History (88 page)

"Come in !" Davide's voice exclaimed from inside. It was certainly his voice, but welcoming, with a light and content tone, never heard before. "The door's locked!" Useppe informed him in reply, with great trepida tion. And then Davide, not bothering even to ask who it was, rising for a moment from the bed, where he was stretched out, came to the door; but before opening it, with a kick he thrust under the bed, from the rug on which they had been lying, a broken ampoule and a wad of cotton, stained with a few drops of blood.

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"Who is it? Ah, it's you!" he said, with that incredible voice of his, clear and relaxed, as if Useppe's visit were a completely natural phenome non : "Funny : I was thinking about you!" he added, brightening with an intuitive tenderness, faintly tinged with wonder: "I didn't know I was thinking about you, but now I understand : it was you I was thinking about."

And he lay down again on the bed, which hadn't been made for God knows how long. On the striped mattress there was only, at the head, a pillow gray with dirt, and, at the foot, a twisted sheet, also grayish. The blanket was piled on the fl near the chair, his pants fl on it and some newspapers. His jersey was on the fl farther away, in another part of the room.

"Bella's here too!" Useppe announced, as if the sight of her weren't enough, for Bella had actually preceded him inside, still attached to him by the leash. She celebrated the meeting by wagging her tail, but she re strained herself from some of her excessive and crazy demonstrations, no doubt conscious of a guest's duties. Promptly eyeing the heap of the blan ket and assuming it was a bed prepared here on purpose for her, she settled on it like a bayadere, still wagging her tail.

Davide's body, almost supine on the bed, wearing only some briefs, revealed his terrible thinness; all his ribs protruded, but his face had a childish vivacity, fi with surprise but also with trust, as at a meeting between children of the same age who have run into each other.

"I recognized your footsteps," he declared, still with that simplicity of a moment ago, accepting the unlikely as a normal event, "tiny little footsteps . . . tiny tiny . . . And I thought:
here he is, he's coming; but who is he?
I didn't recognize the name, and yet I know it very well : Useppe! Who doesn't know it? Today wasn't the fi time I thought of you, after all; lots of other times I've thought about you again . . ."

Useppe brightened, in a hopeful stammering. Every now and then, on looking at him, Davide would laugh briefl

"You and your brother," he remarked in one breath, changing posi tion, "are so diff you don't even seem like brothers. But you're alike in one thing : happiness. Your happiness is the joy of . . . of everything. You're the happiest creature in the world. Always, every time I've seen you, I've thought that, since the fi days I met you, there in that big room . . .
I
always avoided looking at you, I felt such pity! And since then-would you believe it?-I've always remembered you . . .
"

"Me too!!"

". . . eh, you were just a baby then, and you're still a little kid, all the same. Don't pay any attention to what I say: this is my gala day, I'm giving

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a ball! But when you meet me, you should run away: especially when I'm dancing! You're too pretty for this world; you don't belong here. \Vh do they say?
Happiness is not of this world."

He untwisted that dirty sheet from between his legs and now drew it up over his chest, gripped by a comical feeling of modesty, but also of cold (among other things, he hadn't eaten). Unlike the hair on his head, which was wiry and almost erect, on his chest and under his armpits he had wooly curls, like astrakhan. And their exuberant black was in contrast with the present extreme pallor of his dark body which, in its thinness, seemed to have returned to a fi adolescence. He had Rung himself down with his head thrown back, and his eyes roamed towards the ceiling in an ingenuous meditation, grave and spellbound. In his face, though wasted and smudged with beard, today you could recognize that little student of the identity card photograph the women of The Thousand had examined curiously, in a circle, the fi evening of his arrival.

"I've always loved happiness !" he confessed. "On some days, when I was a boy, I was so filled with it I would start running, my arms wide, longing to yell : it's too much, too much! I can't keep it all for myself. I have to give it to somebody else."

But Useppe, meanwhile, was there, still yearning to clear up a funda mental point of their earlier dialogue: ". . . Me too," he resumed, from that point, in a kind of whirr, "you shouldn't think I forgot, about you, when you lived there with us, and you slept there! You had sunglasses, and a bag . . .
"

Looking at him again, Davide's eyes laughed.

"From now on," he proposed, "will we be friends? Will we ALWAYS be friends?"

"Ess-ss . . . Yyess !"

"You still have that cowlick standing up in the middle of your head!" Davide remarked, looking at him, and laughing softly.

In the room, with the door closed, the afternoon light barely fi through the curtain of the little window; and there was a stagnant, almost cold semidarkness. Clearly nobody ever swept or tidied up in there : ciga rette butts were strewn on the fl and some empty, crumpled packs of Nazionali, and here and there cherry pits. On a straight chair which serv

as bedside table there had remained an empty syringe, next to a bologna sandwich, barely bitten into at one end. For the furnishing, everything had remained, more or less, as in Santina's time. Only there were a few books on the table, while the doll had been eliminated or put away somewhere; and the two holy pictures on the wall were covered with sheets of news paper.

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The place somehow reminded Useppe of the big room of The Th sand, and he liked it without reservations. His happy little eyes wandered about, and he also took a few exploratory steps.

"And where are you going, all alone, in Rome?" Davide asked, raising himself up on one arm.

