“‘Are you finicky?’
“I watched her grope around for something behind one of the tanks. She found a glass and filled it from the tap at the bottom. She drained it in one swig, then filled it again. ‘Doesn’t serving wine to all those guests make you want some?’ she asked me.
“I drank, and felt her watching me in the dark. When I handed back the glass she said, ‘I thought it was forbidden for you Jehovah’s Witnesses.’
“‘Who said I’m a Jehovah’s Witness?’
“‘That’s what they say.’
“‘I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness.’
“‘You can be whatever you want, I don’t care,’ she said, turning her head to look me in the eye.
“‘Anyway, they say things about you too,’ I hit back.
“Then she leaned her face over, very close to mine, as if she wanted to bite my nose, and I didn’t dare back away or turn my head. Whispering, she said, ‘Do I scare you, Blade?’
“I sat stock-still until she moved back, sneering. ‘Let them say what they want. They’re just curious. And envious. Come on, ask me a question. What do you want to know? If I used needles? If I exchanged them with other people?’
“‘I’m not interested.’
“‘It’s what everyone is interested in. Whether I exchanged needles and where I got the money. People have wild imaginations. Do you have wild fantasies too, Blade?’
“‘No.’
“I didn’t dare look at her anymore, so her hand on my neck caught me by surprise. Just a caress, light.
“‘If only they were all like you,’ she said.
“Then she got up to draw more. We passed the glass back and forth for a while.
“‘Have you been to Jakarta?’ I asked her finally.
“Corinne sank her chin into her sweatshirt. ‘No. My father gives them to me. I once told him that I liked the Hard Rock Cafe and from that time on he brings me one from every city. I have five continents so far.’
“‘He’s a diplomat,’ she added with a trace of irritability. ‘Before the age of thirteen, I lived in . . . Let’s see if I can remember,’ she said, and began counting on her fingers. ‘Russia, Kenya, Denmark. And India. But only for a few months.’
“I pictured each of those countries in the color in which it appeared on the tablecloth at the masseria. I could see the entire tablecloth distinctly, as if it were spread out before my eyes.
“Corinne had started stroking the raised yellow circle on the sweatshirt. ‘I told him three years ago that I liked them, but he keeps bringing them to me. I wear them to go to the gym.’ She finished what was left and got up yet another time. But when she turned on the tap she hesitated. ‘I’ll show you a way to get high faster,’ she said. ‘Get up. Come on, stand up! Climb up here.’
“I did as she said. I climbed up the ladder on the side of the tank. When I got to the top, Corinne explained how to open the top hatch. ‘Keep your head back. If it gets into your eyes, the first fumes will blind you. Inhale slowly.’
“I inhaled the vapor and it was like a wallop, I was nearly sent flying backward. It was as shocking as the time Nicola and I had gotten our hands on Floriana’s stash of distilled spirits, but the effect of the liqueurs was nothing compared to this. I leaned over and breathed in again, after which I don’t know how I managed to get down. But I know that I burst out laughing, I laughed so hard that Corinne had to cover my mouth with her hand. Since that wasn’t enough to stop me, she wrapped her arms around my head and pressed me against her breasts. Together we collapsed on the ground, clinging to each other.
“‘Stop it! You’ll wake everyone up!’
“I breathed through the fabric of her sweatshirt, through the rough Hard Rock Cafe logo. I was aroused and I was afraid she would notice, so I slid away.
“‘You’re really out of control, Blade,’ she said, letting me go. ‘Who knows what the hell kind of planet you came from.’
“Then winter came, and it rained constantly. The leaves on the vines gave up and dropped off, done in by all that water. Sometimes I would take solitary walks in the vineyard, and when I was far enough away I would start singing. I would sing the ‘Agnus Dei’ and the ‘Salve Regina’ among the dripping vine shoots, my rubber boots sinking into the mud, and I would think of Bern. Now and then I received letters from him, but I had a hard time answering. I told him about the actress’s wedding, about my new duties and how quickly I had learned them, but not much else, because compared to his words mine sounded childish. Bern never tired of writing to me, though, as if he sensed my difficulty. It’s ridiculous when you think about it: cell phones already existed and there we were, separated by less than thirty miles, exchanging letters.
