The Crossroads

  A sour yellow stream gushed out of his mouth without warning. Rino only partly managed to get it into the toilet; the rest spattered over the tiles.

  He sat down on the bidet, exhausted, with the reek of vomit around him.

  As he sat there with the toilet spinning round and round like the drum of a washing machine, he remembered how in his childhood Castardin’s furniture factory and all the other buildings hadn’t been there. Back then the highway had been a rough, narrow road with poplars and weeds along the sides, not much wider than a country track. All around, there had been nothing but cultivated fields.

  Not far from where their house now stood had been the Trattoria Arcobaleno, a little restaurant which specialised in polenta, kid and freshwater fish.

  And on the site now occupied by Castardin’s furniture factory there had been an old farmhouse, one of those square, barrack-like buildings, with a tiled roof, a large shed and a farmyard full of geese and chickens. It had been the home of Roberto Colombo and his family.

  On a large tree by the roadside Roberto had put up a notice:

  MOTOR WORKSHOP

  LORRIES, RACTORS AND CARS REPAIRED

  ITALIAN AND FOREIGN MAKES

  And from a branch of the same tree there had hung a swing on which Rino used to go and play with Colombo’s daughter.

  From his parents’ house, down by the river, it took half an hour to get there on foot. But half an hour’s walk was nothing in those days.

  What was her name? Alberta? Antonia?

  Someone had told him she had got married and now lived in Milan.

  One day, while she was sailing back and forth on the swing and he was trying to catch a glimpse of her knickers, her father had arrived.

  Sitting on the bidet, Rino couldn’t help smiling.

  He had never once seen Roberto Colombo dressed in anything but blue overalls, a red bandanna and a ridiculous pair of moccasins made of interwoven leather threads. He was short and stocky and wore glasses so thick his eyes looked like two pinpoints.

  ‘How old are you, son?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Eleven years old and you’re still playing games like a snotty-nosed kid? Your father’s dead and all you can do is peek at my daughter’s knickers?’

  Half-blind as he was, it was a mystery how he had managed to see that.

  Colombo had looked Rino over as you might appraise a horse at a fair. ‘You’re as skinny as a stray dog, but you’re sturdy. A bit of hard work might help develop your muscles.’

  So he had taken him on at his workshop. The job was simple: he had to make the cars shine as bright as the day they had left the factory. Outside and inside.

  ‘It won’t make you rich, but you’ll earn enough to buy yourself a pair of decent shoes and to help your mother, who finds it a struggle to make ends meet.’

  So Rino had started going to the workshop every day after school, and, armed with pump and sponge, had earned the first money of his life.

  At five o’clock the girl would bring him a sandwich and a meatball with raisins.

  Rino tried to get to his feet, but failed. He wanted to open the window to let in some fresh air.

  A swirl of images wrapped around him like a warm blanket. Him and the girl together. Marriage. Children. The workshop. Working there with Cristiano.

  What wonderful times those had been! Everything was so simple. It was easy to find a job. There weren’t all these bloody laws about working practices and no trade unions to fuck you about. If you had the skill and the will you worked, if you didn’t you were out on your ear. End of alternatives.

  Respect for those who deserved it.

  Then one day Rino had arrived to find Colombo shutting up shop. A certain Castardin had appeared out of nowhere and bought up the farmhouse and all the land around it. Even the Trattoria Arcobaleno.

  ‘They’ve opened some new workshops in Varrano. They’re as big as factories. Nobody comes this way any more … It’s a good offer.’

  End of story.

  ‘Good offer my foot,’ muttered Rino, getting to his feet. ‘The poor gullible prick.’

  6

  The furniture factory was twenty metres away. Bathed in the glow of halogen lights, it stood out in the night like a lunar base. The fence was high and there were coils of barbed wire along the top.

  ‘Shit. The barbed wire.’

  They had put it up some time ago, after thieves had broken in one night.

  A mechanical noise mingled with the barks. A truck.

  Cristiano switched off the torch, squatted down and waited for it to pass. It had yellow headlights and was clearing the snow.

  Maybe school will be cancelled tomorrow. Great!

  When the truck had moved far enough away, Cristiano walked the last few metres and stopped behind the factory.

  The dog was barking even louder now, if that was possible. But he couldn’t see it from there.

  Cristiano couldn’t remember whether they let him off his chain at night, though he had been past the factory very late sometimes.

  He jumped up and down to get the feeling back into his feet, which were like blocks of wood. ‘I hate you! Why do you do this to me?’ He bit his hand to stop himself screaming with rage. He felt a lump in his throat and it hurt as if he’d swallowed a shard of glass.

  I’ve had enough. It’s fucking cold … I’m going home. He took three steps, kicking at the snow, but then stopped.

  Going home was not an option.

  He walked round the perimeter of the fence, looking for the best place to climb up.

  All the while the dog kept barking in the same monotonous way.

  Near one of the posts that supported the wire netting the loops of barbed wire weren’t so big.

  He grabbed hold of the post, put the toes of his boots into the mesh and reached the top without difficulty. Now he had to avoid getting stuck on the barbed wire. Calmly he put over first one leg and then the other, and, holding his breath, jumped down. He landed in the carpentry area.

