The Crossroads (5 page)

Danilo watched the little girl happily eating a huge croissant. Her mouth all smeared with icing sugar.

He took the glass off the counter and went back to his table.

He knocked back the grappa. The alcohol warmed his oesophagus and his head became lighter.

That's better. Much better.

Until five years before the most Danilo Aprea had been able to drink was a finger of moscato. ‘Alcohol and I don't get on,' he would say to anyone who offered him a drink.

This remained the case until 9th July 2001, when alcohol and Danilo Aprea decided that the time had come to bury their differences and become friends.

Until 9th July 2001 Danilo Aprea had been a different person with a different life. He had worked as a night-watchman for a freight firm, had had a wife whom he loved and Laura, a three-year-old daughter.

On 9th July 2001 Laura Aprea had choked to death, with the cap from a bottle of shampoo stuck in her windpipe.

A year later Teresa had left him.

Cristiano arrived at the bus stop, but the bus had just gone. And with it his chances of making the first lesson.

If only he had been a year older … If he'd had a motorbike he could have got to school in ten minutes. And he would have had the fun of riding across the fields and rough tracks. As soon as he finished school next year he was going to get a job – he should be able to earn enough to buy one in six months.

The next bus wasn't due for half an hour.

What do I do now?
he asked himself, kicking at a little mound of snow that was melting away on the pavement.

If he could find someone to give him a lift maybe he could slip into class without being noticed.

But who's going to stop here?

Along that stretch of the highway everyone drove flat out.

He set off, with his woolly hat pulled down over his head, his headphones in his ears and his hands in the pockets of his jacket. The air was saturated with water; the drops were so small you could hardly tell it was raining.

With Metallica shrieking in his eardrums he looked around and lit a cigarette.

He wasn't really all that keen on smoking, though he enjoyed the sensation when his head started spinning. But if his father caught him with a cigarette in his mouth he'd kill him.

‘One of us committing suicide by nicotine is quite enough,' he always said.

In front of him was a strip of asphalt which ran as straight as a ruler and faded into a leaden haze. To the right lay the fields of sodden earth, to the left the row of industrial buildings. When he came to the Castardin furniture factory with its red banners proclaiming special discounts he stopped. The gate was closed and the dog lay there on the ground, tangled up in his chain. Head framed by a dark pool. Jaws open. Eyes rolled back. Gums flecked with foam. Stiff as a piece of frozen cod. One paw sticking out, as straight and stiff as a walking stick.

Cristiano inhaled a mouthful of smoke as he looked at the corpse.

He didn't feel sorry for him.

He had died like a fool. And for what? To defend some arseholes who kept him chained up day and night and beat him with sticks to make him even more ferocious than he was by nature.

He threw the stub on the ground and walked on, as cars and lorries drove past him, churning up a spray of filthy water.

He remembered Peppina, a little mongrel with a long body and legs as short as jam jars.

His mother had got her from the dogs' home in the days before she left home. How often Cristiano had said to himself that a woman could ditch her son and husband if she liked, but not her dog. You had to be a real cow to do a thing like that.

Rino didn't want Peppina in the house because he said she was a stupid little beast and if he was in a particularly bad mood he would threaten to kill her. The real reason he didn't want her
around, in Cristiano's opinion, was that she reminded him of mama, but when it came to it he never gave her away.

Cristiano was different, he liked Peppina. She always made a fuss of you, and if you picked her up she would nibble your earlobes. She lived for tennis balls. She woke up thinking of them and went to bed thinking of them.

You would throw a ball for her and she would keep going to fetch it and when you got fed up she would sit down beside you with the ball between her little paws and keep nudging at you with her nose till you threw it for her again.

One day – it must have been in the summer because it was very warm – Cristiano had arrived home from school, and the school bus (which brought primary school children right to their doors) had left him opposite the house, on the other side of the highway.

