56
She knew who’d done it as soon as she saw the scrawl (palmieri stik your videos up your arse ) and the wrecked television and video recorder.
Federico Pierini.
It was a message to her.
You made me to watch that video on the Middle Ages and this is what you get.
It was obvious.
Since the day she had punished him she had sensed a fierce resentment of her growing in that boy. He’d stopped doing his homework and he put on headphones during her lessons.
He hates me.
She’d realised this from the way he looked at her. With evil, frightening eyes that accused her, full of all the hatred in the world.
Flora had understood and she had stopped giving him oral tests in class and at the end of the year she would award him a pass.
She didn’t know exactly how, but she had a feeling that this hatred was connected with the death of Pierini’s mother. Maybe because she had died on the day she had forced him to stay at school.
Who knows?
At any rate Pierini was really furious with her.
I did wrong, it’s true. But I didn’t know. He’d driven me to distraction, he wouldn’t let me work, he was disruptive, he told all those lies and I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t, about his mother. I went out of my way to apologise to him.
And he had looked at her as if she were the scum of the earth.
And then the practical jokes: the smashed window, the punctured tyres, and all the rest.
It had been him. Now she was certain.
That boy scared her. Scared her a lot. If he’d been older he would have tried to kill her. To do horrible things to her.
Whenever she saw him, Flora felt an impulse to say: ‘I’m sorry, I apologise for whatever it is I’ve done, please forgive me. I was wrong, but I’ll never bother you again, if only you’ll stop hating me.’ But she knew that this would only have intensified his hostility.
He hadn’t broken into the school on his own.
That was clear. The different kinds of handwriting on the wall proved that. He must have taken some of his cronies along. But she would bet her life it had been him who had smashed the TV.
‘Look at the mess,’ groaned the head, bringing her back down to earth.
In the technical education room, as well as Flora, the head and the deputy head, there were two police officers writing a report. One was Andrea Bacci’s father. Flora knew him because he had come to school a couple of times to talk about him. The other was the son of Italo, the caretaker.
She read the other graffiti.
The headmaster sucks the deputy headmistress’s cock.
Italo’s got fishy feet.
Flora couldn’t help smiling. It was certainly a comic image. The headmaster on his knees and the deputy headmistress with her skirt lifted up and … Maybe it’s true, the deputy headmistress is a man.
(Stop it, Flora …)
She saw Miss Gatta’s malicious eyes scrutinising her, trying to read her thoughts. ‘You see what they wrote?’
‘Yes …’ murmured Flora.
The deputy head clenched her fists and raised them to the sky. ‘Vandals. Wretches. How dare they? We must punish them. We must apply an immediate remedy to this running sore which is afflicting our poor school.’
If Miss Gatta had been a normal woman, a scrawl like that might have set her thinking seriously about the way her sexual identity and her relationship with the head were viewed by some of the pupils.
But Miss Gatta was a superior being and didn’t have such thoughts. Nothing shifted her from her perfect obtuseness. Not a trace of embarrassment, not a hint of unease. The ruffians who had broken into her school had merely reawoken her fighting spirit and now the Prussian general was ready for the fray.
Mr Cosenza, however, was red in the face, proof that the words on the wall had struck home.
‘Do you have any suspicions?’ asked Flora.
‘No, but we’ll find out who did it, Miss Palmieri, you can bet your salary on that,’ snapped Miss Gatta. She had never seen her so furious in all the time she’d known her. One corner of her mouth was quivering with rage. ‘Have you read the one about you?’
‘Yes.’
‘It sounds like a message to you,’ she said in Hercule Poirot-like tones.
Flora said nothing.
‘Who can it have been? Why a video, precisely, and not a …’ Miss Gatta realised she was about to say something unseemly and broke off.
‘I don’t know … I’ve no idea,’ said Flora, shaking her head. Why, now that she had the chance to report Pierini, hadn’t she done so? I’d get him into trouble.
You could see a mile off that the law was going to twine like a climbing plant round that boy’s life and she didn’t want to be the one who initiated this symbiosis.
There was also a simpler and more utilitarian reason. She was afraid that when Pierini found out that it had been her who had reported him, he would make her pay dearly for it, very dearly.
‘Miss Palmieri, I asked Giovanni to summon you here before the other teachers because some time ago you came to me to complain that certain pupils were playing you up. They might have been the same children who did this. Do you see what I mean? I’m wondering if this might have been a way of getting back at you. You said you couldn’t communicate with your pupils, and sometimes such failures in mutual understanding manifest themselves in this way.’ She turned to the head for confirmation. ‘Isn’t that so, Giovanni?’
‘Yes …’ he concurred, bending down to pick up a piece of broken glass.
‘Please, Giovanni! Don’t touch that! You’ll cut yourself!’ shouted the deputy head, and the headmaster immediately stood to attention. ‘Miss Palmieri, might that not be the case?’
Then why did they write what they did about the headmaster doing that to you? How she would have loved to answer the harpy like that. But instead she stammered: ‘Well … I don’t think so … Otherwise why would they have written the other … graffiti?’ She said it in fits and starts but she said it.
