Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  Over the course of the next few days, the highest levels of the police department were forced to make an embarrassing admission. Not only had the murderous group carried out another execution, but now it seemed possible to identify the name of its leading member. According to an array of witnesses, there was a man who had been in increasingly close contact with the victim during the last few weeks of her life. The same man appeared to have spent the night with the victim, had intimate relations with her, and murdered her, leaving the corpse on the white sheets, only to vanish into thin air, leaving no trail to his current whereabouts.

  Considering the evidence piling up by the hour, it was reasonable to assume that the man in question was the most crucial member of the notorious group. The awkward point, as far as the police were concerned, was the man’s identity. He was a police officer. The news sent the media straight into a feeding frenzy. A cop! Detective Dennis De Villa!

  *

  Because the murderer of superheroes was on the run, and hence it was impossible to obtain any current images of him or statements from him, the media had no better option than to focus on the person closest to the alleged killer, his brother. And so it was that, for a couple of weeks, the reporter Bruce De Villa was forced to defend himself from a siege by dozens of fellow reporters.

  The press waited for him outside his building. They camped out there for entire days. They stalked him every time he went to buy groceries at the corner store, peppering him with questions he refused to answer. They chased after him as he ran to catch the bus. It actually reached the height of paradox when a crowd of reporters chased another reporter on his way to the news stand to buy the morning papers.

  In other circumstances, Bruce De Villa might have found such an absurd situation laughable. But now, the laughter died in his throat like an ember in a wet fireplace. My brother Dennis, leader of the notorious deadly group. The news left him confused and practically speechless. His power of second sight had given him advance awareness of the deaths of a number of former superheroes, including that of Mystique, but it had told him nothing about how they would die, much less the identity of their killer.

  He didn’t have much to say to the reporters. Why were they besieging him, demanding comments and indiscretions about his brother’s character? After all, what did he know about Dennis? It was very likely that by now they, the reporters, knew more about him than Bruce did. As the police gradually built up a picture of the murders that had taken place to date, casting light on the role that Detective Dennis De Villa had played in those killings, Bruce had the impression that his brother’s actual life was taking shape, before his eyes, like a landscape finally freed from enveloping mists.

  He found a detailed reconstruction of the murderous escalation in the New York Post. It began with the murder of Robin, who’d had his throat cut in a corner of Central Park several years earlier, when Dennis was a young uniformed patrolman and Robin must have looked to him, according to educated guesses, like the easiest target with which to start his career as a killer of superheroes. The reconstruction went on through the following years, which Dennis used to organise a group of sympathisers with his anti-superhero campaign, until he roped in the young Mara Jones. The scabrous death of the Dark Knight. The way Dennis began to take advantage of his position as a detective to establish contact with the potential victims. The quickening cadence of the murderous attacks. The way he apparently organised, probably with the aid of other anonymous members of the group, the terrorist-style attack on the George Hotel. The fatal error that led to the death of the younger Richards. The resulting decision of the elder Richards to take his own life. And last of all, Mystique, the television star with bluish skin, the growing intimacy between the pair, perhaps even a genuine emotional involvement, though it did nothing to prevent Dennis from carrying out his plan.

  Dennis De Villa, seducer and murderer. Who could have imagined, the commentators asked, that behind those delicate eyes, in an apparent state of continuous emotional upheaval… In an attempt to find out more about the ex-detective’s personality, a couple of reporters started digging into his family background. They found references to the sudden and mysterious death of his mother, sixteen years earlier, but were unable to tease out exactly what happened. For that matter, who knows whether those distant events had any significance. Dennis De Villa remained an enigmatic angel of death. If only his brother would agree to give a short interview, tell an anecdote or two, a few memories, a detail that might help to frame, once and for all, the personality of the ex-detective: a crazed fanatic, a terrorist, a cruel hanging judge working on the basis of an unknown law of morality, a reactionary determined to take the world back to a pre-superhero stage of its history?

  “Aren’t they sick of it yet?” asked the man who ran the corner store every time Bruce came in, trailing the team of relentless reporters behind him.

  “They’ll get sick of it soon, you’ll see,” Bruce assured him.

  The intensity of the press siege did indeed begin to wane. Their voices dwindled in number, less and less insistent, as in some inevitable fade-out. Bruce had spent the last couple of weeks reducing communication to a minimum, and not only with the press but with anyone, suspending all work-related activity and choosing to spend as much time as possible in seclusion. He continued that way for a few more days. In the hope of avoiding the perils of insomnia, every night he’d drain a generous glass of warm milk spiked with an equally generous dollop of rum. He’d fall asleep with a myriad of questions echoing in his mind: those that the reporters had been asking him in vain for days, and those which in the final analysis the entire country kept asking. Would the former detective eventually be caught? Would he resurface in the wake of spectacular new murders?

  Impossible questions to answer. As far as he was concerned, for now Bruce hadn’t any premonitions on impending deaths. He wondered whether his premonitions would ever return and, with them, the murders. Only time could tell.

