History (99 page)

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1947

They considered themselves just-in complete good faith!-and nobody contradicted them in this error. His father was considered by all a respect able man, his mother a lady above reproach, his sister a well-raised little girl, a
putela bene allevata
. . . Yes, and in fact she has been raised in conformity with the code of the two
veci
( the old couple, her parents) and she copies it with such naturalness that at times you would say it was a congenital scri transmitted to her, by the
veci,
in their genes . . . You can see reproduced in her-though in embryo-their same ordi nances of justice! It's easy for her, for example, to let herself be waited on ( and even have her shoes laced!) -hcr, a
putel
a
-by a maid who has been in the household for half a century and who is old enough to be her great grandmother . . . And it seems logical to her to insist the two
veci
buy her a little plaid cape seen in a shop-window (she who has a couple of new overcoats in her closet), for the reason that plaid is absolutely the latest thing, and the other girls her age have one! If by any chance, there are some, perhaps, without any coat or winter shoes, she doesn't count them : as if they were on another planet . . .

"Is she a pretty girl, your sister?" the old man with the medal asked him, directly, at this point.

". . . Yes . . ." Davide answered, dumbfounded, after a moment, "she's pretty . . ." And in this answer, despite his grouchy voice, there involuntarily emerged a brotherly satisfaction in which all his previous harshness was dissolved; while a colored mist fl into his irises, only to fl out again at once, irreparably. He found himself suddenly suspended in a state of delirious youthfulness, which diverted him with its impossible consolation, as if he were chasing a cloud : " . . . but she's stupid . . ." he added, in the tone of certain fi brothers who, embarrassed, pretend to taunt. And he declared, comical and discontent: "You can hand her any silly story, and she'll believe it. If you yell at her, one morning: 'Good heavens! what's happened to you?! Your nose has grown a foot long overnight!!' she'll rush to the mirror, scared to death. Any nonsense is enough to make her laugh : you just have to whisper into her ear, pretend ing it's some big secret, a word you've invented at random, which doesn't mean anything, like
perepe
or
bomborombo,
and she'll explode right away in terrifi laughter! . . . And in the same way she's ready to start crying over a trifl 'When Davide was little,' somebody at home recalls, 'the French circus came to tO\\TI, and he wanted to go every evening, to every show!' 'And me?' she asks ri away, 'me no?' 'You weren't here,' they explain to her, 'You weren't born yet.' And she bursts into huge tears at this news! . . . She thinks that if you plant a pearl, a necklace will grow, or maybe that a donkey was born of the cart; and if her girl friends disagree with these opinions of hers, she says they're ignorant . . . She strokes her

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dolls as if they were cats purring, and she ties ribbons on the puppy, convinced she's doing him a favor . . . But she's afraid of big dogs . . . She's even afraid of thunder . . ."

This information about the nameless sister was received, on Useppe's part, with a series of laughs, in which you could sense, beyond his amuse ment, a hint of boasting. In fact, among the subjects dealt with today by Davide, all more or less abstruse and inaccessible to him, it was a matter of personal satisfaction to encounter one that belonged to him at last, within his experi

Unfortuna tely, a fi siren, or some other public service passing through the street at that moment, partially drowned out, for the child's alert ear, his friend's last remarks : ". . . when she receives a present she likes, she takes it to bed with her at night . . . if she has good marks at school, she sleeps with her report card by her pillow . . . at bedtime, she never wants to put out the light in her room . . . A real pain . . . on the pretext of saying goodnight to this one or that . . . a pain . . .
"

"And where is your sister now?" the man with the bloodshot eyes inquired again.

This time, Davide didn't leave his question unanswered. At fi he contracted his whole body, staring, as if at an insult or an intimidation. Then he smiled a miserable smile and answered curtly : "She's in the pile."

