History (45 page)

Tarza had a mortifi smile. "Where's his moth now?" Useppe inquired meanwhile, insistently, at Moscow's side.

"Where do you think she is? At home, with her husband." ". . . is she happy?"

''I'll sayl Happy as a lark."

Useppe laughed, reassured. "What's she doing? Playing?" he insisted, with ferv

"Playing. Jumping and dancing!" Moscow assured him. Useppe laughed again, as if this reply corresponded fully to an uncertain hope of his. "Why doesn't he play?" he asked, nodding towards the mule, grazing alone on the grass.

"Eh . . . he's eatingl Can't you see he's eating?"

With this, Useppe seemed satisfi But still another question was suspended on his lips, as he considered the mule. Finally, he asked:

"Do mules fl too?"

Tarzan laughed. Moscow shrugged. And Ninnuzzu said to his brother: "Hey, stupid!" Of course, he was unaware of the information given Useppe, on the day of the air raid, by that big lady from Mandela. But seeing Useppe smile an uncertain and somewhat sad little smile, he sur prised him with this communication :

"By the way, you know what that mule's name is? He's called Uncle Peppe! l"

"So that makes three Giuseppes here : me, you, and the mule!" Eppe tondo observ boasting. "Four, really," he corrected himself, giving Decima a sly look. The latter blushed, as if at the revelation of a state secret; and that blush, despite his bearded face, revealed his still-immature mind. In fact, his real name wasn't Decima, but Giuseppe; and he, in particular, had a double reason for concealing himself behind an alias. First, as a partisan; and second, as someone wanted by the Roman police for theft and contraband dealing in cigarettes.

Useppe's eyes widened at the thought of all the Giuseppes there are in the world. At that moment, outside, in the vi of the hut, an explosion was hea They all stared at one another. Ace went to the door to take a peek.

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"Nothing, nothing," he announced towards the interior, "that dope Orchid as usual, hunting hens with hand grenades."

"If he only would catch some!" Moscow remarked. "He aims at the hens, and he never catches so much as an egg."

"When he comes back, we'll give him a kick in the ass."

Ninnarieddu armed himself with binoculars and went outside. Useppe ran after him.

Beyond the little wooded rise which hid the hut from view, a valley opened out, of olives and vineyards, all crisscrossed with glistening little streams. The air carried rural sounds of people and animals; and every now and then planes fl by with a hum like guitar-strings. "They're English," Nino said, observing them with the binoculars. At the very very end of the countryside, the Tyrrhenian could be glimpsed. Useppe had never seen the sea, and that blue-violet strip, for him, was only a diff color of sky.

"Want to take a look through the binoculars?" Nino suggested to him. Useppe leaned towards him on tiptoe. It was the fi time he had had such an experience. Nino, holding the instrument in his own hand, set it against Useppe's eyes.

At fi Useppe saw a fantastic red-brown desert, all interwoven with shadows that spread out, upwards, where there were two marvelous golden globes hanging (it was, in reality, a vine tendril, not very far away). And then, as the binoculars shifted, he saw a pale blue patch of water, which throbbed, changing into other colors, and kindling and extinguishing some bubbles of light: until suddenly, festively, it burst into a fl of clouds.

"What can you see?" Ninnuzzu asked him.

"The sea . . ." Useppe whispered, in an awed voice.

"Yes," Nino confi kneeling beside him, to follow the same line of vision, "you guessed it! That's the sea."

"And . . . and where's the ships?"

"There aren't any now. But one day, Use, you kn
o
w what we'll do, the two of us? We'll get on an ocean liner and sail off to America."

"MERICA!"

"Right. Are you game? Give me a little kiss now?"

From below the hill ·w Orchid appeared. He was a boy with an angular, hollowed face, with black tufts over his eyes; he wore a Fascist Youth fez on his head. To it he had applied red stars, hammers and sickles, varicolored ri and similar ornaments. Beneath a red jacket full of holes, he wore a mechanic's overall in very bad shape, bound at the waist by a belt with grenades hanging from it. On his feet he had Italian army shoes of light calf, almost new.

