Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Then Clara smiled, so happy that no one could see her. She was waiting for the harvest. She was receiving the confirmation that the journey through the mists was proceeding very well.

  The second phone call came a few weeks later.

  Costantini was going to bed when his cell phone lit up. He went out onto the balcony to keep from being overheard. His wife put up with his cheating on her, so long as certain duties of courtesy were respected. “Hello, Clara?” The young woman’s voice seemed to come from another dimension. She was whimpering. She uttered a few disconnected phrases. Between the fragments of what she said, Costantini thought he understood that she was asking him to come get her at the same place as the other time. He couldn’t understand clearly. She ended the call.

  A short while later, in the car zipping toward Viale Europa, Costantini tried calling her back. The phone rang and rang. He went past the cemetery, the parking area in Viale Buozzi. Five minutes later he saw the gas station. He pulled over at the wide spot in the road and got out of the car. The girl wasn’t there. The hedges along the edge of the road were trembling in the desolate emptiness. So he turned and went back to the car. He got his cell phone. He tried calling her one more time. He heard the ring of the phone behind him. He saw her coming out of the black of night. She was weaving in a strange sleeveless denim dress buttoned up the front. He’d never seen it on her before. That alone was enough to make him feel even more disoriented. Costantini went towards her. He put an arm on her shoulder, the other around her waist. She was burning up. With some effort, he dragged her toward the car. He eased her down onto the passenger seat. Clara shut her eyes. She had another nasty mark on her lip and one on her forehead. Her arms were covered with scratch marks. She was moaning as if she were having a bad dream. Costantini wondered whether they weren’t both dreaming. He undid the top buttons of her dress. Scratches on her neck, too. “Clara,” he said. After confirming that there was no answer, he stood there, looking at her. She was so still. Not the elusive flash of light he couldn’t even dream of chasing, but a young body, physically abandoned on the seat of his car. He undid more buttons until he’d uncovered her sternum, then her brilliantly white breasts and her belly. He looked, and he was left astonished. She was covered with bruises. Deep marks. Costantini touched her. He felt ill. He undid the last buttons, right down to the bottom. He was desperately trying not to take advantage of the situation.

  He turned over in the bed again. If he tried to keep calm, to think coldly and logically, it seemed impossible that he’d let himself be swayed like that. Actually set foot at a certain point in Buffante’s villa. And yet it had happened. He’d allowed the knife to be rotated 180 degrees. He could feel the blade at his throat. They could make him do whatever they chose.

  He looked over at his wife, still asleep. He shut his eyes and fell asleep himself.

  The next morning, he loafed wearily from his home over to the university. In the afternoon, he shut himself up in his office. He felt confused, out of sorts. He did his work badly. When he talked on the phone he was preoccupied. He’d catch himself and lose his concentration.

  At eight o’clock in the evening he left the headquarters of EdiPuglia. As he was getting his car, he saw him for the fourth time. At the other end of the street. Lit up by white light, standing in front of the Apple Store on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Costantini closed his eyes to keep from slamming his fist down on the hood of the car. They were trying to drive him crazy. He looked once again at the store’s window. Michele was still there. At that point he lunged forward. He crossed the street. The young man stood motionless. By so doing, he prevented the man from grabbing him and shaking him. When he was a yard away, Costantini raised his forefinger to shorten the distance even further. He looked for his sister’s posture in the young man. He didn’t find it. Nothing was ever the way you might expect it to be. So he said that it was time for them to cut it out. Stop trying to blackmail him. It was disgusting, he added. Then he lowered his voice. He tried to explain himself. He assured him that beyond what he was already doing it would be impossible to come up with anything else.

  Michele furrowed his brow.

  A few seconds later he nodded as if he’d actually understood every detail.

  They passed over the chestnut groves, over the limestone sinkholes. They could feel beneath themselves the green force of the Gulf of Manfredonia, which was nothing compared to the emerald green that was drawing them south. The coasts of Libya, then the heart of Africa.

