If she didn’t look and didn’t listen, this darkness was the same as the darkness at Mulberry Farm.
Within a few seconds her eyelids grew heavy and she fell asleep.
*
The daylight dazzled her.
Anna covered her face with her hands and peeped through her fingers at a milky sky. The sun, just above the horizon, looked like a stain left by pasta sauce on a white tablecloth.
By day the amphitheatre seemed smaller. What was left of the tyres sent up straight black threads from piles of ash. The drumming area was deserted. Only a few sick children remained on the terraces.
She propped herself up on her elbows, yawning.
In front of her, a figure silhouetted against the light materialised into a familiar face. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said.
Pietro was sitting cross-legged. ‘I came to look for you,’ he replied. He picked up from the ground a bottle which still contained a couple of inches of black liquid at the bottom and held it to his nose. ‘Have you been drinking this stuff?’
Anna stretched her back. ‘No, what is it?’
‘They hand it out in the evening. It’s a mixture of all kinds of things – alcohol, tablets, sleeping pills … They call it “The Little Lady’s Tears”. I drunk half a bottle once and afterwards I put my head through a pane of glass. Look.’ He showed her a dark fleshy scar behind his left ear. ‘I couldn’t even remember doing it. They told me about it afterwards.’
The girl smoothed down her T-shirt. ‘Weren’t there some dead bodies here?’
‘They take them away as soon it’s light and throw them in a ditch.’
Anna looked at him. He seemed tired, his face haggard and his hair ruffled. But his big liquid eyes were beautiful. ‘Weren’t you going to look for those trainers?’
He picked up an empty tuna tin and turned it over in his hands. ‘You’ll never find your brother without my help.’
Anna ran her fingers through her hair and put her head on one side.
He came here because of me.
Pietro used his forefinger to clean out the remnants, then put it in his mouth. ‘He’s down at the quarry. But if they catch you, they’ll throw you in the tank. Only the guardians – the guys with necklaces – can go there. But I know how to get in. I’ll take you there, if you like.’
Anna remained silent for a moment. ‘How come you know so much?’
He turned away from her. ‘I had one of those necklaces once. Then I had a problem and it’s best if they don’t see too much of me.’ He threw the tin towards the pool, missing by a long way. It landed on the head of a boy who was lying a couple of tiers below.
The boy turned round and pointed a finger at him. ‘What the hell …’ And he started coughing.
Pietro raised his hand apologetically. ‘Sorry.’
Anna applauded sarcastically. ‘It’s a good thing you didn’t want to attract any attention.’ She tied up a shoelace. ‘Let’s go.’
*
They walked round the pool, passing through groups of children huddled together fast asleep, like hamsters in hay. Some were wrapped in sheets of cellophane.
Going up another flight of steps, they came to an open space where a group of guardians were heating a silvery tin over a fire. They were staring at the food in silence, yawning, as if they could cook it with their eyes.
‘Don’t look at them,’ Pietro whispered to her. ‘Nobody’s allowed beyond this point unless they have a necklace.’
They walked through a thicket of broom. When they emerged, a plateau stretched out in front of them, veiled by a milky mist with pale hilltops rising out of it. They went on down a narrow road. After a hundred metres the path was blocked by a barrier made of planks nailed together. There was clearly a latrine nearby: the smell of urine and excrement filled the air.
They slid on their backsides down a ridge among broadleaved trees with spiny fruit and found themselves on a slope covered with crops. Pietro pushed his way through the wheat with his hands, turning occasionally to see if Anna was following him.
They crouched down behind some skips full of rubble at the edge of a rough clearing. A lorry and a mechanical digger stood by some prefabricated huts.
‘That’s where the road to the quarry begins.’
Anna peered over one of the skips.
‘We’ll have to run fast or they’ll see us from the hotel,’ he went on. ‘And if they take us to Angelica, I’m done for.’
‘Who’s Angelica?’
Pietro bit his lip. ‘She’s the one who makes all the decisions, with the Bear.’
