Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  Otherwise, I no longer feel a thing, he thought sadly, as he headed toward his father’s house. After his encounter with Alberto, he’d decided to go back to Rome. The announcement at home two days earlier.

  It had seemed to him that Annamaria was almost sorry. Vittorio had said: “Stay a little longer. Stay until the beginning of August. Then we can all go to the beach.” In his father’s gaze was a grimace that was more than a mere hope. He wanted Michele to stay. He desired it authentically, sincerely. If the young man had given him the chance, now he’d have clasped his cheeks in his old hands.

  To Michele it seemed like a monstrous scene. A horror movie that, instead of ending, seemed intent on starting over again in exactly the same way, but without scenes of blood or suspense, as if the first version had never happened.

  “Stay. Three weeks. What would it cost you?” Vittorio repeated.

  Michele had said: “We’ll see,” but without conviction. He still had his brother-in-law’s words in his head. He felt sorrowful, tired, he would have slept for months. A sense of solitude that was different from that through which he’d educated himself.

  And then the news had arrived. The phones in the house had started ringing. There was a noise of crockery from downstairs, as if dishes and glasses were moving on their own in anticipation of a celebration. Gioia was talking at ratatat speed in her room. Michele walked past it. He listened at the door. A piercing voice, swollen with pride—a family upon whom the star of peace and prosperity had never stopped beaming. In disgust, Michele went downstairs. His father left the house. He came back half an hour later. He was carrying a bouquet of roses. Michele saw him head for the kitchen. Vittorio filled a vase with water and carried it into the living room. He put the flowers into the vase.

  Then, Michele actually saw Annamaria laugh.

  Not believing herself watched, the woman had moved out onto the small balcony off the living room. She’d craned her head back. She’d laughed the way silent film stars used to do when, caught in a cold light, they showed their gleaming white teeth, turning their faces to favor a gleam that could be that of eternity or of a war that had not yet broken out.

  The seizure request had been turned down. They were saved. Gioia started trying on one dress after another. They were all going out to dinner together, to celebrate.

  So, now, two days later, Michele was strolling through the neighborhood streets. The sorrow of having lost a sister, of having lost a mother before that, and in the end, of having lost a cat as well. It wasn’t more than a human body can suffer. This was the sentence. After his encounter with Alberto, Michele felt he no longer had a grip on anything, not even the depth of his malaise. As if he could observe it only from the exterior. The cat had kept him company for four long years. So loving, so patient. A good cat. But he had brought her with him to Bari, just so he wouldn’t have to go alone. He’d put her into the pet carrier. She’d gone into it, full of trust. During the train trip, she’d behaved perfectly. She’d adjusted to a place she didn’t know, a house full of malevolent energies that the poor creature had struggled to ignore, because of her love for him. She’d even come up with that game, where she jumped off the top of the armoire. It had been Michele’s job to protect her. And this was the result. He went past the gas station. He walked under the leaves of the plane trees, along the line of parked cars. A BMW that resembled a silver projectile. Dark marks on the bumper. Blood. Or maybe just mud, scratches.

  Michele thought he could see her, the cat, frozen in the middle of the road, in her eyes the headlights of a car hurtling at sixty miles an hour. A creature used only to being petted. Evil, for someone who’d never even imagined that it existed. He thought about the rats he’d read about in the paper. Huge sewer rats that emerged out of storm drains and frightened people. It had happened in Poggiofranco, in Carrassi. The cat would have been overwhelmed. Rats with ruby-red eyes, born to violence.

  But my sorrow has been amputated.

  Michele walked down the cypress-lined lane. He saw the villa with its terrace emerge through the leaves. There’d been a time when he wouldn’t just have imagined the cat torn to pieces by a pack of sewer rats. He would have felt it. He would have become her. Clara. Something inside him had shifted without his realizing it. The rotation of a room. Windows where walls ought to be, outside walls facing light instead of shade, so that the ghost could flee the unexpected.

