The house was all on one floor, and that was an extra risk. The Master did not have a black uniform like those in the films, but he had dressed himself in dark clothes. Blue velvet trousers in which he was so hot he thought he would burst, a black shirt, a stained waistcoat, a pair of slippers lined with lambswool, an electric torch (the one he used to fix the fuse box whenever the lights went off) and a canvas bag: this was his gear.
Large rooms, windows that by day must let in a good deal of light, clear, scented wooden floors, leather sofas with an
all-pervasive
smell, like living creatures, designer lamps that looked like sleeping flamingoes in the shadows.
It was easy to move in this darkness, easier than expected. The furniture had rounded edges, and the carpets absorbed his steps. Not a sound, not a moan, not a sigh: everything was silent in the temple of Calliope.
The Master was in control. He knew that, whatever time he had left to live, he would never again get so close, so close to something of which he knew the existence but not the essence.
That was why he was in no hurry. He was savouring this fleeting mastery over people and objects, because being invisible is the privilege of thieves and hunters. It is for that intoxication, rather than for the booty, that they set off every night.
The Master went into one of the rooms. Steel dressers gleamed in the light of his torch, a rectangular table in the middle, a lamp hanging over it. The kitchen. A sickly-sweet smell, most likely apple pie, tickled his nose. The Master spotted a dark
sarcophagus
, approached it, opened it, and in a shower of light saw a smoked salmon as plump as a ham, truffles in a glass jar, French cheeses in a drawer and rows of wine bottles stored horizontally
like mortar shells. This was the diet of a best-selling writer. The Master closed the fridge door.
He wouldn’t find what he was looking for in the kitchen. To get his lock of hair, he had to enter the wolf’s lair.
He crossed the living room, marching past an eye-catching dark rectangle that he took for a piece of conceptual art (it was a wall-mounted plasma TV screen). He came to the beginning of a long corridor. On the right, a door was ajar. He pushed it slowly and shone his torch inside. A solid wooden desk. Shelves crammed with books.
His
books. The Writer’s books. Translated into a dozen languages (there were ideograms and runic characters on the spines and covers). A Persian rug. A hi-fi unit. An LP
collection
. A drinks trolley. The Master went up to the trolley and flashed his torch at it: bottles of fine whisky and cognac, spirits and liqueurs from the best brand names on the market. He took a bottle at random, pulled the top off with his teeth, and had a swig: gin. It burnt like fire in his dry throat. He wiped his lips with his shirtsleeve. It was what he needed to find the courage to bring his mission to its conclusion. He left the room and ventured along the corridor. From a closed door came laboured breathing. He checked the map: it was The Ukrainian Nanny’s room. Again according to the map, he should have the small toilet ahead of him, The Filipino’s bedroom to his left—he aimed the torch: empty—and The Baby’s bedroom to the right—he aimed the torch: empty. Towards the end of the corridor was the bathroom, and at the end to the right the master bedroom. The secret chamber at the heart of the pyramid. That was where he would carry out his desecration, like an unscrupulous tomb robber. The Master took a deep breath, switched off the torch and pulled the door handle down.
Husband and wife were in the nuptial bed. Abandoned and dreaming like Etruscan sculptures. Here was The Writer with hundreds of thousands of copies read and translated throughout
the world, lying on his back, his arms crossed over his chest, as motionless as a corpse. Here was The Second Wife of The Writer with hundreds of thousands of copies read and translated throughout the world, lying face down, the back of her neck bare, given up to her dreams. Between them, a miniature that looked human: The Baby.
The Master looked at the royal dynasty immersed in slumber. They were sleeping a remote, aristocratic sleep, chrysalids
waiting
to become butterflies. He could kill all three of them, poison them, smother them as they slept, cut their throats, it would be like a palace revolution. But he didn’t. He could. But he didn’t. He would. But no. He needed only one thing. Just one thing and he would go. The spell would deal with the rest. The Master shielded the mouth of the torch with his hand and aimed it at the back of the room. The light gave form to the solid surface of a modern wardrobe and an armchair on which lay a woman’s clothes flung down haphazardly. Next to the armchair, a valet stand, with a jacket and a shirt hanging all neat and tidy, and trousers with a fine, straight crease held in the press. And finally, at the foot of that pagan fetish, the reason why The Master had come so far, both in this story and in this house. The Writer’s shoes. They were one metre from him. The Master advanced, bent down and took them.
Son of a bitch, you did it. Now put them in your bag and leave the room immediately. Be brave. Take your stiff legs and get them out of here. Get out while there’s still time. Don’t stand there gawking. Move. One small effort and in a minute you’ll be outside. Get out of here and take those dammed shoes to you know who.
