I don’t know what made me think of it, but I unleashed an offensive comment, right in his face, one that made everyone’s blood run cold: “Yes, just like your wife who you conveniently keep locked up in an insane asylum!”
He loomed in front of me, pale and trembling. “Excuse me? I do what?”
I shrugged. Exasperated by everyone’s dismay, and, at the same time, suddenly irritated by the inner awareness of how inappropriate my intrusion was, I softly answered him, in an attempt to put the matter to bed: “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.”
After those words it seemed I’d suddenly turned to—I don’t know—stone, and couldn’t hear what Firbo yelled at me through gritted teeth before flying off in a rage. I do know I was smiling as Quantorzo, who’d appeared at the altercation, was dragging me away with him into the director’s little office. I was smiling to show that there was no need for further violence, that everything had run its course; and yet, despite my smile, deep down at that very moment I felt certain I could’ve killed someone—that’s how irritated I was by Quantorzo’s overwrought harshness. I started looking around the director’s office, amazed that the strange bewilderment that had suddenly come over me didn’t prevent me from clearly and accurately noticing things, almost to the point of being tempted to laugh about them and deliberately asking childishly inquisitive questions about this or that object in the room, right in the middle of Quantorzo’s haughty rebuke.
Meanwhile—I don’t know—almost automatically, I thought that Stefano Firbo had been teased a lot as a boy, and even though his hump wasn’t obvious, basically his entire rib cage bulged out. Indeed, atop those long, skinny bird legs (but elegant ones, definitely), was perched an equally elegant pseudo-hump, a fine combination.
And with that thought in mind, it suddenly dawned on me that he must have used his uncommon intelligence to exact his revenge against everyone who hadn’t been picked on like he had been ever since he was a little kid.
I was thinking these things (I’m repeating myself) as if someone else inside me were thinking them, someone who’d suddenly become strangely cold and distant, not so much as a possible defense mechanism, but more to play a role behind which I could still conveniently keep that bit of terrifying truth hidden—a truth that had come into focus for me, but which still needed to be fleshed out more fully.
“Of course, it’s all here,” I thought. “In this bullying. Everyone wants to force his own inner world view on everyone else, as if it were the only true external world, and everyone needed to see it the same way he did, and that everyone else only existed the way he saw them.”
I took another look at all those clerks’ stupid faces and continued thinking: “Of course, of course! What sort of reality could the majority of people manage to dream up for themselves? Wretched, slippery, faltering. And the bullies, yes, they take advantage of it! Or rather, they delude themselves into thinking they can take advantage of it, making everyone else either endure or accept the meaning and value they assign to themselves, to others, to things, so that everyone sees and hears and even thinks and talks their way.”
I stood up and approached the window with great relief. Then I turned to Quantorzo, who, interrupted mid-sentence was standing there gaping at me. Continuing with the thought that was torturing me, I said: “Of course, of course! They’re deluding themselves!”
“Who’s deluding themselves?”
“The ones trying to bully everyone! Mr. Firbo, for example! They’re deluding themselves because in fact, my friend, all they can impose on everyone is just words. Words, do you understand? Words that everyone learns and repeats in his own unique way. Oh, but that’s how they even form so-called common knowledge! And too bad for the guy who one fine day finds himself branded by one of those utterances that everybody keeps repeating. For example, loan shark! For example, crazy! But tell me, how can you stay so calm knowing there’s someone running around trying to convince everyone else that the way he sees you is the way you really are? Coloring everyone’s opinion of you with his personal judgement? Preventing everyone else from seeing and judging you in any way different?”
I barely had time to notice Quantorzo’s astonishment before I saw Stefano Firbo in front of me again. I could tell from the look in his eyes that he’d become my enemy in those past few moments. Which suddenly made me his enemy as well. Enemy, because he didn’t understand that as harsh as my words had been, the feeling that had just come over me a little earlier wasn’t aimed directly at him—in fact, I was prepared to ask him to forgive me for saying them. Actually, it was like I was drunk, and I went a step further.
