But the reply came, as violent as a hurricane across the Caribbean. ‘You bastard. I don’t know why I ever went out with you. I must have been out of my mind. I’d throw myself under a train rather than marry you. You want to know something? You bring bad luck. As soon as you went away I got a job. You’re a jinx. You just wanted to drag me down, you wanted me to come to that lousy dump. Never. I despise you, and everything you represent. The way you dress. The bullshit you talk in that know-all tone of yours. You don’t know anything. You’re just an ageing, failed drug dealer. Get out of my life. If you dare call me again, if you dare come and see me, I swear to God I’ll pay someone to smash your face in. The show’s starting again. Goodbye. Oh, and one last thing, that poof Mantovani has got a bigger one than you.’
And she hung up.
35
At first sight Fig-Tree Cottage might have been mistaken for a junk yard. What created this impression was all the scrap metal piled up around the farmhouse.
An old tractor, a blue Giulietta, a Philco fridge and a doorless Seicento lay rusting among the thistles, chicory and wild fennel on either side of the gate made of two double-bedsprings.
Behind all this was a muddy yard strewn with pot-holes and puddles. To the right was a heap of gravel which Mr Moroni had been given by a neighbour and which no one had ever bothered to spread. To the left, a long shed, supported by tall metal posts, which served as a shelter for the new tractor, the Panda and Mimmo’s motocross bike. In late summer, when it was filled with bales of hay, Pietro would climb up and search for pigeons’ nests among the rafters.
The house was a two-storey cottage, with a red-tiled roof and the wooden beams stripped of their paint by the cold and heat. In many places the plaster had fallen away revealing the bricks, which were green with moss.
The northern side was hidden by a cascade of ivy.
The Moronis lived on the first floor and had converted the loft to make two bedrooms and a bathroom. One bedroom for them, the other for Pietro and his brother Mimmo. On the first floor there was a large kitchen with a fireplace, which also served as a dining room. Behind the kitchen, a pantry. On the ground floor, the storeroom. Here were the tools, the carpentry workshop and a few barrels and casks which were full of oil, when the few olive trees they possessed were not afflicted by some disease.
Everyone called it Fig-Tree Cottage because of the enormous tree that spread its twisted branches over the roof. Hidden behind two cork oaks were the chicken run, the sheep fold and the dog’s enclosure. A long asymmetrical pen made of wood, wire netting, old tyres and corrugated iron.
Among the weeds you could just make out a neglected orchard and a long concrete trough full of stagnant water, reeds, mosquito larvae and tadpoles. Pietro had put some minnows in it that he had caught in the lagoon.
In summer they had a lot of young and he would give them to Gloria, who would put them in her fishpond.
* * *
Pietro left his bicycle beside his brother’s motorbike, ran to the dog’s enclosure and heaved his first sigh of relief that evening.
Zagor was lying on the ground in a corner in the rain. When he saw Pietro, he raised his head listlessly, wagged his tail and then let it fall back again limply between his legs.
He was a big dog, with a large square head, mournful black eyes and somewhat rickety hind legs. According to Mimmo, he was a cross between an Abruzzese sheepdog and a German shepherd. But who could say for sure? Certainly he was as tall as an Abruzzese and had the typical black-and-tan coat of the German shepherd. At any rate, he stank to high heaven and was covered in ticks. And he was absolutely crazy. There was something amiss in the brain of that hairy beast. Maybe it was all the beatings and kicks he had received, maybe it was the chain, maybe it was some hereditary defect. He had been beaten so often that Pietro wondered how he could still stand up and move his tail.
What have you got to wag your tail about?
And he never learned. Not a thing. If you locked him up in his pen at night, he would escape and come crawling back next morning with his tail between his legs, his coat caked in blood and tufts of fur between his teeth.
He loved killing. The smell of blood made him wild and happy. At night he would roam the hills howling and attacking any suitably sized animal: sheep, hens, rabbits, calves, cats, even wild boars.
