History (56 page)

At the Gianicolense, near the school, there was a modest little villa with a few square feet of garden, enclosed by a little wall that, as a protective measure, had some sharp fragments of glass set in the top. The gate must originally have been of iron; but perhaps as a result of the scrap collections for the war industry, at present there was a wooden one, rein forced on the outside by a network of barbed wire. Not far from the gate, against the inner wall, you could still see a little shed with a sheet-iron roof, which had formerly served as a chicken coop; but now the few surv

hens were prudently raised inside the house.

The fi weeks she taught at the Gianicolense, Ida often rang at the little villa's gate, to purchase eggs; but lately their price had risen to twenty lire apiece . . . It was the latter half of May. One afternoon, coming out of her class, Ida glimpsed through the gate, lying on a rag on the ground, in the shade of a bush, a beautiful, intact egg. Clearly a hen, during a brief escape from the house into the garden, had just laid it there, and nobody

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was yet aware of it. The windows at the front of the house were closed, the owners were perhaps even absent. The little street, almost rural, was peace ful and deserted.

1l1e egg lay on the path to the old hen coop, sheltered between the bush and the base of the wall, no more than two feet from the gate. A flush rose to Ida's brain. She calculated that, if she raised the barbed wire with her left hand, and thrust her other arm through the low slats of the gate, she could easily reach the egg. This calculation, which lasted an instant, was not really made by her; but by a second, spectral Ida, who was released from her material body, bending it in great haste, down on all fours, using her hand to clutch. In fact, calculation and action were simul taneous. And Ida, having placed the little egg in her purse, was already slipping away from the scene of that unpunished and unprecedented crime. In her haste, the barbed wire of the gate had scratched her fairly deeply on her hand and wrist.

There had been no witnesses. She had got away with it. Now she was well beyond the Gianicolense, and an unusual cool feeling, with the physi cal pleasure of speed, rejuvenated her from the age of mother to that of older sister. Her booty, like an enormous oval diamond, shone in the open sky before her, in the collapse of the Tables of the La This fi theft was the most thrilling, but it wasn't the only one. The second was even bolder, downright foolhardy.

It was around the twentieth of May, early in the morning. She had just gone out of the house, leaving Useppe, for breakfast, a little piece of rationed bread, saved from the day before, and a bit of ersatz cocoa, to be dissolved in water. At that hour, only a few workmen were out in the streets. Coming from a side alley out onto the street along the Tiber, she glimpsed a little truck, parked in front of a food storeroom.

Two armed Fascists, in uniform, with parachute-troopers' ·berets, were guarding the operation of a young man in faded overalls, who was going to and from the storeroom, unloading some ca of goods on the sidewalk. Just as she was coming around the corner, Ida saw the two militiamen enter the storeroom together. Their voices, chatting gaily, reached her.

In fact, bored by this peaceful operation, the two boys had sat down on some cases inside, continuing an argument they had already begun. The subject was a woman, Pisanella by name, and the argument was about love. Ida, however, caught nothing but the murmur of their voices, which re sounded vaguely in her ears. Her powers of perception, in that instant, were all concentrated in her eyes, cast on two simultaneous images : the man in the overalls, who was in his turn going into the storehouse; and on the sidewalk, a step away from her, a large cardboard case, its top open, and only three-quarters full. On one side, it contained little cans of pre-

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served meat; and on the other, packets of powdered sugar ( the contents cou1d be recognized by the shape, and the blue color of the wrapping paper).

Ida's heart started throbbing so violently it was like the fl of a pair of huge wings. She reached out one hand and appropriated a can, which she slipped into her purse, promptly taking refuge around the corner of the street. At that very moment the man in overalls came out of the storeroom with another load : without having noticed anything, however, Ida believed. Actually, with
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sidelong glance, he had caught her in the act, though he pretended to see nothing, out of sympathy for the little woman. Two ravenous beggar types, appearing on the broad street at that same moment, as their gaze met hers, gave her a wink of understanding and congratulation. They, she was sure, had seen her: but they too, out of sympathy, walked right on casually, as if nothing had occurred.

Everything had happened in the space of three seconds. And already Ida was slinking away, through the back streets. Her heart continued pounding, but she felt no special apprehension, and no sense of shame. The only voice that rose from her conscience was a shrewish cry that insistently reproached her: "While you were about it, you could have grabbed a pack of sugar with the other hand!! Damn you, damn you, why didn't you take the sugar, too?!!"

The ersatz cocoa, which Useppe drank in the morning, was already sweetened at the factory, with some artifi powder, suspected of being harmful to the health. Sugar cost more than a thousand lire the kilogram

. . . With these thoughts, her face frowning, Ida scratched her wooly mop, which looked like a clown's wig.

In those last ten days of May, she carried out, on an average, one theft per day. She was always alert, like a cutpurse, ready to snatch at the fi opportunity. Even at the Tor di Nona black market, where the vendors were more vigilant than mastiff with her incredible dexterity, she man aged to loot a pack of salt, which at home she then shared with Filomena, who gave her some white cornmeal.

