‘Where are you off to in such a hurry? Your wedding?’ says Don Pino to the driver sarcastically.
‘Yeah, I’m marrying your sister, Father.’
Don Pino tells him to get lost with a good-natured smile. He leaves again and thinks of the girl. He doesn’t know who she is but he understands her. There’s a train to catch. It’s just beyond the barrier that stands between us and our fear.
Wherever that train takes you, it spits you out of hell. His grandfather worked for the railroad and he used to tell him stories about his trips on the tracks. He was just a boy back then and he couldn’t understand how the trains could walk or how the tracks seemed to be endless. If a train were running backward, how did they pick it up so that another train could pass by? And where did all the trains go anyway?
The children’s questions stick with him because he is weak like them. He is afraid like them and dreams like them. He trusts like them and forgets things right away like them. And he does not give up, just like them.
There’s only one thing that’s different about him. He can’t ignore death like they do.
Chapter 2
Wind and light lash the streets of Brancaccio, a neighborhood composed of houses that resemble the scales of a fish that writhes ever more slowly as it dies, gasping all the while for water and life. A dark area of Palermo’s endless port with the sea at its back, Brancaccio rises from the debris that every sea discards along the coast. The Hunter walks across those bits and pieces.
He’s nearly thirty years old. He has a name, the one his mother gave him when he was born, the one that they repeated in church when they baptized him. But now this is his real name. He got the name ‘the Hunter’ thanks to his silent determination in doing what must be done because a man is someone who does what a man must do. The way he sees it, the world is divided into two groups: Predators, the group to which he belongs; and prey that has been sniffed out, identified, hunted down, and killed. He walks with his head held high and his gaze is never distracted from the line of sight. Aim without distraction is a sign of strength. Three decades into this life and he already commands respect, like a father commands respect from his sons. And sons he has, three of them. Then there are all the rest of them. They’re guaranteed a bright future just as long as they stay in line and obey. The Hunter.
Nuccio is with him. Roughly twenty years old with a long nose that makes him look like a bird, thin lips, the night before stuck between his teeth like his ever-lit cigarette. His eyes are sad. Not because he’s sad but because sadness has shaped his features.
They monitor their surroundings as they wander without any apparent destination through the sirocco maze.
As shutters are raised, they reveal multi-form activities behind a sign that they all share: ‘24-HOUR-ACTIVE CARRIAGEWAY. DO NOT BLOCK.’ Yes, it’s called a ‘carriageway’ because in another era carriages went in and out of buildings. Sides of beef hang on hooks and shamelessly show off their meat and limp entrails. Motor scooters waiting to be repaired are dirty with grease. Loaves of bread, their crusts covered with sesame seeds. Brooms, detergent, perfume, toys, soccer balls. And everything else you can imagine. Wicker and wooden chairs, still empty, stand ready outside the shops for breaks between clients. Here, winter lasts three or four months if you’re not lucky. Otherwise it stays away.
The Hunter glances around him before his eyes are once again motionless and steady. He spits on the ground and his saliva mixes with the dust in the street teeming with double-parked cars and trash cans already fermenting in the violent heat of the early hours of the day. The acrid smell of things rotting mixes with the sea-soaked morning to create a bittersweet odor that pervades the neighborhood and the entire city. Heaven on one street, hell around the corner.
A woman hangs her languid sheets in the nearly immobile air. She’s wearing a robe and curlers. Groups of children roam the streets in search of dogs, cats, and lizards to torture; in search of adventure among things that have been discarded by grownups; in search of asphalt patches for a soccer game, a break from the cement and from their boredom. Their threadbare leather ball is so light that it nearly floats away.
They say hello to the Hunter and he smiles like a father smiles at his children.
‘What’s your name?’ Nuccio asks one of the children.
‘Francesco,’ he answers, his chest puffed up after being called upon.
‘Very good. Very good. You always need to tell me the truth. And when the cops come around?’
‘Never tell the truth.’
