Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Any mentally sane individual would feel dismay upon entering Taranto from the Ionian state highway. The tranquil promise of the seacoast shattered against the crusher towers of the cement plant, against the fractionating columns of the refinery, against the mills, against the mineral dumps of the gigantic industrial complex that clawed the city. Every so often a foreman would be carted off in an ambulance after a grinding machine spun out of control. A plant worker would find his forearm stripped bare to the bone by the explosion of a machine tool. The machinery was organized so that it hurt men according to a cost-benefit equation calibrated by other men in offices where they optimized the most unbridled perversions. The regional assemblies ratified them, and the courts acquitted them at the end of battles the local press fed on. Thus, Taranto was a city of blast furnaces. But Bari was a city of offices, courthouses, journalists, and sports clubs. In Taranto it was possible to link a urothelial cell carcinoma classified as “highly improbable in an adolescent” to the presence of dioxin, used in ninety percent of Italy’s entire national production. But in Bari, on Sunday afternoons, an elderly appeals court judge might sit comfortably on the living room sofa watching his granddaughter pretend to swing a hula hoop around her hips, dressed in a filthy pair of sneakers and nothing else. That episode had been recounted by a worker at the cement plant whose own daughter was working as a maid in the regional capital.

  That’s why he shouldn’t have accepted the salesman’s invitation. What did it matter if he’d gotten a home of his own out of the story? Four sparkly clean rooms in a building in the better part of Taranto.

  In Bari, after dinner, he abandoned the salesman to his fate.

  He had no time to enjoy the solitude because he immediately got lost. He made a left turn, then a right and then another right, and found himself right back under the blinking neon owl outside the eyeglasses store. He cursed as he swung the van around. An advertising panel scrolled vertically from a sunny ad for toothpaste to a velvety one for a clothing store. That was when Orazio thought about the jeans still hidden in the van.

  After driving around aimlessly for half an hour, he pulled onto the bridge that connected the center of town to the residential area. Ten minutes later he saw the Ikea tower and felt relief. He realized that he was on the state highway facing the cement barrier that separated the traffic going in opposite directions.

  The person he was all this time later made a tremendous effort to lift a crutch to shoulder height. Wild-eyed, he pointed to the dark space beyond the breakwater, as if to say that not even a Man who’d come walking over the waters could have warded off his accident. The mistakes had piled up in the empty primordial space where life stories are written before the events make them indelible and comprehensible.

  He barreled down the deserted state highway, jamming on the accelerator. The roadway rose so that the vineyards stretched out as far as the eye could see. The moon was just a few days short of full and right now it gave the illusion that it could wax ad infinitum. He accelerated into the curve, altering the relationship between the passing seconds and the reflectors on the pavement. In the distance, beyond a second curve, he saw the inflatable man flailing wildly atop the roof of an auto repair shop. There was something ridiculous about the dance. Orazio furrowed his eyebrows without losing sight of the angle of the road: the absence of lights in the visible stretch corresponded to the lack of dangers in the blind spot. He would have been able to see a car with its parking lights out of order. But what happened was impossible to avoid.

  A woman, or maybe she was a girl. She was walking in the exact center of the roadway, completely naked, and covered with blood.

  He violently jerked the wheel to the right. That was a mistake, since the van immediately shot in the opposite direction. It went whizzing past the girl. It hit the guardrail. The van slid across the road until it smashed into the barrier on the opposite side. It tipped, flipped, and landed on its side, so that he could very clearly see the wall of metal coming back toward him.

  He woke up again at Bari General Hospital, in a room with bare walls where an old man with a fractured femur kept moaning.

  The first signs of a sunny morning entered through the window. Dazed by the pain medicine, Orazio reached his arm out toward the nightstand. He felt his other arm. He grabbed the bottle. The long drink of water refreshed him—his thoughts lined up in a bridge of light, but then collapsed, jumping back into line in a different order.

  He’d had a crash, but he was alive. A nasty crash. He remembered the highway, even the salesman. The van must be a wreck. Then something. An opalescent marble glittered amidst the rough gears he was using to reconstruct what had happened. That was strange, because the gears were interlocking, while the marble floated in thin air. It gleamed again and disappeared. The girl. That had to be a ghost, an imaginary shape risen from the depths of consciousness. He felt an itch. The patient in the adjoining bed wouldn’t stop whining. He scratched his face. He scratched his left hand with his right. Still, an itch. He jerked himself upright, into a sitting position. He felt a tug, reached his arm down toward his right leg.

  Two nurses came running at the sound of his screaming.

  The next morning, as he lay in bed with the stump of his leg draining, the head physician came to see him, accompanied by a nurse. From that point on, Orazio began to believe that the girl was real.

  The doctor was an old man, tall and deathly pale, with wispy white hair. He leaned over him. He observed him longer than was necessary. He smiled. He re-assumed the chilly persona that must have fit him comfortably and spoke to the nurse. The stump needed to be washed with delicate soap, he told her. An antiperspirant would reduce excessive sweating, while the inflammations should be treated with lotions.

