Authors: Niccolo Ammaniti
At five o'clock the girl would bring him a sandwich and a meatball with raisins.
Rino tried to get to his feet, but failed. He wanted to open the
window to let in some fresh air.
A swirl of images wrapped around him like a warm blanket. Him
and the girl together. Marriage. Children. The workshop. Working
there with Cristiano.
What wonderful times those had been! Everything was so simple.
It was easy to find a job. There weren't all these bloody laws about
working practices and no trade unions to fuck you over. If you had
the skill and the will you worked, if you didn't you were out on
your ear. End of alternatives.
Respect for those who deserved it.
Then one day Rino had arrived to find Colombo shutting up
shop. A certain Castardin had appeared out of nowhere and bought
up the farmhouse and all the land around it. Even the Trattoria
Arcobaleno.
"They've opened some new workshops in Varrano. They're as
big as factories. Nobody comes this way any more ...It's a good
offer."
End of story.
"It's a good offer," muttered Rino, getting to his feet. "Poor
gullible fuckwit."
The furniture factory was twenty yards away. Bathed in the glow
of halogen lights, it stood out in the night like a lunar base. The
fence was high and there were coils of barbed wire along the top.
"Shit. The barbed wire."
They had put it up some time ago, after thieves had broken in
one night.
A mechanical noise mingled with the barks. A truck.
Cristiano switched off the flashlight, squatted down and waited
for it to pass. It had yellow headlights and was clearing the snow.
Maybe school will be cancelled tomorrow. Great!
When the truck had moved far enough away, Cristiano walked
the last few yards and stopped behind the factory.
The dog was barking even louder now, if that was possible. But
he couldn't see it from there.
Cristiano couldn't remember whether they let him off his chain
at night, though he had been past the factory very late sometimes.
He jumped up and down to get the feeling back into his feet,
which were like blocks of wood. "I hate you! Why do you do this
to me?" He bit his hand to stop himself screaming with rage. He
felt a lump in his throat and it hurt as if he'd swallowed a shard
of glass.
I've had enough. It's fucking cold... I'm going home. He took
three steps, kicking at the snow, but then stopped.
Going home was not an option.
He walked around the perimeter of the fence, looking for the best
place to climb up.
All the while the dog kept barking in the same monotonous way.
Near one of the posts that supported the wire netting the loops
of barbed wire weren't so big.
He grabbed hold of the post, put the toes of his boots into the
mesh and reached the top without difficulty. Now he had to avoid
getting stuck on the barbed wire. Calmly, he put over first one leg
and then the other, and, holding his breath, jumped down. He landed
in the carpentry area.
He took out the pistol, released the safety catch and primed the gun.
He knew very well how to use it.
His father had taught him how to shoot in a junkyard. At first
he hadn't been able to hold his aim; his arm had shaken as if he
was suffering from Parkinson's disease. But constant shooting at car
windows, rear-view mirrors, rats and seagulls had taught him that
it was all a matter of posture and breathing.
"It's like squatting over a hole-in-the-ground toilet," Rino had
told him.
Legs apart, backside slightly protruding, arms outstretched but
not too stiff. Gun in line with your eyes. And the way you breathed
was crucial. You had to put the tip of your tongue against your
bottom teeth, breathe out through your nose and, as your stomach
deflated, count up to four and then shoot.
He looked around. No one in sight. The mongrel was barking
away on the other side of the building.
If he approached slowly he would have a good chance of getting
close enough to take aim at him. The snow would muffle his footsteps and the stupid mutt was so busy barking he wouldn't notice
he was about to be dispatched to doggy paradise.
If it did go for him, he would have to be cool enough to stop,
crouch and take aim as it ran toward him.
He moved forward in a squatting position, quelling his desire to
run, till he came to a pile of planks. They formed a long block more
than twelve feet high which stretched out to the end of the yard, a
few yards short of the highway. Cristiano climbed up, putting his feet
between the planks and gripping their ice-cold edges with his hands.
