Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Once he’d done something like that, over the years that followed anything became possible.

  Is that why you went to the general hospital this morning?

  Blood relatives never weary of questioning us. They leave their voices inside us. That’s what goes on talking when they’re absent. But the proprietor of that voice is drawing closer, thought Ruggero in his BMW. Beyond the curve, beyond the almond trees in bloom, after the gray buildings and the half-empty stores. The red façade of the Bari train station, where a row of rails zipped glittering northward. Michele.

  Six ounces of aged caciocavallo,” he said, examining the deli counter with the expert eye of a physician studying an X-ray.

  Engineer De Palo had them pack up the olives. He asked them to show him the Parma prosciutto through the glass—like a newborn baby or an artwork—and before the blade of the slicer had even touched the ham, he added: “Thinner.” He bought smoked salmon, two bottles of Amarone. He snapped his fingers at the stock boy to get him the quince jelly. Sitting behind the cash register, white and heavy as a Roman consul, the proprietor reiterated the point loudly: “Get the jelly for Engineer De Palo!”

  He had them add in some burrata and fior di latte mozzarellas. This was the finest delicatessen in the city. Buying something extra, even if they were products that might wind up being tossed in the garbage, meant helping it maintain that status. Outside, the unemployed might be shouting, the students without a future might be spinning out of control. Where until just yesterday there had been a fine clothing shop it was not out of the question that overnight someone might come along and put up a “For Rent” sign. Poverty was disgusting, but nothing was more disgusting than the needy themselves. And even if that shop was weathering the storm—the garlands around the bars of chocolate and the beluga on display that seemed neither blackmail nor a threat were proof—there was no guarantee that at the first sign of trouble the owner wouldn’t give in to the temptation to slip in some average foods amongst the fine delicacies, something that would attract the small-time professionals, the white-collar workers, with all their horrible complaints. He paid. The elderly proprietor leaned out past the cash register. He brought his lips close to the engineer’s ear. He whispered to extend his condolences to the Salvemini family.

  Engineer De Palo arranged the shopping bags on the rear seat. He got into his Ford Focus. He pulled out, drove away from the city center. He slowed down a few yards away from a men’s clothing store. He double-parked. He went into the store. He examined the overcoats on display. He purchased the cheapest one. He left the store. He got back into his car. He drove past even the outskirts of town. After the IP gas station, he turned off onto the narrow tree-lined street on the right. It was a tremendous blow, but the Salvemini backbone should hold. He drove through the villa’s front gate. He observed the oleanders and the hedges he cared more about than his own personal possessions. The engineer remembered when they’d sent him out in the middle of the night to retrieve her, one Christmas many years ago. She’d been sixteen at the time. There’d been a fight with her mother over some trifle that concealed the eternal reason: the half-brother, as always. The engineer found her after midnight, wandering all alone on the edge of a road leading out of town. The engineer pulled over. Clara looked up, got in the car without uttering a word. She sat next to him, docile in a way that failed to deceive him. Little viper. Acting like a little saint might be enough to fool her father, helped perhaps by his sense of guilt over Michele, but the girl wasn’t about to pull the wool over his eyes. Silent in the passenger seat, so studiedly placid that the underlying arrogance became unmistakable. Obvious that she’s hot to trot, he’d thought as he took her home. Even though she was barely a teenager, in spite of the fact that no boy had yet (though when it come to that detail, the engineer would have bet no more than three hundred-euro bills) punctured a hymen whose value at age sixteen Clara must have been smart enough to understand was multiplied by the fact that it would one day be gone, he could sense it baking in the space between her and the car seat. She thought she was who knows who. She felt superior to her mother, for example. Ridiculous! A woman she’d never come close to equaling. Her love for the bastard was absurd, too. The whole thing was a farce. They’d been too kind to the little slut. They should have brought her up on a steady diet of slaps in the face. In fact, now, with her death (which the engineer interpreted as one final insult to a family over which it was his duty to watch as if he were a guard entrusted with the gold of a church), she’d finally found a way of getting her folks into trouble.

