Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  @ClaraSalvemini:

  @pablito82 Tonight anything is possible.

  20 retweets 15 favorites

  @pablito82:

  @ClaraSalvemini Even for us to meet?

  @ClaraSalvemini:

  @pablito82 In the meantime, try to imagine me.

  65 retweets 22 favorites

  @themoralizer:

  @ClaraSalvemini @pablito82 Give us a few hints.

  @ClaraSalvemini:

  @themoralizer @pablito82 I’m wearing a short cotton dress, cut low in the front and the back, five-inch heels. Zipper up the side.

  70 retweets 25 favorites

  @laziale88:

  @ClaraSalvemini I’m undressing you with my eyes.

  This is where the exchange broke off. Michele reached an arm out into the void. He let the ash drop onto the floor. His heart was racing. The days when he hadn’t had to think twice before setting fire to the house. He held his breath. Something else had appeared on the screen.

  @ClaraSalvemini:

  @laziale88 Apparently you were successful. Now all I’m wearing is the scent of my own body.

  Michele hurled himself out of bed. He made a beeline toward his sister’s room, his eyes glazed with anger. When he was in front of the door, he stopped. No one, right up until the last minute, should be ripped away from a happiness that for the rest of their lives they’d retrospectively understand as illusory. Michele took a step back. He went back up the hallway. He returned to his room. The light of day was beginning to flood everything. He went to the window. He closed the shutters. An action to accommodate the distant music of certain natural calamities. Frequency ranges that cannot be perceived by the human ear. He slipped back into bed. He shut his eyes. Catastrophes that gave not the slightest warning of their impending arrival until it was too late. He fell asleep.

  The next day they all had lunch together. Ruggero would swing by later. Michele chewed slowly. He felt as if he’d been numbed. The slight disorientation of someone who’s trained hard for an important match and then rests the day before. The birds were chirping in the trees. Vittorio looked at him with a hint of regret. In a few days he’d be going away. The old man watched him as he lifted forkfuls of spaghetti with lobster to his mouth, as he drank the white wine. Annamaria was surveying the scene with neutrality. Midway through lunch Gioia announced that she was going to spend the month of August traveling around Europe. She and two of her girlfriends were going to head east. Greece. Turkey. Michele asked whether they were planning to visit Cyprus. “Cyprus,” Gioia smiled, “we’re thinking about it.” “You do know it’s divided into two parts?” The dining room was flooded with light. Annamaria’s voice was gently argumentative. Her idea of a return to normalcy meant giving her biological daughter a bit of a hard time, rebalancing the situation as far as he was concerned. “You’ll see the sanctuary of Aphrodite,” said Michele, imperturbable. Before answering, Gioia asked her father to pass her the vegetable side dish. Michele beat Vittorio to it, handed her the platter. He also served the wine. Gioia popped a carrot into her mouth. She chewed. Then she smiled. “But all we care about is the sea,” she said at last. Michele smiled in his turn. The House of the Golden Cupids in Pompeii, he thought. The perfect calm of the day before.

  After lunch he drank an espresso on the veranda with his father.

  “So you’re leaving,” said Vittorio, looking at the tall grass in front of him, the maze of laurel leaves lit up by the sun.

  “Sooner or later it was going to have to happen,” Michele tried to joke.

  Vittorio kept looking out into the garden. The wrinkles around his eyes gave him a wise expression. They heard the noise of a car. A few minutes later, Ruggero, too, appeared on the veranda.

  He kissed Vittorio’s cheeks. Then he hugged Michele. With energy, human warmth. He told Vittorio something about certain accounting documents to be retrieved. The old man waved his hand in a sign of assent. Ruggero went into the house. Vittorio resumed the conversation.

  “We’ve been through some difficult times.” He picked up his demitasse of espresso, by now cold, from the table. He drank. “Terrible times,” he went on, “why beat around the bush? Over the past ten years, you’ve come home maybe three or four times in all, and never for longer than a day or two. Then you stay for two months and it’s for this. I’m really sorry, I wanted to tell you that.”

