“Hey,” Masi said, raising his voice. “I need the bag.”
But the Goat still didn’t respond. He stood there in front of the punchbag, like a brawny little Roman in front of a column.
“HEY,” Masi cried, raising his voice even more. “I NEED THE BAG.”
Everyone stopped, and those who saw the Goat from the front realised that he had his eyes closed. Masi looked at his pals, shrugged his shoulders and smiled, as if to say, “What is this guy, an idiot?” Then he made his mistake, he did something that anyone who’d been around the block a bit would advise you not to do in a boxing gym: he picked a quarrel. He brought both his gloves down on the Goat’s shoulders, sending him thudding into the punchbag like a skier into a tree. Masi barely had time to see him turn before the short, squat, fair-haired boy was under him. Two feints, then a left, a right and a left, and Masi was on the ground, stunned, and that squat, fair-haired boy was standing over him whinnying like a horse and looking as if he was spitting fire from his nostrils. Masi got back on his feet, smiling.
“So you want to do this the hard way,” Masi said. He took off his stinking punchbag gloves, leaving only the bandages on. “Come on,” he said. He fired off two lefts at the Goat’s head, but the Goat parried and turned with his fists up and his head down. There was Masi, tall and slim, his arms and shoulders going up and down like in a documentary on boxing, and there was the other guy in front of him, all hunched and as closed up as a ball of granite. A left and a right from Masi. The Goat saw that long, sharp right before it had even started on its journey. He bent his knees, parried to the left, moved forwards and, pressing down with the full weight of his body, fired off one more of those millions of uppercuts to the liver that he’d been practising in the last few weeks. He saw, as if it was lit up, that uncovered area of the body where Buio had said the liver was and which brings everyone down. And, as if it was all one move, the Goat followed it with a short right to the chin and a left hook to the temple. There are those who are ready to swear they saw Masi leave the ground before he went flying into the punchbag, and then he was down, flat on the ground, and unconscious for five minutes. Masi weighed twelve kilos more than the Goat, and was almost twenty-five centimetres taller. Buio came running and pushed the Goat away, insulting him as he did so. Everyone crowded around Masi, ignoring the young sensation, not even hearing the weak “I’m sorry” muttered by someone who had obviously never learnt to speak.
A couple of days later, a short, plump woman wearing a man’s hat came to the gym and asked for the owner. Someone went to fetch Buio.
“Hello, I’m Sonia Mugnaini.”
“Hello, I’m Buio.”
“Good evening, Signor Buio. I’ve come to ask you to take my son back for training. The thing is, this is the first time I’ve seen him really interested in something. Everyone always makes fun of him and I know he’s not particularly bright, but deep down he’s a lovely boy. He’s had a hard life and he’s always alone and—”
“One moment, signora. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh.” Signora Mugnaini was puzzled. “He told me he can’t come back because he hit someone. You have to forgive him, it won’t happen again. It’s just that, you know, he gets these attacks, but maybe you could try to understand, maybe—”
“Signora, just stop there. Are you the mother of that fair-haired boy?”
“Yes, of course, who did you think I was talking about?”
“You know, signora, a lot of boys come here, and they’re always hitting each other, one way or another.”
The man had a point, Signora Mugnaini thought.
“Anyway, signora, your son can come back whenever he likes. Your son is very talented.”
“Didn’t you throw him out?”
“No. Of course, I don’t want him beating up all my boys.”
Signora Mugnaini let out a laugh. “Yes, you’re right,” she said. “It’s just that he didn’t hear, you know how it is—”
“He didn’t hear?”
“Well, I should have thought that was obvious.”
“Not really. I heard, and I was in my office.”
Signora Mugnaini again gave Buio a puzzled look. “I’m sorry, Signor Buio, but in six months haven’t you noticed that my son is a deaf mute?”
