“Your brother,” he said.
It was Michele, and Gioia remained motionless. Michele was home. She forced herself to conceal the blush blooming beneath her skin, as if her reputation as a conscientious young woman prevented her from feeling disappointment at the injustice of a problem coming on the heels of the one before it.
A sliver of moon persisted in the early morning sky. The Chicken Man was hawking gym shoes. The Pig Man was handing out discount coupons for legs of prosciutto. The spotlights of the Mongolfiera shopping center swept through the alphabetized areas of the paid parking lot. On the opposite side, two plexiglass clouds described the paradox of a provisional universe governed by a firm hand. Pietro Giannelli, sheathed in his frog costume, was peeling flyers for the Toy Center from the stack. He was handing them out to the first customers of the day. Baby Control, with special sensors for under the child’s bed. Healthy-DinDins, baby food that you steamed. Kiss the frog. The arriving customers disappeared, swallowed up by the stairs of the shopping center.
At ten-fifteen he decided that the time had come for a break. He stuck the flyers back into his fanny pack. He pulled his arm out of the sleeve. He reached one hand behind his neck. He hooked the zipper, slid it down. The frog’s head split in half, and from between the two foam rubber hemispheres emerged Giannelli’s overheated face. He took a deep breath. He hopped over to the vending machine. He slipped two coins into the slot. He bent over with some effort to pick up the Gatorade. At ten in the morning he was already bathed in sweat. He drank in big gulps. He hopped toward the payment booth in the parking lot. He passed sector H. Still hopping, he went down the ramp that led to an isolated row of garages with their metal gates pulled down. Here there was some shade. Peace and silence. Raising his eyes, he could see the rail line from a distance.
He leaned his back against the cement pillar. He stuck his hand into the fanny pack. He pulled out the pipe. He grabbed the aluminum foil. He tore off a section. He folded it over until he’d made it into a tiny hood. He tucked the aluminum foil into the spout of the pipe. He reached into the fanny pack for the baggie. He pulled out the DMT crystals. He put them on the aluminum hood and lit it. He took a drag. The garage’s roller gates became an obsidian wall. There was a high frequency whistle. It expanded. The light regressed toward colors that the sun might have produced in the long Precambrian slumber, before life appeared on earth. The movement of the birds created what were to his eyes perfect polygons. Squares. Wonderful ocean-blue rectangles. Then the geometric concept underwent an evolution. Pietro Giannelli felt on his skin something analogous to a divine wind that began to caress him. An incorporeal tide. Between him and a snow-covered peak there was no longer any more distance than that which separated him from his own nose.
The whistle’s intensity grew, then it vanished.
Pietro Giannelli opened his eyes again, stunned. The obsidian of the garage had turned back into steel. The patina that had covered the trees and the road—and the train, that was now rocketing past in front of him—was rapidly beginning to retreat. It was as if some other energy source were sucking down the effects of the dimethyltryptamine, like a bathtub draining. If he’d checked his watch, he’d have seen that not five minutes had passed since that first drag. But he didn’t need a watch. He remembered that sensation.
They could build the industrial sheds of major agribusiness concerns on it, privacy fences for greenhouses and nurseries, thought Michele, in the carriage of the Eurostar, with his head against the glass of the window. He looked out at the countryside as it ran south with him. On his knees sat balanced the carrier inside which the cat had been riding quietly since the start of the trip. They could build cement plants. The wind turbines that he’d seen earlier. Human ingenuity was free to dream up the oddest pieces of architecture, whatever most convinced man that he was lifting the shadow off the land that had first engendered them. But the foundation of things (the damp soil beneath the wind turbines, the worm in the greenhouse, the white dust that kicked up everywhere) remained enclosed in its mystery. They were the woods they had always been. Mouse follows pied piper. Coach turns into pumpkin. Wolf eats little pig. Girl at the bottom of the well. Mirror mirror . . .
He pushed a finger through the mesh of the little cage. He felt the damp nose.
