Dopey was sent straight back to the scrapyard and, still with his milk teeth and a zest for playing, had a chain put round his neck. Lisa, his mother, on the other side of the yard, beyond two walls of junk, would bark at any car that came in through the gate.
The puppy’s diet changed from canned venison nuggets to Chinese cuisine. Spring rolls, bamboo chicken and sweet and sour pork, the leftovers from the China Garden, a foul-smelling restaurant on the other side of the road.
Christian, Signor Oddo’s son, worked in the scrapyard. Or maybe ‘worked’ isn’t exactly the right word for it: he sat in front of a computer watching pornographic videos in a container that had been turned into an office. He was a slim, nervy boy, with bushy hair and a pointed chin which he highlighted by wearing a goatee beard. He also had a second job – selling expired pills outside the local high schools. His dream, however, was to become a rapper. He loved the way rappers dressed, the gestures they made, the women they had and the killer dogs they owned. Though it wasn’t easy to rap with a lisp.
Observing Dopey through sunglasses as big as TV screens, he felt that the puppy, which was growing into a quick, strong dog, had potential.
One evening, sitting in his car outside a shopping mall, he told Samuel, his best friend, that he was going to turn Dopey into ‘a ferocious killing machine’.
‘That name, though, Dopey …’ Samuel, who was training to be a fashion designer, didn’t think it suited a killing machine.
‘What should I call him, then?’
‘I don’t know … How about Bob?’ ventured his friend.
‘Bob? What kind of a name is that? Manson is more like it.’
‘You mean as in Marilyn?’
‘No, you fool! Charles Manson. The greatest murderer of all time!’
Christian dreamed of some illegal immigrant or gypsy breaking into the scrapyard at night to steal something and being confronted by Manson. ‘Just imagine some poor guy trying to get away by climbing over the fence with his guts hanging out and Manson snapping at his arse,’ he guffawed, slapping Samuel on the back.
To make Manson more aggressive, Christian studied websites about fighting dogs. He bought a Taser and, using it and a broomstick wrapped in foam rubber, started a training course of electric shocks and beatings designed to turn the dog into a killing machine. In the winter he doused him with buckets of icy water to harden him against the weather.
Before a year had passed, Manson was so aggressive the only way of feeding him was to throw him food from a distance and fire a jet of water into his bowl from a hose. They couldn’t even let him off the leash at night for fear of losing a hand.
Like thousands of other dogs, Manson seemed destined to spend his whole life chained up.
The virus changed everything.
The epidemic wiped out the Oddo family in the space of a few months, and the dog was left alone on his chain. He survived by drinking the rainwater that collected in the metal remains of cars and by licking up dry scraps of food from the ground. Now and then someone would pass by in the street, but nobody stopped to feed him and he’d howl in despair, his nose to the sky. His mother answered his calls for a while, then she fell silent, and Manson, exhausted by hunger, lost his voice too. He could smell the stench of the corpses in the common graves of Trapani.
Eventually instinct told him his owners weren’t going to bring him any more food and he was going to die there.
The chain round his neck, about ten metres long, ended at a stake fixed in the ground. He started pulling, using his back legs for leverage and his front legs for support. His collar, now that he’d lost weight, was loose, and in the end he managed to wriggle out of it.
He was weak, covered in sores, riddled with fleas and unsteady on his feet. He passed his mother’s body, gave her a perfunctory sniff and staggered out of the gate.
He knew nothing of the world and didn’t stop to wonder why some human beings had become food while other, smaller ones were still alive, but whenever the live ones crossed his path he ran away.
It didn’t take him long to get back into shape. He fed on street litter, entered houses to devour whatever he found there, and chased off crows feasting on corpses. During his wanderings, he met up with a pack of strays and joined them.
The first time he started eating a dead sheep, the others snarled at him. He learned by experience that there was a hierarchy in the group – that he must keep away from females on heat and wait his turn before eating.
One day, on a piece of waste land behind a warehouse full of tyres, a hare crossed his path.
