Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

“Do you remember the newspaper ads?”

  “The owners went right into their villas in their boats. I seem to remember that the truth-in-advertising standards were brought into play, or something like that.”

  “It’s not just that. For instance, what about Rodi Garganico? There really are villas there with private moorings.”

  Two customers came in. The proprietor stopped talking. He served them cappuccinos and pastries. The customers ate. Then they left. The man went on with what he was saying.

  “It’s not just the Mediterranean maquis. It’s not the distance from the sea. In that area they’ve done crap you can’t even begin to imagine. The whole upper Gargano area. Stuff that if you lived there, you’d pack up your whole family and leave in the middle of the night.”

  A university student came in. The proprietor served him an espresso. The student drank it. He left.

  “What kind of crap?” asked the pockmarked guy.

  “Waste,” replied the proprietor “Special waste buried under the agricultural waste. And even that waste ought to be disposed of differently. Everyone says so. We know who’s ended up charge of the area, and for some time now. Stuff that in a couple of years could go up like a bomb—”

  “Like Ilva?”

  “Even worse.”

  “Have you by any chance talked to Engineer Ranieri?” the older man asked the younger one in the cool shade of the veranda.

  But for the tiny mite clinging to the abdomen of the wasp these were just shadows that distance kept from being transformed into real dangers. Despite the fact that the wasp was ten times its size—its sting capable of causing anaphylactic shock in a small dog—the impersonal force that governed the mite drove it to attack the wasp the minute its presence in the vase of cyclamens was identified. The wasp tried to react, but it was too slow. The mite was able to sink its small sharp fangs into the wasp’s abdomen, and then finally insert its powerful tubular appendages. It had no way of knowing that the wasp was old and feeble, and that this was the only reason the mite could hope to best it. The force knew, and that was enough.

  Educated man that he was, Renato Costantini was familiar with the effectiveness of certain re-proposals of the same thing after the crime has been consummated. Voices that rise from underground. Ghosts that only the suspect can see. He also knew that in the real world these things happen at the hands of the ill-intentioned, ready to seek their own gain. Usually blackmailers.

  All the same, they preserve their anguishing power. He’d had concrete evidence of the fact just last week. He was striding briskly through the monumental entrance to the university when he’d seen him. Sitting all alone on a bench in Piazza Cesare Battisti. He’d noticed the strangeness of the scarf knotted around his neck. He thought he’d recognized something whose emotional consequences (a sorrow, the grim unfolding of a Good Friday) had kept him from remembering. He hadn’t stopped.

  Two days later came the shareholders meeting of EdiPuglia. The heat was tremendous. The discussion went on and on. At a certain point Renato Costantini felt the need to step out onto the balcony for a cigarette. From there to the breakwaters the sea was calm and metallic in the summer afternoon. From the conference room came the sound of familiar voices raised. Costantini took a drag. He lowered his head to raze his thoughts to the ground and reconstruct them in a different order. Before this could happen—his mind a temporary open path—he saw him again. About sixty feet away. Sitting at a table of the bar on Piazza Diaz. Jeans and black shirt, hunched over the pages of a newspaper with a demitasse of espresso.

  Costantini felt his head spin. The image of the young man, plummeting like a dead weight into the yielding photo archives of his memory, promptly merged with another one, almost identical. The way in which Michele twisted forward, legs crossed. An unsettling geometric figure—the empty triangle of a chain-link fence swollen in the open countryside by a tumultuous wind—that resembled Clara’s posture. Unnaturally identical. As if the young man had come all the way there to challenge him but, after entering provocatively into the role of his sister, had in his turn fallen under the thrall of it. The man definitively focused on the scarf, as well. Wrapped around his neck was the neckerchief from the other day, the same one that she had been wearing when Costantini went to pick her up in the dark funnel of a night several months ago, and the girl, in the car, looking at him, with a puffy lip, no seriousness to her, had transformed a page otherwise brimming over with meaning into a mirror.

