‘No, I don’t know.’
‘You take three matches,’ – he took them out of the box – ‘one for you, one for me and one for Maria. You remove the head from one of them.’ He took one and broke it, then he gripped them all in his fist and made the ends stick out. ‘Whoever draws the headless match goes to get the water. Pick one, come on.’
I pulled out a whole one. I jumped for joy.
‘Maria, it’s your turn. Come on.’
My sister took a whole one too and clapped her hands.
‘Looks like it’s me.’ Papa drew out the broken one.
Maria and I started laughing and shouting: ‘You go! You go! You’ve lost! You’ve lost! Go and get the water!’
Papa got up, rather crestfallen. ‘When I get back you must be washed. Do you hear me?’
‘Would you like me to go? You’re tired,’ said mama.
‘You can’t. It’s a dangerous mission. Besides, I’ve got to get my cigarettes from the truck.’ And he went out of the house with the jug in his hand.
We got washed, ate pasta with tomato sauce and frittata, and after kissing papa and mama we went to bed without even begging to be allowed to watch television.
I woke up during the night. I had had a nightmare.
Jesus was telling Lazarus to rise and walk. But Lazarus didn’t rise. Rise and walk, Jesus repeated. Lazarus just wouldn’t come back to life. Jesus, who looked like Severino, the man who drove the water tanker, lost his temper. He was being made to look a fool. When Jesus tells you to rise and walk, you have to do it, especially if you’re dead. But Lazarus just lay there, stiff as a board. So Jesus started shaking him like a doll and Lazarus finally rose up and bit him in the throat. Leave the dead alone, he said with blood-smeared lips.
I opened my eyes wide. I was covered in sweat.
Those nights it was so hot that if you were unfortunate enough to wake up it was hard to get back to sleep. The bedroom I shared with my sister was narrow and long. It had been converted from a corridor. The two beds were laid lengthwise, one after the other, under the window. On one side was the wall, on the other about thirty centimetres to move in. Otherwise the room was white and bare.
In winter it was cold and in summer you couldn’t breathe.
The heat that was accumulated by the walls and ceiling in the daytime was emitted during the night. You felt as if your pillow and woollen mattress had come straight out of an oven.
Behind my feet I saw Maria’s dark head. She was sleeping with her glasses on, face upwards, completely relaxed with her arms and legs apart.
She used to say that if she woke up without her glasses on she got scared. Usually mama took them off as soon as she fell asleep because they left marks on her face.
The insecticide coil on the window sill produced a dense toxic smoke that killed the mosquitoes and didn’t do us much good either. But in those days nobody worried about that sort of thing.
Next to our room was our parents’ room. I could hear papa snoring. The fan blowing. My sister panting. The monotonous hoot of a little owl. The buzz of the fridge. The stench of sewage from the toilet.
I knelt on the bed and leaned on the window sill to get some air.
There was a full moon. It was high and bright. You could see for a long way, as if it were daytime. The fields seemed phosphorescent. The air was still. The houses dark, silent.
Maybe I was the only person awake in Acqua Traverse. It was a good feeling.
The boy was in the hole.
I imagined him dead in the earth. Cockroaches, bugs and millipedes crawling on him, over his bloodless skin, and worms coming out of his blue lips. His eyes were like two hard-boiled eggs.
I had never seen a dead body. Except my grandmother Giovanna. On her bed, with her arms crossed, in her black dress and shoes. Her face seemed to be made of rubber. Yellow like wax. Papa had told me I must kiss her. Everyone was crying. Papa was pushing me. I had put my lips on her cold cheek. It had a sickly sweet taste that mingled with the smell of the candles. Afterwards I had washed my lips with soap.
But what if the boy was alive?
If he wanted to get out and was scratching at the walls of the hole with his fingers and calling for help? If he had been caught by an ogre?
I looked out and far away on the plain I saw the hill. It seemed to have appeared out of nothing and stood up, like an island risen from the sea, tall and black, with its secret that was waiting for me.
