Three, Imperfect Number
Page 1
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2012 by Edizioni E/O
First publication 2013 by Europa Editions
Translation by Antony Shugaar
Original Title: Tre, numero imperfetto
Translation copyright © 2013 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609451677
Patrizia Rinaldi
THREE, IMPERFECT NUMBER
Translated from the Italian
by Antony Shugaar
Dedicated to Giulia and Maurizio,
and to their words:
Begin. Go on.
It’s such a simple thing to make love.
It’s like being thirsty and drinking.
Nothing could be simpler than being thirsty and drinking;
quenching one’s thirst, feeling satisfaction at having done so;
no longer feeling thirst. Utterly simple.
—LEONARDO SCIASCIA, One Way or Another
PROLOGUE
Gennaro Mangiavento, stage name Jerry Vialdi, pulls past a line of tour buses along the Via Guglielmo Marconi. He parks his S.S.C. Napoli-sky-blue Fiat 500 and blesses it for its compact size:
At last, I can do without the Porsche Carrera. Now I’m finally my true self.
He looks at the people who have just stepped off the tour buses. The women are dressed in evening gowns at five o’clock in the afternoon, sequins glittering against sweat-sodden makeup.
Look at these rubes, here already. They can write articles about me in the New York Times, but the real money still comes from the usual crowd of ragtag losers. I flew all the way down to South America to bring back Sanjoval, with trumpet and all, but has it done me a bit of good? I promoted that minimal pussycat to the rank of poet with the aid of my beautiful voice and piano, and has it done me a bit of good? I’ve had women, men, and money by the shovelful, but has it done me a bit of good?
Vialdi sits in his car and remembers.
Right here is where I picked and chose among the rejected lyricists, because they treat me with respect inside the RAI building; they have no choice but to put on their smiles, and Zampani lets me use his studio which by now is practically mine, since he’s never there. When they came to see me to be hired, they’d say: I’m Antonio D’Antonio and I’m a writer. I’m Mario Coppola and I’m an experimental author. I’m Ferdinando Colasunto and I’m a poet. I always only had one answer: I’m Jerry Vialdi and I’ve got bad news for you: before I count to five you’d better be the fuck out of here. What the hell! Then the minimal pussycat, Gatta Mignon, showed up, a name I came up with personally, and short and rickety as she was, she opened her mouth and started to speak. She didn’t say I’m a poet, I’m a writer, I’m experimentally good at this or that, instead she said, “You are the voice that stirs desire.” That’s what she said. And I took her on, because as far as ugly goes, she was ugly, but once she started talking I forgot all about that; if I could forget the fact while I was looking right at her, then Pussycat Mignon, without her face before them, could have satiated vast populations with her words. We’d sell them like hotcakes. The exact opposite of Rosina, who decided she was done with me last year, the fool. If Rosina wants to maintain her credibility, what she has to do is keep her mouth shut tight: short red hair she has, a flaming brushfire that only needs to be kindled, along with first-class thighs and neck. I didn’t want to take her on at first because I used to go out on the town and run after women with her husband; I knew him well and it seemed wrong somehow. But then Rosina got my blood pumping and I decided to hire her anyway, because if there’s one thing I like it’s when one of God’s creatures can go head-to-head with me, or lose their heads entirely. Rosina never stopped hating me, which is always worth something: when she meets me now her eyes light up, even worse than that brushfire, and one of these days she’s going to run me down with the car I gave her. Mara, the pharmacist, represents a completely different level of danger, a far more ferocious one. Sometimes I make a date with her and then stand her up: frankly, Mara’s thighs and legs frighten me, inside her stockings she carries a violent madness. She’s particularly good at the work she does. One night, she saved me from an attack of vertigo. I called her and she came, and when I saw her standing there with the hypodermic needle in one hand, I thought to myself: here we go, this is the part where she kills me. Instead, she healed me. Not Julia, she’s a flower, a blossoming rose, a delicate jasmine bud in full season. Of course, there’s some tarnish on her bloom, because she’s seen more than a few seasons in her time. She never makes high-handed demands, she’s happy to take what we are for what we are; she’s a different breed of woman, she’s held onto her soul. I don’t know how she’s done it. I couldn’t say, but perhaps she alone can conjure my soul back into existence. In any case, the most womanly of them all is still Gigi, and when he gets his claws into me he never lets me go, he’s never even heard of the word soul or anything remotely resembling it. When he came into this world all he brought with him was his flesh; the spirit of the world beyond is something they clipped away along with his umbilical cord. He’s a stunningly handsome devil. Forget about brushfires, he’s got an eternal flame burning inside his chest. He’s an advocate of pure evil and bad weather, his mouth spews gold and sea salt.
Vialdi gets out of the car. The flashing headlights tell him that the antitheft system is doing its job.
A woman in her fifties with rhinestone-studded shoes walks up to him.
