Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Since it wasn’t his responsibility to delve into all these absurdities (he was a notary, not a psychiatrist) he resigned himself to finishing the discussion: “It’s very noble of you to think of taking out a health insurance policy for Vittorio,” he said, “but believe me when I tell you that a man like him can take very good care of his own insurance needs. And, while we’re on the subject, your father is in excellent health.”

  “Offering guarantees about other people’s health is never good luck. And in any case, I wasn’t thinking of a health insurance policy.”

  “Then what were you thinking of?” The notary Valsecchi noticed the change in Michele’s voice. Suddenly, that very skinny young man seemed unreal; he was so sharply defined, not unlike certain criminals.

  It was at that moment that Michele’s hands shot upward. The notary jumped in his chair.

  “I have another agreement in mind that I’d like you to notarize,” said Michele with a smile full of ferocity, which dissolved in the afternoon light that suddenly made him want to take a trip over to the National Gallery of Modern Art. “A binding contract,” he continued, “an agreement by which I commit myself to donate my liver whenever my father should have need of it, and lungs and prostate in case of cancer. He’s always been a heavy smoker, don’t forget. We could go as far as the complete removal of my organs, on a strictly preventive basis. I’d imagine that the law allows this.”

  Now Michele wasn’t laughing. He was staring at the owl. And the notary, whose sensations were traveling with a certain delay, was overwhelmed with terror at the thought that Michele meant to smash it into his face.

  So Michele went to take a look at his tiger. And now, having reached the center of town, he was about to cross the Sant’Angelo bridge. To pass beneath the angel with the nails. The angel with the spear. The angel with the crown of thorns. There are those who can’t wait to be robbed so they can shout, stop thief! Refused to sign the documents and avoided the buffoonery in front of that idiot: that’s what he ought to have done. That, yes, would have been a surprise for his father.

  He turned down Corso Vittorio. Big buildings and tobacconist’s shops. On the third floor of number 141 was the room where St. Philip Neri brought a child back to life. On the ground a flyer was disintegrating in a rivulet of water. He looked at it again. He thought back to the eyes of the owl. The image was on the verge of resurfacing in his memory. A car went past, sirens wailing. He needed to turn the piece in by seven. There’s plenty of time, he thought. He turned into Via della Cuccagna. The building’s façade was in shadow. He climbed up to the third floor. He rang the bell. The door swung open. Before he could take a step, the door was shut in his face. Two minutes later, the door opened again.

  “Maybe I’ve come at a bad time.”

  The woman laughed: “If he was here, do you think I would have opened the door again?”

  She was wearing a sky-blue dressing gown, with black sandals at the end of her long, skinny legs. How stupid to think of her husband. Those moments had given her the time she needed to make herself presentable. Obviously she wasn’t. Aside from her hair—the dishevelment of someone who’d brushed it at the last minute and who is no longer twenty—it was that she kept herself in shape with the expectation that all the effort would go unnoticed which really stripped her of desirability. But that was also what made her so ravenous. Her fingers wrapped themselves around his back and pulled him inside.

  An hour later, Michele was back in the street. He reached Piazza Venezia. Here he caught the bus that would take him back home. The sun was setting over the church of the Gesú. The horn honked. The vehicle huffed and puffed. The monument vanished around a curve into the fiery red glare of the afternoon’s death throes, and only then did the picture resurface in all its power. I dreamt of a doe that was drowning in her own blood. Michele shuddered. He saw the stoplights blinking, the lights of the shop windows. Shoe stores, delicatessens. Jewelers buying gold. Old rings: shattered pacts. The dream was from the night before. He felt the anguish rise within him. He tried to distract himself. Thirty-four signs lit-up, and I’m thirty-three years old. One block after the other, the shops were thinning out. Already there were just twenty-eight. When I was sixteen, we’d spend hours and hours shut up in my room. I’d take a last drag on my cigarette and then crush out the butt on the star globe, right on top of Ursa Major, where we swore we’d meet again when we were both dead. The time I gave her the articles to deliver to the guy at the newspaper. When I made it clear to her that I was planning to set the house on fire, and she smiled. Michele saw the ancient Roman aqueduct beyond the line of pine trees. The tufa-stone arches were sinking into the grass. Shit. Now he’d have gladly punched his fists into the seat ahead of his.

