Authors: Niccolo Ammaniti
Where are the keys?
When he remembered where they were, he had to lean against
the window to stop himself falling over.
"No, it's not possible. It's not possible," he said, shaking his head.
Then he put his hands over his face. "What a fool I am ... What a
fool..."
He had thrown them in the canal on the day Laura had been
buried, swearing that he would never drive that car again.
What now?
He couldn't give up just because of a fucking bunch of keys. He
wasn't going to let such a stupid problem stop him.
"If you want to stop Danilo Aprea you've got to blast him with a
bazooka," he exclaimed, noting how firm and resolute his voice
sounded. "Anyway, all I have to do is go upstairs and get the duplicate keys."
He went upstairs and set about opening all the drawers, searching
in every cupboard, rummaging in every box, in every bloody corner.
They had gone. Vanished into thin air.
He was a meticulous man. He never lost anything. "Every thing
has its place and every place has its thing," was his motto.
So the keys must be there, hidden somewhere. But he had no idea
where else to look for them.
He was hot and tired and had a terrible headache. He staggered
through the apartment, which looked as if a herd of buffalo had
just charged through it, and flopped down exhausted, with his legs
apart, in the armchair.
Unless ...
He jumped to his feet as if the cushion had caught fire.
What if that cow Teresa, on the advice of the tire dealer, had
pinched them?
But why?
The tire dealer had a Lexus. What would he want with his old
Alfa?
Maybe he didn't have any special reason. Just did it out of spite.
Or perhaps it was Teresa, worried I might drive again.
But it could have been Rino, too-he could have stolen them
when he'd come around to do his washing. Or that young scoundrel
Cristiano. And why rule out that halfwit Quattro Formaggi?
Everyone coveted his car. You could just imagine what it would be
like when he had the painting of the climbing clown in his sitting
room! An object of such value would have them all trying to steal it...
The first thing I must do tomorrow is put in a steel-clad door
with multiple locks.
But in the meantime he was keyless.
I'm very tired. Perhaps I'd better call it off for this evening...
But he knew himself too well-if he backed out now he would
never have the courage to do the raid on his own the next day. And
then he would be forced to share the loot with somebody else.
No. It's out of the question.
Only he felt drained and his eyelids were drooping.
He must give himself a boost. And there was only one way he
knew of doing that. He shuffled into the kitchen, yawning. He ransacked the cupboards and discovered, among all the other junk, a
bottle of Borghetti coffee liqueur.
He took a swig and immediately felt better.
(Instead of standing here like an idiot, go and see if anyone has
left the keys in their car in the garage.)
This brilliant idea could only have come from the clown on the
bedroom ceiling.
"That's right! You're a genius!"
If there existed a plan of destiny that the course of his life should
change that night, he would certainly find a car open.
In the first place he wasn't suffering.
That was one good thing.
Also, he didn't think he was dead.
That was another good thing.
There had been one immense instant, when the fluorescent cloud
had been suddenly swallowed up by the blackness, during which
Rino had been sure that his story had come to an end.
Now, however, the violet had returned.
Nobody had actually certified that he wasn't dead. But Rino had
always believed in heaven and hell, and this place was neither the
one nor the other. Of that he was certain. He was aware of still
being inside his own body.
He could think. And to think is to live.
And although he wasn't suffering greatly, he was aware of a distant fire, a far-off pain and the ants running through his veins, but
he also thought he could hear from a thousand miles away The
Police singing and the rain falling on the leaves, dripping in silver
drops on the branches, trickling down the bark of the trees and
soaking the earth.
He was blind. Insentient. Paralyzed. And yet, strangely, he could hear.
When he had come to, the darkness had been less intense, shading
gradually into a phosphorescent violet, and suddenly millions of ants
had been there. They covered the plain as far as the horizon. They
were big, like the ones that appear in the wheatfields in August.
With shiny heads and antennae.
Rino couldn't make out whether they were outside or inside
him. And whether that desert over which they were crawling was
him.
He sensed that there was another reality just behind the violet
cloud which enveloped him. The reality from which he had fallen.
The woods. The rain.
He saw himself in the woods with the rock in his hands, Quattro
Formaggi, the dead girl.
That was where he must get back to.
He thought he was still there, and he was sure Quattro Formaggi
had gone to get help.
Danilo Aprea, holding the bottle of Borghetti coffee liqueur in one
hand, had checked the cars in the garage. One by one.
All locked.
In that bloody condominium everyone lived in terror of having
their cars stolen. And you could bet your life they had burglar alarms
and all the latest security gadgets installed.
He had thought of smashing a window and putting the ignition
leads together, like you see people doing in films.
But he was no good at that kind of thing. He would still be there
at daybreak trying to get the dashboard open.
if only Quattro Formaggi was here ...
Danilo gnashed his teeth like a rabid dog and shouted, white in
the face with rage: "Fuck you! Fuck the whole lot of you! You won't
stop me. Do you hear? You won't stop me. You're doing everything
you can to stop me, but you won't succeed. No! No! And no! I'm
going to do this raid." He kicked the door of a Mini Cooper, hurting
his foot like mad.
He hopped around, cursing and swearing, and when the pain
eased he raised the bottle of Borghetti coffee liqueur, gulped down
a third of it and staggered toward the garage door.
In his pants pocket he had his cell phone.
When Rino Zena thought of the phone he saw it appear huge,
as if projected onto the violet sky.
It wasn't a photograph of a cell phone, but a drawing done with
a big black marker pen. The numbers written in a childish hand,
and where the display should have been, a circle with a smile and
eyes. He could have gazed at it for ever.
But now he must get his phone out of his pants pocket ...
He must speak to the ants and explain to them what they had
to do.