Miss Gatta’s eyes disappeared into their bags. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she growled. ‘Remember that the head and I are the highest authorities here. It’s only natural that they should feel resentful towards us, but it’s not at all natural that they should feel resentful towards you. You were singled out above all the other teachers. Why didn’t they write about Miss Rovi? She uses the video recorder too. Let’s not be silly about this, Miss Palmieri. The person who wrote those words has a grudge against you. And I’m not surprised you have no idea who it could have been, you don’t observe your pupils as carefully as you ought to.’
Flora lowered her eyes.
‘What shall we do now?’ interjected the head, trying to calm the T. Rex down.
‘Do? Tidy up. We can discuss this young lady’s teaching methods on some other occasion,’ said the deputy head, rubbing her hands together.
‘The children will be here soon. Perhaps it would be better if they didn’t come in … if we sent them home and called a staff meeting to decide on an effective response to this outrage …’ suggested the head.
‘No. I don’t think that’s the best course. We must let the children in. And we’ll hold lessons as usual. The technical education room must be locked. One of the science teachers has booked it for this morning, but he can teach upstairs. The pupils mustn’t know anything. Even the teachers must be told as little as possible. We’ll call Margherita and have her clean up and then, this afternoon, we’ll call in the painter to redecorate the walls, and the two of us …’ Miss Gatta glared at Flora. ‘… no, the three of us – you, Miss Palmieri, will come along to help us in our inquiries – will go to Orbano to see how Italo is and try to find out who the culprits are.’
The head trembled all over. Like those skinny little dogs that quiver at the sight of their masters. ‘Quite right, quite right. Good, good.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The children are due an
y time now. Shall I give the order to unlock the doors?’
Miss Gatta gave him a leer of assent.
The head left the room.
The deputy head now turned her attention to the two policemen. ‘Well, what are you two dithering about? If you’re going to take photographs, get on with it. We’re going to have to lock up. There’s no time to lose.’
57
The noise the cartilage of a broken nose makes when you put it back into place is not unlike the sound of teeth sinking into a Magnum.
Scrooooskt.
What makes your nerves explode, your heart race, your flesh creep, is not so much the pain as that noise.
Italo Miele had already suffered this unpleasant experience once before, at the age of twenty-three, when a hunter had stolen a pheasant he had shot. They had started fighting in the middle of a sunflower field, and the other man (a boxer, no doubt) had quite without warning hit him full in the face. On that occasion his father had straightened his nose.
That was why now, in the outpatients’ department of the Sandro Pertini hospital in Orbano, he was shouting and swearing that he wasn’t going to let anyone touch his nose, least of all some young upstart of a houseman.
‘Look, it can’t stay as it is. It’s your decision, of course … but you’ll be left with a crooked nose,’ muttered the young doctor, in an aggrieved tone.
Italo struggled up from the litter on which they had laid him. A plump nurse tried to stop him, but he batted her aside like a midge and approached the mirror.
‘Mamma mia …’ he muttered.
What a mess!
A baboon.
His nose, as purple and fat as an aubergine, hung to the right. It felt as hot as a steam iron. His eyes were hidden under two swollen ring doughnuts which started out magenta and shaded into cobalt blue. A deep wound sutured with nine stitches and dabbed with tincture of iodine split his forehead in half.
‘I’ll put it back into place myself.’
Grasping his jaw with his left hand and his nose with his right, he took a gulp of air and …
Scrooooskt …
… he wrenched it back into line.
He stifled a wild scream. His stomach churned and filled with gastric juices. He almost retched with the pain. His legs gave way for an instant and he had to lean against the basin to stop himself collapsing on the floor.
The doctor and the two nurses stared in amazement.
‘That’s done, then.’ He limped back to the litter. ‘Now take me back to bed. I’m worn out. I want to sleep.’
He closed his eyes.
‘We’ll have to staunch the blood and give you some medication.’ The querulous voice of the doctor.
‘All right …’
God, he was tired …
More exhausted, drained, battered and bruised than any human being on earth. He was going to have to sleep for two days at least. That way he wouldn’t feel the pain, wouldn’t feel anything, and when he woke up he’d go home and have three weeks of convalescence being cared for and pampered and pitied by the old woman. He’d eat endless dishes of fettuccine with ragù and watch TV and plan how to make them pay for what they’d done to him that terrible night.
Oh yes, they were going to pay.
The state. The school. The families of those hooligans. Never mind who. Someone was going to pay, down to the last goddamn lira.
A lawyer. I need a lawyer. A good one. Someone with balls, who’ll take them for every penny.
As the doctor and the nurses inserted cotton-wool tampons into his nostrils, he reflected that this was the chance he’d been waiting for all these years. And it had come just at the right moment, with perfect timing, on the eve of his retirement.
Those little bastards had done him a favour.
Now he was a hero, he had done his duty, he had driven them out of the school, and he was going to clean up on it.
A complex fracture of the nose with severe respiratory complications. Permanent scars, grazes and a lot of other things that would come out in due time.
