History (86 page)

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There remains to narrate, finally, that spring and summer of '47, with the wanderings of Useppe and his companion Bella, free, in the Testaccio district and environs. Without Bella as guard, to be sure, such liberty would have been denied Useppe. Not infre

quently he had been gripped again by reckless impulses to fl that is, to walk on and on not knowing where; and there is no doubt he would have been lost if Bella hadn't been there to restrain him and bring him home

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again at the appointed hour. Moreover, from time to time, incredibly, fears stirred in him : the movement of a shadow was enough, or a leaf, to put him on his guard and make him shudder. But fortunately, as soon as he turned his restless eyes, the fi thing he saw was Bella's face, with her brown eyes happy in the fi day, and her mouth open, panting to applaud the air.

In the course of the season, the couple, solitary as they were, didn't lack for encounters and adventures. '111e fi st adventure was the discovery of a wondrous place. This was the place "of his acquaintance" where Useppe had planned to bri the little tailless animal. And the discovery, in fact, only sligh tly antedated Professor Marchionni's examination . It was a Sunday morning; after the brief interval of their confi Useppe and Bella again had the way free. And they were so eager that at nine, having bidden Ida goodbye, they were already out of the house.

'The west wind, in its swift passage after the rains, had left the infi

so limpid that even the old walls were rejuvenated, breathing it in. The sun was dry and glowing, and the shade was cool. In the little breath of air, you walked without weight, as if borne by a sailboat. And today, for the fi time, Useppe and Bella went beyond their usual boundari Without even being aware of it, as they walked on, they passed Via Marmorata, following the whole length of Viale Ostiense; and when they reached the Basilica of San Paolo, they turned right, at which point Bella, lured by an intoxicating smell, began to run, followed by Useppe.

Bella ran with the cry: "Uhrrr! Uhrrr!" which means : "The sea! The sea!", whereas what really lay ahead, of course, was none other than the river Tiber. But no longer the same Tiber of Rome: here it fl among fi without walls or embankments, and it refl the countryside's natural colors.

(Bella possessed a kind of lunatic memory, vagabond and millennial, which suddenly made her scent the Indian Ocean in a river, and the Maremma in a mud puddle. She was capable of sniffi a Tartar wagon in a bicycle and a Phoenecian ship in a tram. And this explains why she bounded off in certain misplaced monumental leaps, or stopped constantly to rummage with such interest among refuse or to hail with a thousand ceremonies certain odors of minimum importance.)

Here the city had ended. Beyond, on the other bank, you could still glimpse amid the green a few sheds and hovels, which gradually became sparser; but on this side, there were only fi and canebrakes, with no human construction. And despite its being Sunday, the place was deserted. With spri barely begun, nobody yet visited these banks, especially in the morning. There were only Useppe and Bella, who ran forward a bit, then

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flung themselves down to roll on the grass, then jumped up and ran forward another bit.

At the end of the fi the terrain sloped down and a little wooded a rea began. It was there that Useppe and Bella at a certain point slowed their pace and stopped chatting.

They had entered a round clearing, closed off by a circle of trees whose highest boughs became tangled so as to form a kind of room with a roof of leaves. The floor was new grass, just born after the rains, perhaps not yet trampled by anyone, and with only a kind of minuscule daisy floweri in it. The fl ers looked as if they had all blossomed together at that moment. Beyond the trunks, towards the river, a natural palisade of canes allowed a glimpse of the water; and the fl of the current, along with the air that stirred the leaves and the ri of the canes, varied the colored shadows inside, in a constant tremolo. Entering, Bella sniff the air, perhaps believing she was inside some Persian tent; then she pricked up her ears only slightly, at the sound of a bleat from the countryside, but she immediately lowered them. She too, like Useppe, had grown alert to the great silence which followed the isolated sound of that bleat. She crouched beside Useppe, and in her brown eyes a melancholy appeared. Perhaps she remembered her puppies, and her fi Antonio at Poggioreale, and her second Antonio underground. It really was like being in an exotic tent, far from Rome and from every other city, who knows where, having arrived after a great journey; and outside an enormous space seemed to stretch, with no other sound but the calm movement of the water and the air.

