"You don't need my permission. You would do it anyway” replied Salieri. The psychiatrist slipped a small key into the
lock of the third desk drawer, where a syringe with five milligrams of Lorazepam in it was always ready for an emergency. Adriano was usually not dangerous, but at the time he seemed very upset, and the doctor would have to intervene with the drug if necessary.
He went on saying, "When Paolo put it inside, she'd sink her nails into his ass to rip his skin off. She liked to make him bleed. She loved pissing in his face, and she only enjoyed it when she slipped the thin heel of her shoe into his asshole. But, mind you, your wife is not perverse. There was nothing sadistic about her actions. It was just her own personal war against you. She hates you because you wanted to marry her to reduce her to a piece of furniture. You sat all day in your study curing the mad, while she, an educated and refined woman, was treated like one of your expensive chinaware. A trinket to which it was enough, from time to time, to give a dusting, to put it on display on some social evening, and then lock it in the window where you keep the useless and precious things. We know how it went: Paolo Magnoli hanged himself, but she would have liked to have seen you hanging from the branch of that oak tree.”
"That's just conjecture. Conjecture seasoned with erotic fantasies” replied Salieri pretending to be calm. In fact, if he could have, he would have slapped him. And not for what she was telling him, but for what she was bringing up. A trauma he had laboriously removed. Something painful that cost years of analysis.
‘Erotic fantasies? Fucking hell! You know perfectly well it's all true. Listen to Adriano when he tells you I exist. And I know things about you that nobody knows. I reminded you of Nicole's betrayals. Am I forgetting something? Oh, yeah. I guess you are. I'm forgetting a little creature that was never born’.
The psychiatrist stopped taking notes. He put his back to the back of the chair.
Adriano also knew about the abortion. The description of the facts was surprising, in some ways humiliating. It was a sordid tale, but Salieri tackled it with the usual elegance. "I would like to clarify a point” the doctor began with a certain annoyance. "I am aware that my wife has had a lover. Sex can be an excellent therapy for unhappy people. As you see, I'm talking about sex, not love. Because Nicole never loved that man."
Adriano smiled smugly. He leaned forward towards him with an attitude of defiance. Face to face, and he whispered to him:
‘So you, doctor, knew everything. He knew that his wife was fucking Paolo Magnoliʹ.
Salieri crossed his arms and did not answer. An instinctive gesture of defence that delighted Adriano. It was no longer a psychiatric session, nor was it a friendly conversation. The dark side of the boy began to do what no one had ever done before. He was digging into the couple's mysterious past.
"Let's get back to the most important question" exclaimed Salieri, giving himself back an attitude more suited to his role.
"You mentioned things that, from your point of view, no one can know. But everything has an explanation. "Your father probably boasted to you of his achievements." The doctor took off his glasses to clean the lenses. He calmly added, "What you said about my wife may grieve me, but I'm not surprised."
‘Do you want me to amaze you? Do you want me to tell you the truth? Adriano challenged him.’
‘I have to say that you are not the hero everyone believes.’
Salieri stared at Adriano. He sensed he knew more than he was letting on.
‘So? Don't we want to talk about that night at the farm?’
Salieri gasped. He demanded to remain calm. He took his cell phone and closed the recording. He pretended to take notes, the pencil between his shaking fingers.
Adriano, adorned with a smile full of satisfaction, waved in his armchair. He closed his eyes, muttering something incomprehensible. He made an unnatural movement with his neck. The deep expression lines flattened out until they disappeared. He opened his eyes wide again. His eyes were now clear again, his features relaxed again.
Salieri had witnessed a spectacular split personality, but for once he did not consider it a case study. He thought it was more important to look for a good reason not to consider it a threat.
"He's been here, hasn't he?" the boy asked, looking around strangely.
"Don't you remember anything?" asked the psychiatrist, squeezing between his shoulders.
"No. I don't remember. When I was taking my medication, something stuck in my mind. Now the separation is clear. It's either me or him. What did he say to you?"
"Nothing of interest” Salieri lied.
"Yet you look as if you've just come out of a sauna."
The pendulum on the wall emitted the gloomy don! who announced the end of the session. The boy did not insist on questions.
Salieri got up from his chair. Adriano reached out his hand.
"Thank you for everything, Doctor."
"I guess this is goodbye."
Adriano nodded. Salieri's handshake was strong and cordial, but not at all sincere. Adriano was still moved.
After so many years, he might have grown fond of even those who'd hurt you with unnecessary and harmful care.
"Promise me you'll continue with the medicine."
"No, Doctor. I'm not sick. I'm just a victim of something bigger than me. And you'll never understand that."
"Then good luck, boy."
Adriano left the studio and never went back in.
The psychiatrist leaned his back against the door. He stared down at an undefined spot on the carpet.
ʺHe cannot know...ʺ
He took the cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He stared at it panting. He pressed his thumb to the screen to listen to the recording again.
All he heard was a child's voice singing the lullaby of a roundabout.
Greta, from her office, heard a thud on the wall.
The assistant went into the psychiatrist's office.
She saw the phone on the floor. The battery on one side, the display shattered on the other.
