‘We’ve got to kill those brutes. They go into the houses and eat the dead.’ Patrizio went back to the Ferrari, took out a shotgun and loaded it. ‘One of these days I’m going to teach you how to use this.’
The virus had cleaned out the flats; they found nothing but corpses. Patrizio flopped dejectedly down on a sofa. ‘Our job will soon be done.’
‘What will we do then?’ asked Pietro, toying with the still hands of an old grandfather clock.
‘We’ll go to Palermo, then onto Paris.’ Patrizio turned and reached out over the back of the sofa to take a box of chocolates from a table. His T-shirt rode up, and his trousers slid down over his buttocks, revealing a red blotch. Pietro had to catch hold of the clock to stop himself falling over. He wondered if Patrizio knew he had the blotches. He’d always said he was immune, that he would never fall ill.
‘Would you like one?’ The young man held out the box, after wolfing down three gianduiotti.
Pietro shook his head.
‘What’s the matter? I’ve never heard you say no to sweets before.’ And with his teeth stained with chocolate, he unwrapped a nougat.
The little boy bit his lip, swallowed and, with the little breath he had in his body, whispered: ‘You’ve got some blotches.’
Patrizio jumped to his feet, grabbed him by the T-shirt and lifted him up in the air as if he was made of cloth. ‘What did you say?’ His mouth, too small for his big round face, was trembling, and his wild eyes had sunk back between his under-eye shadows and his bristly eyebrows. ‘What did you say?’ He raised his fist. It was the first time he’d ever laid hands on the little boy. ‘Where?’
Pietro closed his eyes. ‘On your back.’
Patrizio let go of him and went over to a large mirror with a mahogany frame. He took off his T-shirt, then had a long look at himself, breathing in through his nose. He pulled down his trousers. His hairy white buttocks, too, were covered with red blotches.
The little boy had retreated into a corner of the living room. Patrizio looked at him for a few moments, then pointed to the door. ‘Go.’
‘Where?’
‘Away. Go away.’
Pietro burst into tears and didn’t move.
‘You’ve got to go away. At once,’ barked the fat man. He picked up a glass lamp from the side table and smashed it on the floor.
Pietro slid his back down the wall and clasped his legs between his arms.
‘Do what you like, then.’ Patrizio sat on the sofa, picked up the shotgun, stuck the barrel in his mouth, put his thumb on the trigger and looked at him.
Pietro covered his eyes with his knees and his ears with his hands. He tried to think about something pleasant. Him and his father on the Laverda. That time they’d stopped by a lagoon as flat as a table with mounds of white salt rising up out of it. In the distance there were some pink birds with S-shaped necks, banana-like beaks and legs so thin they could have been billiard cues.
‘Come on, get up.’ A powerful hand clamped round his arm.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m taking you home.’
The assistant followed his master, who marched out with his legs wide apart, the shotgun over his shoulder.
They didn’t speak in the car. Patrizio drove fast, and Pietro shut his eyes every time they approached a bend. They pulled up sharply outside the house in Via Aleramo, leaving thick skid marks on the road.
The young man opened the door. ‘Get out.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Get out.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘I said, get out.’
The Ferrari roared off, scaring flocks of rooks out of the trees.
He didn’t come back.
Pietro joined the other children of the village. They all lived in the school. There were about thirty of them, boys and girls, aged between five and thirteen. They played football in the playground, slept on the big mattresses in the gym and ransacked houses in search of food.
One day Pietro and two other boys decided to venture out to a discount store on the main road outside the village, where rumour had it there was still some Coca-Cola. The store was a concrete box in the middle of an expanse of asphalt.
One of his companions pointed at something. ‘Look at that.’
A Ferrari, its bonnet rammed into a row of rubbish bins, one of its doors wide open.
‘You go on, I’ll join you later,’ said Pietro.
Patrizio was sitting in the driver’s seat, surrounded by empty beer cans and a sickening smell of excrement. His arms were covered with blotches and bruises, his stomach sagged like a punctured football. His double chin, formerly pudgy, now drooped down, greasy and yellowish, over a swollen neck. Eyes as opaque as marrons glacés stared at a windscreen spattered with dry vomit. A cavernous wheezing sound came from his open mouth.
Pietro was amazed he was still alive. He touched his shoulder. ‘Patrizio. Patrizio, can you hear me? It’s Pietro.’
Patrizio closed his eyelids, but his face remained expressionless. ‘How are you doing, assistant?’
Pietro swallowed. ‘I’m fine … What about you?’
Something, perhaps a smile, ran across the thin lips covered with sores and scabs. ‘You haven’t got two plastic bags, have you?’
12
They’d been on the road for four days.
Before leaving, they’d pulled Pietro’s body up to the road with ropes, loaded him onto a supermarket trolley and pushed it down to the beach. There they’d dug a hole in the sand, buried him and overturned a boat on top.
Every now and then Anna would turn round to look for him, but see only Astor shuffling along in her wake and Fluffy sniffing at the sides of the road. Then she’d clutch the pendant and squeeze it so hard the points of the starfish dug into her flesh.
Pietro had exploded in her heart, and thousands of splinters were tearing through her veins.
