The Crossroads (34 page)

Elisa
.

The singer. He knew her.

Elisa singing: ‘Listen to me … Now I can cry. I know I need you … We are light that … Like a sun and a star …'

He thought he could make out, on the other side of the road, a square silhouette which gradually took on the shape of a van. The rain was drumming on its bodywork. A dim glow tinged the glass of the window covered with raindrops.

The Ducato!

The music was coming from its radio.

Cristiano couldn't even feel glad, he was so scared.

What if it wasn't his father in the van, but someone else?

Don't be a wimp
.

He got off his bike and laid it on the ground as quietly as possible. He tried to swallow, but the saliva had gone from his mouth.

Shit, I'm terrified
.

His frozen feet slopped in his shoes as he moved closer. He was less than a metre from the van. He stretched out his hand and felt the bumper. It was dented. And the indicator light was broken.

It was their van all right.

Two steps, grab the handle and … I can't
.

His legs wouldn't support him and his arms were so tired …

If I open the door
…

All that came afterwards was dripping with blood and soaked with death.

I'm going to call someone
…

With a sudden lunge he grabbed the handle, opened the driver's door and sprang back, ready to dodge the attack of a murderer.

There's nobody here
.

The red display of the car radio on the dashboard lit up the driver's seat. He switched it off. He saw the key in the ignition. Underneath the passenger's seat was the toolbox. He opened it. He took out a long torch. He switched it on. Then he picked up the hammer, got out of the van and opened the big rear door.

But there was nothing in there either, except for a bag of cement, a couple of planks, a plastic bag containing the remains of the picnic, and the wheelbarrow.

Pointing the torch beam at the ground he checked the whole of the layby. Two rubbish bins, a notice saying
DANGER OF FIRE
, and an electricity hut.

No, there was nothing else.

Beppe Trecca was kneeling by the African, awaiting his fate.

The car, which was black with alloy wheels, stopped in front of him with its headlights full on, illuminating the road and the rain.

Beppe couldn't see who was inside.

It looked like an Audi or a Mercedes.

Finally the window lit up and rolled down.

Sitting at the wheel was a man of about fifty. He wore a camel-coloured jacket and a light-blue polo neck sweater. A thick black beard grew almost up to his cheekbones. His hair was slicked back with gel. He had a cigarette in his mouth. He stubbed it out in the ashtray, then moved over towards the passenger's window and, raising one eyebrow, looked out. ‘Has he gone?'

Beppe raised his head, stared at him uncomprehendingly and stammered: ‘What?'

The man pointed at the body with his chin: ‘Is he dead?'

‘I don't know … I think …'

‘Did you hit him?'

‘… Yes, I think so.'

‘Is he a nigger?'

Beppe nodded.

‘Well, what are you waiting for?' asked the man, as if he was enquiring when the next bus was due.

‘What?'

‘What are you waiting for? Why don't you just get out of here?'

The social worker couldn't manage to reply. He opened his mouth and closed it again as if a ghost had just stuffed a spoonful of shit down his throat.

The man stroked his beard. ‘Has anyone else come past?'

Beppe shook his head.

‘Well get moving, then, what are you waiting for?' He glanced at his watch. ‘Well, I must be off. Bye, then. Good luck.'

The window rose and the Audi, or whatever it was, vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

Cristiano Zena went out into the middle of the road, with the faint hope that someone would pass by.

How was it possible that this fucking road, which was a constant stream of cars, bicycles and motorbikes in the daytime, could be so deserted at night, as if there were monsters in the woods?

‘Papa! Papa! Where are you?' he shouted at length towards the woods. ‘Answer me!' His voice died away against the dense vegetation.

I wouldn't go into that wood even if
…

But, now that he thought of it, the background noise he had heard during the phone call had been that of rain falling among trees.

What if he's in there
?

He walked over to the guardrail. There was a gap between the metal strips from where a little path began and threaded its way through the weeds and brambles. Plastic bags, bottles, a condom, an old car seat among the moss-covered rocks. He pointed the torch ahead. Black trunks and a tangle of branches dripping with water.

He took one step, stopped and then started jumping up and down, trying to shake off his fear.

‘Why do you do this to me? You bastard! I was in bed … If this is a joke …' he muttered between his teeth.

He stood there, rooted to the beginning of the path, shifting the weight of his body from one foot to the other. Then he breathed in deeply and, raising the hammer, took one step and the mud sucked in his shoe, took another and it wrapped round his ankles. He set off down the path and the trees seemed to be waiting for him, stretching out their branches towards him (
Come! Come!
) and anyone might be there in the darkness, ready to leap out from behind a tree trunk and hit him from behind.

He had only gone a few metres but he already felt as if he was a thousand kilometres from the road. The rainwater dripping off leaves and running down tree trunks. The moss soaked with water. The air saturated with water, earth and rotten wood.

He imagined a pack of wolves with eyes as red as molten lava appearing out of the darkness.

His right hand held the hammer aloft, ready to strike anyone who appeared in front of him, while his left hand shone the torch around frenetically.

Sabre-thrusts of light flashed on the big jagged rocks, on the branches, on the trickles of water that dug rivulets in the mud, and on a pair of black boots.

Cristiano screamed, took two steps backwards, tripped over a branch and fell down on his back. He got up again and, with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking, shone the beam of the torch on the boots, the paint-splashed boots, on the cape, grey with an orange reflector strip, that his father used when he worked, on his shaven head immersed in the slime, on his hand and on his mobile phone which lay in a puddle.

Beppe Trecca was still kneeling in the rain, beside the corpse, and continued to ask himself:
What are you waiting for?

The man in the Audi had made it quite clear that he would have driven on if he had been in his shoes.

