History (15 page)

Non-aggression pact and mutual concessions between Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union.

In East Africa, victorious off of th e British armies which occupy the three capitals of the Italian Colonial Empire ( Mogadishu, Asmara, Addis Ababa ) and, in collaboration with the Ethiopian partisans, restore the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, to his throne.

JUNE

Germany unleashes its great Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets, guaranteeing its triumphant conclusion before winter ( "Stalin's Russia will be wiped off the map in eight weeks" ). Italy decides to participate in the venture. At Verona, Mussolini reviews one of the divisions setting off for the new front.

JULY

Japan occupies Indochina, formerly a French possession.

In Yugoslavia, the resistance struggle against the Nazi-Fascist occupa tion begins.

German forces advance triumphantly across Soviet territory.

SEPTEMBER

The German government decrees that all Jews above the age of six are required to wear a yellow Star of David on their chests.

OCTOBER

Mahatma Gandl1i of India urges recourse to passive resistance ( which he has already declared among l1is own people ) for all peoples subject to the British Colonial Empire.

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In Poland, the obligatory segregation of the Jewish population, already established with the Nazi occupation, is followed by the decree of th e death penalty for any Jew caught outside the ghetto.

The victorious advance of the Panzerdivisionen and the German in fantry continues in Soviet territory. In the four months since the beginning of the Operation, three million Russians are already out of combat ( by the Fuhrer's order, the fate of prisoners of war, as of other subhumans, is ex termination. All intern war conventions are considered void).

NOVEMBER

Meeting of the Fuhrer with Himmler, head of the SS and of the Gestapo (secret police) for the fi solution of the Jewish problem, accord ing to the plan already initiated, which provides for the deportation of all living Jews to extermination camps. Plants and equipment for mass liquidation of the deported are already operating in various Lagers, and some of the most important industrial fi of the Reich collaborate in their technical installation.

In Russia, the armies of the Reich continue their victorious advance, besieging Leningrad and heading towards Moscow.

DECEMBER

Leningrad does not surrender. Farther south, driven back by a Russian counterattack, the Germans interrupt their march on Moscow, executing a difficult withdrawal through the mud and ice of the winter.

In North Africa, the Halo-Germans are forced to withdraw from Cyrenaica.

In East Africa, the surrender of the last garrisons to the British forces marks the end of the Italian Colonial Empire.

With the "Night and Fog" decree, the Fuhrer orders his troops in all occupied countries to capture and suppress without a trace anyone who represents a danger for "German security." The executions, entrusted to special units of the SS and the SD, amount to about one million in Europe. In the Pacifi the Japanese suddeQly attack the American fl sta tioned at Pearl Harbor. War between the United States and Japan, extended to the other Tripartite Powers (Italy and Germany). This further extension of the world confl will increase to forty-three the number of

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Three hundred rejoicing heralds, banners fl

run through the cities, with drums and trumpets. All bells peal.

The Gloria is intoned

by the organ in the cathedral.

Messengers have set forth on plumed horses to carry the news in all seven directions.

From kingdoms and principalities the caravans move off bearing as gift the treasures of the forty escutcheons

in coff of aromatic wood.

All gates are fl open. On the thresholds pilgrims make greeting with hands pressed together.

Camels, asses, and goats bend their knees. And on all lips a single song !

Everywhere banquets, balls, and fi of rejoicing !

For today the queen

has brought into the world an heir to the throne !

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Ida never came to learn the fate of her aggressor. She never even knew his name, nor did she try to know it. The fact that, after his exploit, he sent no further word and vanished as he had appeared, for her, was a certain and natural conclusion, preordained. But

