Ferocity

by Nicola Lagioia

  “And so?” Michele crossed his arms over his chest. It wasn’t clear whether he meant to intimidate the doctor or give himself a little reassurance.

  The doctor heaved a sigh.

  “I don’t know what happened to your sister,” he, said in the end. “The fractures that I found during my examination could easily have been caused by a fall. I wouldn’t rule out that she actually did jump off of that parking structure. But it could have been something else, too. She could have been beaten, for instance. The external examination couldn’t determine that. An autopsy would have been necessary. The one sure thing is that your sister wound up in a nasty situation. The photographs. I’ve never seen anything like them,” he said, and he felt the sensation of when at night you drive a truck over the expansion joints on a long bridge, “but there might be a way to figure something out. A young woman. One of your sister’s friends. Maybe I shouldn’t call her a friend. Let’s just say they moved in the same circles. I can give you her name. I can give you her phone number and address. That way you’d be free to go and talk to her.”

  “Let’s go together,” said the young man.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go see her together. Now. Let’s go see her now.”

  The doctor looked at him.

  Michele tilted his head again. It seemed to the doctor that the young man could have remained in that position forever, so great was not his impatience but his grief; and so, when the physical body necessarily got to its feet, that would remain, the umpteenth phantom planted between the walls of his apartment.

  “But it’s late,” said Gennaro Lopez, knowing he’d already lost.

  A milky white luminosity spread out of the sky, and it was impossible to say where the moon might be. They’d gone out onto Via Corridoni, where they were surrounded by buildings that served as a protective cordon around the old city. The doctor slipped into the narrow lanes of the medieval center, Michele followed him. Behind them they could sense the vast façade of the former Dominican monastery, sliced vertically by the oversized clock tower. They passed under a tufa-stone arch. They walked past a small shrine. Their footsteps echoed through the snarl of empty streets. After more lanes and alleys, they found themselves outside the city walls, on the far side from where they’d entered. Before them lay the black waters of the Adriatic. The streetlamps along the waterfront, the lights of the hotels and the monumental apartment buildings. They were observing them as if from a hilltop watch post.

  The doctor started walking up the steep street that led to the highest point of the bastions. Michele kept following him. After about fifty feet, Gennaro Lopez stopped. A squeak. They both turned to look. They were tucked away in a corner of the overlook. One of them was rearing up on its hind legs, its long snout sniffing at the air around it. The other rats were running ahead and behind. Uneasy. Venturing out of the sewers. The doctor clutched the lapels of his jacket to his throat. Now the drugs were a chilly horizontal blade, a fissure determined to suck him back down, as if the moon they couldn’t find up in the sky were glowing inside him, smaller and smaller, letting him sink into the waters of an ocean at the bottom of which he’d no longer have so much as a name. Black, metallic currents. The pulverized carcasses of small animals that whirled around on themselves as they turned back into water.

  “Here we are,” said the medical examiner, reemerging from his journey.

  A small door, varnished in white. High overhead, the green halo of a half-burnt out neon sign transformed the letters of the name of a beer into an acronym (H K E) that referred to something more intimate and less familiar. Gennaro Lopez rang the doorbell. They heard the lock snapping open. They went in, they shut the door behind them. Michele felt the sudden heat. The doctor greeted the bouncer. He went through the velvet curtain that separated the front entrance from the club proper.

  They found themselves in a long, oval space. Two luminous panels immersed the room into a torrid atmosphere straight out of a tropical aquarium. At the center was a counter topped by a pyramid of bottles that seemed, thanks to the effect of the spotlights, to float in midair. At the tables, a few poorly matched couples. Men with their ties undone, young women whose fluffy hair clashed with the background music. They were drinking, smoking. The men’s chubby hands were the body part that the girls paid most attention to.