But that man wasn't him. He wasn't a hit-and-run driver. He helped other people, he didn't abandon them.

(
Just call the police and an ambulance. That's all you have to do
.
)

Why? To ruin my life? If this poor bugger had been injured, or
dying, I'd have rushed him to hospital. But like this?

He dried his face with the palm of his hand; he was trembling and his teeth wouldn't stop chattering. He shook the African again. There was no response.

He's dead. That's it. Say it. He's dead
.

And so … So there was nothing to be done.

Why couldn't he go back in time? Just a little way, just half an hour, to the moment before he had taken out the Rod Stewart CD?

The dreadful idea that there was no way of putting things right, that no one was capable of granting this simple wish, filled him with terror.

(
Get a grip on yourself! Accept responsibility for what you've
done
.)

But what would it change? Nothing. It wouldn't bring him back
to life. And I'd be up to my neck in shit
.

So one unfortunate life had been snuffed out and another would be ruined for ever.

‘There's no sense in it. No sense at all,' he whimpered, with his hands over his face. ‘It's not fair. I don't deserve this. I can't do it, just now, when …'

Snap out of it! Move. Get into the car and drive away before
anyone passes. As the man said: “What are you waiting for?
”

Beppe Trecca stood up and, hanging his head, got back into the Puma.

Cristiano had imagined a thousand different ways in which his father might be killed (stabbed in a fight or crushed in the wreckage of the Ducato or falling off the scaffolding of a new apartment block).

And he had always imagined that they would give him the news at school. The headmaster calling him: “There's been an accident … I'm terribly sorry … ”

“You don't give a damn, you arsehole,” he would answer, and he wouldn't cry. Then he would set fire to their house and sail away on a merchant ship and never return to that fucking place again.

He had never thought he would die in the mud, like an animal.

Or that it would happen so soon.

But it's fair enough
.

It all added up. He had started by taking his mother away and now he was taking his father away.

I mustn't cry, though
.

He longed to pull him out of the mud. He longed to hug him, but he was paralysed. As if he had been bitten by a cobra. He opened his mouth and tried to spit out the thing that was stopping him breathing.

He kept looking at him because he couldn't believe it, he just couldn't believe it, that that dead man there was Rino Zena, his father.

Finally Cristiano took a step forward. The cone of light from the torch lit up a segment of forehead immersed in the grey slime, the nose, the eyes splashed with earth. The foam at the side of the mouth.

He took the torch between his teeth and with both hands grabbed hold of his father's wrist, trying to pull him up.

Rino Zena's helpless body bent slowly over and leaned sideways against a big rock covered with moss. His head drooped onto his chest and his arms opened out like the wings of a dead pigeon. The rainwater trickled down his forehead and over his earth-clogged eyebrows.

Cristiano put his ear to his father's chest. He couldn't hear a thing. All other sounds were drowned out by the pulsing of the blood in his eardrums and the rustle of the rain falling on the trees.

He knelt there, drying his face with his hand, not knowing what to do, then, after a moment's hesitation, he raised his father's head and pulled up one of his eyelids with his forefinger, revealing a glassy eye like that of a stuffed animal.

He picked up the mobile phone from the puddle. He tried switching it on. It didn't work. He put it in his pocket.

His father couldn't just lie there in a heap like that.

He grabbed hold of his shoulders and tried to sit him up. But he wouldn't stay put. Cristiano straightened him up, but as soon as he let go he slowly flopped down again.

In the end he bored a stick into the ground and propped it under his armpit.

What on earth did he come here for? Why did he leave the van
and go into the wood
?

He must have had some kind of turn. He'd had a headache all day. He must have got into the van, perhaps intending to go to hospital.

Does this road lead to the hospital
?

He had no idea.

But he had been too ill and hadn't made it, and had got out of the van and gone to die in the wood.

Like a wolf
.

When wolves are sick they leave the pack and go off on their own to die.

‘Why didn't you wake me, you bastard?' he asked him, and kicked the stick, whereupon his father slid back into the mud.

He had to get him out of there. The only way was to grab him by the feet and drag him down to the road.

He got hold of his ankles and started to pull, but immediately let go again as if he'd had an electric shock.

For a moment he had thought a tremor had passed through his father's legs.

Cristiano dropped the torch, knelt on the ground and started frantically feeling his thighs, arms and chest and shaking his head, which lolled from one side to the other.

Was it just my imagination
?

He put his hands on his chest, trying to push and repeat ‘One, two, three', as he had seen them do on
ER
.

He didn't know how to do it or what the purpose of it was, but he went on doing it for a long time, with no discernible effect except that the muscles of his arms became as hard as marble.

He couldn't go on; he was wet through and frozen stiff. Suddenly all the accumulated tiredness and anxiety crushed him and he collapsed on his father's chest.

He must sleep. Just for a short while. Five minutes.

Then he would take him to the van.

He curled up on the ground beside the corpse. The cold was relentless. He hugged himself, squeezed his arms against his chest to stop the shivers, rubbed his shoulders trying to warm himself up.

He took the mobile phone out of his pocket, but it didn't come on.

Perhaps I could leave him here
.

Better in a wood than in a fucking graveyard, with a bunch of strangers …

He would decay into compost. No priests, churches, funerals.

The torch, on the ground, painted a luminous oval on a carpet of dead leaves, of twigs, on a tree stump where a cluster of long-stemmed mushrooms grew and on his father's hand.

Cristiano remembered one time when Rino, halfway across a
bridge, had pulled the car over to the side of the road and jumped up onto the parapet. Down below ran the river, flowing between the rocks that protruded from the eddies.

Then he had started walking along, holding his arms out on either side like the acrobats in the circus.