  Costantini was seized by anxiety. It seemed to him that now Michele, bent over the newspaper at the table in the bar, his finger hovering over the porous paper like a pendulum over an alphabetical grid, was reading from that very same page. As if he were talking to himself—a whisper not listened to but nonetheless real—and saying horrible things about Costantini, details that he, first and foremost, would have lacked the courage to admit to himself. Clara. Then Costantini became himself again. But the young man was still there, in the street.

  Someone called him into the meeting room. It was a lucky thing. A few minutes later he was deep in discussion with the other partners. They were arguing over whether it would be wise to move the very expensive offices of Corriere del Sud out to the outskirts of town.

  Friday night, the third apparition.

  This time, Costantini was at the supermarket. He hadn’t had a chance to swing by the deli. He’d been forced to fall back on the Conad supermarket on Viale Unità d’Italia, which stayed open until late. In the long aisles drenched with fluorescent light, he felt lost. The hard part was making sure he didn’t buy the kind of low-quality food that would earn him a rebuke from his wife. And then the people all around him. The faces. The instant reflex with which their attention would seize on the phosphorescent yellow of a deal of the week. If you were lucky enough to be comfortably off, the last thing on earth you’d want around you was poor people.

  He watched anxiously as they sliced his prosciutto. He chose some bread. He headed for the refrigerator case. The long metal tray was packed with yogurts and terrible industrially produced cheeses. He’d just looked up from an unlikely package of frozen croquettes, when there he was before him. Skinny, pale. He was pushing a completely empty shopping cart. His gaze was lost in something that Costantini couldn’t seem to entirely uproot from himself.

  Pretending he hadn’t seen him, Michele brushed past. He vanished behind the refrigerator case. Costantini felt the hairs rise on his forearms, his belly tighten with malaise. They’d forced him to attend the funeral. Then the owner’s lackey had showed up with that ridiculous excuse of the overcoat. Trying to extort favors from him. But now the young man had ambushed him for the umpteenth time. Carrying in his face the pallor of his dead sister (in the grotesque twisting of his lips, Clara’s tranquility), he was doing something that was completely devoid of logic. Unless he was trying to tell him something else. The hypothesis that there might be aspects of Clara that he’d never even come close to. Entire universes. A story that fluttered all around, pulverized, beyond Costantini’s ability to reconstruct, any more than it is possible to go from a bonfire to a book by putting the ashes back together.

  That same night, lying in bed next to his wife, he couldn’t get to sleep. An idiotic prank. The young man was trying to scare him. In cahoots with the rest of the family. Still, after the meeting with Engineer De Palo, Costantini had gotten busy. He alone knew how much effort it had cost him. But had new pieces hostile to Salvemini Construction come out in Corriere del Sud? Had they appeared in Puglia Oggi, in the Gazzetta del Levante, or in any other paper where he had so much as a friend? What message were they trying to send him through this young man’s apparitions? Perhaps they were demanding that articles come out actually in favor of Salvemini Construction. But that was impossible. They were still continuing to devastate one of the loveliest areas in the region. In given circumstances, silence was the most valuable gift that the local press could o
ffer a company of that kind.

  Costantini tossed and turned in the bed. His wife went on sleeping. Her mouth half open, her features relaxed like a rubber mask. Costantini shut his eyes to keep from penetrating any further into that unguarded opening. But as soon as darkness enveloped him, allowing the outlines of things to become a skeleton of light, all at once he saw her again. A sketch enclosed in itself. Exactly the same as when, after making love, Clara would get dressed again and he felt he hadn’t modified in her even so much as the mood of the two minutes that followed.

  Looking at her for the first time, obscurely nonchalant at the journalists’ party, it had seemed to him that she was summoning him to fill a void. The sensation of some missing piece (an invitation that provoked pity, and immediately thereafter, aggression) was something that Clara emanated even when he wasn’t there. This was damned clear. Even when they’d seen each other just the day before. Even when he caressed her flesh, grabbed her wrists in his fists, tried to impress in her body a lasting impulse.