The hare is a difficult animal to catch; it’s quick and its sudden changes of direction can disorientate the pursuer. It has only one weakness: it soon gets tired. Manson’s body, by contrast, was a mass of hardened muscles. After a long chase he caught it, shook it to break its backbone, and started devouring it.
A shambling hound slightly higher in rank in the pack than him, with pendulous ears and a mushroom-like nose, appeared in front of him. Manson retreated with his tail between his legs, but, as soon as the other started to eat, Manson jumped on him and ripped off one of his ears. Surprised and terrified, the other dog turned round, dripping with blood, and sank his teeth into the Maremma’s thick coat. Manson backed away, then jumped forward and with one twist of his neck tore out the other dog’s jugular, windpipe and oesophagus, leaving him writhing in a pool of blood.
Fights among dogs and wolves are seldom lethal; they serve to clarify the hierarchy, to distinguish the lower ranks from the leaders. But Manson wasn’t in the habit of playing by the rules; he didn’t stop till his adversary was dead. Christian Oddo’s intuition had been right. Manson was a killing machine, and all the pain and torture he’d undergone had made him indifferent to wounds and merciless in victory.
Blood excited him, gave him energy, won him the respect of other dogs and the favour of bitches on heat. He liked this world: there were no chains, no cruel humans, and all you had to do to gain others’ respect was use your fangs. In a few weeks, without even having to fight the chief, who rolled over on the ground with his legs apart, he became the alpha male, the one who had first choice of the food and impregnated the females.
Three years later, when the explosion of a natural gas tank surprised the pack as they surrounded a horse in the car park of the Sunflowers shopping mall, he still hadn’t lost his rank. What a horse was doing in the car park was a mystery of interest to none of them. Emaciated and covered in sores, it had got one of its legs stuck in a shopping trolley and was standing there in a cloud of flies, near the cashpoints, its big brown head hanging between its legs. The horse was in that state of dumb resignation that can sometimes come over herbivores when they realise that death has caught up with them and that all they can do is wait. The dogs were closing in slowly, almost casually, certain that they were soon going to eat some fresh meat.
Manson, as leader of the pack, was the first to attack the horse, which barely even kicked out when it felt his teeth sink into its hind leg. But a wall of fire, fanned by the wind, suddenly enveloped the scene in a blanket of acrid, scorching smoke. Surrounded by flames and terrified by exploding petrol pumps, the dogs sheltered behind a household appliance store. They stayed there for several days, nearly asphyxiated, under a vault of fire, and when everything had been burnt and they came out, the world was an expanse of ash devoid of food and water.
*
Anna pulled back her hair.
The Maremma crept forward and stopped, ear cocked, eyes fixed on his prey.
She looked at the fence. It was too high. And there was no sense in going back to the car: he’d tear her to pieces in there.
She opened her arms: ‘Come on then! What are you waiting for?’
The dog seemed uncertain.
‘Come on!’ She sprang up and down on her toes. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
The dog flattened down on the asphalt. A crow passed overhead, cawing.
‘What’s the
matter? Are you scared?’
The dog sprang forward.
She sprinted towards the car and reached it so fast she hit her hip against the side. Groaning, she slipped in through the door and shut it behind her.
There was a thud, and the car swayed.
Anna grabbed the seat belt, wound it round the door handle and tied it to the spokes of the steering wheel. Through the misty glass of the side window she saw the dark shape of the dog jump up.
She climbed into the back and crouched down in the boot, but almost at once the suitcase she’d jammed in the rear window came crashing down on top of her, followed by the enormous dog. She fended him off, using the case as a shield, and searched for some kind of weapon. There was an umbrella under the seat. She grabbed it with both hands and held it out like a spear.
The dog jumped into the back seat, snarling.
She jabbed the tip of the umbrella into his neck, and blood spattered her face.
The dog yelped, but didn’t retreat. He advanced along the seat, rubbing his filthy back against the ceiling.
‘I’m stronger than you!’ She stabbed him in the side. When she tried to pull the umbrella out, the handle came off in her hand.
