History (13 page)

On the wall, over the bed, in the place of holy pictures, there were various photographs, cut out of magazines and held by thumbtacks, of movie actresses in bathing suits or evening dress : the most spectacular had been marked with great scrolls in red pencil, so emphatic they seemed the trumpet signals of an assault, or the cries of an amorous cat out hunting. On the same wall, but to one side, and also attached with thumbtacks, there was also a copy of a poster showing a Roman eagle clutching the British Isles in its talons.

On a chair, there was a football! And on the little table, among unbound schoolbooks (horribly mauled and debased until they seemed rats' leftovers ), there were piles of other sports papers, magazines, and cheap adventure serials; a thriller showing a half-naked lady on the cover, screaming, threatened by a huge, apelike hand; and an album with illustra tions of redskins. And further: a Young Fascist's fez; a wind-up phono graph with a few scattered records; and a complicated, vague structure, in which you could recognize, among other things, the parts of a small motor. Beside the sofa, on a rickety easy chair, set against the wall, beneath a printed view with the legend
Grand HOtel des li
Borromees, there were

5 6 H I S T O R Y
.
.
. . . .
1 9 - -

piled up some parts of fl of vehicles, a defl tire prominent among them, a mileage gauge, and some handlebars. On the
arm
of the chair rested a jersey with a team's colors. And in the corner, propped against the wall, was a rea musket.

Amid such an eloquent array, the soldier's fantasti movements were converted, for Ida, into the precise movements of a fatal machine which was printing also Nino's name beside her own in the blacklist of Jews and their hybrids. As the minutes passed, her own misconceptions were acquir ing an obsessive power over her, reducing her to the native, ingenuous terr of a prerational age. Standing motionless, her coat still on and her little mourn hat on her head, she was no longer a lady of San Lorenzo, but a desperate Asiatic migratory bird, wi brown feathers and black crest, overw in its temporary clump of bushes by a horr Occidental deluge.

And in the meanwhile, the German's drunken thoughts did not con cern races or religions or nations, but only ages. He was mad with envy and, to himself, he argued and silently stammered : "God-damn-it, the luck-y ones are sti un-der the dra age-and-and-they ca enjoy their be long-ings at home-with their mothers! and the foot-balll and screw-ing and every-thing-everything! as if the war was on the moon or the plan-et Mars . . . grow-ing up is the worst luck . . . '\Vh am I any-way? '\Vh am I do-ing here? How did I get here? . . ." At this point, remem- bering he still hadn't introduced himself to his hostess, he went and stood squarely facing her; and wi even looking at her, his mouth cross, he declared :

"Mein Name ist Gunther!"

Then he remained there, in a discontented attitude, expecting this propitiatory introduction to produce an eff denied him in advance. The lady's huge eyes, hostile and dazed, merely blinked briefly, suspiciously at those German sounds, whose only meaning for her was a sibylline threat. Then the soldier's gaze darkened, though he allowed a hint of lively warmth to show in his eyes, as he felt an incurable aff . And remain ing there, half-seated on the edge of the cluttered table, with a kind of reluctance ( which betrayed a jealous privacy) he produced a little piece of pasteboard from his pocket and held it under Ida's eyes.

She took a frozen, sidelong glance at it, expecti an SS identity card with a swastika, or perhaps a Wanted photograph of Ninnuzzu Mancuso, with a yellow star. But instead it was a snapshot of a family group, in which she could vaguely discern, against a background of little houses and canebrakes, the heavy, radiant fi of a middle-aged Germa woman surrounded by fi or six half-grown boys. Among them, the soldier, with a

5 7

faint smile, pointed out one (himself), more grown than the others, dressed in a windbreaker and a cyclist's cap. Then, as the lady's eyes wandered over that anonymous group with dark apathy, he moved his fi to point out the landscape and sky in the background, informing her:

"Dachau."

His tone of voice, in uttering that name, was the same that a three month-old kitten might have, claiming its basket. And for that matter, the name meant nothing to Ida, who had never heard it before, unless by chance, without remembering it . . . However, at that innocuous and in diff name, the wild, transitory migrant, now identifi with her heart, leaped inside her. And fl horribly in the distorted space of the little room, it began to slam, in chirping tumult, against the walls that had no exit.

