Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  “Okay.”

  “That good for nothing, Giuseppe Greco. Tell him not to publish the piece about Joseph Heller. To publish it would be a grave error. Like making something happen that had already happened in the past. Blasphemy. But listen. In place of the Heller piece you have to get him to run a different piece. It’s a piece about a poet. Possibly the greatest poet of the past hundred years. I’m still writing it. Every time I add two lines, I’m the first to be amazed. As if I were putting something together a few years from now, but none of it is my doing. You understand. Clara, but what are you . . . come on now!”

  She’s crying.

  “Come on, Clara, let’s stay calm,” his voice is newly kind.

  “Please . . . please,” she says, unable to stop, “I’m begging you . . tell me when I can . . . What I’m trying to say is I need to see you.”

  “Well, you could have said so earlier,” and now he’s actually cheerful. “That is, sorry, I should have told you. What a dope I am. I have some leave. I’ll be in Bari next weekend.”

  But the following Friday, Michele doesn’t show up in Bari. He doesn’t get there on Saturday either. When Clara asks for explanations, she sees her father’s face darken. Annamaria looks away.

  “What’s happened?” she asks, worried.

  “Nothing is what’s happened,” Vittorio says. “It’s just that his leave was revoked and he couldn’t come. A problem we’re taking care of.”

  There’s no further trace of the man who a few months ago handled her requests with a timid evasion. Now he’s the boss, taking charge of operations, and he doesn’t want any interference.

  “Taking care of what.”

  “I already told you. A problem.”

  “Okay, tell me what problem.”

  “A problem with a military court, if you really want to know,” Vittorio snaps, as if it were partly her fault. “A problem of the kind that the other day your brother pressed another soldier’s hand down onto a kitchen grill. A grill that was on and not, I think, by chance. Apparently he ruined the poor guy’s hand only because he couldn’t manage to slam his face onto the grill.”

  “If he did something like that he must have had his . . . ” Clara says disjointedly. She’s scared, upset.

  “We’re talking about a crime. A crime committed in a barracks. And for your information this isn’t something over which we can convince the victim to withdraw charges. We can’t put this thing to rest with a bunch of apologies and a check for damages. They don’t even need a criminal complaint from the victim. This is something they’re required to prosecute. To get him out of this situation we’d almost have to pray that your brother is out of his mind. And this,” says Vittorio, totally illogically, “this is the result of having managed things the way you all insisted.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “What is it you want to do?”

  “I want to talk to him on the phone. I want to talk to Michele.”

  “Oh, certainly. Your brother practically murdered some poor guy and now you’d like to call him on the phone. Fine. Be my guest. Ask the judge in charge of detention.”

  Clara spends the next few days phoning the barracks and going around town.

  Having received an invitation from a former high school classmate that she would have trashed just a few months ago, she shows up alone at a party for young lawyers at the Yacht Club. She moves in her evening gown past silver buckets full of iced wine. “Clara! What a surprise!” The next morning, she phones the barracks. Later, at the Teatro Piccinni, she buys a ticket for Peter Brook’s production of The Tempest. In the afternoon, she phones the barracks. The usual voice informs her that it’s not possible to talk to Michele. “All right, I’ll call back,” she replies. That night, squeezed between two bejeweled matrons, she’s watching Caliban’s antics on the theater’s stage. She realizes she’s being observed. Three rows ahead. A man in his forties. His face skinny, polished, pleasing in its way if it weren’t entirely expressionless. The glances seem to her so shameless that Clara doesn’t even feel offended. The next afternoon she manages to snag a spot with the finest hairdresser in the city. “Are you sure, ma’am?” When she goes home, her mother tells her that she looks like Jacqueline Kennedy. They go out together in the center of town. They spend five million lire on clothing. That same evening, Clara goes with her parents to dinner. They eat at the restaurant with the director of the Banca di Credito Pugliese. Together with him are his wife and his thirty-five-year-old daughter. When they leave the restaurant, Clara says goodnight and leaves. She spends a few hours at the Blue Velvet. She comes home drunk. The next afternoon she calls the barracks. “I can’t believe you don’t know where the hell my brother has gone!” she shouts at the young man who has the voice of a castrato. The young man tells her to call back. Later Clara drinks an aperitif with the bank director’s daughter. They talk about holidays, the wedding of a friend they have in common. She’s a little tipsy. That evening she takes her new friend to a party being thrown in honor of an academic. She’s bored to death. She doesn’t touch a drop of alcohol. In the morning she phones the barracks. That evening she has a fight with her father.

