Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  They wanted to get his opinion on the hydrogeological reports that were meant to persuade the judge to reject the seizure request. To save the tourist complex with which they were gutting a section of the Gargano coast.

  Official stamps. Resolutions. Maybe a couple of backdated records. Opinion my ass. They were clearly blackmailing him.

  “How much shall I put in today?”

  “Fill it up, please.”

  Or maybe they could guess, he thought as he drove away from the gas station. He watched as the inflatable puppet vanished in his rearview mirror. They suspected that he’d had a hand in it last time, too, when it was a matter of getting approval for the zoning variances concerning the geomorphological risks in the Val di Noto. A resolution tailor-made for the residential complex that Salvemini Construction was just finishing work on down there. At the time, Buffante was still undersecretary. More importantly, she was alive.

  He remembered very clearly when Clara had told him about the residential complex, because that had also been the time she had demanded he drive her to Avellino. Enveloped in a translucent gauze of thoughts as she climbed into the car. Motionless and silent for a hundred twenty-five miles. Then she’d started to talk. Also at her request, they’d slept in Salerno.

  Even though Buffante’s villa was available, she preferred to hide out in hotels. Even small bed-and-breakfasts outside of town. Hotels offered the proper degree of anonymity. The undecorated rooms. The wallpaper peppered with ugly heraldic crests. Clara sat on the edge of the bed, crossed her legs so she could easily take off the first shoe, and when she stood back up, usually in an undergarment, or naked under the electric light, he felt as if he held in his arms a body emptied of memories. White as wax, not dissimilar from the figures in certain old canvases in which all it takes is a second glance to turn the height of familiarity into the height of estrangement.

  Helping her father with the residential complex, all right, that was a request that made sense. But why force him to cross Italy from coast to coast? Buffante couldn’t figure out if it was a passing whim. He still didn’t know her well. That surgeon had introduced her to him. A young married woman who at the first attempt allowed herself to be seduced by a man twice her age. He hadn’t had to fight to get her. And when, not even twenty-four hours after watching her vanish into the crowd, he’d kidded himself that he was being daring by texting her (“It would be nice to see you again”), it was only a handful of minutes before he got an answer back: “Sure, tonight.”

  A young woman, not even thirty years old. Even though his familiarity with power fostered illusions about the allure of maturity, it didn’t escape Buffante what it meant to sense on oneself the smell of an old man who in ten years might perfectly well be dead in accordance with the laws of nature. And yet it happened. He’d send the signal, and Clara would come running. When he’d see her in the place where they’d arranged to meet, usually near the corner of Via Fresa and Via Lenoci—serious and modest in her skirt suit, underneath which lurked the only reason for the hours they were about to spend together—the impulse that made her walk toward his Maserati undermined all the rhetoric on the need for courtship. Clara would get into the car and immediately ask at what hotel he’d made reservations. It seemed as if that technical detail was the crux of the matter as far as she was concerned, or perhaps the real pleasure lay in the ability to imagine between which walls she would no longer have a personal history.

  Buffante would drive toward a restaurant. In certain cases, directly to a hotel. The total absence of obstacles was the sole actual obstacle to a full understanding of what was happening. Clara talked very little. Never about her husband. And when the time came to stretch out in bed, she completed the task, becoming a complete stranger. A girl met by chance. A call girl or a streetwalker.

  One time they’d stayed out until four in the morning. The tranquility with which she pretended she had no home to return to was almost embarrassing. And now she was asking him to take her to Avellino.

  As they were taking the hairpin curves of Irpinia, the young woman’s inspired, attentive face had persuaded him to ask no more questions. Clara observed with obstinacy the dark and solid reliefs through the windshield as if outside there were a magnet of terrifying strength.

  In Avellino, they ate near the municipal gardens. After lunch, she went off for a walk on her own. It was a nice February day. Buffante watched her walk off past the ugly apartment buildings of the quarter. He assumed she just wanted a bit of privacy so she could make a phone call to her husband, and he went to get a newspaper. But Clara had no intention of calling Alberto. She made a beeline for the barracks. Even if Buffante had tailed her, he wouldn’t have understood.