One evening a few months earlier, while watching an old Dean Martin film, it had occurred to Buio that it had been a long time since he had last felt embarrassed. And he had come to the conclusion that maybe that’s one of the things you acquire as you get older: you have your work, you’re well respected, you have a bit of a paunch but two big arms and a mean look, and the bad old days when life wrongfooted you and landed you in embarrassing situations have long gone. You get backache sometimes, you need to have your prostate checked, the other day one of your knees turned to jelly, but you don’t have to worry any more about being embarrassed. And then life comes along, in the form of a cylinder-shaped lady in a man’s hat, and slaps you in the face, right there, right where you’re at home, where you’re the boss, everyone looks on you as a master, everyone respects you when you shout at them in your loud voice and everyone likes it when you pat them on the back. Life takes the form of a mother and leaves you stunned. And makes you turn red like a little boy.
“A deaf mute?”
“I’m sorry again, Signor Buio.” Signora Mugnaini’s voice had assumed a very slightly ironic tone. “My son has been coming here for six months, three times a week, four if he has time. I even bought him a punchbag for his room. And you never noticed he’s a deaf mute?”
Buio looked at the lady, his back stooped. The skin of his face suddenly dropped, as if someone had attached dozens of weights to it.
“Well, no,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice, no one noticed. You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t know how it is.” Signora Mugnaini’s tone was decidedly sarcastic now.
“It’s just that he’s always by himself, away from the others, always quiet …”
“That’s because he can’t speak.”
Buio thought it best not to say anything else, not to clutch at straws, because he was already embarrassed enough to feel as if he’d been taken forty years back in time. His back was even more stooped, as if the caretaker, without being seen, had put two ten-kilo sacks in his hands.
“I’m sorry,” Buio said in a thin voice, with his head bowed.
“That’s all right, Signor Buio. I know my son is a very reserved boy, and that can fool people. I understand how difficult that can be. But maybe you should pay more attention to your boys.”
Buio nodded with his head bowed, and for a moment met Signora Mugnaini’s stern, determined eyes.
“Goodbye, Signor Buio.”
“Goodbye, signora.”
I don’t know if it was as a reaction to that embarrassment, or out of compassion or admiration, or because of the Goat’s sheer, obvious talent, but from that day on Buio’s attitude changed to that squat, fair-haired boy with the forehead like a wall and the shadow over his eyes that looked like a mask. He took him under his wing and turned him into a great boxer. The boy’s talent was second only to his dedication, and perhaps to Buio’s enthusiasm, as he watched him grow from day to day in his hands.
As the weeks passed, he saw everything take shape: those shoulders along with that perfect left hook, that sculpted back along with that granite guard, the line of those pectorals along with that perfect legwork. The Goat was a sponge, a machine for learning, and within barely a year he was ready for his first fight. He won the regional championships, beginners’ class, then the national championships, in the finals of which, in a mere forty-eight seconds, he saw off a bull-headed Milanese who everyone considered a great white hope.
By the time I saw him fighting that night at the Teatro Tenda he had cleaned up in the first heats of the national championships for two years running, and was preparing for the European championship. His opponent was a slim boy with catlik
e eyes who came from a village near Rome. He was a decent boxer, quick on his feet, and defended himself well. Sooner or later, he intended to strip the Goat of his growing legend. He knew it wouldn’t be that night, there was no point in even trying. The Goat had agreed to the fight because it was good practice, and the Roman boy because he wanted to see him at work, at close quarters, without much risk to himself. One of these days, he’d fight him properly and beat him. But that night he didn’t manage to land a single punch. The Goat would wait for Buio to hit him on the leg to let him know that the bell had gone, then, like a machine, he would raise his guard, put his head inside his gloves, hunch his shoulders and skip to the centre of the ring, just like a goat. The Roman boy did what he could: he kept firing off lefts and rights, one after the other, trying to keep that squat little animal with the shadow over his eyes at a distance. But he didn’t even hit him once. It was like a game: making little movements with his body and bending his knees, the Goat managed to parry all those straight punches, one after the other, as if he knew when and how they were coming. And those he didn’t parry he let run on, brushing them away with his glove as if they were mosquitoes. That was all he did for two rounds. Two frustrating rounds during which I saw the tension rising on his opponent’s face, punch after punch; two frustrating rounds during which the Roman boy’s punches, sharp and clean at first, turned loose and messy. It had become a matter of honour to him to hit the Goat at least once, but the Goat just watched as he became ever more flustered. By the end of the second round, the boy was tired, worn down by his own powerlessness, and his once accurate punches simply piled up on top of each other, obsessively, leaving him as wide open as a valley.
