Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  It was March. Alberto had come home after spending the day at one of Vittorio’s construction sites. He’d talked to Clara on the phone. His wife had told him to go ahead and eat dinner without her. She’d be going to the movies with a friend.

  “The Straight Story, at the Odeon.”

  That had been the answer.

  He’d asked the question, driven by the desire to catch her red-handed. He realized it only after he was done talking, when Clara’s voice had reemerged from the silence with a slight crack in it. They ended the call. Alberto immediately felt his head start to spin. Clutching a lie in his hands. A naked, pulsating heart. Until that point, he’d kept a safe distance. He knew about spouses cheating, the way we know that the sun sets every night over cities where we don’t live. He’d never tried to dirty his theoretical understanding through a test. And so, immediately after the phone conversation, he set all hesitation aside and went without shame to get the newspaper out of the trash. Famished. Excited. A rat rummaging through the garbage. He spread out the entertainment pages on the kitchen table. His stomach sank. The atrocious joy of seeing things with your own eyes. Alberto let himself drop onto the chair. What an incredible girl she was! She hadn’t even taken the trouble to check it out. But it was at times like these that Clara sparkled in all her splendor. Costantini. It wasn’t rare for Alberto to know the names of her current lovers. But now things were different. For the first time he could hypothesize that she was cheating on him the very evening that its happening was all but a foregone conclusion. He got up from his chair. He went into the bathroom. He turned on the faucet. He felt as if a giant wedge had been driven into his head. He put his neck under the spray of cold water. Then he lifted his head and looked at himself in the mirror. Devastated, dripping. He clenched his teeth. Then it happened. He felt the tension collapse in on itself and, at that point, he didn’t even understand how, he’d already crossed through the mirror. Suddenly there was only peace around him, a mineral silence. Incredible. On this side, everything became so clear. He saw his wife’s fingers as she unbuttoned Costantini’s shirt, and he recognized them as his own fingers. If was his mouth that he was allowing the old man to kiss. And at the very moment that Clara started making love, he, Alberto, was there, in a point in his body so profound that Costantini became nothing more than a mere vehicle of dead flesh.

  That’s why he would never leave her.

  His rebirth. From that night on, Alberto stopped worrying. Being on the other side meant seeing the world for what it was. Recognizing humiliation as an error in perspective. Anger as the weapon of those who crave defeat. Now, at last, he felt strong. In this new garb, Alberto had been able to consciously shake Costantini’s hand, just as he’d unconsciously shaken hands with the owner of the gym. He would even have been able to speak to him. Why not? With Costantini. With the bank director. Revel in the stupefied expressions of his wife’s lovers.

  Of course it was never painless. You had to know how to suffer in exchange for a reward of that kind. But it was a different kind of suffering. A wall to be slammed against violently so he could find himself with her, magically, united like no one else.

  “I know Clara,” Michele replied, letting his arm fall back on itself.

  Just that. Then the young man smiled. Looking at him, once again, the way she would have just a few weeks before her death.

  Alberto felt himself blushing. In the last months with Clara, when the cocaine had become an obsession and she had become unrecognizable. When she came home and was covered with bruises. Pale. Scandalously skinny, as if from her thirty-six-year-old skin, stretched tight, a mocking skeleton were emerging. A wicked presence that wanted to tip everything over. Obsessed by a project from which Alberto was excluded. As if this terrifying slippery slope were the last act in a very specific strategy, of which she herself—naked on a Sunday morning in the bathroom at home, her eyes ringed with exhaustion and an expression of deranged triumph between her lacrimal bones—had only now understood. Rereading the years they’d spent together. Convincing him, with her simple presence, that she had always followed a different path. Something prior to him, much more important. The house that had been burning in her dreams every night for years.

  But the woman of the last few months had no longer been his wife. She was what might be left of a magnificent young woman when she skids off the road in all directions and the accumulated errors start to be too many. She was a specter. An impostor. The macabre presence that was now emerging from Michele’s own flesh.

