Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
The huge man looked at the watch on his wrist – it was a solid gold Vacheron, almost as big as an alarm clock, but very flat – the watch said 10.37 and after seeing the time he passed a hand through his hair, or rather, through that
black helmet, at least four centimetres high, that natural helmet that constituted his main claim to beauty, or so he thought, even though the expression did not match his little eyes bordered on the north by his heavy eyebrows and on the south by his vast, mountainous cheekbones. However, something must have happened inside him, as a result of looking at the time, because he jumped down from the cash desk, the cigarette now only half visible, as if it had vanished between his thumb and index finger, and went and looked through the pane of glass into the cold room.
He saw the usual quarter of beef poleaxed by the cold, the only piece of meat left there since, as a sign of mourning – or something else? – Ulrico Brambilla had closed up the shop and sent the butcher’s boy on holiday, and then, as usual, he saw Ulrico Brambilla’s bare feet, and then all the rest of his naked body, lying on the floor, all the way up to his face, or what had once been his face. The only way you could deduce now that it was a face was because it was above the neck, and still attached to the neck, but you had the impression the bison’s fists had modified even its geometrical configuration, the bloodstained ears had been attached to the temples, the nose was only a huge swelling and the mouth like a clown’s, going from one cheek to the other. One of Ulrico Brambilla’s arms was lying on the floor in an inverted position, in fact it was broken, it had been broken almost an hour earlier, by a simple pressure of the bison’s hands, it doesn’t take much force, when you come down to it, to break an arm, even one as strong and robust as Ulrico Brambilla’s, you just know have to know where to apply that force, and that was something he knew well.
Ulrico Brambilla was breathing and quivering: that gave the man a certain sense of pleasure, and his face with its purple beard relaxed a little with the pleasure, then he
stopped looking through the pane of glass, went to the end of the workbench, where there were hooks, from one of which hung a white jacket, the kind that butchers use for their work, and on another hook was hanging a white apron, or what had once been white, now it was all stained, and he put on the jacket and the apron that reached down to his calves, carefully placing his sky-blue jacket over the handle of the glass door, beyond which was the lowered shutter, then retraced his steps, and abruptly opened the door to the cold room.
Ulrico Brambilla looked at him, he couldn’t see him well because of all the congealed blood around his eyes, but he saw him, and fainted: he had once been a young stud, the Scarlet Pimpernel, he had been strong too, and killed oxen with a single blow of his big knife, during the war, when he had had to do his butchering clandestinely, but now he had met not so much a man as a stone breaking machine, and the mere sight of him at that moment was worse than a hammer blow.
The man took Ulrico Brambilla by one calf, and dragged him out of the cold room, dragged him over the white tiled floor, which was usually so clean but was now stained with Brambilla’s blood. Then he took the little stool from behind the cash desk, moved it closer to that stiff, quivering body, sat down and said, ‘Have you changed your mind? Are you going to tell me the truth?’ Talking to a man who has fainted, you can’t really except an answer, but he was suspicious, he did not believe he had fainted, let alone that he was dying, a man might pretend to have fainted or to be dying in order to trick you, but he wouldn’t let anyone trick him and he gave him a slap on the stomach. Given the weight of the hand and the force of the blow, the only result he obtained was a spurt of blood from the mouth.
At this point he realised he was making a mistake, if he killed him he wouldn’t get what he wanted. He lit a cigarette, and the smoke flew up towards the lights, the six small ones in the shop. He smoked almost half the cigarette, then threw it away, flicking it through the air with his thumb and index finger as he had been taught at whatever school of good manners he had attended, took Ulrico Brambilla by the armpits, lifted him into a sitting position and propped him against the wall.
He waited, but nothing happened. ‘Don’t play dead, you’re not fooling me.’
No reply.
‘I know you’re not dead, you’re only taking a breather, and then you’re going to pull some trick, but you won’t catch me.’ He spoke with a strong accent from the countryside around Brescia. ‘Open your eyes and talk. Tell me how you killed Turiddu.’