  “A corticosteroid cream,” he specified in a voice that was a caress to the patient’s ears, and an order to the nurse.

  Public hospitals. Orazio knew those places. Once a cousin of his had had her appendix removed, and after the operation they’d left her in the hallway for five hours. The head physician was a nameplate on a door with no one ever behind it. However much the old man might look at him, from behind the protection of his summa cum laude degrees, Orazio recognized in his eyes a strange eagerness to please.

  And so he lay motionless in the bed. He stared at the head physician so that the old man’s eyes followed his as he shifted them toward the other bed.

  “Isn’t there a fucking thing you can do to make him shut up?”

  Two hours later, he’d been moved. A single room with a private bathroom. Really, an oversized room overlooking the eucalyptus trees in the courtyard. Maybe an oversized records room, emptied out at the last second, to which had been added a bed, a bedside table, and a television stand. Each of which now emanated the dreary aura of objects out of place.

  They got him settled in the bed, vanished for a few hours. In the afternoon, a nurse came in carrying a tray with coffee and grapefruit juice. He furrowed his brow and glared at her. He pushed aside the tray, freeing up his line of sight. “What a pathetic excuse for a screen.” He asked them to replace the television set. The next day two attendants were carrying in a 32-inch set fresh from the mall.

  When the head physician came by to see him again, Orazio asked to have the nurse stationed outside the door. His request was granted.

  The next day, the head physician returned, escorted by two men in dark suits. Under the jacket of the first man he glimpsed a dangling hem that looked very much as if it, too, might belong to a labcoat. The second man was in his early fifties, and his hair was brylcreemed. Notable polka-dot tie, chunky-toothed smile. He introduced himself: “I’m Engineer Ranieri.” They started talking. The first man felt called upon to lower the shades, thinning the light.

  At this point, no one was bringing up blood alcohol levels. At the rec center, no one was making any more wisecracks about the possibility that the crash had been fata
l mostly for his memory. Those jokes had been made at first. He’d tell the story and the others would shake their heads. One of them had gotten hold of a copy of the paper from the day when the news report should have been published. “Well?” He slapped the counter with the rolled-up paper. There they are, the things that happened that day. An out-of-work man had set fire to himself outside the Apple Store on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The daughter of a well-known builder and developer had killed herself by jumping off the top tier of a parking structure. There was also a car crash on a highway, but on the Autostrada Adriatica. No reports of a girl on State Highway 100 at two in the morning—neither naked, nor dressed, nor blood-smeared, nothing at all.

  “So, Ora’, do you want to tell us what really happened?”

  But a few weeks later, Orazio had moved house. From the one-bedroom apartment in the old part of the city he’d moved into an airy apartment overlooking Via d’Aquino. The only problem was that there was no elevator. Absurd as it seems, he only realized it the second time he tried to climb the stairs, hobbling up them on his crutches. He didn’t like it one bit. Three months later, a team of construction workers was hard at work on the scaffolding that rose up the side of the apartment building.

  To anyone not convinced by the stump of his leg, this was more than adequate.

  But Orazio hadn’t stopped thinking about the girl.

  It was early May, his hospital stay was coming to an end. One after the other, they’d unhooked his tubes and lightened his dose of pharmaceuticals. They’d given him a pair of crutches.

  After his conversation with the head physician, it had become clear to him that it had been no dream. From a simple ghost, he had transformed the girl into the cause of the accident. Only that meant he’d now placed her in a service role that likewise stripped her of significance. She became the cause of the crash just as a tree or an oil patch might have been, as if tree and oil patch were logical transitions capable of leading to the word “amputation.”

  Every now and then, curses echoed through the hall. That’s when they called for the orthopedic surgeon.

  It wasn’t just the fact that he mentally perceived the presence of his leg. He caught himself actually moving the toes of his right foot, he felt an itch on his right ankle, and pain—piercing stabs between his kneecap and shinbone, or on the knee that was no longer there. He clenched his teeth and broke out in a cold sweat.

  Then, one night, he tracked the girl down once and for all.

  The hospital was shrouded in silence. The laments of the other patients didn’t reach his room. Neither, for that matter, did the sounds of the voices of the staff on duty. He had fallen asleep watching TV. He’d awakened with a start to a commercial for a jeweler offering to buy gold at twenty-five euros a gram. Two young men were rummaging around in a corpse’s mouth, and in the next scene they were handing over the gold teeth to the jeweler. He switched off the television set, and rolled over onto his side. He must have fallen asleep at the precise moment he felt the urge to go to the bathroom. He dragged himself out of bed with his mind elsewhere, convinced he’d be able to support himself on both legs. He collapsed face-first onto the floor.

  Angry, discomfited, he felt the chill on his forehead.

  He tried to get himself into a sitting position by lifting with both hands. His breathing was labored. The room was immersed in quiet. The shadow of the eucalyptus trees stretched across the ceiling so that the leafy branches turned into seaweed, coral branches tossing in the shifting currents. His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. It seemed to him that the floor was swept by a faint luminescence—the catalysis of fireflies and sea anemones—the radiance of the early May nights that the absence of artificial light gradually revealed. But the light that was capable of leaving him open-mouthed was right in front of him.

