History (53 page)

And in the wardrobe, his civilian clothes were also still hanging. Kept in a clothing-bag, along with his sweater, there was his good suit of mixed wool and cotton, dark blue, almost black, the shoulders cut rather square,

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neatly cleaned and pressed; and on a special hanger next to the bag, his best shirt of special white muslin. His other two shirts, more ordinary, for every wear, were in a lower drawer of the wardrobe, with a pair of cheap pants, four pairs of shorts, two undershirts, some handkerchiefs, and some darned colored socks. In addition, on the wardrobe's lower shelf, there was a pair of shoes, almost new, stuff with newspaper and, folded over them, his Sunday socks, also practically new. And on a string stretched across the inside of the door, there was a rayon ti , a pale blue and white check pattern .

In the corner, then, two little printed pamphlets were kept: one was entitled
New and Practical Method for learning to play the
CUlT
AR without a teacher and without knowing music;
and the other Easy
Method for the MAN
No mandolins or guitars, however, were to be seen. The only musical instrument that existed in the place was inside the drawer of the desk-dressing table, next to a pen and a pencil : one of those little reed pipes cut with a knife, which mountain boys play when follow ing their goats. In fact, Giovannino (as his mother Filomena always boasted ) had had a passion for playing music ever since he was little; but except for that reed pipe, till now, he had never owned any other in struments.

To complete the list: under the bed there were his everyday shoes, resoled many times, but with the uppers all worn And hanging from a hook behind the door there was a mangy leatherette windbreaker. These were virtually the entire contents of the little room.

There were no comic books or picture magazines or pictures of fi beauti or football players, as in Ninnarieddu's room. The walls, covered with cheap wallpaper, were bare except for a free calendar, the kind with twelve pages, still for the year 1942, with propaganda photographs of works of the Fascist regime.

No individual photograph of the room's absent owner e2 here or elsewhere. His mother possessed and displayed two pictures of him, in groups; but you could tell little from either of them. The fi taken perhaps by some village amateur, portrayed him, still a little boy, along with another dozen mountain kids his age, at Confi and in the confused and blurred whole, of him in particular you could discern only that he was thin, rather blond, and that he had a cap on his head and was laughing. The second picture, brought back by a soldier who had met him in Russia, was a little snapshot, showing a landscape of undergrowth, with a watery stripe in the background. In the foreground, you could see a thick, crooked stake that crossed the whole landsca from bottom to top; and to the left of the stake, fairly close up, a mule's behind, near a bundled-up little man with puttees on his legs, who wasn't, however, Giovannino. To

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the right of the stake, on the contrary, but farther to the rear, you could see some dark forms, all in a huddled mass, so you couldn't even say whether they were soldiers or civilians, or if there were helmets on their heads or, rather, some kind of limp little hat. Among them was Giovan nino; but really it was impossible to distinguish him, or even to indica him at a precise point within the pile.

After she had taken over the room from Filomena-who on that occasion had made a careful inventory of it-Ida never again allowed herself the liberty of opening the wardrobe, which still was wi a key and with a door that wouldn't close tight. And on this score, she never stopped warn Useppe, who obediently avoided even grazing with his fi the absent proprietor's belongings, content merely to observe them with profound respect.

For their personal possessions, Filomena supplied them with a card board box and also cleared space for them in the kitchen cupboard. Thanks to the Madman's bequest, Ida, feeling rich, had purchased some reserve provisions and also a remnant of red ersatz wool, from which the same Filomena made a little overall for Useppe. With that overall on, Useppe no longer resembled an Indian or Charlie Chaplin, but a gnome from an animated cartoon.

The little room was certainly not as noisy as the vast place at Pietra lata; but here too, noises were incessant. During the daytime, from the entrance-workroom, there was the almost constant racket of the sewing machine, the voices of visitors and customers, etc. And at night, from the kitchen, there was the Ciociaria grandfather, who slept little, in his sleep often had nightmares, and in his waking interv did nothing but hawk and spit. His long body, thin and bent, was a cavernous well of catarrh that could never be drained. The old man kept always beside him a big, chipped basin, and hawking, he emitted sounds of extreme anguish, like donkeys' braying which seems to charge the silence with the total sorrow of the cosmos. For the rest, he conversed little, was simple-minded, and never left the house, frightened by the city streets as if by a siege. If he happened to glance out of the window, he drew back at once, complaining that here in Rome you couldn't see any empty air outside. From his house in the mountains, when he looked out ( for "look," instead of
guardare
he said
tr'mintare)
he could see lots of empty space and here, instead, the air was all full of walls. At night, too, you could hear him exclaim, in his night mares, that stubborn complaint of the full and the void { "Tr'mint! tr'mint! ! Look, look! It's nothing but a wall!"). And if, as often happened, some shots resounded from the streets or some planes passed through the sky or perhaps the windows shook because of bombs in the neighborhood, every time he would be jolted awake with a kind of hoarse, desperate

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howling, which meant "Here I am, awake again!" From time to time in his vigil he would repea t: "Oi
rn
oi
rn
and he would answer himself, in his mother's place : "Son! Son, what is it?" Or else he would be overcome by self-pity, calling himself "little gypsy" and claiming he was "a little gypsy in the strawstack" ( the strawstack was his hut of straw where, in the moun

tains, he had fi been reduced to living alone). Then he would start hawking, with such torment that he seemed to be vomiting blood.

During the day, he remained seated always on a little chair in the kitchen, his basin beside him. His emaciated body, all bones, ended in a great clump of dirty, wispy white hair, over which, also indoors, he would wear his hat, following the mountaineer custom. On his feet, even here in Rome, he wore the bound cioce; but for that matter his walking was limited to the distance from the kitchen to the WC and back. His su preme, insatiable desire was for wine, but his daughter allowed him very little.

