Authors: Niccolo Ammaniti
But surely Fabiana must have heard it.
Quattro Formaggi, on the seat of the Boxer, was climbing back up
around the hairpin bends of the San Rocco woods.
A fire burned in his shoulder. Every rut that he crossed was agony.
But that, too, was a sign that God was with him.
Just like the holes in Padre Pio's hands.
Through his helmet he could hear the sparrows twittering away
merrily.
The sun, which had pushed its way between the clouds, was
threading its rays through the vegetation, dappling the ground with
patches of light. On the branches the wet leaves glittered like diamonds. During the night the rain had dug streams in the earth which
were still pouring mud onto the road.
Quattro Formaggi had no plan for taking the girl's body home.
He couldn't just pick up the corpse and load it onto the scooter.
But God would tell him what to do.
He was excited. Soon he would see Ramona again and be able
to touch her and have a better look at her. He feared that the blow
he had given her with the stone might have disfigured her. But he
would find a remedy for that too.
He stopped in the rest area and dismounted from the scooter. He
took off his crash helmet. And he filled his lungs with that fresh,
damp air.
A car passed ...
Look out!
... and he turned away so that he couldn't be recognized.
If the police caught him he would be sent to prison for the rest
of his days. The idea terrified him. There were a lot of bad people
in there. He reached the edge of the road and was about to put
his foot on the earth, but he stopped with his leg suspended in
mid-air.
Something wasn't right.
The van ... Where's the van?
He turned back in bewilderment and looked around. This was
the place ... He was sure of it.
He felt his skin freeze and an icy hand grab his scrotum.
He plunged into the woods. He went a dozen yards and started
thumping himself on the leg. He turned round and round in circles,
incredulous.
Rino's body wasn't there, nor was Ramona's.
Where are they?
In panic he turned back, then he ran forward...
Maybe they're a bit further on.
Pushing his way through the brambles, he began to circle around,
to step over rotten tree trunks, to climb over rocks, to blunder wildly
about in the wood, as everything blurred into patches of light and
shade.
No ... You can't do this to me ... You can't.
At the wheel of his Puma, Beppe Trecca watched the highway unroll
between the flooded fields like a strip of licorice. He moved up
behind a truck transporting some huge metal pipes. He turned to
look at Cristiano Zena, who was sleeping beside him with his hood
over his head.
Poor kid.
Trecca had found him at the hospital, disorientated and apathetic,
as if his father was already dead. He could hardly walk in a straight
line and had had to be helped down the stairs. As soon as he had
got into the car he had fallen asleep.
The doctor had explained to the social worker that Rino Zena
was in a critical condition and that it was impossible to predict how
and when he would come out of the coma. But even if he woke up
soon, and without any damage, he would still have to undergo a
period of rehabilitation to complete his recovery.
It'll be six months at least. And who's going to look after this
poor little bastard?
He flicked the indicator and overtook the truck.
Cristiano didn't even have a mother, and there was no question
of those crazy friends of Rino's being able to look after him.
Beppe knew he ought to call the juvenile magistrate to put him
in the picture. But he knew what the response would be-to dispatch Cristiano immediately to a foster family or a care home.
I can wait a couple of days. Till we see what happens to Rino.
That way Cristiano will be able to be near his father.
Beppe could go and stay at their house.
His eyes lit up.
I'm a genius! Ida will never find me there.
In the background the radio was playing a song that he knew.
He turned up the volume. A hoarse voice sang: "Maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home..."
Maybe tomorrow I'll find my way home.
Yes, maybe he would.
Or was it possible that he had dreamed it all? And that Ramona
had never existed? Or only existed in films?
But if that was so, why did he have those pains, those bruises,
that wound in his shoulder?
Why were Rino and Ramona's bodies no longer there?
Someone's stolen them.
"What use are they to you, you bastards? Tell me. What use
are they to you?" Quattro Formaggi, on his knees, wept and pummelled the ground. Then, like an actress in a third-rate soap opera,
he raised his head toward the tangle of black branches that imprisoned the sky and spoke to the Eternal Father: "Where have you
put them? Tell me. Please ... At least tell me if it was real. You
can't do this to me ... It was you who helped me." His head
dropped down and he started sobbing, "It's not fair ... It's not
fair..."
(You've got the ring.)
He saw himself slipping the silver skull ring off Ramona's finger,
and then...
I swallowed it. I went back home and I swallowed it.
He put his hand on his stomach. It was inside there. He could
feel it burning inside him like red-hot embers.
(Go home.)
He hobbled out of the woods as fast as he could, picked up the
Boxer and rode off in a cloud of smoke.
If only he had been a bit calmer, if only he had stopped to think,
he would have remembered that Fabiana Ponticelli's scooter was
lying behind the electricity hut.
At the police station an officer explained to Alessio Ponticelli that
before you could register a person as missing at least twenty-four
hours had to pass. Especially if it was a teenager.
Every year at least three thousand investigations into missing
minors are initiated, but eighty per cent of them end after a few
hours with the child returning home.
The officer asked him a lot of questions: if there were problems
in the family, if the girl had a boyfriend, if she hung about with any
strange people, if she had ever expressed a desire to travel, if she
was rebellious, if she took drugs and if she had ever run away from
home before.
To all these questions Alessio Ponticelli replied no, no, and
again no.
The police had recently acquired the services of a support psychologist, who was extremely useful in such cases, and if he wished ...
Alessio Ponticelli dashed out of the police station and began
to retrace the route from Esmeralda Guerra's house to Giardino
Fiorito.
First he went the long way around, following the bypass. He
drove at twenty miles an hour, cursing and swearing and repeating
all the while: "Why did I ever buy her the scooter? It's all my
fault. She hadn't even passed her exams!" Then, as if he was
talking to his wife: "It's all your fault for insisting that we buy it
for her..."
