Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Clara’s voice materialized elsewhere, cool now and chiming, in a form her father did not have the privilege of hearing up close. Vittorio would walk along the upstairs hallway—a sudden silence after Michele’s room. A few more steps and two peals of laughter that ended in an embrace, the excuse being they wanted to smother each other.

  At that point, Vittorio would begin to worry. Young people are easily infected, and Michele was a hotbed of malaises. That was more than an impression. That had been certified by an envelope embossed with the seal of the board of education.

  The letter, which was signed by the vice principal, had come several months into the new school year. Vittorio sent his wife to talk to the boy’s teachers. That evening, Annamaria came home with the expression of someone who’s just had her suspicions confirmed.

  “Now I’ll tell you, but you promise me you won’t lose your temper,” she said, pouring herself a glass of chilled wine.

  The problem wasn’t that Michele’s academic progress was poor, but rather that his progress was impossible to verify. When quizzed in history, he hadn’t uttered a word. Summoned to the blackboard by his math teacher, his greatest act of will had consisted of crumbling the stick of chalk in his fingers. For his Italian essay, he’d sidestepped the problem with an absurd burst of stream of consciousness. “This,” said Annamaria, “will give you some sense of what we’re dealing with.” The prompt asked the students to analyze a statement by Marc Bloch that had been the subject of classroom discussion. “Misunders­tanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.” At the end of the second hour Michele had handed in a sheet of paper whose margins were illuminated with drawings of strange little creatures, while the main part consisted of a long sentence of which it was impossible to make either head or tail (“the room’s window overlooks the garden,” the incomprehensible opening phrase in the middle of the page), whose only connection to the writing prompt was to be found in a shrewd axiom copied who knows where: “But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.”

  And as if that weren’t enough, the English teacher had told her that during her class, Michele simply wouldn’t stop asking to go to the bathroom.

  “You see, Ma’am, I don’t know if your . . . er, that is . . . ”

  “If my son,” said Annamaria, presuming to divert and confirm the teacher’s idea.

  “The boy,” the English teacher dodged her effort, “I can’t tell if he’s suffering from some kind of nervous disorder, or if he’s just found a way to avoid being quizzed.”

  These weren’t the first of Michele’s odd behaviors. And obviously Michele was anything but stupid, Annamaria concluded, balancing her weight on the sofa. But the act of protest might perhaps have degenerated.

  “Neurotically overwhelmed by narcissism. It happens to adolescents.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  That phrase gave Annamaria the license she never would have been so rash as to take for herself. Relying on the dedication that she had shown for Ruggero—and later for Clara and Gioia—she was willing to take on the burden of a problem that in theory was none of her concern, the problem that any other woman in her place would have brandished with all the power of extortion. Stunning, admirable. And those were the adjectives that in contrast echoed in Vittorio’s head at the end of every discussion concerning Michele, because Michele was the ordeal, daily overcome, that gave proof of the solidity of their marriage.

  Annamaria said that this was a delicate matter: “Don’t think you can solve this one with the back of your hand.”

  Vittorio would never have raised a hand against one of his children. But having obtained the permission she didn’t commit the error of claiming, Annamaria made use of a rhetorical trick to take the rest. She was the first human being with a college degree with whom Vittorio was on more intimate terms than those that bound him to the civil engineers working on his construction sites. While, deep down, that didn’t impress him, what did feel exalted was the part—more superficial and concealed—we all look to in ourselves, every day, for confirmation of the progress of our lives. That degree put Annamaria in a position to complete thought processes that he chose to believe he was incapable of undertaking.

  Vittorio had no objections when she told him that a psychiatrist would be the best thing for the boy.

  It was a spectacular and unseasonable afternoon in the early nineties, one of those holdovers that summer stashes in a supernatural space to keep the temperature from spiking excessively, and that in cities like Bari ignites certain days of a beauty inconceivable even in the middle of August. Vittorio had come home early. He wanted a shower, and then to kick back on the sofa to think in peace about work until dinnertime. He’d forgotten what day it was, but the occupants of the house seemed to have been born to sabotage his every last little bit of amnesia.

