He fetches the water. She sits up, and with eyes closed, holding the glass in both hands, drinks greedily, dribbling onto her chin.
‘Erica, tell me something, do you really love me?’ he asks, getting back into bed.
‘Yes,’ she replies, and snuggles up against him again.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘And … will you marry me?’ he hears himself say. As if an evil spirit had put those dreadful words in his mouth. A spirit that was intent on fucking things up.
Erica curls up more tightly, pulls the duvet further up and says: ‘Yes.’
‘You will?’
For a moment Graziano is lost for words, overcome. He puts his hand over his mouth and shuts his eyes.
What did she say? Did she say she would marry him?
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ Erica mumbles drowsily.
‘When?’
‘When we get to Jamaica.’
‘Right. When we get to Jamaica. On the beach. We’ll get married on the cliffs of Edward Beach. It’s a beautiful spot.’
That is why Graziano Biglia left Rome on 9th December at five o’clock in the morning, despite the thunderstorm, bound for Ischiano Scalo.
Bearing all his worldly belongings and some good news for his mother.
3
A traveller armed with binoculars on board a hot-air balloon would be better placed than anyone else to view the setting of our story.
He would at once notice a long black scar that cuts across the plain. That’s the Aurelia, the state highway that comes up from Rome and continues northward to Genoa and beyond. It goes as straight as an airport runway for fifteen kilometres, then curves gradually round to the left and links up with the small town of Orbano, which overlooks the lagoon.
The first thing your mother teaches you around here is not ‘never accept sweets from strangers’ but ‘be careful on the Aurelia’. You have to look right and left at least twice before crossing, whether you’re on foot or in a vehicle (and if your engine stalls half-way across, God help you). The cars streak past like arrows. And there have been all too many fatal accidents in recent years. Now they’ve put up signs setting a 90 kpm speed limit, and speed cameras as well, but nobody takes a blind bit of notice.
At the weekend when the weather’s fine, and especially during the summer, tailbacks several kilometres long are liable to form on this road. It’s the people from the capital travelling to and from the seaside resorts further north.
If our traveller were now to turn his binoculars to the left he’d see the beach of Castrone. The waves come rolling in from the open sea here, and in stormy weather the sand piles up on the waterline and you have to climb over dunes to reach the water. There are no bathing establishments. (Well, there is one a few kilometres further south, but the locals never go there, because it’s full of flash Romans eating linguine in lobster sauce and drinking Falanghina.) No beach umbrellas. No deck-chairs. No pedalos. Not even in August.
Strange, eh?
The reason for this is that the area is a reserve for the reintroduction of migratory avifauna. A bird sanctuary, to you and me.
In twenty kilometres of shoreline there are only three points of access to the sea. Around them in summer there are the usual swarms of bathers, but you only have to walk three hundred metres and as if by magic there’s no one in sight.
Just behind the beach there’s a long green strip. It’s a tangle of brambles, thorns, flowers, prickles, and hardy weeds rooted in the sand. Going through it is impossible unless you want to end up like St Sebastian. Immediately behind it the cultivated fields begin (wheat, maize, sunflowers, in rotation according to the year).
If our traveller were now to turn his binoculars to the right, he would see a long, bean-shaped saltwater lake separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land. That is Torcelli lagoon. It’s fenced off, and hunting is banned. In spring the exhausted birds arrive here from Africa. It’s a swamp, full of vicious mosquitoes, sandflies, watersnakes, fish, herons, coots, rodents, newts, frogs, toads and thousands of other little creatures that have adapted to living among reeds, aquatic plants and seaweed. The railway passes close by, it runs parallel to the Aurelia and links Genoa with Rome. In the daytime, about once an hour, the Eurostar comes hurtling through.
And there, finally, beside the lagoon, is Ischiano Scalo.
Yes, it’s small, I know.
It has grown up over the last thirty years around that little station where a train stops twice a day.
