Numbers in the Dark, Page 3

  As I stepped forward, I squinted with apprehension at the guilty shoe; it was still as tightly tied as before. Yet to my dismay the stranger went on shaking his head for a while, then said:

  ‘Now the other is undone.’

  I felt the way you do in nightmares when you want to scrub the whole thing out, to wake up. I forced a grimace of rebellion, biting a lip as though to hold back a curse, then started yanking frantically at my laces again, crouched down in the middle of the street. I stood up, cheeks flushed beneath my eyes, and walked off head down, wanting nothing better than to escape the gaze of the crowd.

  But the day’s torture wasn’t over yet: as I toiled home, hurrying, I could feel the loops of the bow slowly slipping over one another, the knot getting looser and looser, the laces very gradually coming undone. At first I slowed down, as though a little care would be enough to sustain the tangle’s uncertain equilibrium. But I was still far from home and already the tips of the laces were trailing on the pavement, flopping this way and that. Then my walking became breathless, I was fleeing, as though from a wild terror: the terror that I would yet again come upon that man’s inexorable gaze.

  It was a small compact town where one went endlessly up and down the same few streets. Walking round it, you’d meet the same faces three or even four times in half an hour. Now I was marching across it as though in a nightmare, torn between the shame of being seen about with my shoelace yet again untied, and the shame of being seen bending down yet again to tie it. Eyes seemed to thicken and throng around me, like branches in a wood. I dived into the first doorway I found, to hide.

  But at the back of the porch, in the half-light, hands resting on the handle of his tightly rolled umbrella, stood the man with the light-coloured eyes, and it was as though he were waiting for me.

  At first I gaped in amazement, then hazarded something like a smile and pointed to my untied shoe, to stop him.

  The stranger nodded with that sadly understanding expression he had.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘they’re both undone.’

  If nothing else the doorway was a quieter place to do up a shoelace, and, with a step to rest my foot on, more comfortable too, though standing behind and above me I had the man with the light-coloured eyes watching, missing not one move of my fingers, and I sensed his gaze in amongst them, muddling them up. But after all I’d been through, it didn’t bother me any more now; I was even whistling as I tied those damned knots for the nth time, but tying them better now, being relaxed.

  All would have been well had the man kept quiet, had he not started first to clear his throat, a little uncertainly, then to say all in a rush, with decision:

  ‘I beg your pardon, but you still haven’t learnt how to tie your laces.’

  I turned to him, red in the face, still crouching down. I ran my tongue between my lips.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’m hopeless at tying knots. You wouldn’t believe it. As a child I never wanted to make the effort to learn. I take my shoes off and put them on again without untying them. I use a bootjack. I’m hopeless at knots, I get muddled. You wouldn’t believe it.’

  Then the stranger said something odd, the last thing you would have thought he might want to say.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘how will you teach your children, if you have any, to tie their shoes?’

  But the strangest part was that I thought this over a moment and then answered, as if I’d already considered the question before and settled it and stored the answer away, somehow expecting that sooner or later someone would ask me.

  ‘My children,’ I said, ‘will learn from others how to tie their shoes.’

  Ever more absurd, the stranger came back:

  ‘And if, for example, the great flood should come and the whole of humanity were to perish and you were the one chosen, you and your children, to continue the human race. How would you manage, have you ever thought about that? How would you teach them their knots? Because if you don’t, heaven knows how many centuries might go by before humanity manages to tie a knot, to invent it over again!’

  I couldn’t make head or tail of this now, the knot or the conversation.

  ‘But,’ I tried to object, ‘why should I of all people be the chosen one, as you put it, why me when I don’t even know how to tie a knot?’

  The man with the light-coloured eyes was against the light on the threshold of the door: there was something frighteningly angelic in his expression.

