Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  “Signor Mariani will be with you in a moment.”

  About ten minutes later Greg appeared, followed by another young woman in a suit. He walked towards him and held out his hand. “Hello, Signor Torcini.”

  Lucio found it hard to see in this pale figure in a sweater and grey slim-fit trousers, as long and thin as an asparagus, the quiet fair-haired young man he remembered from the Rocky Road, the man Biagio had often talked about over the years. He had always found it hard to associate that memory with the weight the name Gregorio Mariani bore, now more than ever.

  “I don’t want to steal anyone’s time,” Greg said, without even sitting down. Then he turned very slightly towards his assistant and had her pass him a small sheet of paper. Greg took it with two fingers. “Do you know what this is, Signor Torcini?”

  Lucio must have watched this little performance with a ironic eye, and he was unable completely to suppress his sarcasm. “A piece of paper?”

  “It’s a blank cheque, Signor Torcini. To set up a new team. A team I’d like you to run. I assure you, Signor Torcini, that I’m not in the habit of writing blank cheques, but when I do they really are blank.”

  Greg and Lucio looked each other in the eyes for a moment. When Lucio told me this story I suspected that Greg was going mad.

  “This cheque is yours on one condition.”

  Again a moment’s pause.

  “And what condition is that?”

  “Biagio.”

  “Biagio what?”

  “The one condition is that one of the riders is Biagio.”

  Lucio looked at Greg for a moment or two without saying anything. “I don’t even know where Biagio is. And, assuming I can find out, I have grave doubts that he’ll be in any condition to race.”

  “That, Signor Torcini, is not my problem. If you bring Biagio here, and he’s willing to race, you have at your disposal all the money you need to set up a new team. If not, then it’s been a pleasure to see you again and I wish you all the best.” Without turning, Greg handed the cheque back to his assistant, then stepped forward and held out his hand again. “Goodbye, Signor Torcini, and good luck. The young lady here will leave you all our contacts and, if you like, some small expenses to go and find Biagio. She’ll also provide you with the information we have concerning him. Thanks again.”

  Lucio shook hands with him and watched him leave the room. He came back two months later, with a somewhat older but apparently calmer version of Biagio, surprisingly ready to race for him. But Lucio suggested dropping the Grand Prix and entering him for the Superbike Championships instead. It was a less frenetic, more human environment, he said, where it was easier to do well. And by now the Grand Prix had become as much of a horrible carnival as Formula One.

  “As you wish, Signor Torcini,” Greg said to him when they met again in Rome. “As I promised, you have carte blanche.”

  He then told him that he could discuss the details with his assistant.

  “Forgive me, but I must go now.” He shook hands with Lucio, then with Biagio. “And you, don’t do anything stupid,” he added.

  When Biagio told me about this whole pantomime, I could hardly believe it. “What did you say to that?” I asked Biagio, with an amazed half-smile.

  “What could I say, Jacopo? I told him to go to hell.”

  Fortunately, Greg had given a little laugh, then turned and left.

  They set up a satellite team of Ducati and for a couple of seasons things went quite well. Biagio and Lucio, with a great laugh I imagine, called it Team Rocky Road, and even Greg seemed quite amused when he told me about it. Along with Biagio, Lucio hired a young Japanese racer who fortunately turned out to be much better than expected. They had a number of good races, and in the championships they always reached fifth and sixth place in the general rankings.

  Biagio was seen by everyone as a bit of a hero, like a colleague who had been to hell and back, and they treated him with great respect. After the two races he managed to win, they were all quite moved and they embraced him and cheered him. Biagio was certainly pleased, but it also made him uncomfortable.

  “They treat me like a madman,” he told me one day over the phone.

  At the end of the second championship he decided he didn’t want to any more, and this time everyone accepted it as natural. He moved to a house on the island of Elba, near Capoliveri, and spent all his time there, mostly by himself. A young Indonesian girl lived with him for a while, but then she left too. He didn’t want to have anything more to do with San Filippo, and when I asked him why he didn’t find a house closer to the village, he told me that since Betta had died there wasn’t anything left for him there. “Dad and Graziano are both drunks, and in Australia I got used to the noise of the sea.”