A church. A piazza. A main street. A chemist’s (always closed). A grocer’s. A bank (complete with cashpoint). A butcher’s. A haber dasher’s. A newsagent’s. The farmers’ club. A bar. A school. A sports centre. And about fifty little stone-roofed two-storey blocks of flats, inhabited by a thousand or so people.
Until not so long ago there was nothing here but marshes and malaria, then the Duce reclaimed the land.
If our intrepid traveller should now let the wind carry him across to the other side of the Aurelia, he would see more cultivated fields, olive groves and meadows, and a tiny hamlet of four or five houses called Serra. From here begins a white road which leads towards the hills and the woods of Acquasparta, famed for their wild boars, long-horned cattle and, in good years, porcini.
So that is Ischiano Scalo.
It’s a strange place, the sea is so close but seems miles away. That’s because the fields repel it beyond that barrier of thorns. Now and then its smell and sand waft over on the wind.
This is probably why the tourist industry has always steered clear of Ischiano Scalo.
There’s nothing to do here – no houses to rent, no air-conditioned hotels, no esplanade to walk along, no cafés to sit in drinking of an evening. In the summer the plain gets as hot as a gridiron and in winter an icy wind stings your ears.
And now could our traveller go down a bit lower, to get a better view of the modern building behind that industrial warehouse?
That is the Michelangelo Buonarroti junior high school. There’s a class doing PE in the playground. Everyone’s playing volleyball and basketball, except for a group of girls perched on a low wall chatting and a small boy sitting alone, cross-legged on the ground in a patch of sun, reading a book.
He is Pietro Moroni, the real protagonist of this story.
4
Pietro didn’t like playing basketball or volleyball, and soccer he positively loathed.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried playing those sports. He had tried, as hard as he could, but there seemed to be a communication problem between him and the ball. He would want the ball to do one thing but it would do the exact opposite.
And in Pietro’s opinion, when you discovered that there was a communication problem between you and something, it was best to avoid it. Besides, there were other things he did like.
Cycling, for example. He liked cycling along the woodland paths.
And he loved animals. Not all. Just some.
The ones other people found disgusting, he was very keen on. Snakes, frogs, salamanders, insects, that kind of creature. And if they lived in water, so much the better.
Take the weever, for instance. True, its sting hurts like hell, it has an ugly face and lives hidden away in the sand, but the idea that its mysterious, unidentified poison could paralyse your foot appealed to him.
Yes, if he had to choose between being a tiger or a weever, he would definitely opt for the latter.
He also liked mosquitoes.
They were everywhere. And they were something you couldn’t just ignore.
That’s why he had chosen them as the subject of the science project that he was doing with Gloria. Malaria and the mosquito. And that afternoon he was due to go with her to Orbano to see a doctor friend of her father’s, to interview him about malaria.
Now he was reading a book about dinosaurs. Mosquitoes were mentioned there, too. Thanks to them, scientists would one day be able to recreate the dino
saurs. They had found some mosquito fossils, had extracted from them the blood that the mosquitoes had sucked from the dinosaurs, and so discovered the dinosaurs’ genetic code. In short, though he didn’t understand all the details, what it boiled down to was: no mosquitoes, no Jurassic Park.
Pietro was pleased, because that day the PE teacher hadn’t made him play with the others.
‘Well? Have you decided what we need to ask Colsanti?’
Pietro looked up.
It was Gloria. She was holding a ball, and gasping for breath.
‘I think so. More or less.’
‘Good. Because I haven’t got a clue.’ Gloria punched the ball and ran back towards the volleyball court.
Gloria Celani was Pietro’s best friend. His only friend, to be honest.
He’d tried to make friends with boys, but had never really succeeded. He’d played with Paolino Anselmi, the tobacconist’s son, a couple of times. They’d gone to the big field to do cyclo-cross. But it hadn’t been a success.