  They gave the impression of a giant black hand sailing through the empty air, breaking up into a thousand dots and then condensing into a shape that was equal but never the same, not unlike the astonishment of a man watching them from afar is mutable and perhaps equal. Plovers. In flight over the Gargano. A couple of months early relative to when, after nesting, they ought to have begun their crossing, as if they perceived the arrival (churned up in the hot wind) of a premature winter.

  They flew high over the beach of Siponto. Then the Cervaro channel, near Zapponeta. After that they arrived at Lido San Giuseppe and a small cluster of agritourism resorts and tourist villages. Baia Serena. Porto Allegro. Episodic gray shapes on a blue and green map. The children pointed their fingers up into the sky. How did the members of such a huge flock know with every beat of the wing which way to go? What held them together?

  The grownup’s explanations were always wrong. The leader, they’d say. They’re following the leader.

  They didn’t know that flocks of birds have no commander. Each creature regulates its movements in accordance with those of the ones that fly alongside them, a miracle by which from nothingness, life and motion seem to emerge. A game of mirrors with nothing at the center, similar to that which brings consciousness into existence. That was the reason why men, watching the birds pass in a group, seemed to find, since time out of mind, something of themselves.

  Then the plovers arrived on the salt marshes. Veering to the right, as their golden-grey feathers glistened in the sunlight, many of them began to lose altitude. They’d drop and rise in the air, so that the large black hand would return to itself seconds before becoming nothing. It was a zone of small ponds and channels of brackish water. A spectacular succession of basins made it a territory of supreme beauty. For migratory birds these were small oases, the equivalent of intermediate ports where fleets making the journey between continents would lay over. Here the plovers would drink. They’d refresh themselves. They’d mix with teals, snipes, and delicate pink flamingoes engaged in the same operations. Then they’d resume their flight.

  A half hour later the flock approached San Ferdinando di Puglia. Since their senses were a surface radar, they recognized the shape of streams and ponds, not what totally alien thing could be concealed beneath them. Here, as at Castel Volturno or Mondragone, stopovers on the previous day’s flights. Nor were their senses designed to associate with the blades of grass and the nourishing muddy waters such elements as cobalt, lead, and manganese.

  A fair number of plovers suddenly started dropping. They were dying on the wing. One after another. The large black hand, before turning into a smaller hand, took on absurd shapes that fell outside the laws of nature.

  Alberto emerged from the supermarket, his arms tense with the weight of the grocery bags. He headed back home. He counted his footsteps, looking around in the hope that he’d find no known faces. They’d called him on the phone. They’d sent him emails and texts that expressed their lukewarm condolences (a sign that these were the rewritings of phrases that at first seemed too original). To say nothing of the cards of condolence. He hadn’t replied to a single one.

  They’d placed the coffin in a niche five yards off the ground. They’d sealed up the slab with bronze lettering and the ugly oval of the photograph. It couldn’t be considered a genuine burial. If anything, a byproduct of urban construction. If the purpose was to lodge the dead in the invisible band where at
times the spirit of the living penetrated, it had been a failure. The sun set hot and red between the buildings. Thus, Alberto was the true custodian of his wife. That is why he needed peace and solitude. At every hour of the day and night he was tossing a handful of dirt into the grave.

  The concentration of black dots over the shopping center lit up with an intense vermilion red and vanished. A flash of light deformed the plexiglass clouds. Then, once again, reality.

  “That was a kick,” said Pietro Giannelli.

  Michele shook his head, stunned.

  They were sitting on the asphalt, their backs against the metal roller gate of a garage.

  “That’s insane,” said Giannelli, massaging the back of his neck, “just like the old days dropping acid in Piazza Cesare Battisti. When you’re around, even the effects of DMT only last half as long.”

  Michele felt the wind of late morning on his face. A few milk-white clouds were in the process of disintegrating in the torrential heat. The sky. When he was small even the fields behind the house had seemed immense to him. To say nothing of the Salento plain, red and green, when, aboard a Southeastern Railway train, he traveled down to the sea at Leuca. Once he’d even gone camping with his sister.

