‘What were you thinking about, then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You were thinking about when the dentist goes to see your mother … “Mrs Ponticelli, your daughter’s got a piercing in her tongue” …
How you love it when my parents give me a hard time! ‘Oh come on, doctors have a professional obligation to respect their patients’ privacy.’
Esmeralda raised her eyes from the cigarette paper and goggled at her. ‘Are you crazy? The dentist?’
‘It’s true. They take an oath … I know they do …’
‘Oh sure, the Xenophontic oath. Yeah, sure … Listen, take my advice … Don’t go to the dentist’s. Stay here. If I were you I wouldn’t give a damn about the Turd and your mother … They boss you about, they treat you like an imbecile. Stand on your own two feet for once in your life.’
Fabiana got off the bed.
Esmeralda had given her the strength to go home. She started nervously searching for her clothes among the debris scattered on the floor.
‘You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take it out before I go to the dentist’s.’ She would have liked to add that she didn’t like it anyway, in fact she loathed it, and that really it was just a nightmare, especially since someone had told her a piercing on your tongue gave you a tic, so that for the rest of your life you looked like a ruminating camel.
‘That’d be a big mistake, I warn you … Remember what James said – if you take it out the hole will close up immediately.’ Esmeralda sealed the joint with a deft flick of her tongue.
Fabiana put on her T-shirt. ‘I’d just take it out during the checkup …’
Esmeralda lit the joint and blew out a white cloud. ‘That’s plenty long enough. The mucous membranes heal up instantly! And don’t think I’m going to put it back in for you.’
Fabiana didn’t reply. She finished dressing and glanced at her reflection in a long mirror framed by photos of Christina Aguilera and Johnny Depp. She had bloodshot eyes and dry lips, like Regan, the girl in The Exorcist. She ran her fingers through her hair and touched up her lipstick. ‘Okay, I’m off.’
Esmeralda held out the joint to Fabiana. ‘At least let’s have a goodnight puff.’
‘No, I’m too spaced out. I can hardly stand up. I’m going.’
‘Oh come on, Fabi, you know it’s bad luck to smoke a joint on your own,’ said Esmeralda in the voice of a sad little child.
‘I’ve got to go …’
She seized her hand. ‘You’re cross with me, aren’t you, because of what I said about the dentist?’
‘No, it’s just that I’ve got to go.’
Esmeralda lowered her black eyes and then raised them again. ‘I’m sorry, Fabi.’
‘What for?’
‘You know … It’ll be all right, you’ll see. The worst that can happen is that your mother will make a scene at the dentist’s … Don’t worry.’
Fabiana realised that her anger had evaporated. Esmeralda only had to look at her like that and she’d melt like a little idiot. ‘Okay, but then I really must go.’
‘I love you!’ Esmeralda jumped to her feet, planted a kiss on her lips and hugged her tight and then said: ‘But we’ve got to make this a good one. Pass me the bottle of Uliveto and a pen.’
71
That imbecile Quattro Formaggi was more than half an hour late.
Danilo paced around the room in galoshes, a blue windcheater, a scarf and a woolly hat, repeating over and over again like a cracked record: ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it! Where the hell has he got to?’
He had already tried calling him six times on his mobile but every time the fucking number had been unobtainable.
‘What a stupid bastard …’ muttered Danilo, collapsing in a heap on the sofa. ‘It’s impossible to work with people like this. Turn on your mobile, you fool!’
He poured himself his fourth (was it his fourth or his fifth?) glass of grappa and tossed it back with a grimace.
Maybe he should call Rino and tell him Quattro Formaggi was behind schedule, that he must have got lost somewhere.
But Rino would hit the roof.
And this evening there was no room for rages.
They had to be a united, close-knit, focused team.
But how do you form a close-knit, focused team with a hysterical lunatic and the village idiot?
He was about to pour himself another glass, but decided against it.
I’d get drunk …
He closed his eyes, trying to calm himself.
‘He’ll be here any minute. He’ll be here any minute. He’ll …’ he started repeating like a mantra. ‘If he isn’t here in a quarter of an hour I swear I’ll kill him.’ He forced himself to be silent and heard the fury of the storm swirling round the house and, below, the canal surging, swollen with water.
72
There, finished.
All the inhabitants of the crib were back on their feet and the bridge had been repaired. This made him feel much calmer. But that bridge had been worrying him for some time and sooner or later he was going to have to build a new one, bigger and stronger, with at least a three-lane road across it.
Quattro Formaggi put on his waterproof trousers and checked for the umpteenth time to see whether he’d missed anything.
The next morning, first of all he would tidy up the hill, and while he was about it he could make it into a mountain, a high, rocky one. He could go down to the river and get a few large stones from the beach and it would be perfect.
Lots of animals live on rocks.
The … He couldn’t remember what they were called. The what-do-you-call-ems. Those things with long horns that jump.
‘Steinbock,’ he said, pulling on his rubber boots. He put on his balaclava and over it his green full-face helmet.
He picked up his yellow cape, but didn’t put it on.
Danilo had told him not to wear it because it could be seen from kilometres away.