  Every so often it still happened to him. His thoughts wandered off of their own accord and a switch flipped off. He became a sleepwalker. The bus had driven for miles without his noticing the fact. Of the old passengers he didn’t recognize a single one. This was the Via Appia in the vicinity of Ciampino, which meant, logically, that he must actually be riding on a different bus. Even though he knew he’d been cured, certain symptoms still surfaced. The aftershocks of an earthquake that had occurred some time ago. That was why the flashbacks made him angry. The bus pushed its way through the hot spring darkness. By now it was too late to deliver the piece. The vehicle was running along the Via Appia. If, by some twist of irony, there were to be no end of the line, in a few hours he’d find himself in Puglia. He got off at the next stop.

  He got home a little after midnight. He entered the courtyard. He went down the steps to the small basement apartment and a short while later was in his bed. A soft stroke to his cheek. In the depths of darkness, perfectly mistress of her own motions, the cat had come to say hello to him. Burning bright, in the forests of the night, he recited by heart, chilled, ravaged, convinced that, like all felines, she, too, was capable of reading his mind. A mother. A sister. And now a cat. Michele sank his fingers into the animal’s soft fur. He put a hand under her throat, pressed down until he could feel the vibration. He noticed the LED on his cell phone. It had been lying there forgotten on the nightstand since that morning. Michele reached out his hand and checked. Two calls from his father, one from Ruggero, and even one from Annamaria. Four calls in a single day: it had never before happened. Grandma must have died, he thought. The cat started nipping at him. He’d seen a doe in his dream, but it actually should have been a sow. Further proof of how I’ve lost my powers. He prayed that it wasn’t really his grandmother. A funeral would have forced him to stay in Bari for a few days. And when he slept there, he was still tormented by terrifying nightmares.

  The cat slipped away, out from under his hands, and slowly disappeared into the dark.

  The day after his daughter’s funeral, with the streets awash in the sudden heat, Vittorio Salvemini was driving toward Ruggero’s clinic.

  It would still be several weeks before summer began, the muggy heat recalled to memory old pictures of a city prone to paralysis. Tall palm trees battered by the wind. Voices churned by the whirring fans. The Porto Allegro affair was crying out for revenge thought Vittorio as he turned onto Via Isonzo, wounded by the thought of Clara. His grief at his daughter’s death had cracked open a welded seam in him, it shifted the ground upon which the solution to the mess and the girl herself could amount to the same thing.

  What had offended him especially wasn’t so much the seizure request, but everything that had broken loose even before the request had been filed at the courthouse. The hysteria of the environmental groups. The petitions circulating online. The journalists yammering on about public resources and knowing nothing about hydrogeological and forestry and wilderness zoning restrictions.

  “The Vandal King of the Gargano Coast.” That’s what Corriere del Sud had called him. The article reeked of the rancor felt by those who suspect how much talent there is in someone who has achieved succ
ess by coming up from nothing. Vittorio knew that kind of hatred. They’d insulted him, provoked him, raised the most fanciful sorts of insinuations, until the heavy eye of the Foggia district attorney’s office had blinked open in his direction.

  Only then, in defiance of the best legal opinions of two out of the three lawyers he’d consulted, did Vittorio call a press conference.

