The next text was for Stavodicendo, checking to make sure that Nicolas hadn’t left the lair to go home. Stavodicendo questioned him in return, inquisitively: “Where are you? What are you doing? What have you got in mind? Are you supposed to meet Nicolas?” And he wrote back that he didn’t have anything in mind, that he just had an errand to take care of on Piazza Diaz. And Stavodicendo: “What kind of way is that to talk? What errand?” By then Dentino had simply stopped answering.
He reread it, feeling as if he were being watched by the people seated around him or gripping the handrails and poles. Were they looking at him because he was armed? Were they looking at him because he was on his way to kill a kid? Were they looking at him because he was who he was, a young man? He felt submerged in a world of grown-ups, or actually of old people, men and women destined to come to an end, a world where you couldn’t even figure out why they weren’t dead already. So many zombies. He knew he was alive, far more alive than all those other slaves. He reached down to touch the Beretta again; it made him feel strong, he knew that he was on his way to carry out a vendetta. Vengeance would be his. It was almost too late when he noticed that he was at the Via Toledo stop. He got out, let the people go past, the slaves, and flattened himself against the station wall before turning down the colorful corridor that ran to the escalators. Christian would ride down the escalator because that’s what he had been told to do.
* * *
Christian was at the foot of the strange horse on Piazza Diaz. Nico’ would come, Dentino was waiting for him down below, before the turnstiles, so he headed down. Dentino had asked him: he needed to go down into the metro station, had he ever been down there? No, he hadn’t been. Then he should go, it was beautiful, a fantastic world. Christian had hopped onto the escalator and in fact, there it was, the fantastic world, sure enough! He rode down and above him there opened out an ever-narrower cone of light, light blue and green, a light blue, a green that slid down the walls, transmogrifying into pink, and it seemed like an aquarium, it seemed like pure magic. At school someone had told him that the Via Toledo metro station, so modern, so artistic, was one of the most beautiful on earth, but they’d never taken him to see it. Neither the school nor his family. Why is that? We have the most beautiful metro station on earth and we never go see it. Only ever to see the Castel dell’Ovo, only ever to the seafront embarcadero, only ever down to the sea, when the real sea was right here; in fact, this was better than the water sea, because here you had wave, grotto, volcano, and at the same time it became the sky, too. “This is something, Nico’, you never told me about.” The escalator kept descending and Christian rode along with his head tilted back, and the farther down he rode, the farther back he tilted it so he could remain inside that gush of light descending from on high, a silent gush, an ancient water, or maybe not, a light streaming down from space. He brought me here, to let me take this light blue trip, he thought. And when he found himself at the bottom of that exceedingly long escalator and he saw Dentino, he told him so, he said that that was a fantastic place, better than Posillipo, better than The Lord of the Rings. But Dentino didn’t smile. He told him that now he needed to ride back up, because Nicolas would be expecting him at the Cavaliere di Toledo, the Horseman of Via Toledo. Dentino was there, and Christian wasn’t surprised to see the paranzino with two broken teeth standing there rigidly, giving him orders. He didn’t ask questions, he thought nothing, he just went “Wow” at the idea of going back up, and he hurried happily back onto the escalator to ride all the way back up, through the middle of that aquarium. Dentino let him ride up a way, and then followed him. It was an endless ascent, and for the second time, Christian lost himself in that green, that light blue, the light, until he emerged back into the disappointing light of day.
Nicolas and Mena saw him from the piazza. They saw him emerge from the tunnel of the escalator, and as he emerged they heard three gunshots, clear, confident, without an echo.
* * *
Dentino descended the same escalator, leaping several steps at a time to outpace the upward-rising machinery that would have dragged him back to the surface. Only when he got to the bottom did he stop to catch his breath, turning around to peer at the light up above, and, in the space emptied of people cleared out by the gunshots, he galloped to the platform to wait for the next train. There he realized that he was still holding the Beretta; he slipped it down his pants. And that image as well as all the previous images were already registered in the memory of the video cameras in the station: the one on the tracks that had recorded Dentino leaving the train and walking along in the crowd of other passengers, the one at the bottom of the escalator that had recorded Dentino waiting—and there he would have been seen clearly pulling out the Beretta and keeping it covered with his left hand—just as clearly as Christian would have been seen arriving, smiling, lit up by the adventure he’d just experienced as he descended through the cone of green light, only to ride back up, followed by Dentino, his arm finally extended, the first, the second, and the third gunshot, and then the gallop back down the escalator the wrong way.
* * *
Down in the metro and out on the piazza, people reacted instinctively as in a stesa: some of them threw themselves down on the ground, others turned and ran, a few froze to the spot, as if there were something to be understood.
* * *
Christian walked toward the monument with a gleaming smile that made him smaller, that absorbed him entirely, as if the show that he’d seen hadn’t stopped filling his eyes. Then he had, perhaps, the vague sensation that he’d perceived something different inside himself, a seabird that had dived beak-first into his back and now was trying to emerge from his chest. But the sensation remained formless and his body slammed to the ground, as if he’d tripped, and on the ground it remained, arms sprawled wide, head bent to one side, eyes wide open.
