History (76 page)

the step and holding the eager dog by the collar. "And this next time," he promised, ''I'll come for you with the jeep." Then he waved goodbye, but Useppe remained with his fi clutching the railing, obviously refusing to return the goodbye. Then Ninnuzzu ran back up two or three steps, to say goodbye more properly, near him:

"How about giving me a little kiss?"

It was the twenty-second or twenty-third of September.

6

In the month of October, when the scholastic year began, Ida's old school was reopened, a short walk from Via Bodoni. This year Ida had the first grade, and not knowing with whom to leave Useppe, she decided to take him with her every day. Useppe was

still under the age to be officially enrolled in the school (he had a year to go ); however, considering him, with proud certainty, more mature than norm Ida was counting on the example and the company of the other children to stimulate him at least to learn the alphabet meanwhile.

Instead, from the very fi days, she had to change her mind. Faced with the problems of letters and numbers, Useppe, now fi years old, proved even more immature than he had been as a tiny boy. Obviously readers and notebooks remained, for him, alien objects; and to force him seemed unnatural, like demanding a little bird study the notes of the pentagram. At most, if he was supplied with colored pencils, he could start drawing on the page some curious forms, like fl fl and ara besques all combined; but he soon tired even of this game. And then he would leave the paper there and scatter the pencils on the fl with a capricious impatience, tinged with anguish. Or else he would break off as if exhausted by the eff falling into a dreamy absentmindedness that estranged him from the class.

Such calm moments were rare, however. :M often, to his mother's profound embarrassment, Useppe behaved terribly; and even his usual sociability vanished here at the school. All the regulations, the confi

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ment, the bench, the discipline were impossible trials; and the sight of the pupils seated in rows must have seemed an incredible phenomenon to him, since he did nothing but dis turb his classmates, chatting with them in a loud voice, hugging them, or giving them little blows with his fist as if to waken them from a lethargy. He was capable of jumping on the benches, perhaps confusing them with those other famous benches at Pietralata; and he ran around the classroom with savage cries, as if he were still among

TI1e Thousand, playing football or Indians. But then he would constantly clutch his mother, repeating to her: "Hey,
rn
can we go? Is it time yet?
When
is it time?" Finally, at the clos:ng bell, he would rush out furiously, and on the brief journey home, he did nothing but press his mother, as if there were somebody waiting at the house.

Ida thought she could guess in him an unavowed apprehension that, during their absence, Nino might have come by the house and found nobody there. She realized, in fact, that every time, before passing the entrance, he examined both sides of the street with eager eyes, perhaps seeking that famous jeep already admired in the photograph; and then he would anxiously hurry beyond the fi courtyard, perhaps hoping to fi the festive pair, Nino and Bella, waiting beneath the windows. After the last goodbye in September, the two had given no further news. And Useppe certainly felt their absence more than ever, after those happy days of living together; however, he didn't say anything.

Seeing tha t school age, for him, had not yet arrived, Ida gave up taking him with her and decided to entrust him, instead, to a kindergarten in the same building as her classes. Every day, at the sound of the closing bell, she would run to collect him, taking him, you might say, from the very arms of the teacher-supervisor. But this second attempt proved even more disastrous than the fi indeed, hearing the daily reports on him that the teacher gave her, his mother no longer recognized in this new Useppe the same child as before. It was a rapid and progressive mutation, which, after the fi signs, was accelerating its pace from day to day.

Unpredictably, Useppe now avoided other children's company. When they sang in chorus, he remained silent, and invited to sing with the others, he would soon lose the thread of the song, constantly distracted by every trifl even imperceptible ones. During their playing together, he kept to one side with an expression of uneasy and bewildered loneliness, as if he were being punished. You would have said that, for this punishment, someone had set between him and the others a half-opaque partition, behind which he insisted, as if in fi defense, on hiding. And if the others then asked him to play, he would withdraw, immediately violent. But a little later he could be found huddled on the ground in some corner, whimpering, like an abandoned street kitten.