The dog lunged at her, the umbrella sticking out of his ribs. His teeth snapped shut a few centimetres from her nose. She smelled his warm putrid breath. Pushing him away with her elbows, she climbed over onto the front seat, falling among the woman’s bones.
The dog didn’t follow. His coat plastered with blood and ash, his mouth dripping with red foam, he looked at her, turning his head as if trying to understand her, then swayed and collapsed.
*
Anna was singing a jingle she’d made up: ‘Here comes Nello, funny-looking fellow; his trainers are pink and his whiskers yellow.’
Nello was a friend of her father’s; he drove over from Palermo now and then in a white van to bring her mother the books she needed. Though Anna had only seen him a few times, she remembered him well; he was a nice guy. She often thought about those whiskers.
The sun had risen among streaky white clouds, shedding welcome warmth on her skin.
She shifted the rucksack on her back. The dogs had torn at it, but hadn’t succeeded in getting it open. The bottle of Amaro Lucano hadn’t been broken.
Before leaving, she’d taken one last look at the big dog from the door. He was still breathing hoarsely, his dirty coat rising and falling. She’d wondered whether she should put him out of his misery, but didn’t dare go any nearer. Better to leave him to die.
She started down a road which ran alongside the A29 for a while before curving away towards the sea through a retail park. All that was left of the discount store where they used to buy food were the vertical supports and the iron frame of the roof. The Furniture House, where they’d bought the sofa and bunk bed, paying by instalments, had been burnt down. The white stone steps at the front were now covered with a thick layer of ash. The handsome flowerpots decorated with Moors’ heads had gone. Inside there were only the skeletons of a few sofas and a piano.
Anna crossed the forecourt of a Ford salesroom lined with neat rows of burnt-out cars and walked out onto the fields. All that remained of the vineyards were some vine supports, stumps of olive trees and dry stone walls. A combine harvester near the ruins of a farmhouse looked like an insect, but with a full set of teeth. A plough seemed to be rooting in the earth like an anteater. Here and there shoots of fig trees appeared among black clods of soil, and light green buds could be seen on charred trunks.
*
The low modern structure of the De Roberto Elementary School floated on a black sea among waves of heat which seemed to bend the horizon. The basketball court behind the building was overgrown with grass. Fire had melted the backboards behind the hoops. The windows had lost their glass; inside, the desks, chairs and lino were covered with earth. A drawing of a giraffe and a lion by Daniela Sperno still hung on the wall of Anna’s classroom, 3C. The teacher’s desk was on the dais by the whiteboard. Some time ago Anna had opened the drawer and found the register, the little mirror with which Signorina Rigoni used to check the hairs on her chin, and her lipstick. Anna usually went in and sat at her old desk for a while. But this time she walked on by.
*
The ruins of the residential village Torre Normanna appeared in the distance. Two long straight roads like landing strips, lined with small terraced houses, formed a cross in the middle of the lowland area behind Castellammare.
There was a sports club with two tennis courts and a swimming pool, plus a restaurant and a small supermarket. Most of her schoolmates had lived in this village.
Now, after the looting and the fires, the pretty little Mediterranean-style houses were reduced to shells of concrete columns, heaps of roof tiles, rubble and rusty gates. In those that had escaped the fire, doors had been ripped off hinges, windows smashed, walls covered with graffiti. The roads were littered with glass from smashed car windows. The asphalt of Piazzetta dei Venti had melted and thickened, forming humps and bubbles, but the swings and slide of the children’s playground, and the big sign of the restaurant, ‘A Taste of Aphrodite’, featuring a purple lobster, were intact.
She walked quickly through the village. She didn’t like the place. Her mother had always said it was inhabited by nouveau-riche bastards who polluted the soil with their illegal sewers. She’d written to a newspaper to complain about it. Now the nouveau-riche bastards were no longer there, but their ghosts peered out at her from the windows, whispering: ‘Look! Look! It’s the daughter of that woman who called us nouveau-riche bastards.’