  “Papà, don’t worry.” He wanted to shake him off.

  But Vittorio had barely gotten started.

  “Your sister,” he said, enunciating every syllable, “and then all these problems that came so close to blowing us sky high. I tried to keep from telling you in terms that were too clear, I didn’t want to frighten you.” He looked at him with intensity. “Now, luckily, everything has been straightened out. But the damage was there before, I’m aware of it. I’ve thought it over, in the past few months. How could you not think it over, when all this happens.” He kept looking at him; Michele felt the burden growing heavier with each passing second. “It’s never been easy for me to open up,” Vittorio said, “but I’ve come to the conclusion that, if you’ve been so unwilling to come back over the years, it can’t have been out of malice. It was because deep down you never acknowledged this place as yours. You don’t think of this as your home.” His voice was trembling.

  “Please, Papà . . . ”

  Michele felt ill at ease. His father’s anxiety was sincere. But still, he understood the trick. Like hearing the truth, but proffered in such a way that it came out disfigured, so that the path leading back to the source was permanently off limits.

  “If that’s the way it is,” the old man continued, “then it’s your father’s fault. That’s the way it has to be. I’ve let myself be swept away by day-to-day problems, for years.” He half shut his eyes because of the sun. “I’ve always kept my head down. Terrible battles, with never a chance to stop and think. I never realized what you were feeling. I failed to take into consideration your sister’s state of mind. I’m doing it for the children, I thought. It’s just that I was doing it in the wrong way. No breaks, no vacations. No friends. What would it all have meant, otherwise?” He’s only making everything harder, Michele thought. “I was always thinking of you,” Vittorio said in the end, “I’m sorry that there have been problems. I love you.”

  Michele leaned forward. He wouldn’t have done it. But she was the one who was asking him to. He had to respect the forms of a venerable tradition. The fact that Clara paid attention even to such negligible details moved him. Michele hugged his father. He held him tight. He gave him a kiss. “And I love you, too,” he said.

  Once inside, he went up to his room. He looked up the number in his address book. He phoned the administrative offices of ARPA. He’d already called them once that morning. They’d asked him to call back. Once again, he asked for the technical director. The young woman at the switchboard asked him to hold. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Then, the switchboard operator again. The appointment had been booked.

  In the afternoon, before leaving, Ruggero, too, stopped to talk with him.

  Michele walked with him toward his car. The situation was strange. For two months he’d had practically no interactions with this brother who was more than ten years his elder. His patients, his career, his perennial bad temper. But now he could sense his magnetism, the tacit intention to draw him closer.

  When they got to the front gate, Ruggero stopped. The convertible BMW parked a few yards away. But he didn’t move.

  “I know what you think about him, deep down,” he said, “and I can’t really blame you for it.”

  Michele made an effort not to reply. He was waiting. He watched the sun transform the windshield into a rectangle of light.

  “You think he’s a bastard,” Ruggero continued, “maybe you think that he needs to be punished.” He paused briefly, “I don’t know who you’ve
talked to in the past few days. Anyway, they can’t have told you anything you weren’t already well aware of.”

  Michele started. He was beginning to be afraid that Ruggero might know something. Maybe someone had called him from ARPA. He might even have been told about what happened last night. Or just guessed it, with his sixth sense. The conceit of having Michele as an accomplice was a signal of Ruggero’s arrogance and at the same time of his fear.

  “And yet I don’t think we ought to hurt him,” he continued, “we’re not the ones who need to make him pay.”

  “I don’t understand,” Michele ventured.

  “The punishment,” said Ruggero. “We don’t have to lift a finger. The punishment is on its way,” he grimaced, “that’s something I can guarantee you. I guarantee it as a doctor. Time is a gentleman.” He left room for a pause that could swallow up the event to which he was alluding. “And at that point,” he went on, “taking into account everything he’s put us through, we’ll get our payback. It’s something we deserve. We won’t have to dirty our hands.”