There was so much talk about love in her mother’s books. Now she understood what it was.
To know what it was, you had to lose it.
Love was losing someone.
Without Pietro the world had become threatening again. Silence, once her comforting companion, was now deafening and painful. It had been so stupid, the way he’d died, his long agonies, and she couldn’t find any meaning in it.
It was as if someone watching her from above was writing her story, inventing ever crueller ways of making her suffer. Pushing her further and further, to see when she’d finally collapse. They’d taken her father and mother and left her alone with a little boy to bring up. They’d arranged for her to meet Pietro, made him indispensable to her, then taken him away from her. The truth was she was running along a fixed path, like a hamster in a wheel. The idea that she could choose whether to turn right or left was just an illusion.
She remembered something Pietro had said to her many times. ‘This world doesn’t exist. It’s a nightmare we can’t wake up from.’
*
It was about a hundred kilometres to Messina now. Another three or four days at most, she reckoned. Under her feet the never-changing autostrada, on either side the slow, monotonous landscape, broken only by an interminable series of tunnels.
She turned towards Astor. Head drooping, he was trailing a stick on the ground. Talking to him had become difficult; words were too heavy for utterance.
‘Are you all right?’
He gazed blankly at the green slope which ran down towards the sea in the morning haze.
‘Answer me when I speak to you.’
Astor puffed out his cheeks, folded his arms and ran on ahead, stamping his feet.
He always seemed to be sulky. If she scolded him, he’d run away and hide.
As if it was my fault.
She caught up with him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you hungry?’
He shook his head.
‘Well, I am.’ She sat down at the side of the road and took out of the rucksack two tins o
f tuna, one tin of dog food and a bottle of water.
Fluffy sat down obediently, wagging his tail. Drool trickled down from the sides of his mouth. Anna poured the meat out onto the asphalt, and he devoured it, his body trembling. She opened a can of tuna, poured off the surplus oil and started spooning it out with a knife.
Astor kept whacking the guardrail with the stick.
‘Will you stop that?’
He pulled the hair at the back of his head.
She was worried. He’d started tearing his hair out and talking to himself. He’d have long conversations with himself in a made-up language, punctuated by exclamations and bursts of laughter. With Pietro, Astor had become talkative and sociable, and the long-haired lizards had disappeared. But now, since the accident, he’d retreated into his own world of little things – stones, insects, dead animals and sticks.
‘Pietro had the Red Fever. He would have died anyway.’ She tossed the tin into the gutter. ‘We’ve got to keep going. We’re still here, the two of us.’
He shook his head. ‘The three of us.’ He pointed at the dog.
Anna offered him the other tin. ‘Are you sure you don’t want any?’
‘I’ll have a bit,’ said Astor.
How would he cope when she was no longer around? It was pointless writing in the exercise book for him; he’d never open it. He wouldn’t even read the road signs.
She wasn’t even sure he’d be capable of finding food for himself.
*
In the afternoon the rain started. Cold and relentless, out of a blanket of grey clouds. From the autostrada, which followed the sinuous line of the coast, they could see the rough sea, grey like the sky, foaming against black rocks far below. Soaking wet, they took a slip road down into a small village on a hillside under one of the autostrada’s viaducts. A landslide had come down onto the houses, filling streets and uprooting trees. Rivulets of rainwater had cut beds through the debris and ran down towards the beach, joining together in a torrent which melted into the sea, turning it ochre brown.
There was no sign of life here either.
They entered one of the few surviving buildings, a white cottage surrounded by agaves. The walls were black with soot and in the bedrooms the wallpaper hung down in thick mouldy strips. Not a single windowpane was intact, and there was a cold draught. In the kitchen they set fire to the units, hung up their clothes to dry and huddled round the flames to get warm. They had no food, but were so tired they fell asleep at once, the embers reddening their silhouettes in the darkness.
*
At dawn they set off again. It had stopped raining, but the clouds still hung there menacingly. After only ten kilometres they came to a collapsed viaduct. There was nothing left of it but two stumps. Below, a rain-swollen torrent ran between the piers. The paired wheels of an overturned articulated lorry protruded from the muddy waters.
They went down through a thick thorny wood which grew at the foot of the hill. The stream was too fast-flowing to be fordable; they had to go upstream to a bend where a fallen poplar formed a bridge. Anna led the way, balancing precariously on the trunk. Astor and Fluffy followed her on all fours.
The rain waited for them to get back onto the autostrada before starting again. They sheltered inside a Volvo parked in a lay-by. Its warning triangle was still standing nearby. Fluffy lay down on the back seat and Astor sat in the driver’s seat. The car’s interior filled with the sound of the rain, which drummed on the roof and poured down the windscreen. Anna searched the luggage for something to eat, but the only thing even remotely connected with food was a book of recipes for pressure cookers. She chucked it out of the window. By the time the downpour finished it was too dark to start walking again, and they slept there, curled up on the seats.
During the night Anna woke up. She needed a pee. She got out and saw a light shining in the distance. Maybe a fire. When she got back into the car, she found Astor awake.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
‘Don’t think about it. We’ll look for something tomorrow. Go to sleep.’
