History (29 page)

One of those morn Ida was coming back from shopping, with two heavy bags over her arm, holding Useppe by the hand. The weather was calm and very hot. Following a habit she had got into that summer for her wanderings around the quarter, Ida had gone out, like a working-class woman, in her housedress of printed cretonne, without a hat, her legs bare to save her stockings, and canvas shoes with high cork soles on her feet. Useppe wore only a faded little checked shirt, some makeshift shorts of blue cotton, and a pair of sandals too large for him (because purchased with the idea of his growing into them ), which slapped against the pave ment as he walked. In his hand, he carried the famous ball
Roma
( the walnut
Lazio
during that spring had been irretrievably lost).

They were coming out of a tree-lined avenue not far from the Freight Station, turning into Via dei Volsci, when, unannounced by any alarm, they heard advancing through the sky an orchestrated clamor of metallic humming. Useppe raised his eyes, and said : "Airpanes." And at that mo ment the air whistled, while in an enormous thunder, all the walls were already crashing down behind their backs and the ground was leaping around them, crumbled in a hail of fragments.

"Useppe! Useppeee!" Ida screamed, fl into a black and dusty cy clone which blocked her vision : "Ma, I'm here," he answered, at the level of her arm, in his little voice, as if reassuring her. She picked him up, and in an instant there fl through her brain the instructions of the NAPU ( National Antiaircraft Protection Union ) and of the building warden : when bombs fell, it was best to lie down on the ground. But instead her body started running, with no direction. She had dropped one of her shopping bags, while the other, forgotten, still hung from her arm, beneath Useppe's trusting little behind. Meanwhile, the sound of the sirens had begun. In her dash, she felt she was sliding downwards, as if she were on skates, along an uneven terrain that seemed plowed, and was smoking. Towards the bottom, she fell in a sitting position, Useppe clutched in her arms. In her fall, the shopping bag had emptied its load of vegetables,

144 HISTORY
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among which, scattered at her feet, there shone the colors of the peppers green, orange, and vivid red.

With one hand, she clutched at a crushed root, still covered with shattered earth, which protru near her. And settling herself better, huddled over Useppe, she started feeling him, his whole body, to make sure he was unharmed. Then she placed the empty shopping bag over his head as a helmet of protection.

They were at the bottom of a kind of narrow trench, protected from above, as if by a roof, by the thick trunk of a fallen tree. Nearby, over them, they could hear its broad foliage stirring in a great wind. All around, there was a whistling, ruinous din, in which, among crashes, lively little bursts, and strange tinklings, there were weak, human voices at an absurd distance, and the whinnying of horses. Useppe, crouching against her, looked into Ida's face from beneath the shopping bag-not frightened, but rather curious and pensive. "It's nothing," she said to him, "don't be afraid. It's nothing." He had lost his sandals, but he still clutched his ball tightly in his fi At the louder jolts, she could feel him tremble ever so slightly.

"Nuffi . . ." he said then, half-persuaded, half-interrogatory.

His bare feet were swaying calmly next to Ida, one on either side of her. For all the time the two of them waited in that refuge, he and Ida stared into each other's eyes, intently. She couldn't have said the duration of that time. Her wristwatch was broken; and there are circumstances in which, for the mind, calculating time is impossible.

At the all-clear, when she looked out, they were inside an immense dusty cloud which hid the sun and made them cough with its tarry taste; through this cloud, they could see fl and black smoke from the direc tion of the Freight Station. On the other part of the avenue, the side streets were mountains of rubble; and Ida, advancing with diffi Useppe in her arms, sought an exit towards the square, among the massa cred and blackened trees. The fi recognizable object they came upon was a dead horse, at their feet, its head adorned with a black plume, amid wreaths of crushed fl And at that point, a soft, warm liquid wet Ida's arm. Only then, the dejected Useppe s tarted crying : because for some time now he had stopped being a little baby that wet himself.