  The red walls within whose perimeter Michele had been enclosed during his months in the military. Motionless and silent, the young woman stood watching for several minutes. The oblong specter once again filled with flesh. The fragile hands. The skinny, skinny torso. The young man typed away all afternoon, shut up in a small room, sitting on a pile of old phone books. He was writing his piece tomorrow, tomorrow. Well, that day had finally come. He wasn’t seeking a memory but a beginning. She’d talked to Michele recently to wish him a merry Christmas. She’d phoned Rome. But Clara wasn’t looking for that Michele. She was waiting for the other one. Just as she herself must clearly be somewhere else, because otherwise the Clara that went to bed with a repulsive old man would have no explanation. She caught a flash in the window opened and then closed on the watchtower. Now Clara could feel him. She was convinced that Michele’s shining demon—the trace left behind after spending enough time with a person that their primary characteristics recombine inside us in an increasingly complex manner, until they take on a life of their own—sparkled in those who had known him as a boy. And so it necessarily sparkled inside the other one, the Michele who was in Rome. The one who was becoming an adult, who was trying laboriously to heal, maybe forget. But she, his sister, was now summoning him to her. Michele. A tiny dot. A small dark patch in the young adult who every Friday would go to the National Gallery to watch his tiger, hopeful, unaware of the little flower that it had caused to blossom inside him.

  Clara turned her back to the barracks. She went back to Buffante.

  A few minutes later she asked him to take her to Salerno. At that point it was four in the afternoon. However senseless the request might have seemed, Buffante turned his car southward. Impossible to contradict her, they still hadn’t had sex today. Taking her to bed one more time meant splitting into further units the time he had left to live (a time that Buffante now thought he could glimpse in its entirety), so that even a second itself, split up into tenths, then hundredths and thousandths, would last into infinity.

  While Michele had done his military service in Avellino, Salerno was where the psychiatric clinic was. The minute they got to the city, Clara insisted they stop at the first hotel they chanced to come across. “Here,” she said, pointing to an unattractive pensione, its roof covered with gray wooden shake shingles. The caricature of a mountain chalet. He tried to dissuade her. But the vise that held her in its grip was so powerful, so unequivocally intense that Buffante was forced to yield. They went into the room. They handed over their IDs. They went up to the room. Fast, unsentimental. Then the girl got dressed again. She slipped on pantyhose and skirt and shoes and sweater, and then the overcoat, too, while he lay naked on the bed, recovering his strength.

  “I’m going to go for a walk,” she said.

  She went down to the ground floor. She left the hotel. Ten minutes later she had left the city center. Night was falling among the buildings on the outskirts of town. The sea glittered less and less, while the city lights were still off. In just a few minutes, the long drive that led up to the psychiatric clinic became a deserted track, infested by the shadows that became denser where the welter of branches extended. Clara lengthened her stride. The cars framed her in their headlight
s at the last moment. A few drivers flashed their brights. Others whistled. A compact car driving in her direction slowed down before it passed her. Clara wrapped herself tighter in her overcoat. The car window rolled down, someone whispered an obscene phrase to her. Then the car sped up and vanished. They could have raped her and no one would have noticed. For her, it wouldn’t have been any different from what had just happened in the hotel room half an hour ago.