  That was the good thing about breathing that air: you rediscovered the memories that were so to speak outside the narrative. He and Clara had tried to pitch the tent until nightfall. She wouldn’t give up, kept delivering massive hammer blows to the stakes. She was wearing a terrycloth tank top with white and orange stripes. The South is also this deception, thought Michele, wounded by the sunlight, a part that is greater than the whole that ought to contain it.

  He looked at Giannelli in the frog costume. There was a time when he went everywhere with his eyes made up, his jacket covered with studs. Now the world was in a new phase.

  An hour earlier, Pietro Giannelli had been handing out flyers for the Toy Center. He kept his distance from the Chicken Man. Above all, he steered clear of the Great Hog, who was giving out discount coupons. The Hog was a machine. The number of coupons he distributed halved the number of potential customers for those who worked around him, and Giannelli had planned to get rid of his first batch of flyers by ten.

  It was horribly hot. Those who hadn’t left for the beach were pouring into the shopping center in waves. At ten-thirty Giannelli felt slightly unwell. He grabbed hold of the zipper that closed the large amphibian head. He was suffocating in that foam rubber cage. The zipper wouldn’t come down. So he gave a more violent yank, but all that did was to pull the eyeholes out of alignment. Green. That’s what he saw now. He felt his heart start to race. He staggered. He saw two dark shadows grow larger on either side of the costume. He felt something squeeze around the ears. Kiss the frog. Immediately afterward he saw the hands that were freeing him from the harness.

  When the frog’s head came off entirely, he was looking at the skinny smiling face of Michele Salvemini.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for at least a month,” said Giannelli, but the other man didn’t understand.

  He pulled his arms out of the costume, too. He pulled his friend close. Then—half man, half frog—he led him over to the drinks machine.

  He drank a Gatorade. He treated Michele to a small bottle of water. He dried the sweat off his forehead. Without saying a word, he hopped off toward Section H of the parking lot. Michele followed him.

  They headed down the ramp that led to the garage. Giannelli sat down in the shaded area. Michele did the same. Giannelli slipped a hand into his fanny pack. He pulled out the pipe and the aluminum foil. Michele got scared. It had been so long since his problems had manifested as anything more than minor relapses. He was afraid that a drug like DMT would reawaken inside him the monsters of permanent disturbance.

  Giannelli formed a little inverted hood with the aluminum foil. He inserted it into the pipe. He extracted the crystals and put them into the bowl. He lit it. He inhaled. Before slumping forward, he handed the pipe to Michele. Michele looked at it apprehensively. He put it into his mouth. He closed his eyes. He inhaled.

  The world shattered into a billion spots. Michele felt no discomfort. Instead he felt an enormous pair of eyes open wide before him. They scrutinized him, they caressed him lovingly. He, in turn, recognized them and began to be moved. Then the world went back exactly as it had been.

  “Insane,” said Giannelli, massaging the back of his neck, “just like the old days dropping acid on Piazza Cesare Battisti.”

  But in reality they were talking about Clara. It was as if they’d been doing it even before Giannelli pulled out the pipe. As if they were still sitting side by side on the benches in the piazza, telling each other what they would say to each other as adults if things were to happen exactly the way they ended up happening.

  “After my father’s death, it was the hardest thing to take during my adolescence,” Giannelli was saying with a smile that still hadn’t healed. “At a certain point she just vanished. Just before you left for your military service. She dumped me without a word. You know how things work with kids. You might be together for years and then, at a certain point, it’s all over. You suffer, you’re miserable as a dog, but the whole alphabet that ought to help you decipher your grief doesn’t exist yet. Without warning, your sister wasn’t there anymore and I was too much of a mess to even go and ask her what was going on. We never did talk about it.”

  “I don’t remember much about that period.”