Paolino insisted on racing, and Pietro didn’t like racing. They’d had a few races and Paolino had won them all. And that was the last time they’d played together.
How could he help it? Racing was another thing he loathed.
Because even when he was ahead as they neared the end of the course, flashing along towards victory, a victory he thoroughly deserved, having led all the way from the starting line, he couldn’t help looking back and then he would see it behind him, that creature pursuing him with gritted teeth, and then his legs would give way and he’d let the other boy catch up, overtake him and win.
With Gloria you didn’t have to race. You didn’t have to act tough. You just felt good and that was it.
In Pietro’s opinion, and in many other boys’ opinions too, Gloria was the prettiest girl in the school. There were a couple of others who weren’t bad looking, for example that girl in 3B with long black hair that reached down to her bottom, or that one in 2A, Amanda, who was going out with Flame.
But in Pietro’s opinion those two weren’t even worthy to lick her feet, compared to Gloria they were weevers. He would never have said as much to her, but he was sure that when Gloria grew up she would appear in those fashion magazines or win Miss Italy.
And yet she did her level best to look plainer than she was. She wore her hair short, like a boy’s. She went around in dirty, faded dungarees, old checked shirts and battered Adidases. She always had grazed knees and plasters covering other wounds she’d got climbing trees or scrambling over walls. She wasn’t scared to fight any of the boys, even that fat slob Bacci.
Pietro had only ever seen her dressed like a girl a couple of times in his life.
The older boys, the ones in the third year (and sometimes older ones still, the lads who hung around in front of the bar), used to play the fool with her. They tried to chat her up. They asked her out and gave her presents and offered her lifts home on their motor scooters, but she didn’t want to know.
She didn’t give a shit about them.
How come the fairest of them all, the much-courted Gloria, the despair of all the boys in Ischiano, she who had never sunk lower than third place in the league table of the most fuckable girls in the school carved on the door of the boys’ toilet, was best friends with Pietro, the born loser, the last in line, the friendless little shrimp?
There was a reason.
Their friendship had not originated in the classroom.
In that school there was a system of closed castes (and I bet there was in your school too), rather like in India. The scum (Chickenshits Wankers Wimps Shitfaces Pansies Niggers and so on). The straights. And the cools.
Straights could sink down into the mud and turn into scum, or rise up and be transformed into cools, it was up to them. But if on the first day of school someone grabbed your backpack and threw it out of the window and hid pieces of chalk in your sandwich, then there were no two ways about it, you were scum, and would remain so for the next three years (and if you didn’t watch out, for the next sixty years after that as well), and could forget any idea of becoming a straight.
That was how things worked.
Pietro and Gloria had met when they were five years old.
Pietro’s mother used to go to the Celanis’ villa three times a week to do the cleaning, and she always took her son with her. She’d give him a sheet of paper and some felt-tip pens and tell him to sit there at the kitchen table. ‘Stay there and be good, do you hear? Let me get on with my work, and we’ll soon be able to go back home.’
And Pietro would sit there quietly for two hours scribbling away. The cook, an old spinster from Livorno who had lived in the villa for many years, could hardly believe it. ‘An angel from heaven, that’s what you are.’
The little mite was so well brought-up, he wouldn’t even accept a slice of tart unless his mother said he could.
What a contrast to the daughter of the house. A spoiled minx who could do with a good spanking. The toys in that house had an average lifespan of two days. The little brat’s way of telling you she was tired of chocolate mousse was to throw it on the floor at your feet.
When little Gloria had discovered that there was a living toy, made of flesh of blood, called Pietro, in the kitchen, she had been thrilled to bits. She had taken him by the hand and led him to her bedroom. To play with her. At first she had been a bit rough (MAMAA! MAMAA! Gloria stuck her finger in my eye!), but gradually she had learned to treat him like a human being.
Dr Celani was so happy. ‘Thank heaven for Pietro. Gloria has quietened down a bit. Poor little thing, what she needs is a baby brother.’