He was carrying no hens or booty of any other sort. He dashed to-

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wards the hut, and Nino, after shouting
shit
after him, paid him no further attention. Followed by Useppe at every step, he was inspecting the sur rounding country with his binoculars, when he sighted something towards the mountain that immediately aroused his interest. At no more than six or seven hundred yards' distance as the crow flies, three German soldiers were just coming out of a clump of olive trees along a narr trail that, after crossing some viliages, joined the main road on the other side of the mountain. One of the three, stripped to the waist, was carrying on his shoulder a sack containing, as it later proved, a live piglet, surely requisi tioned from some peasant family. The three climbed without haste, as if out for a stroll, and indeed, their gait suggested they were rather drunk.

Even before they had vanished behind the curve in the trail, Nino impati reentered the hut, to announce at once that he was going to
have a
look, hunting for their overdue comrades (Pyotr and Quattro), who, by now, should be on the descending path, also on that part of the moun tain. To Useppe, left on the little patch of grass in the mule's company, he shouted to wait for him and play there, he would be ri back. And he hastily gave the others various instructions in the event of his being delayed.

Tarzan decided to go with him. Taking some short cuts through the brush ( the same path, more or less, probably being followed by Pyotr and Quattro in their descent) the two planned, with their goatlike agility, to move ahead of the Germans in their climb; so they would be ready and waiting at a lookout point, hidden towards the peak; and from there, they would take the Germans by surprise at the elbow of the trail.

While the two, with feverish gaiety, agreed on this plan ( the space of a minute), from the side of the mountains, borne on the stiii air, fi reechoed : at the beginning some isolated shots, followed at once by a series, a voiiey, and then by a few more single reports. A prompt inspection of that zone with the binoculars revealed no one on the trail or anywhere around. The two hurr On leaving the hut with Ace, Tarza had hidden under his trench coat the sub-machine gun that was propped by the door.

Meanwhile, Useppe was obediently prepared to wait for Ninnuzzu, inspecting on his own the limited territory around the hut. First he chatted with the mule, who, however, though repeatedly caiied by the name of Uncle Peppe, gave no answer. Then he found a naked man, with many red tufts on his hea groin, and under his armpits, who was snoring, his arm wide, in a clearing among the rows of vines. And afterwards, exploring on all fours the littl patch of woods on the lower slopes of the hiii, among other curiositi and wonders, he saw a kind of mouse (with velvety fur, a tiny tail, and its forefeet much bigger than its hind ones ) run suddenly towards him with dizzying speed, peering at him with a pair of sleepy little

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eyes, then, still with the same look, run with the same speed, but back· wards, disappearing inside the earth!

These, however, were secondary events compared with the main event, of extraordinary importance, which happened to him at that point. Among the olive trees, behind the hut, there was a diff tree (perhaps a small walnut) with luminous, merry leaves that cast a dappled shade, darker than the olives'. Passing nearby, Useppe heard a pair of birds chattering together and kissing. And immediately, at fi sight, he recog

nized the couple as Peppiniello and Peppiniella.

In reality, these two can't have been canaries, and were more likely goldfi hes : birds more suited to woods than cages, who come to Italy for the winter. But in their shape and their yellow-green color, they were easy to mistake for the two Pietralata canaries (a bit hybrid themselves, to tell the truth ); and Useppe had no doubts on this score. Obviously the big room's two songsters, this morning, as soon as they were cured of their sanguinary illness, had fl here, perhaps following the little truck, from above.

"Ninielli!" Useppe called them. And the two didn't fl off on the contrary, they began a musical dialogue in reply. More than a dialogue, really, theirs was a little song, composed of a single phrase which the tw repeated in turn, alternating it with skips between two branches, one lower and one higher, and marking every reprise with lively movements of the head. It consisted of a dozen syllables in all, sung on two or three notes always the same except for imperceptible caprices or vari a tempo of
Al con brio.
And the words (quite clear to Useppe's ears) went exactly as follows :

It's a fake a fake all a joke!