"Shit, shit, shit!" The psychiatrist was screaming in anger.
His past wasn't as dead as he thought it was. Adriano had dug him up. And he was coming back to the surface, more alive than ever, carrying all his ghosts.
19
Manuel stopped painting the ceiling. He took off his improvised mason's cap, closed the ladder, rested the brushes and removed the grounded paper to protect the floor,
where a few drops of paint had gone anyway. He had also protected the desk with newspaper sheets. Under the paper, the telephone ringing rose. Manuel took off the paper and answered the call, finding it hallucinating that someone was still calling on landlines.
"Yes?" he answered quietly.
He listened quietly, rolling his eyes all over the place as if butterflies flew around him. He nodded with a half-smile, then looked surprised at the handset, the air of those who were upset because they had closed the phone in his face.
"For fuck's sake" Manuel exclaimed, suddenly accelerating the cleaning operation.
"Do you know what day it is today?" he exclaimed, crumpling up newspaper sheets before throwing them into a plastic bin.
"Thursday the 6th. Can't you see the calendar?" Filippa replied distractedly, busy placing large files on the desk.
"I see it, the calendar. Thursday the 6th is circled in red. We forgot something, didn't we?" said Manuel, who ran to tuck the ladder into the closet at the end of the room. Guido snapped his palm firmly in the middle of his forehead. "Oh my God. It's true! That man's coming in from Milan today."
Filippa was shaken by a sudden chill.
"Holy shit. Consider that I've been wanting to meet him all my life. I'm already shitting myself with emotion."
Professor Zevi showed up at 3:17 in the afternoon. Faithful to the philosophical notion that the superfluous was a man's first need, the art critic wore an immaculate cream-colored double-breasted suit, illuminated by a cheeky red tie, a gold wed
ding ring with a ruby on his little finger, and a fragrant gardenia on his buttonhole.
The scholar limped down two flights of stairs leaning on a stick with a silver apple. Florence, his particular secretary, with blonde hair gathered behind his back, supported him,
holding him on her arm to the last landing, where the editorial staff would sit.
The boys waited for him at the door in respectful silence. They followed his painful climb to the stairwell. When he saw them, he exclaimed with short breath, "May God strike you down, boys. You could have told me there was no elevator in this damn building”. To the young men, the tone did not sound like a reproach, but rather amused, almost affectionate.
Manuel and Filippa welcomed him with great emotion.
The visit was a heavy one, and they knew that this man could change their lives in some way.
Filippa would have wanted him to sit down, but she hesitated. She wondered whether it would be better to help him or not. The critic, in fact, did not move particularly naturally. When he was only fifty-four, it seemed that every movement made him suffer. Eugenio Zevi suffered from multiple sclerosis type RR-MS, a disease he contracted as a child, a disease that he flaunted almost as if it were a detail of his clothing.
Zevi, helped by a good dose of calm, sat alone. After a sigh of satisfaction, he looked one by one at the three young men who were watching him without knowing what to say. And since none of them dared open their mouths, he took the floor. "So, what do you want me to do? Do I freak out like Sgarbi does on TV? Should I insult someone? Like you?" he asked Filippa Villa. "It would be an honour” she laughed. Zevi squinted his cerulean eyes, trying to contain in his gaze all the sumptuousness of the girl. "Are you the one in the Earthquake in the armchair column? The lesbian?"
"That's me. And it's a great pleasure to meet you."
"Your articles are not bad. Maybe puerile, but over time you'll improve your style. But are you really sure you're a lesbian?" insisted the professor, looking at you under your glasses.
Zevi had a chair in medieval history in Pisa. He was a member of the Academy of the Crusca and a former lecturer at the Sorbonne, where he was kicked out for hitting the father of a student with a stick. It had happened ten years earlier. The man had insulted Zevi by comparing him to a cripple like Goebbels, and that was the only detail that made him like him. Zevi, who was Jewish, hit him with the stick on the head. The result: nineteen stitches sewn on the forehead of Le Pen's follower parent. And the curtain fell on his relationship with the Sorbonne.
Zevi and the boys talked for about ten minutes, just to get to know each other better.
He asked them a lot of questions about the earthquake, asking them precise reports on the wounds inflicted on the artistic heritage of Castelmuso. Filippa explained that the damage had been almost irrelevant. The Lotto altarpiece, the most famous work in the country, was kept in the cathedral of San Catervo, and had remained virtually intact. Otherwise, only a few old stuccoes fell from the town hall, and some cracks in the frescoed ceilings of the churches.
Zevi decided that this was enough, and cut it short by saying: "All right, guys. We'll get to know each other. But now let's squeeze together and get down to business. Where is the manuscript?"
"We keep it in a safe deposit box. Leo Fratesi went to get it” Filippa explained.
Leo, at that moment, was on his way back from the bank, carefully driving his father's Smart car.
His Panda, two hundred and eighty thousand kilometres and broken on the engine, had not passed its last overhaul because of the rust that had eaten the roof. Now, when it rained, the water seeped in everywhere, and the coachbuilder wanted five hundred euros for a simple patching, but the car was worth less than half that.
