“Shh … quiet … wait.”
On the opposite side of the basement, to the left of the big window that looked onto the garden, there was a door lacquered in white, one of those coffer doors that never close perfectly. It was water. When, growing silent, they tried to focus their hearing in that direction, they realized that strange but indisputable aquatic noises were coming from beyond the door, a choof-choof of bodies forcefully moving in a pool, a regular sound that had, however, nothing mechanical about it—it wasn’t a mill or a washing machine, it was someone playing with water, a dimension like rocks thrown in a pond, like water polo, shipwreck and premeditation at the same time.
“That’s me,” said the man, placing the glass with the Bellini on the parapet of the balcony. An umbrella with a rice-paper shade was sticking up out of the mixture of champagne and peach juice. He covered the convex surface of the receiver with the palm of his right hand and threw his left back: “And goddamn it, be quiet!”
His daughter snickered without taking her eyes off the small mountain of summer dresses thrown on the bed. His wife peered heavenward. She rose lazily from the wicker chair, slipped her enameled toes one after another into her sandals, and closed the sliding glass door that divided the hotel room from the balcony.
He took the receiver and put it back to his ear. Now he was alone before the ocean. What in the offices of police headquarters might be perceived as interference was, to the eyes of Pippo Candito, the watery wake raised by two motorboats challenging each other a few yards from the shore.
“Fucking hell, go to hell!” he said.
He was silent for a few seconds. Maybe someone was suggesting that he calm down. But at some point his daughter stopped playing with the summer dresses bought in the market in Las Palmas: The shouts had penetrated the barrier of glass. His wife again left the wicker chair, and she, too, headed for the balcony.
The policemen slid open the door through which the noises could still be heard. They found themselves looking at a small horseshoe-shaped room from which a stairway led down, curving to the right. Meanwhile, the men who had searched the bedrooms without finding a soul had also descended to the basement. Four to keep an eye on Saverio and Danilo. The others ventured over to the stairs that led down another level. The stairwell was a sort of narrow tube with white walls, onto which at a certain point a luminescent wave was projected, a pale-blue spot waving like a flag, giving a slap in the face to anyone who thinks that certain kinds of ambience can be experienced only in movies.
At this point the Heavenly Father was called in. Or rather a silent widening of the eyes, hands groping for support. I wasn’t there with the police but I was familiar with the reactions of people arriving for the first time in the underground part of the villa. In the shouts of boys there was astonishment; adults, on the other hand, wondered how much money it must have taken to set up something like that. With their eyes they measured the ceiling, then gazed along the surface of the water for more than twenty-five meters.
It wasn’t an Olympic-sized pool. An Olympic pool would have been twice as long. It was a hymn to waste in four lanes separated by the typical floating ropes, with overflow grating and backstroke turn indicators. Along the right wall were the doors leading to the bathrooms and changing rooms. On the side opposite the diving board was a piano bar: a half-circle of concrete livened by tiny glass tiles, behind which an old mirror retrieved from some second-hand dealer gilded the reflection of the whiskey bottles. On either side of the diving board stood two monsters: enormous papier-mâché statues taken from the carnival in Ronciglione that were supposed to represent the grandeur of ocean divinities. Scattered around the PVC-vinyl floor was everything that could further subvert the cold sobriety of indoor sports into the no-holds-barred games of an opium smoker: leopard-covered sofas, old pendulum clocks, miniature galleons, and so on.
The underground pool was something new. They had seen Mercedes cars transformed into mobile discotheques, ox quarters filled with video recorders, but not this thing here. Yet there was no time to be amazed. The policemen surrounded the pool and stood staring, without saying a word, because what was happening in there surpassed in strangeness the entire scenic display.
A human figure. The body of a boy. He was swimming. The small atoll of a back emerged, a portion of flesh illuminated by neon lights that ran in long tubes forty-five feet up, a burnished oval that broadened and then offered itself to the flow of the water. One arm after the other cut the blue field as a pin suspended above a dead swamp would have done, leaving behind a ripple that disappeared in a dawnlike silence.
