Curlytop began clapping her hands from inside the Smart car. ‘Good on you, Teodoro. Give this slut a piece of your mind.’
I had to react, but all I could think about was that his name was Teodoro and I didn’t know anyone who was called that.
I breathed, trying to push that stupid thought out of my mind. My ears and my neck were now boiling hot and my head was spinning.
Maybe Teo, the old cocker spaniel that belonged to the woman on the first floor, was actually called Teodoro.
I had to get out of there straight away. I had nothing to do with this. I had told her that the dress was saucy and if she had listened to me . . .
I undid my seatbelt, but I still couldn’t move.
I was sitting on a huge giant made of stone that was hugging me and wouldn’t let me go.
I looked towards the pavement hoping that someone would help us. The passers-by were a swarm of fuzzy silhouettes.
The Lazio supporter grabbed my mother by the wrist and yanked her. ‘Come and have a look, sweetheart. Come and see what you did.’
Mum lost her balance and fell over.
The high-pitched squeal of the woman: ‘Teo! Teo! Leave her alone. It’s late. She doesn’t understand anyway. Stuck-up cow.’
My mother lay on the cobbles, one of her stockings laddered. On the cobbles covered in who knows what. They don’t clean the streets in Rome. Infected pigeon shit. She was lying next to the wheel of the car, the guy towering above her.
He’ll spit on her now, I thought. But all he said was, ‘And you better thank God that you’re a woman. Otherwise . . .’
Otherwise what would he have done to her if she weren’t a woman?
Mum closed her eyes and I felt the giant squeezing me in his stone arms, taking away my breath, and then he jumped through the roof of our car and he and I flew over the people, over the Lazio supporter, over my mother sprawled on the cobbles, over the traffic, over the roofs lined with crows, past the church steeples.
And I fainted.
5
At nine o’clock the sun pierced the dirty windows with rays of gold. Maybe it was because of the heat the hot water pipes gave off, but it was hard to stay awake down here.
I yawned and in my pants and T-shirt went into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
My armpits were holding up for now. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of washing myself with cold water and, besides, it didn’t matter if I stank. Who was going to get a whiff of me anyway? I sprayed myself with the fake tan and made myself a Nutella sandwich.
I decided to spend a couple of hours exploring the cellar. All this stuff belonged to the previous owner of our flat, Countess Nunziante, who had died without relatives. My father had bought the house with all her furniture and stuff in it and stacked everything up down here.
Inside the drawers of an old mahogany chest I found brightly-coloured clothes, notebooks full of accounting, solved crossword puzzles, and boxes full of staples, paperclips, fountain pens, transparent stones, packets of Muratti cigarettes, empty perfume bottles and dried-up lipsticks. There were also packs of postcards. Cannes, Viareggio, Ischia, Madrid. Tarnished silver cutlery. Spectacles. I even found a blonde wig, which I popped on my head, and then I slipped into an orange silk dressing gown. I began moving through the cellar as if it were the reception hall of a castle. ‘Good evening, Duke, I am the Countess Nunziante. Ah, Countess Sinibaldi is here too. Yes, this party is a little dull. And I still haven’t seen the Marquis de Monkey. He hasn’t ended up in the crocodile pit, has he?’
Beneath a pile of furniture was a long chest painted with red and green flowers. It looked like a coffin.
‘Here lies poor Goffredo. He ate a poisoned veal cutlet.’
My mobile began ringing.
I snorted. ‘No way! Fucking hell! Mum, please. Leave me alone.’
I tried to ignore it but I couldn’t. At last I couldn’t take it any more and I climbed up to the window. The display showed a number I didn’t know. Who was it? Apart from Mum, Nihal, Grandma and, on occasion, Dad, nobody called me. I stood there staring at the phone, not sure what to do. In the end, I was too curious not to answer. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Lorenzo. It’s Olivia.’
It took me a couple of seconds to work out it was that Olivia . . . Olivia, my half-sister. ‘Oh. Hi . . .’
‘How are you?’
‘Well, thanks, and you?’