still, from the very night after her encounter with him, she began to fear his return. When he had left, in her somnolent state and with mechanical movements, she fi supper for herself and for Nino, who, however, was late as usual in coming home. In the days of her childhood, the attacks of her illness always left her with a voracious appetite; but this time, instead, while she reluctantly chewed a bit of food, she dozed off on her chair in the kitchen. Around nine, she was wakened by the great ringing of the bell in the hall, as Nino returned; and as soon as she had opened the door for him, she went to bed, falling at once into a dreamless lethargy. She slept in this way for a few hours; then, in the middle of the night, she woke with a start, feeling that the German, taller and bigger than life, was bending over her in the darkness, ready to assault her again, whispering unknown words into her ear, hissing and meaningless, the kind you use with babies or with pets. She turned on the light. The alarm said four o'clock; and the events of the previous day ran once more through her absolutely lucid mind in a rapid clash of sharp shadows, like a fi in black and white. Beyond the closed door of her room there was that other room, where Nino was now sleeping! Rememberi she hadn't remade his bed, she shuddered in shame and dis may; and feveri turning off the light, to take refuge in the darkness, she huddled under the covers.

She was wakened at six by the sound of the alarm clock. And that morning, and the following ones, she held her classes with the insistent sensation that she had a visible halo around her body, like a second body of hers (at times icy, at times searing) which she had constantly to shift. She didn't feel the same Ida as before, but rather an adventuress, leading a double life. And it seemed to her that her limbs projected the dishonor of her rape onto her pupils and onto everybody, and that on her face, as on soft wax, the marks of those kisses were imprinted. In her whole life, she had never approached any man but Alfi not even in thought; and now her adventure seemed written everywhere, like a sensational adultery.

In the street, if she barely glimpsed a German soldier in the distance, she immediately thought she recognized that one ( from a certain gait, a certain tilt of the head, or a position of the arms ) and she would turn the corn her heart pounding. And this new fear had temporarily dri out her other fear, of Nazi persecutions. Also the unexpected return of her illness, after she had been cured for so many years, didn't worry her. At heart she was convinced (and, in fact, she wasn't mistaken ) that the attack wouldn't be repeated. She wondered at fi if she should consult th

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pharmacist for some special sedative, no longer recalling the name of the one used before in Calabria; but then she gave up the idea, suspecting that the pharmacist might guess not only her old illness, but worse, also the circumstances of this belated relapse.

Every day, on coming home, she would peep around the corner to wards the door of the building, in the fear of seeing him again, waiting there, as if by appointment. Then, running through the entrance, she would begin to suspect that, knowing her schedule, he had already pre ceded her to the landing, where she would fi him ready, outside the door there, acting as if he wanted to give her a surprise. She pricked up her ears to hear his breathing; she almost thought she could catch his smell, and without strength, she dragged herself up the steps, growing steadily paler as she came closer to the seventh fl Having opened the door, casting a sidelong look, she thought she glimpsed his cap on the rack, where he had put it that day, on entering.

During her aftern in the house, she expected a new invasion of his at any moment. And this anxiety gripped her especially when she was alone, as if Nino's presence were a safeguard against danger. Every now and then, she would go into the hall and listen, her ear to the door, afraid of hearing again that fi tread which had remained in her ears, recogniz able among ail the footsteps of the earth. As much as possible she avoided staying in the living-room-study; and when she made up the daybed she was hindered by a terrible heaviness in her arms and legs, which nearly made her faint.

At night, during this period, she didn't dream; or at least, on waking, she didn't recaii having dreamed. Often, however, she would be roused from sleep, as on that first night, with the sensation that he was near her, a weight so hot it almost burned her. And that he was kissing her, wetting her face with saliva, and meanwhile he was muttering in her ear no longer tender little words but incomprehensible reproaches, in threatening German.

She had never felt at ease in her own body, to such a degree that she didn't look at it even when she bathed. Her body had grown up with her like an outsider; and not even in her girlhood had it ever been beautiful, with its thick ankles, frail shoulders, and the prematurely withered bosom. Her single pregnancy, like an illness, had been enough to make her mis shapen forever; and afterwards, in her widowhood, she had never thought that someone might use her body again as a woman's, to make love. With this excessive weight on its hips, and the wasting of its limbs, it had become for her only a toilsome burden .

Now, after that notorious afternoon, in the company of her body she

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felt more alone. And while she dressed in the still-dark dawns, when she had to perform certain intimate acts, such as fastening her corset or straightening her stockings, she would irresistibly start crying.