  “You mean that we’ll inherit,” Michele was being careful not to move a muscle of his face.

  “Perhaps you can’t imagine how much the company is worth,” said Ruggero, “the company just has to stay intact until then.”

  “Of course. You’re right.”

  “Are we sure?” asked Ruggero, focusing on the car outside of the gate.

  “Agreed, I told you.”

  Speaking. Lying. Doing instead of not doing. It’s real. Voluntary. It leads to consequences.

  She tensed her muscles. As soon as the two vehicles roared past, she shot forward. She sensed death in the gust of air that had not yet dispersed over the asphalt. She crossed the street. She ventured into the lavender bushes. Behind her, other vehicles were now racing past. She started running through the dry grass. She was exhausted. Her fur was reduced to a shapeless dark gray mass. She emanated a nauseating stench. And she was hungry.

  Over the past few days, the cat had wandered at loose ends through the streets of the city. Mixed up with scraps of familiar odors, she’d sensed in the air a brutality so obtuse that it left her stunned. Huge bags of garbage. The inert steel of parked cars. And voices, a racket everywhere.

  As she’d made her way through the last outlying areas, the degree of familiarity had dropped along with the hope of finding her way back home. A different type of brutality made sure there was little space for anything other than sheer survival. Rather than confounding her, this kept her taut. It refined her senses. What reached her nostrils could be broken down into a myriad of new impressions. Frightening, intoxicating, each charged with nuances just waiting to be deciphered.

  Despite the fact that she was safe, the cat kept running alone the curve of the field lit up by the moon. She saw on either side the mulberry trees. Then the apple trees. Black presences that radiated energy. At a certain point something shot into sight on her right side. A dark corporeal mass moving towards her. It veered off onto the left, was swallowed up by the darkness. It went back to tailing her. The part of the cat that possessed memory of her captivity interpreted it as an invitation to play. Then there was the other part. And so, without knowing why, she aimed at an apple tree that towered over the indistinct mass of weeds. She sped up. Then she suddenly whirled around so that her pursuer had the tree behind it.

  Both animals came to a halt. They hunkered down, one in front of the other. No more than thirty feet between them.

  The sewer rat focused on her with its beady eyes. Its front teeth were so large that it had to keep its mouth half-open. It lunged at her. Before it could sink its teeth into her, the cat leapt up, brushing past the rat’s body, and when she landed back on the grass she’d unsheathed her claws. Now it was she who had the disadvantage of the apple tree at her back. She puffed herself up. The rat rose up on its haunches. But it was wounded. The cat lifted her right paw to her face and licked it. That was what definitively tilted the battlefield. The taste of blood roiled her. The part that had been underneath rose to the top, left room for nothing else. She lunged forward. The rat, in turn, lunged at her, mouth open to kill. With extreme precision, the cat’s claws swiped diagonally across the rodent’s eyes. The rat reeled backward onto its side. The feline was on it. She sank her teeth into the hard flesh of its neck. As she fought, she knew, she knew and she remembered at the same time. The rat squeaked desperately. In the cat’s throat, something dense and deep gurgled. She’d found the artery. She was excited, electric. She felt the rat convulse one last time under the light of the moon.

  They’d all be ruined,” said the technical director, “I hope you realize that.”

  They were just a few yards from the sea, sitting at one of the open-air tables of a restaurant where no one had showed up yet. Ten in the morning. Behind them, half concealed by the planters full of succulents, stood the large building that housed the Regional Environmental Protection Agency. The sky over the city was clear and blue.

  When Michele had started talking, the technical director wasn’t certain he’d understood clearly. The request to include the area around Porto Allegro in the monitoring zone might have been a provocation. A way to tell him that the hundred fifty thousand euros was too much. They’d sent the most shameless member of the family on ahead to prod him. But why, now that the contract was signed? That part he couldn’t understand.

