History (30 page)

Until this morning, nobody had been more available than the dwarf bastard Blitz, prompt at any call, even if it was from the garbage collector or the rag man. She herself had never given him much consideration, believing him, in fact, an intruder and a sponge. And at this hour, on the contrary, he was so inaccessible that all the police of the Reich could never ca him again.

The fi thing about him that came back to her memory, giving her a special little stab, was that white star on his belly. That sole elegance of his life became also the supreme pathos of his death.

What would Nino say when he didn't fi Blitz again? In the earth's enormous laceration, Nino was the single point of tranquillity and heed-· lessness in Ida's mind. Was it perhaps because people swear that rogues, as a rule, always survive? Even though, since the day of his departure, he had sent no news of himself, Ida felt splendidly assured, as if by an angel's vow, that Nino would come back from the war safe and sound, and, indeed, would show up again soon.

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They looked inside to say that, in the street, the Red Cross was distributing clothes and food; and soon the old woman from Mandela with her youthful, slightly swinging gait, went out to seek provisions. She wasn't able to collect any clothes; but she got hold of two packages of powdered milk, a bar of ersatz chocolate and another of concentr jam, almost black; and she put this stuff in Ida's empty shopping-bag, to her gratitude. Ida was thinking in fact that Useppe should eat something as soon as he woke up, since his only meal so far that day had been his morning breakfast, shared with Blitz. That breakfast had consisted, as usual, of a piece of rationed bread, elastic and soft, perhaps kneaded with chaff and potato peelings; and a cup of watery milk. But still, as she remembered it, up there in their sun-filled kitchen, it seemed now the picture of extraordinary wealth. As for herself, she had drunk only a little cup of fake coffee; but still she felt no hunger, only nausea, as if the destroying dust-cloud had coagulated in her stomach.

The old woman's grandson appeared, returning with an empty suit case, tied with a length of cord. And he promptly carried his grandmother off asserting haughtily that Rome wasn't destroyed at all, and anybody who said so was talking balls, but they had better run off in a hurry since an observ plane had already been sighted, heralding several thousand Flying Fortresses on their way. "But the train to Mandela? Is it running?" his grandmother was asking him, climbing up the steps with him to the door. Before going away, she left her headcloth as a present with Ida, telling her it was a good piece of new cloth, woven in Anticoli on a handloom, and she could make an overall for the baby from it.

Ida would have liked never to move again from that bench : she couldn't bring herself to muster her strength and face the end of the day. A horrible stench lay in the cellar; but damp with sweat, the child clutched in her arms, she had sunk into a kind of unfeeling, almost ecstatic peace. Sounds reached her muffl on her eyes a sort of gauze had spread. Suddenly she noticed, looking around, that the tavern had emptied and the sun was beginning to set. Then she became afraid she had taken too much advantage of the proprietor's hospitality; and with Useppe asleep in her arms, she went outside.

Useppe was still asleep, his head hanging from her shoulder, when, a little later, she was walking along the Via Tiburtina. On one side, the street followed the wall of the cemetery and on the other, it was fl

by apartment buildings partially destroyed by the bombs. Perhaps because of her fasting, Ida was overcome with sleepiness, her sense of identity was escaping her. She was wonderi vaguely if the house in Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, where she had lived for more than twenty years, were not instead the Cosenza house, destroyed by the same earthquake that had

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destroyed, together, Messina and Reggio Calabria. And if this broad street were San Lorenzo, or the Ghetto. There must be some infection in the quarter; that was why they were demolishing it with picks! And was that body, caked with blood and plaster, male
or
female? Was it a dummy? The policeman wanted to know, because of the Registry. That's why he was arguing with the soldier. Were those festering fl for burning the dead bodies? And if the tracks had been ripped up, and the tram reduced to this carcass, how would she go to school in the morning? The dead horses, that made her stumble : were they Aryans or Jews? The dog Blitz was a bastard, and therefore Jewish for the Registry That's why she was being deported, because at the Registry she was listed as a Jew, there was an accent on her last name. Ah, that explained everything . . . Her surname was Almagia

. . . but luckily Useppe was named Ramundo . . . Is Ramundo ac cented on the middle syllable or the last? . . . And there were the words :
Israelitic Coemetery:
spelled like that:
coemetery.
And
Israelitic
. .
.
Wasn't that a forbidden word?!