He had a treat in store for Peppina: he had gone all the way to the sports club and behind the fences of the tennis courts, in a drainage ditch choked with weeds and nettles, he had collected a lot of balls. He was on the point of crossing the road when Peppina emerged from behind the house, going like the clappers. She looked funny when she ran, like a furry train. How on earth had she heard him arrive? The wooden gate was usually closed, but that day it had only been pushed to.

Cristiano realised that the silly little mutt intended to cross the road to join him.

He looked right and left and saw a constant stream of lorries. In a split second he realised that if he shouted to her to stay where she was she would think he was urging her on and dash across the road.

He didn't know what to do. He wanted to cross the road and stop her, but there was too much traffic.

Peppina had pushed her nose between the gate and the gatepost and was trying to open it.

He had to stop her. But how?

Of course, he must throw her a ball. A long throw. Towards the back of the house. But not too high, or she wouldn't see the ball and it would all be in vain.

He took a tennis ball out of his trouser pocket, held it up so that she could see it, took aim and threw it, but even as it left his hand
he realised he had misjudged it. For a moment he clutched at the air as if trying to pull the ball back, but it flew straight and fast and too low and hit the front of an approaching articulated lorry. The yellow sphere shot up into the air and fell back into the middle of the road, where it started bouncing wildly up and down. Peppina, who had managed to wriggle her way out, saw the ball in front of her and ran to get it. By some miracle she avoided the first lorry, but not the second; it ran over her, first with its front wheels, then with those of the trailer.

It was all over in a few seconds and Peppina was nothing but a heap of flesh and fur squashed on the asphalt.

Cristiano, rooted to the spot on the other side of the road, wanted to do something, wanted to pick her up off the ground, but there was a river of metal flowing in front of him.

For the rest of the day he stood at the window crying and watching Peppina's corpse being turned into a little mat. He and his father had to wait till evening, when the traffic had slowed down, to remove her remains from the road. There was hardly anything left of her – just a furry brown scarf, which his father had chucked in the rubbish bin, telling Cristiano to stop blubbing, because a dog that only lived for a ball didn't deserve to live.

So, Cristiano said to himself, Castardin's beast was the second dog he had killed in his life.

After turning the key in each of the three locks that sealed the door of his flat, Quattro Formaggi went up the steps that led to Corso Vittorio. It was cold, and his breath condensed in the air into white vapour. A solid grey blanket of clouds covered the sky, and it was drizzling.

Quattro Formaggi waved to Franco, a shop assistant in the Mondadori Mediastore, which occupied all the upper floors of the house.

The building stood in a central position, among the clothes shops
and shoe shops, close to Piazza Bologna and the church of San Biagio.

The previous owner, the old notary Bocchiola, had died leaving the whole building to his children, except for a flat in the basement behind the lifts, which he had bequeathed to Corrado Rumitz, aka Quattro Formaggi, his trusted caretaker and factotum for over ten years.

His heirs, furious at his decision, had done everything they could to get rid of the tramp, offering him money and alternative accommodation and mobilising lawyers and psychiatrists, but to no avail. Quattro Formaggi wouldn't budge.

In the end they had managed to sell the rest of the building at a knock-down price to Mondadori, who had divided the three floors into the holy trinity: music, books and videos. The owners of the firm had, in their turn, made several attempts to buy the basement, wanting to turn it into a storehouse. But they had no luck either.

Quattro Formaggi put on his pea-green full-face crash helmet, unlocked the chain that tied up his old green Boxer and with one kick at the pedal started it first time.

The engine fired and the exhaust pipe belched out a cloud of white smoke, which snaked its way down the street and gathered under the red-and-black-striped awning of the Café Rouge et Noir.

Giuliana Citran and Colonel Ettore Manzini, who were sitting at one of its tables, started coughing, choked by the fetid smoke of the three-per-cent mixture. The old lady spat out a piece of croissant filled with white chocolate, which was instantly hoovered up by Ottavio, the colonel's wire-haired dachshund.

‘Don't breathe in, whatever you do, Giuliana, don't breathe in! You've only just recovered from pneumonia!' said the colonel, pressing his napkin over his mouth.

