History (69 page)

In this department, on two successive motorcycle jaunts with Useppe, he was accompanied by a girl, seated on the crossbar. Her name was Patri but she was no patri she worked at the tobacco factory. She was beautiful, even more than the guerrillas'
redhead;
and she displayed a terrible fear of the bike, begging Nino, every time they set out, please not to go so fast. He would promise, but only to enjoy himself the more when, instead, he let himself go in excesses of speed. And then the girl would cling to his waist, furious in her terror, her clothes and hair streaming in the wind, as she shouted : "Murderer! Murderer!" Once, on a country road, her screams alarmed some motorized police, who ordered the Triumph to halt, suspecting a kidnaping; however, the same Patrizia, tidying herself amid many little laughs, excused Nino and explained the misunderstand ing. And they all laughed; in fact the policemen apologized and saluted, adding a few polite compliments.

We may believe, actually, that Patrizia said "Don't go fast" on pur pose, for the subsequent pleasure of being frightened and shouting : "Mur derer!" In fact, also on the meadow, behind the trees, where, both times, she and Nino lay down on the ground, holding each other tight, she would struggle fi and shout at him :
let go of me, help, help!
and she would try to drive him off slapping him and hitting his throat and biting. But then she would suddenly close her eyes, with a saintly little smile, and would start saying : "Yes yes yes . . . Ninuzzo . . . it's so good . . . you're so handsome . . ."' On the fi excursion, whispering with Nino, she was

344 H I S T O R Y
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concern by the presence of the kid running around on the field there and making her uneasy; but Useppe paid little attention to the lovers, having already seen people copulate who knows how many times in the big room at Pietralata, particularly during the last nervous days of The Thou sand. Sora Mercedes, at his why's, had explained to him that it was a sports competition, those were the fi And Useppe, satisfi hadn't concerned himself with them any more, accepting them in his heedlessness. He was concerned, however, on the fi excursion with Patrizia, seeing her hit his brother like that, and he immediately rushed to defend him. But Nino, laughing, said to him : "Can't you see we're only playing? Can't you see how little she is, beside me? Eh, if I wanted to, I could smash her with one punch ." And with this, he reassured him. Nino then, knowing his little brother's ingenuousness, was not the least troubled at seeing him appear from behind the trees at any moment of the game with Patrizia. In fact, on the second excursion, catching him having a pee nearby, he said to him : "Come here, Useppe, show Patrizia what a nice little cock you have, too!" And spontaneously, as if it were nothing, Useppe came forward and showed it. "When you're bigger," Nino said to him merrily, "you'll screw with this, too, and you'll make some Useppolini." And Useppe was amused, delighted at the thought of the useppolini, but without pondering it at all : no more than if Nino had told him, joking, that those future useppolini would be born from his eyes. Truly Useppe was a living refuta tion of the science of Professor Freud (or perhaps the exception to it?). He was a male, no doubt about it, he lacked nothing; but for the present (and you can believe my sworn testimony ) he took absolutely no interest in his own virile organ, any more than in his ears or his nose. The embraces of The Thousand, and, now, Ninnuzzu's, passed before him without trou bling him, like poor Blitz's affairs with other people's bitches, or like the exchanged compliments of the Peppinielli. He felt no off in them; however, a mysterious feeling alerted him, meanwhile, that they were tak ing place beyond his limited present space, in a distance still denied him, like the games of the clouds. And in accepting them, carefree, without any curiosity, he left them where they were. Especially in the country on those fi in spring, he now had other, personal things to do.

Still, he liked girls; indeed, each of them seemed to him, when he looked at her, a supreme beauty: the ugly Carulina of The Thousand, and the beautiful redhead Mari and this other beautiful Patrizia. He liked their colors, and their softness, and their fresh voice, and their tinkle if they wore some little bracelet or necklace of metal and of glass. Patrizia also wore, among other things, two long earrings, like little bunches, whose tiny glass grapes struck one another, sounding all the time; and she took them off carefully, putting them in her purse, before making love.