‘Very good. And how old are you?’
‘Seven. Well, almost.’
‘Only seven years old and you are already this tall? Damn, it won’t be long before you can kill a cop.’
‘How would I do that?’
‘With a gun. How else?’
‘But I don’t have a gun.’
‘When the time comes, you’ll have one.’
They all stare at him as he leaves, their eyes magnetized by his swagger. Anyone with a cigarette and a gun is a hero. Francesco wants to be like him, with a white shirt open at the collar, cigarette between his lips, and some serious attitude.
In the meantime, the Hunter has kept walking. Nuccio watches him from behind. He’d like to be that powerful. That’s why he’s following and learning from him. It’s the food chain of respect. The Hunter has closely cropped hair as curly as an Arab’s. Few in Brancaccio could dispense justice with a gun like him.
‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ he tells him over and over.
It’s the right thing to do.
The family doesn’t do anything that’s not right to do. And it guarantees order in a city where chaos is just another type of order. If it weren’t for them, Nuccio would get bored. He wouldn’t even have the money he needed for cigarettes, and he’d have to find a job on his own. His parents have told him a thousand times. But he has no intention of spending his life breaking his back like his mother and father. Why would anyone want to do that?
All you get is a broken back. No, he’s twenty years old and he has other plans. He wants to get himself a villa by the sea where he can take his girlfriend. He’s already promised her. As sure as his name is Nuccio. He was born, raised, and still hasn’t died in Brancaccio.
The Hunter stops in front of a fishmonger’s stand and presses his finger against the head of a swordfish which stares back at him from its bed of ice with a crazed white eye. Nature has condemned fish to live without eyelids so they see everything, even when they die. The Hunter doesn’t utter a word. Attitude is all someone with power needs and words only get in the way unless they are absolutely necessary.
A restless man is wearing an apron soiled with blood and scales. He slices off a piece of swordfish with a knife twice the size of his hands. He wraps it in butcher paper and places the fish in a bag. He slips in an envelope and hands the Hunter the bag without looking up at him.
The Hunter checks the contents of the envelope. Nuccio observes his calculated coolness. He spits the butt of his cigarette and lights another. He snorts in the summer air and the smoke hovers above him in a not entirely ephemeral halo. It’s going to be a hot day today. When the smoke remains suspended like that, it will always turn out hot.
‘So?’ Nuccio makes the sign of the cross in the damp air as if to say, ‘Are we sending a man to the cemetery?’
‘It’s fine.’
‘What do you mean “fine”?’
This guy needs to learn how not to ask the same question twice.
The swordfish eyeball screaming from its socket reminds the Hunter of his first victim. A bullet is instant destiny. The eyes of prey aren’t like fish eyes. They drain immediately. Fish eyes take too long to die. Either way, everyone dies sooner or later. The way they die is just a detail. You gotta do what you gotta do. He has a family to feed, three marvelous children that he loves more than anything in the world. And the 5 million lire that they give him each month mean food and future and even m
ore importantly, they mean health. If you have that, you have everything.
Killing doesn’t lead to all the remorse that they talk about in the movies. It’s much easier than on film. The wolf has to deliver the meal to its pack. And that’s how some people are born to be prey and others to be hunters in this world. Nature is the one who decides. The rest just falls into place. Killing is simple equilibrium. Cops, rivals, traitors. They are human animals. If blood needs to be splattered when you strike, it’s nobody’s fault. Life is made with blood. Destiny? Fate? Or however the fuck you see it. He needs to protect his children and raise them right. The Hunter became the Hunter for them, from the very first time he robbed someone.
He was fed up with hearing his friends brag about things they had never actually done. And he needed money. It was a day like any other day and he put on a ski mask and robbed a jewelry store. That’s it. There was nothing else to add. Little by little, hit after hit, prey after prey, he earned himself his name: The Hunter. Planning and acting and playing it cool like a snake. The secret is that receiving and executing an order are the same thing. Obedience is the only form of loyalty required. It’s the devotion due to the neighborhood gods so that their wishes are fulfilled.
