Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

‘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