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On the second outing, as he ran around the fi Useppe turned up in the clearing among the trees where, at that moment, Nino and Patri having just made love, were stretched out on the ground, resting. Still fl heavily on top of Patrizia, Nino had his face buried in the grass, his cheek next to hers. And Patrizia, supine, her arms out in a cross, like a blissful martyr, had her head thrown back amid her disheveled hair, so black it had a bluish cast. Beneath her lashes touched with mascara, her eyes resembled two dark stars with hard little rays. In the corner of one eye, a tear had remained. Her half-open mouth, in the halo of the darkish, smeared lip stick, suggested a little bitten plum, its juice trickling from it. And beneath the foliage that dappled the ground in contrasts of light, she seemed to be lying on damask. Useppe considered her so beautiful that, crouching for a moment beside her, he gave her a little kiss on the elbow. Then, content, he went off again.

The lovers paid no attention to him then. But Patrizia must have remembered Useppe's little tribute, because afterwards, when they were all three preparing for the homeward journey, she said to Nino : "I like your brother" (instead, as was later learned, she was jealous of him). And she added, teasing : "Will you give him to me? What do you want with him anyway? You don't even look like brothers. You don't look a thing alike." "You're ri Nino answered, "we have diff fathers. Mine was

a sheik, and his was a Chinese mandarin."

This time, too, Useppe laughed loudly at his brother's new joke. He knew very well, in fact, that mandarins are a kind of fruit, and logically the only children they can have are little fruits . . . This was the only thing in Nino's remark that struck him as curious. And for the rest, he was all agog now to get back on the motorcycle. Any other interest, for him, was secondary.

That chance witticism to Patrizia remains Nino's only reference to Useppe's alien birth : at least in Useppe's presence, or Ida's. After the famous day of his fi meeting with the baby at San Lorenzo, Nino never bothered to inquire about his mother's unknown adventure. Perhaps, among his other clandestine attractions, he enjoyed keeping this brother mysterious : an unexpected arrival from no one knows where, as if they really had picked him up from the ground, wrapped in a bundle.

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In that period, Davide Segre had been for some months in Mantua, at his family's house, where he wrote Nino from time to time. Now, it was known beyond any doubt that of his whole family, deported in 1943, no one had survived. His maternal grandmother,

very old and already ill, had died during the journey. His grandfather and his parents had been exterminated in the gas chamber on the very night of their arrival at the Lager of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And his sister, seventeen at the time, had died in the same Lager a few months later (apparently in March of 1944 ) .

The house, however, must have been occupied in the meanwhile by some stranger, because Davide, among other things, had found some car toons hung on the walls that had never been there before. At present the rooms were abandoned, dusty and half-empty, but not too untidy. Much of the furniture and many family belongings had been carried away, no one knew where or by whom; but certain things, strangely, were still intact in the same place where Davide had always seen them. A simpering doll, which his sister had never taken from a high shelf, was still there, in the same pose as always, its hair fi with dust, its glass eyes open.

Some of those objects had been familiar to Davide since his earliest childhood; and as a boy, he had taken a dislike to them because of their mediocre, constant presence, which resembled a kind of wretched eternity. Now, he almost felt repulsion at fi them again before him, inviolate survivors of the dead. But he had no wish to move them, or to touch them. And he left them there, where they were.

At present he was alone in the house (of fi rooms ). In the city, an uncle had recently returned ( father of that little cousin formerly hidden in Rome by the monks ); he had managed to save himself, in time, with his own family. But Davide had never been close to his relations; and he considered this uncle a stranger, to whom he had nothing to say, and so he avoided his company.

Already during their shared days of guerrilla warfare, Nino had under stood, from certain remarks of Carlo-Pyotr, that he had been alienated since childhood not only from his relations, but to some extent also from his parents and his sister, because they were bourgeois. In all their habits, which he had liked as a child, he had learned, on growing up, to recognize more and more the common social vice, distorting and deceptive. Even the smallest things : the fact that his father had the words
Engineer
and
Com mendatore
printed on his visiting cards; that his mother, full of pride, would accompany his little sister to a certain party of important children and both would dress up for the occasion; and their chatter at table; and their acquaintances; and his sister's smug tone when she mentioned certain rich families' names; and his father's manner when he boasted of Daviduc-

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cio's success at school; and his mother's way, when she caressed him, even as a grown boy, of saying :
my little baby, my angel, my little gentleman
these for him were all sources of a physical disturbance, like a paralysis. And with age, this daily annoyance gradually developed, more clearly, in his fundamental great rejection, which, on the other hand, proved incom prehensible to his hopeless family, like the code of another world. In fact, they lived sustained in their every action by the conviction of being honest and healthy; whereas in their every action or word he always found another degrading symptom of the maximum perv infecting the world; and its name was
bourgeoisie.
This new attention of his, always in revolt, was a kind of negative exercise, which necessarily sentenced his family to his contempt. And even of racism-that is to say Fascism-he held them responsible for their share, since they were bourgeois.

