The girl frowned.
‘So you’re not–what is it?–credente?’
‘A believer? Of course. I’m a fervent Protestant.’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely. I protest against everything.’
Flavia’s frown deepened.
‘I try to watch the news, but I can’t always understand.’
He leaned over and kissed her pale face.
‘I don’t mean the small screen, I mean the big picture. And there’s nothing to understand. Or better, nothing that can be understood. Deterministic materialism is the only game left in town. The intellectual high rollers have figured out the odds down to the last decimal point, and basically they agree with Vincenzo. Details aside, the deal is that shit happens.’
From the hallway, as if on cue, came the sound of the toilet flushing. There followed various unidentifiable thumps and bumps, and finally the slam of the other bedroom door.
‘Yes,’ said Flavia.
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, I understand. But…’
She fell silent.
‘What?’ Rodolfo insisted.
But Flavia shook her head in that decisive way she had.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘It’s none of my business anyway. What do I know about this country, what’s normal and what’s not? I’m just passing through. Another piece of shit working its way through the system.’
Rodolfo chose to regard this as a challenge.
‘Tell me anyway,’ he insisted, rolling over and holding her.
‘No. It would be invadente.’
This gave him a chance to lighten the mood.
‘But you are an invader!’ he declared, clutching his chest with one hand and flinging the other out dramatically. ‘Not only have you invaded my country, but also…’
He was about to add ‘my heart’, but realised just in time that under the circumstances this might not sound like ironic hyperbole but simply hurtful. Lost in her own thoughts, Flavia seemed to pay no attention to the unfinished sentence.
‘He reminds me of…’
She broke off to shake the ash from her cigarette into the saucer by the bed.
‘He’s very beautiful,’ she finally added inconsequentially.
Again Rodolfo made an attempt at humour.
‘Believe me, if I had a single gay gene in my body…’
Flavia seemed uninterested in this speculation.
‘But he’s wicked,’ she said, as if pointing out the logical conclusion of her argument.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Flavia did not seem troubled by either his manner or the question.
‘I probably used the wrong word. Or maybe this thing doesn’t exist here.’
Aradiant smile appeared for a moment, transfiguring her intimidatingly regular features.
‘But you spoke of genes in your body,’ she continued, expressionless again. ‘Well, I have my own genes, and one of them gives me a very clear sense of this thing, whatever you call it.’
She stubbed out her cigarette and lay back.
‘Vincenzo’s just a spoilt brat,’ Rodolfo said in a dismissive undertone. ‘Father’s a lawyer, mother has a pretend job with the giunta regionale fixing up artsy exhibitions and the like. Typical Bolognese upper middle class, in short, with a history of mild political activism when young that makes them socially acceptable now, and enough disposable income to take pricey “alternative” vacations in the Lofoten Islands or wherever. It’s all the usual clichés, so Vincenzo’s done the clichéd thing and rebelled against the family life he can return to any time he wants. He skips his classes and exams, hangs out with a bunch of low-lifes at the football stadium, and drinks to excess. But evil? He doesn’t have the balls to be evil. Or anything else for that matter. The guy’s just a wanker.’
Flavia just lay there, gazing up as though at a distant light faintly visible through the ceiling.
‘Nevertheless, I know such people,’ she said at last. ‘Even though I never met them, I know them. Can you understand? Ion Antonescu, Gheorghiu-Dej, Corneliu Codreanu…I know them very well.’
Rodolfo yawned. It was late, and he had a lot of revision to do for Ugo’s seminar the following day. His attitude to his renowned tutor had become much more overtly confrontational of late, so he’d better be able to demonstrate a flawless grasp of the subject.
‘Who are they?’ he murmured.
‘Which one?’
‘Any of them. The last one.’
‘Codreanu? King Carol had him killed in 1938. Two years later Antonescu overthrew the monarchy and turned the state into a dictatorship run by the Legion of the Archangel Michael, otherwise known as the Iron Guard.’