  “Let’s say instead that you abandoned her,” Alberto replied, to rid himself of the apparition, savoring the young man’s wounded look, “let’s say that you left just when she needed you most. That with the excuse of your alleged problems, you cast a spotlight on your absence above all. Absent from the wedding. Absent from the funeral. Where were you when she took those sleeping pills?” He saw the young man suffer, but Clara’s sneer, her mocking smile, remained in its place. “I took her to the hospital,” Alberto thundered then. “Your father was there to identify the corpse. You were away while she plunged into depression. You left to Engineer Ranieri and Engineer De Palo the task of lifting a corpse you never even saw,” and to Michele it seemed that something had been shown to him by accident, he ground his teeth in the effort to understand, then Alberto, frightened, piled on. “Do you think that she never talked to me about it?” he lied, full of rage. “She talked to me about it. We talked about everything. Even about you. Do you know what she used to say to me?” He brought the young man to the depths of misery, Michele was sitting on the sofa, his face twisted, and it was if his most secret horrors were all dancing together, the voices that spoke to him from within, this madness that had never died, while the shadow of the gaze, thought Alberto, was instead still standing, in all its feminine ferocity, independent of the young man but driven into him, as if that were the mission of the other Clara: to drag her brother along to this point. “She told me that she was so hurt, that she couldn’t wrap her mind around it,” Alberto hissed, “a brother that she had helped so many times and that he repaid with such total indifference. How could you blame her? Just do the numbers. When is it that you came to see her since you moved to Rome?” He raised his left forefinger. “Don’t think that it was easy for her to accept all this.”

  Then Alberto heaved a long exhausted sigh, slapping his hands twice on his thighs. He shut his eyes. He reopened them. The spell was broken. It seemed as if a hurricane had roared through the room. Roofs torn off. Branches broken. Michele looked at him in silence. The atmosphere continued to return to normal. Alberto began to feel awkward. Much like when, at the end of a fight in which you’ve lost control, you start to wonder how on earth you could have made such a scene. You start to feel regret. You consider the consequences. You persuade yourself, in the cool aftermath, that the real mistake was articulating your real position poorly. And in this way—outside of the mystical maelstrom of the tantrum—you fail to fully consider that you might actually have let slip some piece of information that you would have been better advised to keep to yourself. He saw the young man clench the armrests with his fingers. Michele got to his feet.

  “I got carried away,” said Alberto. “I’m sorry.”

  The young man dropped his eyes: “Sure, it’s okay. We’re all a little out of sorts these days.”

  Alberto walked him to the front door. They said a few more things. Conventional phrases that erased themselves even as they were being uttered. Alberto opened the door. Then, with relief, he watched him disappear.

  After the outskirts, he was back in the city.

  He’d covered a long stretch of coastline that was completely deserted. Industrial sheds and buildings that had been left unfinished. Then he’d angled inland.

  The bushes thinned out. Now it was red dirt in the sunshine. Orazio Basile was sweating on his crutches. He was crossing a no-man’s land that he would have found, id
entical, whether leaving Taranto or venturing into the Calabrian plain. He’d have found it identical in Palestine.

  He approached a virtual idiot who was sitting all alone on the grass with a plastic bag in one hand.

  Then an older woman, dressed in black, bent over at the edge of the road. She was gripping a small sickle she was using to uproot wild chicory.

  Then he stopped a man on a bicycle who didn’t look as if he was pedaling for his health.

  No one seemed to know what to tell him.

  At two o’clock, he found himself in the Japigia neighborhood. The white silhouette of enormous apartment buildings, all identical, emerged around a corner, surrounded him. He asked for directions in a small pensione on Via Gentile. Having obtained the address, he went back out. The idea of a taxi, or a bus, irritated him.

  At five in the afternoon, he was already hobbling along on the city’s southern outskirts. Here the children were kicking a ball around, safe and protected, in the courtyards of the row houses, their voices drowned out by the sound of the sprinklers. Even the sunlight was gentler. The heat that arrived was screened by well-tended trees. Along the road, high-performance cars stood parked. Hoods glittering. A plane flew low overhead. The noise diminished in intensity. Once again, the sloshing of sprinklers.