Th very fi day she had hastily hidden the knife he had left her, at the bottom of a chest in the hall, full of scraps and rubbish. And she had never dared look at it again, or shift those scraps, or open the chest. But every time she passed it, she felt a thump in her blood, trembling like a timid witness who knows the hiding-place of some criminal loot.

Gradually, however, as the days went by, she became persuaded her fear of encountering the soldier again was absurd. By now he was surely at some distant front, raping other women or shooting Jews. But, for her, his menace had waned. Between that stranger and Ida Ramundo no relation ship existed any more, neither present nor future.

Except for herself, no one knew anything of their fl relationship; and not even Nino had any suspicions. So now she had only to expel it from her memory, continuing her usual life.

She began all her days by waking at six, then going into the kitchen and, with the electri light on, preparing their breakfast and Nino's noon day meal. Then she would dress and, having waked Nino, always rushing and breathless, she would go to her school, two tram-rides away from the house. On coming out after her classes, her cheeks fl and her throat hoarse, she would bustle about the neighborhood of the school, to do her shopping before the stores' afternoon closing (since, in fear of the wartime blackout, she avoided going out after dark); and on the way home, three times a week, she would get off, with her shopping bags, at Castro Pretoria, where she gave pri lessons. Finally, she came home; and after eating Nino's leftovers, she would straighten up the rooms, correct her pupils' homework, prepare supper; and then her nightly waiti for Ninnarieddu would commence.

Perhaps a week had gone by when the series of her dreamless nights was disrupted, and she dreamed. She was apparently coming home, carry ing, through theft or error, not one of her shopping-bags but instead a basket of the kind used in Calabria for the vintage. From the basket a green plant sprouted and, in an instant, it ramified through the room, and outside the house, over all the walls of the courtyard. And it rose to become a forest of fabulous plants, foliage, bougainvilleas, gigantic cam panulas with Oriental and tropical colors, grapes and oranges as big as melons. Inside the forest, some little wi animals played, like squirrels, all with tiny blue eyes, peeping out in merry curiosity, and now and then they darted through the air, as if they had wings. Meanwhile, a crowd of people had started looking out of all the windows, but she herself was absent, God

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knows where; however, it was known she was the defendant. Th dream followed her for a few more minutes, after she had waked; then it van ished.

By the end of January she had already relegated to the depths of her memory that post-Epiphany afternoon, pressing it down among the other remnants and shreds of her past life, all of which, if she remembered them, hurt her.

But among the many terr and dangers, possible and impossible, consequent to her famous adventure, there was one, possible, which had never occurr to her: was it an unconscious defense, perhaps, supported by her matri experience, which, in all those years of love, had given her only one child?

Since puberty, her body had been subject to certain irregularities of rhythm. The uterus, with its menstruations, was, in her, like an anomalous wound that at times exhausted her with violent hemorrhages, and at other times seemed to arrest its natural fl gnawing at her from inside, worse than an ulcer. From the age of eleven (her pube had come early), Ida had meekly grown accustomed to such obscure caprices; and now amid her doubts and ailments, a number of weeks passed before she recognized this supreme and unthought-of sca that her indecent relations with an anonymous German had left her pregnant.

Th idea of somehow procuring an abortion never even entered her imagi nation. The only defense she managed to think of was to hide her condi tion from every as long as she could. The other problems, then, which threatened her from the imminent future, were absolutely inconceivable to her; and she could only thrust them from her mind. This was easier for her in her new physical state, which daily made her perceptions more blurred, detaching her from her outer motives for anguish, and lowering her into an almost thoughtless passivity. Nobody bothered to ask her about the occa sional nausea (not serious) that affl her, and for which, when neces sary, it was not hard for her to invent excuses. At that ti among curr illnesses, colitis was fashionable, even in proletarian neighborhoods; and to explain certain little indispositions, she invented the story that she suffered from a form of colitis. This nausea came over her suddenly, at the sight of the most commonplace objects : a doorknob, for example, or a tram-track. Abruptly, such objects seemed to become embodied in her own being, ferm there in a yeast of bitterness. From the past then, she was stirr by memories of the time when she was carrying Nino. And at the moment she was forced to bend over and vomit, it seemed to her that the