History (16 page)

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past and the future and her senses and all the objects of the world were turning in a single wheel, in a disintegration that was also a liberation.

Her only raving, during that season, was in her dreams, which had resumed visiting her, fairly often, with their old violence. She fi herself running here and there, completely naked, through a square that seems deserted, but yet resounds, on all sides, with insults and laughter . . . She is imprisoned in a kind of kennel, and from her little barred window she can see tall young girls go by, dressed in many colors, like certain grand wet nurses, who carr beautiful infants, laughing, in their arms. The young women know her, but they look away so as not to see her; and also the infants are not laughing for her. She was mistaken, to believe that . . .

She is walking with her father, who shelters her beneath his cloak; but then the cloak fl off as if on its own, without her father any more. And she fi herself a tiny girl again, alone, on some mountain paths, with little trickles of blood from her vagina. The whole path behind her is marked by the spoor of her blood. To worsen the looming scandal, the familiar whistle of Ninnarieddu is heard from below; and like a fool, instead of running off she stops on the path to play with a nanny-goat

. . . How could she have failed to see the goat is howling, in labor, about to give birth! And meanwhile, nearby, all ready, there is the
sergeant TTUl
of the electric slaughterhouses . . .

. . . Lots of little Polish children, in rags, are playi , rolling some tiny golden rings. Blessed ri and they don't know it. Th game is forbidden, in Poland. Punished by death!!! . . .

Such dreams, even the most futile ones, left her in a state of grievous distress; but then, in the course of the morning, she would forget them.

Now, every day she had to make a great eff to get up; and in the succession of her hours there was no act, however simple, that wasn't toilsome for her. But this struggle, while it reminded her constantly of her condition, sustained her, like a kind of drunkenness. She ran from one tram to another, and from one neighborhood to another, always with her shopping-bags and her little hat, its veil askew, and a furrow above her eyebrows. Once she had reached the school, she proceeded as usual with everything : roll ca general inspection of ears and fi for the daily hygienic check . . . And even to these tasks, as to the others of her teach ing, she applied herself with extreme gravity and concentration as usual, as if they were matters of the most serious importance. From habit, she never sat behind the desk, but moved along the rows, with eyes that, in this duty, were never still, beneath her frowning brows.

"Wri in your copybooks :
Dictation

"The hero-ic Ital-i-an ar-my has
( third pers singular of the verb 'to

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have' )
car-ried the glo-ri-ous ban-ners of Rome
be-yond
the moun-tains
and
be-yond the seas to fi for the great-ness of
the
Fa-ther-land
(capital
F) and to de-fend its
(capitalize again!)
Em-pire
un-til
the fi vic-to-ry

"Annarumi! Stop trying to copy from Mattei! I see you!" "But, teacher. I'm not copying."

"Oh, yes, you are. I saw you. Yes, yes. And if you try it again, I'll give you an F."

"

"But what if I don't copy?" "Then I'll forgive you."

. . . "And what's our homework for tomorrow, teacher?" "What's our assignment?" . . . "Wh the assignment for tomorrow?" "Signora Ramundo, what's our homework for tomorrow?"

"For tomorrow: Composition : theme :
A thought about swallows.
Problem :
Luigino is three years old. His brother is twi his age, and his sister one third. How old is his brother? How old is his sister? And how many months old is Luigino?
Penmanship : write three times in your fair copybook:
Vittorio and Elena are the names of our August Sovereigns .
. ."

At evening, in the kitchen, with supper prepared, she waited as usual for Ninnarieddu, who, even when he came home before the door to the building was closed, rarely went to bed after dinner. Far more often, he devoured the supper in haste, without even sitting down, leaning out of the window every now and then to give a whistle to his friends impatiently waiti in the courtyard below. And then he would ask for money for the movies. And she would doggedly deny it to him, unti he would stalk around the room angrily, like a true exploiter of women, and fi would take it from her, by force or with threats of running away from home forever. Many evenings, this fi quarrel would be followed by a second, because he would insistently demand the doorkey for the double-lock at night, as well as the key to the front door downstairs, while she stubbornly refused them to him, shaking her head as she repeated No, No, No, because he wasn't old enough yet; and on this point she would not give way. She would throw herself out of the wi fi He was the one who, in the end, distracted by more and more desperate calls from below, and also impatient to get to the movies, gave in to the inevitable. And he dashed off grumbling his protests along the stairs, like a noctambulist cat dri off by a broom.

In the past, she had refused to go to bed until she had seen him come home; and in the long vigil, she would usually doze in the kitchen. But now, brutalized by weariness, she couldn't resist her desire to lie down

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remaining alert, all the same, during her sleep, until she was called, from the street, by the whistle of her escaped chaffi Then, crossly, she would go down to open the door for him, a pair of shapeless slippers on her feet, her fl fl lette bathrobe over her n ightgown and her black hair, barely streaked with gray, disheveled, down her back, curly and full as an Ethiopian's. With the impetuosity of a charger demolishing an obstacle, he would enter the building, still excited by the movie. All the fire of his thoughts was directed towards those stars of universal beauty, those amazing stories. And preceding Ida up the stairs, unable to adapt his pace to her slown he would vary the climb with impatient fancies. He would linger a moment to kick at a step, or would jump up three or four at once; then, higher, he would stretch out full length on a landing, with a yawn then suddenly rush up a whole fl as if he were soaring to heaven. But he always arrived at the door of the house with a considerable lead; and from there, astri the railing, leaning a bit into the stairwell and glancing at Ida, clumping up the stairs, he would say to her, in a tormented tone: "Ah,

rn
come on. Let's go. Shift into high. Give it some gas!"