  He dropped his briefcase in the front hall. He rid himself of his jacket. He went upstairs. He saw her emerge—lightfooted and sleepy, wearing a blocky checked shirt and a pair of black Wranglers—through the door outside which she’d reappear eighteen years later with the old trench coat clutched in her hands. His daughter stood in his way. She asked him if it was true that her mother had made an appointment with the psychiatrist for that afternoon.

  It was enough to hear him heave that long introductory sigh.

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  She said it with a smile and downcast eyes, and didn’t give him a chance to reply. It was unclear whether it was a reproof or a warning. I wouldn’t recommend it. Then Clara headed off, barefoot, downstairs.

  At eight o’clock Annamaria came home. Along the way, she’d picked up Gioia at the pool. Vittorio watched as they paraded by: a thwarted woman, a young boy who seemed as if the world had collapsed on his head, and a little girl floating two feet off the ground, excited at the thought that she didn’t understand what was happening. Michele headed upstairs. Gioia went running past him. Annamaria steered straight ahead, into the kitchen. When Vittorio caught up with her, he found her slicing potatoes on the cutting board.

  “Listen, I have a splitting headache. Let’s talk it over, calmly, tomorrow.”

  It annoyed him to be shut out of family matters right when things were at their most interesting. It put him in a foul mood that only got worse the instant he went back into the living room and was dazzled by a flash of light through the window. The source of light wheeled around outside the gate. Without waiting for the intercom to buzz, Clara strode briskly toward the front door. She had a helmet in her arms. Through the living room window, Vittorio saw the cloud of insects intercepted by the beam from the headlight of a high-performance motorcycle.

  She wasn’t fast, she skipped frames—Vittorio didn’t have a chance to start in on a discussion of when she should be home before he saw her, too through the glass, split in two by the reflection and reassembled on the back seat of the bike.

  At dinner, Michele poked idly at his vegetables, head lowered. Annamaria read a magazine as she ate, and Gioia managed to imitate her without reading a single thing. Ruggero was upstairs in his room with the door shut, studying. Luckily the phone rang. Vittorio talked for half an hour with one of his engineers.

  He went to bed, taking a copy of the newspaper with him. He fell asleep without even realizing it. When he reawakened, his wife was lying beside him, asleep. Silence filled the house. Vittorio wondered whether Clara had returned home. The LED on the VCR was blinking on and off without him understanding what time it was. He shut his eyes. A road on the outskirts of the city, a long straightaway. The shafts of light from the streetlamps streamed past, reflecting off the speedometer. The sky echoed with his snores. At the end of the road stood a hundred-floor building. He saw the open space where the motorbike was parked. He turned over between the sheets. The bathroom fau
cet was dripping. Someone laughed. The concentric circles dissolved, filling the sound with the power of the image. His daughter was laughing between the pillows in her bedroom. The girl’s shadow bent forward, slithering over the male shape, and then rose again.

  “Vittorio!”

  His eyes opened wide. Something moved between his fingers, and he clutched tighter. Annamaria’s leg gave a second jerk and pulled out of his grip entirely. Vittorio came to. The videocassette recorder was blinking. There was something odd about the light. He coughed. His wife coughed, too. From the hallway a purplish glow swelled and contracted. He heard a cough from the next room. There was a deafening crash downstairs. His wife screamed. Vittorio woke up for good. He leapt out of bed.

  He ran out into the hallway. He saw the dance of the shadows against the wall. He looked down the stairs and saw the roaring bulb surrounded by billowing clouds of smoke.

  “It’s a fire! Wake up everybody!”