When he was on top he realized that there was a gap of about a yard
between one pile and the next. Like between the carriages of a train.
From where he stood he could see a segment of the deserted
parking lot, and the children's playground with the merry-go-round,
the swings glowing white in the lamplight, and the lamp-posts themselves with their glass globes emanating milky spheres.
No sign of the dog.
Crawling along the wet planks on his hands and knees, he reached
the end of the first pile. He steeled himself and jumped; the planks
rose and fell with a tremendous clatter. From where he landed he
could see the other side of the car park, and three vans emblazoned
with the words:
CASTARDIN & CO. FURNITURE LTD.
THE BEST FOR LESS
He couldn't see the dog, though. And yet he must be very near. Or
was all that barking just a recording?
Then he saw, about thirty yards away, a dark shape on the ground.
Near the long entrance gate. Half-covered in snow ... From that distance it looked like an overcoat.
Cristiano moved closer, crawling over the planks.
The thing on the ground was moving. Only slightly. But it was
moving.
And he understood.
The stupid beast had got himself tangled up in the long chain
that was supposed to enable him to move around the building's
perimeter. Now and then he raised his head.
That's why he's barking so much.
The stupid great mutt.
Shooting him from there would be child's play. Even if he didn't
kill him first shot, the dog wouldn't be able to move, and he would
certainly send him to his maker with the second.
He's barking because he can't move. I could set him free, then
he would stop barking.
No, he must kill him, because the truth was that his father didn't
give a damn whether the dog barked or not. He hated Castardin,
so the dog had to die.
Period.
That was precisely how things were.
Rino Zena hated old Castardin with the same devout intensity
with which a Cistercian monk loves his Lord.
"It's in my personality. If you cross me just once, you've finished
with me for good and I'll always be out to get you. Okay, I may
have a shitty personality, but it's the one I was born with. It's easy
to get on with me: just don't fuck me around and everything will be fine." Such was the reply that Rino would give to anyone who
gently tried to suggest to him that he might be a trifle touchy.
A few years before this story, Rino Zena had been taken on at
the factory as a transporter of furniture.
He was paid in cash and earned more from tips than from the
pittance he got from Castardin.
Things had gone reasonably well, with Rino grumbling to anyone
who cared to listen that he was treated like dirt, until the day old
Castardin in person had phoned to ask him to take the furniture
for a children's bedroom to the home of Councillor Arosio.
"Please, Zena, be on your best behavior. There's no one else I
can send; they're all out doing deliveries. Arosio is an important
customer. Cover up those tattoos or you'll frighten the children. And
speak as little as possible."
Rino had glared at him and loaded the furniture onto the van.
Councillor Arosio was another guy Rino couldn't stand. He was
the shithead who had closed Varrano's main street to traffic. So even
if you had to deliver the space shuttle the traffic police wouldn't let
you through.
When he had reached the house he had learned that the coun-
cillor's apartment was on the third floor and that the porter wouldn't
let the lift be used for carrying heavy loads: "I would let you, but
if you used it I'd have to let everyone else use it too and the lift
would get worn out."
Fuming, Rino had hoisted the furniture onto his back. At the
door of the apartment he had found Mrs. Arosio waiting for him
in a violet satin nightdress.
She was a hot piece of work, about forty, with a tawny perm,
two enormous tits only partly hidden by her nightdress, a slim waist
and an ass as big as an aircraft carrier. She had a round face, a
small nose too perfect to be the one her mother had given her, eyes
tinged with light-blue shadow, and swollen, shiny lips, parted to
reveal some slightly gappy incisors.
Rino had seen her walking down the main street in summer and
winter with plunging necklines over those huge UVA-tanned breasts,
but he hadn't known that she was Arosio's wife.
While he got to work with the nuts and bolts, she had sat down
in such a way that her ample frontage was prominently displayed and had remarked that muscles built up on the job were much more
attractive than ones that were pumped up in a gym. And what were
all those tattoos? What did they mean? She wanted one too, a
squirrel ...