  Disobeying even the last of the three lawyers, he hadn’t sent Engineer De Palo to Foggia. Much less had he entrusted the task to Engineer Ranieri, the latter’s loyalty devoid of all surges of initiative. He’d gone there himself, appearing in person in the Trident Room at the Jolly Hotel. Here (he’d realized it walking down the carpet that led to the table with the microphone) the fury of the hacks—ready to pounce on any emissary from Salvemini Construction—had begun to waver. From blind rage, the anger all around him had turned more reasonable. Admiration! That’s what the journalists had been filled with when the owner had, in flesh and blood, offered himself up to them. They couldn’t wait for the chance to show him just how good they were at putting him in an awkward situation, and in order to do so, they employed the most disingenuous possible form of camouflage: that of a just cause. And so the match began.

  In response to the director of the environmental league, Legambiente, a woman who’d gone from zero to sixty with the destruction of the Mediterranean maquis, Vittorio had countered with the minutes of the Provincial Commission for the Protection of the Landscape.

  With the deputy editor of La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, he’d been more cautious. The journalist had suggested that the judicial proceedings might shake the entire real estate development group to its foundations (a touching error born of optimism: considering their exposure to the banks, the seizure order would bring them to their knees). Vittorio had replied that the sheer number of his employees alone told them all they needed to know about the company’s strength and solidity. He’d expressed his confidence that the investigating magistrate would reject the request.

  But then the spokesman for a consumers’ rights association had accused him of defrauding the hapless buyers who had purchased their villas before they were finished. Vittorio’s face had filled with dismay. “Excuse me, sir, but do you have children?” The man had replied “no” with guilty resentment. Vittorio had suddenly slammed shut the folder that contained the plans and documents of the various building commissions. He’d pulled several sheets of paper from his jacket pocket and started waving them back and forth. Property deeds! Property deeds! he’d repeated. Someone here wants to know who else has tumbled into this trap? My first-born son, a well-known oncologist, bought a villa at Porto Allegro! And in fact, my second-born son did the same thing! Did I defraud them? Did I defraud them, too?

  Only those who weren’t parents could be unaware of how offensive it was to the laws of nature to think that a father would betray his own sons, he’d continued, definitively backing his opponent onto the ropes. Only someone who’d never held them in his arms as newborns—Vittorio had thought to himself—feeling pity for the way the world would reveal itself to their eyes. Only someone who, watching them run themselves ragged on a soccer field (or leap between the Rat King and the Sugar Plum Fairy during a dance recital), had faced up to the fact that those kids would never become soccer stars or ballerinas. Someone who, carrying his own newborn child in his arms, hadn’t whispered the well-known prayer: stay this moment, you are so fair.

  He turned onto Via Innocenzo. He accelerated up Viale de Laurentiis. Rusty playground equipment. His son Ruggero knew the head orthopedic physician at the General Hospital. Good doctors are all members of the same big club. Every patient is a tragedy in his or her own way. This guy from Taranto had busted their chops to get a new room. They’d even bought him a television set. This was nothing but an appetizer.

  “Don’t you believe that the commitment to urban development is nothing but a shameless trick played in order to pave Puglia over once and for all with cement?”

  And you’re asking me, you blithering idiots? Your progressive friends have wallowed for years in commitments to urban development. They’ve constructed conferences on them! Election campaigns! They’ve sung paeans to the nursery schools, the public parks that the municipalities would build thanks to the taxes levied on builders in return for every construction permit issued. A tenth of total building costs! But was it any fault of his that, instead of building the nursery schools the municipalities chose to use that money (his money) to pay back wages to their own employees? to renovate the offices that were falling apart? to straighten out budgets that they themselves had turned into hellish sinkholes?

