History (34 page)

Even his sleep was degraded by it; and in those present, unconsciously, it created an uneasiness close to dislike. Other lost and exhausted charac ters had happened into this place before, but in him you could feel a diff which almost excluded him from the communal sympathy.

Towards one in the morning, when in the vast room's shadows, all had long been asleep, he suddenly began to writhe on his sack, screaming obsessively : "Stop! Stop! I'm thirsty! I want to get out of herel Tum off that light!"

The profound snoring of the sleepers was interrupted. "What light?" one of them grumbled lazily. And, in fact, all lights were out. The fi to move was Useppe, who jumped down from his mattress and ran towards the corner with the sack in an alarmed dash, as if the stranger were a close relative of his.

He was followed by Carulina, who fi of all saw to closing the windows and turn on the central lamp. Little Useppe, all naked, was standing there, a step from the sack, his gaze fi interr The cat, still half stretched out on her straw, pricked up her ears, and sniff the time with her little dark nose still warm from sleep, widening her dazed pupils on the man who was writhing so wildly. At a certain point, she jumped to the fl in alarm, moving around him. He was sitting up on the sack, still inveighing in an obscene manner. He was delirious. He kept repeating: "Take that light away!" but it was clear he wasn't accusing the lamp that had just been lit in the room. His black eyes, afl and bloodshot, watched only a stony point outside himself, like the eyes of the demented. His face, livid before, was now fi His temperature must have

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risen to well over 100 degrees. Giuseppe Secondo tried to take it with a thermometer, but the stranger pushed him away. In his raving, he ripped his shirt, which here and there was striped with brownish stains, either mire or blood, it wasn't clear which. And he scratched his chest so fi

that he tore the skin. He was surely teeming with lice.

Then he started bouncing here and there on the sack, as if he were being pounded from below:
"Mama mia,"
he moaned desperately, "I want to go home, home . . ." and he clenched his eyes shut with such force that his eyelids seemed ready to crush his sockets. Then his lashes were noticed, soft, and so long and thick they must have bothered him.

After about a quarter of an hour, he calmed down a little, perhaps beca they had forced him to swallow an aspirin tablet with some water. His delirium became milder. Absorbed in a strange cogitation, he began to work out certain calculations : additions, multiplications, divisions which came to his lips in a nonsense murmur that seemed a joke : "Seven eights," he was saying, "seven nines . . . three hundred sixty-fi days, makes eleven per minute . . ." He frowned with terrible gravity: "And eighty an hour, that's the maximum . . . Forty-six plus fi y-three, eleven thousand

. . . Don't think! Don't think!" he repeated at this point, dazed, as if someone had interrupted him. And he turn over on the sack, again try to count on his fi : "Minus fi . . . minus four . . . minus one . . . how much is minus one . . . ? DON'T think! Minus one . . ." It seemed he couldn't make any sense of his countdown any more : "Forty dozen shirts," he grumbled sternly, "not enough for a complete service

. . . For twenty-four table settings . . . twelve tablecloths . . . one thousand fi negative exponent . . . how many dozen?! this is algebra, goddammit . . .
"

After a while, Carulina as usual couldn't contain herself, and she had to stifl a laugh with her hands : "\V he counting?" Useppe asked her, concerned, in a low voice. "How should I know?" she answered him, "he's got a delirious fever, that one . . . he's not thinking like a human being!" "A dowry . . . he's arguing about a dowry!" Granny Dinda spoke up, for her, with knowledgeable pedantry. And Carulina couldn't restrain another laugh, which made her two braids dance on the top of her head, where she had left them last night in her laziness, not undoing them.

To make up for her rudeness, she considerately collected the ill man's dark glasses, which he had dropped on the fl and she put them in his bag. Then, seeing he hadn't even removed his sandals, she slipped them off his feet. His feet wereblack with fi and encrusted dust.

He had dozed off And Rossella, also calming down, curled herself again in her hole, covering her head, to sleep.

That night Ida had a brief dream, which she was never to forget

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afterwards, in all its vividness. It seemed to her that screams and groans were coming from the sack again, as they had in reality a little earlier. But there was nobody any longer on the sack, all red with blood. The people around did their best to hide that blood under heaps of sheets and blan kets; but it seeped through everything; and in an instant sheets and blan kets were soaked in it.