In the third round, the Goat made a beeline for that valley like a ploughman who’d rested well and had a good lunch. Fresh as a rose, he would wait for one of his opponent’s messy punches and would get in there with a lightning-fast one-two-three combination. Parry, parry, parry, bend to the left, uppercut, straight punch, hook, swivel and step back. Pause, then parry, parry to the right, hook, uppercut, hook, swivel and step back. He was a pleasure to watch.
After the fifth combination, the Roman boy staggered back onto the ropes and stayed there, and the referee started counting. His trainer went to him, examined him, and stopped the fight.
For the first time I had seen a boxer who could beat me. It was a hard blow. On the way home that night, I couldn’t say a word. When we got to my front door I almost forgot to say goodnight to Beppe.
“Hey,” he said as I unlocked the door.
I turned, lost in thought. “Hey,” I replied.
“Goodnight, then.”
“Goodnight.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I’m tired.”
I was just about to go inside.
“He was good, wasn’t he?” Beppe said, already with his feet on the pedals, ready to start his moped. I thought about it for a moment. I wished I could play it down and say “Not bad”.
“Yes, he’s good,” I replied.
THE WORLD CHANGED. Suddenly there was someone out there capable of beating me, or at least of having a good shot at it.
Up until then, I’d been such a nerd, the only thing I didn’t do was collect stamps. But that was fine, there was even something quite appealing about the fact that there was that one place which was like a distorting mirror. From that point of view, my life was actually rather amazing: I felt like an undercover CIA agent, a character from a film with a double life I had to keep secret. I looked at all the boys who considered me a nerd and thought, you don’t know. I almost felt like a superhero, Spiderman or something. I was Peter Parker and Clark Kent.
But now, suddenly, I had realised that it was all in my imagination, that I wasn’t the best or the strongest, that the world was a big place and there were probably loads of people better than me. In other words, the chances that I was a superhero had suddenly become very slim.
That was why, when I found out that Buio had gone to see Gustavo and asked him to let me fight, I jumped for joy.
Apparently, one afternoon, the Goat had gone to Buio and tossed a piece of paper on his desk. Buio had looked up, puzzled, and had picked up the paper. On it, the words ‘I want to fight the Dancer’ were written.
Buio dropped the paper on the desk and the first thing that came into his mind was “Why?” But he knew why, and perhaps he didn’t want to hear the answer repeated. Buio knew these things, and he didn’t like them. He knew what it meant not to be sure whether you were the strongest or not. And he knew how, in the ring, that uncertainty could become an obsession.
The second thing that came into Buio’s mind was “How does he know about the Dancer?”
The first time the Goat had seen that name was on the lips of Mirco, a mediocre heavyweight who had somehow managed to win a regional championship, beginners’ class, before becoming a plumber and ending up in prison for robbery. He saw that sequence of syllables dan-cer, dan-cer appear, almost in slow motion, on Mirco’s coarse lips, and immediately they rang in his head like a bell. The Goat couldn’t follow the conversation very well, because Mirco and the other two guys, who were drying themselves after the showers, kept moving and turning away, but he had the impression they were talking about a fight: the heavyweight’s lopsided eyes excitedly echoed the avalanche of words which seemed to gush from his mouth like a fountain, and from time to time he raised his guard, fired off one or two of his uncoordinated punches, and dropped his arms again. The Goat even managed to read, “You have no idea the things—” Whatever things he was talking about, it was obvious they had to be better than the way Mirco imitated them.
