Gigetto had looked Cirillo up and down, angry and puzzled. “The guy’s destroying everything, boss.”
“Let him be,” Cirillo had said.
After a while, Dino had slowed down, until he had stopped completely and dropped what was left of the cue and collapsed on the floor and started sobbing, propped up against one leg of the table with his hands over his eyes.
“What a pansy,” Gigetto had said.
Cirillo had looked at Dino for a few moments without moving, then had gone back to his table, put his cue down and taken a bunch of keys from his pocket. He had chosen one and stretched up towards one of the display cases hanging on the wall. He had stood there for a few seconds, looking at the cues in the case, then reached out his hand and taken out a colourful wooden one with little diamond-shaped inlays. He had closed the case again, put the keys back in his pocket, and with the cue in his hand walked calmly across the room.
When he had come level with Dino’s table, the boy was still there, sobbing, hunched over like a wet pine cone next to a leg of the table.
“Here,” Cirillo had said. “Try this one.”
Dino had opened his swollen eyes for a moment and sniffed for the umpteenth time. Standing in front of him, as straight as an officer, with no expression in his eyes that could be made out, there was Cirillo, and next to him, held firmly like a halberd, a colourful, shiny cue.
“What?” Dino had said, his voice still half-cracked.
“I said try this,” Cirillo had said.
Dino had looked at Cirillo again, then again at the cue, and after a few seconds, sniffing a few more times, he had got to his feet.
“It’s an Arlecchino,” Dino had said.
“I know it’s an Arlecchino,” Cirillo had said.
“They don’t make them any more,” Dino had said.
“I know they don’t make them any more,” Cirillo had said. “Take it.”
Timidly, Dino had held out his hand and taken hold of the cue. He had never held a cue like that before. It felt warm and alive, it felt as if it had been made by God himself, and for a moment Dino had wondered if there was a special knack to using it.
“Is it mine?” Dino had asked, looking again at Cirillo for a moment, with the hint of a smile coming back into his eyes.
“Like fuck it is,” Cirillo had said, and, throwing a last glance at his cue and at the boy, he had turned and started back towards his table. After a couple of steps he had stopped and turned and looked Dino straight in the eyes.
“And if you break this one,” he had said, “I’ll break your legs.”
One evening a few months later, at least a year and a half since Dino had succeeded in getting the ball to come back to its starting point, at a time when there were still a few people playing here and there, Cirillo had walked up to Dino’s table.
“How long is it since you last made a bad shot?” Cirillo had asked.
Dino was already leaning across the table, ready for another shot. He turned his head for a moment and stared at Cirillo for a few seconds. “Three days,” he had said as he straightened up in front of Cirillo, holding the Arlecchino in front of his chest with both hands. He seemed to have got older, and in his eyes there was that mixture of courage and sadness which Cirillo had seen, many years earlier, in the eyes of soldiers coming back from the front.
For a moment longer, Cirillo had continued looking that strange boy in the eyes, then he had taken a cigarette, put it in his mouth, lit it, taken a drag, and as he blew out the smoke tapped the cigarette lighter a few times on the edge of the table, then given a little laugh and taken another rapid glance at Dino. When this whole thing had started, he would have bet anything against him. To get the ball back to the exact same position from which it had started, and to do it every time—it was absurd, it was impossible, no one could do it. Even if they had tried, no one would be so crazy, so moronic, as to continue trying day after day. And if they hadn’t been mad when they started, they would certainly have gone mad as they went along, playing one break shot after another.
