“A cat?” asked the proprietor, as if he were struggling to process the concept. Or maybe it was because the young man was talking in too low a voice.
The man told him that he could put up the notice himself. He handed him the adhesive tape. He went back to sorting the bottles on the counter. A lost cat. As if citizens didn’t already have enough problems already.
Michele left the bar. He headed down to the sea with his fists jammed into his pockets. The heat wasn’t letting up. It struck him that the apartment buildings were shimmering before his eyes. But it was sheer determination. Teeth clenched. Like clutching an amulet in his fingers, the silver coin to pay for the journey into the shadows. The cold wrath. This force led him toward the newsroom of Corriere del Mezzogiorno, where he intended to ask Giuseppe Greco why he was following a dead girl’s Twitter account.
He told you what?”
“To say no, Signor Salvemini. He assured me that it was you who had made that decision.”
“And when was it that he would have told you such a thing, excuse me?”
“On the phone. The other night. I called to find out what we were supposed to do and your son answered. He said that you’d said to tell me that we were supposed to turn down the request—”
“My son expressly told you that I’d discussed it with him?”
“Yes. That is, no. Signor Salvemini, right now it’s not as if I can remember every single wor—”
It was in that very moment that Engineer Ranieri raised his right hand to his temple, and the mild state of panic that he’d managed to keep tucked out of sight, in a dignified manner, until just a short while before, suddenly began to moisten the groove of his upper lip.
“Did Michele tell you expressly about an elevator to be built in an apartment house on Via d’Aquino?”
“Well, to tell the truth . . . you see, it came out at a certain point in the—”
“Did he tell you about it, yes or no?”
“I don’t think so, but—”
“Did he speak to you expressly about a truck driver from Taranto?”
“Here too, while we were talk—”
“Did he speak to you expressly about an invalid?”
“No. I’m certain about that part. The thing about the leg didn’t come out at all.”
“Well then . . . ” Vittorio took a long, deep breath, as if storing up oxygen would help to dissipate the purple color that had taken possession of his face, “. . . if he wasn’t the first to mention Taranto, if he didn’t talk to you about a man with an amputated leg, if he never said anything about an elevator, then how can you!”—fist brought down hard on the table—“Even say!” —second fist—“That he told you that it had been my decision!”—yet another fist—“Not to have that damned elevator built?”
“Signor Salvemini—”
“What did you say to him?” he asked with his voice kept intentionally low, so that the engineer would have to make an effort to understand.
“What did I say to him . . . about what?” he seemed confused.
“To the Tarantine. What answer did you give the Tarantine.”
“That we weren’t going to have the elevator built.”
“Call him back.”
“What?”
“Call the Tarantine back. Tell him that you made a mistake.”
“Well, sir. I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.”
“And for what reason.”
“Because he doesn’t have a cell phone. I know that it’s strange . . . He always called me.”
Vittorio whispered something.
“What did you say, Signor Salvemini?”
“Taranto,” he said again, in a louder voice. “Now.”
“Taranto?”
“Don’t bother going home. Don’t go take a shower. If you could only concentrate properly you’d realize that you’re not even talking with me anymore. You’re already in your station wagon. You’re already driving to Taranto.”
If he’d never entered that lovely, freshly painted apartment, with the plaster crenelated molding along the ceiling and the hardwood flooring, overcoming his own disbelief at the fact that it was his and not someone else’s (he wasn’t there as part of the moving crew, it was actually his home), then the effort necessary to reach the seventh floor would never have kindled all that resentment in him. He felt it the second time he came in.
He reached the landing. He felt the ache under his armpits. He opened the door. He closed it with a shove of his crutch. He caught his breath. He saw the lights glitter through the windows in the living room. Because the apartment faced west—though he didn’t even need to know this—the glow came from the Aragonese Castle, then there was the luminous arc of the floating cranes and the grainy nebula of light-blue flares and white dwarfs that were the flames from the petrochemical plant and the steel mill. He wasn’t used to seeing them from afar.
He took a few steps forward. He let himself drop onto the sofa. He found it more comfortable than he’d imagined. He dropped the crutches. He laid his head on the cushion and felt the unmistakable sensation of progressive recovery. Immediately after that came the anger.
He’d have had a hard time trying to calculate how many lifetimes it would have taken him to buy an apartment like this one, but he understood all too clearly how much trouble the person who had gotten it for him must have gone through. And so, what ought to have been a sensation of danger averted, if not an actual stroke of good luck, turned into mere humiliation. Orazio Basile wouldn’t have felt that if it hadn’t been for that brief quivering sensation of privilege. Even dignity sprang out of an abuse of power. Due to the circumstances under which the accident had occurred (he’d happened to be in the wrong place, with his headlights trained on the wrongest of all the girls, who seemed to be in the habit of strolling down the state highway naked and smeared with blood), someone had nonchalantly offered him what would have been for many the dream of a lifetime, and they hadn’t even bothered to see whether the building had an elevator.
