History (63 page)

In the second photograph on the same page, an old man was seen, with a fat, bald head, hanging by his feet, his arm wide, over a large, blurred crowd.

Higher up, on its cover, the magazine displayed another recent photo graph, without hangings or dead people, but still mysteriously horr A young woman, her head shaved like a dummy's, holding a baby wrapped in a blanket, was advancing through a throng of people of all ages, snickering and pointing to her and laughing at her obscenely. The woman, who had regular features, seemed frightened, and was hurrying, struggling along in some run-over men's boots, preceded and pursued by the crowd. All those around her were shabby and poor as she was. The baby, a few months old, with a little head of pale curls, had its fi in its mouth and was peace fully sleeping.

Useppe, his head upraised, was there studying these scenes in a hesi tant awe, still bewildered. He seemed to be confronting an enigma, de form and ambiguous by nature, and yet obscurely familiar. "Useppe!" Ida called him; and obediently giving her his hand, he followed her, puz zled, but without asking her anything. A little later, attracted by some new curiosity, he had already forgotten the kiosk.

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And in the days that followed, it seemed this new discovery of photog raphy, belated and only vaguely perceived, had had no eff on him except as a fl impression, leaving no trace at all in his memory. In the street, Useppe had become the same ignoramus as before, who passed amidst signs and print without seeing them, too taken by the other dimensions of the universe that surrounded him, minuscule though it was. And at home, he never mentioned to anyone the abstruse spectacle of that kiosk; only if he happened to glimpse some photographs in an unfolded page of the newspaper, his eyes would widen in a vague reminiscence towards those others that, at a distance, appeared to him as patches of shadow : and so his reminiscence dissolved, at the same moment, beyond recall.

Once, later, the news-vendor ( who actually called himself a jo
urna
l is ), fi a paper on the table, to amuse Useppe made a hat from it, like a carabiniere's headgear, and put it on his head. Seeing the "journalist" with his round face and his jutting chin like a dwarf's, clowning beneath that hat, Useppe laughed loudly. Then, jumping on the chair, he promptly took the hat from the news-vendor's head to try it on the
piccinina;
then he wanted to try it on Ida, and fi on himself. Now, his head was so small that it vanished entirely inside the hat; and he, in all this, laughed and laughed, as if a crazy refrain had got stuck in his throat.

Unfortunately, Filomena interv a little later, to recover the news paper, which she duly folded and put to one side. However, after that same afternoon, seeing the master of the house intently leafi through some old publications of his (including some of a lovely pink color) Useppe im mediately asked him to make him a hat with one of them. Perhaps, after the
journalist's
example, he had decided this was the logical and, to him, most interesting use for pri pages. He accepted with docile resignation, nevertheless, the refusal of Tommaso, who then, seeing Useppe's new inter est in journalism, seized the occa to boast that this was a collection of sports papers, with historical games from the times when the war hadn't yet interrupted the great championships. And in this illustration you could see a pass in the famous Italy-Spain game; and this player was Ferraris Secondo, and this was Piola . . .

I remember that day was a Sunday; and the month, I believe, was June. The next morning something happened, similar to the previous epi sode at the kiosk, and it seemed at the time equally insignifi and fl

Coming home quickly from the market, between one err and an other, Ida had left a half-opened package of fruit in the kitchen. And a little later, Useppe, tempted by the fruit, found in his hand the sheet of paper it had been wrapped in; was he already thinking, perhaps, of making himself a carabiniere's hat from it?

3 1 6 H I S T O R Y
. . . . . .
1 9 45

It was a page of an illustrated weekly, badly printed, in a purplish hue : the cheap kind that, as a rule, arc full of sentimental little stories and gossip about actresses and crowned heads; however, at present, as was inevitable, most of the space, even here, was taken up with accounts of war experiences. The page reproduced some scenes of the Nazi prison camps, of which, until the Allied invasion, there had been only subdued and confused reports. Only now were these secrets of the Reich beginning to be revealed and photographs of them published, in part taken by the Allies on enteri the camps, in part recovered from fi which the defeated hadn't had time to destroy, and in part found on the prisoners or the dead SS, who had kept them as a documentation or a souvenir of their personal action .

Because of the magazine's popularizing, unscholarly nature, the photographs printed on that page weren't even among the most terrible of those to be seen at that time. They depicted : 1) a heap of murdered prisoners, naked and sprawling, and already partly decomposed; 2) a huge quantity of piled-up shoes, which had belonged to those or other pri

3) a group of pri sti alive, seen behind a metal fence; 4) the "death stairway" of 186 very high and irregular steps, which the forced laborers were made to climb under enormous loads right to the top, from which they were then often fl down into the pit below as a spectacle for the camp authorities; 5) a sentenced man on his knees before the ditch he himself has been made to dig, guarded by numerous German soldiers, one of whom is about to shoot him at the nape of the neck; 6) and a little series of frames ( four in all ) which show successive stages of a decompres sion-chamber experiment, perform on a human guinea pig. This kind of test (one of the many and various experiments doctors carried out in the Lagers ) consisted of subjecting the pri to sudden changes in atmos pheric pressure; and it normally ended in madness and death through pulmonary hemorrhage.

