History (17 page)

Not only the strange news from the
Signora
and the
Nun,
but also the more or less semioffi news from the prison grapevine continued, there in the Ghetto, to encounter a kind of stubborn passivity. For that matter, nobody, in the Ghetto or elsewhere, had as yet learned the true meaning of certain offi terms, such as
evacuation, internment, extraordinary pacifi cation action, fi solution,
and so on. The world's technological-bureau cratic organiza ion was still in a primitive phase: that is, it had not yet contaminated, irremediably, the people's consciousness. Most people, in a sense, still lived in prehistory. And so the simple ignorance of some very humble Jewish women should not be too amazing.

Only one of them, one day, Signora Sonnino, who had a little stand of cheap clothing accessories near the cafe at the bridge, on hearing the Fuhrer's voice from inside there, as he was ranting over the radio, ob served pensively:

"Those characters want to turn everything into arithmeti add, sub tract, multiply, until the numbers come out zero!!!"

And thus meditating, she shook her little head, thin and alert as a

lizard's, though she went on counting the buttons she was selling Ida : as if this arithmetic concerned her more closely than that other.

By now, all the people in general, Aryans and Jews, poor and rich, considered the Nazi-Fascists' victory a certainty, especially after their re

cent progress in Russia and Africa .

But inside Iduzza's brain, at present, all the talk she listened to made a dull noise, like printed letters set before an illiterate. At home in the evening, in the dim votive light of the darkened bulbs, the Fascist Nin narieddu would sing, with his still-untuned childish tenor:

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"Colonel, I don't want bread;

I want bullets for my gun!!"

But every now and then he would vary it: "Colonel, I don't want bread :

I want real coff with my steak!"

in a loud voice, and with the windows open, on purpose, to act big and heedless, defying the police informers. Ida, however, no longer had the willpower to get up and close the windows, as she used to do. By now, she let him go on.

Every so often, at night, the air-raid alarm sirens would resound through the city; but the people of San Lorenzo paid little attention to them, convinced that Rome would never be hit, thanks to the protection of the Pope, who in fact was nicknamed
the Capital's ack-ack.
The fi times, Ida, in agitation, had tried to waken Nino; but he would wriggle down in his cot, grumbling: "Who is it? . . . who is it? I'm asleep!" and one night, half-asleep, he mumbled something about a band with a saxo phone and drums.

The next day he asked if there had be an alarm, complaining that Ida had spoiled his dream. And he told her, defi tively, not to disturb him again when the siren wen t:

"What do we care about the siren, anyway? Say,
rn
can't you see nothing ever happens here? English bombs! Yeah, made out of paper!!"

Later she also stopped getting up at the sound of the alarm, barely

shifting, half-awake, beneath the sweat-damp sheets, amid the scream of the sirens and the fi of the anti-aircraft in the distance.

One night, shortly before an alarm, she dreamed she was looking for a hospital, to give birth. But all rejected her as a Jew, saying she should go to the Jewish hospital, and pointing out a very white cement building, all walled up, with no windows or doors. A little later, she found herself inside the building. It was an immense factory, illuminated by the beams of blinding spotlights; and around her there was no one, only gigantic ma chines, complicated and cogged, which rotated with terrible din. When, suddenly, it turns out that this racket comes from skyrockets for New Year's Eve. We are on a beach. With her there are lots of little kids, and among them there is even Alfi also a kid. All, with their shri voices, protest because, down here, they can't see the fi : they need a platform, a balcony! It's already midnight, and we're disappointed . . . but all at once the sea before us is marv illuminated by huge,

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countless clusters of light, green and orange and pomegranate red, against

the blue of the water at night. And the kids, pleased, say: "Here we can see better than up above, because the whole city is refl in the sea, even the skyscrapers and the mountain peaks ."

