HIS FAREWELL TO BLITZ had been heartbreaking, despite his assurances that he would be back in a week at the latest, at the head of a motorized column, laden with tripe and bones for all the dogs of Rome. Blitz was not credulous like Useppe; and taking those assurances as products of imposture and megalomania, he remained inconsolable. For a whole day, refusing even to eat his hard-won ration, he never stopped running from the door to the window, shouting to Nino to come back, though at heart he knew Nino was now too far away to hear him. And if, from upstairs, he saw the form of a boy more or less Nino’s size, he would whine with bitter longing.
That first evening, Ida, dazed, shut him in the bathroom to sleep; but inside, he never stopped moaning and scratching at the door, and so Useppe also refused to go to bed, determined to sleep in the bathroom too, rather than leave Blitz in there alone. And finally Blitz was allowed refuge in Useppe’s bed, where, in the exuberance of his gratitude-joy-distress, he licked the naked Useppe from head to foot, before falling asleep in his arms.
Blitz never strayed a step from the two of them, except at shopping time. Since it was the vacation period, Ida would go out shopping around ten in the morning; and during those days she had begun taking Useppe with her almost every time, leaving Blitz to guard the house, since while she was waiting in the various lines, Blitz with Useppe would be a double encumbrance. When they left, the dog already knew he was not part of the company on such occasions, and circling around them without wagging his tail, he would watch their preparations to go out with a mortified look, resigned to his lot.
On their return, from the street they could hear him greeting them with all his voice, on sentry duty by the open window on the top floor. And when they arrived, they found him waiting inside the door, ready to receive them with unrestrained effusions, chiefly addressed to Useppe, repeating to him a hundred times: “You’re all I have left in the world now!”
One of those mornings, Ida was coming back from shopping, with two heavy bags over her arm, holding Useppe by the hand. The weather was calm and very hot. Following a habit she had got into that summer for her wanderings around the quarter, Ida had gone out, like a working-class woman, in her housedress of printed cretonne, without a hat, her legs bare to save her stockings, and canvas shoes with high cork soles on her feet. Useppe wore only a faded little checked shirt, some makeshift shorts of blue cotton, and a pair of sandals too large for him (because purchased with the idea of his growing into them), which slapped against the pavement as he walked. In his hand, he carried the famous ball Roma (the walnut Lazio during that spring had been irretrievably lost).
They were coming out of a tree-lined avenue not far from the Freight Station, turning onto Via dei Volsci, when, unannounced by any alarm, they heard advancing through the sky an orchestrated clamor of metallic humming. Useppe raised his eyes, and said: “Airpanes.” And at that moment the air whistled, while in an enormous thunder, all the walls were already crashing down behind their backs and the ground was leaping around them, crumbled in a hail of fragments.
“Useppe! Useppeee!” Ida screamed, flung into a black and dusty cyclone which blocked her vision: “Mà, I’m here,” he answered, at the level of her arm, in his little voice, as if reassuring her. She picked him up, and in an instant there flashed through her brain the instructions of the NAPU (National Antiaircraft Protection Union) and of the building warden: when bombs fell, it was best to lie down on the ground. But instead her body started running, with no direction. She had dropped one of her shopping bags, while the other, forgotten, still hung from her arm, beneath Useppe’s trusting little behind. Meanwhile, the sound of the sirens had begun. In her dash, she felt she was sliding downward, as if she were on skates, along an uneven terrain that seemed plowed, and was smoking. Toward the bottom, she fell in a sitting position, Useppe clutched in her arms. In her fall, the shopping bag had emptied its load of vegetables, among which, scattered at her feet, there shone the colors of the peppers: green, orange, and vivid red.
With one hand, she clutched at a crushed root, still covered with shattered earth, which protruded near her. And settling herself better, huddled over Useppe, she started feeling him, his whole body, to make sure he was unharmed. Then she placed the empty shopping bag over his head as a helmet of protection.
They were at the bottom of a kind of narrow trench, protected from above, as if by a roof, by the thick trunk of a fallen tree. Nearby, over them, they could hear its broad foliage stirring in a great wind. All around, there was a whistling, ruinous din, in which, among crashes, lively little bursts, and strange tinklings, there were weak, human voices at an absurd distance, and the whinnying of horses. Useppe, crouching against her, looked into Ida’s face from beneath the shopping bag — not frightened, but rather curious and pensive. “It’s nothing,” she said to him, “don’t be afraid. It’s nothing.” He had lost his sandals, but he still clutched his ball tightly in his fist. At the louder jolts, she could feel him tremble ever so slightly.