“At the bottom of his letters he always asked the same questions. It took me a while to realize that they weren’t really addressed to me. ‘Do you still believe, Tommaso? Do you believe without having to be forced to? And do you pray, at night? For how long?’
“But all of a sudden God disappeared from his letters. There was no trace of Him anymore. I thought of asking him what had happened, but again I didn’t have the nerve. I was worried about him. I knew that there is no deeper solitude in the world than that of those who once believed and then stopped believing. And I had never known anyone capable of believing as absolutely as Bern. Even Cesare, compared to him, seemed to have doubts.
“It was school. It was the people outside. In September, Bern had taken the exam to enter the last year at the scientific high school in Brindisi. From what he told me, he had left the teachers speechless, quoting a passage from the Metamorphoses from memory. Cesare had made us study Ovid in depth because, according to him, the poet anticipated the doctrine of reincarnation.
“After Latin, however, came math. Bern had not been able to transcribe on the blackboard the expression that was dictated to him. Sines and cosines? No one had told him about them before. ‘This is a scientific high school, Mr. Corianò,’ the math teacher had said. ‘Didn’t anyone explain that to you?’
“In the end, he’d been placed into the third year. Two years’ difference was enough to make him stand out among his classmates like a sore thumb. There was a gang of boys who’d grown up on the outskirts of Brindisi. I knew those people, I’d been raised in the same neighborhoods, but Bern knew nothing about them. He became their target. I could picture him clearly, trying to ward them off with words, as ingenuous as Jesus among the Doctors in the Temple. ‘They’re full of rage, I feel remorse for them,’ he once wrote. He still used expressions like ‘I feel remorse for them.’ Imagine, with those guys.
“‘Don’t get involved,’ I begged him, but he didn’t listen to me.
“I never knew how they tormented him, whether there were only two of them or maybe five or the whole gang. Bern was sure that with patience he would win, that they would finally get tired of him. Instead, he was the one to give up a few months later, because of those boys and because some of the professors didn’t give him a chance, there were too many things that he had never studied or that he’d studied differently. ‘School isn’t for me,’ he wrote to me in January, ‘much better to learn on your own.’ Then he made an effort to talk about things that had nothing to do with it, about the new boy whom Cesare had taken in at the masseria, Yoan, about how taciturn and fearful he was. They had picked olives together on your grandmother’s land. ‘They’re juicier than ever this year’ is how he described them. At the end of that letter he lapsed into despair for a moment: ‘I miss you very much. I still pray, but most of the time I don’t know what I’m praying for.’
“‘Talk to Cesare,’ I replied, ‘confide in him, he’ll know how to help you.’
“His answer came by return mail, just one line: ‘Cesare kicked you out. I want nothing to do with him anymore.’
“In order not to arouse suspicion, he went out just the same every morning, but i
nstead of taking the bus to school he went on foot to Ostuni, cutting through the fields. He sat in the municipal library all day. He got it into his head to read every book it contained, in alphabetical order. That was just the kind of plan that he would undertake, the same as when he got the idea of living in the trees like the rampant baron, or when he persuaded us to eat the seeds and roots and leaves of every plant that grew on the masseria, or when he dragged me into the strike for the computer.
“He stuck to that plan for three months, during which he wrote rarely, and always about books. He would have made it to the G’s, even beyond, but ultimately he became friends with the librarian and allowed him to divert him from that plan and propose a new one.
“‘He’s introducing me to authors I had never heard of. We were in the dark about so many things, Tommi! And now I’m questioning everything, everything! From the foundations. It’s like being born again. We’re reading Max Stirner. Every page opens my eyes even more. We lived in darkness, my brother.’