In the space around the horse, more wreaths could be glimpsed, more fl plaster wings, heads and limbs of mutilated statues. In front of the funeral establishments, broken and emptied, all around there, the terrain was covered with glass. From the nearby cemetery came a damp smell, sugary and stagnant; and beyond the breached walls, you could glimpse black, twisted cypresses. Meanwhile, some other people had reappeared,

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growing into a crowd that wandered around as if on another planet. Some were stained with blood. Screams could be heard, and names, or else: "there's a fi over here, too!" or "where's the ambulance?!" However, these sounds also reechoed hoarse and outlandish, as in a yard of deaf mutes. Useppe's little voice repeated to Ida an incomprehensible question, in which she seemed to recognize the word
home: "Ma,
when do we go home?'' The shopping bag fell down over his eyes, and he was dominated by a fi impatience. He seemed fi with a mixed worry he wouldn't utter, not even to himself: "ma? . . . home? . . ." his little voice con tinued stubbornly. But it was diffi to recognize the familiar streets. Finally, beyond a half-destroyed apartment house, from which the up rooted beams and shutters were dangling, amid the usual dust-cloud of ruin, Ida recognized, intact, the building with the tavern, where they went to take shelter on the air-raid nights. Here Useppe started wriggling with such freenzy that he managed to free himself from her arms and get down to the ground. And running on his little bare feet towards a thicker dust cloud, he began to shout:

"Biii! Biiii! Biiiii!"

Their building was destroyed. Only a slice of it remained, open onto the void. Raising your eyes to the place of their apartment, you could glimpse, through the cloud of smoke, a piece of landing, beneath two water tanks which had remained in place. Below, some howling or mute forms roamed among the cement slabs, the smashed furniture, the piles of wreck age and refuse. No moan rose; beneath, they must all be dead. But some of those forms, driven by an idiot mechanism, were rummaging or scratching with their fi at those piles, searching for someone or something to save. And in the midst of all this, Useppe's little voice continued calling:

"Biii! Biiii! Biiiii!"

Blitz was lost, along with the double bed and the cot and the daybed and the chest, and Ninnuzzu's tattered books, and his enlarged picture, and the kitchen pots, and the clothing bag with the altered overcoats and the winter underw and the ten packets of powdered milk and the twelve pounds of pasta, and all that was left from the last pay envelope, kept in a drawer of the kitchen-ca

"Come away! Come away!" Ida said, trying to lift Useppe into her arms. But he resisted and struggled, developing an incredible violence, and he repeated his cry : "Biii!" with a more and more peremptory demand. Perhaps he believed that, urged in this way, Blitz would necessarily have to pop out, tail wagging, from behind some corner, any moment.

And dragged off bodily, Useppe wouldn't stop repeating that single comical syllable, his voice convulsed in sobs. "Come away, come away," Ida repeated. But the truth was she didn't know where to go now. The

146 H I S T O R Y . . . . . . 1943

only asylum that presented itself to her was the tavern, where she found some people already gathered, so many that there was no place to sit. An elderly woman, however, seeing her come in with the child in her arms, and recognizing them, from their appearance, as
bombed out,
invited her neighbors to push together, and made room for Ida next to herself on a bench.

Ida was gasping, tattered, her legs scratched, and all soiled right up to her face with a greasy soot, in which you could make out the minuscule fi left by Useppe, as he clung to her. As soon as the woman saw Ida more or less settled on the bench, she asked her solicitously: "Are you from around here?" And at Ida's silent nod, she informed her : ''I'm not; I come from Mandela." She was just passing through Rome, as she did every Monday, to sell her produce : ''I'm a countrywoman," she explained fur ther. Here at the tavern she was to wait for her grandson, who, as usual on Mondays, had come along to help her, but at the moment of the air raid he was off in the city, God knows where. A rumor had it that in this raid ten thousand planes had been used, and the entire city of Rome was destroyed, even the Vatican, even the Royal Palace, even the markets of Piazza Vittorio and Campo dei Fiori. All gone up in fl

"I wonder where my grandson is now? I wonder if the train for Mandela is still running?"

She was a woman of about seventy, but still healthy, tall, and big, with rosy complexion and two black rings in her ears. In her lap she held an empty basket with an unrolled headcloth inside; and she seemed prepared to wait for her grandson, seated there with her basket, perhaps for another three hundred years, like the Brahman in the Hindu legend.