Well? What’s come over you? Why aren’t you moving? Have you fallen asleep, too? What are you doing standing there? Hey, I’m talking to you! Make a move! Do you want to be discovered? Do you want them to wake up and find you in their room like a
mouse? Think of the newspapers! Think of the scandal! Think of The Prize! Think of The Prize, Master. Think of The Prize.
Hold on a minute. The Master was old, and perhaps mad, but he wasn’t stupid. If he didn’t move, he had his reasons. Trust him.
Someone was licking him. And now sniffing at his crotch.
That there was a dog in the house was something that stupid Filipino hadn’t even mentioned.
Incredible as it may seem, there are apparently dogs that can sniff out tumours, sense organic material present in cancer cells, recognize a chemical compound even when it has been diluted down to one part in a trillion.
Was The Writer’s Dog sniffing The Master’s prostate tumour? Or was it only the pants he’d been wearing for three days? Who can say?
Only The Dog. And, while it was about it, it could also tell its owner who had paid him a visit tonight. But, just like its owner right now, it was speechless.
When The Master at last left that trap of a house, he found the night waiting for him. And in its black depths, a white van was also waiting for him. With its lights off. And its engine off, too—because it had been making too much noise. A grimy van hidden behind the recycling bins. And when The Master climbed in with his ill-gotten gains and his thumb up as a sign of victory, the van’s lights went on, its engine started up, and it moved slowly towards even darker territories of the night.
A few hours before The Writer was robbed of his shoes, we find The Beginner in the toilet of a bar. The icy water flows from the tap and collects in the hollow of his hands. He rinses his mouth and spits into the sink. He looks at himself in the mirror.
But what’s happened? Just a moment, his mobile is ringing. He looks at the display. It’s The Girlfriend. He looks at himself in the mirror again. Interminable seconds pass. Then he takes a deep breath and answers.
“I only just left.”
“How did it go?”
To get the answer to that, let’s step back in time and imagine we are a robin (
Erithacus rubecula
) that has just come to rest on a window sill in the apartment of The Patroness of The Prize. And let us attribute to the little songbird pronounced audiovisual as well as vocal gifts.
Look, The Beginner is just about to be received. The apartment is crowded, it’s teatime. The butler greets him and asks for his jacket, and The Beginner reluctantly hands it over. He waits in a large room. He looks around, threatened by imposing works of art. In the sumptuous drawing rooms, the ladies exchange reviews as if they were recipes while their husbands doze in armchairs. The frescoed ceiling is animated by the warm light of evening. The French windows that lead out onto the balcony are open, the smokers stroll lazily between the thick plants. The butler goes into the main room and whispers something in The Patroness’s ear. The lines on her face crease a moment like a ruff, then relax. The Patroness is wearing a cream-coloured tailored suit and white shoes with gold buckles, and she keeps her legs parallel and twisted to one side. She is holding a glass, it isn’t tea, it’s a flute of champagne. Reluctantly, she stands up, shaking her head at the lady who is in front of her as if to say that they can never get any peace in this place. As she follows the butler, she smiles to a group of guests standing arguing beside a tray of canapés.
Now here she is, receiving the young candidate for The Prize of which she is the undisputed heart and soul. The Beginner gives an embarrassed smile, he has never before kissed a lady’s hand in greeting (it even disgusts him slightly), but he does so. The
Patroness smiles to take away his embarrassment, then motions him to follow her: there is a small drawing room where they will be able to talk undisturbed.
They walk towards it, skating on the shiny decorated floors.
They sit down on an uncomfortable little sofa. The Patroness calls the waiter and asks for something to drink. Tea for the young man, a spritzer for her. The Beginner tells his story, in an ardent if confused manner. He tells her The Girlfriend is pregnant, then takes a step back, confesses his betrayal—omitting to mention the absurd way it was discovered because he knows that talking about Google Maps to this lady would be like talking about condoms at the Vatican—then takes a step forward and refers to the blackmail, then steps aside and informs her of his fear of winning, but above all of losing what is dearest to him right now: that germ of life in The Girlfriend’s belly. He is speaking like a father, or even like a mother. He gets emotional, lets himself be carried away by his own passion, and for a moment feels so persuasive that he suspects he must be feigning, rather than actually feeling, those emotions.
The Patroness listens to him in silence, while the ice melts in her first spritzer. And in her second. And in her third.
“Poor thing,” she says from time to time, as if adding a cross stitch to the weave of his story. And her heavy rings tinkle on the glass as she puts it down and picks it up. The Beginner summons up all his energy, an extreme, painful act of humility in which he declares he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t deserve it, he wouldn’t pull it off anyway (there, once again that damned inadequacy).
“Can you help me not to win?” he asks at the end of his long speech.
