Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Paralyzed under the spray of hot water, Giannelli wished he were dead. For a moment, an absurd instinct had suggested he lift his fists in the air and shout: “Me, you miserable idiots! I screwed her!” But the pathetic truth was that he had lost her. They knew who she was, but he hadn’t seen any of their faces before that night. Clara would never call him again. The girl whose details he’d carved so painstakingly over the past few months didn’t exist. In reality there was another person, and she no longer had anything to do with him.

  “I had all the confirmation I needed when I ran into her on the street,” he told Michele.

  One evening, not even a year later, Giannelli had just taken his new girlfriend home. Driving down Via Putignani, he saw her. Standing outside a restaurant, smoking. New haircut and lamé dress. She was laughing, flanked by two men in gray suits. A hundred yards further on he’d lost her even from his rearview mirror.

  Michele interrupted him, and stuck his cell phone under his nose.

  “Look at this. Can you wrap your head around it?”

  On the display were the two butterflies that were intertwined to form a heart. Under the Twitter account, phrases that would have seemed ridiculous if they’d found them when unwrapping a chocolate, but in this case the effect was macabre and senseless.

  “I’m struggling for life.”

  “The truth hurts everyone, everyone but me.”

  “Everyone loves you when you’re six feet under.”

  “Every so often a new one pops up,” said Michele. “The terrible thing is that more and more people are following it.”

  Michele told him about his encounter with the journalist in Mola. The absurd things that just a few days ago that other guy had said to him in the street. Renato Costantini. But I know a change is gonna come. Yes, it will, he sang in his mind, well aware by now that the music coming from the clothing department was some other song.

  For the first time, Giannelli seemed to stop wandering off on his own tangents. He joined the conversation. After that time with the five-a-side soccer, he said with a sigh, all he did was run into people who had news of her. Maybe that’s what always happens. He was constantly being pelted with rumors and gossip. One day he chanced to cross paths with Vanessa Lovecchio.

  “I think you know her. Her father is friends with your father.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Saverio Lovecchio. The director of the Banca di Credito Pugliese.”

  Michele’s pulse started to race.

  This Vanessa, said Giannelli, had gone to the same high school as him. The minute she saw him, she practically jumped on him. She dragged him unresisting to the nearest café. “She was out of her mind.” Sitting at a table, she’d pointed her finger right at him. “You,” she said, “dated Clara Salvemini.” He nodded. She shouted that that bitch had ruined her family. “‘In what sense?’ I asked her,” he told Michele. “In the sense that she’s been fucking my father, goddamn it!” she retorted, doing her best to keep from breaking something.

  Vanessa had met Clara one night many months ago. They’d all gone out to dinner together. Vittorio and Annamaria, Clara, and then Vanessa’s father and mother. In the days that followed, Vanessa and Clara had become friends. They met for before-dinner drinks. They gossiped. At night they went to parties. And a few months later, her father was screwing her.

  It seemed to Michele that two of the many pieces that were twirling in his head had just popped into place.

  “And then,” said Giannelli, moving a little closer to him, because the shadow on his side was growing shorter, “at a certain point she said that her mother had had a nervous breakdown and that she herself felt nothing but the foulest disgust: one time, passing by the bank headquarters, she’d even surprised her father chatting with Alberto. Which was obviously the worst thing imaginable.”

  “Alberto,” Michele repeated sadly, sensing two more pieces slipping into place. He looked up at the summer sky.

  “I don’t know how much truth there is to it. The girl really wasn’t in control of herself.”

  “They’re blackmailing them.”

  “Who is?”

  “They’re blackmailing them because she was going to bed with them and they’re all married.”

  Michele shook his head, the way you do when the satisfaction of having understood something crumples in the face of the evidence that this half-truth is totally illogical, beyond being pointless, until you have the rest that will complete it.

  So Giannelli told him about the last time he’d seen her. It was almost lunchtime now. The buzz overhead had increased. The music had vanished. The sound of shopping carts, cars.

  “A night not even a couple of years ago.”

  He’d happened to run into her in a deli that stayed open until late. Horrendous faux marble walls, neon lights everywhere. He’d stopped in to get a bite before going to bed, and he was sitting on a stool with a hot mozzarella-and-tomato rustico in hand when she came in, too. Her hair was super-short. She was wearing a leather skirt and a white T-shirt. Her arms were bare. Skinnier than he’d remembered her. And alone. It was Clara who took the initiative. She slapped him on the back. They said hello with a sort of frozen, but still perceptible, affection. Giannelli bought her a beer. “And,” he said to Michele, “you must have figured out that I have a certain experience when it comes to matters of this kind. She was drugged out of her mind.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Anyway, she was standing upright, she was connecting. We talked for a while about pretty much everything.”

  “Even about me?”

  “We must have gone on for a solid twenty minutes,” said Giannelli.