A whirri ran above the foliage; and then from a half-hidden branch came a chirp little song which Useppe recognized without hesitation, having learn it by heart one morning, in the days when he was little. Indeed, he saw again the scene where he had happened to hear it: behind the guerrillas' hut, on the hill of the Castelli, while Eppetondo was cook· ing the potatoes and they were waiting for Ninnuzzu-Ace of Hearts . . . The memory came to him a bit vague, a luminous quavering, like the shade of this tent of trees; and it brought him no sadness, but on the contrary it seemed a fri little greeting. Bella also seemed to enjoy the song, because, still crouched, she raised her head, listening, instead of bounding up as she would have done on another occasion. "You know it?" Useppe whispered to her very softly. And in reply she fl ked her tongue and raised an ear halfway, to signify : 'Til say I do! Of course!" This time, there were not two singers, but only one; and to judge by what you could see from below, he was neither a canary nor a goldfi but perhaps a starling, or rather an ordinary sparrow. He was an insignifi little bird,

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of a gray-brown color. Peering up, taking care to make no movement or sound, you could better discern his lively little head and even his tiny pink throat which throbbed at his trills. Apparently, the song was popular among birds and had become the fashion, seeing that even sparrows knew it. And perhaps this one knew no other, since he continued repeating it, always with the same notes and the same words, except for a few impercep tible variations :

"It's a joke a joke

all a joke!" Or else :

"A joke a joke it's all a joke!"

or else:

"It's a joke it's a joke

it's all
a
joke a joke a joke ohoooo!"

After having repeated it about twenty times, he whirred again and fl off 11 Bella, content, stretched out more comfortably on the grass, her head res ting on her forepaws, and she began dozing. The silence, after the interval of song was over, expanded to a fantastic dimension, such that not only the ears but the whole body listened to it. And Useppe, in listening, had a surprise that would perhaps have frightened an adult man, subject to a rational scheme of nature. But his little organism, on the con trary, received it as a natural phenomenon, even if never discovered until today.

The silence, in reality, was speaking! or rather, it was made up of voices, which at fi arrived somewhat confused, mingling with the trem bling of the colors and the shadows, until the double sensation became one alone : and then it was clear that those quavering lights, also, in reality, were all voices of the silence. It was the very silence, and nothing else, that made the space tremble, its roots twisting deeper into the fi center of the earth, and rising in an enormous tempest beyond the clear sky. Its clarity remained clear, indeed more dazzling, and the storm was a multitude singing a sole note (or perhaps a sole chord of three notes ), like a cry!

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. .
. .
. .
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Ho11
·
ever, within it, you could somehow distinguish, one by one, all voices and phrases and speeches, by the thousands and thousands of thousands : and songs, and bleatings, and the sea, and the alarm sirens, and shots, and coughs, and the engines, and the trains for Auschwitz, and crickets, and the exploding bombs, and the tiniest grunt of the tailless animal . . . and "hey, how about giving me a little kiss, Use? . . ."

This multiple sensation of Useppe's, not easy or brief to describe, was in itself, on the contrary, simple and rapid as a fi in a tarantella. And the effect it had on him was to make him laugh. In reality, according to the doctors, this, again today, was one of the various signs of his disease : certain hallucinatory sensations are "always possible in epileptic subjects." But anyone happening past, at that moment, in the tent of trees, would have seen only a carefree, dark-haired little boy wi blue eyes, looking into the air and laughing at nothing, as if an invisible feather were tickling his nape.

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"Carloo!
.
. . ? . . . Vavide . . . Ddavide!"

