The Crossroads (3 page)

Rino had glared at him and loaded the furniture onto the van.

Councillor Arosio was another guy Rino couldn't stand. He was the shithead who had closed Varrano's main street to traffic. So even if you had to deliver the space shuttle the traffic police wouldn't let you through.

When he had reached the house he had learned that the councillor's flat was on the third floor and that the porter wouldn't let the lift be used for carrying heavy loads: ‘I
would
let you, but if
you
used it I'd have to let everyone else use it too and the lift would get worn out.'

Fuming, Rino had hoisted the furniture onto his back. At the door of the flat he had found Mrs Arosio waiting for him in a violet satin nightdress.

She was a really attractive woman, about forty years old, with a tawny perm, two enormous tits only partly hidden by her nightdress, a slim waist and a bum as big as an aircraft carrier. She had a round face, a small nose too perfect to be the one her mother had given her, eyes tinged with light-blue shadow, and swollen, shiny lips parted to reveal some slightly gappy incisors.

Rino had seen her walking along the high street in summer and winter with plunging necklines over those huge UVA-tanned breasts, but he hadn't known that she was Arosio's wife.

While he got to work with the nuts and bolts, she had sat down in such a way that her ample frontage was prominently displayed
and had remarked that muscles formed at work were much more attractive than ones that were pumped up in a gym. And what were all those tattoos? What did they mean? She wanted one too, a squirrel …

By now Rino had a hard-on and was finding it difficult to follow the instructions under that hungry gaze.

After the little writing-desk, the mini-blackboard and the wardrobe, he had assembled the bunk bed.

‘Have you screwed it together tightly enough? I wouldn't want it to come apart … My son Aldo is a bit on the heavy side. Would you mind getting up onto it yourself? To try it out?'

Rino had climbed onto the top bunk and bounced up and down. ‘Seems all right to me.'

She had shaken her head. ‘You're too light. I think I'd better come up too. Just to make quite sure.'

Half an hour later the bed had suddenly given way. Mrs Arosio had broken her wrist in falling out and had sued the furniture factory.

Rino had sworn to Castardin that he hadn't had sex with her.

And technically speaking that was correct. Penetration had not yet taken place when the bed had collapsed. She was on all fours, with her face buried in the pillow and her petticoat pulled up, and Rino was holding her by the hair like a red Indian gripping his horse's mane, stamping her buttocks with large red slap-marks like the patches on an Apache steed.

Then the bed had given way.

Rino Zena had lost his job.

And he had sworn to get even with old Castardin.

Cristiano Zena lay down and aimed at the head. He took a deep breath and fired. The animal flinched, gave a little whine and lay still.

He raised his fist. ‘First shot!'

He jumped down from the pile of planks and, after checking that
no cars were passing by, approached slowly, keeping the gun trained on the animal.

The mouth open. The froth. The tongue hanging to one side like a bluish slug. The eyes rolled back and on the neck a red hole among the black hairs and the snow swirling lazily in the air, burying the corpse.

One fucking mongrel less in the world.

Cristiano returned home and ran to his father to tell him how he had killed it first shot, but Rino was stretched out on his bed fast asleep.

An open cluster is a group of stars held together by gravitational forces. The number of stars can be in the thousands. Their low attraction favours a chaotic arrangement around the centre of the system.

This untidy formation resembled that of the thousands of little towns, villages and hamlets which dotted the vast plain where Cristiano Zena and his father lived.

The snow that had fallen all night on the plain had whitened the fields, the houses and the factories. The only things it had not covered were the thick, incandescent cables of the power stations, the lamps on the billboards, and the Forgese, the big winding river which linked the mountains up in the north with the sea down to the south.

But at the first light of dawn the snow changed to a thin, persistent drizzle which in less than an hour melted the white mantle that had momentarily made the plain as beautiful as a cool albino model wrapped in an Arctic fox fur. Varrano, San Rocco, Rocca Seconda, Murelle, Giardino Fiorito, Marzio, Bogognano, Semerese and all the other towns and villages re-emerged with their dingy colours, with their small or large areas of urban sprawl, with their modern two-storey houses surrounded by frost-browned lawns, with their prefabricated industrial buildings, their credit institutions, their flyovers, their motor showrooms and forecourts, and with their vast expanses of mud.

At a quarter past six in the morning Corrado Rumitz, commonly known as Quattro Formaggi because of his consuming passion for the pizza of that name, his staple diet for the best part of his thirty-
eight years, was sitting on a shabby, flower-patterned sofa having his breakfast.

He was wearing his home clothes: dirty underpants, an ankle-length tartan dressing-gown and a pair of battered Camperos boots, a relic of the old millennium.

With his gaze fixed on the little area in front of the kitchen, he took a biscuit out of a packet, dunked it in a bowl of milk and shoved it whole into his mouth. He repeated the action with metronomic regularity.

