The only problem was her face, which was horrible. Her forehead was covered with a thick layer of spots. With all those craters, her skin was like a photograph of the surface of the moon. Patrizia would smother it with Topexan, homoeopathic remedies, herbal creams, anything she could find, but it was no good, her acne just seemed to lap it up. After the treatment she would be even more seborrhoeic and pimply than before. Her eyes were small and horribly close together and her nose was dotted with blackheads.
But Mimmo didn’t seem to notice. He was besotted with her. To him she was beautiful and that was the main thing. He swore that the day she was finally cured of her acne she’d ‘kick even Kim Basinger’s ass’.
Patrizia was twenty-two, she worked as a shop assistant but dreamed of becoming a primary school teacher. Her character was strong and decisive. She made poor Mimmo toe the line.
And then we come to his last fixation, the worst. Alaska.
A certain Fabio Lo Turco, a hippy type who claimed to have sailed single-handed round the world but had really set out from Porto Ercole and only got as far as Stromboli, where he had set up a market stall selling Indian wares and Jim Morrison T-shirts, had gone up to Mimmo one evening in the Lighthouse pub in Orbano, cadged a drink and cigarettes and talked to him about Alaska.
‘You see, Alaska’s the turning point. You sail up there, in that freezing cold, and you turn. You embark on a big Findus trawler at Anchorage and head for the North Pole to fish. You stay there for seven or eight months, at twenty degrees below zero, you never come back down. It’s mainly cod fishing up there. There are Japanese masters on the ship who are expert at cutting up live fish. They teach you how to make fish fingers, because Findus fish fingers are all hand-sliced. Then you put them in boxes and stack them in the refrigerators …’
‘When do they put the breadcrumbs on?’ Mimmo had interrupted him.
‘Later, on dry land. What the hell has that got to do with it?’ the hipster had bristled, but had then gone rambling on in his guru-like manner. ‘There are people from all over the world working on the ships. Eskimos, Finns, Russians, quite a few Koreans. The pay’s good. You can make big money. A couple of years up there and you could buy yourself a hut on Easter Island.’
Naively, Mimmo had asked why they paid so well.
‘Why? Because the work’s exhausting. You’ve got to be as tough as old boots to work at minus thirty. Your eyeballs freeze at that temperature. There can’t be more than thirty or forty thousand people in the whole world, apart from the Eskimos and Japanese of course, who are capable of working in those terrible conditions. The owners of the trawlers know that. In the contract they make you sign it says that if you don’t last the full six months they won’t pay you a lira. Do you know how many people have embarked and then had themselves flown out by helicopter after only three days? Hundreds. People go out of their minds up there. You have to be strong, and have a skin as thick as a walrus’s hide … If you stick it out, though, it’s great. There are colours that don’t exist in any other part of the world …’
Mimmo had taken the story very seriously. It was no laughing matter.
Lo Turco was right, this could really be the turning point of his life. And Mimmo had no doubt that his own skin was as tough as a walrus’s hide, he had seen the evidence on some icy mornings out with the sheep.
All he had to do was prove it.
Yes, he felt he was made for deep-sea fishing, Arctic seas, sunlit nights.
And he’d had all he could take of living with his parents, he felt as if he was going mad every time he entered the house. He would barricade himself in his room so as not to be near his father, but continued to feel that bastard’s presence oozing through the walls like a deadly poison.
How he hated him! Even he didn’t really know how much. It was a painful hatred, a rancour which poisoned his body at every moment and never left him, which he had learned to live with but which he hoped might end the day he went away.
Away.
Yes, away. Far away.
He would have to put at least one ocean between him and his father before he could feel absolutely free.
He was always ordering him about, telling him he was a layabout, a spineless idiot, incapable even of looking after a few sheep, that he dressed like a fool, that he could go away if he wanted, no one was trying to keep him.
Never a kind word, never a smile.
So why did he stay, ruining his life alongside the man he hated?
