When the Dead Awaken (23 page)

‘Come on, off you go.'

‘I'll deal with it,' Antonia said. ‘Come on, Gianni. Now! And stop staring at the girl. She's eighteen.'

The nurse was sympathetic, as one would expect, but also matter-of-fact: the MRI scan of Enzo Canavaro's brain showed no abnormalities, but they believed that Signor Canavaro had suffered a minor stroke; a blood clot in one of the brain's smaller arteries which had yet to show up on the scan. They would repeat the scan tomorrow. The blood clot was probably the result of hardening of the arteries, which again was caused by Signor Canavaro's sky-high blood pressure and possibly a genetic predisposition. Did Signora Moretti follow? Her lodger was currently being kept in a kind of artificial coma on a respirator. He was not sedated so he could wake up. He might experience paralysis and confusion, possibly speech difficulties. Prognosis? His future? The nurse's gaze became evasive. Her hands lifted with a shrug of the shoulders. Impossible to predict, signora. We can only hope for the best, can't we? On admission the patient's blood pressure had been terribly high, the nurse repeated. Was Antonia imagining things or was the nurse blaming her? It really was quite
irresponsible, the nurse added. Antonia stuttered as she tried to explain Enzo's rejection of any reality check regarding his health … she had, and God was her witness … tried, she really had … but he was careless with his medication to the point of suicidal. The nurse nodded and turned to the bed, which the large, bearded man filled from headboard to foot. Family? Did he have any? Not as far as Antonia knew. The nurse found this most peculiar. She couldn't imagine anyone without a family.

‘Paralysed … ?' Antonia started counting the floor tiles. Then he would be better off dead. Enzo was as active as a sheepdog right from dawn to his late evening walk. Sometimes he would even wander around all night when insomnia kept him awake. He encountered the world through his hands. Such a situation would be intolerable. As if she had read her mind, the nurse carefully explained to Antonia that obviously they had got the blood pressure under control at once and that they had started him on medication to break down the presumed blood clot; ‘thrombolytic therapy', as the treatment was called, would – if all went well – restore the blood supply to the affected section of the brain. A new MRI scan would provide more information.

As would the patient's own responses, of course. When he woke up. Antonia looked at her. Was it really possible? It was. Both in theory and in practice, signora. Thrombolytic therapy had revolutionized neurology in the last five
to ten years. Doctors now got patients through strokes mostly without permanent physical side effects. Obviously not every time. Far from it. But often.

While the nurse was busy at the neighbouring bed, Antonia slipped her hand into the bedside table drawer and helped herself to Enzo's keys.

A young ghost was staring back at her from the wall. Antonia had automatically straightened the crooked frame before she looked at the picture. The frame wasn't dusty and the wall behind it had not faded. It showed a grainy colour photograph. It could have been cut from one of the old racing magazines piled up under Enzo Canavaro's desk, tied and bound up with twine. As if they would escape if given their freedom.

The young god looked at her from the seat of a Formula One car. The visor of his helmet was up and the visible part of his face was framed by the helmet's padding and the white fire-retardant cloth of the face mask. It might be a standard publicity shot, but Antonia didn't think so. None of the PR staff who fluttered around Formula One teams would have allowed this photo to be used to promote their driver. His gaze was far too bored, introverted and unsmiling. The glamour coefficient was absolutely zero.

She had to sit down. She had known him once and she had recognized him by his eyes. She had been looking at those same eyes every day for the last two years.

And she had kissed the man in the racing car. When he was a boy of only sixteen. It was a complete mystery to her until she remembered that Bruno Forlani, the man in the racing car, had a twin brother, Giulio – whom she now realized was calling himself Enzo Canavaro.

So of course they had the same eyes, but now Enzo looked nothing like his twin.

The picture fell to the floor and the glass shattered. But she kept looking at it.

