Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Vittorio grimaced nastily. He slipped his right hand into his jacket. He turned sideways to make way for himself. He bumped his wife and son-in-law and first-born son inconsiderately until he had slid out of the pew. He turned his back on the altar. He walked toward the exit without taking his hand away from his chest, drilling into the eyes of the men a whiff of concern for themselves. He walked up the aisle, red-faced. He went past the confessional. He strode out the door and was once again in the open air.

  The evening wind tossed his hair. Vittorio took a few steps across the dry grass. A driver was smoking, his back against the door of a BMW. The sun had dragged the last lingering luminescences away with it. A foggy blue covered the cow paths, made the highland, from one moment to the next, an independent profile or one with the sky. The banner of a chain of supermarkets being towed by an airplane twisted high above and vanished. Vittorio veered to the right, descended the slope for a few yards. He placed his hand on the trunk of a tree. He pulled the cell phone out of the inside pocket of his jacket and put it to his ear.

  “Hello!”

  Engineer De Palo informed him that the man from Taranto, the Tarantine, had emerged from his coma.

  He started breathing slowly. He was listening. The voice repeated the news. Then he added that they had amputated one of his legs.

  Vittorio ran his free hand over his face, trying to ward off the ridiculous hope that a man with one leg less was in greater danger of dying than a man in a coma. The amputation of the leg just made the problem worse. It complicated it terribly. Vittorio raised his head, observed the way land and sky merged beyond the trees. A gear had started turning two nights ago. The mechanism had gone from one with potential to one that was active, from one that was simple to one that was complex. A universe whose expansion—real and unconscious in the fabric of the world, artificial and well codified beneath the light of his reason—was the most visible manifestation of the concept of ruin that he’d ever beheld.

  Engineer De Palo informed him that the first thing the man had demanded was a different room.

  “What?” Vittorio thought he must have misunderstood.

  “The problem was the patient in the next bed. He was moaning.”

  He asked what they’d done.

  “We gave him a different room. What else were we supposed to do? We cleared out a closet to give him a room all to himself.”

  Vittorio said that he’d take care of it himself, in person, the next day. The engineer said goodbye. He closed his phone. He adjusted his jacket, shaking the lapels twice. He moved off again in the direction of the church.

  They didn’t know where to look.

  They vanished, hurrying into the underpasses in the railroad station. They brooded, their foreheads pressed against the steering wheels of small cars stuck in traffic after the end of the workday. Outside the Apple Store they lit a cigarette, finding a source of comfort in the first puffs. Via email. Via text. Crimson-red stripes in the reflective plate-glass windows of the Banca di Credito Pugliese. They drank in a bar on Via Crisanzio where they hadn’t expected to go. Outside the window, in the shimmering opacity of light pollution, they were following the axis at the end of which it was possible to spot it. With their noses tipped upward, studying the sky. An S, a U, a P on the plastic-coated strip. They were drumming their fingers on the lampposts to kill time while waiting for their dealer. Left alone in the office, they were checking to see if the tweets they’d sent out in the last hour had resulted in new followers, trying to figure out how many of them had been incentivized by the tweets in their own name, how many by the tweets in the newspaper’s name, and how many by those tweeted under the nine different fake accounts that they themselves had come up with. Scent of electrostatic shock. The banner reading RICCARDI SUPERMARKETS was done crossing the sky, towed by a plane during the sunset’s last convulsions. They lingered to think about it in solitude, or they talked about it with their current girlfriends.

  Few of Clara’s old friends had seen the obituary in the paper. The news had begun to spread, entrusted to the sovereignty of algorithms. Few if any phone calls. Over the years, they’d all fallen out of touch. The network of contacts blinked on the screens of the smartphones. From the white sea of pixels emerged the old photo of a woman’s volleyball team. This is not a memory.

  They received the news. They clutched their arms about their chests as if they were cold. They tried to figure out which way they’d have to look to be in line with Noci, the small town in the Murge near which, incomprehensibly, the family of their old friend had decided to celebrate the funeral mass.

  A mass that, at that time of night, must have been over and done with.

  Giuliano Pascucci, thirty-nine years old, head warehouseman at a textiles plant, took a sip of his Negroni and sat there, staring at the lights that exploded and reassembled themselves in the bar’s plate-glass window.

  Monday and Thursday were practice days.

  Back then he’d been working at a car repair shop, after getting his high school diploma from a vo-tech institute. With his first paychecks, he’d bought a used Fiat Panda. On Saturdays he’d round up his friend and drive them to get a pizza in Torre a Mare. His traveling companions, crammed into the car seats—all of them ranging in age from fifteen to eighteen—handed around beers to the tune of idiotic jokes. On the way back, there was always someone who shouted at the whores.

  The Panda testified to his self-esteem, and was the launching pad for future feats of virility. But on Mondays and Thursdays, in the late afternoon, after the owner had already left, giving him the keys, Giuliano turned off the lights in the auto repair shop and an additional veil fell over his gaze. Something that wasn’t virility but which ran, as it were, parallel to it, made him lower the roller shutter and climb aboard his Panda.

  He drove across the city to go see her.

  They practiced in a small gym over near Carbonara. A dome-covered facility with a room for the equipment, the showers, and not much else. Outside was the silence of the suburbs. Inside, the girls ran and did push-ups, running their formations and showing off their side rolls. The shouts echoed, sharp and strong. At the end of the big room were two wooden benches upon which friends and would-be boyfriends gathered, only rarely a parent.

