The blackout tricks included, for example, this: the two of us would walk quickly along with our cigarettes lit; we would see a single person coming towards us along the same pavement from the opposite direction; then, while continuing to walk alongside each other, one of us would raise our right hand, the other the left, holding our lit cigarettes out at head height; the passer-by would see the two glowing cigarette tips at some distance from each other and would think he could pass between them, but, in fact, he would suddenly find his path blocked by two people and would be trapped there like an idiot. Then you could also do the opposite: walk along apart from each other at the two edges of the pavement, and instead hold our cigarettes close to each other, between us; the passer-by, thinking that we were walking right along the centre of the pavement, would move to the side, thus crashing into one of us; he would mutter ‘Oh, I’m sorry’, and move to the other side, where he would crash into the other person.
We spent a pleasant hour or so in these games, as long as we found the right passers-by. Some of them, disorientated, would say sorry, others uttered swear words or threatened to start a fight, but we quickly nipped out of the way. I would be worried each time, imagining each passer-by coming towards us to be a weird night-bird, people with knives, dodgy drunks. Instead they turned out to be respectable people suffering from insomnia, who were taking their hunting dog for a walk, or pallid gamblers coming back from the card game, or workers from the night shift at the gasworks. We nearly played the trick on two carabinieri, who gave us a dirty look. ‘Everything under control round here?’ Biancone asked them brazenly, as I tried to pull him away by his shirt sleeve.
‘What? What do you want?’
‘We’re from the UNPA, on duty,’ Biancone replied; ‘I was just saying was everything under control?’
‘Eh, yes, yes, all under control.’ They said goodbye, not entirely convinced, and went off.
And we also would have liked to find women on their own, but there weren’t any, apart from an ageing prostitute with whom the ruse didn’t work, because she tended not to avoid but to enjoy walking into people. We lit a match to examine her and immediately put it out. After a very short chat we let her go.
More than in the main streets these tricks were good to play in the smaller ones, which were narrow and dark, with steps in them, the ones that came down from the old town. But there the fun was already in the shadows, the pattern of arches and railings in the area, the close huddle of houses we didn’t know, the night itself, and we stopped mucking about with our cigarettes.
Already from the discussion with Palladiani I had realized that Biancone was not in fact that connoisseur of nightlife that I had taken him for. He was always in a bit too much of a hurry to say ‘Yes … I know … No, you don’t say, not her!’ at every name Palladiani mentioned, anxious to show he was in the know; and certainly he was, on the whole, but his knowledge was clearly a superficial and patchy smattering compared with the perfect mastery displayed by Palladiani. In fact, I had watched with some regret as Palladiani went off, thinking that he and he alone, not Biancone, could introduce me into the heart of that world. Now I would watch every move by Biancone with a critical eye, waiting to regain my original confidence in him, or to lose it for ever.
Certainly, I felt a sense of disillusionment with this nocturnal walk of ours. Or at least, an impression that was the opposite of what I expected. We were wandering along a poor, narrow street; there was no one around; all the lights were out in the houses; and yet we felt we were in the midst of so many people. The windows scattered randomly over the dark walls were either open or just half-shut, and from each of them emerged low breathing or sometimes a deep snoring, and also the tick of alarm clocks, and the dripping of taps in sinks. We were in the street, but the noises were the noises of the house, of a hundred houses all together; and even the windless air had that heaviness that human sleep causes to sit solidly in bedrooms.
The presence of unknown people sleeping arouses a natural respect in honest minds, and in spite of ourselves we were intimidated by this. And that cracked, irregular concerto of breathing, and the ticking of the clocks, and the poverty of the houses, gave the impression of precarious, troubled rest; and the signs of the war that you could see all around – blue lights, poles propping up walls, piles of sandbags, arrows pointing the way to shelters, and even our very own presence – all this seemed a threat to the sleep of exhausted people. So we had lowered our voices, and without noticing it had abandoned our role as noisy jokers, rebels against the rules, violators of all human decency. The feeling that now dominated us was a kind of complicity with unknown people, who were asleep behind those walls, the feeling of having discovered some secret of theirs, and of knowing how to respect it.
The street finished at a stairway with an iron banister, and, at the bottom, in the uncertain light shed by the moon, there was an empty square, with the market stalls and trestles all piled up. And all around it lay the amphitheatre of old houses swollen with sleep and breathing.
From a street that went down to the square came the sounds of footsteps and singing. It was a raucous chorus, made up of voices that had no harmony or warmth, accompanied by a stamping of boots. Down came a group of the Fascist militia, middle-aged people, one behind the other, and others in a group running up and joining them: the latter were in black shirts underneath the coarse grey-green military uniform, carrying shotguns and rucksacks. They were singing a vulgar refrain, but with some hesitation and shyness, as though they were forcing themselves, now that night time had released them from any semblance of discipline, to show off their true nature as soldiers of fortune, enemies of everyone and totally above the law.
Their irruption into that space brought in a gust of violence; my skin crawled as though suddenly I had been plunged into civil war, a war whose fire had always stayed lit beneath the ashes and, from time to time, would spit out tongues of fire.
