When the first type of sorrow is reproduced, Michele releases his grip. Time once again flows normally. A classmate pinches his nose shut with the tips of his fingers. The little girl in the desk ahead of him stares wide-eyed. More heads turn. Michele stares insistently at the footrest. Now it’s as if time were accelerating, because it is he who reveals to the student body a few seconds early the source of the smell. A robust, nauseating stench.
The little girl in the desk ahead of him starts shouting: “Ahhh!”
A little boy says: “That’s disgusting!” He does it in the way that Michele had foreseen and already defused a few seconds earlier.
The bodies of the other pupils rise and fall. The fat boy in the fourth row is seized by an attack of hysterical laughter.
Someone cries: “Salvemini!”
The teacher, too, cries out: “Salvemini!” Then she shouts: “Cristina!” speaking to a little girl running for no good reason toward the door. The chairs screech across the floor. A notebook flies through the air. Then a satchel takes flight, too. “Something stinks!” A boy with red hair clutches his throat with both hands, pretending he’s being strangled. The janitor walks into the classroom. The teacher raises her voice to be heard over the general bedlam. She asks the janitor to bring some sawdust.
“Salvemini!—Salvemini!—Salvemini!”
He’ll come out of it alive. The pain no one else knows anything about possesses furrows in which it’s possible to hide. But all the same, something else is going on. The colors of the classroom are coagulating. Michele looks up at the sky through the big windows. He looks straight ahead and again finds the teacher’s desk. This can’t be. The children are still there, and so is the teacher. So he looks outside, and then he looks straight ahead again. The scene hasn’t changed. He feels a sense of anguish throttling him. He shuts his eyes, reopens them. He’s in despair. If this is reality, then he’s only been imagining (for weeks? Months? Or has it lasted a year?) his mother calling him for his snack on a warm and endless afternoon. With the added problem that the sky, glimpsed through the classroom windows, has no intention of throwing itself open the way that other sky did. A closed, metallic blue. An entire mechanism has inverted the marching order. My mother doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen her, nor will I in the future. That is the reality. The world without nuances.
The cat leapt off the armoire. Michele took another drag on his cigarette. The small ears peeped up over the edge of the sheet. If he had tried to grab her, she would have run away. So he turned over onto his side. As soon as he stopped looking at her, the cat traced a crescent moon on the mattress. She crept nearer in silence. After a few seconds he felt her on his back. Without stroking her yet, just thinking of doing it, and therefore doing it, reaching his arm back, into the animal’s shiny black fur, he sensed his father and Annamaria on a territory that, more than obscene was brutal, more than noisy, mute, and chilly and bare. What happened afterward, he remembered.
What happens in the months that follow is enveloped in the mists of uncertainty. You might say that Vittorio starts to detest him. He tolerates his son’s awkwardness less and less. His shyness fills him with rage. It seems as if Michele is always about to say something but then the way he doesn’t say it is artfully contrived to inflict a form of damage the blame for which falls on them. To say nothing of his apathy, the lack of anything in him that can be ascribed however vaguely to ambition, or to self-respect. It is as if he is building scale models of a far-off indictment so that they can’t tear their eyes away from it.
Vittorio is forced to scold Michele every evening for how late he is to come to the table, when Ruggero and Clara have been sitting before their steaming dishes for some time already.
“I didn’t hear.”
This child is lying. His father called him in a loud voice a couple of times and then was forced to shout up the stairwell. When he at last takes his place at the table with the others, Michele eats with downcast eyes, making everyone feel awkward with an absurdly submissive attitude that defies interference. Gioia, in her high chair, claps her hands and laughs.
His grades, though, those are subjects for discussion. There’s plenty of arguing about them. Michele drops from outstanding to satisfactory. Then unsatisfactory, needs improvement, gravely unsatisfactory.
So one day, Vittorio tells him to get in the car and drives him out into the nearby countryside. He turns off the engine and asks him what’s wrong.
“Go on, spit it out.”
“Spit what out?”
Maybe he thinks he’s found some ingenious way to defy them, says Vittorio. Maybe he has problems with Annamaria, or with his brother, something more general that he can’t digest about a family that is remarkably considerate toward him, whose patience is inexhaustible.
“No,” Michele objects.
“Feel free to talk.”
“Really, Papà. It’s . . . nothing,” he says, staring down at the car’s floor mat.
It is in these moments that Vittorio is tempted to slap him silly. His son summons the ghost of the woman who brought him into the world, the fork in the road beyond which Vittorio’s own life would have gone in a different direction. No one ever talks about these things. Lines that have been erased. Even Vittorio can’t bring himself to think about it when he’s alone. But since there’s someone who seems to exist only to refresh his memory, he should get to the bottom of it. That’s why Vittorio wishes his son would tell him there’s something wrong. That he’d back him up against the wall and make clear to him—pitilessly, incontrovertibly—the long sequence of mistakes that keeps their lives standing upright, if that’s really the case. Instead, Michele remains silent.
