Around Via Bovio the crowds of the city had thinned out because there were fewer shops. He went on walking with his hands in his pockets. A vertical scrolling billboard shifted from a sunny poster for toothpaste to a nocturnal ad for a lingerie shop. Giannelli turned the corner. He turned right again and saw the parking structure. He remembered when he would walk with Clara, and if they ran into someone, she’d drop her eyes. They’d lost touch after Michele left Bari, one of those sudden changes that only later reveal themselves for the great cataclysms that they are. Her brother had enlisted in the army against all sensible medical advice. Some time later, Giannelli had seen Clara again, outside a restaurant. New hairstyle and a lamé dress. She was laughing, flanked by two men in gray suits.
The sidewalk rippled on both sides of the street, tensed as it curved skyward until an ocean of ink fell on the two errors, the person he’d been then and the person he was now, who moved in solitude through the spring evening.
That Sunday they’d decided to stay in the gym until late. Just to be safe, she’d left before the last few clients and he’d pulled down the steel shutters. An hour later she was waiting for him outside the serviceman’s entrance. She was wearing a flimsy jersey dress, open-toed sandals, and nothing else. She tilted her head and said: “Here I am again,” and it seemed to him that she was saying the words with such falseness that he had to make a conscious effort to keep from slapping her right in the face. They fucked in the cardio fitness room. Then Clara got back on her feet, leaving a sweat mark on the hardwood floor.
Fucking at the gym after closing time was wonderful. The moans that echoed through all that silence. And then there was the partial darkness. The only lights came from the television sets screwed to the steel bars in front of the exercise bikes, five Sharp monitors turned to music and all-news channels.
At nine o’clock he asked: “You want me to go get a couple of pizzas?”
He slipped back into his tracksuit and track shoes while she, still naked, smoked a cigarette with her back pressed against the glass wall that gave onto the halotherapy room. Salt therapy for the skin. Every time he thought about the money he’d wasted on such bullshit he felt like beating himself silly.
He went out into the street and headed for the pizzeria. He tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, though he certainly wasn’t the one who needed to hide. Forty-five minutes later, he came back with piping hot cardboard boxes in his hands. He laid the pizzas on the front desk. He closed the door behind him. The gym was enveloped in a silence that immediately struck him as strange. He called her name. The monitors were turned off. A ray of moonlight descended diagonally, covering the Smith machine with a faint silvery patina. “I’m back!” He caressed the light switch. He stopped. He weighed the possibility that this was some new erotic game. So then he took off his shoes. He tiptoed through the equipment room, then along the short hall that led downstairs to the saunas. He threw open the door and found himself in the most absolute darkness. A noise came up from the floor below.
He thought to himself: why that slut. He started down the stairs, cautiously, one step after the other. He peered down. An extremely faint glow illuminated the floor. Only then did he realize that he was afraid. The knot of the rope, tied just a few minutes ago: he had to admit it had been there from the minute he’d come back in. He chuckled. He descended a few more steps. His heart sped up. This is nuts. He put his hand to the back of his neck: he’d broken out in a cold sweat, and this confused him even more. He set foot on the landing without a clear idea of just where he was. Now the noise had grown louder. He turned his head. A phosphorescent green stripe cut the darkness in two. At first skinny, it swung wide, transforming itself into a luminous wall. His eyes opened wide. An ancient Egyptian deity, preparing to step out of a sarcophagus. He saw the charred black silhouette swing up into a vertical position, first one leg, then the other, and even though he’d just realized that the noise was a whirring fan and that she, Clara, had merely decided to indulge in a short UV sunlamp session in the club’s five-thousand-euro Hapro Onyx tanning bed, the sight of her emerging from the capsule and striding toward him in that alien green light convinced him for a moment that the scene wasn’t unfolding in the gym’s basement, wasn’t unfolding in the recesses of his fucking mind, that it hadn’t been him luring her to this place for the past several weeks, but actually she who had just dragged him into the exact center of her own private nightmare, whatever that might turn out to be.
The girl’s belly shifted from bright green to a more opaque color. Clara turned on the light. She placed a hand on his chest and smiled as she rose on tiptoe.
That episode was on the verge of resurfacing intact in his memory ten years or so later, when he read in the paper that she was dead. Luckily, he was sitting across from a pharmaceutical rep he was on good terms with. He used his voice to cover the weak electric current that was emanating from the depths: “A slut,” he said, “half a whore I used to fuck before she got married.”
Silvio Reginato, fifty-four years old, hundreds of operations as chief surgeon in the surgical ward at Bari General Hospital, rummaged among the shelves where he kept his records and his art catalogues. He recognized the light blue of the spine, then he touched the stiff shell of the cardboard binder. He pulled out the photo album. He went over to sit down on the sofa. He set the album down on the coffee table. He poured the chilled vodka into the glass. He drank. He’d read the news in the paper. He opened the cover and looked at her. He hadn’t done it in months. Dozens of obscene snapshots. A crescendo of increasingly sad perversions, though not for him. Reginato had started taking those pictures of her immediately after meeting her. And he’d continued until just a few months before losing track of her.