In the neighborhoods around the steel mill, young men in their early thirties died. Twelve-year-old girls fell ill. Tumors of the stomach, of the lungs. Healthy family men folded over at the waist and in the course of a few months were dead. Hollowed-out faces. Bald heads. One out of every eighteen people was sick, a rate akin to that of a biblical plague. And this was, deep down, what Orazio Basile had been afraid of until just a split second earlier, what even those who emerged from the distant era of the union battles were afraid of. That there was something supernatural at work here. Some cruel and invincible god. Investigations were undertaken, the investigations ran aground. Entire plants were seized by the state, yet the plants went on running. Enormous fortunes were frozen, the fortunes were returned. Meanwhile the hospitals were full to bursting. The surgeons opened chest cavities, sawed through brainpans. Small knots of people wept in rooms that grew ever grayer and more run down. If something happened that was capable of reversing this cycle, then perhaps tens of thousands would gain the awareness that they were alone on the earth. They’d arm themselves with rocks and clubs.
But now Orazio Basile, fifty-six years old, former truck driver and legally disabled, had been given a nice apartment in the city center, and it wasn’t the inscrutable cruelty of some distant entity but rather the petty cruelty of men together with the gift itself that had inflicted the insult. The one rendered the other visible. He decided that he would demand the elevator.
The response that his request was not going to be fulfilled had been conveyed to him by the most idiotic of all the boot-lickers he’d had to deal with while in the hospital. Orazio Basile stepped out of the phone booth swaying with rage.
That evening it took twice the effort. He was getting used to the stairs, he could even foresee every individual move. He knew that he’d have to place the right crutch on the step,
pushing himself with his body against the railing. To press on one side, regain his balance immediately after using the second crutch. The anticipatory thought was every bit as odious as the effort itself.
Descending to the ground floor was no less complicated. The next morning, when he found himself opening the door to the street, he was already drenched with sweat. At the height of his fury, he headed for the swing bridge. By noon he was in the old town. He cursed. He hobbled along behind a line of parked cars, careful to keep from being seen outside the rec center. The sun was beating straight down, perpendicular rays hitting the devastated asphalt. With aching forearms and armpits, he saw the two girls on the pedestrian mall. Pink miniskirt. Cheap, tight dress. The one in the miniskirt was better. It would be the first time since the accident. But he’d also feel it was his duty to crush a couple of her ribs with a few blows of his crutch. He kept walking.
An hour later, he entered the train station. Sitting in the waiting room, his hands intertwined on the plastic arm cuffs, he stared down at the fake-marble floor. He grabbed the crutches again. He’d make that gaggle of idiots pay for the stairs in the underpass, too. He boarded the first train for Bari.
He finished editing the piece. Then he went online to check the impact of yesterday’s article. A long think piece about the films of Arthur Penn. It had taken him three days of hard work. All the same, he realized as he gazed at his reflection in the screen, the piece hadn’t gotten more than thirty likes.
At that time of night there was still a fair amount of activity at the newspaper. He went to get a glass from the watercooler. He came back into his office. What did he expect, after all? That his work would circulate so widely that it might eventually come to the attention of the arts editors at Corriere della Sera or La Repubblica? That the editor in chief of Ciak might notice him? Or that he might wind up catching the eye of a Tornatore, a Benigni, someone who might mention his name to the executive staff of some international festival?
Well, yes, that’s exactly what he’d been hoping.
Giuseppe Greco contemplated the empty desks on a Thursday evening. The important things were happening elsewhere. Certainly not in Bari. He went back to his desk. He had to write a long article about the delegation from the department of tourism now visiting Beijing.
He heard someone chatting in the other room. Night owls like him. After another fifteen minutes of typing, he ordered a pizza. In the office that was home to the travel supplement, three editors were sweating out the issue around a desk. Giuseppe Greco went to the bathroom. He took a piss. He washed his hands. He came back out into the hallway.
He realized that he’d walked past his own office. He turned around and went back. He hadn’t registered his own office because when he’d left the lights were still on, and now, strangely, they were all off. He entered the room. Suddenly he stopped.
“Excuse me, who were you looking for?”
The slender figure turned in his direction. Giuseppe Greco felt an inexplicable sensation of sorrow flood through him. As if he were touching the hull of a sunken ship lying abandoned on the ocean floor. The memory of youth. He turned on the light.
The silhouette revealed a young man in jeans and a black shirt. Dark hair, jutting cheekbones, and one eyelid slightly lower than the other.
“What are you doing in my office?”
“No, you see . . . ” the stranger smiled, and Giuseppe Greco once again felt the same sensation, “please forgive me for the time of night, it’s just that I wanted to purchase a space . . . ”
“For advertising you’d have to go up to the sixth floor. And anyway, at this time of night, the offices are . . . ”
“Actually,” with a sudden leap, the young man sat on the edge of the desk, “it’s that I’ve lost my cat and I wanted to place an advertisement with all the details and contacts.”