  Not long after arriving in San Filippo to spend a few weeks with my family, I decided to go and see him. I asked Dad to lend me his car and drove to Piombino to catch the ferry. As I stood with the wind on my face and looked out at the Tyrrhenian, I told myself it had been a great idea and that I might stay a few days longer. The next day, I was already on my way back.

  The directions I had to get to the house were surprisingly quite precise, and it didn’t take me long to find it. It was a small two-storey colonial-style stone house, surrounded by a forest of shrubs and swept by the wind, facing the Golfo Stella and the southern coast of Elba. If you went along a path for a few dozen metres towards the sea and leant over, you could see the quarry of Punta Calamita. The bedrooms were upstairs. On the ground floor, once past the entrance hall, there was a big living room with a beautiful stone fireplace, and at the back was a spacious kitchen with a terracotta tiled floor, as well as another room, now bare, that must once have been a dining room.

  It would have been a really nice place if every corner of the house hadn’t been filled with that disturbing smell of rottenness. The windows were opaque and probably hadn’t been opened in months. There were big damp stains on the ceiling, and a uniform film of dust covered every object left lying around. The only sign of a recent human presence was the hollow in the worn green velvet sofa, which in the middle of all that neglect looked more than anything else like the inside of a sarcophagus. The kitchen table was covered in all kinds of junk, and the sink was filled to the brim with dirty dishes and plastic cups. I was about to open the fridge when it struck me that that might not be a good idea.

  “Doesn’t anyone ever come?” I asked, putting my bag down by the kitchen door and looking around, trying to temper my disgust.

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know… to clean.”

  Biagio went to the fridge and took out two beers. “A woman sometimes comes.”

  Luckily the front of the fridge door was towards me, preventing me from looking inside. Biagio seemed to have shrunk: he wore big wraparound dark glasses that he never took off, his hair was dirty and floppy, and although he had always been thin, he now looked flaccid and sickly. He dragged himself from the dusty interior of the house to a deckchair he’d set up in the yard next to a little table. The effort of taking a second deckchair outside and opening my beer for me was the only real sign that he acknowledged my presence. It wasn’t that having me there made him uncomfortable: it was more like indifference. It was as if nothing that was happening could possibly interest Biagio, let alone disturb him. We sat there on the deckchairs for the rest of the afternoon, with me occasionally venturing a few sentences to which Biagio replied with simple gestures or brief little laughs. In the evening, when I asked if he wanted me to cook something, he told me he wasn’t very hungry, but that there might be a couple of pizzas in the freezer that we could heat up. After dinner we went back inside the house to watch a film and, as he had on the deckchair, he simply sank into the hollow in the couch and stopped moving. He finally took off his dark glasses: his eyes were as blue as ever, but opaque and dull, as if there were an unbridgeable gap between them and the person behind them. True, Biagio had never been much of a talker, and it
was quite normal for us to spend a lot of time together in silence, but there had always been something in his presence, a kind of vibration or magnetic field, which seemed to reorganize the world around us, if only for a few minutes. At a certain point everything had taken a different turn, but as boys it was as if despite himself he had always known how things were, and somehow you too were touched by the same awareness. Now nothing seemed to remain of that vibration, that magnetic field, or it was so distant as to be confused with all the rest. That was what he was, distant. Biagio was distant: he had gone a long way inside himself, far from the surface of his eyes and his skin, and far from anything surrounding him. In the old days, even when he was silent, he’d sucked you in like a vortex.

  As soon as the film finished, in the hope of overcoming my anxiety with a bit of reading, I told him I was tired and went upstairs. Biagio simply nodded and said goodnight. I had chosen a room that was bare except for two wrought-iron beds. In a chest of drawers in the corridor I found some sheets that looked a bit cleaner than the others, and lay down on the bed half dressed. I’ve never been a fastidious person, but the idea of any part of my skin touching any surface in that house for a few hours filled me with unease.