Giuseppe Greco, forty-six years old, deputy editor of Corriere del Mezzogiorno, the author of a monograph on Rudolph Valentino, five books on the adventure of jazz in Puglia, printed by the regional government’s publishing house, divorced, two children, reread the team rosters on his computer screen and sighed. The directories on the website for the Amatori Volley, Bari’s amateur volleyball club. A long list of first and last names, including Clara’s. The news, on the other hand, he’d just read a short time before in the obituaries.
He lit a cigarette. He watched the smoke dissolve in the empty newsroom. The desks lined up in parallel rows, and then the Xerox machine. He went back to looking at the monitor.
He thought about the Facebook accounts that remained active after the owner was dead. Hundreds of comments immediately after the death and then a shameful dribble. To say nothing of those who posted old pictures trapped in a cell phone’s memory.
Every day Giuseppe Greco produced fifty or so tweets, using eleven different identities. The conscious intent was to publicize his column—Lumière Space, five hundred words of film criticism, every day—outside of the suffocating basin of the regional boundaries. He used @lumierespace to broadcast to his followers the topic of the day, which he retweeted via the newspaper’s account. As himself (@giuseppegreco) he recommended, with a great show of fair play, articles by his better-known colleagues, whose bylines appeared in La Repubblica or Corriere della Sera. Then there were his imaginary identities. @brancaleone was a relentless fan, @nocturama savaged indiscriminately, @magellan reported those takedowns to the subjects of same, while @vivresavie poked directors—but also actors and screenwriters—with questions (a link followed) that came from reading the column. The hope was that sooner or later someone might see fit to answer. And in fact that had actually happened. “Read review. Seems good,” was the reply from @wimwenders to a callout from @vivresavie. Giuseppe Greco treasured it deep within himself as a sort of holy relic, after retweeting it over all eleven of his accounts.
There was an imaginary fog to the north of the Tavoliere plain, beyond which the star reporters from the major papers drank their aperitifs on large oval piazzas where the sunsets seemed to last forever. Rome. It w
as painful to come to terms with his resentment. It hadn’t always been like this. (He lifted his fingers from the mouse and thanked fate for the fact that Clara Salvemini didn’t possess a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, and that, save for people who had her same name, her online presence was limited to the results of an old sports tournament.) For Giuseppe Greco there had been a time, ever further in the past, when everything worth seeing, hearing, reading, and telling about happened just a short walk from him.
The summer he met Clara and her brother, Giuseppe was working as the culture editor for La Città, a tiny daily that pinned its hopes for survival on a virtually imaginary readership. A front-page editorial on the gratuitous act in Gide as part of a commentary on a family massacre made the editors of the rival papers heave a deep sigh of relief. La Città folded not long afterward. At the time, though, he was a thirty-year-old full of optimism, and he paid no attention to the storm warnings. He went to small and experimental plays, saw local bands in concert, and while they were playing the encore, he—at a folding table in the back—was just finishing typing the review of the reading he’d attended a few hours before in the Poggiofranco neighborhood, where a poet locked in a dog cage recited Mayakovsky.
He believed in those young people. Naïveté was the protective shell beneath which talent could develop undisturbed. He was convinced that hidden among them was a Fassbinder, or even a Werner Herzog who, one day, after leaving the shadow of the provinces, would take Rome, or even Paris or New York by storm, vindicating them all.
Every night Giuseppe Greco drank his nth cup of espresso and set out in pursuit of them. He made friends with them. He reviewed them with generosity in long, four-column articles. He tried to figure out whether it was worthwhile trying to recruit some of them for the newspaper—who could say? In their midst might be lurking a young Hunter S. Thompson just waiting for the right opportunity.
Michele appeared in his office one afternoon in July.
He was wearing an oilskin jacket that must once have been green. How he kept from sweating remained a mystery. In his hands he was clutching a sheaf of A4 paper that was no more than a Kleenex, it had been folded over on itself so many times.
“I didn’t mean. Forgive me. Secretary. An article. But if you have something to do, I can come back another time.”
“Please, let’s try to calm down,” he replied from the unspeakable chaos of his own desk.
Michele suggested he publish a strange religious article, in which he tried to show that Christ’s time here on Earth had changed once and for all His Father’s facial features. Thus, if Abraham had heard a voice whispering something to him about Isaac now, he would have had to forget about it.
“And what’s the current affairs peg?”
In his newspaper, no one was obliged to pass under that kind of humiliating yoke; it was a trick question that Giuseppe Greco used to test the conformism of prospective writers.
“It strikes me as an extremely current topic, Signor Greco,” the young man replied with dignity.
