Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Now it was ten at night, and Giuseppe Greco didn’t even ask himself how the young woman had been able to get in. He saw the shadow lengthen and shorten, rotating from one wall to another.

  “Ah,” he said, setting down the X-Acto knife he’d been toying with for the past few minutes.

  “Good evening,” said Clara.

  She was wearing a silver lamé dress and a pair of boots. She seemed different from the last time, but not so different that she was already someone else. A note of sorrow ran up her body, lit as it was by the glow of the table lamp.

  “I know,” said Giuseppe Greco as if he were smiling into thin air, “the piece on Joseph Heller.”

  Clara stepped forward, revealing a yellow envelope clutched tight in her hands. Her lips contracted until they formed a tiny zero.

  “I believe there’s been a change in plans.”

  She told him that as far as Michele was concerned, the piece on Joseph Heller no longer had any significance. He was still in Avellino. As military life had continued, it had made him change his mind. He considered the previous piece to be obsolete. “I’m going so fast these days that I’ve already overtaken it a couple of times,” he had told her over the phone. So now she had come to ask him not to publish it.

  “However I would be very grateful if you’d take this under consideration.”

  She handed him the envelope. Also by phone, Michele had told her some strange things, saying that, even though he’d put them down in black and white, he was actually composing those thoughts from the future. A long article about the poetry of Georg Trakl. This time the young woman couldn’t have sworn that this was a clear piece of journalism. She herself, reading it, wasn’t sure she’d understood every passage. What was needed was an expert’s eye.

  “I’m not sure I’m up to the task,” he replied sarcastically.

  Clara changed her tone of voice: “Please,” she said, clenching her teeth, “my brother’s having a rough time. Really rough, I tell you. He’s not well. It would be important for hi—”

  “Just leave it there,” he said, cutting her off, and pointing to the pile of papers at the foot of the shelves.

  It was a complicated period. It was a complicated period for everyone, though. Giuseppe Greco was starting to reach the conclusion that naiveté was nothing but a smoke screen to conceal the absence of talent. If with all the good will in the world there hadn’t emerged a Fassbinder, a Julian Beck, not even a young Oriana Fallaci capable of turning her careerism into a virtue, then it meant that the ferment of the chemical compound that in the lives of great men makes them confidently say “Here,” laying their finger on a map to mark the spot from which they set out, was happening somewhere else. A city in the south without great traditions, save its entrepreneurial approach to construction and a particular tenacity among the law firms. That, then, is all that was left in Bari.

  He went back to looking straight ahead, and only then did he realize that the dam had collapsed. Clara was bleeding from one hand. The blood was flowing down her arm and dripping onto the floor. Giuseppe Greco shot forward. He opened the fist that was clenching the blade of the X-Acto knife. The girl let him do it, now serious and docile. He took her in his arms and concluded that she was nursing a malaise completely unknown to him. The malaise gripping Giuseppe Greco was a chilly peak in the Apennines, while hers was a Mt. Everest, even a would-be Ararat. The summer was over. The newspaper was dead. An entire archive was crumbling at their feet while the evening heat continued to waft up to them.

  And so that same girl, he thought to himself many years later, had thrown herself off the top level of the parking structure on Via Lioce. By now, the members of her family must have returned to their expensive homes. He reentered the details on Google and once again ran into the website of the Amatori Volley team. When someone told him that she had married that guy, it had seemed like the obvious conclusion. Every so often he had stumbled across her brother’s byline. He remembered having read an article of his in the back pages of La Repubblica. Then another in La Stampa, one in Ciak, and one in Panorama. He would open a daily paper and there he was. Every time he felt the burning sensation of a slap. The fact that he, Giuseppe Greco, had in the meanwhile attained a position of his own was clearly not enough. He felt resentful all the same. Michele had vanished years ago into the jammed streets of the nation’s corrupt capital, and even though his mind was fragile—bipolar or schizophrenic or whatever disturbance it was that afflicted him—for the son of Vittorio Salvemini it was quite obviously not a sufficiently large obstacle to prevent him from getting his work published in national papers.

