Hell's Gate

by Laurent Gaudé

  I drag Cullaccio out of his seat. He falls to the ground and lies there for a while, crying like an old woman, face covered in snot, legs bathed in blood. I leave him there – there’s no risk of him getting away. I fetch a pair of bolt cutters from the boot and slice through the padlock. The gate is stiff, rusted to the ground by years of neglect. I rattle it angrily. It gives way, opening just enough to let us through. Cullaccio’s going to have to stand up now. I tell him so, my voice sufficiently authoritative that he gets to his feet, weak as he is. We enter the cemetery. The gravestones look like strange ships in the night. I mustn’t be afraid. Mustn’t let the nightmares take hold of me. The statues seem to smile at us as we pass. I recognise the heavy silence of death. I begin to struggle for breath. I need to focus on Cullaccio and forget everything else. We walk between the rows, scattering several cats as we go. I push him ahead of me. He stumbles often. It’s good to see. The living sound of him struggling to walk brings me comfort. It really is him, in the flesh, carrying his pain and his injury. Each time he falls I hoist him back up and push him in front of me again. He’s puffing like an animal. It’s strange how little I feel. I don’t take my eyes off him but I feel no pity, no disgust, in spite of his ugly, childish cries.

  ‘There it is.’ The sound of my voice stops him in his tracks, like an order. He turns and scours the area around us. I point to a gravestone. There it is. I want him on his knees. He turns his head towards me. He looks like a gargoyle, pleading. He starts to speak, stammers that he doesn’t know who I am but if he’s done something to upset me … I don’t let him finish. We’re here. I show him the headstone and ask him to read it. He turns his head anxiously. ‘Out loud,’ I add. I want to hear him say it, loud and clear. He hesitates. I give him a kick, the way you nudge a dog to make it run. He does as he’s told. Filippo De Nittis. 1974–1980. His words turn to sobs. He doesn’t know why he’s crying: anticipating the blow he thinks is imminent, perhaps … He’s racking his brains, but nothing comes to mind. The names and dates on the headstone are no help. He’d like to know who I am and what it is I want revenge for, but he doesn’t dare ask me anything. At this point, I start to see things. I remember the Underworld. The vast, empty halls filled only with the wails of departed souls. The forest of ghouls where the trees are twisted by icy winds. I remember loose groups of souls walking together, waving the stumps of their limbs. All of this runs through my mind, roars in my ears. I have to stay strong. I think of my father again. I can feel him watching me, willing me on, bringing me to life. I take Cullaccio by the hair and push his face into the gravestone. I order him to put his hands on it. I can tell by his silence that he thinks this is it: I’m about to kill him. I pin him down by putting my knee on his head. His cheek must be rubbing against the granite. I grab hold of his wrist. With my right hand, I take the knife out of my pocket and I cut off his fingers. One swift action severs all but the thumb. As I cut, his whole body responds with a movement that almost throws me off. Blood pours from his mutilated hand. ‘The other one.’ I shout so he’ll hear me despite the pain. He begs me to stop. I’m not listening. I take hold of his right hand and I look at it. That finger, his index finger – that’s the one he shot with. The pressure on the metal trigger came from this finger. I start cutting again. The screams coming out of his mouth are horrendous. I get up. He collapses, sprawled on the tomb, clutching his two useless stumps to his belly. This is what I want – for him to stay this way for the rest of his life, powerless, unable to hold anything or perform the most basic tasks. He’ll have to rely on people. He’ll understand the humiliation of having to ask for help to get up, to brush his hair, blow his nose. A nurse will look after him like a poor old thing, doing her best to hide her disgust. He’ll remember me with every simple gesture he can no longer make. I’ll be with him until his dying day. I’ll drive him mad. And if he tries to come after me, even if he puts the whole of Naples onto me, he’ll soon find that all paths lead here, to the tomb he’s howling on. Every time, he’ll come up against a crazy truth he will never make sense of: my name is Pippo De Nittis and I died in 1980.

