History (72 page)

to the police.

Davide knew nothing about it, since nobody bothered to inform him (his intermittent aff with her had been almost clandestine) and in that period he didn't even glance at the newspapers. It's probable, for that matter, the newspapers up North carried no mention of the event. It appeared in the Rome papers, and there were also photo graphs of Santina and of the murderer. Her picture was not recent; but, though more fresh and full, and less ugly, her face already showed that opaque resignation of an animal marked for slaughter, which today, when you looked at it, seemed the sign of a predestination. The murderer's photograph, on the other hand, had been taken at the police station at the moment of his arrest; however, he also seemed younger than his age. He was, in fact, thirty-two, but he looked ten years less in the picture. Dark, a smudge of beard despite the holiday, with a low forehead and the eyes of a mad dog, his was exactly what they call a "jailbird's face." He betrayed no

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special emotion; he merely seemed to declare perhaps, in an inexpressive and sluggish language of his own : "Here I am. I came on my own. You didn't catch me. Look at me. Go ahead and look. I don't even see you, anyway."

On this occasion, his name, never told anyone by Santina, was learned from the newspapers. It was Nello D'Angeli.

The crime, apparently unpremeditated, had taken place in the woman's ground-fl room. And the weapons had been more than one, things to be found there in the house : a big pair of scissors, the iron, and even the bucket of dirty water. Death, however, proved to have been caused by an initial stab with the scissors, which had cut the woman's carotid artery; but the murderer had continued striking the unconscious body with every object he could get his hands on. The newspapers, refer ring to the crime, spoke of "temporary insanity."

On Ferragosto, at that hour (between three and four in the after noon ) the surrounding area was deserted; and anyway, certain neighbors, at home taking their siesta, had heard neither screams nor quarreling. It hadn't taken long, in any case, to discover the crime, since the murderer hadn't gone to any pains to wipe out the traces. He even left the door ajar, so that a stripe of blood trickled through it from inside, soaking into the dusty ground. In the room, the blood fanned a big puddle by the bed, the rug and the mattress were steeped in it, and it had also spattered on the walls; moreover, the criminal left his own bloody footprints and fi prints everywhere. Santina's body was on the bed, naked (perhaps, with her one boyfriend, she agreed to undress, as she didn't with her transient lovers ). And though it was known in the vicinity that, thanks to the presence of the occupying soldiers, the woman still enjoyed an unusual good fortune, no money was found in her clothing or elsewhere in her room. After the removal of her body, her purse was dug out from under the mattress, where she herself usually kept it; but, besides her identity card, the housekey, and some old tram tickets, it contained only small change.

At the time of Nella's arrest, however, they found on him a number of banknotes of medium and small denomination. He kept them normally in the back pocket of his pants, in an imitation-crocodile wallet; and though worn and dirty, they showed no signs of blood. When asked, nevertheless, if he had stolen the money from the woman, he answered, in his sly and arrogant way, "You've got it," whereas, actually, he had re ceived it from her own hands, a few moments before killing her. But he couldn't be bothered to clarify certain minor details.

Except for the wallet buttoned up in his pocket, all his clothing, and also his hands, even under the fi , were stained with blood, partly blackened and mixed with dust and sweat. In fact, he hadn't taken the

360 H I S T O R Y
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trouble to wash, and he presen ted himself to the police in the same clothes he had been wearing since tha t morning : a rather fi open shirt, of pink linen, with a four-leaf clover of green enamel hanging from a chain around his neck, some loose duck trousers, without a belt, and summer shoes on his bare feet. He said he hadn't returned to his house after the crime, but had gone off alone behind Via Portuense, across some fi towards

Fiumicino, where he had even slept, maybe an hour_ In fact, there were some wisps of
dry
grass in his hair. It was seven-thirty in the evening.