‘Well. Sorry if I’m interrupting you. I got your number from Aunt Roberta. Listen, I wanted to ask you something. Do you know if your mother and Dad are at home?’
It’s a trap!
I had to be careful. Maybe Mum had suspected something and was using Olivia to work out where I really was. But Olivia and Mum, as far as I knew, didn’t talk to each other. ‘I don’t know . . . I’m away for ski week.’
‘Oh . . .’ Her voice was disappointed. ‘Well, you must be having fun.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me something, Lorenzo. Are your parents normally in at this time?’
What sort of a question was that? ‘Dad’s at work. And Mum sometimes goes to the gym or to the gallery. It depends.’
Silence. ‘Okay. And if they’re not there, is anyone else in?’
‘Nihal will be.’
‘Who’s Nihal?’
‘The housekeeper.’
‘Ah. Well. Listen, can you do me a favour?’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t tell anyone I called.’
‘Okay.’
‘Promise me you won’t.’
‘I promise I won’t.’
‘Good boy. Have fun skiing. Is there much snow?’
‘A bit.’
‘Well, bye then. And don’t forget, not a word.’
‘Yeah. Bye.’ I hung up and took off the wig, trying to work out what the hell she wanted from me. And why did she want to know if Mum and Dad were at home? Why didn’t she just call them? I shrugged my shoulders. It was none of my business. In any case, if it was a trap, I hadn’t been fooled.
The only time I’d seen my half-sister Olivia was at Easter in 1998.
I was twelve and she was twenty-one. The times before that didn’t count. We had spent a couple of summers together in Capri at Grandma Laura’s house, but I was too little to remember.
Olivia was the daughter of my father and some woman from Como who my mum hated. A dentist whom my father had married before I was born. Back then he lived in Milan with the dentist and he had had Olivia. Then they’d divorced and Dad had married Mum.
My father didn’t speak easily about his daughter. Every now and then he would go and visit her and he always came back in a bad mood. From what I could understand Olivia was crazy. She pretended to be a photographer but she just got into trouble. She’d failed her high-school exams and run away from home a couple of times, and then in Paris she’d had an affair with Faustini, my father’s accountant.
I had worked all these things out in bits and pieces because my parents didn’t discuss Olivia in front of me. But sometimes, in the car, they would forget I was there and so I was able to pick up snippets.
Two days before Easter we had gone to visit my uncle who lives in Campagnano. During the ride there Dad had told Mum that he’d invited Olivia for lunch to convince her to go to Sicily. There were priests there and they would keep her in a nice place with fruit trees, orchards and things to do.
I had expected Olivia to be ugly and with an unpleasant face like Cinderella’s stepsisters. Instead she was incredibly beautiful, one of those girls that as soon as you look at them your face burns red and everybody knows you think she is beautiful, and if she talks to you, you don’t know what to do with your hands, you don’t even know how to sit down. She had lots of curly blonde hair that fell all the way down her back and grey eyes, and she was sprinkled with freckles, just like me. She was tall and had big, wide breasts. She could have been the queen of a medieval kingdom.
She had barely spoken during dinner. Afterwards she an
d Dad had locked themselves in the study. She left without saying goodbye to anyone.
I stood there for a while thinking about that strange phone call, then I realised that I had a much more serious problem to solve. If I had another Sim card I could send a text to my mother pretending to be Alessia’s mother. But it wouldn’t work. Mum wanted to talk to her.
I put on a high-pitched voice: ‘Greetings, Signora, this is . . . Alessia’s mother . . . I wanted to let you know that your son is fine and having lots of fun. Goodbye.’
I was terrible. She’d have recognised me on the spot.
I picked up the phone and wrote:
Mum we’re in a hut up high in the
mountains. There’s no reception.
I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you.
And so I’d earned myself another day.
I turned off the phone, cleared my mind of my mother, flopped down on the bed, put on my headphones and started playing Soul Reaver. I came up against a mutant so tough I couldn’t beat him, which pissed me off, so I switched off the PlayStation and made myself a mayonnaise and mushroom sandwich.
