History (104 page)

By now dusk was falling, and the belated pair marched in great haste towards home, already plotting, however, en route, a complete plan for the

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next day. The appointment with Davide, in fact, hadn't made Useppe forget his other friend, Scim6. So it was established, between him and Bella, that they would go to the river in the morning to visit Scimo ( getting up earlier than usual tomorrow), and would dedicate, instead, the afternoon to Davide. In Useppe's little head, now, there stirred such a festive air that it dispelled any suspicion of disappointment; while at that very moment, with Bella, he was walking along the side of the Porta Portese square dominated, at the end, by the Reformatory building. Neither of the pair knew Scim6 was now shut up right in there, behind those walls; but Bella-who knows why?-at the sight of the square, fl tened her ears, and turned away, almost stealthily, towards the bridge.

7

During that whole night, the repose that had seemed promised to Davide since dusk was instead denied him. To tell the truth, he was already sleeping when Useppe went out of the room; and as Useppe had left him-fully dressed, his shoes on his feet-he

continued to sleep till morning. But his was a kind of false sleep, morbid and broken, more tiring than insomnia. That wakeful point which had remained fast in his brain since yesterday, now resisting drugs and free of his body's lethargic inertia, seemed alert there, ready to thrash him, like a whip assigned to guard him, to prevent escape. If he barely began to sink towards the depths of unconsciousness, he was suddenly roused by imagi nary lightning-fl or alarm bells in the dead of night. And waking and dozing, he found himself constantly involved in a ri little theater, like a mocking surrogate of the visions he had just recently sought from drugs, and which he no longer expected. In fact, by now he had said farewell forever to the hope of seeing-at least in the form of obvious hallucinations-his family cured of the leprosy of the Lagers of Ninnuzzu unharmed, or of witnessing an array of celestial apparitions that might deceive him, temporarily, with who knows what revelations or special grace. He received, instead, inferior products, which irked him with their evident fakeness and their stupidity. Tonight, however, these falsifi weren't limited to the usual accessory distortions of the furniture or the shadows, which he had only to turn off the light to dispel, nor to the usual soap-colors which fl to him, fairly innocuous, in the dark room, van ishing as he dozed off In light or in darkness, the machine which since evening had been set in his brain never stopped, sometimes in neutral, sometimes driven, you would have said, by a precise intention, even if obscure. For a long stretch of the night, it insisted on manufacturing an

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assembly-line of jokes, so cheap that he himself couldn't understand why they should torture him so much. For example, as soon as he turned off the lamp, he was awai ted in the void by a one-dimensional invasion of com mon geometrical abstractions : rhombs, triangles, squares, multiplied in myriads, in a tumult of absurd colors. And if he turned on the lamp again, he found the familiar room, on the contrary, ravaged by abnormal concrete things : the fl was a fl agita ted substance, and the walls swelled, covered with scabs and tumors, or else they split in cracks. Now he suc cumbed (and this was the bizarre part ) to such jokes, recognizing their silliness at the same time. He saw how in themselves they were gratuitous and meaningless little tri but meanwhile he looked on them as name less horrors : not even the worst monsters of the apocalypse could have been more repulsive to him. Not knowing whom to call, in his panic he murmured "God God," like a child, covering his eyes with his hands . . . And God appeared to him as in the oleographs of the Sacred Heart and the Holy Bishop, which he, rather than off Santina's memory, had left hanging over the bed, merely covering them with some newspaper. At his call, the two oleographs jumped from their places. And that was God : a stupid, pink young man with a little blond beard, and a half-pound of beef heart in his hands; and a dumb old man, with all the trappings of estab lished power and authority. "If you really were a saint," Davide addresses the latter, "you wouldn't get yourself up like a high priest, you wouldn't wear chevrons and carry a baton . . ." And now, for the twentieth time that night, he falls to sleep again. And he dreams : however, in his dream he remains aware, as usual, that he is lying on his bed in his own little room. He has set out, meanwhile, to fulfi a schoolboy wish of his, towards a marvelous city he has learn of in his history and geography and art books. In the dream, this city has an indefi name, and it would seem to be an emblem for him : a kind of social and egalitarian synthesis of labor, brotherhood, poetry . . . He already knows its image, pored over in his texts . . . But as he walks on and on, in the place of those famous archi tectures he fi only enormous and sordid blocks of apartments massed together to the horizon, still not fi but already marked with zig zagging cracks, like electric shocks . . . In this jumble, the streets are a honeycomb, cluttered with flotsam and stones, and filled with interminable lines of windowless freight cars, like reptile carcasses. He forces his way through the main streets, looking for the king. It is hard for him to get his bearings, also because of the thick blackish smoke that comes from the cars and the buildings, accompanied by the constant scream of sirens. Obvi ously the city's buildings arc all workshops and brothels. In fact, from the street you can see their interiors, illuminated by spotlights; but the spec tacle is monotonous, the same everywhere. On one side, there are long

