Steal You Away (6 page)

Ivana had moved to Orbano from Fiano Romano in the mid-Seventies and got a job there as a manicurist in a beauty parlour. Within a year she had succeeded in marrying the old barber who owned it and had taken over the running of the place. She had turned it into a hairdressing salon, renewing the furniture, stripping off that ugly wallpaper and replacing it with mirrors and marble and adding washbasins and perming hoods. Two years later, her husband had died in the middle of Orbano high street, struck down by a heart attack. Ivana had sold the houses he had left her in San Folco and opened two more hairdressing salons in the area, one in Casale del Bra and the other in Borgo Carini. One summer in the late Eighties she had gone to visit some distant relatives who had emigrated to Orlando and there she had seen the American fitness centres. Temples of health and beauty. Superbly equipped clinics that treated the whole body, from the tip of your toes to the topmost hair of your head. Mud baths. Solar beds. Massage. Hydrotherapy. Lymphatic drainage. Peeling. Gymnastics. Stretching and weights.

She had returned with her head full of grand ideas which she immediately put into effect. She had sold off the three hairdressing salons and bought a warehouse on the Aurelia that sold agricultural machinery and turned it into a multi-specialised centre for the care and health of the body. Now she had a staff of ten, including instructors, aestheticians and paramedics. She had become immensely rich and much sought after by local bachelors. But she said she was faithful to the memory of the old barber.

When Graziano entered, Ivana welcomed him joyfully, hugged him to her large perfumed bosom and told him he looked like a corpse. She would put him to rights. She drew up a programme for him. First a course of massage, bath in toning seaweed, total sunbed, hair-dying, manicure and pedicure, and, to round it all off, what she called her recreative-revitalising therapy.

Whenever Graziano returned to Ischiano, he always liked to undergo Ivana’s therapy.

A series of massages of her own devising, which she performed only after hours and on people she deemed worthy of the privilege. Massages which tended to revitalise and reawaken very specific organs of the body and which left you feeling, for a couple of days afterwards, like Lazarus when he rose from the grave.

On this occasion, however, Graziano declined the offer. ‘I’m sorry, Ivana, but I’m about to get married. You know how it is.’

Ivana gave him a hug and wished him a happy life and lots of children.

Three hours later, he emerged from the centre and drove to the Scottish House in Orbano to buy a few items of clothing that would make him feel more in harmony with the country life on which he was preparing to embark.

He spent nine hundred and thirty thousand lire.

And here he was at last, our hero, outside the doors of the Station Bar.

He was ready.

His hair, glossy, frizzy and savannah-coloured, smelled of conditioner. His shaven jaw smelled of Egoiste. His eyes were dark and bright. His skin had regained its melanine and at last had that colour, halfway between hazel and bronze, which drove the Scandinavian girls wild.

He looked like a Devonshire gentleman fresh from a holiday in the Maldives. Green flannel shirt. Brown wide-cord trousers. Scottish short-sleeved pullover with the tartan of the Dundee clan
(the shop assistant had told him that). A tweed jacket with elbow-patches. And chunky Timberland shoes.

Graziano pushed the door open and took two slow, measured, John Wayne-type steps towards the bar.

Barbara, the twenty-year-old bartender, nearly fainted when she saw him appear. Just like that, on an ordinary day. With no trumpets or fanfares to announce him. No heralds to warn of his impending arrival.

Biglia!

He was back.

The ladykiller was back.

The sex symbol of Ischiano was here. Here to rekindle never-extinguished erotic obsessions, to reignite jealousies, to set tongues wagging.

After his performances in Riccione, Goa, Port France, Battipaglia and Ibiza, he was here again.

The man who had been invited on to the
Maurizio Costanzo
Show
to talk about his experiences as a Latin lover. The man who had won the Casanova Cup. The man who had played on
Planet
Bar
with the Rodriguez brothers. The man who had bedded the actress Marina Delia (the page torn out of
Novella 2000
with photographs of Graziano on Riccione beach massaging Marina Delia’s back and kissing her neck had hung beside the pinball machine for six months, and still reigned supreme in Roscio’s workshop among the nude-model calendars). The man who had beaten the great Peppone pulling record (three hundred scores in one summer, the papers said). He was here again.

