The end
"Shoot on me, target missed, try again, it’s a minefield, what remains of our past don’t deny it, it’s time wasted, indelible stains, covering them is a crime, let him cast the stone who is without sin."
("Mentre tutto scorre", Negramaro)
"Come on, fuck, I shot! It works, the Beretta works. Shoot, shoot. I’m a myth. I did it! I killed her. Have you seen? I did it! I did it!"
Silvia turned to Deborah. Their classmates were staring at them in silence, terrified, shocked, each fearing to be the next victim. Mrs. Boschi leaned against the wall, ready to faint. A nightmare, she felt like she was in the midst of a nightmare. The worst of her life. Eleonora, lying face down in the middle of the room, with a trickle of blood staining the floor, showed no signs of life. Maybe she could still be saved, she repeated. But how could she convince the two crazies to drop the weapons? How could she restore order and discipline, rationality in a word? She looked around cautiously. No one dared to make a gesture.
"Fuck. I really shot."
Silvia, the boss, that she had always protected because she seemed the most unhappy and problematic student of the class, bad-mannered and spoiled, yes, but still a little girl to be understood, had revealed to be a girl possessed. From the tension of the moment before holding the weapon, she had passed to euphoria. She was jumping in the middle of the room as if she had achieved a strike at bowling.
"I did it! I did it! "
She kept screaming, kicking at an imaginary ball in the room.
"I'm a myth, I’m a myth!"
Around her all was frozen, even Debby was still. Dazed. Silvia was there, but she wasn’t really there. Killing or scoring a goal, taking the life of a peer or winning the New Year lottery were the same thing for her right at that moment. She had lost touch with reality, she had entered the circle ready to fly high and then fall to the ground, delete, tear down and be torn down, a vortex that she could not control, but that gave her a feeling of drunkenness, sensation, omnipotence.
"Come on. I did it! I killed her!"
She looked at the body on the ground, the girl whose life she had taken, with the same enthusiasm with which a good housewife looks at the cake she has baked, happy with the result. A happy housewife at the end of a hard day's work.
Around her, the silence.
"Are you crazy? Are you craaaazy? What the fuck have you done? You killed Eleonora. You killed Eleonora. Bastard! You're a bastard! Silvia, you're a bastard!"
Luca was the only one to react, after absorbing the shock. He had always been the only one in the class to take the side of the classmate, not to slavishly obey the overwhelming power of the two bullies. Instinctively he advanced from the bottom of the classroom, with the rage of a wounded beast, and bounded towards Silvia to take her gun away, hurt her, stop her, but he only made a few steps. He was hit by a bullet full in the chest, instinctively shot at close range by Deborah. He fell to the ground, broken, not far from the body of the teenager he loved.
Marina started to scream but she stopped immediately, remaining paralyzed with her mouth open. Sara threw herself on the floor, hiding under the nearest desk, curling up almost as if she had been a contortionist. She started to pray.
Nobody paid any attention to her.
"Shit, he was not in the list Deborah. Be careful, shit, be careful. Come on. This way you spoil everything. And you, stay away, stand still, don’t come any closer, don’t come any closer. Shut up. Just one gesture and I kill you all."
Silvia was shouting as she walked across the room. She seemed like a ferocious beast ready to rebel against her trainer. She zigzagged with the gun in her hand, burning with anger. Deborah’s move had given her the feeling that she wasn’t going to be able to face the situation. And now she was afraid that the slaughter could go out of her hand. She was full of anger toward her accomplice, who had dared to defy her, make an unplanned move.
"Shit, Deborah. Come on. You have to be careful. You mustn’t do it your way. No crap."
Silvia felt the ground slip under her feet. She no longer understood too well where she was and what she was doing. She had massive doses of hashish and limoncello in her system. She had upended her parents’ bottle before leaving the house, along with Deborah, and she had put two more joints on top of it. It was then that she had decided to leave the last warning to Eleonora on the sidewalk before the event.
"You'll see she’ll be scared shitless all morning", she had said, laughing, to Debby, who had immediately hidden in her backpack a box of white chalks.
