Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  “I see that you know everything about me,” the young man said, careful to remain impassive, “while I still haven’t been able to figure out why you’re following a dead woman’s fake Twitter account.”

  “To put the profession on alert,” the senior editor surprised him once again. “Because your sister, dead or alive, had a habit of getting rid of journalists that didn’t suit her purposes.”

  Giuseppe Greco lowered his gaze. That’s the rumor that was circulating. And anyway, he didn’t have it in for that poor girl. It was him he couldn’t stand.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh no? Oh no?” Giuseppe Greco reacted as if Michele had denied something. “Oh no!” he raised his voice, and his excitement make him tear a page out of his notepad, grab a pen and write, on that same sheet of paper, someone’s name, with all the heat of someone completing an evil spell, as if the exact sequence of letters were about to destroy Michele, immediately incinerate him.

  But Michele wasn’t incinerated. The most remote part of him, which was also the most dangerous, protected him this time. It breathed inside him much like an underwater sea monster in whose belly lies sleeping the little sandman of our dreams. For an instant, Michele glimpsed himself at sixteen. He saw Clara too. He was afraid. Then the sensation vanished.

  Giuseppe Greco handed him the sheet of paper.

  “Ask him if what I say is true or not.”

  “Coming to ask me. That took some courage on your part . . . ”

  It was a beautiful afternoon. They’d been sitting together for the past hour in the old Ford Fiesta parked under a walnut tree. Untilled fields. Reddish dirt between one tree and the next. Then there was the sea, the blue line. On the other side were the first few buildings of Mola. Collapsing rents and good food. It was here that history slowed down. But this was also a place where someone like Danilo Sangirardi could find a haven in which to lick his wounds between one investigative piece and the next.

  “But I love this sort of thing,” the journalist went on, “I adore ungrateful children.”

  He was rattling on and on. Since they’d gotten into the car, he hadn’t stopped for a moment. He was doing and undoing. An overgrown boy of around forty. His curly head of hair undermined by the beginnings of a bald spot. His stout physique communicated an idea of inexhaustibility, as if being overweight had put at his disposal a stock of resources he could afford to burn through.

  “It took more courage to find out how to get in touch with you,” said Michele.

  But the guy wasn’t even listening to him. He was talking about a shipping container full of toxic waste. “The system of flipping waybills. They just change the codes on the form and at that point industrial waste can become agricultural after-products. From Germany to Foggia, then straight into Campania and Albania. But some of the shit stays right here, don’t kid yourself. A month or so ago a piece was published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. And guess who wrote about it here in Italy, aside from me. No one. Did you hear anything about it? You couldn’t have,” he said, answering his own question, “because they published the piece in Daunia Oggi. The weekly parish bulletin, more or less. And as soon as they did, we were notified that the lab that did the chemical analysis had filed a lawsuit. And now that you mention it, yes, if I think about who gave you my contact information, I feel a little ill.”

  Instead he listened to everything. He stockpiled every piece of information. “Giuseppe Greco is an imbecile,” he added, “one of those reporters who interview Peter Gabriel when he does a concert at Melpignano and think they’ve cleansed their conscience.”

  A truck loaded with watermelons passed by. It kicked up a cloud of dust and vanished.

  Giuseppe Greco, Sangirardi continued, hadn’t had the simple courage to defend him when he’d been sued by the Mangimi Mediterranei feed company, nor had he carried the news that the lawsuit had been dismissed out of hand. And as for letting him, Sangirardi, ever write in his paper, forget about it. Anyway, he’d probably given him the contact just because he owed Michele’s family.

  “After all, who doesn’t owe you Salveminis?” he said, as he lit a cigarette. “They fear you or they hate you. When they’re not dependent on you. I don’t hate you. It’s much more interesting to study you. You’re one of the natural consequences of this land. When you don’t plough a field properly, then of course what happens is that weeds proliferate. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been some other family of entrepreneurs.”