Seeing the desperation of Useppe, who was still ca11 his
Bi
in a voice more and more faint and weak, she tried to amuse him, by swaying in front of him a tiny mother-of-pearl cross she wore around her neck, on a little string:

"Bi bi bi baby! What are you saying? Eh? What do you want?"

In a low voice Ida stammered the explanation that Blitz was the name of the dog, buried under the rubble of their building.

"Ah me, humans and ·animals, we all have to die," the other woman remarked, moving her head only slightly in placid resignation. Then, ad dressing Useppe, fi with matri chal gravity and without coyness, she consoled him with the following speech :

"Don't cry, kid, your dog's sprouted wings. He's turned into a dove and he's flown up into the sky."

In saying this, she raised her palms and imitated the fl ter of wings. Useppe, who believed everything, suspended his weeping, to follow wi interest the little movement of those hands, which settled again on the

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basket and stayed there, in repose, their hundred wrinkles blackened by earth.

"Wings? Why?"

"Because he's turned into a white dove."

"Wite dove," Useppe agreed, carefully examining the woman with his tearful eyes, which were already beginning to smile. "And now what's he do?"

"He Hies, with lots and lots of other doves." "How many?"

"Lots and lots!" "How many?"

"Three hundred thousand." "Thee huned ousand are lots?" "Eh! More than a ton!!"

"That's lots and lots! What they do?" "They fl around and have fun. Yes."

"And wallows? Are wallows there too? And osses?" "They're up there, too."

"Even osses?" "Even horses." "They fl too?"

"Oh my yes, indeed they fl

Useppe gave her a faint smile. He was covered with blackish dust and sweat, he looked like a chimneysweep. The black locks of his hair were so sti they stood straight up on his head. The woman, seeing his little feet were bleeding from a few scratches, authoritatively called to a soldier who had come in looking for water, and ordered him to treat them. And Useppe submitted to the rapid medication without even paying any atten tion to it, he was so enthralled by Blitz's happy career.

When the soldier had fi Useppe absently waved goodbye to him. His two little fi were empty: the ball Roma was also lost. A little later, in his fi clothing and wet shorts, Useppe was sleeping. The old woman from Mandela, after that moment, remained silent.

In the cellar a throng of people were coming and going; the place stank with the crowd and with the gusts from outside. But, unlike the air raid nights, there was no confusion, no shoving, no raised voices. Most of those present looked one another in the face, dazed, not saying a word. Many were wearing tattered or scorched clothes; some were bleeding. Somewhere outside, in an endless and incoherent murmuring, every now and then a death-rattle seemed perceptible, or else a fi scream suddenly rose, as if from a blazing forest. Ambulances began to circulate, fire en-

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gines, soldiers armed with picks and shovels. Someone had also seen a truck arrive, loaded with coffi

Among the people inside, Ida knew hardly anyone. Through her thoughts, which spun in an inconclusive raving, from time to time there passed the faces of some of her neighbors in her building who, on air-raid nights, had run to take shelter down here with her. On those nights, dazed with sleeping pills, she had hardly glimpsed them; but today her brain presented them to her, though they were absent, with the precision of a photograph.
Messaggero,
with his trembling limbs and his stunned face, carri by his daughters like a puppet. Giustina, the farsighted concierge, who used to hold her needle way out to thread it. The clerk on the second fl who always said
Greetings
and
Prosit,
and had planted a
victory garden
in the courtyard. The plumber, who resembled the actor Buster Keaton and suffered from arthritis, and his daughter, who recently had s tarted wearing a tram-conductor's uniform. A mechanic's apprentice, fri of Ninnuzzu's, who wore an undershirt with
Pirelli Tires
printed on it. Proietti, the house-painter, who though unemployed, always kept on his head a working cap made of folded newspaper
.
.
_
In the present uncertainty of their fate, these faces appeared to her suspended over a no man's-land, from which in a moment they might reappear in fl and blood, scrounging around the San Lorenzo quarter, available as usual and cheap; or from whence they might, instead, have set forth towards an unattainable distance, like the stars that had burn out millennia ago, now irretri at any pri beyond even a tr sunk in the Indian Ocean.