The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (17 page)

*

Up and down narrow streets, maddening search for two square metres of pavement to leave the heap of rubber and screws, no parking so he did so illegally (he already had plenty of unpaid tickets anyhow).

Feeling hunger, he went and ate fried polenta smothered with meat sauce.

His manners were often raw. He was habitually sulky. Without proper reason, he thought himself superior—even as good as the founder of the Christian religion, though his mother, a cleaning woman of southern origins, was certainly no Madonna.

And then darkness swallowed up the meagre day.

He walked along the streets, gaze lowered, the fingers of his hands sheathed in his pockets, a cigarette protruding from his lips. The sidewalks were congested with people—their tongues clicking against the roofs of their mouths. His eyes dove and soared; he nudged his beak through the rising tide of fully developed but more often adolescent flesh which flushed out onto the roadsides on Friday evenings; bleach-dyed jeans; prematurely corrupt faces.

A hand, tapping on the glass from inside a restaurant, attracted his attention. He approached, stared through the pane of more or less transparent silicates, saw his friend Delio, a poet of odious free verse, a little, unshaven man with large lips who had the shifting, neurotic demeanour of a thief or drug addict. (His writing had a mephitic tang to it, like sewage.)

Massimo went inside. Delio was sitting with another man.

“
This is Klaus,” he said. “He is German but speaks Italian better than I do!”

Klaus had the beard of a mystic—wispy, pointy—and a thin, long face out of which protruded a huge nose like the beak of a bird of prey. His fingers, which he made constantly apparent with lavish gestures, tapered at the ends, were prehensile, and this added to his attitude of a raptor.

Massimo joined the two men and ordered a beer.

“
I was just telling Klaus about my latest project,” Delio said. “La Società Delle Poetiche Arrabbiate wants to publish a piece of mine in their yearly calendar.”

“
Brilliant.”

“
Yes, my poem begins:

“
No wonder women are attracted to writers,” Klaus murmured as he plunged his fork into the last segment of beefsteak on his plate.

“
They are partial to deep men.”

“
No—like animals,” Massimo said, taking a sip of his beer, “they rut according to season.”

“
Speaking of seasons,” said Delio, looking at his watch, “I have to go. There’s a Nigerian girl I am supposed to meet in twenty minutes.”

Delio left. The waiter came and took Klaus’s plate away. Massimo finished his beer and ordered another.

“
So Delio is a friend of yours,” Klaus said.

“
He is an acquaintance.”

“
You are a poet also?”

“
No, I work for a living.”

“
A worker. Earning his monthly bread.”

“
Have to eat.”

“
Yes, but if you become too much part of the system . . .” Klaus poured a thread of wine into his glass. “The hardest working slaves are those who consider themselves free.”

“
Well, if you want to philosophise . . .”

“
I do.” He filled the air with nebulous ideas. “First off, you have to accept the social revolution as the end to capitalism. The downfall of the corporations. The machinery of government is controlled by the corporate god. Violence is simply a means—to end the state. The code of established morality is another prison. Morality is injustice. Every day 40,000 children die as a result of poverty. Reform isn’t enough. The right to vote is a mockery, serving only to consolidate the power of the corporate entity. Action is required—not just words, but complete destruction. Madman, fanatic. Great thinkers are initially misunderstood. A man must fulfil his individual potential.”

“
So,” Massimo asked, “you belong to some sort of organisation?”

“
No. I belong to a tactic.”

He lifted his glass of wine to his lips and sipped it carefully, as if it were blood.

Upon parting, Klaus handed Massimo some pamphlets and a scrap of paper on which was scribbled his phone number.

“
Call me if you ever want to meet . . . for a coffee,” he said.

Massimo arrived back at his car, but it was booted. He shrugged his shoulders and threw his car keys into the gutter. He boarded the subway at Cairoli, took the Linea Rossa; looked at faces: distorted, shapeless as clods of earth. The passengers sat hunched on their seats—eyes hollow, lips set tight in tense depression. Yes, Klaus was right. These people were simply slaves of some great corporate entity, an entity which they worshipped without even knowing it. Massimo, under the influence of a subtle egoistic intoxication, felt as if he could knock the human race over with a word, destroy it with a few blows of his fist.

At Amendola two young men got on. One held an accordion, the other a guitar. They began to play, stubbornly, somewhat clumsily. Then the beggar’s cup went round. A woman dropped a valueless coin in—and then they debarked, at Lotto. Massimo himself got off a few stops later at Uruguay.

He lived in the Quarto Oggiaro. Sinister activities, homicides, violence of every genre.

On the street, darkness, gliding shadows. He had a good walk, as the stop was far from his home. He passed by a group of Albanian prostitutes. That area of town was full of women either exploited or exploiting themselves. They lurked under the street lamps, flitted along the sidewalks like bats.

Gentle boiling red, painful veins desire sacred whore submit to sterilized fecundation.

Finally he was there. He made his way through the entrails of the building—up stairs—through halls;—then, arriving at his door, he realised that, when he had thrown away his car keys, he had also thrown away the key to his apartment. He rammed the rectangle of wood with his body, hurt his shoulder, forced the lock.

His apartment had a stale smell. Furniture crammed into two small, high-ceilinged rooms. He threw himself on his bed and slept.

II.

He lived amongst the constant roar of machines, grinding of metal, shouts and spray of sparks. The place was crowded with sculptures in various states; wrecked plaster busts, abhorrent nudes of bronze, monumental mythological themes and questionable contemporary retro-futurist pieces, post-apocalyptic-tribalism which might make one dream of the mating of invertebrates. Then the wax room: full of red figures, some minute, some gigantic, stuck full of nails—sprues—bizarre—more than vaguely masochistic—many resembling huge humanoid candles.