  *

  June was already beginning to wilt. The days were sliding down towards the scorching abyss of midsummer. News reports about Mystique’s murder and the former detective now on the run evaporated slowly, day by day, giving way to the indistinct, customary buzz of stories about yet more new victims of the violence in the Middle East, yet more new sea ice melting at the poles, yet more new galloping financial crises moving like deep shivers along the skin of the whole planet.

  Like every year, Broadway was assigning the Tony Awards. The film season was launching the summer blockbusters. Joseph Szepanski’s book was dominating the bestseller lists. Well-to-do New Yorkers were migrating, the way they did every summer, to their beach houses on Long Island and Cape Cod… Bruce lay wide awake in his bed nearly every night, listening intently as if he were trying to capture each tiny movement of the world. Was he perhaps waiting, in the night, for one of his foreshadowings? Or was he simply trying to understand once and for all what he should do with his strange superpowers, what direction to send his life in now?

  When a call came one morning from the New York office of La Repubblica, Bruce panicked. He was afraid that the Italian newspaper wanted to weasel an interview out of him about his brother.

  But quite to the contrary, the bureau chief never mentioned the subject. Speaking in Italian, in a flat and matter-of-fact tone he just asked whether Bruce was ready to resume working again. Because, yes, there was an interview he wanted to discuss, but he didn’t want to interview Bruce, rather he wanted Bruce to interview someone else. And apparently it was a pretty important interview.

  At first Bruce hummed and hawed. He wasn’t that sure he was interested in pursuing his journalistic career. Even though he wasn’t clear what else he might do, he doubted that journalism was the path he should follow. In the last few weeks, he had sensed a number of things changing inside him. His life seemed like a building that had been blown up, and when the stones fell back to earth, they’d reassembled themselves into their exact original arrang
ement. Everything looked the same as before. But it wasn’t.

  He was thinking that over when the bureau chief decided to tell him who he was being asked to interview.

  Bruce gulped. “Would you mind saying that again?”

  The bureau chief laughed and repeated the name.

  “Well…” Bruce paused and then went on. “In that case, I guess I cannot refuse.” He had no idea how the hell the paper had managed to secure such a sought-after interview, but this was clearly a spectacular opportunity. He decided that this could be his last piece. A fitting capstone to his career. A rare interview with the most venerable of the venerable figures, the most glorious of the old glories, the father of all superheroes. He asked for the details. The interview was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon in Park Slope, at the period residence where the old man in question had founded, it appeared, a sort of school for aspiring superheroes with serious intentions.

  Bruce didn’t give the school a lot of thought. The idea that nowadays there might be aspiring superheroes with serious intentions struck him as bizarre to say the least. But what interested him was the chance to meet the great old man. The living legend. The inaccessible Superman.

  *

  The next day he took the subway to Brooklyn. He got out at Grand Army Plaza and started walking south. The day was painfully beautiful, with a sky as shiny as a sheet of glass and just one single strand of white cloud whose outline reminded Bruce of the shape of Long Island. He turned into a street lined with massive trees, where he encountered a couple of solitary pedestrians, and a female family of two mothers and a little girl in a pushchair strolling at a leisurely pace towards Prospect Park.

  He looked up at the façades of the monumental houses, all of them rather austere, until he found the one he was looking for. Before ringing the doorbell he checked himself over. He was wearing the best of the two summer suits he owned and a shirt he’d picked up that morning from the dry cleaners.

  He rang the doorbell. He waited. He rang again and peeked into one of the windows. Behind the curtains all he could see was a strip of hardwood floor.

  At last, the door creaked and slowly swung open.

  Bruce had taken it for granted that he would be welcomed by an assistant, by a housekeeper, by a bodyguard, or even by one of the students attending the school. He had taken it for granted that the elderly hero would receive him sitting in a luxurious office, or on an elegant veranda, where he would only be allowed, as if into a throne room, after the requisite several minutes in an anteroom. He was astonished, therefore, when he realised that the figure before him, framed in the rectangle of the front door, backlit by a whitish glow that seemed to reign inside the house, was none other than Superman himself.

  Before then, Bruce had only seen him in person one other time, from a considerable distance, at the crowded funeral of Franklin Richards. That time, Superman had worn his superhero costume, and had hobbled forward with a hesitant yet solemn gait, making his way through the mourning superheroes. Despite his age and the afflictions of illness, he was still a charismatic figure. He had retired long ago, about twenty-five years, before the era of great superhero exploits had begun to decline, and as a result he had been one of the few to avoid being tainted by the atmosphere of gradual defeat that had later washed over the superhero scene.