  If only Giuseppe Greco had taken the time to think it over, he’d have understood that all told, there were no more than fifteen or so articles in ten years, a very clear sign of failure.

  He re-read the team rosters on the screen. He checked the New York Times homepage in one of his open windows. He verified the presence of new notifications on two of his accounts. He retyped her first and last name into Twitter. He felt saddened. He reflected on the way that the transmigration of souls was changing the rules of the game. Analog and digital. The transition was transforming the emotions into something for which better-suited adjectives still remained to be coined. Open. Exhilarating. Useful. Friendly. Superficial. Pornographic. Bloody.

  Giuseppe Greco sat frozen before the computer screen.

  It hadn’t existed until just a few seconds ago. But now there it was, before his eyes. You could have touched it, if touching it weren’t impossible. The umpteenth grave desecrated by the maniacs on the internet. What a heinous prank. The Twitter account @clarasalvemini loomed, brand new, on the right side of the screen. The picture next to the name showed a girl, naked, from behind. He contemplated in horror the newborn icon. Then he clicked on it. It had zero followers, was following no one, and just one tweet. He held his breath and read it.

  “I didn’t kill myself.”

  Every day, at sunset, an adult tiger climbs the steps that lead up to the second story of the Palazzo del Grillo in Rome. For her, the garden door is always open. The tiger wanders silently among the eucalyptus trees and it is in that magnetic instant, balanced among the oil paints, that everyone can see her.

  Now he alone was looking at her. The painting was hanging in a small blind vestibule. The visitors went past it without noticing, attracted by the greater fame of Klimt and de Chirico. The gray of the marble and the dark green of the vegetation around that dreamy yellow symmetry. A tiger in a European garden.

  The canvas was called The Evening Visit, and Michele came to look at it when he wanted to come face to face with a future image. He had read in a catalogue that the animal represented the greed lurking in the homes of the powerful, but he disagreed. The tiger was a reward, and the garden an interior space. If she had already peeked into his own inner space, he thought, things would have gone differently at the notary’s office.

  He went back through the front hall. He went out through the door. He walked down the grand staircase of the National Gallery of Modern Art. He counted the money in his wallet, gave up the idea of a taxi.

  A couple of hours earlier he’d been in the notary’s office. A massive mahogany table dominated the room. On the wall was a reproduction of an ideal city concerning which Michele might be in agreement (the absence of other human beings is an excellent remedy for loneliness, he thought, flashing another smile at the notary). There was a paperweight in the shape of a large owl with ruby-red eyes.

  The notary Valsecchi read aloud the text of the private agreement. He was a man in his mid-sixties, small and wrinkled, in a navy blue suit from which emerged the snowy sail of a pocket square. It was the second time that Michele had met him in the past few months. Many years ago he’d come down to see them in Bari. Where else had he seen that redhead recently? he thought, staring at the paperweight.

  The notary passed him the she
ets of paper. Michele lined them up to a sixteenth of an inch to show off. He read his father’s signature. He hesitated. Then he started signing as well. The notary was watching the movements of the Parker pen. When it was too late, a smile bloomed on Michele’s lips.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said to the notary.

  What would have, until just recently, worried the man now filled him with benevolence.

  “Anything you like.”

  Michele looked at the ideal city on the wall. He imagined the foundations in the air, the roofs of the buildings thrust into the soil.

  “It has to do with legal rights of inheritance.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Let’s say that I draw up a will . . . ”

  The notary made a perplexed face.

  Michele saw him again, sitting on the covered patio in the garden, between a porcelain tureen and the sauce bowls on the hand-embroidered doilies. Many years had passed since then. His father was saying: “You shouldn’t pay any attention to that, a good price is never excessive,” and the notary’s only response was to gleefully seize the bottle of Amarone. He filled the glasses of the other diners around him as well. But the diners vanished from sight. The place settings faded with time. The late-August light tumbled onto the Virginia creeper. At that point, the patio was lit up again with a warmer red. Selam brought the trolley with the cheeses (through the rubber band of time, back into Michele’s mind came even the deep blue of the cotton, the white hems on the uniform that his father and Annamaria insisted the young housekeeper had to wear on holidays). The notary spread his hands, simulating the expanse of the land to be auctioned for the public housing plan. Vittorio reiterated: “If that’s the margin, then we’ll see if I can’t find a way of laying my hands on the money.” Valsecchi laughed: “All right, let’s say you find the money. But with all those construction sites underway, how do you think you’re going to come up with the workers to finish it in time? His father shouted: “Pasquale!” as if he’d just come up with the solution to a math problem. After a few seconds, during which Gioia could be heard asking her mother if she could try on her necklace, the voice arrived, deep and low: “Signor Salvemini.”

