by Joshua Sobol
There’s no need, she says. I have the money to cover tonight.
You mean to pay that slimebag Tino?
Tony, she corrects him, and adds: Every profession has its own code of ethics.
You have a strange way of speaking, he says.
What’s wrong with the way I speak?
Nothing, he hastens to reassure her, it’s only that sometimes you use high-flown language, sometimes you even quote Shakespeare.
I’m writing a doctoral dissertation, she says.
What’s the subject?
The Samson family.
Who were they? he asks.
Hangmen, she says, a family of hangmen. The profession passed form father to son.
That’s interesting, he says. How did you get onto it?
My grandfather was a hangman’s assistant, she says. He helped to hang eleven war criminals at Nuremberg.
Good for him, he says. He did a good job, your grandfather.
Not really, she demurs. They hanged them on an improvised gallows, and he sawed the holes in the floor for the trapdoors.
So what wasn’t good about it?
The holes were a bit too small, and when the hanged men fell through them, they bumped against the sides. The fall was arrested, and instead of breaking their necks and dying instantly, they hung on the noose for ten to fifteen minutes until they choked to death.
Even better, he says.
You’re a cruel man, she remarks.
No I’m not, he protests, but there are bastards who deserve to die slowly and in great agony. I’d be glad to shake your grandfather’s hand.
That would be difficult, she laughs. He died in a work accident, on the electric chair. He sat on it to give a demonstration to apprentice executioners. It’s not clear how it happened, but the electric current was connected, and by the time they switched it off, he was already fried like a fish.
So that’s your specialization, the family history of executioners?
You know that these people had a sense of mission and great professional pride?
I’m not surprised, he says, and I’m sure that they were happy people too.
I understand that you’re in favor of the death penalty, because you yourself carried out—
Yes, he interrupts her, there are people who don’t deserve to live. There are people I’d be happy to kill.
People who harmed your parents? she asks.
How do you know? he exclaims.
I have a third eye, she says, like Shiva and like you.
You know something about Indian mythology too?
I had a lot of spare time, she says, and noting to do except read.
Were you in jail?
Eight years, she says. Two years in a juvenile facility, the rest in a lifers’ wing.
It wasn’t for soliciting or vagrancy, I imagine.
No, she confirms, I was barely sixteen when I was sentenced to life in prison.
Who did you kill? he asks.
Patrice Terramagi.
She pronounces the name Patrice Terramagi as if it was John Kennedy or the Prince of Wales at least.
Patrice Terramagi? He pages through his memory and fails to connect the name with any well known personality. Was he some prince or African president?
Neither a prince nor a president, she replies. Just a piece of dogshit my mother scraped off the street.
So what are you doing free, he asks, did you escape from jail?
No, she says, after eight years inside my lawyer got me a retrial, and the sentence set a precedent. Thanks to my case continuous abuse is now recognized as cumulative aggression, and a woman who kills someone who abused her for years can claim that she acted in legitimate self-defense, even if there was no immediate threat to her life, but only one more act of abuse, even a small one, in a long series of cumulative abuse.
How long did he abuse you? He asks. For months? Years?
For ever, she says. For ever. My parents separated when I was five. They were both alcoholics. My father moved to another continent and disappeared from my life. I stayed with my mother, who would come home late at night. Always drunk. Ever time with a different man. They would screw her for two or three days, and bugger off. If anyone stayed with her a little longer, it was a sign that he was completely down and out, that he had nowhere to put his stinking bum at night. But even the most fucked-up homeless only stuck it out for a week at most before they ran for their lives from her attacks of rage and fits of weeping and craziness and threats of suicide. Now try to imagine what kind of a lowlife this Patrice was, if he stayed with her for three years, until the night I stuck a barbecue skewer into his heart.
He stayed with her because of you, he states.
Good guess, she confirms. The first night she brought him, after he fucked her, he got into my bed and raped me.
You were only thirteen, he calculates.
Twelve and a bit, but far from innocent, she laughs her bitter laugh.