"We're going to the
sea!"
Bella interjected. Useppe, however, aware that Davide perhaps didn't understand the shepherdess's language, trans lated for him, correcting:

"We're going to the
river!
Not this river here," he promptly confi "but farther on, past San Paolo! and then farther, lots farther on!!" He was about to tell Davide of their encounter with that winged songster who knew the refrain : "it's a joke . . . etc." but he changed his mind, and after a pause, asked him instead,

"Have you ever seen a little animal" (with his two hands he indicated its size) "without any tail, brown with yellow patches . . . and short legs? . . .
"

"What other animal does it look like, for example? . . ."

"Like a rat . . . only without a tail . . . and its ears aren't as big!" Useppe eagerly explained.

"It could be . . . a dwarf pika? . . . a guinea pig . . . a ham ster . . ." Useppe would have liked to give and ask further information; but Davide, following his own train of thought, remarked with a futile smile:

"Me, when I was a kid like you, I wanted to be an explorer, I wanted to see every do everything . . . But now," he added with a gesture of weakness and almost nauseated lack of appetite, "I don't even feel like raising my hand, or going any place . . . But one of these days I'll have to go to work! I want to do manual labor, something hard, so when I come home at night I'll be tired and I won't be able to think any more! . . . Do you think much?"

"Me? . . . yes, I think."

"What do you think about?"

Here Bella made a sound, to encourage Useppe. He wriggled on his little legs, looked at her, then looked at Davide again.

"I make poems!" he told him, blushing with secrecy and trust. "Ah! Yes, I had heard you're a poet!"

"Who from?!" Useppe glanced at Bella, the only one who knew . (But actually, it had been Nino who, boasting to his friend of his famous if spurious little brother, had said to him, among other things : "If you ask me, he'll be a poet or a champion! You ought to see him jump! And hear him talk!" )

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"You mean you already write poems?" Davide resumed, ignoring Useppc's question.

"Nnooo . . . I don't want to
wite
. . . I . . . no . . ." (as usual, in moments of emotion or confusion, Useppe lapsed into his erroneous, abbreviated baby's utterance)
"
. . . I think the poems . . . and I say them . . ."

"Who do you say them to?"

'To her!" Useppe nodded towards Bella, who wagged her tail. "Say them to me, too, if you remember them."

"No, I don't remember . . . I think them, then I forget them right away. There's lots of them . . . but little! LOTS, though! I think them when I'm by myself, and even when I'm not by myself, I think some someti

"Think one now!"

"Ess."

Immediately, Useppe frowned, beginning to think. ". . . But just one isn't big enough . . ." he remarked, shaking his head, ". . . now I'll think a lot of diff ones, and I'll say them to you!" The better to concentrate, he shut his eyes so hard his eyelids wrinkled. Then a moment later, when he reopened them, his gaze, like songbirds', seemed to follow a shifting, luminous point out of eyeshot. At the same time, accompanied by a sway ing of his legs, his airy, shy little voice began to chant:

"Stars like trees and rustle like trees.

"The sun on the ground like a handful of little chains and rings. "The sun all like lots of feathers a hundred a thousand feathers. "The sun up in the air like lots of steps of buildings.

"The moon like a stairway and at the top Bella looks out and hides. "Sleep canaries folded up like two roses.

"The ttars like swallows saying hello to each other. And in the trees. "The river like pretty hair. And the pretty hair.

"The fi like canaries. And they fl away. "And the leaves like wings. And they fl away. "And the horse like a fl

"And he fl away."

Since each of these lines for him was an entire poem, between one and another he had marked the pauses with a breath; until, having said the last, he gave a louder breath, stopped swaying, and ran towards his audience. Bella welcomed him with a little festive leap; and Davide, who had lis-

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tened with great gravity and respect, declared to him firm : "Your poems all talk about GOD!"

Then throwing his head back on the pillow, he seriously began ex plaining his personal opinion : "All your poems," he said thoughtfully, rationally, "center about a LIKE . . . And these LIKES, taken all to gether, in chorus, mean to say : GOD! The only true God is recognized through the resemblances of all things. Wherever you look, you discover a single, common imprint. And so, from one resemblance to another, step by step, you climb up to one alone. For a religious mind, the universe repre sents a process where, from one testimony to another, all in agreement, you arrive at the point of truth . . . And the most reliable witnesses, obvi ously, are not clergy, but atheists. And it's not with institutions, or with metaphysics that you testify. God,
that is nature
. . . For a religious mind," he concluded gravely, "there is no object, not even a worm or a wisp of straw, that doesn't testify equally to the existence of GOD!"

Useppe had seated himself familiarly on the easy chair, from which his thin little legs swung in mid-air, his naked feet in sandals; while Bella, comfortably curled up between bed and chair, gazed blissfully fi at Useppe then at Davide. And Davide, meanwhile, pursued his own medita tions aloud, as if he were disputing in a dream with some great Doctor, no longer realizing he was speaking to two poor illiterates. As if, indeed, he no longer remembered who, among the three there in the room, was the cultivated student, and who the kid and who the dog . . . Still, all of a sudden, his eyes stared with attention at a place on his own naked arm, where a slightly swollen vein showed a dot of blood on the surface, like an insect's bite. Every time he had recourse to his medicine, Davide always injected it at that precise point of that vein, always the same one, because of a mysterious fi which perhaps concealed his intention of deliber ately creating a visible sign of his own recidivous cowardice. However, the intoxica which now cradled him like a mother, promptly distracted him from that defaming brand. He was taken with the musical pleasure of his own voice, while his eyes had become limpid in their blackness, like pure and cool water refl the night.