  Orazio Basile resumed his walking. He walked past the IP gas station. He’d understood for some time now that he was approaching his objective. Now he could see it.

  I’m doing it for them. They give me the strength.

  Vittorio Salvemini was sitting among the patients in the waiting room by the reception desk of the Cancer Institute of the Mediterranean. He was waiting for Ruggero. With the excuse of a doctor’s visit for his by now proverbial sour stomach, he’d be able to hear directly from his son’s lips what had happened with the technical director of the ARPA.

  The video screens in the waiting room—four Samsungs attached to a metal bar—were showing cartoons sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. A cat was left alone at home. It was chasing a fly in the living room. When the master returned, he found the place half wrecked and the cat rolling on the carpet in the front hall.

  Vittorio wondered how those images could help a cancer patient. They were part of the new world. Smart phones. Action figures. Childish things that were born on the internet and a few months later were worth millions. In the old days, people built cars. Television sets, toasters, electronic calculators. But now they were making stuff that didn’t even exist. You could think it, maybe even see it. Great constellations turned in the night sky, freed from the physical phenomenon that had begat them. All this produced cash. It produced future. Vittorio had been afraid of being cut out of the change. He’d been afraid that a heart attack was the logical consequence of his efforts over the last few months. But after all the back and forth, Valentino Buffante had arranged for the technical reports to be drawn up. Dr. Nardoni had added them to the file to be sent to the investigating magistrate. At last the phone call had come. Mimmo Russo, the chief justice of the Bari Court of Appeals, had heard from the tribunal of Foggia. God bless him, he thought. The invitation to dinner had been decisive. That was what had untangled the situation. Letting him feel the warmth of hearth and home.

  “Signor Salvemini.”

  The girl at the reception desk was smiling. Vittorio got to his feet. A male nurse came out the door of the staff entrance. Behind him was Ruggero. He wore a lab coat. And he was grim faced. “Let’s get going.” Vittorio was afraid that something irreparable had happened with the technical director.

  Now he was walking along behind Ruggero down the long hallway that led to Radiology. They’d give him blood tests. A gastroscopy. Amylase and gastrin. Whatever it meant, it would take all day. Vittorio was sure he didn’t need any of it anymore. His pains had vanished the instant he’d heard that the chief justice of the court of appeals had talked to the administrative office of the court of Foggia.

  He waited for Ruggero to greet other colleagues. He saw him stop to talk with a male nurse. Or was he a doctor? They started walking again. Before they could get past the dispensary, Vittorio lengthened his stride. He grabbed him by the arm. He lowered his voice.

  “Well, how did it go?”

  “Damn it, Papà. Can’t that wait? We have an appointment at nine thirty at the lab for tests.”

  Perfect Ruggero style. Angry about one thing, he dredged up another about which he could lecture you more easily and immediately. The trick was to make him angrier still. He couldn’t get his blood test without first finding out what had happened at ARPA. The results would come out all skewed.

  “Come on, you’re the deputy director,” Vittorio insisted without releasing his arm. “Who do you think’s going to complain if you show up fifteen minutes late with your old father to get a few blood tests? Blame me,” he chuckled. “You can always tell them that because of my prostate I had to stop and piss a few times too often.”

  “But how can you not . . . it’s a matter of principle, goddamn it!” Ruggero slowed down as he came even with a sign that said ANTISMOKING CENTER.

  Two minutes later, Ruggero had given him the news. The little office consisted of a desk, an exam table, a glass-front cabinet full of documents. On the walls were diagrams illustrating the indices of replacement of precancerous cells, depending on how long it had been since the last cigarette. Twelve months. Two years. Ten years. One hundred fifty thousand euros, said Ruggero with a grimace of disgust. A fake consulting fee would do the trick. He was swollen with rage.

  “One hundred fifty—”

  “Do you realize? Do you or don’t you understand what kind of humiliation you’ve exposed me to?”