He couldn't believe the stupid woman had stuffed herself with
tranquillizers and gone to bed without waiting for Fabiana to come
home. With all those stories on the news about Moroccans and
Albanians raping girls on every street corner. Not to mention the
kidnappings.
"You'll pay for this, so help me God..." He had left his wife at
home in case there was a phone call.
He decided to try the road through the San Rocco woods. Though
it was unthinkable that his daughter would have gone that way. He
had told her a thousand times not to.
He drove up the hill, around the hairpin bends. He went through
the woods and out the other side. But then he decided to turn back.
He parked the BMW in a rest area where there was an electricity
hut and got out of the car.
For the rest of his days Alessio Ponticelli wondered what had
made him stop in that precise spot, but could never find an answer.
According to some American research, certain animals can smell
pain. Pain has a distinctive odor, strong and pungent, like the
pheromones of insects. A stench which sticks to things for a very
long time. And perhaps he, somehow, had smelled the pain that his
daughter had felt before she perished.
In any case, when Alessio Ponticelli saw his daughter's scooter
lying on the ground behind the electricity hut, something inside him
withered and died. And he knew for certain that Fabiana was no
longer of this world.
He listened to the gasps of his own irregular breathing. The universe broke up into a series of disconnected thoughts, and, descending
over them, the grief that would accompany him, like a faithful dog,
for the rest of his life.
Quattro Formaggi sat on the toilet and, with a series of thunderclaps and spurts, unleashed a spray of fetid diarrhea. Then, with
pain and satisfaction, he felt something as hard as a stone pass
through his rectum.
There it is!
He started squeezing and gasping as if he was in labor, and at
last pushed out something that fell with a TING on the porcelain.
He got up and looked into the bowl.
The sides were encrusted with limescale and a dark mess. Below,
the pitch-black sludge reflected his pale face.
The lightbulb that hung naked from the ceiling, behind him, created a luminous halo around his head like that of a saint in a religious painting.
He dipped his hand into his shit and took it out again clenched
into a fist. He held it under the tap and finally opened his fingers.
A big silver skull ring lay in the middle of his palm. Triumphantly
he began to rinse it. "There it is. You see? I wasn't mistaken, was
I? I did kill her, and this is the proof."
He smiled, opened his mouth and swallowed it again.
Now he must find out what had happened to the bodies of the
blonde girl and Rino.
"I could ask your father myself, you know. Do you think I'm scared?
I wouldn't think twice about it." So Fabiana had said to him in the
shopping mall.
That had been on Saturday. In the evening he and Rino had gone
looking for Tekken and had then returned home. On Sunday they
had been together all day.
There was no time for them to meet and get to know each other.
..I wouldn't think twice about it."
If she wouldn't think twice, it was because she already knew him,
Cristiano reasoned.
They had gone to screw in the woods because they didn't want
to be seen.
In the rain? At that time of night?
And then he'd had the hemorrhage and had gone into a coma.
And she ...
Cristiano rubbed his feet against each other. The cold that he felt
in his bones wouldn't go away despite the boiling hot shower and
the layer of blankets under which he was buried.
Trecca had stationed himself downstairs and was watching the
television with the volume turned up. The broken shutter banged
in the wind and the alarm clock kept flashing. Everything had
changed, yet that damned clock continued to show the time and
that shutter kept banging, as though nothing had happened.
Cristiano put his head under the pillow.
And my father hit her on the head with the stone.
He just couldn't understand why.
Because she told him she was going to tell everyone about itthat he was screwing her. She's under age. They quarrelled and he
lost his temper and killed her.
No, that was bullshit. It wasn't possible.
There must be another reason.
"That's enough," he said, hugging his legs. "Now I must sleep.
I mustn't think about it."
He closed his eyes and remembered a book he had found lying
on the bench in the bus shelter, when he was ten years old. It was
dog-eared and the pages were yellowed, as if it had been read and
re-read a million times. The title was printed in red letters in the
center of a nondescript gray cover: Mary Rebels.
The first page was occupied by a black-and-white illustration. In
the middle was a little girl with big round glasses, plaits and an
apron below which protruded two legs as thin as twigs. On the right a portly priest with slicked-back hair, a double chin and a sharpedged ruler in his hand, on the left a plump woman with her hair
tied back in a bun and an unpleasant turned-up nose. The story was
about Mary, the little girl in glasses, who was an orphan (her rich
parents had been killed in a railway accident) and lived in an
immense English house (she had to use a bicycle to get from the
kitchen to her bedroom) with the unpleasant woman and the portly
priest, who acted as her tutor and rapped her on the knuckles whenever she gave a wrong answer. The two of them stole all the money
from her inheritance and were now the owners of the house, which
was in a ramshackle state and had a leaky roof. Mary was alone,
without even a dog for a friend. Whenever the two of them left her
any time to herself, she would go and explore the garden, which
had turned into a jungle.
One day she was playing in a little temple, overgrown with wild
roses and ivy, which stood on an island in the middle of a small
dark lake. She saw something moving. A mouse, she thought. She
went closer and saw two little men and a tiny woman feeding a cow
which was two centimeters high.
They were Lilliputians who had been brought to England by a
certain Gulliver when he had returned from his travels to unknown
lands. They had managed to escape and lived in that little temple
in the middle of the pond.
Mary caught one and put him in a shoebox. And in time she
became his friend.
It was a wonderful book. Cristiano kept it hidden in a cupboard.
How he would have loved to have a Lilliputian to talk to at that
moment; he would have carried him in his jacket pocket...
Rino's cell phone started ringing.
Cristiano, who had almost dropped off to sleep, jumped.