  But certain troubles are propitious, they arise so that other kinds of problems can be solved, he thought, at last, as he parked on the stretch of gravel.

  He switched off the engine of the Focus. He got out of the car, walked around it. He pulled out the shopping bags. For the thousandth time, he failed to see the tiny star-shaped earring that had gotten stuck between the cushion and the back of the rear seat. He heard the twittering of birds. He climbed the stairs. He set down the shopping bags by the doormat, rang the bell. He hoped that the housekeeper would answer the door, to keep himself from hoping for something better. Instead the door swung open and Annamaria appeared. Signora Salvemini emerged from the shadow of the living room, an expression of sadness, of heroic decorum on her face. She was wearing a peach-colored dressing gown and gilt slippers, her naked ankles all angles like lintels capable of warding off attacks. Even if her makeup might smudge in the hot noonday wind, in spite of the fact that her sixty-six years had been assaulted by the selfishness and madness of that degenerate daughter, to him she was still a stunningly beautiful woman.

  “Ah, Pasquale, thank you. Leave them there,” she said, her voice hoarse.

  “Signora, I ventured to get some burrata as well.”

  “That was smart of you,” said Annamaria, with a hint of a smile that pierced the engineer through and through, while she looked at him as she would a play of light or some inert object—he considered her the guarantee that everything was going to turn out for the better.

  He went back to the car. He pulled out his cell phone and read the address on the message that Signor Salvemini had sent him a few hours earlier. Before he’d even turned the key in the ignition he heard a shout. He looked up. The lady had vanished. The housekeeper, at the front door, was waving her fist threateningly in the air. The cat dove into the bushes. The shopping bags still next to the doormat. Idiot woman, thought Engineer De Palo.

  “There’s no such thing as a steady job. There’s no such thing even as a steady profession anymore. China. Brazil. Everything happens so fast. So don’t get scandalized when I say that academic knowledge isn’t per se a professional qualification.”

  “. . .”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “. . .”

  “I’d try to turn that question around. Let’s try taking a look at the financing enjoyed by the top hundred universities in the ranking that you cite.”

  Different in their sameness, the questions blew about in the wind of that season’s agenda. Briefly, he had been allowed to pursue excellence. This was the long process of decline that he’d have to learn to live with. For that matter, the young interviewer looked like someone who’d be out on the street, unemployed, in three months. He shook the boy’s hand. Then Renato Costantini, sixty-four years old, with a master’s degree in economics from Chicago, a major figure in local periodical publishing and the chancellor of the University of Bari, got ready to go out.

  Noise in the hallways of the departments, students on the move from one lecture hall to another, the tongue ever turns to the missing tooth, heading for the café, the library, the copy center, and no place where sense could be made. Students when they could have just been kids. Crazy that they kept on enrolling. The prize for failing to find a job was learning to be servile. Of course, Professor. After you, Professor. What little they learned they’d lose in t
he years they spent begging for jobs as baristas.

  He went through the gates and he was back out in the street. The prettiest girl on the advertising posters wasn’t good enough for him, he mused at the peak of sadness as he thought back on the funeral. A pedestrian bumped into him. A bus braked to a halt right on the crosswalk. A pair of butterflies seemed to spawn out of the blackness of the asphalt. Spring was everywhere. But all this because something inside him had recognized the diminutive silhouette coming straight at him in the distance. The man approached him circumspectly, now they were face-to-face, no way to sidestep him.

  “Hello, Mr. Chancellor.”

  A dreary, gray gentleman, dressed like an office clerk from thirty years ago. Narrow, slumping shoulders. Folded under his arm, he was carrying an ugly camelhair coat.