  Michele, too, lit a cigarette. He looked at Sangirardi. He admired him. He had the impression that the quest for truth in this man went hand in hand with personal glorification. As if the urgency sprang not from a wound but from a challenge, a desperate competition to which he’d summoned himself.

  “That’s right, precisely,” said Michele, “but let’s go back to my sister.”

  Sangirardi ashed out his window. In the distance a tiny dot appeared, moving in their direction. Slow, wobbling. An unidentified object in the stifling June heat.

  “So you want to know whether your sister really did get me fired from the newspaper?” Sangirardi turned toward him and smiled. “Absolutely, she did. Twice. First from Corriere del Sud, and then from Puglia Oggi. But don’t think she was the only one.”

  It seemed to Michele that he could see Clara’s face emerging from a pool of water.

  “My CV is like a war bulletin,” Sangirardi continued with macabre satisfaction. He listed the publications that had fired him. Once again Michele had the sensation that this was some kind of race in which Sangirardi was devoured by the need to come in first, whatever the cost. There was a calendar and there was a trophy shelf, even when the winner was the one who lost.

  “If they hadn’t tied my hands, I’d have easily proved that your father inflated the costs for the expansion of the port of Manfredonia well beyond the threshold of decency. I’d have shown that the city commissioner for public works was actually on your payroll, and it wouldn’t have been hard for me to show that you got away with building the residential complex in Val di Noto by manipulating the coefficients of environmental sustainability. Instead something always happens just when things are coming together. Some important document disappears. Or else I get fired.”

  The strange moving object proved to be a cart loaded with fruit. It seemed that it was being hauled by a man on a bicycle. A scooter overtook it.

  “Why did my sister have you fired?”

  The journalist sat with his cigarette poised in midair. His mane of hair waved in the wind.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  He got a little more comfortable in the seat, as if he wanted to be closer to Michele. Perhaps he felt sorry for this young man who seemed incapable of fully understanding the mechanism, and Michele, in turn, registered how the car shook and staggered under the weight of its owner, shitty shocks, a clattering old jalopy hurtling against an armored world, proof that the journalist was in the right.

  “The question, really, is how she managed to get me tossed out on my ear so fast,” he continued without ever losing his smile. “Costantini,” he said, “your sister was Renato Costantini’s lover. The chancellor of the university. One of the big shareholders in EdiPuglia. I was writing a piece attacking your father, Clara went to talk to Costantini, and he called the editor of the paper in the middle of the night.”

  The object in motion could be seen more clearly now. It was in fact a man on a bicycle.

  “I’m sorry she killed herself,” said Sangirardi with a fatalistic tone that Michele didn’t like. “Every so often I’d see them together in Bari,” he scratched his chin, “her and Costantini. I have to say they made a strong and not particularly pleasant impression. It wasn’t just the difference in age, or all the cocaine. The thing is that . . . Look. To suddenly come face to face with them on parade along Via Sparano, or see them appear under the
porticoes of Via Capruzzi only to disappear immediately after into Costantini’s car. They looked as if they’d popped right out of a sewer main. Don’t take this the wrong way. It was as if they glittered in a cruel, gruesome light. I don’t know how to explain it any better for you. At a certain point, when La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno started publishing the occasional article that raised doubts about whether the construction sites at the airport were being run properly, it appears that the guy in charge of that project went to complain personally to Costantini. If you see what I’m trying to say.”

  “Alberto,” Michele said in astonishment.

  “Exactly,” said Sangirardi, “so do you see what kind of people your sister got herself mixed up with? Her husband went without a second thought to ask a favor of the man she was going to bed with. Maybe at a certain point she couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Michele nodded. He knew that wasn’t it.

