One evening, after practice ended, he wedged Clara into a corner of the gym. The dead zone where the equipment was stored. She set down the medicine ball on the floor next to the mats. Pascucci was smiling. (The hot swarm of the other players was dissolving in the steam of the showers.) Clara exhaled as if she’d just finished a tiebreak, tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. Then she took a step forward. Pascucci braced one hand against the wall, cutting off every avenue of escape. She narrowed her eyes imperceptibly.
“I was just thinking,” Pascucci improvised, “you were all slower than usual, weren’t you? I mean . . . the plays.”
“What do you mean?” asked Clara, perplexed.
“Your brother. This evening, if you ask me, he’d be happier if we left him to his own devices. Because, listen . . . ” and without even finishing the sentence he understood that he’d made a mistake for which he’d never be forgiven. Clara turned pale. Then she scowled. Having forced the issue allowed Pascucci to see her—the shadow of a wound—as she would have started to show herself of her own free will if he’d only been more patient. The extortion of a down payment already reduced to a sale price.
“We’ll take the bus.”
He was done before he even got started.
Perhaps (Pascucci concluded the few times that he chanced to think back on it) it was a secret calling for failure that made him say those things. The thought distracted him from Clara. He dedicated himself to an inventory of the past few years. He grew gloomier still. He drummed his fingers on the table until his forefinger slipped on something dampish. He told himself he shouldn’t order a fourth Negroni, and then proceeded to order a fourth Negroni.
Pietro Giannelli, thirty-seven years old, former clerk in a shoe shop, now Spiderman for the Toy Center at the Mongolfiera shopping center, took a last drag on his cigarette and then he sent it flying with a flick of his fingers. He pulled his back away from the lamppost. He moved away from the lights of the Apple Store on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. He started walking down the sidewalk, hands plunged into his jacket pockets. He squeezed the baggie containing the DMT. Former owner of a Suzuki GSX-400. University enrollment number 16020134, with a grade book into which not a single test result had ever been entered. He blended in among the Friday night crowd. He felt his cell phone vibrate again—having reached the last link in the chain, the information bounced back by mistake to the previous links in that chain. He shut his eyes and walked forward like that a few yards. He stopped before someone could run into him.
The man had invited him to make himself comfortable on the sofa and then he’d asked him pointblank if he was accustomed to walking around at home with eye makeup on. He’d realized that it was a trap while his finger was on the intercom, when he’d heard the rumbling background noise grow in intensity. He’d looked up. Clara’s father. Smiling, hair black in spite of his age, green sweater over white trousers.
He’d been coming to see her for a week and they’d never once let him in the house. He’d park the motorcycle and they’d stand outside the villa, talking, for hours. The day before, Clara had come to join him under the willow tree that, extending over the iron fence, made a patch of shade between three and four in the afternoon. She was wearing a light blue, long-sleeved cotton sweater, jeans, and an old pair of Converse All Stars on her feet. At a certain point she had asked him what he thought of the Stravinsky.
“Ever since they reopened, the magic is gone. They can put on all the fucking music they want, but it won’t work. The black sofas. That was the secret.”
Clara had kneeled, and then stood back up holding a mud-spattered campaign flyer. Then, slowly, she’d torn it to pieces. She’d asked him what he thought of psychiatrists. The wind had tossed the willow tree, opening patches of sunlight on her face. A hair lay stuck on her cheek, looking like the outline of the island of Malta.
Giannelli had thought about the staff of the SERT, the drug addiction center, where he’d been court ordered to sign in on the fifth of every month.
“A bunch of idiots.”
He’d seen the patches spread over her and rotate clockwise, but it was just because he was coming down off the acid.
She seemed interested in any word that came out of his mouth. In the shifting group of their friends, Clara had changed her attitude toward him overnight. It had happened after she’d learned about his family situation.
