Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (4 page)

After the curses came hunger; he began to pour whole mess tins of minestrone into his belly as if he were drinking it, spilling it all over himself. Then he smiled, with a round blissful animal face, in the midst of bandages and plasters, mumbling something, God knew what.

‘What language does he speak?’ the others asked, watching him. ‘Where is he from?’

‘Ask him yourselves,’ answered his old prison-mates and the ex-guards. ‘Hey, you, where are you from?’ Natale half opened his eyes to think, but then let out a groan and went back to grunting things the others couldn’t understand.

‘Has he gone crazy,’ asked the blond man, who was in charge, ‘or was he already?’ The others weren’t sure. ‘He certainly got a big crack on the head,’ they said. ‘If he wasn’t crazy before, he is now.’

With his round, flat, black, bottom-of-the-pan face, Natale had been on the move ever since they’d called him up many years before. Unable to read or write, he hadn’t heard from home at all. They’d sent him off on leave a few times, but he got on the wrong train and ended up in Turin. After September 8th he’d found himself in the Todt and had gone on wandering around half naked with his mess tin tied to his belt. Then they had put him inside. All of a sudden they came to set him free and hit him over the head with a stick. For him this was perfectly logical, like everything else in his life.

For him the world was a mix of yellows and greens, of noises and shouts, the urge to eat and the urge to sleep. A good world, full of good things, even if you couldn’t understand it at all, even if trying to understand it brought on that sharp pain deep inside his skull, that flight of ducks in the brain, the stick that cracked down on his head.

The partisans in the blond man’s band were supposed to carry out raids on the town; they lived in the first pine woods above the suburbs, in an area that was all small villas where middle-class families used to spend their summers in the good old days. Given that the area was now under their control, the partisans had come out from their caves and huts and set up camp in a few Fascist leaders’ villas, infesting their mattresses with fleas and installing machine-guns on their dressers. There were some bottles in the villas, some stored food, gramophones. Blondie was a tough boy, ruthless with the enemy, despotic with his friends, but he tried to keep his men happy when he could. They threw a few parties, some girls came up.

Natale was happy to be with them. The plasters and bandages had come off now; all that was left of his wound was a big bruise in the middle of his shaggy hair, a bewilderment which he didn’t feel came from himself but from all the things around him. The partisans played all kinds of jokes on him but he didn’t get angry, he shouted curses in his incomprehensible dialect and that was that. Or he would start wrestling with someone, even with Blondie: he always got the worst of it but was happy just the same.

One evening the partisans decided to play a joke on him: they would get him off with one of the girls and see what happened. They chose Margherita, a tubby girl, soft and fleshy, white and pink. She was game and they began to work on Natale, to put the idea in his head that Margherita was in love with him. But Natale was wary; he wasn’t used to this. They all started drinking together and got her to sit next to him, to get him excited. Seeing her making eyes at him, feeling her leg press against his under the table, Natale felt more lost than ever. They left the two alone, watching them from behind the door. He laughed, in a daze. The girl pushed it a bit, provoking him. But then Natale realized that her laugh was false; she was batting her eyelashes. He forgot the stick, the ducks, the bruise: he grabbed her and threw her on the bed. He understood everything perfectly now: he understood what the woman beneath him wanted, white and pink and soft, he understood that it wasn’t a game, he understood why it wasn’t a game, but something theirs, his and hers, like eating and drinking.

All of a sudden the girl’s already bright eyes blinked and turned hard and angry, her arms fought him off, she wriggled to be out from under him, shouting: ‘Help, he’s on top of me.’ The others came in laughing, shouting, and tossed water over him. Then everything went back to how it had been before, that coloured pain right at the bottom of his skull; Margherita smoothing the blouse over her breasts, bursting into strained laughter, Margherita who, already bright-eyed, wet-mouthed, had started shouting and calling the others, he couldn’t understand why. And, with all the partisans round him shooting their guns in the air and laughing so hard they rolled about on their beds, Natale burst into tears like a child.