  She no longer resembled the diva you look at as you leaf through the pages of a magazine. She was now the diva you run into on the street many years after her last hit and you notice how different she looks from her picture in the paper. And so the worst gossip is confirmed. You understand that if you felt like it, you could pull out a knife and disembowel her. Give into the general climate. And so, even though he felt like going to sleep, Giannelli hadn’t made the first move. He waited for her to say hello to him. “Because I didn’t want to leave her alone in that place at two in the morning.”

  Michele repeated the question. He asked if they’d talked about him. He was more precise. He asked Giannelli if Clara had talked to him, Giannelli, about him, Michele. He broadened the question before Giannelli had a chance to answer. He asked if Clara, perhaps in other circumstances, had ever talked about him.

  “Talked about what?”

  “Anything in particular, anything that stuck in your mind,” he asked, holding back his tears.

  In his frog costume, Giannelli stopped to think for a little while. He, too, was looking up at the immense sky.

  “To tell the truth, no.”

  Once he reached the station, he caught a whiff in the air of the same odor he’d breathed in the hospital every time the nurse opened the windows. His stomach lurched. He grabbed his crutches. He refused the extended hand of a young man who gazed at him through the elegant frames of his sunglasses. He got out of the train. Once on the platform, he followed the strip of light that led to Piazza Aldo Moro.

  He moved forward through knots of university students and well dressed women. If you just counted the clothing shops, you’d guess that Bari had twice the number of inhabitants, and the average income of a city in Northern Europe. He saw the sky, more open to the right, beyond the nineteenth-century apartment buildings. He headed in that direction. Leaving behind him a checkerboard full of completely useless symbols and pawns.

  After a church reduced to a gray parallelepiped hurled upwards, the landscape became familiar. Isolated gas stations. Old men sitting on blocks of cement. These were people you could talk to. He asked for directions from a tire repairman sitting outside his shop and smoking. He cont
inued along Via Ballestrero. The city was big, and the people he was looking for wouldn’t necessarily be easy to find. He put his right crutch forward, and gave a push on both props at once.

  After an hour, he was walking along the waterfront on Via Cagno Abbrescia. On the right, a long strip of uncared-for grass. He passed a small dump. At the foot of a ruined building, on the terrace of which was an incomprehensibly new sign (MARINA SPORT), he saw the unmistakable silhouettes.

  One of the women was wearing a leather jacket and black panties. The other was wearing hip-high pleather boots.

  He was too tired and angry not to take a break.

  The one with the hip boots looked up. She understood immediately. Keeping in mind that he only has one leg, she thought, there was even time for a cigarette.

  The BMW convertible went off the road after a curve taken badly. Ruggero clenched his teeth. He didn’t make the mistake of trying to jerk the wheel around. With a move hardly intuitive but perfect, he accelerated until the car was accepted into the new trajectory sketched by his mistake. The door brushed against the guardrail. Only then, after downshifting, did he steer leftward. The BMW returned to the ribbon of roadway.

  “Fuck! Fuck!” he shouted. Even he couldn’t say if he was more angry or more satisfied that he was still in one piece.

  He continued along the waterfront. He was getting near Pane e Pomodoro beach. It wasn’t far now. There hadn’t been time to prepare an appropriate speech. He cursed his father. In his mind, he improvised the words that he’d say to the technical director of ARPA. He went through two stoplights. After a hundred yards or so, he saw the large building of the Regional Environmental Protection Agency heave into view. Ruggero parked.

  He entered the building. He told the receptionist that he had an appointment to see the technical director. The young woman asked him to wait. Ruggero went over and took a seat on the sofa facing her desk. He could see the young woman talking on the phone and nodding her head. The young woman, in turn, noticed that the man was ceaselessly tapping his right foot on the floor. She ended the call. She informed him that Dr. Paparella was waiting for him in his office. “Thirteenth floor.” She watched him vanish into the elevator.

  “Listen, sir, I’d be sorry if this whole ugly episode were to create any prejudice as far as your monitoring in the Gargano region is concerned.”

  He finished uttering that sentence. He looked the technical director in the eye, wondering whether that was the right approach.

  The office was a 325 square-foot room with a terrazzo floor. Two desks. A leather sofa with its back to the oversized windows. On the walls hung large plastic-laminated posters depicting the region’s natural beauties. The sea stacks at Mattinata. The grottos at Castellana.

  “My father has invested very heavily in that area,” he added, “and after everything that’s happened, frankly, we’re scared.”

  He wasn’t sure whether he’d been right to address the man in the formal voice. He was nervous. He sensed that every action he took, that morning, was slightly ahead of the train of thought that ought to have calibrated it.

  “Our work is carried out in complete independence from the pending cases that involve the area being monitored,” the technical director said in an exaggeratedly institutional tone. “If we were to try to follow that line, we’d constantly have to shift our objectives and operating strategies. Don’t worry about it,” he added, reinforcing the distance between them and at the same time doing his best to appear protective, “the agency undertakes its investigations without allowing anything outside of its own scruples and sense of responsibility to influence it.”