Signor Salvemini gestured and Giannelli started up the drive, finding that the man was now behind him, in a strategically advantageous position. He could hear his buzzing. When they got to the living room—the man was still behind him, saying “go right on in”—he understood how the Persian carpets and the candelabra and all that junk hanging on the walls could be used to make people who came in here feel comfortable or intimidated, depending on how much money they’d glimpsed in their lives.
He gestured for him to sit on the sofa and only then did he pretend to study him carefully, displaying his annoyance at the worn pants and the eyeliner.
Was he accustomed to going around with that mess on his eyes at home, too?
“Yes, Signor Salvemini,” he replied, meeting and holding the man’s gaze.
He was accustomed to the pettiness of grownups. The fact that people like him existed was useful to the psychiatrists at the SERT because it strengthened their grip on the knife handle. They subjected him to a string of idiotic questions and then sent him off to get papers stamped or schedule urine tests. Every time he pulled out the money for his co-pay at the local health care clinic, he sensed a red-hot tangle of black filaments. The effect vanished instantly. So he’d head back out into the street where he’d drop another tab of acid. The incandescent spiderweb re-exploded all over him, the filaments rising into the air, illuminating the grim face of the legislator, the judge’s bench, the cavalcade of law enforcement—the mechanism activated by his act resonated like a flash of lightning that reveals, amidst the clouds, the ghost ship that ensures that in the police appointee’s collection plate the annual bonus echoes, as does a sense of purpose the psychiatrists at the SERT, as does life itself for the functionaries at the offices that suspend driver’s licenses and travel visas.
“And what does your father think about this disguise?”
“He died last year.”
The man was on the verge of making some retort, but his daughter’s boots came clacking down the stairs. The buzzing subsided somewhat. Clara made her entrance into the living room. She furrowed her brows, surprised to find her friend sitting there on the sofa. Vittorio picked up a magazine from the glass coffee table and pretended to read. The background noise had vanished entirely. She said: “We’re going to be late.” Giannelli got back on his feet.
Ten minutes later they were straddling the Suzuki and crossing the main artery of Via Fanelli, heading for the multiplex in Casamassima.
Giannelli had already talked to her little brother a number of times. He was about fifteen years old, in the process of thinning out, unkempt hair and a ravaged green greatcoat that made him look like a deserter from an army that had no particular interest in reclaiming him. He had the air of someone struggling to recover from a particularly hard blow—the physical self a little blurry, the spirit knocked forward by the impact, he seemed to be a prisoner of a future he was struggling to make his way back from. The last time they’d chanced to run into each other in front of the main post office. They’d gone to sit on one of the benches on Piazza Cesare Battisti, hunched over, smoking a cigarette. Michele, too, looked like he spent his afternoons wandering aimlessly around the city. Giannelli had waited until the two university buildings were done intersecting. The mangy laurel hedges had stopped quivering. Before the acid had worn off, he’d felt a new, undefinable sensation. The flick of an eyelid pulled upward. Michele moved the hand with the cigarette back and forth. They’d started a discussion that seemed like the continuation of a dispute begun much later—he’d tak
e a deep drag and then force himself to claw at a concept in the hope of bringing it back into the present. He was saying that, in spite of bad experiences, the most profound part of human beings always expects people to do them good and not harm.
“But that’s not the part that gets angry. That’s not the part that protests.” As far as he could tell, the hurt inflicted below a certain threshold no longer produced a voice that could be heard from the exterior. “In each of us, there’s something sacred, but it’s not one’s personality.”
While Michele pursued his line of thought, Giannelli had pulled out the stamp with the face of the Mad Hatter. He’d slipped it under his tongue. He’d waited in vain for the university to split itself in half again. The laurel hedges had convulsed, but the halo of light had maintained a faint intensity. The kid. It was because of him. In his effort to concentrate, like a black hole, Michele absorbed the energy from the world around him. Giannelli would never have realized it if it hadn’t been for the acid. The laurel leaves spread their force, but the instant the green light left its source, it was sucked toward the boy. His sister had no reason to be concerned: if they’d decided to drag Michele to see some psychiatrist, they wouldn’t be able to wring blood from that stone.