I loved it here. If they brought me food and water I could spend the rest of my life here. And I realised that if I ever ended up in solitary confinement in prison I would be as happy as a pig in shit.
The fly had finally found a place where it could be itself, and so it may as well take a nap.
My eyes flew open suddenly.
Someone was fiddling with the lock on the door.
I had never even considered the possibility that someone might want to come into the cellar.
I stared at the door, but I couldn’t move. It was as if I were stuck to the bed. My throat had closed over and I was struggling to breathe.
In an unexpected move, like I was freeing myself of a spider’s web, I flung myself off the bed, banging my left knee on the corner of the bedside table. Gritting my teeth and swallowing a scream of pain, I limped towards the space between the cupboard and the wall. Grazing my legs, I slipped under a table, where rolls of rugs were piled up. I stretched out on top of them as the blood pulsed in my eardrums.
They wouldn’t be able to unlock the door. The lock was old and if you pushed the key the whole way in, it wouldn’t turn.
Then the door flew open.
I bit down on a smelly rug.
I could only see a slice of the floor from where I was. I heard footsteps and then a pair of jeans and black cowboy boots appeared.
Nihal didn’t own a pair of boots. My father wore Church brogues, and moccasins in summer. My mother had lots of pairs, but none of them were that scruffy. And the Silver Monkey only had old, worn-out trainers. Who could it be?
Whoever it was would notice that the cellar was being lived in. It was all there. The bed, the food, the television turned on.
Meanwhile the black boots were wandering around the room like they were looking for something. They moved towards my bed and stopped.
The boots’ owner was breathing through their mouth, like they had a cold. They lifted up a tin from the table and put it back down again. ‘Is anyone there?’ A woman’s voice.
I crushed the rug between my teeth. If she doesn’t find me, I said to myself, I will go and visit my cousin Vittorio, who loves playing board games, every single day. I swear to God I’ll be his best friend.
‘Who’s in here?’
I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears but I could still hear her walking, moving, looking.
‘Come out from under there. I can see you.’
I opened my eyes again. A shadowy figure was sitting on my bed.
‘Move it.’
No, I would never move, not on my life.
‘Are you deaf? Come out from under there.’
Maybe it was best to know who it was. I pulled myself up and, like a dog that has been caught with his nose in the fridge, I slid out.
Olivia was sitting on my bed.
She’d lost a lot of weight and her square cheekbones stuck out. Her face looked stretched and tired and her long blonde hair had been cut short. Above her jeans she was wearing a faded T-shirt with the Camel cigarettes logo and a blue sailor’s jacket.
She wasn’t as beautiful as she had been two years ago.
She studied me, perplexed. ‘What are you doing here?’
If there was something I hated, it was being seen in my pants and in particular being seen by women. Embarrassed, I picked up my trousers and slipped them on.
‘Why are you hiding down here?’
I didn’t know what to say. I was so confused I could barely shrug my shoulders.
My stepsister got up and looked around. ‘Forget about it, I don’t care. I’m looking for a box that I gave to my . . . to our father. The servant, upstairs, told me that it should be down here. He couldn’t come down with me because he was ironing. Was he being an idiot?’
Nihal was actually a bit of an idiot with people he didn’t know well. He had this bad habit of looking down his nose at everyone.
‘It’s a big box, with OLIVIA written on it. Give me a hand looking for it.’
I felt so happy that my stepsister didn’t care what I was doing in there that I really did help her to look for it.
But there was no sign of the box, or rather, there were heaps of boxes but none had OLIVIA written on them.
My stepsister shook her head. ‘See how little your father cares about my stuff?’
I whispered, ‘He’s your father too.’
‘You’re ri—’ Olivia squeezed her hand into a victory fist. Sitting beneath a cabinet, just behind the cellar door, was a box covered in sellotape, with OLIVIA’S HOUSE FRAGILE written on it.
‘Here it is. Look where he put it. Give me a hand, it’s heavy.’
We dragged it into the middle of the room.