“It’s just that this isn’t the advertising office. This is the entertainment page.”
He was surprised to find himself offering all those explanations. As if his objective wasn’t to kick out some stranger who had snuck into his office and, to make things worse, was taking the liberty of sitting on his desk like that, but rather to defend himself from something.
“Oh, and do you also cover culture?”
“Now and then,” he said dismissively, “but I hope you’ll excuse me because I have to finish editing a . . . ”
The young man did another strange thing. He jumped down off the desk. He pulled one of the wheeled chairs toward himself and sat on it. He gave a good hard shove with his feet and skated all the way around behind the desk.
It wasn’t just the arrogance of the gestures. Rather it was the ease that was, in a certain sense, amputated. As if moving with that presumption wasn’t in fact something that came easy, and he, the young man, were obliged to overcome invisible obstacles even just to get from one point in the room to another, obstacles that in the past might perhaps have conditioned his life in no uncertain terms, but that were now tucked away in some corner of his inner map. Giuseppe Greco knew that way of moving. It was this ineffable sensation of familiarity that kept him from calling the security guard, while his conscious memory was working at full steam to dredge up the rest.
But once again it was the young man who beat him to the punch.
“Maybe you’d be interested in a nice long article about Joseph Heller and the art of war.”
Why of course, thought the senior editor.
“My youthful misdeeds have come to pay me a visit.”
He regretted the wisecrack. He’d said it to cushion his guilt at having failed to recognize him, not in order to put him at ease. The Salveminis, he thought without restraining his dislike. He pulled up his own chair and sat down across from him. Michele wasn’t smiling now. If anything, Giuseppe Greco would have said he was looking at him with disregard. He’s looking at me with arrogance, with contempt. He observed the face more closely. Where he remembered a curve there was a sharp angle. He’d lost the disarming impracticality of adolescence. After a certain age, the true nature emerges. They thought of themselves as the masters of the city. They came strolling into your office at all hours because they were used to doing as they pleased.
“Like I was saying, I’m just finishing up something important,” he hissed, fed by the antagonism that burned in the young man’s eyes, so that a perfect hostility glittered between them, the kind that exists between those who detest each other for different reasons, each of them unaware of the other’s. “There are some of us who have to work late,” he continued, “and I’m not even clear on whether this whole thing with the cat is true. In any case, if there’s anything else you want to ask me, I think you’d better get to it.”
“Just one thing I’m curious about.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Why are you following my sister on Twitter? Clara has been dead for more than a month.”
You make the first move. Now the passage of time really weighed on them both. Aside from the physical changes in each, what hadn’t happened to him in the last decade, and what, in contrast, was Giuseppe Greco convinced had happened to the scion of the Salvemini clan. A daddy’s boy. A young man who’d only needed to snap his fingers to sit down to dinner with the editor of some major newspaper. And now, the very incarnation of social injustice had the nerve to come and lecture him for some minor peccadillo.
“There’s something I’m curious about myself,” the senior editor replied coldly. “I’d like to know how it’s possible for someone like you to rise so high.”
Michele furrowed his brow. He didn’t understand if the man was serious.
“I open the pages of Corriere della Sera and I read an article you wrote about Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks,” the senior editor continued, “then, again in Corriere, a piece about Ellison. I leaf through Ciak and who do I find? Michele Salvemini holding forth on Herzog as if
he were a family friend. The Madness of Fitzcarraldo. A piece that, among other things, is riddled with fairly serious inaccuracies.”
Now Michele was taken aback. He could barely even remember those pieces. He’d transformed his habit of failure into a faithful and protective traveling companion. He preferred to forget the few times his name had appeared in a major publication, as if those notches in his biography were a threat rather than an encouragement. Apparently, though, there was someone who remembered everything right down to the slightest detail. The world certainly was a strange place.
“How is it possible, I’ve asked myself all these years,” the senior editor tried to reverse once and for all the ownership of the element of surprise, “for a young man with all your problems to make his way in the world? Everyone knows how important it is to be able to deal with other people in this line of work. To know what moves to make. A young man who’s actually mentally ill,” he continued shamelessly, “someone who’s never even taken a class in journalism and whose only experience, before heading off to Rome, the big city,” he emphasized, full of resentment, “consisted of writing articles that only someone like me could have taken seriously. Articles that no one else would have dreamed of publishing. How is it possible that I now find the work of this misfit in Corriere della Sera, in La Repubblica, in Ciak?
“I often ask myself the same thing,” Michele replied, toughing it out.
“Your surname,” Giuseppe Greco smiled malevolently, “the importance of being a Salvemini. And then, once you’ve entered the clique of renowned journalists, the habit you have of protecting each other.”
Ferocity Page 30