Pietro had seen the film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on television and had been taken aback. He was just like Zagor. They had the same disease. Angelic in the daytime and monsters by night.
‘Animals like that have got to be put down. Once they’ve tasted blood they become like drug addicts, you can hit them as hard as you like but as soon as they get the chance they’ll escape and do it again, see? Don’t let his eyes fool you, he’s a faker, he seems friendly enough now, but later … And he can’t even keep guard. He’s got to be put down. He’s just too much trouble. I won’t make him suffer,’ Mr Moroni had said, pointing his shotgun at the dog as he lay in a corner, worn out by a night of madness. ‘Look what you’ve done …’
Scattered round the yard were pieces of sheep. Zagor had killed it, dragged it all the way home and then torn it apart. Its head, neck and two front legs were by the barn. Its stomach, guts and other innards were out in the middle, in a pool of clotted blood. With a cloud of flies buzzing around them. And the worst of it was that the sheep was pregnant. The tiny fetus wrapped in its placenta had been hurled to one side. The hind quarters, with half the backbone still attached, protruded from Zagor’s kennel.
‘I’ve already had to pay that bastard Contarello for two sheep. I’ve had enough. Money doesn’t come out of my arse. I’ve got to do it.’
Pietro had started crying, clung to his father’s trousers, pleaded with him desperately not to kill him, saying that he loved Zagor and that he was a good dog, just a little crazy, and that all you had to do was keep him in his enclosure and he would make sure it was locked every night.
Mario Moroni had looked at his son imploring him, clinging round his ankle like an octopus, and something, something weak and soft in his character that he didn’t understand, had made him hesitate.
He had pulled Pietro to his feet and stared at him with those eyes which when they were on you seemed to be peering into your soul. ‘All right. You’re taking on a responsibility. I won’t shoot him. But Zagor’s life depends on you …’
Pietro nodded.
‘Whether he lives or dies depends on you, do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘The first time you forget to put him in his kennel, and he gets out, and he kills so much as a sparrow, he dies.’
‘All right.’
‘But you’ll have to do it. I’ll teach you to shoot and you’ll kill him. Do you accept those terms?’
‘Yes.’ And as Pietro was saying that decisive, grown-up yes, there had passed through his mind a chilling scene which would plant itself there like a stake. Shotgun in hand he approaches Zagor, who wags his tail and barks, urging him to throw a stone for him, and he …
Pietro had always kept his side of the bargain, returning home early, before darkness fell, when Zagor was out.
Or at least he had until that evening.
So when he saw him in his pen, he felt much better.
It must have been Mimmo who put him in.
He went up the steps, opened the front door and entered the little cloakroom that separated the entrance from the kitchen.
He looked at himself in the mirror that hung on the door.
He was a mess.
His hair ruffled and encrusted with mud. His trousers soiled with earth and pee. His shoes ruined. And he had torn his jacket pocket climbing out of the toilet window.
If Papa finds out I’ve torn my new jacket … It didn’t bear thinking about.
He hung his jacket on the coat rack, put his shoes on the shelf and donned his slippers.
He would have to dash up to his room and take off his trousers straight away. He would wash them himself
, in the sink in the garage.
He entered cautiously, not making a sound.
It was pleasantly warm.
The kitchen was in semi-darkness, lit only by the glow of the television and the embers dying in the fire. A smell of tomato sauce, fried meat and, beneath it, something vaguer, less easy to pinpoint: the damp of the walls and the aroma of the salamis hanging by the fridge.
His mother was dozing on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket. Her head resting on the thigh of her husband who, deep in a heavy alcoholic sleep, was sitting beside her with the remote control in his hand. His head lolling over the back of the sofa, his mouth open. His balding brow reflected the blue of the screen. He was snoring. In spasms, alternating pauses with breathing and grunts.
