Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  He tried to better modulate his tone. In the past he’d had his problems with them. The scope of the Salveminis’ business was such that occasionally they overstepped the bounds of the law. That, unfortunately, was a normal thing. Put an elephant in a room full of glasses and then scold it if it breaks one. More than once they’d taken their respective documents before a judge. Skirmishes.

  “Go ahead,” said old Salvemini without moving an inch.

  Already, putting his hand on the man’s shoulder hadn’t come naturally to him. There was a whole school of gestures of that kind, of which Piscitelli was no master. To find the right tone he tried drawing from colleagues of bygone generations, the ones who uttered their vowels so ineptly that they undermined the unity of the nation with the very tool that should have tightened its collar.

  “It’s something that might save time,” the assistant district attorney said awkwardly, “so I wanted to ask you . . . Well. Was this the first time your daughter tried to take her own life?”

  Vittorio’s eyes opened a little wider.

  There had always been gossip about the Salveminis, certain rumors had been circulating for years.

  “I understand I’m just piling sorrow on top of sorrow.”

  The words that had come out of his mouth were faker than ever. And yet, the lack of naturalness made him feel in tune with the old man. Two elevators traveling in opposite directions in two shafts of clear glass, destined to intersect for a few brief seconds. A magnetic tension threw open and then reshut a door inside the assistant district attorney. He saw something incomprehensibly unsettling. The sensation passed.

  “Oh,” said Vittorio, “it was a long time ago.”

  The assistant district attorney felt relieved. He told Vittorio that if someone would let him have the medical certificate attesting to that attempt, the case could be filed away in a few days.

  “Do you know what hospital she was taken to that time?”

  Old Salvemini involuntarily raised an eyebrow. The assistant district attorney did the same.

  In the distance, the rustle of the city rose just before its reawakening, the sound of cars without cars, the small electrical storm of the many who, on the verge of reopening their eyes, re-experienced in a few split seconds the film of the day that was about to begin.

  The fluorescent light in the parking structure flickered.

  “I have no idea where she was taken the other time,” Vittorio’s lips curled, “but I’ll arrange to have you informed.”

  She phoned her boyfriend and he was unable to say a single word. (Every time he tried, Gioia just cried louder and told the whole story over again from the beginning). She phoned her best friend. She phoned a university friend with whom she had a fraught relationship. All it took were a few words for all the mistrust to collapse. She phoned the teaching assistant who was helping her with her thesis. She called Rosa, the daughter of the woman who had been coming to the villa for years to do their ironing. As little girls, they had played together, and it was only later that Rosa had developed a tendency toward submissiveness around Gioia; it was hard to say to what extent that tendency might grow after the news Rosa was about to receive. She phoned an ex with whom she’d had a nasty breakup. He said, “I’m coming straight over,” as if he had never ordered her to ignore him if they ever chanced to run into each other on the street. With every phone call, she felt stronger and more desperate. She felt, growing within her, her power and her grace.

  The spirit of her dead sister was filling every empty space.

  Child of the pure unclouded brow. He hid the little book in the drawer and picked up the missal.

  Clara’s funeral was held at six in the evening in a rural church thirty miles away from Bari, a small building dating back to the year 1000 that stood white and solitary on a hill in the Alta Murgia.

  It had been such a beautiful day that a cascade of light still kindled the oaks and the asphodels, made the clouds of pollen blaze, and conferred on large, smooth, pale boulders the consistency of an optical illusion. Beyond the roof of a farmhouse, a small paved road ran downhill. There the trees grew thicker, giving anyone who looked a sudden sensation of melancholy, perhaps because the darkness—of which those shadows were a faint bellwether—would soon creep all the way up there.

  Standing erect at the altar, the priest threw his arms open wide. He said that, having brought into the world nothing but his own soul, there was nothing else a human being could drag away with him. He had hoped that this formulation would express his regret for the poor girl. But the words came out of his mouth like an admonishment hurled against the congregation, by and large older people dressed in black, in whose midst anyone who kept up with the local press could recognize a few well-known faces.

