Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  SEP: Student Exchange Program.

  That summer, his father and Annamaria decide to enroll Clara in a study abroad program in England. Three months in Eastbourne, where she’ll stay with a local family. From blouses to gray pullovers in virgin wool. Light lunch, cream tea. Brushing up on her language skills. Mingling with young people from all over the world.

  Clara tries on an overcoat in a shop downtown. She asks, in a worried voice: “How do I look?”

  Photo IDs and new luggage. It all happens so quickly that at first Michele doesn’t understand. He takes the danger for enthusiasm, and he allows himself to be infected. When they need to renew the exit visa on Clara’s ID card, he offers to take care of getting the documents stamped. In the weeks that follow, he manages to all but forget about it. Clara doesn’t mention it when they’re together. They pretend nothing’s wrong. More time passes.

  The day before the departure is a Sunday. Michele wakes up early. He eats breakfast. Then he leaves the house, catches the bus. He stays downtown for a few hours with his friends. They go into a coffee shop. They chat, smoke cigarettes. At a certain point he stops talking. He sets his demitasse of espresso down on the table. A disaster. A horrible premeditated catastrophe. Suddenly it’s all clear. He stands up. He leaves without a word.

  An hour later he comes running through the villa’s front gate. He’s out of breath. He leapt from one bus to another. He goes in the house. He finds Gioia in the front hall sniffling all by herself. His father shouts in irritation: “I can’t find it!” The words are aimed upstairs. “Will you help me with the puzzle?” Still Gioia. Michele ignores her. Instead he notices a long line of dresses on the sofa, in their plastic covers, one next to the other. So he gallops furiously up the stairs. He runs down the hall. He resolutely grabs the handle as something grips his stomach.

  “Hey! Wait!”

  He closes the door again immediately. The long profile sheathed in the white of the panties. It remains impressed for another instant on the retina. The rosy-tipped breasts hurled up to the ceiling as if in a Cubist painting. He’s afraid she did it intentionally. Sat there, half-naked, waiting, so that she could reject him in that way. Michele takes a deep breath, opens the door again. He walks forward into his sister’s bedroom.

  Now Clara is in short shorts, back to the window. The same striped sweater she had in her photo ID. She tips her head back. Michele looks around. On the bed, the open suitcase. From the suitcase, the handle of a hairdryer sticks out. He clenches his teeth to keep from crying.

  “You’re leaving.”

  “Michele . . . ” Clara comes toward him, it doesn’t seem like her.

  When she’s about to hug him she stops, as if the show threatens to go to pieces if she takes it past a certain point.

  “Michele,” she tries again, “we won’t even notice it. I’ll be home again before Christmas.”

  His sister is sitting on the bed. It seems to him that she’s about to start crying, too. Michele doesn’t understand how it can be. How they could have failed to realize. The ambush was not only foretold, it actually required their involvement. The form stuffed into the files of the St. Giles International School of Eastbourne. The British pounds exchanged. The tutor over here is already in touch with the tutor over there. Everything has been set up.

  “Come on, help me pack my suitcase.”

  Clara gets back up. The light cuts through her as it slants diagonally into the room and it seems to Michele that his sister is about to dissolve or die, pierced by a sorrow less painful than the dedication it takes her to keep from showing it to him, while still showing it.

  “Are you going to be able to fit in all the clothes I saw downstairs?” asks Michele, inflicting the same treatment on himself.

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to find out. Go on, run and get them.”

  A few minutes later, Michele comes back into the room with the bags stacked one on top of the other. “I’m going to drop them!” Clara lends a hand. Dresses. Sweatshirts. Dusters. One of them grabs an item. The other places it in the suitcase, taking care not to wrinkle it. Buckingham Palace. Driving on the left. Their avatars talk about this nonsense all afternoon. Even the Beatles. They continue over dinner. They say goodnight without looking each other in the eye.