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lines of men in whitish uniforms, chained to one another, and busy solder ing into more chains some heavy iron rings wi th their bloodstained hands; and on the other, some half-naked women, who make obscene movements, and all have bloodstains on their legs : "Only the sight of blood can arouse the customers," someone explains to him, laughing. And he immediately recognizes the king, who, as he now seems to have known, is none other than the accursed tree. Davide fi himself facing him : a little character in an offi uniform, wriggling on a cement platform (a kind of dance fl and laughing continuously. Davide would like to ask him various questions: "What have you done with the revolution? \Vhy have you degraded labor? Why did you choose ugliness?" etc., etc., but fi with embarrassment, he realizes he has become a schoolboy again, in short pants, so the questions are truncated, and he can only manage to say "\V . . ." in an excessive shout. "Because," the other man answers, nevertheless, laughing, "beauty was a fraud, to make us believe in paradise, when it's well known that we are all condemned at birth. We won't fall for certain tricks any more. Awareness is man's honor." And he continues laughing in Davide's face and still wriggling hysterically: "This," he ex plains to him, "is the Upa-upa, the fl dance." And, with this, in fact, he fl ens himself, until he has disappeared. Davide is now grown up again, as in real life, with long pants and a summer sports shirt; and around him there is a colonnade of stupendous architecture. In the place of the dance floor, below him there is a cool meadow, and right in its center, directly in

front
c�
him, stands a tree, damp with dew, covered with fruit and leaves.

Not far off the sound of water can be heard, a bird's voice. "There," Davide says to himself, "all the rest was a dream. But this is real." And, in proof, he decides to leave one of his shoes beneath the tree; so when he wakes, fi one foot bare, he will have the certitude that, here, he wasn't dreaming. At this point, he heard some bright familiar voices of little boys or girls, in chorus, calling from beyond the wondrous colonnade: Davide! Davide! and he woke with a start. The voices were imaginary; in reality no one was calling him. The lamp had remained on, and he found himself lying in the rumpled bed, as before. Both his shoes were on his feet. It was still late at night, but he couldn't know exactly what time it was, having forgotten to wind his watch that evening. Actually, while his dream adventure, as he remembered it, seemed rather long and spacious, this interval of sleep had lasted no more than three minutes.

Here begins another phase of that endless night of his. He no longer saw abstractions or concrete things, his senses lay idle; but his brain was working constantly, feverishly, in certain elucubrations or complicated dis cussions. He didn't know whether he was waking or sleeping, or whether the two states alternated in him. He seemed to be reasoning about univer-

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. . . . . .
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sal problems of advanced philosophy, and suddenly he realized that, in stead, they were shopping bills, laundry lists, calculations of dates or dis tances, etc. He regretted not having answered the king of the city, and his answer came to him, belatedly, clearly: "What you say is false. The truth is the exact contrary. God is the real essence of all existing things, which confi their secret to us through beauty. Beauty is God's modesty . . ." when suddenly, to illustrate this principle, his brain began an elaborate disquisition on the octanes of gasoline and the proof of alcoholic beverages

