History (55 page)

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point of indigestion and vomiting; and in there, at the supper tables, the massacres for the next day were orchestrated. The Commander, who had himself called King of Rome, was a big compulsive eater and drinker, and alcohol was the customary stimulant and narcotic for the occupiers, both at the High Command and in the lower ranks. In secondary, remote streets of the city, you could remark some little building or villa, in middle-class style, with rows of windows recently walled up on the various fl They were former offi or family-style boarding houses, now converted by the occu pying police forces into torture chambers. Inside, all the wretches infected with the vice of death found employment, like their Fuhrer, masters at last of living, helpless bodies for their perv practices. From inside those buildings, day and night, there often came a deafening din of cheap dance music and songs from gramophones turned up to full volume.

Every day, in every street, you could see a police wagon stop in front of a building, with orders to search every room and the rooftops and terraces, in the hunt for someone whose name was written on a piece of paper. No regulation limited this perpetual hunt, without any forewarn

in which the masters' power was total. Often an entire building or quarter would suddenly be barred off by cordons of troops, with the order to round up, within that enclosure, all males between sixteen and sixty, to deport them to the Reich for forced labor. Instantly, public transport would be stopped and emptied, a helpless and mad throng would run in confusion towards escapes with no exit, followed by volleys of automatic fi

For months now, to tell the trn the streets had been papered with proclamations printed on pink paper, which ordered all ablebodied men to present themselves for obligatory labor under pain of death; but nobody obeyed, nobody heeded those edicts, by now they didn't even read them any more. It was known that, in the city's cellars, there were stubborn little squads of guerrillas in action; but the sole eff of their enterprises on the crowd's apathy was the nightmare of the reprisals that followed from the occupiers, carried away by the convulsions of their own fear. The populace had fallen silent. The daily news of round-ups, torture, and slaughter circu lated through the neighborhoods like death-rattle echoes without any pos sible response. It was known that, just outside the city's girdle of walls, ineptly buried in mined ditches and caves, numberless bodies were thrown to decompose, sometimes heaped up by the tens and the hundreds, as they had been collectively massacred, one on top of the other. Communiques of a few lines, with no explanation, announced the date of their decease, but not their place of buri And the crowd avoided speaking of their ubiqui tous, shapeless presence, except in some evasive murmurs. Every contact and every substance gave off a funereal, prison stench : dry in the dust, damp in the rain. And even the famous mirage of the
Liberation
was being

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reduced to a fatuous cl subject of sarcasm and mockery. For that matter, it was said that the Germans, before abandoning the city, would blow it up completely, from the foundations, and that already, underground, miles and miles of sewers served as a deposit for mines. The architectures of the metropolis "of which not a stone will be left upon a stone" seemed a panorama of phantoms. And on the walls, meanwhile, day after day, the pink posters of the city's masters multiplied, with new orders, taboos, and persecutory vetoes, niggling to the point of ingenuousness in their bureau cratic delirium. But fi inside the isolated city, sacked and besieged, the true master was hunger. Now the only food distributed by the Food Offi was, in a ration of one hundred grams per person, a bread made from rye, chickpeas, and sawdust. For other provisions, practically speak ing, there was only the black market, where the prices rose so recklessly that, towards the month of May, Ida's salary was no longer enough to buy even a fl of olive oil. Moreover, in these last months, salaries were paid irregularly by the city offi

The Madman's bequest, which had seemed to her a huge patrimony, had been dissipated much sooner than she had foreseen. The supplies bought with that money were also about to run out: she barely had a few pota toes left and some dark pasta. And little Useppe, who thanks to the Madman had begun to put some fl on his bones again, was now losing weight every day. His eyes took up nearly all the room in his face, small as a fi Around his well-known central cowlick, always erect in an exclama tory air, the black clumps of his hair had become lank and dull, as if covered with dust; and his ears stuck out from his head like a nestling's featherless wings. Every time the Marroccos put their pot of beans on the stove to heat up, he could be seen roaming around their legs, like a poor begging gypsy.

"Join us, join us," Filomena would say, according to the dictates of proper manners, as she sat down at the table. And at this ritual phrase from the good old times, now those present, in general, retired, prudently, discreetly. But at least a couple of times it so happened that Useppe-to whom, since he was only a tiny kid, nobody ever said : join us!-would step forward naively to prompt: Join? on his own initiative. And his mother, blushing, had to call him away.

Ida's wretched war against hunger, which had engaged her for more than two years, was now a hand-to-hand combat. This single daily impera tive-fi food for Useppe-made her insensitive to any other stimulus, her own hunger's to start with. During that month of May she lived, practically speaking, on a little grass and water, but it was enough for her; indeed her every mouthful seemed a waste, beca it was robbed fr Useppe. At times, to take still less from him, she decided to boil some

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peelings for h erself, or ordinary leaves, or even flies and ants; they were still a sustenance . . . or perhaps gnaw on some stalk from the garbage, or tear the grass from the walls of the ruins.

In appearance, she now had white hair and the bent shoulders of a little humpback, having become so tiny that she was only slightly taller than some of her pupils. And yet, at present her physical resistance was greater than that of the giant Goliath who was six cubits and a palm tall and wore a cuirass of fi thousand shekels of copper. It was an enigma, where that drained little body drew certain colossal reserves. Despite her malnutrition, which was visibly consuming her, Ida felt neither weakness nor appetite. And truly, from her unconscious, an organic certitude prom ised her a kind of temporary immortality which made her immune to needs and diseases and spared her all eff for her personal survival. This unnamed instinct for preserv which regulated her body's chemistry, was also obeyed by her sleep, which for that period, as if to serve her as nightly nourishment, was unusually normal, empty of dreams, uninter rupted, despite the external noises of the war. However, at the hour of rising, an internal din of grand peals would shake her. "Useppe! Useppe!" was the cry of those tumults. And immediately, even before waking, with urgent hands, she would seek the child.

