History (95 page)

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irresistibly advanced with Bella to the edge of the carnival, had an involun tary little laugh of joy, in the presence of those fantastic machines. But he drew back at once, with a mixed feeling of yearning and nightmare, as if before a denied intoxication. It is a fact that, from the beginning of his illness, at night he had certain frightening dreams ( even
if
he then forgot them ) in which he plunged down into blind abysses, or was whirled in measureless orbits in a rutilant void with neither beginning nor end.

The possession, in his buttoned pocket, of his usual spending money, lured him forward, towards the stands where they sold cakes, brittle, and especially spun sugar, pink and yellow in color. But here too, the festive throng pressed him back, solitary. Then, on Via Marmorata, towards Testaccio, they came upon the isolated cart of an ice-cream vendor. And Useppe made up his mind to extend his little hand with the money, to purchase two cones : one for himself and one for Bella. Indeed, encouraged by the face of the vendor, a squint-eyed little man with a friendly smile, seeing his watch, he asked him : "\Vhat time do you have?" "Five thirty," the vendor replied.

It was still early to go home. And suddenly Useppe made the impul sive decision to pay a visit to Davide Segre. "Vvavide!" he announced to Bella, right in her face, in such an irrevocable, though pleading, tone, that this time, making no objections, Bella trotted towards Ponte Sublicio. Here, however, Useppc had second thoughts and decided to take his
friend
as a present that fl of wine Ida had purchased days before especially for him. There was the hope that Davide, seeing him turn up with this gift, wouldn't send him away.

To retrace their steps towards Via Bodoni, this time, instead of Via Marmorata, they took the inner streets of the district. From the windows, from the cafes and the tavern they were accompanied by the uniform voices of the radio, broadcasting the football scores; but on crossing Via Mastro Giorgio, they heard, inside a tavern someone shouting: "war . . . his tory . . ." and other words, drowned out by the radio. It was Davide's voice. Useppe knew the tavern having sometimes accompanied Annita Marrocco there, when she went to buy wine. Excited by this surprise, he immediately went to the doorway of the ta,·crn; and having seen Davide, he said to him in a loud voice, "Hey!", making his familiar gesture of greeting \vith his hand.

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There was only one table of customers, all poor people of the neighborhood, and all fairly elderly men, of whom a little group of four was playing cards; and the others, more numerous, were sitting beside the group, or a bit behind, observing the game

without taking part in it. Davide was one of these, though he showed no in terest in the play. Until a moment before, really, his place had been at a little table nearby, where he had sat drinking alone, and where there still stood a couple of quarter-liter pitchers he had left, one drained, the other nearly empty. On his own, he had suddenly turned his chair, taking a place at the next table, without anyone's having invited him. Here he ordered another double liter, which he off to the others, pouring some from time to time into his own glass. All the same, he didn't seem drunk, but overeager and expansive. At the sight of Useppe and Bella, a sudden radiance, sweet and boyish, caressed his face for a moment. "Useppe!" he cried, like someone running into a friend. And Useppe, with Bella, was at his side in one bound. "Sit here," Davide invited him, pulling a free chair to his side. However, once Useppe, glowing with happiness, had sat down, Davide paid no further attention to him. After his fl gesture of welcome, his face resumed its same tense and burning expression of a moment before.

To tell the truth, nobody in there paid any attention to Useppe and Bella. But the two were so pleased with their present situation that they asked for nothing more. Indeed, rather than compromise their luck, they avoided even the slightest disturbing action. Bella had stretched out on the fl between Useppe's chair and Davide's; and (except for a tiny, irre pressible flick of her tail ) she forced herself into a perfect immobility, until she seemed the monument of a dog. Every now and then, she addressed a futile and blissful glance upwards, to say:"Well, what do you think of this? Here we are, all three of us." And Useppe, from the chair where he was settled, would look silently around, with wide and trusting eyes, even taking care not to kick his dangling legs. Davide's nearness, though it instilled respect in him, freed him from all uneasiness. And further, among those present (besides a couple of other neighborhood fi he knew by sight) he had promptly glimpsed an old acquaintance: Clemente, Con solata's brother.