Rodolfo yawned again and embraced her.
‘You’re Scheherazade, spinning me crazy stories to keep me awake all night. You and your Ruritania! I don’t believe the place even exists.’
Flavia nodded.
‘It’s never been very real, particularly if you happened to be a “stateless alien” of Hungarian or Jewish origin. But it does exist. And some of the things that happened there definitely weren’t imaginary.’
‘Like what?’
It was Flavia’s turn to rise, though with evident reluctance, to the perceived challenge.
‘Like the sealed rooms. They couldn’t afford gas chambers, so they just locked them up and left them to suffocate.’
Rodolfo leaned over her and took a cigarette.
‘What’s all this got to do with Vincenzo, precisely?’ he enquired in the pedantic tone, unwittingly borrowed from Professor Ugo himself, that he employed in the latter’s classes.
Flavia took a long time to answer, as though her reply had to travel all the way back from the planet she had been observing earlier, situated at a distance that made even light lame.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said at last. ‘I know only that he is very strong. So am I, but I may not be here to take care of you. And you are not strong, caro mio. You’re very sweet and intelligent, but you’re weak. The man you are living with is none of those things. So be careful.’
4
Gemma Santini stood in her nightdress, dispassionately surveying the ravages of time in the mirror above the dressing table. Not too bad, all things considered, was her conclusion. Some decorative details might have succumbed to wear and tear, and the odd patch of pediment gone missing, but the Goths and Vandals had yet to lay waste to everything in sight. In short, she still felt reasonably confident that she could get a date, if it should come to that.
Which it very well might, she reflected. This was an uncomfortable thought, but Gemma had never felt at ease with anything but the truth, however inconvenient it might be. Facts had to be faced, whether they were the facts about her own face, as reflected in the bedroom mirror, or about the man in her life, as reflected in the kaleidoscopic sequence of grotesque and disturbing patterns into which their life together had recently disintegrated. Gemma took a modest pride in being a truth-teller who did not spare herself or others; a realist who, whatever mistakes she might make, could recognise them as such and learn to stop making them. And she was beginning to consider her relationship with Aurelio Zen as just such a mistake.
Another characteristic of hers was that having come to this decision–or at least contemplated the possibility of doing so–she had not the slightest interest, unlike her partner, in endlessly analysing the hows, whats, whens and whys of the situation. At the same time she took a certain satisfaction from knowing that if she had chosen to play this game, she could have beaten Zen hollow. There were, for instance, two crucial factors involved of which he remained totally unaware. One he might be forgiven for, since it was a family matter which Gemma had kept from him. He had only himself to blame for his ignorance, however. If you make it abundantly clear that certain concerns of other people are of not the slightest interest to you, it is only to be expected that they will spare you any details of subsequent developments.
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br /> The other factor was Zen’s hypochondria, in the broadest sense of the term, encompassing not only a morbid anxiety about his health but also chronic depression. Of this, Gemma had originally been as unaware as Zen still was that she herself might be going to become a grandmother. Looking back, she had perhaps been a little slow on the uptake, but then she’d had plenty of reasons for wishing it not to be true. But by now the evidence appeared incontrovertible. First there had been Zen’s endless complaints about abdominal pains and a vague sense of lassitude. Then, once it became clear that he had no intention of seeing a doctor of his own free will, Gemma had had to browbeat and virtually strong-arm him into doing so. Diagnosis had proved to be another series of hurdles, involving trips first to the local hospital and then to a private clinic in Rome, where the consultant that Zen was revisiting that day had prescribed a surgical intervention which was reported to have been ‘routine and without complications’. The patient, on the other hand, seemed to regard this everyday procedure as a nightmarish and potentially lethal ordeal comparable with being the first-ever recipient of a brain transplant.
