History (47 page)

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sleep peacefully tonight in heaven!" And the grandmother, his wife, hear ing him, exclaimed in a shrill voice: "Gest't! Gest'!

The least agitated was Sora Mercedes, who remained seated on her little stool till the last moment, her knees covered by the blanket ( from beneath which the provisions had been removed ), merely repeating, in a chanting tone: "Aw, shut up a while, damn you all!" while her husband, Giuseppe Primo, seated beside her with a kind of wool bonnet on his head, relieved his emotion by hawking and spitting on the fl

It was decided that a part of the company, including Carulina and her daughters, would reach the new headquarters by tram. Before the farewell, Carulina left Useppe, as a souvenir, the record with the comic scenes,
which,
unfortunately, without the gramophone (already packed away with the load of luggage) could no longer play; but for that matter, from excessive wear, for some time it had been able to emit only rasping sounds and coughs. She also made him a present (winking at him secretly, that he was to tell no one ) of a little sack forgotten by her kin, containing about two pounds of dried beans.

At the departure, an uncertain sun was peeping out in the sky. The last of all was Carulina, immediately preceded by her Roman sister-in-law, who carried Celestina in her arms and, on her head, a crammed suitcase that wouldn't close; while Carulina carried Rusinella in her arms and the bundle of damp diapers on her head. If it hadn't been for the piercing cries that came from them, it would have been hard to tell which of the two bundles carried by each of the departing women contained babies. In fact, Carulina, as a last resort, had wrapped the little girls in every sort of rag available-Carlo Vivaldi's former curtain, leftovers from the Charity Ladies, even wastepaper-because of her shamed fear that, on the Castelli tram, all the passengers would be able to tell, from the odor, that her daughters were soiled from diarrhea.

Urged by the others who went ahead of her and turned to call her sharply, she hastened, with effort, in the mire, still in her summer shoes, reduced to clogs. The hand-me-down stockings she wore, too big for her feet, bagged at her ankles, and because of the weight that made her tilt to one side, her walk was more crooked than usual. As an overcoat, she wore a kind of uneven three-quarter-length garment made from a jacket of her brother Domenico; and under the bundle of diapers you could see the precise parting of her hair, divided into two even bands to the nape, with the braids at either side pressed low by her burden.

Before passing the curve of the path, she turned to wave to Useppe, with a smile on her broad, turned-up mouth. Useppe was standing motion less, this side of the ditch, watching her leave, and he answered her wi

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his special wave that he made on such occasions, opening and closing his fi very slowly and sadly. He was grave, with only a little, hesitant smile. On his head he wore a cyclist's cap she herself had found for him, with his usual Chaplinesque pants, his two-tone boots, and the rain cape down to his feet, which opened as he waved, displaying its red lining.

A few months later, a terrible air raid on the Castelli destroyed a great part of the city of Albano, and at the news Ida thought of The Thousand, wondering if by chance the tribe had all been wiped out. Instead, they were unharmed. In the following summer, Nino, in Naples for certain dealings of his, happened to run into Salvatore, who on that occasion took him home for a visit. They lived in the remains of a handsome building half-destroyed by the air raids, in a room on the second fl which-since the stairway had collapsed-was now reached through the window by a kind of drawbridge made of planks. And Carulina was also there, having become, through the natural logic of destiny, a prostitute with the Allies. Though a bit taller, she was even thinner than at Pietralata, so that in her reduced face, her eyes, smeared with mascara, seemed doubly broadened. And the gait of her scrawny legs, on high heels, was more clumsy than ever. Still, her way of looking and acting, her speech, hadn't changed at all.

There was no sign of the twins, and Ninnuzzu didn't bother to ask for news of them. In the brief course of his visit, an Afro-American soldier arrived, Carulina's lover; he was happily preparing to return to America the next day; and as a present, at Carulina's own choice, he brought her one of those all too well-known Sorrento music boxes, that are wound up and play, off pitch, a little song. On the box's inlaid top there was a little celluloid doll, dressed in a bodice and tutu of lilac rayon. Thanks to a stick inserted in her body, every time the music box was wound up, she made a turn around the lid. Carulina was spellbound by that ballet to the sound of music; and as soon as the device ran down, she would immediately rewind it, with an owner's eager self-importance. There, along with the other grandmother and the two grandfathers, their husbands, was also Granny Dinda, who, to justify Carulina's overexcitement to the visitors, explained that this was the fi doll she had ever owned in her life. Meanwhile, the same Granny Dinda sang the words of the box's old song, accompanying them with cafe-chantant movements. As refreshment, the guests were off whisky and potato chips.

But Ninnuzzu never remembered, afterwards, to report this meeting to Ida, who certain!�'. in view of the vastness of Naples and its countless throngs, never thought to ask him if he had encountered any of The Thousand in that immensity. And so Ida remained forever with the thought that The Thousand might have been buried beneath Albano's rubble.

