History (9 page)

36 H I S T O R Y
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"Mammuzza mia, this death, it's too narrow. How can I get through? I'm too fat, I am."

Finally, one morning he seemed to recover slightly, and in a faint musical voice, half-whimsical, half-homesick, he declared that he wanted to be buried in Messina. So the little money he left as inheritance was all spent on satisfying his last wish.

His dying had taken less than two months, and morp had eased it for him.

From his African expedition he had brought Nino some Ethiopian thalers and, as a trophy, a black mask Ida didn't even want to look at. Nino would put it over his face, to frighten the rival neighborhood gangs, singing, as he attacked, the popular song of the time :

"Little black face,

Fair Abyssinian maid,

Maramba burumba bambuti mbU.!"

until he traded the mask for a water pistol.

Ida never dared utter the word
cancer,
which for her evoked some thing fantastic, sacral, unnamable, like the presence of certain demons for savages. In its place she used the defi
disease of our time,
which she had learn there in the neighborhood. If someone asked her what her husband had died of, she would answer,
"the disease of our
time
in a thin and trembling voice, since that little exorcism of hers was not strong enough to dispel the horrors from her memory.

After losing Giuseppe and Alfi one after the other, she found herself defi ively exposed to fear; hers was the typical case of someone who had always remained a child, and was now fatherless. Still she devoted herself with conscious precision to her duties as teacher and mother; and the only sign of the violence she, a little girl, underw from certain everyday practices of the adult world was an imperceptible but constant trembling of her hands, which were stubby and short, and never rea properly washed.

The Italian invasion of Abyssinia, which promoted Italy from King dom to Empire, had remained, for our little schoolteacher in mourn ng, an event as remote as the Punic wars.
Abyssinia,
to her, meant a land where Alfi if he had been luckier, could apparently have become ri dealing in special oils, paints, and even shoe polish ( though it seemed to her, from her readings in school, that the Afri thanks to the climate, go around barefoot). In the classroom where she taugh t, in the center of the wall, just above her desk, next to the Crucifi there were enlarged framed

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photographs of the Founder of the Empire and its King-Emperor. The former wore on his head a fez with a rich hanging fri and an eagle on the front. Under such headgear, his face, in a display so impudent it was downright ingenuous, wanted to imitate the classica mien of the Condot tiere. But in reality, with the exaggerated jut of the chin, the artifi clenched jaws, and the mechanical dilation of eye-sockets and pupils, it resembled more a vaudeville clown playing a sergeant scari recruits. And as for the King-Emperor, his insignifica features expressed only the nar row-mindedness of a provincial bourgeois, born old and with an inheri income. However, in Iduzza eyes, the images of the two fi (no less, you might say, than the Crucifi which to her meant only the power of the Church ) represented the absolute symbol of Authority, that occult and awe-inspiring abstraction which makes laws. In those days, on instructions from higher up, she wrote on the blackboard in large letters, for her third grade students to copy as a penmanship exercise:

"Copy out three times in your good notebooks the following words of the Duce :

Hold high,
0
Legionaries, your banners,
your steel, and your hearts, to
hail, after fi centuries, the reappearance
of the Eml-ire on the
fatal hills of Rome!

Mussolini"

For his part, meanwhile, the recent Founder of the Empire, taking this great step in his career, had actually put his foot in the trap that was to doom him to the fi sca to his downfall and .dea This step, in fact, led precisely to where he was being awaited by the other Founder of the Great Reich, his present accomplice and his preordained master.

Between the two ill-starr counterfeiters, diff t by nature, there were yet some inevitable resemblances. But of these, the most interior and painful was a point of fundamental weakness: both men, inwardly, were failures and serfs, and sick with a vindictive sense of inferi

It is known that such a feeling gnaws at its victi with the ferocity of a tireless rodent, and often compensates them with dreams. Mussolini and Hitler, in their way, were two dreamers; but here is where their inherent diff lies. The dream-vision of the Italian Duce (corr to his physical desire for life) was a histrionic festival, where among banners and triumphs, he, a scheming vassal, would play the part of certain beatifi ancient vassals (Caesars, Augustuses, and so on . . . ) before a living crowd humbled to the rank of puppets. \V the other ( tainted by a monoto nous, vicious necrophilia and horrid terrors ) was the half-conscious minion

3 8 H I S T O R Y
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of a still formless dream. In it, every living creature (including himself) was the object of torment, to be degraded even to putrefaction. And at the end-in the Grand Finale-all the peoples of the earth (including the Germ ) would rot in unseemly piles of corpses.

We know that our dream factory often has its foundations in debris of our waking hours or our past. But in the case of Mussolini, the product was fairly obvious in its superfi y; whereas in the case of Hitler, it was a teeming of infections, clustered around who knows what roots of his dis turbed memory. Searching his biography, that of an envious little phil istine, one could unearth some of these roots without much diffi ulty . . . But this is enough for now. Perhaps the Fascist Mussolini didn't realize at the time of the Ethiopian venture, supported by Hitler the Nazi (and then followed immediately by another common venture in Spain ), that he had irrevocably yoked his own carnival chariot to the other's funeral hearse. One of the fi eff of his serv was that the national slogan,
Romanity
of his own coinage, had to be replaced with a foreign one, of another's coinage:
race.
And so it was that in the fi months of 1938, in Italy too, the newspapers, the local clubs, the radio, began the preparatory campaign against the Jews.