  He took out the pistol, released the safety catch and primed the gun.

  He knew very well how to use it.

  His father had taught him how to shoot in a scrapyard. At first he hadn’t been able to hold his aim; his arm had shaken as if he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. But constant shooting at car windows, rear-view mirrors, rats and seagulls had taught him that it was all a matter of posture and breathing.

  ‘It’s like squatting over a hole-in-the-ground toilet,’ Rino had told him.

  Legs apart, backside slightly protruding, arms outstretched but not too stiff. Gun in line with your eyes. And the way you breathed was crucial. You had to put the tip of your tongue against your bottom teeth, breathe out through your nose and, as your stomach deflated, count up to four and then shoot.

  He looked around. No one in sight. The mongrel was barking away on the other side of the building.

  If he approached slowly he would have a good chance of getting close enough to take aim at him. The snow would muffle his footsteps and the stupid mutt was so busy barking he wouldn’t notice he was about to be dispatched to doggy paradise.

  If it did go for him he would have to be cool enough to stop, crouch and take aim as it ran towards him.

  He moved forward in a squatting position, quelling his desire to run, till he came to a pile of planks. They formed a long block more than four metres high which stretched out to the end of the yard, a few metres short of the highway. Cristiano climbed up, putting his feet between the planks and gripping their ice-cold edges with his hands. When he was on top he realised that there was a gap of about a metre between one pile and the next. Like between the carriages of a train.

  From where he stood he could see a segment of the deserted car park, and the children’s playground, with the roundabout and its dwarves, the swings glowing white in the lamplight, and the lampposts themselves with their glass globes emanating milky spheres.

  No sign of the dog.


  Crawling along the wet planks on his hands and knees, he reached the end of the first pile. He steeled himself and jumped; the planks rose and fell with a tremendous clatter. From where he landed he could see the other side of the car park, and three vans emblazoned with the words:

  CASTARDIN & CO. FURNITURE LTD.

  HIGH QUALITY, LOW COST

  He couldn’t see the dog, though. And yet he must be very near. Or was all that barking just a recording?

  Then he saw, about thirty metres away, a dark shape on the ground. Near the long entrance gate. Half-covered in snow … From that distance it looked like an overcoat.

  Cristiano moved closer, crawling over the planks.

  The thing on the ground was moving. Only slightly. But it was moving.

  And he understood.

  The stupid beast had got himself tangled up in the long chain that was supposed to enable him to move around the perimeter of the building. Now and then he raised his head.

  That’s why he’s barking so much.

  The stupid great mutt.

  Shooting him from there would be child’s play. Even if he didn’t kill him first shot, the dog wouldn’t be able to move, and he would certainly send him to his maker with the second.

  He’s barking because he can’t move. I could set him free, then he would stop barking.

  No, he must kill him, because the truth was that his father didn’t give a damn whether the dog barked or not. He hated Castardin, so the dog had to die.

  Period.

  7

  That was precisely how things were.

  Rino Zena hated old Castardin with the same devout intensity with which a Cistercian monk loves his Lord.

  ‘It’s in my character. If you cross me just once, you’ve finished with me for good and I’ll always be out to get you. Okay, I may have a shitty character, but it’s the one I was born with. It’s easy to get on with me: just don’t fuck me around and everything will be fine.’ Such was the reply that Rino would give to anyone who gently tried to suggest to him that he might be a trifle touchy.

  A few years before this story, Rino Zena had been taken on at the factory as a transporter of furniture.

  He was paid in cash and earned more from tips than from the pittance he got from Castardin.

  Things had gone reasonably well, with Rino grumbling to anyone who cared to listen that he was treated like dirt, until the day old Castardin in person had phoned to ask him to take the furniture for a children’s bedroom to the home of Councillor Arosio.

  ‘Please, Zena, be on your best behaviour. There’s no one else I can send; they’re all out doing deliveries. Arosio is an important customer. Cover up those tattoos or you’ll frighten the children. And speak as little as possible.’

  Rino had glared at him and loaded the furniture onto the van.

  Councillor Arosio was another guy Rino couldn’t stand. He was the shithead who had closed Varrano’s main street to traffic. So even if you had to deliver the space shuttle the traffic police wouldn’t let you through.

  When he had reached the house he had learned that the councillor’s flat was on the third floor and that the porter wouldn’t let the lift be used for carrying heavy loads: ‘I would let you, but if you used it I’d have to let everyone else use it too and the lift would get worn out.’

  Fuming, Rino had hoisted the furniture onto his back. At the door of the flat he had found Mrs Arosio waiting for him in a violet satin nightdress.

  She was a really attractive woman, about forty years old, with a tawny perm, two enormous tits only partly hidden by her nightdress, a slim waist and a bum as big as an aircraft carrier. She had a round face, a small nose too perfect to be the one her mother had given her, eyes tinged with light-blue shadow, and swollen, shiny lips parted to reveal some slightly gappy incisors.

  Rino had seen her walking along the high street in summer and winter with plunging necklines over those huge UVA-tanned breasts, but he hadn’t known that she was Arosio’s wife.