Towards the end, almost every day, on the pretext of having to buy some little article, but actually without any specifi motivation, Ida, on leaving school, would set off for the Jewish quarter. She felt drawn there by a summons of sweetness, like the stable's smell for a calf, or a souk's for an Arab woman; and also by an impulse of obsessive necessity, like a planet gravitating around a star. From Testaccio, where her school was located, in a few minutes she would reach the little settlement behind the Synagogue; but even after the beginning of summer vacation, despite the distance from San Lorenzo, every so often she would follow her familiar summons. And so it was that one afternoon, in the dead of summer, she happened into a food shop only a few hours after the proprietress, in a little room next to the shop, had given birth to an infant. In the shop, the midwife, a Neapolitan Jewess, was still bustling around. Her thick eyebrows, her sturdy, arched nose, her heavy feet and her stride, and even the way she wore her white cotton cap over her curly gray hair, made her resemble an engraving of the prophet Ezekiel.

Ida mustered her courage; and taking this woman aside for a moment, she asked her address in a faint voice, claiming she wanted it for a relative who would soon need her. Saying this, she became all red in the face, as if accusing herself of something indecent. But Ezekiel, since lduzza was totally unknown to her, took her question as something licit and natural. In fact, she congratulated Ida's relative. And promptly she gave her a pri ed card, with her name, address, and telephone number. She was also named Ida; Di Capua was her last name. She lived in the neighborhood of the Lateran, the San Giovanni district.

As
the summer ripened, among the many imminent problems now besieging Ida, the most serious for her was Nino, who still suspected noth ing. Terrifi she saw the day approach when she would necessarily have to give him some explanation, she didn't know how. Vaguely, she thought of going off alone, to have the baby in some other city, then coming back with it, pretending it had been entrusted to her by some deceased relative

. . . But Nino knew very well she had no relatives; and, still less, such a close one that she would accept the burden of a baby in times like these! Nino was not the type to be taken in by certain tales. So here too, Ida's only refuge was to withdraw in the face of the impossible, letting destiny act.

The infant somehow came to her assistance, anticipating its birth by several weeks. Foreseen for the autumn, it occurred instead at the end of

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August, while Nino was off at a Young F3scists' summer camp. On the 28th of August, when she felt the first labor pains, Ida was alone in the house; and, seized. with panic, not even announcing her arrival by a phone call, she took a tram towards the midwife's address.

As she climbed the woman's long stairs, her pains increased, until they became terrible. Ezekiel in person answered the door; and no longer capa ble of giving explanations, Ida, the moment she was inside, fl herself on a bed, crying : "Signora ! Signora! Help !"

And she began to writhe and scream, while Ezekiel, practiced and soothing, was freeing her of her clothes. But Ida, even in her spasms, was terrifi at the thought of revealing her nakedness; and she began groping to cover herself with the sheet. When the other woman then started undoing the corset, Ida clung to her desperately to prevent it : because there, under the corset, fastened with a pin, she had a sewn-up little sock containing her savings. In fact, despite the diffi of the war, she hadn't abandoned her habit of putting aside a bit of her salary every month. In her distrust of the morrow, and in the certainty, alone as she was, of being unable to count on anyone's help at any twist of fate, she kept in that stocking her whole independence, her dignity, her treasure. In all it came to a few hundred lire; but to her it seemed a great sum.

Understanding, after some diffi y, the reason for her frantic resis tance, Ezekiel found a way of convincing her, nonetheless, to allow the corset to be removed; and to reassure Ida, she placed it under the very matt where Ida lay, the stocking still fastened to it.

The birth was not long or diffi That unknown creature seemed to be trying to come into the world with his own strength, without costing others too much suff And when, emitting the fi scream, the mother lay free at last, submerged in her own sweat as in a salty sea, the midwife announced :

"It's a little man!"

He was, indeed, a little man; that is to say a male, but very little, in truth. The infant was so small he could fi comfortably in the midwife's two hands, as in a basket. And after having proved himself by the heroic enterpri of coming into the world on his own, he hadn't even the voice to cry. He announced his presence with a whimper so faint he seemed a little lamb, born last and forgotten in the straw. Still, for all his tiny size, he was complete, and even pretty, well-made, as far as they could tell. And he meant to survive : in fact, at the right moment, he sought his mother's breasts eagerly, on his own initiative.

And through the mysterious workings of her maternal organs, she never lacked the necessary milk. Obviously, what little she had eaten had

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been divided entirely between the hidden little one and her milk supply.

