Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  “No. These are things I say at home,” he replies seriously.

  At home, Vittorio and Annamaria continue to speak of Michele’s alleged problems. One day, in the kitchen, while Clara’s brother is away, Vittorio asks his wife whether she’s noticed anything that’s gotten worse recently. His tone is very serious.

  “Well,” Annamaria replies, “I was hoping to talk to you about it when there was time.”

  The woman stands up. She vanishes into the living room. She comes back with a half-open envelope. The letter from the vice principal summoning “the parents of Michele Salvemini.” As soon as she’s finished reading the letter, and before Vittorio can ask “Could you take care of this?” and Annamaria can reply “Certainly, I’ll go in and talk to him,” it seems to Clara that her folks are showing signs of a solid bond, as if they found the news comforting more than it could be worrisome.

  Them, she thinks.

  She pushes back her chair. She gets up. She looks at Vittorio and Annamaria. She pushes back a lock of hair with a quick swipe of her hand: “What on earth are you talking about,” she smiles incredulously, “my brother isn’t sick.” She turns her back on them and leaves the room. She’s furious. In the hallway, she notices something. Gioia is staring at her aghast. So Clara walks over and leans over her. She gives her a kiss on the forehead, closes her eyes. Them, she thinks, and you, too.

  (It shouldn’t be assumed that Annamaria tells Vittorio everything that the high school teachers told her. The Italian teacher confesses she’s perplexed. The history teacher speaks of a “scholastic achievement” that is “indeterminable.” “A psychological collapse?” Annamaria ventures. The man throws his arms wide. To the English teacher, Michele is “a mystery.” To the Latin teacher, “some kind of ghost.” The math substitute, though, says it’s something else. In fact, Michele started the year out well and then he collapsed. But there is one important thing that the substitute teacher noticed. The classwork that the regular math teacher gave a D minus—classwork that this not yet twenty-eight year-old woman had the stubbornness to go and fish out of the file cabinets in the teachers’ lounge—if examined carefully, might lend itself to a different interpretation. At first glance, the problem of calculating the perimeter and area of a square with a side congruent to the height of a rectangle whose area and the proportions between whose base and height are known seems to have been addressed by Michele in an incoherent manner. “You see?” asks the substitute, displaying a sheet of paper covered with incomprehensible marks: first Michele tried to set up an equation, then he gave the effort up entirely and started dividing the base of the rectangle into seven equal parts. “In reality, however,” the substitute teacher raises her eyebrows in a way that Annamaria doesn’t like one bit, “this is just an alternative system for arriving at the same conclusions. At the correct solution of the problem. I just think that he didn’t manage to finish in time. The surprising thing is that the kids hadn’t yet studied this alternative method. Do you see what initiative?” And in the subsequent exercises, the substitute realized, something very similar took place. “You might not believe it. I didn’t believe it at first either. Michele doesn’t actually arrive at the solution of the problem, caught up as he is by the anxiety of attacking it in so many different ways, all of them equally correct.” “Does that mean that he’s mentally confused?” Annamaria interrupts her. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t say that,” says the substitute with a shrug, “if anything I’d say suspicious. If I were really forced to ascribe it all to a specific state of mind, I’d have to say that he doesn’t trust what we teach him. He hasn’t, so to speak, taken into account the official version of the truth. He must have considered it to be suspect. Or dangerous. So he went off in search of a method all his own. And, surprisingly, he almost succeeded,” and now she laughs, full-throated, “maybe I’m overstating things, but as I review his classwork I get the impression that he’s discovering mathematical laws all on his own as he proceeds. And though these are theorems of a certain simplicity, each time it must have taken a tremendous effort. Which is why none of his classwork is finished.” “A tremendous effort,” Annamaria repeats, “like when someone is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” “I’d have to say no, Signora. To say nothing is hardly to lie if what you omit would only complicate matters needlessly.” And so, Annamaria will choose not to report a syllable of this conversation with the somewhat flighty young substitute teacher who won’t be there in just a few weeks’ time.” What do you think we ought to do?” asks Vittorio once his wife is done speaking).

