Steal You Away (24 page)

Sitting on the toilet is …

…
that little tart Patrizia!

Her hair is wet and she is wearing his blue bathrobe and painting her toenails with red varnish, but when she sees him with his penis sticking out of his fly she starts screaming and yelling as if he were trying to rape her. Mr Moroni puts his penis back in his trousers and slams the toilet door so hard that a large piece of plaster is dislodged from the wall and falls on the floor. As wild as a warthog, he brings down his fist on the mahogany sideboard like a hammer on an anvil, splitting it in two. He breaks a couple of bones in his hand. He stifles a howl of agony and goes to seek out Mimmo in his room.

Mimmo isn’t there.

He opens the door of HIS room and finds him sprawling on HIS bed, snoring away contentedly, stark naked, looking serene and satisfied, like a little angel who has just been the recipient of a blow job.

They’ve been scr … screwing on on my bed you you fucking
little bastard respect no respect fucking little whore I’ll teach you
some respect I’ll kill you I swear it respect a lesson you’ll remember
for the rest of your life I’ll teach you some manners
.

A primitive, brutal fury, hidden in the most ancient sites of his DNA, reawakens with a roar, a blind rage that demands immediate release.

I’ll kill him I swear it I’ll kill him I’ll go to jail I’ll go to jail I
don’t give a fuck I’ll stay there for the rest of my life better much
better I don’t give a damn I’m tired shit shit shit I can’t stand any
mooooooore
.

Fortunately he manages to control himself and grabs his son by the ear. Mimmo wakes up and starts wailing like a banshee. He tries to free himself from the vice-like grip that is clamped on his ear. To no avail. His father drags him out into the corridor shouting obscenities and gives him a kick with the sole of his foot and Mimmo goes careering down the stairs and succeeds, he doesn’t
know how, a miracle perhaps, in remaining on his feet all the way down but on the last step he trips, cruelly bad luck, and twists his ankle and collapses on the ground, gets up again and dragging his leg, rushes out of the house, naked and aching all over, into the countryside. Mr Moroni runs after him, goes out onto the front steps and roars. ‘Don’t you ever show your face here again. If you come back I’ll break every bone in your body. I swear I will, so help me Mary Madonna. Don’t ever show your face here again. Don’t ever show your face or …’ He goes back into the house and his hands are still itching and he hears behind him a stifled moan, a whimper. He turns.

His wife.

She is sitting there by the fire, hands over her face, crying. That stupid woman is sitting there by the fire, snivelling and sniffing. That’s all she does. Cries and sniffs.

Oh yes well done that’s the only thing you can do isn’t it cry
your fucking eyes out that’s how you’ve brought your kids up isn’t
it that’s what you are a pathetic little fool and I have to do everything
and pay because you do nothing but cry and cry … pathetic
little doped-up fool
.

‘Why? What’s he done?’ sobs Mrs Moroni, her face hidden in her hands.

‘What’s he done? You want to know what he’s done? He’s been screwing in our bedroom! In our bedroom, for God’s sake! Now I’m going upstairs and I’m going to throw that little slut out …’ He heads for the staircase but Mrs Moroni runs after him, clutches his arm.

‘Mario, wait, wai …’

‘Let go of my arm!’

And he hits her across the mouth with the back of his hand.

How can I convey to you the sensation of being on the receiving end of a backhander from Mr Moroni? Well, it’s a bit like getting a smack in the teeth from Mats Wilander’s racket.

His wife crumples like an inflatable doll that has been sliced in two and lies there.

And just at that moment who should enter the house?

Pietro.

Pietro, happy because he has just ridden Princess all round the paddock on his own and then helped Gloria to wash her down with soap and a brush. Pietro, who has run to buy the MS Lights for his brother. Pietro, who hasn’t had an ice cream but has put aside five thousand lire towards a catfish he’s seen in the petshop in Orbano.

‘The ciga …’ The sentence remains unfinished.

‘Ah, there you are at last, young man. Have we had a good time? Have we been enjoying ourselves? Been for a nice walk, have we?’ his father sneers.

Pietro takes in the scene. His father with his shirt untucked. Hair unkempt, face flushed, eyes glistening, the clown picture on the floor, the chair overturned and, behind, a kind of bundle. A bundle with his mother’s legs and his mother’s outdoor shoes.