  Despicable old geezers, he thought.

  The priest was thirty-two, four years younger than the woman who’d committed suicide. He was skinny and short, with small eyes and the complexion of someone suffering from stress. He saw the young woman, from his vantage point, upside-down. She lay in repose in her dark-wood coffin, dressed in an outfit of viscose and virgin wool with a V-neck collar and a white fur appliqué along the sides. A trumpet will sound and the face, nicely treated with cosmetics, will conceal the lesions brought on by stagnating blood. She had broken bones everywhere, he thought. But in spite of the violent impact, and the work of the undertaker’s technicians, she had preserved a personality. There were bodies that death dispossessed instantly and bodies so lovely that they would admire their reflection for days in the survival of an idea. This young woman glowed in the offense. Her lips, stitched tight with thread, seemed to twist in a grimace of satisfaction. And then there was the residue of youth, the distant budding of childhood that the priest could still manage to glimpse.

  He turned his eyes back to the attendees.

  The morning had begun with a phone call from the diocesan administrator. He’d talked to the monsignor in the past few days, as well. They needed to make an appointment with the technicians to connect the parish website to the Episcopal Conference’s server. The yeast of the Sadducees. Only now his superior wanted to talk about something else. The calendar of meetings with the families. The redesign of the parish newspaper. The priest was walking from the galley kitchen to the living room with the moka pot and a demitasse, the phone clamped between neck and shoulder, when the monsignor’s voice grew thin. A funeral mass. To be celebrated that very day. People from Bari.

  “A woman, very young.”

  This is what his superior had told him in response to his request. But then he’d stayed silent, long enough for the priest to find, in the silence, wrath. He’d asked him the cause of death.

  The monsignor’s voice reemerged from the silence as if it had fallen into a crevasse and now showed the marks of a depth that overrode personal opinion. It asked him to reflect on the state into which anyone who uses narcotics sinks: “It seems that they found traces of cocaine.” Moreover, the monsignor added, there wasn’t any regulation in canon law forbidding the funeral service for a suicide. From the open window came birdcalls. The priest even thought he could hear the sound of the valley bottom. A music that climbed up the ravines, entered into the villages, and gathered up the sorrow of each individual, only to scatter it again amongst the rocks and the olive groves, like the ashes of the dead generations, so that the same burden of peace weighed on everyone. In this lay the unhappiness of the South, its untouched privilege. But behold how from Bari came the corpse of a dead girl. A girl who had jumped from sixty-five feet up. The obstinacy, the stubborn individual force of the city people.

  A diocesan priest had a duty to investigate the inner dimensions of the tragedy, the monsignor had said over the phone. Peer into the depths of the heart. See if somewhere there might have been a flicker of doubt countering the decision to throw herself off the parking structure, even though it was ultimately carried out. An
d then, while they were at it, the priest had grumbled to himself, try to figure out whether his superior’s insistence was bound up with the warp and weft of the world by the double thread of opportunity. Perhaps he knows her relatives, he thought, or owes them something.

  “How free to choose, in your opinion, could a young woman befuddled by narcotics really have been?”

  Those aren’t the effects of cocaine, he thought as he greedily smoked the first Marlboro of the day.

  Later the dead woman’s family arrived. It was three in the afternoon and the shade of the chestnut tree was stretching over the right side of the church. He saw them pulling back the curtains in the rectory. Father, mother, husband, and two siblings. The car was parked on the crescent of dry grass. He went up to the front door. He grabbed the door handle and pulled it toward him.

  They appeared in his presence speaking over each other, disheveled, on edge. “All you had to do was read the map,” objected the youngest girl, lowering her voice. He looked at her more closely. She was over twenty, but she was trailed by a heavy childish wake. Someone uttered her name. Gioia. She must have been a chubby little girl.

  “Our father would like to read from Psalm 40,” the older son broke in.

