History (80 page)

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suddenly to convince herself that the earth was living without Ninnuzzu. His death, for him so rapid, on the contrary was long for Ida, who began to feel it grow after the hour of his burial, at which she had not been present. From that moment, it was as if he had been divided into so many doubles of himself, each of which tortured her in a diff way.

The fi was still that merry and impudent Ninnarieddu seen the last ti at Via Bodoni as he was dashing out of the courtyard with Bella. He, for Ida, was still running about the earth. Indeed, she told herself that, walking and walking along the whole terrestrial curv and across all fron tiers, perhaps she would end up by encountering him. For this reason, at certain hours, like a pilgrim abandoning himself to the great unknown, she would set forth looking for him. Every time she went out, she always found again that terrible staring, fi noon light, those unreal dimensions, and those distorted and indecent shapes that, to her, constituted the city since the morning of the "identifi at San Giovanni. For some months now, because of her failing sight, she had had to wear glasses, and on going out, she slipped over their lenses a second pair of dark glasses, to blind herself, at least partially, against that dazzling sight. And so, in another false, eclipselike light, she hopelessly pursued her fugitive. At times she thought she recognized him in some mischievous little child who laughed and waved from the doorway, or in another, astride a motorbike, one foot on the ground, or in another who rapidly turned a comer, curl haired, in a windbreaker . . . And she hurried breathlessly after them, knowing in advance she was chasing a mirage.

In this way she went on until she was rapt in weariness, and lost all notion of facts, names, even her own identity. She no longer remembered being Ida, or her own address; and for a while she would shift uncertainly from one wall to another, through the passage of the crowd and the vehicles, with no information, as if she had happened into a world of masquers. The fi signal of awareness came to her from two little blue eyes, which glowed at her from the depth of her morbid haze like a pair of little lamps, promptly summoning her home, where she had left Useppe by himself.

Though the autumn season was mild, Useppe lived like a recluse those days, because Ida hadn't yet found the courage to take him to the park or towards the country. Even more than by the city, she was repelled by nature, because in trees and plants she saw an abnormal growth of tropical monsters, nourished on Nino's body. Here it was no longer that same Ninnuzzu who was still running about the world, making her pursue him with no trail; but the just-buried Nino, imprisoned under the earth, con fi in darkness. This other Nino appeared to her as if he had become a little baby again, crying and clinging to her, asking her for nourishment

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and company; and among Ninnuzzu's various doubles, this was the only one that belonged to her as part of her fl however, at the same time, untouchable, lost in a dizzying impossibility. His wretched den in San Lorenzo had become a point farther than the Poles and the Indies, unat tainable by ordinary routes. At times, Ida fantasticated of joining him through trenches and subterranean canals; at times she fl herself all fours on the earth, listening infi ely, to hear his heart beat.

But there was still one Nino worse than all the others : since Ida, of this one, was afraid. He presented himself to her just as he had been the day she saw him on the stretcher, for the identifi at San Giovanni : his curls and face stained with mud, and a line of blood from his nose, as if he had come home from a fistfi after a normal wicked evening spent out of the house. His lids seemed lowered as if he weren't even aware of her; but, instead, beneath the long lashes, his pupils peered at her with hatred. And with his mouth half-closed in a grimace of hatred, he said to her:

"Go away from me. It's your fault. Why did you make me be born?!" Ida knew that this Nino, like the others, now existed only in her deranged mind. And yet, she feared his persecution so much that, espe cially at night, she trembled thinking she would see him assume a shape, she would fi him waiting behind a door, or in some corner of the house, to reproach her : "Why did you give birth to me? You're the guilty one." Then, she took fright like a murderess at crossing the dark corridor, or even lying in bed with the light off She had covered the lamp at the head of the bed with
a
rag, so as not to disturb Useppe's sleep, and she turned it ti its light was full on her face, often lying this way till morning. It was a kind of third degree, really, that she unconsciously imposed on herself, to make Nino forgive her; and in which, like an informer against herself, she did nothing but denounce herself, instead of attempting a defense. It was she who had killed Ninnuzzu; and now, one by one, she dug up the countless proofs of her own crime : from his fi breath and the milk she had given him to the fi wickedness : not having prevented him, with whatever means (perhaps with the intervention of the law ) from going off to die