They were used to men who, to avoid capture, threw themselves into the Tiber and then, undone by panic, floundered, begging for help amid the tracery of foam. This boy was something else. It was impossible that he could be unaware of their arrival, but he swam as if he would continue infinitely: His style didn’t reveal the least disturbance the whole time they watched. They probably wondered if it was the expression of a particular form of fear, a panic that instead of exploding in every direction was compressed into a single obsessive gesture. (Once, they had raided the office of a city councilman who hadn’t deigned to look up, but had remained bent over his desk, writing; when they got closer, they noticed in the registry he was holding a series of calculations that at a certain point came to an end in incomprehensible scribbles similar to the product of a seismograph.) Or maybe it was a strategy of desperation: As long as I keep swimming, no one will catch me.
They didn’t know, they couldn’t know, that Giancarlo Colasanti, that was the boy’s name, had an infernal brother. Not a blood brother or, worse, a twin: something more intimate and at the same time more distant. They were in constant contact. They were aware of each other’s presence, they talked to one another in their sleep. Every action undertaken by Giancarlo was a challenge, a mutiny, and a desperate attempt to gain the approval of this presence. He paid attention to no one else, nothing mattered to him that did not have to do with the pursuit of this relationship that we all knew about. They never made peace but they never separated. And in particularly difficult moments they entered the arena as adversaries and, fighting, became a single thing.
He reached the edge of the pool, executed the turn, and continued in the opposite direction. To swim so well, and so long, he must have had tremendous physical strength and perfect control of his breathing. But he couldn’t stop, because someone else was doing the same thing in the waters of the Styx, surrounded by volcanic vapors and the sound of drums. He completed another length, and another, and still another. It was something more than a simple contest with himself. And at the same time, the sound of his passage, amplified by the resonance chamber of the enormous subterranean structure, was a distillation of rage and starlike solitude.
When the contest was over, the policemen saw a shockingly thin, sensual body climbing up the ladder. And, amid the streams of water descending from his curls, a smile that spoke of illness and contagion. They covered him with a bathrobe, as if it would serve more than anything else to protect him. They led him upstairs.
I arrived later, when it was all over. Simply, a girl had kept me all morning and so that day I hadn’t gone with them to sell. One might say that in this way I was saved. But time is a master capable of destroying even its favorite students, and the slender profile of the ’90s was ready to spring the trap. I didn’t see them again for some years, my best friends. And when I did see them again we were no longer us.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
BOOSTA is well-known in Italy as both a writer and a musician. His real name is Davide Dileo and he was born in Turin in 1974. He has released four albums and performed over five hundred concerts with his group Subsonica, which won MTV’s Best Italian Act at their European Awards. He has also become a major producer and mixer for various artists. His first two books are Dianablu and Un’ora e mezza, which will soon be made into a film.
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO is a former anti-Mafia prosecutor base
d in Bari. He is the author of the international best sellers Involuntary Witness, A Walk in the Dark, and Reasonable Doubts. The Past Is a Foreign Country, a darker and more personal novel, is currently being made into a film. He is the only Italian crime writer whose full catalog has been translated into English. While not writing, he works as a consultant to an Italian parliamentary commission investigating the Mafia.
DIEGO DE SILVA is a criminal lawyer whose first novel, La donna di scorta, was published in 1999. His follow-up, Certi bambini, about growing up in the south of Italy, was turned into a film by the Frazzi Bros. His novel I Want to Watch was translated into English and has been compared to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. He has since written Da un’altra carne and Non avevo capito niente. He is a regular contributor to Il Mattino, an Italian newspaper.
MARCELLO FOIS is an award-winning Italian author, poet, and screenwriter, born in Nuoro in 1960. His first novel, Ferro recente, was published in 1992 and was followed by Picta, which won the Premio Calvino, and Nulla, winner of the Premio Dessi. He has written a crime trilogy—Sempre caro, Sangue dal cielo, and L’altro mundo—the first volume of which appeared in English as The Advocate. He has also written extensively for TV, radio, and film.
CRISTIANA DANILA FORMETTA is a young Salerno author who has never set foot outside Italy. Her books include the collection Il nero che fa tendenza and the novella The Sex Lives of Chameleons, which was translated into English by Maxim Jakubowski. A frequent contributor to leading Italian underground magazines, Formetta is known for her complex mix of erotica and noir. She is currently writing her first full-length novel, while also working as an editor for an independent Italian publisher.