  ‘Why me?’ he said. ‘That’s how all men answer. And all men have a knot on their shoes, something they don’t know how to do; an inability that binds them to others. Society depends on this asymmetry between people these days: a dovetailing of skills and incompetence. But the Flood? If the Flood came and one needed a Noah? Not so much a just man as a man able to bring along the few things it would take to start again. You see, you don’t know to tie your shoes, somebody else doesn’t know how to plane wood, someone else again has never read Tolstoy, someone else doesn’t know how to sow grain and so on. I’ve been looking for him for years, and, believe me, it’s hard, really hard; it seems people have to hold each other by the hand like the blind man and the lame who can’t go anywhere without each other, but argue just the same. It means if the Flood comes we’ll all die together.’

  So saying he turned and disappeared in the street. I never saw him again and I still wonder whether he wasn’t some strange maniac or an angel, for years roving the earth in vain in search of a second Noah.

  Like a Flight of Ducks

  He woke to the sound of gunfire and jumped down from the plank-bed; in the stampede someone opened the cell doors, his own included. A blond, bearded man appeared, waving a gun; he said: ‘Come on, hurry up and get out, you’re free.’ Natale was glad, though without understanding; he remembered he was naked, in just his T-shirt; he pushed his legs into a pair of military trousers, his only other clothing, cursing because they wouldn’t go in.

  That was when the man with the stick came in, a good six feet tall; he had one cross eye and with nostrils flared he muttered, ‘Where are they? Where are they?’ Natale saw the stick when it was already high above his head, coming down on him. It was like a flock of ducks exploding in his brain; a flash of red burned deep in his skull. He fell in a pool of cottonwool, numb to the world.

  One of the militiamen who had been in league with them from the beginning, shouted: ‘What have you done? He was a prisoner!’ Immediately people were fussing round the man on the ground whose head was bleeding. The man with the stick was at a loss: ‘How was I to know? With those Fascist trousers he was wearing!’

  Now they had to hurry, the Fascist reinforcements might arrive any moment. The thing was to get the machine-guns, the magazines, the bombs, burn the rest, especially the documents; every couple of minutes someone went to say a word to the hostages: ‘We’re going, are you coming?’ But they were in a frenzy: the general was wandering round the cell in his nightshirt. ‘I’ll get dressed now,’ he said. The pharmacist with the anarchist’s neckscarf was asking the priest for advice. But the lawyer, a woman, was up and ready.

  Then they had to keep an eye on the militiamen they’d taken prisoner, two old men in plus-fours who kept getting in the way talking about their families and children, and the sergeant silent in the corner, his face thick with yellow veins.

  In the end the general began to say that they were there as hostages, that they were sure to be freed soon, whereas it was hard to say how things would turn out if they went with the partisan. The lawyer, around thirty and well-endowed, would have liked to join the partisans, but the priest and the pharmacist agreed with the general and they all stayed.

  The clock was striking two in the morning when the partisans headed off for the mountains, some one way, some the other, taking the two guards who’d helped them get in, a few boys freed from the cells and the three Fascist prisoners shoved along with machine-guns in their backs. The tall man with the stick wrapped the wounded man’s head
in a towel and carried him on his back.

  They had just slipped out when they heard shooting from the other side of town. It was that idiot Gek, in the middle of the piazza, firing bursts into the air so that the Fascists would run there first and waste time.

  At the camp the only disinfectant was sulphonamide cream for leg rashes: to fill the hole Natale had in his head would have taken the whole tube. In the morning two men were sent down for medicine to a doctor evacuated from the town.

  Word got around, people were pleased at the night attack on the militiamen’s barracks; during the day the partisans had managed to get enough supplies to give him disinfectant douches on his skull and make him a turban of gauze, plasters and bandages. But with eyes closed and mouth open, Natale was still dead to the world, and they couldn’t tell if he was groaning or snoring. Then, around that point in his skull still so atrociously alive, colours and sensations gradually began to form, but each time it was a wrench right inside his head, a flight of ducks in his eyes, so that he ground his teeth and muttered something in groans. The next day, Paulin, who was cook, nurse and gravedigger, gave them the good news: ‘He’s getting better! He cursed!’