Danilo stood on the parapet of the canal, hands on hips, gazing
blankly at the raindrops.
In the dim light shed by the lamp-post on the little footbridge
they seemed like silver threads, which dissolved on the brownish
surface of the canal.
The pebble shores and the greater part of the pillars under the
bridge had been engulfed by the rising waters. If the rain kept coming
down like this, by morning the flood would be over the dykes.
Danilo was soaked through to his pants. His cheeks and chin
frozen and the lenses of his glasses streaked with rain.
It had taken just fifty yards, the distance from his home to there,
out in that downpour, to reduce him to a sopping rag.
A polystyrene box, the kind that is used for packing fish, raced
along through the waves, bobbing up and down, like a raft in the
rapids of the Colorado River, and disappeared under the bridge.
Trying to ignore an icy trickle that was running down his back,
Danilo closed his eyes and tried to remember where, five years ago,
he had thrown the keys.
About here.
On the 12th of July five years ago... It was boiling hot and the
mosquitoes were driving me mad.
After Laura's funeral he had sent Teresa home with her mother
and had taken the Alfa and stopped at a bar where he had drunk
the first glass of grappa of his life and for good measure had
bought a whole bottle, then he had gone to a car accessories shop,
bought a tarpaulin and returned home. He had parked the car in the garage, covered it with the tarpaulin and gone down to the
canal.
That day it had looked very different. There had been no rain
for a long time and the canal had shrunk to a stinking stream,
infested with insects, which flowed slowly among carcasses of
scooters, skeletons of washing machines and bog arum in bloom.
Danilo had looked at the greenish water. Then he had taken the
car keys out of his pocket and hurled them with all his might into
the canal. The bunch had sailed over the stream and the sandy, reedcovered bank, hit the dyke and fallen back onto the foreshore, disappearing among some big concrete blocks embedded in the dry
mud.
This he remembered well, because for a moment he had thought
he had better go down and throw the keys in the water in case the
old men, who sometimes came to fish from the bridge, should find
them and then go and steal his car. But he hadn't done it.
Anyone would have thought that it was mathematically impossible for them still to be there-the current must have carried them
away and by this time they would be out in the depths of the sea.
But that was in ordinary circumstances. The circumstances in
which Danilo found himself were not ordinary; this was his life,
and if destiny had decided that he should find them, find them he
would.
He ran along the canal, crossed the little brick bridge and went
back along to the point where he remembered the keys falling.
He looked down. It wasn't a very big drop. Two or three yards. If
he lowered himself down with his arms the jump wasn't impossible.
The problem would come later, when he had to get out.
Twenty yards downstream there was a tree trunk sticking out of
the water.
From there I can climb up onto the road.
Danilo took off his glasses and put them in his jacket pocket.
He climbed up on the parapet, took out the chain with the Padre
Pio medallion, kissed it and lowered himself down from the edge.
Now he only had to drop down.
It's just a question of finding the courage.
But even if he couldn't find the courage, he'd never be able to pull
himself up again with the mere strength of his arms, so ...
He took a deep breath and let himself go.
He landed up to his waist in water. It was so cold he didn't
even have the strength to cry out. A billion needles pierced his
flesh and he was immediately caught by the strong current. He
had to cling with both hands to some weeds that grew in the
cracks between the bricks of the dyke to stop himself being swept
away.
He couldn't even rest his feet on the bed, such was the strength
of the current. And the weeds, although they were tough, wouldn't
support his weight for long.
He started searching for the keys on the bed of the torrent. He
let go with one hand and the river pushed him under.
He drank a lot of water which tasted of earth.
He put his head up and started spluttering and then, gasping for
breath, started groping around on the bed again. He felt with his
fingertips the edges of the concrete blocks covered with algae and
the slippery stems of the water plants. It was difficult to move his
fingers, which were numb with cold.
They're not here. How could they be? Only a fool like me could
have thought that after five years...
The branch he was clinging to, without warning, came away
from the wall. Danilo felt the current seize him, started thrashing
about with his arms and legs like a drowning dog, trying to resist,
but it was impossible, so in desperation he tried to grab hold of
the concrete blocks, but they were slippery. His knuckles knocked
against a steel rod sticking out of the mud. He managed to catch
hold of it and hung there, amid the eddies and the deafening roar
of the water, like a great big tuna fish caught on a hook.
He knew he couldn't hold on for long-the cold was unbearable and the current was pulling him-but if he let go he would
be swept away and would be dashed against the floodgate a mile
downstream.
What the hell am I doing?
Suddenly, like a sleepwalker who wakes up to find himself on a
ledge on the fifth floor of an apartment block, he was terrified to
see what a mess he'd landed himself in. Only suicidal madness could
have brought him from the cozy warmth of home to the swirling
eddies of a flooding canal.
He exploded into a fusillade of unrepeatable blasphemies which
would have damned him for all eternity if he hadn't already been
long since doomed, he was sure, to the fires of hell.
He was almost exhausted, he tried to resist, to cling on to the
steel rod, but by now only his nose was sticking out of the water,
like a shark's fin. He was about to give up when he realized that
there was something around the rod, something like a metal ring.
He touched it.
No! It wasn't possible!
In his excitement he almost let go.
The keys!
I've found the keys!
My keys.
All three of them. The one for the car, the one for the front door
and the one for the roll-down shutters of the garage.
What an incredible stroke of luck!
No, it was blasphemous to call it luck. It was a miracle. A fullfledged miracle.
When he'd thrown them the keys had hit the dyke, and as they
fell the ring that held them together had dropped over the steel reinforcing rod.
It was a bit like that game in the carnival where if you throw a
ring over a bottle you win a cuddly toy. But he hadn't taken aim.
He hadn't even seen the rod.