  Sangirardi stopped talking. He looked through the windshield. Michele did the same. The shadows of the clouds ran along the road, and between the shadows and the sunlight jolted this huge cart. Apricots, bananas. A green pyramid of watermelons. Pulling it was an old man on a bicycle. Now that he was closer, they realized that he might be very old. One of those ancient fifty-year-olds from four or five centuries ago. All muscles and sinews. Canvas trousers, braided plastic sandals. Sticking out of the shirt were the bones of an intensely bronzed torso. Bald cranium. The mouth a horizontal fissure. He was pedaling with all the effort in the world, but never slackening his pace, driven by a force more primitive than that of will. The journalist held his breath in the seat beside him, and Michele felt that there was a narrow but deep groove within which they both loved the South in the same way. Then they began to translate that skinny old man who was hauling a load twenty times his own weight using different dictionaries. He and Sangirardi would never be able to understand each other entirely. Opposite models of orphanhood. They had a better shot at understanding and being understood by their respective adversaries.

  In any case, the journalist was kind.

  After they were done talking, he drove Michele to the station. Michele fell asleep on the local. By ten that night, he was back in Bari. He emerged from the underpass. He walked along Via Capruzzi. He couldn’t help but imagine the scene that the journalist had described to him. His sister and Costantini getting out of the car and disappearing into the mouth of a sewer. He saw a shadow moving under the parked Fiat Punto, and he thought of the cat. But when he remembered that now he was going home to his father’s house, he felt even worse. He turned down Via Giulio Petroni. He headed for the number 19 bus stop. The blackened sky overhead. He could feel the thousand pieces of the puzzle moving into place. Iron filings on a sheet of paper under which a magnet is placed.

  When, many years later, Gennaro Lopez, former medical examiner for the Bari health clinic ASL 2, found himself extracting from his many if tangled memories the most awful one, that is, the one that could do him the most harm, he would choose the night on which a guy of about thirty knocked on his front door and started showering him with questions about his sister’s death certificate.

  He dialed Dr. Rosaria Nardoni’s number. The cell phone was turned off. He tried the second number he’d been given. The phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. So he phoned the Foggia court directly. He asked to speak to the office of the court clerk for the investigating magistrate. After a short pause, a second operator answered. Vittorio asked to speak to Dr. Nardoni. “Hello?” the woman said two minutes later. “Buongiorno, ma’am.” There followed an awkward pause. “Are you calling me . . . that is, you’re calling . . . ” “No, no,” Vittorio hastened to reply, “I’m using my wife’s cell phone.” “Forgive me,” the woman said, in relief, “I should have guessed. These have been extremely exhausting days.” Vittorio thought how unfortunate it was that he’d called during the so-called Black Week, when at court they sometimes were forced to work for as long as three hours at a stretch. “In any case, however, I’m answering your call in the court clerk’s office.” The old man got the hint. He gave the woman his wife’s cell phone number. She hung up. Ten minutes later the cell phone rang. This time city traffic was the background to her voice. Vittorio informed her that the technical reports on the hydrogeological impact of the villas of Porto Allegro were ready. They’d been countersigned by the administrative offices of the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA). Dr. Nardoni said: “Certainly.” Then she added: “Signor Salvemini, the only reason we’re doing this thing is because the approval from the Ministry of the Environment depends on it.” “Of course,” Vittorio replied, contemptuously.

  He phoned Engineer De Palo. Then he phoned Ruggero. He told him about his sour stomach. Ruggero said that it was because of the stress. He recommended Maalox. Vittorio sighed: “Do you seriously think I haven’t already taken it?” Then he said it took him forever to digest these days and his ankles were swollen.” “Papà,” said Ruggero, “you’re seventy-five years old.” He added that if he wanted to do some tests, he could swing by the clinic any time he wanted. “Listen,” Vittorio stopped him before his son could hang up. “The new technical director for ARPA, the Regional Environmental Protection Agency.” Ruggero’s silence, so to speak, intensified. The new technical director, Vittorio went on, had managed pharmaceutical services for the Bari health care clinic until two years ago. “Do you know him?” Ruggero had no choice but to confirm. “Well,” said Vittorio with a sorrowful voice, feeling his son’s growing mistrust. Now of all times, after the Porto Allegro mess was finally getting under control, it was time for ARPA’s biannual monitoring of the Gargano district. “Well?” asked Ruggero. “It’s not like you have anything to hide.” When he was like this, he was intolerable. “Of course we don’t have anything to hide,” Vittorio humiliated himself, “but given the fact that there’s a file open on Porto Allegro, I wouldn’t want the ARPA technicians to start digging in their heels.” “In other words, you want me to talk to them.” Vittorio replied that the economic crisis out there was something awful, that if the tourist village fell apart it would be a catastrophe. “The banks would bleed us dry in an instant.” He was sure that his son remembered all the lines of credit he’d co-signed over the years.