I already had a history of running away, vagrancy, drugs, prostitution, arrests, committal to a psychiatric ward for observation, removal from home by order of a judge in juvenile court to an institution for minors, which I couldn’t stand, because it was like a prison, and being a vampire, I found a crack in the dark and ran back home, to my alcoholic mother. And when two policemen come to look for me, to take me back to the institution, I shut myself in the bathroom and slash my veins, so they’ll return me to the hospital, to the psychiatric ward, and maybe this time I’ll be able to persuade them to recommend to the court to let me stay with my mother. But the social worker testifies that my mother is drunk twenty-four hours a day, and she does me nothing but harm. And I tell the judge that my mother drinks because she wants me at home, and the judge asks me, why does she want you at home, and I say, because she’s my mother, but this judge wasn’t born yesterday, she’s seen all kinds already, and she says to me, tell me the truth, Pipa, your mother wants you at home so much that she drinks twenty-four hours a day because she misses you so much? And I say, yes, your honor, I swear on my life that I’m telling you the truth! And she says to me: Why does she miss you so much, Pipa? Tell me why she needs you so much? And for a minute I want to tell her the truth: Because my mother knows that Patrice only stays with her because of me, because he’s dying to fuck me, and my mother knows it, and she doesn’t care that this is the price I have to pay so that this maniac will stay with her and fuck her too even though she disgusts him with the crazy scenes she makes whenever she gets drunk, in other words, at least twice a day, but I know that I can’t tell the judge the truth, because then she’ll remove me from home forever, so I keep quiet, and the judge understands my silence, and she says, Pipa, for your own good I’m sending you back to Mulberry Woods, in other words, the institution, and as soon as they take me back there I stick my fist through the window, and cut my hand to pieces, and I’m back in the hospital again, and I plead with the social worker, that if they don’t want to send me back to my mother, then let them look for my father in Australia, and send me to him, but the social worker says to me, face up to reality, and I pick up a vase that’s standing next to my bed and throw it right in her face, and two orderlies come running and strap me to the bed, and while I’m lying there strapped to the bed like a person sentenced to death waiting for a lethal injection, I ask myself what’s wrong with me, what, am I so different from everybody else? Am I mad? Am I going to spend the rest of my life in closed wards in mental hospitals? Or in jail as a murderer? Or maybe one day I too will find someone who cares about me, and who’ll want to live with me and set up a family with me, and we’ll have children who I’ll bring up the way you’re supposed to bring up children, and not the way I was brought up by my mother, who never related to me like a mother to a daughter, and even when they let me go home for a visit, on Christmas, Patrice fucked me and slapped me around, because he came quickly and he hated me for it, as if it was my fault, until I stabbed myself in the stomach because I was so sick of
him, and they took me back to the hospital, and afterwards I told my mother that a gynecologist there said I’d done myself so much damage that I probably wouldn’t be able to get pregnant—so what did she say, my mother? You’re better off this way, otherwise you would have had at least ten abortions before you turn seventeen, ooh, you hug me so good, she suddenly says in the middle of all this outpouring, hug me tight and don’t let go now, and she twines herself around him, and her whole thin body quivers in the too strong hands of the man whose penis is sleeping like a soft warm baby in her hand, and her matchstick legs wind round his hairy grizzly-bear leg, and he says to her, don’t talk if it makes you feel bad, but it makes me feel good, she says, it makes me feel so good, but if it’s hard for you to hear, it isn’t hard for me, he says, on the contrary, it does me good, how does it do you good, the terrible story of my lost youth, how can it do you good? I don’t know, he says to her, but it does me good, maybe because I went through a few things that weren’t so nice in my own life too, not nice things, she laughs her bitter laugh, yes, he says, not nice things, that were put into deep freeze and left for years covered in a thick layer of ice, which is apparently beginning to crack. And after that time for some reason they sent me home, the words start to gush out of the gaping wound in her childish face again, and for a few days Patrice was careful and didn’t dare to touch me, he was apparently frightened by what I had done to myself with the scissors, and perhaps he felt that what I had done to myself I was capable of doing to him too one day, if he went on torturing me, and he loved his own skin too much, that piece of shit, but after a few days his need overcame his fear, something about me turned him on, I don’t know what, what does it matter anyway, I began working the streets on a regular basis, I did quite well, there are perverts out there that need little girls to turn them on, and that gave him a good reason to slap me around, all of a sudden he turned into my moral guardian, whenever I came back from work he would grab hold of me and hit me again and again, until I cried, and that gave him a hard-on, my crying, and when I caught on I began to fake it, I would begin to howl at the first slap, to cut it short, but it didn’t solve the problem, because the minute he came, always too quickly, he would begin to blame me and say that it happened to him because of me, and that I did it on purpose, moving and making him come, and it wasn’t true, because I didn’t even move a muscle, because I don’t feel a thing when the creeps are fucking me, not pleasure or pain, nothing, because I’m not there at all when they press up against my body and shove it into me—but it didn’t help me, straightaway yelling: Why did you move? You whore! And straightaway blows. One night I came home finished. Three stinking homeless guys threatened me with a box-cutter and raped me and robbed me of all the money I’d made, and when I got home, Patrice was waiting for me with two friends of his, and I begged him, Patrice, leave me alone tonight, but he said, tonight I’m gonna to stick it to you, and then I’m gonna give you to my friends, and I said to him, not tonight, and he began slapping me around, and I began to cry, and as usual it gave him a hard-on, and he pushed me up against the kitchen sink and bent me over the sink and pulled down my panties and shoved it into me from behind, and as usual he came right away, and he started to curse me and hit me, and bending like that over the sink which was full of dirty dishes, I grabbed hold of a steel barbecue skewer, and I turned round to face him and I stuck it between his neck and his collarbone, and it sunk in as if it was slipping into butter, and suddenly he looked at me in great surprise, and there was such a sorrowful look in his eyes that I almost took pity on him, but it was already too late, he collapsed and crumpled onto the floor like a rag, and suddenly he jerked and kicked and hit the garbage pail that was standing there, and the pail overturned and the garbage spilled onto the floor, and that’s it.
You did an absolutely professional job, he says, and explains: A matador strike.
What’s that? she asks.