Since she had entered the classroom she hadn’t stopped checking the Leaguer. She had spied on her with her senses altered by drugs and alcohol. She knew that her enemy was afraid. She felt it. She could feel her breathing, her anxiety, her thoughts, from bench to bench. She felt and enjoyed her surrendering. That angel-faced cunt was everything she hated. Too beautiful, too popular, too bookish, too well-dressed, too perfect. She imagined her house, her quiet family, happy parents, the world opening its arms to embrace her. Everything she would never have. She wanted to demolish her. Make her disappear. Maybe if Eleonora had bowed to her, recognized her power, if she had rebelled, cried, begged forgiveness, tried to defend herself, Silvia would have been magnanimous, she would have left her alone. But no, not her, Eleonora the redhead was better. She was arrogant. With that attitude, she seemed to be saying "Shoot on me", like in that song by Negramaro. Yes, she had asked for it. She had to die.
She looked around. She saw the terror in the eyes of her classmates. She saw Deborah looking at her, puzzled.
"What the fuck is wrong with you Silvia? Calm down, stay calm. He wanted to hurt you, didn’t you see? He wanted to hurt you and I saved you. It's all right, be quiet... all right", her friend eventually muttered, waving the gun around, but in spite of her reassuring tone, she was scared.
"Shit, we're not serial killers. It’s the first time I shoot. I must learn. Do you forgive me, Silvia?"
She was stuttering. If those dead bodies hadn’t been on the floor, it might have seemed a farce. But Eleonora and Luca were there, in the middle of the classroom. They reeked of blood, they were scary. And Silvia and Deborah had guns and were ready to shoot again and again. Nobody had even the strength to breathe left.
"Where is he, where is Alessandro? Come on. Where are you, grim shitter?"
Silvia had recovered and was now looking for her other target, swinging her arm and the gun in the room. She saw Mrs. Boschi pressed against the wall, behind the teacher’s desk, and Sara hidden under the desk, hands over ears, still. She saw Marina, pale as a sheet, hugging her backpack, shaken by sobs she was trying to muff. She looked at them with disdain. Those little cry-babies did not interest her now, she wanted him, her long-time friend/enemy.
"Come on. Alessandro come out. Noooow! Or I'll kill them all!"
Deborah had moved behind her, watching her back.
Alessandro called the grim was sixteen, he had tough-boy jeans and the tattoo in Japanese on his arm. He would have liked to be big and strong, act like an adult, but he was only sixteen and so afraid he could not think clearly.
"Come on, come here. Get on your knees, asshole."
"Why?"
Roller-man obeyed, swallowing. He could not escape. The time had come. He knelt on the floor, just a few steps from the bodies of Eleonora and Luca. His face was red, his eyes small, his hair tousled. He trembled. He didn’t want to die.
"What's wrong with you, why are you angry with me? I beg you, don’t shoot, please don’t shoot. We are friends, I don’t want to die", he started to beg, raising his arms in surrender.
"We will not say anything to anyone, we will help you get away, please, please don’t shoot me."
As he was speaking, staring into space, Alessandro had bent his head on his legs, crying. He looked like a child about to be punished.
"Silvia. Leave him alone. We're friends, don’t you remember?", Marina cried, taking a step forward."Alessandro, I love you.
I love you."
"Shut up asshole, don’t interfere. Go back to your place or I shoot you too", Deborah said, pointing the gun on her. She was careful, now, she didn’t want to pull the trigger by mistake. Marina stepped back, terrified.
Silvia hadn’t even turned to look at her. She was staring at Alessandro.
"Come on. Come on. You must die, little asshole. You must die."
She didn’t hesitate any longer. Two more fatal shots rang out in the room. Alessandro felt like he had been suddenly catapulted on his roller skates, a waist-bag tied at his waist, knees and wrists secured by the special bumpers. He had done that even the night before, pirouetting with his friends at Mole Adriana, down and up the slopes of Muro Torto. It was their secret pact. They texted one another and met in less than an hour, running through the streets of Rome wearing only speed and fear. The speed that challenged cars and cobblestones, potholes on the road and the difficulty of keeping in proper footing and balance. Then there was the fear, the terror of falling, getting hurt, meeting the police just around the corner. "This time we get caught", Marina had said, holding his hand, frightened, and he had smiled like the macho he felt he was. Strong. Bold. A different boy. Here, while his heart was going away on its own, while his life was going away on its own, he still felt that intoxication, that lightness that takes the body when it is thrown into the unknown. He let himself go, imagining himself launched like a rocket against a moving car. He felt the crash. He thought he saw his mother running toward him, arms outstretched, like when he was a child and slid in the midst of the football field. Back then it was nice and sweet to feel protected. He surrendered to her embrace. A little man bending in front of life and its oddities. Then he felt nothing more. He had stopped flying.