  But none of all this endured in her.

  In his travels around the city, it often happened that Costantini would spot her in the company of other men. Never her husband. Leaving a restaurant with Valentino Buffante. Out shopping with the director of the Banca di Credito Pugliese. Then, one night when she’d asked him to swing by and pick her up out front of a club so they could go to dinner together, he’d found her talking in the shadows with some kind of aged chimp in an overcoat and black shoes. To Costantini it seemed (but as if in a nightmare, the intermittence of a premonition) that it was the elderly chief justice of the court of appeals. To stifle the jealousy, they would have had to be in the hotel already, bodies sinking into the bed. Shame and rage prevented him from suggesting the change of plan. And so, after helping her into the car, Costantini limited himself to driving toward the restaurant. Once they emerged onto Via Crisanzio, he even began to wonder whether she hadn’t gone to bed with the judge that same night. Maybe only an hour ago. That is, if it really was the judge. He thought it with her sitting beside him, as a whiff of her exceedingly faint scent reached him, flowers mixed with sweat. Even if she hadn’t done it, she was certainly capable of it, he told himself. So she’d done it. The indifference of certain beautiful young women. That devastating weapon. If it had fallen to him, to keep two or three lovers on tenterhooks simultaneously, he would have succeeded only through sheer force of will. However brutal and instinctive. The reason he’d never be as successful at such a thing as she was. Clara never put any will into it. In her, there wasn’t even the strategic determination to do without will. For Costantini it was a sort of brainteaser that drove him crazy.

  That night they dined near Via Amendola. They had sex in a hotel at Torre a Mare. But already, as he watched her get out of bed, walking naked toward the bathroom, it seemed to him that, from a body held firmly in his hands, Clara was turning back into an elusive compound of other people’s thoughts. He imagined her as composed of pure energy rendered possible—in her immaterial intensity—by what she did with other men. Exactly what she did with him. If he had been able to peek through a keyhole, he wouldn’t have found anyone other than himself.

  Being part of the same logic meant not understanding.

  If he’d hoped to so much as graze the edge of the problem, he ought to have overturned the plane on which he reasoned. Change his point of view. He would have had to glimpse her immersed in her most concrete pain. The grass up to her calves on summer evenings. When, in an absolutely pathetic manner, after going over to her parents’ for dinner, Clara got up from the table and went for a walk through the moonlit fields. Walking past the mulberry bushes, she ventured deeper amongst the spikes of Bermuda grass. Then into the peat bog. She was searching for Michele. There had been, in their lives, one long moment of happiness. Every time she came into the old house, Clara better understood what would otherwise have been for her just a mute force that governed her days. Then it’s this, she said to herself after climbing the stairs to the second floor. Seeing Michele’s bedroom reduced to a storage room made her feel ill, but it was the sign of the insult. It’s this, of course it is. Clara managed to fetch it back an instant before the black drop was diluted in the sea inside which it would have become an indistinct malaise, with neither origin nor direction. Instead, there was an origin. There had been an outrage, a crime that now cried out for compensation. Clara imagined herself repeating the phrase under her breath beneath the constellations of summer. Not that she dreamed of vengeance. She liked order. A small ceramic vase to be put back in place. She went past the tufts of the cane plants, then past the trees in the radiant sky of eleven at night. She knew that naming him too explicitly was the opposite of finding him again. It wasn’t enough to walk through the places where he had loved to get lost before that wonderful year had begun. It wasn’t enough to dig up those comic books she’d given him as a gift. There was something mawkish, something obvious about these attempts. At the same time, they were necessary to ensure that the real grief could surprise her from behind. Point blank, it would happen. Clara felt herself being torn by the same emotion as when she and her brother would wrestle in the bed. The splendid peace of the moments in which Michele observed her while she was spiking over the top of the net. Delirious with joy, she had the confirmation that the world wasn’t just made up of naked material objects. It wasn’t even made up of people, but of presences. He and I unleashed the energy of the dead. In a future as inaccessible yet certain as the sprout of a seed already buried in the dirt, Clara sensed that Michele would mentally unroll the missive, would give it voice. At that point, she fully understood. She remembered that she was a ghost, and wouldn’t find peace until things had gone back to the way they were supposed to be.

