History (18 page)

Th darkness, however, was in her favor on this occasion : coming home like a criminal return to the scene of his crime, she managed to avoid anyone's noticing her. Her bedroom was at the corn of the build ing, and its one window looked down on the street; so from there Giu seppe's rare cry could hardly give him away to the neighbors, whom Ida wanted to leave in ignorance as long as possible. She settled her tiny son beside her own double bed in a little iron cot with sides, which had

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belonged to Nino in the days of his early in fancy, and which afterw

had served to hold blankets, boxes, old books, and every sort of junk. And there, Giuseppe, like an outlaw whose hiding-place no one must know, spent the whole day, sleeping and resting.

Nino's absence was to last until mid-September, the schools were closed, and in this period she had no private lessons; so Ida stayed in the house most of the time, going out only for the necessary shopping, towards nightfall. Among her other concerns, she wondered if she should have the infant baptized, the better to protect him from the famous list of the impure; but the idea of taking him inside a church was too repugnant to her, like a final betrayal of the poor quarter of Jewish pariahs. And she decided to leave him, for the present, without a religion : "Anyway," she said to herself, "he's different from Nino; he has only half a family tree. How could his Aryan half be proved? The Authorities would declare him even less Aryan than me. And besides he's so tiny, that whatever happens, wherever they may send me, I'll always take him with me, even if we have to die together."

The fi of September, for her, was a critical day, since that was approximately the date of Nino's expected return, and hence the moment of the fatal explanation, which she had always postponed . Into her mind, at interv came tha t sole, miserable pretext she could invent: the imagi nary relative. And she began to ponder it, but reluctantly, without convic tion; it immediately gave her palpitations, along with a disgusted indolence. Expecting Nino's return any moment, that day she went out earlier than usual for her daily shopping. But it was precisely during this interval that Nino came home; and now master of the keys, he en tered the house freely in her absence.

From beyond the door, while she was fussing with her shopping-bags and the lock, she heard a stirring inside the rooms. And, coming into the hall, she saw the knapsack on the fl Then Nino promptly appeared, still wearing his uniform pants, but with his chest bare (since, on fi arri he had quickly taken off his shirt, in the great heat ). He was all tanned, and an extraordinary liveliness shone in his eyes. With a thrilled voice, in irresistible surpri he said :

"Hey,
rn
Who's that?"

And he led her straight into the bedroom, where with little peals of rejoicing laughter, which already seemed a dialogue, he bent over the cot. And there was Giuseppe, who looked at him as if he recognized him already. His gaze, till then drea my, misted in infancy, seemed to express in this moment the fi thought of his life: a thought of supreme festive understanding. So that even his little arms and his tiny legs accompanied it, hinti at a minimal, primitive waving.

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"Who is it,
rna?
Who's he?!" Nino repeated, more and more wild with amusement.

In a dizzying urgency, Ida felt the old story of the relative rising in her throat; but this cursed pretext refused to reach her lips. And the only explanation that came to her, absurdly, in a stammer, was :

"He . . . he . . . was found in the street!"

"And who found him?" Nino asked further, immediately excited by such a formidable event. But barely for an instant: when he had hardly noticed, you might say, the distraught Rush on his mother's face, already he no longer believed the story. His gaze, aware, downright cynical, went from his mother's infl face to her bo as if in sudden recollection of a sign which, at the time, he hadn't perceived. And for ten seconds his thoughts were amused at the comical idea : his mother had a lover. "Who can ever have taken her, old as she is?" he wondered, uncertainly. "It must have been," he decided privately, "a passing thing, just once . . ." From his gaze, meanwhile, Ida had already realized he saw through her; but in the end he cared little about the source of this unexpected present: what mattered to him was to make sure of it, forever. And letting all further inquiry lapse into indiff he asked anxiously:

"We're going to keep him now, though, aren't we? We'll keep him here with us!"

"Yes . . ."

"What's his name?" he asked, radiant with contentment. "Giuseppe."

"Hey, Peppel Hey, Peppiniello! Oh! Hey!" he began to exclaim, acting crazy in front of the baby. While the latter, in response, continued his

tiny, beginner's kicks, in the happiness and gratitude of knowing life, starting today.

"Say,
rn
how about it? Can I hold him a while?" the delirious Nino proposed at this point, his hands already over the crib.

"No! no! nooo!!! You'll drop him!"

"Aaah, I can lift weights with both hands, and you think I can't hold him!" Nino turn with contempt. But he had already given up his proj ect, shifti in the turbulence of his thoughts, to quite a diff questi

to be resolved, now that the moment was propitious. And he demanded, without delay:

"Say, rna! Now that Giuseppe's here, we can have a dog, too, here in the house!"

This was one of the eternal quarrels between him and his mother. Because he was dying to own a dog, and she, for any number of reasons, wouldn't hear of it. But today, in her position of horrible inferiori ty, she

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could only give in to the blackmail : "Well . . . urn . . . urn was her

fi inarticulate reply, already condemned to resignation.

However, with vehemence, she added : "You want to plunge this house into ruination !!!"

In her quarrels with Ninnarieddu, she unconsciously imitated certain of Nora's Biblical invectives, but uttered by her, with her incongruous

twelve-year-old's face, they seemed positively comical, rather than off

This time, too, from Nino's eager look, it was already clear he was antici- pating her unconditional surrender . . .