  He ushered them in. Their movements slowed. The reason they were there settled back over them. Now they were standing in the small living room, crushed by numbness. He was the priest: what was keeping him from reading from the instruction booklet? The girl was picking at her iPhone case. The dead woman’s husband was looking anywhere that he could to avoid meeting another pair of eyes. “Forgive me.” The mother. She’d asked for a glass of water. She thanked him and drank, shifting from a blank detachment to a dignified detachment. Her eyes were glistening. The noise of a chair slamming to the floor. The girl had tripped and now she was getting awkwardly to her feet, arrogant and irritated, grateful for the mishap. These were rich people. And even though they didn’t know how to behave—at every false step, the assignment of blame elsewhere—through the most unthinkable path, suffering had managed to find its way to them.

  “We are in agreement,” he’d allowed, “go ahead and read the psalm.”

  That was then they started quarreling. Gioia said that she wanted to be one of those carrying the coffin on her shoulder. Her mother took umbrage: “Not this again . . . ” as if they’d woken her up from one nightmare only to shove her back into the depths of the one before. Her older brother reiterated that the coffin would be carried by the employees of the funeral parlor. “As we agreed.” Gioia began to speak in a slightly angry voice. At a certain point her brother started yelling at her. She burst into tears. Just like a fourteen-year-old girl. The head of the family shook his head. The priest thought to himself that the girl’s corpse was drawing closer. Shut up in the back of the hearse, she must have already left the regional capital.

  They emerged from the rectory still arguing. Now it was the mother and the daughter who had bones to pick. Five minutes later, from the window, he saw that they were tearfully embracing. Another cigarette. He stretched out on the bed with the book by the competition in his hands. Every so often he’d do it. A way of distracting himself, of shaking off the tension. Woe to those who deal in fraud. Mercy to the smokers. Eighty-Third Surah. He dozed off.

  Around five in the afternoon, he saw several powerful cars making their way along the last stretch of the uphill climb. The chestnut leaves presenting themselves over and over in an endless array of new shapes on the enamel of the bodywork. His bad humor roused itself like a dry clod of dirt in the falling rain.

  Out of the cars, what emerged were mostly old people. Bent, pale, some with chauffeurs trailing in their wake. They marched forward in dark suits of striped fabrics. They were all over sixty, and almost all males without wives. He thought he’d recognized the chief justice of the Court of Appeals. The chancellor of the university. And that was the deputy mayor of Bari. In the church’s small courtyard, they were shaking hands with the dead’s woman’s father. They were putting on a show of keeping their distance that seemed a product of embarrassment, not delicacy. Stepping out of a midnight-black Maserati was the former undersecretary Buffante—the priest waited for the attention of the attendees to focus on that man, drawn by the wake of scandal and popularity that followed him. But that didn’t happen. The ritual of backslapping continued. Every so often, amidst the wrinkles creasing the eyes of those present, there pulsed an annoyance free of abrasions. Then the hearse arrived.

  “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,” said the priest, thinking the exact opposite in mid-Mass.

  Vittorio listened to him, not far from the coffin, without taking his eyes off the floor, his face not broken but grim, focused on the voice of the officiant. The product of my act of will, departed without my having any say in the matter. The body of his daughter radiated the inexplicable truth of the rooms in houses we haven’t lived in for a long time.

  The priest theorized: “If thy right eye offend thee.”

  Alberto lifted three fingers to his forehead. He was pale and exhausted, the body more held up by his jacket than the other way around. When was the last time he had been in a church with her? It was their wedding day, and Clara, in a Vera Wang dress that added to her own allure something unbearable and coarse, had joined him at the foot of the altar, flashing a drunken grin. She had kneeled down next to him. Taking advantage of the fact that the bishop was addressing the rest of the congregation, she had languidly rested her flower-crowned head on his shoulder. “This is the most comical day of my whole life,” she had snickered. Which had startled him, in part because he had caught a heavy whiff of alcohol on her breath: Ballantine’s or Southern Comfort, clashing totally with the gracefulness of the body that was producing it. Alberto had lifted his eyes to the God in whom he didn’t believe and had prayed that Clara hadn’t drunk because she needed the liquid courage, though also he found, deep in that fear, a dangerous source of attraction.