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There was no following his moods, contradictory and unexpected. He seemed stubbornly to deny himself society and companionship : at snack time, however, if another child eyed his cookie, he would impulsively give it to him, with a friendly and contented smile. At times, when he was silent, he could be found with a tear-streaked face, for no reason. And then all of a sudden he would let himself go in riotous, desperate merr

like a little African carr off from his forest in the hold of a slave ship.

Not infrequently he would doze in boredom; and when the teacher tried to rouse him ( even very gently, in her sweetest tone of voice) he would reawaken with an excessive and brutal jolt, as if he had fallen abruptly from a high bed. One day, on one of these wakings, getting up, he dreamily unbuttoned his little pants and peed in the middle of the class room : he, a boy over fi among the oldest in the class.

If he was given games requiring concentration, such as building things or the like, at the beginning he would set out with some interest; but long before reaching the conclusion, he would suddenly sweep everything aside. One day, in the midst of such a game, he burst into sobs, silent and aching, which tri to fi release in sound and seemed to suff him; until, bursting, they broke into screaming weeping, of painful, intolerable revolt.

While the teacher spoke of this with Ida, Useppe stood nearby, his eyes wide and amazed, as if he himself didn't recognize that strange child; and yet he seemed to say : "I don't know why this happens to me, it's not my fault, and nobody can help me . . ." Meanwhile he would start pulling on Ida's dress, urging her to go home. And as soon as the conversation was over, he would dart off as usual, in an impatient race towards Via Bodoni, barely restrained by his mother's hand : as if in their absence, in Via Bodoni, the menace of a mysterious and inconceivable event might have come true.

At fi the teacher assured Ida her little boy would become more acclimated to the school in time; but instead his state of anxiety worsened. In the morning, actually, he went out with Ida, carefree, perhaps not recalling his daily trial, convinced he was going out for a stroll! But at the appearance of the school, Ida could feel his little hand tighten in a still confused resistance, while his eyes sought in her some defense against the uncertain oppression that repelled him there. It was a torment, for her, to leave him alone like that. And he remained there, frowning, without rebel ling, indeed waving her his usual goodbye, clenching and unclenching his little fist. However, less than a week after his fi entrance in the kinder garten, the series of his escapes began.

At recreation period, in the yard, the slightest distraction of the teacher was enough for him to try to run off The teacher was a girl of about thirty, who wore eyeglasses and long hair in a braid. She was very

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seri and thorough about her job; she never took her eyes off her eigh teen pupils, and during the time in the yard she counted them again and again, careful to keep them around her like a hen. Then there was also the presence of the concierge, always on guard in the entrance hall, which led from the yard to the gate on the street. The teacher couldn't understand how, with all this, Useppe managed to steal away, promptly seizing each opportunity as if he had been waiting for nothing else. You turned around for an instant, and he had vanished.

Most times, at least in the beginning, he didn't get far: he would be found just outside the entrance, hidden under the stairs or behind a co]. umn. And when questioned, he never lied or attempted excuses, but said right out with a bitter expression of panic: "I want to go 'way!" One morning, however, he wasn't to be found; and after a long hunt, he was brought back to the teacher by a charwoman who had discovered him wandering around the corridors of another fl seeking an unguarded avenue towards the exit. For him, the school building, with all those closed doors and those stairways and those fl must have been an endless labyrinth; but the day came when he found its thread. And Ida saw him arrive in her classroom; in his little blue smock and his bow, he ran to her, and clung to her, all trembling and crying. And he wanted to stay there with her for the rest of the morning (distraught, she promptly sent word to the teacher), continuing to tremble like a migrant swallow overtaken by winter.

