As God Commands (34 page)

"She's right. Can't you see what a state I'm in? You'd better listen
to your girlfriend."

She corrected him, puffing out a cloud of smoke: "I'm not his
girlfriend."

In the meantime the boy had taken off his boots and trousers.

"Give them to me. Quick." Danilo reached out of the window
and took them. "And now you have to push the car. My battery's
dead."

Niccolo Donazzan said to Pannocchietta: "Come on, help me.
His battery's dead."

The girl slouched reluctantly around to the rear: "What a drag!"

The two of them started pushing the car toward the garage door.

Danilo waited till they were going fast enough, released the clutch
and went into second. The engine lurched three times and fired in
a cloud of white smoke.

Those two kids, too, Danilo said to himself as he drove out of
the garage, were angels sent by the Lord.

The ants were moving his arm, but in the effort thousands of them
were dying and being carried out of the cave and replaced by others
that arrived from distant regions of his body.

Rino Zena couldn't understand why they were sacrificing themselves to help him.

The ones inside his hand moved together, with coordination, so
as to enable his fingers to bend and grasp the cell phone in his pants
pocket.

Well done ... Well done, little ones.

Now call Cristiano. Please...

Rino tried to imagine his thumb pressing the green key twice.

In the Zena household the phone didn't often ring.

And after a certain hour it never did.

A couple of times Danilo Aprea, during one of his fits of missing
Teresa, had called after eleven o'clock at night in search of a friendly
voice. Rino had listened and had then explained to him that if he
ever tried phoning him again at that hour he would make him
swallow his teeth.

But that night, after months of silence, the phone started
ringing.

The sound took a full three minutes to wake Cristiano, who was
asleep upstairs.

He was having a bad dream. He was very warm and had soaked
the sheets in sweat, as if he had a fever. He lifted his head and
noticed that the gale showed no sign of abating. The broken shutter
was knocking against the window. The gate outside was rattling in
the wind.

His mouth was parched.

The ham.

He reached out and picked up the bottle off the floor, and as he
drank he noticed that the phone was ringing downstairs.

Why doesn't papa answer it?

He flapped the blankets to disperse some of the heat from inside
the bed and then, since the phone kept on ringing, with a yawn he
thumped twice on the thin wall that divided his bedroom from his
father's and in a sleepy voice shouted: "Papa! Papa! The phone!
Can't you hear?"

No reply.

Just for a change he was drunk, and when he was drunk a herd
of wild gnu could charge through his bedroom and he wouldn't notice.

Cristiano stuck his head under the pillow and in less than a minute
the phone stopped ringing.

After the banana had turned the camper into a coupe, the storm
had lifted up the cushions, the crockery, the Chinese food and everything else and dumped them in the car park.

Beppe Trecca and Ida Lo Vino lay locked in each other's arms,
naked and trembling, on the roofless sleeping compartment. Over
their heads the sky twisted and howled, and the clouds, as huge as
mountains, were lit up by thousands of electric flashes.

At the boathouse a rubber dinghy rose up from the ground and
whirled out into the middle of the swollen river.

"Beppe, what's happening?" Ida shouted, trying to make herself
heard above the noise of the storm.

"I don't know. We've got to get out of here. Let's go down this
way," he replied, and eventually, hand in hand, they succeeded in picking their way through the remains of the camper and retrieving
their clothes, which were scattered across the car park.

They took refuge in the Puma.

Luckily Beppe had his gym bag in the car. He put on his track
suit, she a T-shirt and his bathrobe.

He wanted to tell her that he loved her more than he had ever
loved anyone and that he felt as if he had been born again and
that he would do anything in the world to keep her, but instead
he just held her tight and they sat watching the storm finish sweeping
away the campsite.

Then she stroked his neck. "Beppe, it took me a while to understand it but now I'm sure. I love you. And I don't feel guilty about
what we did tonight."

Automatically Beppe said: "What do we do now? What about
your husband?"