“You’re so good-looking, Jerry, you want to sign my record?”
“What do you have here, Signora? Did you dismantle the brakes on that bus?”
“What a charmer you are. You just have to make the dedication out to Annina.” You have to do this, you have to do that. Jerry Vialdi’s whole life has been a race to escape from what you have to and what I tell you to, and still they catch up with him. Almost invariably.
“I don’t do dedications.”
Before turning to enter the RAI building in Fuorigrotta, the ex-wedding singer and, later in his career, ex-neomelodic pop singer and, later still, ex-folk and traditional singer, and even later still ex-Ariston singer, then ex-star of musicals, until he finally became a sensitive singer winning the acclaim of the most discerning critics, turns and speaks to the looming horizon of the Polytechnic:
“If I’m ever reborn, I’m going to become an engineer and to hell with music and these ragtag losers in evening dress.”
At the front door, the security guard doesn’t bother asking for his pass, asking instead for predictions on the championship match.
“How’s it going to go, boss?”
“This year is the year, brother, but we can’t say it and we can’t even think it because it’ll bring terrible luck.”
Jerry Vialdi leaves nothing to improvisation; he even rehearses his smiles in front of the mirror. In his dressing room he checks his image; he twists his head to one side, swings one hand up to cover his chest, spreads his fingers wide and presses them against his sternum, then smiles:
“You are,” pause, “you are all my own warm heart of love.”
The concert is a success; the sole annoyance is the excessive applause, distinctly not to his liking: he wants to include a few of the b
etter numbers in his next live album. Well, they have technicians to take care of that.
In spite of all the depth of his musical erudition, he inevitably hits the high point of the evening with the same song: a crass little ditty featuring words of furtive sex in a car and the subsequent return home to his cuckolded wife. The phrase Tu, solo tu, sei tu—you, only you, it’s you—of the refrain is the song’s earworm.
A bona fide piece of crap. What came over Pussycat Mignon when she wrote it? Who can say? But I surely never thought she could serve up such a generous helping of tripe! She turned in the lyrics four years ago. Let’s set it to some fast-paced tune, loaded with percussion and blam-blam guitar riffs, she said. I objected, it’s just too gruesome, I told her. You’ll make enough money to buy a penthouse with another penthouse on top of it, she told me. And she was right. When I moved into the double-decker penthouse in Pozzuoli with a view of the water I nailed platinum honors to the walls, tributes to an awful song and a fraudulent confection of percussion and blam-blam guitar riffs. And as usual, the money came and quickly left. Money: it scampers off on quick little cat’s feet, the elusive imp.
Jerry Vialdi strips off his basic black stage outfit and fine-tunes his street clothes of autumn-hued cashmere and corduroy trousers. The end of any concert still pumps him up to a boastful pitch and he channels it into a flood of beauty and rare courage.
He caresses his inside jacket pocket, whispers for later and drinks, with short sips, a foretaste of death.
1.
Detective Arcangelo Liguori was experiencing a moment of pure grace.
Even the sheer absence of minor defects forced him to admit how lucky he was. Even his fifty odd years, which were more odd than even, struck him once again as few and useful.
He told himself that perhaps it was all due to August in Sicily and in Ireland, the love affairs remembered and archived, the rediscovery of his body in a late-breaking recovery of various activities. Perhaps it was a reward for his ability to think quickly about situations that did not concern him and which therefore tickled his curiosity just enough. The void had filled up with lovely and chaotic dovetailing elements.
He was feeling good, and that made him dangerous, now that he could turn his improved mood to the pursuit he found most congenial: spoiling the good mood of everyone else around him, first and foremost among their ranks Captain Martusciello.
In October, his vitality hadn’t diminished by so much as a fluid ounce and so, the minute he got back from the police station of Fuorigrotta, he strode into the administrative offices of Pozzuoli and went in search of Martusciello.
Captain Vincenzo Martusciello had spent what little summer vacation police regulations afforded him at a cut-rate holiday resort, with his wife Santina, his daughter Giulia, and his granddaughter.
Him, of all people—a man who refused to set foot on Procida in August for fear of succumbing to his phobia of crowds—had sunk to the level of bartering his family’s dignity for a miniclub. Upon contact with the place, the children had shown no obvious signs of fatal pathologies. Though it wasn’t clear why.
At the discount beach club, the sea was like a vast plain, the sand belonged to lands that had never seen rain. The local sunshine had killed off any breezes and stowed them away in the dreary ice-cream receptacles.
After a while, Martusciello stopped thinking of himself as a husband, a father, and a grandfather, and had gained a new respect for certain land animals that were capable of reproducing without seeing the need to stick around afterwards.
The line for the swings had given him an indelible sense of melancholy and an uncomfortable realization: expectations for the future were deader than the stillborn breezes.