‘Look at that lot!’ said Biancone, and standing still against the banister we watched them march off in the empty square, which echoed to their footsteps.
‘Where have they come from, yes, where have they come from? What’s up there?’ I asked, convinced that they had emerged from some brothel or other, whereas maybe they were a squadron returning from a pointless tour of guard duty in the mountains, from some manoeuvres exercise.
‘Up there? Ah, yes, there must be …’ replied Biancone, betraying once more his limited competence. ‘Come with me, I know where to take you!’
The appearance of the soldiers had broken that atmosphere of tranquillity that had stood over us: now we were tense, excited, with a need for action, for something unpredictable.
We went down the steps towards the piazza.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Ah! To La Lupescu!’ he replied.
‘La Lupescu!’ I shouted, and I stood aside, because there was a man climbing up the steps, stooped, with his grey hair almost totally shaved off, in shirt sleeves, going up and supporting himself with a big, knotted hand clutching the banister. The man, without looking us in the face, but continuing his climb, said in a loud baritone voice:‘Workers … ’
Biancone was already mumbling a reply – something along the lines that there was no reason to take the piss, that we were workers too, in our own way – when the old man, who meanwhile had got to the top of the steps, added, still in a loud voice, but in a bass timbre ‘… unite!’
Biancone and I stopped.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘Yes …’
‘He must be a communist?’
‘“Workers, unite!” He’s a communist, did you hear?’
‘But did he not look more like a drunk?’
‘Not a bit of it: he was walking straight up. He’s a communist! The old town is full of them!’
‘Let’s go and talk to him!’
‘Good idea! Let’s catch him up!’
>
We turned round and flew up the steps.
‘But what will we say to him?’
‘First, we’ll make him realize that with us he can talk … Then we’ll ask him to explain that phrase to us …’
But the man wasn’t there any more: from that point several narrow streets went off; we ran from one to the other, randomly; he had disappeared; we couldn’t work out where he had gone in such a short time; but we never found him again.
We were full of curiosity and excitement: excited to abandon the reins, to do new, forbidden things. But the image in which this imprecise desire expressed itself most easily was that of sex, and so we headed off to the house of someone called Meri-meri.
This Meri-meri lived in a low house, on the edge between the clutter of housing in the old town and the kitchen gardens of the countryside, and on the ground floor it had stable quarters for carters. The cobbled street came out from under a dark archway, and after Meri-meri’s house it continued, flanked by a metal fence beyond which a mass of rubbish spilled down an uncultivated slope.
I went with Biancone to just beneath her house: at one of its windows light filtered from behind a thick curtain. Biancone whistled twice, then called out: ‘Meri-meri!’
The curtain rose up and at the window there appeared the white of a woman: a long face, it seemed, surrounded by the black of her hair, and her shoulders and arms: ‘What is it? Who are you?’
‘La Lupescu!’ I whispered to Biancone. ‘Tell me, is that La Lupescu there?’
Biancone tried to put himself under the light cast by a pale street lamp. ‘It’s me, do you recognize me? Yes, of course you do, I came the other week! I’m here with a friend. Will you let us come up?’
‘No. I can’t.’ She lowered the curtain again.
Biancone whistled again, and called out. ‘Meri-meri! Oh, Meri-meri!’ He started to hammer on the door with his fists. ‘She must open up, for God’s sake! Why doesn’t she?’
The woman appeared again. This time she had a cigarette in her mouth. ‘I’ve got company. Come back in an hour.’ We stayed for a while listening, until we heard that there really must have been a man in her room.
We started to wander off again. Now we were in a street between the old areas and the newer ones, where the old, tall houses had dubious modern-city paintwork.
‘This is a good street,’ said Biancone. A shadow came towards us: it was a little bald man, in sandals, dressed in a pair of trousers and a vest, despite the cool hour of the morning, and with a thin, dark scarf tied around his neck.
‘Hey, youngsters,’ he said in a whisper, his two round eyes, surrounded by thick black eyebrows, staring at us, ‘do you want to have sex? Do you want to go to Pierina? Eh? If you want, I can give you her address …’
‘No, no,’ we said, ‘we’re already fixed up.’
‘Pierina’s lovely, you know? Eh?’ The little man wheezed into our faces with those demonic eyes.
But we had spotted someone else coming along the centre of the street, a lame girl, not beautiful, with one of those then fashionable crew-neck sweaters and her hair cut short. She had stopped some distance from us. We dodged past the little bald man and went up to the girl. She held out her hand with a sheet of paper in it. ‘Who is Signor Biancone?’ she asked, in a whisper. Biancone took the piece of paper. In the light of a street lamp we read the following words, written in a neat hand, like that of a schoolboy: ‘Do you know the pleasure of love? Vito Palladiani.’
The meaning of the message and the way it had been delivered to us were mysterious, but Palladiani’s style was unmistakable.
‘Where is Palladiani?’ we asked the girl.
She smiled awkwardly. ‘Come with me.’