He petted the cat. A certain kind of sorrow doesn’t cause tears. I could be bounded in a nutshell, he recited by heart. He showed his ticket to the conductor again. He got a Coca-Cola when they were around Molfetta.
The young stray cat gathered itself, concealed amongst the ferns. It lunged forward and buried its face in the shopping bag. It fled with a slice of prosciutto in its teeth.
By the time the housekeeper waved her fist in the air, the cat had already darted into the bushes.
But the screams, the lunge of the beast, Engineer De Palo’s Focus on the front driveway, were point, line, and surface in an abstract drawing compared to those who, turning their backs on them, were already facing the credenza in the front hall. Annamaria started up the stairs. She observed the scenes of war that familiarity had transformed into patches of color. The grief of the past few days had turned them back into the unsightly paintings that they’d purchased years ago, when auctions at resorts were all the rage. Cortina 1976. The auctioneer had lowered the gavel on the walnut sound block. Clara had just been born, she was moving her tiny hands in the white lace of the cradle as she and Vittorio sat in their dressing gowns, buttering their melba toast amid the moldings of the hotel suite overlooking the Tofane mountains. Those weren’t the good old days, she thought, turning down the second-story hallway.
Annamaria went past the closed door of what had once been Michele’s bedroom (now reduced to a never sufficiently dead storage room), went past Clara’s bedroom, Ruggero’s. Those had been the terrible days. She entered the master bedroom. She collapsed on the bed. She bent her head and ran the palm of her hand over her neck. Through the cracks in the shutters the heat wafted in like the crystals of a kaleidoscope diving into the water. The days full of hope had been the ones while she’d been expecting her first son. Soon after, Vittorio bought the house they were living in, and the energy he devoted to renovating it was already tucked away in her belly like a sun taking shape week by week.
Being pregnant with Ruggero was wonderful. Annamaria felt her belly stretch, her tummy was covered with small brown spots while the veins on her legs became visible. In the morning she’d throw the windows open in the apartment that Vittorio had rented and feel the warmth hit her face.
Men make women happy. And she, every time the baby gave a start (even amidst the waves of nausea in the first few weeks), received confirmation of how right she had been to marry Vittorio. A question of instinct. When she’d been in high school, stealing time from her books at a table in a café with her girlfriends, she’d seen plenty of young men who were capable of rescuing her from a future as a teacher. The son of the lawyer who was defending a former cabinet minister. The son of one commissioner or another. When one of these good-looking scions of important families stopped nearby, Annamaria caught a whiff of large landholdings and corpses. Those young men might have plenty of property but they lacked drive, and in order to get their hands on the former they’d have to ask permission. Annamaria had looked up from her martini and then she’d immediately glanced down again, but in the space between the one thing and the other, she’d already made up her mind. The lunatic who, after circling the block a few times without finding a place, had parked his Citroën DS on the sidewalk and run straight toward the Chamber of Commerce might have been one of those losers who were trying their luck only to fall back on a civil service position a year later, but he wasn’t.
The first time that he sat down at the table with them, it seemed to her that he was thinking on several levels at once. Charcoal gray jacket and lovely safecracker’s hands.
“This is the third day I’ve seen you sitting here at the bar
. Since you’re clearly not that interested in spending time with your books, I’ve come to study you from a little closer up. But if I’m interrupting something impo—”
“Caro, nothing could be more important here than these three empty glasses,” one of the girls interrupted him with a laugh.
Vittorio bought a round of drinks. He smiled at them all, but especially at her. He returned the glance with which Annamaria had pierced him without his even noticing. At the same time, he darted his pupils from one side to the other in pursuit of the precious time that those exceedingly pleasant minutes were costing him. A young businessman with aspirations to a great fortune and beginnings in the gutter is obliged to cram fifty or so hours into the normal twenty-four. But he wasn’t dull.