. . . Suddenly, the defendant Ida turned prosecutor; and she blamed Ninnarieddu, calling him gangster and criminal, as she had in the days when they lived together. This comforted her for a moment, as if he were really there to hear her; but immediately, with a shudder, the knowledge returned that he no longer lived in any place.

During the day, because of the weariness after her sleepless vigils, every now and then she would doze off And in her drowsing she would still hear Useppe's incessant little steps, in his winter boots :

tick tick tick tick

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"It's your fault,
rna.
It's your fault. It's your fault."

Ida's daily confl ts with Ninnuzzu's various doubles stopped, how ever, after the fi weeks; until, gradually, those diff doubles were fused into a single, poor creature. This fi Ninnuzzu was no longer alive, but he wasn't yet dead; and he ran raving on the earth, with no place where he could stay any more. He wanted to suck the air, the oxygen of the plants, but he had no lungs to breathe with. He wanted to chase girls, call his friends, dogs, cats, but he couldn't make anyone see or hea him. He wanted to put on that beautiful, American-style shirt displayed in the shop window, take that car and go for a spin, bite into that sandwich, but he had no body, and neither hands nor feet. He was no longer alive, but he continued, reduced to the most atrocious prison misery : the desire to live. In this impossible form, Ida felt him constantly moving around in the air, trying desperately to cling to any object at all, even the garbage can, if only to link himself once more with the earth of the living. Then Ida longed to see him even for an instant, barely the time to say to him : "Ninnuzzu!" and to hear him answer: "Aw,
rn
even if only through an hallucination. She began to shift back and forth in the kitchen, calling (in a low voice so that Useppe wouldn't hear her in the bedroom ) : "\Vh are you, Nin narieddu?" and she would bump into the walls. She felt with an irreparable physical certitude that he existed, not only here but anywhere around, always writhing, nailed to his own desire to live, worse than a cross, and envying even the least insect, or the existence of a thread that can enter the

eye of a needle. Now without any further desire to accuse her saying "it's your fault!", th;s Nino was reduced to the single cry : "help me,
rn

Iduzza had never believed in the supernatural existence of any god; indeed, it never occurred to her to think of God, still less to pray to him. And this was the fi and I believe the only prayer that escaped her lips during her whole lifetime, one of those afternoons, late, in the kitchen in Via Bondoni :

"God! give him rest if nothing else. At least let him fi dying."

The weather continued undecided, and always variable, more like March than November. And Ida, every morning, feared the reappearance of the sun, which poured out in the air the horrible shamelessness of the objects and the living, caring nothing for Ninnarieddu's impossible absence. She felt a bit alleviated, as if by a medicine, when rising from the night, she saw above the city a leaden sky, overcast to the horizon, without even a strip of light.

It was on one of these rainy morn of true autumn ( perhaps four

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or fi days had passed since the funeral, and Ida still hadn't resumed her work at the school ) when, towards eleven, someone was heard scratching at the front door of the house. Useppe started, alert to that little, still uncertain sound, as if he had been unconsciously awaiting it, and he ran towards the entrance without a word, his mouth trembling and pale. His little steps were answered, from beyond the door, by a whimper. The door had barely begun to move on its hinges, when a thrust, from outside, pushed it wide. And immediately Useppe found himself struck by the full force of an embrace of canine paws, which swung around him in a crazed dance, while a rasping tongue washed his whole face.

