Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  All right, he’d keep his mouth shut. But what about them? Were they capable of properly guarding the silence that he was entrusting to their care?

  They raised their heads, heard the sound of cars without cars that was arriving from the city’s outskirts.

  The assistant district attorney laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder, and the old man took comfort from this empty gesture. An alligator executing a half turn on the ground, finding in the other’s move the missing part of the dance. The lights of the parking structure sparkled in the empty air.

  “Signor Salvemini, I’m sorry.”

  Half an hour ago he’d watched him get out of the car. Vittorio had moved past the flashing dome lights of the cars. The policemen had stiffened. The medical examiner had led the way. Vittorio had identified his daughter’s body on the asphalt. The medical examiner’s face was long and bony. It looked as if they’d yanked him out of some bed of dubious repute. Then the policemen had started to leave. The squad cars had begun to pull out. They’d turned the corner and had fallen back into somber gravity. After ten minutes, the medical examiner had told him: “Here they come now.”

  From the end of the road a large black vehicle headed in their direction. It seemed to float in the silence. The bodywork devoured the sound before it could issue from the engine.

  Out of the vehicle emerged the three men from the funeral parlor. They pulled the tubular structure out of the back and began assembling it on the asphalt. They pulled out the covered mortuary tray, too. They fastened it to the gurney. They opened the calendered lid, similar to the top of a chafing dish. They pushed the gurney to where it lined up with the young woman. The driver pulled the handle on the double-scissor frame, the mortuary tray lowered. They loaded the corpse onto it. They closed the lid and the body disappeared. They slid the gurney into the hearse so that the metal legs fit into the grooves inset in the cargo deck. One of them closed the rear hatch. The other went around to the driver’s seat. The third waved to the medical examiner. He shook hands with the assistant district attorney. He shook hands with the young woman’s father. Vittorio noticed that he was chewing, empty-mouthed. The medical examiner also got into the hearse, and together they set off for the mortuary. The insects continued to slap against the fluorescent lights.

  The assistant district attorney decided that he’d put a hand on Signor Salvemini’s shoulder, and then he did so.

  “Everyone else was sobbing and then this girl starts shouting. The snuffbox. The gold snuffbox is missing. The snuffbox was here before, she says.”

  “My father-in-law lost his shoes that way.”

  “Go someday and sit outside the geriatric ward, and get your head down at ground level. Take a look. All the male nurses . . . ”

  “They’re all wearing shoes that don’t belong to them. By the time they’re ready to retire, they have hundreds of pairs.”

  “Yes, but this was in the mortuary. I already had the soldering iron in one hand.”

  “And she goes out of her mind.”

  The hearse sped through the night. After the public housing projects, the road narrowed. All curves and trees. The tires screeched. They dove under a viaduct. They remerged skidding. Two lines of high red walls lined the roadway. The moon appeared, pale and distant. Another curve rocked the doctor against the hearse’s passenger-side window. Now the engine could be heard, the roar of an auger drill at the far end of a cave.

  “So she starts accusing her relatives. Thieves, she shouts. The gold snuffbox. She points her finger as if she’s going to count them one by one. The son says: Why, where do you think it is, it’s in his pocket where you put it when we redressed him. Then she grabs the granddaughter. She grabs her by the wrist and pulls her violently, so the poor girl finds herself face to face with the open casket. The old woman shouts: All right, let’s go! Put your hands into your grandfather’s pockets! Let’s see if it turns up!”

  “Last month, the wife of the owner of the hardware store . . . ” the guy driving started in.

  “The great thing is that the girl does it. She’s so shocked that she starts rummaging around with the corpse.”

  A glasses case flew from one end of the dashboard to the other. The tires screeched again. Black trees and low buildings. The doctor grabbed the assist grip. He noticed the gleam on the floor mat. Beyond the buildings the countryside could be sensed, like a white radiation. To pass from a feverish night to a dreamless lethargy. The doctor clenched his jaw. He saw a crane in the shafts of moonlight. Then the city resumed.

