The Past is a Foreign Country (20 page)

THEY RANG THE bell by the entryphone. Once. Twice. Then a third, longer ring.

No answer.

Cardinale started trying the keys in the lock. In less than a minute, the front door opened. Martinelli and Pellegrini had stayed in the car. Chiti had said he should be the one to go in. They hadn’t objected.

They climbed the stairs to the third floor, read the name on the name plate, and rang the bell.

Once. Twice. Then a third, longer ring.

No answer.

Cardinale put on latex gloves and starting working on the lock. There was a hum of machinery from somewhere. Chiti could also hear his own heartbeat and his own breathing. He tried to think what he would say if the other door on the landing opened suddenly and someone put his head out. He couldn’t think of anything, so he stopped thinking. He concentrated on the hum, on his heartbeat, his breathing.

Until he heard the click of the lock. As they went in, it struck him that he had no idea how long they had been standing outside that door. Thirty seconds? Ten minutes?

Inside, it was dark and silent and smelled stuffy.

In that pitch blackness, he suddenly, for no reason, saw his
mother’s
face. Or rather, what he assumed his mother’s face was like,
because
he didn’t remember it. Not well. Good as he was with images,
whenever he made a deliberate effort to remember it, he couldn’t. It was elusive, and sometimes turned into something monstrous that he had to drive out of his mind immediately.

Cardinale found the light switch.

The apartment was tidy, in a meticulous, obsessive, lifeless way. Lifeless: that was it. Chiti stopped for a moment to wonder how the apartment must have been when it was full of life.

If it had ever been full of life.

Then he roused himself, put on latex gloves and started searching. For something, anything.

There was a thick layer of dust everywhere, but no visible prints of hands or anything else. The apartment must have been
unoccupied
for at least a month. In other words, more or less since the mother had died. The son must have left immediately afterwards. Or, Chiti caught himself thinking for no particular reason,
immediately
before.

They soon came to his bedroom. In the rest of the place there was nothing interesting. Old objects, old newspapers, old utensils. All neat and tidy in a way that seemed almost ritualistic, unhealthy.

The first thing he noticed was the Jim Morrison poster. Hanging awry, the face staring out at them.

Then the Tex Willer comics, hundreds of them. He recognised some of the titles and covers. He had read them as a child.

They searched through the drawers, under the bed, on the shelves. Nothing strange or suspicious, apart from all the packs of playing cards. He wondered what they meant, and if they had any
connection
with the investigation, with the assaults. He really hoped this man and his cards had something to do with the crimes, and that the real culprit wasn’t snug and warm somewhere, gloating in anticipation at the thought of his next assault and how he was going to outsmart all the police and carabinieri in the world.

‘Look at this, lieutenant.’

Cardinale was holding a sheet of paper, typewritten on both sides.

A rental agreement for an apartment.

There was an address on the sheet.

Ten minutes later, they were in the car. None of them – Pellegrini driving, Chiti beside him, the other two in the back – said a word all the way back to the barracks. As the car glided along streets made unsightly by all the cars parked with their front wheels on the
pavements
, Chiti thought for the first time that they were going to get him.

It wasn’t a clearly articulated thought, let alone a reasoned one.

He simply thought they were going to get him. 

ABOUT TEN DAYS after the encounter with my sister, Francesco phoned me.

What had become of me? Why hadn’t I called him in all this time? Damn, we hadn’t seen each other for at least two weeks. It was much longer, but I didn’t tell him that. Just as I didn’t tell him I’d tried to get in touch many times but he’d never been in and had never called me back.

‘We really have to meet as soon as possible, my friend.’

We met about eight for an aperitif. It was November now, and cold. Two or three days earlier, hundreds of thousands of East
Germans
had demolished the wall and gone over to the other side, while my life had crawled along, devoid of meaning.

Francesco was euphoric, but there was a dark undertone to his euphoria that I couldn’t figure out.

He took me to his favourite bar. You could see the sea from there, even when you were sitting inside. He ordered two Negronis
without
even asking me what I wanted, and we knocked them back as quickly as if they were glasses of orange juice, and munched on crisps, pistachios and cashews. We ordered two more Negronis and lit cigarettes.

What had I been up to? he asked me again. What had
he
been up to? I shot back. I’d tried to get hold of him many times. I’d talked to his mother. And then even she had stopped answering.

He was silent for a moment, half closing his eyes. As if he’d suddenly remembered some detail he had to tell me about before he went on.

‘My mother died,’ he said. There was no particular intonation in his voice. He was telling me a piece of news, without emotion. I felt my blood run cold. I tried to find something to say, some gesture to make. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. How did it happen?
When
did it happen? How are you feeling?

I didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything. I didn’t have time. After only a few seconds, he spoke again.

‘I don’t live there any more.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘In an apartment. I rented it a while back.’ It was the same apartment we’d gone to all those months earlier, with the two girls. He didn’t remember taking me there. I was
overwhelmed
with a sense of anxiety that was very close to fear.

‘You must see it. I’ll take you tonight, show you how I’ve fixed the place up. But first let’s have dinner.’

With the Negronis spreading through our legs and brains, we went to a rather shabby trattoria I’d never been to before. We ate a bit, but did rather more drinking. Wine and then grappa. We should start seeing each other again, Francesco said. We had to play more poker, but in style now. We’d go outside Bari, to different parts of Italy, maybe even farther afield, and make some real money. Not the small change we’d wasted our time and our talent on until now.
Our
talent, he said.
We had to start again from where we’d left off
. He repeated this several times. Apparently looking me in the face, but actually looking right through me, his gaze febrile and remote.