  After the curses came hunger; he began to pour whole mess tins of minestrone into his belly as if he were drinking it, spilling it all over himself. Then he smiled, with a round blissful animal face, in the midst of bandages and plasters, mumbling something, God knew what.

  ‘What language does he speak?’ the others asked, watching him. ‘Where is he from?’

  ‘Ask him yourselves,’ answered his old prison-mates and the ex-guards. ‘Hey, you, where are you from?’ Natale half opened his eyes to think, but then let out a groan and went back to grunting things the others couldn’t understand.

  ‘Has he gone crazy,’ asked the blond man, who was in charge, ‘or was he already?’ The others weren’t sure. ‘He certainly got a big crack on the head,’ they said. ‘If he wasn’t crazy before, he is now.’

  With his round, flat, black, bottom-of-the-pan face, Natale had been on the move ever since they’d called him up many years before. Unable to read or write, he hadn’t heard from home at all. They’d sent him off on leave a few times, but he got on the wrong train and ended up in Turin. After September 8th he’d found himself in the Todt and had gone on wandering around half naked with his mess tin tied to his belt. Then they had put him inside. All of a sudden they came to set him free and hit him over the head with a stick. For him this was perfectly logical, like everything else in his life.

  For him the world was a mix of yellows and greens, of noises and shouts, the urge to eat and the urge to sleep. A good world, full of good things, even if you couldn’t understand it at all, even if trying to understand it brought on that sharp pain deep inside his skull, that flight of ducks in the brain, the stick that cracked down on his head.

  The partisans in the blond man’s band were supposed to carry out raids on the town; they lived in the first pine woods above the suburbs, in an area that was all small villas where middle-class families used to spend their summers in the good old days. Given that the area was now under their control, the partisans had come out from their caves and huts and set up camp in a few Fascist leaders’ villas, infesting their mattresses with fleas and installing machine-guns on their dressers. There were some bottles in the villas, some stored food, gramophones. Blondie was a tough boy, ruthless with the enemy, despotic with his friends, but he tried to keep his men happy when he could. They threw a few parties, some girls came up.

  Natale was happy to be with them. The plasters and bandages had come off now; all that was left of his wound was a big bruise in the middle of his shaggy hair, a bewilderment which he didn’t feel came from himself but from all the things around him. The partisans played all kinds of jokes on him but he didn’t get angry, he shouted curses in his incomprehensible dialect and that was that. Or he would start wrestling with someone, even with Blondie: he always got the worst of it but was happy just the same.

  One evening the partisans decided to play a joke on him: they would get him off with one of the girls and see what happened. They chose Margherita, a tubby girl, soft and fleshy, white and pink. She was game and they began to work on Natale, to put the idea in his head that Margherita was in love with him. But Natale was wary; he wasn’t used to this. They all started drinking together and got her to sit next to him, to get him excited. Seeing her making eyes at him, feeling her leg press against his under the table, Natale felt more lost than ever. They left the two alone, watching them from behind the door. He laughed, in a daze. The girl pushed it a bit, provoking him. But then Natale realized that her laugh was false; she was batting her eyelashes. He forgot the stick, the ducks, the bruise: he grabbed her and threw her on the bed. He understood everything perfectly now: he understood what the woman beneath him wanted, white and pink and soft, he understood that it wasn’t a game, he understood why it wasn’t a game, but something theirs, his and hers, like eating and drinking.

  All of a sudden the girl’s already bright eyes blinked and turned hard and angry, her arms fought him off, she wriggled to be out from under him, shouting: ‘Help, he’s on top of me.’ The others came in laughing, shouting, and tossed water over him. Then everything went back to how it had been before, that coloured pain right at the bottom of his skull; Margherita smoothing the blouse over her breasts, bursting into strained laughter, Margherita who, already bright-eyed, wet-mouthed, had started shouting and calling the others, he couldn’t understand why. And, with all the partisans round him shooting their guns in the air and laughing so hard they rolled about on their beds, Natale burst into tears like a child.

