Authors: Niccolo Ammaniti
"Papa! Papa! Rino! Rino!" shouted Cristiano Zena, with the crossbar of the bicycle between his legs.
The huge yellow canopy of the gas station cast a cold light on
the pumps and on the pools of rainbow-colored oil.
His father wasn't there. Nor was the van. There was nobody
there.
Not once along the way had it crossed his mind that when he
got to the gas station his father might not be there.
The panic that had lain hidden in the coils of his guts, and that
had only made itself felt when instilling in him the doubt that the
turning for San Rocco might have been closed off, now invaded his
head and blocked his throat.
"You said ... the Agip ... And I'm here. I know ... I've been a long
time, but it was a long way. You ... said ... the Agip. Where are you?"
he moaned, running his fingers through his wet hair.
He took another turn around the carwash and the cashier's booth.
Go and look further on.
He started pedalling again, but barely two hundred yards from
the gas station the road began to rise gradually and went into the
wood.
The light of the bicycle lamp fell on the black tree trunks that
lined the roadside.
I don't like this place. He can't be here.
Perhaps the van had been parked before the gas station and he
hadn't seen it as he had gone by.
He was about to turn his bike around when something stopped
him. Music, so faint as to be almost imperceptible. It mingled with
the rain that lashed the road and the foliage of the trees and with
the rustle of the wheels as they turned on the asphalt.
He stopped, with his guts twisting tight and an unpleasant tingling at the back of his neck.
Elisa.
The singer. He knew her.
Elisa singing: "Listen to me ... Now I can cry. I know I need
you ... We are light that ... Like a sun and a star..."
He thought he could make out, on the other side of the road, a
square silhouette which gradually took on the shape of a van. The
rain was drumming on its bodywork. A dim glow tinged the glass
of the window covered with raindrops.
The Ducato!
The music was coming from its radio.
Cristiano couldn't even feel glad, he was so scared.
What if it wasn't his father in the van, but someone else?
Don't be a wimp.
He got off his bike and laid it on the ground as quietly as possible. He tried to swallow, but the saliva had gone from his mouth.
Shit, I'm terrified.
His frozen feet slopped in his shoes as he moved closer. He was
less than a yard from the van. He stretched out his hand and felt
the bumper. It was dented. And the indicator light was broken.
It was their van all right.
Two steps, grab the handle and... I can't.
His legs wouldn't support him and his arms were so tired ...
If I open the door...
All that came afterward was dripping with blood and soaked with
death.
I'm going to call someone...
With a sudden lunge he grabbed the handle, opened the driver's
door and sprang back, ready to dodge the attack of a murderer.
There's nobody here.
The red display of the car radio on the dashboard lit up the
driver's seat. He switched it off. He saw the key in the ignition.
Underneath the passenger's seat was the toolbox. He opened it. He
took out a long flashlight. He switched it on. Then he picked up
the hammer, got out of the van and opened the big rear door.
But there was nothing in there either, except for a bag of cement,
a couple of planks, a plastic bag containing the remains of the picnic,
and the wheelbarrow.
Pointing the flashlight beam at the ground he checked the whole
of the rest stop. Two trash cans, a notice saying DANGER OF FIRE,
and an electricity hut.
No, there was nothing else.
Beppe Trecca was kneeling by the African, awaiting his fate.
The car, which was black with alloy wheels, stopped in front of
him with its headlights full on, illuminating the road and the rain.
Beppe couldn't see who was inside.
It looked like an Audi or a Mercedes.
Finally the window lit up and rolled down.
Sitting at the wheel was a man of about fifty. He wore a camelcolored jacket and a light-blue polo neck sweater. A thick black
beard grew almost up to his cheekbones. His hair was slicked back
with gel. He had a cigarette in his mouth. He stubbed it out in the
ashtray, then moved over toward the passenger's window and, raising
one eyebrow, looked out. "Has he gone?"