But there was one little problem: Mrs Celani no longer had a uterus, so that was that. They wouldn’t hear of adoption, and anyway now they had Pietro, the angel from heaven.
In short, the two children began to spend every day of their lives together, just like brother and sister.
And when Mariagrazia Moroni, Pietro’s mother, began to be unwell, to suffer from a strange, inexplicable condition that left her feeling weak and listless (‘it’s as if … I don’t know, as if my batteries were flat’), from something the doctor called depression and which Mr Moroni called being bone idle and finding cleaning the villa too much like hard work, Dr Mauro Celani, the manager of the Orbano branch of the Bank of Rome and president of Chiarenzano sailing club, had stepped in and drafted a plan with his wife Ada:
1) Poor Mariagrazia needs help. She must see a specialist immediately. ‘I’ll call Professor Candela tomorrow … What do you mean Professor who? The consultant at the Villa dei Fiori clinic in Civitavecchia, surely you remember … ? The guy with that beautiful twelve-metre yacht.’
2) Pietro couldn’t stay with his mother all day. ‘It’s not good for him or for her. He must come here and spend the day with Gloria after school.’
3) Pietro’s father was an alcoholic, a convicted criminal, a bully who was ruining the lives of that poor woman and their adorable son. ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t cause any trouble. If he does, he can forget about getting a mortgage.’
And the plan had worked to perfection.
Poor Mariagrazia had been taken under the protective wing of Professor Candela. This luminary had prescribed a powerful cocktail of psychotropic drugs all ending in ‘il’ (Anafranil, Tofranil, Nardil, etc) which had introduced her to the magical world of monoamine oxidase inhibitors. An opaque and comfortable world of pastel colours and grey expanses, of mumbled, unfinished sentences, of constantly repeating, ‘Oh dear, I can’t remember what I was going to cook for dinner.’
Pietro had been taken under the maternal wing of Mrs Celani and had continued to go to the villa every afternoon.
Strange to relate, even Mr Moroni had been taken under a wing, the large rapacious wing of the Bank of Rome.
Pietro and Gloria had attended the same primary school, but not in the same class. And everything had been fine. Now that they were in junior high, and in the same class, things had got more complicate
d.
They belonged to different castes.
Their friendship had adapted to the situation. It became like an underground river which flows unseen and constricted beneath the rocks, but which as soon as it finds an opening, a crack, gushes out in all its awesome power.
In the same way, at first sight you might have thought the two of them were complete strangers, but you’d have had to be blind not to notice how they were always looking for each other, always passing close to each other and how during breaktime they would sit whispering in a corner like a couple of spies, and how, strangely, when school was over Pietro would wait there at the end of the street till he saw Gloria take her bike and follow him.
5
Gina Biglia, Graziano’s mother, suffered from hypertension. Her blood pressure was never below a hundred and twenty-eight and sometimes rose as high as a hundred and eighty. It only took the slightest anxiety or excitement and she would have palpitations, giddiness, cold sweats and fainting fits.
Usually, when her son came home, Gina was so joyful that she felt ill and had to retire to bed for a couple of hours. But when, that winter, Graziano arrived from Rome, after two years without a visit or even a phone call, announcing that he had met a girl from the North and that he wanted to marry her and come back to live in Ischiano, her heart leaped in her chest like a jack-in-a-box and the poor woman, who was making fettuccine, fainted and crashed to the floor, pulling table, flour and rolling pin down with her.
When she came round, she couldn’t talk.
She lay on the floor like a capsized tortoise among the fettuccine, making incomprehensible mumbling noises as if she’d become a deaf mute or worse.
A stroke, thought Graziano in a panic. Her heart had stopped beating for a second and she’d suffered brain damage.
He rushed into the living room to call an ambulance, but when he returned he found his mother as right as rain. She was washing the kitchen floor with Cif and when she saw him she handed him a piece of paper on which she had written: