As God Commands (2 page)

Cristiano was a slim boy, tall for his thirteen years, with slender
wrists and ankles, long bony hands and a size ten and one half foot.
On his head grew a tousled mop of fair hair, which couldn't conceal his protruding ears, and which continued down onto his cheeks
in the form of two bushy sideburns. He had two big blue eyes separated by a small snub nose, and a mouth too wide for his thin face.

The snow was falling more thickly. The air was still. And the
temperature several degrees below freezing.

Cristiano crammed a black woolly hat on his head, puffed out a
cloud of vapor and shone the flashlight around the yard.

A layer of snow covered the gravel, the rusty old rocking chair,
the garbage cans, a pile of bricks and the van. The highway, which
ran right past the front of the house, was a long, immaculate strip
of white. The dog continued to bark in the distance.

He shut the front door and tucked his pajamas more tightly into
his rubber boots.

"Go on. It's a piece of cake. All you have to do is shoot him
in the head-make sure you hit the head, or he'll start whining and you'll have to shoot him again-then come home. You'll be
back in bed in ten minutes. Go, soldier." The little speech his
father had delivered as he yanked him out of bed still echoed
in his brain.

He looked up. The dark shape of his father stood behind the
window, waving at him to get a move on. He stuck the pistol into
his underpants. The cold steel shrivelled his scrotum.

He waved to his father and stumbled unsteadily around to the
back of the house, as his heart began to beat faster.

Rino Zena watched from the window as his son went out into the
snow.

He had finished all the beer and grappa. And that's bad enough
in itself, but if, on top of that, you have a piercing whistle boring
into your eardrums, it becomes a real problem.

The whistle had begun when Rino had fired at the bathroom
door, and although a week had passed since then, it wasn't decreasing.

Maybe I've burst an eardrum. I should see a doctor, he said to
himself, as he lit a cigarette.

But Rino Zena had sworn that the only way he would ever enter
an ambulance was feet first.

He wasn't going to get caught in the trap.

The bastards start by telling you that you need some tests done,
that way you enter the tunnel and you're a goner. If the illness
doesn't do you in, the medical bills will.

Rino Zena had spent the evening slumped on a folding chair in
front of the television, drunk out of his mind. With two slits instead
of eyes, his jaw sagging and a beer can in his hand, he had tried to
follow some crappy show that kept blurring over in front of him.

As far as he could make out it was about two husbands who had
agreed to swap wives for a week, God only knew why...

They had no respect for anything these days on the fucking TV.
Just to be original they had chosen a piss-poor family from Cosenza
and a filthy rich one from Rome.

The poor husband was a repairman. The rich one, who anyone
could see was a complete asshole, worked in advertising. And of
course the repairman's wife was as ugly as sin and the other woman
was a curvy blonde with long shapely legs who taught people how
to breathe in a gym.

In the end, however, the story had caught Rino's attention and
he had finished a whole bottle of grappa watching it.

At the advertising agent's home the hag from Cosenza made herself unpopular by going around with a bottle of Windex, and you
couldn't sit down without her scolding you for spoiling the cushions. But before the first day was out they were ordering her about
like a chambermaid and she was as happy as a clam.

Rino was more interested in the situation in Cosenza. The repair
man treated the sex-bomb as if she was Lady Diana. Rino had been
hoping that, in a surge of lust, he would grab the blonde-who for
all her airs and graces was clearly begging for it-and fuck her.

"Come around here, you slag! I'll show you the way we do it in
the Zena household!" he had bellowed, hurling a beer can at the TV.

He knew it was all a sham, that those shows were about as genuine as the African handbags the niggers sold outside the shopping
malls.

Then he had dozed off. He had woken up again some time later
feeling as if he had a dead toad in his mouth and with a vice crushing
his temples.

He had wandered around the house searching for something alcoholic to alleviate the pain.

Eventually, at the back of one of the kitchen units, he had found
a dust-covered bottle of Poire William. God knows how long it had
been there. The grappa was finished, but the pear still seemed pretty
well steeped in alcohol. He had smashed the bottle on the sink and,
bending over the table, sucked the pear. It had been then that he
had noticed the dog. It barked on and on. After a while he had
figured out that it was the mongrel in Castardin's furniture factory.
It would lie in its kennel all day as quiet as a mouse, then when
night fell it would start barking and never let up till dawn.

Old Castardin probably didn't even know about it. At closing
time he would come out, drive to the club in his great hearse of a
BMW and fritter his money away on poker. In the village he was known as a great gambler, one of the old-fashioned kind who
showed dignity in defeat.

In other words, he gritted his teeth and kept his mouth shut.

So he showed all his great dignity in losing the money he stole
with his trashy furniture, and his bloody dog barked all night.

And if anyone had pointed this out to him, he would have replied,
with his old-fashioned dignity, that there was nothing but factories
in the area. Who could possibly object to a dog that was only doing
its duty? Rino was sure it had never crossed that old-fashioned man's
mind that only half a mile away there was a house in which a young
boy slept.

A boy who had to go to school.

Okay then, Rino Zena had said to himself, taking the pistol out
of the drawer, tomorrow you'll have a chance to show the world
just how dignified you can be, when you find your dog stone-dead.

Cristiano decided to approach the furniture factory via the fields.
Even though the highway was covered with snow, there was still a
chance that someone would come along it.

The light from the lamppost didn't reach the backyard, and the
darkness was total. He shone his flashlight on the twisted hood of
a Renault 5, a cement mixer, the tattered remains of an inflatable
swimming pool, a plastic chair, the skeleton of a dead apple tree
and a six foot high fence.

Cristiano had left the house in a hurry, without having a pee. He
considered doing it there, but decided not to, it was too cold and
he wanted to get this thing over with.

He put the chair against the wire netting of the fence, stood on
the chair, put the flashlight between his teeth, gripped the mesh with
his fingers and pulled himself up. He swung one leg over to the
other side, but the seat of his pants got caught on a piece of wire.
He tried to break free, but couldn't, and in the end he threw the
flashlight down on the ground and jumped. He heard a ripping
sound and felt a pain in his leg.

He found himself lying on his back among the wet weeds, with
snow melting on his face. He got to his feet and slipped his hand
through the tear that ran halfway down his pajamas. A long scratch,
not deep enough to bleed, scored the inside of his thigh. The pistol
was still in his underpants.

He picked up the flashlight and began to work his way around
the fences of the factories, the mud sucking down his feet and brambles blocking his path.

He was on the edge of a plowed field, which in the daytime
stretched as far as the horizon. In the distance, if there was no fogbut there always was fog in winter-you could see the gray foliage
of the woods that lined the banks of the river.

If it hadn't been for the barking of the dog and his own heavy
breathing the silence would have been complete.

Far away, across the river, he could see the lights of the factories
hanging in the air and the yellowish glow of the power station.

His fingers, squeezed in the vice of cold, were beginning to feel
numb, and the chill was rising up through his feet and biting his calves.

What a fool.

In his haste to go out, furious with his father, he hadn't put on
his socks. The snowflakes were falling on his neck and his jacket
was beginning to get wet along the shoulders.

The black silhouettes of the industrial buildings followed one after
the other. He passed a bathroom furniture outlet. Toilets. Tiles.
Basins. Neatly stacked all around the building. Then a salesroom
that sold tractors and farming machinery and the rear end of a nightclub, which had had to shut down because it had gone bankrupt.

It's no good, I'm going to wet my pants.

He switched off the flashlight, put the pistol in his jacket pocket,
lowered his trousers and pulled out his pecker.

Fear and the cold had shrunk it. It looked like a little salami. The
spurt of urine melted the snow and a cloud of acrid steam rose from
the ground.

As he was shaking it, he noticed that the dog's bark was louder.

The next building was Castardin's furniture factory.