In the end, her resistance exhausted, and afraid also that, seeing her in her nightclothes, he might recognize her swollen belly, she resigned herself and granted him the famous right to the keys. And that evening for him was a celebration, like male initiation among tribes. He fl out of the house, without saying goodnight, his curls looking like so many little bells. Even as her pregnancy advanced, it was not hard for Ida to hide it. Her body, already ill-made and out of proportion from the waist to below the pelvis, showed only slightly the new change, which remained limited. Cer tainly the hidden, undernourished little creature could not weigh much,

demanding so little room.

Even though rationing was still a few months off many items of food were already beginning to grow scarce, and prices were rising. Nino, still a growing boy, had an unruly and insa tiable hunger; and his share, inevi tably, was achieved at the expense of the portions of Ida and the other invisible being who asked nothing. He already made himself felt, true, moving now and then in his hiding-place; but the little blows he gave seemed more information than protest: "I inform you that I am here and, in spite of everything, I'm coping, and I'm alive. In fact, I'm already feeling the urge to enjoy myself a bit."

There was a shortage of gas in the houses, and people had to wait in long lines to win two shovelfuls of coal. Ida could no longer, as she had in the past, complete her shopping in the morning; and sometimes darkness overtook her still out in the streets, plunged into the wartime blackout. If from some window a thread of light happened to shine, curses would immediately rise from the streets : "Murderers! Cri Put out the

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liiiight!" From the tavern blacked-out doorways, radios could be heard at full volume, or choruses of young men would release their energies, singing popular songs and playing the guitar, like village boys. At certain lonely intersections, Ida, with her load of potatoes and coal, would hesitate, aghast, in her ancient panic fear of the dark. And immediately the little individual inside her would answer her with lively kicks perhaps meant to encourage her: "What are you scared of? You're not alone. After all, you've got somebody with you."

Unlike other mothers, she never refl on the enigma of whether the infant was a boy or a girl. In her situation, even this curiosity would have seemed a greedy whim, something to be ashamed of. She was allowed only indifference, which she could use as white magic against destiny.

With the warm season, which forced her to leave off her wool coat, she tried to draw her corset tighter. As a rule, she would leave it rather loose, to alleviate its torment, even if her schoolmistress decorum obliged her always to wear it. In these last few months, her arms and legs had grown thin as an old woman's, her cheeks were fl but emaciated, even in their round shape; and in the classroom, when she wrote on the blackboard, certain letters came out crooked. Summer arri early and sultry, her fl was all sweaty day and night. But she reached the end of the term without anyone's having caught on to anything.

Towards the end of June, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. At the beginning of July, German offi were assigned to organize the total evacuation of the Jews from all occupied countries (which now comprised all Europe) in view of the
fi solution.

The women who kept the little shops in the Ghetto, where Ida stopped off on her rounds, had become more taciturn and reticent, and they went on with their humble everyday trade as if European events didn't concern them. At intervals she still ran into Vilma, dejected because collecting scraps was becoming daily more diffi and also, more and more of her cats in the ancient ruins were failing to show up at roll call. She knew them individually, and would ask around the quarter in a wretched, disconsolate voice : "Hasn't anyone seen Gimp? Or Casanova? And the tom with only one eye? And Fiorello? And the orange one with mange? And the white one, about to have kittens, who used to hang out at the baker's?!" The people questioned would laugh in her face; but she could still be heard calling, incurably, among the ruins of the TI1eater of Marcellus: "Casanoooova!!! Whiskers!! Chubby!"

From her private informers, the
Signora
and the
Nun,
Vilma always had some new revelation, which she would report with her lunatic gesticu lations, in a low voice. She told, for example, how in all of conquered

78 H I S T O R Y
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Europe, these days, in houses where they still suspected the concealed presence of some Jew, the windows and doors were walled up, then the houses were pulverized with some special gases called
cyclones.
And in the countryside and the forests of Poland, from all the trees hung men, women, and children, even tiny babies : not only Jews, but gypsies, and Communists, and
Polandese,
and
fi
. . . Their bodies were falling to pieces, with foxes and wolves quarreling over them. And in all the stations where the trains passed, you could see skeletons at work on the tracks, skeletons
that had only their eyes
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. Similar reports, as always, were received as fantastic products of Vilma's mind; and so they were, in part, although, here too, afterwards, historical results were to surpass them by far. In fact, no living imagination could, on its own, conceive the aberrant and complicated monsters produced by its opposite : namely, by the total lack of imagination, which is the property of certain mortuary mechanisms.