  It was then that his memory vivified that part of the garden, too. Two rows of gentian plants emerged from the shadows and Michele remembered about the other table. There was the table with friends and relatives; and, a few yards away, under a large horse chestnut tree, there was the table of construction workers and their wives. (Selam ate alone in the kitchen, even when she was off duty. An apparent privilege, but in fact an exile to which the young Eritrean woman had been sentenced for reasons not otherwise specified.)

  An enormous man presented himself before them. He was older than sixty and he smiled, showing a broad mouthful of teeth.

  Vittorio rotated his hand around the wrist as if to take in the entire villa: “Pasquale,” he smiled with ferocity, “show this poor notary how long we took to renovate this place.”

  The foreman composed a number with his hands by holding up certain fingers and not others. His curiosity aroused, the notary asked: “Months?” Engineer De Palo snickered. Vittorio shouted triumphantly: “Weeks!” slapping his hand down onto the table. The foreman laughed. Engineer De Palo turned to Engineer Ranieri: “Could someone please ask Cheeta to bring in the profiteroles.” “Stop using that name for her!” said Annamaria, out of sorts, but in a loud voice, so everyone could hear her. Gioia was clutching the necklace in her hands. The notary shrugged his shoulders. He said that twenty years ago, the foreman might have finished the renovation work in record time; but now he looked like a retired boxer.

  A murder of ravens emerged from the hedges to the west of the garden. It seemed as if they were bursting through the green wall, coming from where the tennis club had once stood.

  Vittorio burst out laughing, and made a theatrical show of despair: “Oh, Pasquale! This poor notary from Rome just makes me sad. He breaks my heart, I feel such compassion!” The foreman started unbuttoning his shirt. The ravens kept calling in the sky. Selam brought a tray with the desserts. The foreman in the meantime had also removed his T-shirt, was displaying his bare chest. Whistles of approval went up from the table where the construction workers were dining. The foreman pumped his biceps. The notary was about to raise another objection, but then he reconsidered. Pasquale was on the patio doing push-ups. A number of chairs were pushed back. Someone from the other table started counting out loud. Engineer De Palo said: “Now he’ll collapse.” The foreman’s wife laughed, disgusted, concealed among the wives of the other construction workers. A pitcher full of water fell onto the floor. Selam plunged her face into her open hands. Then came the explosion of voices. The foreman had passed his hundredth push-up. Gioia was riding on his back. It wasn’t clear how it had happened, but the little girl was laughing happily. The scene was taking on the appearance of certain nineteenth-century Italian paintings of country vistas (those pieces of artistic claptrap you’ll find in civic museums, in which the badness is accentuated because the painter pretends to ignore it), and he, Michele—memory further lowered its shaft of light—couldn’t utter so much as half a phrase. Military service had reduced him to a new and disastrous low. On the advice of their psychiatrists, they’d sent him off to Rome. He was sitting next to Engineer Ranieri. Facing him was his father’s wife. (Ruggero was pursuing studies in his specialty in Amsterdam, he remembered.) Engineer Ranieri’s wife said: “What now, she’s even started crying?” “Who?” asked Annamaria. “The girl. What’s her name?” She pointed at the Eritrean housekeeper. Someone said: “Cheeta!” Michele was confused. This was the first time he’d come back to Bari since his time in the hospital. He felt crushed by his helplessness, by an astonished sense of shame. Then he saw her.