Useppe gave him a shy, knowing nod, but the man didn't recognize him. Clemente wasn't playing; he was seated among the players, almost behind their backs, on the side opposite Davide. Shrunken by his extreme thinness, with a greenish pallor and hollow, clouded eyes like a dead man's, he was huddled up in a little autumn topcoat, despite the hot season, and even his head was covered by a cap. On his mutilated hand, instead of Filomena's black knitted glove, he now wore another, of very worn leather

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dyed a reddish-brown . However, he was still known by his nickname Black Hand. His status was that of a hopelessly unemployed invalid; and his defi dependence on his sister had brough t him to hate her, and to make her hate him. Especially on holidays, when she didn't go off to work, this hatred drove him from the house early in the morning; and he spent his whole Sundays seated in this place. From time to time, he could be seen to extend his ann and pick up his glass of wine, untouched; but after having looked into it, with a fi and nauseated stare, as if he saw worms, he would put it back on the table, having drunk not a sip of it.

Though he sat among the others, he remained confi in a gloomy torpor of his own, almost without reaction now to external stimuli. He was interested neither in the cards nor in the news broadcast by the radio. He listened, though in an oblique and intermittent fashion, to Davide's talk; and only then did his wasted features have a certain vibration, which expressed animosity, bitterness, almost contempt.

He alone, at that table, belonged to the still-young generation ( though in appearance, he was ageless ). He was in fact only a little more than ten years older than Davide. The others (all, to look at them, over sixty, or thereabouts ) treated Davide with detachment and patience, like an odd little boy, displaying tolerance even if his aggressiveness was clearly troubling their peaceful game. Not a few men, among those in the tavern, seemed to know him already, at least by sight; but no one hailed him as a hero any longer, like the time he had shown up at the Marrocco home. Rather, because of his differen t social class, they seemed to consider him descended from a kind of decayed nobility, if not actually from an obscure planet.

The game was played by partners . The player nearest Davide was an old man about seventy, but with an athletic build, bursting with health. A tan undershirt left his muscular sunburned arms bare and the whiter skin under his armpits. l-Ie had thick, graying hair, and over the undershirt a baptismal medal hung from a silver-plated chain. His partner in the game, seated at the opposite side of the table, was a bald man with a fl face, in a messenger's uniform. And of the two members of the second couple, one, obviously from outside Rome (as you could tell from his accent) was a rustic character, squat and very red in the face, perhaps a cattle-trader; and the other was somebody Uscppe had seen before, because he went around the district with a box hung from his neck, selling chestnut fritters, cakes, and peanuts (he had, in fact, left nearby, on a windowsill, the box with his merchandise, towards which Bella occasionally cast yearning glances ). He had a round face covered with wrinkles, ver�· small eyes and nose, and his fellow-players teased him, because he was slow-witted.

Near the big old man with the medal, but a bit behind him, as a

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spectator, a seedy little man of about sixty was sitting, his thin, sinewy neck emerging from a patched Sunday jacket which betrayed his extreme pov erty. His sickly eyes, the irises pale blue, were all bloodshot, but their gaze was resigned, simple, and it followed with lively pleasure the destiny of the game. These Sunday afternoons were the only social occasions in his entire lonely week; he was a pensioner who managed still to eke out a living with little odd jobs. From time to time, he would applaud, a bit ostentatiously, the moves of the player with the medal.

Of the others witnessing the game, some followed its progress with interest, others seemed simply to be resting, dozing, as if they were con tinuing their holiday siesta in the tavern. There were some who, from time to time, got up to collect news from the radio, then came back to report it to their friends. Or else some transient would linger a while to watch, while others would withdraw, leaving their seats for the newcomers . . . But in the midst of the discreet coming and going, Davide never moved from his place, held there by the heaviness of his legs, in contrast with his inner ferment.