His classmates saw him fall to the floor as if he were curling. They watched with horror the blood that stained the floor. Marina was biting her lip to keep from screaming, about to faint. She just said a muffled "no", feeling that her life too had ended in that moment. Mrs. Boschi looked at her stealthily, ready to stop her if she had run again in the middle of the classroom to reach her lover. She thought she would try to save her at least. She hesitated. What is the role of an educator in front of a gun? Interfere, get killed, stay hidden, cry, pull out a useless register? Silvia had remained motionless, unrecognizable, she stared at her with silent hatred. If the teacher had even lifted a finger, it would have been her end.
Deborah, instead, was standing near the door, ready to leave.
"Silvia, hurry up, come on, hurry up. The police is coming."
But the words died in her mouth. The door of the opposite classroom had opened. The girl turned quickly and instinctively fired two more shots that reached professor Rossigni, the math teacher, in the chest. The woman fell to the floor, in her eyes a look of terror mixed with surprise.
"Shit, she had nothing to do with this", Silvia muttered. "You’ve fucked up again, Deborah. Come on. You’re the usual asshole. What did Mrs. Rossigni have to do with this? Shit, shit!"
As if caught by a sudden rush of anger, she started shooting wildly at the classroom window, the one overlooking the lungotevere. The kids moved away, swaying and screaming. The glass broke into a thousand pieces. A splinter slightly wounded Alessia, the youngest of the class, who had taken shelter next to the radiator and was now crying softly, clutching her hand.
"You make me sick, you make me sick", Deborah, now in the corridor, shouted, the gun firmly in her hand.
"Be still. Got it? If you move I'll kill you!" Silvia said to her classmates," I'll kill you, you understand? Come on. For me nothing can change by now. Stay still."
She loudly walked away from the classroom, closing the door behind her.
Everybody stood there, petrified. Marina started to moan, as if she were repeating a mantra, "Alessandro, Alessandro."
Sara closed her eyes, she refused to look, feel, even breathe. Alessia Bruni, huddled in a corner, was crying and looking desperately at her wound.
"It hit a tendon, it hit a tendon. I'm sure. I will not be able to play anymore. It hit a tendon, I know."
Alessia had small hands and a dream tied to those hands: using them to play. It had always been like that. When, in the evening, she sat in front of the large piano, sitting down with a stylish pose in front of the keyboard, she felt that the world, the whole world, stopped spinning, and that in that moment, with her will alone, she was taking control of the strings that drive life. The exercises, the scores and tunes she could play – while everyone in the house was fiddling nervously, waiting for the dinner, the news, the ring of the phone – were hers only, a motion of the soul, a continuous flow that brooked no argument .
"What are you doing? Starting again? Always at this hour? But mom that’s not possible. Tell her to stop, I can’t stand it any longer", her sister Claudia thundered, slamming the door of the living room in anger, "the same thing every night. When you're at that damn piano I can’t do anything, not even talk on the phone."
Their mother had to intervene, acting as a peacemaker, screaming in turn from the kitchen.
"You'll end up making me go crazy. Claudia, if you have to talk to your boyfriend take the cordless and go to your room. Alessiaaa... make less noise, the lady downstairs complained again about your exercises."
"Noise? But how can one complain about Beethoven?" Alessia whispered quietly.
She felt offended by the lack of artistic sensibility of the entire condo. If a man had been able to write something like the Moonlight Sonata, there must necessarily be a God capable of creating beauty, abstraction, and the perfect harmony of a chord. Then she threw down her hands with more force on the keyboard and focused.
"Art is art, miss you-make-me-sick."
And she felt even more determination within herself.
Music was her true life, not books, not the Marco Polo high, not the companions with whom she could at best go to a concert or dancing on Sunday afternoons. Music was for her something more than a soundtrack. She put on her iPod earphones when she went to bed, and she fell asleep listening either to Bach or Francesco De Gregori, Beethoven or Vasco Rossi. Sometimes even U2. She did not have a favourite genre. She favoured the sound. And with sounds she had grown up, since when, at about six years of age, she had serenely said the sentence that would change her life. "I want to play the piano."
