“We have a problem, he was hurt.”
I didn't say a word the whole way home.
When we got there, my mother rubbed medicated cream on my side.
“If there was a pomade to put on your heart to make you feel better, my love, I'd put it on immediately, even if it cost me my life.”
The bruises on my side would vanish in time. But the wound inflicted by seeing and losing Nina again wouldn't heal anytime soon.
Gerruso had called me a couple of days earlier.
“This Saturday my cousin Nina is going to the Mediterranean Fair, my aunt asked me to go with her, but I told her I'd only go if my friends came with.”
“You don't have any friends.”
“Wanna come with me to the fair?”
“I don't know.”
“Please?”
“Okay, fine. But your cousin, is she going to the fair all by herself? Or with girlfriends? She wouldn't by chance be planning on bringing that blond friend of hers again, the Imperial Whore?”
“Uh, I don't know, if you want I could ask.”
“You could ask? Why would you do that? What the hell do you think I care about Nina?”
I hadn't seen her for two months, since that afternoon at Giusi's party. I hadn't talked to her since the day after the party, when the telephone was heavy in my hand and the click of the receiver brought relief.
Two months ago, Nina and I had nothing more to say to each other, and with the end of words, our relationship, too, had ended in silence.
“Gerruso, how the hell are you dressed?”
On the sidewalk outside the front door of my building, he'd shown up wearing a shiny formal suit: dark slacks and jacket, white shirt, patent leather shoes, a fuchsia tie.
“Why? I look real sharp.”
“We're going to a fair, not to a wedding.”
“My cousin likes it when I dress up fancy.”
“Let's get going before I change my mind.”
The Mediterranean Fair was teeming with strollers, cotton candy, young couples, games, colored lights, women shouting, ravenous young men on the make, and sideshow rides blaring amplified music, heavy on the bass.
“I don't believe in miracles.”
“But they do happen.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“My mother tells me so. And in any case, I always pray to Jesus for the miracle, every night.”
“And did He perform the miracle?”
“Not yet.”
“So what conclusion do you draw from that fact?”
“That Jesus has a lot on His plate. Even so, though, the miracle I'm asking Jesus for is just a little one.”
“What is it?”
“For him to grow back my . . .”
“Your stump-finger?”
“Even just a little piece of the fingernail would be enough for me.”
“Gerruso, the fingernails are all growing in your head.”
Gerruso stopped in front of the punching ball.
The guys who were trying to rack up points were throwing miserable punches. Everything you could do wrong they were doing, hitting the punching ball with the strength of their arms alone. None of them got the top score.
“How many points can you get with a single punch?”
“I don't know, I've never tried.”
“Should we give it a try?”
“Gerruso, I have a fight next week, I don't want to get injured.”
“Okay, but you're the strongest.”
“That's for sure.”
“I'll hit it first, so I can tell you if it hurts.”
A small crowd had begun to form around us. They were mocking Gerruso for the way he was dressed. They were snickering and teasing him, and with good reason. I envied them.
“Should I go, Davidù, should I hit it?”
I was about to dip my head forward when the worst thing happened. A kid, fifteen or sixteen years old, started making fun of Gerruso, repeating in a girl's voice: “Should I go, Davidù, should I hit it?”
The match was in just seven days.
I decided to ignore the provocation.
The kid went on, enthusiastically: “Davidù, oh my loooove, I'm going to hit it now.”
“Gerruso, come over here, take off your jacket, and give me your handkerchief.”
As soon as he took off his jacket, the kids started howling that we were a couple of women.
“Don't give a damn about them; listen to me: the jacket keeps your shoulders from moving freely. Next, stop thinking about your arm, think about the way your foot is pivoting. Give me your healthy hand, I don't even want to look at the hand with the stump-finger.”
I wrapped a handkerchief around his knuckles. I arranged it so that it was in the perfect position for him to take the punch.
“Your feet, Gerruso, you need to turn your feet.”
I took a look at the score column where the points appeared. Your average customer hits seventy points. If Gerruso got sixty points it would already be something on the order of a miracle. He looked over at me, as if I were his trainer or, even worse, his friend.
Come on, Gerruso, get a move on, let's get this out of the way.
He concentrated, focused on the target, and wound up for the punch.
The kids stopped howling.
Gerruso let fly and delivered the punch with all the power he possessed.
