And his sister? Can he see Clara, too? Drunk on her wedding day. Feverish with excitement as she hooks up with a publisher at the journalists’ guild party. Stuffed with sleeping pills. Wrecked on coke in her old trench coat as she contemplates the city from high atop the parking structure. Slapped around in a hotel. Observed in an obscene photo by the medical examiner who will certify her death a year later.
Despite the fact that just one of these images is false, Michele at age twelve sees nothing of all this. He senses the significance of all this. Whether in the Panda, or at the gym, or in Rome before his complete recovery, he senses, he knows that, at the moment when she finally emerges from their ideal dimension (the ball spiked to the floor, the gym shoes still floating in mid-air), troubles will ensue. They have. Something unpleasant. Something terrible, he thinks as the young assistant mechanic slouches off, head down.
A few minutes later, his sister emerges from the shower.
“Come on, let’s go home.”
The winter loosens its grip, the sun shines bright on the windshields of the parked cars.
Michele has started going around the city on his own. The previous months have filled him with a courage that he doesn’t clearly recognize. Parks. Video arcades. He talks to people he doesn’t know. He spontaneously makes friends with people he doesn’t see again for days. He runs into them again outside a record store. He finds Clara at home when he returns. He goes with her to practice. Then he stops. He runs into her on the street on Saturday afternoon while she’s standing in line outside the Stravinsky.
At home, Gioia has started looking at him strangely. For some time now, Annamaria has been treating Clara with mistrust. Vittorio flies to Berlin. He flies to Seville. Apparently, this is another golden age for Salvemini Construction. After every trip, his father returns home electrified. Michele wouldn’t bet on business having a mind of its own. If, however, it does, it’s not particularly well disposed toward him and Clara. Certain afternoons she bursts into his room and finds him smoking one of his first cigarettes. Michele sucks greedily on his Lucky Strike. Without taking the last drag, he crushes the cigarette against the star globe sitting on the nightstand.
“Alioth!” he tells her. “After we die, that’s where we’ll meet.”
“As soon as possible,” his sister smiles.
I didn’t kill myself.
I’m still alive.
Michele had gotten hold of the demented, nonsensical sequences of words at night through Inagist. Not on Twitter, where the tweets had been deleted. The account was still active. But the photo had been changed. Clara’s bare back. When he’d had the impression the other day that he’d seen it on the display—before Gioia could grab back the iPhone—he’d allowed himself a margin of error. I was dreaming. It can’t be. He remembered that photo in its original version, taken by Giannelli on the Monopoli beach—she was changing her top—and then dumped with some others in a cookie tin. But now he had to accept the evidence. The cat was looking at him from the chair.
@ClaraSalvemini.
The new picture showed two butterflies overlapping their wings to form a little heart. The graphic design infuriated him. It seemed that superficiality had definitively branded the indecency of creating an account for a young, dead woman. He pressed his fingers onto the screen. The false account wasn’t following anyone. So he opened up the list of the account’s followers. @guillaman. @herself. @max1084. He jotted down each name on a sheet of paper. Then he recognized one of them. @giuseppegreco. He clicked on the picture. There he was, ten years older. He wondered why the journalist was one of the followers of that despicable prank. He thought back to Gioia. The presence of the cat, motionless, staring at him, in the circle of light from the lamp, helped calm him. Still, thinking in the dark. If I left this room and kicked her right out of bed, the hoax would be over. She’d shout, beg forgiveness. She certainly wouldn’t get the itch anymore for these kinds of exploits. The account would be closed. The fingerprints erased.
But with this prank, the right thing is to see it through to the end.
Michele turned off the lamp. He turned over in the bed. And yet, he thought, however absurd, you had to admit the presence of something true in it. As if the messages written and deleted, the images of the followers (an owl, a Beardsley nude, a pair of red slippers) and the incessant anarchic indecent traffic of messages that continued to stream past behind the online platform, were, taken together—shifted onto a different plane—the most faithful imitation of Clara that he could imagine.
The next morning, while shaving, he listened to his father talking on the phone downstairs.
“He said that he wants an elevator?”
He was pacing back and forth in the living room.
“We ought to slam him back into that cesspool where he lived in old town Taranto!”
Michele emerged from the bathroom, flattened himself against the wall. Now he was eavesdropping, as he had so many years ago.
“Do your best to make the man listen to reas . . . ” Vittorio lowered his voice. “ . . . Find him a caregiver, a nurse . . . ” Five minutes later he ended the call.
After lunch, Gioia’s boyfriend showed up. Michele ran into him on the veranda. Handshake. The same sensation as that other time. Staring at him he felt certain that, as soon as he turned his gaze away, the young man’s face would relax.
“Buongiorno, Signor Salvemini.”
Vittorio came out onto the veranda with the cordless in hand. He tossed a hasty wave in his daughter’s boyfriend’s direction. He poured a few drops of espresso into the demitasse. Still talking, he walked away down the hall. Gioia’s boyfriend vanished upstairs.