  Alberto looked at the coffin in front of him. His wife’s smooth, spacious forehead, her white hands. The area around the parking structure was as grim as you could imagine. After attacking him so absurdly the day before, the old man had told him how it had happened. The filthy streets in the leaden pallor of morning. He imagined her, ashen and exhausted, walking in the echo of her heels, clutching the lapels of her old trenchcoat around her neck as she passed among the sleeping cars. Then she’d looked over the railing. Alberto felt someone touch his side. Gioia had been sobbing since the coffin had entered the church. She was suffocating her weeping with an effort that was still inferior to that necessary to convince herself that the pain could be mastered. She seemed to stop. Then she peeked at her iPhone and plunged back into a sonorous weeping. Ruggero looked at her with contempt. He was watching the priest’s movements with exasperation. He was observing his parents with grimaces of tolerance. He seemed to be doing the same thing with the coffin.

  A family of crazy people, thought Alberto, and the craziest one of all didn’t even show up.

  The priest continued to observe those present. It was clear that the family members had come all the way up here in order to avoid the embarrassment of a ceremony near home. But the fact that he saw not a single person the dead woman’s age confirmed his theories. If she had taken her life when she was in high school, for the family there would have been no way out—beautiful, tearful, unstoppable, by the hundreds, her friends would have fought their way even through the sempiternal ice.

  When a sixteen-year-old died, and sometimes even a twenty-year-old, the churches were invaded by this army of boys and girls. None of them had ventured past a holy water font since the day of their confirmation, and they wouldn’t be coming back again anytime soon. A languid, rabid charge of bodies in flower. There wasn’t a saint who could match the perfume of fruit and sweat emanating from a fourteen-year-old girl in tears for the death of a girlfriend. Child of the pu
re unclouded brow, the priest recited once again. When it was people in their sixties who passed away, their colleagues from work gathered. People in their nineties were experts at dragging after them whole towns. But the real tragedy was those in their thirties. The thirty-five year olds, not infrequently those in their forties. There were no colleagues from work because there was often no work. And when there was work, then the colleagues were too busy struggling for survival. The friends—the real friends, those who had once been real friends—were far away, lost in the cities up North, mired in the swamps of their lives. Perhaps the news had even reached them, and the condolences (from hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away) caused tiny twisting flickers in the flames in the electric candles.

  And so in those cases the body remained at the mercy of the family. With the result being (the joke being, really, thought the priest as he prepared for communion) that the whole thing was managed by those against whom the deceased must have struggled to emancipate herself when she was still alive—mothers and fathers and grandparents and aunts and uncles whose very teeth, distorted through the curve of the glass from which they were drinking, she couldn’t stand the sight of.

  Having at your own funeral the people whose funerals you ought to have attended instead. To say nothing of their friends, whom you might never even have met.

  So it is for this young woman, he thought, breaking the host over the paten, guessing only in part and never dreaming, for the half he was wrong about, how far he was from the truth.

  He had no time to give the matter any more thought, because Vittorio leapt to his feet before he’d even called the communion, even before the time had come for the psalm.