He approached me, dark and menacing, getting right in my face and saying: “I want you to explain yourself for what you said about my wife.”
I dropped to my knees. “Of course,” I cried. “Look! Like this!” And I touched my forehead to the floor.
I was instantly horror-stricken by my action, or rather, by the thought that he and Quantorzo might think that I was kneeling because of him, Firbo. I looked at them with a laugh, and thump, thump, two more times my forehead hit the floor.
“You, not me, don’t you get it? In front of your wife, don’t you understand? This is what you should be doing! And me, him, everybody—in front of so-called lunatics—this is what we should be doing!”
I jumped to my feet, in a manic state.
The two of them looked at each other, afraid. One asked the other: “What’s he talking about?”
“New words!” I shouted. “Do you want to hear them? Go, go there, where you keep them locked up—go, go and listen to them speak! You keep them locked up for your convenience!”
Laughing, I grabbed Firbo by the lapel of his jacket and shook him. “Don’t you get it, Stefano? You’re definitely not the only one I’m mad at! You took offense. No, dear friend! What was your wife saying about you? That you’re a philanderer, a thief, a forger, an imposter, and all you do is tell one lie after another! It’s not true. No one could believe it. But before you locked her up—right?—we all stood around listening to her, terrified. I’d like to know why!”
Firbo barely looked at me. He turned to Quantorzo with foolish apprehension as if to ask his advice and said: “Oh, fine! Precisely because nobody could believe it!”
“Oh, no, my friend!” I yelled at him. “You need to look me straight in the eye!”
“What do you mean?”
“Look me in the eyes!” I repeated. “I’m not saying it’s true! Relax!”
He forced himself to look at me, color draining from his face.
“You see?” I screamed at him. “You see? Even you! There’s fear in your eyes!”
“Because I think you’re acting crazy!” he screamed at me in exasperation.
I burst out laughing and laughed a long, long time, unable to control myself, noticing the fear and confusion that my laughter was causing them both.
I suddenly stopped, frightened myself by the way they were looking at me. What I’d done, what I’d been saying, it certainly had no rhyme or reason for them. To get a grip on myself, I abruptly said:
“Let’s get to the point. I’ve come here today to ask you to explain about a certain Marco di Dio. I’d like to know why it is that man hasn’t been paying rent for years, and there’s still no move to evict him.”
I wasn’t expecting that question to shock them as much as it did. They looked at each other as if to find in the other’s expression some support to help them make sense of what they were seeing and hearing from me, or rather from some unknown individual they’d suddenly and unexpectedly discovered in me.
“What? What on earth are you talking about?” Quantorzo asked.
“What part don’t you get? Marco di Dio. Does he or doesn’t he pay rent?”
They kept gaping at each other. I burst out laughing again, then, suddenly, I became serious and spoke as though I were talking to someone who’d just popped up in front of me right that second: “When have you ever p
aid attention to such things?”
More shocked than ever, practically terrified, their eyes fixed on me, looking for whoever had uttered the very words that were on their minds and on the tips of their tongues. What was going on? Did those words really come out of my mouth?
“Yes,” I continued, serious. “You know full well your father let that man, Marco di Dio, stay there for years without hassling him. What made you think of it just now?”
I rested my hand on Quantorzo’s shoulder, and with a different expression, not less serious, but now burdened by a harrowing fatigue, added: “Just be aware, dear friend, I’m not my father.”
Then I turned to Firbo and put my other hand on his shoulder. “I want you to draw up the papers right away. Immediate eviction. I’m the boss, I give the orders. Then I want a list of all my properties with the files for every one of them. Where are they?”
Clear words. Precise demands. Marco di Dio. Eviction. List of properties. Files. And yet, they didn’t understand me. They were looking at me like a couple of half-wits. And I had to repeat what I wanted over and over and make them take me to the shelf where they kept the file that Stampa the notary needed for that house. Like a pair of robots, Firbo and Quantorzo led me to the little room where the shelves were located. Once inside, I grabbed them by the arms, escorted them out, and slammed the door behind them.
