“I mean the whole thing is a bit more complicated, Gregorio. Your father was one of the richest men in Italy.”
Greg remained motionless and swallowed more saliva.
“Do you remember his trips to South America?”
Greg nodded. More than the trips, he remembered the photograph albums, the sense of admiration and pride he’d felt for that younger version of his father, in khaki trousers and shirt with a machete in his hand or with his arm around the shoulders of an Indian, surrounded by the gigantic leaves of a tropical forest. Over the years, poring over the pages of these albums, he’d felt as if he had got to know both his father and the meaning of the word “adventure”. Apart from that, all he remembered were long absences, and an undeclared sadness over his mother’s loneliness.
“Why do you think he went to South America?”
Greg sighed and for the first time since he had entered the room managed to regain a little self-control. “Signor Rastello, I don’t think I want to spend all afternoon on guessing games.”
Rastello looked at him and smiled. “Zinc, Gregorio.”
Greg continued to stare at him without saying anything.
“Your father bought a zinc mine. He went down there just after the war to follow a friend on an expedition to the Amazon, but on the way he ran into the owner of an old mine. This person was an eccentric American gold prospector who hadn’t been very successful in his own country and had gone down to Peru because he’d heard there were large unexplored deposits. He’d bought some land where he thought there might be a deposit, but all he’d found were some greyish metals. Nobody in the area knew what to make of these minerals, and the mine was a burden on the American’s back. Your father always told me he bought it more to amuse himself than for any other reason. He was young and innocent, and had simply been fascinated by the idea of owning a mine. But I think he must have seen something in it.”
“And then?”
“And then it turned out to be much more than an amusement. The mineral was sphalerite, or blackjack, the main source from which zinc is extracted. It was a very rich seam. In partnership with a German he found a way to refine it, and he was among the first to market it by air. At first, they sold it as anode for navigation. These days, our zinc is used mainly as a protective industrial coating. Our mine… your mine, is one of the largest deposits in Peru. Up until about twenty years ago it was the biggest, then people woke up and started exploring other seams. He and the German split up at the end of the Sixties. Your father kept the mine and his partner kept the extraction centre on the coast.”
Rastello looked at Greg for a moment, then continued. Once production had started and people had been found to run the mine, he explained, it had more or less taken care of itself, and his father, with a huge amount of capital suddenly at his disposal, had invested in various other sectors, buying and selling large shares in companies around the world. Apparently he had a great nose for such things and, apart from a few rare disappointments, had managed to multiply his capital and become quite a powerful figure. Rastello then paused again briefly.
“When he was told that his cancer was incurable, he devoted every remaining minute to arranging things for you. I well remember the evening he called me. He had me sit down in the armchair in front of his desk. ‘Massimo,’ he said, ‘it’s quite likely that I have less than four months to live.’ I swear, Gregorio, I almost fell off my chair. Your father was a quiet person, quite aloof, and yet I had never before realized how much I was in his debt. Everything I was I owed to him and all he’d taught me in his quiet way. He told me he was planning to wind up most of his companies and that he was spending a lot of time with his lawyers laying the groundwork for when he was no longer around. ‘But I need someone I can trust to keep the show on the road,’ he said. I don’t think I’ve shed a single tear since I was twelve, but I was so struck by your father’s dignity in the face of death that I had to strain every muscle of my face and body in order not to burst out crying like a baby. I set up a holding company, GMH, comprising the mine, the farm, the properties, the foundations and those few companies he couldn’t or wouldn’t wind up. And he made me managing director of the holding company. He had watertight contracts drawn up, to which he devoted all his remaining energy. He was very worried about the fact that this would fall on you so early, but for technical reasons that was very difficult to avoid. So here I am, Gregorio: from today you are the sole official president of GMH, the owner of more than 60% of the shares. In accordance with your father’s wishes, I remain, at least for the moment, the managing director.”
So Massimo Rastello was no longer that sinister, ambiguous figure who turned up from time to time to shake things up a bit, but the man to whom Greg’s father had entrusted their lives. He was good, though, and without venturing into large operations—Greg’s father had ordered him to be cautious and had appointed three different lawyers as guarantors—had continued increasing the capital. Some time later it emerged that the reason the famous estate manager had been quietly asked to leave was that he was caught pocketing money from the estate’s coffers.
“What about Mother?”
Rastello looked at Greg for a moment, his lips pursed slightly in what seemed to be a hint of embarrassment. “Gregorio, your father always sensed she wouldn’t be up to it.” For a moment, a kind of shadow fell over the room. Then Rastello unfolded a sheet of paper he had been holding in his hand from the start and held it out to Greg. “This is a draft prospectus of all you own, apart from the turnover and net profits for the past year. The data isn’t exact, but it’ll give you an idea.”
Greg took the piece of paper and as he ran through all those numbers he felt a series of kicks in his stomach, forcing it up into his throat. That sense of nausea, of disgust, stayed with him for months. He rarely came to school, often said he was ill, and headaches prevented him from sleeping well. My father visited him, and simply prescribed sedative drops and decent sleep. “He’s not sleeping enough, that’s all it is,” he said that evening at dinner. He was hardly ever seen in the village that summer, and on all the occasions I went to his villa to see him, he was available only a couple of times.