Mario Moroni was fifty-three, small and thin. Although he was practically an alcoholic and ate like a docker, he never put on an ounce of fat. He had a lean, wiry physique and so much strength in his arms that he could lift the share of the big plough on his own. There was something disturbing about his face. Perhaps it was the extraordinarily blue eyes (which Pietro hadn’t inherited), or the colour of his sunbaked skin, or perhaps it was the fact that few emotions appeared on that stony visage. His hair was fine and black, almost blue, and he slicked it back with brilliantine. Strangely, he didn’t have a single grey hair on his head, whereas his beard, which he shaved twice a week, was completely white.
Pietro stood in a corner to warm himself.
His mother hadn’t noticed that he had come home.
Maybe she’s asleep.
Should he wake them up?
No, better not. I’ll go to bed …
Tell them about the terrible thing that had happened to him?
He reflected for a moment and decided against it.
Maybe tomorrow.
He was about to go upstairs to his bedroom, when something he hadn’t noticed before made him stop.
They were sleeping beside one another.
Strange. Those two never came very close together. Like electric wires of opposite valencies which cause a short circuit if they touch. In their room the beds were separated by a bedside cabinet and by day, during the little time his father spent in the house, they were like creatures from two different planets forced by some inscrutable necessity to share life, children and home.
To see them like that made him feel uneasy. It was embarrassing.
Gloria’s parents touched, but that didn’t bother him at all, let alone embarrass him. When her father came home from work, he would put his arms round her mother’s waist and kiss her on the neck and she would smile. Once Pietro had gone into the living room to look for his schoolbag and had found them by the fireside kissing. Their eyes were closed, luckily. He had turned and fled into the kitchen like a mouse.
His mother suddenly sat up and saw him. ‘Oh, you’re back. Thank goodness. Where have you been all this time?’ Then she rubbed her eyes.
‘At Gloria’s. It took longer than I thought.’
‘Your father was cross. He says you must come home earlier. You know that.’ She spoke in a flat tone.
‘It took longer than I thought …
(shall I tell her?)
… we had to finish the project.’
‘Have you had supper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come here.’
Pietro went towards her, the water dripping off him.
‘Look what a mess you’re in. Go and have a wash and get into bed.’
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘Give me a kiss.’
Pietro drew near and his mother hugged him. He would have liked to tell her what had happened, but instead he squeezed her tightly and felt like crying and rained kisses on her neck.
‘What’s the matter? Why all these kisses?’
‘No reason …’
‘You’re soaking wet. Run upstairs or you’ll catch your death of cold.’
‘Okay.’
‘Off you go, then.’ She patted him on the cheek.
‘Good night, Mama.’
‘Good night. Sleep tight.’
After he had washed, Pietro tiptoed into the bedroom in his underpants without switching on the light.
Mimmo was asleep.
The room was quite small. Beside the bunk beds was a small table where Pietro did his homework, a wardrobe made out of hardboard which he shared with Mimmo, a small metal bookcase where he kept, besides his school books, his collection of fossils, sea urchin shells, sun-dried starfish, a mole’s skull, a praying mantis in a jar of formalin, a stuffed owl which Uncle Franco had given him for his birthday and a lot of other nice things that he had found on his walks through the woods. In Mimmo’s bookcase there were a radio-cassette recorder, some cassettes, a pile of Diabolik comics, a few issues of Motorcycling and an electric guitar with its amplifier. On the walls, two posters: one of a motocross bike in mid-air and the other of Iron Maiden, which showed a kind of demon emerging from a grave brandishing a bloody sickle.
Pietro climbed the bunk ladder, holding his breath and trying not to make it creak. He put on his pyjamas and slipped under the blankets.
How good it felt.
Under the blankets the terrible adventure he had just been through seemed far away. Now that he had before him a whole night to sleep on it, that business seemed smaller, less important, not so serious.
If the caretaker had recognised him, then it would.
But he hadn’t.
He had got away and Italo couldn’t have seen who he was. In the first place, he wasn’t wearing his glasses. And secondly he was too far away.