Reading that sign on the cemetery gate, she was convinced this was how things really stood : she was being deported as a non-Aryan. She tried to walk faster, but she felt she couldn't make it.

At the suggestion of the tavernkeeper, she had fallen in behind a group of bombed-out families and fugitives, heading in the direction of Pietralata, towards a certain building where, so it was said, a dormitory had been set up for the homeless. Almost all the people ahead of her or following her carr bundles or suitca or household goods; but except for Useppe, she had absolutely nothing to carry. The only property left her was the shopping-bag hanging from her arm, with the Red Cross packets inside and the headcloth of the old woman from Mandela. But luckily, safe inside her corset ( which she never failed to wear, even in summer) she still had the precious little bundle of her savings. After so many hours, to tell the truth, that corset was becoming a hairshirt for her. Now her only desire was to arrive, anywhere, even at a concentration camp or a ditch, to release herself at last from that ferocious corset.

"Silence! The enemy is listening! Victory . . . Victory! . . .
"

A little man, at her side, alone and elderly, kept repeating in a loud voice similar war slogans, which could be read here and there along the way, on the scorched walls and the smoke-stained posters. And he seemed to be amusing himself pri very much, since he snickered as if he were telling himself jokes, commenting on them with various grumblings. His right arm was in a cast to the shoulder, so he had to hold it up, extended, as if he were giving the Fascist salute; and that also seemed to exhilarate him. He looked like an artisan or a clerk, skinny, not much taller than Ida, with lively eyes. Despite the heat, he wore a jacket and a brimmed hat set

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squarely on his head; and with his free hand he was pushing a barrow where he had loaded some household goods. Hearing him always mutter ing to himself, Ida decided he was a madman.

"Signora, you're Roman?" he suddenly addressed her, in a merry Roman accent.

"Yes, sir," she murmured. In fact, she privately thought you must always answer madmen affi and respectfully.

"Roman born and bred?" "Yes, sir."

"Like me.
Roma Doma.
I'm Roman myself, and as of today, a war invalid." And he explained to her how a slab had hit him on the shoulder blade just as he was coming back to his workshop-home (he was a marble cutter, near the cemetery ). His little house had been spared, luckily, but he preferred to clear out all the same, taking with him the bare necessities. The rest, if thieves or bombs didn't screw him out of it, he would fi when he went back.

He chattered with increasing gaiety, and Ida kept staring at him, frightened, not following his talk.

"Lucky kid! He's asleep," the madman remarked a little later, nod ding towards Useppe. And, seeing how exhausted she was, he suggested she put the baby in his barrow.

She glanced at him with enormous distrust, imagining that, under the pretext of helping her, the little man meant to steal Useppe from her, carrying him off in the barrow. Still, since she was at the end of her strength, she accepted. The man helped her settle Useppe ( who continued to sleep serenely) amid his possessions and then he introduced himself to her with these words :

"Cucchiarelli Giuseppe, hammer and sickle!" and as a sign of under standing and greeting, he clenched the fi of his good hand, winking at her with both eyes.

Ida's poor dazed head went on reasoning : if I tell him the baby's named Giuseppe the same as he is, it's more likely he'll steal him from me. Following this logic, she chose to say nothing. Then to protect herself against any dark intention on the part of the little man, she clung to one handle of the barrow with both fi And though she was now almost asleep on her feet, she wouldn't let go of that handle, not even to str

her numbed fi Th having passed the Jewish cemetery, they fol lowed the sharp curv of the Via Tiburtina.