". . . do as you like! Oh God! . . . I've known for ages it would end

like this . . .
"

"Great, m�i Then I'll bring him home! There's one who always waits for me outside the tobacco shop!!" Ninnari shouted, beside himself. Then he remained silent for a li ttle while, cherishing canine visions which made him obviously, blissfully happy. And here Ida, already disconsolate at heart for having given in to this new calamity, wanted perhaps, in her tum, to extract at least some advantage from the situation. And she said, with eff

"Listen, Nino . . . now I must say something . . . it's something very serious . . . Mind you : don't tell anyone about . . . about this baby. For the present, it's better to keep it a secret that . . . that he's here . . . But if people should fi out somehow, and anybody asks you, the only thing to do is tell them he's a nephew, left all alone in the world, without any other relatives . . . and so he's been entrusted to us . . .
"

In the space of a rapid glance, Nino radiated arrogance, compassion, supremacy, and freedom. He shru one shoulder with a gri and replied, planting his feet in the pose of a barricadiero:

"If they ask ME anything, I'll say:
what the shit
do you
care?''

At that same moment, from the crib a whimper was heard, which immediately made him laugh. Fickle, the happy images of a moment be fore return to joke in his eyes. And changing the subject, hands in his pockets, he suggested to his mother:

"And now, to celebrate Giuseppe's being here, how about some money for a pack of Nazionali?"

"I knew you'd take advantage of this, too! You're an exploiter! And an opportunist and a profi Now, to celebrate Giuseppe, you want to set

him an example of vice. You're not even sixteen yet! Is that any age to be smoking?"

"If you don't smoke at sixteen, when are you supposed to smoke? At ninety?" he rebutted, with bullying impati Then suddenly, as if fol lowing an inspiration, he went on :

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"And how about an ice cream cone, too? No, let's make it a couple: one for me and one for you."

"Why, Nino . . . What are you thinking of? You think I've become a millionairess today? You want us to be completely ruined !! . . . And besides, these ersatz ice creams . . . there's no telling what they're made of

"There's the dairy, next to the tobacco shop; they make grea t ones." "Ice cream
or
cigarettes. Here: I'm not giving you more than two

lire."

"Cigarettes, plus the cones, plus the
Carriere della Sport
and the
Gazzetta
(did you forget today's Monday? ) : that takes fi lire, not two! Come on, rn don't give me the same old whine! Five lousy lire won't ruin you. Come on, cough it up, will you?! You're getting to be worse than a Jew!"

This last remark, for Nino, was an ordinary slang expression, with no real meaning. In fact, Ninnuzzu hadn't the slightest interest in the Jews and their present vicissitudes. He was about as ignorant of them as if they had been the Ci mbri or the Phoenicians. So Ida's inevitable, slight shudder was invisible to his eyes. But still, Ida, to release her tension, attacked him on another topic (by now rancid, to tell the truth ) of their family brawls : "Ah, how many times have I told you how it disgusts me to hear you speak such low dialect, and these bad words, worthy of a house of ill-fame! Who would ever think, hearing you speak, worse than a jackass, that instead you . . . you are the son of a teacher, and are attending the classi cal High School!!! You're not an ignorant peasant, after all! You've studied

good Italian . . ."

"Madame, allow me the pleasure of repeating my request : give me a dubloon."

"You're a hoodlum . . . I can't bear you! When I have to see you, I see red !"

Nino, now fuming with impatience, had started whistling "Deutsch- land, Deutschland" : "Well, fork over the cash !" he interrupted her.

"Money . . . that's all you think of! Always money!" "And without money, where's the party?!"

Determined to go out, and intolerant of further delays, he considered the restric ted and enclosed space of the house an injustice. And he began to pace back and forth in the room as if inside a prison, kicking a slipper, a rag, an empty basin, and any other object that came within range of his feet: "The dough, rn he concluded, worse than a bandit, facing his mother.

"You'll end up a thief and a murderer!"

"I'll end up Chief of the Black Brigades. As soon as I'm old enough,

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I'm going off to fight FOR THE FATHERLAND AND FOR THE DUCE!"

The excess of defi in his voice as he uttered these ca be trayed a blasphemous intention. You could sense that, in his boyish de mands, Fatherlands and Duces, and the whole theater of the world, were reduced to a farce, which had value only because it agreed with his rage to live. Again, his eyes suggested his mysterious adulthood, ready for any scandal and every wickedness; then suddenly, in rapid contradiction, a radi ant innocence appeared and transfi his gaze. At that moment, in fact, his mother had taken her mangy li ttle change-purse from her shopping bag and was handing him the famous
dough.
And he, grasping it, fl without delay towards the door, prompt as a fl dashing onto the fi of victory.

"\V are you doing?" his mother stopped him. "Aren't you going to put some clothes on? Axe you going out naked?"

"What's wrong? Don't I look good?" he replied, though giving in to necessity. And as he ran back towards the chair, where he had fl his shirt, he didn't fail to pause at the wardrobe mirror, to give himself a satisfi look. His slender tanned body still betrayed his childishness, in the grace of his nape and the still-thin back with protruding shoulder blades; but his arm on the contrary, were already developing their virile muscles,

which he measured at the mirror, displaying them to himself with insa tiable self-assertion. Then, running, he started to put his black shirt on again, but fi it sweaty and hot, he slipped on instead a little white cotton jersey over his uniform pants, careless of this contamination, in his haste to run down And he vanished.

Iduzza was already prepared (even with some relief ) not to see him reappear, perhaps, till late evening, now that he must have fl off with her fi lire towards his usual band, like a bee to a sunfl But less than twenty minutes had gone by when a certain confusion at the front door announced his return. And even before him, there came into the room a little brown dog, held on a leash, jumping in a paroxysm of happiness. It was an animal of slight dimensions, round, with crooked legs and a curled up tail. It had a big head, with one ear more erect than the other. Alto gether, it was a typical homeless dog (or
dog of others,
as the Slavs say).