He kept walking down the sidewalk. Grim, dispirited, with the DMT still in his pocket. Dressing up as Spiderman was better than dressing up as some chicken-man, and that was it as far as consolation went. Every morning, at twenty to seven, he parked his Toyota Yaris in the lot at the shopping center. He’d get an espresso with the security guards. He’d head for the administrative office at the Toy Center, step into the broom closet, take off his shoes and pants, wriggle into the foam rubber costume, and a short while later start handing out flyers. In the past, the eyeliner had helped earn him points for outrageousness, as had the leather jackets and the studded wristbands. If he hadn’t tricked himself up like that, he’d have been a scared kid whose father was dead, someone you could think you were depriving of something by revoking his motorcycle license, though on the warm seat of that same bike he had continued to go see Clara without giving it a second thought.
A violent blow to the shoulder spun him a three-quarter turn. A passerby had hit him by accident and now he was walking off.
On the screen in the movie theater, half-empty at eleven at night, the man started slapping the girl around in the bedroom, which was furnished in a Fifties style. The actress put on an ecstatic smile with a bleeding nose. Then the man slammed her flat on her back onto the wall-to-wall carpet. Giannelli’s eyes opened wide. Clara had grabbed him by the hand and was squeezing it tight. Her hand was soft and warm, it communicated opposing sensations, of a house deep in the woods and a bottomless fall. They kissed. She took his head in both hands. Giannelli unbuttoned her checked shirt. He touched one of her breasts, delicately, rotated his hand with great care so as to hold it in his palm. Someone coughed from the back of the theater. Giannelli stiffened. Clara lunged at him, half-climbing over the armrest that separated them. Two hours earlier she had seemed worried over this thing with the psychiatrist, where apparently her mother had taken her brother that same afternoon. Now she was furiously alive in the fine, silvery dust of the movie theater. She put a hand under Giannelli’s T-shirt. The man on the screen turned off the lamp and started savagely beating the girl. Clara kissed him passionately. Giannelli ran his hand between their two bodies, pressed against each other, caressed the denim of her pants, then rose up and undid the button of her black Wranglers. Clara sighed. He had the distinct sensation of lots of yellow eyes peering out, wide open, from the bushes. He tried to slip his hand into her panties, she pressed on the armrest with one elbow to help him, and when he pulled hard upward he heard Clara’s angry moan and saw her white, slender fingers clench into a fist and then extend.
They got ice cream in a café in the center of town and hung around, chatting idly about trivial things. They saw the moon mirrored in the glass-fronted office building of the Banca di Credito Pugliese. They climbed aboard his Suzuki bike, and went for a ride. They went out past the outskirts of the city. They rode up the ramp to the beltway, where the moon was bigger and they could really open up the throttle.
He took her home about two in the morning. At least, at that time of the night, he was sure he wasn’t going to have any unpleasant encounters. He went past the gas station with her in the middle of the night. He turned, leaving the lampposts behind him. He started up the narrow potholed lane. The shadows of the cypresses streamed past on either side. The clouds, at the edges of the moon, seemed to curve in an unnatural fashion, toward the roof of the villa.
“Oh fuck!”
Giannelli felt her arms tighten around his hips. He slowed down.
“What’s going on?”
“What are you saying, can’t you see? Stop the bike and let me off.”
The garden was lit up as if it was broad daylight and four figures were standing on the front steps. A column of black smoke arose from the building, like a giant gallows pointing straight up.
“A fire . . . ” he said, open-mouthed.
Clara got off the bike. She pulled off her helmet. She whispered hurriedly: “Go on, get out of here.” Beneath Clara’s worried gaze, though, a contrary force was pushing. The pebbles alongside the road crackled. Giannelli saw a large lizard dive into the foliage. Then Clara. While she was turning her back to him, walking up the lane toward the villa, he seemed to see a smirk of satisfaction dart across her lips.
“A whore. Half a slut that I fucked before she got married.”