Anna remembered the Bear from her conversation with Katio, the cart-driver. ‘Where is she?’
‘She’ll be asleep at this time of day.’
The girl tipped her head to one side and looked up at him.
Pietro waggled his hips seductively. ‘She fell in love with me. She was all over me. She wanted me.’
Anna roared with laughter.
He put his hand over her mouth and hissed: ‘Keep quiet! They’ll hear us …’
Anna dried her tears of laughter with her wrist. What was that name Mama called Papa when he boasted he could dive into the sea off the priest’s rock? ‘You’re just like my father, a bullshitter.’
‘I’m telling the truth, I swear to you.’ Pietro kissed his forefingers. ‘That’s why I ran away. She’s crazy. She said she’d show me the Little Lady if I slept with her, but that was just an excuse. Look, could we talk about this later?’ He tried to sound grown up. ‘Listen, when I say go, we’re going to run as fast as we can over to the digger, and hide behind it.’
‘What’s she like? Attractive?’
‘No. She’s too skinny. Looks like a witch.’
‘How do you like them, then? All …’ Anna drew some curves in the air.
Pietro put his hands together, as if in prayer. ‘Please …’
She tried to put on a serious expression, but her eyes continued to laugh. ‘So if we get caught, you get Angelica?’
‘We won’t get caught.’
‘Why not?’
Pietro looked her straight in the eye. ‘Because you and I are invisible.’
‘I told you you’re a bullshitter.’
*
Maybe they weren’t invisible, but nobody saw them when they dashed across the clearing.
Anna stopped by one of the digger’s caterpillar tracks. A second later Pietro rushed in beside her and gestured to her to wait. He was breathing hard. ‘They’ve closed the road.’
The rough track that wound its way down into the valley below in a series of hairpin bends was shut off with wire netting. Where posts still supported the fence, it was still in good condition; the rest had disappeared under falling rubble.
‘We’ll have to go through the wood,’ said the boy.
Anna hesitated. What if he was lying to her? How could she trust a bullshitter, someone who claimed a girl called Angelica lusted after him, and who spent all his time looking for a pair of shoes?
But he’s the only friend I’ve got.
*
Trees clung to each other as if terrified of falling down into the valley. Ivy smothered the oaks and cascaded down, turning the ground, pitted with potholes and rocks, into a treacherous green tangle. The sun had come up, and with it clouds of midges which bit their ankles and arms.
Anna followed Pietro anxiously down the ridge. ‘Are you sure this is the right way?’
‘No, I’m not,’ Pietro confessed.
‘If you’re wrong, we’ll have to climb all the way ba—’ Before she could finish the sentence, she tripped over a root and found herself sliding downhill on her backside. She clutched at the ivy, but only carried it down with her. Screaming, she came to a hump which launched her into the air. Branches and leaves lashed her face and arms.
The wood spat her out.
After several somersaults she landed on a steep scree. She tried to slow her progress with her hands and feet, but slid fast
er and faster, raising waves of pebbles, until the whole slope became a landslide. A small green patch, which at first seemed only a bush, grew bigger and bigger as she hurtled down. Then she was caught, like a fish in a net, by the branches of a wild fig tree poised on the edge of a cliff which fell vertically down to the bottom of the quarry. Her heart, unaware that it was safe, was pumping blood into her temples. She flexed whitened fingers and ran her tongue over dust-covered teeth.
A few seconds later, preceded by a shout, Pietro landed beside her, spraying her with sand.
Lying there under the vault of leaves, they looked at each other, amazed to be still alive. They were white from head to foot. They burst out laughing.
Anna breathed in through her nose. ‘Can I ask you something? Don’t be offended …’ She cleared her throat. ‘Why are you so obsessed with those shoes?’
Pietro rubbed his eyelids, took a deep breath and lay back, his head on his arm. ‘There’s no point in me telling you – you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Try me.’