At the station, they already knew his present occupation as pimp. And it wasn't hard for those offi ials to explain his crime, which they defi
classic
in its typicality : the old whore he exploited had perhaps refused him, and perhaps hidden (or at least so he must have suspected ) a part of her earnings, which, instead, belonged totally to him, according to his own law. And he, who was defi in the report as
amoral, unfi of subnormal intelligence and lacking all restraining inhibitions,
had thus punished her

. . . He himself, for his part, lightened the job of the investigators as signed to him. At their questions, now futile and obvious, he answered, as he had in the beginning about the bills, nothing but : "That's it," "yeah, right," "that's how it was," "it was like you say" . . . or even with a silent raising of his eyebrows, a Southern movement which means simply a con fi Indeed, as he gave those answers of his, he displayed an indiffer ent, grumpy laziness, like someone who, subjected to a superfl exertion, fi it convenient to be relieved of it, at least partially, by the investigators' inductive logic . . . And it was with a kind of relaxation, half-cynical, half-idiotic, that, not arguing, he signed at the bottom of the report:
D'Angeli Nella.
His signature, decorated with curlicues, was so excessive it occupied all the width of the page, like the signatures of Benito Mussolini and Gabriele d'Annunzio.

"Homicide, aggravated by abject motive."
Abiect motive
in his case, according to the authorities, meant
exploitation and monetary interest;
but Nella D'Angeli would have been far more ashamed of his real motive, if he had been aware of it.

For a young man to exploit an old whore was normal to him; but to love her was not. And instead, the unconfessable reality was this : in his way, he loved Santina.

In all his previous life, he had never possessed anything of his own. He had grown up in public institutions for abandoned children and minors. In his infancy, the nuns of the institution, once a year, at Christmas, gave him a teddy bear, which was taken from him after Christmas and kept in
a
closet un til the following year. Once, in the course of the year, seized by a longing for the bear, he had secretly taken it, after breaking the lock of the closet. Discovered a few minutes later, he was punished by being beaten

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with a brush and, the following Christmas, was deprived of the bear, which remained locked up.

From that time on, he had got into the habit of petty theft. The punishments were various and also odd : besides beating him, they made him stay on his knees for many hours, at meals they gave him all the food jumbled together in a single bowl, they chased him waving burning news papers behind him, threatening to set fi to his ass, and even, on one occasion, they made him lick his own shit. Since his thieving habit was notorious, he was sometimes punished for thefts that hadn't been his doing. He wasn't a likable child, or a quick one; nobody came to his defense, and nobody ever felt any desire to cuddle him. \V he was a young boy, it sometimes happened that a companion at the institution, an abandoned child like himself, would slip into bed with him, hugging him and even kissing him, or would try to go off somewhere with him. But he had learned this wasn't normal; and since he wanted to be a normal male, he furiously fought off those caresses with his fi His fi were hard as iron, and the others were afraid of them. La he always mistrusted any aspiring friends, suspecting they were abnormal.

Released from the institutions at about twenty, he had gone, on his own initiative, to seek out his mother. Originally the daughter of shepherds (she came from the interior of Sicily, and was of Albanian descent), she had turned, as a girl, to the same trade as Santina; but now she was living with a man, and with three small children she had had by him. ''I'll let you sleep here and I'll feed you," she said to him, "provided you work to help out the family." He worked digging ditches, but his mother wouldn't gi him money even for cigarettes, and besides she reproached him all day long for earning too little, considering how much he ate. One day, though she was his mother, he hit her with his fi then never showed his face again. A few months later, he turned up in Rome.

It was in those years that he came into possession of a little dog, who might perhaps have been white in color, with spots, but its raw patches and its fi made it seem blackish and greenish. He found it in a hole, all bruised from sticks and rocks; God knows how, through his personal care, he brought it back to life. He named it Fido; and he took it with him everywhere. However, he didn't pay the dog tax for it. And, in conse quence, one day a city employee came and, with a kind of harp pulled Fido straight into a little truck where a number of other dogs had already been loaded : all of whom, Fido included, went directly to the slaughter house.