He turned and looked at me with a satisfied expression on his face.
“Did I hit it hard?”
Forty points.
Less than half the max.
Gerruso.
How pathetic can you be?
The kids went wild.
“Faggots! Faggots!”
With his hand still wrapped in the handkerchief, Gerruso went over to them.
“You want to bet that Davidù can make a hundred?”
“Who the hell is Davidù?”
Passersby slowed to a halt. The music died out and the colorful blinking lights stopped winking on and off. The scene staked its claim to a certain solemnity. It was a moment out of a western. Trust Gerruso to ruin everything.
He stretched out his arm and pointed straight at me.
With his stump-finger.
“That's him. Now he'll show you all.”
There aren't many sounds that can really wound the ears: a pistol shot, the crack of vertebrae shattering, the scornful roar of a circling crowd. Gerruso, completely ignorant of the way the world works, piled on.
“You want to bet he gets a hundred?”
“How much?”
“Two thousand lire.”
“You're on.”
Gerruso, two thousand lire is a hell of a lot of money, and if I can't get a hundred and we lose and then we run into Nina, how am I going to treat her to a ride if all of a sudden thanks to you I'm broke?
Nina.
The thought that she might be hidden somewhere watching me caused a radical shift in my approach to the matter.
I walked straight over to the leader of the pack.
“Oh, hey, let's make it five thousand lire. Or are you scared?”
“Okay.”
The punching ball had a rough surface, I'd better wrap my knuckles.
“Gerruso, the handkerchief.”
A new thought suddenly lunged at me. What if Nina wasn't there? Then this whole production was pointless.
“Gerruso, swear to me that Nina is here.”
“But you told me that you didn't care.”
“Swear it.”
“My aunt told me she was.”
“That's not enough.”
“I swear it, Nina's here.”
No one saw the punch as I let it fly. What came next was a thunderstruck silence while the highest possible score flashed on the display. I hadn't even bothered to wrap my hand.
While we were hunting for Nina in the jungle of the fair, suddenly the most breathtaking ride of all appeared before us in all its majesty: the pirate ship.
Why are we fatally attracted by extreme amusement park rides, the ones that create vacuums and drive up our blood pressure, the ones that, unless you hold on for dear life, are sure to throw you to your death? What is this determination to test the outer limits of what the body can withstand? What creates this need for the adrenaline charge that surges into every last inch of our flesh?
At the gym, once a month, we were put through a circuit of somersaults and tumbling: five forward somersaults, five backward somersaults, five side tumbles, to the left and then to the right, and then we had to leap immediately to our feet. Walls, floor, and ceiling spun dizzyingly, depriving us of the comfortable certainty of a handhold or footfall. Some of the boxers tried to set their feet right and regain their balance but they would inevitably and helplessly lose control, tumble to the floor. Others managed to stay erect on trembling legs, eyes darting in search of support while their mouths filled with churning gastric juices. It was the best simulation that could be created in a training session of the feeling that you have when you take a punch to the templeâexcept for the pain. The minute we managed to get our bodies back into a vertical position, we were supposed to throw as many punches as we could as fast as we could, straight ahead, in every direction, trying to strike every inch of space available.
“But how did you ever come up with this exercise, Franco?”
“I happened to be at the tavern and Peppuccio was there, drunker than usual. He had a bottle of beer in one hand, he slipped and fell to the floor, all on his own, but then he did something I'd never seen before: he leaped back upright in a flash and, with the bottle in hand, started waving it all over the place, as if he were brandishing a sword, ready to cut anyone who came within reach.”
“Attacking as defense. And that's why you teach them this feeling.”
“There's more, Umbè. I want to teach you to think with your body. If the mind is too fucked up, the body has to know how to do the right thing at the right time.”
Gerruso asked me what I was thinking.
“Punches thrown at the empty air.”
“Like at your own shadow?”
“More or less.”
“But that's pointless, you'll never hit the shadow, but he'll catch you off guard, striking a chill into your heart, like a ghost.”
“Gerruso, what are you talking about?”
“Ghosts. They exist. My mother told me so. Sometimes her aunt Concetta, the one who died of a broken heart, appears to her in her dreams. My mother invokes her protection for the family, plus power-balls and bonus balls.”
“Have you ever won?”
“No.”