They wound up in bed, and she felt nothing. Between the sheets, she studied the apartment, trying to understand. A two-bedroom apartment, barely furnished. Empty boxes and invoices.
The second time, they had fun. The sweat glistening on their naked bodies would influence many of her dreams over the years that followed. That night, they went to a party. The birthday party of some mover and shaker in the food distribution sector. Annamaria saw Vittorio laugh and chat with the guests, he asked her to dance, he introduced her to men and other young women and old matrons whom she could barely remember the next time around. In every move that Vittorio made, there was affability and courtesy, but—she noticed—every facial muscle was employed in pursuit of profit.
The fourth or perhaps the fifth time that they made love, Annamaria felt a surge of emotion and a depth that she’d never imagined descend on top of her. As soon as they were done, she smoked a cigarette over it. Vittorio, sitting on the edge of the bed, tossed back half a bottle of Sangemini mineral water in a single gulp. Then he got to his feet and, in his underwear, in the middle of the room, he began to pour out his soul, leaving her thunderstruck. He was worried. Even worse, he was terrified at the idea of financial ruin. He had a great many construction projects underway at the same time, he said. But he’d also run up debts, a complicated network of financing that a simple hitch would unravel. “A rise in the cost of steel. All it would take is for the United States to be successful in their trade negotiations. All payments with foreign suppliers are in dollars.” He shook his head. He kept repeating the same expression: “You don’t understand.” In this premature imitation of a married couple, all that was missing was for him to put his hands in his hair.
“Hey, come on, bring me another cigarette.” Annamaria called him back to bed in a firm voice. Men were so stupid, even when they were also intelligent. It was clear that he wasn’t going to be ruined. It was so spectacularly obvious that he was going to make a pile of money! Only he just didn’t know it yet. Annamaria had seen him at work. If two or three deals went south, there were other tables at which he could bring his talents to bear. What could stop a man like him? The only prayer that Annamaria caught herself whispering was for the Almighty to protect him from some cruel disease.
By the time, not even a year later, she found out she was pregnant, Vittorio’s wealth had doubled. The airy beachfront apartment that he rented after their wedding was below their means. The skin on Annamaria’s abdomen was tautening. The situation was so redolent with promise (Vittorio was flying to Spain, he was engaged in negotiations for a spa in some far-flung corner of the Côte d’Azur) that she felt obliged to spend as much money as they were bound to have a few months later if luck stayed on their side.
When the time came to move to the villa, they could already have afforded an even larger one.
And the way they laughed when Vittorio took her out to dinner? she recalled without moving from the bed, in the half-light, her fingers dug into the sheets, suffering as she sat in the muggy heat that stagnated in the bedroom. The insane dresses that he bought when, just a few months after giving birth, she was already back in shape? The jewelry, she thought, closed in the gloom of her mind. The Tiffany bracelet, the waterfall necklace that filled her with light. The vacations in New York. The cheap bottle of nail polish that might, by way of a macabre prank, pop out of his suitcase after a work trip. Phone numbers on a piece of paper crumpled up in his trouser pocket. All mixed together.
Annamaria’s feelings weren’t too badly hurt when Vittorio cheated on her, which, for that matter, he did rarely. Great men, in order to keep from turning into monsters, ought to preserve a childish part of themselves. Vittorio might even, every so often, so to speak betray her, the important thing was that he not suspect a thing when he returned home. Annamaria found herself eliminating the asterisk of a fine strand of blonde hair from the collar of a jacket she was handing her husband. She felt pity for the nameless young slut, and for Vittorio she felt the blame she had reserved for Ruggero when it still occasionally happened that he wet the bed.
Then she’d go take a sauna, or spend hours in the sweet-smelling shell of a beauty spa.
There’s always the chance that within the loveliest bud lurks a filthy worm. But that a nice juicy worm might thrive within the chemistry of Chanel perfume she never would have imagined. When she became pregnant with Clara, the gestation proved, from the beginning, rather unpleasant. The dizzy spells would catch her by surprise. The waves of nausea were more intense than they had been with Ruggero. It seemed to her that a cork had popped, sending a whiff of sewer rot straight into the center of her brain. In the afternoon, alone in the kitchen, she’d burst into tears for no good reason.
