The boy was a gas-station attendant.
He worked at that station.
He was killed three weeks ago in a robbery, by thieves after the cash.
Two hundred and forty euros.
And so?
And so? she asks.
Let’s get going, I’m tired and my contact lenses are getting dry …
He finishes reading quickly, chooses a pump, and thinks that the kid didn’t deserve it.
Maybe no, maybe yes, but not like that, and anyway he feels bad for him.
He feels bad.
He thinks that she, lustful and fierce as a mantis, would have deserved it much more.
For what she’s doing to him, to them, to the monument of the two of them.
To die a terrible death, the death of a woman who leaves her man instead of caring for him through hard times.
A few drops on the side of the car, if he had a match it would all be easy.
He gets in and drives off, now she’s staring at him.
I don’t know … I think we should talk about it.
He thinks that with a little luck he could make the car crash against the guardrail in just the right place so that the window would shatter and the corner of the trailer would pass right through her without leaving even a scratch. A couple of spins and he’d come to a stop there, straddling the lanes, in a state of confusion. Ready to start again.
He doesn’t want to listen and raises the volume on the radio, she turns and looks silently at the dark outline of the hills, the fires burning on the smaller parallel roads, the shadows of the whores running along and jumping in cars like theirs.
He passes the truck without signaling, locks his jaw, one step away from cramping his facial muscles.
The radio is playing The Police.
This is the song you need. Learn to leave me alone, learn, she says, happy and exasperated at the same time.
Don’t stand, don’t stand so close to me.
He shakes his head. He’d like to have cascades of words ready to pour out of his wounded mouth, legions of truth endowed with conviction, like Christians in the middle of a crowded arena. But not a thing, he can’t say a thing because grief strangles him, and to have imagined her dead has upset him even more.
Weak, he feels weak, and the light of the dashboard projects an orange stigmata on his shirt.
Finally he manages to mutter, Then why are you still with me?
His eyes are shining.
Again she pauses for a long time while she pretends to hum. She knows it, the why, but she says, I don’t know.
He accelerates.
He thinks about jerking to a sudden stop while she’s unbuckling her seat belt: She would hit her head and with a little luck some interesting scenarios might open up.
But he repents.
There is no revenge, there is no redemption, only tears.
You’re driving worse than a blind man, watch out.
She is so beautiful that looking at her makes him feel terribly immoral, like someone spying through the chinks of a confessional.
She shouldn’t exist.
That old adage that the higher you go the harder you fall sounds more and more real.
He thinks of his friends, all absent spectators at this farce. They, too, are ready to stab him, because basically it couldn’t last.
Life is a serious business—if you start thinking about how much pain, you risk swerving off the road. If he weren’t crying silently he would have thought he’d fallen asleep at the wheel.
Five hundred meters to the Autogrill on the ring road.
He downshifts and with his left ring finger engages the right turn signal. He goes into neutral for a moment in the emergency lane because he’s always liked hearing the wheels spin freely, out of control, for a few seconds, it lets him breathe.
He steps on the clutch and puts the car in gear, takes his foot off, and the engine screeches while the revolutions get slower and the wall approaches a little too quickly.
It could end like this. She’s right, everything is unfolding badly, tiredly, for the worse.
He heard her say to a friend, Do something for him, he’s gotten heavy and boring.
He saw her smile several times at another friend.
Friends, how many infiltrated in the ranks of the good …
An abrupt turn of the wheel, and he is calmly controlling the approach to the brightly lit bar.
They get out of the car and separate.
He leans on the hood, which is hot, and peers at the sky; she heads, hips swaying, in the direction of the rest room.
She walks the way princesses of ancient Egypt must have walked.
Slow, sinuous, she glides over the asphalt without touching it, without hurrying. You need nobility of soul or an extreme lack of control to walk like that.
The same voice from before tells him that now, right now she can’t see him, he could take off and leave her there.
Or he could set fire to everything, run away, and let her burn. It would be the bonfire of vanity, the fire of catharsis.
Would a fabulous cunt like her be transformed into a phoenix as she runs maddened into the night, he wonders.
Would the gas station explode?
Would he die too?
Would the poor attendant survive or join his former colleague of a few kilometers and a few minutes earlier?
Would there be a big bang?
And what if he were saved but disfigured for life?
He doesn’t have the stuff of a pyromaniac, not him.
He turns on the engine while she touches up her makeup in the passenger-side mirror.
He puts it in first, drives off with a little jerk, and brakes suddenly after a dozen meters.
She screams.
A deafening, terrifying sound, like a trumpet. A noise not human stops his heart while a divine light floods the car’s interior.
The biggest truck in the world passes by with its horn blasting a few centimeters from his door.
Then it grows distant in the night.
Her makeup is all smeared and she is weeping hysterically, out of fear.
Sometimes it simply happens that the whole universe plots against you.
He is silent, dazed, the car stops along the edge of the road, clouds of gnats in the headlight beams and brave crickets singing of lovely death.
