Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  He grabbed another profiterole. He stuffed it into his mouth. He continued to consider both unseemly and at the same time understandable what old Salvemini had suggested to him when he’d gone to their house for dinner. The shadow of extortion. He’d let him know that he knew. Showing it to him in the presence of his whole family. That in itself was a remarkable bit of courage. But deep down, it was still the same old show. The chief justice of the court of appeals returned to his position in front of the picture window. Still, looking out over the sea. How lovely and how stupid creation really was.

  Vittorio woke up at five in the morning. He made a phone call to Turkey. Then he got dressed, had breakfast, and left the house. He got in his car. He drove off for the usual tour of construction sites. As he drove, he kept making phone calls. He talked to Turin and to Cagliari, in Sardinia. He received reports from his Spanish business partners. He was trying to catch up on all the fronts he’d neglected over the past few weeks. If he thought about what still had to be done before August, he felt ill. He was feeling reasonably well. Frail, but possessed of a new kind of serenity. The force that even old age possessed.

  After making the rounds of the construction sites, a little before noon, he drove over to the administrative offices. There was still lots to be done there. And also, at lunchtime, Michele would be coming. His son was coming to visit him at work.

  He took him to a restaurant a short distance from the offices. Michele ordered a pasta dish and a main course. A steak, very rare. Vittorio limited himself to a salad and a dish of grilled vegetables. His stomach was still giving him trouble. But it was a pleasure to watch his son eat. To listen to him talk, to enter his world. A week. At a certain point, he didn’t even know how, Vittorio had managed to wheedle it out of him. “All right, Papà,” said Michele, spearing what remained of the steak. He’d stay in Bari until the middle of July. Good. Very good. Maybe he’d already made up his mind a few days ago and he’d come there today to let him believe that it had been him, his old father, who had been wily enough to convince him to stay. They ordered fruit cocktail. Michele also ordered an espresso. The old man paid the check.

  Before leaving the restaurant, Michele asked if it would be all right if he came up with Vittorio to the offices. He needed to make some photocopies. Also, he needed to use a computer. He needed to check his email, write a piece. In other words, work.

  “As long as there’s a desk no one’s using, Papà. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anybody.”

  “Michele, what are you talking about?”

  Vittorio’s face darkened. He almost felt that his sorrow was twisting in his belly. He thought of how that young man must have experienced life, if after all these years he still felt the need to ask permission to make a few copies. Had he made mistakes? Like almost all fathers. And, as was the case with so many fathers who had made mistakes, time was giving him a chance to make up for it.

  “Martina!” Vittorio shouted five minutes later, as he walked into the offices. “My son needs a place to work. A desk with a phone and a computer.”

  His tone was so solemn that it could prove embarrassing for Michele. Vittorio didn’t realize that. Instead he lowered his voice, addressing the young man.

  “Please. You’re the boss in here. Do whatever you need to do.”

  At eight in the evening the employees started leaving, one after the other.

  At nine-fifteen, Vittorio made the last phone call. He walked out into the hallway. The other offices were dark, the rooms empty. But Michele, motionless in his corner at the computer, was still there working. The very picture of discretion, of good will.

  Vittorio went back to his office. He picked up his briefcase. He turned off the light. He went back out into the hallway, and went over to his son.

  Michele stopped typing. He turned to look at him.

  “I’m tired. I’m going home. Want to come with me?”

  “Actually, I still haven’t finished,” the young man replied. “Can I stay a little longer?”

  Vittorio threw his arms wide in a sign of desperation. But he was smiling.

  “Cut it out with all these can I’s,” said the old man, “otherwise I’m going to have to think you’re making fun of me. Do whatever you like. Should we expect you for dinner?”

  “There’s no need. When I’m done here, I’m going to see some friends.”

  “Friends from high school?”

  “Something like that.”

  Michele smiled. He winked at something undefined that his father—convinced that he could bask in the reflection of the light that he himself had engendered—proudly associated with ex-girlfriends not otherwise specified.

  Vittorio smiled in turn. “Good.” He rummaged in his pockets. With an imperceptibly affected gesture, he slid the office keys across the desk. He said goodnight to his son. He left.

  At a quarter to three in the morning, Michele left the administrative offices of Salvemini Construction. He was tired, his eyes were red. For five long hours he’d done nothing but open and shut drawers. He’d leafed through ledgers and accounting books, documents full of numbers and incomprehensible abbreviations. But then he’d found what he was looking for. Clutching the sheets of paper, he’d felt an obscure restorative energy spread throughout his body. A chilly green light. He’d made the photocopies.

  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 at his front door and started showering him with questions about his sister’s death certificate. At the time, Lopez was deep in debt and was 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 and now the same synesthetic details organized themselves again before his eyes.

  The problem was that the young man started blackmailing him.

