Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  “Hey, seriously, are you okay?”

  “Yes, everything’s fine.”

  She nods goodbye. She heads toward the front door. As soon as she turns her back on him, she hears the whispering again. So she goes back a second time. She puts an arm around his neck. The compliance with which Michele lets her do this makes her feel bad. She hugs him to her. They head toward the house. And, still side by side, holding him as if he were five, she leads him up the stairs.

  Once upstairs, Michele wriggles free. He walks down the hall. He enters his room. Clara has the impression she hears the key turn in the lock. And so she lengthens her stride, leans against the doorjamb. After a few seconds, she takes her ear away from the door. The hem of her overcoat hangs over her calves, then folds like the pleats of an accordion. Now she’s sitting on the floor. She shuts her eyes and tries hard not to cry.

  “A general. Or otherwise, I don’t know, a warrant officer from the carabinieri. Or maybe a doctor, a cardiologist. He could diagnose him with a heart murmur.”

  “You’re saying I need to get someone to put in a good word for him.”

  Clara is in Vittorio’s office, sitting across from him. It’s eight at night. No one’s home. The hotel with the golf course built in the Salento in the Sixties. A crew of construction workers on the stretch of highway running from Cadiz to Seville. Clara turns her gaze away from the pictures hanging on the wall, turns her eyes on Vittorio again. Separating them is a desk diary and a large paperweight in the shape of an airplane.

  “Papà, it’s so obvious that we need to get someone to put in a good word for him, and in a hurry! That certificate of fitness is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” For a moment it seems as if she’s about to violently rip herself away from the chair. “Do you have any idea the condition he was in after his draft examination?”

  “He’s always been a young man with in his own particular w—”

  “Papà, he was talking to himself.”

  “All he’d need to do is enroll in the university.”

  “Only he doesn’t want to enroll.”

  Vittorio has an incredulous look on his face. His expression seems swept clean of defensive intention. He slowly rotates his hands on the desk, as if he were shaping the small god of justifications.

  “But didn’t you tell me—”

  “I don’t know exactly what happened during his draft exam,” she interrupts him again, “maybe they noticed he was odd. In other words . . . he’s different from all those . . . when they’re doing draft exams at the barracks, all kinds of people show up, don’t they?”

  “I served in the military.”

  “They must have seen how introverted he was . . . maybe they ganged up on him. Oh, come on, everyone knows the kind of fucked up pranks . . . ” she heaves a sigh. “I’m not saying they did anything to him. Maybe they did nothing more than to say something to him. But that’s all the more reason, if that’s all it took. The fact remains that he was a mess that day. I don’t understand how we can even think of . . . ”

  “It seems to me that he’s okay now.”

  “I stood there for a half an hour listening at that door. The things he was saying aren’t the things someone who’s okay would say.”

  “Now, let me point out, it strikes me that your brother behaves in a fairly normal way. He goes out at night. At school he’s passing. As far as I can tell, he’s going to graduate without problems. He doesn’t seem to me to be in danger of losing his mind. He was talking to himself, you say . . . ”

  Vittorio hesitates, furrows his brow, as if he were seized by some preventive regret, the suspicion that this is the last opportunity to change course. Michele, his mother’s death, making peace with what happened. To confront it before the error becomes irreversible. A presentiment. Vittorio decides to ignore it.

  “Come on, Clara,” he smiles, “who doesn’t talk to themselves every so often? You should have heard me the day after the finance police came to see me. Monologues an hour long, the whole time staring at that little airplane there,” and he points to the paperweight in the shape of a bomber.

  “Papà, the fact that he seems normal doesn’t mean that he is. Even if for certain periods he manages to achieve an apparent state of equilibr—”

  “But you’re the one who said your brother wasn’t ill.”

  Vittorio now has his hands clasped, an even more baffled expression on his face. A wrestler, a rock crusher. How could it be that someone like him suddenly appears so ill equipped? Clara feels a slight dizziness.

  “Papà,” she presses her thumb against her forefinger as if she were crushing a pencil, “I’m begging you to make an effort of the imagination. Think of Michele in a barracks. A whole year far from home. Thrown into a place where every instant is regulated by a concept as rational as only the will of superior officers can be. At worst, though, it’s the will of the strongest, the most violent. So there you are. Just tell me what you see. Because what I see is something I don’t like one bit. Some friend of yours in the army. A cooperative doctor, maybe some colleague of Ruggero’s. Whoever it was who put his signature on that certificate had no idea what he was doing. You have to get him a deferment.”

  “Get him a deferment,” Vittorio picks up a pencil, starts drawing circles on a blank sheet of paper, “but just think, if he was rated unfit, he’d lose a whole series of rights. Faking myopia would mean he could never be an airline pilot, if that’s what he decided he wanted to do one day. Aside from the fact that finding someone to give him a deferment in cases like this isn’t exactly as easy as drinking a glass of water.”

  This is where Clara’s dizziness turns into nausea. There’s something foul in Vittorio’s languor, at least as marked as determination when he decides to shove aside an adversary. He may not be able to force her to come home early at night if she doesn’t want to. But there’s nothing that Clara can do to convince him, if he’s opposed.

