History (73 page)

And so it begins again almost every evening. He can't comprehend the heart-rending homesickness that calls him back to her. And meanwhile, wherever he is, he feels the need of her body. On certain evenings, out of hatred, he doesn't show up; but the next day, she doesn't reproach him for anything. In the summer sunsets, at times she waits for him, sitting on the doorstep; and when she sees him arriving, a spontaneous, almost ecstatic gratitude glows in her dim, ingenuous eyes. She smiles her shy little smile, and says to him :

"Nella!"

She gives him no other greeting. She gets up, and with her heavy feet precedes him into the dark, cool little room.

"Where's the money?!"

If, one of these times, she were to drive him away, he would hate her

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less. Santina's presence, in his life, is like a disease's reddish spot, spreading. Man, by his very nature, tends to give himself an explanation of the world into which he is born. And this is what distinguishes him from the other species. Every individual, even the least intelligent, the lowest of outcasts, from childhood on gives himself some explanation of the world. And with it he manages to live. And without it, he would sink into mad ness. Before meeting Santina, Nella D'Angeli had furnished himself with his own explanation : the world is a place where every is the enemy of Ne11o D'Angeli. His only recourse against the enemy, his norm lity, in order to cope, is hatred. Now Santina's existence is a fragment of alien matter, which upsets his world and makes his du11 brain spin, out of

gear.

At times, in sleep, he was invaded by nightmares, in which Santina was always being taken away from him. He dreamed a squad of Germans, having surrounded the room, was dragging her towards a truck, aiming
Maschinenpistols
at her, or else some orderlies in white coats, preceded by an Inspector, came with a coffi raised Santina's dress, and said, "She's got syph," and they took her away in the coffi Then he would yell and rage in his sleep, and would wake up charged with hatred against Santina, as if the fault were hers. One night, at one of these wakings, fi her asleep beside him in the bed, he fe11 on her, his eyes bloodshot, shouting: "Get up, damn you!" And as he hit her, he thought he was in an enormous brawl, where he himself, beaten, was being lynched.

Not once did he sleep, even for a little while, without dreaming; and his dreams, whether Santina appeared in them or not, were inevitably murky and uneasy. On Ferragosto, when he dozed off in the fi after the crime, he dreamed he was in that same fi walking towards a ditch. It was neither day nor night, there was a dull glow he had never seen before; and at the bottom of that ditch there was Santina, who had fallen and was no longer moving, her eyes open, staring. He climbed down to her and took her in his arms, carry her up from the ditch, and to bring her round, he stripped her naked. And she lay there stretched out on the fi beneath him, with her body all bones, white and fl and her old woman's little breasts, thin and sagging. Slowly her eyes closed and her face was regaining color, and meanwhile she raised one hand, moving her fi

as if joking. And she repeated to him with her usual little smile, trying to hide the gap of the missing tooth in her gums :

"It's nothing . . . it's nothing . . .
"

And for the first time in his life, he felt content and trusting. Waking, as the sun set, he saw again the bloodstains on his pink shirt and immedi ately remembered everything. There was no home, now, where he could go.

365

One of the many things he had taken to hating, for some time, was freedom. He had never been free. First the institutions, then the brief stay at his mother's with daily forced labor, and fi the coming and going at Regina Coeli. As at the nuns' orphanage when he was little, also later, not all the crimes he was charged with were crimes of his. Known as a habitual thief, he was often arrested without his having done anything, because he was suspect. And in this way, even when he was back in circulation, he felt like a sewer rat, who as soon as he shows himself in the street expects to be driven away by the fi person who sees him. And without giving it any more thought, he went straight to tum himself in. With his crime of murder, since he was now thirty-two, he was sure to grow to old age in prison. That was his only home.

Ahead of the dates he had written Nino, Davide came back down to Rome at the beginning of September. He arrived as usual without forewarning, and wandered in vain from one of Nino's possible addresses to another, not fi him. In the end he ventured to Via Bodoni; but even before he had looked in at the concierge's lodge for information, he heard a little voice call : "Carlo! Carloo!" He had already become unused to this name; however, he was not long in recognizing Useppe, coming towards him from the fi courtyard in the company of a big white dog. Useppe was waiting for his mother, who would be coming down in a little while. And though with some regret at having to disappoint the visitor, he announced brightly: "Carlo! Nino left yesterday! He went with the
airpane
and said he'd be back soon, with another
airpane!"
Though he had passed the age of fi even now, and especially when an excess of vivacity or emotion over came him, Useppe mixed up words and consonants, like a baby.

Davide yawned, or sighed, on learning of Nino's departure, without, however, commenting on the news. Instead, in a low voice he pointed out : "My name isn't Carlo. My name's Davide . . .
" "Vavide
. . . yes!" re peated Useppe, recovering himself, a bit mortifi at his earlier mistake. And he began again, dutifully : "Vavide! Nino left yesterday. He went with the airpane . . ." etc., etc.

Meanwhile, the dog was jumping about to welcome the unknown passing visitor with friendliness and trust. And she still leaned forward, barking to greet him, while he, having no further reason for lingering, was going back towards the entrance. "Ciao, Vavidee!" Useppe shouted to him at the same time, waving his hands and kicking happily. And Davide, turn ing to wave goodbye, saw the child pulling the huge animal to him by the collar, as if he were holding a horse by the reins; and the dog, in its constant ructions, turned to lick his cheeks and his nose, and the child,

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leaping, hugged the big white head. It was clear there was perfect and wondrous agreement between the two. Davide turned the corner of Via Bodoni.