  He rushed downstairs. When the rise in temperature became unmistakable (his hair pushed back by the waves of heat) he realized that it was the wrong tactic. He ran back up the stairs. A shadow passed in front of him, running in the opposite direction. Ruggero. Vittorio went back into his bedroom. He threw open the armoire and pulled out a wool blanket. He headed back downstairs. He thought he saw his wife vanish beyond the billowing smoke. She had Gioia by the hand. So he lunged forward with the blanket onto the fire. Just as he was right on top of it, he realized that the wooden beam had collapsed. He heard roaring everywhere, he waved the blanket, kicking up swarms of sparks. As he was fighting, he thought he understood the intelligence of the flames, the obstinate will to devour everything that belonged to him. Which just made him push harder, ignoring the pain to his forearms.

  He emerged into the garden, coughing. His face was blackened, the weave of his pajamas was fringed with burn marks, but he’d won. He ran the back of his hand over his forehead. At the foot of the stairs he found his wife and Gioia. The girl was sobbing in terror. “It’s all okay, it’s all okay,” he muttered. In the meantime, he looked around. The tops of the pine trees were swaying in the wind. Whilever you were on the losing end of the battle, lucidity was lacking. Then your senses sharpened. The shadow crossing a face hours earlier. Vittorio walked down the driveway, moving confidently toward the fountain. He turned into the hedges, continuing to walk as the lights of the house receded behind him.

  He found him sitting at the foot of a palm tree. He hadn’t even bothered to get rid of the can of gas. He was holding it in his arms like a lifesaver.

  Michele looked up. The guilty expression tightened a knot inside Vittorio that had already been reduced to the size of a pinhead. He would have had to kick the boy black and blue to make the feeling stop. “What have you done?” he asked, to give himself a moment’s breathing room. Taking him to the psychiatrist had been a mistake, he thought. It amounted to attempting a superficial solution to the problem. Blood and its slow exchange. The sensations kept moving inside Vittorio, like plants in a single vase responding to the rising sun—he felt the pain of the two overlapping plans and only then did the betrayal fill him with its significance.

  “Come on, let’s go, get up!” he said sternly.

  He let his anger flow in an incomplete form. If he’d had to trace it back to its origin—the woman who had engendered this son—he would have felt his strength grow fragile.

  They walked, exhausted, side by side, taking slow steps back to the villa’s front door. Michele still had the tank with him, absurdly, recklessly, clear proof of an impulse to self-harm in defiance of his father’s vehemence.

  Annamaria stiffened. Then Ruggero. Long-limbed and furious, his first-born took in the scene from the top of the stairs, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of green underwear. He was ready to attack them. Not the absurd stunt his half-brother had pulled. Not Vittorio who was refraining from slapping him silly, and not his mother, either, so obstinate in pretending she could measure the same weight on a scale whose plates were of different alloys. Not the eight-year-old girl immune to the idea that there might exist girls of her same age untouched by the anguish of having lost a choker with a diamond, nor the eighteen-year-old girl that no one could force back by so much as an inch. But the family as a whole. That was Ruggero’s problem: the concretion of lunatics with which fate had chosen to distract him from the only pursuit that would set him free, the nail he would continue to hammer until the particle of madness that fed, in a straight line, also into him, had been turned into a nude ring that transmits nothing; study, the fanatical study of medicine to which he devoted himself without wasting a second.

  Vittorio saw Ruggero fold forward at the waist. He was ready to face even his eldest son. But before charging into the dispute, he heard a noise behind him. He saw the motorcycle’s rear lights illuminating the bars of the gate less and less brightly, like water drying.

  Clara appeared at the end of the driveway.

  Vittorio descended the steps. As she emerged from the shadows, she appeared with her rumpled shirt and jeans-clad legs that showed no alteration of pace (if anything, her gait seemed to slow), which made her father even angrier. Putting on that display of unflustered calm was just a further lack of respect, as if there were nothing strange about finding them all on the front steps of their house at four in the morning, with smoke still pouring out the door.

  “Where have you been until now.”

  He tried to say it as if he were spitting.

