History (44 page)

"And what will Sor Giuseppe say now? After he even paid you to take care of them!" all present yelled at
un,
who was sobbing disconsolately at the sight of the slaughtered pair. Meanwhile Useppe, in the face of those little clumps of spent, bloodstained feathers, had turned pale, and his chin was trembling : "Say, rn won't they fl any more?" he repeated softly, as

Ida thrust him away from there towards their corner, "not fl any more,

rn Can't they fl any more?"

The women, in their repugnance at touching blood, didn't have the heart to pick them up from the fl , and pushed them out into the street with the broom. The next morning, they had vanished from the spot, and it's not impossible that they too were eaten by some living creature: per haps a dog, perhaps a cat, but perhaps also a human. In that peri the people in the neighborhood who hunted for their food among the garbage were becoming more and more numerous every day; and to somebody who is content at fi some potato peelings or rotten apples, a pair of roast canari can look like an Archbishop's dinner.

In any case, Ida told Useppe they had fl away.

The sun, that morning, was shining so warm that summer seemed to have come back; and a little after Ida's daily exit, Nino's promise, fi

was kept.

He was radiant, no less thrilled than Useppe. ''I'm taking my brother out with me!" he declared to the others, "he'll be home before lunch"; then he wrote a note in pencil, and left it on Ida's pillow:

Back in 4 hours

Useppe

Guaranteed by Nino

and beneath this guarantee, he drew his personal coat of arm : an ace of hearts over two crossed swords.

He hoisted Useppe astride his shoulders, and running and jumping down along some vacant fi he came to a grassy space at the edge of a dirt road, where a little truck was waiting for him, with a man and a woman of middle age. Useppe recognized them at once: they were the tavernkeeper and his wife (Remo had a special permit to transport food-

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stuffs). Inside the truck there were demijohns, baskets, and sacks, some already full, others still to be filled.

The journey lasted about three-quarters of an hour, and it proceeded without hindrance. Nobody stopped them. It was the fi time in his life Useppe had traveled in a car and seen the great open countryside. Until now, of the whole world he had known only San Lorenzo, the Tiburtino and environs (Portonaccio, etc. ), and the slum of Pietralata. His emotion was so great that, during the fi part of the trip, he remained silent; until, in his joyous rapture, he began to chatter to himself or with the others, trying to comment, in an unthought-of and incomprehensible vocabulary, on his discovery of the universe.

If it hadn't been for an occasional passing German vehicle and some burnt-out automobiles abandoned at the edge of the road, you wouldn't have known the war existed. The sumptuous autumn splendors seemed ripened in a legendary peace. Even where the terrain was in shadow, the sun breathed through the air in a gilded veil that calmly stretched over the whole sky.

At a little country crossroads, Remo and his wife unloaded the two passengers and continued on their own, agreeing they would meet at the same place later. Again Nino put Useppe on his shoulders, and leaping and skipping with him, crossed gulleys, slopes, and muddy paths, amid rows of vines and rivulets that glistened in the sun. At about two-thirds of the way, they stopped at a little house, where a girl was up in an olive tree shaking the branches, while a woman below collected the olives in a tub. This girl was Nino's mistress, but in the presence of the woman, who was her mother, she didn't want to let it be seen. The woman, however, knew (and they were aware she knew), and at Nino's arrival she gave him an ecstatic smile, as the girl climbed down from the tree, and, casting him only a fl glance, went into the house with an arrogant stride. She came out a little later, to give him something wrapped in newspaper. "Hello there!" Ninnuzzu then said to her pompously, and she grumbled hello, in a grouchy, cross tone. "This is my brother!" Nino announced to her, and she answered "Is that so?" with hauteur, as if to pay no further compliment, meaning : if he's our brother, he can only be a rasca the same as you. Nino, who knew her, laughed and then said to her: "Ciao!" "Ciao," the girl answered, through pouting lips, going back to the tree, with a high, reluc tant step.

"What do you think of her?" Ninnuzzu asked Useppe, resuming his way, as if speaking to his confi "Her name's Maria," he went on. "Her mother's a widow, and she's an orphan. When the war's over," he con cluded, joking cynically, ''I'm going to marry her." And turning back to wards the tree, he called : "Mariulina! Mariulina!"

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The girl, perched in the tree like a fantastic eaglet, didn't even look around. However you could tell from her secret wriggling, from the way her chin was hidden against her throat, she was laughing a little laugh of jealous pleasure.

After another stretch of road, Useppe, impatient to run on his own legs, began to kick at Nino's chest; and Nino put him down. In this last stretch, too, the terrain was rather steep, and Nino admired Useppe's athletic prowess, amused at introducing his brother to the realm of adven ture. At a certain point they stopped to have a pee, and this was a source of further amusement, because Nino, as he used to do when a kid with his ignorant friends, showed Useppe his virtuosity, sending the stream high into the air, and Useppe imitated him with his own little jet. The countr side was deserted : Nino had purposely avoided the mule-track, where Ger mans could be encountered; and there weren't even any houses, only a few straw huts. Not far from a hut hidden in a depression of the hill, a littl mule was cropping grass. "Horse!" Useppe shouted at once. "Not horse," a familiar voice said from inside the hut, "that's a mule." "Eppetondol" Useppe shouted then with enthusiasm. In the low, medium-sized hut, the partisan Moscow was busy peeling some potatoes in a basin; and at the pair's entrance, he smiled with his mouth, his eyes, his wr and even his ears. Besides him, there were two young men seated on the ground, cleaning some rusty, mudstained weapons with rags soaked in kerosene. And around them, in the hut, there was a disorder of arm blankets, heaps of straw, shovels, picks, knapsacks, fl of wine, and potatoes. From beneath one blanket some gun-barrels stuck out; next to the door a sub machine gun was propped against the wall; and nearby, on the ground, there was a little pile of hand grenades.