The silence hurts more than death’s scythe.
It’s toxic and humiliating, terminal.
Sorry, sweetheart, he stammers.
Shut up and take me home, she says.
The words bounce first against the window on the passenger side, reaching him only on the rebound.
But they are faraway words, he is alive and this for now is enough. Fear, the sudden terror has distanced him from her. Now it’s as if he has grasped the good and the bad, the drama and the farce. His love finished, and his love with makeup smeared like a clown or a whore at the end of the night.
He scratches his nose.
He starts off again.
He turns up the music a little and, out of the corner of his eye, lets himself glance at the cheap imitation of the woman he’s in love with. He hums, he tries to stay in tune to show that he can do something well.
You lousy shit, you practically got me killed. I can’t deal with you anymore, I’m not happy.
She says she’s not happy and he somehow understands.
To be in love does not imply being completely stupid.
In his new privileged position he manages to feel opposing feelings at the same time, the joy of survival and the torture of abandonment.
He struggles to swallow the knot that rises in his throat, he would like to be able to tell her that everything’s fine, that they’ll be happy, that there won’t be any room for sadness between them.
But again nothing comes out.
He would like to tell her that he’s been struggling for a lifetime, that he’s felt bad for a lifetime, that the only time he feels good is when he sleeps with he
r, tightly embraced.
If he took the key out of the ignition while they’re hurtling toward the curve they could talk about it in the afterlife.
Now he has so much darkness in his head, so much that she wouldn’t be able to find his face to hit him.
Sweetheart, I’m doing everything and the opposite of everything to make you happy, but it’s so complicated, it’s incredibly painful to never see you happy, I don’t know what to do, he says all in one breath.
She laughs in his face.
Now he stops talking.
Homicide can also be an evolved feeling of mercy, even if he’s not thinking about it anymore.
He downshifts, puts on the turn signal without listening to the music anymore, and musters courage.
Why are we stopping?
She might have said it, he doesn’t know with certainty because he’s not listening.
The place is completely deserted.
He pulls up to the most invisible point and turns the key. The engine sighs and then is silent, only the fan whirs loudly.
What the fuck are we doing here? Now she’s definitely said it.
You know that I love you? he says, staring at her.
Now she’s worried, she gets out of the car, dark and aggressive, so that she seems as never before a dangerous animal, well camouflaged.
Why don’t you accept this very simple, very beautiful thing? I love you and I don’t want to be forced to pursue, to suffer, to always ask …
Now she looks behind him, as if hoping for the arrival of someone, something.
Please, let’s go, she says.
He puts a hand in his pocket and she starts to back up.
I could never treat someone the way you do, I could never humiliate you the way you humiliate me, I couldn’t hate you …
Suddenly the wind rises, strong, violent.
His shirt, open to the second button, swells. She backs up some more and in spite of that his eyes seem to approach, burning.
All I ask is to be able to love you.
She continues to look at his right hand in the wide pocket of his pants.
All right, but you scared the hell out of me and …
He brings his left index finger to his lips, making a sign for her to be silent.
They go on this way a little longer, one step after the other, she retreating and he advancing slowly.
She glances back and notices that she’s getting close to a billboard, the ad pasted to it promoting the wine of the Castelli, a wine that’s good for your blood.
He sees it too.
Blood.
The highway, in the distance, begins to grow light.
On the slight incline the headlights of a truck appear, bright and powerful.
I’ve done everything for you, forever, I can’t understand what I could have done wrong this time. Every time! he shouts.
She stumbles and ends up on the ground, her hands reaching forward, her voice strangled by fear.
Listen, I can’t do it, I didn’t think you would …
The lights are getting closer, and he stops.
This is the scene of the moment when it’s all over.
She is sitting.
He is standing.
The car is far away.
The car is low.
God is distracted because the car is low.
The truck is arriving swiftly.
The truck proceeds toward them, facing him. He takes a step forward.
She cries out desperately.
He takes a step sideways.
The truck hits him directly.
He knows he has always loved her.
She didn’t know that another she hadn’t loved him.
To the police, while the emergency workers scoop up the last shreds of white shirt off the asphalt, she says absently that it was the first time.
That he had paid in advance.
That she had never seen him before.
That he had told her what to do, how and when.
That he had told her what to say.
A policeman gives her his wallet.
Inside is a photograph, there she is.
Another she.
A she who didn’t love him.
CAPUT MUNDI
BY GIUSEPPE GENNA
Montecitorio
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Rome, early, brisk May morning. The sky is clear and the air surprisingly chilly. Tension converges in the frigid sunshine, an unperceived tension. Humans, tourists and natives, walk along Via del Corso in dense throngs, their clothing vivid, smiling, thinking about what they have to do, where they have to go, the office, monuments to visit: everyday banalities. What is commonly called happiness. What others more warily call serenity—or indifference. Everyday life: banal, feverish, cheerful, Roman …
Police cars are packed tighter than usual around Montecitorio. Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies: the political heart of the nation. The old, yellowish Baroque building, which the genius Bernini distilled from an incubus of the imagination, twisting and bending the forms in dizzying abysses, complicating the internal labyrinths, widening the staircases, violating the door of the guarded entrance that faces the hunchbacked piazza. Here there are soldiers everywhere. And near the hotel to the left of the Chamber’s façade as well. This is the hotel where uniforms of American pilots were stolen in 2001, along with their badges: the access source for the terrorists who brought about September 11. It came out in subsequent investigations: a robbery in Rome for the attack in New York.