  He walked through the villa’s front gate. Clearly Alberto had lied. Against the things Michele had said, he’d opposed the obtuse part of himself. The closed part, the dead part. He walked past the oleanders. The stone fountain, lined with the damp stripes of moss. He climbed up the stairs. His sister and those men. At the level of explanation, it might even be true. He pulled out the keys. He opened the front door. He went into the house. But obviously it didn’t hold together. In the segment that was Clara’s life (Michele had glimpsed it in its entirety in the long-ago days of his military service, when he was sunk in his delirium), there was something different from what they had tried to make him believe. He’d never know.

  He crossed the living room. He said “Ciao,” loudly. The house was empty. He went into the kitchen. He drank a glass of water. Then he went upstairs to his room. He stretched out on the bed without removing his shoes. He lit a cigarette. He looked at the top of the armoire. He concentrated. (Staring into the void, to make the shape of the little animal blossom inside him.) It didn’t work. That’s enough, he thought. Rome. Like saying Paris or Buenos Aires. Vanishing into the crowd.

  He got out of bed. He went to the window and opened it. He heard the ruckus. Then in the sky he saw the airplane flying at low altitude.

  Last drag. He shut the window. Now the sound of a repeated signal. Michele held his breath. He calmly observed the nightstand, then the bed. Then the armoire. Noises of settling, creaking. It happened with wooden furniture. Then a hope. His heart started beating faster. But when the noise was heard again, Michele realized that it was coming from the floor below. Someone was knocking at the door. For an instant, he transferred the hope of finding the cat in the armoire to the hope that someone might have brought her back. Is this cat yours? As he went downstairs, it occurred to him that it might be Vittorio, having left the house without his keys. Whoever it was knocked again. Absurd though it was, his hope was still alive. He opened the door. It wasn’t his father. Something inside him began struggling. A confused, violent movement that he could no longer control.

  “Hello,” said Michele, shocked by what he was seeing.

  The man stood there. A middle-aged man. His right leg stitched shut at the knee. Supported by a pair of crutches. His face large and stout. Moist eyes. Lips half open, like someone about to curse, or shout in your face.

  “Orazio Basile,” the man said, introducing himself. Nothing more.

  Michele showed him in.

  “An elevator?” he asked in bewilderment fifteen minutes later.

  To make it clear that he wasn’t kidding around, the man said that unless they held up their end of the bargain, he wouldn’t hold up his. He’d tell everyone. A young woman. Naked and covered with blood, in the middle of the road. That’s what he’d tell anyone who would listen.

  Then Vittorio arrived. He saw his son and Orazio Basile sitting on the sofa. He went pale. Michele turned toward him. He made a tremendous effort to transform his hatred into a look of complicity.

  @ClaraSalvemini:

  Wise men are happy when they discover falsehoods. Idiots when they discover the truth.

  10 retweets 2 favorites

  @pablito82:

  @ClaraSalvemini It should be the other way around.

  @ClaraSalvemini:

  @pablito82 Tonight anything is possible.

  19 retweets 10 favorites

  The medical examiner is named Gennaro Lopez and he has a terrible reputation,” said Danilo Sangirardi.

&n
bsp; Once again sitting shoulder to shoulder in the old Fiesta parked on the road to Mola, while an afternoon even sunnier than the last gleamed all around. Not far from the sea, the grass was wilting in a long reddish shadow.

  Then the journalist added: “Remarkable on your part. In Italy the family is sacred. Usually people prefer to let themselves be destroyed by theirs.”

  Michele caught the affected coda. As if Sangirardi wanted to tell him more, but needed a greater sense of complicity.

  He didn’t tell him about his encounter with the Tarantine. Nothing about a naked, bloody girl on State Highway 100 the night that Clara died. He’d called him to say that he wasn’t so sure anymore that she’d killed herself. Or at least not the way they said. It was likely that his father and his father’s wife and his siblings had come to a mistaken conclusion. He’d asked him whether it might be possible to track down the name of the doctor who had examined the body. With every word he’d struggled to keep calm, working to restrain the fury he’d been shaking with for the past few days.