  I leave him there, slumped on the ground, wailing, half conscious, muttering gibberish. I begin to walk away, retracing my steps back to the car. I take one last look at the scene to sear it onto my memory: the tombstone is spattered with blood. There are some fingers lying on it and others strewn on the ground around it. I bend down and pick up two fingers and then I leave Cullaccio to his pain. He won’t die of this. He’ll soon be found. He’ll be carried off and treated and then they’ll start asking questions. The customers at Da Bersagliera will have long since raised the alarm. It’s fine. He isn’t meant to die. I turn my back on him. I’m done with him. It’s a mild night. The blood is pumping through my veins. I’ll head back to the car and I’ll go. There’s still so much I need to do.

  IV

  The Lonely Road

  (September 1980)

  What happened afterwards, Matteo and Giuliana couldn’t remember. Surely hours went by, one after another. Days too. But they felt as if life went on without them. Did they manage to sleep during that time? They must have, otherwise they would not have survived, but they didn’t remember doing so. And, in fact, the idea of sleep seemed incongruous. There was no respite from the pain. They were living just one long day, made up of the same words said to them with that mixture of embarrassment and emotion. Friends, colleagues from the taxi office, neighbours, all spoke the same phrases, in low voices without waiting to hear the reply, as though placing an offering at the foot of a statue. Matteo and Giuliana said thank you. They said that they were touched. Or they said nothing, determined not to cry.

  Frequently people congratulated Matteo on his courage. They thought he was strong and resilient. He always found that absurd because he knew he had been broken, he was destroyed. He was aware of all the things he could no longer do: enter Pippo’s bedroom, say his name, go back to the places they used to go to together. He knew that he was in a perpetual state of stupor and that nothing mattered any more.

  The hardest thing was hearing the shouts of children in the street. Especially when the children were the same age as Pippo, expressing the same delight at running behind a bike, or joyfully calling out to their neighbourhood friends. He heard them as he passed, ‘Eh Anto’, vieni qua!’ He shuddered. ‘Ant’, vieni a giocare.’ These were living children, he thought, hurrying on. They are all living, except mine. They went on as normal: racing about, playing catch. ‘Anto’!’ Perhaps they had played with his son. He didn’t want to look at them because he knew what he would think: he wouldn’t be able to stop himself cursing them. He would think, let death take one of them, never mind which one, one who would never amount to anything, or even all of them. He didn’t care how many of them death took as long as it gave him his child back. Why were they still living? Were they better than Pippo? He hurried on, so that he would not grab them roughly by the sleeve and ask them, ‘Why? Why?’ like a madman.

  Giuliana always wore the same expression now. Ashen and hollow-eyed, she spent most of her time sitting in an armchair, crying and desolate, like a faded photo of her previous self. One day – some time after Pippo’s death – she got up and went out. She wanted to go to the cemetery. She hadn’t been back there since the burial. She walked slowly to the bus stop. She waited, with a blank gaze holding her bag tightly under her arm. When the bus arrived, she didn’t manage to get on. There it was in front of her, but her muscles wouldn’t obey her. The driver waited a few seconds to see whether she would make up her mind, then he closed the doors again and drove off. She stayed rooted to the spot, still blank. She hadn’t moved a muscle. Her body had not been able to respond. Eventually she set off on her way home, but very slowly, as though defeated by her own weakness.

  *

  Matteo did not tell anyone, even Giuliana, that he relived that terrible day over and over again. He was always in the same place at the corner of Via Forcella and Vicolo della Pace. He co
uld not tear himself away from that pavement. He spent hours there in his thoughts. He continually went over the day. The day as it had happened, the day as it could have happened, the minute microscopic changes that could have altered the course of events. If he had walked a little less quickly. If he had not parked the car so that they could finish the journey on foot, or if he had parked somewhere else. If he had only crossed the road into the shade, which had occurred to him, or if he had taken the time to kneel down and re-tie Pippo’s lace as the boy had asked … A few seconds at every stage would have been sufficient to ensure that they were a few inches out of harm’s way. A few seconds earlier or later and the trajectory of the bullet would have missed the boy. A tiny thing, like hearing a voice he thought he knew, making him stop for a moment, or a Vespa roaring past that would have forced them to step back. But no. Everything had conspired to create that terrible conjunction of body and bullet. What force could have willed that? What horrible turn of fate had ensured that everything came together in that way? Was that what was known as the evil eye? And if it was, why had it chosen them that day? By chance or design?