“Thinking to himself, he summed up everything that had gone through his head starting with that book. He called it The Ego. Only afterward would I discover that this wasn’t the complete title, but Bern was no longer aware of what I might know, and anyway it wouldn’t have mattered much to him. He began signing himself ‘The Great Egoist.’ In huge letters, in the center of the page, he wrote: ‘Our task is to storm the heavens!’ He wrote: ‘We must devour it, the sacred!’ By then he wasn’t really speaking to me at all, and realizing that made me feel more alone than ever. In the final letter, before a silence that lasted a long time, he included a passage that was the result of all that study: ‘It wasn’t I who couldn’t pray, Tommaso. I understand that now. I wasn’t the one who went wrong. God is a prosaic invention. For only he who is alive is in the right.’”
* * *
—
“HIS COPY of the book is still here,” Tommaso said, raising his head. He pointed to a spot on my left. “There, on the shelf.”
I got up too quickly, I felt dizzy. Medea lifted her snout at the same instant, on the alert. Seeing me go toward the shelf, she lay back down. The books were all turned on their sides.
“The spine is . . .”
“I found it.”
The complete title was The Ego and His Own. I handed it to Tommaso and he leafed through some pages.
“Look at all the places he underlined. Practically every line.”
He handled it carefully, like a relic. Then he closed it and placed it sideways on a corner of the bedside table.
“My head is exploding,” he said.
“Do you want me to get you a pill?”
“I’m afraid I finished them all. Do you have anything?”
“No.”
“Too bad.”
He massaged his forehead. When he moved his hand away, it left red marks. Then he started talking again, losing himself ever further back in time, as if I weren’t even there.
“Going down to the cellar with Corinne turned into a habit. We’d go there at the end of the shift. We’d talk for a long time, passing that makeshift glass back and forth, then we’d climb up on the tanks. At that point everything became very confused. I wanted to go up again and Corinne would pull me down by the heels. ‘Enough, Blade! You want to kill yourself?’ But I didn’t let her deter me, I inhaled again and again. In the end she always said the same thing: ‘You are really out of control.’ It was like a signal, it meant it was time to part company, because otherwise we’d be forced to go further, to do something that I wasn’t sure I could do. I’d go up the stairs from the cellar first, and for a few days we kept away from each other.
“One evening, Nacci sent for me. ‘The workers say you play cards,’ he said. He joined his hands together on the desk while I hid mine behind my back, fingers crossed.
“‘It’s not true.’
“‘Don’t lie to me, Tommaso. I know very well that everyone needs his distractions.’
“He took a deck of cards from the drawer. ‘What do you play?’
“‘Skat, bridge, canasta. Also scopa, but not as well.’
“‘The workers say you play poker.’
“‘And poker, right.’
“‘I said you mustn’t lie to me, Tommaso. And blackjack, do you know it?’
“I hesitated.
“‘Do you know it or not?’
“‘You mean twenty-one?’
“It was my father who’d taught it to me. All the card games I knew came from my father. Except for skat: that one came from Bern and the mulberry treehouse.
“‘Twenty-one, call it whatever you like,’ Nacci said.
“‘Then I know it.’
“He pushed the deck toward me, new, shiny, springy cards. ‘Shuffle them.’
“I did it the classic way, and Nacci studied my hands.
“‘Not like that,’ he said, ‘the American way.’
“I cut the deck in half, put the cards on the desk, and demonstrated.
“‘Can you keep one on top?’
“‘That’s cheating.’
“‘Can you do it or not?’
“I showed him I could, but a card slipped out and fell to the floor. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.
“‘You’re clumsy,’ he said, ‘and slow. But you can improve. On Friday nights some friends come over. We like to play a little. I’ll pay you an extra day’s work. You can keep ten percent of what the bank wins. Deal?’