  Vittorio couldn’t believe it. What he’d feared would be bad news wasn’t even good news. It was fantastic news. A man who tells you his price is a problem solved before it’s even been examined. One hundred fifty thousand euros was a ridiculous trifle in comparison with the amount at stake. And Ruggero, instead of being gratified, was acting scared. What’s more, he was acting angry. He felt mortified, outraged, and he was blaming it on Vittorio.

  And yet I did it for them, thought Vittorio, remaining serious, concealing his jubilation to keep from offending his son. For them he had run risks, fought. It had been for Ruggero. And for Gioia. For Clara who was no longer with them. And Michele. On this point, Vittorio came close to becoming emotional. Lately, when he thought about Michele, he felt as if he was able to go back in time. Once again young and full of energy, bent over the damage, a turning point in his life that was waiting to be put right.

  Riccardo Terlizzi, sergeant in the Forestry Service of Margherita di Savoia, stopped his jeep among the blindingly white pyramids. The salt marsh stretched southward for ten thousand acres. Even those who worked here routinely entertained the thought that this beauty was excessive. The pools of water ran one after the other in an uneven succession, and every hundred yards or so they changed color. A shattered mirror, a kaleidoscope that could give you vertigo in the summer.

  Riccardo Terlizzi got out of his jeep. He wasn’t sure of what he’d seen as he skirted the coastline. It was hard to believe that it was what he thought it was. After the plovers last week, found dead in clusters in the brackish waters, it was reasonable to expect nasty new surprises.

  He drove past the gate. He ventured into the wetlands. He tried to calculate the point at which the parabola ought to have come to its conclusion. He saw the canals flowing. Further off in the distance, the ponds like vibrant horizontal lines. He heard the teals flying overhead, the flapping of wings. This was where the canebrakes started. Here the water turned red between the islets breaking the surface. The pigment of the microorganisms that prospered in contact with the salt. The view at a glance was incredible. The light, reflecting between the pools of water and the mountains of salt, took on shades of cobalt and ashy green.

  He made his way through the ru
shes, and when the vegetation opened out, transforming itself into a cornice framing the water, he saw them. Twenty or so specimens. Clouds on long, straight poles. Pink flamingoes. Creatures of an almost unsettling beauty. They were dipping their beaks in the water, tipping their long necks backward and nipping at their plumes. It was here that the guides told children about the mysterious arrival of the birds in the mid-Nineties. Not far away, he saw the canes moving. Exactly the area where, if it had been true, the trajectory would have come to an end.

  The Forestry Service sergeant stepped forward. He saw the water rise to his ankles, and then to his thighs. He was moving slowly. He felt the silt beneath the soles of his boots. Irises and ranunculi were bobbing all around. He emerged half drenched on the other side. Mud and foliage. He passed an arrowhead bush. He stopped. The large pink body was writhing in the marsh water. So it had happened. A flamingo in flight fallen out of the sky. The bird’s movements were convulsive, desperate. Every so often the beak would open, and out of the curving extremity would protrude a large rough white tongue. The sergeant felt himself caught by a feeling of pity. He took a couple of steps forward. At that point, the flamingo raised its neck. Blinded by whatever it was that was devouring it, it tried to lunge at the intruder. It wriggled in the mud, and even though it was no predator, it seemed to be on verge of rebelling against its nature. The man was paralyzed. The flamingo emitted a deep hoarse cry that no animal behaviorist had ever recorded. It fell back into the wet soil and died.

  Vittorio Salvemini was at home when the phone rang. With his customary low, Lenten voice, the tax lawyer announced that the request for a preemptive seizure of the tourist complex of Porto Allegro had been turned down by the investigating magistrate.

  The shade of the magnolias and the IP gas station was winning out over a heat already tamed by the sprinklers. So that on that stretch of road, you could sense the approaching evening, when the wealthy residents would light the mosquito coils and their grills, leaving the aroma of roast meat faintly veiled by the smoke and by the force of the wine blossoming in the decanters. As he passed by, Michele saw the beam of the television sets on the patios of other houses, small villas surrounded by hedges that at night muffled the noise that came from the nearby discotheques in Otranto, Ostuni, and Leuca. A foreshadowing of mid-August, when the city would be empty and those same residents far away.