And so it had gone on ever since. Like any pharmacist in a culture where, even by strictly legal criteria, the profession is granted considerable discretionary powers, Gemma had her share of regulars who frequently dropped in to discuss their latest ailments and general state of health before asking her to supply ‘a little something’ to alleviate their symptoms which, however, were ‘not worth bothering the doctor with’. Nevertheless, she had never before encountered a full-blown case of paranoid hypochondria until Zen returned home to recuperate after his discharge from the clinic.
She had initially been indulgent, reasoning that he would soon pull himself together and return to normal. Not only was there still no sign of this, but he seemed to come up with a fresh complaint every day. If it wasn’t backache, it was toothache. When those afflictions lost their novelty, he claimed to have terrible migraines that made sleep impossible, so that he felt–there was a lot about his feelings–utterly exhausted, confused and depressed. He couldn’t think straight, he couldn’t remember anything, and he certainly couldn’t go back to his job. He’d finally realised how important his work was to him, and now he would never be able to work again. In short, he no longer recognised himself. ‘I just don’t feel like me any longer,’ he’d moaned. ‘It’s as if a thread has broken somewhere and the whole fabric is unravelling before my eyes.’ These melodramatic displays had finally pushed Gemma’s patience to its limits, and the result had been some quite lively rows, followed by long periods of sullen silence. Zen had apparently adopted the tactic of pointedly ‘not speaking’ to her, which she was only too happy to reciprocate. But things plainly couldn’t go on like this much longer.
When the phone rang, she nearly didn’t answer it, suspecting that it would be her former lover, as she now thought of him, soliciting a lift from the station, or even from Florence. But the caller turned out to be her son. This was as welcome as it was unusual. It had almost always been Gemma who initiated contact with Stefano, particularly after she had made the mistake of touching ever so lightly on various aspects of his new situation which she privately found worrisome in the extreme. Neither mother nor son had much small talk, but both made a show of chatting briefly about neutral topics such as the weather and Zen’s health before Stefano got to the point.
‘Actually, Lidia and I were wondering if you could come up here some time.’
‘To Bologna?’
‘Well, yes. This weekend, if you’re free.’
‘Has something happened?’
She tried to keep an edge of urgency out of her tone, without complete success. Stefano had obviously been expecting this question.
‘We’ve got lots to tell you, but let’s wait till you come. If you’re able, that is. But it’s hard for us to get away, and…’
‘Don’t be silly! Of course I’ll come.’
She replaced the phone with mixed emotions. On the one hand she was looking forward to getting away from her own domestic problems, on the other she was already concerned about those that might await her at the other end. She could think of at least three main possibilities, none of them good. But they would have to be faced anyway, and a change of scenery was a definite bonus.
The echo of a door shutting in the stairwell, followed by a series of trudging, faltering footsteps, warned her that her significant other had returned. She quickly turned off the light, dived into bed, pulled the covers over her face, and was to all appearances deeply asleep by the time that Aurelio Zen hesitantly pushed open the door.
5
Flanked by two beaming bimbettes wearing smiles as big as their boobs and very little else, Romano Rinaldi grasped the wooden handle of the Parmesan dagger and held it dramatically above his head.
‘And now, like an Aztec priest performing the ultimate sacrifice, I open the heart of this cheese, the very heart of Italy!’ he cried, plunging the cutter home and simultaneously bursting into a rendering of Verdi’s ‘Celeste Aida’ that went on, and on, and on.
In the soundproofed control booth, Delia’s glance met that of the director.
‘Coked again,’ she muttered.
‘You amaze me,’ the director replied drily.
He touched a button on the console before him.
‘Technical edit,’ he said. ‘Romano, the teleprompt script to camera three, please.’
He switched off the microphone link to the studio beyond the triple-glazed window.
‘I’ll cut in some of that promotional footage the producers’ association sent us,’ he said with a brief, harsh laugh. ‘Maybe one of those scenes with lots of cows. Then lay Lo Chef’s big aria under, fade it out and meld to the teleprompt VO with cutaways to him gabbing to camera.’