The kitchen window was long and extended in a ti covered balcony, where, those fi days, a rabbit lived. Immediately, on his entrance into the new lodging, Useppe had glimpsed it there, hopping on its long rear paws. And after that, his greatest pleasure in the house was to stand behind the panes of the balcony to con template the rabbit. Its color was pure white, with a touch of pink in the ears, and its pink eyes seemed unaware of the world. Its only attitude towards the world was a certain fright that seized it, quickly and unpredictably (even without any apparent motive), and made it fl its ears and run for shelter inside its little house made from a plywood box. But as a rule it would remain crouched to one side, in an intent calm, as if it were brooding on some baby rabbits; or it would fervidly gnaw the cabbage stalks Annita furnished it. A hospital patient had given it to Tommaso; and the family, particularly the daughter-in-law Annita ( though accustomed, of course, as herdsmen, to the slaughter of animal fl had taken it-who knows why?-to their bosoms, as if it were a kind of relative, so they couldn't make up their minds to sacrifi it in a pot. One day, however, Useppe, who ran to the balcony every morning when he woke up, found Annita alone there, sweeping up the remains of the stalks with a sad face. The rabbit was gone: the family, resigned, had traded it out of necessity, for two cans of meat.

". . . where's the abbit?"

"He's gone away . . ."

"Who'd he go with?! . . .
"

"With an onion, some oil, and tomatoes" . . . ( the mother-in-law answered, sighing, from the entrance-hall).

In the workroom, along with Filomena and Annita, there was always a

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piccinina,
a little one, that is to say a girl apprentice, whose duties also included errands and shopping. She was from the Abru about fourteen, already developed, but so thin that in the place of a bosom she had a cavity. Sewing, mending, or at the machine, she always sang a popular song that went:

". . . my joy, my
tormend

you are . . .
"

The three women were rarely alone. When no customers were about, there was never any lack of visitors. Every day a neighbor woman dropped by; she was about thirty-fi named Consolata, and she had a brother who had gone off to the Russian front at the same ti as Giovannino, in his same unit, and his fate had also been unknown for a long ti A man,
who
late at night listened to Radio Moscow,
had
said, months ago, that this brother's name had been mentioned in a broadcast list of prisoners; however, another man, who listened to the same program at night, said the fi name mentioned by the radio was his, all right, Clemente; but the last name was diff t.

This, their relatives in Russia, was the sole, etern subject of the women's talk; it even eclipsed the other subject, famine. Ninnuzzu, also had sent no news, as he was off wandering somewhere or fi as a guerrilla; and Ida preferred not to speak or even to think of him : a kind of unconscious exorcism. But she kept the tavemkeeper Remo always in form of her movements, in case Nino should pass through Rome again. Another visitor to the Marrocco women was a certain Santi who lived alone near Porta Portese. She was about forty-eight, rather tall, and with excessively large bones, which, despite her extreme thinness, made her body seem heavy and bulky. She had large dark eyes, with a deep gaze, without light; and as she was losing her teeth from lack of nutrition, and an incisor was missing in front, her smile had something helpless and guilty about it, as if she were ashamed of her own ugliness, and of herself, every

time she smiled.

Her hair was turning gray, and she wore it loose over her shoulders, like a young girl; however, she used no powder or cosmetics, and didn't try to hide her age. Her ruined, pale face, with broad, jutting bones, expressed a crude and resigned simplicity.

Her chief profession, even now, was whoring. However, she also con trived to make some money washing clothes, or giving injections, among the neighborhood families. Every now and then she would fall ill and go to the hospital, or else she would be caught by the police; but as a rule, she

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wasn't accustomed to bari her wounds, and on her return after an ab sence she would say she had been
back to the village.
She also said she had a mother, back in the village, whom she had to support. But everyone knew she was lying. She had no relatives in the world and that
mother
was, in reality, a pimp, many years her junior, who lived in Rome, but rarely let himself be seen with her. Apparently he lived in another quarter, and there were some who had glimpsed him, but like an apparition or a shadow, without precise outlines.

Santina's frequent visits to the Marrocco home were due, especially, to her ability to read the unknown in cards. For this, she had a personal system not to be found in texts of cartomancy, learned nobody knows where. The Marrocco women never tired of consulting her about Giovan nino; and as soon as she arrived, they would hastily clear the worktable of snippets, scissors, pins, and other clutter, to make room for the deck of cards. Their questions were always the same:

"Tell us if he's well."

"Tell us if he's thinking about us." "Tell us if he'll come home soon." "Tell us if his health is good."

"Tell us if he thinks about his family."

Filomena asked these questions of hers in a tone of insistent urgency, as if she were begging an answer from a very busy and brisk Authority; while Annita ventured them slowly, in her usual reserved and melancholy way, her head bent slightly towards one shoulder, her habitual pose. Her dark-skinned, oval face seemed paler because of the black weight of her chignon, which she left loose, to one side. And in commenting, with her mother-in-law, on Santina's replies, her voice was hesitant and discreet, as if she was afraid of being a nuisance.

Santina never raised her dense, opaque eyes from the cards, and she gave her answers in the tone of a slightly backward girl reciting an obscure prayer. Her replies, like the questions, did not vary much from one time to the next:

"Swords . . . swords upside down . Cold. It's cold out there," Santi

says.

"You see!" Filomena reproaches Annita, "I kept saying we should

have sent his heavy sweater, too, in the package!"

"He wrote us he didn't need it, and to send him more socks instead, and chestnuts . . ." Annita justifi herself.

"But is his health good? Tell us that: if he's in good health."

"Yes, here I see good news. There's a powerful person near . . a good recommendation. Somebody important . . . King of Coins .
. a