“Unfortunately, you’re not convincing me,” said Michele.
He felt as if he were holding her hand, like when they were kids. She at his side. She was above him, inside of him. Everywhere.
“By doing this, you’re not just creating problems for your family.” The director lifted his hands, displaying his palms as if the young man were an atmospheric event, devoid of a will with which one could reason. “You’re not just causing them a major financial loss. If we go there and we find something, they’re well and truly fucked. I’m not just talking about the company. I’m talking about serious crimes. You’re running the risk of ruining once and for all someone who did things because he had no choice about—”
“That’s not true.”
Michele felt he was at the peak of intensity. Then Clara vanished.
“It’s not true in an ideal world,” the technical director replied, “it’s not true in movies and novels. It might not have been entirely true when we were born. But in the twenty-first century, that’s the way things are.”
Michele said nothing. The sky overhead was a slab of turquoise and Clara had abandoned him. That’s how it had happened. She had released her grip on him. She had left him alone in the world. Free forever.
“Do you know what scientific discipline best explains the new century?” the man asked.
A faint sea breeze was tossing both men’s hair.
“Ethology. Animal behavior,” the technical director answered his own question. “Put a starving fox in front of a herd of rabbits. Run into a piazza full of doves and you’ll see them fly. Find me a dove that doesn’t fly.”
“We aren’t animals, we do strange things,” said Michele.
He felt disconcerted. He was having a dizzy spell. Before him was no longer Clara, but the days that were yet to come. Empty, terrifying space, an immense blank page.
“We do what nature has decided for us. The limits are reasonably clear,” the man replied.
Michele looked him in the eye. What did it all mean, if she was gone? He felt a shiver in his legs.
“We behave in ridiculous ways. We’re unpredictable,” he said then, and it was as if he were taking his first steps without Clara to hold his hand, proceeding in a straight line after throwing his crutches to the ground. “There was someone in the past who did for me something that they couldn’t do. Acts that went against the laws of nature. Good things were done for me without any practical motive, and now I’m doing this thing. This unnatural thing. Ridiculous even for me. A miracle. Just think.”
After having remained hidden for such a long time, it began to take shape. To Michele it seemed he could finally see it. The future. As magnificent and ferocious as the yawning maw of the tiger he’d read about as a boy.
The technical director dropped his hands in a sign of surrender.
“All right,” he said, “I’ve just been wasting my breath.”
EPILOGUE
The first ones to enter were the children.
The door to the villa was thrown open—it had been two years since anyone had done that—and they started running down the hallway. They kicked up dust and flakes of dry plaster, vanished, leaving a white cloud in their wake. The little boy was seven. The girl was five. Their footsteps echoed where the living room had presumably once been. Without furniture, it wasn’t easy to get one’s bearings.
Then it was the father’s turn. He passed from the golden autumn light through the semi-darkness of the front hall, followed by the architect. He caught a whiff of the odor into which manmade settings plunge when they’re abandoned, and in which other people, caught up in a never-ending game, feel the need to establish new order.
The new owner of the house was just a little over forty. Tall, with an olive complexion. He’d married in 2004, but only recently had things started to take off financially, and even so, he couldn’t really afford the villa.
He saw his children emerge from the white nebula that was the mouth of the hallway. Figures born out of the light. They were laughing. They went running past him and the architect. They went galloping upstairs. It had been the villa of the local podestà. A senator had sold it in the early Seventies. Then the stroke of luck. The last owners had been caught in a scandal, and the ensuing financial collapse had forced them to get rid of it quickly.
They entered a dark, airless room, with the shutters fastened tight, bolted shut for two summers in a row. The dust of dried paint whirled in a rivulet of light. The architect was delivering his sermon on the necessity of renovating the partition walls. The new owner suggested inspecting the second floor. Here the children were chasing each other around. They ran from room to room. Until the little girl found one room that was locked. She turned the handle. She pushed and pulled with all her might. Useless. The door wouldn’t open. Her brother caught up with her.
The architect turned on his heels and headed off toward the stairs.
Alone now, the new owner stood for a few minutes in the partial darkness, as if that, too, was his responsibility. Weighing the symphony of deterioration before remedying it. There was something that fascinated him, but he couldn’t explain it any more clearly. So he walked forward. He pushed on the door until it swung open. The light exploded into a sunburst. He saw the kitchen. He went in. He pushed past the screen, half-torn out of the French windows that gave onto the other end of the garden.
Once again the September sun warmed his face, enclosing his senses in the contentment of a circular route. Now he was on the veranda. A stack of dust-covered furniture was piled up against the picture window. Lounge chairs, serving trolleys, the canvas canopy of an old glider. One on top of another. As if they’d been heaped up in a hurry, or perhaps someone had hurled them into a corner in an ugly outburst of rage.
Trying not to knock anything over, the new owner pulled out a lounger. He dusted off the seat and the backrest as best he could with a tissue. He dragged the lounge chair to edge of the lawn. He settled onto it. He adjusted the angle and looked straight ahead. Weeds. Wild rose bushes. He heard the shouts of the children from the opposite end of the garden. Beyond the luxuriant branches of the trees, up above, two ravens chased each other through the empty air. They were plying the same cerulean surface that millions of years ago had been the domain of the flying reptiles. He ought to call his wife. The sun, softened by the eucalyptus leaves, touched his forehead. The man shut his eyes. He was so certain of his slice of good fortune that he slid into sleep and ambiguity without realizing it had happened.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All references to events, persons, and institutions that have actually existed or now exist are strictly coincidental. Minor modifications of the topography of the places described, or of the chronology with respect to well-known historic, news, or media events have been made here and there for dramatic reasons. I would like to thank everyone who supported me in the complicated years that the writing of this novel required. My longtime friends. All the care taken by the staff at my publishing house. Those who provided me with technical consulting (in the areas of medicine, law, and construction), which I used or ignored, depending on my needs. Those who invited me to dinner, almost every week, just a short distance from home. Giovanna, who in the meantime has had a baby girl. And especially on Mondays, this book is dedicated to the medium, Chiara.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
One of Italy’s most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists, Nicola Lagioia has been the recipient of the Volponi, Straniero, and Viareggio awards, in addition to the Strega. In 2010 he was named one of Italy’s best writers under forty. He has been a jury member of the Venice Film Festival and is the program director of the Turin Book Fair. Lagioia is a contributor to Italy’s most prominent culture pages. He was born in Bari, and lives in Rome. Ferocity is his English-language debut.
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