When he had woken up he had seen from the window of his room, in the pale light of dawn, an expanse of gentle hills and white valleys, as if he was enjoying the view from a mountain lodge. If he avoided looking at the walls of the building opposite he might even have imagined he was in Alaska.

He had sat in bed, huddled up under the blankets, watching the snowflakes fall as light as feathers.

It hadn't snowed like this for ages.

Almost every winter, sooner or later, there was a sprinkling, but before Quattro Formaggi had time to go out for a walk in the countryside it had always melted.

But that night at least twenty centimetres must have fallen.

When Quattro Formaggi had been small and lived in the orphanage run by the nuns it had snowed every winter. Cars would stop, some people would even put on cross-country skis and the children would make snowmen with branches for arms, and would slide down the garage ramps on old car tyres. What incredible snowball fights they'd had with Sister Anna and Sister Margherita. And there had been sleds drawn by horses with jingling bells …

At least, he thought there had.

Lately he had noticed that he often remembered things that had never happened. Or he got things he had seen on TV jumbled up with his own memories.

Certainly something in the world must have changed if it no longer snowed as it used to.

On TV they had explained that the world was warming up like a meatball inside the oven and that it was all the fault of man and his gases.

Quattro Formaggi, lying in bed, had told himself that if he hurried
up he could go round to Rino and Cristiano's and when Cristiano came out to go to school he could pelt him with snowballs.

But as if the weather had been listening and decided to put a spanner in the works, the snowflakes had become increasingly heavier and more liquid till they had turned to rain, and the hills had first become pockmarked and then shrunk to patches of icy mush, revealing the mass of old junk heaped up in the little yard. Beds, furniture, tyres, rusty rubbish bins, the skeleton of an orange Ape 125 pickup, and the carcase of a sofa.

Quattro Formaggi gulped down his cup of milk, his pointed Adam's apple rising and falling. He yawned, and stood up to his full height of one metre eighty-seven centimetres.

He was so tall and thin he looked like a basketball player who had been put on starvation rations. Gangly arms and legs, enormous hands and feet. There was a callused weal on the palm of his right hand and a hard brown scar on his right calf. His bony neck supported a head as small and round as that of a silvery gibbon. A greyish beard stained his sunken cheeks and his chin. His hair, unlike his beard, was black and shiny and hung in a fringe over his low forehead, in the style of an Amazonian Indian.

He put the cup in the sink, quivering with tremors and spasms as if he had hundreds of electrodes clamped to his body.

He continued to stare at the yard, cocking his head on one side and twisting his mouth, then he thumped himself twice on the thigh and slapped his forehead.

The children in the park, when they saw him go by, would stare at him in amazement and then run to their nannies and tug at their clothes, asking: ‘Why does that man walk in that funny way?'

And usually they would get the reply (if the nanny was a polite person) that it was rude to point and that the poor fellow was an unfortunate who suffered from some mental illness.

But then the same children, talking to the older ones at school, would learn that that strange man, who was always in the public gardens and who would steal your toys if you didn't watch out, was called Electric Man, like some enemy of Spiderman or Superman.

That would indeed have been a more appropriate nickname for Quattro Formaggi. At the age of thirty Corrado Rumitz had had a nasty experience which had nearly cost him his life.

It had all begun with an air rifle which he had exchanged for a long fishing rod. It was a good bargain: the air rifle's gaskets were worn out and it made a farting noise when you fired it. It barely even tickled the coypu in the river. The rod, by contrast, was practically new and extremely long, so if you cast it properly you could reach the middle of the river.

Feeling very pleased with himself, Quattro Formaggi had set off, rod in one hand and bucket in the other, to fish in the river. He had been told that there was one special point, just below the lock, where the fish gathered, carried down on the current.

After having a look around, Quattro Formaggi had climbed over the fence and stationed himself just above the lock, which that day was closed.

He had never been the brightest of people. When he was in the orphanage he had caught a particularly acute form of meningitis and consequently he ‘thought slowly', as he put it.

That day he may have thought slowly but he had thought well. He had made a few casts and could feel that the fish were touching the bait. There must be hundreds of them, massed by the lock gates. But they were very crafty. They would eat the worm and leave him with nothing but a hook that needed re-baiting.

Maybe he should try further out.

He had made a long, vigorous cast, describing a perfect curve through the air. The hook had cleared the foliage of the trees but not the electric cables that ran right over his head.

If the rod had been made of plastic he wouldn't have come to any harm, but unfortunately for him it was made of carbon, which on a scale of electrical conductivity is second only to silver.

The current had entered his hand and gone right through his body, leaving via his left leg.

The lock-keepers had found him lying on the ground, burnt almost to a frazzle.

For several years he hadn't been able to speak and had moved jerkily, like a green lizard. Then gradually he had recovered, but he still had spasms in his neck and mouth and a crazy leg which he sometimes had to thump awake.

Quattro Formaggi took some minced meat out of the fridge and gave it to Uno and Due, the turtles who lived in five centi
metres of water in a big washing-bowl on the table by the window.

