History (5 page)

She, however, seeing him confront her, stared at him with an abso lutely inhuman gaze, as if confronted by the true and recognizable face of horror.

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The woman, an elementary teacher by profession, was named Ida Mancuso, nee Ramundo, a widow. To tell the truth, her parents had meant her fi name to be Aida. But because of an error by the clerk, she had been inscribed in the registry as Ida,

called lduzza by her father, a Calabrian.

Her age was thirty-seven, and she certainly made no eff to seem younger. Her rather undernourished body, shapeless, the bosom wi

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the lower part awkwardly fattened, was covered more or less by an old woman's brown overcoat, with a worn fur collar and a grayish lining whose tattered edges could be seen hanging from the cuff of the sleeves. She also wore a hat, held fast with a couple of straight pins, complemented by the little black veil of her long-standing widowhood; her legal status of
Signora,
indicated by the veil, was further proved by the wedding ring (of steel, replacing the gold one long since donated to the Fatherland for the Abys sinian enterprise ) on her left hand. Her coal-black, curly hair was begin ning to gray; but age had left strangely intact her round face which, with its protruding lips, seemed the face of a worn little girl.

And in fact, Ida had remained basically a little girl, because her chief attitude towards the world had always been and still was (consciously or not) one of frightened awe. The only people who had never frightened her, really, had been her father, her husband, and later, perhaps, her little pupils. All the rest of the world was a menacing insecuri which, uncon sciously for her, was deeply rooted in some tribal prehistory. And in her great dark almond eyes there was the passive sweetness of a very profound and incurable barbarism, which resembled foreknowledge.

Foreknowledge,
actually, is not the best word, because knowledge had nothing to do with it. Rather, the strangeness of those eyes recalled the mysterious idiocy of animals, who, not with their mind, but with a sense in their vulnerable bodies, "know" the past and the future of every destiny. I would call that sense-which is common in them, a part of the other bodily senses-the
sense of the sacred:
meaning by
sacred,
in their case, the universal power that can devour them and annihilate them, for their guilt in being born.

Ida was born in 1903, under the sign of Capricorn which favors industry, the arts, and prophecy, but also, in some cases, madness and foolishness. As far as intelligence went, she was mediocre; but she was a docile student, diligent in her work, and she was promoted each year. She had no brothers or sisters; and her parents both taught in the same elemen tary school in Cosenza where they had met for the fi time. Her father, Giuseppe Ramundo, came from a peasant family, in the deep Calabrian south. And her mother, whose name was Nora Almagia, ca from Padua, of a shopkeeping, petty bourgeois family. She had ended up in Cosenza an old maid of thirty, and alone, as the result of a competition for a teaching post. In Giuseppe's eyes, she-in her manners, her intellect, and her fi

-stood for something superi and delicate.

Giuseppe, eight years younger than his wi was a tall and corpulent man, with red stubby hands and a broad fl face, immediately likable. In a childhood accident, a hoe had wounded his ankle, leaving him slightly

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lame for the rest of his life. And his limping gait accentuated the sense of trusting ingenuousness he naturally emanated. Since he was no good for certain farm jobs, his family, poor sharecroppers, had contrived for him to study, sending him fi to the priests for lessons, with some help from the landowner. His experi of priests and landowners had not extinguished, but had rather fanned, it seems, a secret passion of his. Somewhere, some how, he had dug up texts by Proudhon, Bakunin, Malatesta, and other anarchists. And on these he had based a personal creed, ignorant but stubborn and destined to remain a kind of private heresy. In fact, he was forbidden to profess it, even within the walls of his
O'Ml
home.

