‘But who was it?’
‘We don’t know. There are some things written on the wall which seem to suggest they might have been pupils from the school, but I’m not sure … Anyway, the police are here, there are a lot of things to do, decisions to take, and these scrawls …’
‘What kind of scrawls?’
The headmaster hesitated. ‘Nasty ones …’
‘How do you mean, nasty?’
‘Nasty. Nasty. Very nasty, Miss Palmieri.’
‘Nasty? What does it say?’
‘Er… Could you come here?’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘Yes, of course, I’ll come right away … I’ll get dressed and I’ll be there … shall we say in half an hour?’
‘All right. I’ll be expecting you.’
She put down the phone, very agitated. ‘Oh my goodness, what can have happened?’ She wandered round the house for a couple of minutes, not knowing what to do. She was a methodical woman. And emergencies threw her into a panic. ‘Oh yes, I must go to the bathroom.’
39
Ra ta ta ta ta ta …
There was a helicopter in Graziano Biglia’s brain.
An Apache, one of those huge combat machines.
And if he lifted his head off the pillow it was even worse, because the helicopter started napalming his poor aching brain.
What was that again? You weren’t going to let anyone take you for a ride? Everything would be fine? I can get along perfectly well without her? … Bah!
And to think that everything had been going smoothly till he’d gone into that crummy Western Bar-Tobacconist’s.
His recall of the night was like a black, moth-eaten cloth. Every now and then you found a little hole through which a bit of light shone.
He’d gone down to the seashore. That he did remember. It was bitterly cold and he’d slipped and fallen among the beach huts. He’d wandered about in the rain singing.
Wave on wave, the ship, cast adrift, the bananas, the rasp berries …
Ra ta ta ta ta …
He must take something, quickly.
A magic pill that would shoot down the helicopter caged inside his head. Its rotor was whisking up his brain like a vanilla Danette.
Graziano reached out and turned on the light. He opened his eyes. He shut them again. He opened them slowly and saw John Travolta.
At least I’m at home.
40
Every morning Flora Palmieri had a long ritual to go through.
First of all a bath, in foam scented with Irish lily of the valley. Then listening to the first part of Good Morning Italy with Elisabetta Baffigi and Paolo d’Andreis on the radio. And breakfast with cereal.
This morning all that would have to go by the board.
Those nasty things written on the wall. She was sure they were about her.
What on earth could they say?
Actually, in a way she was pleased. At least now the headmaster and the deputy headmistress, faced with this crisis, would be forced to act.
For several months someone had been playing practical jokes on her. At first they had been harmless pranks. The blackboard rubber glued to her desk. A toad in her handbag. A caricature on the blackboard. Drawing-pins on her chair. Then they had stolen the register. Not content with that, they had raised the stakes by puncturing the tyres of her Y10 and jamming a potato in her exhaust pipe. And to cap it all, one evening while she was watching television a stone had smashed the sitting-room window. She’d nearly had a heart attack.
At that point she had gone to see the deputy headmistress and told her the whole story. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it,’ the old dragon had said. ‘We don’t know who’s responsible. And we’re powerless to act because it happened outside school. Anyway, in my opinion, if you don’t mind my saying so, Miss Palmieri, it’s partly your own fault that things have come to such a pass. You just don’t seem to be able to establish a constructive dialogue with your students.’
Flora had reported the matter to the police, but they hadn’t done anything.
Maybe now …
Finally she collected her thoughts and entered the bathroom, adjusted the flow of the shower and took off her clothes.
41
He was dressed.
Timberlands on his feet. A rancid, pungent smell of …
‘Damn I’ve puked on myself.’
Another little hole.
Graziano had been in the car and driving. Suddenly a sour stream of Jack Daniel’s had risen up through his gullet and he’d turned his head and vomited out of the window. Only the window had been closed.
Ugh, what a mess …
He opened the drawer and began fishing out bottles at random.
Alka-Seltzer. Panadol. Aspirin. Anadin. Senokot. Nurofen.
He hadn’t made it. He hadn’t managed to hold out, to resist the enormous wave of shit that had hit him.
And to think that for a couple of hours after the phone call he’d lived in a strange, euphoric Zen-like detachment.
42
That Miss Palmieri had a beautiful body there wasn’t a shadow of doubt.
She was tall and slim, with long shapely legs. Maybe she didn’t have much in the way of hips, but nature had endowed her with a full bosom which was set off by her slender body. Her skin was white, pure white, the white of the dead. Completely hairless except for a little carrot-coloured tuft on her pubes.
Her faced seemed carved out of wood. All hard edges and pointed cheekbones. A wide mouth with thin bloodless lips. Strong, yellowish teeth. A long wafer-thin nose divided two eyes that were as round and grey as river pebbles.
She had a prodigious mass of red hair, a curly mane that reached halfway down her back. Out of doors she always wore it in a bun.
When she emerged from the shower, despite her haste she glanced in the mirror.
This was something she had seldom done in the past, but lately she had been doing it more and more often.