Olivia sat down and crossed her legs. She peeled the tape off and began pulling out books, CDs, clothes and make-up, throwing them on the floor. ‘Here it is.’
It was a white book with a worn-out cover. The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels.
She began flipping through it, looking for something and talking to herself. ‘Fuck, it was here. I can’t believe it. That bastard Antonio must have found it.’ She got up quickly. Her eyes had gone shiny. She put her hands on her hips, looked up at the ceiling and began kicking the box in a rage. ‘Fucking hell! Fucking hell! I hate you. You even took that. And now what the fuck am I supposed to do?’
I stared at her terrified, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘What was in there?’
I thought she was going to burst into tears.
She looked at me. ‘Have you got any money?’
‘What?’
‘Money. I need money.’
‘No, I’m sorry.’ Actually I did have a bit. Dad had given me some spending money for the mountain, but I wanted to save it to buy a stereo.
‘Tell me the truth.’
I shook my head and opened my arms wide. ‘I swear. I don’t have any.’
She studied me, trying to work out whether I was lying to her. ‘Do me a favour. Put all this stuff back in the box and close it up.’ She opened the cellar door. ‘See you.’
I said, ‘Listen.’
She stopped. ‘What is it?’
‘Please, don’t tell anyone I’m here. Not even Nihal. If you tell them I’m dead.’
Olivia looked at me without seeing me. She was thinking about something else, something that worried her. Then she blinked as if to waken herself. ‘All right. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘Thanks.’
‘By the way, your face is orange. You overdid the fake tan.’ And she closed the door.
Operation Bunker was falling apart. Mum wanted to speak to Alessia’s mother. Olivia had found me. And I had a fluorescent face.
I kept looking at myself in the mirror and rereading the tanning instructions. It didn’t say anything about how long it took to go away.
I found an old bottle of Jif Lemon
, smeared it all over my face, and then lay down on the bed.
The only thing I was sure of was that Olivia wouldn’t say anything. She didn’t seem like the sort of person who would tell on me.
After ten minutes I washed my face but it was just as orange as before.
I rummaged through my sister’s big box. Everything had just been chucked in, mostly clothes and shoes. An old laptop. A manual camera without a lens. A statue of Buddha made of smelly wood. Sheets of paper with stuff written on it in big round handwriting. The majority were lists. People to invite to a party. Shopping lists. In a light blue folder I found some photographs of Olivia when she was still in good shape. In one of them she was lying on a red velvet settee, wearing just a man’s shirt, part of her boob was visible. In another shot she was sitting on a chair, a cigarette in her mouth, putting on her stockings. The one I liked the most was one of her taken from behind with her head turned towards the camera. With one hand she covered her boob. And her legs looked like they were never-ending.
I shouldn’t even think about her. Olivia was fifty per cent my sister.
Among the photos there was a small one, in black and white. My father, with long hair, wearing jeans and a leather jacket, sitting on the bollard of a jetty with a little girl, probably Olivia, who was sitting on his knee and eating an ice cream.
I burst out laughing. I would never have imagined that when he was young my father would have dressed so badly. I’d always known him with greying hair cut short and a grey suit with a tie and the shoes with holes in them. But here, with his hair like an old-fashioned tennis player’s, he looked happy.
There was even a letter that Olivia had written to Dad.
Dear Dad,
I’m writing to thank you for the money. Each time you get me out of trouble using your wealth I ask myself: if money didn’t exist in this world, how would my father help me? And then I ask myself if it’s the guilt or the love for me that makes you do it. You know what? I don’t want to know. I have been lucky to have a father like you who lets me live my own life and who, when I make a mistake, practically always helps me out. But enough now. I don’t want you to help me any more.
You’ve never liked me, I annoy you. When you’re with me you’re always too serious. Maybe it’s because I’m the living proof of a relationship gone wrong and each time you think of me you’re reminded of your shitty marriage to my mother. That’s not my fault, though. I know that for sure. For all the other stuff, I’m not sure. Maybe if I’d tried to be in contact more often, if I’d tried to break down the wall that separates us, maybe it would all have been different.