Someone had thrown them into the fountain in Piazza Bologna and he had brought them home. When he had found them they had been the size of two-euro pieces; now, five years later, they were nearly as big as cottage loaves.

He looked at the clock shaped like a violin that hung on the wall. He couldn't remember exactly at what time, but he was supposed to be meeting Danilo at the Bar Boomerang, after which they had arranged to go round together to wake Rino up.

There was just time to reposition the little wooden church by the lake.

He went through into the sitting room.

A room about twenty square metres in area, completely covered with mountains of coloured papier-mâché, with rivers of tin foil, with lakes made out of plates and bowls, with woods made of moss, with towns dotted with cardboard houses, deserts of sand and roads of cloth.

And the surface was populated by soldiers, plastic animals, dinosaurs, shepherds, little cars, tanks, robots and dolls.

His nativity scene. He had been working on it for years.

Thousands of toys retrieved from rubbish bins, found on the dump or left by children in the public gardens.

On the highest mountain of all stood a stable with Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the ox and the ass. They had been a gift from Sister Margherita when he was ten. Quattro Formaggi, moving with surprising agility, crossed the scene without knocking anything over and repositioned the bridge across which a troop of smurfs was walking, with a Pokémon at their head.

When he had finished the job he knelt down and prayed for the soul of Sister Margherita. Then he went into the tiny toilet, had a cursory wash and put on his winter gear: some long johns, a pair of cotton trousers, a flannel shirt with a blue-and-white checked pattern, a brown sweatshirt, an old quilted jacket, a Juventus scarf, a yellow cape, woollen gloves, a peaked cap and some heavy working shoes.

Ready.

The alarm clock went off at a quarter to seven and jolted Cristiano Zena out of a dreamless sleep.

It was a good ten minutes before an arm emerged like a hermit crab's pincer from under the bedclothes and silenced the ringing.

He felt as if he had only just closed his eyes. But the most terrible thing was leaving the warm bed.

As every morning, he considered the idea of not going to school. Today it was particularly tempting, because his father had told him he was going to work. That didn't happen often these days.

But it wasn't possible. There was the history essay. And if he skipped it again …

Come on, up you get
.

One corner of the room was beginning to brighten with the dull light emitted by the overcast, grey sky.

Cristiano stretched, and checked the scratch on his thigh. It was red, but it was already forming a scab.

He picked up his trousers, fleece and socks off the floor and pulled them under the bedclothes. Yawning, he sat up, slipped on his trainers and shuffled, zombie-like, towards the door.

Cristiano's room was large, with still unplastered walls. In one corner two trestles supported a wooden plank on which exercise books and textbooks were piled. Above the bed, a poster of Valentino Rossi advertising beer. Sticking out from the wall by the door were the truncated copper pipes from a radiator that had never been fitted.

With another yawn, he crossed the hall floored with grey linoleum, passed the tatters of the bathroom door that still hung from its hinges and entered the room.

The bathroom was a little cubbyhole measuring about one metre by two, with blue, flowery tiles encircling the floor of the shower. Over the basin hung a long shard of the mirror. A bare light bulb dangled from the ceiling.

He stepped over the remains of his father's vomit and looked out of the little window.

It was raining and the rain had eaten away all the snow. All that
was left were a few useless white patches, melting on the gravel in front of the house.

School will be on
.

The toilet had no seat and he rested his buttocks on the cold porcelain, gritting his teeth. A shiver ran up his spine. And in a state of semi-consciousness he crapped.

Then he cleaned his teeth. Cristiano didn't have good teeth. The dentist wanted to give him a brace, but luckily they had no money and his father had said his teeth were fine the way they were.

He didn't take a shower, but sprayed himself with deodorant. He dug his fingers into the gel and ran them through his hair to make it even more towselled, if that was possible, but taking care not to let his ears stick out.

He returned to his room, put his books in his rucksack and was about to go downstairs when he saw a dim glow under the door of his father's bedroom.

He pushed down the handle.

His father was huddled up in a camouflage sleeping bag on a double mattress on the floor.

Cristiano drew nearer.

Only the oval of his shaven head protruded from the sleeping bag. The floor was strewn with empty beer cans, socks and his boots. On the bedside table, more cans and the pistol. There was a stench of rancid sweat and dirty clothes which mingled with the smell of an old, threadbare blue carpet. A lamp swathed in a red cloth threw a scarlet glow on the enormous flag with a black swastika in the middle that hung on the plasterless wall. The shutters were down, the curtains, patterned with brown-and-white lozenges, were held together with pegs.

His father only came here to sleep. Usually he collapsed on the sofa in front of the television, and only the cold, and in the summer the mosquitoes, gave him the strength to drag himself up to his bedroom.

If Cristiano ever saw him open the windows and make an attempt at tidying up the room he knew old baldy had arranged to fuck some woman and didn't want to suffocate her with rotting socks and cigarette stubs.

Cristiano kicked the mattress. ‘Papa! Papa, wake up! It's late.'

No reaction.