“All right.” Vittorio feels overwhelmed by an unconquerable weariness, starts the car up again. “All right,” he says, “let’s go back home.”
Everyday life. When he looks at his siblings in the morning, Michele feels admiration. He watches them in the bathroom struggling with the dental floss. The nonchalance with which they occupy space, the absolute mastery that they possess as they move from one floor to another in the villa—these things lead him to reflect on the fact that he cannot do all the things that they can. Not with the same natural ease.
On sunny Sundays, Clara doesn’t even think twice before hopping on her father’s old bike if she feels like going for a ride. Every time, Michele feels obliged to ask permission. He knows that it will just expose him to an even worse humiliation (“Why, what kind of questions are these? Just take it, no?” Vittorio would reply), so most of the time he just does nothing.
Circumspection, prudence. Then, one afternoon, it could have been at the end of spring, Annamaria is having tea in the living room with some new girlfriends. One is the wife of a magistrate. Another comes from a family that has a coffee monopoly in Puglia. These are all solid, educated women, with enough of a sense of humor to either establish intimacy or raise the drawbridge without regrets. There are times when Annamaria finds herself at a loss. When they talk about art, or the books they’re reading. She understands that their money is worth more than hers, even if they have less of it. These acquaintances nonetheless are the threshold beyond which she can glimpse herself the way she’s always imagined. And after all, it’s not as if the crème de la crème of the city’s high society only talk about art exhibits or old classics. Right now, for instance, they’re talking about film, a topic about which Annamaria knows a thing or two.
“The leather sandals and all that white linen. Milena Canonero did an incredible job on her,” she says about Meryl Streep in Out of Africa.
“The safari vests with all the pockets that you see in the film.”
“Apparently Karen Blixen had a whole collection of them,” this from the magistrate’s wife.
At that point she hears the sound of a car on the front drive. Through the curtains, Annamaria glimpses Engineer Ranieri’s station wagon. Sh
e furrows her brow. She has no way of knowing that Michele’s catechism has been canceled at the last minute. So the car drives off, and a few moments later the child comes into the living room.
“Hello . . . ”
All the women turn to look at him. Annamaria goes white as a sheet. The other women make an effort to appear nonchalant. One of them seems unable to tear her eyes away. There’s something not right about this little boy. First of all, he shouldn’t be dressed so sloppily. To say nothing of his glasses. Where did they get them? And then the rolls of fat. Here there’s no shadow of any rudimentary attempt to encourage physical fitness, no sign of a dentist’s touch, paid to correct the overlapping of his incisors. His smile. Even that is different from what it ought to be. Some very strange things seem to be happening in this house.
Michele sees the veil of disapproval settle over his father’s wife. It’s clear that Annamaria has committed a serious mistake. Michele actually begins to suspect that she’s even concealed his existence. Could it be that she’s been so reckless, so foolish and naïve, as never to speak of a child born out of wedlock?
“I’m going upstairs,” Michele mumbles.
The other women smile, frozen-faced. Annamaria waves her hand: “Ciao, Michele.” He shoots up the stairs. The thought of what happened makes him feel like sobbing his heart out. He’d laugh like a lunatic. He can feel his heart speed up. In order to let off the tension, he’s ready to slam his fist against the wall, he could head-butt it. He lengthens his stride. Then a gray shadow. It happens before he reaches the end of the hall. He feels the misery subside, the anxiety drain away, sucked away into the vibrant black rectangle that is the open door of his sister’s bedroom. Clara is looking at him.
The period between the ages of nine and ten is a mystery that not even the adult of thirty will be capable of fathoming. Few are the sensations that remain intact over time. Like geologists with the center of the earth, he will reconstruct that year by process of induction. He will believe that he was in the depth of things in a way he’ll never again approach for the rest of his life. Crushed by an absolute darkness, like the centipedes, like the termites, creatures unchanged over millions of years, capable of picking up on information without needing to translate it.
The adult will perhaps be the laborious result of the child aged seven or twelve. But it’s the nine year old who has a one-way ticket.
One Sunday morning, for absolutely no reason, he makes a girl fall down the stairs, the daughter of a steel supplier who’s there on a courtesy call. He trips her. The little girl gets a cut to her eyebrow. Vittorio doesn’t know how to beg his guests’ forgiveness. Michele is sent to his room for the rest of the day.
Another time a wall collapses just inches from him without his noticing.
“To make a long story short, this bulldozer crashes into our classroom and I don’t bat an eyelash,” he’ll tell the story years later, in Rome, in bed with an older woman. “They were supposed to demolish an old building nearby and they must have read the documents wrong. That’ll tell you what kind of shape the school where they sent me was in.” Nine in the morning. The schoolteacher hasn’t finished calling roll. There is a tremendous roar. The other children are the ones who heard it. The teacher screams. The children instinctively run for the door. “And I . . . do you know what I find myself thinking at a time like that?” he’ll confide to his lover. “I ask myself: isn’t it a little early for recess? All this while the wall behind me collapses. Do you see the level of alienation I was capable of? In any case, at a certain point I do turn around, and there where the wall used to be is a whirlwind of dust. By now I’m alone in the classroom, I can see the bulldozer, too. A huge yellow beast with the shovel in plain sight and two big shafts of light.”