“I began that same week and continued every Friday thereafter. If it was poker they wanted to play and they needed a fourth, Nacci lent me the money to sit at the table. But in general he and his friends preferred blackjack. They spoke very little. On the other hand, they smoked nonstop and drank Jameson from water glasses. At dawn the pilgrimage to the bathroom sped up; they peed without even having the decency to close the door anymore.
“When they finally dragged themselves out of the living room, worn to a frazzle, I put everything back in place: the green cloth folded into the drawer, the chips in the container. I emptied the ashtrays and rinsed the glasses. Before going back to the dormitory I took a walk as far as the vineyard. Only wild animals were awake at that hour.
“What with the evenings at cards and what I saved of my salary, I put some money aside. One day, with a roll of bills in my pocket, I went to the commercial district in Massafra. I found a body shop that had motorcycles displayed on the sidewalk. They looked battered, but it didn’t matter. I showed the owner how much I had and asked him what I could buy.
“‘Have you got a license, at least?’ he asked skeptically.
“I offered him the money again. If he didn’t accept, I would look somewhere else.
“‘Right, it’s none of my business,’ he said then. He grabbed the bills and ran them through his fingers, counting. They were small denominations, ten or five thousand liras, as if I had robbed a tobacconist. That was exactly what he thought, I suppose. ‘I can give you that one.’ He pointed to a scooter. ‘It’s an Atala Master. Its papers are all in order.’
“I was getting used to my new life. I had my regular work shifts, nights playing cards, evenings with Corinne, and now the Atala as well, to drive around whenever I wanted. I could live like that. I could have lived like that. But then Bern showed up in the courtyard, out of the blue, with his black boots and muddy pants, as if he had waded through a swamp. Seeing him, I tightened my grip on the handle of the basket I was carrying. ‘What are you doing here?’
“I set the basket on the ground. I wanted to hug my brother, but I waited for him to make the first move. He stayed where he was.
“‘I came to liberate you,’ he said, ‘get your things, we’re leaving.’
“‘Leaving? Where are we going?’
“‘I’ll show you. Now hurry up.’
“Nacci appeared at that moment. I explaine
d to him that Bern was a friend of mine. He glanced at the driveway, and when he didn’t see any cars, he asked, ‘How did you get here?’
“‘On foot.’
“‘On foot from where?’
“‘From the Taranto station.’
“Nacci burst out laughing, but stopped when he realized that Bern was serious. ‘Now I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’re Cesare and Floriana’s nephew. They always said you were a character.’
“He insisted that Bern stay for dinner. It was the only time I ate at his house, though he was deep in conversation with Bern the whole time.
“‘Take this boy away,’ he finally said to me, getting up from the table, ‘he can no longer stand up. And you, give my regards to Floriana and Cesare.’
“As soon as we heard the TV go on in the next room, Bern jumped up. He dumped the remaining bread into a napkin, then the leftovers he had in his plate, as his eyes urged me to do the same. He opened the refrigerator, grabbed a few cans of Coke and a container of yogurt, and hid them under his sweatshirt.
“‘What are you doing?’
“‘Just these. And these,’ he added, taking a carton of eggs.
“‘We can’t, Bern!’
“‘No one will notice. There’s plenty of stuff here.’
“We slinked out of Nacci’s house and fled to the workers’ quarters. Bern paused in the doorway to check out the room.
“‘My bed is over there,’ I said, pointing it out to him, but he no longer seemed interested.
“‘Get a move on,’ he said.
“‘I can’t go back to the masseria,’ I said. ‘Cesare was clear.’
“‘We’re not going to the masseria.’ He took a step and it looked as if he were about to drop to his knees. He clung to the doorframe.
“‘What’s wrong?’
“‘Nothing, a spasm in my back. I’ll just sit here a moment.’
“He lay down instead, perpendicular to two joined beds. He stared at the ceiling, breathing hard. His T-shirt was raised a few inches and I saw how thin he was.
Heaven and Earth Page 9