The Patroness looks at him, full of understanding. Her eyes are shining, her hair motionless, trapped in a nest of lacquer. She moves closer. The Beginner thinks she wants to tell him something in confidence. She moves even closer. The Beginner smells her breath, it’s reminiscent of faded flowers. She passes
a hand through his hair. He sees her powdered face a few
centimetres
from his. The Beginner barely has time to turn his face away before a kiss sticky with lipstick is imprinted on his cheek.
He runs away, leaving his jacket in the cloakroom. The Patroness regains her composure and returns to her guests, whom she has neglected for far too long.
The robin has seen too much. It flies away, without even a left-over canapé.
Now that we have an idea of what happened, we can return to the toilet of the bar in which we left our young writer.
“Well? How did it go?”
“O… K. It went OK.”
“Will they vote for you?”
“I don’t think so.”
The first specimen arrived from the coast, coming up the mouth of the river while the herons watched anxiously. Urged on by the beautiful sunny day and its own pioneering sense of enterprise, it flew curiously over the great sedimentary terrain, the Pleistocene and continental marine deposits, took advantage of the sweet thermal fumes that rose from the alluvial plain of the Tiber, looked with respect at the enigmatic summit of Mount Soratte to the north, and with scepticism at the spurs of the Sabine and Prenestine Hills to the east. It hovered over the volcanic plateaux carved and dislocated into seven hills by the sinuous course of the river, until at last it hovered over the city and its swarming humanity, eventually landing on the top of the Vittorio Emmanuele Monument, resting its tired wings, right at the tip of the wing of the winged quadriga. Hard to believe, isn’t it? And yet that is what
happened
. From there it had the privilege of enjoying a view of Rome denied to the Romans themselves. And this happened on 7th May 1912, the day on which a Caspian gull (
Larus cachinnans
) was spotted in flight over the city for the first time. Since then, many things have changed.
(One day to The Ceremony)
I
F WE TOOK THE LIVES
of human beings in the hours
preceding
terrorist attacks, heroic enterprises, brilliant discoveries, it would be discovered that men are not doing anything
exceptional
at such times. That is why we say nothing about it, why we observe a vow of silence over what happens on the eve of things. Knowing that a general before a crucial battle had been struggling with his haemorrhoids, or that a scientist before making a momentous discovery ate a roll with mortadella, would make heroes too similar to us mortals.
Now that we are on the eve of The Prize, aren’t you curious to know how our friends the writers are spending it?
It may perhaps be worth dropping in on The Master, but the image of a man sprawled on the sofa with a bottle on the floor beside him and the TV on is something we can frankly do without. And what if we sneak into The Beginner’s loft, where he is cleaning his teeth and The Girlfriend is looking through a dictionary of names in search of inspiration for her as yet unborn child? Not too captivating, is it?
Better to hover over the usual high-class neighbourhood where you-know-who lives.
If an alien had landed in The Writer’s garden and asked for information about planet Earth, he would have said to him, “I’m sorry, I’m not from round here.” That gives some idea of his state of mind with just twenty-four hours to go until The Ceremony. And even less time until The Great Moment.
The unease began last night, when he had two terrible dreams,
the most terrible thing about them being that he remembered them perfectly. In the first, more distressing of the two, he was being spied on by the secret service, who had sneaked into his house and planted bugs and miniature TV cameras all over it. In a small van parked somewhere, a bored but zealous security operative was following, on a screen similar to the baby monitor, his life and that of his family, from the toilet to the bedroom, as if it were a reality show about successful writers. From the first dream, as if a floor in his unconscious had collapsed, he landed straight in the second, more horrifying of the two dreams, in which The Dog was trying to have sex with The Second Wife. The beast was slobbering as it pursued the young woman all through the house, its fluorescent glans flashing beneath its fur like an emergency light on a leather dashboard. The Writer and The Second Wife barricaded themselves in the bedroom, but the animal, which had been taught by its master to pull down door handles with its paws, managed to smash down even this final defence. And now they faced one another, The Dog, with its indecency on open display, The Writer, with his imperfect shield of honour, and The Second Wife, who was screaming like a virgin cornered by Saracens. It was then that a loud barking echoed through the room, making The Baby cry and jolting the couple awake, and they found The Dog standing at the foot of the bed, eager to play, or perhaps—who knows?—to
communicate
something.
If he had not already made his decision—but he had—after a dream like that, The Writer would have taken the stupid animal and abandoned it on the ring road. But it occurred to him that after The Great Moment, a bit of company, a bit of cheap warmth, would not come amiss for a future widow and a future orphan. That was the only reason he spared it. And he fell asleep again in the arms of his anxiety.
When he woke up, he could not find his shoes.
The shoes he had cleaned with care, nourished with
waterproofing
wax and worn all week to break them in for The Great Moment, were no longer there.
And yet he was sure he had left them in the bedroom, at the foot of the valet stand, where he always took care to place the clothes he would wear the following day. He asked The Second Wife, and she said she didn’t know anything about them—in fact, she had no idea what he was talking about.