She was ageing. Not that this bothered her, quite the contrary, in fact. She was intrigued by the way that with every passing day her skin became less fresh, her hair less glossy, her eyes duller. She was thirty-two and might have looked younger if it hadn’t been for that cobweb of thin lines around her mouth and for the slightly loose skin on her neck.
She looked, and didn’t like what she saw.
She hated her breasts. They were too big. She wore a five, but when she had her period it could hardly contain them.
She took them in her hands. She felt an urge to squeeze them till they burst like ripe melons. Why had nature played this obscene trick on her? Those two monstrous, hypertrophic glands were out of all proportion to her slight figure. Her mother had never had two things like that. They made her look like a loose woman and, if she didn’t crush them into elasticated bras, if she didn’t disguise them under prim-looking clothes, she felt men’s eyes on her. She would have paid to have them surgically reduced, if she’d had the courage.
She put on her bathrobe, went into the little kitchen and pulled up the shutters.
Another rainy day.
She went to the fridge and took out some cooked chicken livers, courgettes and boiled carrots. She put them all in the blender.
‘I’ve got to go out, Mama,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m going to give you your breakfast a little earlier than usual this morning, I’m sorry but I must rush to school …’ She switched on the blender. In an instant the ingredients turned into a pink mush. She switched it off.
‘That was the headmaster on the phone. I’ve got to hurry to school.’ She took the lid off the blender and poured in some water and soy sauce. She stirred it. ‘There’s been a break-in at the school. I’m rather worried.’ She put the mixture into a large feeding bottle. She warmed the bottle in the microwave. ‘They’ve written some nasty things … Probably about me.’
She walked across the kitchen with the bottle and entered a dark bedroom. She turned
on the switch. The neon crackled and lit up a small room. Not much bigger than the kitchen. Four white walls, a small window with the shutters down, grey linoleum on the floor, a crucifix, an aluminium-framed bed, a chair, a bedside table and a drip stand. That was all.
Lying on the bed was Lucia Palmieri.
43
Graziano had taken a long shower and gone out at nine thirty the previous evening.
Destination? The Mignon Cinema in Orbano.
Title of film? Knock Off.
Actor? Jean-Claude Van Damme. One of the greats.
When your heart has been ripped out of your body and mashed to a pulp the best cure’s a trip to the cinema, he had said to himself.
After the film a pizza, and then to bed, like a wise old man.
Everything would probably have gone according to plan had he not stopped at the Western to get some cigarettes. He had bought them and was about to leave when it had occurred to him that after all one little whisky couldn’t do him any harm, in fact it might cheer him up.
And indeed it might have, had it been only been one.
Graziano had sat at the bar and downed a series of harmless whiskies and the pain, hitherto stifled in the depths of his being, had begun to writhe and howl like a tortured mongrel.
Ditched me, have you? Fine. Who cares? No problem. Graziano Biglia is better off without you, you slut. To hell with you. Go ahead and screw Mantovani. I don’t give a shit.
He had started talking out loud. ‘I’m fine. Couldn’t be better. What did you think I was going to do, burst into tears? Well you were wrong, baby. Sorry to disappoint you. Do you know how many women there are in the world who are sexier than you? Millions. You’ll never hear of me again. You’ll miss me, you’ll come looking for me, but I’ll be gone.’
A group of children, sitting at a table, were looking at him. ‘What are you lot staring at? Come over here and tell me to my face if there’s anything you object to,’ he’d barked and then, taking the bottle from the counter, he’d sat down wounded and forlorn at the darkest table in the bar and had taken out his mobile.
44
Before her illness, Lucia had been as tall as her daughter. Now she was about one metre fifty-two and weighed thirty-five kilos. As if some alien parasite had sucked out all her flesh and innards. She was reduced to a skeleton covered with loose, bluish skin.
She was seventy and suffered from a rare and irreversible form of degeneration of the central and peripheral nervous systems.
She lived, if it could be called living, confined to that bed. More insensate than a bivalve mollusc, she didn’t speak, didn’t feel, didn’t move a muscle, didn’t do a thing.
Well, there was one thing she did.
She looked at you.
With two huge grey eyes, the same colour as her daughter’s. Eyes that seemed to have seen something so immense that they’d burnt out, short-circuiting her whole body. Having been immobile for so long, her muscles had turned to jelly and her bones had shrunk and twisted like the branches of a fig tree. When her daughter had to make her bed she would pick her up and cradle her in her arms like a baby.
45
Graziano had dialled the first number memorised in the phone book of his mobile.
‘Hallo, this is Graziano, who’s that?’
‘Tony.’
‘Hi, Tony.’
Tony Dawson, deejay of the Anthrax disco and Erica’s ex.
(Of course Graziano didn’t know about that last detail.)
‘Graziano? Where are you?’
‘At home. In Ischiano. How are things?’
‘Not bad. Too much work. How about you?’
‘Fine. Great.’ Then he’d swallowed the tennis ball in his throat. ‘I’ve split up with Erica,’ he had added.
‘No!’
‘Yes.’ And I’m glad about it, he had intended to add, but hadn’t managed to.
‘How come? You seemed so well suited to each other …’
There it was. There was the bloody question that would haunt him in the coming years.
