Having finished his speech, he checked its effect on his listeners.
The headmaster was bent forward on his chair, his hands over his mouth and his gaze directed downwards. Italo judged that posture to be an expression of deep sympathy for his sad, unfortunate situation.
Good.
Then he moved on to inspect Miss Palmieri.
The redhead was staring at him blankly. But what could you expect from a woman like that?
And, finally, he explored the face of the deputy headmistress.
Miss Gatta had a face of marble which didn’t seem to bode well. A derisive smile curled her lips.
What did it mean? Why was she giving him that nasty little leer? Didn’t the sour old spinster believe him?
Italo screwed up his eyes and contracted his facial muscles, trying to express all the pain that he felt. And he lay there waiting for comfort, a friendly word, a handshake, anything.
The deputy headmistress coughed and took a notebook and her spectacles out of her little chamois handbag. ‘Italo, I don’t understand some of the things you said. They don’t seem to correspond to the evidence we found at the school with the police. If you feel up to it, I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
‘All right. But make it quick because I don’t feel too well.’
‘First of all, you said you spent the night on your own. Who is this Alima Guabré, then? It appears that it was this Nigerian girl – who, by the way, has no residence permit – who called the police.’
A sharp pain formed in the caretaker’s bowels, shooting up to inflame his tonsils. Italo tried to hold back this flow of acidic gas that had risen from his oesophagus, but failed and gave a loud burp.
The three teachers pretended they hadn’t heard.
Italo put his hand over his mouth. ‘What did you say, deputy headmistress? Alima who? I don’t know the woman, never heard of her …’
‘How odd. The young lady, who apparently works as a prostitute, says she knows you very well, that you took her to the school and invited her to spend the night with you …’
Italo snorted. His nose was now pulsing like a broken radiator.
Wait, wait a minute … That old bitch was interrogating him. Him? The man who had saved the school, and nearly got killed in the process? What the hell was hap …. This was a stab in the back. And there was him expecting a hug, a box of Ferrero Rocher, a bunch of flowers.
‘She must be mad. She’s made it all up. Who is she? What does she want from me? I don’t know her …’ he said, waving his arms about as if trying to ward off a swarm of wasps.
‘She says you dine together every week at the Old Wagon and she mentioned a practical joke …’ the teacher grimaced and held the notebook away from her as if to read it more clearly. ‘I didn’t quite understand … The police say she was very angry with you … A trick you played on her during dinner …’
‘How dare that fucking tar …?’ Italo only just managed to break off the sentence in time.
The deputy head gave him a glare as lethal as Mazinger Z’s rotating mallet.
‘I agree the whole story does sound extremely odd. One detail appears to confirm Miss Guabré’s story. This morning your 131 was outside the chained-up gate. And then there’s the testimony of the waiters of the Old Wagon …’
The caretaker started trembling like a leaf and looked at this heartless monster who was delighting in torturing him. He felt like leaping on her and wringing that scrawny neck and pulling out all her teeth and making them into a necklace. That wasn’t a woman … it was a demon with no feelings and no pity. With a ball of lead where her heart should be and a freezer instead of a cunt.
‘This leads me to believe that when the vandals entered the school you were not present … As was probably the case two years ago, when the burglars broke in.’
‘Nooo! I was there that time, I was asleep! I swear to God. It’s not my fault if I’m a sound sleeper!’ Italo turned to the headmaster. ‘Please, sir, surely you believe me. What does this woman want? I feel so bad. I can’t bear to hear these scandalous accusations. Me going with prostitutes, not doing my duty. Me, with thirty years’ honourable service behind me. Headmaster, please, say something.’
The little man looked at him as one might look at the last specimen of a now extinct species. ‘What can I say? Try to be more honest, try to tell the truth. It’s always best to tell the truth…’
Then Italo looked at Miss Palmieri, seeking sympathy, but didn’t find any.
‘Go away, the lot of you … go away …’ he murmured with eyes closed, like a man on his deathbed who wishes to die in peace.
But Miss Gatta was not to be melted. ‘You should be grateful to that poor unfortunate girl. If Miss Guabré hadn’t been there, you would probably still be lying there unconscious in a pool of blood. You’re an ungrateful wretch. And now let us move on to the subject which is of more concern to me. The shotgun.’
Italo felt faint. Luckily he had a vision which for a moment alleviated the pain in his nose and the constriction in his chest. That old spinster being impaled – yes, him ramming a lamp-post covered with chilli powder and sand up her arse, and her screaming in agony.
‘You used a shotgun on school premises.’
‘It’s not true!’
‘How can you deny it? They found it beside you … The gun doesn’t seem to be licensed, nor, apparently, do you have a hunting licence or a firearms permit …’
‘It’s not true!’
‘That is a very serious offence, punishable …’
‘It’s not true!’
Italo had adopted the last and most desperate strategy of defence. Denying everything. Anything. The sun is hot? It’s not true! Swallows fly? It’s not true!
Saying always and only no.