But who’s going to be out in this weather?
He put it on.
He had no desire to go out. He would have been happy to stay at home, working on the crib.
Did they have to do the robbery that evening, of all evenings? In all that rain?
He turned off the television just as Ramona was coming out of the house stark naked, meeting Bob the lumberjack and saying to him: ‘Get out your joystick and let’s have some fun.’
‘Snap out of it. Go,’ he ordered himself. He put on his gloves and left the flat.
73
Cristiano Zena was in bed, buried under three layers of blankets, listening to the storm. If he closed his eyes he felt as if he was in a bunk on an ocean-going liner in the middle of a hurricane. The rain drummed against the window panes, and the frames creaked, pushed by the wind. A trickle of water was running down from the windowsill into the room and in one corner of the ceiling a dark patch had spread and every one, two, three, four, five seconds a drip fell making a loud PLIC.
He would have liked to get up and put a bucket there and roll up a cloth and lay it along the windowsill to stop the rain, but he was so sleepy …
74
Fabiana Ponticelli staggered out of Esmeralda’s room. She stood in the hall in the half-light, trying to muster the strength to face the storm. The last joint had finished her off.
I’m going to throw up.
To her left, on a long dresser, she saw the silhouettes of four Chinese vases and for a moment she thought of vomiting in one of them.
Swaying and putting her hands on the walls lined with old Arabian carpets and shelves full of books, she advanced towards the exit. The front door, at the end of the hall, was illuminated by a patch of reddish light that came from the sitting room.
Please God, don’t let Esmeralda’s mother be there … If she sees me in this state …
Over the past year Serena Guerra had caught her in even more disastrous situations than this one, embracing the toilet bowl or comatose on the bed
.
That time we dropped acid and …
But now, with the paranoia that had taken hold of her, Fabiana didn’t think she was even capable of saying ‘goodnight’.
Walk straight past, quickly, don’t stop, don’t look into the sitting room, open the door and go out.
She closed her rainproof jacket more tightly, put up the hood, took a breath and headed for the door as boldly as a hussar on parade, but when she was outside the sitting room door she took a quick glance inside.
Serena Guerra was lying on the floor on a coconut mat, leafing through a big book of photographs.
The room was lit by the weak glow of the fire that was dying on the hearth and by a dozen candles on a chest made of red wood. On an old sofa, muffled up in blankets and with a funny woollen hat on his head, little Mattia was sleeping with his mouth open.
Even in her present delicate mental and physical state, Fabiana couldn’t help being flabbergasted for the millionth time at the resemblance between mother and daughter.
The first time she had seen Esmeralda and Serena together she had been lost for words. The same straight brown hair, the same oval face. Same eyes, same shaped lips, same everything. Except that Serena was an extra-small version of Esmeralda. There was a good ten centimetres’ difference between them. On her arms and shoulders the mother was a trifle more muscular, she had a fairer complexion, a slightly irregular nose and gentler, more liquid eyes. A certain angularity in the daughter’s features was, as it were, smoothed out in the mother.
Serena must be about forty but looked much younger. She could easily have passed for thirty.
Fabiana found her dress sense excellent. That evening she was wearing a pair of low-waisted Levi’s, Texan boots and a coarse woollen cardigan with geometric patterns, and she had gathered her hair into a mass of little plaits.
A few days earlier, in a condition not dissimilar from her present one, Fabiana had met Esmeralda’s mother and they had had a chat. Serena knew how to put you at your ease, she talked to you like an adult and listened to you. Only, that evening she’d looked at her for a little longer than usual and then asked her: ‘Don’t you think you two are overdoing the pot?’
Fabiana, like a dog that has just crapped on the carpet, had squatted down against the wall and with a smile that had nearly dislocated her jaw had said, in the falsest of tones: ‘What? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t you think you’re overdoing the pot?’
She had opened her mouth and hoped that some meaningful sentiment would come out, but none had, so she had closed it again and shaken her head.
‘I know … it’s your business and I’m sure … well, I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to keep it under control. But with pot it’s easy to get carried away … Then it gets difficult to concentrate at school … Look, I’m sorry to be a bore … I don’t usually do this.’
It’s a terrible effort for her to say this to me, Fabiana had thought.
‘I’m a bit worried, if you want to know the truth. It’s impossible to talk to Esmeralda at the moment … She’s always angry, as if I’d done something terrible to her. She answers me so aggressively, it frightens me … All I’m saying is that if you smoke too much pot you become isolated and the world begins to seem small and stifling … Maybe you should both try to get out more, not to keep to yourselves all the time, shut up in that …’
Fabiana had gazed at her open-mouthed in wonder, like a child watching a chameleon change colour.
The small, stifling world.
That was it. Esmeralda’s mother had put her finger on a problem she had been aware of for some time, the reason she felt so dissatisfied.
A small, stifling world. Which you must escape from as soon as you finish school. You must go to America, Rome, Milan, wherever you like, but you’ve got to get away from this small, stifling village.