Giuseppe Ramundo, at the time of his death, was fi and Nora, sixty-six when she was widowed, was already retired. She never went to visit her husband's grave, prevented by a kind of sacred terror of burial-places; but still it is certain that her deepest bond, which made her stay in the city of Cosenza was his nearness, since he dwelt there still, in that cemetery

She would never leave the old house, which had become her lair. She went out only rarely, in the early morn to buy food, or on the days when she had to draw her pension or send the usual money-order to Giuseppe's ancient parents. To them, as also to Ida, she wrote long letters, which the illiterate old couple had to have read to them. But in her letters she took care never to refer, even in the most indirect and reticent way, to her own pressing terrors for the future : by now she suspected censorship and inform everywhere. And in those frequent and endless communica tions of hers, she did nothing but repeat the same notion in every possible variation :

"How strange and unnatural destiny is. I married a man eight years younger than myself, and according to the law of nature I should have been the fi to die, with Him at my side. Instead, it was my destiny to witness His death."

In speaking of Giuseppe, she always wrote Him, with a capital letter. Her style was prolix, repetitive, but with a certain academic nobility; and

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her handwriting was elongated, fi even elegant. ( However, in her final decline, her letters grew shorter and shorter. Her style be amputated and disjointed; and her written words, all shaky and twisted, groped across the page, uncertain of their direction .)

Besides this correspondence, which occupied her like a mania, her usual pastimes were reading illustrated magazines or love stories or listen ing to the radio. For some time now, the tales of racial persecution in Germany had alarmed her, like a precise signal confi her old forebod ings. But when, towards spring of 1938, Italy also intoned the offi chorus of anti-Semitic propaganda, she saw the thunderous magnitude of destiny advancing towards her door, growing more enormous day by day. The news broadcasts, with their pompous and menacing voices, already seemed to be physica invading her little rooms, sowing panic; but to be prepared, she felt more and more obliged to listen to the news. And she spent her days and evenings on guard, alert to the news-broadcast sched ules, like a little, woun�ed fox that has gone to earth and strains to hear the barking of the pack.

Some minor Fascist offi arrived from Catanza one day and spread the unoffi word of an imminent census of all Italian Jews, each of whom would be required to report himself. And after that moment, Nora no longer turn on thr. radio, in her terr of hearing the offi announcement of the govern order, wi a time-limit for reporting.

It was the beginning of summer. Already the previous winter, Nora, now sixty-eight, had begun to suff a worsening of her ailments, due to the arteriosclerosis that had been undermining her for some time. With other people, too, her behavior (which had been shy before, but always tempered by an inner sweetness ) had become angry and harsh. She no longer spoke if someone greeted her, not even when it was a former student, now grown up, perhaps one who had until then remained dear to her. On certain nights, she had raving fi when she tore her gown with her fingern One night, she fell out of bed in her sleep, and she found herself lying on the fl her head aching and buzzing. She often would wheel around, frowning and furious on the slightest pretext, sensing mysterious insults even in innocent gestures or words.

Of all the possible measures threatened against the Jews, the one that most immediately frightened her was the predicted obligation to report oneself for the census! All imaginable forms of near and future persecu tions, even the most wicked and disastrous, were confused in her mind like wavering phantoms, among which the terrible spotlight of that single de cree froze her in its beam! At the thought of having to declare publicly her fatal secret, which she had always hidden as something infamous, she

40 H I S T O R Y
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promptly said to herself : it's impossible. Since she never saw the news papers or listened to the radio anymore, she suspected the famous decree was by now promulgated and already in eff (whereas, in reality, no racial decree had so far been issued ); and indeed, she became convinced, in her isolation, that the time-limit for reporting oneself was already up. She was careful, all the same, not to make inquiries or, worse, present herself at City Hall. As each new day dawned, she repeated : it's impossible, spending the hours then in this constant fear, until the city offi closing-time, only to fi herself, the next day, with the same obsessive problem. In her rooted conviction that she was already late, and hence subject to all sorts of unknown sancti she began to fear the calendar, dates, the sun's daily rising. And though the days went by without any suspect sign, she lived every moment from then on in the expectati of some forthcoming, terrible event. She expected to be summoned to the city offi to explain her transgression, then publicly given the lie, charged with perjury Or else someone from City Hall or Police Headquarters would come looking for her; she might even be arr

She no longer left the house, not even for her daily needs, which she asked the concierge's wife to buy for her. One morning, however, when the woman showed up at the door for her list, Nora drove her off with bestial cries, hurling a cup she had in her hand. But people suspected nothing and had always esteemed her, so they forgave her these shrewish moods, attrib uting them to gri for her husband.

She began to suff hallucinations. Her blood, ri wi eff to her brain, would pound and roar in her hardened arteri and she would think she heard violent blows in the street, hammering at the front door, foot steps or heavy breathing on the stairs. At evening, if .she suddenly turn on the electric light, her failing eyesight transformed the furn and its shadows into the moti ss shapes of informers or armed police who had come to take her by surprise and arrest her. And one night when, for the second time, she happened to fall out of be in her sleep, she imagined one of these men, having entered by stea had thrown her to the ground, and was still roaming about the house.

She thought of leaving Cosenza of moving somewhere else. But where? And to whom? Padua, with her few Jewish relatives, was impos sible. At her daughter's in Rome, or at her in-laws', down in the country below Reggio, her alien presence would be more noticeable than ever, would be recorded, and would compromise the others too. And be

how could she impose the intrusion of a neurasthenic, haunted old woman on those who already had so many worries and torments of their own? She had never asked anything of anyone; she had been independent, since her

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girlhood. She always remembered two verses heard in the Ghetto, from an aged rabbi :

Unhappy the man who needs other men! Happy the man who needs only God.

Why not leave then for some other city or anonymous town, where no one knew her? But, in any place, she would have to report her presence, pro duce her papers. She pondered escaping to a foreign country, where there were no racial laws. But she had never been abroad, had no passport; and acquiring a passport meant, again, questions at the registry office, the police, the frontiers : all places and rooms denied her, menacing, as if to an outlaw.