  She saw the lights of the Alma Mater after what seemed like the thousandth curve. She drove to the end of the long lane. She came out on the large clearing that served as a parking area. The last blazes in the sky, thin bloody strips, were descending vertically over the two buildings separated symmetrically by a long gravel driveway. It was from one of these two parallelepipeds that Michele had spoken to her that day, when he’d told her it would be best if she didn’t come to see him. Well, now his sister was here anyway. Clara walked over to the gate. She slipped her hand through the floral vortices of wrought iron. Michele was in there. The one who’d been talked into starting a new life was gone. But the boy determined to burn his whole family alive, the one who stubbed out cigarettes on the star globe while alluding to a meeting someday in a place beyond death that only now could Clara fully sense, that boy was there, he was moving all around her with the slow breathing of evening. Over the roofs of the clinic. Through the branches of the trees. In the deep rooms where she awaited him. Clara put a silver coin into his hands. So now he was committed. She’d go back to the hotel. Buffante. The surgeon. Then someone else. She knew that was the lead to follow. The black forest in the depths of which the long figure of Michele, white and silent in the morning mists, awaited her. It would be the other part of him, the one that was in Rome, that would bring him back to her.

  Clara returned to the hotel. She let the undersecretary undress her. She let him caress her. Right now, he was probably inside her. He was pushing. Getting himself excited. A poor old naked man, immersed in a sea whose expanse was unknown to him. And when Clara closed her eyes, she let her smile be interpreted as a response to the determination the man was putting into it. Poor idiots. When they were pushing into a corpse, only then were they convinced they were worth something.

  A wonderful night, Buffante remembered.

  And now it would never happen again. He passed a truck, and then a BMW. On his right appeared the Ikea tower. Talk to the analysts from the Commission on Environmental Impact. Convince them of the validity of those technical studies. Then arrange for the administrator of the provincial office to backdate the Commission’s opinion. It wouldn’t be easy. And that was just one front in the battle. Then there was the matter of timing the hearings. Slip the opinion into the files of a trial already underway. But old Salvemini would take care of that. He drove under an overpass plastered with posters layered one atop the other. He left behind the five-a-side soccer pitches and two minutes later he was in the traffic of Bari. Seafood shops. Bakeries. Laborers unloading merchandise from double-parked semitrailers. The Odeon movie theater. Then the Gardenia café. Buffante tried to keep from looking at it. But the traffic was creeping.

  That had been another time. An evening in late April. He and Clara were sitting outside. The girl was drinking one Negroni after another. They were talking about the journalist she’d gotten fired. It had been five years since he’d driven her to Salerno. An eternity. As if time weighed down twice as heavily on Buffante because he was seeing her, but ten times as heavily on Clara, seeing that she was the epicenter of the tremor.

  “Certain people can’t control themselves,” she’d said, shaking her head. She’d had her hair cut. She’d bleached it in a way that on the whole made her look a little bit savage.

  “The journalist?” asked Buffante.

  “Who else?” she’d answered, dragging out the words, then dropped her eyes. “After he was fired, he continued to slander us. In the pages of Puglia Oggi. He accused my father of having pushed the mayor to appoint I don’t know which of our employees to a position in I don’t know what agency. But do you want to know something?”

  “Yes?” Buffante would have to be careful to nurse the wine, serve it with an eyedropper.

  “I managed to get him fired at Puglia Oggi, too!” The girl burst out in a cavernous laugh. Her voice was coming from the depths of a well.

  “Can you guess what I have in here?” she asked, tapping her red-enameled fingernail against the purse.

  Perfection, thought Buffante as he looked at her. At thirty-four, she could as easily be sixty as sixteen. When he’d met her the vice that was inside her was an undemanding tenant. Unsullied at twenty-nine. Uncorrupted at thirty-one. But now the habits were beginning to tell. The bags under her eyes. That put-off smile. The imminence of decline made her even more desirable. The cocaine. Cocaine was a blessing.

  At that point Clara noticed something. She got to her feet. She staggered in place. She turned her back to him, looking toward the crowd coming down Via Re David. A moment later, Buffante saw her in the arms of a man. She was literally sinking into the dark suit of this stranger. The undersecretary didn’t understand. Clara turned around. Without needing to take him by the hand, she dragged the man toward the café table. It seemed as if she were laughing and crying and was amused and wanted to die. The surviving portion of a slow process of destruction. So she crushed that part, too.

  “My husband,” she said.

  Her husband, the engineer, nodded his head uncertainly. A partial motion of the hand. Then he vanished among the pedestrians who kept streaming past along the street.