No reply: the hairy body of this man who had once been a young stud was perfectly still, with what the Nazi doctors had established in their experiments on the Jews as the stiffness of environmental thermal collapse. In the cold room it was only seven or eight degrees below zero, because that was enough for the normal preservation of meat, and a physique like Ulrico Brambilla’s had withstood that modest degree of cold very well, but the bison had not reckoned with the fact that all the blows he had taken had affected Ulrico Brambilla’s sensitivity, causing thermal collapse. The only method of re-establishing thermal balance and reviving sensitivity, or at least the quickest, most efficient method, as had been demonstrated by the experiments carried out by Nazi doctors in the extermination camps, was that of animal warmth through sex with a woman: the Jew who had been exposed, naked, for four hours to a temperature of fifteen
degrees below zero, was revived, if he was not already dead, by the warmth of a girl, also Jewish to avoid any undesirable mixing of the races, and once he had regained enough strength to feel desire and had achieved an orgasm his thermal balance was re-established and if his heart was strong he recovered. This was why, during the war, when a German pilot fell into icy waters and remained immersed for a few hours before being rescued, the Luftwaffe were recommended to perform this so-called animal thermal therapy.
But the bison did not know these things. This man was playing dead, and he would show him that nobody had ever fooled him. ‘Now let’s see if you’re dead,’ he said. He lifted him again by the armpits and dragged him to the end of the workbench, keeping him more or less on his feet, until they reached the slim, geometrically harmonious machine that was used to saw bones.
The principle of the bone saw is very simple: it is a serrated steel band wound around two spools, almost like a film projector. Part of the band remains exposed for a length of thirty or forty centimetres, and when a bone is pushed against the serrated edge of the band as it rotates at high speed, the bone is neatly severed. It is also used to carve the bones of large Florentine chops, which are then cut further with a little hatchet, or in any situation where a butcher needs to divide a bone into two or three pieces.
‘Now we’ll see if you’re dead.’ He put the plug in the socket and moved the thumb of Ulrico Brambilla’s right hand closer to the sawing band, which had started moving very quickly. ‘If you don’t tell me where you put the two hundred sachets of M6 and how you killed Turiddu, you’re going to lose this thumb.’
No reply. Ulrico Brambilla had opened his eyes a little, but could not see, could not hear, and gave only an
imperceptible start – only his body, not his soul – when his thumb was neatly severed.
‘Tell me where you put the M6. You killed Turiddu to get it from him, didn’t you? Tell me where it is, because otherwise the second thumb is going.’
No reply. The thermal collapse had taken away all sensitivity, and had left only a small light in the crypt of his personality, a final vestige of memory, wandering amid the wreck that had been made of him, a single memory, as he stood there, worse than dead, supported under the armpits by his pitiless enemy in front of the angrily advancing band, a single memory: Giovanna’s coloured nails, Giovanna’s hand with the silver nails caressing his chest, Giovanna with nails each a different colour, the highly aphrodisiac smell of nail varnish and nail polish remover in the hotel room, those beautiful hands dancing in front of his eyes and then over his body, Giovanna was a virgin, she was a whore, but she was a virgin, and so to the wreck of his memory was added another wreck, in the last moments of his death agony, not a memory, but an image of the future: what would have been, if it had happened, his wedding night with Giovanna, after flooding Romano Banco with carnations and devouring the monumental cake, taking her virginity, hearing her scream, and her nails still painted each a different colour.
‘You think you can make a fool of me, do you? Want to play dead, do you? Well, I’ll make you play dead for real.’
He still didn’t hear him, but he opened his eyes again, and this time, in a final flash, his pupils saw: he saw the band of the machine that he knew so well coming closer to his forehead, to his nose, to the bloodstained rosette of his mouth, to cut his face in two exact halves. He did not close his eyes, even though he was horrorstruck, but the flash in his pupils was gone.
‘Now die for real, let me show you how it’s done.’
The band squealed more loudly, more shrilly. It seemed to hesitate, as if refusing, even though it was an inanimate machine without a soul, to carry out that task, but in the end it did carry it out after all. ‘That’ll teach you.’
Duca stood up. ‘So, if your friend is in Ca’ Tarino, in Ulrico’s butcher’s shop, I want you to take me to where your friend is, and if your friend does turn out to be there, I’ll let you go.’
‘He is there, unfortunately.’
‘Then you’ll be able to go free.’
‘With the Opel?’
‘Of course, we don’t need it. We’re not looking for a car.’