‘Mama! Mama!’ Pietro runs towards her, but his father grabs him by the scruff of the neck, lifts him in the air and whirls him round and it seems as if he is going to hurl him against a wall and Pietro screams, kicks, wriggles like an electric toy that has short-circuited, trying to get free, but his father’s grip is firm, secure, holds him fast like a lamb that is about to be slaughtered.

Mr Moroni kicks open the front door and goes down the steps while Pietro struggles in vain to free himself, carries him into the storeroom and stands him on the floor.

In front of the washing machine.

Pietro is in floods of tears, his features distorted and his mouth open as wide as an oven door.

‘What’s that there?’ asks his father, but the boy can’t answer, he is crying too much.

‘What’s that there?’ His father seizes him by the arm and shakes him.

Pietro is red in the face. He can’t breathe, he gasps desperately for air.

‘What’s that there?’ he smacks him hard on the back of the head, then seeing how he wheezes he sits down on the stool, closes his eyes and starts to massage his temples slowly.

He’ll get over it, no one has ever died of crying
.

Again. ‘What’s this thing here?’

Pietro sobs and doesn’t answer. His father smacks him again, less hard this time.

‘Well? Are you going to answer me? What’s this thing here?’

And at last Pietro manages to blurt out, between his sobs: ‘Hhha wahh sh shing mma sh sh shine Hha wahh sshing mma …’

‘Correct. And what’s it doing here?’

‘It isn’t it isn’t my my fault. I didn’t wa wa want to go out. Mimmo Mimmo … told me … It isn’t isn’t my fault.’ Pietro bursts into tears again.

‘Now listen to me. You’re wrong. It is your fault, do you hear?’ says Mr Moroni, suddenly calm and didactic.’ It is your fault. What did I tell you to do? Stay at home. And you went out …’

‘But …’

‘No buts. Any sentence beginning with but is wrong from the outset. If you hadn’t listened to your brother and you’d stayed at home as I told you to, none of this would have happened. The repair man would have taken away the washing machine, you brother wouldn’t have done what he did, and nothing would have happened to your mother. Whose fault is it, then?’

Pietro is silent for a moment, then turns his big hazel eyes, now bloodshot and glistening, into his father’s icy gaze and sighs:

‘Mine.’

‘Say it again.’

‘Mine.’

‘Good. Now run along and see how your mama is. I’m going to the club.’

Mr Moroni tucks his shirt into his trousers, smooths down his hair, puts on his old working jacket and is on the point of leaving when he turns round. ‘Pietro, remember one thing, the first rule in life is to accept your own responsibilities. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand.’

Five hours later, at midnight, the cyclone of violence that had descended on Fig-Tree Cottage has blown over.

Everyone is asleep.

Mrs Moroni is curled up in a corner of her bed, with a swollen lip. Mr Moroni is lying on the other bed, deep in a dreamless alcoholic sleep. He is snoring like a pig with his bandaged right hand resting on the bedside table. Mimmo is asleep downstairs in the garage, hidden among the tractor tyres, in an old moth-eaten sleeping bag. Patti, a few kilometres away, is asleep with her long legs covered in sticking plaster. She scratched them in making her escape through the toilet window. She grabbed hold of the drainpipe but slipped and fell into a mass of rambling roses.

The only person who is not yet asleep, but is on the point of dropping off, is Pietro. His eyes are closed.

How he cried!

His mother had to cuddle him and rock him in her arms as she used to when he was a baby, and repeat to him, despite the blood trickling down onto her chin: ‘There, there, it’s all over, it’s all over, it’s all right now. Don’t cry now, there’s a good boy. You know what your father’s like …’

But now Pietro feels good.

As if he’s had a long walk which has drained all his strength. Limbs relaxed. Feet clasping the hot water bottle. He keeps murmuring as if it were a lullaby, ‘It wasn’t my fault it wasn’t my fault it wasn’t …’

The Moroni family was rather like those South Sea islanders who live in a state of perpetual apprehension, ready to abandon the village as soon as they recognise in the sky the premonitory signs of a hurricane. Then they run away to shelter in caves and let the forces of nature unleash themselves. They know the storm will be violent but brief. When it’s over, they return to their huts and patiently, philosophically, put back together again the few planks of wood that serve to cover their heads.