I’m positive they lingered at the door a while, looking at each with a dazed expression until finally one of them remarked to the other:
“He must’ve gone insane!”
6 ~ The Theft
The second I was alone, that nightmarish bookshelf took hold of me. I sensed its bulky presence as though it were a living being, an ancient, inviolate custodian of all the files crammed onto its incredibly old, imposing, worm-eaten shelves.
I looked at it, then quickly lowered my eyes and looked around: a window, an old straw-bottomed chair, an end table that was older still, bare, black, and covered with dust—there was nothing else in the room.
Dreary light filtered through the window panes which were so thick with dust and mildew that I could barely make out the metal grating and the blood-red tiles of the edge of a roof which faced the window. Those roof tiles, the painted wood of those widow jambs, those window panes, grimy as they were—the motionless calm of inanimate objects.
Then I suddenly thought about my father’s hands, laden with rings, in this very room, reaching up to grab files from those shelves. And I saw them, hands like wax, white, fleshy, with all those rings and red hairs on the backs of the fingers. And I saw his eyes, like glass, blue and spiteful, intently looking through those files.
Then a fresh horror appeared, blotting out the specter of those hands. The entire volume of my black-clad body emerged and stood there solidly, right before my eyes. I heard the rapid breathing of that body which had come here to steal, and the sight of my hands opening the doors of that bookcase sent a shiver down my spine. I clenched my teeth, shook myself, and angrily thought:
“Where could it be, among all these files, the one that I need?”
And just to be doing something right away, I started pulling down armloads of files and throwing them on the table. At a certain point, my arms began to ache and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. How ridiculous was this, stealing from myself?
I looked around again, because suddenly I no longer felt confident about being there. I was about to commit an act. But was I me? I was again struck by the thought that perhaps all the strangers who were inseparable parts of me had come along into the room, and that I was about to commit this robbery with hands that weren’t my own.
I looked at them. Yes, the were the hands I knew. But did they really only belong to me? I quickly hid them behind my back. Then, as if that weren’t enough, I closed my eyes.
In that darkness, I felt my willpower had lost its way and was devoid of any precise substance, and it terrified me to the point that I nearly lost control of my body as well. I instinctively reached out to the table to steady myself. My eyes flew wide open:
“Yes, yes, of course!” I said. “There’s no logic to it! Not in the least! That’s it!”
And I began rifling through all those papers.
How long did I search? I don’t know. I do know that my frenzy dissipated again at a certain point, and that a more desperate weariness overcame me. I found myself sitting on the chair in front of the table, now completely cluttered with stacks of papers, with another pile of papers loaded onto my lap. My head went limp and I wanted—truly wanted—to die, if this despair which had come over me would prevent me from carrying out my unprecedented undertaking.
I remember that, with my head buried in those papers, my eyes closed, possibly to hold back the tears, I heard, as though from an infinite distance, in the wind that must’ve stirred up outside, the plaintive clucking of a hen that had laid an egg, and that clucking reminded me of one of my properties in the countryside, where I hadn’t been since I was a child. Except I was irritated by the nearby creaking of the window shutter, jostled by the wind. Finally, two unexpected knocks on the door gave me a start.
“Leave me alone!” I angrily shouted and immediately resumed my relentless search.
When I finally found the file containing all the papers for that house, it felt like I’d been set free. I jumped to my feet, exultant, but then immediately turned to look at the door. So sudden was my swing from exultation to suspicion that I saw myself and it gave me the shivers. Thief! I was stealing. Really stealing. I pressed my back against that door. I unbuttoned my vest. I unbuttoned the top of my shirt and stuck the rather bulky file against my chest.
A somewhat wobbly cockroach crawled out from under the bookcase at that moment, headed toward the window. I immediately squashed it with my shoe.