Beppe raised his head, stared at him uncomprehendingly and
stammered: "What?"
The man pointed at the body with his chin: "Is he dead?"
"I don't know ... I think..."
"Did you hit him?"
"...Yes, I think so."
"Is he a nigger?"
Beppe nodded.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" asked the man, as if he was
enquiring when the next bus was due.
"What?"
"What are you waiting for? Why don't you just get out of here?"
The social worker couldn't manage to reply. He opened his mouth
and closed it again as if a ghost had just stuffed a spoonful of shit
down his throat.
The man stroked his beard. "Has anyone else come past?"
Beppe shook his head.
"Well get moving, then, what are you waiting for?" He glanced
at his watch. "Well, I must be off. Bye, then. Good luck."
The window rose and the Audi, or whatever it was, vanished as
suddenly as it had appeared.
Cristiano Zena went out into the middle of the road, with the faint
hope that someone would pass by.
How was it possible that this fucking road, which was a constant
stream of cars, bicycles and motorbikes in the daytime, could be so
deserted at night, as if there were monsters in the woods?
"Papa! Papa! Where are you?" he shouted at length toward the woods.
"Answer me!" His voice died away against the dense vegetation.
I wouldn't go into that wood even if...
But, now that he thought of it, the background noise he had heard
during the phone call had been that of rain falling among trees.
What if he's in there?
He walked over to the guardrail. There was a gap between the
metal strips from where a little path began and threaded its way
through the weeds and brambles. Plastic bags, bottles, a condom,
an old car seat among the moss-covered rocks. He pointed the flashlight ahead. Black trunks and a tangle of branches dripping with
water.
He took one step, stopped and then started jumping up and down,
trying to shake off his fear.
"Why do you do this to me? You bastard! I was in bed ... If this
is a joke..." he muttered between his teeth.
He stood there, rooted to the beginning of the path, shifting the
weight of his body from one foot to the other. Then he breathed
in deeply and, raising the hammer, took one step and the mud
sucked in his shoe, took another and it wrapped around his ankles.
He set off down the path and the trees seemed to be waiting for
him, stretching out their branches toward him (Come! Come!) and
anyone might be there in the darkness, ready to leap out from
behind a tree trunk and hit him from behind.
He had only gone a few yards but he already felt as if he was a
thousand miles from the road. The rainwater dripping off leaves
and running down tree trunks. The moss soaked with water. The
air saturated with water, earth and rotten wood.
He imagined a pack of wolves with eyes as red as molten lava
appearing out of the darkness.
His right hand held the hammer aloft, ready to strike anyone who
appeared in front of him, while his left hand shone the flashlight
around frenetically.
Sabre-thrusts of light flashed on the big jagged rocks, on the
branches, on the trickles of water that dug rivulets in the mud, and
on a pair of black boots.
Cristiano screamed, took two steps backward, tripped over a
branch and fell down on his back. He got up again and, with a
hand that wouldn't stop shaking, shone the beam of the flashlight
on the boots, the paint-splashed boots, on the cape, gray with an
orange reflector strip, that his father used when he worked, on his
shaven head immersed in the slime, on his hand and on his cell
phone which lay in a puddle.
Beppe Trecca was still kneeling in the rain, beside the corpse, and
continued to ask himself: What are you waiting for?
The man in the Audi had made it quite clear that he would have
driven on if he had been in his shoes.
But that man wasn't him. He wasn't a hit-and-run driver. He
helped other people, he didn't abandon them.
(Just call the police and an ambulance. That's all you have to do.)
Why? To ruin my life? If this poor idiot had been injured, or
dying, I'd have rushed him to hospital. But like this?
He dried his face with the palm of his hand; he was trembling
and his teeth wouldn't stop chattering. He shook the African again.
There was no response.
He's dead. That's it. Say it. He's dead.
And so ... So there was nothing to be done.
Why couldn't he go back in time? Just a little way, just half
an hour, to the moment before he had taken out the Rod Stewart
CD?
