History (110 page)

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tortuous trail, amid a lunatic bawling; then, like reversing binoculars, she observed in the distance, small as the eye's pupil, the green view of their holiday at Vico; and then again Useppe and herself, hand in hand, con fused among the subterranean automata of the EEG . . . But a little la ter, the uncertain tomorrow was detached from her, like ballast. She found herself suspended in the present, as if this calm nigh t, fi with sweetness, was never to end.

Useppe was sleeping, apparently serene and placid, and so was the dog, lying a pace from him, on the fl But Ida, not sleepy, delayed going to bed. She was as if spellbound in the position assumed in the early evening, on her knees by the bed, where she rested her head on her arms. And there she remained, her eyes open, watching Useppe breathing in his sleep. There was no moon; in that top fl room, however, the stars' glow was enough to make the sleeper visible, as he rested on his back, his fi relaxed on the pillow, his mouth slightly open. His body, in the bluish gilded penumbra, still seemed shrunken, doll's size, making almost no outline under the sheet, as in the time of hunger in Via Mastro Giorgio. But tonight, as long as the doll was hers, here in the safety of their room, Ida believed she heard in his breathing the pulse of a time that could not be consumed.

\Vh all the radios were silenced, and the belated midnight traffi had also stopped, you could hear, at interv only the clang of the last trams, heading for the car-barn, or the soliloquy of some drunk passing by on the sidewalks. It seemed to Ida, in a kind of reverse vertigo, that these poor sounds became tangled in the thick and silent net of the stars. At a certain point, the night had released our little room in a blind fl without navigation instruments. And this could be a night of the previous summer, when Useppe didn't yet "fall," and in the next room Ninnari eddu was sleeping.

The darkness was still deep when a city cock, from some roof in the area, raised his precocious cry. A little later, Bella grumbled in her sleep : was she perhaps dreaming of the Pirate-wolves' attack? At the very fi glow of dawn, she suddenly sprang up on her paws. And hastily leaving her place in the bedroom, she went to lie down in the hall in front of the door, as if she meant to guard the house against the invasion of some thief or alien. Ida meanwhile had dozed off on the bed for a little while. The fi bells could be heard, from the church of Santa Maria Liberatrice.

The day was clear and windless, and it was very hot from early morn ing. \Vh Ida prepared to leave the house, around eight, Useppe was still sunk in sleep. His hot cheeks, in the calm light of the shutters, seemed to have regained the pink color of health; and his respiration was calm, but his eyes were circled by a little dark halo. Ida delica tely moved aside the

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locks moist with sweat on his forehead, and whispered in a very low voice: "Useppe . . ." The child barely blinked, in a trembling, to show a mini mum strip of his blue eyes, and answered :

"rn . . .
"

"I'm going out, but I'll be back very soon . . . you wait at home for me, eh? Don't move . . . I'll be right back."

"Ess."

Useppe closed his eyelids again and went back to sleep. Ida tiptoed away. Bella, who meanwhile was fl back and forth from bedroom to entrance to kitchen, silently accompanied her to the door. Ida hesitated an instant, uncertain whether or not to douo]e-lock it from outside, but then she didn't, ashamed to insult Useppe in the dog's presence. Instead, trust ing her, she said to her softly: "Wait for me in the house, both of you, eh? Don't go off I'll be back soon." As she went out, downstairs, she asked the concierge to go up around eleven, to take a look at the boy, if by chance she herself wasn't home by that time.

But little more than an hour had gone by (it must have been about half-past nine) when she was overcome by a kind of unbearable sickness. She was in the Headmistress's offi in a meeting with other teachers, and at fi since certain nervous phenomena were not new to her, she forced herself nevertheless to follow the discussion in progress (it was about sum mer camps, family certifi questions of merit and students' ri . . . ) until she was convinced, with an almost blinding certitude, that none of this concerned her any longer. She heard the sound of voices around her, and she also heard the words, but in a topsy-turvy dimension, as if those voices were a memory which meanwhile were jumbled with other memories. It seemed to her that outside, under the burning sun, the city was invaded by panic, and people were running for their doorways, at an insistent warning : "it's curfew houri" and she no longer understood whether it was day or night. Suddenly she had the cruel sensation that, from inside, scratching fingers were clutching at her throat, to strangle her, and in an enormous isolation, she listened to a little distant cry The strange thing was she didn't recognize that cry. Then the great fog dis solved, and the present scene reappeared to her normally, with the Head mistress at her desk and the teachers seated around her, discussing. They, meanwhile, had noti nothing: in fact, Ida had simply turned pale.

A few minutes later, the same sensation, already experienced, came over her again, identical : once more the scratching nails, strangling her, the absence, and the cry. It seemed to her that this cry, really, belonged only to herself: a hollow moan of her lungs. In passing, it left in her a mark of physical off like a mutilati And in her clouded consciousness, tat-

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tered shreds of memory flapped together: the young German soldier in Via dei Volsci, stretched out upon her, in orgasm . . . herself a child, in the country with her grandparents, in the courtyard where a nanny-goat's throat was being cut, for Sunday dinner . . . Then all was scattered in disorder, as the fog faded. In the course of perhaps a quarter of an hour, the thing was repeated twice more. Suddenly Ida rose from her chair, and stammering some incoherent excuse, she ran to the secretary's little offi deserted today, and called home.

This was not the fi time that, at her call, for one reason or another, the familiar little voice of Via Bodoni delayed replying. But today, the futile rings at the other end of the wire came to her as a signal of rebellion and invasion, ordering her to rush home urgently. She let the receiver fall from her hands, not thinking to hang up. And without even looking into the head's offi she started down the steps towards the door below. Again, halfway down the steps, she was overtaken by that strange repeated spasm, but the interior cry that accompanied it, this time, was more like an echo : and it brought her an obscure hint of its own source which it answered, stark, retarded. The fog, too, which had stopped her halfway down the stairs, this time dissolved immediately, clearing her path.