  “Pretty much a total sleazeball,” Sangirardi had replied.

  A coke fiend. A whoremonger. Full of debts and questionable friendships. “He’d even come under a disciplinary investigation,” he’d added, lighting the first delicious cigarette of the conversation. Then he’d narrowed his eyes. Even though Michele hadn’t said anything about it, Sangirardi’s intuition perceived the opening. Could it be that Michele was looking for a way to act against his own family? Was that what he was asking Sangirardi to help him do? Because if that was it, the journalist let slip, there were also rumors of a wire transfer to an ARPA functionary. Maybe some money through intermediaries of some kind. A considerable sum. If Michele happened to have a way of getting into the company’s offices, he might be able to find documents or receipts that could shed light on this matter as well.

  “Listen,” said Michele, taking a drag in turn on his Marlboro, looking the journalist hard in the face, “I understand that you might bear a grudge against my family. I can also understand that you’re not especially fond of my sister,” he made an effort, “even after her death. But I’m not looking to get anyone into trouble,” he lied. “I just want to understand.”

  Sangirardi dropped his eyes, gave a fatalistic smile.

  “If I wanted to get revenge on everyone who’s tried to seal my lips, three lifetimes wouldn’t be enough.” To Michele it seemed as if he saw him sparkle. “If you want to be good at my profession, rancor is every bit as important as fear.”

  The blast of sunlight, unnaturally enhanced on the walls of the buildings, ricocheted among a thousand luminous circles through the windshield. Sangirardi wasn’t lying. No resentment. The truth as a missing number. The truth, and that human depiction of this god that was respect for the law. That was what interested him, and he presumed that Michele was driven by the same needs. But Michele wasn’t looking for the truth. Something more subtle. The black celluloid membrane inside which is imprisoned a ghost that vanishes during the developing process. He wasn’t even looking for a lie, but a gesture. Something that might break the chain of meanings, so that the thirst for truth would never even spring into existence.

  “Thanks for the name of the medical examiner.”

  “And listen, Michele . . . ” Danilo Sangirardi smiled for the first time in a fragile way. Uncertain about something. Michele associated it with the veiled compliments from before, as if he were seeking the alliance that he’d started to weave, a kind of agreement that Michele considered human while for Sangirardi it clearly must have been in some way embarrassing.

  “Well . . . ” Sangirardi continued after overcoming the obstacle. “If you find anything interesting, I’d like to be the first to know. You understand. To write an article.”

  “Naturally. You gave me the contact, you get first shot. That’s a promise,” said Michele, hearing the ocean seethe on his right.

  Now, thought Ruggero in the privacy of his office, life might resume its normal course. Now that the seizure request had been torn to shreds in court, after his father had overwhelmed that miserable wretch with chitchat, too, sending him back to Taranto with the promise of his elevator. You could see the storm was moving away. After bursting violently two months ago, it seemed to him that he could see it inflicting itself on other, already distant lands. Once again, calm seas. All over.

  Ruggero looked at the file folder. The list of patients in his appointment book. The Robert Wenner Prize certificate from the Swiss Cancer League framed on the wall. Every object gleamed in a different light than it ought to. He was almost fifty years old. He was sinking in the role of deputy director of the best-known cancer clinic in southern Italy like an insect in jelly. He thought back to the face-to-face meeting with the technical director of ARPA. Someday, he’d be appointed director. Between his consulting work and grants and fellowships, he’d earn twice as much. He pulled the lab coat off the coat rack, put it on. But the international prizes. The opening ceremonies of the conferences at the Federation of European Cancer Societies. The articles in The Lancet or in the British Medical Journal. That wouldn’t happen.

  For that matter, as soon as he took his position at the Cancer Institute of the Mediterranean, he’d allowed his father to talk him into handing over the documents of the Regional Medical Archives.