  The priest’s disappointment turned to disbelief when Vittorio turned his back on him, and then apprehension as he saw the man bend over at the waist. Now he needed to turn to the cross. He recited the formula. In the meantime he suspected sudden illness that would only confirm the impossibility of righting a day that had begun badly. He turned to the pews and caught sight of him on his way out of the church. He no longer knew what to think. The first of the communicants answered his call. His fingers picked up another consecrated host and a second mouth opened to his hand. He saw the widower and the young girl step forward. He peered amongst the heads. The line stretched halfway down the nave. The priest searched for a big enough gap through which he might see the figure of Vittorio. Instead, he noticed something else. The hand had been pulled away quickly, which meant that it had been put in just a short while before. The priest thought his eyes must have deceived him. It was absurd to think that’s what it could have been. He gave communion to the girl. He gave communion to an old man with an olive complexion. Then the scene repeated itself. The whitish fingers, followed the golden wave of a wristwatch, extended over the dark wooden side, covered by the others stepping forward. The priest stretched his neck to understand. The former undersecretary. Too far away to be him. He looked for him elsewhere, and there he was. The fact that he’d recognized him outside of the church helped. He’d seen him recently on a local TV news broadcast. The round, sagging cheeks, the patch of beard sprouting on his chin to give substance to a boring speech about the university’s balance sheet. The university chancellor’s eyes were glistening. He seemed to be in a state of despair. Partially concealed by the other men, if in fact what the priest was now certain of actually was taking place, it seemed that the only method he had of calming himself was to come into physical contact with the dead woman. To touch her ankle. The soft fur stitched along the sides of her dress. The arms and then the neck, as the line inched forward. The priest blushed. They’d undressed her and had hastened to break the stiffness of her neck. Same thing for the fingers, the wrists, the jaw. Then, charitably, they pressed down on the urogenital area. Such a pretty young woman. They’re turned her onto her side to encourage the discharge of regurgitations from her nose and mouth as well. They’d washed her, shampooed her hair. With the help of a pair of anatomical forceps, they’d inserted strips of absorbent cotton into her various natural orifices. They’d disinfected her, applied makeup, dressed her again. They’d had to drive the needle between her upper lip and her gums, until it poked out through one of the nostrils and the thread could be drawn upward. That was when that grimace had formed. She must have been a very beautiful little girl, he thought to himself. An alert young woman. The chancellor caressed her once again. Though he’d clearly lost his mind, he managed to control himself so as to avoid triggering a scandal. He’d rummage in the coffin, yank his hand away, and immediately clutch at the wooden side, pretending it was a handrail. The priest sought out the body of the deceased woman. Just a few days ago, she might have been sitting down to lunch with a friend. She was still eating, talking. Such a pretty young woman, a magnificent child years and years ago. Then an act of will. The curse of individual impulses. Which had only been the start of the show, the call to break ranks that had led to her body being undressed and manipulated, to his receiving that horrible phone call from the diocesan administrator, and to all those old men showing up here, judges and bankers and politicos, and now this man, the chancellor of Bari University, caressing her in the coffin, or palpating her, or clutching her throat, and all this absurdity, the priest intuited; he watched the chancellor’s bewildered eyes and the knot in his throat finally loosened, he saw, he understood, he was enlightened, once again he understood, fool of a fool that he was, and now he could have laughed, danced, this obsession, he told himself, this unbridled frenzy, only the Roman variant could accomodate and minister to it, bring it on board and understand it. The weave of the English version was too loose. The Protestants would have found it implausible. The Pentecostals would have prohibited it, the Adventists detested it, Baptists and Congregationalists would only have let it get close enough so they could wave a noose at it, but the Roman variant, Catholic and Apostolic, knew how to take pity on professors who caressed a dead woman in her coffin, its embrace was broad, its heart boundless, it could feel the heartbeat of a man when he steals from his brother’s pocket, when he counts the cash, when he cheats on his wife, when he swears to a falsehood, when he murders and rapes and sets fires, the Episcopalians would have made sure they came down with a colic, the worshippers of the crescent moon would have erected a gallows . . . But nothing could scandalize the Apostolic and Roman variant because everything is human, thought the priest; he rejoiced, understood, remembered, open and sweet, grateful and compassionate, it could even accept that a young man of thirty, as he had been, should have gone with a girl of fourteen, and even managed to grasp the reasons driving the girl, her expectations, her foolish mistake of spilling the whole story to her parents so that the young man swept himself into a fine mystical crisis, on your knees son! he thought, he understood, suffered, remembered, north of Rome it was all a matter for the judiciary, in Tehran for the executioner, here in the South a mystery, south of London and Mecca, south of Athens and Jerusalem, her soft, sweet, sweaty hand as she walked up the hill, her purple leggings and her Peanuts T-shirt.