The connection between the neck and the collarbone. Soft tissue all the way, from the lung and the aorta straight to the heart.
I didn’t know what I was doing, she says. And suddenly she has second thoughts:
Hey, if one of us is professional, it’s apparently you. But you don’t say much. I have to guess everything.
What do you want to know? he asks.
You won’t tell me the truth anyway, she says.
What do you like hearing before you go to sleep, the truth, or a bedtime story?
Tell me a story, she says, and snuggles further into his big body.
23
Imagine a hilly landscape, he says.
Is it winter or summer? she asks.
Which do you prefer? he replies with a question.
Winter, she presses against him and nestles into him, everything covered with snow.
Yes, he says, deep fluffy snow, and the sky resting like a blanket of gray cotton-wool on the mountain tops and the white forests, and a snowy road winds between abandoned log cabins around which big rusty cogwheels are scattered, only their upper halves peeping out of the snow, and coils of steel cable whose wooden spools are sunk in the snow, and the road disappears into a gaping hole in the mountainside.
An abandoned mine shaft, she says, I like it already. Go on.
Through the opening you can see narrow rails, leading into a tunnel hewn out of the rock, lower than the height of a man and no wider than his outspread arms, and the pale light filtering in through the tunnel entrance soon fades, and the darkness is absolute, and from here on you can only continue by lamplight.
Don’t stop, she requests, and he goes on leading her down the tunnel, and stops for a minute to tell her that the tunnel was quarried by copper miners in the Middle Ages, between five and ten centimeters a day, the traces of their chisels are still etched in the rock—and after ten long minutes of stooped walking in the tunnel you reach a little square, which we’ll call Andreus Square, a square roofed with iron beams supporting its ceiling, and from Andreus Square three new tunnels branch out, the one on the left half full of water, the lake tunnel.
A lake in the bowels of the mountain? she asks.
Yes, he confirms. A lake the color of Bordeaux soup.
What kind of soup is that? she wonders. I’ve never eaten Bordeaux soup.
Of course not. If you’d eaten Bordeaux soup, you wouldn’t be here now.
Is it a kind of poison?
It’s a kind of fungicide used against leaf blight, once it was also used to spray potato and tomato fields.
Where do you get all this information from?
I grew up in a country village, he replies.
What’s its color? She goes on questioning him.
The houses are white, with red-tiled roofs.
No, she says, I mean the Bordeaux soup.
A kind of venomous blue, he says, a kind of turquoise.
Go on, she requests.
Where were we? he asks.
In Andreus Square, she reminds him. You said there were three tunnels branching off from it, and the left one was half-full of water—
Yes, he confirms.
And the central tunnel? she asks and in her mind’s eye she sees the three tunnels branching off from the underground square.
The central one is the track tunnel, because of the rail tracks.
And the one on the right?
The machine-hall tunnel, he recalls.
Go into the tunnel of the turquoise lake, she requests, and her fingers stroke his feet, feeling for something hidden there, and her electrifying touch sends currents through him that make the roots of his hair tingle and stiffen his nipples.
He takes her into the lake tunnel. Walking is difficult and progress is very slow.
Why, she asks, and he explains that at the entrance to the tunnel the water reaches only to the ankles, but the floor is very slippery, and the ceiling is so low that you have to walk at a crouch. But the deeper you penetrate into this tunnel, the more the water gradually rises. At first you don’t feel i
t, because the slope is very mild, almost imperceptible, but after advancing slowly for five minutes, you find that the water is already above your ankles, and after another five minutes you’re splashing in the water that reaches halfway up your calves. And you have to move in absolute silence.
Why in silence? she wonders and her fingers focus on a very specific area on the arch of his foot, next to the ball of the big toe, and the currents advance to the bottom of his stomach, close to the surface of the skin.
You have to keep quiet in order not to disclose your location.
To who? she asks.
To the character guarding the person you went into the belly of the mountain for.
But he can see the light of your lamp, she says.
Only if he has glasses that can distinguish infrared light, he says.
And does he? she asks in suspense.
I don’t know, he says, I’m taking a risk.
Go on, she says and her fingers hover over the sole of his foot, and he doesn’t know any more if they’re touching or not touching, but the heat and the maddening tickle reach the root of his nose.
He goes on advancing at a slow, silent crouch. In the infrared light of the miner’s lamp set in the middle of his forehead the walls of the tunnel look greenish.
Like Shiva’s third eye, she comments.
Exactly, he agrees. Now the water already reaches his knees. But precisely here the ceiling of the tunnel begins to rise, and it seems that the walls too are moving a little further apart. There is no longer any doubt that the tunnel is widening like the neck of a bottle of Beaujolais. Now he is hugging the left wall of tunnel.
Why the left? Her fingers travel down the slope of the arch of his foot, and he abandons himself to the sweetness seeping into his blood like chartreuse and remembers the beginning of the chase, in the mountains next to Grenoble, and since his tongue is heavy now, and his silence continues, she repeats her question, Why are you hugging the left wall of the tunnel?
Because the space suddenly opening out is the ‘Hall of love and creation’, he says, and if you go on doing what you’re doing to me now, we’ll end up fucking.