‘You fired a shot. You tried to hit them. And you broke one of the gym windo …’
‘It’s not true!’
‘Stop staying it’s not true!’ deputy headmistress Gatta shouted, shattering the calm she had maintained till that moment, and becoming a Chinese dragon with two vicious little eyes.
Italo deflated and rolled up in a ball like a beach flea.
‘Mariuccia, please, calm down, calm down …’ The head, paralysed on his chair, implored her. All the patients in the ward had turned round and the nurse was glaring at them.
The deputy head lowered her voice and, between her teeth, continued.
‘My dear Italo, you are in a very serious predicament. And you don’t seem to be aware of the fact. You risk a multiple charge of illegal possession of firearms, attempted murder, living off immoral earnings, being drunk and disorderly …’
‘No no no no nooooo,’ repeated Italo in despair, shaking his big head.
‘You’re a complete imbecile. What is it you want? Did I hear you correctly? Compensation? You even have the nerve to ask for a whip-round. Now listen to me very carefully.’ Mariuccia Gatta rose to her feet and those cold eyes suddenly lit up as if they had thousand-watt light-bulbs inside them. Her cheeks flushed. She grabbed the caretaker by his pyjama lapels and almost lifted him off the bed. ‘The headmaster and I are doing our best to help you and only because your son, a policeman, begged us to do so and said his mother would die of shame if she found out. That is the only reason why we haven’t reported you. We are doing all we can to save your ar … to save you, to prevent you from spending a couple of years in prison, to stop you losing your job, your pension, everything, but now I absolutely must know who those vandals were.’
Italo gaped, like a large tench caught on the hook, then breathed out through his nose. Blood was beginning to trickle down from the tampons in his nostrils.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know, I swear on the heads of my children,’ he whimpered, writhing on his bed. ‘I didn’t see them. When I entered the storeroom it was dark. They threw medicine balls at me. I fell down. They trampled over me. There were two or three of them. I tried to catch them. I couldn’t. Little bastards.’<
br />
‘Is that all?’
‘Well, there was another one. One who came out of the high-jump mattresses. And …’
‘And?’
‘Well, I’m not sure, I was some way away, I didn’t have my glasses on, but he was so small and thin it might have been … yes, it looked like the shepherd’s son, the one from Serra … I can’t remember his name … But I’m not sure. The one in 2B.’
‘Moroni?’
Italo nodded. ‘Only it’s strange …’
‘Strange?’
‘Yes, it’s strange that a boy like that, such a well-behaved kid, could do something like that. But it might have been him.’
‘Right. We’ll check.’ The deputy head released the caretaker’s pyjamas and seemed satisfied. ‘Now you take care of yourself. Afterwards we’ll see what we can do for you.’ Then she turned to her companions. ‘Let’s go, it’s late. They’re expecting us at school.’
Giovanni Cosenza and Flora Palmieri jumped to their feet as if they had springs under their backsides.
‘Thank you, thank you … I’ll do anything you want. Come and see me again.’
The three went out and left the caretaker trembling in his bed, terrified of spending the last years of his life in jail, without a lira to his name nor even a pension.
61
A war was going on inside him.
Curiosity was battling with the desire to go home again.
Pietro’s mouth was as dry as if he’d eaten a handful of salt, the wind slipped under his hood and swelled his cape and the rain lashed his face, which had become as cold and unfeeling as a block of ice.
He shot through Ischiano practically in apnoea, through the middle of the puddles, and was about to turn into the school street when he screeched to a halt.
What would he find round that corner?
Dogs. Growling German shepherds. Muzzles. Studded collars. His schoolmates lined up, naked, shivering in the downpour. Their hands flat against the walls of the school. Men in blue tracksuits, with black masks on their faces and boots on their feet, walking in the puddles. If you don’t tell us who did it, we’ll execute one of you every ten minutes.
Who was it?
Me.
Pietro steps forward between his schoolmates.
It was me.
He would certainly find a lot of people with umbrellas, the bar crowded and the firemen sawing away at the chain. And in the midst of them would be Pierini, Bacci and Ronca enjoying the show. He had no wish to meet those three. Much less to share with them the secret that was burning his soul.
How he would have loved to be someone else, one of those who stood outside the bar enjoying the show, and who would go home without that great burden that weighed on his mind.
Another thing he was terribly anxious about was meeting Gloria. He could already imagine her. She would start making a fuss, jumping around all excited, trying to discover who the great genius was who had chained up the gate.
And what do I do, tell her? Describe to her exactly what happened?
(Get moving, for Christ’s sake. Are you going to cower behind this wall all day?)
He turned the corner.
There was nobody outside the school. Or outside the bar.
He rode on. The gate was open as usual. No sign of firemen. In the car park were the teachers’ cars. Italo’s 131. The classroom windows were lit up.
There is school, then.
He pedalled slowly, as if he were seeing the building for the first time in his life.
He entered the gate. He checked to see if there were any remnants of the chain on the ground. There weren’t. He leant the bike against the low wall. He glanced at his watch.
Nearly twenty minutes late.