When, that day almost two years earlier, the boy had come up to his table and disturbed him, Cirillo had felt a kind of shock. But—and this was perhaps even more surprising—he hadn’t lost his temper. Anyone else who had disturbed Cirillo as he was playing, worse still, just as he was about to shoot— even thinking about it was like blasphemy—would, in the best of cases, have looked at like a madman, told in no uncertain terms to go away, and finally been given a thrashing he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Instead of which, for some reason it had seemed almost normal that this boy should interrupt his game—and his life—like that, and instead of his losing his temper, a kind of summer calm had descended on Cirillo. Of course, he had no intention of giving lessons—he had never taken any and he didn’t believe in them and would never give them. Billiards was a battlefield, in which every trajectory intersected until they formed the thickest of forests, so thick that you didn’t know how to get out of it or how to defend yourself, but in which you had to find the direction by yourself. Billiards was a matter of muscles and heart, and you had to learn for yourself how to take the blows and get out alive. That was Cirillo’s billiards, a world of stinking parlours and dirty baize, money laid on the edge of the table, sometimes binges after a game, hunger and pains in the stomach when you lost your bearings—until that magical evening fifteen years earlier, when he had beaten two-thirds of the room with a perfect shot, hitting two cushions, then knocking his opponent’s ball straight into the castle. Those who were present still remembered that game between Cirillo and the Baron, still talked about it with that gleam in their eyes that people get when they’ve seen something that can’t really be put into words.
“Let’s do something,” Cirillo had said, still tapping the silver cigarette lighter on the edge of the table. “I don’t give lessons, I don’t believe in them. But if you like we can play together. Whenever you like. Maybe tomorrow.”
“OK,” Dino had said, and inside him there were thirty or forty people crying in every corner of his body.
“See you tomorrow, then,” Cirillo had said, a half-smile hovering over his lips.
“See you tomorrow.”
Cirillo had tapped the cigarette lighter on the table a couple more times, more loudly, then had turned and started walking back to his own table.
“What about this?”
Cirillo had stopped and turned to look back at Dino, who had bent the Arlecchino slightly to one side, as if to show it.
“You can carry on using it, if you like,” Cirillo had said. “And if you manage to beat me it’s yours.”
Chapter Nine
DINO DIDN’T REALLY KNOW where to go, or even how to go back to his friends, who were still laying those round pieces of stone that had started to look more like corpses. That was how Dino saw himself and his workmates now—gravediggers dressed in black, moving like automata, throwing down corpses of stone, pale and tired and travelling along an avenue that led to darkness. That day everything ended in darkness, in that filthy, sticky black sludge that Dino had seen for the first time when he had gone to visit his cousin who was ill.
“Hi,” Dino had said when he had got to the hospital and was at his cousin’s bedside.
“Hi,” his cousin had said, in a thin voice.
“So how are you?” Dino had asked, as if everything was normal. There were tubes in his cousin’s nose and arms, and a funny machine with a strange coloured thing that passed behind a dark pane of glass and every now and again made a weird noise.
“I’m dying,” Dino’s cousin had said, with a smile and a shrug, his voice not much more than a breath.
Dino had nodded, and for a moment he, too, had smiled. “It happens,” he had said.
This cousin had often met up with Dino in the centre of town, and they had all gone around in a group, boys and girls, and Dino had shown him a good time.
“Yes, it happens,” his cousin had sighed, trying to laugh a bit.
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For a few moments, the two of them had fallen silent, while the machine kept making that strange sound, beating time.
“Listen,” Dino had said after a while, “what is all that stuff on the roads?”
“What stuff ?” Dino’s cousin had sighed again, then he had had a little coughing fit, making the bed squeak.
“I don’t know,” Dino had said. “It’s black.”
His cousin had raised his eyebrows a little, slightly bewildered, and looked at Dino. “It’s asphalt,” he had said after a while, and sighed.
Dino had looked at him gravely for a few seconds, as if all at once that stuff had come into the room, or as if it had been that stuff that had seeped into his cousin’s bones and dragged him onto that deathbed.