  And the problem was also that, at the moment he heard the doorbell ring, Gennaro Lopez was about to bend over the fourth line laid out on his nightstand, after dedicating the afternoon to a triptych (ketamine, speed, and ecstasy, to which he’d added a light acid), and he was doing it in the company of Rocco—an old partying buddy of his who had jumped off the seventh floor of the Hotel Parco dei Principi after overdosing on LSD—whose white image came back to pay him a visit every once in a while, when he found himself in this sorry state.

  “Coming!”

  In spite of the fact that the doorbell had already rung twice, he snorted the coke until he could feel the frozen drop. He respected the old principle that said when something unexpected happens, and you have a half-finished line, it’s always best to snort the rest of it. Even if it was no one but some nosy neighbors, then at least you’d snorted it. If it was someone who’d come to beat you bloody with a pair of brass knuckles, then at least you’d snorted it.

  Gennaro Lopez got up from the bed, cursing. He slipped on his sandals. He threw on a shirt. He took a few steps forward and at that point he stopped. The space between the armoire and the wall mirror was where he always got his best ideas. He turned his head slowly toward his guest.

  “Go on, go see who it is.”

  The ghost, motionless at the foot of the bed, looked at him sternly. His figure became the long urn of light sketched by the floor lamp. It’s your house and you need to answer the door said a voice that the medical examiner recognized as the banal extension of his own solitude.

  Gennaro Lopez emerged from his bedroom. The doorbell rang for the third time. He walked down the hallway. In front of th
e bathroom door he shut his eyes and lengthened his stride. The bathroom, when he was in that state, was best avoided. One ran the risk of locking oneself in, curled up in the radiator recess, hands clamped to one’s ears to keep from hearing the voices. Voices that wanted their money back. They threatened him, they showered him with insults. But the worst thing was that, beneath the yelling voices of his creditors, Gennaro Lopez managed to perceive something else. A warm, slow current: wails, sobs. The strangled little girl who’d been certified as a simple cardiac arrest. The criminal finished off with a blow from a bludgeon that, in his medical certificate, became a “cranial trauma caused by accidental fall.”

  Gennaro Lopez jerked in surprise, safely made it past the bathroom door. He finally managed to struggle down the hall. He planted his feet in front of the door, and at that point asked: “Who is it?”

  In response, the doorbell rang again.

  “I said: Who is it!”

  “You don’t know me, sir. But I need to talk to you. Please open the door. It’s better for everyone.”

  Hadn’t he heard that voice before? In any case, he was reassured by the use of the “sir.” No brass knuckles. The warning had probably just been added on at the end to make up for the mistake of having sounded too courteous. And yet . . . That’s where he’d heard the voice! The sense of déjà vu. The time-warp that still yawned open in his head. Gennaro Lopez felt as if he were reliving the same movie from the night before. As the scene progressed, he found himself sitting in the kitchen, across from the owner of the voice who giving him the third degree. A young man, clearly not armed, who never would have been able to get into his house if he hadn’t been so stupid as to open the door. So Gennaro Lopez was able to reply without hesitation: “Beat it!”

  The doorbell started ringing again.

  “Beat it, I said!”

  “Open up. Or I’ll call the police.”

  Obviously he wasn’t armed. But it was every bit as clear that, for that very reason, he wouldn’t hesitate to put his threat into effect. And if the police came into his home, well, what they’d find would be more than sufficient to get him into a world of trouble.

  Depressed, humiliated at the way things were working against him, Gennaro Lopez seized the door handle. He undid the security bolt with his other hand. He opened the door.

  “Good evening,” said the owner of the voice.

  Gennaro Lopez turned pale.

  In fact he found himself face to face with a young man, about thirty. Only this wasn’t the one suggested by the déjà-vu. In physical terms he was—dark, emaciated, high cheekbones, his right eyelid slightly lower than the other—but the result had little to do with the sum of the parts: he emanated an obscure vibration that the medical examiner felt himself immediately engulfed by. A sensation of loss and despair, which a resulting duty to seek revenge (the extreme homage to something concerning whose reversibility we have ceased to entertain illusions) did not make less sad.

  The young man slowly lifted his right hand upward, a funereal gesture that frightened the doctor even more—a force amplified by the alterations of the state of consciousness, whose power it was difficult to elude. So much so that now Gennaro Lopez was already sitting in the kitchen, across the table from the young man, just as he’d feared when he first heard his voice.

  His guest tilted his head. From his features emerged a final but understanding gaze, similar to that of certain frightening Madonnas that sit enthroned at the far ends of hallways in hospitals buried in childhood memories. He clasped his hands together. Then he spoke. He asked him to tell him everything he knew about the death of his sister.

  “What sister?” asked Gennaro Lopez. The tiles were suddenly crossed by a green light that immediately vanished.