“Nuffing …” he said then, half-persuaded, half-interrogatory.
His bare feet were swaying calmly next to Ida, one on either side of her. For all the time the two of them waited in that refuge, he and Ida stared into each other’s eyes, intently. She couldn’t have said the duration of that time. Her wristwatch was broken; and there are circumstances in which, for the mind, calculating time is impossible.
At the all-clear, when she looked out, they were inside an immense dusty cloud which hid the sun and made them cough with its tarry taste; through this cloud, they could see flames and black smoke from the direction of the Freight Station. On the other part of the avenue, the side streets were mountains of rubble; and Ida, advancing with difficulty, Useppe in her arms, sought an exit toward the square, among the massacred and blackened trees. The first recognizable object they came upon was a dead horse, at their feet, its head adorned with a black plume, amid wreaths of crushed flowers. And at that point, a soft, warm liquid wet Ida’s arm. Only then, the dejected Useppe started crying: because for some time now he had stopped being a little baby that wet himself.
In the space around the horse, more wreaths could be glimpsed, more flowers, plaster wings, heads and limbs of mutilated statues. In front of the funeral establishments, broken and emptied, all around there, the terrain was covered with glass. From the nearby cemetery came a damp smell, sugary and stagnant; and beyond the breached walls, you could glimpse black, twisted cypresses. Meanwhile, some other people had reappeared, growing into a crowd that wandered around as if on another planet. Some were stained with blood. Screams could be heard, and names, or else: “There’s a fire over here, too!” or “Where’s the ambulance?” However, these sounds also reechoed hoarse and outlandish, as in a yard of deaf-mutes. Useppe’s little voice repeated to Ida an incomprehensible question, in which she seemed to recognize the word home: “Mà, when do we go home?” The shopping bag fell down over his eyes, and he was dominated by a fierce impatience. He seemed filled with a mixed worry he wouldn’t utter, not even to himself: “Mà? … Home? …” his little voice continued stubbornly. But it was difficult to recognize the familiar streets. Finally, beyond a half-destroyed apartment house, from which the uprooted beams and shutters were dangling, amid the usual dust cloud of ruin, Ida recognized, intact, the building with the tavern, where they went to take shelter on the air-raid nights. Here Useppe started wriggling with such frenzy that he managed to free himself from her arms and get down to the ground. And running on his little bare feet toward a thicker dust cloud, he began to shout:
“Biii! Biiii! Biiiii!”
Their building was destroyed. Only a slice of it remained, open onto the void. Raising your eyes to the place of their apartment, you could glimpse, through the cloud of smoke, a piece of landing, beneath two water tanks which had remained in place. Below, some howling or mute forms roamed among the cement slabs, the smashed furniture, the piles of wreckage and refuse. No moan rose; beneath, they must all be dead. But some of those forms, driven by an idiot mechanism, were rummaging or scratching with their fingernails at those piles, searching for someone or something to save. And in the midst of all this, Useppe’s little voice continued calling:
“Biii! Biiii! Biiiii!”
Blitz was lost, along with the double bed and the cot and the daybed and the chest, and Ninnuzzu’s tattered books, and his enlarged picture, and the kitchen pots, and the clothing bag with the altered overcoats and the winter underwear, and the ten packets of powdered milk and the twelve pounds of pasta, and all that was left from the last pay envelope, kept in a drawer of the kitchen cabinet.
“Come away! Come away!” Ida said, trying to lift Useppe into her arms. But he resisted and struggled, developing an incredible violence, and he repeated his cry: “Biii!” with a more and more peremptory demand. Perhaps he believed that, urged in this way, Blitz would necessarily have to pop out, tail wagging, from behind some corner, any moment.
And dragged off bodily, Useppe wouldn’t stop repeating that single comical syllable, his voice convulsed in sobs. “Come away, come away,” Ida repeated. But the truth was she didn’t know where to go now. The only asylum that presented itself to her was the tavern, where she found some people already gathered, so many that there was no place to sit. An elderly woman, however, seeing her come in with the child in her arms, and recognizing them, from their appearance, as bombed out, invited her neighbors to push together, and made room for Ida next to herself on a bench.