Below the photo of Bruno Forlani there was a short article about a crash at Zolder in October 1993. The article was very brief and focused mainly on the coincidence that the far more famous Formula One driver, Gilles Villeneuve, had come off the circuit and been killed on the same stretch, Terlamenbocht, exactly ten years before the twenty-three-year-old Italian hope nearly lost his life at the same spot. The article was from Castellarano's local newspaper,
Mercurio Reggio Emilia
, which had long since gone to newspaper heaven, but its source was probably one of the international news agencies, such as AP or Reuters.

The smallest of Enzo's three rooms was a shrine to Bruno; a disturbing project. Everywhere were photos from Bruno Forlani's short but spectacular career as a go-kart champion, a successful year in Formula Three, and finally the gateway to heaven: his year as a Formula One test driver for Ferrari in the '92–3 season. Everything was
categorized, laid out and displayed as if it were a tribute to a saint.

And in between the photographs of the brother, she found one of a married couple she vaguely recognized as the boys' parents taken during one of the family's annual visits to their mother's home town. She saw the Castellarano background, which she knew like the back of her hand.

And she saw that everything had been displayed in a careful pattern centred around a single photograph of an attractive young woman and a smiling boy who had the same colouring and facial features as his uncle, Bruno Forlani, but with Enzo's dark, pondering eyes.

She hadn't been inside these rooms for two years and hadn't known what to expect. Certainly not this. She remembered the wooden crates from the freight company in Genoa that were delivered to the grocery shop every now and then. Remembered Enzo's anticipation and secrecy when he spotted them in the garage.

The walls seemed to close in on her. Antonia remembered that she hadn't eaten breakfast. She leaned forwards with her hands on her knees and forced herself to take deep slow breaths.

She closed her eyes to Enzo's impossible, hopeless and detailed reconstruction of a past and a future that could never be his. The woman and the boy. His wife and their
son, undoubtedly. His twin brother Bruno. Their happy parents. Enzo had approached the reconstruction in the only way he knew. The way he went about everything: dedicated, careful, detailed – and frustratingly unresolved … like the engine forever hovering over the empty engine compartment of the Testarossa.

As if that was enough. As if that could ward off a new tragedy.

And as if someone else might hold the key, interpret Enzo's photo-collage, utter the secret password, and the wall would open like a door. As if a past come back to life was ready and waiting on the other side.

The three rooms were interconnected. Antonia walked back to the middle room: Enzo's bedroom. Once it had been her parents'. Now the double bed was standing in the middle of the floor, neatly made with a lace bedspread covering the blankets and the pillows, and aligned on an east–west axis. On the wall behind the headboard there was a crucifix and a wedding photograph. The same woman again. Heartbreakingly beautiful. On the steps in front of the church in Castellarano. Under the wedding photo was a picture which made her shudder: a wild, grey and black sea, the tilted deck of a fishing boat, spray cascading over orange oilskin-clad fishermen hauling swordfish on board. The fish glittered red and green and the men grinned broadly under their caps and hoods.

To the left in the picture – turning half away and serious as always – stood Giulio Forlani, whom she knew as Enzo Canavaro. Antonia remembered how his hands had still been swollen and chafed the first night she saw him, and that he still had the smell of the deep sea on him. From the trawler's radio mast, between lanterns, aerials and radar domes, a torn Stars and Stripes was flapping in the storm.

With a pen someone had written on the lower edge of the photograph: ‘Flemish Cap, St John's, Newfoundland, 14 April 2009, bloody, bloody hell!'

She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and massaged her temples. From the garage she could faintly hear Gianni's cornet like a bittern's mournful call. The boy had refused to take part in this disloyal expedition to Enzo's past, and she understood why.

Antonia would not have believed it possible that any human being could move so quietly, least of all a man almost two metres tall whose weight was on the respectable side of one hundred kilos, but she didn't hear him enter. Enzo Canavaro walked straight past her, opened a wardrobe and started putting things into his old salt-water-stained sea bag.

Antonia blinked.

Then she blinked again. She was sure that if she blinked hard enough he would be gone; preferably back in the hospital bed.

‘Enzo … ? Enzo! What in God's name … ?'