Outside the village she took a road which followed the bed of a dried-up stream at the foot of some round, bare hills that looked like pin-cushions, pierced as they were by vineyard props. Reeds grew thickly on both sides of the road, their plumes rising up against the blue sky.
A hundred metres further on, she entered the cool shade of an oak wood. Anna thought this wood must be magical; the fire hadn’t succeeded in burning it, but had merely licked at its edges before giving up. Between the thick trunks the sun painted golden patches on the covering of ivy and on the dog roses that swamped a rickety fence. A gate opened onto a path overgrown by long-untrimmed box hedges.
Just visible on a concrete post was a sign: ‘Mulberry Farm’.
2
Anna Salemi had been born in Palermo on 12 March 2007, the daughter of Maria Grazia Zanchetta and Franco Salemi.
The couple had met in the summer of 2005. He was twenty-one and worked as a driver for Elite Cars, his father’s private taxi firm. She was twenty-three and studying Italian literature at the University of Palermo.
They noticed each other on the ferry to the Aeolian Islands, exchanging glances among the crowd of tourists crammed on the deck. They disembarked on Lipari, with their separate groups.
The next day they met again on Papisca beach.
Maria Grazia’s friends rolled joints, read books and discussed politics.
Franco’s friends, all male, played football, challenged each other to games of beach tennis and showed off the muscles they’d built up in the gym during the winter.
Franco’s approach was pretty clumsy. He kept pretending to miskick the ball, moving it closer and closer to the beautiful girl sunbathing naked.
Finally Maria Grazia said: ‘Stop kicking that ball around me. You want to talk to me? Come over here and introduce yourself, then.’
He asked her out for a pizza. She got drunk and pushed him into the pizzeria toilets, where they made love.
‘I know we’re very different. But it’s through their differences that people complete each other,’ Maria Grazia confessed to a friend who was amazed she liked such a vulgar lout.
Back in Palermo they continued to see each other and the next year she got pregnant.
Franco was still living with his parents. Maria Grazia shared a room in a student flat and had an evening job at a wine bar in Piazza Sant’Oliva.
The Zanchetta family lived in Bassano del Grappa, in northern Italy. Her father had a small business that manufactured hi-fi equipment and her mother taught in a primary school. Their daughter loved warm weather, the seaside, Sicily and the character of its inhabitants. After finishing school she decided to move to the island, against her parents’ wishes.
Maria Grazia didn’t even consider abortion. She explained to Franco that he was free to choose: either he could recognise the child, or she’d become a single mother, and that would be fine with her.
Franco asked her to marry him, feeling that it was his duty.
Six months later the wedding took place in the village hall of Castellammare, the Salemi family’s place of origin. The Zanchettas thought their daughter deserved better than this southern taxi driver and didn’t attend the ceremony.
There was no honeymoon. The couple moved to the centre of Palermo, where they lived in a flat on the third floor of an old palazzo near the Politeama Theatre.
Signor Salemi discovered that he had heart problems and retired, leaving the running of Elite Cars to his son.
Two months later, in an inflatable birthing pool full of warm water, Anna was born, dark-skinned like her father, with her mother’s features.
‘I brought Anna into the world by accepting pain. Because women can give birth in the peace of their own homes.’ So Maria Grazia would say to anyone who asked her about her unusual choice.
The Salemi family couldn’t stand their daughter-in-law. They called her ‘the madwoman’. What other word was there for a woman who gave birth like a monkey and smoked pot?
Over the next two years Maria Grazia, as well as looking after the baby, graduated and got a temporary job teaching Italian and Latin at a high school. Franco, meanwhile, had expanded Elite Cars, buying more taxis and hiring new drivers.
They didn’t see much of each other. He would come home exhausted in the evening, bringing boxes of food from the takeaway, and collapse on the bed. She taught during the day, and in the evening, in her book-filled study, cuddled the baby and read about psychology, the environment and women’s liberation. And she started writing stories, which she hoped to publish.