Apparently one evening at the end of July he called Rastello and told him he had to talk to him. When they were in the small drawing room again, with the doors closed, Gregorio looked him straight in the eyes. “I want to know everything,” he said.
“About what?”
“About everything. I want to see the mine and find out how it works. I want to know where the money is and how to invest it and how the markets work and all that stuff. I want to know everything.”
Obviously I wasn’t there, and I never heard this for certain, but I’m sure Rastello smiled.
That was the moment when Greg really started to evaporate. The first symptom was quite simply his disappearance: he was nowhere to be seen, either in the village or school. While he was learning everything there was to learn about his businesses and his history and about zinc and the markets, while he was constantly at Rastello’s side, posing as his new young assistant, he was also, with the help of tutors, studying for his final exams as an external student at a private school in Rome.
The couple of times I managed to see him, he was displaying the second symptom of evaporation: his appearance. He wore only dark, elegant suits, grey or black, presumably made to measure, and with his fair hair and pale face had the mad, remote look of an Andy Warhol. Only a few months had passed, but he wasn’t like my old friend any more: he was a colder, more rarefied version of him. Nobody in the village ever saw him again in person, and the only signs of him were the dark cars or the helicopters that came and went.
Even though looking down at that vast terraced hollow in Peru had given him an unexpected quiver of pride, he wasn’t very interested in the mine, let alone in the farm. What really fascinated him were the fluctuations in the international markets, and gradually discovering that the world was a lot smaller than he ha
d imagined.
“It doesn’t take much,” he said to me one day on the phone, after telling me about a killing he’d made with a Japanese transport company and confessing that he didn’t know how he did it. “It’s a bit like playing Monopoly, but with real money.”
“I’d die of anxiety.”
“To be honest, all you have to do is take away a few zeros and then just stop thinking about it.”
After a while, he really did disappear. At the beginning of my first year at university, he vanished into thin air, and apparently nobody knew what had become of him. He told Rastello to keep things going on his own, and that he needed to be by himself for a while. Nobody heard from him for nearly seven months, at the end of which he drove up to the gates of the villa in a dark car as if nothing had happened.
“Where have you been?” I asked him the first time we talked on the phone.
“In the Far East.”
“The Far East?”
“Yes, the Far East.”
“Where in the Far East?”
“All over. I spent quite a bit of time in Mongolia.”
The idea of Greg in Mongolia just didn’t fit the image I had of him.
“What’s it like?”
“Cold.”
Years later, it emerged that he had actually spent a few weeks in a monastery, but he always seemed reluctant to talk about that journey and those weeks.
So, from time to time, we would talk on the phone. That was what Greg had become more than anything else: a voice. A voice suddenly filled with a wonderful, keen sense of humour. Surrounded as I was by the ridiculous dreams of all those students, listening to him talk was like looking out again at the world for a few minutes, or at least at the most overt and glittering part of it. The idea that behind that voice there was also a body, a person of flesh and blood, had gradually ceased to be of any importance.
4
THOSE OCCASIONAL phone conversations with Greg were, as I’ve said, the only pleasant note in my second year in Glasgow. So it was no surprise that I clung to the work at Leonard’s and that old attic room like a shipwrecked sailor to a tree trunk.
As storeroom, Leonard used a small attic at the top of a narrow wooden staircase you reached through a dark door at the far end of the club. The door of the attic was on the left at the top of the stairs. On the right there was another door, which it had never occurred to me to open.
I opened it for the first time one day in mid-December, after taking a box of drinks and cans from the storeroom to fill the fridge. I dragged the box outside, and as I bent to pick it up, my eye fell for the umpteenth time on the white wooden door on the other side of the landing. I was in something of a hurry. Whenever I went up to get the drinks, the fear of being bawled out by Leonard had always stopped me from yielding to my curiosity. That day, though, Leonard, after sending me upstairs, cursed and yelled up the stairs that he was going to the electrical shop for a moment. So I turned and looked for a few moments at the mysterious closed door. I looked around as if I were being watched, then went closer and put my hand on the handle. The door opened with a creak, and I barely had to force it. Beyond the threshold there was another attic: completely empty, the floor of rough dark wood, a few damp stains on the walls. And yet, all things considered, it seemed in good condition, and at the far end of the room was a small brick fireplace. Light from the neon sign of the club opposite filtered through a skylight in the ceiling. I stood in the middle of the room for a couple of minutes, and suddenly imagined myself there, studying and working, by candlelight if necessary, next to a lit fire.
When Leonard came back a bit later, I was still arranging the drinks in the fridge. He went to the box room, messed around with something and came back with a small screwdriver in his hand and then went over to the blender and started taking the plug off.
“I saw the other room upstairs,” I said after a while, placing a bottle of tonic water on a shelf.
“Mmm,” Leonard replied, trying to force a screw that was holding the plug together.
“Whose is it?”
“It’s mine. Whose should it be?”
“Don’t you do anything with it?”