As if he also celebrated Sundays, today he had carefully bathed and shaved. He had somehow combed his hair, which his neglect allowed to grow in a mop, smoothing it with water, and parting it on one side. And so, in his unusually kempt appearance and his pensive and (sometimes ) almost ecstatic gaze, he resembled more than ever that beardless student of the old identifi snapshot, despite his gaunt cheeks and his pallor. He had put on a pair of pants not actually pressed, but fairly new, and a white knit shirt, fresh and clean, with short sleeves. Right away, Useppe, who kept his eyes on him most of the time, noticed a swollen, festering little sore on his bare arm, in the crook of his elbow; and sympathetically, he would have liked to ask its cause, but he didn't dare interrupt the relentless speech he was making.

Why, or of what, he talked so much, Davide himself didn't know. In fact, what he expounded were not topics, but rather pretexts, to involve the others, but himself fi of all, in some general-or perhaps personal? problem. To such questions there is no answer, for in his unusual and morbid loquacity, he seemed to be seeking not so much a solution as the actual problem! And when I try to recapitulate his talk that afternoon in the tavern, I see it in the image of many horses chasing one another around a circular track, always passing the same spots. At present, his voice (with its special timbre, of a young bass) could be heard drilling on a point his listeners couldn't be persuaded to take up, no matter how stubbornly he reiterated it: he was accusing everyone-not only his audience, but all living people, in general-of willful reticence on the subject of the last war and its millions of dead. Nobody wanted to talk about it any more, as if the

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matter were settled : this was the point he kept hammering home. And he went on repeating, in a tone of dogged protest, but also of almost pathetic appeal :
"Nisun
. . . nobody . . . nobody . . ." Until the old man with the medal said to him, though without much conviction, and taking care not to be distracted from his cards :

"Then you talk about it. We can hear you . . ." Then, fl a card on the table with decision, he exclaimed : "Face-card!" while Clemente, sniggering, also looked at Davide, as if to confirm : "That's right. What are you waiting for, before telling us your philosophy?"

The room, rather spacious, had two entrances. In the corner near the back door, beyond the refrigerator and the counter and the table with the card-players, a little crowd was standing around the radio to listen to the football results. Unlike the seated customers, these men, for the most part, were young; and they didn't drink or occupy any table, just stopping off here on their way by, for the news. As they left, others from the street took their place; and through this entrance, with some coming in, and some leaving, there was a constant movement and a mumble of football argu ments, in which the proprietor, from his counter, also gladly joined. On this side, meanwhile, other elderly customers had formed a second table, with their pack of cards. And on either side, you could hear exclamations of "Low card!" "Play!" and similar expressions appropriate to cards, min gling with the voices and sounds from the street in an absurd, deafening confusion. But Davide didn't feel disturbed by the noises; on the contrary, a sudden silence would perhaps have thrown him into panic. He enjoyed a clarity of awareness so acute that he was excited by it, as if by a physical stimulus inside his brain; and yet he felt he was groping his way, like a lost kid who doesn't dare ask directions of the passersby. Over everything else, however, a kind of enthusiasm prevailed in him : so that gradually the sounds outside became involved in his own interior clamor and ferv in a single, ultimate adventure!

He was-as we can easily understand-on one of his
gala days;
but unlike such days usually, this Sunday gala had made the solitude of his room intolerable and had driven him out into the streets, with the slightly apprehensive thrill of a debut. He wanted to meet the footsteps of other people, the voices of other people.

And he wasn't guided by a choice, but only by accident. However, passing by here, he had slipped into this tavern, which he occa

visited, and which promised him, to some extent, a family atmosphere.

He didn't want wine; in fact, alcohol, chemically, did not mix well with certain
gala
states of his. He had been led to drink a little, but only for decorum's sake, to justify, in this way, his presence as a customer and not an intruder. Now, with the wine, he had developed the restlessness of

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someone who, having entered a dancehall, is dying to dance; but the dance didn't go with his legs' ponderous weariness, which had come over him at the same time. And this, moreover, was not a dancehall . . . It was an ordinary . . . place . . . in the world . . . Exactly! Exactly! An ordi nary place in the world!