  Vittorio sees her come into his study, in a short silk sleeveless dress and high black boots. On her earlobes, she’s wearing the earrings encrusted with diamonds and tanzanites that her mother gave her many Christmases ago.

  “Why am I unable to talk with Michele?” she asks without so much as saying hello.

  Vittorio lays the pen down on his desk diary, raises his head.

  “Oh, well, you see . . . ” he says, making an effort to conceal his satisfaction at her new appearance, of which he instinctively approves, “that’s exactly the problem I’ve been working on these past few days. We’re getting everything squared away.”

  “Yes, but I make phone calls to the barracks, and they never put me through to him. Where is he now?”

  “Good question,” Vittorio sighs. “He is, so to speak, in a juridical void at the moment. He’s where he shouldn’t be. Which is a way of saying that he isn’t where he ought to be. He’s not in solitary confinement. And he’s even not in prison, thank heavens.”

  Vittorio stands up. He walks over to the bookshelf. He pulls a file folder out of a cabinet. He comes back to the desk. Now he’s in the exact place where he’ll be fifteen years from now, when they call him to say that she’s dead. He pops open the binder rings. He pulls the sheet of paper out of a plastic sleeve.

  “The request to be filed with the detention judge,” he says. “Greatest possible impact in the briefest possible space. Thanks to this, your brother will soon be set free.”

  The following morning Clara phones the barracks. They tell her to call back in the afternoon. In the afternoon, no one answers. In the evening, she goes alone to the Yacht Club. Dance music. A man in his fifties dressed all in white tries to chat her up. He pays her a series of vague compliments. Clara stares at him. The man smiles. She ditches him by the buffet table. Giannelli, she thinks for the last time, on her way home. The next morning she phones the barracks. They tell her to call back. Clara chokes back the tears. That evening she’s in her room, staring at the ceiling. She’s taken a tranquilizer. At nine thirty, she decides to go do something. She gets up from the bed. Without bothering to shower, she slips into the dress she wore the night before. She leaves home. She gets in her car and heads into town. Half an hour later, she makes her entrance onto the roof garden of the Oriente Hotel. It’s a ninetieth birthday party for one of the city’s old mayors. From what she can tell when she gets there, the birthday boy has already blown out his candles, delivered a brief speech, and gone to sleep, urging the guests to continue to enjoy themselves. Clara wanders around the buffet tables. She serves herself: first and second glass of cold white wine. She greets an acquaintance. When she’s about to grab the bottle again, the waiter beats her to the punch. He sl
ips it out of her hand. “Allow me,” he smiles. An overgrown boy with red hair, cropped short. He can’t be any older than twenty. She intentionally moves her glass so that the wine splashes onto the tablecloth. She stares at the boy, until she sees the blush spread across his face. Now the wine is once again being poured in the right place. Now Clara’s arm is still. She’s noticed something out of the corner of her eye. She waits until the waiter is done pouring. She turns. She smiles sarcastically.

  “Are you in the habit of staring at people like that?”

  Charcoal gray suit, black shoes, white shirt. Small blue eyes. Solid-color tie. He doesn’t smile, not even as he watches her approach him with a badass swagger.

  “At the theater the other night you wouldn’t stop staring at me. And now even when I had my back to you.”

  “Clearly in both cases I was enjoying the show,” he says without a hint of irony.

  “Oh, is that right? And what type of show do you think I am?”