“At first I thought…” He broke off, his face contorted with the effort of trying to turn the screw, which finally moved with a creak. He extracted it, opened the plug and took a good look inside, then glanced at me. “… I thought of making it my office, but it was too cold so I left it the way it was.”
“And don’t you have any intention of doing anything with it?”
“I don’t know. Not for now.”
Leonard finished fixing the plug and I finished filling the fridge and shelves and the evening continued as usual. I didn’t mention it again, but the image of that damned attic continued to haunt me, and every day when I went back to sleep in the hall of residence I felt like throwing up. I now hated everybody and everything: my flatmates, the endless bustle of students, the winks, the knowing looks, the cold, the hard-edged light and the eighteen hours a day of darkness, the cars driving on the wrong side of the road and Kibble Palace and the greyness and the whole of Glasgow. The only salvation seemed to be the shelter of that little attic above Leonard’s Lodge. When I got to the club the following week, I couldn’t even wait until I had taken my jacket off and hung it up.
“Listen, Leonard, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to rent me the attic.”
Leonard was cleaning the low tables and sofas with a cloth. He stopped and turned to look at me. “Rent you what?”
“The attic.”
He stood there looking at me without saying anything and after a moment or two a slight sense of unease crept up my back. I felt awkward, and didn’t really know where to look or what to do.
“All right, I understand. Forget it,” I said after another few moments, unable to keep a hint of irritation out of my voice. Actually I had no desire to forget it, but I didn’t know how to get out of this uncomfortable situation. I went to the door of the box room, opened it, hung my jacket on the usual hanger, took off my plum-coloured shoes and a couple of sweaters, went behind the counter and crouched on the floor to see what drinks we were missing. In the meantime, Leonard had gone back to cleaning the tables with his cloth.
“And what would you like to do with it?”
I stood up slowly, my heart pounding in my chest, and for a moment I thought I could hear the sound of an orchestra from somewhere.
“I don’t know. Stay there, I think. Study, spend time there, do my own thing.”
“Can’t you do all that where you live?”
“I hate where I live, Leonard. I’m living with an idiot who’s always in the gym, a Shi’ite who stops us from doing anything, and an Irish loser whose greatest ambition seems to be to make porn films.”
“Porn films?”
“Yes, he’d like to get laid but nobody will have him. I tried fixing him up with a friend of a friend, a pimply girl who’s fucked just about everyone, but he says she’s a loser too.”
Leonard laughed and continued cleaning the two remaining tables, then the battered old jukebox and all the shiny surfaces. He did this every Thursday. The bottles behind the counter, on the other hand, he dusted on Tuesdays.
After watching him move the cloth around for a while and waiting in vain for a sign from him, I dived under the counter again, finished checking what was missing, brought the usual crate from the box room and headed upstairs to collect juices and bottles. Before coming back down, I opened the door of the attic again for a moment, just to have another glance in. It seemed even cleaner and more welcoming than when I’d seen it the week before and I almost had the impression that I could see myself, lying there reading on cushions in front of a lit fire, a beam of moonlight illuminating part of my face.
When I went back down, Leonard was beating the cushions on the sofas into shape, the cloth over his shoulder like a barman in a film. I went behind the counter and started getting
out the bottles.
“And what will you do about the cold?” He had suddenly appeared behind the bar and startled me.
“Jesus,” I said, catching my breath for a moment. “I talked to Larry, the owner of the pub opposite. I asked him where he gets wood for their fireplace. He says someone brings it every Wednesday morning from out of town. I asked him if I could also take some and he told me he didn’t think there’d be any problem. In fact, he also told me that we could get it together and maybe they’d charge us a bit less, or at least give me the same price.”
Leonard gave a slight smile. “And when did you ask Larry all this?”
“Two or three days ago, something like that.”
Leonard shook his head, smiling, and continued looking at me for a moment or two. “It’ll cost you at least half what you’re earning.”
“No problem.”
“And you’ll have to come and give me a hand on Tuesdays too.”
“No problem.”
“And you can only be there when I’m also around. I don’t want any trouble.”
“No problem.”
“And you’ll have to come and clean the club and the toilets every day.”
“Don’t overdo it, Leonard—I’m not that desperate.”
Leonard laughed, then gave me a little slap on the face with the cloth and went back to arranging the sofas.
So I had the attic. It didn’t seem true. The following Saturday I spent the whole morning and afternoon there with a bucket and rags, trying to remove all the dust and make the place look at least slightly respectable. The skylight was half caked with dirt, and in my attempt to open it I was afraid for a moment that I might break it. Then fortunately it moved, icy air came rushing in through the wide-open pane, and I seemed to feel the room starting to breathe again. The wooden floorboards were loose or warped in several places, but, once cleaned, the deep, dark veins of the wood looked like the lines I’d have liked to have on my face as an old man. I also thought of buying paint and giving the walls a coat, but all things considered, those two or three damp patches didn’t bother me too much for the moment. Around the middle of the afternoon, I had to go down and warm my hands and body with a big steaming cup of tea. I was all wrapped up in my jacket and my layers, with a woollen fisherman’s hat on my head.
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