  As soon as the new arrivals fetched up within range of the voices, it was as if an invisible membrane were at first hindering their movement, before letting them slide through. The doctor walked toward the bar and gestured to the man making cocktails. A young man of about thirty with an anonymous face. Goatee and bandana. They chatted. The doctor turned toward Michele. They sat down at a small table. A waiter arrived with two ice-cold vodkas. The doctor drank his down in a single gulp. Michele drank, too. Then the girl arrived.

  “A pleasure, Bianca,” she said, extending her hand toward Michele. He started to get to his feet, but she was quicker; she leaned forward, kissed him on the cheeks. Face powder and sweat. An awkward gesture, and yet at the same time aggressive. Michele looked at her. Blonde, not even thirty, boots and a skimpy, skintight dress.

  “Sit down,” said the medical examiner.

  The girl took a seat on the settee. She languidly ran a hand through her hair. She scrutinized them both, trying to transform a natural resentment into a channel of communication devoid of meaning. The waiter brought a caipirinha. The girl reached out and took the glass, lifted it to lips that were covered with an ugly pale-pink lipstick, neither slutty nor childish, the mark of a broad range of choice that she completely squandered, as if that, the waste itself, were her prison.

  She took a sip, then moved the glass away from her mouth, careful not to set it down on the table, holding it in midair. “But are you from Bari? I’ve never seen you.” She addressed Michele with the smile of someone whose job it is to let herself be charmed.

  “Listen, Bianca,” the doctor immediately put an end to any thoughts of that type of conversation, “more than anything else what he’s looking for is some information about what you and Clara Salvemini got up to. You remember her, don’t you? What the two of you used to do when you went out together.” Then he waved his hand in the waiter’s direction.

  The girl widened her eyes ever so slightly, and set the glass down on the little table. She snickered. “You’re looking to land me in deep shit,” she said with a face that acknowledged the fact that that was where she was already. She opened her purse. She pulled out the pack of cigarettes.

  “No, really,” she shook her head with the fatalism of someone who is retracing the outline of bad luck in front of someone who is yet another demonstration of the same, “don’t drag me into fucked-up situations.”

  Michele understood that the doctor held her in his grip. For some obscure reason, about which he’d never learn anything, the girl had no choice but to tell him what he wanted to know.”

  “No nasty situation,” the medical examiner extended his hand in her direction, and the girl let him take hers, “we just want you to tell us exactly what happened to her.”

  “She should never have become the only attraction at the party, that’s all,” she said contemptuously, pulled her hand out of the doctor’s.

  “What party?” Michele broke in.

  The waiter came to the table. The medical examiner ordered two more vodkas and a caipirinha.

  “It’s just a manner of speaking,” the girl went on, “the parties, the orgies. She would have been better off if she’d stuck to that.”

  “Was she a prostitute?” asked Michele.

  She made a pained grimace.

  Michele looked at her.

  “Oh, no, what are you talking about,” and she spit out the smoke, scandalized, though it wasn’t clear if she was defending the honor of Clara or the profession. “She was no whore. Not in the slightest.”

  “Then what?” asked Mic
hele, relieved, confused, feeling a lump rise in his throat.

  “She had . . . unusual relationships,” the girl smiled slyly. “She had these men and then, every so often, she’d come hang out with us. That surgeon was the one who organized our parties.” The medical examiner spun his hand clockwise, as if to suggest she skip the intermediate steps.

  “She was dating some guy who owned newspapers,” she went on, “but she was seeing Buffante too, that guy who got into politics. Then there was the judge. The problem is that at a certain point it turns out they started seeing each other for their own purposes. I mean Clara and those three idiots. At Buffante’s house. That’s where the situation got out of hand. That’s what people are saying,” she took another drag on her cigarette. “Fuck, everyone knows,” she objected, “and you come asking me of all people.”

  The waiter came back with a tray.

  The medical examiner drank, throwing his head back theatrically. Then he looked at Michele. He was trying to understand if he had enough.

  “What do you mean, got out of hand?” the young man asked instead.