He coughed. ‘I had this friend, Pierpaolo Saverioni. He was two years older than me. He got the Red Fever, badly. He was covered in blotches, could hardly breathe and never got out of bed. He didn’t have long to live. One morning he gave me a page from a newspaper, the one I showed you, and told me those shoes were magic, they could save him, and asked me to go and look for them. He was quite convinced. What could I say? He was a friend of mine, he’d put me up and fed me. I went to the shopping mall and I found them. Adidas Hamburgs. There were dozens of boxes.’ He batted away a fly that was buzzing around him. ‘I thought it was nonsense and only took one pair, size 42. He put them on – or rather I put them on his feet, because he couldn’t do it – and I went off to bed.’ He fell silent for a few seconds. ‘The next day he was gone. He’d left the page about the shoes on the bed. I searched for him everywhere. He couldn’t have gone away on his own two feet: he was as thin as a skeleton, couldn’t move. I looked to see whether he’d jumped out of the window.’
The girl scratched her cheek. ‘And where was he?’
‘On the other side. In the universe where everything is as it was before, where the Red Fever has never existed and things go on the way they should. I don’t know why the shoes work like that, but Pierpaolo explained to me that by putting them on you start down a road, a road that takes you into that other world.’ He shrugged. ‘I ran to the mall, but there were none left. They’d all gone.’ He turned towards Anna.
She stared at him. ‘What if you find them and they don’t work?’
Pietro lowered his eyes. ‘Don’t you believe there’s a way of surviving? Are we really just doomed to die?’
Anna’s gaze fell on a brown spider quivering in the middle of its web as it shook in the wind. ‘I don’t believe anything. All I know is, I’ve got to find my brother. I promised my mother I’d never leave him.’
‘But what difference does it make? Soon you’ll die anyway, and he’ll be left alone.’
‘Yes, but before that happens I’ll take him to the mainland.’
The boy rubbed the tip of his nose. ‘To Calabria?’
‘Maybe some Grown-ups have survived there and have the vaccine.’
‘So you do believe something.’
Anna closed her eyes.
Pietro’s fingers sought hers. She squeezed them.
*
They lay there hand in hand, stretched out like two salamis, and they would have lain there a lot longer if it hadn’t been for a strange clinking sound.
Anna raised her head. ‘Did you hear that?’
Pietro seemed reluctant to move. ‘What?’
‘That noise. Can you hear it?’ She pushed through the branches and opened a gap in the screen of leaves. Small thick white clouds were floating in the blue sky. Below, hanging from a crane by a steel cable, was a puppet in the likeness of a human skeleton. Anna wasn’t very good at calculating sizes, but it looked higher than the bank in Piazza Matteotti.
It was made of planks of wood held together by links made of rope. The chest looked like the hull of a boat and the pelvis had a hole in the middle. Apart from half of the left leg and the right arm, which was unfinished, the structure was entirely covered with bones. Humeri hung from the humeri, femurs from the femurs, clavicles from the clavicles. But the most amazing thing was the skull, which was made up of real skulls arranged in spirals. The backbone was a mosaic of vertebrae. The bones were free to move and clinked against each other, shifted by the wind.
Pietro leaned over to see. ‘So they finally made it.’
Anna was full of admiration. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s for the Little Lady’s party.’
Down at the bottom, around the crane, were countless piles of bones. Further away, beside a long steel shed, were a tanker, heaps of car tyres and stacks of wood.
*
Anna and Pietro crawled along the sandy edge of the precipice and went down into the quarry. The marionette looked at them with black orbits made out of tractor wheels.
The wind rushed between heaps of sand and blew on the ground, raising eddies of dust and banging the door of the shed. The tanker was in good condition and the tyre tracks it had left behind were still visible.
The smallest heaps of bones were divided up according to type. Tibias, ribs, radii, and so on. The larger ones had not yet been sorted.
Anna put her hands on her hips, dismayed. ‘There’s nobody here. Let’s go back up.’
Pietro sat down on the ground. ‘And yet …’
Anna interrupted him. ‘What’s that?’ At the end of the valley a cloud of dust melted into the blue sky.