He had traveled all night in an old third-class coach with wooden seats; and moreover, because of the crowd, he hadn't been able to stretch out, so he had simply dozed as best he could, his face half-hidden against a rented pillow; however, though he had eaten nothing since the day before, he had no appetite. And having crossed the Ponte Sublicio, he continued, almost running, beyond Porta Portese, to go to Santina. With Nino away, he knew nobody else in Rome.

The door of the room was pulled almost shut; and outside, next to the step, there was a pair of slippers. A sweating, barefoot woman, with de formed feet, was busy with some buckets inside; and turning slightly, in a reticent and unsociable manner, she said Santina didn't live there any more. It was sirocco weather, sultry and cloudy. Davide was seized by a terrible thirst and a desperate desire to take refuge somewhere in the shade; however, the only tavern of his acquaintance, around there, was a low dive from which a radio's din emerged. It was playing a samba record with voices and the loud rhythm of drums. At one of the two tables a couple of customers was seated; the other was free; and the young man who waited on the tables must have been new to the place. Davide didn't recall ever having seen him before, the few times he had happened in there. Still, he tried asking him news of
Signora Santina.
The young man remained puzzled, especially since, around there, Santina was known not so much by her real name as by a slightly derogatory nickname, inspired by the size of her feet. "Yeah, yeah,
Bigfeet,''
a customer spoke up, in fact, from the other table, "the Ferragosto one . . ." "It was in the paper," the other customer remarked, glancing at Davide. "Ah, that one!" the waiter said. And lazily, with few but expressive words, he informed Davide of Santina's nasty end. Finally, he held the side of his hand to his neck, the better to indicate how her throat had been cut.

At this news, Davide felt no particular emotion. It seemed to him, indeed, that he had just heard a natural, familiar announcement, as of an experience already undergone in some previous existence of his; or else it was like a book where, before reading the other chapters, he had already glanced at the last pages. He had by now drunk more than half of his liter; and mechanically he bit into the sandwich he had ordered along with the wine. He had sunk into total impassivity; but his senses were confounded by his fatigue, so even though there were no trees around, he heard an enormous buzzing of cicadas or insects. The radio's racket stunned him, and he was longing to get out of this place. He asked those present if they knew of a room to be rented in the neighborhood, as soon as possible . . .

367

They shrugged, then the young waiter, after some refl said : "It's for rent again . . . there . . . From the
gimp
. . . where she lived . . ." he clarifi after a pause, with some scruples about naming Santina's room. His manner in making the suggestion was skeptical, however, oblique and hesitant. And in fact, though there was a scarcity of lodging in Rome, especially of cheap rooms, it wasn't easy to fi someone willing to adapt himself to a room branded like that, and barely yesterday.

Davide left the tavern. Outside, he found again the same cloudy sky, the same sirocco wind, and the same sultriness as before, along with that absurd buzz . . . And he started to run towards the room, as if in panic fear that meanwhile even that last possible refuge might have disappeared. The door this time was closed, but some boys, playing nearby, following his movements with a slightly curious indifference, came to his help, calling the proprietress from below. It was the same
gimp,
the woman with de formed feet, whom he had seen a little earlier inside there with the bucket. And in furious haste Davide paid her, took the key, and holed up in his own lodging, fl himself bodily on the bed. The familiar little room, which still retained Santina's poor smell, received him on that day as a familiar, almost affectionate nest. It was cool, shady. And Davide wasn't afraid of ghosts. He had learned, in fact, on his own, that the dead don't answer, even if you call them. All means are futile, even praying them to show themselves if only in feigned and hollow guise, even as a hallucina tion's eff

Santina's personal belongings, unclaimed by anyone, had remained the inheritance of the landlady; so the room's furnishing was more or less the same as before. The bed, repainted a darker color, was the same, except for the replacement of the mattress and the cover, which now was the kind made of hard, twisted threads, with arabesques of a Turkish nature, to be bought from street peddlers. Instead of the old rug, there was another, even more worn and threadbare. The table, the little cupboard, the chair, and the holy pictures had remained the same, and so had the curtains, which, freshly washed, had faded still further. On the walls, the blood stains were hidden beneath patches of whitewash; while on the armchair, scrubbed away as far as possible, they mingled with the dirt.

In the evening, when the air had turned a little cooler, Davide went out to collect his suitcase, checked at the railroad station. And he sent a letter to Nino (addressing it, as usual : Paste Restante, Rome) to inform him of his Roman address and to say he was here, waiting to see him the minute he came back.

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5

During all the past summer of
1946,
despite his many excursions and departures and his mysterious deals, Ninnuzzu had been an unusually frequent visitor in Via Bodoni.

Now he no longer had to call or whistle tunes to announce his arrival to Useppe : his horn's blast was enough, or the roar of his engine, to announce him! Useppe would have recognized the special sound of the engine and of that horn even amid a great horde of speeding motorcyclists! But one day, around the middle of July, instead of these habitual sounds, Nino's voice was heard calling from the courtyard below: "Useppee! Useppeee!" accompanied by a great, expansive barking. Filled with the presentiment of an unparalleled surprise, Useppe looked out of the kitchen window; and his pupils widening, he started feverishly down the steps, not even fastening his sandals. After the fi few steps, he lost one; and instead of wasting time picking it up, he slipped off the other as well, and left both there. To save time, he made part of the descent sliding down the banister; but at the third landing he crashed into a white giant who, as if already a centuries-old acquaintance, caught him up in an enormous welcome. At this point, Nino hurried up from below, laughing, and meanwhile Useppe fel t his bare feet being licked. "Hey, you forget your shoes?" Nino remarked, arriving. And at Useppe's uneasy explana