‘You’re a star, Luciano.’
‘Thank God for digital is all. The trailer segment has to be ready to air tomorrow. In the old days, that would have taken Christ knows how many man-hours. Even with the money the parmigiani are slipping us under the table, we’d still have had a hard time costing out.’
Delia nodded vaguely. She looked, and was, preoccupied.
‘How much longer till wrap-up?’ she asked.
‘Where our Romano’s involved, who knows? The studio’s booked till noon, just to be on the safe side. As long as he doesn’t manage to eviscerate himself with that Parmesan cleaver, we should be finished by then.’
Lo Chef’s voice boomed out over the speakers set against the padded wall.
‘…sixteen litres of the finest, richest, freshest milk to make a single kilo of this, the Jupiter of cheeses lording it over the rabble of minor gods. And then as much as two years of completely natural ageing, according to traditions handed down over seven centuries of continuous production, with no artificial manipulation to influence the process…’
Delia walked over and kissed the director lightly on the forehead.
‘Do me a favour, Luciano. Keep him at it for at least another fifteen minutes. I’ll have to hose him down and mother him when it’s over, but I need a coffee first.’
‘No problem. If he goes all speedy and rushes through the rest of the script, I’ll just tell him he was a bit flat on a couple of bars of that Verdi aria and get him to repeat the whole thing.’
Delia smiled her thanks.
‘Hey, did you see that thing that Edgardo Ugo wrote about him in Il Prospetto?’ Luciano added. ‘Got him bang to rights, no? I laughed myself sick!’
Without answering, Delia went out to the corridor. Almost immediately her mobile started to chirp. She checked the screen and said ‘Damn!’ before answering.
‘Have you told him?’ the caller asked.
‘Not yet,’ she replied, ignoring the stairs down to the street. ‘He’s in one of those moods this morning. You know what he’s like when he’s taping.’
‘Delia, he’s going to find out sooner or later, probably within a few hours. The damn magazine is on the streets
now. It’s essential that he hears the bad news from us. How are you going to spin it?’
Delia pushed open the door to the fire escape, blocking its automatic closing mechanism with her briefcase, and stepped out on to the metal platform.
‘More or less as we discussed. The big question is how he’ll react. You know how he feels about having his competence called into question.’
‘Naturally, since he hasn’t got any. But the show is making a fortune for us here at the station, another fortune for Lo Chef and a very nice career for you, my dear. Don’t let’s screw any of that up just because Romano Rinaldi can’t take a joke. And that’s all it was meant to be.’
Aplane flying low overhead on the final approach into Ciampino put the conversation on hold for some time.
‘You’re sure about that?’ Delia yelled over the final resonant rumbles.
‘One hundred per cent. My people checked with Ugo’s people today. In any case, none of our audience is going to care less what some professor of semiotics in Bologna thinks. All Romano needs to do is ignore the whole incident and it’ll be forgotten in a couple of days.’
Delia checked her watch.
‘I’ve got to go. He’ll be off-stage at any moment.’
Actually there were at least five minutes to go, but Delia had never mastered the art of taking a mobile phone call and lighting a cigarette at the same time, and it was the latter rather than a coffee that she desperately needed before bearding her highly-strung client. Unmarried, very ambitious, with a baker’s dozen years of ova already addled and a molto simpatico but totally ineffective significant other, Delia knew that she couldn’t afford to lose this job.
After graduating with a modest degree, she had worked her way up through several jobs in corporate communications and public relations before landing her present position as personal assistant to the celebrity chef whose television show, Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta, regularly pulled in millions of faithful viewers every week. Moreover, the figures were always rising, and there had even been approaches from other European broadcasters interested in acquiring the rights for their own territories. And then this left-wing academic and obscure novelist pops up and lets the cat out of the bag, jokingly or otherwise, thereby threatening to ruin the whole sweet deal.
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