  “I was just looking at you because I know your brother.”

  “Michele?” Clara’s eyes open wide.

  “No, the oncologist. Ruggero.”

  The man’s gaze is so level and expressionless that Clara feels as if she’s been run through like the other night. No pain. No attraction. Nothing.

  “Silvio Reginato, I’m a surgeon,” he introduces himself, shaking her hand, “and it strikes me that tonight you’ve overdone it a bit with the wine.”

  Clara bursts out laughing: “Ah! Exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a—”

  “You’re right, a stupid thing to say,” and he puts a hand on her back. “How about we both go get a cup of coffee.”

  He gives her a brief shove. Clara starts walking. They go past the table with the pastries. Her head swivels slightly. His footsteps behind her. Clara stiffens. She does it just enough so this man will take his hand off her back. He doesn’t. So they go past the table with the espresso machine. The scene seems to glow at its center, blur at the edges. Curtain, tied back. They leave the room. They go through the atrium. Then a black door. At last, he takes his hand off her back, opens the door, and ushers her through. Now it’s all white. A long marble table with blue veins. Three faucets, one after the other.

  “But this is the bathroom,” Clara points out in a fairly obvious way.

  She hears the key turn in the lock. She doesn’t have a chance to turn around in time. He’s walked past her again. He slips a hand into his jacket pocket. He bends over the marble counter. He dries the space between the faucets. He starts laying the coke on the surface. It all seems to happen very quickly. At the same time, the man doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.

  “Be my guest.”

  Clara takes the banknote out of his hands. She bends over the counter. She closes her right eye. She positions the rolled-up banknote over the small white trail, and snorts. A cold drop glitters in the eye still open. She feels the man’s hand. It slips without hesitation under her skirt. It slips under her panties, makes way, enters.

  The next morning, Clara wakes up with tremendous headache. She’s convinced that it must be past noon. She throws open the windows. She half-shuts her eyes. She reaches out and picks up the alarm clock from the floor in a corner of the room. She doesn’t know how it wound up there. Nine-thirty. She curses herself. She staggers into the bathroom, washes her face. She goes back into the bedroom and starts getting dressed. As she’s about to leave she feels something icy grip her temples. She wraps her arms around her belly. She rushes into the bathroom. Ten minutes later she’s back in her room. She picks up her purse and leaves.

  She drives to the end of Via Fanelli. As soon as she sees a phone booth she pulls over. She phones the barracks. She asks for Michele. “You’re the sister, aren’t you?” Clara drags out a “yes.” The voice is the one from so many phone calls ago. It’s not the same one as always. “Yes, certainly, that’s me,” she confirms, and she feels her legs give beneath her. “Listen,” says the voice, “strictly speaking I’m not even authorized to give you certain information.” He tells her that Michele isn’t in the barracks. He’s at the Alma Mater in Salerno. Clara hangs up. Her head still hurts. She gets back in the car. She returns home. She has a quick lunch and goes up to her room. Exhausted. She collapses onto the bed.

  She reopens her eyes when it’s already the middle of the afternoon. She must have slept for two hours. She yawns, caressing the nape of her neck. Then it’s as if her eyes fly wide open, even if they don’t. I wasn’t dreaming. Ten minutes later, she’s back in the car, she presses down on the accelerator. Then she starts to slow down. She gets out of the car. She steps into the phone booth. She dials the switchboard number and asks for the Alma Mater of Salerno. Someone tells her that it’s a psychiatric clinic. She asks for the phone number and hangs up. Now she’s breathing slowly. She looks through the glass at her parked car. Other vehicles go sailing past on the road. Clara opens and shuts her right hand, as if she were about to give blood. She lifts the receiver and calls the Alma Mater. She asks for her brother. They put her on hold. The switchboard operator again. She tells her to call back in half an hour.

  Half an hour passes, Clara phones again. She asks for Michele. She’s told to hold. A piece of music starts playing. Five minutes later, the music stops.

  “Clara.”