  While he got to work with the nuts and bolts, she had sat down in such a way that her ample frontage was prominently displayed and had remarked that muscles formed at work were much more attractive than ones that were pumped up in a gym. And what were all those tattoos? What did they mean? She wanted one too, a squirrel …

  By now Rino had a hard-on and was finding it difficult to follow the instructions under that hungry gaze.

  After the little writing-desk, the mini-blackboard and the wardrobe, he had assembled the bunk bed.

  ‘Have you screwed it together tightly enough? I wouldn’t want it to come apart … My son Aldo is a bit on the heavy side. Would you mind getting up onto it yourself? To try it out?’

  Rino had climbed onto the top bunk and bounced up and down. ‘Seems all right to me.’

  She had shaken her head. ‘You’re too light. I think I’d better come up too. Just to make quite sure.’

  Half an hour later the bed had suddenly given way. Mrs Arosio had broken her wrist in falling out and had sued the furniture factory.

  Rino had sworn to Castardin that he hadn’t had sex with her.

  And technically speaking that was correct. Penetration had not yet taken place when the bed had collapsed. She was on all fours, with her face buried in the pillow and her petticoat pulled up, and Rino was holding her by the hair like a red Indian gripping his horse’s mane, stamping her buttocks with large red slap-marks like the patches on an Apache steed.

  Then the bed had given way.

  Rino Zena had lost his job.

  And he had sworn to get even with old Castardin.

  8

  Cristiano Zena lay down and aimed at the head. He took a deep breath and fired. The animal flinched, gave a little whine and lay still.

  He raised his fist. ‘First shot!’

  He jumped down from the pile of planks and, after checking that no cars were passing by, approached slowly, keeping the gun trained on the animal.

  The mouth open. The froth. The tongue hanging to one side like a bluish slug. The eyes rolled back and on the neck a red hole among the black hairs and the snow swirling lazily in the air, burying the corpse.

  One fucking mongrel less in the world.

  9

  Cristiano returned home and ran to his father to tell him how he had killed it first shot, but Rino was stretched out on his bed fast asleep.

  BEFORE

  You are too just, Lord,

  for me to dispute with you,

  but I would like to talk with you about justice.

  Why do the ways of the wicked prosper?

  Why do all the treacherous live at ease?

  You have planted them and they have taken root;

  they grow and bring forth fruit.

  You are near to their mouths

  but far from their hearts.

  Jeremiah 12, 1–2

  Friday

  10

  An open cluster is a group of stars held together by gravitational forces. The number of stars can be in the thousands. Their low attraction favours a chaotic arrangement around the centre of the system.

  This untidy formation resembled that of the thousands of little towns, villages and hamlets which dotted the vast plain where Cristiano Zena and his father lived.

  The snow that had fallen all night on the plain had whitened the fields, the houses and the factories. The only things it had not covered were the thick, incandescent cables of the power stations, the lamps on the billboards, and the Forgese, the big winding river which linked the mountains up in the north with the sea down to the south.

  But at the first light of dawn the snow changed to a thin, persistent drizzle which in less than an hour melted the white mantle that had momentarily made the plain as beautiful as a cool albino model wrapped in an Arctic fox fur. Varrano, San Rocco, Rocca Seconda, Murelle, Giardino Fiorito, Marzio, Bogognano, Semerese and all the other towns and villages re-emerged with their dingy colours, with their small or large are
as of urban sprawl, with their modern two-storey houses surrounded by frost-browned lawns, with their prefabricated industrial buildings, their credit institutions, their flyovers, their motor showrooms and forecourts, and with their vast expanses of mud.

  11

  At a quarter past six in the morning Corrado Rumitz, commonly known as Quattro Formaggi because of his consuming passion for the pizza of that name, his staple diet for the best part of his thirty-eight years, was sitting on a shabby, flower-patterned sofa having his breakfast.

  He was wearing his home clothes: dirty underpants, an ankle-length tartan dressing-gown and a pair of battered Camperos boots, a relic of the old millennium.

  With his gaze fixed on the little area in front of the kitchen, he took a biscuit out of a packet, dunked it in a bowl of milk and shoved it whole into his mouth. He repeated the action with metronomic regularity.

  When he had woken up he had seen from the window of his room, in the pale light of dawn, an expanse of gentle hills and white valleys, as if he was enjoying the view from a mountain lodge. If he avoided looking at the walls of the building opposite he might even have imagined he was in Alaska.

  He had sat in bed, huddled up under the blankets, watching the snowflakes fall as light as feathers.

  It hadn’t snowed like this for ages.

  Almost every winter, sooner or later, there was a sprinkling, but before Quattro Formaggi had time to go out for a walk in the countryside it had always melted.

  But that night at least twenty centimetres must have fallen.

  When Quattro Formaggi had been small and lived in the orphanage run by the nuns it had snowed every winter. Cars would stop, some people would even put on cross-country skis and the children would make snowmen with branches for arms, and would slide down the garage ramps on old car tyres. What incredible snowball fights they’d had with Sister Anna and Sister Margherita. And there had been sleds drawn by horses with jingling bells …