  But when Michele wakes up the next morning—the puddle of light on the floor testament to ten hours of sleep—it’s not the avatar that finds itself in bed with scalding temples. What reemerges from the sheets is a blinded body. She’s not there. They must have taken her to the airport.

  Michele drags himself out of bed. He goes down to the kitchen. Three empty mugs. The glitter of the stove top in the glare of the late-August light.

  The months without Clara are a sort of fake nightmare. As if the nightmare were being dreamed by a Xerox machine. Which is even worse. Michele goes to school. He comes back home. He does his homework. He plays soccer. But it all takes place in the silence of a vibration without which there’s nothing left but the naked material world. If as a child he fell down wells that put him in touch with something so powerful it couldn’t be remembered, now the opposite is happening. He’d be able to catalogue the writings on the walls, the license plates on the cars that he sees in the street. Except it’s all fake. Roads without a road. Trees without a tree. He misses his sister. He misses her in a stabbing, hallucinatory way. The sense of annihilation is so intense that certain afternoons he forgets what her face is like. How her features change when she laughs. Her lips, rounded, as she says no. So he rushes into the living room and stares at a photograph.

  At night, he sleeps poorly. He wakes up with a start, covered in a layer of tar that was the same as in the dream.

  In class, she recited the poetry of Ben Jonson. Then there was choir. Standing erect in the blazer with lions embroidered on the breast pocket, she intoned, along with the other girls Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour.

  In the morning, Michele wakes up as usual in his bedroom. That is, if the days are actually passing. If that really is his room and not the arid space between walls that would look the same to anyone if time were to collapse in on itself. Perhaps he’s still going to school. Perhaps he’s listening to his math teacher and understanding everything she says. Perhaps, on his way home, he runs into that strange young man with the eyeliner he met some time ago. He says: “It’s me, Pietro, do you remember?” Perhaps he shouts: “Hey, I’m talking to you. Can’t you hear me? Hey, stop!” On the afternoon of that same day, he’s lying in his bed with the pillow over his head. He’s mulling things over. Something that could happen when he’s home happens precisely when he’s not there. Clara phones. Or they call her. Why haven’t they spoken since she left? Perhaps Michele is going to school. Perhaps, after lunch, he does his homework. After studying, he picks up the books that she gave him. It’s been a while since he last did it. Tyger tyger. Die Raben. Where you go, it turns to autumn and to evening. Between one line and the next, one has the impression that time once again begins to flow.

  She stepped out of the Jaguar’s back door, re-buttoning her blouse to the neck. Whipped by the rains of East Sussex, she readjusted her skirt at the waist. She started down Longstone Road on foot, touched by the lights of dawn.

  Michele’s eyes open wide. He looks at the clock. Four in the morning. He rolls over in bed.

  The next day is Sunday. He wakes up early. Vittorio and Annamaria have gone out. He jumps out of bed, washes up in a hurry, and goes into the kitchen. He puts the espresso pot on the stove. He pulls out the phone book. He opens and closes drawers. The form. He pulls the big dictionary with the red cover down off the shelf. He pours the espresso into the demitasse. Then he takes the form, the list, and the dictionary, carries them all over to the phone. He looks up the country code. How do you say “urgenza” in English. He calls the St. Giles School, leafing through the dictionary. A strange prolonged sound. Wrong number. The press
ure. So he calls back. Stay calm. They have to believe everything you say.

  When the voice responds, he explains everything coolly. The switchboard operator seems quite matter of fact.

  “Please, hold on.”

  As he’s waiting, deep inside the receiver he thinks he can hear the fluttering of wings echoing in a tower. Then another voice. All the imaginary sorrow swept away by a sea of reality.

  “Clara!”

  “Michele! What the hell . . . ”

  His sister’s voice is excited, frightened, embarrassed, wonderfully on the verge of a hysterical fit.

  “What’s happened? They told me something about an emergency.

  “Forget about that. I just said it to be sure . . . ”

  “You scared me. But Michele, why haven’t I heard anything from you these past few weeks?”