  After lunch, Vittorio tried to find some pretext to talk with Michele. It had been a month and a half since his son had come back to Bari. The old man would never have bet on such a lengthy stay. In truth—the initial awkwardness aside—the situation gave him a great deal of pleasure. In the last several days he’d been surprised to catch himself feeling tenderness where there had once been nothing but bafflement. In the rare breaks in his work, he reflected on the possibility that they were reestablishing a relationship. With certain children, mutual understanding comes late. He was sincerely sorry that he’d lost his cat. It was a pity he didn’t have a steady job. Growing up without a real mother must have been complicated. It might just be that Michele was on the verge of finally finding his path. Vittorio felt the prospects were rosy. And then, after all, Michele was the only one who never asked him for anything. Never a favor, a gift. The only one who was truly selfless, he thought with gratitude as he walked from the living room into the kitchen. He walked out onto the veranda, where he finally found him.

  “Ciao, Papà,” said Michele.

  They drank an espresso together. They talked about summer, which had finally arrived. Michele said that recently, in Europe alone, more than twenty thousand people were dying from the heat every year. “You read that on the internet,” said Vittorio, emphasizing his lack of expertise with the medium. As if that weren’t enough, he added: “At my age . . . ” He said it as if the admission of weakness were a tribute paid to his son’s own, convinced that Michele wouldn’t catch the innuendo, since Vittorio hadn’t entirely caught it himself. Then he asked Michele if he’d spoken recently with Engineer Ranieri. “Yes,” said the young man wit
hout hesitating. Vittorio was beginning to calm down. In the pot of cyclamens at their feet, two insects were battling savagely. “Last week,” Michele added, “when the chief justice of the court of appeals came to dinner.” Vittorio asked whether he’d given the engineer any particular instructions. “Concerning what?” The young man avoided the trap. “He mentioned some situation involving elevators to be installed in Taranto. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I told him that he’d have to talk to you.” “That’s what I thought,” the old man replied, shaking his head. In the meantime, one of the two insects was dead.

  Half an hour later, Vittorio went upstairs to his bedroom for his afternoon nap.

  He awoke at four. He went downstairs. He made himself another espresso. He phoned Engineer Ranieri. The engineer said that he’d been unable to track the man down. He’d been going up and down the streets of the city for three days now. He’d even staked out the apartment building on Via d’Aquino. Of course he’d pressed the buzzer. He’d gone to the rec center. Nothing. He’d vanished into thin air. Vittorio asked him if he was certain he was in Taranto. Engineer Ranieri asked: “What do you mean, Signor Salvemini?” Vittorio was fully convinced that Engineer Ranieri must be turning stupid. He felt a surge of love for his third-born child greater than ever before.

  “Because you actually think that at Porto Allegro it really is just a question of a few maritime pines being cut down?”

  “The Mediterranean maquis,” replied the pockmarked guy, “are you kidding? One time at Castellaneta Marina my mother-in-law dug up two rosemary bushes. She stacked them up behind the garden and burned them. The State Forestry Corps was there immediately. A 2,000-euro fine. And then, anyway, there’s the whole issue of the coastline. You can’t build a tourist complex fifty feet from the water.”