As for herself, the delivery left her so scrawn she looked like a stray bitch who had whelped at a street corner.

The infant's hair-all in little tufts, like plumes-was black. But as soon as he allowed a glimpse of his eyes, even in the two little slivers he barely revealed, Ida immediately recognized that blue color of her scandal. The eyes were not long then in opening wide, and proved so big in the tiny face that they seemed already spellbound by the spectacle they beheld. And beyond any doubt, their color-even in its fi milky haze-repro duced perfectly that other blue, which seemed born not from the earth but from the sea.

On the other hand, you couldn't yet tell where he got his features. You could discern now only their delicate and pretty form. The mouth perhaps, with its soft, protruding lips, also recalled slightly that other mouth.

Until she was able to move, Ida stayed with Ezekiel, who left her the bed and settled herself on a mattress on the kitchen fl The apartment, in fact, where the midwife lived alone, consisted entirely of the kitchen and the bedroom. Here there was a big Neapolitan bed, of painted iron; and from a window on to the street you could glimpse, obliquely, the Lateran Basilica, crowned by the fi teen immense statues of Chri the Saint Johns, and the Doctors of the Church.

The midwife was very pleased and proud of her private lodging. And seeing her here at home-with a long cotton robe that looked like a tunic

-it was harder than ever to tell whether she was a woman or an old man. Her voice wasn't a woman's either, but an old man's. It sounded like one

of those bass voices that, in operas, sing the parts of aged kings, or of hermits.

The second day, she reminded Iduzza that the baby had to be given a name; and Ida answered that she had already decided to call him Giuseppe, after his maternal grandfather, her own father. Ezekiel, however, kept saying that a single name wasn't enough; a second name was needed, and a third. But Iduzza hadn't thought about these other two names. And the midwife, after pondering the question, suggested she call him Felice, or "happy," as a second name, to bring him luck; and as third name, Angio lino, because he was so small, and had blue eyes, and was good as a little angel, and didn't make much noise.

The names having been settled, the midwi fe off to go herself to the Registry, for the necessary declaration. Iduzza was at fi recalcitrant, for the imaginable reason; but after thinking it over, fi herself faced with the choice of having to declare her own dishonor either to a civil

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servant of the City or to the midwife, she preferred to reveal it to the midwife. And wi giving any spoken explanation, she wrote out for her in printed letters, in a trembling hand:

GIUSEPPE FELICE ANGIOLINO BORN IN ROME 28 AUGUST 1 941

MOTHER: WIDOW IDA MANCUSO, BORN RAMUNDO FATHER: UNKNOWN

Each day, Ezekiel appeared at meal hours to do the cooking; but the rest of the time, she was always out on her professional rounds. And Ida would lie for the whole day in that enormous bed, with its clean sheets; in it, Giuseppe was too small not to feel lost among the huge people of the world. Most of the time, both slept. The dog-days weighed on the city; but even the great sweat in which she lay drenched gave Ida a sense of aban donment and of passivity, like a warm and briny sea in which her body was unraveled. And she would have liked to die in that bed along with her child, both leaving the earth, as if in a boat.

On
the fourth day, she decided to go home; Ezekiel off to accom pany her, but Ida wouldn't hear of it, already aghast at the thought the woman might turn up sometime in her neighborhood. In fact, anyone who knew her secrets became, for her, a disturbing figure, whom she was careful to avoid, like desert animals when they try to cover their trail against the enemy's scent.

So she prepared to leave by herself, prudently waiting till dark. At the settling of their accounts, Ezekiel made Ida pay for her food; but for the rest (seeing that swollen and wretched body, which, with what clothed it-despite the famous stocking-betrayed poverty ) she wanted nothing. She herself supplied a broad rag, faded but clean, in which Giuseppe, sleeping blissfully, was wrapped up so that only his nose stuck out. And laden with this bundle, besides her shopping-bag, Ida took the tram again for San Lorenzo. As on every evening, because of the blackout, the street lamps were extinguished, and on the trams the little masked bulbs cast a dim bluish glow.