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When the last of The T1 had gone around the curve, Useppe, coming back inside, discovered the room had become huge. His little steps reechoed there; and when he called "Ma" and Ida answered "Eh?" their two voices sounded different from before. Everything w'l motionless, amid the wastepaper and the garbage scattered on the ground; not even a cockroach or a mouse ventured forth at that hour. In the obtuse angle, the glass of the little votive candle holder, broken in the uproar, lay on the ground next to the greasy wick and a patch of spilled oil. In the center of the room, a packing case had remained, formerly used as the twins' crib, with a layer of old newspapers inside, all soiled with their feces. In Eppe tondo's corner, there was still his rolled-up mattress; and in the corner beside the door, where the rag curtain had been torn away the better to wrap up Rosa and Celeste, there was the straw pallet, still stained with the blood from the birth of Rossella's kitten.

Ida had lain down on her own mattress, for a brief rest. But her organism must have become habituated to the racket, as if to a drug, since the incredible silence which had suddenly fallen in the room exacerbated her nerv tension rather than calming it. Rain had begun falling again. Neither from the city nor the slum came any sign of other existences. And the rustle of the rain, with the returning echo of distant bombing, enlarged the silence around that room, half-sunk in mud, where only she and Useppe remained. Ida wondered if Useppe realized The Thousand's depar ture was defi She could hear his little steps slowly cover the room, all around, as if on a tour of inspection; then suddenly that slowness of his walking was transformed into an excited haste, until, seized with a frenzy, he began to run. On the ground there was a rough ball of cloth that, on days of fi weather, had allowed other, older boys to imitate football players out in the open fi And he, in turn, imitating those boys, began kicking it furiously, but there were no teams, no referee, no goalie. He scrambled madly up the pile of desks, and jumped down with one of his usual fl

The faint thud of his booted feet was followed by a total silence. A little la ter, peering from behind the curtain, Ida saw him seated like an emigrant on a sandbag, examining the record left him by Carulina, scratch ing his fi around the grooves. His eyes looked up, grave and bewildered, at Ida's movement. And he ran to her with the record :

"A' rn play it!"

"It can't be played, like this. You need the gramophone to play it." "Wy?"

"Because, without a gramophone, a record won't play."

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"Without a gammapone, it won't play . . .
"

The rain was falling harder. In the air, a hiss, like a siren, made Ida start. But probably it was only a truck, going by on the Via dei Monti. It stopped at once. Darkness was falling. The vast abandoned room, cold, fi with rubbish, seemed isolated in an unreal space, this side of
a
besieged frontier.

Waiting for the rain to let up a little, Ida looked for some pastime to entertain Useppe. And for the umpteenth time, she sang for him the story of the
ships:

"And the ship turns and the ship veers . . .

. . . Three the lions and three the big boats

"Again," Useppe said to her, when she had fi She told it to him another time.

"Again," Useppe said. And meanwhile, with a hinting little smile, to announce a surprise that would surely find her incredulous, he revealed to her:

"A' rn I saw it . . . the sea!"

It was the fi time that, in some way, he referred to his adventure on the guerrilla fi As a rule, when questioned, he kept his mouth shut, maintaining a proper secrecy on the subject. However, this time Ida inter preted his obscure phrase as a simple fantasy and asked him nothing.

"And the ship turns and the ship veers . . .
"

For a certain period, in that month of November, the two of them remained the room's only occupants. The schools, though with some delay, had been reopened; Ida's school, however, had been requisitioned by the armed forces, and her classes had been transferred to another locality, even farther away than the previous one (with afternoon sessions, because they had to have shifts ) so it was practically impossible for her to reach it, given the present scarcity of public transport and the curfew hour. Ida, therefore, thanks to her status as an air-raid victim, obtained a temporary dispensa tion from teaching. She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time
thinking.
He would press both fi to his brow and begin to
think.
What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were impon derable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the
lesser panda,
which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy-bear and lives on the trees in

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inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative : in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed.

Those solitary hours of Useppe's were, however rarely, interrupted by some unexpected visits. One day it was a striped cat, so thin it seemed a eat's ghost, which, still, with the strength of desperation, managed to break through the paper that replaced the windowpane and enter the room in search of food. Naturally, the mice, on his arrival, avoided looking out; and Useppc had nothing to off him but some leftover boiled cabbage. But with that peculiar aristocratic haughtiness cats retain even in decline, he sniff the off and, without condescending to taste it, went off his tail erect.

That same day, three German soldiers arrived : obviously, as on other occasions in the past, they were ordinary army privates ( neither Polizei, nor SS ), without evil intentions. With the common custom of German troops, however, instead of knocking, they hammered violently on the door with the butts of their guns. And since Useppe, locked in, couldn't open the door, they fi tearing away from the window the rest of the paper already broken by the cat shortly before, to search the interior's length and breadth with their eyes. Useppe had gone towards them, below the win dow, pleased at receiving a visit, from anyone at all; and, seeing only him in the room, they addressed him in their language. What the devil they were looking for, nobody knows; and Useppe, not understanding their Ostro goth words, but presuming that, like the cat, they were looking for food, tried offering them that same leftover cabbage. But like the cat before them, they also refused the off and indeed, laughing, they offered Useppe a candy in return. Unfortunately, however, it was a mint candy-a fl Useppe didn't like-and he promptly spat it out. Dutifully, after having spat it out, he started to return it to the donor, saying to him with a smile : "Here!", at which, laughing harder than ever, they went off again.