She went into a dark doorway and we went up a steep stairway that had no landings. She knocked at a door with a coded knock. The door opened. There was a room with flowery upholstery, an old woman all made up, sitting in an armchair, and a gramophone with a trumpet horn in a corner. The limping girl opened a door and we went into another room, full of people and smoke. They were standing around a table where others were playing cards. Nobody turned to look at us. The room was entirely closed and the smoke so thick you could hardly see, while the heat was such that everyone was sweating. In the circle of people standing watching the others play cards there were also some women, not pretty or young; one was in her bra and underskirt. Meanwhile, the limping girl had led us into a kind of Japanese sitting room.
‘But where is Palladiani?’ we asked.
‘He’s coming now,’ she said, and left us there.
We were examining this place when Palladiani arrived in a great hurry, carrying in his arms a heap of crumpled sheets. ‘My dearest friends, how are things?’ he said, all cheerful, as always. He was in his shirt sleeves and wearing a garish bow tie that I was certain he was not wearing when we had met him in the street.
‘Have you seen Dolores? What? You don’t know Dolores? Ha ha!’ and off he went with the pile of sheets in his arms.
‘What the hell kind of job does this Palladiani do?’ I asked Biancone. ‘Any idea?’
Biancone shrugged his shoulders.
A woman came in, one who was still good-looking, despite her haggard, powdered face. ‘Ah, are you Dolores?’ asked Biancone.
‘You kidding?’ the woman replied, and went out through another door.
‘Okay, then, let’s wait.’
After a short while Palladiani came back. He sat between us on the divan, offered us a cigarette, slapped his hand on our knees. ‘Ha, ha, my dear friends. Dolores: you’ll have a good time.’
‘But how much does it cost?’ asked Biancone, not letting himself be carried away by that enthusiasm.
‘Well, how much did you give to the woman when you came in? Yes, the one at the entrance … What do you mean, nothing? Here you have to pay up front, pay the woman …’ and he shrugged his shoulders and opened his arms wide, as if to say ‘That’s the way things work here, nothing you can do about it.’
‘Yes, but how much?’
Palladiani, grimacing a bit, mentioned a figure. ‘In an envelope, I’d advise you, it’s more refined, yes …’
‘In that case,’ replied Biancone, ‘let’s go immediately, let’s pay her at once …’
‘No, no,’ said Palladiani, ‘it’s not important, you’ll pay later …’
‘Eh, it’s better to do it now,’ said Biancone, and he was already leading me across the room of card players, then the antechamber, and pushing me down the stairs.
‘He’s crazy!’ he was saying, as we ran down the stairs. ‘Out of here, at the double! With Meri-meri we only pay half that.’
Outside in the street we found the little man in the vest.
‘Hey, have you been with Pierina?’ he asked us. ‘Did you say to her: Kneel down?’
‘No, we didn’t go to her,’ we replied, without stopping.
But he was trotting backwards, still standing in front of us, with those round sparkling eyes: ‘Kneel down! That’s what you say to her: Kneel down! And she, Pierina, kneels down …’
We went back to Meri-meri. This time, at our shouts, she came down and opened the door ajar. I had a good look at her: she was tall, thin and horsey, with elongated breasts; she did not look us in the face, she kept her half-shut eyes staring straight in front of her underneath her frizzy hair.
‘Come on, let us in,’ Biancone was saying to her.
‘No, it’s late, I’m now going to get some sleep.’
‘Oh come on, we’ve been waiting all night for you.’
‘So what? Now I’m tired.’
‘We’ll only be five minutes, Meri-meri.’
‘No, there are two of you, I won’t let two of you up together.’
‘But just five minutes for each of us …’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll wait … Eh? I’ll wait outside …’ r />
‘Okay,’ said Biancone, ‘I’ll come up first then him, is that okay?’ To me he said, ‘Wait a quarter of an hour for me and I’ll come down, then you go up.’ He shoved her into the house and went in too.
I took the road towards the sea. I crossed the whole town. A column of armoured cars was going along the main street. At that very moment it came to a halt. In the milky light of their headlamps you could see the soldiers stepping down, stretching their arms and legs, looking around with their sleepy eyes at the dark unknown town.
Immediately there was an order to leave. The drivers went back to the steering wheels, the others clambered up and disappeared into the darkness of their convoys. The column of cars, with their engines roaring, half invisible to eyes blinded by the alternation of light and darkness, moved on and disappeared as though it had never existed.
I reached the harbour. The sea was not sparkling, you could hear it only by the sound of the waves lapping against the mossy wall of the pier. A slow wave was wearing away at the rocks. In front of the harbour gaol the prison guards walked up and down. I sat down on the jetty, at a point sheltered from the wind. In front of my eyes was the town, with its uncertain lights. I was sleepy and unhappy. The night rejected me. And I was not expecting anything from the day. What was I going to do? I would have liked to lose myself in the night, devote myself body and soul to it, to its darkness, to its revolt, but I realized that what was attractive in it was only a dull, desperate negation of the day. By now not even our local Lupescu attracted me any more: she was a hairy, bony woman, and her house stank. From those houses, those roofs, that mute prison, I would have liked something fermenting in the night to arise, wake up, and open up a different day. ‘Only great days,’ I thought, ‘can have great nights.’