And so, while still in High School, Davide began to evade the family's contagion, waiting until he could run away from it. When he was home, he locked himself in his room; and anyway, he spent barely the necessary amount of time at home. He took his holidays alone, wandering around Italy like a penniless gypsy; but from the places he happened upon, he would send his family long, fervent letters, which were read and reread as if they were novels by a celebrated author. In fact, he, the only son, and the fi born, was the family favorite, and they adapted themselves to his de mands (everyone, for that ma tter, considered him very earnest, not spoiled or eccentric ). When the racial laws excluded Jews from state schools, he decided he didn't need school anyway, and he would fi his studies on his own. And when his parents, at whatever sacrifi both wanted to send him to safety across the ocean like other Jewish youngsters of his class, he passionately refused, saying he had been born in Italy, and his place, now, was here! There was no dissuading him; indeed, from its tone, his refusal would seem to constitute for him an ultimate, even if somewhat puerile, rescue: as if he, Daviduccio Segre, had some unknown mission to carry out in his hapless native land; and exile, at the present time, for him would be a desertion and a betrayal.

It was in that period, in the course of his summer pilgrimages, that Davide met some militant anarchists in Tuscany and began some under ground propaganda work with them; and there, in September of 1943, he was caught by the Germans, under a false name, after some stool pigeon had denounced him.

Now, he seemed to have broken off all political activity, and he saw no one. The only former acquaintance he had tried to seek out in Mantua was a girl, his adolescent lover, whom he designated in his letters to Nino only with the initial G. Baptized, not Jewish, she was a couple of years older than he and had been his only true love so far; and at the time she loved

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Davide she had been a bea utiful young girl, a factory worker. But, after 1942, she had been unfaithful to Davide with a Fascist; then, during the occupation, she had started making love with the Germans and had quit the factory, leaving Mantua. It was said that in Milan, after the Germans withdrew, she had had her head shaved as a collaborator; but nothing specifi was really known. Of her parents, who had emigrated to Germany years ago to work, there was no news; and despite all Davide's inquiries, nobody could say what her end had been.

He had no other company; and his only correspondent was Ninnuzzu, to whom he wrote without any regularity; he might write him two letters in a day, or none for several weeks. For his part, Nino answered at most with an occasional picture postcard ( to sit down and write, for him, was like a jail sentence : the mere sight of a blank page and a pen reminded him of school, and his fi promptly developed writer's cramp and numb ness ). He chose brightly colored cards, gaudy and comical; however, he wrote only greetings and his signature, and if Useppe was there, he guided his little hand to add :
Useppe.

He couldn't understand why Davide was extending his stay up there (he had left with the idea of remaining only a few weeks ); and he won dered how he spent his time, alone, in that house in the provinces. "Maybe," he surmised, knowing him, "he spends it getting drunk." Some times he would blurt out : "I'm going up there to get him," but his excur sions and his mysterious dashes north and south of Rome, for the moment, didn't take him to Mantua. And anyway, in every letter Davide insisted that he planned to come back as soon as possible, as soon as certain money became available : and when it was fi (he added once, on this sub ject ) he would get a job as a farm laborer or a worker: any physical employment that prevented thinking. He wanted to devote himself to the most physical and exhausting toil; in that way at least, coming home at evening, in his weariness he would want only to fl himself on his bed, without any possibility of thought . . . But on this point, Ninnuzzu shook his head, incredulous : Davide, in fact, the very evening of their haza arrival in Naples, on his fi drunk, had confi in Nino some plans for the future, dreams of his since childhood. And among these the fi perhaps the most urgent, was to write a book: with the writing of a book, he had declared, you can change the life of all mankind. ( Then a moment later, he was almost ashamed of having revealed such a confi dence; and frowning, he had stated that it was a lie and that he, if he set out to write, meant to produce only pornography. )