History (57 page)

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man soldier had appeared with reinforcements, some Italian militia of the PAL They held up their arms, pistols in hand; and to intimidate, they fired some shots in the air, but Ida, hearing the shots and the women's confused screams, thought it was a massacre. She was gripped by a terrible fear of falling, mortally wounded, leaving Useppe alone in the world, an orp

She ran blindly, screaming, mingling with escaping women who almost ran her down. Finally she found herself alone, not knowing where she was, and she sat on a step beside a ditch. She couldn't see anything, except for some imaginary dark bubbles of blood, which burst in the sunny air. That same hammering racket, which always woke her in the morning, now had come back to throb inside her temples, with the usual rumble of an uprising : "Useppe! Useppe!" she felt a spasm in her head, so sharp she touched her scalp with her fingers, suspecting she might find them wet with blood. But the shots hadn't wounded her; she was unharmed. Suddenly, she jumped up, no longer seeing the shopping-bag over her arm! But she found it nearby, on the uneven lot, with the fl intact to the brim : she had lost very little, fortunately, in her fl Breathlessly then, she started searching for her little change-purse, fi remembering that it must have remained at the bottom of the shopping-bag. And she dug it out feverishly, staining her whole arm with fl mixed with sweat.

The shopping-bag, too full, wouldn't close. From a pile of refuse there on the ground, she picked up a piece of newspaper to hide the stolen fl before heading for her tram.

At home, that morning, there was not only no gas, but also no electricity or water. Filomena, however, grateful for a little gift of fl managed to make Ida some pettola ( pasta ) and to cook it along wi her own, adding a little fistful of beans, already boiled.

Ida took another portion of fl with her when she went out that afternoon. That day (like every Thursday since the schools had closed ) she had to go give a private lesson in the neighborhood of the Trastevere station. And she planned, on her return, to go as far as Via Garibaldi, where she knew a man who, in exchange for the fl would give her some meat for Useppe's supper.

This plan for the day was tangled in her head like wire. It was the fi

of June, and, oddly, it was like a due date, for all the accumulated fatigue of the month of May to fall on her at once. After the fear of death that had gripped her as she fl from the truck, she found h erself again, worse than before, bewildered and cowardly like a pariah dog persecuted by the dogcatchers. As she headed for Via Garibaldi, she felt her legs buckling, and she sat down to rest on a little bench in the garden this side of the

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bridge. Her mind was distracted, so she could barely perceive, in confusion, some voices conversing nearby, in the little garden or at the tram stop not far off The subject was not new : they were talking about an air raid that same day, in the outskirts : some said twenty deaths, some two hundred. She remained aware of being seated there in the garden, and at the same time she found herself running around the San Lorenzo quarter. She was carrying in her arms something of supreme value which must have been Useppe; but though it had the weight of a body, this thing had neither form nor color. And also the quarter, which was now enfolded in an opaque dust cloud, was no longer San Lorenzo, but a foreign space, with out houses or form. She wasn't dreaming, since she heard meanwhile the tram clanking on the tracks and the passengers' voices at the stop. How ever, at the same time, she knew she was mistaken : that wasn't the tram's clanking, but another sound. Recovering herself with a jolt, she was embar rassed to fi her lips drooping and saliva running down her chin. She stood up, unresolved, and having walked only halfway across the Garibaldi bridge, she realized she was heading for the Ghetto. She recognized the call that was tempting her there and that came to her this time like a low and somnolent dirge, still loud enough to engulf all exterior sounds. Its irresis tible rhythms resembled those with which mothers lull their babies, or tribes summon their members together for the night. Nobody has taught them, they are written already in the seed of all the living, subject to death.

Ida knew that the little quarter, for months now, had been once more cleared of all its population : the last evaders from the previous October, having s tealthily returned to their narrow rooms, had been rooted out again in February, one after the other, by the Fascist police in the serv

of the Gestapo; and even refugees and vagabonds avoided the area . . . However, in her head, today, this news was lost amid reminiscences and older habits. In some confused way, she still expected to encounter there the usual gang of little families with curly hair and black eyes, in the streets,' at the doorways and windows. And at the fi intersection, she stopped, puzzled, no longer recognizing the streets or the doors. In reality, she was at the head of a street she had often visited in the past : narrow at the start, among low houses, it opens into a small square, then continues among other little ramifi to the central square. Its name, unless I'm mistaken, is Via Sant'Ambrogio. And from here, more or less, Ida used always to set off in her past wanderings. Around here were the little shops and courtyards and the familiar alleys where she had busied herself with her buying and selling and where she had heard from Vilma, "a bit upset in the head," the radio-information of the Signora and the Nun, and where once she had learned from a little old woman in a tiny hat about the

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official halfbreed race, and another time she had met the midwife Ezekiel

. . . It was an enclosure more minuscule than the most minuscule village, even if within it thousands of Jews were crowded, in families of ten to a room. But today Ida dragged herself through it as if in an enormous maze without beginning or end; and no matter how much she roamed about, she always found herself at the same point.

She vaguely realized she had come here to deliver something to some body; indeed, she knew this somebody's last name : EFRATI, which she kept repeating to herself in a low voice so she wouldn't forget it. And she looked for someone she could ask for directions. But there was nobody, not even a passerby. No voice was heard.