Ida's body had remained inert, like her consciousness, with no move ment but a throb of the muscles and a defenseless gaze of extreme repul sion, as if she were facing a monster. And at that same moment, the soldier's eyes, their dark-blue, sea color, approaching violet (an unusual color on the continent; it is more often encountered in the Mediterranean islands ) fi with an innocence almost frightening in its timeless antiq uity: contemporary with the Earthly Paradise! To those eyes her gaze seemed the defi tive insult. And instantaneously a tempest of anger clouded them. And yet through this clouding there fi a childish questioning, which no longer expected the sweetness of an answer, but wanted one all the same.

It was at this point that Ida, without thinking, began to shout: "No! No! No!" in the hysterical voice of an immature girl. In reality, with this no of hers, she was not addressing him or the outside world, but another secret threat she sensed from some interior point or nerve, suddenly rising within her from her childhood years, something of which she thought herself healed. As if returning to that age, backwards, through foreshort ened time, she promptly recognized the great dizziness, the strange echoes of voices and torrents which, when she was little, had announced her spells. Now her cry was against that snare, which would steal her from safeguarding the house, and Nino!!

However, this new, inexplicable reaction of hers (no, the only answer she had given this day) acted on the soldier's confused wrath like a signal of revolt against an immense transgression. Unexpectedly, the bitter tenderness that had humiliated him with its torture since that morn was unleashed in him, with a fi determination! ". . . fare amore! . . . FARE AMORE! . . ." he shouted, repeating in a boyish outburst an-

5 8 H I S T O R Y
. . .
.
. .
1 9 - -

other two of the 4 Italian words that, in his foresight, he had made them teach him at the frontier. And without even taking off his uniform, ca nothing that she was old, he hurled himself on top of her, throwi her on that disheveled daybed, and raping her with rage as if he wanted to murder her.

He felt her writhe horribly, but, unaware of her illness, he thought she was struggling against him, and he became the more obstinate for this reason, like all drunken soldiery. In reality, she had lost consciousness, in a temporary absence from him and from the situation, but he didn't realize this. And he was so charged with stern, repressed tensions that, at the moment of orgasm, he emitted a great scream above her. Then, in the following moment, he peeped at her in time to see her face, fi wi amazement, relax in a smile of ineff humility and sweetness.

"Carina carina," he started saying to her ( this was the fourth and last Italian word he had learned ). And at the same time he began kissing her, with little kisses full of sweetness, on the dazed face that seemed to look at him and continued smiling at him with a kind of gratitude. Meanwhile, she was gradually coming to, abandoned beneath him. And in the state of relaxation and calm that always passed between the spell and conscious ness, she felt him again penetrating her, but slowly this time, with a heart rending and possessive movement, as if they were already kin and accus tomed to each other. She found again that sense of fulfi and repose she had known as a girl, at the end of an attack, when she was received once more by the affectionate room of her father and her mother; but that childish experience of hers was extended today, through her half-waking state, into the blissful sensation of returning to her own, complete body. That other body, greedy, harsh, and warm, which explored her in the center of her maternal sweetness \\·as, at once, all the hundred thousand fevers and coolnesses and adolescen t hungers that fl together from their jealous lands to fi to the brim her girlish river. It was all the hundred thousand young male animals, terrestrial and vulnerable, in a mad and merry dance, which struck into her lungs and to the roots of her hair, calling her in every language. Then it slumped clown becoming once more a sole imploring fl dissolving within her womb in a sweet, warm, in genuous surrender, which made her smile, moved, like the only gift of a poor man, or a child.

It wasn't, for her, not even this time, a true erotic pleasure. It was an extraordinary happiness without orgasm, as sometimes happens in dreams, before puberty.

The soldier, this time, in sating himself, let out a little moan, among light kisses, and letting his whole body sink on her, he promptly fell asleep.