  The Porto Allegro story was an old one. When the mayor of Sapri Garganico and his urban planning commissioner had welcomed him under the bas reliefs of town hall, Vittorio had no idea whether in their eyes he represented the revival of tourism or a last ditch attempt to avoid bankruptcy. In any case, he’d taken the two of them out for dinner, more than once. He’d invited them to Bari. He’d gone back to see them during the Festival of the Madonna, contemplating in their company the way the fireworks were doubled in the surface of the Adriatic Sea. He’d come to know by heart the shoe sizes, favorite wines, and musical preferences of both. (Rossini Early Operas, an exquisite boxed set of thirty CDs he’d given as a gift to the commissioner.) When they’d issued construction permits, Vittorio couldn’t have been expected to be able to read their minds, as well. He had no idea whether the 420 acres of coastal pine grove were subject to zoning restrictions. The mayor was behind him, and that was all he needed. It certainly wasn’t for him to distrust the man who was guardian of the landscape, it wasn’t Vittorio’s job to dredge the bottomless well of laws, decrees, and special administrative dispensations necessary to understand in each specific case the fate of a single row of maritime pines.

  He needed to solve the problem with the Tarantine, he thought as he waited for the green. The accident had been a mess. Vittorio didn’t even want to try to guess at the state of mind of a man who had just had a leg amputated. In the celestial harmony that gives birth to disasters in order to ensure that wonders have a name, the Tarantine hadn’t been necessary. He put one hand to his forehead, clenched his teeth. Clara had been dead three days. The light turned green and he pressed down on the accelerator.

  That morning he’d gotten the phone call from Piscitelli. The assistant district attorney wanted to thank him for sending over the old hospital records. He reported that the case was being closed. Suicide in the aftermath of a serious depressive episode. Vittorio felt as if he were glimpsing the scene through a sheet of pouring rain. He drove past the building that housed the economics and business department.

  After the Tarantine, he’d have to settle things with the chancellor of the university. The former undersecretary Buffante and the deputy mayor. The chief justice of the court of appeals. All of them emissaries of chaos.

  After he’d passed through the residential district, after he’d gone by the bike racing tracks, the Cancer Institute of the Mediterranean began to loom in the distance. That was where his son worked—the monster of concentration incarnate with whom, during his time at the university, Vittorio had had to struggle for so much as a hello. Bent over his textbooks like a wolf over its prey. The deputy director whose bursts of rage now frightened even the director.

  He needed to persuade him to talk with the head orthopedic physician. Convince a man who wouldn’t have refrained from smiling at a diagnosis of cancer of the uterus for the satisfaction of being able to destroy it.

  At last Vittorio parked. He unbuckled his seat belt, got out of the car, and headed toward the front desk. As he slipped his cell phone into his jacket pocket, he found a call from Engineer De Palo. A call from his wife. A call from Michele. He decided, with a touch of resentment, that he wouldn’t call him back. By this time his son must have heard, he was probably on his way to Bari. He was the reason his son had missed the funeral.
He’d basically avoided calling him. But for Vittorio it would have been impossible to admit to this. If businessmen failed to keep their thresholds of unawareness high, if they allowed thoughts to emerge that, once on the surface, would explode in all their total contradictory essence, then they’d never be able to rule the world as they do.

  And it was therefore not while thinking about these things, but rather while letting them steam in a pressure cooker, that Vittorio went to see his first-born son.

  So then the girl was real, Orazio Basile kept repeating to himself, while the others kept changing places for no reason other than to keep the comedy playing.

  The head physician had retreated into the background. The fifty-year-old with the brylcreemed hair was reading from the papers on the clipboard. “Via d’Aquino is Taranto’s social drawing room,” he said. At that point the third man, who seemed the uneasiest of the group, went over to the window. Under his jacket the white hem of a lab coat could be glimpsed. While the engineer finished describing the apartment, Orazio noticed that the other man was closing the shutters, almost as if breaking the light meant keeping the rest of the world in the dark. Stretched out in bed, he could feel the analgesic. He moved the toes of his phantom foot. He saw again in the semidarkness the inflatable puppet that danced like a specter over the gas station. He noticed that the head physician had vanished. The engineer spoke of registration fees paid in advance. The other one kept moving in and out of the darkness, as if on a swing. All to make sure he hadn’t seen the girl, even though no one was willing to take responsibility for saying this loud and clear.