Ida was gasping, tattered, her legs scratched, and all soiled right up to her face with a greasy soot, in which you could make out the minuscule fingerprints left by Useppe, as he clung to her. As soon as the woman saw Ida more or less settled on the bench, she asked her solicitously: “Are you from around here?” And at Ida’s silent nod, she informed her: “I’m not; I come from Mandela.” She was just passing through Rome, as she did every Monday, to sell her produce: “I’m a countrywoman,” she explained further. Here at the tavern she was to wait for her grandson, who, as usual on Mondays, had come along to help her, but at the moment of the air raid he was off in the city, God knows where. A rumor had it that in this raid ten thousand planes had been used, and the entire city of Rome was destroyed, even the Vatican, even the Royal Palace, even the markets of Piazza Vittorio and Camp dei Fiori. All gone up in flames.
“I wonder where my grandson is now? I wonder if the train for Mandela is still running?”
She was a woman of about seventy, but still healthy, tall, and big, with rosy complexion and two black rings in her ears. In her lap she held an empty basket with an unrolled headcloth inside; and she seemed prepared to wait for her grandson, seated there with her basket, perhaps for another three hundred years, like the Brahman in the Hindu legend.
Seeing the desperation of Useppe, who was still calling his Bi in a voice more and more faint and weak, she tried to amuse him, by swaying in front of him a tiny mother-of-pearl cross she wore around her neck, on a little string:
“Bi bi bi baby! What are you saying? Eh? What do you want?
In a low voice Ida stammered the explanation that Blitz was the name of the dog, buried under the rubble of their building.
“Ah me, humans and animals, we all have to die,” the other woman remarked, moving her head only slightly in placid resignation. Then, addressing Useppe, filled with matriarchal gravity and without coyness, she consoled him with the following speech:
“Don’t cry, kid, your dog’s sprouted wings. He’s turned into a dove and he’s flown up into the sky.”
In saying this, she raised her palms and imitated the flutter of wings. Useppe, who believed everything, suspended his weeping, to follow with interest the little movement of those hands, which settled again on the basket and stayed there, in repose, their hundred wrinkles blackened by earth.
“Wings? Why?”
“Because he’s turned into a white dove.”
“Wite dove,” Useppe agreed, carefully examining the woman with his tearful eyes, which were already beginning to smile. “And now what’s he do?”
“He flies, with lots and lots of other doves.”
“How many?”
“Lots and lots!”
“How many?”
“Three hundred thousand.”
“Thee huned ousand are lots?”
“Eh! More than a ton!!”
“That’s lots and lots! What they do?”
“They fly around and have fun. Yes.”
“And wallows? Are wallows there too? And osses?”
“They’re up there, too.”
“Even osses?”
“Even horses.”
“They fly too?”
“Oh my yes, indeed they fly!”
Useppe gave her a faint smile. He was covered with blackish dust and sweat, he looked like a chimney sweep. The black locks of his hair were so sticky they stood straight up on his head. The woman, seeing his little feet were bleeding from a few scratches, authoritatively called to a soldier who had come in looking for water, and ordered him to treat them. And Useppe submitted to the rapid medication without even paying any attention to it, he was so enthralled by Blitz’s happy career.
When the soldier had finished, Useppe absently waved good-bye to him. His two little fists were empty: the ball Roma was also lost. A little later, in his filthy clothing and wet shorts, Useppe was sleeping. The old woman from Mandela, after that moment, remained silent.
In the cellar a throng of people were coming and going; the place stank with the crowd and with the gusts from outside. But, unlike the air-raid nights, there was no confusion, no shoving, no raised voices. Most of those present looked one another in the face, dazed, not saying a word. Many were wearing tattered or scorched clothes; some were bleeding. Somewhere outside, in an endless and incoherent murmuring, every now and then a death-rattle seemed perceptible, or else a fierce scream suddenly rose, as if from a blazing forest. Ambulances began to circulate, fire engines, soldiers armed with picks and shovels. Someone had also seen a truck arrive, loaded with coffins.