  One morning the Germans all woke at once: they came packed in trucks and beat the area bush by bush. Woken by the gunfire, Blondie was too late getting out and went down under a burst of machine-gun bullets in the middle of the meadow. Natale survived by crouching in a bush, sticking his head in the ground every time a bullet whistled by. After Blondie’s death, the band broke up: some died, some were caught, some betrayed others and changed sides, some went on wandering about the area surviving one search after another, some joined the brigades up in the mountains.

  Natale joined the brigades. Life was tougher in the mountains: Natale’s job was to walk from one valley to the next, loaded like a mule, to take turns on watch and on fatigue duty; it was like being a soldier again, a hundred times worse and a hundred times better. And the partisans who laughed at him and mocked him were like the soldiers who’d laughed and mocked him in the army, yet different too, in a way he would surely have understood had it not been for that flurry of ducks in his skull.

  He came to understand it all when he found himself with the Germans just beneath him climbing the road to the Goletta and firing their flamethrowers into the bushes. Stretched out on the ground, he started to fire shot after shot and he understood why he was doing it. He understood that those men down there were the militiamen who had arrested him because his papers weren’t in order, they were the Todt guards marking down his hours, they were the orderly who made him clean the latrines, they were all these things at once but they were also the farmer who made him sweat the week long before he was called up, they were the boys who had tripped him on the pavement the time he went into town for the fair, and they were his father too, the time he’d shown him the back of his hand. They were even Margherita, Margherita who was on the point of going with him, then had turned against him, not exactly Margherita but whatever it was that had made Margherita turn against him: this thought was even more difficult than the others, but at that moment he understood. Then he thought about why those men down there were firing at him, shouting at him, falling under his shots. And he understood that they were men like him beaten by their fathers as children, set to work by farmers, mocked by orderlies, and now they were taking it out on him; it was crazy of them to take it out on him, he had nothing to do with it, and that was why he was firing at them, but if they had all been on
his side he wouldn’t have been firing at them but at others, he wasn’t sure who, and Margherita would have gone with him. But how his enemies came to be these people and those, good and bad, like him and against him; why he was here, in the right, they there, in the wrong, this Natale could not understand: it was the flight of ducks; that’s what it was, no more, no less.

  Just a few days before the end of the war, the English decided to drop things by parachute. The partisans walked to Piedmont, they marched for two days and lit fires at night in the middle of the fields. The English dropped overcoats with gold buttons, but it was already spring, and bundles of old Italian rifles from the first African war. The partisans picked them up and pranced wildly round the fire like so many Negroes. Natale danced and shouted amongst them, and was happy.

  Love Far from Home

  Occasionally a train sets off along the seafront and on that train there’s me, leaving. Because I don’t want to stay in my sleepy, cabbage-patch village, puzzling out the licence plates of out-of-town cars like a kid down from the mountains sitting on the wall of a bridge. I’m off, bye bye village.

  In the world, beyond my village, there are other towns, some on the sea, others, why I don’t know, lost in the depths of the lowlands, on the banks of railways that arrive, how I don’t know, after breathless journeys through endless stretches of countryside. Every so often I get off in one of these towns and I always have the look of the first-time traveller, pockets stuffed with newspapers, eyes smarting with dust.

  At night in my new bed I turn off the light and listen to the trams, then think of my room in my village, so distant in the night it seems impossible that two places so far apart could exist at the same moment. And, where I’m not sure, I fall asleep.

  In the morning, outside the window, there’s so much to explore: if it’s Genoa, streets that go up and down and houses above and below and a rush of wind between them; if it’s Turin, straight streets that never end, looking out over the railings of the balconies, with a double row of trees fading away beyond into white skies; if it’s Milan, houses that turn their backs on you in fields of fog. There must be other towns, other things to explore: one day I’ll go and see.