ENRICO FRANCESCHINI is a well-known Italian journalist and broadcaster. Born in Bologna in 1956, he has worked for twenty years as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper La Repubblica, stationed in Moscow, New York, Washington, Jerusalem, and now London. He won the prestigious Europa Prize for his reporting of the 1994 popular uprising in Moscow. In addition to nonfiction, he has written novels, including La donna della Piazza Rossa and Fuori stagione.
GIUSEPPE GENNA was born in Milan in 1969. His novels include Catrame, Assalto a un tempo devastato, In the Name of Ishmael (which was translated into English), Non toccare la pelle del drago, Grande Madre Rossa, and Dies Irae. He is also a member of the notorious Luther Blissett writing collective.
MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI is a British editor and writer. Following a long career in book publishing, during which he was responsible for several major crime imprints, he opened London’s mystery bookshop Murder One. He reviews crime fiction for the Guardian, runs London’s Crime Scene Festival, and is an advisor to Italy’s annual Courmayeur Noir in Festival. His latest crime novel is Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer, and he edits the annual Best British Mysteries series.
NICOLA LAGIOIA was born in Bari in 1973. He is one of the leading lights of a new generation of young Italian writers, having edited a number of anthologies, along with the Nichel imprint, for the publisher Minimum Fax. His first novel, Tre sistemi per sbarazzarsi di Tolstoj, was published in 2001, and was followed by a collection of essays, Occidente per principianti, and a nonfiction book, Babbo Natale.
CARLO LUCARELLI is one of Italy’s national treasures: author, screenwriter, television personality, academic. He has written over thirty books, including the Bologna-set Grazia Negro series, Lupo mannaro, Almost Blue (winner of the British Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award), and Day After Day. His Inspector De Luca series, set during the time of the Salo Republic, has also been translated into English.
FRANCESCA MAZZUCATO splits her time between the Ligurian coast and Bologna. A prolific and controversial writer, she is also an active presence on the web, with two important web sites: Books and Other Sorrows and Erotica. Her books include La sottomissione di Ludovica, Relazioni scandalosamente pure, Transgender Generation, Amore a Marsiglia, Hot Line, Web Cam, Diario di una blogger, Enigma Veneziano, L’anarchiste, and the recent collection Magnificat marsigliese.
ANTONIO PASCALE was born in Naples in 1966 and now lives and works in Rome. His first book, La città distratta, a nonfiction story set in Caserta, won the Elsa Morante Award. He is also the author of the story collection La manutenzione degli affetti, and his controversial first novel, Passa la bellezza, was published in 2005. This was followed by S’è fatta ora and a travel book, Non è per cattiveria. He writes regularly for the newspaper La Repubblica.
TOMMASO PINCIO’S first book, M., a literary reinterpretation of Blade Runner, was published in 1999. Later novels include Lo spazio sfinito and the controversial Love-Shaped Story, which was translated into English, about the imaginary life of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain. A fan of contemporary American writing, which he chronicles in the Italian edition of Rolling Stone and leading newspapers, Pincio lives in Rome. His writing pseudonym was inspired by Thomas Pynchon.
EVELINA SANTANGELO was born and raised in Palermo. She studied English and linguistics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and worked as a journalist for L’Ora. She now works in book publishing in Turin, teaches creative writing at the Scuola Holden, and writes. She is the author of the novels L’occhio cieco del mondo, La lucertola color smeraldo, and Il giorno degli orsi volanti.
ANTONIO SCURATI was born in Naples in 1969 and is a writer and academic, which includes his role as the coordinator of Bergamo University’s center for the language of war and violence. He has published several books of nonfiction, and his first novel, Il sopravvissuto, published in 2005, won the Premio Campiello. His major historical novels, Il rumore sordo della battaglia (2002) and Una storia romantica (2007), were best sellers in Italy.
CHIARA STANGALINO worked for many years for one of Italy’s leading publishing houses. She is now a freelance festival organizer, including her work on the Courmayeur Noir in Festival literary events and Festarch, the Sardinian architecture festival. She has also directed a documentary film about American crime writer Joe R. Lansdale. She lives in Turin.
NICOLETTA VALLORANI began her prolific writing career as a science-fiction author. Born in the Marche region, she has a degree in foreign languages and American literature and currently teaches at the Statale University of Milan. She won the Premio Urania in 1992 and published her first crime novel, Dentro la Notte, e Ciao in 1995. She has since published ten more novels, including Occhi di lupo, Come una balena, La fatona, Eva, and Cordelia, as well as several children’s books.
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