  “Clara Salvemini.”

  “And who is that supposed to be?” This time the doctor was lying. The first thing that had come to mind was the floodlight in the mortuary room. He was adjusting the intensity of the light, he was kneeling forward to examine the corpse, and now the floodlight was scalding the back of his neck. It curled the hairs on his neck, that’s how powerful it was.

  The young man said that it was Lopez’s name that appeared on the certificate.

  “How am I supposed to remember? In the past few years I must have seen hundreds of corpses.” The doctor tugged at his shirt because of the sudden chill. But then, instead, he was too hot.

  At that point the young man separated his hands and, with the same exasperating slowness, opened them like a goblet, as if he were effortlessly bearing up the invisible burden troubling the conscience of the man in his presence. He said that he would alert the judicial authorities. If pushed to extreme consequences, that’s what he’d be willing to do. He raised his finger, with anguish, into the air, sketching in the void the numerals of a way of the cross in reverse. They would disinter the corpse. They’d compare the findings of the new examination with what they found in the document he’d drawn up. But Michele didn’t want the corpse to be disinterred. The ultimate insult to his sister’s dead body would be if it became the subject of an inquest, he said, with an increasingly contrite face. He was speaking from beyond a bloodstained veil, and he felt sincere sorrow for anyone who, forcing him to cross it, would be smeared with the same substance. The doctor realized that he wasn’t kidding around.

  “I couldn’t help it,” he said.

  “Why.”

  “They forced me.”

  “Who forced you.”

  The doctor felt a chill again. If he listened carefully, it wasn’t just the young man’s voice. In his masculine timbre there was another one. And in the voice of the live man, the voice of the dead soul. The girl. The two voices were holding hands. This made a strange impression on him. Watching him talk, it seemed to Gennaro Lopez that his guest’s tone, every so often, faded. At that point, he scraped the bottom of all his grief, which was also his strength, to extract from the depths the living figure of his sister, that is, the finest memory of her that he had, held upright by the finest memory he had of himself, so that not one but two dead people spoke through his mouth. Little brother and little sister. This was disconcerting. To see them walk together along the curve of time. Hurtled into a future they hadn’t anticipated.

  “Who is it that you say forced you?” asked Michele.

  “I don’t know,” the medical examiner sniveled, overwhelmed by the suddenly resurgent wave of narcotics.

  “You can’t not know.”

  “They call me and I go.” He was no longer the young man’s victim but his own. “It’s a matter of working out the causes of death,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll be called by an executive of the health care clinic. Or the director of technical operations. Usually, though, it’s people I don’t know. They call. I know that they’re speaking on behalf of someone else, but I’ve never heard their voices before. At that point, in any case, I have to go examine the corpse.”

  In the past, Gennaro Lopez had had a clear picture of the constantly updated map that let him understand which requests he could turn down without risking grave consequences. But the number of people capable of blackmailing him had grown over the years to a frightful extent. At a certain point, the map had exploded in his head.

  “I understand, but in my sister’s case, exactly who would have called you?”

  “A director of the health care clinic.”

  “The name.”

  “I can tell you, but it wouldn’t do any good.”

  The young man glared at him.

  The doctor met his gaze. He didn’t have any problem doing that if he wasn’t lying.

  Michele shook his head. It seemed to the doctor that he had just sensed the kind of maze of other names the name of the director would lead to, the links in an interminable chain that he’d have to snap one after the other to make any kind of sense of it. The young man dropped his head into
his hands, probably exhausted, and that was enough to let the rising tide that was carrying the medical examiner to the height of prostration suggest the presence of another dock. Empathy. Methylene­dioxymethamphetamine. The active element in ecstasy regained some ground.

  “Believe me,” the doctor said at that point, driven, in spite of himself, by the fire of solidarity, “even I couldn’t dig anything up starting from that guy. And what’s more I can tell you something more useful about this story. The problem,” he leaned cautiously toward Michele, “is that at the moment I performed the examination of your sister’s corpse, there at the cemetery mortuary, well . . . I realized that I was already familiar with that body.”

  The young man looked at him without saying a word.

  “The photos,” the doctor went on, “at least a year earlier. I’d seen her photographs.”

  “What photographs?”

  “The photographs of your sister. Those pictures were making the rounds, if you catch my drift.”

  He saw Michele grow sad. He felt the force of his profound displeasure that once again threatened him.

  “Who was it that you say took those pictures?” the young man asked after a pause. It seemed as if the mere act of uttering those words caused him minor burns on his lips.

  “A surgeon.” Gennaro Lopez tried to withstand with the strength he lacked the young man’s pathological unhappiness, so they wouldn’t plunge, one after the other, into a deep sea with no more light or sound. “But he’s not the solution to the problem either.”