Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  “I see that there’s a bar,” he went on, pointing to the gazebo, “and I realize that I’ve inconvenienced them as well. And so . . . ”

  “You have first-rate powers of observation.”

  No one laughed. The man who had spoken was in his early fifties, not especially tall, all gussied up at ten in the morning. Jacket and trousers draped in a facsimile of elegance, an intentional step behind genuine elegance, but only so as to show it the way. Vittorio decided that this must be the club director. He remained confident: “And so, in the hope you’ll forgive me . . . ” he went on, and as he spoke, he felt a twinge of hope quiver in his chest, “I’d like to treat you all to a nice round of champagne.”

  Two men turned on their heels then and there. They headed off toward the tennis courts as if the offer had settled any remaining doubts about the stranger.

  “Signor . . . ?” the director smiled with venomous charm.

  Vittorio uttered first and last name, hoping that the man was capable of glimpsing them from the future, the letters, from that perspective, written in an ever larger typeface, the way he saw them himself on the days when inspiration (nothing but the anguish of the talented) allowed him to perch at the far end of the decade.

  “Signor Salvemini,” the man went on, “to enter this club all you need is a membership pass. It’s small and rectangular, and to procure one you need to submit a request supported by five members who’ve renewed their own memberships for the past ten years. Which of our old friends have the pleasure of being yours as well?”

  A few more men moved away. Vittorio did not retreat. As more and more men went to join their wives, he sensed that, for the director, questions of principle were once again mingling with practical considerations.

  “May I speak with you for a moment?”

  “Why of course.”

  “Earlier, you said that I had good powers of observation. I’m afraid for myself that you’ve put your finger on the heart of the matter.”

  The director’s face continued to register curiosity.

  A propensity for detail, Vittorio went on, had led him to notice the deposits of rust on the lampposts on the second tennis court, the pitted pavement at a certain point along the front drive—where the eye strained to reach, though not his eye, and not at sunset, since at that time of day the rainbows produced by the sprinklers faded away. He’d noticed the signs of wear on the façade of the administrative building and the necessity of replacing the modular dance floor from which at night (on those occasions he and his workers had stayed late working on the renovations) the notes of instruments playing mazurkas, polkas, and sambas floated across the lawn, along with the laughter of women and men hidden behind the hedges.

  He kept to himself the fact that those voices constituted, for him, the sweetest of possible calls. In them he sensed the movement of surnames that appeared on zoning plans, flinty tablets of laws that he could only work around. He promised to take care of the small amounts of work required. It wouldn’t cost the club a cent. In fact, he had no idea whether he could even afford to bring skilled workers over from the other construction sites. In all likelihood, the debts the banks held would require him to further speed up his schedule. And yet, hadn’t he just undertaken the reconstruction of the entire dance floor, free of charge?

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  He pointed to his workers. Without a word from him, they were doing their best to put out that small bonfire. Strong as bulls, intuitive as horses capable of sensing the coming spring from the scent of blossoming oats. He’d summon more men, he told the director. They’d be done applying new coats of paint to the lampposts before the members of the tennis club even realized they were there. These were men accustomed to far more demanding endeavors. Last year they’d introduced the idea of row houses to the province of Taranto; and now, in Santa Cesarea, they were completing in record time a vacation resort that would yank the district out of the past.

  “Where were you born?” Vittorio asked, as he adjusted his jacket. The director smiled. Because Puglia was certainly not Bari, he went on. It wasn’t Lecce and it was hardly Foggia. For that matter, it was a land that you had to have the guts to kneel down and kiss with the rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer. Vast expanses of wheat and fields of tobacco, dirt roads that fetched up in the piazzas of towns and villages whose inhabitants elbowed each other aside to hurl wads of cash into the faces of the statues of their patron saints. They prayed to God through the eyes of their parish priests for a building permit that would allow them to sell farmland that was ever less productive.

  The proposal in question is approved by a majority. In Santa Cesarea they’d been forced to blow up a deconsecrated church. In the province of Taranto, they’d had to wait for a fire to devour 225 acres of pine grove before crossing the threshold of the city council.

  Crossing that boundary had been nothing but a first step. Over the years he’d shared meals with mayors and struggled to follow conversations so tangled an interpreter should have been present. Men with shirts dotted with spaghetti sauce who practically forced you to take their cleaning women to bed as revenge for the favors you were doing them. Lunch after lunch after lunch. And now he was in the regional capital, at the age of thirty-five, the sole owner of a company that no one had ever heard of. But just ask the Bantus of Pulsano. Gather information from the aboriginals of Campi Salentina. Take a Southeastern Railroad train and admire, I beg you, in these northernmost reaches of the Horn of Africa, the first hotel in Puglia to boast a golf course, a hotel on whose cornices, if they hadn’t already been covered over by blooming geraniums, you’d be able to notice the name of Salvemini Construction carved in bas-relief.

  “Hurry up and get that little fire put out, or we’ll have to call the police on you.”

  It was too bad that Vittorio took that phrase the wrong way. If pride hadn’t blinded him, he’d have glimpsed in the eyes of the club director a very different signal. From a gentleman in pinstripes to a gentleman in a linen three-piece suit, the invitation was merely to raise the stakes. But Vittorio turned his back on the director without a word of farewell. He headed straight for his workers. He yelled at them to work faster until his scolding calmed them.