At times, she found him huddled against her bosom, grasping her breasts in his sleep, in a blind, anxious movement. Since the time when she had nursed him during his fi months of life, Ida had become unused to the sensation of those little hands clutching her; but her breasts, scant even then, had now dried up forever. With an animal and useless tenderness, Ida detached her little son from herself. And at that moment she began her daily quest through the streets of Rome, driven on by her nerves, whipping her like an army of men in parallel rows.

She had become unable to think of the future. Her mind had nar rowed to the day, between the hour of her morning rising and the curfew. And with all the many fears she had borne innate within her, now she feared nothing. The racial decrees, the intimidatory ordinances, and the public news had on her the eff of buzzing parasites, swirling around her in a great strange wind, without attacking her. That Rome was all mined and would collapse tomorrow left her indifferent, like an already remote memory of Ancient History or an eclipse of the moon in space. The only threat to the universe, for her, was summed up in the recent sight of her little son she had left sleeping, reduced to such a trifl weight that he made almost no hump under the sheet. If she happened to see herself in a mirror, in the street, she saw an alien thing in the glass, without identity, with which she barely exchanged a dazed glance, then immediately moved away. A similar glance was exchanged among the early-morning passersby,

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who avoided one another, all run-down and ashen, hollow-eyed, their clothes sagging on their bodies.

For these adults, she had no pity. On the other hand, she felt compas sion for her little pupils, because they were children, like Useppe. But the most wretched and wasted of them still seemed to her better nouri

than he. Even their little brothers, however small they were, seemed more grown than he. Lacerating fantasies took her thoughts back to certain pink, plump babies in ads; or certain blessed children of wealthy families, whom she remembered having glimpsed in their embroidered baby-carriages or in their wet-nurses' arms. Or else her thoughts returned to when Ninnuzzu was in his cradle, so pretty and big that Alfi his father, in picking him up would cry : "Allez-oop! Weightlifting!!!" raising him h igh in the air, with a boastful, triumphant laugh. Useppe, instead, had had to fend for himself since infancy, to put a few little rings of fat on his wrists and thighs; but compared to today, that period of the li ttle rings was to be recalled as
a
time of abundance. And it seemed incredible to her that in all of enorm Rome she couldn't collect enough to fill such a tiny belly.

Several times, during that rvfay, she retraced her steps to San Lorenzo ( walking obliquely and keeping her eyes off the ruin of her house) to beg something from the tavemkeeper Remo. She also went to plead for some leftovers or scraps from the father of a student of hers, who ran a delicates sen, and from another who worked at the Municipal Slaughterhouse. Armed with a little pot lent by the Marroccos, she would stand in line for the economic soups distributed by the Vatican; but although called eco nomic, those soups, at the price of two hundred lire, were a luxury for her fi and she allowed herself this expense only rarely.

Gradually, she lost all sense of honor or of shame, as well as fear. Once, coming home around noon, she encountered a lot of people with packages in their hands, coming from Piazza Santa Maria Liberatrice, where the Germans were distributing free food. 1l1is exceptional donation in the working-class districts, prompted in those days by fear, was meant as propa ganda, a show. In fact, the general in charge of the Germans ( the well-fed
King of Rome )
presided over the distributions, and in the square, around the trucks, photographers and movie-cameras were at work. 1l increased the repugnance of the district's inhabitants, and a number of them, sus pecting some German machination, abandoned the square. But at the sight of those packages, Ida felt only an impetuous greed, which sucked at her from inside. Her brain emptied. The blood raced through all her body, until it spread in some enfl patches on her skin. And pushing her way through the crowd in the square, she held out her hands towards the truck, to collect her kilogram of fl

Until a few weeks before, whenever decorum required, she still wore a

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second-hand felt cloche, formerly derived (along with a pair of slippers, two old brassieres, unmatched stockings, and other odds and ends ) from the famous gifts of the Charity La at Pietralata. But now she no longer wore stockings or hat; and recently, for practical reasons, she had cut her hair, which, short like this, crowned her head with a crinkly mop. For some time, indeed, whenever she combed her hair, many strands were left in the comb; but it was still thick. So her head, though white, with this little crown of curls involuntarily took on the aspect of her childhood years in Cosenza. Her face, of a waxen pallor, though grown smaller and hollow, remained oddly free of wrinkles, its natural round form resembling the muzzle of an animal, pointing aimlessly.

Already that past winter, more than a few shops had closed down. Many shutters were lowered, and all the display windows were bare. The few provisions still available were requisitioned, or confi or looted by the occupiers, or taken over by black marketeers. Wherever there was a legal store open, you could see long lines waiting outside; but those lines still stretched along the sidewalks after the supplies being sold had run out. When she found herself among the last, left empty-handed, Iduzza would go off dazed, with the tread of a guilty person who has received a deserv punishment.

At the sight of any edible substance, alas inaccessible to her means, she remained spellbound, with a heart-rending envy. Nothing made her mouth water, even her secretion of saliva had dried up; all her vital stimuli had been transferred to Useppe. There is a story about a tigress who, in a chill solitude, kept herself and her cubs alive by licking the snow and distributing to her little ones some scraps of meat that she ripped from her own body with her teeth.