The apartment didn’t look any different from the last time, except
that now there were piles of clothes on the sofa and the floor and some still unopened cardboard boxes. The place smelled of cigarette smoke, among other things. It smelled like somewhere where the windows were never opened. In fact, it smelled like his mother’s apartment.

We drank more grappa, straight from a half-empty bottle without a label which Francesco fetched from the bedroom. He was
talking
faster than usual and, if possible, listening even less. In fact he wasn’t listening at all. His eyes were wide open, staring into the distance. He took out an old vinyl disc and put it on the turntable of his expensive stereo unit. I recognised it from the first bars.
Exile on
Main Street
by the Rolling Stones.

I was pretty far gone even before he went into the bedroom a second time and came back out with a white plastic packet.

I’d been pretty far gone for quite a while now.

‘I kept some of the stuff from Spain. In case we needed it.’

I watched him with a stupid smile on my face as he tipped four straight lines of white powder, of identical length, onto the shiny table.

I felt a rush of fear and desire. For a moment, I lost any sense of the things around me – shapes, sounds, the concreteness of objects – and the thought crossed my mind that Francesco was gay, and that he had chosen tonight to come out. A couple of lines of coke, and then he would fuck me in the ass. For that brief moment, it seemed almost normal, or anyhow, inevitable and conclusive. A liberation, in a way.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the thought vanished and my senses started working again. I could hear the music playing and the scene in front of me came back into focus.

With one hand Francesco was rolling a fifty-thousand-lire note into a thin, straw-like tube. A simple, graceful gesture, like part of a magic trick.

He held out the tube and I took it without saying anything, but then I sat there, motionless, not knowing what to do. He made a quick gesture with his hand, as if to say, ‘Go on, what are you waiting for?’ But I didn’t move. He took the rolled banknote from my hand, pressed his left nostril, put the straw to his right nostril, leaned down over the table and quickly sucked up one of the lines. He shook his head, pursing his lips and half closing his eyes. Then he immediately repeated the sequence on the other side, and handed the tube back to me.

For the umpteenth time, I imitated him. I did what he said. I did what he did. I sniffed hard, first on one side then on the other, and as I did it I remembered the times when I had a cold as a child and Mum would put Rinazin in my nose before I went to bed. ‘Breathe in,’ she would say and I would do it and immediately taste the salty, medicinal taste of the drops in my throat. The scene formed in my mind, in my
senses
, with remarkable vividness.

Then it disappeared in a puff of smoke, like something in a
cartoon
. I was alone again, with a slight tingling, a slight numbness, in my nose, wondering if these were the famous, amazing effects of cocaine. Francesco was sitting there, calm and composed, with his eyes half closed and his arms outstretched, his hands on the table with the palms up.

I don’t know how long it was – minutes? seconds? – that I sat with my head propped on the palm of my hand. As if meditating, though I wasn’t thinking of anything. Anything at all, except that cocaine wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Then, all at once, I felt an obscenely thrilling sensation spreading through every fibre in my body, just as the first soft, down and dirty bars of
Sweet
Virginia
started up. I had a very slight but inexorable tingling in my eyes. As if there were thousands of tiny pinpricks on my pupils. As if I was experiencing a transformation, like a
superhero
in the comics.

It struck me that if the walls hadn’t been there, I’d have been able to see for miles and miles.

I’m not sure when exactly Francesco started talking about
assaulting
a girl. I’m sure he did it quite naturally. Or at last, what was natural for him. He snorted a few more lines, turned the record over, lit a cigarette, drank some more grappa – and so did I – and talked about assaulting a girl. Together. The two of us.

‘Doing her here isn’t so much fun, when you get down to it. It’s always the same ritual. You tell jokes, you make hints, just to get closer to what you both want. And she follows you, in a kind of dance, to get to what
she
wants, like a bitch on heat.’

The phrase hit me in the stomach, and I leaned forward, as if to vomit. But I didn’t vomit and Francesco carried on talking. His eyes only apparently on me, but in reality somewhere else. In some nightmare country.

He carried on talking, almost without pause. He told me how exciting it could be to take a woman by force. A way of getting back to primitive roots. The rape of the Sabines. What they
really
wanted, deep down. They only realised it at the ultimate moment of pain and annihilation at the hands of the predatory male.
Predatory
males
. Because the deepest form of friendship between men was taking a woman together by force. Having her together, like a ritual sacrifice.

The harmonica of
Turd on the Run
was tearing the air. The
objects
in that anonymous room were part of his madness. His
madness
, but also mine: my skin was sensitive, the smallest hairs on my body seemed to vibrate, all my senses were hyperactive, I was feeling something new and overwhelming. The sense that I was no longer bound by any rules. It was horrible, and it was beautiful. He knew that.

He told me he had been watching a girl, studying her movements. She was a student from out of town, she lived in the Carrassi
neighbourhood, and worked in a pub to pay for her rent and studies in Bari. She went home from work every night, on her own, about one o’clock.

Very soon.

Francesco’s mouth was moving, but the sound of his words was out of sync. And the voice was coming not from him, but from somewhere else, some indefinable point in the room.

We went out without switching off the record player. Jagger’s spectral voice sounded from another world, singing
I just want to see his face
. Percussion, a distant chorus, fog.

I was going to meet my destiny. Once and for all.