  At last she was heading back toward the villa, ready to say farewell to her parents, get in her car, and go join Alberto. She thought for a moment about her lovers, vague bumpers in a game about whose precise workings she knew no more than what her instincts told her. She moved in a sea of fog, trusting in the fact that going forward was the right thing to do. Even though the fog thickened, and the ground beneath her feet grew chilly and dank. The odor of marsh and rotting leaves before the waters made their presence known, lapping around her waist, lifting her dress like a parachute.

  That was when the nighttime phone calls started coming in.

  Costantini tossed and turned. He turned his back on his wife, afraid that the woman’s slumber might harpoon his secrets. He curled up in the bed. The first time, he remembered, the cell phone rang a little past midnight. He was in a restaurant in the city center, together with the editor-in-chief of Puglia Oggi. He answered the phone. He raised one hand in a gesture of apology before a table full of glasses that had already been filled and emptied many times. Half an hour later, he was driving all alone toward Viale Europa. At that time of night the area was completely dead, surrounded by farmland and discount furniture stores and ugly, illegally built houses. He found her where she’d told him. Where the road widens, just past the Q8 gas station. Motionless in the night like a sentinel for a world he didn’t have the credentials to access. Costantini slowed down. Clara hopped into the car. He looked her in the face and started in surprise. She said resolutely: “Let’s get out of here.” Out of an abundance of caution, he drove for a few miles, and then pulled over to the side of the road. He turned off the engine. He turned on the dome light. He turned to look at her.

  “So, do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  Clara was wearing a leather jacket, a white T-shirt, a silk scarf around her neck. And her upper lip was swollen. She was surrounded by the electric wind of bodies that have ceased to struggle. Costantini imagined that someone had hurled her out of a car after something he couldn’t imagine. He tried to contain his anger.

  “What happened to you?” he asked again.

  “Nothing, really, nothing.” Clara shrugged. She gave him a sort of half
-smile that made her unapproachable: “Come on, take me home.”

  He pulled back out onto the road. He tried to say something. He was agitated, confused. Twice he spread his hands out into the air before replacing them responsibly on the steering wheel. He didn’t know if she really had been hit. Much less what she was doing in that ridiculous part of town in the first place. He asked her whether she’d had a fight with someone. Clara replied wearily not to worry, that it was all under control. “Was it your husband?” More than a question, Costantini caught himself realizing that it actually constituted a hope. She lit a cigarette. “What are you talking about? Alberto’s at home waiting for me.” She had the tone of voice of a mother trying to reassure her son about something it’s better for him not to know. Costantini went on driving. He was following the reflectors. He asked no more questions because he was starting to feel embarrassed. He was afraid that she might be able to read his thoughts. He tried not to look at her. Why could someone else do this and he couldn’t?

  What Costantini would have had to know—and he couldn’t know it, he was barred from the scene—had nothing to do with the nighttime occurrences. Sooner or later he would have had access to those. But he could never have seen her the next afternoon, at home, immediately after a long warm bath, when Clara got out of the tub with the specific intention of phoning her brother. It had been a month since they’d spoken. She wrapped a towel around her head. She slipped on her bathrobe. She shut the toilet lid, sat down on it and stretched her legs out in front of her, crossing her ankles on the bidet. She lit up a nice cigarette and dialed Michele’s number.

  “Hello?” he said after a couple of rings.

  Ten minutes of conversation without telling each other a thing. They’d been talking like this for years. But she, smoking and chatting, joking about empty shapes, caressed with satisfaction her fist-pounded lip. She sought in the voice of this Michele the unconscious resonance of the other. She thought she could hear it. Much louder than the last few times. An angry breathing grew under the calm, judicious tone.