  “Hello,” the chancellor replied, shaking hands and trying to understand, guessing, not realizing. Then—in the space of time necessary to associate a name with that face—he felt his stomach clench. Without quite knowing how, he saw her again as she emerged from the shower, wrapped a towel around her head, and then stretched out, belly down, on the bed in the hotel room. “Go on, get the lotion,” Clara had said. I’m sixty-one years old. I have a wife. Two children. An ownership share in a number of local newspapers. I don’t give a good goddamn anymore.

  “We saw each other yesterday, at the funeral,” said Engineer De Palo.

  “Oh . . . ” said the chancellor as he felt his legs go, closed his eyes to block out the sun, “oh . . . ”

  “You forgot this at the church. I came by to bring it to you.”

  He held up the overcoat.

  “That’s not mine,” said the chancellor.

  “What’s not yours?”

  “The overcoat. It’s not mine. I didn’t forget anything.”

  Touching her yesterday, in the coffin. Sometimes she just wanted me to give her a nice massage. If, after I spread the lotion on her legs, I tried slipping two fingers inside her, she got upset. So odd. Hard to figure out, every time. She’d appeared out of nowhere at the region of Puglia newspaper guild party. Christmas 2008. Paul Newman dead. Charlton Heston dead. She came, arm in arm with her husband. A dreary little man. Then the engineer had left. Who, looking at her there all on her own, hadn’t felt at that point as if a light was radiating out of a box newly thrown open? But it was she who had approached him.

  “You shouldn’t have allowed that Sangirardi to insult my father in your newspaper,” Clara had said, walking toward him with a glass in her hand.

  “Forgive me if I insist, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” said Engineer De Palo.

  They were still standing in the street. On the one side a line of shops, on the other the university building. When the dream ends, what you were prepared to lose suddenly becomes, once again, all that matters.

  “We can talk about it in my office,” said the chancellor.

  Taking her to the Hotel Covo dei Saraceni in Positano. The Hassler Hotel in Rome. The time she made him drive all the way to Avellino. Or when she reserved a suite at the Sheraton, right there in Bari. They stayed in their suite for nearly two days, just a stone’s throw from their everyday lives—Clara’s husband, the chancellor’s wife, the faculty conferences, the meetings of the shareholders of the publishing house EdiPuglia, all fatally within reach, and all shut out of their hotel room. There was something intolerably lovely about a body close to old age that had the good fortune to be gratified by a girl in the flower of her years. Something so unjust that the chancellor thought he could sense in her breath a puff of the divine. The way that Clara got annoyed when he tried to kiss her in the mouth. And the completely unexpected, deeply moving, inexplicable way that, five minutes later, he was in contact with her flesh (he had to do his best to keep from thinking he’d dreamed his own forearms motionless, opening her legs) and she, hoarse-voiced, thrilling with pleasure and baring her teeth in a smile.

  “The Vandal King of the Gargano Coast,” said Engineer De Palo in the office, grim-faced, “that’s what they called Signor Salvemini in Corriere del Sud last week. It’s the fourth article in six months. Enough to believe that it’s not a campaign being waged by a single journalist. There was a different byline. It’s not a pretty thing.”

  “I’m not the editor of Corriere del Sud,” he said.

  “It’s owned by the EdiPuglia group.”

  “Along with everyone else who’s involved.”

  “You could be considered the publisher.”

  “Oh, listen,” she’d said, slipping into the informal voice after not even five minutes, shifting her glass from her right hand to her left, “the article was disgraceful. I felt ill all day. My father described as a criminal.” Clara had smiled.

  At the time, it was the tourist marina at Manfredonia that was at issue. The accusation was that he’d inflated the costs.

  “You must think it’s worse to feel bad for your father than to charge the taxpayers for the Empire State Building and deliver a dinky little marina.”

  Did she want the journalist who wrote the piece to apologize? Did she want him fired outright? Anything, as long as he could see her laugh like that. Or did she prefer that, in addition to his wife, he be willing to betray a friend as well? One of his children?