  “Oh, who gives a damn if he can never become an airline pilot,” she says, exasperated, discomfited, hollowed out. “Who cares if he can’t join the civil service on account of a heart murmur he doesn’t have. Don’t you even understand that what’s at stake here is something . . . ” her voice catches in her throat.

  “I promise you,” he says firmly, “I promise that we’ll do everything within our power.”

  Clara tries talking about it with her mother, too. But the distance that’s grown up between them ensures that the woman dismisses all objections with even greater facility.

  “Do you think that if there was any real danger your father wouldn’t have done something?” is all that Annamaria has to say a week before Michele’s departure.

  These are days when her brother is, anyway, impossible to track down. He leaves the house first thing in the morning. At night no one knows exactly what he does. Clara finds him unexpectedly at home long after midnight. She’s alone, watching TV with a can of beer when she hears the footsteps in the front hall. A slow shadow, then him. But at that hour, all Michele wants is to sleep. He greets her with the same gesture a traffic cop might use to order a driver to halt.

  The day before his departure, Clara enters his room as he’s packing his bags.

  “Ciao.”

  She finds him on his feet, folding a pair of pants. The suitcase on the floor. A pile of underwear on the bed. He looks skinnier than usual, less substantial. But the room, too, is strange. It gives the impression of losing weight as the seconds tick by. “Ciao,” he responds. His face is so distant that Clara can feel herself vacillate. If the roles were reversed, it could be the scene of her departure for England. But now there’s something else. Clara can’t know that this will be the last time Michele ever occupies his room. She also doesn’t know that she, in less than a year’s time, will leave this house. And yet the untranslated language of the imminent future swells the walls.

&nb
sp; At that point Clara sits down on the edge of the bed. With a confidence that she can feel draining away, she holds her hands out to Michele. Michele stares at her, dumbfounded. She persists, motionless, arms extended, until he finally has no choice but to take her hands.

  “If you don’t want to leave, you can stay here.”

  Michele smiles.

  “If you don’t want to take that stupid train to Avellino,” and she clenches her brother’s hands a second after he starts trying to wriggle free, feeling ridiculous, “then just don’t set your alarm tomorrow. Or else go out and don’t come home.”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been drinking. Your breath.”

  “Oh, two stupid glasses just to get rid of the . . . Michele, don’t leave if you don’t want to go.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? It’s not as if I can,” and he looks at her as if she were his baby sister.

  “We aren’t at war,” Clara resumes her grip, and he lets her, “it’s not as if we’re under martial law. If leaving right now strikes you as nonsense, and it strikes me as a huge pile of nonsense, don’t get on that train, and the worst that can happen to you is some kind of administrative sanction. And anyway, probably, with Papà’s help—”

  “It seems to me if I don’t go, I’ll be looking at something worse than a simple fine.”

  He untwists his hands from hers. He steps back. The unruffled look on Michele’s face is unbearable. He turns his back to her. Clara sees him rummage through the drawers. He pulls something out. He turns and comes toward her. He has some stapled sheets of paper in his hand.

  “But I did want to ask you a favor.”

  He entrusts her with the new article he’s written for La Città. A lengthy refutation of Joseph Heller and his novel about military life. He tells her that he mailed it to the paper a couple of weeks ago, but that strangely the piece still hasn’t been published. He asks her if she’ll take it to the senior editor in person.

  The first day without Michele, Clara feels as if she’s going crazy.

  She wanders through the house like certain pets when they’re deprived without warning of some crucial point of reference. She goes out before lunch, skips a series of appointments, drives alone around the streets of the city. Even though she hasn’t spent all that much time with her brother in the past few months, it still felt to her as if she were picking up his signal. She might not have had any idea of exactly where he was, but in every instant of the day she felt the imprint of a tiny dot that turned off and on, echoing through the void. Now that signal has vanished.

  The second day without Michele, as soon as she wakes up, she goes downstairs and immediately feels as if she’s been thrown off balance by the sheer act of looking around. The objects. She has the impression that nothing is related to anything else anymore. A chair. The tea kettle. The cooktop. The kitchen no longer exists as a whole, only the objects in and of themselves. She clutches the mug of hot milk as if it were a handle without which she would fall into the void.

  A sound behind her. Gioia, too, walks into the kitchen. Clara catches her breath. She stops clenching her teeth. She realizes that she’s just stifled the instinct to hurl the scalding milk in her sister’s face. She greets her. She abandons the mug on the table. Then she leaves the kitchen, exhausted. She goes upstairs to her room. She puts on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt. She puts her wallet, a pair of sunglasses, the stapled pages, and her driver’s license into her bag.

  In the city center, she walks four times around the block without being able to make up her mind to go in. Stalling for time, she enters a record store. She stands looking at the display window of a jewelry shop. She eats a grilled cheese sandwich. She wastes more time. Hours later, she goes back and surveys the area around the corner of Via Cairoli and Via Dante. It occurs to her to call Giannelli. But it’s a desperate thought, and she knows it. At last, she heads for number 127 on Via Cairoli. She climbs the stairs to the newsroom of La Città.

