She dreams — the corpse opens like a book. it flips open by itself, like a magic box, and in it are tiny diamonds, a multitude of tiny diamonds like flakes of dead skin — light. then, like a river, they flow. in the corpse which refuses to die, in that now genderless dead person, everything is still except the light which flees. the lack of smell. an embalmed erasure. the skin on the face of the corpse is taut, the eye sockets dry and empty. the skull shows through the dried parchment envelope, in the open mouth the teeth are growing, they get whiter and longer. haya looks into the belly and sees her face in the thousands of miniature surfaces of colourless precious stones, distorted and multiplied
That year, 1935, a quarter of a million Italians donate their gold and silver for a better future, for the happy days to come. In Rome 250,000 wedding rings are collected; 180,000 in Milan. Benedetto Croce gives up his senator’s medal; the Cardinal of Bologna, Nassali Rocca, donates his bishop’s chain; and Pirandello, his Nobel Prize medal. A total of 33,622 kilograms of gold is amassed. That same year Mussolini gives three million gold francs to Albania with a promise of additional economic support to follow.
That year, 1935, the slogan “Buy Italian!” is pushed; an autarky is born; imported goods and foreign businesses disappear. Italy cleanses its digestive tract, feeds on purgatives, gloats with self-satisfaction, blossoms in its little corral.
Two years later the demographic campaign reaches its peak. Mussolini writes a cheque for 700 lire, a good month’s wages at the time, to every young man who decides to marry. The administration creates new jobs and welcomes in its embrace child-bearing Italians, pint-sized studs. Fecund mothers, those with at least seven sons, receive a cheque for 5,000 lire and a life-insurance policy. This is a time of wholesale fornication.
MINCULPOP is born, the Ministry of Popular Culture, and with it new dictionaries, orthographies, patriotism; the use of foreign phrases is banned, and they are replaced by Italian surrogates. Maxim Gorky is dubbed Massimo Amaro, but he is swiftly removed from the libraries and bookshops; Louis Armstrong becomes Luigi Fortebraccio, and Benny Goodman is Beniamino Buonuomo; shortly thereafter MINCULPOP bans all jazz performance and broadcasts.
Life in the Tedeschi family goes on. For Haya it is altogether ordinary, completely forgettable, as ordinary life is, until the day when, at the beginning of the school year in September 1938, her teachers Nella Negri, Amato di Veroli, Samuel Tagliacozzo, Massimo Pavoncello and Viola Sass do not show up to teach Geography, Mathematics, History, Italian and Physical Education. Until the day when Florian, after dinner, whispering in a conspiratorial hush, as if about to say something obscene, declares, We are Jews, and she asks, What does that mean?
So many shocks, so many tragedies, for centuries, with this meaningless fact that people hide even from themselves, or, conversely, of which they boast, as if it determines who they are and what they are, as if faith and blood are in and of themselves a blessing or a curse. She, Haya, has always felt nothing along those lines, or maybe just a little about being someone’s daughter or sister, someone’s mistress, someone’s friend, which does not imply unconditional devotion to those closest to her. She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones. Like little Sisyphuses they lug this wretched and perilous load through life, these clusters of tuberculosis and syphilis germs, these elusive, invisible, and oh so infectious containers of putrescence, they even leap into the containers voluntarily, choke on the sewage sludge in their own fermented excrement, imagining, perhaps, that they are duty-bound to do so, thereby expressing their gratitude that they are still here, as if they have been spared. Haya thinks back to a dwarf tree by the road, a diminutive tree with a round crown of violet-hued blossoms, much like a bright child’s cap as it stands there alone and smiles. That little tree is like a kiss, she whispers. Borders and identities, our executors. Married couples who sow wars, vast upheaval and death.
Instead of her lost faith, Haya, like Kosovel, believes in darkness.
If you had at least been killed for reasons of honour; if you had fought for love or to forage food for your little ones. But no. First they hoodwinked you, then they slew you in war. What do you want me to do with this France which you, like I, it seems, helped survive? What do we do with it, we who lost all our friends? Ah! If it had been to defend the rivers, the hills, the mountains, the sky, the winds, the rain, I would have said: “Gladly, I concur, this is our job. Let’s fight! All our life’s joy is in the fact that we live here.” But we defended a false name for it all. When I see a river, I say “river”; when I see a tree, I say “tree”; I never say “France”. There is no such thing, Jean Giono says, although he has been dead for thirty years.
A few months before the school principal fires him, in 1938, Amato di Veroli, Haya’s favourite school teacher, brings to class his friend, the mathematician Renato Caccioppoli.* It is May. Naples smells of “Santa Lucia”, freshly washed bed linen and lemons. Haya is fifteen. Professor Caccioppoli has a handsome face. Professor Caccioppoli’s fingers are stained with tobacco and he is thirty-five. He hops around as he talks. He grins. If you are afraid of something, measure what you are afraid of and you’ll see it is but a trifle, Professor Caccioppoli says. You will see, your fear is nearly nothing, almost too small to measure.
This is when Hitler starts out on his journey; the newspapers are full of Hitler. They speak of Hitler in history classes, in maths they talk of Hitler, in gym class they talk of Hitler. Hitler arrives in Rome, then comes to Naples; excitement runs high. Four trains follow Hitler’s train carrying five hundred foreign diplomats, generals, agents, party leaders and journalists, all in uniform, one uniform or another, an entire little army. Hitler is in a foul mood. He often scowls. He suffers from stomach pain, mostly gas, so he is forever gulping Mutaflor, prescribed by his faithful companion Dr Morell, but he takes scant joy in his encounter with “the little man”, King Vittorio Emmanuele. And so, as he is depressed, on his trip to Rome Hitler pens a will. He leaves the Party his personal effects, Berghof, his furniture and paintings, and to Eva Braun, his sisters, his other relatives, secretaries and servants, he leaves tidy sums from the sales of Mein Kampf.