  “Listen,” said Engineer De Palo, “the Porto Allegro complex is one of the biggest projects to have been built recently in this godforsaken part of the world. It’s creating jobs. Thousands of tourists will flock here. These days, who else would invest even half of what Signor Salvemini is committing? You ought to build a monument to him. Instead you attack him. So I start to wonder what this is really about. Maybe there’s the jealousy of some competitor at work here.”

  What could be nicer than to screw her at ten in the morning, with her looking at you at a certain point, letting you glimpse the possibility that this wasn’t anything yet? “Renato, come here.” What more do we really want, aside from a chance to take to bed a girl who could be our daughter? What else could she make us do, that girl? What primary image would she be capable of showing us? Beyond her body as it pants miraculously beneath ours, isn’t there by chance some deeper and more primitive pleasure at play? Of course there’s something else. “Renato . . . Knock down that wall. Open up that trapdoor.”

  “That poor girl died such a horrible death,” said Engineer De Palo.

  Now everything is clear, thought the chancellor, turning his eyes elsewhere.

  “I’m not promising you anything,” he said a quarter hour later, bidding his guest farewell at the office door, “and thanks again for bringing me the overcoat.”

  He couldn’t stop talking about it. He told his coworkers about it. At dinner with friends. The night before, at a table in a restaurant not far from the newspaper. Look. He passed the smartphone around. This girl must have gotten herself into some kind of serious trouble, he said. What kind of trouble? asked one of his fellow diners. The waiters emerged from the kitchen bearing pizzas. Giuseppe Greco started to reply. Two texts from a fake number are nothing, said another. You ought to see what happens to public figures. People are lunatics. Giuseppe Greco picked up his glass of wine. He took a drink. “I didn’t kill myself.” “I’m still alive.” Between the first and the second message, less than twenty-four hours had passed. Newspaper websites seethed with psychotic messages. Death threats among YouTube users. A price list for prostate massages, divided by city. Invitations to commit suicide, offhand insults that arose from narrow fissures of interest. To call it the unconscious, a century earlier, was even then a mistake, a way of forcing into a single linguistic canon diametrically opposing forces. From the asphalt. From the sewers. A force welled up from wherever it had been confined. One of his tablemates lifted a chunk of sausage to his mouth. Giuseppe Greco turned away. A car shot past with the music blasting.

  Her girlfriends did their best to console her. Gioia, si
tting among them on the sofa in the living room, went on singing her dead sister’s praises. How pretty she had been. She reminded everyone of the unmistakable way she had of entering a room. A line removed from the undifferentiated acoustic cage that surrounds us—that was how you knew that Clara was just a few steps away. Gioia lifted her head toward the credenza: “The wedding,” she said, “the wedding pictures.” Her four friends twisted on the sofa, as if it were their duty to know where the photo album was. But they couldn’t possibly know. So Gioia leapt to her feet. If she had told them that it was a habit of her sister’s to levitate at every winter solstice, they’d have had to believe her.

  She pulled the photo album out of one of the drawers. She went back and sat down. “Look how happy they were,” she said, pointing at Alberto being hit by a cloud of rice.

  At noon she texted her boyfriend.

  She saw him arrive an hour later, as Engineer De Palo was leaving. She took him by both hands. She embraced him. She wept for some minutes on his chest, standing, under the veranda, in the hot light on the transparent windows. A disorderly, furious weeping. Then she said: “Come.” They headed out into the garden. They strolled through the bushes, in the cool shade of the eucalyptus trees, by the stone fountain with green stripes where rivulets of water ran. They ventured past the gazebo and the swing, toward the hedges that transformed the garden into a vast stretch of shade. The porcelain-berry vine emanated its reddish force. They walked down the steps cut into the living rock. A small cockroach fled before she could crush it underfoot. It seemed to him that now Gioia’s power had become boundless. The play of light through the leaves formed a large transparent fish. Then they heard a noise. They looked in the other direction. The taxi pulled away. The silhouette came through the gate, like a cart with the head of a man. His roller suitcase in one hand, a cage of some sort in the other.