“Even your dead relatives are Gerrusos. Come on, let's ride the pirate ship, as long as you promise to shut up, okay?”
Everyone on the pirate ship was shouting: women, men, grownups, and Gerruso. I was the only one who didn't open my mouth. I was watching the crowd, hurtling closer, hurtling away. Nina, where are you?
“Let's climb up to the highest place on the ride, Gerruso.”
The best vantage point for a view of the broadest slice of the world. My hands firmly gripped the steel bar in front of me. The pirate ship gathered speed. It rose into the air and the earth below dropped into the distance; it hurtled downward and a shiver ran up my spine. The ride went on creating turbulent air pockets, indifferent to the startled cries of the passengers. I had to respect its point of view. The pirate ship would have made a fine boxer.
Right at the exact opposite end of the pirate ship, facing us, perched a noisy clutch of girls. There were seven of them: seven identical handbags and seven indistinguishable hairstyles. The one directly across from Gerruso was pretty scrumptious. A red ribbon atop her head. A colorful bead necklace traced a thin line between neck and chest, a point that I decided to stare at in order to ward off unexpected bouts of nausea. The girl's hands were intertwined with the hands of her girlfriends. They were all screaming, every last one of them. Before the pirate ship started moving, all the passengers had started pointing at Gerruso in his jacket and tie. Gerruso looked back with laughing eyes and waved with his stump-finger hand. Like his holiness the pope, only dressed in men's clothing. The ride operator interrupted the amputee's benediction and the pirate ship started moving. Once it had begun to build up a head of speed, all inhibitions fell away and the screaming began in earnest. Everyone was shrieking but me. If Nina was watching me, I'd have earned plenty of points. I tore my eyes away from the chest of the scrumptious girl to take a look and see whether she was down there watching me. But my sense of equilibrium was knocked off-kilter just then, the sort of thing that happens when, in a moment of distraction, your foot lands right on a hollow spot in the ground and for an instant everythingâworld, body, mindâis pushed off balance. It lasted no more than the blink of an eye, it was an impression more than anything else. But it was more than sufficient. My body experienced an immediate urge to throw a punch. I lashed out at the air right in front of me with as many jabs and straights as possible. I wasn't merely learning the rote grammar of a new form of movement. My hands had let go of the steel bar. I was acquiring frameworks of autonomous thought. My fingers had already clenched tight. My flesh was thinking and acting toward a specific objective, the first and most urgent directive that I'd been taught since the age of nine: survival. My right hand shot forward, only to resume its cocked position as I let my left fly, and by then the right was back again with an uppercut.
I loosed three punches into the empty air, over an infinitesimal arc of time.
Without even realizing it.
I was thinking with my body.
Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one.
Gerruso, too, was thinking with his body. He started vomiting. Without warning. Without sounding the alarm. He vomited, straight ahead, no care for where it would land. He vomited voluminously, showering the unfortunate girl sitting right across from him with puke. Face, bead necklace, red ribbon: all defiled by Gerruso's geyser of vomit. A person would want to soak in bleach for a whole year. It was the onset of such a wide-scale slaughter that it could have held its head high among even biblical sacrifices and been foully unashamed. The girl, hit directly by Gerruso's vomit, reacted the only way she knew how: by throwing up in turn, and with no more consideration for her fellow passengers. No presence of mind to throw up into her own lap. Her face was transformed into an unsightly grimace as she sprayed vomit over everything and everyone. The pirate ship, blithely indifferent to this gastric inferno, increased its rhythm and its velocity. There came into being, in midair above the vessel, a colorful galaxy of vomit. Every time we hurtled down, new astronauts ventured into that celestial realm and, eager to pitch in, added a little something of their own. The screaming had died out. Everyone was busy vomiting. The democratic nature of amusement park rides. My hands, balled into fists, protected my face. I kept my guard high, my eyes wide open, my torso tensed, ready at any instant to dodge. The first voices floated up from beneath: tiny acidic meteors had rained down on the strolling pedestrians below. Down there, too, the plague of vomiting began to spread. Gerruso's face was split down the middle by his tie. His shirt looked worse than a tablecloth after an Easter Monday feast. On my left, a skinny boy was vomiting between his legs. In a paroxysm of sisterhood and solidarity, the once-attractive young woman's friends were now vomiting onto one another.