Among the people inside, Ida knew hardly anyone. Through her thoughts, which spun in an inconclusive raving, from time to time there passed the faces of some of her neighbors in her building who, on air-raid nights, had run to take shelter down here with her. On those nights, dazed with sleeping pills, she had hardly glimpsed them; but today her brain presented them to her, though they were absent, with the precision of a photograph. Messaggero, with his trembling limbs and his stunned face, carried by his daughters like a puppet. Giustina, the farsighted concierge, who used to hold her needle way out to thread it. The clerk on the second floor who always said Greetings and Prosit, and had planted a victory garden in the courtyard. The plumber, who resembled the actor Buster Keaton and suffered from arthritis, and his daughter, who recently had started wearing a tram-conductor’s uniform. A mechanic’s apprentice, friend of Ninnuzzu’s, who wore an undershirt with PIRELLI TIRES printed on it. Proietti, the housepainter, who though unemployed, always kept on his head a working cap made of folded newspaper … In the present uncertainty of their fate, these faces appeared to her suspended over a no-man’s-land, from which in a moment they might reappear in flesh and blood, scrounging around the San Lorenzo quarter, available as usual and cheap; or from whence they might, instead, have set forth toward an unattainable distance, like the stars that had burned out millennia ago, now irretrievable at any price, beyond even a treasure sunk in the Indian Ocean.
Until this morning, nobody had been more available than the dwarf bastard Blitz, prompt at any call, even if it was from the garbage collector or the ragman. She herself had never given him much consideration, believing him, in fact, an intruder and a sponge. And at this hour, on the contrary, he was so inaccessible that all the police of the Reich could never catch him again.
The first thing about him that came back to her memory, giving her a special little stab, was that white star on his belly. That sole elegance of his life became also the supreme pathos of his death.
What would Nino say when he didn’t find Blitz again? In the earth’s enormous laceration, Nino was the single point of tranquillity and heedlessness in Ida’s mind. Was it perhaps because people swear that rogues, as a rule, always survive? Even though, since the day of his departure, he had sent no news of himself, Ida felt splendidly assured, as if by an angel’s vow, that Nino would come back from the war safe and sound, and indeed, would show up again soon.
They looked inside to say that, in the street, the Red Cross was distributing clothes and food; and soon the old woman from Mandela with her youthful, slightly swinging gait, went out to seek provisions. She wasn’t able to collect any clothes; but she got hold of two packages of powdered milk, a bar of ersatz chocolate and another of concentrated jam, almost black; and she put this stuff in Ida’s empty shopping bag, to her gratitude. Ida was thinking in fact that Useppe should eat something as soon as he woke up, since his only meal so far that day had been his morning breakfast, shared with Blitz. That breakfast had consisted, as usual, of a piece of rationed bread, elastic and soft, perhaps kneaded with chaff and potato peelings; and a cup of watery milk. But still, as she remembered it, up there in their sun-filled kitchen, it seemed now the picture of extraordinary wealth. As for herself, she had drunk only a little cup of fake coffee; but still she felt no hunger, only nausea, as if the destroying dust cloud had coagulated in her stomach.
The old woman’s grandson appeared, returning with an empty suitcase, tied with a length of cord. And he promptly carried his grandmother off, asserting haughtily that Rome wasn’t destroyed at all, and anybody who said so was talking balls, but they had better run off in a hurry, since an observation plane had already been sighted, heralding several thousand Flying Fortresses on their way. “But the train to Mandela? Is it running?” his grandmother was asking him, climbing up the steps with him to the door. Before going away, she left her headcloth as a present with Ida, telling her it was a good piece of new cloth, woven in Anticoli on a hand-loom, and she could make an overall for the baby from it.
Ida would have liked never to move again from that bench: she couldn’t bring herself to muster her strength and face the end of the day. A horrible stench lay in the cellar; but damp with sweat, the child clutched in her arms, she had sunk into a kind of unfeeling, almost ecstatic peace. Sounds reached her muffled; on her eyes a sort of gauze had spread. Suddenly she noticed, looking around, that the tavern had emptied and the sun was beginning to set. Then she became afraid she had taken too much advantage of the proprietor’s hospitality; and with Useppe asleep in her arms, she went outside.
Useppe was still asleep, his head hanging from her shoulder, when, a little later, she was walking along the Via Tiburtina. On one side, the street followed the wall of the cemetery; and on the other, it was flanked by apartment buildings partially destroyed by the bombs. Perhaps because of her fasting, Ida was overcome with sleepiness, her sense of identity was escaping her. She was wondering vaguely if the house in Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, where she had lived for more than twenty years, were not instead the Cosenza house, destroyed by the same earthquake that had destroyed, together, Messina and Reggio Calabria. And if this broad street were San Lorenzo, or the Ghetto. There must be some infection in the quarter; that was why they were demolishing it with picks! And was that body, caked with blood and plaster, male or female? Was it a dummy? The policeman wanted to know, because of the Registry. That’s why he was arguing with the soldier. Were those festering flames for burning the dead bodies? And if the tracks had been ripped up, and the tram reduced to this carcass, how would she go to school in the morning? The dead horses, that made her stumble: were they Aryans or Jews? The dog Blitz was a bastard, and therefore Jewish for the Registry. That’s why she was being deported, because at the Registry she was listed as a Jew, there was an accent on her last name. Ah, that explained everything … Her surname was Almagià … but luckily Useppe was named Ramundo … Is Ramundo accented on the middle syllable or the last? … And there were the words: ISRAELITIC COEMETERY: spelled like that: coemetery. And israelitic … Wasn’t that a forbidden word?!