The following morning, the new guest had already recovered. His tempera ture was normal, and as soon as he waked, around nine, he got up on his own. He avoided conversation, and he always wore his black glasses, even indoors; his attitude, however, seemed very changed since the previous evening: now he moved awkwardly, almost shyly. And the others, who had previously felt jarred by his presence as if by a scandal, gradually recovered from that fi unnerv eff regarding him with greater indulgence and liking.

Not knowing what to say to all those people, he tried to apologize for having forced himself on them : "They gave me an address, here in Rome, where I could stay, with some acquaintances, but the address turned out to be wrong. I didn't know where to tum . . ." he explained in his untamed way, half-embarrassed and half-curt. "This here," Giuseppe Secondo an swered him, "isn't pri property! This is a public shelter, at the disposal of the community." 'Til pay everyone back, at the end of the war!" the young man declared, high-handed and grouchy, 'Til reward everyone gen erously!" He didn't feel like eating, for the moment; but he asked ('Til pay, of course," he added ) for a cup of hot ersatz coff "I didn't want to stay any longer
. . _,
he kept saying to himself, barely holding the cup in his shaking hands. "I didn't want to stay on . . . but I can make it . . ." He didn't so much drink the coff as suck it, his breath whistling.

He was no longer ghostly, as he had been on arr but even after he had shaved with a Gillette razor lent him by Giuseppe Secondo, his pallor was frightening, malari At noon, he fl himself on a dish of pasta, attacking it brutally, with the fury of a starving puppy.

After he had eaten, a more natural color return to his cheeks. From Giuseppe Secondo he accepted the present of a shirt which was very big on its donor, but was small on its recipient, in spite of his thinness. He was apparently pleased, all the same, to be wearing something cl Caro washed his pants in the tub, making him pay only for the soap : black market price, be it was a special pre-war laundry soap, not the kind you got wi your ration card, which seemed made of sand and gravel. Th while the pants were drying, he clumsily covered himself with a rag

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around his waist (he had sturdy, hairy legs, of an almost naive, pri roughness), and asked for the loan of a basin, to wash his body with the remainder of the purchased soap. And Rossella, who never failed to show up promptly wherever he was, accompanied him even into the latrine, where he withdrew to bathe.

After that fi angry introduction at the window, he gave very little further news about himself: and he revealed such information reluctantly, under pressure, only to explain his presence there. He was heading, he said, for the South, for the Naples area, where he had some relatives. And he planned to resume his journey as soon as possible, perhaps tomorrow. He wasn't ill, in fact, but only tired, since he had come this far on foot, and in disastrous conditions. This was the fi night he had slept under a roof. The other nights, before, he had spent in the open, sleeping behind a bush, in a gulley, wherever he happened to be. ''I'm not sick!" he repeated wi some hostility, as if they had accused him of being contagious.

Carulina's two brothers, who moved back and forth for their aff between Rome and Naples, told him that if he would wait two or three days, he could take advantage, along with them, of a truck belonging to a friend, who had the necessary passes and was going, in fact, to Naples. This friend knew how to handle any eventuality, being a lot smarter than the Germans and the Fascists. Maybe he would fi a way to hide him in the midst of the truck's merchandise, as he wouldn't want to be seen, logically, since he was a deserter.

They added, however, that according to the latest news they had gathered, the Allies were nearing Naples, and the Germans were about to leave the city, dri out by a popular uprising. Once Naples was occupied, the Allies would have the road open to Rome. It was a matter of days, perhaps of hours. In a little while Rome too would
be
liberated, and it would be all over. Seeing tha t he had waited this long, he might just as well wait to the end, to fi the way free, and without risk of being held up along the road.

Carlo, although uneasy, ended by accepting the suggestion. In reality, even if he insisted he felt great, you could see his bones and his nerves were battered. Sometimes he would make a grimace and stand still, staring into the void, under the lingeri effect of the nightmare.