  “Oh, you know,” she spun her fingers in the air, focused on stringing together a series of thoughts, “if she’d gone on spending her evenings with us, those guys wouldn’t have lost control like such idiots. When there’s lots of you, it eases the tension,” she crushed out her cigarette, seemed irritated by Michele’s failure to agree, which kept her from neatly cutting the discussion short.

  “What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

  Another scandalized smile flashed across her face. But this time, there was a rip to be re-stitched between surprise and irritation.

  “Come on . . . let’s not pretend we were born yesterday,” she began, crushing the stub of her cigarette, which was already thoroughly extinguished, into the ashtray. “Everyone knows that men like to hit girls.”

  Michele said nothing. The deeper the grief, the more time it takes before the senses are capable of perceiving it. Even the doctor remained silent.

  “Anyway the incredible thing was the family,” she threw in, to fill the silence. “The fact that . . . this is something else that everyone’s saying,” she held the topic at arm’s length so that, when she picked it back up, it had less to do with her, “those three morons got themselves into a position where they could be blackmailed—”

  “Listen, just one more thing,” Michele interrupted her, having already understood enough, he’d known it before coming in, he just needed to understand it this way, he even understood what remained an enigma, as visible as a woman’s face glimpsed through a window pounded by rain, the words that Alberto had let slip about the two engineers, details, finishing touches that he’d never be able to glimpse in their entirety, he understood enough, and yet now it wasn’t the pain and grief but his sister, whether she was a ghost or whether it was just the persistence of her tracks, the living imprint that the people we’ve loved leave in us to go on shaping us, driving us, obsessing us with their inexhaustible voices, this then their bequest, the difference between a dead body and that which lives on, his sister was angry, he could sense that, but he needed to compare the versions.

  “Yes,” said the girl, rubbing her eyes.

  “The times you saw her,” Michele forced himself to remain focused, as if the answer depended on that, “did you talk together?”

  The girl shrugged her shoulders. She took a sip from the glass. “Well,” she said with weary expertise, “every now and then we’d go home together, at the end of the night. She’d give me a ride. We’d stop at a café. We’d eat breakfast before going to sleep.”

  “You’d eat breakfast together.”

  “Breakfast. That’s right.”

  “And you’d talk.”

  “That’s what I said. We’d have a pastry and—”

  “What would you talk about?”

  The girl dropped her eyes, feigned a timidity she didn’t possess. “Oh, I don’t know, everything, nothing.”

  “What did she talk about?” asked Michele. “Did she ever talk about her brother?”

  “Yes, she had a brother,” the girl looked him in the eye, “an oncologist, I think. He was pretty—”

  “I mean another brother,” Michele whispered, on edge, his voice clearly saying that enough was enough, they had the evidence, all they needed to do was act, “a younger brother, in Rome,” he insisted, “did she ever talk about him?”

  “A brother? In Rome? I wouldn’t know about that. I really don’t think there was another brother in Rome,” the girl replied, starting to sound bored.

  A few minutes later Michele got up from the settee. He turned his back on them both. He headed for the exit. It might have been three in the morning.

  The sliding glass door suddenly slid open, ran violently the length of its track, and shuddered to a stop. From the pool of light in the living room a human figure emerged into the windy night. An old man, pushing sixty-five, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, his shirt hanging rudely untucked. He looked around. A shower of tiny red spots had splattered him, from his collar to the hems of his shirt cuffs. He took a few steps forward, unsteadily, like someone trying to escape a nightmare that his own body had engendered. He noticed the cloud of moths hovering in the empty air, attracted by the lights of the adjoining villa. That wasn’t what he was looking for. He walked down the front steps and started walking across the lawn. The overwrought expression persisted on the long gray face. He heard footsteps behind him. A second man, taller and more powerfully built, emerged from the villa. He was staggering. He was struggling with all his might to emerge from his state of confusion. He caught up with the other man. With an effort, he placed his hands on the back of a plastic lounger.