  They stood looking at each other. Superman was wearing a pair of navy-blue trousers. A short-sleeved shirt in a material that might be linen. He was leaning on a wooden cane and seemed to be quavering with a vague, relentless tremor. The famous face with its classical American beauty had remained recognisable over the course of the years, with his square chin and powerful jaw, even though his expression now seemed somewhat stiff and the skin drab, slightly waxen. His hair was thick, a less intense raven black than it once was, with white streaks that created the effect, here and there, of a series of veins of silver shot through a dark boulder. The eyes were still lively. Although disease had stiffened his face and slowed the movement of his eyes, those two pale blue spotlights seemed to maintain something fresh, almost amused about them. He studied Bruce and commented: “So here you are.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Bruce hesitated, afraid that he’d been taken for someone else. “Mr. Kent, my name is Bruce De Villa. I’m here on behalf of that Italian newspaper…”

  “I know,” the other man said, nodding his head longer than necessary, in a way that made it hard to tell whether he was really nodding or might be succumbing to an attack of tremors instead. “De Villa,” he repeated. “De Villa.”

  Inside, the period home seemed to have been renovated from top to bottom. The rooms were arrayed around a large central light well that cut vertically through the building’s four stories and was illuminated by a milky-white skylight on the roof. Superman and Bruce walked towards the railing that surrounded the light well. Without undue formality, the elderly man seized Bruce’s arm while his other hand gripped the handle of his cane. There was still something imposing about his physical presence. He’s taller and no doubt heavier than me. The power of his arm intertwined with mine. Through that arm, Bruce could sense the other man’s tremors like a series of seismic shocks, a faint, continuous, rhythmic earthquake, almost as if Superman’s body were vibrating in time to some imperceptible music, or as if that body were a sensitive wand capable of capturing the vibrations in the air, in the house, in the ground beneath them, the entire spectrum of the earth’s vibrations.

  “Welcome to my training centre,” said the old man, a trace of mirth in his voice.

  Bruce leaned over the railing. He took a look down at the floor underneath, the one at basement level. Half a dozen people were sitting in relaxed postures, legs crossed, each on a small rug, in what looked very much like a meditation session. Bruce observed the scene with slight astonishment. Were these the aspiring superheroes? Sitting on carpets and meditating? What was this? A training centre or some kind of ashram?

  “I bet this is nothing like what you were expecting,” Superman suggested. The curve that surfaced on his lips was barely a smile, but his rigid face had the expression you might see on someone who was just managing to stifle a resounding belly laugh. His arm seemed to vibrate even more. “I bet you didn’t expect this.”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t know what I was expecting.”

  “Of course, this isn’t all the kids do with their time. Down there… down there are the lecture halls. A well-equipped gymnasium.” The pale blue eyes flashed when they met Bruce’s. The old man paused. “Nothing too esoteric. Quite the contrary, in fact, this is a very… practical approach. Action and meditation. A superhero can’t do without either.”

  Down below, everyone was pretty young. They all wore jeans and T-shirts; they were barefoot, eyes closed. A short distance away from the group, a young woman who must have grown tired of meditating was sitting peacefully, tapping away at a laptop computer. Bruce wondered what had driven these people to join up with Superman. What had made them decide to pursue the project of becoming nothing less than superheroes in the proper sense of the word. Old-school superheroes, he thought to himself. Superheroes who want to fight for real. Superheroes who, somehow or other, want to set the world straight. Fight evil and all that stuff? Aren’t those ideas that belong to the musty past? In the space of two months, no more, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they weren’t all signed up for some dumb reality show, or taking walk-on parts in a film with Angelina Jolie.

  But he kept his scepticism to himself. He went back to listening to Superman, who was providing a brief history of some of the students. That young man sitting on a manila-coloured rug, the one with the Hispanic features, was known by the name of Spinning Top, and until recently, the old superhero told Bruce, his lips twisting with growing amusement, he’d made his living posing for stupid calendars. But in actual fact, he was a serious-minded young man. His distinguishing characteristic was that he had no fixed superpowers. Every time his body accumulated a sufficient charge of adrenaline,
it developed a different superpower. Impossible to tell in advance what that power might be. The superhero with the most unpredictable powers the world had ever seen! That young woman working away on the computer, on the other hand, was a mutant and she hadn’t yet chosen her own superhero name; she possessed one eccentric superpower, which consisted of negating all cause-and-effect relationships in the world around her. Guns would fire, but no one was hit. Mouths flew open, but no shout emerged.

  Bruce remained sceptical. More than for great superheroic exploits, the bizarre superpowers that were being described to him seemed suitable for a performance of abstract theatre. He let his uncertain look wander around the place.

  All the same, he had to admit there was a pleasant atmosphere in the house. Filtering down through the skylight was a substantial, almost solid shaft of light, not unlike what you’d see slanting through the windows of a cathedral. On the walls hung reproductions of paintings by Lucian Freud, Stanley Spencer, and other artists—or come to think of it, they might even be originals, portraits of men and women who looked out from the canvas, wordless, filled with a deeply luminous, moving, and fleshly humanity. Bruce and Superman continued the tour. They ran into a few people along the way, perhaps other students or even instructors, who limited themselves to a courteous smile. The elderly man went on explaining practical details of the school. A handful of well-to-do friends were underwriting the operation. So far no one—neither within the larger scene of the ex-superheroes nor among the national mass media or government authorities—was taking seriously the idea of training a new generation of superheroes. Old Superman was happy about that. As a matter of fact, he was actively discouraging publicity, eager to protect his protégés from outside pressure.