More flourishing and in better shape than ever.

His contemporaries, who had become husbands and fathers, worn out by a dreary, humdrum life, resembled mangy, greying bulldogs, whereas Graziano …

(
What on earth can his secret be?
)

… grew more handsome and attractive by the year. How well that hint of a pot belly suited him. And those crow’s feet round his eyes, those wrinkles at the sides of his mouth, that slightly receding hairline, gave him a certain je ne sais quoi …

‘Graziano! When did you get b …’ said bartender Barbara, going as red as a pepper.

Graziano put his finger to his lips, picked up a cup, banged it on the counter and shouted: ‘What’s wrong with this place? Aren’t you going to welcome back an old villager? Barbara! Drinks all round.’

The old men playing cards, the little boys at the videogames, the hunters and the carabinieri, all turned round together.

His friends were there too. His bosom pals. His old fellow-roisterers. Roscio, the Franceschini brothers and Ottavio Battilocchi were sitting at a table doing the football pools and reading the
Corriere dello Sport
, and when they saw him they jumped to their feet, hugged him, kissed him, ruffled his hair and gave him a chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. And other more colourful and ribald songs which are best passed over in silence.

That is how people celebrate, in those parts, the return of the prodigal son.

And here he was, half an hour later, in the restaurant area of the Station Bar.

The restaurant area was a square room at the back of the bar. With a low ceiling. A long neon light. A few tables. A window overlooking the railway track. On the walls, lithographs of old steam trains.

He was sitting at a table with Roscio, the two Franceschini brothers and young Bruno Miele, who had come along specially. The only one missing was Battilocchi, who had had to take his daughter to the dentist’s in Civitavecchia.

In front of them were five big steaming dishes of tagliatelle in hare sauce. A jug of red wine. And a plate of cold meat and olives.

‘This is what I call living, boys. You’ve no idea how much I’ve missed this stuff,’ said Graziano, pointing at the pasta with his fork.

‘Well, what’s it to be this time? The usual lightning visit? When are you off again?’ asked Roscio, filling his glass.

Since childhood, Roscio had been Graziano’s best friend. Back
then he had been a skinny little boy with a helmet of carrot-coloured hair, slow of tongue but quick as a ferret with his hands. His father had a junk yard on the Aurelia and sold stolen spares. Roscio lived among those mountains of metal, dismantling and reassembling engines. At thirteen he was riding round in the saddle of a Guzzi one thousand and at sixteen he was racing on the viaduct at the Pratoni. At seventeen, he had had a horrendous accident one night, his motorbike had stalled and bucked at a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour and he had been launched off the viaduct like a missile. Without a helmet. They’d found him next day, five metres below the road, in a drainage outflow from the sewers, more dead than alive and looking like an ant that’s had a dictionary dropped on it. He had been in traction for months with twenty bones either broken or dislocated and more than four hundred stitches on various parts of his anatomy. Six months in a wheelchair and six more on crutches. At twenty he walked with a pronounced limp and could no longer bend one arm properly. At twenty-one he had got a Pitigliano girl pregnant and married her. Now he had three children and after his father’s death he had taken over the business and set up a workshop as well. And probably, like his father, he did some shady deals. Graziano hadn’t found him so easy to get on with since the accident. His character had changed, he’d become edgy and was given to sudden fits of anger, he drank, and the word in the village was that he beat his wife.

‘Who are you going with now, you old letch? Still hanging around with that foxy actress … ?’ Bruno Miele was talking with his mouth full. ‘What’s her name? Marina Delia? Hasn’t she just made a new film?’

Bruno Miele had grown up during Graziano’s two years away and was now in the police force. Who would have thought it? A notorious tearaway like Miele settling down and becoming a guardian of the law? Life moved on in Ischiano Scalo, slowly but surely, even without Graziano.

Miele had idolised him ever since he’d learned of his affair with a famous actress.