  At night, or when he was alone, he relived the sound of his son crying. He was there, holding his father’s hand, whimpering because he had run so much and was tired of being dragged along. That was how they had parted: in anger. And he couldn’t tell that to anyone, not even Giuliana. What on earth had made him so angry that he had hurried them into the path of death? Fear of being late for school? How petty and stupid that now seemed. If he had at least been able to talk to his son, in the street, or the ambulance, and tell him that he was there and loved him, and wasn’t angry, but he hadn’t said any of that. Pippo had died in the silence of his father’s anger.

  It took him a while to gather the strength to get his car back. When he finally decided to go, he went at night. He did not want the streets to have the feel of the day of the shooting. He did not want crowds, or noises, or the light to remind him of that day. He saw the car from afar. It was still there. He went over, opened the door and got in, his jaw clenched, and drove off. He did not pick up any passengers that night. He did not switch on the light that indicated whether he was available for hire or not. He wasn’t in his car for work. He was just driving. He went from Capodichino airport to Santa Lucia, from Piazza Dante to the business district and from the port to Vomero. He drove without knowing why he was driving, sometimes stopping for several minutes at the side of the road, his hands trembling, his lips parted, his head bent. He drove until he was exhausted and only then did he resign himself to going home.

  When he went into the bedroom, moving as quietly as possible because it was five in the morning, Giuliana turned over in bed without completely waking up and asked him, ‘Have you started working again?’ He did not reply. A few seconds passed during which he remained standing close to the bed, then she said, ‘That’s good,’ before burying her head in the pillow, a sign that she wouldn’t be speaking again. He said nothing. He did not contradict her. He did not explain anything about where he had been. He slipped into bed, letting her fall back to sleep with the comforting sense that her husband was a brave man slowly getting back to normal, a man she’d be able to rely on.

  He, on the other hand, could not get to sleep. He thought back over his long nocturnal drive, from Mergellina to the station, along wide empty streets. He asked himself what he had been doing there, what hurt or desire had he been trying to assuage? Was he recovering as Giuliana thought or was he dropping into the abyss? He wondered if he would do it again, if he would go out like that every night like a man who wasn’t seeking anything but who just wanted the soft night air to bathe his face.

  Giuliana made another attempt to go to the cemetery. The idea haunted her. There was something there she had to overcome. The second time she did manage to board the bus. She was white-faced and kept her head down throughout the journey so that no one would ask her if she was all right or if she needed any help. She braced herself. The drive up to Santa Maria del Pianto seemed endless. The bus stopped in the traffic then jerked forward in fits and starts. She felt sick.

  When she finally got off, the fresh air did her good. She walked slowly, gradually regaining her breath. Then she was outside the tall gates of the cemetery and stopped. She gazed at the wrought iron and the tombstones behind and decided not to go any further. She had failed again. She did not have the strength yet. She would have to overcome her reluctance over several attempts. She stared for a long time at the gates and then turned away. But this time she didn’t feel undone. She knew she would succeed, but she wanted to do it in her own time. She wanted to be able to enter the cemetery without flinching or lowering her head, to do what she had decided to do there.