  “Ever since they reopened, the magic is gone. They can put on all the fucking music they want on, but it won’t work. The black sofas. That was the secret,” says Pietro Giannelli.

  Clara kneels, stands back up having picked a mud-spattered flyer up off the ground. Then, slowly, she tears it to pieces. The wind tosses the leaves of the willow trees that extend onto the road from the garden, throwing open luminous patches. Giannelli sees them rotating clockwise, but it’s just because he’s coming down off the acid.

  That’s when the girl says: “What do you think of psychiatrists?”

  Today she’s wearing a light blue, long-sleeved cotton sweater, jeans, and a pair of old All Stars on her feet. If he could indulge their shared happiness, he’d kiss her right then and there.

  “A bunch of idiots.”

  “That’s what I thought. Same for me.”

  Naturally, Clara hasn’t talked to Pietro about it. She couldn’t say exactly when it was that she and Michele decided it. Maybe it started with that song where the singer invited everyone to burn down the disco. An interplay of allusions. A game of Scrabble in which everyone has inserted a letter in such a way that the word forms itself.

  Vittorio and Annamaria have decided to have him examined by a psychiatrist.

  They can’t be stupid enough to pull this move, thinks Clara as Giannelli, after almost brushing against her cheek, takes a step back and says: “See you tomorrow.”

  It’s not clear how the gas can first appeared in the house.

  Hidden for the past week in my dresser, thinks Clara. She returns to the living room. She’ll stay long enough to take a shower and she’ll go out again. She’s always off somewhere. Her father has tried to scold her, but she knows how to make him give ground. But then, the following afternoon, Clara goes down into the living room and finds Giannelli sitting on the sofa next to her father. Vittorio invited him in. Clara clutches tight to the last length of railing. Her father picks up a magazine from the glass coffee table and pretends to read. “We’ll be late for the movie.” In the meantime, she thinks it over. Clearly, something has happened. She can tell from Giannelli’s face. Clara stares for a moment at her father. Vittorio avoids looking up. So then she blesses the gas can. Materializing out of nowhere like the paintings of the physician saints that appeared overnight in the wells of the churches.

  “You can’t do it.”

  Clara chuckles on the living room floor, after taking another tug on the bottle. They’re half drunk. Ruggero has just won a very important fellowship. Apparently, he’ll be going to study in Amsterdam. Vittorio and Annamaria took him and Gioia out to dinner to celebrate. Clara and Michele were left home alone. At first, she was planning to cook. Somehow the bottle of Barbaresco found its way into her hands.

  “Do what?” he says with a wink, sitting with his back against the television cabinet.

  Clara stretches out on the carpet, like a cat stretching. She looks at him, an unkempt mess, her back on the floor. She takes another drink and turns her head to one side, opens her mouth wide, her teeth bluish, wine-stained.

  “Do what,” she repeats her brother’s words with her eyes closed.

  The next week, Vittorio sees her emerge from the darkness of the hallway. Blocky checked shirt and black Wranglers. But she’s like a ghost, a presence that hails from some future disaster. She stands i
n front of him so he can’t get past her.

  “Is it true that later Mamma is going to take Michele to the psychiatrist?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” she adds before he has a chance to reply.

  That night, at the movies with Giannelli, as she kisses him with ferocity, she realizes that it’s going to happen again. Very soon. After the man she met in England, she’s going to make love with this young man.

  But when Giannelli takes her home, the plan goes sideways once again. Two in the morning. Clara sees the cloud of black smoke rising from the villa. Ridiculous that she’d stopped thinking about it. She walks through the gate at a brisk pace, then she slows. Her father comes toward her. “Where have you been until now.” A dark, credible voice. As if the seriousness of what has happened opened her up to insinuations (that which, deep in some unattainable depths, he’d like to be justified in thinking of his daughter) that until tonight had never brushed up against her. Clara holds Vittorio’s gaze. She wonders what she’d actually wished would happen. That the house would collapse, devoured by the flames? That Vittorio and Annamaria would die?