The young man who preceded them at the distance of a few paces along Via Marmorata barely turn sideways. After the rapid visit to Via Bodoni the previous summer, Useppe had not

seen Davide Segre ( formerly Carlo Vivaldi and Pyotr); but Bella, on the other hand, had had further occa to meet him, in the late summer and the following autumn, the times that Ninnuzzu had hap pened into Rome without fi a moment to show up at the house. Recognizing Davide immediately, she fl herself towards him with such impetuous joy that Useppe let her leash slip from his hands. (There had been a rumor circulating for some time, that the City dogcatchers were after stray dogs, and Ida, frightened, had bought a leash and even a muzzle, urging both Bella and Useppe to use them. And afterwards, con vinced, whenever they were in inhabited areas, the two always remained thus linked to each other: with the natural eff that Useppe, the smaller, was led on the leash by Bella.)

The little voice which, shouting his names, had made the young man turn, had left him indifferent, however, just as if someone else had been called; nor was he quick to recognize Ninnuzzu's Bella in the stinking, festive dog that overtook him in the street. "Clear off was his fi reply to that unknown dog. Meanwhile, someone else came running up : ''I'm Useppe!" this other one announced with a bold mien; and bending over, he perceived two blue eyes smiling at him, in a quiver of greeting.

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Recognizing them, Davide was almost frightened. His only wish, at that moment, was to be alone. "Ciao, ciao, I've got to go home," he said curtly. And turning his back, he continued with his clumsy gait towards the Ponte Sublicio. But as he was crossing the bri he was seized with remorse and turned around. l-Ie saw the pair, who after having followed him a couple of paces had stopped, dumbfounded, at the beginning of the bridge, the dog wagging her tail and the boy swaying with an uncertain expression, clinging to the leash with both hands. Then, to apologize as best he could, Davide made a hasty gesture of goodbye with his hand, and sketched an embarrassed, vaguely promising smile. This was enough for the two to rush to him, like a couple of baby chicks. "Where are you going?" Useppe confronted him, blushing. "Home, ciao ciao," Davide answered. And to be rid of them, he added, almost fl towards Porta Portese:

"I'll be seeing you, eh? Later!"

Useppe, resigned, at this point gave him his usual goodbye, opening and closing his fi But Bella, instead, fi in her mind those words "see you later" as if they constituted a valid appointment. Meanwhile (it was almost one o'clock) she dragged Useppe by the leash towards Via Bodoni for lunch; while Davide, turn the corner, vanished beyond Porta Portese. In reality, he was hastening to another appointment of his own, await

ing him at home, fi him with a furious desire, like the call of a woman. It was, instead, only a medicine to which he had been resorting for some time, in certain diffi hours, as he had turned to alcohol in the past. But whereas alcohol warmed him, perhaps exciting him even to rage, this other remedy had for him the opposite eff promising him a state of calm.

After Ninnuzzu's death, he had fallen at fi into a feverish restless ness, which every now and then drove him from his little Roman domicile, towards those places which still, from his brief past, could represent a kind of family. First he had turned up at the village of his wet-nurse, from whence he had departed immediately for Rome. Then a day later, he had gone back to Mantua, but from there he had soon taken the train south again. Some of his own anarchist comrades had seen him reappear in a cafe in Pisa or in Leghorn, where they used to meet in the days of his adoles cence. To their questions, he had replied reluctantly, in monosyllables, or with forced smiles; and then he had sat there, frowning, taciturn, his legs never still, as if the chair made him itch or numbed his limbs. After about thirty minutes, in the midst of their talk, he had jumped up, with the impatience of somebody answering a call of nature; but instead, he had abruptly said goodbye to all, announcing in a grumble that he had to hurry to the station not to miss the Rome train. And without warning, as he had appeared, so he vanished once more.

One day, in Rome, he had boarded the little train for the Castelli, but

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he had got off at the first stop, to msh back. And more than once he had chanced to be seen in l\' . . . However, in all the places where he went, he found always the sole, defi ve conviction that, as in Rome, so in any other city or town, he had no friend. And then there was nothing left for him to do but hole up in his rented room at Portuense, where at least he found a familiar bed on which he could fl his body.

In the fi analysis, however, those journ of his and those muddled sorties had not all been in vain. He had derived, at least, one profi from them, which could serve him from now on in his loneliness. And in calcu lating it, without any irony, he considered it a friendship, even if not a human friendship, but artifi and, in his opinion, revolting.