By now Rino had a hard-on and was finding it difficult to follow
the instructions under that hungry gaze.
After the little writing-desk, the mini-blackboard and the wardrobe,
he had assembled the bunk bed.
"Have you screwed it together tightly enough? I wouldn't want
it to come apart ... My son Aldo is a bit on the heavy side. Would
you mind getting up onto it yourself? To try it out?"
Rino had climbed onto the top bunk and bounced up and down.
"Seems all right to me."
She had shaken her head. "You're too light. I think I'd better
come up too. Just to make quite sure."
Half an hour later the bed had suddenly given way. Mrs Arosio
had broken her wrist in falling out and had sued the furniture
factory.
Rino had sworn to Castardin that he hadn't had sex with her.
And technically speaking that was correct. Penetration had not
yet taken place when the bed had collapsed. She was on all fours,
with her face buried in the pillow and her slip pulled up, and Rino
was holding her by the hair like a red Indian gripping his horse's
mane, stamping her buttocks with large red slap-marks like the
patches on an Apache steed.
Then the bed had given way.
Rino Zena had lost his job.
And he had sworn to get even with old Castardin.
Cristiano Zena lay down and aimed at the head. He took a deep
breath and fired. The animal flinched, gave a little whine and lay
still.
He raised his fist. "First shot!"
He jumped down from the pile of planks and, after checking that
no cars were passing, approached slowly, keeping the gun trained
on the animal.
The mouth open. The froth. The tongue hanging to one side like
a bluish slug. The eyes rolled back and on the neck a red hole among
the black hairs and the snow swirling lazily in the air, burying the
corpse.
One less fucking mongrel in the world.
Cristiano returned home and ran to his father to tell him how he
had killed it first shot, but Rino was stretched out on his bed fast
asleep.
You are too just, Lord,
for me to dispute with you,
but I would like to talk with you about justice.
Why do the ways of the wicked prosper?
Why do all the treacherous live at ease?
You have planted them and they have taken root;
they grow and bring forth fruit.
You are near to their mouths
but far from their hearts.
Jeremiah 12, 1-2
An open cluster is a group of stars held together by gravitational
forces. The number of stars can be in the thousands. Their low attraction favors a chaotic arrangement around the center of the system.
This untidy formation resembled that of the thousands of little
towns, villages and hamlets which dotted the vast plain where
Cristiano Zena and his father lived.
The snow that had fallen all night on the plain had whitened the
fields, the houses and the factories. The only things it had not covered were the thick, incandescent cables of the power stations, the
lamps on the billboards, and the Forgese, the big winding river which
linked the mountains up in the north with the sea down to the south.
But at the first light of dawn the snow changed to a thin, persistent
drizzle which in less than an hour melted the white mantle that had
momentarily made the plain as beautiful as a cool albino model wrapped
in an Arctic fox fur. Varrano, San Rocco, Rocca Seconda, Murelle,
Giardino Fiorito, Marzio, Bogognano, Semerese and all the other towns
and villages re-emerged with their dingy colors, with their small or large
areas of urban sprawl, with their modern two-storey houses surrounded
by frost-browned lawns, with their prefabricated industrial buildings,
their credit institutions, their overpasses, their car dealerships and courtyards, and with their vast expanses of mud.
At a quarter past six in the morning Corrado Rumitz, commonly
known as Quattro Formaggi because of his consuming passion
for the pizza of that name, his staple diet for the best part of his thirty-eight years, was sitting on a shabby, flower-patterned sofa
having his breakfast.
He was wearing his home clothes: dirty underpants, an anklelength tartan dressing-gown and a pair of battered Camperos boots,
a relic of the old millennium.
With his gaze fixed on the little area in front of the kitchen, he
took a biscuit out of a packet, dunked it in a bowl of milk and
shoved it whole into his mouth. He repeated the action with metronomic regularity.