The dreadful idea that there was no way of putting things right,
that no one was capable of granting this simple wish, filled him
with terror.
(Get a grip on yourself! Accept responsibility for what you've
done.)
But what would it change? Nothing. It wouldn't bring him back
to life. And I'd be up to my neck in shit.
So one unfortunate life had been snuffed out and another would
be ruined for ever.
"There's no sense in it. No sense at all," he whimpered, with his
hands over his face. "It's not fair. I don't deserve this. I can't do it,
just now, when..."
Snap out of it! Move. Get into the car and drive away before
anyone passes. As the man said: "What are you waiting for?"
Beppe Trecca stood up and, hanging his head, got back into the
Puma.
Cristiano had imagined a thousand different ways in which his
father might be killed (stabbed in a fight or crushed in the wreckage
of the Ducato or falling off the scaffolding of a new apartment
building).
And he had always imagined that they would give him the news
at school. The headmaster calling him: "There's been an accident...
I'm terribly sorry..."
"You don't give a damn, you asshole," he would answer, and he
wouldn't cry. Then he would set fire to their house and sail away
on a merchant ship and never return to that fucking place again.
He had never thought he would die in the mud, like an animal.
Or that it would happen so soon.
But it's fair enough.
It all added up. He had started by taking his mother away and
now he was taking his father away.
I mustn't cry, though.
He longed to pull him out of the mud. He longed to hug him,
but he was paralyzed. As if he had been bitten by a cobra. He opened
his mouth and tried to spit out the thing that was stopping him
breathing.
He kept looking at him because he couldn't believe it, he just
couldn't believe it, that that dead man there was Rino Zena, his
father.
Finally Cristiano took a step forward. The cone of light from
the flashlight lit up a segment of forehead immersed in the gray
slime, the nose, the eyes splashed with earth. The foam at the side
of the mouth.
He took the flashlight between his teeth and with both hands
grabbed hold of his father's wrist, trying to pull him up.
Rino Zena's helpless body bent slowly over and leaned sideways
against a big rock covered with moss. His head drooped onto his
chest and his arms opened out like the wings of a dead pigeon.
The rainwater trickled down his forehead and over his earthclogged eyebrows.
Cristiano put his ear to his father's chest. He couldn't hear a
thing. All other sounds were drowned out by the pulsing of the
blood in his eardrums and the rustle of the rain falling on the trees.
He knelt there, drying his face with his hand, not knowing what
to do, then, after a moment's hesitation, he raised his father's head
and pulled up one of his eyelids with his forefinger, revealing a glassy
eye like that of a stuffed animal.
He picked up the cell phone from the puddle. He tried switching
it on. It didn't work. He put it in his pocket.
His father couldn't just lie there in a heap like that.
He grabbed hold of his shoulders and tried to sit him up. But he
wouldn't stay put. Cristiano straightened him up, but as soon as he
let go he slowly flopped down again.
In the end he bored a stick into the ground and propped it under
his armpit.
What on earth did he come here for? Why did he leave the van
and go into the wood?
He must have had some kind of turn. He'd had a headache all day.
He must have got into the van, perhaps intending to go to hospital.
Does this road lead to the hospital?
He had no idea.
But he had been too ill and hadn't made it, and had got out of
the van and gone to die in the wood.
Like a wolf.
When wolves are sick they leave the pack and go off on their
own to die.
"Why didn't you wake me, you bastard?" he asked him, and
kicked the stick, whereupon his father slid back into the mud.
He had to get him out of there. The only way was to grab him
by the feet and drag him down to the road.
He got hold of his ankles and started to pull, but immediately
let go again as if he'd had an electric shock.
For a moment he had thought a tremor had passed through his
father's legs.
Cristiano dropped the flashlight, knelt on the ground and started
frantically feeling his thighs, arms and chest and shaking his head,
which lolled from one side to the other.
Was it just my imagination?