  At that point, Buffante, too, got to his feet. Inebriated by the same force he’d perceived when she’d burst out laughing. He took Clara’s arms in his hands. “Let’s go to the restroom.” Even he couldn’t say whether or not he was drunk.

  He gave the young man tending bar a hundred-euro tip to make sure no one bothered them.

  Shut up together in the restroom, the old man plunged his hands into her hair. He wrapped his arms around her hips. The narrow, barren room. The toilet a white altar. Everything unfolding in an absurd, chaotic manner. Clara opened her handbag. She pulled out the plastic baggie. Buffante grabbed it out of her hand. Then, after kissing her on the mouth—as if the baggie was something he’d stolen only to give it back to her for a price—he waved it back and forth in the air. Clara reached out her hands. He yanked back his arm, snickering. At that point the girl slipped. She landed with both knees on the filthy floor. “Fuck!” It felt as if she were in the belly of a ship during a tempest at sea. Buffante showed her the baggie with the coke. “Give it to me!” she said. Driven by the power of the music he could hear echoing all around him, the ex undersecretary stepped back. He lifted the lid of the toilet. He laid out a line of coke on the rim. At this point even he didn’t know what he was doing. He saw her lunge toward the toilet bowl. She snorted the coke hungrily. But at the center of her being she was tranquil. In a part that no longer required any contact with the exterior, she knew that the process was irreversible. She was happy to have finally arrived. The certainty that a rock tossed into a pond would kick up a spurt of water. The rock was in midair. Only God could have stopped it. Deep down, amidst the chilly currents, when her body touched the slimy green surface, then Michele’s eye would snap open, mirroring itself in hers.

  Once past the traffic jam on Via Amendola, Buffante turned left into Via Capruzzi. He drove down into the underground garage. It was a quarter to ten when he made his entrance into the headquarters of VersoSud.

  At a quarter past noon his secretary informed him that Engineer De Palo had arrived. Buffante closed the file folder containing the Salvemini documents. He went to welcome his guest.

  “Let’s go get an espresso.”

  They went down to the street. They strolled down Via Carulli, turned onto Via Melo. They went into the Café Riviera.

  “Dottore, buongiorno!”

  T
he proprietor was a powerful-looking man in his early fifties, his forehead dotted with sweat. Next to him was a man in overalls, ten years his younger, his face devastated by acne.

  Buffante and Engineer De Palo drank an espresso. The engineer ate an ice cream. The proprietor of the bar and his friend complained about the heat. “Arrivederci, Dottore!”

  They went back out into the street. They walked silently down Via Melo. They returned to the foundation. Buffante headed back toward his office. He shut the door. He waited for his guest to make himself comfortable. He sat down across from him. He opened the file folder. He pulled out the technical reports. He said: “Now then.”

  “Thick as thieves,” said the pockmarked guy after the other two had left.

  “Shut up,” said the proprietor.

  “Do you know how much that guy’s pension pays?”

  “Still, he had to resign his position.”

  “He lives in a three-story villa. He drives a Maserati that costs more in upkeep than you and I make in a year.”

  “You don’t know how much this thing costs in upkeep,” he said, pointing at the espresso machine behind him.

  The pockmarked guy checked something on his smartphone. The proprietor served other customers. He went on chatting, mopping his brow, and cursing the two fans that were failing to keep the place cool enough.

  Then the pockmarked guy went home. The proprietor ate lunch alone, a tea sandwich. He sat there, reading the newspaper behind the cash register. After an hour of no business, a few university students came in. The bar started to fill up again.

  At a quarter to four a young man, around thirty, came in. An odd duck. Skinny, angular. He pointed to the glass-paneled display case where announcements could be posted. He wanted to add his own. It wasn’t an advertisement, he added. His courteousness seemed as if it might snap from one moment to the next. Just like certain criminals. But he was clearly no criminal. He said that he was handing out these flyers to all the businesses in the neighborhood.