One morning the Germans all woke at once: they came packed in trucks and beat the area bush by bush. Woken by the gunfire, Blondie was too late getting out and went down under a burst of machine-gun bullets in the middle of the meadow. Natale survived by crouching in a bush, sticking his head in the ground every time a bullet whistled by. After Blondie’s death, the band broke up: some died, some were caught, some betrayed others and changed sides, some went on wandering about the area surviving one search after another, some joined the brigades up in the mountains.

Natale joined the brigades. Life was tougher in the mountains: Natale’s job was to walk from one valley to the next, loaded like a mule, to take turns on watch and on fatigue duty; it was like being a soldier again, a hundred times worse and a hundred times better. And the partisans who laughed at him and mocked him were like the soldiers who’d laughed and mocked him in the army, yet different too, in a way he would surely have understood had it not been for that flurry of ducks in his skull.

He came to understand it all when he found himself with the Germans just beneath him climbing the road to the Goletta and firing their flamethrowers into the bushes. Stretched out on the ground, he started to fire shot after shot and he understood why he was doing it. He understood that those men down there were the militiamen who had arrested him because his papers weren’t in order, they were the Todt guards marking down his hours, they were the orderly who made him clean the latrines, they were all these things at once but they were also the farmer who made him sweat the week long before he was called up, they were the boys who had tripped him on the pavement the time he went into town for the fair, and they were his father too, the time he’d shown him the back of his hand. They were even Margherita, Margherita who was on the point of going with him, then had turned against him, not exactly Margherita but whatever it was that had made Margherita turn against him: this thought was even more difficult than the others, but at that moment he understood. Then he thought about why those men down there were firing at him, shouting at him, falling under his shots. And he understood that they were men like him beaten by their fathers as children, set to work by farmers, mocked by orderlies, and now they were taking it out on him; it was crazy of them to take it out on him, he had nothing to do with it, and that was why he was firing at them, but if they had all been on his side he wouldn’t have been firing at them but at others, he wasn’t sure who, and Margherita would have gone with him. But how his enemies came to be these people and those, good and bad, like him and against him; why he was here, in the right, they there, in the wrong, this Natale could not understand: it was the flight of ducks; that’s what it was, no more, no less.

Just a few days before the end of the war, the English decided to drop things by parachute. The partisans walked to Piedmont, they marched for two days and lit fires at night in the middle of the fields. The English dropped overcoats with gold buttons, but it was already spring, and bundles of old Italian rifles from the first African war. The partisans picked them up and pranced wildly round the fire like so many Negroes. Natale danced and shouted amongst them, and was happy.

Occasionally a train sets off along the seafront and on that train there’s me, leaving. Because I don’t want to stay in my sleepy, cabbage-patch village, puzzling out the licence plates of out-of-town cars like a kid down from the mountains sitting on the wall of a bridge. I’m off, bye bye village.

In the world, beyond my village, there are other towns, some on the sea, others, why I don’t know, lost in the depths of the lowlands, on the banks of railways that arrive, how I don’t know, after breathless journeys through endless stretches of countryside. Every so often I get off in one of these towns and I always have the look of the first-time traveller, pockets stuffed with newspapers, eyes smarting with dust.

At night in my new bed I turn off the light and listen to the trams, then think of my room in my village, so distant in the night it seems impossible that two places so far apart could exist at the same moment. And, where I’m not sure, I fall asleep.

In the morning, outside the window, there’s so much to explore: if it’s Genoa, streets that go up and down and houses above and below and a rush of wind between them; if it’s Turin, straight streets that never end, looking out over the railings of the balconies, with a double row of trees fading away beyond into white skies; if it’s Milan, houses that turn their backs on you in fields of fog. There must be other towns, other things to explore: one day I’ll go and see.

