To avoid The Second Wife making a scene, The Writer had taken care to leave the shoes outside the door, next to the doormat with the words In&Out.
Once inside the house, he had started looking for The Filipino, an activity that had lately become the domestic sport par excellence.
The Second Wife came out of the bedroom with The Baby in her arms and barred his way threateningly.
“Are you looking for someone?”
“Yes, have you seen…”
The Second Wife said nothing. The Writer waited. The Second Wife walked to the little cabinet by the entrance. Supporting The Baby with just one hand, she picked up an envelope, clearly already opened, and handed it to him. It had been sent by recorded delivery. The Writer took out the contents and read it. It was a letter from a lawyer. The Filipino’s lawyer. It mentioned
irregular conditions of work. Payment in cash. The threat of action. An employment tribunal.
The Writer looked up.
“And you were always defending him! That skunk!”
“…”
“I should have expected it, he’d been very strange lately…”
“…”
“To think that wretch gave The Baby a little gun to make soap bubbles! I found her playing with it. Can you imagine? She could have swallowed the soap! Or the cap! She could have died! I’m going to report him. Are you even listening to me?”
“…”
“And now what do we do? Can you tell me that? What are we going to do?”
“…”
“Oh, not speaking now, eh?”
“…”
“But you still want your trousers ironed with a crease, your shirts starched, your chicken nicely seasoned, your records dusted…”
“…”
“And still he doesn’t speak. Don’t you realize we’re in trouble?”
“…”
The Writer let the letter fall to the floor.
“That’s it, go on! Throw papers on the ground. As long as there’s someone to clean up after you, right?”
The Second Wife had raised her voice. The Baby was crying.
“That’s it, congratulations, now you’ve made the little one cry. No, darling, don’t cry, yes, I know, daddy’s bad…”
The Writer left the room. It wasn’t that he couldn’t speak. He had other things on his mind. Just imagine. Right now, dealing with the case of The Filipino would have been like stopping to answer a market research questionnaire while the bombs were falling.
He picked up the shoes and went to the garage. There, he put on a pair of rubber gloves and found a brush with steel bristles. He switched on the hose and started cleaning the shoes in the garden. He always had to do everything himself. He couldn’t even get a dog to help him die. On the contrary.
“They say it’s good luck, signore!”
The porter had stuck his head outside his lodge and had been watching him for a while, but The Writer hadn’t noticed. He looked up from the shoes, looked at the porter, shrugged and went back to brushing his good luck.
The Beginner didn’t think he could pull it off. That was what always happened. He didn’t think he could pull it off, and then he pulled it off. In every single case. This time, though, it was
different
, this time pulling it off meant not pulling it off. He had started to feel scared. It was the kind of fear that comes over a tennis player when he has three match points in hand and then chalks up three consecutive double faults, a surgeon’s assistant before an operation, or a man who at last finds the woman he’s been
dreaming
about naked in his bed. In other words, the fear of winning.
But the fear of winning is only the most presentable aspect of the desire to lose. Difficult? Twisted? Maybe, but that’s how it is. Man is an enigma that has swallowed its own solution.
So, faced with the terrifying possibility of being left by The Girlfriend—because even the most misanthropic of writers are terrified at the thought of being left alone with only themselves for company—The Beginner started to feel that he had a good chance of winning. A growing, definite, confident chance of winning. It was something he hadn’t thought before. Or rather, he’d thought it but hadn’t believed it. What he needed now was reassurance, reassurance that he wouldn’t win. To get it, all he
really had to do, instead of writing his book, would be to read it. Naïve, openly derivative, imbued with a certain idea of literature (rather than with literature itself ). But that was something for the critics to discuss. Now all he needed was someone who could get him out of trouble.
As he drove his moped in and out of the cars and buses walled up in the mortar of the streets of Rome, The Beginner became firmly convinced that the only person who could understand his situation was The Patroness of The Prize.