It seemed as if the brute ran on batteries: it didn't even pause for
breath. Every now and then, though, it stopped barking and howled
like a fucking coyote.

He switched on the flashlight and started walking again, more
quickly. He was taking too long. Old baldy would already be fuming.
He could just see him pacing around the house like a lion.

Cristiano Zena was wrong. At that moment his father was in the
bathroom. Standing in front of the toilet, one hand against the wall,
he was looking at his reflection in the black water at the bottom
of the bowl.

His face was swelling up. Where had his cheekbones gone? His
gaunt jaw? He looked like a Chinaman. He was thirty-seven years
old and he looked fifty. He had put on several pounds in the last
few months. He hadn't dared to get on a scale, but he knew it. His
stomach had swollen up too. He kept lifting weights and doing
push-ups and struggling with sit-ups on the bench, but that bulge
below his pectorals just wouldn't go down.

He couldn't decide whether to piss or to throw up.

His stomach contained a dozen beers, half a liter of grappa and
a Poire William.

He hated being sick. But if he got it all out of his system he would
certainly feel better.

Meanwhile the dog kept barking.

What the fuck is Cristiano doing? What if he doesn't shoot it?

One part of his brain was telling him yes, the boy did have the
balls to shoot a dog. But another part wasn't so sure: Cristiano was
too childish, he only did things out of fear of his father. And if your
only motivation is fear, not anger, you'll never be able to pull a trigger.

A sour yellow stream gushed out of his mouth without warning.
Rino only partly managed to get it into the toilet; the rest spattered
over the tiles.

He sat down on the bidet, exhausted, with the reek of vomit
around him.

As he sat there with the toilet spinning round and round like the
drum of a washing machine, he remembered how in his childhood
Castardin's furniture factory and all the other buildings hadn't been there. Back then the highway had been a rough, narrow road with
poplars and weeds along the sides, not much wider than a country
track. All around, there had been nothing but cultivated fields.

Not far from where their house now stood had been the Trattoria
Arcobaleno, a little restaurant that specialized in polenta, roasted
goat and freshwater fish.

And on the site now occupied by Castardin's furniture factory
there had been an old farmhouse, one of those square, barrack-like
buildings, with a tiled roof, a large shed and a farmyard full of geese
and chickens. It had been the home of Roberto Colombo and his
family.

On a large tree by the roadside Roberto had put up a notice:

MOTOR WORKSHOP
TRUCKS, TRACTORS AND CARS REPAIRED
ITALIAN AND FOREIGN MAKES

And from a branch of the same tree there had hung a swing on
which Rino used to go and play with Colombo's daughter.

From his parents" house, down by the river, it took half an hour
to get there on foot. But half an hour's walk was nothing in those
days.

What was her name? Alberta? Antonia?

Someone had told him she had got married and now lived in
Milan.

One day, while she was sailing back and forth on the swing and he
was trying to catch a glimpse of her underwear, her father had arrived.

Sitting on the bidet, Rino couldn't help smiling.

He had never once seen Roberto Colombo dressed in anything
but blue overalls, a red bandana and a ridiculous pair of moccasins
made of interwoven leather threads. He was short and stocky and
wore glasses so thick his eyes looked like two pinpoints.

"How old are you, son?"

"Eleven."

"Eleven years old and you're still playing games like a snottynosed kid? Your father's dead and all you can do is peek at my
daughter's underwear?"

Half-blind as he was, it was a mystery how he had managed to
see that.

Colombo had looked Rino over as you might appraise a horse
at a fair. "You're as skinny as a stray dog, but you're sturdy. A bit
of hard work might help develop your muscles."

So he had taken him on at his workshop. The job was simple:
he had to make the cars shine as bright as the day they had left the
factory. Outside and inside.

"It won't make you rich, but you'll earn enough to buy yourself
a pair of decent shoes and to help your mother, who finds it a
struggle to make ends meet."

So Rino had started going to the workshop every day after school,
and, armed with pump and sponge, had earned the first money of
his life.