The two creatures, before fl off again into the air, repeated this little song of theirs at least twenty times, surely with the intenti of teaching it to Useppe, who, in fact, after the third repetition had already learn it by heart, and later kept it always in his personal, private reper tory, so he could sing it or whistle it at will. However, without explaining why, even to himself, he kept this famous song, which accompanied him all his life, as his own, and never communicated it to anyone, then or later. Only towards the end, as we shall see, he taught it to two of his friends: a little boy whose last name was Scim6, and a dog. But it's probable that Scim6, unlike the dog, forgot it immediately.

From inside the hut, Moscow called Useppe, wanting to give him a boiled potato. And in addition, Wild Orchid, climbing up then from a tum around the vi made him a present of a little bunch of wine

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grapes : the skin was fairly hard-to be spat out, in other words-but they were very sweet inside. "Ninielli! Ninielli!" Useppe hastened to explain meanwhile to Eppetondo, tugging him by the sleeve in great excitement; but since Moscow, involved in other matters, paid no attention to him, he gave up trying to inform him of his canaries' salvation. And after that, he never spoke with anyone about his meeting with that fortunate little couple.

In the hut, the remaining three discussed the emergency situation, calculating that Ace wouldn't soon return from his excursion on the moun tain. Perhaps it would be best to send someone to consult Eyeglasses ( that was the Chief's name) because, if the battle with the three Germans took place in a nearby stretch of the terrain (and in the present uncertainty of its outcome), they could fear, they were saying, a subsequent search of the area . . . And it was also a question of getting rid of Useppe promptly, turning him over to some trusted person who would take him back in time to meet the truck on the main road.

Meanwhile, after those shots earlier, nothing more had been heard. Among his heterogeneous equipment, Moscow also possessed some small binoculars. They weren't war loot, however, but a little instrument of his own property, which in the past he had used in the peanut gallery to enjoy theatrical performances, in particular
Tasca,
Petrolini, Jnd Lydia Johnson, his special favorites. Now, in the course of the discussion, Mos cow went out from time to time to examine the mountainside with his opera glasses. And it was a surprise for all when, ahead of every expecta tion, the band of the absent was seen, complete, appearing from behind some undergrowth not a hundred yards from the trail, and advancing up from the dip towards the hut. In front, side by side, came Ace and Quattro, with Tarzan only a short distance behind them, pulling a tom and blood stained sack by a rope; and farther back came Pyotr, alone. Besides their bulging knapsacks, all ca supplementary loads; and at their arrival they emptied everything into the hut, except for the slaughtered booty, the piglet that Tarzan had taken upon himself to quarter outside in the woods. There was kerosene and provender (polenta, cheese, salt) and, in addition, waterproof German boots, two German revolvers with their cartridge-belts, a cigarette lighter, a Contax. Almost feverish, Decima tried on a pair of boots. At this point, from outside, Harry also made himself heard; he had slipped on some corduroy peasant trousers and was repeating : "Mag-nifi Mag-nifi . . ." still half-asleep.
Magg nifi
as he pronounced it, was one of the few Italian words he knew. He was, in fact, an Englishman who had escaped from prison camp in a movie sequence adventure (in his escape he had even stolen back his own gun!)

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and had recently joined up with the band. From the loot, he was off a watch.

By this ti the bodies of the three Germans, covered with boughs and earth, were lying in a ditch by the side of the trail, about two-thirds of the way from the crest. Quattro and Pyotr had performed the job on their own. And when, coming obliquely down through the brush, they had run into Ace and Tarzan, it was all over. However, neither of the two victors seemed to want to talk about it. Pyotr, with his murky, dead-man's eyes, his face sagging and brutalized by an enormous weariness, as soon as he

had taken off his knapsack, went and fl himself down in the grove behind t
h
e hut, where he fell sound asleep, breathing with his mouth open,

like an addict in an opium stupor. And Quattro sat himself down in a corner of the hut, huddled there, complaining of exhaustion and dizziness. There was an unusual, nauseated pallor on his face, and a feverish look in his eyes . He said he didn't feel like eating, or talking either, and he wasn't even sleepy. All he wanted to do was rest like that a while, off to one side, and his sickness would pass.