  He’d met Clara at a birthday party, and then he’d seen her at the Stravinsky: she was dancing at a hardcore punk concert. Their eyes had brushed past each other when she, drenched with sweat, had ordered a Fanta at the counter. Something not completely clear had suggested the span of the social gap between them, and yet it was something else that kept him from feeling up to her level.

  Watching her at the gym only confirmed his fears. She was the most interesting girl he’d ever run into. The gym shoes padding softly to the ground, just fractions of a second after the sound of the ball pounding onto the linoleum, ended the aural sequence that he’d have wanted to hear every night in the headphones of his Walkman before falling asleep. The setter lifted the ball into the air, and Clara coordinated her movements so as to hit the sphere just as it reached the highest point. From what he had been able to figure out, there were different ways of lofting the ball to the net, depending on whether the player who was going to spike was on the outside or in the middle. Between Clara and what he liked to call “her favorite setter,” there was an understanding that went well beyond the human in its perfection, and well beyond the machine in all that was human passing between them. The setter ensured that the apex of the arc corresponded with the top of the net. A centimeter lower and the spike would bounce off the tape. That allowed Clara—he’d guessed at first, and he understood more clearly now—to strike, each time revealing her nature.

  She spiked violently, never maliciously. It hardly even seemed as if the scoring of points were one of her objectives. Her hair flew free, upward, as she dropped, her feet touching ground, the sensation that gravity had enriched itself with somethi
ng that was not its own. In the surrounding space, the volleyball game became a miniature universe whose deepest ravine had something in common with botany—the slow growth of the blades of grass, the tropism of certain flowers.

  He began to dream of her several times a week. When he also dreamed of the owl with eyeglasses, the logo for Berruti Optics that held pride of place on the green-striped team jersey, he understood that it was time to make his move.

  One Thursday in late November, after practice, he worked up the nerve and went over to her. He offered to give her a ride home in his car. He hadn’t missed a practice in three months, so to Clara he was a familiar face. The girl nodded. Pascucci stood there staring at her in amazement. Clara added that they’d have to take Michele, her kid brother, too (she said the words “my brother” to redact all terms of endearment), and that was how Pascucci took in the most incredible answer he could have imagined with the delay necessary to extract it from the news that undercut its impact.

  The girl held out her arm, pointing to the far side of the gym. He followed her finger and saw him.

  Motionless on the bench sat a chubby boy aged twelve or thirteen. A heavy sweater and corduroy trousers. A sloppy bowl cut. Cheap glasses. He realized he’d seen him before, more than once. (He raised the glass to his lips, identified the silvery propeller of the gin in the sea of Campari). In fact, he’d seen him every time he’d been there. His sister brought him with her and Michele was capable of fading into the background color of someone else’s memories. A zebra’s head was imprinted on his sweater. The effect was heartbreaking. Clara disappeared into the showers. Pascucci stared at the little boy a few seconds too long. Michele sat there motionless on the bench, his specific gravity increasing.

  Twenty minutes later, Pascucci was driving toward the city’s south side. Michele was in back. Next to him sat his sister’s gym bag. Pascucci struggled to keep from imagining it as a languid treasure chest (filled with balled up socks and women’s underwear in fermentation) insofar as she was a treasure without a treasure chest, and all the same more complicated to approach than if she had been locked up tight in a safe. Still, facile fantasies aside, Pascucci felt tense. Since they’d all piled into the car, no one had uttered a word. Clara was looking straight ahead as if the only effort required of her was to confirm the correctness of their route. From the backseat, the little boy was peering straight into the void with such intensity that Pascucci was afraid that it was he who couldn’t see something obvious. He felt his cell phone vibrate. He ordered his third Negroni at the bar on Via Crisanzio. The lights continued to disintegrate through the plate glass window. The age of confusion. The age of separation. Now he was capable of isolating the components on his palate. And so, already on his way to tipsy, around his head spun the silvery propeller of the gin, the pink rectangle of the Campari, the blood-red square of the vermouth. To reduce things to present day terms, he would have said that brother and sister—in his Panda, that evening—were exchanging an uninterrupted series of mental texts. Question. Answer. Request for explanation. Reassurance. Insinuation. Terse reply. Monosyllable. More extensive explanation. Emoticon.

  Once they passed the IP gas station, the girl asked him to turn into the narrow, tree-lined street on the right. After a few minutes they were immersed in darkness. The Panda jolted along, over stones and small potholes. A long line of cypress trees was revealed by the headlights. When the villa appeared, Pascucci thought that, once again, this wasn’t what separated him from her.

  Now he was thinking about how strange it was that two young people who were so rich should have to ride a bus home. He took the last sip. He peered out through the window in search of the axis at the end of which it was possible to find the church of Noci. In the days that followed, he went back to pick her up at the gym. Clara always accepted his offers of a ride. Every time, Michele came, too. They spent three or four weeks with the torture of those silent rides. Him driving, Clara and Michele sitting still, never speaking so much as a syllable. The more the boy was swept under by some crashing wave of sadness, the more beautiful and focused she became. Pascucci didn’t believe he was in the presence of a mystery that he might, with respect and devotion, be able to unveil. He felt this the way you feel things when you’re young: grandiose, terrible, indivisible, and without explanation. The lens splits the luminous ray and you will not be struck by it. He concluded, very stupidly, that the situation was becoming rather embarrassing. A month, and he hadn’t made any progress. His friends would have laughed in his face. In the auto repair shop, as he was disassembling an oil pan, in all those agonizing quarter hours he spent slaving away on a carburetor, out of the grease and the valves, a shadow of resentment was taking shape. He thought of the others his age, enrolled at the university. He stared with the ferocity of his inner eye at the fake Scottish pattern on the seats in the Panda where a woman’s back had still never reclined.