“Shit,” Dino had said looking his cousin straight in the eyes. When Dino got to the site, the others were working as usual. Duilio and Blondie were on their knees on the ground, laying the stones in the damp base, while some distance away Saeed was watering the ground with a long tube attached to the pump of the old tanker truck. From time to time, Duilio would look up to see what Blondie was doing and sometimes, saying “Hey” or giving him a blow with the end of the little hammer if he was closer, would tell him to straighten the stones or not to turn them so much. It was quite annoying, as Dino must surely know, but in the end, with no little effort, even Blondie had learnt to bear it. Above all, he had learnt that most of the time, for reasons he didn’t entirely understand, Duilio was right.
Saeed, on the other hand, would from time to time spurt a little water in Duilio’s direction and grin. “HEY!” Duilio would yell, jerking backwards. This was something that Dino had done when he was younger, on sunny days. It was odd—it was as if this whole business of putting the stones down on the road carried with it a whole world of gestures and habits that each person had to learn for himself. The funny thing was then to continue spurting some water at Duilio, and watch him yell “HEY!” every time like a caveman, and make that sudden movement with his back, but the best thing of all, after at least six or seven of these heys, was to see the tiny, elderly figure of Duilio all at once, at the umpteenth spurt, jump to his feet with surprising agility and yell, red in the face, “HEEYY! I’ll stick that tube up your arse, got that? Son of a bitch!” Then, with the same speed with which he had leapt to his feet, he would crouch down again and resume work as if nothing had happened. And the nice thing was that none of the anger in that outburst lasted any time at all—as soon as he was back at work he became the same polite, taciturn Duilio as ever, as if he didn’t even remember what had happened.
Dino came level with his workmates. Saeed spurted some more water in Duilio’s direction, and Duilio gave his usual backwards jerk and yelled his usual “HEY!” Blondie looked up at Saeed and they smiled at each other, then turned towards Dino.
“Hello, boys,” Dino said, also trying to smile. “I have to talk to you for a minute.”
Saeed and Blondie didn’t quite know how to interpret that not very convincing half-smile, or the fact that Dino hadn’t taken his hands out of his jacket, but Duilio had known immediately that something was wrong. He knew Dino too well not to recognise in his eyes when something bad was brewing. He had seen him playing when he was a little boy, he had seen him laying his first stones together with his father. He had seen him laugh and cry, and none of the nuances in between held much of a secret for him any more.
“What’s happened, son?” Duilio asked.
“It’s better if we go over there,” Dino said.
Saeed shut off the tap controlling the water then went to turn off the pump on the tanker truck, while Blondie helped Duilio to his feet.
“Getting older,” Duilio said.
They all went up on the pavement and took up positions, leaning on a lamp post, perching on the edge of the barrow or sitting on sacks of earth. They all looked at Dino, who continued standing there with his hands in his pockets and that weary half-smile on his face.
Dino glanced at them and then kicked a little stone. “They’re going to use asphalt,” he said, looking the other three in the eyes.
Saeed, Duilio and Blondie looked at each other uncomprehendingly.
“What?” Duilio said.
“THEY’RE GOING TO USE ASPHALT!” Dino said, raising his voice. “They’re going to use asphalt,” he said again, kicking another little stone.
“Asphalt?” Duilio said with a frown.
“Yes, asphalt,” Dino said, nodding, his chin jutting out, his hands spreading in the pockets of his jacket.
“What means, ‘They’re going to use asphalt’?” Saeed said.
“It means the town council have decided there’s no more money, so they’re going to use asphalt to surface the streets.”
“What about stones?” Blondie asked, in that strange hard foreign accent of his.
“No more stones, Blondie. They’ll be covered over with asphalt.”
“But is not possible!” Blondie said.
“Yes, it is,” Dino said. “It’s possible.”
Saeed took a step back and kicked the lamp post. “Fuck,” he said.
All four of them were silent for a while, each staring ahead of him at a different spot, looking for roads that stretched away in unknown directions.
“What about us?” Saeed asked after a while.