  In the morning I got up early and, just to do something, went downstairs and started cleaning up. I opened all the windows, found a dishcloth and tried to dust as best I could. I discovered some big black bags into which I threw all the food left lying around and the plastic dishes from the sink and the waste paper strewn in every corner of the living room. I gave the place a good sweep: the balls of dust were as big as cats and twisted around the broom like a Rastafarian’s dreadlocks.

  “Leave that,” Biagio said behind me, as I was sweeping. He had already put on his sunglasses and sounded quite annoyed.

  “Don’t worry. At least I’m doing something.”

  He looked at me for another moment, then went and got his first beer of the day from the fridge, walked outside and took up his place again on the deckchair.

  Some time later, after sponging down the worktop in the kitchen and opening the cupboard under the sink to see if I could find anything to clean the bathrooms and the windows with, I was assaulted by a wave of stench. In the adjoining cupboard was a green plastic bucket with some rubbish in it in a black bag that had been there for God knows how long. Screwing up my face, I opened the bucket and took out the black bag. I was already closing it in a hurry when something attracted my attention. Holding my breath and making an effort not to vomit, I took a closer look. From underneath some wet leftover food, a long narrow object stuck out which for a few seconds I wished with all my heart I hadn’t seen. I looked around, grabbed a roll of kitchen towel, tore off two sheets, folded them a couple of times and, holding them between my fingers, plunged my hand into the bag. I moved a few mouldy scraps to one side and, trying not to touch anything, pulled out the object. An insulin syringe. As I stared at the traces of dried plasma at the base of the needle and imagined, with nausea rising in me, everything they meant, the picture finally started to compose itself in front of my eyes. How could I not have realized? This explained all the mysteries about Biagio: his decline, his detachment, his lack of interest, his solitude, his apathy, the image of him in Sydney in his dressing gown, his silences, and for some reason, also the image of him when he was small, walking around the fields at night.

  I admit it: I was overcome with an embarrassing but undeniable wave of terror. I placed my hand on the edge of the sink, and as I was trying to hold back the gush of acid rising in my throat I started to see all the tiny objects in the kitchen—and immediately afterwards in the rest of the house—as if they were set dressing for a horror movie. For a moment I gazed into a cold dark place, the depths of which made me violently dizzy. Sometimes, over the years, when things had been going badly, I had wondered like an idiot if that was what people called the abyss. Well, here at last was the answer: no. This was a much blacker, deeper monster, faced with which—I’m ashamed to confess—I was unable to do anything but run away. I wrapped the syringe in a thick layer of kitchen towel, went to the bedroom where I had slept, threw the wad in my bag along with the few things I had taken out the previous evening, and went out again. Biagio was still there on his deckchair, sipping a can of beer and looking at the gulf. I told him I’d called my parents and my mum was apparently feeling ill again, I was sorry but I had to go. As I expected, Biagio didn’t seem very interested in the news, although he did make the effort to stand up and hug me.

  “Try to keep well,” I said to him, feeling vile and mean.

  “You too,” he replied, sitting back down and looking at the sea again.

  An hour and a half later, going back on the ferry, I was struck by an intense mixture of deliverance and guilt. Half of me—not the smaller half—was goading me and calling me a coward; the other half was unable to hide its relief at having managed to get to a safe place before it was too late.