The little man, not understanding, remained expressionless. "And my father too, and my mother," Davide resumed, with a strange accent, neu tral and mechanical, as if he were reciting a litany, "and . . . and the others. All in the pile. In the pile! In the pile!" Again, from his dilated pupils, the fawn's soul peered out; but this time it was a little animal, frightened in the extreme, hunted and blocked on all sides, in some waste land, and he doesn't know where to run and tries to persuade himself:
there must be some mistalw here . . . all this chase . . . these barrels aimed . . . they must be hunting some dangerous beast in the vicinity

. . . but that isn't me . . . I'm another animal . . . not carnivorous

. . . Suddenly, this visible tumult was followed by the void; his eyes froze. And turning to his neighbors, he asked, with a cold little laugh : "Have you, any of you, ever heard tell of ZYKLON B?"

None of his neighbors had ever heard such an object mentioned; but they deduced it must be something grotesque, from the way it excited him.

"Hey, Vvavide!" Useppe's voice made itself heard at this point. But this time it had a broken sound, useless and distant, like the waving of an invisible little hand behind a thick fence. For that matter, Davide seemed

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less than ever in a mood to reply to it: perhaps he didn't even perceive it.

His face had become walled-up in a directionless stare, a kind of white and void ecstasy, like that of a man accused but not confessing, when the torture machinery is shown to him. He seemed to have aged in a moment; and even his always latent sexual ardor ( which gave him the tragic grace of a constant, burn stigma ) seemed to have dried up and withered be neath the press of old age that was crushing him: "These last years," he rea in a dull voice, snickering, "have been the worst obscenity in all History History of course, is all an obscenity from the beginning; how ever, years as obscene as these have never existed before. The
scandal-so
the proclamation goes
-is necessary, but unhappy the man who is its cause!
Yes, in fact : it is only on the evidence of guilt that the guilty party is accused . . . And so the proclamation means : that in the face of this decisive obscenity of History, witnesses had two choices open to them : either the defi ive disease, namely becoming defi accomplices of the scandal, or else defi health-because precisely from the spectacle of the extreme obscenity it was still possible to learn pure love . . . The choice was made: complicity!"

In drawing this conclusion, he assumed the almost triumphant air of one who denounces a misdeed, just discovered and irreparable: "And then," he said more harshly still, "how can you think of setting fi to the laza et, when you, you yourself, are a carri of the contagion and spread its stink around?!" This nameless
you,
whom he branded with infamy, seemed to be addressed to none of those present, but rather to some invisible spy, crouched behind his back.

Thanks to a fairly frequent phenomenon of certain
gala
states, in his inner ear now, his every word, as he uttered it, increased its duration, so in the last two minutes, he felt he had expounded a long theorem, which he considered somehow da.zzling. Moreover, while his voice sank progressively lower (to the point of becoming, in the racket, an indistinct sound ) it seemed to him, instead, grotesquely, that he was talking in a very loud voice, and the little crowd in the tavern for him had the eff of a multitude. This multitude, however, was fairly distracted (he was aware of that) or even alienated from him : some played cards, some listened to the songs; and though an old man or two, in the second rows, nodded at some of his phrases, he could see ( with a curious lucidity ) that those were almost mechanical movements, rather of vacuous amazement than of par ticipation. "What the hell am I saying?" he asked himself curtly.

When he reached a climax, in the face of this total lack of success, he was disturbed by painful doubts about his own oratory; and worst of all, he recalled, in this connection, a certain dream he had had in the past, to be

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specific in the days when he was called Pyotr and had become a partisan in the Castelli. It was towards the end of that period, when food was scarce, and one night he was standing his turn of guard-duty at the base, outside the hut. What with the fatigue of staying awake, and his weakness due to scant nourishment, at a certain hour of that night he had been overcome by a terrible drowsiness. And to master it, he did nothing but pace up and down, never stopping or, still less, sitting down; but all the same, at one point, he had irresistibly dozed off against a wall, on his feet, like a horse. Although surely very brief, his sleep had suffi to bring him a dream. And this was the dream:

he is in a white cell, barely a man's width, but with a dizzyingly high ceiling, so high it vanishes from sight. And his eyes peer upwards, waiting, because certainly, in a short while, from that invisible ceiling, an extrater restrial Being is going to descend to him with a Revelation. It will be (and this is already known ) a single, short sentence : which, however, will con tain the sum of universal truths, the sole defi solution that will free the human intellect from all seeking . . . The dreamer doesn't have to wait long. The Being is not slow to descend, almost to his level. He is a superhuman figure, in a tunic, wi a white beard, majestic-looking like the prophets of Jerusalem or the sages of Athens. He stops, in mid-air, facing the dreamer, and says to him in a resounding voice:
to mal�e a hot soup, you can also boil old shoe-leather!
Then he vanishes.

