History (79 page)

Having stretched him out on the bed again, Ida wiped a little blood fl ked foam from the corner of his lips; and letting her do it, he dreamily touched his damp hair: "What happened to me, rn But already this question came from him confused in a yawn, and his eyelids lowered again almost abruptly. His fi great desire was to sleep.

He slept almost the whole day, bu t towards noon, he woke for a brief interv He neither remembered nor knew anything of his own attack ( these attacks-the doctors were to explain to Ida-
are not experienced by the sub;ect),
however, he must have sensed somehow that he had under gone an off of which he was ashamed. He huddled up across the
sommier.
And fi of all, hiding his face in the pillow, he urged her: "When he comes back, rn don't tell Nino . . ."

Ida reassured him, shaking her head, promising to keep the secret : still all unaware that Useppe's insistence was already futile. Now there would be no more time to talk to his brother. A few hours later, in fact ( barely another day and a scant night), an incredible thing was to happen : so incredible that even today, from this distance which makes the living and the dead equal, I continue to suspect it of being a fraud. But, instead, it happened. Like so many of his companions of the "violent generation," Ninnuzzu Mancuso-Ace of Hearts was also suddenly, roughly fl aside by life. In May of the following year he would have been twenty-one.

Although she had been inclined since birth to believe in premonitions, Ida this time had had none. And so when a policeman turned up at the house early in the morning, and asked her: "Are you related to Mancuso Anto nino?" her fi question was : "Why? Has he done anything wrong?" She immediately realized the policeman's embarrassment. ''I'm his mother . . ." she declared, stammering. But already the man's considerate informa ti was coming to her from beyond an abnormal, hollow clamor. It was a road crash (actually, the man said
accident)
on the Via Appia. A

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truck had run off the road. "Your son was wounded . . . badly." They had taken him to the emergency station at San Giovanni.

From Via Bodoni to reach the San Giovanni hospital you have to cross half the city. Iduzza must have had to go to the tram stop, board the tram, buy a ticket, get off at the other stop, make inquiries; and someone must have had to direct her to the place. But of all this journey, her consciousness recorded nothing, marking only the point of arrival, like a torn picture. It is a whitewashed room : Ida knows this, because curiously, on fi entering she seemed to taste that dusty lime, as if it were in her mouth. Whether it is an isolated room or a passage, with windows or without, this she can't tell : just as the presence of people accompanying her to the hospital is confused. In front of her are two stretchers, with the shapes of two bodies, entirely covered by sheets. A hand has raised the fi sheet. It's not he : a bloodstained head of a young man with blondish hair, left with half a face, the other half disfi They have raised the second sheet, and this one is Nino, visible to the neck. No wound can be seen on him, only a line of blood beneath his nose. And perhaps because of an eff of the light, he doesn't even seem very pale. His unmarked cheeks and his curls are spattered here and there with mud. His upper lip pro trudes, parted, his eyelids with their long curving lashes do not seem natu rally lowered, but as if crushed over his eyes in a kind of bitter subjugation. The last expression which has remained on his face is an animal, hesitant ingenuousness, which seems to be asking, filled with amazement: "What's happening to me?l I feel something I've never felt before. Something strange, I don't understand."

On recognizing him, Ida immediately had a fi lacerating sensation in the vagina, as if they were tearing him again from there. Unlike Useppe's, Nino's birth had been terri for her, after a long and diffi labor, which had almost drained her of blood. At birth, the baby weighed almost seven pounds, too big for a tiny little mother bearing her fi child, and they had had to rip him by force from her body. But then the little mother had let out such savage cries that she seemed a great, massive beast, according to what her husband Alfi told her afterwards, teasing her; whereas today, on the contrary no sound could emerge from Ida's throat, as if they had poured concrete over her.

Here, after the scene in the morgue, is the second half-conscious sensation that was to remain with her from that morning: she couldn't scream, she had become mute, and she was walking along certain unrecog nizable streets, where the light was a blinding zenith, giving all objects an obscene prominence. The photographs displayed at the kiosks laughed obscenely, the crowd was writhing, and the numerous statues on top of the basilica swooped down in monstrous attitudes. Those statues were the

394 H I S T O R Y . . . . . . 1 9 46

same she had seen in the days after Useppe's birth, from the midwife Ezekiel's windows; today, however, the basilica was distorted, and so were all the other houses and buildings around, as if in convex mirrors. The streets were twisted and stretched out in every direction, to an excessive degree, against nature. And so her own house, too, was shifted away: however, she had to run there urgently, because she had left Useppe alone, not yet awake.

vVhere was she now?
Porta Metronia
must have been the name of this place. Ida, Ida, where are you going? You've taken the wrong direction. The fact is that these villages are made of plaster, all plas ter, which can crack and collapse any moment. She herself is a piece of plaster, and
i-i
sks crumbling into fragments and being swept away before she reaches home. In any case, no telling how, she has made it. She has reached Via Bodoni, climbed to the door. She is inside the house. Here, at last, for a while anyway, she can fl herself down, let herself fall into dust.

Useppe had got up and had also dressed, by himself. Ida heard perhaps his voice asking her: "\Vh you doing, rn sleeping?" and her own voice answering : "Yes, I'm a bit sleepy. I'll get up soon," as her body was breaking into dust and rubble, like a wall. From her childhood, perhaps heard from her mother's lips, the words
wailing wall
returned to her. She didn't know, in reality, what this
wailing wall
was exactly, but the name echoed to her in the room, even if she could neither wail nor weep. Not only her own body, but the walls themselves rustled and hissed, turning to dust. But she still hadn't lost consciousness, because, in that enormous downpour of dust, she heard a constant tick tick tick. It was Useppe's little shoes. The whole time he did nothing but walk, never stopping, back and forth through the rooms of the house. Tick tick tick tick. He walked up and down, for miles, in his little boots.