How come he’d been such a fool as to leave an incredible piece of ass like that?
‘The usual reasons. We hadn’t been getting on so well lately.’
‘Ah! Did you dump her or … or did she dump you?’
‘Well, let’s say I dumped her.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. You might say we split up because of incompatibility of character … We’re such different people, our outlooks on life are light-years apart.’
‘Ah …’
Despite the whisky that was marinating his stomach, Graziano had noticed that that ‘Ah…’ contained a good deal of scepticism, disbelief, pity and other things he didn’t like at all. It was as if that bastard had said, ‘Yeah, sure, pull the other one.’
‘Yes, I dumped her because, to be quite honest, she’s a bit unhinged. I’m sorry, I know she’s a friend of yours, but Erica’s got water where her brain should be. She’s that kind of girl. Untrustworthy. I don’t know how you can still be her friend. Especially as she says some pretty nasty things about you behind your back. Says you’re the kind of guy who’ll screw you as soon as he gets half a chance. If I were you – and I’m not saying this just because I’m angry you know – I’d steer clear of her. She’s just a sl … ah, forget it.’ At this point Graziano had had a vague perception which warned him to terminate that phone call. Tony Dawson wasn’t the most, shall we say, appropriate person to confide in, being one of the Slut’s closest friends.
As if that weren’t enough, the deejay, as treacherous as an asp, had given him the final push. ‘Erica’s a bit of a gold-digger. That’s the way she is. I know, I know.’
Graziano had swallowed a tot of whisky and taken new heart. ‘So you’d noticed? Thank God for that. Yes, she’s a real slut. One of those girls who’d walk over your dead body for a bit of success. You’ve no idea what she’s capable of.’
‘What, for example?’
‘Anything. You know why she dumped me? Because they took her on as an assistant on You Reap What You Sow, the show presented by that poof Andrea Mantovani. And naturally she didn’t want any deadweight preventing her from expressing herself as her nature impels her to, in other words like the slut she is. She dumped me because … how did she put it?’ Graziano attempted a whining imitation of Erica’s Trento accent. ‘Because I despise you, and everything you represent. The way you dress. The bullshit you talk … You slut.’
There was a deathly hush at the other end, but Graziano didn’t care, he was unloading the wagonful of shit he had accumulated in six months of torture and frustration and even if it had been Michael Jackson on the phone, or Eta Beta or Sai Baba in person, he didn’t give a damn. He had to get it off his chest.
‘Despise me and everything I represent! Can you believe that? What the hell do I represent, eh? The fool who showered gifts on you, put up with you, loved you as no other man ever has, who did everything, everything, ev … Shit! I must be going. Bye.’
He had cut short the conversation because a pain as sharp as a bee sting had shot through his carotid artery, and the fragile Zen superstructure had by now completely collapsed.
Graziano had picked up the bottle of whisky and staggered out of the Western Bar-Tobacconist’s.
The cruel night had opened its jaws and swallowed him.
46
‘Here you are. It’s delicious, you’ll see. I’ve put some chicken livers in it …’ Flora Palmieri lifted her mother’s head and put the bottle in her mouth. The old woman began to suck. With those bulging eyeballs and her head reduced to a skull, she looked like a newly hatched chick.
Flora was a perfect nurse, she poured homogenised soup down her throat three times a day and washed her every morning and in the evening helped her do her exercises and emptied the faeces and urine bags and twice a week changed her sheets and gave her a revitalising drip and always talked to her and told her lots of things and gave her enormous quantit
ies of medicines and …
… she had been in this state for twelve years.
And she seemed to have no intention of leaving. That organism clung to life like a sea anemone to a rock. She had a pump inside her that beat as regularly as a Swiss clock. ‘Congratulations! Your mother has the heart of an athlete, you can’t imagine how many people wish they had such a good one,’ the cardiologist had told her once.
Flora propped her mother up a bit higher. ‘Tasty, isn’t it? Did you hear what I said? There’s been a break-in at the school. They’ve smashed everything up. Gently, gently or you’ll choke …’ She wiped away a little stream of pulp that was trickling down from the corner of her mouth. ‘Now they’ll see for themselves what some of the pupils are like. Hooligans. They talk of dialogue. And the pupils break into school during the night …’
Lucia Palmieri went on sucking voraciously and staring at a corner of the room.
‘Poor Mama, having to have breakfast at this time of night …’ Flora brushed her mother’s white hair into place. ‘I’ll try to be back early. But now I really must go. Be good.’ She detached the catheter and picked up the urine bag from the floor, kissed her on the forehead and went out of the room. ‘This evening we’ll have a bath. You’ll like that, won’t you?’
47
The fear which he had succeeded in banishing the previous evening tugged him roughly out of his sleep.
Pietro Moroni opened one eye and brought into focus the large Mickey Mouse clock ticking away merrily on the bedside cabinet.
Ten to six.
No way am I going to school today.
He felt his forehead, hoping he had a temperature.
It was as cold as that of a corpse.
A bit of light entered through the small window next to the bed, brightening one corner of the room. His brother was asleep. His pillow over his head. One foot, as long and white as a hake, stuck out of the blankets.
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