Nora Ramundo nee Almagia was, as her maiden name indica Jewish (indeed, her relatives still lived, as they had for several generations, in the little ghetto of Padua ); however, she didn't want anyone to know, and she had confi only in her husband and in her daughter, under a solemn oath of secrecy. In offi and business matters, she used to camoufl her family name, transform it from Almagi into Almagia, convinced that by changing the accent she was fabricating an immunity for herself! In any case, in those days, obscure raci backgrounds were not yet really being explored or recorded. That poor Alma (or Alma whichever it was) down South was accepted by all, I believe, as an ordinary Venetian sur name, innocuous and meaningless; and by now, for that matter, people didn't even remember it. Nora, to everybody, was Signora Ramundo, con sidered obviously a Catholic like her husband.

Nora had no special qualities, mental or physical. And yet, without being beautiful, she was certainly pretty. From her prolonged spinsterhood she had retained a chaste and puritanical reserv ( even in her intimacy with her husband she had certain childlike modesties ) which was held in great esteem in that region of the South. And the Venetian grace of her manners made her girl students love her. She was subdued in her behavior, and shy by nature, especially among strangers. However, her introverted character nurtured some torm Hames, which could be seen burn

in her gypsy eyes. There were, for example, some unconfessed excesses of youthful sentimentality . . . But most of all, there were suppressed fer ments, which became outri manias in her. Then, gnawing at her nerv they erupted, within the walls of the house, in rash and oppressive forms.

These outbursts of hers had a single, natural target, the closest one: Giuseppe, her husband. She would tum on him at times, worse than a witch, upbraiding him for his birth, his village, his relatives, slandering him horribly with obvious falsehoods, and even shouting at him : "Sign of God's wrath! Walk on the path!", a dialect verse, referring to his lamed foot. Suddenly, then, she would be exhausted and would lie there, drained, like a

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rag doll. And she would start stammering in a faint voice: ". . . what did I say? . . . I didn't mean that . . . that wasn't what I meant, poor me . . . Oh my God . . . my God . . ." her face livid, her hands clutch- ing the curly hair of her aching head. Then Giuseppe, moved to pity, would try to soothe her saying : "Ah, what does it matter? It's nothing. It's all over. You're a loony, that's what you are, a little silly thing . . ." while she would look at him, dazed, her eyes speaking of infi love.

A little later, she would remember these scenes of hers as a frightful dream, of a split personality. It was not she, but a kind of leechlike crea ture, her enemy, who clung to her, inside, forcing her to play a mad and incomprehensible role. She wanted to die. But rather than reveal her re morse, she was capable of maintaining, for the rest of the day, a grim and acid silence, almost accusatory.

Another characteristic of hers was certain exaggerated, solemn rhetori cal turns of speech, handed down to her perhaps from the ancient patri archs. These Biblical expressions, however, were mingled with the usual phrases and cadences she had absorbed from the Veneto region, which, in these surr sounded like a comical little song.

As for her Jewish secret, she had explained to her daughter, from early childhood, that the Jews are a people destined, since time began, to suff the vindictive hatred of all other peoples; and that even duri apparent peri of truce, persecution will always dog them, etern recurring, as their prescribed destiny. For these reasons, she herself had insisted on having Iduzza baptized a Catholic, like her father. Who, though recalci trant, had agreed for Iduzza's sake : submitting even, during the ceremony, to making in great haste a huge, sloppy Sign of the Cross, in front of every In private, however, on the subject of God, he was accustomed

to quote the saying:
"The God hypothesis is useless,"
adding in solemn tones the signature of the Author:
"FAURE!",
as he never failed to do with all his quotations.

Besides the main secret, Nora's, other secrets existed in the family; and one was that Giuseppe was addicted to drink.

It was, as far as I know, the only sin of that guileless atheist. A man so steadfast in his aff that, for all his adult life, as earlier in his youth, he regularly sent a large part of his salary to his parents and his brothers, poorer than he. Political motives aside, his instinct, I believe, was to em brace the whole world. But more than the whole world he loved Iduzza and Noruzza, for whom he was even capable of composing madrigals. To Nora, when they were engaged, he used to say; "My Eastern star!" and to Iduzza (ori meant to be
Aida )
he would often sing (N.B. both he and Nora had been constant spectators at the performances of the barn storm opera troupe) :

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"Celeste Aida forma divina . . .
"

But his drinking bouts ( Nora's cross ) were something he couldn't forego, even if, out of respect for his position as teacher, he renounced visiting tavern devoting himself to his wine at home, in the evening, especially on Saturdays. And since he was still a young man under thirty, on such occasions he would naturally and heedlessly expound his clandes tine ideals.