. . . The question now before him was human
superiori
consisting in the intellect; and he had to demonstrate to his comrade Ninnuzzu the various species of violence, and that the worst violence against man was the
degradation
of the intellect. From there, he passed to the distinction be tween intellect and substance, or rather God and nature, which Davide's brain, tonight, attributed to Hegel and Marx, declari it a manichean distinction, that is to say wicked; as science now confi for that matter. And at this point, from God knows where, Bakunin spoke up, to say (so Davide's brain asserted ) that atomic weapons would also disintegrate the intellect . . . Whereupon the debate with Ninnuzzu resumed, except that it now concerned the various types of automatic guns and revolvers, and questions of caliber and fi Suddenly Davide reproached Nin nuzzu for having hastened his own death :
Anyw
Ninnuzzu seemed to rebut,
if you don't die fast, you die slow. And, if you ask me, slow
is
shit.
The English word
slow
prompted a confused dispute about popular dances, with a quantity of American terms, and Spanish, Portuguese, Afro Cuban . . . mingled with gossip about the sex of Creoles . . . Similar subjects and others of every kind crowded and clashed incessantly in Davide's brain, in an involved and jumbled activity, sometimes spinning like wheels, sometimes exploding like bubbles. And this foolish bustle, which he couldn't elude, seemed a shocking humiliation to him. He re membered having read somewhere that in the future, scienti will suc ceed in keeping a human brain alive indefi ely, separated from the rest of the body . . . And he imagined the toil of this nerve-matter, isolated, with no possible relationships; it would have to resemble a feverish grind ing of leftovers and rubbish, illuminated briefl from time to time by some reminiscence, which would shine all the more painfully because it would promptly be ground up with the rest. The worst anguish of such a sen tence, he felt, was humiliation. And he recalled having heard that in a Turin institution they keep alive a female
creature,
all of whose organs and limbs are in the embryonic state, except the lower part of the trunk and the sexual system . . . The word
humiliation
suddenly reminded him of the most horrible sound he had ever heard : the young German's weeping as he had stamped on his face with his boot. That sound returned often to

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persecute him day and night: a wretched, feminine voice, like the i mplor ing paroxysm of dissolving matter.
The worst violence against man is the degradation of the intellect
. . . Now in his brain, in a shaft of light, G. has appeared, her hair shaved; she is in her working smock, pulled up to her thighs, as she writhes on the ground with her legs spread. Then, a new picture, a ri wheelbarrow is seen passing, heaped with plaster arms and legs, like ex-votos, of
a
livid, repulsive whiteness; and this is followed by the old man with the medal, two horn on his head like Moses, who fl down a card and says :
There's nothing to be done here, my boy. There is no act which, once performed, does not revolt your conscience.
Now Comrade Ninnuzzu pops up again, laughing and shooting in all direc tions . . . But a little later, unexpected, the photograph of Aunt Tildina appears and is distorted to assume the face of Clemente . . .
I want to sleep I want to sleep,
Davide says. The impossibility of true sleep, empty, refreshing, torments him like a new law, promulgated today against him by special decree. Signs and billboards fl into his mind :
Coca-Cola-The Pause That Refreshes;
or else
Beautyrest-Sleep Like an Angel.
He realizes he is invoking all known divinities : Christ, Brahma, Buddha, and even Jehovah, whom he fi disagreeable. And in his raving the usual bazaar of helter-skelter words and phrases is always intruding:
I don't want to think,

I want to sleep, the accursed tree, goodnight, the syri the urinal, the curfew, intravenous or ora
�
and more and more often the word ORDEAL.

It seems impossible, but in this wandering of his brain, Davide has spent at least a quarter of the earth's rotation. And at the end he has sunk into another of those inescapable dreams of his, which entangle him like a bird lime, just as he passes the fi threshold of unconsciousness. In this dream, the accursed tree ( which this time is clearly himself, Davide) is not only a betrayer of the true revolution, a born murderer, a man of violence, but also a rapist. In his bed there is a girl, a virgin, very thin, as if consumptive, with pubescent breasts just emerging, and long hair, already white, with little white childish legs and thick plebeian feet, and a fat behind; and he rapes her. Then, when he is paying her, he realizes he has only useless money, probably Moroccan coins. She doesn't reproach him, but only observes him with a meek smile : "These are no good . . ." and then he cheats her, saying they're collector's pieces, of great value on the market. And he fl them at her, and the coins make a sound like a machine gun.