Suddenly, she had fallen into an unscrupulous depravity. If she had been less old and ugly, she might have taken to the sidewalks like Santina. Or if she had been more practical, she might have followed the example of an old retired woman named Reginella, a customer of Filomena's, who went to beg every day in Rome's rich neighborhoods, where she was un known. But those luxurious districts were not only, by now, the fi of the German High Command, but had always been situated, for Ida, in a foreign and unattainable distance, no less than Persepolis or Chica

And yet, in this unexpected Ida, as in a double phenomenon, a natural shyness of nature continued, indeed grew morbidly. After she had rushed

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about the streets stealing, at home she hardly dared use the stove in the common kitchen. From the ( fairly scarce) food of the family, she stayed not just her hand, but even her eye, like savages before taboos. And in the classroom, she seemed not so much a schoolteacher as a frightened little pupil : so her children, though speechless from hunger, already threatened to degenerate into a disrespectful gang. (Luckily, the early closing of the schools came in time to spare her this affront, never undergone before in her career. )

But most of all she was shy of asking help from her acquaintances, whose number lately had shrunk to one : the tavernkeeper Remo. On days of extremity, when she had no other resource, she made herself take the familiar, long way to San Lorenzo, where at the usual hour the proprietor was punctually in his lair behind his counter, beneath which he defi ly kept ready a rolled-up banner, the red fl With his dark face, lean as a woodman's, his black eyes sunk above harsh, bony cheekbones, he seemed always locked up in dominant concerns of his own, and at Ida's entrance he remained seated in his place; in fact, he didn't even greet her. Ida came forward, embarrassed, full of blushes, half-stammering. Nor could she bring herself to confess the primary and urgent reason for her visit; but he would forestall her. And without even opening his mouth, with a silent signal of his chin, he ordered his wife to fi again today, a free portion of something for the mother of comrade Ace. Now that little basement kitchen was becoming, truly, emptier and emptier, as the tavernkeeper Remo became more and more laconic; and Ida emerged, confused, carrying her little packet of food, ashamed even to say thanks

"Weg! Weg da! Weg! Weg!"

Some Germ exclamations, interrupted and drowned by women's voices, reached her one of those mornings, when, after a futile trip to the closed Bursary, she was heading for Remo's tavern. She had just turned into a cross-street of the Via Tiburtina, when she heard the voices from the direction of Via Porta Labicana, a short distance away. As she stopped, hesitant, she almost bumped into two women, who came running from another side street to her right. One of them was old, the other younger. They were laughing excitedly, the young woman holding the other's clogs in her hand, while the old woman ran barefoot. By its hem, the old woman was holding her skirt up in front of her, swollen with a white powder: fl spilling a bit behind her on the cobblestones as she went by. The other was carry a black oilcloth shopping bag, also bulging with fl As they passed Ida, they shouted at her: "Hurry, Signora, run! Tonight we eat!" "We're taki back what's ours!" "They have to give our stuff back, those lousy thieves!" Word was already spreading, other women were com-

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ing rapidly out of the doorways. "You, go back upstairs," a woman passing by fi ordered, letting go of a little boy's hand; and on the spoor of the spilled fl they all ran in a pack, Ida among them. They had only a few yards to go. Halfway between Via di Porta Labicana and the freight station there was a blocked German truck, from the top of which a soldier of the Reich was yelling, confronting a crowd of poor women. Obviously, he didn't cl put his hand to the pistol in his belt, for fear of being lynched on the spot. Some of the women, with the supreme audacity of hunger, had actually clambered up on the truck, which was loaded with sacks of fl And having slashed the sacks, they were fi their skirts, their shopping bags, and any other receptacle they happened to be carrying. Some even fi coal scuttles or pitchers. A couple of sacks lay on the ground, already half-empty, amidst the assault; a quantity of fl had poured out on the ground and was being trampled. Ida desperately forced her way forward. "Me, too! Me, too!" she screamed, like a child. She couldn't break through the siege that encircled the sacks fl on the ground. She made an eff to climb onto the truck, but she couldn't manage it: "Me, too! Me, too!!" From the top of the truck, a beautiful girl laughed above her. She was disheveled, with very thick black eyebrows and strong teeth like an animal's. She was holding her brimming little dress out in front of her by the hem, and her thighs, bared to her black rayon underpants, shone with extraordinary whiteness, like a fresh camellia's : "Here, Signora, but hurry up!" And crouching towards Ida, with a laugh, she hastily fi her shopping-bag with fl pouring it directly from her own lap. Ida in turn had started laughing, like a halfwitted little girl, trying to get away now with her burden, through the screaming crowd. The women all seemed drunk, excited by the fl as if by a liquor. Intoxicated, they yelled the most obscene insults against the Germans, things even a whore in a brothel wouldn't have uttered. The least brutal words were: bastards! cowards! murderers!! thieves! Emerging from the crowd, Ida found herself in a chorus of young girls, the last to arrive, who were doing their share, screaming in loud voices, skipping as if in a ring-around-the rosy:

"Dirty pigs! Dirty pigs! Dirty piiiiigsll!"

At that point she heard her own voice, shrill, unrecognizable in her infantile excitement, shout with the chorus :

"Dirty pigs!"

For her, this was already a brothel obscenity; she had never said any thing like it before.

The German guard had taken fl in the direction of the freight station. "The PAl! the PAl!" Ida heard someone shout behind her. In fact, as she was fl towards the Tiburtina, from the opposite side the Ger-