  He walked out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around his waist. Meowing. The cat performed a complimentary half-turn around his ankles. After extorting a stroke, she leapt up onto the bed. At a quarter to eight, seen through the window, the sunset presented itself as a glass of water into which a few drops of wine had been poured. Twenty days to the start of summer. The cat tensed with the muscles of her posterior. Then she leapt onto the top of the dresser. The love that he felt for the little beast, so different from the love she felt for him. Michele looked at himself in the mirror. He sought on his own face traces of change. Grief excavates along paths that are difficult to comprehend, and to him, just an hour earlier, it had seemed he was dying when in the garden he had recognized the nick on the edge of the fountain. Clara had fallen on it by accident. She’d chipped a tooth.

  He undid the towel. He pulled open the dresser drawer. He got out a pair of underpants. He put them on. He put on the socks as well. He took the striped shirt, pulled it on, first one arm then the other. From downstairs came the noise of major operations. Tables being moved, crockery stacked. Soon the chief justice of the court of appeals would arrive. The plates arranged on the table like a flower pushing out petals from nowhere. Michele smiled into the mirror. The signs of disgust, so much quicker to show themselves. He wondered whether with her prodigious sense of hearing the cat would hear the red-hot coils in the stove, cooking the sea bass in its salt crust.

  Idiot wind, a rain of leaves on the record stores. All my problems seemed so far away. The clouds were scudding over the waterfront and my brother had the indecipherable smile of lead on newsprint.

  Not even when she cheats on Alberto with the owner of the gym, or when she enters the Palace Hotel for the newspaper guild party, not even at the moment she swallowed all those sleeping pills will Clara be able to forget the afternoon she rushed out to the newsstand to buy the copy of La Città that featured Michele’s first piece.

  At the time, he went everywhere dressed in a horrible oilskin jacket. Clara has enrolled, without enthusiasm, in the School of Architecture. Though she considers him capable of winning an argument with a university professor, reading his name at the end of the article still stirs her deeply. The third newsstand she went to. The first two had never even heard of the paper.

  She rips out the page with the article, and tosses the rest in the trash. She turns on her heels and strides off, clutching her trench coat shut to ward off the wind.

  Since the night of the fire, things had been getting steadily worse. You couldn’t say that she and Michele had drifted apart on purpose. Maybe they’d suffered some sort of blowback from which they’d never managed to recover. The disappointment. Maybe they deserved no better than what happened. Neither of the two was, perhaps, the innocent, pure-hearted soul Michele talked about that time after the movies.

  At night they cross paths around the Black Drone (ex Stravinsky Club). She’s downed a couple of vodkas. These days, alcohol doesn’t seem to have any effect on her. Michele is hunched over in a black jacket with a couple of guys she’s never seen before. Brother and sister exchange a smile. They have a hard time talking. She tries to strike up a conversation. He looks at her, says nothing. Intermittent explosive disorder. A mild form of schizophrenia, the psychiatrist had said. Should Clara believe it? The fact is that lately he’s been so strange, all closed up inside himself. As if he were doing his best to fit into the groove of the diagnosis.

  At home, in the middle of dinner, Michele stands up without warning and say: “Fine. I’m going for a smoke in the garden.”

  Vittorio and Annamaria don’t so much as bat an eye. Even if he smoked at the table, they wouldn’t scold him. They let him do what he wants. In turn, he lets them do what they want, but they’re getting the better of the exchange. Clara carves at her finger with a fingernail. As if things, for some time now, had reached a point where doing nothing leads to inevitable consequences.

  A few minutes later, she catches up with him in the garden.