Enzo Santangelo—fifty-five years old, a body-building instructor and the proprietor of the Body Empire gym on Via Postiglione, the Extreme Fitness gym on Viale Unità d’Italia, the best stocked store for dietary supplements and sports performance products in Bari (Vitamin Center, Via Calefati)—took a sip of his flavored water and handed over the signed form to the pharmaceutical representative.
“A client?”
“That’s right. She’d come into the gym as if she’d just left a fashion show. Then, though, she’d come out of the locker room in these sleeveless tank tops, these Hogan gym shoes, these red exercise shorts that made her look a lot more casual. You see what I mean? I think she was already fed up with her husband-to-be. And you needed to get a look at him. An engineer. He clearly had money.”
“Nowhere near as much as her.”
“Nowhere near as much as her father, that’s right. But every once in while this guy would come to pick her up at the gym and I’d keep an eye on him while he was taking a look around. He got on my nerves. You know those fake-humble types? He’d watch the exercises as if he thought he knew something. It was obvious that he believed he could buy the whole gym at a discount if he ever felt like it. He pretended to wander around in here with that innocent look on his face. Any minute I expected him to start whistling, and I thought to myself: there isn’t a weight bench in here, handsome, not a rowing machine, not an exercise mat, not a treadmill, there might not be a single square yard left in this place where I haven’t fucked her.”
“You fucked her in the gym?”
“I couldn’t help but fuck her in the gym,” he said “She wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last. But listen. This one was a slut. All I had to do was go near her, even if it was only to give her the weekly schedule . . . It wasn’t the way she looked at me. The gaze is strictly for beginners. The vibrations. Got it? I’d walk past her, and without her having to move a muscle, I knew she’d go for it. I knew that I had to go for it. She was already practically telling me I was a faggot for not having made a move already. Do I seem like a faggot to you?”
“Let me give that some thought . . . ” the representative chuckled.
“I’m not a faggot, and what’s more, I have a sense for these kinds of things. There were times when she’d get here an hour before closing time, she’d hop up on an exercise bike and get to work, and a
s soon as I was within earshot, she’d whisper: “This evening I’m having dinner with Alberto.” My brain just needed to process the information. I had to stop myself to keep from breaking into a run. I’d open my locker, pull out a packet of Interflon, and slip it into my fanny pack.”
“Interflon, the tool lubricant?”
“Interflon is also a tool lubricant. I’d take it and go wait for her in the downstairs bathroom. At a quarter to nine, punctual as a rent collector, the engineer would come pick her up. There we’d be, face to face. I’d say hello to him, because by now we knew each other. But especially shake his hand, because I knew that at that exact moment, his future wife was in the shower with an ass I’d bruised black and blue. Well, that was one of the biggest satisfactions I’ve ever had in my professional life.”
He didn’t talk about the strange sensation that pierced him straight through one Sunday night, when they remained shut inside the gym until late. Over the course of the years, he’d never stopped thinking about it, but his mind deleted the memory every time it surfaced. So he wound up having a recurring dream about it. And then he’d forget the dreams.
Scared by the motorcycle, the lizard dove into the tufts of grass. It vanished through the branches, tearing, in its flight, the web of the jumping spider, which, having assembled the image of the reptile with its eight eyes, had managed to avoid the impact. The spider jumped. The dry and arid ground registered the information, superimposing it on the alphabet of the ants that were intersecting one another, breaking up and bifurcating and then reassembling a line that was never the same. The law they obeyed modified itself within them, confirming itself in the law of every likeness, receiving new impulses from the depths of the anthill, and then from farther away, from the tremendous force that changes the face of the seasons. The saliva passed from one pair of lips to another and the heart raced in the dark of the movie theater. The curve of the abdomen tensed in on itself and then broke. Under the thrust of the molt, a brand new epidermis emerged from the dead carcass, brownish in color. After letting the cuticle harden in the open air, the cicada took its first flight. It landed on a rosemary leaf. The tymbals under the abdomen began to vibrate, and a sharp sound, like a finger-snap, signaled its presence to the world.
Ferocity Page 9