All that must be worth a cool … what? twenty million. No, that’s too low. If it turns out that I can’t breathe through my nose any more, it’ll be at least fifty million, maybe more.
He was quoting figures off the top of his head, but it was in his impulsive nature to start making wild guesses at the amount of the compensation without having the slightest knowledge of the facts.
He would buy himself a new car, complete with air conditioning and radio, get a larger television and change all the kitchen appliances and the windows and shutters on the upper floor of the farmhouse.
And he’d be getting all these things for a broken nose and a few piddling little injuries.
Although those three incompetents were hurting him like mad, he felt a surge of spontaneous, sincere affection and gratitude to the little thugs who had done this to him.
58
Behind the black hills the sky was covered with big clouds that twisted and rolled over each other to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning like something out of Noah’s flood. The wind brought over sand and the smell of brine and seaweed. The white oxen, on the meadows, didn’t give a damn about the rain. They grazed slowly and methodically and now and again raised their heads and looked without interest at the raging storm.
Pietro was dashing to school. Although it was raining hard he had gone by bike.
He hadn’t been able to bring himself to stay at home. Curiosity, the desire to know what had happened, had prevailed over his plan to feign illness.
He had held the thermometer under the hot tap, but when the moment had come to tell his mother that he had a temperature of thirty-seven point five he had said nothing.
How could he stay in bed all day, not knowing if they had managed to open the gate, not hearing the reactions of his schoolmates and the teachers?
When he had taken the decision to move it had already been late, so he had dressed hurriedly, gulped down his caffè latte, swallowed a couple of biscuits, donned his cape and galoshes and to get there more quickly had taken his bike.
Now that he was less than a kilometre from the school, every turn of the pedals was another twist at his guts.
59
On entering the ward Miss Palmieri had the impression that she wasn’t in an Italian hospital but in a veterinary centre in southern Florida. In the middle of the large room, under the white lights, stretched out on a bed, was a manatee.
Flora, though no expert in zoology, knew what a manatee was, having seen a National Geographic documentary on television a few weeks earlier.
The manatee is a sirenian, a kind of gigantic, flabby albino seal that lives in Lake Chad and in the estuaries of the great rivers of South America. Being naturally lazy, slow animals, they often get caught by boats’ propellers.
The caretaker, lying flat on his back in his underpants, looked just like one of those creatures.
He was monstrous. As round and white as a snowman. His taut, swollen belly was like an Easter egg about to explode. On the summit was a thick tuft of white hairs which joined up with those on his chest. His short stumpy legs were hairless and covered with thick blue veins. The calf of the lame leg was purple in colour and as round as a cottage loaf. His arms, stretched out on the bed, seemed like fins. His fingers were as thick as cigars. Cruel mother nature had not seen fit to supply him with a neck, and that big round head slotted directly between his shoulder blades.
He was in a pretty bad way.
His forearms and his knees were covered with scratches and grazes. His forehead stitched up and his nose bandaged.
Flora didn’t like him. He was a layabout. Aggressive with the pupils. And a pervert. When she passed the porter’s lodge, she felt herself being mentally undressed. And Miss Cirillo had told her he was also a notorious frequenter of prostitutes. He went every night with those poor coloured girls who hustled on the Aurelia.
It gave her no pleasure at all to be there playing detective
with those two. She wished she were in school. Teaching.
‘Come along … hurry up,’ Miss Gatta said to her.
The three of them sat down by the caretaker’s bed.
The deputy head nodded in greeting and then spoke in the most worried voice in the world. ‘Well, Italo, how are you?’
Despite the scratches and bruises that he had on his battered face, a disgusting, sly expression appeared in the caretaker’s piglike eyes.
60
‘Terrible. How am I? Terrible!’
Italo reminded himself of the part he had to play. He must cut a pathetic figure, seem like a poor cripple in need of care who had sacrificed himself for the good of the school and the teachers in combating juvenile delinquency.
‘Now, Italo, if you can, I’d like you to explain exactly what happened last night in the school,’ said the head.
Italo looked around and began to tell a story of which about sixty per cent was the truth, thirty per cent was complete fabrication and the remaining ten per cent was padded out with exaggeration, pathos, drama and pathetic tear-jerking details (… you’ve no idea how cold it can get in winter in that little room where I live, alone, far away from home, my wife and my darling children …).
He omitted a number of minor details, which would only have encumbered the narrative and complicated the plot. (My nose? How did I break it? One of those boys must have hit me in the face with an iron bar while I was walking in the dark.)
And he concluded. ‘Now I’m here. You see me. In this hospital. A broken man. I can’t move my leg and I think I’ve got a couple of broken ribs but it doesn’t matter, I saved the school from the vandals. And that’s the most important thing. Isn’t it? All I ask of you is one thing: help me, you educated people. I’m just a poor ignorant old man. Help me get what I deserve after all these years of work and after this terrible accident which has robbed me of what little health I still had. In the meantime a whip-round among the teachers and parents wouldn’t go amiss. Thank you, thank you very much indeed.’