All this was explained, as far as I can recall today, by brief captions underneath each picture. For an ignoramus who couldn't even read, how ever, that page's unusual spectacle must have seemed an insoluble riddle, especially since the cheap magazine's poor printing made some images ambiguous and unclear. You see there a chaotic heap of whitish, stick-like objects, whose forms cannot be distinguished, and, elsewhere, an enorm waste of piled shoes which, at fi sight, could be mistaken for a pile of dead bodies. A long, long stairway, which reaches beyond the frame, with some tiny, crumpled form at the bottom, among brownish spots. A bony young man with big eyes, crouching at the edge of a hole, a kind of bucket beside him and around him many soldiers, who seem to be amusing them selves ( one of them is making a blurred movement with his arm). And on

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the other side of the page, some little skeletal human shapes, staring be hind a fence, wearing striped tunics, loose and sagging, which make them look like puppets. Some of them have bare, shaven heads; others wear caps; and their faces show an agonizing smile, a wretched, defi depravity.

Finally, at the foot of the page, you can see, in four successive photo graphs, the same man with a dazed face, all tied up with heavy straps, under a low ceiling. In the center of the ceiling there seems to be some kind of apparatus, looking like a funnel; and the man raises his eyes up towards that undefi object, as if he were praying to God. You might think the diff expressions in the four photographs are caused by the incompre hensible actions of that sort of God. From a stupefi cowardice, the dull face passes to a horr suff then to an ecstatic gratitude, and then again to stupefi cowardice.

It will be forever impossible to know what poor illiterate Useppe may have understood of those meaningless photographs. Coming home a few seconds later, Ida found him staring at them all together, as if they were a single image; and she thought she recognized in his pupils the same horror she had seen there that noon at the Tiburtina station, about twenty months earlier. At his mother's approach, he raised his eyes to her, drained and discolored, like a little blind child's. And Ida felt a shudder run through her whole body, as if a huge hand were shaking her. But with a soft, gentle voice, so as not to upset him, she said, as you would have spoken to kids much younger than he:

"Throw away that nasty paper. It's ugly!"

"It's uggy," he repeated (he still hadn't learned to pronounce certain combinations of consonants ). And he immediately obeyed Ida's words; indeed, almost impatient, he helped her tear up that bit of newspaper as if it were rubbish.

A minute later, a peddler's cry could be heard below the windows, as he passed along the street with his barrow. And this was enough to distract Useppe. He ran towards the front window, curious to see the peddler. "Onions! Garl Greens!" the man shouted, in his sing-song chant. And Annita, to spare herself the steps, lowered to him from the window a little basket tied to a string. Standing on a footstool at the window, Useppe followed the basket's journey wi the same interest as if it were an Earth Moon airship, or, at the very least, Galileo's fi experiment on the Lean ing Tower of Pisa. Today's incident, as usual, seemed to have gone by without leaving a trace in his little head.

Sti in the fi days that followed, at the sight of certain newspapers or picture magazines, he would keep his distance, like a puppy after a whipping. And in the street he seemed a bit uneasy, dragging Ida off by her dress from the proximity of any wall poster or the famous kiosk. There was

3 1 8 H I S T O R Y . . . . . . 1945

a visit from Nino, who this time invited him out for an ice cream. And on the way back, Nino seized the opportunity to dash to the kiosk on the other side of the street, saying to the boy : "You wait for me here." But Useppe, on seeing him approach the kiosk, began to shout from the side walk :

"Back! Come back! Baaaack!" with a tone of desperate alarm, as if to defend his brother against some unknown threat of the street. "You," Ninnuzzu teased him then, corn back to him, "the more you grow, the more you make me laugh! What're you yelling about? I'm not going to run away!" Then with his laughing mouth, he concluded: "Hey, how about giving me a little kiss?"

. . . During that summer, there were another two visits from Nin nuzzu. At the fi he glanced at his mother, remarking : "Your hair's turned all white, rn you look like my grandmother!!" as if he hadn't already seen her white hair on his previous visits and were noti the novelty only now.

And on the second visit, he announced he would soon become the owner of a motorcycle, a foreign make, good as new, a terrifi bargain! And next time he would come to Rome on that!

So it happened that the
piccinina
(who now, in Ace's presence, always remained demurely to one side) that same night dreamed she was being chased furi by a motorcycle, speeding on its own, with nobody on the seat. And she fl left and right, so frightened that all of a sudden, in her fear, she learned how to fl

Meanwhile, during the month of August, after the dropping of the atomic bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan had also signed an unconditional surrender.

The news of the atomic explosion was such that people talked of it reluctantly, as they spea of repulsive abstractions. They couldn't talk about time, because the phenomenon's duration (if that was the word) was so minimal it couldn't be calculated ( they tried to fi it in twenty thousandths of a second ). Within this
duration,
the two doomed cities, wi their inhabitants, had ceased to exist down to the molecules of their matter. There could be no talk of destructi or of death. They talked about such a
mushroom
of light that people blind from birth had per ceived its unreal glow, at a distance. And of every previously existent wi its range, the mushroom had left only, here and there, some shadows on the ground, like ghost-images printed on a plate. Beyond the mushroom's range, the
fi tornado
is unleashed, and then the
second torna
and then a putrid rain of strange poisons or embers. Impossible to

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count the victims : because the physical consequences of the
mushroom,
and of the
tornadoe
and of the
atomic fallout
cannot be evaluated only by the number of the
annihilated
and the dead (at Hiroshima, at a fi calculation, these came to eighty thousand ). The
demolition and incendi ary
bombs and their impacts, fi and
clouds
seemed still earthly phenom ena; while Hiroshima and Nagasaki no longer seemed places of this world. It wasn't possible even to feel compassion for the Japanese.

And so the Second World War was over. In the same month of August, the Big Three (Messrs. Churchill and Truman, and Comrade Stalin ) met again in Potsdam to defi the peace, that is, to mark the reciprocal boundaries of their Empires. The Rome-Berlin Axis and the Triple Entente had vanished. The Iron Curtain was appearing.