Now the memory of this dream, in fact, was accompanied by an immediate suspicion :
perhaps I believe I'm saying all sorts of important things, and instead, ever since I opened my mouth, I've done nothing but bawl ridiculous banalities, without any connection or logic
. . . this, how ever, was only a fl obfuscation for him, beyond which he found, lucid, his today's fi : he had to untangle a certain skein, as in legends, to arrive he really didn't know where . . . perhaps to save someone, or at least something . . . But save whom? The people in the tavern? Or what? A testimony? A ring? A letter? Unless it was, on the contrary, a question of striking down . . . executing . . . He had no idea. He knew only that today was the day. As if he had to get across a bridge which would after wards be forbidden to traffi

He then fl himself, with new energy, into the continuation, after the last obstacle had been leaped over: "\Vhat I mean, in other words," he declared in a voice still louder than before (at least so it seemed to him), "is that only a pure man can drive out the money-changers and say:
the earth was the temple of total consciousness, and you have made it a den of thieves!"

He had uttered this sentence with fi confi pronouncing it

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syllable by syllable, as if reading something written on the wall. But an ironic in terjection by the Superego led him to translate it into simpler terms, to assure its clarity. "Right. Only a clown," he clarifi raving, "can say to another man :
executioner,
when he, as his turn comes, is ready to operate the same machine . . . of slaughter . . . There. This is a clear defi !" The weariness of his muscles was so great it could be seen even in the physical movement of his lips.

Still, though it was clear enough, his
defi
aroused no appreciable echo from his audience. "The fact is," he reproached himself secretly, ''I'm a lousy demagogue. To the crowd, you have to speak of parties . . . fl

. . . I bore them. You need the knack of entertaining them . . . amus- ing them . . ." Here he had a brilliant idea, which made him laugh in advance, with an innocent, trusting sweetness : "I don't remember in what book," he narrated, "I read the story of a writer who goes to visit an insane asylum. A patient comes over to him and, pointing to another patient, whispers :
Watch out for that one. He's crazy. He thinks he's a button. But believe me: if he really was,
r
d be the fi to know it, because I'm a buttonhole!!"

This gag of Davide's likewise failed to produce the hoped-for eff also because, I believe, it reached his public in a very confused form. The only one who laughed at it, in fact, was Useppe, who, for that matter, was Davide's sole attentive listener in that room; and it didn't matter, really, that Useppe understood almost nothing of those speeches, because for that very reason they sounded to him more venerable, like oracles. All the same, he sensed from the beginning something disturbing in his friend's behav ior, worse than sadness or a sickness, and so he was often tempted to say to him, "Davide, why don't we go?", but he didn't dare. Meanwhile, another old acquaintance of his had come into the tavern, the news-vendor friend of the Marroccos, whom he recognized at once, although he could see the man had changed. But though the man had always been cordial to him in the past, he now answered Useppe's festive greeting with a vague gesture of rejection. A few months before, he had been stricken by a thrombosis, which had confi him a long time in the hospital, leaving him half paralyzed. He leaned on a cane, all tilting, and in his face, dejected and swollen, you could read a constant fear of dying. He could no longer peddle papers or drink wine. From the hospital, he had moved into the home of a daughter-in-law, a second-fl apartment, noisy and confi overpopulated with young grandchildren. And at present he considered all living children a disaster. It is quite probable, moreover, that he didn't even recognize that kid waving at him from the other side of the table. And as for Davide, the man apparently hadn't seen him again after that