History (81 page)

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war's destruction, famines, and slaughters. It was a kind of miraculous little calyx that reopened each morning at the top of her bodily stem, even if the stem swayed, roughly treated by arctic winds. But in that winter of 1946, her fl which seemed perpetual, was exhausted.

The deterioration had begun, really, at the beginning of autumn, with Useppe's exile from the school. Although Useppe himself had wanted the exile ( through that instinct that drives wounded animals to hide), Ida, at that blow, perhaps without being aware of it, had felt carnally off by the en tire world of other people: as if they had fl Useppe into the lowest zone of outcasts. And in this zone, she herself chose to remain with him defi ively : her real place was there. Perhaps she didn't even realize this choice of hers, but by now the fi chilhood on earth for her meant Useppe. And then the only others in whom she had found comprehension ( children ), they too, like the whole adult world, began to frighten her. The Iduzza Mancuso who returned to her little illiterate pupils after the period of mourning no longer seemed a teacher. She resembled a poor novice slave-laborer who arrives at the factory of the older laborers, dazed by the long march across Siberia.

After the fi sleepless nights, now, in the evening, she was overcome by a somnolence that made her doze on her feet. And such was her furious longing to trace Ninnuzzu that she hoped, at least, to meet him in a dream. But in her dreams, Ninnuzzu never showed up; indeed, most of the time, all living forms were excluded from them. Before her, for example, there opens an endless sandy plain, perhaps an ancient buried kingdom of Egypt or of the Indies, with no sign of a horizon, all planted to infi with perpendicular stone slabs, bearing indecipherable exotic inscri

It seems those inscriptions explain something important (or fundamental ) for anyone who can read. But the only person present is she herself, who cannot read.

Then another infi y presents itself to her, a dirty, barely ruffi ocean where innumerable shapeless things are fl things that may have been clothes, sacks, crockery, or other norm objects, but all now are limp, colorless, unrecognizable. Of organic forms, even dead, she sees no trace; but strangely, these materials, though inanimate, express death more clearly than if there were bodily remains in their place. Here, too, there is no sign of a horizon. And over the water, instead of the sky, there stretches a kind of concave, dull mirror, which refl the view of the same ocean, chaotic and indistinct, like a memory about to fade.

Elsewhere, the solitary sleeper goes wandering inside an enclosure, amid a wreckage of rusting scrap-iron, the pieces gigantic as dinosaurs around her, so tiny. She listens alert, anxiously in the hope of some human

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voice, were it even the groan of a dying man. But the only sound in this space is a siren's whistle, which for that matter is also an echo, repeated from who knows what millennia! infi . . .

Springing up from these dreams at the summons of the alarm, Iduzza found herself always so bewildered and awkward she wasn't even able to dress herself. One morning, at school, having taken off her coat, she was writing something on the blackboard when she heard subdued laughter running along the desks behind her back. In fact, the hem of her skirt had been caught in her corset, exposing a little naked strip of her thigh, over the garter, all twisted and worn. Aware of it, she blushed purple with shame, worse than a soul displaying its sins before the Last Judgment.

Often, in that season, she had an accidentally com
i
c eff on her pupils. One morning, shortly after she had installed herself at her desk, she

happened to doze off (perhaps because of the sleeping pills she took in the evening) and waking at their racket, she thought, for some reason, she was in a tram and thus said to one of the desks : "Hurry, hurry, we get off at the next stop!" Every now and then she stumbled over the dais; or else, think ing she was going to the board, she headed for the door; or she got words mixed up ( for example, instead of saying to a pupil, "take your copybook," she said to him, "take your coff ). Her voice, as she imparted the usual notions to her little audience, sounded like an out-of-tune hurdy-gurdy; and at times she would suddenly break off while her face would assume a dull, dazed expression, no longer remembering the subject she had been ex pounding a moment before. Still, she forced herself, as usual, to guide the more backward children's fi over the paper; but her own hands trem bled so that the letters came out crooked, ridiculous. On certain days her lessons, for the children, were better than a Punch-and-Judy show.

The relative discipline she had maintained in the past, familiarly and without eff was diminishing from day to day and breaking down Even a stranger could have identifi at once, among all the others, the door to her classroom, by the incessant sound of voices, the disorder and shuffl heard from it. At times, there were such deafening outcries inside there that the janitor looked in from the threshold, concerned. And a couple of times the Headmistress herself appeared, though she withdrew discreetly, saying nothing. Unfortunately, in their faces Iduzza thought she could read pitiless threats : reports of unsatisfactory performance to the Ministry, and perhaps loss of her post . . . But, in reality, she was shown a special indulgence, however temporary, in consideration of her past meri and of her recent trials : bombed out in the war, the loss of her son, a former heroic partisan, and now her solitude with the other little boy without a name . . . ( In the school, who knows why, there was a rumor that, after

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her widowhood, she had casually forn with a close relative, and in this way the child's neuropathic nature was explained.)

The pupils' parents, somehow informed of their bad conduct, took pity on Ida and urged her to beat them if necessary. But in all her life she had never hit anyone, not even in the days of her devilish little fi stborn, and not even at the time of Blitz, who, having grown up in the streets, boorish and without any manners, at the beginning often went peeing around the house! The very idea of punishing, or even frightening, fright ened her fi of all . And so in the childish tumult of her classroom, she writhed, stupefi and helpless, as if at a lynching. All she could do was to beseech them saying : "Sssh . . . sssh . . . silence, silence . . ." with her hands clasped as if in prayer, trotting and staggering among the unruly desks. l l1ose forty poor kids no longer seemed children to her, but a race of malign dwarfs, and she could no longer distinguish their individual faces, confusing them in a single hostile mass with adult, persecuting features. "Sssh . . . sssh . . ." Her only consolation, during those hours of purga tory, was that sooner or later the bell would ring and release her. And then, eager as the worst blockheads of the school, she would rush out towards Via Bodoni and Useppe.