No one would ever find out.
And a grown-up thought, the thought of a person who has experience, not of a child, passed through his brain.
This thing, he said to himself, would pass because in life things always do pass, as in a river. Even the most difficult things which you think you’ll never get over you do get over, and in a trice you find they’re behind you and you have to go on.
New things await you.
He curled up under the blankets. He was worn out, his eyelids felt leaden and he was about to drift off into sleep when his brother’s voice called him back. ‘Pietro, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘No, I was thinking.’
‘Oh …’
‘I’ve got some good news about Alaska.’
36
At this point we had better break off for a moment and talk about Domenico Moroni, known to all as Mimmo.
Mimmo, at the time of this story, was aged twenty (he was eight years older than Pietro) and worked as a shepherd. He tended the small family flock. Thirty-two sheep in all. In his spare time, to earn a few extra lire, he worked for an upholsterer in Casale del Bra. He preferred sheep to sofas and described himself as the only metalhead shepherd in Ischiano Scalo. As indeed he was.
He would stomp across the fields wearing a leather jacket, skintight jeans, a belt studded with silver knobs, huge army boots and a long chain that hung down between his legs. Headphones on his ears and crook in hand.
Physically, Mimmo in many ways resembled his father. He was skinny, like him, though taller, he had the same blue eyes, though without their fixed, sullen expression, and the same raven-black hair, though he wore it long, almost half-way down his back. He had his mother’s mouth, wide and with prominent lips, and a small chin. He was no beauty, and in his metalhead gear he looked even less prepossessing, but it was no use telling him, that was of one his fixations.
Yes, Mimmo had fixations.
They attached themselves to his neurons as limescale does to pipes, making him monomaniacal and, in the long run, boring. So he didn’t have many friends. After a while he wearied even the most patient of people.
His first fixation was Heavy Metal.
‘Only the classic stuff, though.’
For him it was a religion, a philosophy of life, everything. His hero was Ozzy Osbourne, a weirdo with long ha
ir and the brain of a psychopathic teenager. Mimmo worshipped him because at his shows the fans threw him the carcasses of dead animals and he would eat them and once he had swallowed a dead bat and caught rabies and had to have an injection in his stomach. ‘And you know what old Ozzy said? Those injections were worse than having twenty golf balls shoved up your arse …’ Mimmo was fond of repeating.
What he found so great about all this is not clear. But there’s no doubt that he worshipped old Ozzy. He also worshipped Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, and bought as many of their T-shirts as he could find. He didn’t have many of their albums, though. Seven or eight at most, and he seldom listened to them.
Sometimes, when his father was out, he would put on an AC/DC record and jump round the room like a madman with Pietro. ‘Metal! Metal! Mosh! Mosh! Smash things up!’ they would shout at the tops of their voices, and push and shove each other about till they both fell exhausted on the bed.
To tell the truth, Mimmo couldn’t stand that music.
It was too loud (he didn’t mind Richard Clayderman). What he liked about the Heavy Metal singers was the way they looked, the way they lived and the fact that ‘they’re outsiders, they don’t give a fuck about anything, they can’t even play the guitar and yet they have loads of women, motorbikes, make pots of money and smash things up. Man, they’re cool …’
His second fixation was motocross bikes.
He knew the motorbike yearbook by heart. The makes, the models, the engine capacities, the prices. With an enormous effort and with savings that had made him a virtual ascetic for two years, he had bought a secondhand KTM 300. An old two-stroke that guzzled petrol and broke down every day. With all the money he had spent on spare parts he could have bought three brand new motorbikes. He had even entered a couple of races. A disaster. The first time he had broken the fork, the second his tibia.
His third fixation was Patrizia Loria. Patti. His girlfriend. ‘Definitely the most beautiful girl in Ischiano Scalo.’ In some ways it was hard to disagree with him. Patti had a fantastic figure. Tall, curvy and in particular ‘a bum that doesn’t just talk, it sings’. All perfectly true.