‘Michele, I’m thirsty …’ Maria woke up. ‘Will you get me a glass of water?’ She was talking with her eyes closed and running her tongue over her dry lips.
‘Just a minute …’ I got up.
I didn’t want to open the door. What if grandmother Giovanna was sitting at the table with the boy? Saying, come, sit down with us, let’s eat? And there on the plate was the impaled hen?
There was nobody there. A ray of moonlight fell on the old flower-patterned sofa, on the kitchen cabinet with the white plates, and across the black-and-white tiled floor, and crept into my parents’ bedroom, climbing up onto the bed. I saw their feet, intertwined. I opened the fridge and took out the jug of cold water. I took a swig from it, then filled a glass for my sister who drank it in one draught. ‘Thank you.’
‘Now go to sleep.’
‘Why did you do the forfeit instead of Barbara?’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Didn’t you want her to pull down her knickers?’
‘No.’
‘What if I’d had to do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Pull down my knickers. Would you have done it for me too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good night, then. I’m going to take off my glasses.’ She shut them in their case and snuggled up to her pillow.
‘Good night.’
I lay for a long time staring at the ceiling before I got back to sleep.
Papa wasn’t going away again.
He had come home to stay. He had told mama he didn’t want to see the autostrada again for a while and he was going to look after us.
Maybe, sooner or later, he would take us to the seaside for a swim.
Two
When I woke up mama and papa were still asleep. I gulped down some milk and some bread and marmalade, went out and got my bike.
‘Where are you going?’
My sister was on the front steps, in her knickers, watching me.
‘For a ride.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I want to come with you.’
‘No.’
‘I know where you’re going … You’re going on the mountain.’
‘No I’m not. If mama and papa ask you anything, tell them I’ve gone for a ride and I won’t be long.’
Another scorching day.
At eight o’clock in the morning the sun was still low but was already beginning to roast the plain. I was going along the road we had come down the previous afternoon and wasn’t thinking about anything, I was pedalling along amid the dust and insects trying to get there quickly. I took the road through the fields, the one that skirted the hill and led to the valley. Every now and then magpies rose from the wheat with their black and white tails. They chased each other, quarrelled, insulted each other with their raucous croaks. A hawk circled with still wings, drifting on the warm currents. I even saw a red hare, with long ears, dart across in front of me. I was finding it hard going, pushing on the pedals. The tyres slipped on the stones and the clods of dry earth. The closer I got to the house, the bigger the yellow hill grew in front of me, and the heavier the weight that crushed my chest, taking my breath away.
What if I arrived and found witches or an ogre there?
I knew witches met at night in abandoned houses and had parties and if you joined in you went mad and that ogres ate children.
I must be careful. If an ogre caught me, he would throw me in a hole too and eat me bit by bit. First an arm, then a leg and so on. And no
body would ever hear of me again. My parents would weep in despair. And everyone would say: ‘Michele was such a nice boy, we’re so sorry.’ My aunts and uncles would come, and my cousin Evelina, in her blue Giulietta. Skull wouldn’t cry, not him, nor would Barbara. My sister and Salvatore would, though.
I didn’t want to die. Though I’d have liked to go to my funeral.
I didn’t have to go up there. Was I out of my mind?
I turned my bike round and started for home. After a hundred metres I braked.
What would Tiger Jack do in my place?
He wouldn’t turn back even if Manitou in person ordered him to.
Tiger Jack.
Now there was a serious person. Tiger Jack, Tex Willer’s Indian buddy.
And Tiger Jack would go up that hill even if an international conference of all the witches, bandits and ogres on the planet was taking place there, because he was a Navajo Indian, and he was fearless and invisible and silent as a puma and could climb and knew how to lie in wait for his enemies and then stab them with his knife.
I’m Tiger, even better, I’m Tiger’s Italian son, I said to myself.
Pity I didn’t have a knife, a bow or a Winchester.