5 9

Regaining consciousness, she felt his weight on her body, the rough uni form and the belt buckle pressing on her naked belly. And she found herself with her legs still apart, and his sex, now poor, helpless, and as if cut off resting gently against her own. The boy slept serenely, snoring; but as she moved to free herself, he clutched her instinctively against himself; and his features, even in his sleep, assumed a grimace of possession and jealousy, like a real lover.

She was so weakened that in separating from him she had the impres sion she was performing a mortal labor; but fi she managed to free herself, and she sank to the fl on her knees, among the pillows scattered beside the cot. She straightened up her clothes as best she could; but the effort produced in her a nausea that made her heart turn over; and she remained there, where she was, on her knees beside the daybed with the sleeping German.
As
always, when she ca to, only the shadow of a recollection was left her from her illness, no more than the initial sensation of a confused theft, an instant's duration. In her memory, actually, there was a total blank, from the moment the boy had started kissing her face, whispering
carina carina,
to the other moment, earlier, when he had showed her the photograph.

However, the whole previous period, not just the fri hour before her attack, but the entire past, in retrospect, also presented itself to her recollection as a point of arrival, still confused in an immense remote ness. She had set sail from the crowded and vociferating continent of her memory, on a boat that in this interval had gone around the world, and now, return to its port of departure, found it silent and calm again. There were no more shouting crowds, no lynching. The familiar objects, stripped of all emotion, were no longer instruments, but creatures, vege table or aquatic, algae, coral, starfi which breathed in the sea's repose, belonging to no one.

Even the sleep of her aggressor, stretched out there before her, seemed to rest on the leprosy of all experiences-violence, fear-like a healing.
li:t
moving her eyes (cleared by the recent spell as if by a bath of lumi transparency), she saw on the ground, at some distance from each other, her run-down shoes, which she had lost, along with her hat, while writhing unconsciously in the German's arms. But not bothering to pick them up, seated, inert, on her bare heels, she fi her widened eyes again on the sleeper, with the stupid look of the maiden in fairy tales, staring at the dragon which a magic potion has made harmless.

Now that his lover had escaped him, the boy had embraced the pillow and was hugging it tight, stubborn in his possessive jealousy of a moment before. However, his face had meanwhile taken on another expression,

6 0 H I S T O R Y
. . .
. .
.
1 9 · ·

intent and grave; and Ida, almost without realizing it, immediately read there the subject and the plot of his dream, if not the details. The dream was suited to a boy of the age, roughly, of eight. There were important matters under discussion : the sale of bicycles or accessories, where he had to deal with an untrustworthy character, no doubt an eccentric sort, a Levantine smuggler perhaps, or a Chicago gangster, or a Malayan pi ra . . .

This character was trying to cheat: and consequently the sleeper's lips, of a parched pink, wild and a bit chapped, protruded in an ilkoncealed pout. His eyelids hardened, flutteri the gilded lashes, so short they seemed dust. And his brow furrowed in concentration, below the clumps of hair, darker than his lashes, smooth, suggesting a cool, damp softness, like the coat of a little brown kitten just bathed by its mother.

It would have been easy, now, to kill him, following the example of Judith in the Bible; but Ida, by nature, couldn't conceive such an idea, not even as a fantasy. Her mind, distracted by its reading of the dream, was darkened by the thought that perhaps the intru would go on sleeping until late in the evening, and Nino, corn horn , might surprise him, still here. Nino, however, with his political ideas, might even be proud of this visit, and would hail the German, his mother's rapist, as a companion . . . Instead, as suddenly as he had fallen asleep, the German woke abruptly, as if at a trumpet's brutal blare. And immediately he looked at the watch on his wrist: he had slept barely a few minutes, still he didn't have much time to get back to the transit camp for roll call. He stretched : not with the arrogant bliss of boys when they release themselves from sleep, but rather with the disgust of an anguish and a curse, as if he had

discovered again the chains of prison attached to his limbs. The twi shadows were beginning; and Ida, having risen, with her barefoot and trembling body, approached the light socket, to insert the plug. The wires were loose, and the light of the bulb fl Then Gunther, who in Germany was an electrician by trade, took from his pocket a special clasp knife (the envy of the whole army, a multi tool which, in addition to the blade, hid a razor, a fi and a screwdri in the handle); masterfully he repaired the plug.