  When the phone had rung two hours earlier, the doctor had opened his eyes wide with the luminous body of a woman undulating on the screen. While the fifth man came on her face, the numerical sequences had returned to his mind. He’d turned off the television set. The room had been plunged into darkness with the exception of the light from the DVD player. The scene continued in the player’s circuits, he thought. His cell phone’s ringtone emerged definitively from his state of unconsciousness. Numbers. He’d dreamed of numbers. Combinations that opened electric security gates by remote control. There were numbers behind the animated advertisements on the luminous billboards. A text message: one thousand one hundred and twenty digits. A photograph: a hundred seventeen thousand. A porn DVD: three times ten to the ninth. But then tumblers turned and steel locks were opened. Doors swung open on hinges fastened to nothing but walls, stairs that led to narrow underground passageways. Not even a hundred-digit sequence would be enough. A numerical code of sixteen to the sixth reproduced a lung in a CAT scan. Nine to the twelfth was two minutes of phone conversation. Twelve to the twenty-fourth: all the information contained on planet earth. But for a spider spinning its web, the concept of number was no longer enough. The woman in the porn flick, caressed by a veil of summer light, was now frying an omelet in her home in Van Nuys, California. Now she was a little girl at her desk in a classroom in Wilmington, North Carolina. Now she was dead. Turn to the right in the underground passageway, then to the left. Another door opens wide. The light in the room was so strong that the hairs on the back of the neck were curling. A young woman, naked, on a steel table. The freckles formed a pattern reminiscent of a constellation. He’d held his cell phone up to his ear. Hello. Then he’d asked: “Do you want me to go there now, sir?” The director of the local branch of the national health service had given him the address. Necessary to verify that she was dead. He’d thought to himself: I’m not on call tonight. A young woman had committed suicide, the voice had gone on. If the cause of death is known, then what’s the use of an external examination in the morgue, he’d thought. “Tonight Palmieri’s on call,” was all he’d said. The voice had remained silent. Only then had the medical examiner realized. “All right,” he’d said. He’d climbed out of bed. He’d put on his slippers. His weakness, their knife gripped firmly by the handle. Walked toward the kitchen. Switched on the light. He’d put on a pot of espresso. Sat at the table. Chewed vacantly. Before the espresso pot came to the boil, he’d stood up. If I have to do it for them, I’ll do it first for myself. He’d taken the jar out of the cabinet. Pulled out a ceramic plate. He’d turned the second burner on low. Pulled the baggie out of the jar. Laid it on the plate. Then put the plate on the burner. He’d turned off the flame under the espresso pot. Taken the plate off the burner. Laid it on the cover of the desk diary. Credit card. Chopped the crystals with the edge of the card. First line.

  “So one morning the wife of the proprietor of the hardware store comes to see me in person at the undertaker’s,” says the hearse driver.

  The trees grew dense along the sides of the road. Beyond the curve a line of warehouses emerged. The medical examiner wondered why the driver was driving as fast as he was. Beyond the industrial sheds he saw the lights glowing in vertical rows. The driver countersteered, the cemetery vanished.

  “She starts in with a roundabout discussion on the economic slowdown that she claims deva
stated the store after her husband’s death. Forced to close, she says. I say: Signora, I’m sorry. She says: Any minute now, they might turn off the electricity.

  “They don’t throw away anything that belonged to their husbands.” The man next to the driver snickers. He knew the rest of the story.

  “It’s just that this time it wasn’t a snuffbox,” said the driver, stepping on the gas. “It was the Rolex her husband had wanted to be buried with. A precious one, from the Seventies. The woman bursts into tears. I say to her: Signora, it’s been more than a year. It’s not as if we can disinter the corpse. She takes her hands away from her face, I look and I say to myself I must not have understood right, then I take another look and I think, here comes trouble. It’s clear that she’s crying, but basically, she’s laughing, too. She smiles through her tears, she slips a finger under the collar of the jacket of her skirt suit. Oh, yes you can, she says.

  The man next to the driver burst out laughing. The driver laughed. The man next to the medical examiner laughed. The driver laughed. The man next to the driver grunted. The driver laughed. The night opened out black and diagonal through the windshield. They narrowly missed a dumpster. The medical examiner jerked, startled. Then the trees thinned out. The sky opened out, the road became broad and straight. The cemetery of Bari, with its luminous eyes and its cypresses and the niches and monumental chapels, rose up before them.

  They waited while the electric gate swung open. They entered. They skirted the vaults and the horizontal burial crypts. Among the cypresses, the silhouette of a statue, plastic bags full of dead flowers. The vehicle came to a halt in front of the mortuary. The guard greeted them, emerging from the shadows: “Come, bring ’em in, who knows who’ll be bringing you someday.” No one laughed. The guard went to open the mortuary. He came back toward them. He gave the keys to the medical examiner. He said: “Lock up good, after you’re done.” He headed back to his booth, buried in the perfume of dirt and reinforced concrete.

  The medical examiner asked: “Who has a cigarette?”

  The three men pulled the stretcher with the girl in it out along the rails, fastened it to the gurney, taking care that the lid didn’t open. They pushed the gurney toward the morgue.

  The medical examiner thought he heard noises coming through the bushes. He licked his cigarette. He stuck his right hand into his inside jacket pocket. He opened the baggie with his thumb and middle finger. He stuck in his forefinger, then pressed it against the edges of the cigarette. He lit it. Taste of ammonia. A young cat moved circumspectly beyond the leaves. A leap onto the gravestone. The mouse fled. The medical examiner took another drag. The door to the mortuary had opened. The three men from the undertakers came out, one after the other. The last one was pushing the gurney, now empty.

  “She’s ready,” said the driver, “when you’re done, we’ll be with the guard.”

  They headed toward the guard’s booth.

  The medical examiner took another drag. In the distance, the song of night birds. He tossed the cigarette. He picked up his bag and headed off.