Later, when the papers had come out, the doorbell started ringing. Besides the concierge and her granddaughter, Filomena and Annita Mar rocco came, the teacher from the nursery school, the old colleague, Gio vannino's former teacher, Clemente's sister Consolata. Ida answered the door to all of them, her face stiff and white as a plaster cast, to whisper: "You mustn't talk about it in front of the baby. He mustn't know any thing." So the silenced visitors stood in the kitchen around Ida, huddled on a chair by the stove. Every now and then Useppe would peer in, wearing his mongomeri, because the house was cold; he looked like a domestic dwarf. He would peep in and then withdraw. The Marrocco women suggested taking him out, to distract him a little, but Ida wouldn't have it. In reality, after the attack two days before, she was secretly afraid he might have another, in the presence of outsiders; and that people, in consequence, might begin trea ting him like an invalid or a backward child.

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Towards evening, a telegram of condolence arrived from the headmis tress of the school. There were no relatives to inform. After the death of her grandparents in Calabria, Ida had had no further communication with her uncles and cousins left down there. Practically speaking, she had no relations or friends in the world.

Annita and Consolata helped her through the necessary formalities, assisted by Remo the tavernkeeper, who lent the money for the funeral and also provided a wreath of red carnations with a ribbon saying :
from his comrades.
Ida lacked the strength to do anything. She was called to Police Headquarters to be asked some questions, but the Inspector, seeing her, felt pity and let her go without insisting. For that matter, it was clear she knew even less than the Inspector himself did about her own son.

She didn't want to know any details of the accident. · If someone mentioned it, she would stammer: "No, not yet. Don't tell me anything, not now." It seemed there were three of them, on the truck. One, the driver, was already dead when help arrived. Nino had died at the door of the hospital. The third, wounded in the abdomen, his legs shattered, was lying in a ward at San Giovanni, under police guard.

There was, in fact, something shady about the episode, from what Ida herself could make out from her dazed conversation at Headquarters. It seems the truck was suspect, because of a stolen license plate, and under a load of wood, it was actually transporting illegal merchandise, with, more over, some unauthori concealed weapons, of the kind formerly issued to the German army. There were still some cases (as the Inspector had to explain to Ida ) of ex-partisans, plotting vague future acts of subversion or pseudo-revolution, which, for the present, really came down to penal illicit activities in the world of smuggling or acts of minor banditry . . . All this was at present under investigation. The only surv of the three, before losing consciousness, had had time to scrawl the names and addresses of the other two on a piece of paper. Already half delirious, he had also insistently asked for news of a dog which, it seems, was with them on the truck; but they knew nothing of this famous dog's fate.

The accident had taken place shortly before dawn. Apparently the highway police had fi signaled the truck to stop, but instead of stopping, the driver had pressed on the accelerator, swerving into a side road, no one could say with what precise intention. Then the chase had immediately begun, and the occupants of the truck ( so the policemen testifi had reacted by fi some shots from the cab. For their part, the police had returned the fi but only to intimidate, aiming at the tires (on the scene they later found some cartridge-cases whose exact origin was still being debated). And in the course of the brief shooting, perhaps because of a miscalculation of the driver's, or perhaps because the road was slippery (it

3 9 6 H I S T O R Y
.
.
. . . .
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had rained during the night), at the fi curv the truck had run off the road, plunging down an embankment beside it. It was still dark.

Three days later the surv of the trio, a mechanic by profession, also died, after a long, uninterrupted delirium. In his condition, they had been able to extract no information from him about his own activity or that of his companions and their possible accomplices, and even the further in· vestigation ( which confi the police version of the event) achieved nothing on this score. Among those questioned were also Proietti Remo, owner of a tavern in the Tiburtino quarter, member of the Communist Party since underground days; and Segre Davide, student, Jew: both former members of the same partisan group to which Mancuso had be longed. But both proved unconnected with the events. In the end, the case was fi away.

8

The mother hadn't gone to the funeral; and even afterw she could never fi the strength to go to Verano, where Ninnarieddu had been laid, a short distance from the old house of San Lorenzo, where he had grown up. Her legs buckled at the very

idea of seeking him out inside that ugly wall which, in childhood, he had run past so often, playing, as if it were an odd frontier that didn't concern him. Now, the red carnation wreath of the
Comrades
had dried up over that little hole, unvisited by his mother. And the little bunches of cheap fresh fl which every now and then appeared to decorate it, were not brought there by her.

She hadn't even wept. In front of Useppe, in fact, she had to make an eff of concealment; and with outsiders, a suspicion restrained her. She had the sensation that if she merely uttered a moan, after it, like the breaking of a dike, irrepressible screams would burst out, and screaming, she would go mad. Then people would lock her up, and the poor little bastard Useppe would be left with no one.

She yelled only in dreams. \V she managed to doze off she heard terrible cries, which were her own. But these cries resounded only in her brain. Inside the house, all was silence.

Her sleep was more of a drowsiness, fragile, often interrupted. And it happened that, stirring in the night, she would fi Useppe awake, with a look as if he were questioning her, his eyes open. Still, he never asked her anything: nor did he seek news of Nino any more.

During the last years, Ida had become spellbound in the magic faith that her son Ninnuzzu was invulnerable. And now, it was hard for her