She shook her head. "I don't know... I'm so confused. I only
know I love you. I love you very much."

"I love you too, Ida."

"The river's wide. On the other side a speeding car that leaves a
trail of smoke and me. And this green and lovely world, so indifferent, unreal..." sang Danilo Aprea at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo,
going through the storm.

What a great feeling, to be driving again.

What a pleasure to hold the steering wheel in your hands and
feel the warm blast from the radiator on your feet. The gas gauge
indicated half-full. In the stereo was a cassette of Bruno Lauzi's
greatest hits.

Why on earth did I ever give up driving?

He no longer felt cold, his mind seemed to have cleared and his
sadness had suddenly vanished, to be replaced by an alcoholic euphoria.

Danilo turned the radio up higher: "...because everything has
changed and its arms no longer open to one like me who hungers
for something rare and new."

"The Eagle" had always been his favorite song.

He found himself thinking about the trip he'd taken with Teresa
in autumn 1995. How often they had listened to that record. And
sung along with it.

Back then he'd had an Autobianchi A112 with a white roof.

He and Teresa had just got engaged. And they'd decided to go
and spend three days at Riccione. How young Teresa had been then.
How old would she have been?

Eighteen, nineteen.

She was slim. Since then she had put on a bit of weight, but she
still had a good figure.

What a vacation! Three days making love in a room in a small
hotel. And they weren't married, either. They got married soon afterwards. Teresa's parents hadn't come to the wedding. They didn't
want their daughter to get married so young, especially not to a
man who was out of work.

"But Teresa took no notice of them. She wanted to marry me,"
said Danilo with a proud smile.

She had kept calm even on the day she'd given birth to Laura.
She had told the obstetrician: "Let my husband in. I want to hold
his hand."

"My husband," said Danilo out loud. And he repeated it: "My
husband."

Why hadn't he thought of it?

The ants couldn't speak for him.

It had been wrong to make so many of them die for that pointless phone call.

Rino Zena, imprisoned in his own body, didn't even know if the
ants had really moved his arm, pushed the right key. And now,
besides, he couldn't hear anything. The rain had disappeared. Quite
suddenly. And that violet sky, toward the horizon, was covering over
with bluish clouds.

It's too silent. Perhaps I've been buried alive.

"Every creature on Earth is alone when it dies," his mother
always used to say.

But she was wrong: when you die the ants are there to keep you
company.

They were standing in straight rows and were looking at him in
silence. They only moved their antennae. He could feel billions of
little eyes on him.

Please, little ants, try again. One more phone call, that's all.
Please.

While Cristiano Zena, with his head under his pillow, tried to rock
himself to sleep by moving his backside, some fragments of a dream
came up to the surface from the depths of his subconscious and a
knot of sadness blocked his throat.

He couldn't remember why, but in the dream he was in despair
(perhaps because of something he didn't know how to do) and had
decided to kill himself.

He was in the bathroom of the school gym, though it looked a
bit different. In the first place it was a thousand times bigger and
secondly it had lots of showers, all of which were spraying out hot
water and steam. In the middle of the room was a bath tub, one of
those old-fashioned ones with animal-like legs, and Cristiano was
in it with the water up to his shoulders.

He had to commit suicide and he had to be quick-if anyone
came in and caught him in the nude he'd look stupid. His classmates would soon be coming. He could hear them in the gym,
playing basketball. Voices calling to each other. The ball bouncing
off the backboard.

He was holding in his hand one of those old cut-throat razors,
with a square, rusty blade. Slowly, without any fear, he had opened
the veins in his wrists, but no blood had come out.

It's always like that when you cut yourself, a moment passes and
then the blood starts to flow, but this time at least a minute had
gone by.

So Cristiano had inspected the wound and out of the edges some
ants had emerged, each with a bit of green leaf in its mouth.

And then he had woken up.

He hoped it wasn't one of those episodic nightmares that start
again as soon as you fall sleep.

The telephone started ringing again.