And so Useppe made the rest of his journey as if in a coach : still sleeping, settled on a quilt, between a cage inhabited by a pair of canaries, and a covered basket containing a cat. The latter was so terrifi and

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bewildered by the whole obscure event that for the entire journey it didn't breathe. The two canaries, on the other hand, huddled side by side at the bottom of their cage, occasionally exchanged minimal chirp of solace.

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About another two and a half months went by, with no news of Nino. Meanwhile, on July 25th, the Duce, left without any fol lowing in his bad luck, had been deposed and arrested by the King, and Fascism had fallen with him, replaced by the Badoglio

provisional government, which lasted forty-fi days. On the forty-fi day, which was the 8th of September
1943,
the Anglo-American Allies, masters by now of much of southern Italy, signed an armistice with the provisional governors. And they immediately fl southwards, leaving to the Fascists and the Germ the rest of Italy, where the war continued.

The Italian army, however, scattered through the country, without any leadership or order, had disintegrated, so only the Blackshirt militia remained fi at the side of the Germans. Freed by Hitler's men, Mussolini had been set up in the North at the head of a Nazi-Fascist republic. And at present the city of Rome, left without a government, was in fact under Nazi occupation.

During all these events, Ida and Useppe had continued living at the edge of the Pietralata area, in the refugee shelter that had received them that fi night after the air raid.

Pietralata was a sterile country area on the extreme outskirts of Rome, where a few years earlier the Fascist regime had set up a kind of village for pariahs, or rather of poor families driven by the authorities from their old homes in the center of the city. The same regime had hastily constructed for them, with ersatz materials, this new neighborhood, composed of rudi mentary, identical dwellings, which now, though still recent, seemed al ready decrepit and rotting. They were, if I remember ri little rec tangular houses all in a row, all the same yellowish color, in the midst of a barren terrain, unpaved, which produced an occasional bush, born with ered, and for the rest, only dust or mire, according to the season. In addition to these hovels, you could see certain cement constructions, used as latrines or public washing-places, and some clotheslines, like gallows. And into each of those dormitory-hovels whole families and generations were crammed, mingled now with a stray population of war refugees.

In Rome, especially in the last few years, this territory had been considered virtually a no-man's-land, beyond the law; and in general the

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Fascists and the Nazis didn't dare show their faces much in the area, though its view was dominated by a military fort, standing high on a hill.

But for Ida, the Pietralata settlement, with its inhabitants, remained an exotic region where she ventured only to make purchases at the market, or for similar reasons, crossing it always with her heart pounding, like a rabbit's. The shelter where she lived was, in fact, about half a mile from the built-up area, beyond a desert of uneven fi all dips and embank ments, which hid the building from view. It was isolated, quadrangular, at the end of a crumbling ditch; and it wasn't clear what its ori functi had been. Perhaps it had fi served as a place for stori farm produce, but later it must have been used as a school, because there was a pile of desks inside. And probably some further work had been started, then suspended, because on the roof, fl like a terrace, a part of the railing had been demolished, and a trowel and a pile of bricks had been left there. Practically speaking, it consisted of a single ground-fl room, rather vast, with low gri windows, and one exit which opened directly onto the ditch; but it boasted some conveniences truly rare those days in the outly ing slums, namely a pri latri with cesspool, and a cistern feeding a water tank on the roof. The only faucet in the building was in the latrine, in a narrow basement, and from there the apparatus for the fl of water into the tank was also regulated. Now, however, at the end of summer, the cistern was dry, and Ida, like the other women, had to go to a public faucet in the slum-settlement for water. Later, with the rainy season, the situation improved.

No other dwelling existed nearby. The only building this side of the main settlement, about three or four hundred yards away, was a tavern, a kind of plaster shed, where they also sold salt, tobacco, and other rationed goods, scarcer and scarcer with the passing of time. If there were threats of raids in the area, or round-ups, or the mere presence of Germ or Fas cists, the proprietor found a way of alerting the refugees, with certain signals of his.

From the entrance to the shelter at the end of the ditch, in the direction of the tavern, a rough path had been made, reinforced as far as possible by some stones. This, in the area, was the only trodden path.