And that was how the morning passed. The Writer looked everywhere: he turned the wardrobes and the garage upside down, climbed up into the loft, rummaged under the beds, and generally searched in the unlikeliest places, finding things (a hat, an umbrella, the recharger for a mobile) he had been looking for for so long that he had convinced himself he could happily do without them.
“Tomorrow’s going to be a long day for you.”
The Writer, who was lifting the cushions on the sofa, turned abruptly and looked The Second Wife straight in the eyes.
“Forget about those shoes. The Filipino must have thrown them away.”
“…”
“You have The Ceremony. Try to relax.”
Maybe The Second Wife was right. Maybe The Filipino really had taken them. He could no longer quite remember if he had found the shoes before or after The Filipino had gone. He was starting to confuse the sequence of events. The last week had been like one of those festival films, the kind that plays around with chronology, which nobody understands and about which everybody coming out of the cinema says, “What a masterpiece!” Too many things had happened inside him. Things he couldn’t talk about, things that were his business and nobody else’s.
To assuage the pangs of anxiety, The Writer needed concrete facts, trivial acts, to reconnect him with reality. When it came to
triviality, The Writer was a champion. In the afternoon he went to a medical supply shop and bought some clogs, those white openwork ones that nurses and dentists wore. He would go to The Great Moment looking very elegant, with those immaculate clogs on his feet: even death requires maximum cleanliness.
Then he spent the afternoon at home, playing on the carpet with The Baby, trying—without success—to make her say the title of his last novel. When The Baby had fallen asleep, he made love to The Second Wife, who wasn’t really in the mood but, surprised by such boldness, yielded to him. Furtive and agitated, with a vague desire to finish quickly: that was how the last fuck of his life was. Afterwards they lay there on the dishevelled bed, panting.
“If you weren’t with me who would you be with?”
The Writer had surprised the Second Wife as she was pulling her knickers up over her pale buttocks.
“What a thing to ask!”
“Answer me.”
“But I’m with you.”
“Who with?”
“Nobody.”
“But if you really had to be with someone?”
“I’m going to make myself a herbal tea. Do you want one?”
The Writer stayed in bed a while longer, looking up at the ceiling. Then he dressed, went in the kitchen, ate a roll with the leftover omelette and knocked back a can of beer without pouring it into a glass. That was the best thing he had done all day. And so the afternoon also passed.
In the evening they called the best Japanese takeaway in Rome and ordered a sumptuous sushi and sashimi combo. Not long afterwards, there was a ring at the gate and The Writer saw a thin young man in trainers and baseball cap on the videophone screen. One of the many young people whose future had been stolen from them, as the media were always saying.
What if The Boy, the son he had had with The First Wife, the one he never saw except to shower him with video games, ended up doing that kind of work? Without The Writer there to provide for him, what would his future be like? Oh, come on! The judge had given his mother custody, so it was only right that his mother should take care of him.
The Writer opened the gate and, just to put the young man to the test, gave him instructions that would make it difficult for him to find their house. The young man materialized soon afterwards along with his polystyrene container and a vague smell of fish. The Writer had only large-denomination banknotes, yellow, green and pink, for which the young man had no change. So The Writer gave him an enormous tip, equal perhaps to what he earned in a month. The young man hesitated for a moment, but without losing his composure. The Writer watched him as he walked away to catch any sign of surrender or any manifestation of excitement. But there was nothing, unless it only happened when he was out of sight. He was on the ball, that young man. If his son did end up like that, well, when you came down to it maybe it wouldn’t be so tragic after all.
They ate the sushi in the living room, watching cartoons on the satellite channels. That was how the evening passed.
Before going to bed, The Writer found a message on his answering machine. How about we read it and try to guess who it was from?
“Hi, big guy. How are you? How do you feel? I wanted to remind you it’s one day to the great day… Go and see your mother tomorrow if you can… I’m sure she’d be pleased… See you at nine in the morning. We’re really going to blow them away!”
The Publisher, of course. Who else could it have been? The following morning, he was going to drop by to pick up The Second Wife and The Baby and take them out of the city, maybe to the sea. Before the battle The Writer needed peace and quiet to
concentrate on the task at hand. They had already talked it over and agreed on the plan. Yes, The Publisher was a real friend.
A long day is coming to its end. Surrounded by the darkness of the garden, the light is still on inside the house. In the bedroom, The Baby is sleeping. The Ukrainian Nanny has the day off and will be back at any moment. The Filipino isn’t there, and we know he won’t be coming back. The Second Wife is removing her make-up. As for The Writer, he is leafing through his last book. It’s really terrible: hard to admit it, but even his mother has nothing more to say. He puts it down on the bedside table and turns off the light.
Now night has finally fallen, the night before The Ceremony, the last night of The Writer’s life.