Because he was waiting for his big opportunity.
And the big opportunity was Alaska.
How often, while out on the pastures, he had dreamed of telling his father, ‘I’m leaving for Alaska. I don’t like it here any more. I’m sorry if I’m not the son you wanted, but you’re not the father I wanted either. Goodbye.’ What bliss! Yes, those would be his very words. He would kiss his mother and brother and off he would go.
The only problem was the ticket. It was very expensive. When he had gone in to ask at the travel agency, the girl at the counter had looked at him as you might look at a madman and, after tapping away at her computer for a quarter of an hour, told him the price.
Three million two hundred thousand lire.
An astronomical sum!
And that was what he was thinking about when he heard his brother enter the bedroom.
‘Pietro, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘No, I was thinking.’
‘Oh …’
‘I’ve got some good news about Alaska. I’ve thought of a way of raising the money.’
‘What is it?’
‘Listen. I could ask your friend Gloria’s parents. Her father’s a bank manager and her mother inherited all that land. They’d have no problem lending me the money, so I could go. Then as soon as I got my first pay packet I could repay them, in one go. See?’
‘Yes.’ Pietro had curled up, the bed was cold. His hands tucked between his thighs.
‘It would be a short-term loan. The only thing is, I don’t know them well enough, you’d have to ask Mr Celani … You know them really well. The Celanis love you like a son. What do you think?’
37
He wasn’t convinced.
In the first place he would be embarrassed.
I wanted to ask you a favour. My brother …
No.
It wasn’t nice to ask for a loan like that, it was like begging. Anyway, his father had already had a loan from Mr Celani’s bank. And he wasn’t sure (though he wouldn’t have told them this even if they’d killed him) that Mimmo really would repay them. It didn’t seem right, either, that his brother always tried to use others to solve his problems. It was too easy, as if the Count of Monte Cristo, instead of making all that effort to dig the hole with a teaspoon to escape from his cell, had found the prison key under his bed and all the guards asleep. He ought to earn his money, and then it really would be great and, as Mimmo always said, he’d have fucked Papa.
Besides, he wasn’t too keen on the idea of Mimmo leaving for Alaska.
He would be left all alone.
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pietro hesitated. ‘Maybe I could tell Gloria …’
Mimmo, underneath him, fell silent but not for long. ‘Okay, never mind. I’ll find some other way. I could sell my motorbike. Though I wouldn’t get much for it …’
Pietro was no longer listening.
He was wondering if he should tell Mimmo what had happened at school.
Yes, perhaps he should, but he was worn out. The story was too long. And besides, it hurt him to drag up the fact that those three bastards had tricked him and forced him to … His brother would say he was a wuss, a snotty-nosed kid, that he’d let himself be pushed around, and right now that it was the last thing he wanted to hear.
I know that already.
‘… a plane and you can join me. We could live in Alaska in the winter and with
all the money I’ll have earned, in the summer we could go to an island in the Caribbean. Patti would come too. Beaches with palm trees, just imagine it, the coral reef, all the fish … It would be gr …’
Yes, it would be really great. Pietro let his thoughts drift off.
To live in Alaska, to have a dog sled, a heated shack made of corrugated iron. He would look after the dogs. And go for long walks on the ice, muffled up in his parka and with snowshoes on his feet. And then in the summer, deep-sea diving among the coral with Gloria (Gloria would join them along with Patti).
How often he and Mimmo had talked about it, sitting on the hillside near the sheep. Making up incredible stories, adding a new detail every time. The helicopter (Mimmo would get a pilot’s licence as soon as possible) that landed on an iceberg, the whales, the little hut with hammocks, the fridge full of cool drinks, the beach in front, the turtles laying their eggs in the sand.
That evening, for the first time in his life, Pietro really hoped for it, with all his might, desperately.
‘Mimmo, can I really come too? Tell me the truth, please.’ He said it in a broken voice and with such intensity that Mimmo didn’t reply at once.
