History (101 page)

. . . I," he stated, with one of those strained, curtailed breaths, character istic of children in the midst of a tantrum, "I can no longer divide the world into black and white, fascists and communists, ri and poor, Ger- mans and Americans . . . This porno-porno- . . . this lurid . . . farce has been going on too long . . . enough ! . . . I . . . am . . . fed

. . . up . . .
"

Not even Clemente Black Hand bothered, anymore, to pay attention to Davide Segre, who in fact seemed fatally lost now, in a drunken raving. He meandered on, I don't know how long, in his obsessive chatter with a thick and stammering voice, alluding to various objects and events, with no connection among them. He said that before Galileo people believed the sun revolved; afterwards they believed that the earth revolved, and later it turaed out the movements are relative to each other, so you can say the earth and sun both revolve, or both are still, it doesn't make any diff

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Then he repeated that he was the cursed tree, and that he had insulted Christ after having murdered him. And if his family was dead, the fault was his, since he had had no charity for them, who were basically simple children, inexperienced and deceived. And if his girl had ended like that, the fault was his, since in pursuing his fi politics he had neglected his only love. And if his dearest friend was dead, the fault again was his, because the boy was actually
a
child seeking a father-he was an orphan, without knowing it-and \\ knowing it, he was asking Davide to act as his father. And if the old whore was dead, the fault was again his, because she was a child with a pure heart, born for pure love . . . And the guilt of all the deaths was his . . . And in reality the bourgeois was him- self . . . and the whore was him . . . and the pimp was him . . . and the origin of all obscenity was him . . . It must be said that Davide was surely not the only one, in the tavern, who was babbling . . . By this hour, the empty wine jugs on the tables were beyond counting. The holi day break was about to end. And all around, the voices of the yammering old men could be heard, meaningless, boasting obscenities, coughing and hacking. The radio meanwhile had broadcast I don't know what papal messages from the Vatican . . . now it was repeating a summary of the afternoon sports news. Again some young men clustered around the radio, while the proprietor, who knew the day's sports results by now, was yawn ing, or else giving orders to his wife, on hand to serve the tables. In the midst of all this, Davide appeared a case of normal drunkenness; whereas, in reality, he felt all too clear-headed. His lucidity throbbed in his brain like so many glistening splinters. Suddenly he said, smiling, in a more resonant voice :

"I read somewhere, I don't know where, that a man visiting a Lager glimpsed something living, moving in a pile of dead bodies. And he saw
a
little girl come out. 'Why are you here in the midst of the dead?' And she answered him : 'I can't stay with the living any more.' "

"That actually happened!" he guaranteed, in conclusion, with a strange, forced, didactic hauteur; and in saying this, he sank down with his arms on the table, sobbing. Actually, you couldn't tell if they were sobs or laughter. "This is it, all right, you drank yourself a skinful," the old man with the medal said to him, giving him a paternal slap on the shoulder. It was here that Useppe, shy, frightened, came closer and said to him, tugging at his shirt:

"Let's go, Vavide . . . come on, let's go 'way . . ."

For some while, namely since the moment Davide had sat down again, speaking more and more deliriously and in a lower voice, Useppe had slipped from his own chair, crouching beside Bella on the fl He didn't dare interrupt his big friend, afraid of making him mad; but he felt

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a growing fear of some unknown danger being prepared against him. Even the word GOD that constantly returned to his lips was becoming, for Useppe, a source of fear: as if this famous God might come forward suddenly, engaging Davide in a hand-to-hand fi Among them all, Useppe was the only one who didn't consider Davide drunk : he suspected, instead, that he was sick, perhaps because he didn't eat enough. And he was wondering if, afterwards, he couldn't convince him to come home to supper with them in Via Bocl . . . Meanwhile, in an attempt to drive away fear, he played with Bella. Without noise they played paws and hands, or else she tickled him, licking his ears and throat, until she pro voked little laughs, promptly stifl out of respect for the place.

". . . Come on, come on, Vavide!! Let's go 'way!"

Useppe's face was pale, and he was trembling, scared; but he also had a comical, indomitable manner, as if he intended, personally, to protect Davide from some numerous onslaught. "The kid's right," the old man with the medal said, also urging Davide, "go on home. You'll feel better." Davide stood up : he wasn't weeping and he wasn't laughing; he had, in stead, an opaque stiff in his features, and glassy eyes. He didn't go towards the door, but, staggering, headed for the toilet. Useppe followed him with his eyes, afraid of seeing him fall; and he didn't notice that meanwhile Annita Marrocco had looked in at the door for a moment. She didn't see Useppe either; his smallness hid him amid the adults' height. She greeted the propri ess from the distance with a brief, melancholy smile, her little black head bent languidly to one shoulder, as if her hair were weighing it cl and seeing the place too crowded, she withdrew. "That one," Clemente commented, chuckling, "is still waiting for her bridegroom to come home from Russia . . ." And he went on snickering, as if he had told a little ghost story, the kind that, at night, keeps the gues ts of the castle awake. But actually the only one who heard him was the former news-vendor, who grumbled something incomprehensible in reply. When Davide came back from the toilet, he no longer seemed the same person; or rather, he had passed to a new stage of his exaltation. Useppe was the only one who noticed a little dot of blood on his shirt; and in his ignorance, he supposed simply that the wound in his arm had started bleeding again. I, for myself, don't know what other
medicine
he had injected into his body during his brief absence; I know that lately he had not only been using the ones preferred in the past months, but was also trying out all sorts of substances, often of opposing eff mixing or alternating stimulants and narcotics in a breathless succession. Especially during the last week, you might say this had become his chief nourish ment : perhaps also because the season's fi warm days stirred again in his blood his innate instincts of life and of health, those energies that, in him,

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were then inexorably converted into forms of sorrow. Nothing frightened him so much as the return of certain states of his, absolute awareness or total wretchedness, at times accompanied by dreams, at ti by too-lucid wakefulness. And rather than be caught off guard by them, he never failed to carry with him a supply of his remedies when he left the house . . . In those days, such cases went unnoticed, especially in poor neighborhoods.

He crossed the noisy room again, walking unsteadily, but merry, like certain crack-brained animals driven in circuses by the whip. His unnatural pallor betrayed him. But worse than the pallor was the strangeness of his eyes; there had suddenly reappeared in them that kind of depravation which had disfi him on his arrival at Pietralata after his capture and fl from the Germans, and which for some time had seemed expunged. Even in his brief journ from the radio to the table, he found a way of performing some numbers worthy of a vaudeville show : although, in his surprising lack of inhibition, he didn't lose that special clumsiness, a shy and sullen child's, incurably part of his nature. Moreover, anyone could notice that, beneath the artifi excitement, his physique was exhausted from God knows what excesses and malnutrition. Useppe, however, was not sorry to see his friend revived and jolly.

In the space around the radio, Davide attempted fi a parody of dance, though the set at present was not broadcasting a musical program, but a very serious talk, of quasi-offi or perhaps ecclesiastical nature. Then he burst into singing the anarchist anthem :

"There will be the revolution, and the black fl will fl . .
"

interrupting it with a raspberry : a sound, this, so unnatural on his lips, that little Useppe ( who, alone among all the others, laughed at his friend's performance in childish solidari ty ) fel t an instinctive sadness. Arriving at the table, he started slapping the backs of the various people there, calling them all
comrade;
at which, the man in the messenger's uniform, who was an outspoken anti-Communist, was roughly outraged. The players, having put aside their cards by now, were preparing to leave; the old man with the medal had already gone, and the peddler was putting his box around his neck again. But Davidc stubbornly wanted to make them stay; and with a millionaire's gestures, he purchased the peddler's total s tock, scattering cakes and fritters and little paper cones of peanuts to everyone, insistently off drinks all round. He himself fi his glass, then, presenting him self before Clemente, gave him a military salute, with the invitation, among other blasphemies : "Let's drink to that pig God," and he drank, in fact, a sip on his own, but spat it out again immediately, nauseated. He

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shifted around, shoving and taking clumsy steps like a sailor on deck in a rolling sea, amusing himself by blabbering (if anyone was listening ) certain private affairs of his, now loudly, now confi but alway in a tone of cheap gossip. He informed them, for example, that he was a steady customer of brothels (and in fact, in these fi weeks of June, rather than go back to pacing those sad bridges, he had lapsed a couple of times : bringing home from them a fury of indecency and remorse, since he considered brothels a social abjection, almost as bad as Lagers ) . . . Or else, mockingly, he resuscitated his famous voluntary experience as a worker, ending each day in fi of vomiting . . . And he insisted on revealing to all, as if it were a very important secret, that he was the principal murderer, he was the pimp, he was the Fascist . . . He talked of corpses and beauty contests, of Betty Grable and the massacre of peasants at Portella della Ginestra in Sicily, and of cold war and hot, and of banquets and of bombs, etc., mixing, in his chatter, tragic and comic and indecent references, but always with unseemly laughter, as if everything he said were funny. And in these various
numbers
of his, he was accompanied every now and then by the fresh and uneasy laughter of Useppe, who understood nothing of what was said, but felt encouraged to enjoy this clowning. Not to mention Bella, who could fi let herself go, jumping, wriggling, and wagging her tail, as if it were Carnival. At the height of the party, Davide had chanted a vulgar little song from the days of his grandmother:

Seneghin seneghin

Stick your shirt-tail in again

inviting all present to a kind of chorus. But those present, really, paid no attention, only slightly and absently amused by him and his showing off in fact, half fed-up, as at a drunk's normal spectacle. The tavern, for that matter, was emptying. Clemente too had gone off all alone, dragging his mutilated body, which shuddered in the warm breeze, in his unseasonal overcoat. Davide left without saying goodbye to anyone. Useppe and Bella hastened after him.

These were the longest days of the year. The sun was not yet setting, al though it was already time for the Evening News on the radio. Along the street, from the windows, odds and ends of the latest news arrived :

. . . a police ordinance, issued in the name of the Minister of the Interior, has ordered all Chiefs of Police to forbid political rallies or assem blies in factories .
. .