My face twisted with disgust, I haphazardly tossed all the remaining files back into the bookcase and left the little room. Luckily, Quantorzo, Firbo, and all the clerks had already left. Only the old custodian remained, and he had no reason to suspect a thing. Still, I felt like I had to tell him something:
“You need to clean the floor in there. I squashed a cockroach.”
And I ran to Via del Crocefisso, to Mr. Stampa’s notary office.
7 ~ The Explosion
I can still hear the water pouring down from a gutter next to a still-unlit streetlamp in front of Marco di Dio’s shack, in the already-dark alley just before sundown. And there I see all the people huddled along the walls in search of shelter from the rain, watching the eviction, along with other people, under their umbrellas, pausing out of curiosity upon seeing the crowd and the pile of pitiful furnishings forcibly cleared out of the building and left in the rain there in front of the door, all accompanied by the screams of Mrs. Diamante di Dio, who, disheveled, intermittently appears at the window to hurl some of her odd expletives, which are received with catcalls and other vulgar sounds by the barefoot street urchins who, heedless of the rain, are dancing around that pile of misery, splashing water from the puddles on curious onlookers who respond with curses. And the comments:
“More disgusting than his father!”
“Out in the rain, my friends! He couldn’t even wait until morning!”
“Taking it out like that on a poor lunatic!”
“Filthy loan shark! Dirty moneylender!”
Because I’m there, purposely present at the eviction, protected by the police chief and two officers.
“Loan shark! Bloodsucking moneylender!”
And it makes me smile. Sure, maybe I’m a bit pale, but I still feel a measure of delight that brings a tingle to my innards, a tickle to my uvula, and a catch to my throat. It’s just that I feel the need now and again to cast my gaze on something. So, with an almost absent-minded apathy, I focus on the trim around the door of that little shack as a way to visually isolate myself, confident that it would never occur to anyone at such a moment, unless they didn’t care a whit about the racket in the street, to look up for the s
heer pleasure of verifying that the trim really is quite sad and gloomy: peeling gray plaster, with pockmarks all over the place. Nor would that someone, like me, feel the need to blush from modesty at the shameless display of an old chamber pot tossed out with all the other items from the shack, left where everyone could see it, on a nightstand in the middle of the street.
However, this guilty pleasure of marching to the beat of my own drummer nearly cost me dearly. Once everything had been forcibly cleared out, Marco di Dio, leaving the shack with his wife Diamante, noticed me in the alley between the police chief and two officers and couldn’t restrain himself. While I was staring at that door frame, he hurled his old stonemason’s hammer at me, the one he’d used in his marble work. I definitely would’ve been a goner if the police chief hadn’t been on the ball, quickly pulling me out of the way. Amid the shouts and confusion, the two officers jumped into action to arrest the poor man who’d flown into a rage at the sight of me. But the growing crowd protected him and was about to turn on me when a dark little pipsqueak of a man, shabbily dressed but fierce looking, climbed up on an end table there in the heap of household goods in the middle of the alley. It was the young assistant who worked for Mr. Stampa in the notary office. He was practically jumping up and down, madly flapping his arms, when he began to shout:
“Hold on! Hold on! Listen to me! I’m here representing Mr. Stampa, the notary! Listen to me! Marco di Dio! Where is Marco di Dio? I’m here from Mr. Stampa’s notary office to inform him that there’s a donation waiting for him. This loan shark, Moscarda—”
I was—I couldn’t say why—all aquiver, waiting for the miracle: my instantaneous transformation that would take place in everyone’s eyes. But suddenly that thrill seemed to shatter into a million pieces, and my entire essence felt like it had been completely battered and flung about by an explosion of ear-splitting catcalls mixed with disorderly shouts and insults from the entire crowd, all aimed at me—they couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that I was the one who’d made the donation, after orchestrating such a cruel eviction.
One, No One & 100,000 Page 10