I hid my bike, as Tiger would have done with his horse, ducked into the wheat and crawled forward on hands and knees, till my legs felt as stiff as pieces of wood and my arms were numb. Then I started hopping like a bird, looking right and left.
When I reached the valley I stopped for a few minutes to get my breath back, flattening against a tree trunk. And I flitted from tree to tree like a Sioux shadow. With my ears pricked up for any voice or suspicious sound. But all I heard was the blood throbbing in my ear-drums.
Squatting behind a bush I scanned the house.
It was silent and still. Nothing seemed to have changed. If the witches had been there they had tidied up afterwards.
I squeezed through the brambles and found myself in the yard.
Hidden under the corrugated sheet and the mattress was the hole.
It hadn’t been a dream.
I couldn’t see him clearly. It was dark and full of flies and a sickening smell welled up.
I knelt on the edge.
‘Are you alive?’
Nothing.
‘Are you alive? Can you hear me?’
I waited, then I picked up a stone and threw it at him. I hit him on the foot. A thin, slender foot with black toes. A foot that didn’t move a millimetre.
He was dead. And he would only get up from there if Jesus in person ordered him to.
My flesh crawled.
Dead dogs and cats had never affected me like this. Fur hides death. But this corpse, so white, with its arm thrown to one side, its head against the wall, was repulsive. There was no blood, nothing. Just a lifeless body in a dismal hole.
There was nothing human about him any more.
I must see his face. The face is the most important thing. From the face you can tell everything.
But going down there scared me. I could turn him over with a stick. It would take a pretty long one. I went into the cowshed and found a pole, but it was too short. I went back. A small, locked door gave onto the yard. I tried pushing it, but although it was rickety it held. Above the door there was a little window. I climbed up, supporting myself on the jambs, and got through head first. A couple of kilos heavier, or a bum like Barbara’s, and I wouldn’t have got through.
I found myself in the room I had seen while I was crossing the bridge. There were the packets of pasta. The opened cans of tomatoes. Empty beer bottles. The remains of a fire. Some newspapers. A mattress. A drum full of water. A basket. I had the same feeling I had had the day before, that someone came here. This room wasn’t disused like the rest of the house.
Under a grey blanket there was a big box. Inside I found a rope that ended in an iron hook.
With this I can get down, I thought.
I took it and chucked it through the little window and climbed out.
On the ground there was a rusty crane jib. I tied the rope round it. But I was afraid it would come undone and I would be left in the hole with the corpse. I tied three knots, like the ones papa tied on the tarpaulin of his truck. I pulled as hard as I could, it held. So I threw it into the hole.
‘I’m not scared of anything,’ I whispered to hearten myself, but my legs were wobbly and a voice in my brain was screaming at me not to go.
Dead people can’t hurt you, I said to myself. I crossed myself and went down.
Inside it was colder.
The dead boy’s skin was dirty, caked with mud and shit. He was naked. About the same height as me, but thinner. He was skin and bone. His ribs stuck out. He must be about my age.
I touched his hand with my toe, but it remained lifeless. I lifted the blanket that covered his legs. Round the right leg he had a big chain fastened with a padlock. The skin was scraped and raw. A thick transparent liquid oozed from the flesh and ran onto the rusty links of the chain, which was fixed to a buried ring.
I wanted to see his face. But I didn’t want to touch his head. It gave me the creeps.
Finally, tentatively, I stretched out my arm and with two fingers took hold of one edge of the blanket and I was trying to lift it off his face when the dead boy bent his leg.
I clenched my fists and opened my mouth wide and terror gripped my testicles with an icy hand.
Then the dead boy raised his torso as if he was alive and with eyes closed stretched out his arms towards me.
My hair stood on end, I let out a yell, jumped backwards and tripped over the bucket and the shit spilled all over the place. I landed on my back screaming.
The dead boy started screaming too.
I thrashed about in the shit. Then at last with a desperate lunge I grabbed the rope and shot out of the hole like a flea gone berserk.