  “No, because in any case I can assure you that the seizure request is going to be rejected,” he realized the heat that he was putting into every word, tried to rein himself in. “It’s a matter of days at this point,” he said, regaining a certain equanimity.

  “That’s inconsequential to us.” The man reiterated the point with a smile.

  Next to the desk, it was impossible to ignore the standing ashtray. Ruggero noticed the shape of the lamp, too. The array suggested the idea of the elegant interior of a ministerial office in the Seventies that would have depressed anyone, unless it was on display in a museum in London or New York.

  “You know, in Italy you never know how certain things are going to turn out,” Ruggero tried to shuffle the deck again, “when I think about the number of jobs that my father—”

  “I’m sure that what you say is true,” the technical director interrupted, lowering his eyes. “Your father has certainly respected all the zoning restrictions and the villas won’t be taken over by the state. In any case, we’ll proceed as usual. There’s no reason to think, for that matter, that the surface area of the tourist village will form part of the sample that we’ll be examining. Leaving aside the areas that are sensitive by definition, the monitoring stations are placed each time in different locations. Listen, I haven’t even checked to see whether in this case—”

  “They’re very nice villas, you know?”

  The director stopped talking. He raised his head. He stared him right in the eyes.

  “I have no doubt,” he finally replied.

  Ruggero understood that the man had understood. Now he could quit it with the whole song and dance.

  “That one there was designed by Gae Aulenti,” he said, pointing to the bat-shaped lamp.

  The technical director nodded. He said that the furnishings were the only thing that the economic crisis had spared in those offices. Then he added: “By the way, the service at the agency’s café is terrible. Why don’t we go out for an espresso?”

  The hot wind swept over them as if it were exhaust from an industrial air conditioner. Once they were out in the street, instead of heading for a café, the technical director started walking toward the sea. Ruggero followed him. Beyond the sidewalk were the planters with their succulents, then a parking area without an attendant. They passed that, too. The noises of the city faded into the distance. The technical director took the narrow path leading down to the beach.

  Five minutes later they were walking among black pebbles and papers blowing in the wind. Straight ahead of them the Adriatic: choppy and blue. The beach, if you could call it that, was no bigger than a basketball court. About fifty feet away, a man with a fishing rod and rubber boots was standing in the water, ankle-deep. The waves covered up all sounds other than their voices.

  “Listen,” said the technical director, “I want to be as frank as possible. I’m not interested in your villas.”

  Ruggero said nothing. He sensed that his father had pushed him into the arms of a colossal error.

  “The fact that you’ve come to talk to me at all means that the seizure issue is nothing compared to what would happen if we went into the Porto Allegro site with our monitoring stations. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  Ruggero still said nothing.

  “In any case, it wasn’t hard to guess,” the man went on in a friendlier tone of voice. “You’re not alone in this. In fact, you probably had no real alternatives. We know what’s been going on in the district for some time now. This monitoring process will let the cat out of the bag. The other day we received the quarterly report from LIPU, the Italian Society for the Protection of Birds. The chancellor bent over backwards to convince them to delay. There’s going to be a joint publication of the documents. Obviously, we can’t go over that part of the Gargano with a fine-toothed comb. For the same reason, a complete reclamation would be impossible. We lack the personnel, to say nothing of the funds. Most of the area will always remain ou—”

  “Look, I don’t have any idea what you’re talk—”

  “Yes, of course,” the technical director interrupted in turn, “you’re just an oncologist, you know nothing about it. But your father is well informed on these matters. Ask and you’ll be told. In any case, let me say it ag
ain, for me the villas are just a complication,” he paused. “I need a hundred fifty thousand euros. And, unfortunately, in a bit of a hurry. I’m sorry to have to put it like this. If you have problems with a cash payment, we can come to an agreement on a fake consulting fee. I can point you to a trusted individual. You, or your father. Anyone you like.”

  He drove twenty miles an hour the whole way home. What do I have to do with any of this? he kept saying to himself. He felt unsettled, depressed.

  Half an hour later, he passed the Texaco station. The industrial sheds of Officine Calabrese. The old bowling alleys, closed for years, with a gigantic rusty pin that stuck out over the road. Which is how he realized he was heading in the wrong direction.

  When, many years later, Gennaro Lopez, former medical examiner of the ASL 2, the Bari health care clinic, found himself extracting from his many if tangled memories the most awful one, that is, the one that could do him the most harm, he’d choose the night on which a guy of about thirty knocked on his front door and started showering him with questions about his sister’s death certificate.

  At the time, Lopez was deep in debt and consuming two grams of cocaine a day. He’d managed to dodge a threatened disciplinary proceeding. He was taking Diamet, Lormetazepam, Depakote drops, he was patronizing prostitutes on a regular basis, and all this ensured that he was tormented by an elusive sense of déjà vu—the sensation that he’d read the same page of the newspaper, that he’d experienced a scene the day before the same synesthetic details organized themselves before his eyes.