Twenty minutes later, Michele still hadn’t moved from the veranda. He was listening. His father was still just a few yards away, talking on the phone. He made one call after the other. From his tone of voice, Michele tried to guess the identity of the person on the other end of the line. Irascible (Engineer Ranieri). Exasperated, and then conciliatory and resolute (Ruggero). He was talking about the former undersecretary Buffante. More about this guy from Taranto (“Fine, agreed, with one le . . . sure, sure, but do you understand how many damn obstacles you’re going to have to get around to build an elevator in a building of that kind?”) He heard his father move away. Then Vittorio came closer again. Once more, he uttered Buffante’s name. The words Porto Allegro. Drawled out. Gravely. Opaque and nauseated. It seemed he was speaking with Engineer De Palo. “The chief justice of the Bari Court of Appeals,” he said. The chief justice, apparently, was key to the investigating magistrate. The university chancellor could be key to the chief justice of the Court of Appeals. The tone seemed to thicken every time he failed to properly distance himself. The equivalent of a piece of mud that had to be swallowed, thought Michele, as he heard his father’s footsteps moving away toward the front door.
Michele made himself an espresso. Then he went upstairs. He gripped the handle of the door to his room. He relaxed his grip. A squeak. He went back, his curiosity piqued. Gioia’s bedroom. Ridiculous that they’d left the door ajar. More than a provocation, it struck him as a form of carelessness, as if it were something they were used to doing, a house within that house that had long since collapsed, with them thriving in the disorder, in the absence of authority. Gioia was whispering something in a low voice. She was moaning. She was giggling. He couldn’t keep himself from looking at her.
Michele went back to his bedroom. He started to lie down on the bed. He stopped himself. From right to left. The nightstand. The armoire. He looked around with a worried expression. The half-open window. His heartbeat accelerated. Stay calm. She can’t have jumped out the window. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He took off his shoes without making any noise. He picked one up off the floor. He gripped the end of the lace. He pulled it out. He leaned forward, started moving his wrist so that the lace undulated across the floor like a snake. A
nother couple of seconds and the cat shot out from behind one of the doors of the armoire, hurled herself onto the shoelace, and started to play.
Four patches of light. They ran over the edge of the fountain, rose up to the leaves. Vanished. Five in the afternoon.
Michele went downstairs again. He stepped out onto the veranda. He saw her rosy cheeks while, as if she were still a little girl, she drank her milk, holding the cup with both hands. She was alone. He noticed that she had noticed him. His sister set the cup down on the table. From her fixed gaze (and also from the unreality, the evanescence that anyone pretending nothing has happened can confer upon their features), he understood that she was hoping he wouldn’t approach.
Michele approached. He sat down facing her.
“Ciao, Gioia.”
She was wearing a light cotton blouse and pajama bottoms, sky blue with small white clouds. It wasn’t clear whether she was dressed to go out or to go to bed. The afternoon light smoothed out the star of her twenty-five years. On the table, a large book, closed. Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Michele smiled, pointed to the textbook.
“I’ve started studying again,” Gioia sighed. He didn’t stop looking at her. She added: “Sooner or later I was going to have to do it. Return to normality. I open it in the morning and it’s like reading a book in Chinese. I don’t understand a thing. Shit . . . ” she shook her head.
It was always strange to talk to someone who had just finished fucking. It meant recognizing in the person before you the mark of a door thrown open and, at the same time, a sign barring entry, all while that body, until just recently heated and abandoned, was now hastening to tidy itself up, to regain so to speak the normal equilibrium between doors closed and thrown open. But to find oneself face to face with one’s little sister, well aware that she had just finished fucking, and, what’s more, knowing that she knew that you were conscious of the fact (since she’d done everything within her power to ensure that you could see it), this transmuted a vague intellectual seduction into a pleasure that smacked of rot, a pleasure taken from suffocation, since the same body that lay sprawled between the bedclothes and later debated in your presence university exams and grief to be processed might as well have been still writhing, might as well have been molesting you (it obliged you, that is, to imagine its own sex while pretending not to allow you to imagine a thing, since it was you, now, who was forced to find the sum of the moment in which it had allowed you to understand what was happening and the present moment), so that you were able to catch even its odor (though no odor strong enough to be perceptible was produced by that body), so that you found movements, contractions, bent to her wishes.
Her wishes, in this case, were taking form in the expectation that Michele would abstain from asking unwelcome questions.
But Michele did not intend to give in. He made a concerted effort to distance himself. He smiled without dropping his gaze.
“They didn’t stop for a second,” he said, trying to cast the lure. He was alluding to Vittorio and Annamaria.
Gioia understood immediately. “They’re always in a hurry,” she said, “they’re constantly busy, ever since . . . ” she paused. “This Porto Allegro thing . . . I’m not saying it isn’t important . . . ”
“Everyone reacts the way they can.”
“You just say that because you haven’t had to put up with them all these years. You weren’t the one who had to deal with them every damn day. Instead, they react in a way that no mother and father who still have children ought to.”
Something satanic truly is pulsating in this sea of stupidity, thought Michele as he looked at her, because right now she was managing to complain while remaining securely lodged in a groove, pretending to be on Michele’s side, pretending to raise a small objection against him, while she was in fact on a completely different side.