But his worst exploit came the following day. This time, despite the vigilance of the doorman at the entrance, he somehow managed to get to the street (it was perhaps the fi ti in his life that he ran the city's streets alone ), and he was brought back by the concierge of Via Bodoni. She was a sixty-year-old widow, grandmother of many now-grown grand children, who at present lived alone in her lodge-apartment (consisting in all of the porter's booth and an adjacent windowless hole with a bed for sleeping). She had seen Useppe pass the lodge, alone and coatless, wearing his school smock; her suspicions aroused, she had gone into the entrance to call him. As a rule, Useppe always stopped with curiosity at the glass window of the lodge, because in the cubbyhole inside, the old woman kept a radio, a little stove "like Eppetondo" and a glass egg with the Madonna of Lourdes on a snowy fi (if you shook the egg, the snow rose in so many white fl ). But today, he had gone past without stopping. He was breathless, bewildered, and at the woman's insistence, he muttered he was "going home" ( though he didn't have the keys ), adding a disjointed and bewildering speech about "something" that was "catching him" and "not the other children" . . . Meanwhile, he restlessly put his hands to his head, as if that unnamed "thing" were inside it . . . "Have you got a

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headache maybe?" "No, no ache . . ." "If it isn't an ache, what is it then? Troubles?" "No, no troubles . . ." Useppe continued shaking his head furiously, without explaining himself; gradually, however, after his great exertion, he was regaining his natural color : "You know what you have there, in your head?" The concierge then concluded : "I'll tell you! A bee in your bonnet! That's what!" And he, suddenly, forgetting his great haste, began to laugh at the old woman's funny idea : a bee in his bonnet. Then he meekly allowed her to take him back to school.

His escape had lasted less than a quarter of an hour; but in the meanwhile, already two men had been set off to seek him, while the teacher minded her other charges, still enjoying their recess in the yard. Every moment, she would look nervously towards the interior of the build ing, or beyond the entrance passage, at the gate on the street. And it was from this direction she saw the fugitive reappear, an old woman holding him by the hand and trying to distract him meanwhile with tales of bees and singing crickets.

Exasperated though she was, the teacher hadn't the heart to maltreat him (nor had anyone, really, since he was born, ever maltreated him). She received him fairly calmly, and with only a slightly hurt manner, she said to him, frowning:

"At it again! Now what have you done? You should be ashamed of yourself, setting such a bad example. That's enough now, however. From today on, the school is closed for you."

Useppe's reaction to her words was unexpected, almost tragic. Not answering, he turned pale in the face, as he looked at her with questioning eyes, all agitated by a strange fear: not of her, but rather (it seemed ) of himself. "No! away! away!" he shouted then with a strange, altered little voice, as if he were chasing away shadows. And suddenly he burst into a scene no different, apparently, from a normal fi of temper: fl him self on the ground, fl wi th rage, inveighing and rolling around like a wrestler, kicking the air and hitting it with his fists. Usually, however, childish fits are meant to create a spectacle; while here you could sense a total isolation. You had the impression that this child, in his tininess, was really waging an immense fi against enemies present to him alone, and to no one else.

"Useppe! Useppe! Why are you acting like this? You're so nice and good! And all of us here love you . . ." Slowly Useppe calmed down at the teacher's blandishments, until he gave her a little consoled smile; and from that moment till the time class was dismissed he never let go of her skirt. At the gate, however, the teacher took Ida aside and informed her the child was
too nerv
and, at least for now, unsuited to school : so she couldn't assume responsibility for him any longer. Her advice was to leave

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him at home, in the care of some responsible person, until he reached school age, a year from now.

And Useppe the next morn didn't go to school. Contradicting himself, to the last moment, he followed Ida around the house and ques tioned her with eloquent eyes, in the uncertain hope he would go out with her, as on other mornings. But he asked no questions; he said nothing.

In the concierge's opinion, Useppe's case was simply that of an over lively little boy, always eager to
get into trouble
without the school's realiz ing. But Ida didn't agree : she knew Useppe kept certain secrets to himself ( as he had, for example, after that famous morn of his with the ban dits), but they were, she thought, secrets of another order, who knows what. In any case, it seemed futile for her to question him (or, still more, to accuse him).