  Then, as he went on listening, he realized that the young man wasn’t joking. He really was asking him not to turn a blind eye. To keep both eyes wide open. To check. To poke around. To place the mobile monitoring units on his father’s land. Lead detectors, mercury detectors. Kits to evaluate radon gas percentages.

  “What the hell kind of request is that?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything left to understand.”

  As he was talking he felt Clara brush his skin, which ensured that his voice didn’t tremble in the slightest. Synchro­nized swimming. Artistic gymnastics. One of those disciplines in which every cell participates in the result.

  At that point the technical director had crossed his arms. He’d looked at him with pity. Black sheep. Every family had one. Resentful and thirsty for revenge. Luckily they were also completely clueless. They expected to be able to blow up bridges but knew nothing about dynamite.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  At that point, Michele pulled the photocopy of the consulting contract out of his trouser pocket. He handed it over.

  The technical director felt the blow without letting it show. There it was, the dynamite. Old Salvemini must have lost his mind if he was letting this lunatic get access to the documents.

  “Who can guarantee that if we include the tourist complex in the monitoring plan you won’t just go ahead and circulate these documents?”

  Considering the way things were turning out, he had to protect himself first of all.

  “Don’t include Porto Allegro in the monitoring plan and you can rest assured that the documents will circulate.”

  Michele ought to have given them to Sangirardi first. He’d promised him that. He’d made that commitment and he’d failed to respect it. He felt the hot wind in his face.

  “All right then,” said the technical director, “you’ve decided to create some problems for your folks. I don’t know what they can have done to push you to do such a thing. But maybe you can’t really imagine what the consequences might—”

  “I can imagine very clearly, the consequences of my actions. I can’t actually imagine anything else, if you really want to know.”

  “Listen, Michele,” the technical director unfurled his last reserves of authority, which didn’t exist, which paradoxically would have remained intact if Michele hadn’t placed a Xerox of the contract under his nose, “maybe it’s not clear to you what an enormous mess this new inspection will cause. This isn’t going to be some mo
nitoring operation like the others. We should have already been at this point a few years ago. The overall situation made it impossible. You want to do something. They won’t let you. But you keep pushing and after a while you succeed. In the grownup world that’s the way things work. We’ll find concentrations of arsenic in the water five times higher than the legal limit. The dioxin levels will solve the newspaper editors’ problem of what to slap on the front page for weeks. The lead will come out, and so will the copper. A bunch of animals have died. A lot of people are going to suffer. Children that haven’t even been born yet are going to get sick. It’s statistics,” he continued, “most of it is happening on the other coast. But part of it’s arrived here, too. It’ll be impossible to clear out such a vast area and it will be impossible to carry out a complete reclamation.” He sighed as if he needed to defuse the tension. “Your father,” he said, looking at him again, “your father has absolutely nothing to do with this whole issue of toxic wastes. Last week he was cleared of all charges of having violated hydrogeological and forestry restrictions during the construction of those houses. Restrictions so complicated it would have required a whole platoon of philosophers to interpret them. A whole tangle of laws and counter-laws. And yet your father didn’t break one. Respecting those regulations to the letter is impossible, but he managed to do it. The investigating magistrate had to recognize the fact. Just think. Your father respected the ordinary restrictions, which means that he took care not to uproot even one albino downy oak. And now,” he shook his head in disbelief, “now you’re asking us to go and find out whether somewhere, buried in the area of the complex, there isn’t by chance something dirty. Well,” he said, his voice hardening, “of course there’s bound to be something there that shouldn’t be. Seek and ye shall find. Too bad your father never got a penny for it. Did you ever think of that? Maybe he was forced to do it. Didn’t it occur to you that he might never have had a choice? That someone, while they were building that fucking tourist village, might have ever so politely asked him to stop the work. Just for a couple of days. Enough time to come in with an earthmover and a couple of trucks, do what they had to do, and leave. Your father never made a single euro. On the contrary. He simply lost workdays. The alternative was that they would ever so politely blow up the whole construction site. Or that they’d hurt one of his loved ones.”