So it wasn't a wrong number...

"What a fucking nuisance!" He got out of bed, snorting with
exasperation, and went out onto the dark landing in his vest and
pants. It was freezing cold and all the warmth in his body was immediately dispersed.

He opened the door of his father's room and fumbled for the
light switch.

"Papa, can't you he..."

The bed was empty.

He's downstairs.

If he couldn't hear the phone, half a yard from his ear, he must
be absolutely smashed.

Danilo Aprea could have gone on driving for ever. How wonderful
it would be to leave behind you that thunderstorm and that gray
land infested with snakes and scorpions and head south.

Down to Calabria. To Sicily. And from there further down. To
Africa. Further and further down. The deserts. The savannahs.
The Nile. The crocodiles. The blacks. The elephants. South Africa.
Down to ... What was it called? Cape Horn? There he would stop.
On the southernmost tip of Africa, looking out in silence at the
ocean.

"...rare and new that I'll never get from you. A moving car is
enough to make me ask if I'm alive," sang Bruno Lauzi. Danilo
started beating the time on the dashboard.

In South Africa he would make a new start. In those underdeveloped countries all you need is a bit of initiative and you'll
have a thriving business in no time. And he would find a young woman, a woman much younger than him, and have a baby with
her.

Then he would call Teresa. "Hi, it's Danilo, I'm in South Africa,
I just wanted to let you know I'm not dead, on the contrary I'm in
the best of health and I've had a baby with a girl..." he recited,
pushing down the accelerator. The hand of the speedometer reached
ninety mph. The streetlamps flashed by on either side in a long trail
of sodium.

He turned onto the exit that led to the bank.

While the phone kept on ringing, Cristiano Zena went downstairs,
cursing his father for a drunken fool.

It was dark and the television, which was on, spread a pale blue
glow over a segment of the room. Inside the screen was a guy with
a gray fringe and a big mustache who was drawing graphs.

The beach chair was empty. The blanket screwed up into a heap.
The heater off.

Where is he?

Running toward the phone, he passed the window just as an electric vein was printed on the dark blue sky, lighting up the highway
and the yard as bright as day.

The van's not there.

That was why he wasn't answering.

So all his talk had been a load of hot air. "I'm not going on the
raid ... I'm this, I'm that..." And then he'd gone along anyway. It
was strange, though. His father never changed his mind. Maybe
he'd just gone out to find another whore.

Typical! It's probably him on the phone, the idiot.

Cristiano clumsily hurdled the folding chair and landed with one
foot inside a pizza box while the other hit a bottle of beer and sent
it rolling across the floor. A slice of ham got stuck to his heel. He
picked up the handset and yelled into the microphone: "Hello!
Papa?"

A clap of thunder deafened him, rattling the windows.

Cristiano put his finger in his free ear. "Hello? Hello? Papa, is
that you?"

Silence.

"Hello? Hello?"

Tekken!

His guts tightened in a spasm of pain and his scrotum shrunk
between his legs as fear crept through his veins.

It was him, Tekken. Without a doubt. He wanted revenge.

He had waited for his father to go out before coming after him.

He took a deep breath and growled: "Tekken, is that you? I know
it's you! Speak, you bastard! What's the matter, haven't you got the
guts? Answer me!"

The rain, quite suddenly, as if the sky had been ripped apart,
started beating against the window panes and at the same moment
the television went off and Cristiano found himself in the dark.

Don't worry. It's only a power cut.

"Is that you, Tekken? Admit it! It's you!" he repeated, without
the same conviction as before.

He peeled the ham off his sole with his finger, squatted down
shivering on the sofa and sat there in silence with the receiver pressed
to his ear, waiting for the CLICK of Tekken hanging up.

Rino Zena thought he could hear Cristiano's voice.

But it was so far away that it might be only his imagination.

If only he could speak to him. If the ants had succeeded in moving
his arm, perhaps they could move his lips, his jaws and his tongue
and make him speak.