The fi signal of his free speech was a certain restlessness of his huge hands, which began to shift or knock over his glass, as his dark brown eyes became troubled and pensive. Then he would start to shake his head, saying :
betrayal! betrayal!,
meaning that he himself, since he had become an employee of the State, was behaving like a traitor towards his comrades and brothers. A teacher, if he was honest, facing those poor little creatures in the school, should preach anarchy, total rejection of the established order, of the society that raised them to be exploited or used as cannon fodder . . . At this point, the worri Nora would run to close the doors and windows, to muffl these subversive notions from the ears of neigh bors or passersby. And, for his part, he would stand squarely in the center of the room and start quoting in a full voice, louder and louder, holding up one fi

". . . the State is the authority, the rule and the organized force of the propertied and self-styled enlightened classes over the masses. It guar

antees always what it finds: to the former, freedom based on ownership; to the latter, serv fatal consequence of their poverty.
BAI"

". . . Anarchy, nowadays, means attack, war on all authority, on all power, on all government. In the society of the future, anarchy will be defense, the obstacle opposed to the reestablishment of any authority, any power, any government.
CAFIERo!"

At this point Nora would begin to plead : "Ssssh . . . sssh . . ." lurching from one wall to another, like a possessed creature. Even when the doors and windows were closed, she was convinced that certain words and certain names, uttered in the house of the two schoolteachers, would create a universal scandal: as if around their poor, closed, barr rooms there were an enormous crowd of listening witnesses. In reality, though she was as much an atheist as her husband was, she lived as if subject to a vindictive jailer-God, who spied on her.

"Freedoms are not granted. They are seized.
KROPOTI"

"Ah, what a cross! Quiet, I tell you. You want to plunge this house hold into the abyss of shame and dishonor! You want to drag this family in the mire!"

"What mire, Noruzza sweetheart? The mire is on the white hands of

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landowners and bankers! Mire is our rotten society! Anarchy isn't mire! Anarchy is the honor of the world, the true and holy name of the only new history immense,
implacable
Revolution!!"

"Ah! I curse the day, the hour, the minute when I won that competi tion! I curse my infern destiny, that brought me down among these Southerners, all of them highway bandits, the lowest scum of the earth, infamous creatures, worthy of hanging, one and allll"

"You want us hanged, Non]? Hanged, light of my life?!"

In his amazement, Giuseppe sank back into a chair. But half-sprawled, he would irresistibly be inspired to sing once more, his eyes on the ceiling, like a wagon-driver singing to the moon:

"Dynamite the churches, blast the palaces, Death to the hated bourgeoisie! . . .
"

". . . Aaaaaha! Be quiet! Murderer! Be quiet, criminal! Or I'll throw myself out of the window!"

To make sure the neighbors couldn't hear her, Nora was careful to keep her voice low, but the eff made her veins swell, as if she were choking. Finally, strangled and exhausted, she would fl herself on the little sofa, and then Giuseppe, concerned, would go to her and apologize, kissing her hands, as if she were a great lady, those thin hands, already aged, and chapped from housework and chilblains. And after a moment, she would be smiling at him, consoled, her ancestral anguish temporari allayed.

From her little colored chair ( bought by her father specially to suit her size), Iduzza would follow these quarr ey wide, naturally not understanding anything of them. From birth, she never had the slightes tendency towards subversion, to be sure; but if she could have expressed an opinion, she would have said that, between the two litigants, the more subversive was her mother! In any case, all she could understand was that her parents disagreed on certain questions; nor, lucki was she overly frightened by their scenes, since she was used to them. Sti as soon as she saw peace return between them, she would smile a little smile of con tentment.