But in every town the room is always the same, it seems the landladies must send the furniture on from town to town as soon as they know I’m coming. Even my shaving kit on the marble dresser top looks as if I’d found it there when I arrived rather than putting it there myself, it has such an air of inevitability, doesn’t seem mine at all. I could live years in one of these rooms after other years in other and absolutely similar rooms, without ever managing to feel it was mine or make my mark on it. Because my suitcase is always ready for the next journey, and no town in Italy is the right town, no town has work to offer, no town would be good enough even if you did find work because there’s always another and better town where you hope to go to work one day. So I put my stuff in the drawers exactly how it was in my suitcase, ready to be packed again.

Days and weeks go by and a girl begins to come to the room. I could say it was always the same girl because at first there’s no difference between one girl and the next, they’re strangers and you communicate with them following a prescribed ritual. You have to spend a bit of time and do a lot of things with this girl for you both to understand the whys and wherefores; and then begins the season of enormous discoveries, the real, perhaps the only exciting season of love. Then, spending still more time and doing still more things with this girl, you realize that the other girls were like this too, that I too am like this, we all are, and everything she does is boring, as if repeated in a thousand mirrors. Bye bye, girlfriend.

The first time a girl comes to see me, let’s say it’s Mariamirella, I hardly do anything all afternoon: I go on with a book I’m reading, then realize that for the last twenty pages I’ve been looking at the letters as though they were pictures; I write, but really I’m doodling all over the white paper and all the doodles together become the sketch of an elephant, I shade it in and in the end it turns into a mammoth. Then I lose my temper with the mammoth and tear it up: why a mammoth every time, you baby!

I tear up the mammoth, the bell rings: Mariamirella. I run to open the door before the landlady can appear at the barred toilet window and start shouting; Mariamirella would be frightened off.

One day the landlady will die, strangled by thieves: it’s written down, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. She thinks she can save herself by not going to open the door when they ring, not asking: ‘Whoozzat callin’?’ from the barred toilet window, but it’s a pointless precaution, the typesetters have already prepared the headline—Landlady Adelaide Braghetti Strangled by Unknown Killers—and are waiting for confirmation to lay out the page.

Mariamirella is there in the half-light, with her sailor’s beret and pompom and her heart-shaped mouth. I open the door and she’s already prepared a whole speech to make as soon as she’s in, it doesn’t matter what she actually says, only that we talk without a break as I lead her down the dark corridor to my room.

It ought to be a long speech, so as not to get stuck in the middle of my room without having anything left to say. The room offers no prompts, hopeless in its squalor: the metal bedstead, titles of unknown books in the little bookcase.

‘Come and look out of the window, Mariamirella.’

The window is a French window with a waist-high railing but no balcony; you have to go up two steps to it and it feels as if we were climbing and climbing. Outside, a reddish sea of tiles. We look at the roofs stretching off all around as far as the eye can see, the stumpy chimneys suddenly puffing rags of smoke, the ridiculous balustrades on cornices where no one can ever look out, the low walls enclosing empty spaces on top of tumbledown houses. I put a hand on her shoulder, a hand that hardly feels like mine, swollen almost, as if we were touching each other through a layer of water.

‘Seen enough?’

‘Yes.’

‘Down then.’

We go down and close the window. We’re underwater, we fumble with vague sensations. The mammoth roams about the room, ancient human fear.

‘So?’

I’ve taken off her sailor’s beret and tossed it on the bed.

‘No. I’m off now anyway.’

She puts it back on her head, I grab it and throw it up in the air, flying, now we’re running after each other, playing with gritted teeth, love, this is love one for another, a scratching biting longing one for another, punching too, on the shoulders, then a weary weary kiss: love.

Now we’re smoking sitting face to face: the cigarettes are huge between our fingers, like things held underwater, big sunken anchors. Why aren’t we happy?

‘What’s the matter?’ asks Mariamirella.

‘The mammoth,’ I tell her.

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘A symbol,’ I tell her.

‘What of?’ she says.

‘I don’t know what of,’ I tell her. ‘A symbol.’

‘Look,’ I tell her, ‘one evening I was sitting on a river bank with a girl.’