*
The driver of the tanker must have been religious. The dashboard was covered with sacred pictures of Padre Pio and Pope John Paul II. Above them was a gilded plate, which bore the inscription: THE MEASURE OF LOVE IS TO LOVE WITHOUT MEASURE.
Hunched up on the driver’s seat, Pietro and Anna peered out of the side window at the cloud of dust which, as it grew in size, split up into three two-horse carts like the one Katio had driven. But instead of bones, these were carrying children. The caravan stopped under the marionette and they all jumped down, shouting.
Anna remembered when the yellow school bus used to leave her outside the gates of the primary school and she would run into the schoolyard with a bunch of rowdy schoolmates. The difference was that these children were naked, and as thin as lizards.
Her eyes skipped from one to the other, searching for Astor, but at that distance they all looked alike. She’d imagined them being chained up like the slaves in Egypt, but they were free, and seemed perfectly happy too. Six older kids followed them like schoolmistresses, struggling to keep them under control. They’d catch one and another would slip away. In the end they managed to lead them over to a row of barrels.
Pietro slapped himself on the forehead and pointed to a tall girl, who was half naked and painted white. ‘That’s Angelica.’ Next to her a fat boy, with sloping shoulders and shapeless hips, took handfuls of blue dust out of a bin and threw it over the kids, who disappeared in a cobalt-coloured cloud. ‘And that’s the Bear, Rosario.’
Anna grabbed his wrist. ‘I’ve seen those two before. They’re the ones who killed Michelini.’
As soon as the colouring operation was over, a girl with a limp brought a big cardboard box and handed out bottles of Coca-Cola.
After the drinks break, Angelica blew a whistle and the blues split up into groups. Some picked up tibias and put them in bags slung over their hips, while others worked on the piles. The tasks were carried out quickly, a sign that this wasn’t the first time. The ones with the bags caught hold of hooks which hung down from the cranes and were slowly hoisted up by others pulling ropes. They climbed up the skeleton like monkeys, swung about and jumped from one section to another, fixing bones to nails with wire. The older children shouted instructions from below.
Anna put her face right against the window
. ‘There he is. That’s him.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’ She pointed at a little boy standing on a heap of bones. ‘I’m going to get him.’
‘Wait …Wait …’ Pietro tried to stop her, but she jumped out of the lorry and ran off.
*
The little boy had his back to her. He was holding a pelvis in both hands, in the manner of a steering wheel. Anna scrambled up among ulnae and vertebrae which gave way under her feet, stretched out her arm and managed to grab him by the ankle. He let out a yell and tumbled down on top of her.
She stood up and saw, under the blue paint, her mother’s light blue eyes, her father’s nose, and Astor’s lopsided teeth. His eyebrows had been shaven off. She smiled at him. ‘Astor.’
He stared at her blankly, seeming not to recognise her, then swallowed hard and stammered, ‘Anna … Anna …’ He burst into tears.
Anna held out her hand. ‘Come with me.’
He shook his head, grimacing as he sobbed.
‘Astor, come with me.’
He raised his arm, to wipe away the snot running down onto his lips, but didn’t move.
‘Come with me,’ Anna said again.
But the little boy took three steps backwards, like a lobster, sinking back into a pile of bones. ‘No, I don’t want to …’
She tried to smile. ‘Come on, there’s a good boy.’
She’d imagined all kinds of things on the way here, but had never dreamt her brother would refuse to go with her. In her surprise, the only thing she could manage was a forced grin. ‘Let’s go back to the long-haired lizards.’
Astor dropped his eyes. ‘You’re bad. You told me everybody was dead. There aren’t any monsters. And there’s no such thing as the Outside.’ He burst into tears again.
Her ears were buzzing. The quarry, the bones and the puppet circled around her like a lopsided roundabout. There was a lump in her throat. Gasping for breath, she said: ‘I was only thinking of you. I didn’t want you to see all the nasty things. Come on now, please. Come with me.’
The blue powder mingling with tears and mucus, he gulped in air and said: ‘No, I won’t. There are little children here, like me.’