At six o’clock in the morning a scarecrow disguised as Graziano Biglia was sitting in a corner of the Station Bar. Slumped forward, forehead propped on his fist. In front of him, a cold cappuccino which he had no intention of drinking.

Luckily there was no one around to bug him.

He needed to think. Though any thought he formulated was a nail driven into his head.

First of all he had a serious problem to solve. How was he going to square things with the villagers and his friends?

Everyone, for twenty kilometres around, knew he was getting married.

What a fool I was to talk about it. Why did I tell everyone?

The question was a rhetorical one and didn’t expect an answer. Rather like a beaver asking itself, ‘Why the hell do I keep building dams?’ If it could, the rodent would probably reply: ‘I don’t know, it just comes naturally. It’s in my blood.’

When they discovered that he wasn’t getting married after all, they’d go on taking the piss out of him until 2020.

And imagine what they’ll say if they find out she’s got something
going with the Poof
…

Gastritis churned his stomach.

He’d even told them the Slut’s name. And they’d have seen her on TV. Or in those trashy magazines they read.

Lovers in the Limelight: Mantovani with his new squeeze Erica
Trettel … I can see it now
.

And what about Saturnia, too?

Of all the idiotic ideas, he had chosen the most idiotic of all. He’d always loathed bathing in the thermal baths at Saturnia ever since he was a child. The stench of the sulphurous water disgusted him. A smell of rotten eggs that impregnates your hair, your clothes, the seats of your car and never goes away. Not to mention the Arctic cold that hits you when you emerge from that lukewarm swill. And all this to show those meatheads the Slut’s body.

Only he could have dreamed up such a stupid idea.

If he thought about it he felt like vomiting. Though the only thing he had left to throw up by now was his soul.

And what about his mother and her vow?

‘Oh, my poor stomach … Oh God, it hurts,’ moaned Graziano.

Such an utterly bird-brained mother would be hard to find.
How could anyone make such a stupid vow … ?
There was nothing for it but to tell her the truth. She must have been wondering after last night’s phone call. And then he would have to go to his friends and say: ‘Sorry about Saturnia, boys, it’s all off. You see, I’m not getting married after all.’

Too difficult. Impossible, in fact. It would have been like kicking your own ego to pieces. And Graziano wasn’t born to suffer. The only thing to do was get in his car and get the hell out of there.

No!

That was no good either. It wasn’t his style. Graziano Biglia didn’t run away.

He must go to Saturnia anyway.

With another woman
.

Right. He must find another woman. A real sex-bomb. The Marina Delia type. But who?

He could call the Venetian, Petra Biagioni. She was really tasty. But he hadn’t been in touch with her for a long time and their last encounter hadn’t been exactly amicable. He could phone her and say: ‘Hey, how about driving four hundred kilometres down here for a bathe at Saturnia?’ No.

He must find something around there. Something new. Something that would set tongues wagging and banish the wedding from his friends’ minds.

But who?

The problem was that Graziano Biglia had sucked, like a greedy mosquito, everything this barren land had to offer. All the females who were worth the trouble (and, to be honest, a good many who weren’t) had already passed through his hands. He was famous for it. There was a saying among the village girls that if you hadn’t had your baptism with Biglia you were a skank and would never
get a man. Some had even offered themselves to him just to keep up with their friends.

And Graziano had been generous to them all.

But those glory days had gone. Now he had returned to the quiet of the village to rest, like a Roman centurion tired of campaigning in foreign fields, and he didn’t know any new girls.

Ivana Zampetti?

No … That monster wouldn’t fit into the pools at Saturnia. And what kind of novelty would she be, anyway? All the best-looking women were married by now and while one or two might still be prepared to spend an afternoon with him in a motel in Civitavecchia, none of them would be prepared to go to the baths.

Better just to forget about it.

It was sad, the only solution, cowardly but necessary, was to do a runner. He would go home and tell his mother to break off her culinary Le Mans and revoke her vow, then he would make her swear on the Madonna of Civitavecchia not to divulge the truth and would confess to her: ‘Mama, the wedding’s off. Erica has dump …’ Well, he would tell her and ask her to cover for him with a little white lie, such as: ‘Graziano had to leave unexpectedly for a tour in Latin America.’ Or better: ‘Paco de Lucia called this morning. He begged him to go to Spain to help him finish his new album.’ Something along those lines, anyway. And lastly he would ask her for a loan so that he could buy a ticket to Jamaica.