Dino raised his eyes and looked straight at Saeed. “Each of us can do what he likes,” he said. “I hired you to lay stones, but the council hired you to surface the streets. Those who want to can stay and learn how to lay asphalt, those who don’t want to can go, and nobody will make any fuss.” He was silent for a moment longer, while the others all glanced at him in turn. “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t even have to finish this street.”
Duilio raised his head abruptly. “Are you crazy?” he said. “The street has to be finished, fuck it, even if it’s the last street I do. And fuck asphalt.”
The others laughed and then, as if everything was normal, they all went back to work.
When Dino got home that evening, Sofia knew immediately that something had happened. Dino had that look in his eyes of someone who has seen a world that will no longer be the same, and still doesn’t quite know which way to turn. He had not even gone to the billiard parlour and, instead of blue chalk marks, his hands still bore the marks of earth and work.
“Have you been working all this time?” Sofia asked him from the kitchen, with a ladle in her hand.
“No, I went for a walk,” Dino said, hanging his jacket on the coat stand and coming towards Sofia.
“Hi,” he said, planting a kiss on her lips and a hand on her belly. “How’s he doing?” Then he turned and took something from one of the shelves in the kitchen.
Sofia grabbed him by a corner of his sleeve. “Come here,” she said. “What’s the matter?” She pulled him to her, trying in vain to get him to look her in the eyes.
“Nothing, don’t worry,” Dino said, trying to smile. “Everything will be all right, you’ll see.” He kissed Sofia on the forehead and turned away. He opened a cabinet, took a glass, filled it with water and drank it all in one go. Then he placed his hands on the shelf of the cabinet and stood there like that, his face to the wall and his head half-bowed.
Sofia again took a few steps towards him and placed a hand on his back. “What’s the matter?” she asked in a low voice.
Dino heaved a deep sigh and raised his head slightly. “They’re going to use asphalt,” he said, still with his back to her, then after a few seconds he turned. His eyes were swollen with something he couldn’t find his way out of. “No more stones.”
Sofia moved closer and slipped into his arms. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Chapter Ten
DINO AND SOFIA were still in the middle of their dinner when they heard knocking at the door. Puzzled, they stopped and looked at each other.
Dino frowned, put his fork down on his plate and wiped his mouth with a napkin and got up and went to
open the door. Outside stood Duilio, wearing a pair of greyish trousers, an old brown velvet jacket a little bit too big for him and a green felt hat that was different from the one he usually wore to work.
“Oh,” Dino said. “Duilio.”
“Hi, son, can I come in?” Duilio asked, with a slightly sad look on his face.
“Of course,” Dino said, and opened the door wide.
“Thanks,” Duilio said, lowering his head as he came in.
When he was inside and saw Sofia sitting at the table with a half-full plate in front of her, he gave a little start, quickly took off his hat and threw Dino an embarrassed look. “Oh, you’re still eating,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ll come back later. Or maybe tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry,” Dino said, closing the door and going back to his seat. “No problem. Would you like something?”
“No, thanks,” Duilio said. “I’ve already eaten.”
Dino had picked up his fork and plunged it in his food. “Sit down,” he said, indicating one of the other chairs with his chin, then reached out and filled an unused glass with wine.
“Thanks,” Duilio said, nodding, then stepped forward to the chair, holding his hat in front of his chest with both hands. He put his hat to one side and sat down, still looking as tense as when he had come in. “Good evening, Sofia,” he said, bowing his head again slightly in greeting.
“Hi, Duilio,” Sofia smiled, before plunging her fork back into her food.
Dino pushed the glass of wine towards Duilio, then took a sip of his own.
“You eat late,” Duilio said, picking up the glass with thumb and finger and raising it to his mouth.
It was funny seeing Duilio outside work, it was like suddenly realising that he was a man, too, an old man just as shy and embarrassed as anyone else, not that rough beast of burden who was quite capable of spending all day bent over the road without uttering a single word.
“Sofia usually waits for me to come back from the billiard parlour,” Dino said, shoving a forkful of food in his mouth.
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