  As she talks to the senior editor, that is, while she implores him to publish Michele’s piece, she thinks for a moment that she’s heard his signal. Extremely faint. But once out on the street, the signal has vanished.

  The next day, she phones the barracks. A young man with the voice of a castrato tells her that he’s answering from the regimental office. He informs her that today it’s not possible to speak with enlisted men, but then (as if it were the logical consequence of what he’d just said) he asks her to call back in two hours. Clara calls back, the phone rings and rings, but no one picks up. That evening she tells her father that he must, “absolutely,” let her know when they hear from him.

  Two days later, Annamaria summons her from downstairs because “Michele’s on the phone.”

  “No, yes. Everything’s fine. It’s just that it’s kind of cold here. At night, more than anything else.”

  That’s what Michele’s voice says through the receiver before she even has a chance to ask him how he is. The tone is dull, slightly metallic. Clara repeats: “Cold?” and overcomes the gazes of her parents who are watching her attentively because of the strange expression that must have surfaced on her face. She folds her hand into a shell in front of her mouth.

  “Would you rather we talked when I’m alone?” she whispers.

  “Yes. Thanks for the phone call.”

  “But just tell me what time I can call you there in the barrac—”

  He’s hung up.

  In the days that follow, Clara telephones a number of times. She’s worried. Michele’s tone evokes images that ought normally to be sad, but that seem to her like the normality behind which something else lies hidden. At the barracks, the same voice as the last time answers. A different voice answers, but it’s still the voice of someone who seems to have no idea what she’s saying. A couple of days later, a third voice tells her: “Clara Salvemini. Michele’s sister?” “Yes, that’s right,” she replies. “Well, listen, your brother left a message. He says to call him at 7:30, even if what he wrote right here is 7:27.” Clara is about to hang up. “Excuse me!” she reconsiders. “Yes, I’m listening.” “Did he write thirty or twenty-seven?” “Twenty-seven . . . and, listen . . . ” he says this time. “Yes?” “It’s just that I wanted to understand. Because maybe you, being his sister . . . ” “Yes, what is it?” asks Clara, suddenly alarmed. She hears other voices overlapping. “Then just call back later,” the young man says, cutting her off.

  At a quarter past seven, surrounded by the palm trees of Piazza Umberto, Clara occupies a phone booth across from a stand selling drinks and sandwiches. To keep the two men standing in line from complaining, she pretends to talk into the receiver. After a few minutes, she dials the number for the barracks. She drops her eyes, stares at the metal grate. The switchboard operator’s voice says: “Hello?” She asks to talk to her brother.

  “Difficult to communicate. Anyway, yesterday I was fine,” he’s saying at a certain point.

  “Michele!”

  “Yesterday a magnificent day. The sunlight. As if through the sunlight I were able travel back to certain afternoons from the past. Back then you were there, too. You understand. But this is exactly what . . . ”

  “What . . . But how are things up there? What’s life like in the barracks?”

  “Down here, you mean. Avellino is actually just a little south of Bari.”

  “Sure, all right. What I meant to say . . . ”

  “That’s what doesn’t work. If yesterday I was feeling so well in the past, today it’s as if I were stuck there. As if I were looking at myself right now from back there. You’re there with me, on that long-ago afternoon, and at the same time, I’m being watched by the both of us while I’m here in this barracks. So I wondered whether at the time when it seemed that I was capable of traveling to the future I wasn’t really, basically, alread
y here. As if it had all happened just yesterday. And there it is, the contradiction in terms. And when those boys asked me to come with them to the orderly room because it was over . . . ”

  “What boys? What orderly room? What are you talking about, Michele!”

  “Oh, please. Don’t start getting upset. They’d lied. Here we all seem to be a little too upset. But, more importantly,” his voice is different, “the piece on Joseph Heller.”

  “The piece on Heller,” Clara repeats, staring furiously at the two gentlemen outside until they stop staring at her. “I went to the paper. I talked to the guy. He told me not to worry. From what I was able to understand, it’s just a matter of—”

  “Forget about that piece. It’s gone.”

  “What? How do you mean, gone?”

  “But Christ Almighty, are you not understanding on purpose?” and what frightened her wasn’t the sudden souring of the voice, but the fragility of its harshness. “If I tell you that it’s gone, it means it’s gone. Dated, obsolete. Kaput. Learn to open your ears when someone talks to you. That piece should never have come out because it already came out.”

  “Already came out.”

  “It’s like writing a piece that came out ten years ago. You’d have to be arrogant not to see it clearly. You’d have to be a pathetic asshole daddy’s boy. Those boys in the orderly room tried to teach me that point.”

  Clara narrows her eyes. She wants to clap her hands over her ears. Now her brother has burst out laughing.

  “Michele! Cut it out! Cut it out, for Christ’s sake!” she wishes she could punch the plastic dome of the phone booth.

  “No, you cut it out!” he snarls. “And do exactly what I tell you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go back to the newspaper.”

  “Yes.”

  “That piece of shit newspaper.”