During the time he spent at the enchanting Ghiglia Resort, which he mentally referred to as Fanghiglia Resort—Bubbling Ooze Resort—he had half-persuaded himself that at least getting back to work would be a pleasure. He even expected to enjoy the morning commute on the ancient subway line, a term that was laughably applied to junkable train cars running on creaky old tracks.
But that’s not the way it went.
The sticky brine of melancholy and relentless boredom had remained stuck to his heart, under his feet, and in the usual stab of pain on the right side of his body.
Upon his return, another inconvenience was joined to the long list of tiresome issues. The police captain found himself spending a week in the Ultramarine medical clinic, covered by his health plan, for the removal of a bodily appendage that he preferred not to discuss.
Laziness had been October’s response. Walking the streets until he was ankle-deep in them no longer warmed his heart. He felt no interest in human beings, animals, the streetscapes of alleys, lanes, and piazzas, that reasoning of emotion and logic that had always induced him to undertake depositions and interrogations with the eagerness of a marathon runner.
Indignation had gone to ground and, with it, the desire to stage and restage the experience of life, like a stubborn village mule that only follows the route that it knows and yearns for, however unfashionable it may be.
His wife Santina, who was visibly rejuvenating for reasons unknown, gazed at him with a consummate love that plucked at his nerves.
“So tonight, again, you’re not working, you’re not going out?”
“I’m not going out.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve tormented me for most of a healthy lifetime with your why aren’t you staying in’s and now you’re starting on me with why aren’t you going out’s?”
“Do as you like.”
As you like. Sure. There was nothing he liked, there was nothing that interested him. He just wanted to step out of the line for the swings.
Liguori made his way to Martusciello’s office by a roundabout route through a series of corridors, in order to avoid running into Deputy Peppino Carità, who had informed one and all that he preferred to be addressed as Giuseppe Càrita—literally and precisely, with the accent weirdly on the first a instead of the last. This new development seemed to date back to the diction and acting course that he had taken recently.
Martusciello pretended to talk into the Bakelite telephone that had accompanied him in his migrations from one office to another.
Liguori made himself comfortable and conveyed, with hand gestures, that he really wasn’t in a hurry. Then he gave the police captain one of his goofy half-smiles, which reckoned up the sum of annoyance added to mockery.
Martusciello jutted his chin in the direction of the telephone and waved his free hand in the air to say this may go on for some time. The detective spread out the other half of his smile to say I’m in no hurry, and then went over to the window and stood, looking out.
Even though it was nearly noon, the colors hadn’t yet merged into the hot haze of muggy sunlight. The sea lay there, crystal clear, the tiny waves sweeping in toward the waterfront, topped with foamy white crests. Even at this distance, the dark blue was still blue, the white was still white. The ferry boats to the various islands boarded a few scattered foreign tourists. Liguori surveyed the improvised seamen’s uniforms. He ran one hand over his linen shirt before sliding it into the pocket of his duck trousers, artfully wrinkled as they descended to meet the tops of his expensive leather shoes, which had cost as much as half of Giuseppe Càrita’s monthly pay.
Martusciello broke off his phone conversation with a nonexistent colleague.
“Ah, gallant cavalier, a pleasure to see you!”
“Oh, it’s been such a long time since I’ve been addressed by one of my rightful titles!”
Martusciello called Liguori cavalier, squire, proprietor of vast property, gentleman and scholar, prince, professor, count, and any other number of titles evocative of rank and learning. He liked to emphasize the fact that the detective had chosen to go into policework for his own amusement, not out of economic necessity or class affilia
tion.
Liguori’s family had been members of the Neapolitan aristocracy for long centuries of sobriety and prestige, and Captain Martusciello spotlighted the sharp difference from his own birth by dragging out his s’s and putting on working-class dialect and aspirations.
“What now?”
“Someone’s been murdered, Vialdi, the singer.”
“’O ssaccio. I know. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Captain, what do you mean, what do I want you to do about it? Did you get a new job and forget to tell me?”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t, but the Vialdi headache belongs to Captain Malanò and his Fuorigrotta office. And you just wait and see, that case isn’t going to be just his for long, because Vialdi and the way they found his body is going to prompt a general outbreak of rubbernecking. The same itch you’re here scratching right now.”
Deputy Peppino Carità, alias Giuseppe Càrita, walked into the office with a tray and a demitasse cup.
Martusciello gave every sign of dismay.
Carità ignored him, continuing to stride toward the desk in a contrived posture, every muscle straining to make him look taller.
Liguori laughed.
“Are you wearing elevator shoes? Lift your pants leg, let me see.”
The deputy froze to attention.
“No elevator shoes, sir.”
“Sir?” Martusciello walked toward him, took the tray out of his hands, and set it down on his desk. “Peppino, ever since you’ve started doing amateur theater, you’ve gone soft in the head. And why have you stopped making coffee yourself? Why do you order in from the bar?”
“Giuseppe, if you don’t mind. There’s no regulation currently in force requiring me to make coffee.”