He glanced at her while he stuffed a sleeping bag into the sea bag, but said nothing. His movements were miraculously steady and measured, and his eyes and face devoid of expression.

‘I am … I'm sorry, Enzo.' She made a helpless gesture towards the open door and the bundle of keys hanging from the lock. ‘I know that … What are you doing? Where are you going?'

She began to cry.

‘You can't just leave,' she sobbed.

A leather jacket and a white silk scarf, which Enzo only wore when he rode his motorbike. Leather gloves.

Antonia rose and placed her hand on his arm.

He stood still and looked at her hand until she removed it.

Antonia leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. She tried anger instead.

‘So who are you? Enzo Canavaro? Giulio Forlani? Bruno Forlani's brother? All of them?'

Jeans, underwear and shirts. A small laptop on his desk. Her eyes widened when he casually stuffed a couple of thick bundles of banknotes into the inside pocket of his leather jacket. There were many more neat stacks like them on the top shelf of the wardrobe. She gulped.

‘You can keep the rest, Antonia,' he said. ‘Spend it on yourself and Gianni as you see fit. He's a good boy and I've
been glad to know him. He's bright. He deserves a good education. There's enough for both of you. More than enough.'

‘Enzo … I don't understand what's going on. Do you think you could stop for one minute and …'

He straightened up and finally looked at her.

His mouth opened, and she could see that he was searching for the words, but had to give up.

She was crying openly now.

‘Is that what Gianni was? A substitute for your own boy?' she asked.

She pointed to the photograph of the woman and the boy on the wall.

‘No! … No!'

She held out her hand.

‘I'm sorry, Enzo.'

‘Giulio.'

He placed his hands on her shoulders and she sank down on the bed. He sat next to her and took her hand.

‘You've been great, Antonia. You're the best person I … the very best. Really. You're very … fine.'

With the tip of her finger Antonia stroked the gnarled, scarred bumps that made up his knuckles. She could see nothing of her hand, which had disappeared into his enormous, warm paw.

‘Yeah, right,' she muttered.

‘I mean it.'

‘What happened to your face? Where did it go?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Your brother, Giulio! When you were sixteen you were the spitting image of your brother and now you look like a train wreck.'

‘I know that you have a million questions, Antonia. Of course you do. But I can't say anything right now, do you understand?'

‘More than a million, Giulio.'

She pointed at the sea-sickness inducing scene on the wall.

‘Your ship?'

He nodded.

‘Not mine, but Fred Wilson's, the skipper of the
Roseanne
, from Gloucester in Massachusetts. Or perhaps it doesn't belong to him, but some consortium. It's complicated.'

‘Why Massachusetts?'

‘My father is from Boston.'

She hid her face as tears dripped quietly down from her fingers on to the floorboards, leaving perfectly round circles.

‘Where are you going?' she said.

‘My wife and my son have been found,' he said. ‘They went missing three years ago.'

She looked at him.

‘What do you mean, missing?'

‘The Camorra took them.'

‘The Camorra? Why? Are they alive?'

‘No.'

There was a hint of a terrible smile.

‘No,' he said again.

She pointed to the central photo on the wall. ‘Is this your wife?'

‘Yes, that's Lucia.'

‘Was she from here?'

‘Yes. She went to the convent school and later worked as a lawyer in Milan.'

‘Did you meet her here … during one of your summer holidays?'

‘Yes and no. I saw her here, but didn't give her a second glance. Later I recognized her in Milan at a concert.'

‘Who was she with?'

He blushed.

‘You ask a lot of questions, Antonia.'

‘Who was she with?'

‘Eros Ramazzotti.'

‘Why did the Camorra take them, Giulio? Why did they take your wife and son?'

‘Not now! I was an idiot. I was working for … various industries. I had started a business with a friend. We thought we could take the bread from the mouths of the Camorra and that they would just roll over. I was an idiot,
Antonia. The police said they would take care of us, that nothing would happen, that we were safe.'

He buried his face in his hands and his shoulders tensed up, but he didn't let go of her hand.