A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can become a tornado in New York, according to fractal theory. A banal theory, a serene butterfly. Don’t trust butterflies, or serene banality.
Montecitorio surrounded by soldiers: Inside, there’s no one. The sessions are adjourned.
Evidently, not all of the sessions are adjourned. The Premier, pale, rushes out of the smaller side door, not intended for television cameras, which for that matter are absent. What is he leaving behind on a chilly, luminous day of adjournment like this one? A rare chat with some listless deputies in the Transatlantico, the excessively Baroque hallway called “dei passi perduti,” the corridor of “lost footsteps,” where the Republic’s intrigues, both transparent and obscure, are hatched.
Outside, the chill does not seem to ease up. The Italian flag, limp in the cold air, hangs over the main door of Montecitorio along with the blue European one: bright in a cloudless sky.
In the narrow streets around Montecitorio: centuries-old dampness, the reek of cat piss, of animal piss. Gaps in the bricks, irregularly set. Some pigeons hunker in the cracks of the wall to protect themselves against the cold: They coo. Cats cross paths with one another. People walk along, some toward the Pantheon.
Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte. Two hundred meters from Montecitorio as the crow flies.
The surreal atmosphere of this cold spell. An imperceptible tension glances off the walls encrusted with nineteenth-century plaster, the old niches of the masters, the rust-brown paint of the closely set buildings. Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte: its strange, not-quite-right opening. Abnormal, narrow, difficult, yet expansive, forcing all eyes to the church, which dominates the street and the opening. The church’s façade is a flat barrier, peculiar, it seems to bear down on the back of the skull. It is naked, pure masonry, the color of tufa almost. A further work of the architect Bernini, a bell tower that impresses tourists, though Romans have grown accustomed to the sight of that anomaly. The bell tower is indescribable: It is a small temple, joined to the ground by an unreal masonry volute. The main entry of the church is a door: a plain door. There is no rose window; there is just a window.
In front of the entrance: armored cars and a doubled guard. The Italian Premier is very Catholic and prays here every day.
Now he is inside.
Inside the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte there is an explosion of gold. Periodically, the Santissimo, the consecrated Host of
the body of Christ, is exposed, and for this reason one must kneel upon entering. It is a scene that is enthralling for tourists, customary for Romans. Only a few faithful come here. Right now there are four of them. They are praying to the monstrosity of the Santissimo, the walled altar, the worked gold. The small shrine in which the body of Christ is exposed to view: a masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art and faith. Wherever you are, inside the church, you see the Santissimo, you look at Christ. The church is very small, with one nave. There are four rows of benches for the faithful, very close together.
The Premier is kneeling down in his dark overcoat, his over-sized glasses smudged with fingerprints and dust, his head bent, his eyes shut tight, his hands joined at his breast.
This is the part that makes your head spin.
A small gold almond appears.
The Madonna appeared here in Rome in 1820, and two Jewish bankers of the Ratisbonne family were instantly converted.
The small gold almond quivers and expands.
It appears to stream forth from the altar, it instantly inflames the altar’s gold like an ultra-body, a blazing spirit.
It is the void exploding.
The void explodes and grows larger, the flame is hungry for air, it mushrooms.
The Premier of Italy only has time to be astounded, to raise his bent head.
The church collapses in a roar.
The bodyguards are killed in the blast.
When the attaché, former FEMA, of the United States third intelligence service in Rome, the real secret agency, arrives at the scene of the devastation, the disaster has not been reconstructed: Italians, those clever people, spaghetti-eaters good for patting him on the head or endlessly running around behind the bench of the Court of New York, in perpetual trials against the Mafia. Clever guys good for Scorsese. The attaché who arrives at the “scene of the slaughter” (the dirge, repeated over and over, audible above the dense ring of reporters droning on like automatons in front of their cameramen) has the advantage of language: He is a fourth-generation macaronic and knows how to listen, knows how to speak Italian, and knows what the Italians are hiding under this language that is the oldest and most ambiguous modern tongue in the world, intact for eight hundred years, from Dante’s Inferno through to today.
What Joe Spiazzi sees, zipping his jacket up to his neck, occasionally flashing an embassy badge, is an inferno of concrete and centuries-old beams of moth-eaten wood, the remains of an unseemly bell tower, a few meters from the political heart of the nation that generated, digested, and excreted its great-grandfathers to the New World. The church is no longer there. The bodies have been extracted from the rubble. The cars are ulcerated scrap iron.
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