An artist in a white apron—like those worn by surgeons or dentists—stood atop a chair and worked on the wax of his sculpture—a massive male form, vaguely reminiscent of an elongated toad.

Massimo was touching up a figure of Padre Pio, taking the seams out of the wax.

Ugo came striding in, looking for some tool or other. His grey hair had turned green due to all the cupric nitrate and liver of sulphur he used in giving patinas to the sculptures. Stopping, he gazed with admiration at the piece Massimo was working on.

“
Do you like what you see?”

“
Ah, Padre Pio . . . he was a real saint. . . . The stigmata you know,” Ugo said, showing the palms of his hands. “He had them fresh and bleeding for fifty years!”

“
Stigmata del culo
.”

“
Hey don’t talk that way!”

“
If it wasn’t for you religious maniacs we would be living in a paradise.”

“
If you call the flames of hell a paradise, my dear!”

“
Idiot!”

“
Filth!”

“
Faccia di merda!
”

“
Ruffiano!
”

“
Faccia da blatta!
”

“
Facciakkkallaa-ah!
”

Ugo thrust his hands against Massimo’s chest. The latter bunched his fingers together and began to swing—plunging his fists, one after the other, into Ugo’s face. Then both men grappled, hugged each other like frenzied lovers, and flew backwards.

A scream, like that of some wild animal, went up. It was the artist. Ugo and Massimo had bumped into the wax of his sculpture, knocked it over, and it had broken to pieces. The strange, somewhat amphibian head rolled under a table. There were pieces of shoulder, a hand, the giant torso broken in three;—all of this bright red—like body parts after some especially heinous crime.

III.

Unemployed.

Filaments of rain descended from the sky.

New Revolutionary Techniques; The Necessity for Violence; Militant Disobedience.
These were the names of the tracts that Klaus had given him, and he read them with ardour, his imagination infused with the smell of smoke, the chaos of crowds and the wailing of sirens. He hated. The emotion pushed itself out from within, like a pus-filled boil, demanded expression—in acts of aggression, violence, burning rage. He wanted to destroy—property, people—taste the pain of industrial society as its flesh was burnt smoking black.

A knock at the door stirred him from his reverie. It was Delio.

“
I thought you could use some company.”

“
Why?”

“
Why not!”

Massimo lit a cigarette and began to prepare coffee in a little aluminium espresso pot.

“
Last of the coffee,” he murmured as he emptied out the dark-brown, almost black powder.

“
Hey, do you want to have some fun?”

“
I don’t want to visit your Nigerian prostitute if that’s what you mean.”

“
No, I mean this.”

He held up a can of gold spray paint.

“
What’s that for?”

Delio laughed uneasily.

“
I see,” Massimo said.

The coffee boiled. He poured it into two small, white cups.

“
Ah,” Delio murmured as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into his espresso, “you act like an anarchist, but really you are full of . . . middle-class prejudices.”

“
Che cazzo vai dicendo!
” Massimo blurted.

“
OK.”

The poet pulled a somewhat dirty looking rag out of his pocket, soaked it full of the paint and held it up to his nose and mouth, inhaling vigorously.

Massimo followed suit. The hiss of the paint can, like a snake;—flit of paranoia aching eyelids peeled back drinking melted fig red scorpion genitals of desert sparks. She. Prototype industrial woman, a golden female oozing out of a can: wrapped herself around his feet, as if in obeisance. And he could feel his body changing, becoming mighty, deified, snorting smoke, blazing eyes rolled back in sphere-shaped head. He glanced at Delio. The latter was transformed into a strange batrachian-like creature with tiny glittering eyes and the quivering antennae of a moth.

Massimo opened the window and began to crawl out.

“
Are you crazy!” Delio cried, and flung himself on Massimo’s back, clung there, the latter on the sill a vast sweep of molten air before him in aching strange red-gold tumble.

Together strength of deity of drug of hate (through Massimo’s power) they began to float out and over the city, which boiled below, he soared above, the air around him hot as fire. Sucked up bodies spewed out ground corpses sprayed city slippery red muck blue steam sooty steam.

A giant serpent was curled up in the clouds.

“
I am Tyrrhenian Sea Dragon,” it said. “And what deity are you?”

“
At the moment Gold Vapour God!”

The next morning Massimo awoke with a terrible headache. He opened his eyes and looked over at the clock, but is seemed incredibly distant, as if it were miles away. His body manipulated itself out of bed, made its way to the kitchen; hands fumbled with the coffee tin. . . . Empty. . . . He pulled on some jeans and left the place, to walk to a café. The streets seemed to be strewn with small pools, red, as if they were pools of blood.

IV.

He began to meet Klaus regularly in town, at the restaurant, and the latter, in his cultured voice, the voice of a professor delivering a lecture, would set forth the philosophy of violence, the working man’s revenge on the great corporate machine. Sometimes he would fall into a sudden whisper and then deliver some very specific tit-bit, some morsel of information that his listener might draw on if he wished to make himself useful to the cause. And Massimo, nodding his head gravely, furrowing his brow, smoking cigarette after cigarette, lapped up this revolutionary talk as if it were water and he a thirsty dog. Ah yes! He was all for destruction. Let the whole world burn, so that the brightly-feathered phoenix of the future could rise out of its ashes!

V.

“
You are in love?”

“
No. She is meat.”

Delio had a rash around his nose and mouth. His whole person smelled of solvents.