest; and over his bleeding and agonizing carcass, become single again: I, Ninnarieddu, the Invincible, the Ace of the Cor rida!