* * *
Mena and Nicolas were still astride the motorbike. Mena got off first, all alone on the piazza, with her red dress open in the back. She walked slowly as if she were bearing a weight, as if fate were slowing her stride. She bent down over the child, touched him, moved her hands away with the palm held shut like a seashell over him, lowered them closer again, touched his forehead, caressed it, then took his head and placed it on her knees, closed his eyes, and let loose a rough sigh, saw the blood that was seeping out, and heard someone shout: “Call an ambulance!” No one dared to take a step. She was suffocating inside her head of hair. You couldn’t see her anymore. And she couldn’t see anyone else. Then she heard Nicolas shouting something, ordering the others, pointlessly, to stay clear. She heard him saying as if he were at the theater that that was his brother and that she was his mother. And maybe that’s how it was, after all. But those standing around him couldn’t help but notice how that young man with blond hair had twisted around, doing his best not to be seen, bent over, his helmet pressed against his stomach, how he started to moan, either seeking to weep or to repress his weeping. “God.” He let the word escape his lips, and once he’d uttered that word, he started repeating it, “God God God,” with no idea where to look except down at the ground. He was surprised to find himself retching, then it happened again, and he’d never felt as alone as in that moment, and so it was that he got rid of the helmet, letting it roll away from him, and he bent over his brother’s body, with his mother. No one was coming out of the metro now. The circle of those who wanted to look grew larger, but under the Cavaliere di Toledo there were only Mena, Nicolas, and, by now invisible under the deep crimson of his mother, little Christian.
* * *
In the time that followed, Mena never shed a tear. She took care of her husband, who never stopped weeping, sitting on the bench in the hospital, on the chair at police headquarters, on the pew at church. Mena never exchanged a word with a soul, except to get through practical errands and respond to the investigations that, of course, the police were carrying out. From time to time, she gave Nicolas a sidelong glance. Left
alone at home with her son and her husband, she finally took off the red dress and, once in a slip, she didn’t put on anything else. She gazed at that dress with only two buttons on the back, smoothed it out on the table, grabbed it rudely, started ripping it apart, first along the stitching, then furiously rending the fabric wherever she happened to rip it, and it was only then that she dissolved into a scream, a rusty, metallic shout, that made even her husband stop crying. The television news reported in the days that followed on the “young boy murdered by the Camorra at the foot of William Kentridge’s monument to the Horseman of Via Toledo.”
The funeral was held five days later, in the quarter. Mena never stopped asking for flowers. She asked all the kids in the paranza. “I want flowers, you understand that?” and she’d glared at them angrily. “You know how to get them for me. I want the finest flowers in Naples. White flowers, lots and lots of white flowers. Roses, calla lilies, whatever is most expensive.” She inspected the church and with a gesture dismissed the priest and the undertaker: “You aren’t listening to me! I want flowers. I want so many flowers that you feel like fainting from the scent they put out.” And so it was. And behind the hearse there walked so many people from the quarter and other people that no one had ever met before, who knows where all those people even came from, and she was glad they had come, Mena decided, che qui nessuno adda scurdà questo piccolo mio, chesta criatura mia. No one can ever forget my little boy, this child of mine.
Nicolas lagged behind his mother. He obeyed. He studied. He didn’t miss a scene, a gesture. Like a real king, who knows who’s there and who isn’t and who shouldn’t be. His men stayed close to him, and they expressed their mourning. They did it the way they knew how. They were lost in the midst of that mountain of white flowers that Christian’s mother had insisted on.
There were Christian’s classmates, a swarm of kids accompanied by their teachers, and there were also Nicolas’s classmates and his teacher, Signor De Marino, pensive and speechless.
The casket, too, was white. A casket for a child. The paranzini’s girlfriends had all donned silk scarves because they knew what the tradition was and they understood they were to observe it.
Mena, dressed in black, her hair gathered back in a black lace shawl, locked arms with her husband, the gym teacher. She asked everyone to wait for the last trip to Poggioreale Cemetery and asked Nicolas to gather the paranza in the sacristy. “Your honor the priest will forgive us if, for two minutes, we take your place,” she said, preventing the parish priest from following her and the paranza in full array, with Pesce Moscio and Briato’, who stumped along, one on crutches, the other with an orthopedic cane.
Once they were together in the dim light of the sacristy, Mena seemed to fall rapt in meditation, but then she raised her face high, brushed aside the black veil, gazed at them one by one, and said: “I want vendetta,” and then she corrected herself. “I want vengeance,” and she went on: “You all can do it. You are the best.” She took a breath. “Maybe you couldn’t keep him from being killed, this son of mine, but fate is fate, and times change. Now it’s time for the tempest. And I want you to be the tempest scourging this city.”