  “We had problems with the motorcycle, didn’t we?” She lifted her head and unsheathed a scandalized smile.

  It sounded to Vittorio like she was stating the opposite (I didn’t have any problems with a motorcycle, I went to get myself fucked while the house went up in flames) with a force he had not counted on and could not match, because then he would have had no choice but to admit that Clara’s appearance was the perfect incarnation of the one he’d encountered in his dream such a short time before. Then Vittorio understood. She went on observing him with a sort of indignant astonishment mixed with composure, in such a way that Vittorio saw—dark brown in the clear green—her half-brother’s eyes in hers. Michele had known. He’d known that Clara wasn’t home. Otherwise he’d never have set that fire in the living room.

  Vittorio moved away from the window. The curtains swung gently. The ladybug was still there, closed in on itself on the door of the bookshelf. He sat down at the desk. The black of the sky resisted the arrival of dawn. He put one hand over his eyes and imagined the worst.

  He ought to have overcome the disparity between despair and the simulation of despair that he was now confronted with. He ought to have gone upstairs to give the news to his wife and to Gioia. Get on the phone to Ruggero. To say nothing of Alberto. He’d be willing to bet that Clara’s husband was completely in the dark about everything.

  But at that point, even if he wasn’t carried off by a heart attack, they still wouldn’t be safe.

  Two hundred and fifty detached houses on the Gargano coast. Construction only recently finished, a few houses already sold. The Porto Allegro residential complex could prove to be the black hole capable of swallowing them all. The Foggia district attorney’s office had already submitted to the court a seizure request because certain restrictions that even Vittorio was struggling to figure out had been violated. A terrible tangle in which experts, technicians, environmentalists, rival developers, and lawyers of every type had become involved.

  He ought to have battled with all his might. That way, even if the worst had happened to Clara—he thought, staring at the screen of his cell phone—he wouldn’t have had sufficient strength. In a last spasm, perhaps he’d have been able to bring home a mayor or deputy mayor for dinner. Then he would have begun retreating, overwhelmed by the force of events.

  If he stopped to think, it was astounding. His whole life, luck and danger had risen in equal measure. He couldn’t figure ou
t whether it was something connected to the nature of individuals or that of business in general, the soul of which, if so, would really prove to resemble the little demon that you can spot from time to time on the façades of banks on days of blazing sunlight.

  For that matter, everything that promised to return to its proper place went out at night in search of just the opposite. For all Vittorio could have said until last night, Clara had returned to the ranks. One day she had slipped into the finest hairdresser’s in Bari, putting an end to the wild hair that hung down to her ass. Another day (a magnificent day) she’d cut ties with all those jeans and checked shirts. The dingy canvas shoes lay in a corner of the bathroom like proof of some crime committed the night before. At a certain point, they, too, vanished. She had come shooting out of the revolving door of epochal changes showing off an outfit worthy of Jacqueline Kennedy. That happened during the period in which Michele had come home from his military service and yet another psychiatrist had told them that the only way to get him back to normal would be to change his surroundings. Michele had moved to Rome. Clara had started going to parties held by up-and-coming young lawyers. Parties held by engineers, doctors. Occasionally Vittorio ran into her at events where he was a guest himself. Evening gown. Skirt suit and high heels. Of course, not long after that she got married. Half an idiot, was what Vittorio had thought when he got his first look at Alberto. A forty-two-year-old engineer, intelligent, responsible, and pretty experienced. Over time, he’d been forced to admit that. Never a single problem with any of the construction sites he’d entrusted to him after the wedding.

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught a gleam of something at the edge of his desk.

  Vittorio reached out his hand, grabbed his cell phone. “Hello,” he said. Then he nodded. He felt his throat tighten. He instinctively raised his right hand to his chest. On the other end of the line, the voice seemed incapable of getting to the point. He was the one who said it. Suicide. He said it before the voice could go on courting such dead-end words as “body” and “discovery.” The hand clenched and relaxed on the shirt.