  The magic of predestination. The pure force that erupts from certain men before they even open their mouths. He’d lost all this. He’d had it in a nascent state as a young man. He’d allowed them to destroy it. It hadn’t happened to other students under Professor Helmerhorst. Ruggero observed their careers from a distance. He read the newspapers, he was interested in the statistics. Mario Capecchi, Nobel laureate in medicine, was orphaned at age four. Christiaan Barnard’s father was a missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church. Pascal’s father was a mathematician, not a builder and developer. Every time that Ruggero found another one, he instantly memorized the information. Descartes. Voltaire. Gandhi. Erasmus. Michelangelo. All of them orphans at a tender age. He’d wound up with a fighter more violent than any adversary he could construct with his imagination. Nine on the dot. He picked up the receiver. He dialed the extension. He told the young woman at the front desk to send in the first patient.

  After five hours of examinations, he started getting organized for the next day.

  He jotted down some names in his appointment book. He confirmed some appointments, tried to cancel others. He focused on the medical charts. Then he moved on to the exams. He spent two more hours reading the medical reports. Patience, concentration. At a certain point, he cocked his right eyebrow in an unnatural manner. Iron-deficiency anemia. Gastric bleeding due to altered iron absorption. He grabbed the neck of the table lamp, shifted it towards the documents. The albumin had collapsed below the warning level. The progression from the gastric mucosa to the gastric submucosa seemed undeniable. Three indicators of that kind were basically crushing proof. His father was a goner. Ruggero closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and slammed both fists down on the desk. He remained in that position for several seconds, head bowed, hands aching.

  “Fuck!”

  Having digested the burst of pure joy, he tried to regain the composure he’d had just minutes before.

  He looked at the tray. He savored the preemptive repentance of someone with too much sugar in his bloodstream. He grabbed a chocolate profiterole with his hands. He stuffed it in his mouth.

  Then Mimmo Russo, chief justice of the Bari Court of Appeals, went over to stand in front of the large picture window. The villa overlooked the water, which was being crossed by an ocean liner and lots of white sails. His wife was in Salento, baking in the sun. His children were far away. The city was emptying out. And so he—an ancient monument washed up in the summer solitude—had had to give in in the end. Call Foggia. An hour of explanations, of clarifications. Every time that he’d pushed the investigating magistrate on some aspect o
f the matter that made no sense, Mimmo Russo had felt—part of the give and take over the arc of the conversation—the crumbling of another fragment of his authoritative reputation. All this for a slut who was dead now, anyway.

  As far as that goes, I asked for it, he thought as he dragged himself away from the enormous expanse of the picture window in the living room. He’d gotten himself into trouble at Valentino Buffante’s house. He’d accepted the invitation. He hadn’t underestimated the young woman’s pliability. Everyone knew what these sluts were like, willing to do anything as long as they didn’t have to take responsibility for the way certain evenings might turn out. He’d have sworn to her tawdriness. It was the others’ degree of idiocy that he hadn’t taken into account. That Costantini. The way he’d lost control. She had provoked them and he’d fallen for it. Imbecile. In these kinds of situations you need to be tough. It takes less than nothing, and from a perfectly consensual situation, well within the rules of the game, things go off the rails.

  The elderly chief justice went back to the tray. Once he’d been assigned to preside over the case of a young man beaten to death outside a wine shop. It had started out with two against one. An ordinary argument. But the minute the victim had fallen to the ground, he’d made the mistake of curling into a ball with his hands on the back of his neck even before anyone had even touched him. That had unleashed the violence. The other two had started pounding him. Then a third guy joined in, someone who wasn’t even involved. Then a fourth, a fifth. They’d finished him off, kicking his teeth in, for no good reason, fomented by the alcohol and a hatred that belonged to no one. A brutal energy that spread into the void, a collective fever. Perhaps a residue from a time before the first laws were chiseled into the basalt, a very distant, ferocious era, always ready to open wide beneath our feet.