All the same, she was obliged, before going home, to make the usual detours here and there for her daily shopping and other errands. And not infrequently, in those days, she would take the wrong street, so several times she had to retrace her steps, driven through that familiar neighbor hood itinerary like a foreigner in a hostile country. It was on such an occasion that, one morning, beyond a street cluttered with tracks being repaired, she saw an elderly creature, shapeless and laughing, come towards her, advancing with great, rickety steps, waving her arms and greeting her with guttural cries of exultation and of agitation at the same time. Ida stepped back as at the sight of a ghost, having immediately recognized her ( though changed ) as Vilma, the "prophetess" of the Ghetto, whom she had never seen since and had long believed deported and dead in a Lager, with the other Jews of the quarter. Vilma instead had escaped capture ( finding refuge in the convent of her famous Nun ) and indeed a story is told of her, which I have actually heard in various versions, and which goes back to the date of the big German "round-up," Saturday, October 16th, 1943. They say that on the eve of that day, Friday, October 15th, towards evening, Vilma ran weeping and breathless into the little Jewish district, calling from below in a loud voice to the families, gathered in their homes at that hour for the Sabbath prayers. Like a tattered herald, running in tears through the narrow streets, she begged them all to fl taking with them the old people also and the babies and saving whatever they had that

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they valued, because the hour of the massacre (already announced by her so many times ) had come, and at dawn the Germans would arrive with trucks; and her Signora had even seen the lists of names . . . A number of people looked out of the windows at her shouts, and some came down to their front doors; but nobody believed her. Not many days before, the Germans ( whom the Jews considered fi perhaps but "men of honor" ) had signed an agreement guaranteeing the safety of the Jewish population of Rome, after receiving the desired ransom : fi kilograms of gold! col lected miraculously, with the help of the whole city. Vilma was treated, as usual, as a poor crack-brained visionary, and the Ghetto's inhabitants went back up into their homes to fi their prayers, leaving her alone. That evening it was pouring rain, and Vilma, returning to the convent, all sweating and soaked, had been seized by a raging fever, the kind that usually attacks animals rather than humans : from which she had then risen, on being cured, in her present state of chaos, perhaps without mem ory, and happy. Her language was no longer intelligible; but she did no harm to anyone, and she still worked like a mule, so she continued to earn her double protection : from the Signora and the Nun. The latter, indeed, had had her baptized one Sunday in the church of Santa Cecilia; except that later they discovered that in her infancy, through the intervention of a godmother, she had already been baptized. And so Vilma, in her existence, received baptism twice.

At present, she looked like a creature without sex, and also without age, though from many signs you could tell she was old. Her hair was white, and clumps had fallen out, leaving some pink bald patches here and there on her head. She tied her hair with a bluish ribbon, knotted over her brow. And though it was win ter, she wore only a little cotton summer dress ( clean and neat) , her legs bare, with no stockings; and yet she seemed overheated. She laughed loudly, with enthusiasm, as if she had been wait ing a long time for this meeting with Ida; and she made great feverish and disjointed gestures to her, assuming the poses, from time to time, of hier atic or bacchic dances. She seemed eager to tell some news or some joyous announcement; but from her mouth came only certain thick and inarticu late sounds, which she explained by laughing and touching her throat, as if to acknowledge some disease there. Her mouth was toothless, but the splendor of her eyes, abnorm before, had now become almost unbearable.

Still under the fi impression, of seeing a ghost, Ida tried to move away from her; but in a moment, Vilma, as she had come, with the same urgent haste, crossed the tracks again, as if she were rushing to some appointment that couldn't be postponed, in the opposite direction.

Ida never saw her again; btit I have reason to believe she survived a long ti In fact, I think I recognized her, not long ago, in the midst of

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that little bunch of old women who go every day to feed the stray cats at the Theater of Marcellus or other Roman ruins. She was still wearing her ribbon around her head, though her hair had been reduced to a few woolly clumps; and this time too she was wearing a light little dress, poor but decent, over bare legs, which now seemed dotted-perhaps because of some blood disease-by little brown spots. She was sitting on the ground among the cats, always talking to them in that broken and inarticulate language of hers, whose timbre, however, now resembled the voice of a little girl. From the way they came to her and answered her, the cats, at any rate, obviously understood her language very well; and among them, she was oblivious and blissful, like someone immersed in a celestial conver sation.

Meanwhile, in the course of that post-war year, the "Big" men of the earth, with various "summit meetings," trials of the most notorious crimi nals, interventions, and non-interventions, were busy reestablishing some kind of appropriate order. The great social metamorphosis, however, for merly awaited with impatience by certain of our friends (such as Eppe tondo and Quattropunte), on all sides, east and west, fell apart the moment it was touched, or else it fl in every direction, like a mirage. In Italy, with the republic established, the working-class parties also had a role in the government. And after so many wretched years, this was surely a luxury and a novelty, which nevertheless clothed an old indestructible skeleton. The Duce and his supporting cast had been buried, and the Royal Family had packed its bags; but those who pulled the strings re mained backstage, even after the scenery changed. The landowners still held the land, the industrialists the machinery and the factories, the offi their ranks, the bishops their dioceses. And the rich were fed at the expense of the poor, who then aimed, in their turn, at taking the place of the rich, according to the general rule. But neither among those rich, nor among those poor was the place of Iduzza Ramundo, who belonged, tr