“Every time one of us had a problem, they always had something else to do,” Gioia continued. “They had something else to do even when they were the ones who had problems, even major problems. I mean private problems, maybe emotional problems. They can’t bring themselves to appear vulnerable. They can’t even manage to be affectionate. It’s stronger than them. If only they had bee—”
“Do you miss her?”
“Oh, fuck, Michele!” His sister turned pale; her eyes glistened. “From drinking a glass of water to the simple fact of looking at myself in the mirror in the morning. I can’t do anything without there being a picture of her right in front of me.”
“She was beautiful,” he said, stifling the temptation to smack her.
“She was stunning. She had something that ninety-nine people out of a hundred lack. She’d walk into a room and everyone would notice her, even though she’d do nothing to attract attention. For that matter, she was the most generous person on ear—”
“Why do you think she killed herself?”
“Why do you . . . Oh, thank you!” a tear raced down one cheek. “Thank you for asking me these things. Thank you for coming back.”
Michele reached a hand out toward hers. She grabbed it.
“Does this seem normal to you?” said Gioia, continuing to cry. “Does this seem . . . oh fuck, Michele!” she broke off, sobbed, blew her nose. “Does it seem possible to you that she’s been dead for twenty days and no one in this house even talks about it? Clara’s no longer with us, and everyone pretends she’s gone off on a little jaunt to Rome.” A shiver ran through Michele, Gioia’s grip was the artificial light that dimmed the moon’s splendor. “There are days when I feel like I’m losing my mind,” she went on, “I understand that no one reacts to these things the way they ought to. No one acts like they do in the movies, I understand. But here we’re doing the opposite. Look at Mamma,” Annamaria he thought, making a mental correction, “have you heard her say Clara’s name since you came home? Papà has all his troubles with those fucking villas down in the Foggia area. Ruggero. You know what they say about certain doctors, don’t you? They save other people at the hospital so they have an excuse not to give a fuck the rest of the time. Even you and me,” and here it was as if the tears were solidifying on her cheeks, “why are we only talking about this now?”
Stupefying, thought Michele. She puts a part of the problem in front of you and that’s how she neutralizes it, she conceals it by slapping you in the face with it.
“Why do you think she killed herself?” he asked again.
“Ah, Michele, why do people kill themselves?” As she talked, Gioia bared her teeth. “Loneliness. A sense of emptiness. Do you realize the lives we lead?”
“Her marriage,” he said.
“Alberto loved her. He’s still in love. It breaks my—”
“That wasn’t a happy marriage.”
“Even happy marriages aren’t,” she said, “especially not the ones that aim at love. For Clara love was important. She sought it in the ridiculous way we hunt for things that don’t exist. We know they don’t exist. And yet we keep banging our noses up against them all the time. You know what it’s like when you’re waiting to meet the one, the moment that will change the way you see things, that will make you put work on the back burner, make you want to get married and maybe have children? What happens when you wait for it and it never comes? And maybe the reason it never comes is that it doesn’t exist in the first place, that kind of love was invented by an advertising executive to sell perfume.”
Now she was talking as if she were in a TV series. Loosen your grip, he told himself. He pulled his hand away from Gioia’s.
After dinner, Michele went for a walk in the garden.
The moon, almost full in the May sky. He stood there looking at it, as if doing so cleansed Clara’s voice within him. The wind through the leaves. Then he turned to walk toward the villa. Beyond the front steps, a shadow. Tall, pallid. Annamaria. She’s watching me, he thought, she was here waiting for me to come
back. He looked at her warily.
“Excuse me,” the woman said, “there was something I wanted to ask you.”
That’s the way she always was. When there’s something important, she always dives right in, thought Michele admiringly.
“I wanted to know whether you had plans for Saturday. If you were planning to stay home. Or else . . . ”
Twenty days. Twenty days he’d spent without once setting foot outside the villa. Why would he think of going out on Saturday, of all days?
“Or else?” asked Michele, embedding the question with the emphasis that forces the interlocutor to voice the thought that follows without having time to disguise it.
“No, nothing,” said Annamaria with a hint of embarrassment, “I was just wondering if you would still be . . . or else, if you’re staying, I wanted to tell you . . . ”
It had slipped out. She had been extremely swift at turning a possible insult inside out, but for an instant Michele managed to glimpse beneath. Her expectation. The desire to have him go back to Rome.
“I wanted to tell you that there’s going to be an important dinner and it would make sense for you to be there, that’s all,” she continued after reading on Michele’s face the will to stay on.
“What dinner?”
“Oh, he organized it.” The conversation had jumped back onto the tracks of their customary code of communication. “He’s invited the chief justice of the court of appeals to dinner. He wants to get a better understanding of this whole thing with the tourism complex. You know what your father’s like. He’s convinced there’s a plot, and in fact, unless I’m mistaken, we might be in real trouble. Obviously he’s talked to the chief justice. Having him over to dinner is just one more thing. Human warmth. Your father is convinced that this, too, will turn out to be useful. I’d like it if we were all there,” she concluded.
Ferocity Page 23