No one wants to upset Mother Nature’s balance. The cops don’t need to come to the neighborhood looking for fugitives. They don’t need to come and check up on things like that priest from San Gaetano who fills up the church with babies and children and cops, and that center he opened next door, the Holy Father Center. Amen. He needs to keep an eye on him. Something really ugly could happen in there. People come all the way from Palermo, from the rich people’s neighborhoods. They show up with their designer clothes and they think that they can teach us how to live here in Brancaccio. They speak fancy Italian. Once his kid went to play soccer at the Holy Father Center and he had to give him a good beating to make him forget how much fun he had. He made him slash the tires of the cars that belonged to those smart-aleck kids who speak Italian. He gave the job to his son and to two other boys, a couple of kids that were just standing around waiting for something to do. After fifth grade, that is pretty normal for Brancaccio. Children go to school when they feel like it. And they’re the ones who assign the homework.
He stopped going to school after fifth grade. And then the street became his classroom. You should take what you want with your hands. Or with the claws that pop out when you don’t get the piece of meat that you wanted. It’s just like what happens to wolves. In the fury of grabbing for the meat, they can’t stop their claws from popping out.
Nuccio hasn’t killed anyone yet. He’s still waiting for the right moment. When they call on him to do it, he will and that will be the end of the story. He knows that’s the test of obedience that can make your career. At the moment, he’s just dealing, collecting, and looking after a few whores. He knows how to do his job but that’s not all. He’s also capable of skimming a little off the top just for the hell of it. But the Hunter doesn’t know that.
The Hunter watches out over the empty street. The street is what makes a man a man. They know the street and its rules. Anyone who doesn’t learn will die like a fish who tries to breathe out of water because it thinks the water’s dirty. That’s the water where you were born and where you have to swim. You have to dominate so as not to be dominated. It’s not a question of good or bad. And that priest just doesn’t want to understand. It’s a question of dignity.
‘Take this to Maria,’ he says to Nuccio as he hands him the fish.
‘Sure thing.’
Nuccio couldn’t ask for anything better.
And with the package with the fish arrives the answer to Nuccio’s earlier question about the cemetery: ‘It’s like putting a piece of metal into a piece of flesh. Nothing more, nothing less.’
Nuccio goes into the courtyard of an apartment building with crumbling balconies and blinds colored pink by the sun. The aroma of boiled vegetables descends like a veil over the space. The sky is clear above, and what a beautiful day it is: Bright and warm, a day for the beach. Before he heads up, he looks in his bag and notices there is an envelope. He opens it and there are 200,000 lire for Maria. He puts the envelope in his pocket and walks up. He rings the doorbell and a girl with dark eyes like an Arab princess and blue bags under her eyes like a prostitute barely cracks open the door.
‘This is for you.’
‘Thanks.’
Maria extends her hand to grab the bag without opening the door any more. But Nuccio pushes her back with delicate forcefulness.
He goes into the kitchen and tosses the swordfish steak on the table. He turns and sets his eyes on Maria. He moves closer and puts his finger on the mascara streak that runs down her cheek. He presses the skin on her face and squeezes her mouth between his thumb and index finger as he takes what he is due.
Maria can feel hell enter her body. Her eyes are like those of a fish dumped out onto the shore. As they search for water, their spines convulse and whip about so violently that their extreme force nearly breaks the residue of life to which they still cling.
A piece of meat in a piece of meat can wound just as much.
Chapter 3
They are children like all children. But they have the uncontrollable sneer that strays have on nights when the sirocco blows. Francesco watches them. They laugh and he laughs, too. But he’s just pretending because he doesn’t want to feel left out.
The dog has a broken leg, a missing eye, and black liquid smeared on its side. He’s whimpering so he must have another hidden gash in his bag of bones. He’s as big as a German shepherd but he’s a mutt. You can tell from the unusual blend of colors and shapes he wears on his fur.