  “Michele, thank heavens!” she swings a weak punch against the phone booth wall. “But what did you get up to? Jesus . . . And how did you wind up . . . How are you?” she catches her breath.

  “I’ve really messed things up. I understand that.”

  Understand what? The voice strikes her as even stranger than it was a couple of weeks ago, far too calm.

  “But when are you getting out of there? When are you coming home?”

  “Come on, now we’ll see. Let’s do things nice and calmly. We need to stay calm and collected. You know . . . ”

  A very tired voice, a voice Clara might find common ground with when she’s asleep, not now.

  “You know,” he resumes, “I even broke a tooth.”

  “A tooth?”

  “I thought I was the only one, but luckily that’s not the case. It happens to lots of guys. The rubber mouthpiece. At a certain point you clench so hard that you run the risk of breaking a few teeth. It’s really tough at first.”

  “Yes,” Clara looks out again at the traffic in the street, afraid that now she understands.

  “The first day, there are times when you can’t remember who you are. Who your family is, who your friends are. Just think, I couldn’t even remember you. Total void.”

  “Yes,” she nods again. She’d feel she were dying if it weren’t for the fact that in order to hold his hand, virtually, she has to hurl herself into a dimension where listening to these things leaves one indifferent. “Yes.” She observes the trees, the blue sky.

  “That’s the way it is,” says Michele, “and just to have something to hold onto I immediately asked for something to read. They gave me a copy of Il Mattino. I’d get past the first few lines and forget what the piece was talking about. So then I had to start over.”

  “And now?” she asks.

  “This kind of thing is all right again,” his voice is even calmer now than it was before, puffed up with hot air, “and after the first few days the other things come back to mind, too. Slowly, then increasingly quickly, and before you have time to wonder what it is that’s happening, you already remember everything perfectly. The time to absorb the shock.”

  “When are they going to let you out?”

  “You have to be patient. In any case, it’s much better here than you’d ever imagine. There’s ping-pong. There are cats. The cats are fantastic.”

  “I’ll come visit you. I’m totally dying to see you again,” she gets the tone completely wrong.

  “Oh no. No, dear. That can’t be done.” He’d neve
r said “dear” to her like that.

  “What do you mean? Since when aren’t relatives allowed to come—”

  “Oh, no no no,” he chuckles, embarrassed, “I wasn’t trying to insinuate . . . the people at the clinic have nothing to do with it. They’re wonderful. Of course relatives are free to visit. Why on earth wouldn’t they. But if I wanted to turn my brain into total mush, then I’d just let you do as you please.”

  “You don’t want to see me.”

  “It’s better that I don’t, Clara,” he says, maintaining the same tone of voice throughout the conversation, as if it were a system for remaining faithful to the imperative not to lie. “It’s much better if we don’t see each other. And now maybe I’m supposed to add that I’m sorry. In fact, though, I’d be sorry if we saw each other. You understand. We’ll see each other, don’t worry. We just need to stay calm. I mean to say,” and as she listens to him, Clara observes the summer sky, “in other words, that time, it seems to me, is over now,” he concludes.

  That very same evening, Clara is on the terrace at the Sheraton. Inside, people are eating and cutting loose on the dance floor. White flashes behind her. Every so often she hears the music. Then the glass doors are closed, and once again the only noise is from the traffic on the street below. Earlier her father came by, too. There was the director of the Banca di Credito Pugliese. The mayor, the Public Works Commissioner. A group of engineers. She drinks her first glass. From the geraniums on the top floor she looks out over the lights in the neighborhood all around her. The trelliswork with the climbing vines. To jump. She dries her tears, doesn’t even have the strength to regain her composure when the man appears before her. Light-blue suit, unbuttoned white shirt. Nice hands, long and gnarled. A kind face, all things considered. At first, he seems to have to overcome his embarrassment, but then something gives him strength and he extends his hand toward hers. She shakes his hand. He says his name is Alberto.

  Three weeks later they’ll be engaged.