In the darkness he heard a suppressed sigh.
‘Yes, of course. If I can get away … You know how things are, it’s difficult …’
‘Goodnight, Mimmo.’
‘Goodnight, Pietro.’
Beretta Force
On the Aurelia, about twenty kilometres south of Ischiano Scalo, there’s a long two-lane descent that ends in a wide, sweeping curve. All around is open countryside. There are no dangerous crossings. On that stretch of road even ageing Pandas and diesel Ritmos find a new lease of life and elicit unsuspected power from their clapped-out engines.
Even the most careful drivers, on their first trip along the Aurelia, are tempted by that wonderful incline to step on the gas a bit and feel the thrill of speed. Those who know the road well, however, restrain themselves, because they know that there will almost certainly be a police car lying in wait just around the bend, ready to cool their automotive ardour with fines and licence confiscations.
The police are not as lenient here as they are in town, they’re more like the traffic cops who populate the American freeways. Tough guys who stick to the rules and with whom it’s impossible to argue, let alone bargain.
They throw the book at you.
Driving without a seat belt? Three hundred thousand lire. Brake light out of order? Two hundred thousand. Missed your annual check-up? They impound your car.
Max (Massimiliano) Franzini knew all this perfectly well, he drove down that road with his parents at least ten times a year to reach the seaside resort of San Folco (the Franzinis owned a villa in a complex called ‘The Agaves’ directly opposite Red Island) and his father, Professor Mariano Franzini, a consultant orthopaedist at the Gemelli hospital in Rome and the owner of two private clinics on the Rome orbital, had more than once been stopped and heavily fined for speeding.
But that rainy night Max Franzini was two weeks past his twentieth birthday, had only had his driving licence for three months and was at the wheel of a Mercedes that went from zero to two hundred and twenty kilometres an hour in the space of one kilo-metre and on the seat beside him was Martina Trevisan, a girl he really fancied, and he had smoked three joints and …
When it’s raining as hard as this the police never bother to stop you. Everybody knows that.
… the road was deserted, it was not a weekend, the Romans weren’t leaving for their holidays, there was no reason not to drive fast and Max wanted to get to the villa as soon as possible and his father’s car certainly didn’t impede the fulfilment of that wish.
He was wondering how to organise the night with Martina.
I’ll take my parents’ room, then I’ll ask her if she prefers to sleep alone in the guest room or with me in the double bed. If she says she’ll join me, I’m home and dry. It means she’s game. In practice I don’t have to do anything. We get into bed and … But if she says she prefers to sleep in the guest room, it’s more complicated. Though it won’t necessarily mean she’s not game, she might just be shy. Or I could ask her if she’d like to watch a video in the living room and we could sit on the sofa with the blanket and I could play it by ear …
Max had problems making out with girls.
With the first approaches, the chatting up, the larking about, the cinema, the phone calls and all the other stuff he was fine, but when it came to the crucial moment of making a move, the kiss test, as we might call it, all his bravado would evaporate, he would be seized by a fear of rejection and freeze like a gawky teenager on his first date. (Something similar happened to him at tennis. He could go on returning the ball for hours with powerful forehands and backhands, but when he had to make the killer shot and win the point he would panic and hit it into the net or out of court. In order to win he had to count on his opponent’s errors.)
For Max, making sexual advances was like diving off a high cliff. You step up to the edge, look down, turn back muttering never in a million years am I going to do that, you try again, hesitate, shake your head and, when everyone else has already dived and got fed up with waiting for you, you cross yourself, shut your eyes and jump off, screaming as you go.
What a disaster.
And all those joints certainly didn’t make it any easier to sort his ideas out.
And Martina was rolling another.
She’s a real pothead, this one.
Max realised that they hadn’t said a word to each other since Civitavecchia. All that smoke had somewhat clouded his mind. And that’s not a good thing. Martina might think he didn’t have anything to say, which wasn’t true. There is the music, though. They were listening to REM’s latest CD.