She also stood up and drank a little more Sambuca. ‘I really want to see if those filthy bastards are capable of keeping the truth.’ She should have said
keeping their word,
but even in the depths of her vulgarity, the romantic word
truth
had an attraction greater than linguistic accuracy.
He did not pick her up on that vulgar phrase she liked repeating. ‘Make sure you don’t try and trick us,’ he said. ‘My friend will follow us in his car and he’s armed.’
She had clearly understood. She drank some more Sambuca, shrugged, and passed a hand over the swelling on her cheek, but with everything she had drunk she no longer felt any pain. ‘Too late,’ she said, obscurely. Was it a threat? Or did it only mean that at this point deception was pointless?
Outside, Duca made her get in behind the wheel of the Opel. ‘You drive, I don’t like driving.’
She looked at him uncertainly. Was he joking?
Duca signalled to Mascaranti to approach. ‘The young
lady is taking us to see a friend of hers,’ he said to him. ‘Please follow us.’
‘Yes, Dr Lamberti,’ said the spirit of obedience.
They left. Never had Milan had such a lyrical, d’Annunzian
11
spring as that spring of the year 1966. The wind, a mild but impetuous wind, blew over the flat, industrious metropolis as if over a green, undulating, flower-bedecked Swiss plateau and, unable to bend the tall grass of the meadows at its caress as there wasn’t any tall grass, it enveloped and lifted and caressed the skirts of the women, gently ruffled the sparse hair of the half-bald workers and the long hair of the youngsters, stirred the long tablecloths on the café terraces, obliged the various Rossis and Ghezzis and Ghiringhellis and Bernasconis who were wearing hats to hold them down firmly on their heads with their left hands, and all that was missing were the butterflies, big white and yellow butterflies, but butterflies are not suited to Milan, he thought, they are too frivolous, maybe in the Via Montenapoleone, but not even there, they would be a bit art nouveau, and art nouveau was out of fashion. ‘Go slower,’ he said to the woman at the wheel of the Opel: according to her passport her name was Margherita, but it was jarring to call a woman like that Margherita, ‘I don’t like going too fast.’
Obediently, she slowed down.
‘What’s your friend’s name?’ he asked, nonchalantly, as if just trying to make conversation.
‘Claudino,’ she said.
‘The surname,’ he said. He didn’t like diminutives, he wanted to know the real name, not the pet name women called him.
‘Claudino Valtraga,’ she replied conscientiously: she had understood which side her bread was buttered. She smiled as
she drove skilfully around the Piazza Cinque Giornate. ‘But they call him Claudino because he’s very tall and well-built, he always goes around in a car because when he’s on foot people turn to look at him. Everybody calls him Claudino.’
So Claudio Valtraga was tall and well-built: good. ‘Where is he from?’
She smiled again, extracting herself from the tangle of cars that were trying to get out of the Piazza Cinque Giornate. ‘I don’t remember, he took me to his village once, it’s not far from Brescia, somewhere up in the mountains, but I can’t remember the name, it was such a small village it only had one bar, his grandfather still lived there, as tall and well-built as he is, but his father and mother were dead, it was so cold that day.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Thirty-three,’ she said, then: ‘Can we stop at a bar? I need a pick-me-up.’
The lioness seemed to have grown weaker. ‘If you like,’ he said: he wasn’t in any hurry, it was only two minutes past eleven on a gorgeous May day, and when you came down to it he needed a pick-me-up too. ‘But don’t try anything, or it’ll be all over for you.’
In the Viale Sabotino she managed to find a cheap drinking hole, more of a tavern than a bar. Their entrance, and especially her entrance, in black and white, with those cowboy-style trousers that clung to her thighs like gloves to fingers, was greeted with a salvo of glances: even the two drunks sitting just under the television set, clearly regulars, seemed to wake from their stupor and stared with watery eyes at the brown lioness, her thighs, her eye-catching mandolin-shaped bottom, and even the young woman behind the counter stared at her, if not with envy, with nostalgia, as if there was a vague desire in her to wear those black
trousers, that white jacket with the big button in the middle dividing her breasts, and those white boots. There was nothing drinkable, apart from anisette for her, and for him some kind of white wine poured from a little fountain with four spouts, and, partly because of the anisette and partly because of those itchy male eyes which swept over her like the wind and which she probably liked, she became a lioness again. ‘Even if you arrest me and Claudino, we’ll be out again in a few months, we have friends.’