Why was that sensitive, beautiful creature standing in front of her Esmeralda’s mother, not hers? Why was she so unfortunate as to be the daughter of a woman who was about as open-minded as a cloistered nun and who spent her whole life repeating the refrain that papa was having a hard time at work and that they must do all they could to make his life easier?
What about me? Don’t I exist? No, as far as my mother is concerned I don’t. Or rather, I exist because I’m part of the Ponticelli family, so I must be Good, Nice and Beautiful.
Isn’t that a wonderful thing, a mother who tells you that if you get stoned out of your mind it’s none of her business?
When her mother had discovered a minute quantity of marijuana in the pocket of her trousers, she had first pretended to have a fainting fit, then she’d taken her to speak to Beppe Trecca, the social worker, then she’d tried to send her to boarding school in Switzerland. And if it hadn’t been for the tight-fistedness of the Turd, by this time she’d be locked away in some paramilitary college in Lugano.
And the most ridiculous thing of all, which really upset her, was that Esmeralda didn’t realise how lucky she was to have a mother like that. She would answer her rudely on principle. Raise her eyes to the sky. Snort with exasperation.
For a moment, hidden in the shadow, Fabiana was uncertain whether to ask Serena to give her a lift home. But it was better to face the rain than show herself in that state.
With the furtive lightness of Eva Kant, Fabiana Ponticelli turned the key in the lock and went out into the storm.
75
Danilo was holding the receiver in two hands like an iron mace. ‘How the hell can I keep calm, Rino? You tell me! That idiot has disappeared! We’re way behind sche …’
‘He’ll be there. Keep calm! And behind what schedule, anyway? What difference does it make whether we get there a bit sooner or a bit later?’ replied Rino, yawning.
Pure hydrochloric acid was bubbling inside the walls of Danilo Aprea’s stomach. He made a superhuman effort not to start shouting so loud he would burst a blood vessel. He must keep calm. Very calm. He swallowed the bile that was stinging his oesophagus and piped: ‘What do you mean, behind what schedule? Please, Rino, don’t be like this …’
‘Don’t be like what? Have you seen what it’s like outside? How are we going to get to the tractor? Swimming? Let’s wait for the storm to ease off, then we’ll see.’
Danilo inhaled and exhaled, puffing out his cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie.
‘What are you doing? Having an asthma attack?’ asked Rino.
‘Nothing. Nothing. You’re right. As always, you’re right. We’ll wait.’
Pure hatred.
It was that placid tone of Rino’s, that air of a know-it-all God Almighty who remained calm even when the Martians were invading the Earth, that drove Danilo wild with rage. How he would have loved to plunge a dagger in his heart. A hundred, a thousand times, shouting: ‘So you know everything, do you? Yes, you’re perfectly right, you know everything!’
‘That’s the way. You’ve got to relax. I’ll wait for you here, we need to talk.’ And Rino hung up without even saying goodbye.
‘Talk? Talk about what?’ Danilo shouted. He seized the remote control and hurled it against the wall, smashing it to pieces, then started jumping up and down on it.
76
The dark sky was hammering down on Quattro Formaggi and his Boxer. Gusts of wind and rain buffeted him this way and that, and it was a struggle to keep the scooter on line.
The rush of the torrents that flowed down the roadside and the gurgle of the drains vomiting out streams of brown water merged into a fearful roar inside his helmet..
It was impossible to see anything and Quattro Formaggi was making his way towards Danilo’s house from memory.
The wind had uprooted a row of trees from the pavement and thrown them into the middle of the road. A big pine had fallen on a car, smashing its windscreen.
What was this, the storm of the century?
The next day all the television news bulletins would talk of rivers in spate, floods, collapsed buildings,
damage to agriculture, compensation. And while the downpour lashed the plain, a gang had carried off the cash machine from the Credito Italiano dell’Agricoltura.
As well as being rich we’ll be in all the papers …
Over the past few days Quattro Formaggi had tried to imagine what he would do with all that money. The only idea he had come up with was buying some more clay to build a big castle and an electric train complete with points, level crossings and stations to link up the south and north of the crib. Journeys were very complicated now with all those mountains, lakes and rivers, and having a railway at their disposal would help the inhabitants of the crib no end.
What if I put in a …
What was the name of that box hanging from a wire which people who went skiing used for going up mountains? He didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. In the toyshop in the shopping mall he had seen a fantastic one. With two cabins made of green tin with black roofs, and skiers inside them and an electric motor that made it really work.
It could take people straight to Baby Jesus’s cave instead of them having to go all that way on foot …
He was already imagining his ski lift going up and down when, beyond the rain-streaked visor of his helmet, there appeared in the distance a red gleam in the middle of the road.
It looked like the rear light of a scooter.
77
In the camper Beppe Trecca, sitting on the little sofa, had eaten the won tons, which with the cold had taken on the consistency of chewed-up Hubba Bubba. To warm himself up he had drunk a little melon vodka and wrapped himself in all the blankets he could find.
Let’s face it, Ida will never come.
Mario had arrived home. She would have to wait till he went to sleep and then sneak out secretly. It was madness.
But if Ida was willing to take such a risk she must be madly in love with him. And that made him feel very good.
Certainly, it might be better to put it off to another day.