In the entrance, the school porter shouted something after her: in fact, as usual, Ida had left in his care her bag with the shopping, already done before working hours. She saw him shift and move his lips, but she didn't hear his voice. In reply, she waved her hand in a vague gesture, which seemed a kind of greeting. She made the same gesture to the old concierge of Via Bodoni, who laughed and nodded as she went by, pleased to see her coming home so soon.

In the brief distance from school to home, Ida had been excluded, really, from external sounds, because she was listening to another sound, like something she hadn't heard since her last walk in the Ghetto. It was, again, a kind of cadenced dirge which called from below, and summed up, in its tempting sweetness, something bloody and terrible, as if it were calling towards scattered points of misery and toil, summoning the fl inside for the evening. Then, as soon as she came into the second courtyard, the real voices of the morning assailed her again, with radio sounds from the windows. She avoided looking up at her own kitchen window, where Useppe, in the days of his domestic imprisonment, usually waited for her, behind the pane. In fact, almost absurdly, she was still hoping she would see, if she looked up today, that familiar little form. And she was also try to elude the certainty that, instead, today the window was empty.

While she started up the stairs, from the top fl she heard the sound of her own telephone, which had gone on ringing since she herself

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had called the number a few minutes earlier in the school offi without hanging up. But when she arrived at the last landing, the stupid signal fell silent.

Then, beyond the door, she heard a painful weak voice, like a little girl crying. It was Bella's whimper; in her own solitary lament, she didn't even react at hearing the familiar footsteps coming up the last fl Here Ida started, seeing a grim fi facing her, menacingly, but in reality, it was only a stain on the stairway wall, fl and damp because of the water-tanks nearby. That stain had been there ever since they had lived in the building; but till today Ida had never even noticed such a terrible presence.

In the dark little entrance hall, Useppe's body was lying, arms fl out, as always in his falls. He was fully dressed, except for his sandals,

which, unfastened, had dropped from his feet. Had he perhaps, seeing the fi sunny morning, insisted on going again today with Bella to their
forest?
He was still warm, and just beginning to grow rigid; Ida, however, absolutely refused to comprehend the truth. Denying the earlier premoni tions received by her senses, now, in the face of the impossible, her will withdrew, making her believe he had only fallen (during this last hour of his incredible battle with the grand mal, there in the hall, Useppe had really fallen again and again, in one attack after the other, almost without respite . . . ) . And after having carried him to the bed, she stayed there, bent over him, waiting for him to raise his eyelids in that usual, special smile of his. Only belatedly, when her eyes met Bella's, did she understand. The dog, in fact, was there looking at her with a mourning melancholy, fi with animal compassion and also with superhuman commiseration : saying to the woman : "What are you waiting for, you wretched creature? Don't you realize we have nothing now to wait for?"

Ida tried the stimulus of shouting; but she fell mute, thinking im mediately: "If I shout, they'll hear me, and they'll come to take him away from me . . ." She bent threateningly towards the dog: "ssh . . ." she whispered to her, "hush, we mustn't let them hear us . . ." And after having drawn the chain in the en trance, she began to run about the rooms in silence, bumping against the furniture and the walls with such violence that there were bruises all over her body. It is said that in certain crucial states people see all the scenes of their life pass before them at incredible speed. Now in the dull and immature mind of that little woman, as she ran wildly around her small home, the scenes of the human story (History) also revolved, which she perceived as the multiple coils of an interminable murder. And today the last to be murdered was her little bastard Useppe. All History and all the nations of the earth had agreed on this end: the slaughter of the child Useppe Ramundo. She landed in the bedroom again

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and sat on the chair by the bed, in Bella's company, to look at the kid. Now, beneath his clenched lids, his eyes seemed to dig into his head, deeper and deeper with every passing moment; but still, among his tousled locks, his single, central tuft could be recognized, the one that would never lie fl with the others and stood there in the middle, erect . . . Ida began moaning in a very low, bestial voice : she no longer wanted to belong to the human race. And meanwhile she was surprised by a new auditory halluci nation : tick tick tick was heard all over the fl of the house. Tick tick tick, Useppe's footsteps, the past autumn, when he was constantly walking up and down, all through the place, in his little boots, after the death of Ninnuzzu . . . Ida began silently swaying her whitened head; and here the miracle occurred to her. The smile, which she had awaited uselessly in Useppe's face, appeared to her on her own. It wasn't very diff to see it, from the smile of calm and of wondrous ingenuousness, which came to her in her infancy after her hysterical attacks. But today it wasn't hysteria : her reason, which had always had to struggle to maintain its hold in her inept and frightened brain, had fi let go.

The next day the ne\\ report appeared in the papers :
Pathetic drama in the Testaccio quarter-Crazed mother watching over little son's corpse.
And at the end you could read :
It was necessary to destroy the dog.
This last detail-easy to understand-referred to our shepherdess. In fact, as could have been foreseen, Bella displayed a bloody ferocity, capable of anything, against the strangers who, )laving forced the door, came into the little Via Bodoni home to perform their legal duties. She absolutely refused to allow them to take Useppe and Ida from the house. We may note at this point that sterilized animals, according to what people say, usually lose their aggressiveness; but Bella, obviously, at least for the moment, contradicted this physiological law. Her defense yesterday against the river pirates was nothing compared to her war today against the new intruders. Alone, she managed to frigh ten a squad of enemies, at least two of whom were armed with ordnance weapons. No one had the courage to face her directly. And so she kept her word, given Useppe the day of her return home: "Th never be able to separate us, in this world."