  In the days that followed he extended the working hours. He was convinced that they could get it done in less than the short time he’d already allotted. He thought back to the members of the country club. Did they drive gleaming sports cars? He knew how much work went into paying for one. Were they napping in the shade of the city’s finest lawyers? Vittorio knew that behind the zoning plans there was legislation, and behind that (which they considered the solid earth that had forever been beneath their feet) there was nothing but an initial act of arbitrary personal will.

  He ordered his men to dismantle the old wall-mounted armoires. He had them hammer the granite flowerpots at the foot of the interior staircase to rubble and dust.

  The morning he decided to knock down the large expanse of wall separating the front hall from the living room, though, the foreman finally balked. There was a good chance that the wall was load-bearing. Vittorio smiled. The foreman’s fear confirmed the presence of a seal that remained unbroken.

  Once the wall had been demolished, the bright light that poured in on the rubble gave him the impression that he’d finally burned through the faint patina of time, allowing him to see, and perhaps even to touch—as if the villa could rejoin something that reached back earlier than its own foundations: the Austrians before the Bourbons, and the Aragonese before the Austrians—an uncertain presence that he recognized from having perhaps glimpsed it in some recurring dream. Namely, glory. Impossible to give it a more specific name, because its power—provided a man was sufficiently daring to reach out his hand to it—consisted in the fact that any name would do.

  The following year, Vittorio had won his first major contract, in Bari, for a small universit
y cafeteria next to the building that housed the economics department. Ten years later, he was constantly shuttling between Sardinia and the Costa Brava, and so it fell to his wife to toss his invitations to evenings at the Rotary Club into the trash.

  He looked at the hands on his watch dial once again. Upstairs, his wife and Gioia were asleep, blissfully unaware.

  He left the sofa and went over to the window overlooking the garden. He watched the shadows of the trees around the fountain. Something moved in the leaves without discomfiting the shadows. The last time he’d seen Clara had been the week before. She’d come by to pick up an old trench coat that had lain forgotten for years in what she alone still considered Michele’s bedroom.

  The coat hung in the back of an armoire that by now was packed with all manner of things, wrapped in a plastic cocoon ever since the days when Gioia was still just a girl and Ruggero was shining at the medical school where he was specializing in oncology and on his way to graduating first in his class. They all still lived under the same roof, back then. And even if, with the passing of the years, that bedroom had been transformed into a sort of storage closet, every time Clara came by to visit, she lingered in front of that door as if behind it she would still find her younger brother.

  It’s not as if he’s dead.

  Then she’d continue down the hall, a glint of contrariness swallowed in her gaze.

  Vittorio thought he knew what was bothering her. She blamed him and his wife for having, over the years, allowed dust to cover the star globe, for having let the ashwood furniture fall out of their shared tastes so that they had an excuse to discard every last stick of it.

  If, however, the last traces of his son had almost evaporated, that was, according to Vittorio, not the reason. Quite the opposite. Since he’d left Bari, Michele hadn’t come to see his family more than five times. Five visits in ten years.

  Michele never spent the night. He’d arrive from Rome and leave the same day. Without wasting so much as a syllable, he’d made it clear what the odds were on the likelihood of his spending so much as a single night in the house where he’d grown up. Vittorio would have liked to know what urgent responsibilities summoned him back to the capital. He wasn’t a successful professional the way Ruggero was. Saying “he works in Rome” was just a way of fending off the curiosity of his acquaintances. At thirty-three, Michele scraped by in Rome. He wrote for newspapers that went out of business after a month or else forgot about him, evidence that leaving Bari hadn’t solved all his problems, as the psychiatrists had hoped. The train schedules even kept him from staying for dinner. In the implausibility of those obstacles, Vittorio glimpsed the pretense of a duty to safeguard. To safeguard them. As if sitting down for a meal with Michele exposed them, not so much to embarrassment as to danger. Were they still ready to leap out of bed at the sound of a beam collapsing, devoured by the flames of a fire set in the living room?

  Clara would have run that risk. She and Michele were separated by hundreds of miles, their only contact reduced to cordial chats over the phone during the holidays. There was no longer the same asphyxiating intimacy that had so worried Vittorio years ago. And yet, Michele’s older sister would still have unhesitatingly rushed into the flames for him.

  For that reason, the fact that the last time he’d ever laid eyes on her was as she emerged from that room struck Vittorio as the bitterest of coincidences.

  Vittorio was climbing the last steps of the interior staircase. This was a complicated period. Business was creaking under the weight of uncertainty, and the whole Porto Allegro affair was robbing him of sleep. He’d heard the door click shut and then he’d seen his daughter suddenly emerge from the far end of the hallway: an elongated s in the darkness, miniskirt and white blouse, the trench coat she’d just taken from the armoire clutched firmly in her bejeweled fingers. She’d brushed past him saying “Ciao, Papà” with a faint smile on her lips. Vittorio hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask her if she wanted to stay for lunch. Clara was already walking out into the garden, ready to head back to her own apartment or to take a stroll in the center of town, leaving, beyond the door, the idea of a flock of birds rising into the air from a beach without witnesses.