  Michele dropped his gaze. He took a deep breath and tried to tell him what had happened in the past month. He talked about the absurd atmosphere that reigned in his father’s house. He told him about Gioia. The way she was running, incomprehensibly, their sister’s fake Twitter account. Ruggero, he said, was swallowed up by his work at the clinic. And then there was Annamaria. If she were grieving over Clara’s death, she gave no sign of it. Michele touched on the constant bustle at home. There was something sick about all the phone calls going in and out. “I don’t know how to explain it to you any more clearly.” He held out his hands as if to mime the shape of a giant subterranean worm. He told him about the chief justice of the court of appeals, and how he’d come to dinner at their house.

  “That night I threw up.”

  But Giannelli went on talking about the past. Over their heads wafted the notes of a jingle coming from the clothing department. Pushed and undone by the breeze, it might have been reminiscent of A Change Is Gonna Come. Giannelli said that the first little while without Clara he’d lived in a sort of trance. “I realized I’d lost her months after the last time we saw each other.” Blinded by a solipsistic delirium, he was convinced they were just taking a break, that any day now Clara would be calling him to talk things over. Giannelli had even gone so far as to work out, as he waited for that fateful meeting.

  “I joined a gym. I started getting my hair cut by a decent barber. I went so far as to buy myself some decent clothing. I wanted to make an impression, in other words.”

  But instead of the meeting there was that terrifying five-a-side soccer match.

  “Five-a-side soccer?” Michele thought he must have missed something.

  “Yes, yes, after the match,” Giannelli confirmed.

  To keep from losing his mind during those months, going to the gym every day was not the only thing Giannelli did. At night he’d go into the first movie theater he happened across. He’d walk endlessly along the waterfront. And he started drugging himself with games of five-a-side soccer. One, two, five matches a week. At the end of every match there was always someone who asked who wanted to play another the next day. Maybe with a different group of people who often went to a different sports facility.

  “If you’re serious about it, in Italy, through five-a-side soccer alone you could try to climb any kind of social ladder.”

  Giannelli found himself playing all over the place. On the small ravaged fields of the indu
strial district and under the elegant tensile structure on Via Camillo Rosalba. In Poggiofranco. In Carbonara. In a sports center on the road to Valenzano. Sometimes his contact canceled at the last minute and he’d run up and down the field with total strangers for an hour. So it was that one night he wound up in a team of lawyers. There was a notary, too. People who were fairly well off. The match was a normal game between middle-aged men. Not a lot of competition, laughter and shouts of encouragement when someone screwed up an easy goal. But afterwards it turned horrendous. In the showers, one of the lawyers started talking about an underage whore that he liked to go see in an apartment in the Libertà quarter. Another one said that there was no way he could start the day without a blowjob from his secretary. “A blowjob from the secretary!” shouted the notary as if it were a newly coined slogan at a meeting of advertising executives. The laughter echoed through the locker room. Pietro Giannelli, covered with body wash, started to feel a little uncomfortable. At a certain point, they were talking about nothing but sluts and whores. “One of these days I’m going to put some arsenic in that old slut’s Valium!” The “old sluts” were their wives while “the whores” were the women (usually very young) with whom they went to bed outside of their respective marriages. The game of “who would you fuck” started up, and a few seconds later her name popped out.

  Giannelli stopped massaging his soapy hair.

  He was certain he must have misunderstood. But the name was repeated. One of the younger lawyers asked: “The daughter of Vittorio Salvemini? But is she hot?” “Hot? She’s the sexiest whore you’re ever likely to see on Via Sparano.” “She’s a world-class cum bucket!” Amidst the steam of the showers, one of the voices said that she was so hot that he’d gladly fuck her while also kicking her ass black and blue. Another one (maybe it was the notary again) added: “Slam her against the floor until she loses consciousness. Then you can fuck her in the ass.” “Until she dies!” More laughter. “Like this? Like thi-i-i-s?” Out of the steam emerged a pale white body with a partially erect dick. He pretended to try to sodomize his shower-mate. “Cut it out, fuckhead!” Then the voices went back to describing what kind of attentions they’d lavish on Clara.