Almost with shame, he asked Giuseppe Secondo if he could also have for his own corner a curtain on the order of the Signora's (he was referri

to Ida). Among them all, for his requests, he preferred to address Giu seppe Secondo, perhaps because, seeing the man kept very busy around the place, he had taken him for a kind of head of the family. And in asking for these poor favors (the loan of the basin, the ersatz coff which he paid for) he would frown, assuming an arrogant mien; but his voice

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came out upset and hesitant, as if he were asking for a huge sum, a million. From the summer's many old rags, Carulina fi him up a kind of composite curtain, which looked like Harlequin's cloak, and which pro tected him from the others' gaze up to a point. You could still see the lower part of his body, half stretched out; and every now and then, his hand was visible at the side of his pallet, rummaging in his bag, as if its contents didn't consist, entirely, of three tattered old books and an identity card and some stale crackers and some ten-lire notes; as if, instead, it might harbor possible pastimes for him, some help against his wretchedness and

delirium, and maybe even a surprise.

Moreover, you could see, at intervals, from beyond his feet, the little form of Rossella appear, sinuous and a bit stunted, with her imperceptibly swollen belly, as she stretched after a nap and walked undisturbed over his legs. She had observed the hanging of the curtain with a look of expertise and approval, and then she had established her permanent residence be hind there; so the kids, respecting her now as the property of that isolated character (who frightened them with his grim manner), no longer dared chase her, bother her, and tease her, as they had often done in the past.

The young man, to tell the truth, was too concerned with his own thoughts to pay attention to the cat; while she, beyond any doubt, was already convinced she meant a great deal in his life. He had only to shift his position, or move on his pallet, and she would promptly rise up on her forepaws, extending her face and going: "Muhi," which was her special answeri call : like someone saying
pr
at a roll call; when, he, in reality, didn't see her or hear her at all, as if she didn't exist. Only rarely, by chance, his hand would stretch absently and give her a pat; and she would close her little eyes, blissful, answering him in the intimate feline language of purring : "Ah, yes! This is really the right moment. That pat was just what was needed, to complete our contentment in staying here, the two of us alone, together and independent."

Carulina's sisters-in-law began to remark : "Rossella has found her man." "The little witch" ( this is what they called her at times ) "got a crush at fi sight" and meanwhile they would snicker at Giuseppe Secondo, trying to get a rise out of him, her legitimate owner. But he would wave his arm, with an air of generosity and indiff which meant: "Let her do as she pleases. It's her business."

It happened, now and then, that the kids would venture to look in, beneath the curtain, to spy on that lonely couple. And Vivaldi Carlo neither rejected them nor made friends : he ignored them. The only one who never came to bother him, contradicting his usual sociable ways, was Useppe : perhaps because he had sensed the other wanted to be left alone. Once, however, playing hide-and-seek, he completely forgot this considera-

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tion. And he burst in under the curtain, crouching behind the sack and whispering to the young man, as he did to Sora Mercedes : "Don't tell, eh? Don't tell."

Every now and then, perhaps suff in that dark and stinking corn the young man would emerge from the curtain and take a few steps in silence, as if to say: "Oh my God, what shall I do? \Vh shall I put this body of mine?" But, repelled by the room's pandemonium, he would withdraw at once to his lair.

The second day he went out and came back a little later with a new purchase, a candle which was to serve him for reading, since the light in his comer was insuffi both during the day and at night. He also bought two packs of black-market cigarettes from Carulina's brothers. And he spent the rest of the day behind his curtain smoking and reading, or try

to read, the books he had with him.

The third day he went out again, without saying goodbye to anyone, with a conspirator's ambiguous, grim air, and he returned towards evening, with a relieved look. Inside Rome, he must have had some private postal address, since from his sortie he brought back two letters, without stamps on the envelopes (as the women noticed immediately). He had already tom open the envelopes, surely to take a rapid glance at the two letters, waiting to read them properly, in greater safety, behind his curtain. But, too eager and anxious to concern himself with anything else, the moment he was back, he began rereading them, sitting half outside, on the edge of his pallet, without drawing the curtain or lighting the candle, in the pres ence of all. "Good news?" they asked him. "Yes," he answered. And, with an unexpected need to communicate, he added, with an indifferent look : "From my family. From home."