But that story was an embarrassment to poor Graziano. The
photographs in
Novella 2000
had been very useful to him, they had turned him into a local legend, but at the same time they made him feel rather guilty. In the first place, he had never actually gone out with Delia. She had been sunbathing at the Aurora bathing establishment at Riccione and when she had seen a paparazzo from
Novella 2000
prowling around on the beach searching for VIPs, she had gone frantic. She had immediately whipped off her bra and started shouting. She was alone. The minor French actor she was dating at the time was confined to their hotel with a temperature of thirty-nine as a result of food poisoning. Only a fool of a young Frenchman would pick the mussels off the mooring lines of Riccione harbour and eat them raw, saying that his father was a Breton fisherman. It served him right. But now Marina was in a fix. She had to find someone to be her beau, and quickly. She had run along the seashore looking for a good-looking male to pose with. Rapidly scanning all the beefcakes, hunks and lifeguards on the beach she had finally settled on Graziano. She had asked him if he would mind rubbing cream on her breasts and kissing her when that little man over there, the one with the camera, passed in front of them.

That was the story behind the famous photographs.

And it would probably have ended there if Marina Delia hadn’t become, after a film she had made with a Tuscan comic, one of the most popular film stars in Italy and hadn’t decided never again to reveal a single speck of skin even for a million dollars. Those were the only available photographs of Delia’s breasts. Graziano had dined off the tale for a couple of years at least, describing how he had pleasured her fore and aft, in the lift and in the Jacuzzi, come rain, come shine. But now enough was enough. Five years had passed. And yet every time he returned to Ischiano they all started going on about Marina Delia and what a slag she was.

What a bore!

‘I read somewhere that she was going out with some jerk of a footballer,’ went on Miele, his head buried in the fettuccine.

‘She ditched you for a Sampdoria midfielder. Sampdoria of all
teams! Can you believe it?’ guffawed Giovanni, the elder of the two Franceschini brothers.

‘She might at least have chosen a Lazio player,’ echoed Elio, the younger.

The Franceschini brothers owned a bass farm in Orbano lagoon. The Franceschinis’ bass were instantly recognisable because they were all twenty centimetres long, weighed six hundred grams, had opaque eyes and tasted like farmed trout.

The two of them were inseparable, they lived in a mosquito-infested farmhouse near the tanks with their wives and children and nobody could ever remember which wife and which children were whose. They made enough to live on from the bass, but they certainly can’t have got rich on it since they were reduced to squabbling over the van whenever they wanted to go out for a beer in the evening.

Graziano decided that the time had come to liquidate Delia.

He wasn’t sure how much to tell his friends about his future plans. Better not mention the jeans shop. People are always out to steal your ideas. News travels fast in a village, and some son-of-a-bitch might beat him to it. First he must get everything organised and call in the Milanese architect, only then would he be able to talk about it in public. But the other news, the best part, why shouldn’t he tell them about that? Weren’t they his friends? ‘Listen, boys, I’ve got something to tell y …’

‘Let’s hear it. Who’re you screwing now? Are you going to tell us or do we have to read about it in the papers?’ Roscio interrupted him, filling his glass to the brim with that deceptively strong local wine that slipped down as easily as fizzy pop but later grabbed your head and squeezed it like a lemon.

‘I bet he’s been fucking Simona Raggi. Or, let’s see, who else could it have been?’ said Franceschini junior.

‘No, I reckon Andrea Mantovani’s more likely. Poofs are the in thing at the moment,’ concluded his elder brother, waving his hand.

And everyone roared with laughter.

‘Could you all be quiet for a moment?’ Graziano, who was getting irritated, hammered his fork on the table. ‘Stop talking crap.
Listen to me. The time of starlets and records is over. It’s all in the past.’

Raspberries. Guffaws. Nudges in ribs.

‘I’m forty-four now, I’m not a kid any more. Okay, I’ve had some good times, I’ve travelled the world, I’ve slept with so many women I can’t even remember the faces of most of them.’

‘I bet you can remember their arses, though,’ said Miele, delighted with this brilliant witticism he had thought up.

More raspberries. More guffaws. More nudges.

Graziano was beginning to get really angry. You couldn’t have a serious conversation with these idiots. Right. He was going to have to tell them straight out. Without beating about the bush. ‘Boys, I’m getting married.’