He liked him immediately. These were the days when people, if they wanted to pitch an article, wouldn’t send you a flurry of insipid emails. They had to come to the newspaper in person, climb three or four flights of stairs, and then screw up the courage to present themselves. They had to know what you looked like, or at least they had to have made the effort to try to imagine. And you, in turn, understood whom you had before you. And Michele—he decided first thing—had his reasons.
He gestured for him to hand over the sheets of paper. He gave a quick glance to the opening, the body of the piece, and the last three lines.
“All right,” he said, “we’ll run it the day after tomorrow.”
Thinking back on it now, it was incredible how—in his dealings with him, and later with his sister—he hadn’t allowed himself to be intimidated by the weight of that surname. You didn’t have to be a good journalist to know who the Salveminis were. On the pylons flanking the entrance to the city pool, there was a bas relief with the company’s logo. They had built the city’s business district. They’d renovated the last section of the waterfront and expanded the train station. They’d even built the serpentine apartment building on Viale Europa, on the next-to-highest floor of which Giuseppe Greco himself, in a room that smelled vaguely of stubbed-out cigarettes, had had sex ten years ago with a colleague from the university faculty. He knew that the Salveminis counted among their friends the crème de la crème of the city’s society. The slightest crumb of their patrimony would allow a small newspaper to limp along taking losses for years.
And yet, none of this had the slightest influence on his decision to publish Michele’s pieces. The idea that that young man’s strange energy might be linked to a surname hadn’t even occurred to him.
Michele showed up another four or five times. He always clutched his rumpled sheets of paper. Giuseppe Greco published them all without problems. Then the boy disappeared. Giuseppe never even had time to wonder why. They were now in the heart of summer and—having ignored them for months—he was forced to give a name to the shadows that were looming over his desk.
One night the publisher invited him to dinner. At Giuseppe’s first objections, he held out a sheet of paper with a sales chart for the last quarter, then the fax that he’d received the day before from their advertising sales people.
In response to the advice that he look around for a new job, Giuseppe Greco increased his hours at work from ten to fourteen a day. On certain days he wrote three pieces for the next day’s paper, then he’d interview a musician, pop a couple of tabs of methamphetamine, and zip off to the theater to catch a show. Something illusory was persuading him that bleeding his psychophysical energies dry like that might slow the advance of passive interests. Methamphetamine became a habit. The accumulation of articles, an obsession. Right in the middle of his workday, he found himself hunting for traces of the preceding hours, finding himself faced with a sinkhole that reminded him of the Dead Sea as seen in satellite photographs.
One night, while he was editing an article that was likely to see publication only when the paper existed in documents held by a bankruptcy court judge, a noise distracted him from the drift of notes and scattered papers.
He lifted his head from his desk, emitted an inquisitive “Ciao” toward the door.
The girl was looking at him, serious and erect in the dim light. A handful of syllables being typed by the transcription secretary in the room next door came unstuck from her hair the minute she took a few steps forward. She was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a jacket that hugged her hips. She said that she was Michele’s sister.
“I’m sorry to bother you. My brother should have sent you some material a few weeks ago. And since he hasn’t seen it in print, well . . . ” she held her breath.
From the depths of his own confusion, Giuseppe Greco sought, without finding, the information he required: “Ah, of course.”
He pointed apathetically to a mountain of large, still unopened envelopes on the shelf. He turned his eyes back to her, taking her measure with a critical eye. He hadn’t slept but ten hours in the past three days.
“I’m sorry, but couldn’t your brother come and lodge a complaint in person?”
The girl started. Suddenly she seemed mortified. Worse. She seemed quite frightened.
“I assure you in Michele’s intentions there was no . . . that is, he couldn’t come himself.”
She explained that her brother was serving in the military at Avellino. She said that Michele respected him, that he thought of him as a father, a precious guide, and that he had sent him this article on Joseph Heller, a “fine article” on Heller, the young woman assured him, even if, she added, she was certainly no expert. If it turned out he’d lost it, she’d bring him another copy. Giuseppe Greco only needed to read it. Read it and judge. And, if and only if he thought it was good enough, publis
h it.
“Please, my brother cares very much about your opinion.”
Giuseppe Greco stopped savoring the sensation that the young woman’s words were provoking in him. Only when it vanished did he realize what it had been. Complacency. This too was a bad sign.
“Joseph Heller, why of course, certainly . . . ” he lied before ushering the young woman out.
More time passed—days, weeks during which the newspaper’s crisis became increasingly self-evident. Every so often a desk would disappear, or a photocopier. Individuals he’d never before laid eyes on began lurking in the halls.
When Clara reappeared in his office, the summer was ending. A Friday night. The heat was circulating freely and impetuously from room to room, and at that hour Giuseppe Greco should no longer have been there. Even the editor in chief was somewhere else. But by now, he was living between those four walls, he only went home to sleep. A force that might seem self-destructive—while it was actually an extreme version of every force of self-preservation—was leading him to absorb all that he still could from that life before the death of the newspaper turned the page once and for all. The cleaning ladies were appalled to find him there at the most unthinkable times of night.
Ferocity Page 10