  He half closed the door, the noises ceased. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The light was so strong that he had to wait for the outlines to take shape. It was a squalid mortuary with tiled walls. The inset wall sink must have considered itself a luxury. He went over and washed his hands. Then he turned off the faucet, pulled a length of paper towel off the roll, dried himself, tossed the towel into the trash. He put on his gloves. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the trench coat. The skirt, the blouse, the panties and bra. All piled on a chair. He turned away. He had the impression that the light hadn’t yet stabilized. The girl was on the steel table next to the window. He stepped closer to the body. He set the bag down on the accessory table. He opened it. He pulled out pen and notepad, and set them on the facing shelf. He leaned over the girl. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He stood up straight. He adjusted the light of the minispot. He went back and stood over Clara. Even before touching her he felt a slight recoil, as if something about that body had pierced him, depositing itself somewhere he could hardly reach. He clenched and unclenched his jaw. He took the head in his hands. He rotated the neck from one side to the other. The osseous crunch suggested a craniofacial trauma. To establish whether that was due to a fall would require an autopsy. An external examination wouldn’t be sufficient. He felt something prick his left forefinger. He pulled the finger away from the earlobe and saw a star-shaped earring, gold-plated, pretty run-of-the-mill. On the other earlobe, the earring was missing. Torn away. He noticed the location of the freckles. For an instant, he was close to the memory of the Ursa Major he’d dreamed just a short while before. He lost the information. He felt the cheekbones and the forehead. Then it was time for the arms. As he pressed down on the torso with his fingers, he felt the air bubble. As the ribs fractured, they had perforated the pleural sacs. There could be multiple causes for that too. He wasn’t there to find that out. He chewed empty-mouthed. Subcutaneous emphysema. He wrote that finding down on his notepad. He turned back to look at her. Her breasts were full and firm. The pale skin on her thighs was riddled with large brownish bruises. A layman would have associated them with Rorschach blots. But it was only blood effusion. He turned her on her side. He tried rotating her. He pressed one hand down near where her kidneys would be. He found something. He felt the back of his neck sizzle. He asked how this could still be possible. He adjusted the light of the minispot. He turned back to Clara. Something stirred in his memory. Who in Bari didn’t know the Salveminis? Even the Physical Therapy Institute on Via Camillo Rosalba existed thanks to that family. On a few occasions, he’d run into her when she was alive, lovely and pale in an evening gown, outside some club. She cheated on her husband. That was something people said. A friend of his had told him about some kind of affair with the chancellor of the university. Still, there’s something else, the doctor told himself. The mortuary room was steeped in silence. He went back to palpating the corpse. He clenched and unclenched his jaw. With renewed determination, he inserted his fingers under her kidneys. He pressed, until he recognized the compression of the vertebrae. Lumbar fracture. He felt the frozen drop of cocaine in his throat. He set the corpse straight again. He bent over her again. If she were alive, he’d have felt her breath on his forehead. He felt her sternum. He pressed on her pelvis. With one hand he gripped her right ankle, then slipped the other hand under the bend in her knee. No fractures. He braced the left leg. The whiteness of her flesh was a frequency intercepted by the antenna that had been activated in him as soon as he’d glimpsed her. He started to bend the other leg. Oh, Christ. The blow hit him direct and violent and now all it was doing was spreading through his head. Like a shot, he dropped the corpse’s leg. He looked behind him. Instinctively, he made for the door. He locked it. Slowly, he caught his breath. He went back to the anatomy table. Now the glare from the spotlight burned on him like the reflection from a polar ice cap. It was the girl in the pictures. But of course. He hadn’t noticed it at the time because the subject wasn’t looking directly into the lens. But he realized it now. He put his hands on the corpse’s knees, touched the thighs. He opened the legs. The thing dated back to less than a year ago. Dozens of obscene photos in the hardcover binder. Stuff that demanded a strong stomach. He spread her legs with renewed vigor. He remained stunned for a few seconds. Vittorio Salvemini’s daughter. He turned her back onto her side. He recoiled from the corpse as if it were a bag of garbage. He went back to the door. He flipped the light switch. The room plunged into darkness. Now he could hear his heart beat. Little by little, the light of the moon took possession of the room, spread over the floor and onto the anatomy table. The corpse’s body became visible again, but this time it emerged from a farther-away place. The medical examiner ground his teeth. He felt an urgent need for a blast of cocaine fired right up his nostrils.

  The operation last time.”

  “A quad
ra . . . ”

  “The quadrantectomy,” she corrected herself, beating him to it, then blushed.

  She was aware of the correct terminology. She consulted the Garzanti encyclopedias, the articles that came out in the popular publications on the subject. A woman in her early fifties. The oncologist’s presence threatened to keep her from thinking straight.

  “A quadrantectomy of the left breast, with a biopsy of the lymph node,” the professor went on, without taking his eyes off the report, “performed on February 15, 1997 at the San Carlo hospital in Potenza.”

  “Fifteen years ago,” the woman said to herself.

  The doctor restrained his impulse to sigh. He entrusted the gesture to a cocked eyebrow. His assistant, sitting beside him, stopped typing on the keyboard of her computer.

  “Mamma, if it was 1997 that means fourteen years ago,” the young man broke in, irritated.

  The woman and her son looked at each other with all the love, all the hate for the destiny that brings certain bodies to clash with each other just when it attracts them to each other.