Okay, now I’ll ask her a question.
He concentrated, turned down the stereo and spoke in a slurred voice. ‘Do you prefer Russian literature or French?’
Martina took a drag and held in the smoke. ‘How do you mean?’ she croaked.
She was so thin as to be bordering on the anorexic, with close-cut hair dyed electric blue, piercings in her lip and in one eyebrow, and black varnish on her fingernails. She was wearing a little Benetton dress with blue and orange stripes, a black cardigan, open at the front, a buckskin jacket and boots which had been spray-painted green and which she was resting on the dashboard.
‘Which do you prefer? Russian writers or French ones?’
Martina snorted. ‘That, if you don’t mind my saying so, is a pretty stupid question. It’s too general. If you asked me which book is better, this one or that one, I could answer you. If you asked me who is better, Schwarzenegger or Stallone, I could answer you. But if you ask me whether I prefer French or Russian literature, I don’t know … It’s too general.’
‘So who is better?’
‘Eh?’
‘Schwarzenegger or Stallone?’
‘Stallone. Far better, in my opinion. Schwarzenegger has never made a film like Rambo or Rocky.’
Max pondered for a moment. ‘That’s true. But Schwarzenegger made Predator, which is a masterpiece.’
‘That’s true, too.’
‘You’re right. I asked you the classic stupid question. Like when people ask you whether you prefer to take your holidays at the seaside or in the mountains. It depends. If by seaside you mean Ladispoli and by mountains you mean Nepal, I prefer the mountains, but if by seaside you mean Greece and by mountains you mean Abetone, I prefer the seaside. Right?’
‘Right.’
Max turned up the stereo.
Max and Martina had met for the first time that morning at the university, in front of the Modern History noticeboard. They had got talking about the imminent exam and the enormous tomes they had to study and about how if they didn’t get down to some hard work neither of them would be ready to take the exam this time round. Max had been rather surprised by Martina’s openness. So far in a whole year of university he hadn
’t succeeded in talking to a single girl. Besides, all the girls on his course were plain, greasy-skinned and bookish. But this one was really pretty and seemed to be a nice person too.
‘Oh no … I’m never going to make it in time,’ Max had exclaimed, exaggeratedly anxious. In fact he had already made up his mind weeks ago that he was going to skip this session of exams.
‘Nor am I … I suppose I’ll have to give it a miss and try again in three months’ time.’
‘I think what I’m going to have to do is go to the seaside and study there. Hide away in some quiet place.’ After a carefully measured pause he had gone on. ‘Christ, it’s boring at the seaside on your own, though. It’s enough to drive you out of your mind.’
This was complete and utter bullshit.
Rather than go to the seaside on his own he would have cut off his own little finger, and his ring finger too. But he’d tossed out the remark rather as a fisherman trying his luck throws a piece of bread-and-cheese bait to the tuna.
You never know your luck.
And sure enough the tuna had taken the bait. ‘Can I come too? Would you mind? I’ve quarrelled with my parents, I’m fed up with them …’ Martina had asked, straight out.
Max had been speechless with amazement but then, struggling to suppress his enthusiasm, had applied the finishing touch. ‘Sure, that’d be fine. We’ll leave this evening, if that’s all right with you.’
‘Okay. We will study, though.’
‘Of course we will.’
They agreed to meet at seven o’clock at Rebibbia underground station, near Martina’s home.
Max was as nervous as if he were on his first date. And in a sense he was. Martina was nothing like the girls he usually went around with. Two different breeds. The girls he knew wouldn’t have gone to the seaside with a stranger if you’d paid them two million dollars. Their lives revolved around the Parioli, the city centre and the Fleming, and they didn’t even know what Rebibbia was. Even Max, though he had a pony tail and five earrings in his left ear, wore trousers three sizes too big for him and hung around the communal squats, had had to look Rebibbia up in Rome A to Z.