Of course. The distinguished lady who pulled the strings, hatched all kinds of literary plots and conspiracies, administered a huge cultural inheritance and maintained relations with the sponsor.
He would talk to her openly. The way you do with a mother. No, with an aunt. No, with a grandmother. He would tell her everything. The betrayal. The (incredible) way in which it had been discovered. The baby they were expecting. The dilemma. Or better still. The blackmail. Imposed on him by The Girlfriend. Everything. From first to last. And she would listen. She would understand. She would help him. He felt sure of that. Confident. Because nothing bad can happen. To someone who tells the truth.
The evil eye? The Master didn’t believe in such things. He was a man of letters, a man of culture. And yet he couldn’t completely leave the irrational out of his cosmogony. If you looked at it the right way, he worked with the irrational. What was poetry if not a spark of irrationality, a match struck on the bare walls of logic? Besides, things had been going so badly for him lately, it was better not to take any risks.
He had been given the name of a witch by the woman who came to clean a couple of times a month. The Witch wasn’t a
real witch. Assuming there were such things as “real witches”. She was a woman from the South who practised her profession from home—her kitchen, to be precise.
The Master had walked for a long time because he couldn’t find the address. Then he had asked some immigrants waiting for buses that would never arrive. One of them, who didn’t speak Italian well, made some vague gestures with his hands, which at least indicated the direction.
In the end he had found it. The Witch lived in a bleak
apartment
building on the edge of the city. She spoke with a strong Apulian accent and kept her heavy breasts propped up on the kitchen table. On the table were a plate, a cruet of oil and a pot of salt. You could have used these things for a salad, or to take away the evil eye, depending on what you were hungry for.
The Witch had first wanted to see his money—The Master would have liked to see it, too—then, uttering the name of the Father, had marked the plate with an upside-down cross. Then she had poured three drops of oil into the plate, one at a time. In contact with the water, the oil, instead of floating, had somehow vanished, an unmistakable sign of the evil eye. The Witch had observed an ancient ritual which she had learnt in her native region when she was a child: she had uttered an arcane formula, full of incomprehensible words, and with the salt had drawn an imaginary cross on the four sides of the plate. Then she had poured oil into another plate of water, and this time the drops had stayed on the surface, like floating coins.
“Do you want to know who did it?” she had asked.
The Master was surprised. He didn’t know you could actually trace the evil eye back to the person who had given it to you. The Witch had told him it was only possible to find out the initials of the person. But that had been enough to remove any lingering doubt from The Master’s mind.
“Do you wish him harm?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to do him harm?”
“Can you turn the evil eye against him?”
“No. A more powerful magic.”
“What magic?”
“A spell.”
“…”
“I need his shoes. And a nail from a coffin.”
“A nail from a coffin? And where would I find that?”
The Witch opened a drawer and took out a handful of nails. From them she chose one that was bent and rusty and put it on the table.
“The nail is a hundred euros.”
“Really?”
“And the spell is a thousand.”
“And without the spell?”
“What?”
“Nothing, I was joking.”
“I wasn’t. You don’t joke with the evil one. A thousand.”
“A thousand, eh?”
“With what we’ll do to him he’ll never again be able to hurt you.”
“…”
“…”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you have a thousand euros?”
“I have them.”
No more than that, but he did have a thousand.
“Bring me the shoes.”
The evil eye, if it existed, had been defeated. But there was more. Something that The Master, coming out of a small local cinema where he went every now and again with The Lawyer to see second-run films, would soon find out.
“The scene where the husband comes home unexpectedly and the wife hides her lover in the sofa bed and the husband sits on it, takes off his shoes and his feet stink and the other man practically has them in his mouth, that scene really killed me.”
“I thought it was disgusting.”
“Why? Come on, it was good.”
They had been to see a comedy that had cleaned up at the box office, and The Master was lost in thought. But not because of the film.
“Listen, do you believe in the evil eye?”
“Of course I do.”
“So everybody believes in it!”
“Why do you ask?”
“I went to see a witch.”