Reading that sign on the cemetery gate, she was convinced this was how things really stood: she was being deported as a non-Aryan. She tried to walk faster, but she felt she couldn’t make it.
At the suggestion of the tavernkeeper, she had fallen in behind a group of bombed-out families and fugitives, heading in the direction of Pietralata, toward a certain building where, so it was said, a dormitory had been set up for the homeless. Almost all the people ahead of her or following her carried bundles or suitcases or household goods; but except for Useppe, she had absolutely nothing to carry. The only property left her was the shopping bag hanging from her arm, with the Red Cross packets inside and the headcloth of the old woman from Mandela. But luckily, safe inside her corset (which she never failed to wear, even in summer) she still had the precious little bundle of her savings. After so many hours, to tell the truth, that corset was becoming a hairshirt for her. Now her only desire was to arrive, anywhere, even at a concentration camp or a ditch, to release herself at last from that ferocious corset.
“Silence! The enemy is listening! Victory … Victory! …”
A little man, at her side, alone and elderly, kept repeating in a loud voice similar war slogans, which could be read here and there along the way, on the scorched walls and the smoke-stained posters. And he seemed to be amusing himself privately very much, since he snickered as if he were telling himself jokes, commenting on them with various grumblings. His right arm was in a cast to the shoulder, so he had to hold it up, extended, as if he were giving the Fascist salute; and that also seemed to exhilarate him. He looked like an artisan or a clerk, skinny, not much taller than Ida, with lively eyes. Despite the heat, he wore a jacket and a brimmed hat set squarely on his head; and with his free hand he was pushing a barrow where he had loaded some household goods. Hearing him always muttering to himself, Ida decided he was a madman.
“Signora, you’re Roman?” he suddenly addressed her, in a merry Roman accent.
“Yes, sir,” she murmured. In fact, she privately thought you must always answer madmen affirmatively and respectfully.
“Roman born and bred?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Like me. Roma Doma. I’m Roman myself, and as of today, a war invalid.” And he explained to her how a slab had hit him on the shoulder blade just as he was coming back to his workshop-home (he was a marble cutter, near the cemetery). His little house had been spared, luckily, but he preferred to clear out all the same, taking with him the bare necessities. The rest, if thieves or bombs didn’t screw him out of it, he would find when he went back.
He chattered with increasing gaiety, and Ida kept staring at him, frightened, not following his talk.
“Lucky kid! He’s asleep,” the madman remarked a little later, nodding toward Useppe. And, seeing how exhausted she was, he suggested she put the baby in his barrow.
She glanced at him with enormous distrust, imagining that, under the pretext of helping her, the little man meant to steal Useppe from her, carrying him off in the barrow. Still, since she was at the end of her strength, she accepted. The man helped her settle Useppe (who continued to sleep serenely) amid his possessions and then he introduced himself to her with these words:
“Cucchiarelli Giuseppe, hammer and sickle!” and as a sign of understanding and greeting, he clenched the fist of his good hand, winking at her with both eyes.
Ida’s poor dazed head went on reasoning: if I tell him the baby’s named Giuseppe the same as he is, it’s more likely he’ll steal him from me. Following this logic, she chose to say nothing. Then to protect herself against any dark intention on the part of the little man, she clung to one handle of the barrow with both fists. And though she was now almost asleep on her feet, she wouldn’t let go of that handle, not even to stretch her numbed fingers. Thus, having passed the Jewish cemetery, they followed the sharp curve of the Via Tiburtina.
And so Useppe made the rest of his journey as if in a coach: still sleeping, settled on a quilt, between a cage inhabited by a pair of canaries, and a covered basket containing a cat. The latter was so terrified and bewildered by the whole obscure event that for the entire journey it didn’t breathe. The two canaries, on the other hand, huddled side by side at the bottom of their cage, occasionally exchanged minimal chirps of solace.