  When I got home, I simply took a long shower and went to bed. The next morning, as soon as I woke up, I set about planting and watering my mother’s nasturtiums and pansies with even greater passion than before, and started pulling out the few weeds from the rest of the garden. Two days later, bent over a flower bed, digging a small hole in the dark earth with a shovel, I heard and then saw Greg’s helicopter hovering over the village and descending towards the villa. I went back inside the house, took off the apron that Mum had lent me to work in the garden, washed my hands as best I could in the kitchen sink, went upstairs to my room for a moment and finally went out. It was a hot, humid day, more like August than the end of June, and with every step I took I could feel sweat breaking out on my chest and making my T-shirt stick to me. I walked with big slow strides, stooping more than usual. I crossed the village, weaving between the English and German tourists, past the main square, which increasingly resembled the piazzetta on Capri, and kept going until I got to the gate of the villa. When I got a reply through the entryphone, I simply gave my first name, as I’d done when I was little. Incredibly, the gate opened without my being asked anything else. At the end of the cedar-lined drive, at the top of the stone steps in front of the main door, a butler I’d never seen was already there waiting for me.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s nobody at home,” the butler said. He looked Filipino, and was wearing a big white jacket.

  “I saw that thing arrive,” I said pointing up at the sky. “Tell Signor Mariani that Jacopo is here and is waiting for him in the study,” and I went in before he even gave me permission. The butler stood there for a moment, stunned, then followed me along the corridor and through the blue drawing room, and when I entered Greg’s study he switched the lights on.

  Greg had adapted as his study what had once been the real heart of the villa, a vast drawing room with a coffered ceiling and a monumental fireplace surmounted by the family arms. The time when guests had been received here and parties had been given was long gone, and Greg, to stir his megalomania, had had the idea of putting a big dark wooden table at the far end of it and making it his study. My two-room apartment on the Upper West Side could probably have fitted comfortably into a quarter of this room. After a couple of minutes a maid appeared, greeted me shyly and started opening all the windows and the frosted glass doors, gradually flooding it with natural light and gusts of hot summer wind.

  On one side, under a window, stood Sandra. For a moment I was overcome with an irrepressible sense of nostalgia. I looked at the shiny egg of the engine and the fibreglass fairing that I had made with my own hands almost twenty years earlier. I placed my fingers on the twist grip of the accelerator and, as I lightly pulled the brake lever, I felt a strong impulse to shed a few tears.

  “What are you doing, spying on me?”

  I raised my head. Greg had gone straight to the back of the room and put some papers down on the desk. He was wearing grey trousers and his shirt sleeves were rolled up.

  I again looked at Sandra and pulled the brake
lever a few more times. “Is it her?”

  Greg raised his eyes a moment, then started looking through some papers. “Of course it’s her.”

  I let go of the grip, looked at Sandra for another moment or two, then walked towards Greg’s desk. “I thought you left it to Paolino.”

  “Paolino? What’s Paolino got to do with it? It was mine and I took it back.”

  Before collapsing into one of the three red velvet armchairs in front of the desk, I took the wad of kitchen towel from the back pocket of my trousers. I slowly opened it and threw the syringe on the desktop. Greg glanced first at the syringe, then briefly at me.

  “Thanks. Another time, maybe.”

  “Idiot. It’s Biagio’s. I went to see him on Elba.”

  Greg sighed, clicked his tongue rather oddly a few times, and sat down. “And?”

  “He’s in a bad way, Greg. He spends all day sitting in a deckchair looking at the sea and drinking beer. God knows how many of these things he does a day. The house stinks like a corpse.”

  “How does he get hold of it?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t see anyone come to the house, but I was only there for one night. I wanted to stay longer… then I saw this and left. I don’t know—I was afraid. It’s tough being there, it’s upsetting.”

  Greg was listening to me without saying anything.

  “I asked him if someone at least comes to tidy up a bit, and he told me a woman comes from time to time. But I don’t believe that. The house seems abandoned. Maybe she’s the one who brings him this.”

  Greg drummed on the arms of his chair for a few moments. “And what do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t know, Greg. Go there, take him away, put him in a home, shoot him in the head. I really don’t know.”

  Greg looked me in the eyes for a moment, then down at my T-shirt. “You’re dirty.”

  I looked down and with two fingers held the white cotton a few centimetres away from my chest. There were in fact stains of sand and grass on it, as well as blue streaks from some flowers. “I’ve been gardening.”