The apartment building is still under construction but has been forever abandoned to its mattresses and syringes. You can see roofs and uniform swaths of sky. Everything is rusted over and sharp, like the rods that emerge from cement blocks like iron bushes.
They drag the dog to the edge of what would be the kids’ playroom in the best of all possible worlds. That’s where he is supposed to lie down and dream of hunting and eating meat. Francesco wishes he were at school but this morning his mother didn’t drop him off, nor did she tell him to go on his own.
She didn’t even get up. And when she’s like this, all he wants to do is hit the streets. Last night, he heard her laughing until late. And then he heard her sobbing after she’d been left alone. He opens his eyes during the night and can hear his mother and the men who laugh with her. Then he closes and reopens them again to see if he’s dreaming. But even in the dark, the sounds are still there.
So in the morning, he got dressed by himself and he took to the street. The first street took him to Don Pino’s car and then his encounter with Nuccio. And then the street took him where it wanted to, where it decided to take him, where it ends.
Now Francesco wishes he were at school with Ms. Gabriella. She smells nice. There are colored walls in that little classroom where you don’t have to listen to the creaking bones of an animal won in a dogfight by a man who bets on its pain. No, it’s not nighttime there. It’s far from the basements of Via Hazon. That dog doesn’t have a name. A fighting dog doesn’t ever have a name.
There’s a big poster on the wall of the classroom with a large letter D. And there’s a drawing of a dog that’s not bleeding and doesn’t have a broken leg. It’s a whole dog and it’s clean, the way things should be. It’s a dog with happy eyes. But everyone knows that at school they teach you things the way they should be, not the way they are. Francesco can see the red drool drop from the mutilated teeth of the dog with no name.
He closes his eyes and then reopens them. But the drool is still there, dripping. There is no mirage, no nightmare, and no miracle either. Everything is real in Brancaccio, for better or for worse. He’d like to call that dog by a dog name. But he doesn’t know any dog names. Pino does, for sure. He repeats this to himself, as if the dog could hear him. The first name that comes to mind: Dog.
He’d like to see him get up again and be healed like the dog on the poster at school. But a dog can’t hear you if you just call him Dog. He could try Charlemagne, like the King of the Franks. That would be a perfect name for a dog. Everything is perfect, just the way it is supposed to be, on the posters at school: Cherries, gnomes, butterflies, fish, bottles . . . Ms. Gabriella knows some great stories about the drawings on the signs, like the one about the boy who is so good at swimming that he reminds people of a fish. They call him Colapesce, like the legendary Sicilian ‘fish man.’
One day, he stays in the water trying to find the bottom of the sea as everyone waits for him to come out. He goes to the beach when he’s worried that he will run into Colapesce. He’s afraid that he’ll see the fish man come out of the water. And that’s why he never swims far from shore. Then there is the story of the mermaid who wants to become a girl and she sprouts legs. But they are very sore because she’s never used them. Francesco loves these stories that mix men and fish and it’s not clear whether it’s a fish or a man or both.
His favorite time to go to the beach is when his mother comes with him and she puts on her green bathing suit and lets her beautiful hair down. Swimming underwater and opening his eyes and seeing all the things mixed up together the way they look when you open your eyes underwater. Then his eyes start burning. But he likes the silence underwater and he likes diving into the waves, under the waves, with the waves. The sea and his class at school are the only things that he likes.
Aside from his mother, everything beyond the posters at school is ugly. The houses don’t have roofs and white smoke coming out of the chimney tops. The dogs have broken backs and empty eye sockets. Cherries? He’s never even seen one, and bottles are used only for breaking with rocks.
And he’s scared. Especially when the hot wind outside is so strong that it makes the windows burst open. But he doesn’t have the courage to get up and go close them because maybe the wind will snatch him up and he will fly away. And he doesn’t have a dad who would go looking for him and bring him back home.
What Hell Is Not Page 2