Later, every time he was alone and ran into a stray dog or cat, Nello D'Angeli took pleasure in torturing it, until he saw it kick the bucket.

He didn't feel like working. He lived from day to day, throug
h
casual

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thefts, never joining up with other thieves. He vegetated, like that, at the edge of society; and not being clever by nature, he was quite often clapped into the Regina Coeli prison, where, in and out, he spent several months of the year. Then, after he had met San tina, in the intervals he lived partly off her.

He wasn't really ugly, but not handsome, either. He was a peasant type, short in stature, grim, sullen, and in general he didn't appeal to girls. Still, if he had wanted, he could have found one more suited to his age. and less ugly than Santina; but he himself, instinctively, avoided youth and beauty, like a hydrophobe afraid of being bitten. His only woman was Santina.

Their bond was money. But since, in reality, he loved her, the fi

cial interest, unbeknownst to him, served him rather as an excuse to be with her. He had nobody but her in the world, just as Santina, except for him, had nothing. But she, even with her scant intelligence, was able to recognize her own love; whereas he didn't recognize his.

Every time he appeared at her place, fi of all he said to her, grim and threatening: "Where's the money?" And she promptly gave him all she had, only regretting she didn't have more to give him. If she had refused it to him, or perhaps had insulted him, the thing would have seemed more normal to him. But how could she, in her simplicity, deny him anything? If she went on plying her trade as a whore, it was for him; and it was also for him that, in hard times, she rushed here and there, working as laundress, nurse, laborer. If she had been alone, she would have let herself die, like certain animals without a master, when they become old.

And with the pretext of money, he had become truly attached to her person : to her old and awkward body, which gave itself to him in her rough, meek, and-oddly-inexpert way, as if in all those years of her trade she still hadn't learned how to do it; and he was attached to her melan choly smile, to her smell of poverty. \V she was in the hospital, he brought her oranges; and when they arrested her and locked her up in the Mantellate, he shut himself in his own rented shack, in the dark, feeling nausea even at the colors of the day. When he saw her free again, his fi feeling was of anger; he received her with curses.

At times, leaving her abruptly after having taken her money, he would continue hanging around the vicinity of her place, like a poor strange dog not knowing where to go. His home was that ground-fl room. He always kept his own rented lodging, in a hovel on Via Trionfale; towards the end, however, when Santina was earning a bit better, more and more often he would go and sleep at her house in the even ing. If she had customers, he would stay outside, sprawled on that refuse dump, waiting till they had

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fi He felt no jealousy, well knowing that other men, for her, didn't count. She belonged to him, her sole master. The only purchases she made were for him. For herself, she spent nothing, beyond the necessities of her business, such as a public bath every now and then or a hair set. And in these times of good fortune, the only luxury she allowed herself was giving him presents : for example, the fake crocodile wallet, or some fi linen shirts, or other nice things. The enamel four-leaf clover on the little chain was also something she had given him.

And she washed and ironed his clothes, his pants, she cooked his pasta and meat on her little stove, she bought American cigarettes as a surprise for him.

. . . There, a shadow of a strange man comes out of the door of the room. Inside, the sound of running water is heard . . . He stretches, stands up, and goes towards the door:

"Where's the money !"

And, after taking the money, if he likes, he can also go away; she doesn't ask anything of him in return . But instead, like babies after their mother has given them their milk, he starts to yawn and fl himself on the little bed, as if waiting for a lullaby.

She meanwhile moves about, busy with her preparations, takes maca roni from the little cupboard, onions, potatoes . . . Reclining, he leans on one elbow and examines her with a sidelong glance:

"Jesus Christ, you're ugly! Those arms and legs of yours look like four poles, and your ass looks like two sides of rotten beef!"

She utters not a word of reply, but moves a bit aside, with her passive, uncertain, culprit's smile . . .
.

"What're you doing? What're you cooking up? You've already made me sick, Christ, with that stink of onions. Stretch out here on the blanket. At least I don't see you that way . . .
"