  *

  Matteo never worked in daytime again. Every evening he would leave the apartment at about six o’clock, only returning in the very early morning. It soothed him to be out at night behind his steering wheel. The world asked nothing of him, did not see him. He glided along, silent and miserable, and gave himself over to his grief. For several hours, he managed to forget everything and it was a profound relief. As he drove along deserted streets, catching sight of figures disappearing round corners, he found beauty in the grimy city. The people he saw, at those improbable hours, when the sky was darker than the road, were people he recognised. They were broken men, who were fleeing life or who had been rejected by it. He saw them – as he drove with all his windows down – drunk and pissing on the dirty pavement. ‘Are they still living?’ he wondered. ‘They’re shadows going from one place to another. Like me. With no substance. Trying to work out what to do with themselves. They’re empty and floating. What do they still feel?’ He saw them in the street – distraught, cut off in their solitude, their gaze vacant, wandering from one place to another, just for the sake of walking, so that they would not be on their own and tempted to end it all. He saw them, sometimes arguing, with the heavy slowness of drunkards or the dangerous swiftness of murderers. The people that the light of day chased away were there; he saw them roaming about filled with despair or spite.

  He drove around at that strange hour when shops are no more than sad façades behind iron grilles, and when there was nothing that could remind him of the man he had once been. He drove, counting the beggars and the overturned dustbins. When he had no passengers, he turned off his engine wherever he was, in the port, near the station, in Via Partenope across the bay from Castel dell’Ovo, or in the grim little streets of the Spanish quarter. He let the sounds of the city wash over him as his thoughts wandered: why could men not just die away like flames? Just gently exhaust themselves until they were extinguished? That’s what he would have liked for himself – it seemed to him to correspond to his real state. He should not continue, he should just gradually diminish, with ever shorter breaths, and eventually disappear. But that didn’t happen and each evening, as the humid sea air swept through the empty Naples streets, he was forced to admit that he was still alive.

  And then came that morning in September. Giuliana left the apartment with a determination she would not have believed herself capable of any more. The sun was rising and the façades of the buildings were half in shade and half in light. She had told the hotel the day before that she would not be going in, but had said nothing to Matteo because she wanted to be able to leave at her usual early time without having to explain. She walked all along Via Foria. She was pale and drawn but had a quiet strength about her. She knew that this was the day she would succeed. She did not want to take the bus. She wanted to walk. To get there by putting one foot in front of the other. She wanted to have time to think and to feel her fatigue pull on her muscles. She made her way to the Naples cemetery, up there on the heights of Santa Maria del Pianto, leaving the city behind to wake up in a halo of bluish pink.

  She passed under the cemetery portal without hesitating. She walked through the tombs without flinching. When she arrived at her son’s grave, she stopped dead and read the inscrip
tion without betraying any emotion.

  ‘A stone, so that’s all that remains of my son,’ she said to herself. The silence all around was soothing. It would have been unbearable to meet other visitors or to be disturbed by the comings and goings of municipal employees. She was very still, not looking any more either at the stone or at the name engraved on it. On the horizon, the Bay of Naples sparkled like the scales of a fish. She was lost in memory. She could clearly recall the voices of those who had come to Pippo’s funeral a few weeks earlier. She remembered walking behind the hearse, and the long ceremony during which she had held on to Matteo’s arm to stop herself collapsing. She remembered the procession of people who all said the same thing. It was as if she was once again in the midst of the slow crowd walking behind the coffin. The empty cemetery seemed suddenly full of people again. She felt they were there in front of her. They were all there, around her, looking sombre in their black clothes. Family, friends, the local shopkeepers. Everyone. She felt a cold anger developing, an anger that could burn everything, destroy everything, the anger of grieving mothers who won’t resign themselves. So she began speaking, right there in the middle of nowhere, at that hour of the day with only the birds to hear her and this was Giuliana’s first curse:

  ‘I curse you all, every one of you. For the world is ugly and it’s you who have made it that way. You crowded round me, you smothered me with gentle words and solicitude but I did not want any of it. I curse the people who work in this cemetery who carried my son’s coffin, relieved because they could not help noticing how light it was and how that was less tiring for them. I know that’s what they were thinking even though it didn’t show on their faces and I curse them for their thoughts.