At night, Vittorio would tenderly take her face in his hands. “What is it, what’s going on?” She felt dispossessed, run through by other people’s dreams.
Was it conceivable that a fetus in its twentieth week was doing this? Annamaria knew that at the end of the first trimester they develop a sense of smell, in the second trimester they swim with confidence in the amniotic fluid, start kicking in response to otherwise unspecified stimuli. But this little girl was destroying her. She seemed to inhabit her flesh with a natural hostility. Her presence is malevolent, Annamaria was surprised to catch herself thinking. She had the impression that to the fetus’s intelligence (an archaic box of wonders that become nightmares on contact with the outside world) she was simply a nude shell to exploit without pity. However absurd the thought might be, it was as if Clara were the daughter not of another father, but a different mother, a remote female principle that—knowing, indeed, approving of the baby girl’s ferocity—had placed her in a womb toward which she need show no clemency.
Acting weak is fine. But beware of becoming weak. Especially if you’re married to a successful man who’s capable of seeing in other people’s problems the basis for his own. It wasn’t the chromatic variety of the dead hairs found on an overcoat. On the contrary, the chestnut hue of a very specific head of hair (which she learned to recognize as wavy, glossy, vaguely tumid) began to be the same every time.
Annamaria realized before the evidence brought her confirmation. At home, Vittorio was strangely kind to her. Then, around the thirty-fourth week, he took her to the gynecologist for a vaginal swab test.
They were both in the waiting room. At a certain point Vittorio leapt to his feet. He walked briskly toward the reception desk. Watching him from behind, it seemed to Annamaria that he was saying one thing with the intention of saying something else. He came back to her with a studiously (oh, disgustingly!) vexed expression, denounced the “absurdity” of the fact that in a doctor’s officer where a sonogram cost an arm and a leg they didn’t have a phone that patients could use. He needed to make a call for work. “I’m sorry, it’s pretty urgent. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” Annamaria sat there, waiting for him to get back, tapping the index finger of one beringed hand on the other. The minutes crept by. Three quarters of an hour later, even the last patient before her (a young woman of color accompanied by her boyfriend) was summoned for her examination. Annamaria leaned forward in her chair, both arms wrapped around her abdomen. She felt the stee
l cable, with which Vittorio had always made her feel safe, snap. And so, when her turn came and Vittorio still had not reappeared, Annamaria got to her feet and went into the office in a slightly disorientated state.
The door closed behind her. The gynecologist, a woman, seemed to be enveloped in a disk of light. She said something in an offhand manner about streptococcus in pregnant women, but by that point Annamaria was observing the scene from somewhere outside of herself. She watched herself take off her shoes, skirt, and panties and then place herself, legs wide, on the gynecological examination chair. The doctor put on her gloves. She placed an exploratory finger in her vulva. She took the speculum. She lubricated it with gel. She inserted the speculum in her vagina. She slowly began to widen it until the pink body of the cervix became visible. Annamaria felt the burning sensation between her legs and returned to her senses. She felt the first and then the second cotton swab being inserted all the way to the cervix (the doctor unhurriedly placed the sample in the test tube, placed the test tube in the refrigerator, and only then did she tear the cellophane containing the second packet and extract another swab to insert inside her), wondered to herself where Vittorio had just seen that slut while the thin thread of a tear streaked the space between her cheekbone and her ear. Maybe they’d met downstairs. They’d chatted in a bar, or perhaps they’d just hurried to a hotel. She assumed (as in fact happened) that she’d find Vittorio in the waiting room when the examination was over, and that that same evening, when she would make the first jealous scene of their relationship, he would deny it with the force of a confession, attacking her like a little boy caught red-handed torturing a dog.
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