Everyone in the paranza nodded their heads. All except Nicolas, who took his mother’s arm and told her: “It’s time to go.” Outside the door to the sacristy, his father grabbed Nicolas by the shirt, he would gladly have lifted him off the ground if he could have, and he drilled into his eyes a gaze without shadows, then he began speaking, first in an undertone and then gradually louder and louder: “You’re the one who killed him. It was you. It was you. You’re a murderer. You’re the one who killed him.” Mena managed to free her son from his grip and threw her arms around her husband. “Not now. There’s time for that,” she said, and caressed him gently.
They all left the church, in the midst of the procession of white flowers, and waited outside for the hearse.
Aucelluzzo, dressed in black, walked over to Nicolas. He embraced him with a gentleness Nico’ had never suspected he possessed: “Nico’, my condolences. On my part, and from you-know-who.”
Nicolas nodded his head without a word, his eyes never strayed from the white casket. He tried to step around him, he wanted to go to his mother, take her arm, but Aucelluzzo stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Have you seen this?” he asked. “They’re talking about you.” He held out the newspaper. A front-page article drew a connection between the death of Christian, the death of Roipnol, and the new typhoon that was slamming down on the historic city center, and stated that it all had been triggered by a new paranza.
The coffin was shut up inside the hearse now, and Nicolas looked at the newspaper that Aucelluzzo was handing him. “Guagliu’,” he said to his men, as they stood close to him, “they’ve given us a name: simmo la paranza dei bambini. We’re the children’s paranza.”
Suddenly it started raining, raining hard, without thunder. The street blackened with open umbrellas as if all of Forcella and Tribunali had been waiting for that downpour as a form of liberation. Amid the tide of umbrellas, the hearse made its way forward, haltingly. Only the paranza were willingly drenched.
* * *
Death and water are always a promise. And they were ready to cross the Red Sea.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One of the challenges of this novel is the use of dialect. The choice came naturally, but then the composition demanded work, cross-checking, patient listening.
I didn’t want the “classic” Neapolitan dialect that is still what we find in the work of poets and authors writing in dialect, and in terms of transcription as well. At the same time, I wanted there to be a full awareness of that classical tradition. I therefore requested the help of Nicola De Blasi (professor of the history of the Italian language at the Federico II University of Naples) and Giovanni Turchetta (professor of contemporary Italian literature at the University of Milan), and I thank them both. Starting from that point, I sensed the malleability of that language; I felt that I could, here and there, force my way toward a living oral language, though reconstructed within the context of the written form. Where this deliberate manipulation moves away from the standard codes, it’s because I’ve intervened as an author to shape, to filter, the acoustic reality of listening within the rendering of the dictation, an accomplice to the characters who were working with their “bastardized” dialect in my imagination.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
In translating The Piranhas into English, there were two particular stumbling blocks. One was the title, originally La paranza dei bambini, literally “The Children’s Paranza.” A paranza is a procession of fishing vessels; it is also a mob crew, or a loose association of young men. It is an exquisitely Neapolitan term, even when used in Italian. The title we chose in English was different, perhaps, but similar in meaning and heft.
The second stumbling block was dialect. Although Roberto Saviano addresses the issue of dialect in his Author’s Note, he is writing in Italian and speaking to an Italian audience.
Neapolitan dialect is a great and literary language, with a tradition dating back before English. It is now, as the old saying goes, a language without an army. But there once was a Kingdom of Naples, and it had both army and navy in its six glorious centuries of history.
Neapolitan dialect is largely foreign even to most Italian readers of the book’s original Italian version. That is why I have chosen to leave a certain amount of dialect in its unique and distinctive original form.
—ANTONY SHUGAAR
ALSO BY ROBERTO SAVIANO
Gomorrah
ZeroZeroZero
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roberto Saviano was born in 1979 and studied philosophy at the University of Naples. Gomorrah, his first book, has won many awards, including the prestigious 2006 Viareggio Literary Award, and was made into a play, a film, and a television series. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
&nbs
p; Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator. He is the author of Coast to Coast and I Lie for a Living and the coauthor, with Gianni Guadalupi, of Discovering America and Latitude Zero. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
CHARACTERS
PART ONE: THE PARANZA COMES FROM THE SEA
THE BESHITTING
THE NEW MAHARAJA
BAD THOUGHTS
THE WEDDING
THE CHINESE PISTOL
BALLOONS
ARMED ROBBERIES
PARANZINA
SOLDERING IRON
THE PRINCE
PART TWO: THE FUCKERS AND THE FUCKED
COURTROOM
HUMAN SHIELD
EVERYTHING’S TAKEN CARE OF
LAIR
ADDA MURÌ MAMMÀ
CAPODIMONTE
RITE
ZOO
TURK’S HEAD
TRAINING
CHAMPAGNE
PART THREE: TEMPEST
LET’S GO TAKE CHARGE
MARKETS
AMM’ ’A SCASSÀ I CIESSI
WALTER WHITE
TANKER TRUCK
I’LL BE GOOD
BROTHERS
THE MESSAGE
RED SEA
AUTHOR’S NOTE
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples Page 37