It was New Year's Day, and from the TV came live the arias of the inaugural concert in Vienna. Alessia followed them swinging in the room like a ballerina rehearsing a new choreography. Her grandfather Vincenzo, sitting in an armchair, rhythmically pounded his hand on his leg. In silence, lost in thought.
"I want to play the piano", she had repeated, not knowing where that desire had suddenly come from. She wasn’t even certain that someone would really listen.
"I'll buy you a piano then", grandpa had muttered, "as long as you behave. I want to listen to the Blue Danube."
And on those notes, in the general silence, with the ecstatic smile of a child, the musical career of Alessia had been born.
"What do you find so wonderful in a room full of old people?" Claudia asked her when she saw her preparing with care, on Sunday afternoons, to go with their grandfather to St. Cecilia.
"Art is art, you ugly witch", Alessia replied, intent on tying coloured ribbons to her braids.
Then she left, in her good dress, her hand confidently entrusted to that of her grandfather, to whom a past as general had left the habit to command and put everyone in line. But for her he always made an exception. He had always granted her any extravagance, for virtue of their being so different, in love not with material possessions but with music.
"Art is art, grandpa", she said seriously.
Alessia Bruni was a tiny teenager – whose physique reminded those of the young girls mastering gymnastics – with an absolute willpower when it came to study music. The only break she allowed herself from music was to ride her bicycle. She loved the wind brushing her face and the feeling o
f danger while dodging cars in the traffic of Rome. On two wheels she went and came back from school, on two wheels she got lost in the fields in the Summer, when her whole family moved to the villa in San Nicola, a few steps from the sea. Alessia suffered in silence that deportation, sighing. Each time it was three months of partial silence. Claudia was always taken by some love and spent her time at the beach, acting like a diva. She slept in, calmly prepared, adjusted her shorts, tied her long hair with a rubber band, put on lip gloss and started towards the sea, holding a book of which she didn’t even know the title.
"This way I can watch the boys without being seen", she explained to Alessia, who instead really read books, and even talked about them, with her cousin Enrico who lived a stone's throw away, and had a dream in turn, that of becoming an actor. In the evening they went to the movies in the arena, then they gladly stopped to eat an ice cream, commenting emphatically on the plot and the interpretation, obviously including the soundtrack. Enrico, who acted like an adult, pulled out of his shorts pocket a packet of cigarettes.
"Want one?"
"Isn’t it too soon, Enrico? They are bad for health."
"Go figure, with all the poison we breathe."
"You're right too. Would you let me try? Let’s say just once..."
"Sure."
It had been like that, it had been with him, one evening at the sea, a few months before that Monday morning at school, that Alessia had learned to smoke. She wondered why she was remembering it then, in the classroom, while everyone was crying and sobbing, while she too was crying and had a bleeding wound and was wondering whether her hand would ever be right again, whether she would be able to play again, whether she would come out of that nightmare alive.
"Please God, save me, let all this end, let me play the piano again, and I promise I will not smoke ever again, for the rest of my life. Even more, I promise that I will start studying too, and become as good as Eleonora. Oh God, but Eleonora is sick. Maybe she's dead."
It was this thought that prompted her to leave her shelter near the radiator. The sight of Eleonora – who was lying there, with her beautiful red hair lying on the floor, motionless, helpless – pulled her back to the here and now. She also looked with compassion at Alessandro and Luca. Maybe she could help them somehow. She moved forward without thinking, sitting down beside the girl. She didn’t have the courage to touch her, but she was convinced that something needed to be done. She thought it was immoral to stand by and watch a person die without at least trying to save her. She thought that all that was happening was absurd. Then the door suddenly opened. Silvia was back in the classroom, like in a horror movie, reaching out with the gun, pointing it in the direction of Alessia.
"Come on. Didn’t you understand me, bitch? What the fuck are you doing there?"
And before the girl could answer, she angrily approached her and fired two dry shots at close range that struck as two cannonballs, and threw her on the ground, her head turned back looking at the ceiling. Alessia could not even understand that she would never see her beloved piano again.