‘Oh my goodness, it's all gone down my throat! Help!' croaked Giuliana, sticking out her tongue.

It took them a few minutes to recover their composure, and by the time they had Quattro Formaggi had ridden off on his scooter, despite the fact that the centre of the village was strictly out of bounds, day and night, to any form of transport equipped with wheels, skates, air cushions or caterpillar tracks.

For a while the old lady and the colonel sat in silence, too indignant for words.

Finally, after taking a sip from her cappuccino, Giuliana managed to say: ‘It's scandalous. Did you see what he did?'

The colonel shook his head. ‘Quite disgraceful, Giuliana. I've heard the wretched man takes rubbish into his house.'

‘Really, Ettore, do you mind? I'm eating …'

Manzini sank his teeth into a doughnut and said: ‘I'm sorry, my dear, but these things make my blood boil. So much for all the fine talk about cleaning up the centre of Varrano. People like that need to be helped, locked away in some institution …'

Giuliana wiped the crumbs away from her mouth and asked: ‘So you know who he is, do you?'

The colonel nodded: ‘I most certainly do.'

It was rumoured in the village that Corrado Rumitz was Bocchiola's illegitimate son – that the late lamented notary had dumped him in an orphanage when he was a baby, but then, twenty years later, had been overcome with remorse and had given him a job and left him that flat which was worth a fortune.

As Cristiano Zena walked along the highway, resigned to going on foot, he heard the high-pitched drone of a scooter's exhaust pipe growing louder and louder behind him.

Cristiano looked round and his heart missed a beat.

A beige Scarabeo 50 with a big yellow smiley on the front was coming towards him.

It was Fabiana Ponticelli's scooter.

What am I going to do?

He looked around in a panic for some place to hide. But where? There was no cover anywhere.

He hated the idea of Fabiana Ponticelli seeing him walking along the side of the highway like a complete twat, three kilometres away from school.

So, on an impulse, he turned away towards the fields, hoping he
wouldn't be recognised. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the scooter flash past. On the back seat behind Fabiana Ponticelli was Esmeralda Guerra. Both in phosphorescent windproof jackets. One pink, the other pistachio. Both in miniskirts. Both in black tights with embroidered seams, and Texan boots. Both wearing a helmet with a fluffy tail hanging down behind.

They were the same age as Cristiano (well, actually Fabiana was a year older – she'd been kept down for failing her exams – which is why she could ride a scooter). They all went to the same school, but were in different sections. The girls in H, he in B.

Cristiano didn't know them well.

They didn't recognise me.

He was wrong. After travelling another fifty metres the scooter slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road.

Don't worry; they've probably stopped because one of their
mobiles was ringing.

The girls' long legs stuck out on each side of the scooter like the black legs of a tarantula. The exhaust pipe belched out white smoke.

He walked on, ignoring them and holding his breath, but finally, when he had almost passed them, he couldn't help turning to look at them.

Fabiana raised the visor of her helmet. ‘Hey, you! Stop! Where are you going in this rain?'

Cristiano struggled to find enough air in his lungs to give a reply. ‘To school …'

On the rare occasions when he talked to the two of them, something happened which always left him unhappy and frustrated.

He would become so shy that he couldn't string two words together, his body temperature would soar and his ears would burn.

If only he had been a little less awkward perhaps he could have made them laugh, become their friend, got them to like him. But this was impossible because there was a problem.

They were too beautiful.

They paralysed him. When he met those two his brain would seize up. He would become a complete moron, only able to stutter, nod and shake his head.

They had a way of behaving that made you feel like a worm.
They knew the whole school fancied them and they delighted in driving you crazy. They would start toying with you and then when they tired of it – and they tired very quickly – you no longer existed and weren't worth a gob of spit. And they were weird. They kept to themselves. They touched each other. They kissed. The other kids whispered that they were lesbians. It was as if they weren't of this world and had only come down to it for a moment to make you understand that you would never be able to have them.