Within a few weeks, the Goat had managed to reconstruct everything. He knew that Mirco had been talking about the day he had seen me training. That name, “the Dancer”, had started appearing more and more frequently on the lips of the people around him—like words you don’t know that suddenly start cropping up everywhere—to finally reveal the figure of this legendary boxer, who danced in the ring like a butterfly, as fast as a gun and as powerful as a missile. The final shock came when the Goat read on the lips of a guy named Lotti that the Dancer was the same weight as him. He had only to glimpse that handful of syllables, junior welterweight, to understand they were talking about his weight.
That was when the Goat started to become obsessed with my legend. Let’s be clear about this, for him there was no one better to play that role: I obviously had an extraordinary talent but I didn’t fight, I packed quite a wallop but had a totally inappropriate body, and outside the gym I was the biggest nerd imaginable, as well as being shy and not talking much. In other words, I was a shadow. There were boys at school who boasted about how they’d met me several times and had actually seen me fighting an illegal match in some seedy basement. One day I told one of my fellow singers in the school choir—another thing my mother had forced me to do—that I was a boxing fan. He looked at me with a glint in his eyes and asked me if I had seen Mike Tyson’s last fight. Of course, I said, but Tyson is a has-been these days. We talked about boxing for a while and although he made out he was a real connoisseur he didn’t know anything. He was convinced that Cassius Clay was Muhammad Ali’s constant challenger, and had once even beaten him. It was an interesting mistake, and in its way quite acute, even if unwittingly, but it spoke volumes about his knowledge of sports.
Anyway, after a while he asked me if I had ever heard of the Dancer. I burst out laughing.
“Why are you laughing?”
“No, nothing, forget it.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Have you ever heard of him?”
“Yes, a few times.”
His eyes lit up again. “Really?”
“Yes, a few times.”
“And have you seen him training?”
“No, never.”
“I have.”
“Oh, sure you have.”
“You know he doesn’t fight
, don’t you?”
“Yes, so I heard.”
“Or at least not legally.”
“Obviously not.”
“He says he doesn’t fight because when he’s in the ring there’s a risk he’ll kill his opponent.”
“Is that right?”
“I swear. My brother trains with him.”
“Oh, yes? And what’s your brother’s name?”
“Enrico.”
The only Enrico I knew around the gym was the caretaker, who had three fingers of his right hand missing, and it was as unlikely that he was his brother as that he had ever trained with me.
“What’s he look like?”
“Who, my brother?”
“No, the Dancer.”
“Oh, he’s tall and thin with a small head.” So far, the description was spot on. “And he’s covered in tattoos and has a long scar over his right eye.”
Here it came.
“Imagine that,” I said. “I was told he was a very ordinary guy you wouldn’t look twice at.”
He looked at me and moved his hand up and down, as if to say, “Come on!”
I have no idea who that tone-deaf boy who sang with me in the choir had seen training, or if he had even seen anyone training, or if he even had a brother at all. But it’s a good indication of the kind of things people said about me.
And this legend had been started by people who had all their five senses; people who should, with those five senses, have been able to put together a picture that had some connection with reality. But think now about a deaf person, think about someone who, in order to put together that same picture, is forced to gather bits and pieces here and there, wherever he finds them. What are you left with then? You’re left with that bloody name that jumps from mouth to mouth and bounces around your head like a stone, always preceded and followed by knowing and admiring looks, until you’re going out of your mind.
And when you’re a boxer, and you believe in it, and you’re good—maybe the best—and you discover that name belongs to someone who weighs the same as you do, then you wait a while and when you can’t stand it any more you go to your trainer’s office and inform him that you want to fight that name, because the reason you go to that damn gym every bloody day and sweat and slog away like an animal is that you want to be able to say that life isn’t shit after all, and you don’t really want to be wasting your time because of some little arsehole people call the Dancer.
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