  After handing Gioia back to her parents, Pasquale went back to the table under a torrent of applause. The aroma of coffee started to spread through the air. It was then, at four in the afternoon, that she appeared at the end of the driveway. She was wearing a denim shirt and corduroy trousers tucked into her riding boots. She walked toward the entrance to the villa, careful—but a natural, unforced carefulness—not to get close to any of them. Her figure cut by the curvature of the field. Michele tried to call to her. In fact, he did nothing more than move his lips. Things had changed. After a few minutes, Clara reappeared in the door. Now she was dressed in a T-shirt and gym shoes. She retraced her steps from one side to the other. She was carrying a gym bag with EXTREME FITNESS written on it. It felt to Michele as if a red-hot bar of metal had been jammed into his lungs. To be the only ones who understand that someone else is drowning and the only ones who don’t know how to swim. The ravens were cries without bodies, so that that really was the voice of the sky.

  The notary said: “Vittorio, you don’t know how much I envy you.”

  And now, years later, after signing the documents that his father had arranged to have drawn up, Michele spoke to the notary about a theoretical will.

  “If you would be so good as to notarize my last wishes,” he said, “I’d like to leave everything to my father. Do you think that would be possible?”

  The man looked at him, more baffled than before. He hesitated. “For the ascendants there would in any case be a forced portion or legitim,” he said, trying to divine the young man’s intentions, “in the case of the parents the entailed portion is equal to a third. But even if we assume that one wished to expand it . . . ”

  Six months earlier, that same notary had recorded the deed by which Michele became the owner of a villa on the Gargano coast. A little odd, considering that there was no real estate in Michele’s name, and he lived two hundred and fifty miles away. The purchase had been fine-tuned by redeeming the shares that Vittorio had put in Michele’s name on the day of his eighteenth birthday, shares of whose nature, issuing institution, and method of access the beneficiary had always been ignorant. Now, an agr
eement had just been notarized requiring Michele to give back that same villa to the Salvemini Construction Company, within a year. The Bank gives, and the Bank takes back.

  “In your particular case,” the notary continued, “considering that you’re unmarried and you have no children, you’re free to leave your father anything you like.”

  The man paused. He furrowed his brow, as if what he had just said didn’t make the conversation less absurd, and it were up to him to do the dirty work and extract the implicit element: “The siblings have a right to the legitim only in the case in which there is no will,” he sighed, “while if instead there is a will, then a person can do as he likes. All the more so for the siblings who only have one parent in common, if that’s the meaning of your question.”

  The thought that the notary believed him capable of excluding Clara from her so splendidly re-proportioned properties—the clothing she could no longer use, the cigarettes that Michele had already smoked, the cheap furniture in his rented basement apartment in Rome—made him feel free to pick up the owl-shaped paperweight and smash it into his face. But that didn’t happen. Michele smiled inoffensively: “Why, no, Signor Valsecchi, all I want is to protect my father’s interests!”

  He needs to understand that I’m a complete idiot. Haven’t we just notarized the document attesting to the fact?

  The notary faltered. For a moment he was frightened by something he didn’t understand. To keep from feeling ridiculous, he hurried straight towards the young man’s blissful expression. “Why Michele, what are you talking about!” He threw wide his arms, finally unfurled the gaze of an old family friend. “Aside from the enormous unlikelihood of a parent surviving his own children, it hardly seems to me that Vittorio has any need of your financial assistance.”

  “And what if he were to fall sick?”

  “Are you suggesting you take out a health insurance policy for him?” The notary at this point was brushed by the idea that something wasn’t right, because he was, after all, an old family friend, and therefore he could hardly be ignorant of the fact that the frequency with which Michele worked was barely enough to allow him to take girls out to a pizzeria. He knew, or at least he could guess, that Michele’s father never gave him a penny, since the money always goes to the children who are already making plenty, or to those who follow in the wave of that money, those for example who have a genuine vocation for spending (he thought of the youngest girl: the last time he’d seen her, she’d had, around her throat, a necklace studded with small pink diamonds). He knew that this young man had had some serious problems. Mental problems. But above all, he was certain, since this was his profession, that just a few minutes ago Michele’s total assets had been reduced to zero. How could he think of underwriting a health insurance policy for a man in his seventies who was loaded?