To Ida's ears, the perpetual roll of the cannon in the distance was confused with the echo of her own solitary footsteps. Here, separated from the traffi along the Tiber, the silence of these sunny little alleys isolated the senses like a narcotic injection, excluding all surrounding, populated territory. Through the walls of the houses, you could strangely feel the resonance of the inner voids. And she kept on murmuring EFRATI, EFRATI, entrusting herself to this uncertain thread to keep from being completely lost.

There she was again in the broader space with the fountain. The fountain was dry. Dead plants trailed from the narrow street's little loggias and decrepit balconies. At the hovels' windows there was no longer the usual array of underpants, diapers, and other rags strung out to dry; at either side, from the outside hooks, the little broken lines were still hang ing. And some windows had shattered panes. Through the grille of a street level room, formerly a shop, you could glimpse the damp, dark interior, stripped of the counter and the merchandise, and invaded by cobwebs. Some of the doors seemed barred, but others, bashed in during the looti were ajar or half-open. Ida pushed at an unhinged door, with only one leaf, then closed it behind her back.

The entrance hall, the size of a closet, was almost in darkness, and it was cold there. But the little stone stairway, all worn and slippery, received light from a window at about the level of the third fl On the second landing there were two closed doors; but one of the two had no name. The other had, written in pen, on a little glued card : Astrologo Family, and on the wall, above the bell, two more names, in pencil : Sara Di Cave, Sonnino Family.

Along the wall of the s tairs, peeling and covered with stains, you could read various writings, most of them obviously by childish hands :
Arnalda loves Sara-Ferruccio is hansome
(and below, added by another young hand :
he's a shit) -Colomba loves L-Roma's the winner.

Frowning, Ida examined all the writings, in an eff to decipher her

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own confused reasoning in them. The house had two upper stories in all, but the stairway seemed very long to her. Finally, at the next landing, she discovered what she was looking for. Actually, the number of people named EFRATI in the Rome Ghetto was beyond counting. There was no stairway, you might say, where one wasn't to be found.

Here there were three doors. One, without a name and off its hinges, opened into a windowless cubbyhole, with the springs of a bed on the fl and a basin, both battered. The other two doors were closed. On one, there was a little plate with the name : Di Cave, and above it, written on the wood, also the names : Pavoncello, Calc. And on the second, a broad piece of paper was glued, which said : Sonnino, EFRATI, Della Seta.

In her weariness, Ida couldn't resist the temptation to sit down on those iron springs. From the broken window over the stairs came a swal low's shriek and she was amazed by it. Heedless of air raids and explosions, that little creature had fl across the sky-its fragile body unerringly oriented-as on a domestic path. While she, a woman, and over forty years old, found herself lost.

She had to make an enormous eff not to give way to her desire to stretch out on those springs and spend the whole night there. And cer tainly it was this eff which, in her state of extreme weakness, then provoked an auditory illusion. First she was surprised by an unreal silence in the place. And within this, her ears, buzzing from her fasts, began to perceive some voices. It was not, actually, a true hallucination, because Ida realized that the manufactory of those voices was in her brain, indeed she herself did not sense them elsewhere. However, the impression she re ceived from them was that they were spreading through her auditory canals from some unspecifi dimension, which no longer belonged to exterior space, or to her memories. They were alien voices, of various tone, but predominantly female, unconnected with one another, without dialogue or communication among themselves. And they distinctly pronounced phrases, some exclamatory, some relaxed, but all of ordinary banality, like assembled fragments of the common life of every day:

. . . ''I'm on the roof collecting the laundry!!" . . . "If you don't fi your homework, you're not leaving this house!" . . . ''I'm going to tell your father when he gets home!" . . . "They're distributing cigarettes today . . ." "All right, I'll wait for you, but hurry . . ." "Where've you been all this time? . . ." ". . . I'll be right there, rn
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. . !" "How much are you asking?" "He told me to start dinner . . ." "Put that light out; electri costs money . . ."

This phenomenon of hearing voices is fairly common, and at times even the healthy experience it, more frequently when they are about to fall asleep, and after a hard day's work. For Ida, it wasn't new; but in her

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present emotional fragility it seized her like an invasion. The voices in her ears, before dying away, started reechoing one after the other, overlapping at a turbulent rhythm. And in this haste of theirs she seemed to sense- a horrible meaning, as if their poor gossip were exhumed from one confused eternity into another confused eternity. Without knowing what she was saying, or why, Ida found herself murmuring, to herself, her chin trembling like that of a child about to cry :

"They're all dead."

She said it with her lips, but almost without voice. And at this mur mur, within the silence, she felt a weight like the plunging of an acoustic probe in her memory. She was then able to establish that she had come here today to deliver the message picked up from beneath the train on October 18th at the Tiburtina Station; and she immediately began to rummage, with restless fi in her bag, where she had kept it since that day. On the little paper, worn and fi the penciled writing had been almost entirely rubbed away. She could just read : . . .
see Efrati Pacifi

. . . family . . . lire debt
. . . The rest was illegible.

She was gripped by an anxiety to leave this place. In hunting for her purse, she had seen again at the bottom of her shopping-bag the packet of fl she had put there on leaving home: it recalled her to some vague but very urgent matter to which she had to attend before evening . . . Half drunk, she came out again on the landing. The electric bells, at the two closed doors, made no sound; then she began to knock on one, then the other, at random, on either side of the narrow landing. She knew she was knocking without eff or intention; and soon she gave up. However, as she descended towards the front door, those absurd raps in the void, in stead of stopping, came at her, striking her between the throat and the breastbone. The useless message from the Tiburtina Station remained up stairs in the cubbyhole, where she had dropped it.