“A witch?”
“I had the evil eye.”
“Oh!”
The Lawyer’s instinctive reaction was to move half a step away from The Master.
“I
had
it. She took it away.”
“It’s a good thing she did.”
“She also told me who gave it to me. Do you want to know?”
“Who could it be?”
The Master looked around as if afraid someone was spying on him. Then he whispered a few words in The Lawyer’s ear.
“I can’t believe it! Isn’t he one of the finalists for The Prize?”
“That’s right.”
“What a bastard, he wanted to screw you.”
“Precisely.”
“He must have been scared of you. And in a while he’ll be scared of me too.”
“Why should he be scared of you?”
“Because his Filipino is bringing an action against him.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m dealing with the case.”
“…”
“…”
“Let me talk to this Filipino.”
“Why?”
“Let me talk to him.”
Who does the darkness belong to? The nocturnal animals? The screech owls (
Tyto alba
) that fly up from the roofs of abandoned apartment buildings? The mice that come out of the manholes to search among the remains in local markets? Or the human beings? The children sleeping in their colourful pyjamas, the wives unable to sleep beside their snoring husbands, the whores walking up and down the Via Salaria, the Sinhalese in the
self-service
shops? The cooks grilling hamburgers on greasy hotplates, the young men with bottomless appetites waiting for them to get hot? The cleaners sweeping the streets, the car thieves, the police patrols driving around the city? Or the inanimate things? The motionless statues, the cold steps, the deserted benches, the damp parks, the sleeping squares?
Who does the darkness belong to?
An evanescent, intoxicating darkness was sniffing at him with its wet nose like a weasel, and he opened his mouth wide and swallowed it in spoonfuls. It swelled his lungs heavy with the steamroller of night, a cloud of black silk within which to move with legs and hands, to jump from one shadow to the next,
gripping
them like a lemur. This darkness belonged to The Master. But it wasn’t his: he had taken it.
The gate had opened with a click, like the trigger in a game of Russian roulette that he had won. Beyond the gate, silence. And beyond the silence, the little lights at the sides of the drive,
tracing the route. The Master had passed the porter’s lodge and had introduced himself into the nocturnal calm of the
neighbourhood
. The swimming pool slept beneath tall palms. The cars were asleep, their powerful engines still warm beneath the bonnets. The inhabitants were sleeping behind their closed shutters. To The Master, this place had seemed almost familiar, as if he had already been here in another life, a life in which he wrote and the world read him. He had looked more closely at the buildings that comprised the area, semi-detached houses, elegant and discreet, with adjoining garages and well-tended lawns to define their borders. Then he had stopped next to a garden spotlight and taken a dirty sheet of paper from his pocket, an arabesque of confused lines traced in pen: the map made for him by The Filipino. Couldn’t that madman have drawn it more clearly? The Master had put on his glasses. Left right right left. Had he turned right at the first fork in the road? He had gone round in a circle like the needle of a crazed compass until he managed to realign himself. Yes, it was right. At that exact moment he had heard a noise. A noise of shifting gravel and trampled pine cones. He had flattened himself against a hedge. Nothing. Just a cat on the prowl. He had continued scrupulously following the map, and was now facing a door. Behind it, tucked up in the warm blankets of his certainties, slept his enemy, the man who wanted to win at all costs, the man who was about to get a taste of a mad poet’s revenge.
The key turned in the lock of the reinforced door: a soft click, the sound of lubricated gears. The door opened with a bow, as if after years spent protecting a usurper it had finally recognized its true master.
Now he was in the dark. In the dark from which he came, the dark to which he would return. He who had lived in the shadow of others had finally cracked the darkness that imprisoned him. And he felt free and happy. He closed his eyes to fraternize with
the darkness. A darkness scented with lavender and lemon, with wax and resin, rubber and freshly mown grass. A darkness so different from his own, which smelt of burnt egg and dirty sheets, cork and expired medicines, dusty books and full ashtrays.