“And afterwards?” she’ll ask. “What happened afterwards?”
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, the child turns his back to the bulldozer. He leaves the classroom and heads down the hallway. Silence all around. The doors of the other classes are open and the classrooms are all empty. Michele walks past the teachers’ lounge. He passes another hallway. Now there’s a sound of voices. He goes out into the courtyard. That’s where they’ve all gone. A tide of light-blue and white smocks. A few children sob in terror. The schoolteachers count them with their ledgers in hand. A short distance away, the principal is talking animatedly with a man in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. The man gesticulates, tries to justify what’s happened. The second the principal lowers her eyes, she starts in surprise. She strides away from the construction foreman. She runs over to Michele and bends over him. She puts both hands on his head. She asks: “Are you all right?” He says nothing. Suddenly the principal is worried. If he was left behind, then someone else might have been left further behind. “Were there other children?” she asks. “Yes. Another little boy.” The principal goes pale. “I turned around and I saw him. A little hand, opening and closing under the rubble.”
“I didn’t have the faintest idea that I was lying.”
“Because it wasn’t a lie,” the woman will say, running a hand through her hair, “it’s obvious that the child under the rubble was you.”
She’ll turn in the bed, displaying the nudity of her breasts, the too taut flesh of a forty-seven-year-old body subjected to nine hours in the gym every week. The afternoon light will immerse the room in the salmon pink that is the red of eighteenth-century apartment buildings risen to the third floor through the smog of Rome. Michele will think: it’s true, I was that child. The trail of his semen on the woman’s neck will become one with her husband’s sadness were he to see her now.
“I was punished that time, too,” he’ll say, caressing her chin; he’ll rotate his wrist downward, touching his mouth with the tips of his fingers.
That night, the little boy is sent to eat all alone. Vittorio asks Selam to bring in a folding table, and to set Michele’s place so that the boy can see them all together at the other end of the living room. His father, Annamaria, Clara, Ruggero, and Gioia. The dinner is eaten in general silence. Someone makes a half-hearted attempt at conversation. There’s something comical about it, as well as something painful and awkward. As he eats in silence, the child notices something at the other table. Sitting between Gioia and Annamaria, she seems sad. With her thumbnail she’s tormenting another finger’s cuticle. She’s carved open a wound. In the wound there’s a light. Someone is suffering for me.
He grabbed the cat by her rear paws; the cat struggled to get loose but finally gave up. He hugged her. Then he got up from the bed.
At three in the morning, everyone was asleep. Michele threw open the window, felt the wind on his face. The cool of springtime mingling with the muggy heat of the impending summer.
He slipped on a shirt, and left the room, taking care to close the door behind him so the cat wouldn’t run away. Then he went downstairs. He felt like a burglar. When he reached the living room, he ran a finger over the silver platter sitting in the middle of the table as a decorative centerpiece. Touching this thing that’s not mine. Having discovered a portion of his face on the opaque surface, he received confirmation of the opposite. A right of usucapion on anything a person has survived. If I were to go and awaken my father and start talking to him, he’d look at me in bafflement. Annamaria would recoil in fright. They wouldn’t understand. And yet, they’d understand something. From the usual incredulity, the expressions on their faces would turn tragically incredulous. This so-intimate stranger is once again in our midst. If I spoke to them, if they reflected on the fact that since the day of the funeral, a greenish patch has sprouted on Clara’s chest, has started to spread, her belly has swollen, her eye sockets have begun to collapse, her flesh corroded by intestinal bacteria is now emitting a devastating stench, if they were to imagine what the dark of the grave is like, the loneliness of the tuff in which she’s decomposing. They’d understand that I’m talking about from down the
re.
He went back to his room. He stretched out on the bed and went back to sleep.
The next day, Alberto came to see them.
He had an appointment with Vittorio to take care of a number of bureaucratic matters. Burdens that fell to the surviving spouse. Returning her driver’s license to the department of motor vehicles, her passport to police headquarters. Shutting down various accounts, finding the originals of old contracts. More than ten years of marriage. But the documents were all still there. As if Clara, when she went to live with her husband, had just been loaning herself out.
Michele saw him come in. He observed the scene from the upper floor. In Vittorio’s presence, Alberto almost bowed his head. Annamaria greeted with condescension this son-in-law who, though he was widely considered one of the finest engineers in the city, was treated as an errand boy by everyone in that house. The two men went into Vittorio’s study. An hour later, Michele heard voices echo. At that point, he emerged from his room. Alberto and his father were downstairs. Standing there talking. Still, it seemed like the one was eager to see the other to the front door. Michele waved his arms out over the railing.
Ferocity Page 20