  “That’s the point! It’s exactly . . . ”

  “Every time that Mamma and Papà called me, you weren’t there. And then, the other day, when I called, they told me . . . ”

  “Clara. Listen to me. Now you’re going to board a plane and come straight back here to Bari.”

  “What are you talk . . . ”

  “Pack your bags and get out of there.”

  “It’s not like I could . . . Have you lost your mind?”

  “Never been saner in my life,” he says, raising his voice. “Drop everything and leave now. Away from that shitty island. Don’t you realize that they’re screwing us? That they’re doing it on purpose?”

  “That who are, for Pete’s sake? Who is it that you think is screwing us?”

  “It’s in their interest to keep us apart. They’re . . . Wait! Shut up for a second!”

  “. . .”

  “What’s that sound?”

  “What sound?”

  “Voices. Voices singing.”

  “Ah. It’s the St. Giles choir.”

  “And what are they singing?”

  “What are they . . . In Freezing Winter Night, is what they’re singing.”

  “I knew it! You see?”

  “See what?”

  “Clara, come back to Bari and do it now.”

  “Michele, but even if I wanted to . . . ” says his sister, and in that hesitation he thinks he’s found confirmation of all his suspicions. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t very well just leave overnight. If I didn’t finish the quarter, when I got home they wouldn’t accept the credits. I’d lose the year. And I’d look like an ass. The family I’m staying with . . . ”

  “The Wilsons!”

  “They’re called Thompson. And anyway, they’re so sweet and all. What would they think if I just left without a word of explanation?”

  “So sweet and all? What the hell are you saying? Clara!”

  “Listen. In mid-December I’ll be in Bari. You only have to . . . we only have to hold out another month and a ha . . . Hello? Hello, Michele!”

  (In a certain sense I was right, he’ll think seventeen years later, as he finishes taking a long drag on a cigarette at the San Lorenzo station, a year before she dies, just a few seconds after realizing he himself has recovered. He’ll look at all the cars on the bypass as if it was the first time he’d seen them. It’s obvious that his father and Annamaria didn’t send her to England with the specific intent of separating them. It’s clear however that they did it—as if they’d foreseen danger, a day of reckoning—because we’re not ourselves, he’ll think, as he coughs, because we’re guided by forces of which we’re unaware, we act without knowledge, we say things whose motive is unclear, crimes without guilt and deaths without any apparent cause).

  When, on December 12, at Bari Palese airport, as she walks down the steps of the 767 in her short sky-blue overcoat—red-cheeked, but nothing compared to the cold in England—and sees her mother and Gioia frantically waving their arms on the other side of the plate glass, Clara is not surprised. Their bodies adhere to the figure she’d cut out while watching the clouds out the plane window.

  As soon as she gets home, she drops her suitcase and catches up with her own mental image, which has been immobile outside Michele’s door for a while now. But when she opens the door and searches for the boy’s shape, presumably stretched out on the bed with a comic book in hand, that shape Clara doesn’t find.

  “Mamma, where’s Michele?” she asks later, nonchalantly, at lunch, when her father’s there too.

  Vittorio mutters something. Gioia has her head bent over her Game Boy.

  “Lately, we can’t pin your brother down for a minute,” says Annamaria, “he’s always off somewhere.”

  “Somewhere where?”

  “You tell me. Listen,” Annamaria changes the subject, “later let’s go with your sister to run some errands downtown.”

  “No, thanks, Mamma.”

  “Oh, come on-n-n-n-n,” moans Gioia, lifting her head from the screen.

  “No, really, I’m exhausted.”

  So Clara stays home. She dreams up excuses to put off the girlfriends who call her every half hour. They’re anxious to see her again. But she doesn’t want to miss Michele’s return. She checks her watch. At a certain point, she hears footsteps at the front door. Clara holds her breath. But it’s only her mother and Gioia on their way back from shopping.

  After dinner, around eleven thirty, Michele finally shows up. She hears him open the front door, she leaps to her feet. But when she sees him emerge from the hallway, she’s taken aback.

  “Ciao, Clara.”