  Michele takes a drag on his cigarette, looks up at the stars shining against the November sky. The cinder turns an intense red. At least his second, Clara reckons.

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  “I’m not staring at you.”

  “Before you got here, I thought I could hear the garden seething.”

  “You . . . you what?” she asks, touching her forefinger to her teeth.

  “The plants. The flowers. As if they were talking.”

  “And, excuse me . . . what were they saying?”

  “They were dying,” he takes another drag, “they were alive a long time ago. Now it’s as if they were circumscribed by a square. In nature, you’ll never find two identical ladybugs. A square is an abstraction. Besieged by something that doesn’t exist. The truth is too delicate, too haughty not to allow itself to die in the presence of such a grave insult. This, before you got here.”

  “And now that I’m here?”

  “Now the garden has been dead for centuries.”

  “Do you want me to go away?”

  “No, no, you can stay.”

  In the past few weeks, Clara has started having sex with other boys. Pietro Giannelli is in the dark about it. In a rather reckless way, he’s presumed that he’s her boyfriend now. If only he’d stop to think for a second, she tells herself, then he’d easily be able to figure it out. It’s as if at a certain point her olfactory tracts had gone off kilter. All the places she used to hang out in strike her as pathetic now. Giannelli’s leather jackets make her feel like laughing in his face, and then giving him a hug for the sadness he inspires.

  So, one afternoon, leaving the university late, she casts her eyes on a stranger at the bus stop. He must be younger than thirty. Curly hair, an athlete’s physique. He runs his eyes over her. Clara meets his gaze before he has time to look away. The young man smiles at her. “Ciao.” His physical beauty strikes her then as even more obvious. “How are you?” Clara responds. Half an hour later, they’re at his place. As they’re making love, she brings herself pleasure as if she were skinning an animal. That night, she’ll go to the movies with Giannelli. That afternoon, in the meantime, she walks alone through the streets of the city center. She feels pity for the university students who stand crumbling hash into joints near Piazza Umberto. The glowing sign of the Macondo bar serves only to run up the electric bill. A lower degree of hypocrisy in the Prada and Armani signs. The new spiral parking structures. Buildings being renovated along the waterfront. She feels as if she can see written text superimposed over them. As if a caption were popping out from behind every corner. Giannelli is at the entrance to the Odeon. While they watch the movie, he takes her hand. If only he understood what reality is actually made up of, she thinks, if he knew that this very hand is still war
m from another man. End credits. On the one hand, Clara feels as if she understands things with a clarity she’s never before possessed. On the other, she is forced to admit that the direction in which her life is moving is not at all clear. The university. Since enrolling, she’s spent maybe one or two days with her books.

  But then, every time one of her brother’s articles comes out, she rushes to the newsstand to get a copy of the paper. She reads hungrily, in search of hidden meanings. One Sunday morning, sipping a cappuccino in a café. One night, after a fight with Giannelli. She runs her finger over the lines from left to right. They’re obscure, fascinating pieces. At the very best moments, she feels as if she understands without understanding anything. She talks herself into believing that Michele is developing a secret code to stay in contact with her. As if their relationship were continuing undercover. He might have found a way of sending her messages, a distant place into which they can retreat to talk, to tell each other things that outside of there would sound ridiculous or implausible.

  One afternoon in early December, Clara finds Michele talking to himself in the garden. She is coming home. She’s wrapped in an overcoat, bundled in a cashmere sweater that keeps her warm. She walks through the gate. She walks past the fountain, too, heading for the steps. I’m not really sure I got that. Clara stops. She retraces her steps.

  He’s standing against the large terracotta vase, bent over the ferns.

  “Michele, is everything all right?”

  “Ciao.”

  Clara stands there for a moment, taken aback. Her brother’s eyes drill right through her. His lips alternately relaxed and puckered as if he were about to say “no” but then didn’t say it. A room where the drawers have all been rummaged through and then everything has been put back and tidied by a hand paid to do so. Even his clothing seems to fall off him.