"This is my brother!" The older of the two guerrillas, a short boy of about twenty, with a round face and some wisps of beard, wearing a few dirty tatters ( even on his feet, he had rolled-up rags instead of shoes), barely raised his eyes from the job that was absorbing him. But the other gave Useppe a fi smile of friendship, ingenuous and festive. Th youth, though his body was already grown, perhaps six feet tall, s till betrayed his age in his pink and beardless face : he was sixteen. He had a low forehead, and his broad eyes, of a milky blue, avoided other people's gaze, in a kind of sti shyness, contrasting with a certain tough expression of his. He was wearing a whitish trench coat, now fi hy, over his bare torso; pants and boots originally belonging to the Italian army ( the pants were too short for him); and on his wrist, a Germ watch of which he seemed extremely proud, for every minute he happily held it to his ear to make sure it was working.

"This is Decima, and this is Tarza Ace made the introducti

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"Here!" he added, throwing the younger man (Tarzan ) the package re ceived from Mariulina, which contained some tobacco leaves. And tempo rarily abandoning the cleaning of the weapons, Tarzan took a switchblade knife from his trench-coat pocket and began at once to chop up those thick brown leaves, to make some cigarettes with newspaper immediately.

"Everything okay?" Ace inquired, having been absent since the previ ous night, spent in Rome with another girl friend of his from the old days. And meanwhile, with an air of knowledge and mastery, he was examining those weapons, now being restored, which represented his latest exploit. It was he, in fact, who had discovered them, the day before, at the edge of a wood where some Germans were camping, and yesterday, as soon as it was dark, he and two other comrades had gone to take them by stealth, eluding the camp's sentries. He personally, however, had shared only in this fi phase ( the most dangerous, really ) of the expedition; leaving to the other pair the more toilsome part (namely the transport of the load to their base), in his anxiety to catch the last tram and to keep his Roman date.

"You can see for yourself . . ." Decima answered his question, still intent on his work, with an almost grim determination. Decima was new; he had just joined the band, and for this reason he still hadn't conquered himself some shoes. He didn't even know how to use weapons, and Ace was teaching him how to take apart the Breda automatic guns, how to unscrew the breech of rifl etc. The new weapons, just looted (ten pieces in all ), were of Italian ori having fallen into the Germans' hands after the dispersal of the Italian army. And Nino displayed a certain contempt for Italian arms (outmoded stuff according to him, and rejects ). But for him, in any case, handling arms was always a passionate delight.

"We're running out of kerosene," Decima remarked gravely, "we have to get hold of some more." "I believe," Tarzan said, "Quattro and Pyotr will take care of that." (Pyotr was the guerrilla pseudonym of Carlo Vivaldi.)

"Where are they?" Ace inquired.

"They went up the hill, for provisions. But they're late already. They should be back by now." And Tarzan seized the opportunity to consult his watch.

"What time did they leave?" "At 0730 hours."

"What did they take with them?"

"Quattro has the P.38, and Pyotr took Harry's Sten." "Where's Harry

"He's outside, in the vineyard, naked, taking the sun." "Ah, getting some rest," Moscow intervened, reproaching Ace (but in fun), "after he had to take two turns of guard duty last night. And after all that work he

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did in the evening, left alone there in the middle of the road, with all that artillery in his arms . . ."

"
I would of missed my tram! And I didn't leave him alone, anyway.

Wild Orchid was there. 1l1ere were two of them."

"Eh, Orchid. He's a big fi all right! Fine company, eh!" "And where's he now?"

"\Vho? Orchid? He's probably lying outside too, somewhere in th garden."

"And the Chief?"

"He slept in the village. He'll be back in the afternoon. By the way, Ace, you haven't heard the news . . . Him and me, last night, we fi that PAl character."

In communicating this inform Tarza curled his lips in a hard and contemptuous grimace. But a childish blush rose to his cheeks at the same time.

"Ah," Ninnuzzu said, "high time. Where?"

"A few feet from his house. He was lighting himself a butt. The fl

of the lighter helped us recognize him. He was alone. It was all dark. Nobody saw a thing. The two of us were around the corner. We fi at the same time. It all took a couple of seconds. We were already safe when we heard his wife yelling."

"The bereaved widow," Ace of Hearts commented.

"Yeah, but all the same," the partisan Moscow exclaimed emphati cally, "I bet she wasn't crying, the Signora, when there was that Germ round-up thanks to her late husband's good offi s!!"

"He was a lousy spy," Ace remarked again. "A fat-ass," he concluded, the defi ive judgment. In the meanwhile, he never stopped gazing at the weapons scattered there on the ground before him, with the air of
a
capitalist inspecting his personal wealth. "At the present moment," Tarzan summed up for him, about to glue his newspaper-cigarette with saliva, "we have eight shotguns and six '91's . . .
"

Even the partisan Moscow took part every now and then in the arm count with an expert's haughtiness : "Th are German projectiles," he informed the beginner Decima, indica the grenades with his foot.

"They're good for the explosive in them," Ace spoke out. "La
I'll

show you how they're used . . ."

"We take out the charge and make gunpowder from it, and when you mix that with TNT . . ."

"Eppetondo! What kind of horse's that?" Useppe spoke up at this point, still interested in the mule.

"I told you : that's not a horse. That's a mule." "Ess! Mule! Mule! But what kind of horse is it?!"

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"Aw, come onl A mule's not a horse. It's half horse and half donkey."

••. • .
?
. . •"

"It had a mare for a mother, and a donkey for a father."

"Or vice versa," ventured Tarza who, having been born and bred in the city, wanted to show a proper knowledge of these rusti subjects, all the same.

"No, if it's vice versa, it's not a mule. It's a hinny."