  Further on, beyond the wide-open bathroom door, the magnifying mirror fastened to the wall was flooded with the moon. Reduced by half up in the sky, it still appeared full in the concavity of the reflective surface—a silvery puddle that emerged from the past, at the bottom of which he seemed to find her again. The small opaque patch took form, drawing closer. Orazio realized once and for all that she was beautiful. He realized that she was in her death throes. He realized, with a shiver, that sheer will couldn’t have kept anyone on their feet like that, which meant there had been something else making her place one foot in front of the other. Movement itself, more than that from which the movement physically derived. A quicksand, a dead swelling beneath the summer rain.

  He understood, above all, that he’d swerved not to avoid her but to save himself, because everything about her was a magnet and an absence of will, the hypnotic call that, once followed, makes everything identical and perfect, so that we cease to exist.

  Seated on the sofa, his legs crossed, he crooked his arm along the armrest so that he held the handsome gold watch dial up before his eyes. It was a quarter to three in the morning, and Vittorio was waiting for the phone call that would tell him whether or not his daughter was still alive.

  He was breathing slowly in the den of the villa that he’d purchased after the birth of his eldest child. The first person to live there had been a large landowner under the Bourbon dynasty. It had become the property of the local podestà, and then passed into the hands of an elderly senator who wisely stopped thinking of it as his home when, sensing as he dozed the pull of the thread tying him to Rome, he attributed, night after night, a syllable to every jerk of the string, so that he was able to read in advance the judicial sentences of the coming year. At that point, Vittorio Salvemini made the first bad bargain of his life, purchasing the building at market price.

  It was 1971, and the employees of the neighboring South Bari Tennis Club saw him arrive one morning, escorted by a small team of men, the bare minimum necessary. Tall and tan, dressed in a tailor-made linen suit, he clenched between his lips a self-satisfied smirk that no tailor would have attributed to a tradition older than ten years. The others were too rough even for the furthest outlying areas—five men, short and muscular, to whom even dialect was an achievement. They walked up the drive, one after another taking the lead with sharp shouts, sniffing the air like the vanguard of a barbarian king who had just crossed the sheltering Alps.

  Here comes another one who doesn’t know his place, thought the custodian of the tennis club, lowering his gaze to the chalk lines he hadn’t stopped tracing.

  The senator had come close to transforming the villa into a modern residence behind the art nouveau façade. Vittorio was of another mind. He had the furniture heaped up in the garden. He ordered his men to uproot the marble statues, and beneath them reappeared the slabs of stone aggregate. Every time he heard a hollow sound when he rapped his knuckles against the wall, his face lit up. Away with the partition walls, away with the false ceilings. The workers knocked down one wall after another.

  The men, it later emerged, came from the same town where he was born. They would have been normal farmhands if the times they lived in hadn’t left them unemployed before they could learn the trade from their fathers. More than out-of-work laborers, they were his slaves, creatures without a past, faithful and willing to do anything. They hauled sacks bursting with rubble and garbage without ever taking a break, and they’d have tried to rotate a house barehanded if he’d asked them, because he, not they—at least so they believed—knew precisely the point beyond which they would collapse, never to rise again.

  Vittorio wanted them to finish the work in just a few weeks. To save time, he one morning authorized them to burn all the furniture he had no intention of reusing down at the far end of the garden. After half an hour, one of the workers came running up to him, out of breath. He was gesticulating. On his face was an expression of disbelief. Vittorio followed him. Just on the other side of the boundary line between properties, a number of men were gesturing in indignation. Two of them wore shorts and polo shirts. They were po
inting at the black column rising into the sky.

  The smoke, after drifting across the tennis courts, was brushing against the gazebo, where loungers had been hastily abandoned by ladies in swimsuits who were now chattering indignantly, their hands on their hips.

  “I’m so sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  He made a show of bowing in an exaggerated fashion. He was smiling. A part of him was flattered by the idea that he’d bought a house in a neighborhood where, albeit for a complaint, he could attract the attention of these kinds of people, men who, even in their underwear, could evoke the image of a gold nameplate screwed into the door of an office that they had never needed to take by storm. Their faces luxuriated in a special form of relaxation, the apparent state of idiocy particular to the privileged, in which Vittorio identified a further form of intelligence. No trace of the metal foil that darkens beneath the skin thanks to friction with the world. Their grandfathers might perhaps have felt fear in their lives, and their fathers only the volatile apprehension that filled the monarchs of bygone times with wisdom.

  Still, a part of that part of him would instead have led him to kneel at their feet, to kiss the marks of the tennis balls that they’d been driving for decades over the red clay.

  “My workers must have thought that the wind would blow all day long toward the road,” he lied, because it would have been worse to admit that it had never occurred to him that at that time of the day men might be doing something other than work, or that women would be out of the house for reasons other than adultery.