I pedalled, I swerved between holes and ruts at the risk of crashing, but I didn’t slow down. My heart was exploding, my lungs were burning. I hit a bump and found myself in mid-air. I landed badly, I dragged one foot on the ground and squeezed the brakes, but that made it worse, the front wheel locked and I slid into the ditch at the side of the road. I got shakily back on my feet and looked at myself. One knee was grazed and bleeding, my T-shirt was spattered with shit, a leather strap on my sandal had snapped.
Breathe, I told myself.
I breathed and felt my heart calming down, my breathing returning to normal, and suddenly I felt sleepy. I lay down. I closed my eyes. Under my eyelids everything was red. The fear was still there, but it was just a slight burning way down in my stomach. The sun warmed my frozen arms. The crickets sang in my ears. My knee throbbed.
When I opened my eyes again some big black ants were crawling over me.
How long had I slept? It might have been five minutes or two hours.
I got on the Crock and rode on homewards. As I pedalled I kept seeing the dead boy rising up and stretching out his hands towards me. That gaunt face, those closed eyes, that open mouth, kept flashing in front of me.
Now it seemed to me like a dream. A bad dream that no longer had any force.
He was alive. He had pretended to be dead. Why?
Maybe he was ill. Maybe he was a monster.
A werewolf.
At night he became a wolf. They kept him chained up there because he was dangerous. I had seen a film on television about a man who changed into a wolf and attacked people whenever there was a full moon. The peasants set a trap and the wolf fell into it and a hunter shot it and the wolf died and turned back into a man. It was the pharmacist. And the hunter was the pharmacist’s son.
They kept that boy chained up under a fibre-glass sheet covered with earth so that he wouldn’t be exposed to the moon’s rays.
Werewolves can’t be cured. To kill them you have to have a silver bullet.
But werewolves didn’t exist.
‘Stop all this talk about monsters, Michele. Monsters don’t exist. Ghosts, werewolves and
witches are just nonsense invented to frighten mugs like you. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters,’ papa had said to me one day when I had asked him if monsters could breathe underwater.
But if they had hidden him there, there must be a reason.
Papa would explain it all to me.
‘Papa! Papa!’ I pushed the door and rushed in. ‘Papa! I’ve got something to …’ The rest died on my lips.
He was sitting in the armchair with the newspaper in his hands looking at me with toad’s eyes. The worst toad’s eyes I had seen since the day I had drunk the Lourdes water thinking it was acqua minerale. He squashed his cigarette-end in his coffee cup.
Mama was sitting on the sofa sewing, she raised her head and lowered it again.
Papa drew in air through his nose and said: ‘Where have you been all day?’ He looked me up and down. ‘Have you seen yourself? What the hell have you been rolling in?’ He grimaced. ‘Shit? You stink like a pig! And you’ve broken your sandals too!’ He looked at the clock. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
I said nothing.
‘I’ll tell you. Twenty past three. You didn’t turn up for lunch. Nobody knew where you were. I went all the way to Lucignano looking for you. Yesterday you got away with it. Not today.’
When he was so furious papa didn’t shout, he spoke in a low voice. That terrified me. Even today I can’t stand people who don’t give vent to their anger.
He pointed towards the door. ‘If you want to do as you please, you’d better go away. I don’t want you. Get out.’
‘Wait a minute, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘I don’t want to hear it, I just want you to go out through that door.’
I pleaded. ‘Papa, it’s important …’
‘If you’re not out of here in three seconds I’m going to get up from this chair and kick you all the way to the Acqua Traverse road sign.’ And suddenly he raised his voice: ‘Get out!’
I nodded. I felt like crying. My eyes filled with tears, I opened the door and went down the steps. I got on the Crock again and cycled down to the stream.
The stream was always dry, except in winter, when it rained hard. It wound its way between the yellow fields like a long albino snake. A bed of white pointed stones, incandescent rocks and tufts of grass. After a steep part between two hills, the stream widened out to form a pond which in summer dried up into a black puddle.