‘Why don’t we go home?’
Anna hugged him. ‘We’ve got to go to the mainland.’
‘I liked it at home.’
‘So did I. But you’ll see: it’ll be even better on the other side.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do. Now go to sleep.’
*
The sun had opened a gap through purple clouds, but the wind felt cold on their wet clothes.
Anna was beginning to have serious doubts about crossing the Strait. She had no idea how wide it was. As wide as a river? A sea? And how were they going to cross it? By boat?
They reached the slip road to Patti. Rising up to the right were some low, barren hills. To the left, beyond a strip of green land crowded with roofs, lay the sea. They passed the remains of a burnt-out tollbooth and a column of abandoned cars, and started along the main road into the city.
When they’d gone a hundred metres, Anna stopped and turned round.
A low noise, like a rumble, was growing in intensity.
‘Do you hear that?’ she asked Astor.
He nodded and looked at his feet.
The asphalt was shaking as if an earthquake was starting. Some rooks rose up from a cedar.
Fluffy growled, baring his teeth and pricking up his one good ear.
A herd of cattle swept round the bend and came thundering down the road towards them.
Anna pulled her brother back behind the guardrail.
The mass of hide and horns passed by, hemmed in by the metal barriers. It lasted nearly a minute, then, in a cloud of dust, dozens of children appeared, running after the animals, brandishing sticks, shouting and whistling.
Astor gaped at his sister, then jumped back onto the road and mingled with the shrieking mass, with Fluffy following behind.
‘Where’s he going?’ said Anna, and she too started running.
The herd ran down to the end of the road and into a car park, where a hundred or so other children were waiting, to steer them with their shouts towards the King Arthur shopping mall, a big pink building in the form of a castle, complete with battlements and four round towers at its corners.
Terrified, the cattle ran between two lines of children, who beat them with sticks. Without slowing down, they went through a row of open doors and into a dark tunnel, which led into the heart of the big mall. Kiosks advertising Fastweb, Sky and Super-Mop: the Magic Broom were knocked down by the animals to the thunder of hooves and the sound of mooing. Those at the sides ended up in the clothes shops, banging into empty display cases, smashing the windows of the Zecchino snack bar, skidding into the Bosphorus kebab house and upending counters, grills and tables. Others slipped over and were trampled. Behind them, thin arms waved torches which threw gleams on the signs for Big Burger, the shops and the Wurstelleria Liebe. Lamed, wounded and terrified, the cattle found themselves at the end of the tunnel on a huge circular balcony. In front of them the balustrade was missing; on either side two flaming barricades made escape impossible.
One after another, without even slowing down, the cattle leapt into the void, like the mammoths driven over cliffs by primitive human beings. The only difference was that, after a flight of some fifteen metres, they landed not in the frozen undergrowth of the Pleistocene, but on the tables of the restaurant, The Trawler, crashing like living bombs onto a big glass tank which had once housed a pair of small blue sharks, and onto a boat that served as a display stand for fresh fish.
Anna reached the end of the tunnel, befuddled with smoke and dust. Gasping, she looked down from the balcony.
Below her was a heap of cows in their death throes, gashed by horns, their backs broken and their heads crushed. Many had died on impact, others writhed on top of their companions. A stench of excrement, blood and petrol rose out of the mass. An army of children covered in filthy rags cheered from the balconies and escalators. Some had painted their faces with black stripes,
and all them – male and female – had long hair that reached halfway down their backs. Some were crippled, others blind, others disfigured with scars. They shouted, beat their hands on their chests and stamped their feet louder and louder, drowning the piercing screams of the animals. When the room was filled with deafening noise, those who were below started climbing the mountain of flesh and bludgeoning the animals that were still alive, urged on by the spectators on the terraces.
They’re all so small …
Anna’s heart leaped in her chest.
Astor!
From the smoke that flooded the tunnel, unrecognisable figures emerged and blended together. Anna looked for her brother, pushing her way through the bodies, tripping over marble benches. But in the darkness everyone looked alike.
She circled round the columns of the lifts and elbowed her way towards the stairs.
Astor was leaning over, looking down and stroking his chin.
She shook his arm. ‘You must stay with me, do you hear? You must stop running away!’ And she hugged him tight.
He was trembling with excitement. ‘Did you see that? Did you see what they did? They drove them over.’
‘You weren’t even listen—’
Fluffy’s barks exploded in the tunnel. Squashed against the window of a mobile-phone shop, hackles raised, he was showing his teeth. A small group of children were pointing sharpened sticks at him.
Anna ran over to him. ‘He’s friendly. Leave him alone.’ She gestured to them to calm down, but one boy, bolder than the others, tried to hit Fluffy, who leaped forward, knocked him over and sank his teeth into his arm.
Anna grabbed the dog by the neck and pulled him back.
Those around them, excited and scared, shouted, grunted and ground their teeth like a crowd of macaques, threatening them with their spears, while the unfortunate boy got to his feet, clutching his elbow.
‘Astor! Astor, where are you?’ shouted Anna, holding the dog.
Astor slipped through the group and joined her.