  “Ciao, Michele.

  They ought to hug, but they hover at a distance. Her brother waves one hand in her direction. He starts up the stairs. Clara follows him submissively up to his bedroom. He’s lost weight. He’s wearing a strange tattered green jacket. His hair has grown. His face is pale. “Do you have a light?” Even the room has changed. Very neat. A stack of new books. On the wall a poster depicts a vitrified forest. “What is that?” Europe After the Rain,” he says, “don’t you know it?” His face isn’t pale, it’s actually white, Clara thinks, looking at him more carefully. A ghost. Or an insomniac.

  “Well. The lighter?”

  He hasn’t stopped loving me. But he’s a different person now, she thinks. The person he used to be, I’ve lost him for good.

  In the days that follow, Clara studies the situation. She goes back to school. She’s brilliant in her meeting with her tutor. She lets her girlfriends celebrate her return. Meanwhile, her gaze is elsewhere. It’s vaulting over the walls of the school, pushing through the streets, going into bars and clubs.

  In less than a week it has all become reasonably clear. Her brother has a social life. He’s hanging out with a group attached to an older boy. A guy who’s always in ridiculous getups. He wears makeup, maybe he’s on drugs. Pietro Giannelli. It’s not hard to spot him racing down Via Amendola on a Sukuzi GSX 400. Michele likes being with him. School. That’s the real problem. For a couple of months her brother’s performance improved. Then (more or less starting with their phone call in November) his grades started collapsing the way they did a few years ago. Vittorio and Annamaria say they’re worried. Her mother insinuates that Michele is suffering from some kind of attention deficit disorder. Over the course of a few days, this disorder is transformed. Without anything significant happening, as if a young man’s state of mental health could change according to the chitchat of his parents (of his father and his father’s wife, Clara corrects herself), Michele’s problem turns into a bipolar disorder. Perhaps a mild form of schizophrenia.

  Clara listens to what the two grownups have to say. She sees Michele come home at night. She observes him carefully. There are times when he actually does have a somewhat hallucinatory gaze. All things considered, though, it’s the face of someone in full possession of his faculties. One afternoon she runs into him in the center of town. She went to buy an LP that they
played for her in England. She sees him in front of the record store with his new friends. Michele looks up, goes over to her. He makes the introductions. This is Nicola. This is Domenico. Valentina. Pietro Giannelli, thinks Clara before her hand grasps the hand of the guy with the eyeliner. Meanwhile, she’s been keeping an eye on Michele. He’s laughing. It even seems as if he’s sort of playing the fool with that girl Valentina. My brother’s doing all right.

  “Them,” says Michele one Saturday night.

  He and Clara have gone out to the movies together. Afterward they’ve gone to get something to drink. They’re sipping a milkshake.

  “They need to be stopped,” he goes on, “not with words, not with recriminations. They’re innocuous only in appearance, but there’s nothing innocuous, not even in their silences. If we give them more space, it will be too late.”

  Clara looks at him without understanding. She decides that she cannot touch him the way she did before. She can’t hug him to her. The new understanding doesn’t entail physical contact.

  Michele stops playing with his straw: “You should know that these are phrases uttered by Adolf Hitler. Taken from his speeches. You should read them. From the beer halls to his official rallies. If their progression had a shape, it would be a funnel. The situation becomes increasingly irreversible. But instead,” and here he impulsively lights a cigarette, “what would happen if these phrases were placed instead in the mouth of one of his victims? The words of the most evil man on earth adopted by a truly good person. Not, however, a victim determined to take vengeance, but an innocent, someone who feels pity for him. Cleansed. Transfigured. Don’t you believe then that History would retrace its own footsteps? As if another dimension were to open, the light on the path that we rejected when we chose the path of catastrophe.”

  “Oh shit!” Clara bursts out laughing, slaps a hand down on the table, almost knocking the glass with the milkshake over. “Shit, Michele, are these the kind of things you’re saying at school? That’s why they lowered all your grades!”