He stopped at a traffic light to signal work in progress.
On the seat beside him, in the black leather briefcase, a special guest: the manuscript.
Leo was listening with some concern to a speakerphone call. "Two point three. Two point four. Two point six. Two point eight. I guess they're not normal reruns" Giorgio Paoloeta said to the other end of the phone.
Paoloeta was a brilliant scholar on contract. His face was framed by a rough Himalayan climber's beard, but his weight, which swayed around 100 kilos, would not even allow him to climb a hill on the playground. The phone call came from his office in Rome, on the second floor of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.
On his desk was a greasy cardboard box containing a pizza, pieces of onion and salad were scattered on the floor, a few bottles of beer here and there, and an ashtray where a cemetery of gum rested.
"Giorgio, we are all still rehearsed. Do we have to talk about it?" Leo complained.
"Absolutely. But I don't want my name to come out. So, can you publish it?"
"I say, are you crazy? People would be scared to death."
"I know that too, for Christ's sake. That's why I don't want to expose myself. But radon's climbing significantly. I believe there's a significant expansion at the fault line across Castelmuso."
"Can you explain it? Wait... an incoming call. I'll talk to you in a minute."
"Okay."
Leo reached out to get his cell phone.
"Guido, tell me."
"Did you get the manuscript?"
"I took it. Did you feel the last shake?"
"There have been tremors for a month” remarked Guido, a more nervous voice than usual.
"I'm on my cell phone with Paoloeta, the geologist from the National Earthquake Center. He says it's not a normal sequence."
In the newsroom, no one escaped Guido's long silence. Zevi had noticed that Guido Gobbi, while enjoying a good reputation in Milan, was an unusually gloomy guy. He smoked all the time, smelled of tobacco, was very distracted and very quiet. He didn't expect that. But that was probably the character, the scholar thought.
"Hey! Are you all right?" Manuel asked. Guido, the cell phone in his ear, nodded thoughtfully and said to Leo, "We're waiting for you. Tell me what the geologist said later." Guido, with an annoying headache, closed his phone.
Leo, still standing at the traffic lights, put his cell phone on the seat. When the lights went green, the Smart car took the downhill road. The thin rain caused him to liven up the windscreen wiper speed a bit.
He called the geologist back. "Excuse me, Giorgio, but I had to take this call. Then could you explain what's going on?"
"I'll try” replied Giorgio Paoloeta, the voice that after three hairpin bends had stopped croaking.
"The process of deformation of the subsoil is putting a vast area under stress. The rocks in the affected area are changing their physical characteristics. Some cracks are probably forming. The fluids circulating in the cavities are changing paths and coming into contact with other rocks. When they do, gases find new routes and escape from the ground. In the second phase of the dilation process, the tremors become milder, but the gas increases. In the third stage the radon remains constant, the shocks become more rare, then usually comes the bang. And this time it won't be a five point four. Do you follow me?"
"When will there be a bang?" he asked concerned.
"I don't know about that. Nobody can know that. But it will happen soon. I'm sure it will. Radon is constant. It means we've reached stage three."
"You're freaking me out, Jesus. You can't predict earthquakes."
"I know perfectly, Leo. I'm not telling you when it's gonna happen. But it's gonna happen. It's definitely gonna happen."
"Holy shit. People are totally freaked out. Another shock would be unbearable" Leo noted, as exasperated as everyone else by the constant fear of a new earthquake.
The geologist worried about a series of complicated graphs from two computer screens. He pointed to some red spikes in pencil that he thought were anomalous.
"The problem is that the gas detectors give a large concentration of radon along the entire fault line, with the peak in the northeast, thirty-two kilometers away from Castelmuso.
"The distance isn't reassuring, but it's quite far from here” Leo found relieved.
"Leo, I'm telling you that the peak of activity is exactly in the area of Lake Montevicino."
"Oh, shit!"
"I see you now understand."
"The fucking dam."
"The dam, Leo. There are three locks. Three artificial dams containing 20 million cubic meters of water."
Leo was familiar with Lake Montevicino. It was an artificial riverbed built by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s, when the Duce did ʺalso good things before making the mistake of entering in warʺ as all the grandparents, fascists and even anti-fascists used to say. The lake fed the hydroelectric plants of the valleys around Castelmuso. The lights of the buildings, houses, all the street lamps, every single appliance or light bulb in Castelmuso, worked thanks to the artificial basin. Over time, Montevicino had become a tourist
destination. In summer, the shore was assaulted by groups of Germans. People who lay in the sun like lizards, becoming extraordinarily red in a surprisingly short time. The waters were furrowed by long, brightly coloured canoes, and when the wind was generous someone would go out for some sailing. The lake, seven hundred and two meters above sea level, was a paradise of land and water, under which a green vertigo of cultivated valleys stretched, together with the villages scattered on the slopes, distant dots of churches, Guelph and Ghibelline towers. Lands quilted with history, full of flavours, culture and harmony. Underneath so much beauty, a dangerous fault that unwinds like a snake swollen with poison.
"Are you sure the radon peak is near the lake?" asked Leo restless.
The Dawn of Sin Page 21