If Bella had been transformed, let's say, into a black bear, or even into a prehistoric or mythical animal, he would have recognized her all the same. However, besides him, perhaps no one else would have been able today to recognize in this fi stray the luxuriant shepherd dog of before. From a well-fed and carefully washed lady, in a few days she had become reduced in appearance to the lowest social level of the mongrel. Thin, her bones sticking out, her beautiful coat all a scab of mud and fi (so that her regal tail seemed a length of black string ), she was almost frightening, worse than a witch. And only in her eyes, though veiled with mourning, fatigue, and hunger, could you still recognize immediately her clean and snow-white soul. It was clear that, despite exhaustion, she had recovered at this moment all her girlish energy again to hail the rediscovery of Useppe; nor will we ever learn what and how many trials she underwent before returning to her one, last family. Had she perhaps witnessed the disaster of the truck? Escaping, thanks to her instinct, the treacherous hands of the guards and the stretcher-bearers, had she followed the ambulance, gallop ing invisibly to San Giovanni, to wander then outside those walls, un touchable as a pariah, to accompany the hearse of her Ninnuzzu? Had she perhaps, afterwards, remained lying on his grave, keeping watch, like a statue? Or perhaps, like Ida, had she set out to hunt for him in the streets of Rome or even perhaps of Naples or who knows where, following the scent he had left in his movements, still vivid and fresh on the earth? No one will ever be able to say. The story of this evasion of hers remained always her own secret, about which Useppe himself never questioned her, not even later. Meanwhile, there in the entrance, in a little voice tinged with panic, he only repeated to her: "Bella . . . Bella . . ." and nothing else, while she was making a love-speech which to uncouth ears would sound merely like : "Grui grruii hump hump hump" but whose translation (superfl for Useppe) would be : "Now you're all I have left in the world. And no one will ever be able to part us."

So, starting today, there were three of them in the house in Via

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Bodoni; and starting that same day, Useppe had two mothers. Bella, in fact-unlike Blitz-from the fi meeting, had felt for Useppe a love diff from her love of Nino. With the big Nino, she behaved like a slave companion; and with the little Useppe, on the contrary, like a pro· tectress and a guard. Now the arrival of his new mother Bella was a stroke of luck for Useppe; since at present his mother Iduzza not only was old (some strangers, seeing her with him, assumed she was his grandmother) but also strange in her behavior, and childish.

After a brief period of absence, she had resumed her daily lessons. And her little pupils, in formed that the poor lady, in the meanwhile, had lost a son, at first displayed, in their way, a certain respectful sympathy. Some of them came and put on her desk, as a present, some bunches of fl ( which she avoided even touching, and looked at them with wide fright ened eyes, as if she saw leeches ). And, if not all, at least the majority tried to maintain a polite, calm deportment in class. But you can't demand the impossible of about forty wretched fi convicts, who, among other things, had known their teacher less than two months. The winter of '46 marked an irreparable decline in Ida's professional quality.

Till now, even through the various vicissitudes of the times, she had always remained a good teacher. Obviously her teaching had never been a model of progressive methods! On the contrary, she knew how to do nothing except transmit to her elementary pupils those ordinary notions that to her, as an elementary pupil, had been passed on by her teachers, who in turn had received them from their teachers, etc. On occasion, obeying the dictates of the Authorities, she introduced into their themes and dictation the Kings, Duces, Fatherland, glory, battles that History imposed; however, she did it in all mental innocence, unsuspecting, be cause History, no more than God, had never been an object of her thoughts. I say she was a good teacher, only to say that children were her sole predestined vocation (in fact, she herself, as has already been reported and repeated, had never managed to grow up completely). Even her re spect for Authority was the kind found in children, and not that privately conceived by those Authorities themselves. From this she even developed, in the minimal territory of her classroom, and only there, a certain natural authority of her own : perhaps also because the children felt they were protecting her against the enormous outside Fears they themselves shared with her. And they respected her the way children respect anyone who entrusts himself to their protection, even if only a donkey. This spontane ous relationship, not desired or reasoned out, had been maintained virtu ally intact for almost a quarter-century of Iduzza's existence, surv the loss of Alfi her husband, and of her father and her mother, and racism,