He was in danger of getting a black mark but he walked up the steps slowly, spellbound, like a soul ascending the long stairway to heaven.
‘What are you doing? Get a move on! It’s late!’
Graziella, the caretaker.
She had opened the door and was beckoning him in.
Pietro ran inside.
‘Are you crazy, coming by bike like that? Do you want to catch pneumonia?’ she scolded him.
‘Eh? Yes … No!’ Pietro wasn’t listening.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing. Nothing.’
He trudged off towards his classroom.
‘Where do you think you’re going? Can’t you see you’re dripping all over the floor? Take that thing off and hang it on the rack!’
Pietro turned back and took off his cape. It dawned on him that she was the caretaker from Section A and that Italo should have been there, in the porter’s lodge.
Where was he?
He didn’t want to know.
Things were fine as they were. Italo wasn’t there and that was that.
His trouserlegs were wet, but it was nice and warm and they would soon dry out. He rested his frozen hands on the radiator for a moment. The caretaker had sat down and was leafing through a magazine. Otherwise the school was deserted. The only sounds were the rain beating on the windows and the water gushing down the drainpipes.
Lessons had started and everyone was in class. He headed for his own classroom. The door of the secretary’s office was open and the secretary was on the phone. The door of the headmaster’s office was closed. As usual. The staffroom empty.
Everything’s normal.
Before going into class he simply must go down and see the technical education room. If everything was normal there, too, and there was no writing on the wall, and the TV was undamaged, one of two things might have happened. Either he had dreamed the whole thing, which was equivalent to saying that he was completely mad, or the good extraterrestrials had come and cleared everything up. Pow! One ray from a photon gun and the TV and the video recorder were as good as new (like when you see a film running backwards). Pow! And the graffiti had gone from the walls. Pow! And Italo was disintegrated.
He descended the stairs. He turned the handle, but it was locked. So was the gym.
Maybe they’ve decided to clear everything up and pretend nothing happened.
(Why?)
Because they don’t know who did it so it’s best to play possum. Right?
This conclusion reassured him.
He hurried to his classroom. As soon as he put his hand on the door handle, his heart began to race wildly. Fearfully he pushed it down and entered.
62
Flora Palmieri was sitting on the back seat of the headmaster’s Ritmo.
The car was struggling up Orbano hill. The rain was teeming down. All around was a grey thundering mass, with the occasional flash of lightning in the distance, out at sea. The raindrops drummed frenziedly on the roof. The wiper was having trouble keeping the windscreen clear. The road was like a torrent in full flood and the lorries sped past the car, as dark and menacing as whales, churning up spray like speedboats.
Mr Cosenza was hunched over the wheel. ‘I can’t see a thing. And these truckers are utterly reckless.’
Miss Gatta was navigating. ‘Overtake him, what are you waiting for? Can’t you see he’s making room for you? Step on it, Giovanni.’
Flora was pondering what the caretaker had said and the more she pondered, the more ludicrous it seemed.
Pietro Moroni break into school and smash the place up?
No. The story didn’t convince her.
It wasn’t like Moroni to behave like that. To get a word out of the little lad you almost had to go down on your knees and beg him. He was so quiet and good that Flora often forgot that he even existed.
It had been Pierini who had written that sentence, she was sure of it.
But what had Moroni been doing there with Pierini?
A few weeks earlier, Flora had set class 2B as homework the hoary old essay: ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’
And Moroni had written:
I would love to study animals. When I grow up I would like to be a b
iologist and go to Africa and make animal documentaries. I would work very hard and make a documentary about the Sahara frogs. Nobody knows it but there are frogs in the Sahara. They live under the sand and hibernate for eleven months and three weeks (one year minus a week) and wake up in the exact week when the rain falls on the desert and floods it. They have very little time and have to do many things, such as eating (especially insects), having babies (tadpoles), and digging themselves another hole. That is their life. I would like to go to high school but my father says I have to be a shepherd and look after the fields like my brother Mimmo. Mimmo doesn’t want to be a shepherd either. He wants to go to the North Pole to fish for cod but I don’t think he will. I would love to go to high school, and university too, to study animals but my father says I can study sheep. I have studied sheep and I don’t like them.
That was Pietro Moroni.
A little dreamer, a searcher for frogs in the desert, as timid and inoffensive as a sparrow.
And now what had happened to him?
Had he suddenly turned into a hooligan and teamed up with Pierini?
No.
63
In the classroom everyone was present.
Pierini, Bacci and Ronca threw him some anxious looks. Gloria in the front row smiled at him.
They were all very quiet, a sign that Miss Rovi was doing an oral test. You could cut the tension with a knife.
‘Moroni, are you aware that you’re late? Hurry up, what are you waiting for? Come in and go to your place,’ Miss Rovi rapped, peering at him through her lenses, as thick as bottle-ends.
Diana Rovi was a dumpy old woman with a round face. Hunched up at her desk she looked faintly like a raccoon.
Pietro went to his desk, in the third row, by the window and started taking his books out of his backpack.