  “Well?”

  “Damn it, I can’t see her,” whispered the other man.

  The third man was inside, sitting in a chair in the downstairs dining area. He continued to sob as he stared at his blood-spattered hands.

  On the second floor of the villa next door, Signora Grazioli tossed and turned in her bed, annoyed. This was hardly the first time they’d made such a ruckus. She shut her eyes, tried to get back to sleep.

  A few minutes after the crash, before the ambulances had arrived, they found the body. It was fifty feet from the road, abandoned in the dry grass. That was good luck. They’d seen her naked as a newborn, and now they were going to have to update their perspectives. They exchanged a glance. They lifted her easily, one by the shoulders, the other holding her by the feet. In silence, walking quickly, the nearly-full moon lighting their way, Engineer De Palo and Engineer Ranieri carried Clara’s corpse towards the station wagon.

  That night they all gather at the ex-undersecretary’s villa. They’re drinking, high as kites. Or else they don’t drink, they don’t smoke, they’ve never done drugs in their lives. They take it out on her. They beat her bloody. Or maybe something else happens. They must be drunk. They must be on drugs. Otherwise there’s no way to explain how she could have left the villa. Naked. And it’s in that state that she crosses the highway. She causes the crash. At that point they find her. Or maybe they did something else to her. What else could they have done to her. What, exactly, were they doing in there. Anyway, they find her dead. At this point he knows that. He’s always known it. He acts like he doesn’t. He convinces himself he doesn’t. In his heart of hearts, he doesn’t know it anymore. That’s in his best interest. They arrange for her to be found at the foot of the parking structure. That night he must have picked up the receiver of his phone many times. He has to chase down a series of men. He blackmails the three, but never in explicit terms. An invitation to dinner, a funeral. He sends his regards. It’s enough that they know there’s a reason he’s doing it. Forget the reason. For an instant he knows it. Then he doesn’t know it anymore, as if he’d never known it in the first place. No one has any awareness now of their o
wn worst actions. We did, once. But we don’t anymore. We suffer. We blame the mechanism. Like blaming it on nature. If there’s no choice, then there’s no blame either. Doing something instead of not doing it. Doing it.

  Michele kept thinking about it as he walked back to his father’s house. After leaving the club, he’d walked the entire length of Via della Repubblica. Now he was trudging down Via Giulio Petroni. Weary, numb, he was moving through the last eddies of night wind. A concrete, voluntary action. He passed the IP gas station. He looked at the gardens of the villas, still shrouded in darkness. The silence of the sprinklers. The old 19 bus stop. He felt a tightness in his stomach. The sandwich stand wasn’t even there anymore. Along the route, from the city center to the residential outskirts, he’d kept his eyes trained on the edge of the road. Under the parked cars. The sidewalks. The cat. She was dead too. The foliage of the cypresses. He saw the façade of the villa. Doing it instead of not doing it. He heard her voice.

  Now he was moving through the garden. He passed the fountain. He walked up the staircase. Behind him, the chirping of the early birds. He opened the door. He took off his shoes. He went upstairs, careful not to make any noise lest the sudden awakening of any one of the members of his family ruin the perfection of the moment. A universe of mirrors that crisscross one another in turn, the lucid dream in which the murderer becomes one with his act. He went past the bathroom. Gioia’s room. He kept going. From the window of his room he saw the sky as it became tinged with pink. He started undressing. It was hot, but he was shivering. He leaned over the trousers tossed onto the floor. He stood up with a cigarette between his fingers. He climbed into bed. The sheets were freshly washed. His head on the pillow. He lit the cigarette. He took a drag. Very soon, the new day. And then he was asleep. He felt a burning sensation. He reopened his eyes. He took another drag. He brushed the ashes he’d carelessly dropped off his chest. He picked up his cell phone off the nightstand. He held it in front of his eyes. He pressed on the screen. The plastic surface lit up. He went onto Twitter.