  The equivalent of a filial benediction, Vittorio had thought vaguely, as if all his problems were on the verge of being solved.

  He threw open the sashes of the casement window. He received the cool caress of the springtime night. The moonlit sky gave him the feeling that he could, paradoxically, read earthly distances, as if in place of the nothingness of space he could see Brazil, the United States, and China . . . The constellation of Los Angeles. The sleepless nebula of Tokyo. As he waited to learn Clara’s fate, the sun had already been shining on Phuket for four hours. That meant that a small army of bulldozers was busying itself around the small hotel complex that he was building with his partners over there. By the time they stopped working in Thailand, it would be three in the afternoon in Turkey, where he was completing work on a spa. In Italy he’d call the supervisors of the various construction sites with the moon already high over the Bosphorus, leaving only the hours between ten and eleven at night empty of activity.

  That was the only moment during which the machinery everywhere in his little empire would fall still. Vittorio ultimately came to consider that hour a dangerous vulnerability. Wasn’t that the time of day he’d first received news of the problems with his vacation resort in Porto Allegro? And the heart attacks? Both of them right after dinnertime. “Not actually heart attacks, just particularly violent angina attacks, from which for that matter you’ve recovered completely,” Ruggero repeated, barely concealing his annoyance.

  Still, at seventy-five, Vittorio could no longer smoke. At tennis he wouldn’t last past the first set, and his memory was no longer that prodigious thing men his age had envied him for so many years. To say nothing of how the world had changed. He’d have bet against Argentina in soccer a hundred times, but he would never have dreamed how the thoughts, frustrations, and shared confidences of millions of adolescents slumped in front of a computer screen could fatten the wallet of the most cunning of their ranks. There had been a time when all he needed was a little confidential information from a union organizer—a tip about Fiat management being ready to take to the streets in defiance of the striking metalworkers—and he’d buy some shares. Now there were algorithms sailing around the internet, issuing huge buy orders, canceling them a split second before they took effect, and instantly issuing new orders to profit from the price variations they themselves had generated.

  There were nights when he looked up at the starry sky—the world was once again revolving upon its own axis, and he feared that the show was happening outside his line of sight.

  Clara.

  A ladybug came in through the open window. A nondescript black speck transformed itself into a handsome vermilion shell as it emerged from the darkness of the night. Its flight, slow and tremulous, could have been extinguished by a simple clap of the hands. Its pleasing appearance for humans made that eventuality fairly rare. Birds on the other hand were deceived for the opposite reason—they associated that spotted red with the poisonous nature of mushrooms and berries. In this way, the little ladybugs could better play the role with which nature had entrusted them: they managed to devour as many as a hundred aphids a day, and they did it with a voracity, a rapidity, a cold convulsive mandibular movement that on a large scale would have been intolerable to human sensibilities.

  Like a Japanese umbrella, the insect resheathed its wings and paused on one of the doors of the bookshelf.

  The feeling he had about Clara was that he never understood her quite well enough. Snapshots of his eldest daughter emerged, each detached from the others. The only objectifiable theme was the fact that she was attractive, and that was a puff of air no net could capture for long. Quiet and taciturn until the age of thirteen. Logical without being pedantic at fourteen. Magneti
c at sixteen—jeans and long-sleeved cotton shirts, hair worn loose and long, straight-backed and composed on an armchair in the living room. A Mayan idol whose touch unleashed visions from the future: the caravels of Christopher Columbus, the mass rapes of the conquistadors.

  At eighteen, she sometimes resembled certain movie stars after the va-va-voom period. Her curves soft, though not excessively so, a Natalie Wood without the final gloss.

  Vittorio couldn’t grasp what linked one transformation to the other. He’d had to wait for Clara to get married before he understood her place in the world. Until that moment, however, he’d struggled. The young woman passed lightly through the rooms of the villa. It was rare to hear her raise her voice or even try to start an argument. Calm incarnate. But she seemed to be the portion, as it were, favored by the light, and he was afraid to receive confirmation of the fact by those who, over time, really did enjoy the benefits of the presence of his daughter. Young men.

  The specimens that appeared for many years at the end of the drive couldn’t be described as anything but embarrassing. The important thing seemed that they be obviously marked by want and poverty. Lowlifes, practically. Individuals who were explicitly or implictly hostile to the paternal authority he represented. They would come pick her up in the afternoon and he wouldn’t hear a thing from her until the middle of the night. As he lay in bed with his wife, Vittorio would hear the door click shut downstairs. He thought he could sense Clara’s hair releasing the scornful nocturnal power with which a motorcycle ride had charged it.

  When he tried to scold her, his daughter’s lovely mouth lightened in an expression that had a hint of melancholy. Though she was still standing in front of him, she eluded him as surely as she did when she wasn’t home. In those moments, Vittorio not only failed to understand where but what this daughter—whose essence dissolved, leaving in her place only the naked heartbeat of a regret, perhaps even of a sorrow, in the presence of which all were forced to take a step back—was.