The Crossroads (16 page)

He swore to himself that he wouldn't utter even the faintest groan.

Tekken put the heel of his shoe on Cristiano's hand and pressed and Cristiano gave a piercing shriek with what little air remained in his lungs.

‘Why did you do it, eh? Why?' Tekken kept repeating to him. ‘Tell me!' His voice was plaintive, incredulous, as if he was about to burst into tears.

Cristiano couldn't answer, because he had no answer to give, except that during those five minutes he had had some kind of brainstorm.

Tekken pressed harder and Cristiano felt an explosion of pain envelop his forearm and fingers.

‘Why? Speak!'

On the one hand Cristiano wanted to plead for mercy, to beg him to stop, to say it hadn't been him, that they were wrong, that he had nothing to do with it; on the other hand he felt inside him a block as hard as stone which stopped him doing so. They could kill him if they liked, but he would never beg for mercy.

Tekken stepped back and Cristiano started crawling towards the shelter. Everything around him had got tangled up in a rainbow of colours, exhaust fumes, wheels and legs. His ears were buzzing and he could hear what the others on their motorbikes were saying.

He thought he could hear female voices.

Esmeralda and Fabiana.

They were there too. Another reason for not giving in.

Cristiano dragged himself under the bench of the bus shelter.

Maybe if I can get a little further in they won't find me
.

It was a vain hope. Tekken grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him back. ‘Well, what am I going to do with you?' He gave him a kick. ‘Can you believe it, you guys? This little pillock has ruined my motorbike.' He sounded despairing, as if someone had just shot his mother. ‘What am I going to do with him?'

Cristiano curled up, his knees against his chest. He couldn't stop shaking. He must react, get up, fight.

‘Let's chuck him off the bridge,' suggested a voice.

A moment's silence, then Tekken decreed: ‘Good thinking.'

Through a mist of confusion and pain Cristiano found the idea of dying like that, thrown off a bridge, almost beautiful, a liberation.

‘Get hold of his legs.'

They grabbed his ankles. An iron hand tugged at one of his arms. He didn't resist.

He would be spotted next day by an old woman waiting for the bus, squashed like a cockroach on the concrete embankment of the canal. He felt sorry for his father.

He'll die of grief
.

But when he suddenly sensed a dark abyss sucking him down, heard the sound of the water and felt the icy wind on his face, he realised that they had lifted him up and something inside him snapped. He opened his eyes wide and started struggling frantically and shouting, ‘You bastards! You bastards! Sons of bitches! You'll pay for this! I'll kill you. I'll kill you all!'

But he couldn't break free. There seemed to be at least three of them holding him fast.

The blood went to his head. Below him was a black stream which gleamed silver each time a car passed by.

‘Well, you little runt, do you want to die?'

‘Fuck off!'

‘Ooh, tough guy, are we?'

They pushed him further out.

‘Fuck off, you bastards!'

He got a slap in the face which brought blood spurting out of his nose.

Tekken's voice: ‘Listen to me very carefully. If you don't give me a thousand euros, on the nail, on Monday, I swear on the head of my mother that I'll kill you! And don't even think of running away, because I'll find you!' And then, to the others: ‘Now let him go.'

They put him down on the ground.

The whole world seemed to be a whirl of lights and featureless faces.

Sitting there, slumped against the guardrail, Cristiano saw them start up their engines, turn round and ride off towards the village.

It was five minutes before he tried to move a muscle, and when he did so he discovered he had pissed himself.

When Cristiano Zena got home the lights were on.

Nothing was going right.

If his father saw him like this, with his trousers soaked in piss and covered with dirt, his jacket bloodstained and torn …

God knows what he'd do
.

Cristiano limped across the yard, past the van and round to the back of the house. A concrete ramp led down to an underground garage with an aluminium rolling door. He lifted up a flower pot to find the key. He put it in the lock and, stifling a cry of pain, raised the door far enough for him to slip under it.

It was cold in the garage. He switched on the light, to reveal a room which smelt of damp and of the paint in the tins that stood on the long shelves. The pea-green walls and the yellow neon light made it look like a morgue. In the middle was an old ping-pong table covered with piles of newspapers, tyres and other junk which had accumulated over the years. A dusty, worm-eaten upright piano stood against one wall. Rino had always been evasive about its origins and why it was there. It had nothing to do with the two of them. And his father was the most tone-deaf person Cristiano had ever met. At the millionth time of asking, he had finally got a reply.

‘It was your mother's.'

‘What did she do with it?'

‘She played it. She wanted to be a singer.'

‘Was she any good?'

His father had been reluctant to admit it. ‘She had a nice voice. But when it came down to it, it wasn't singing she enjoyed, but tarting herself up and going to piano bars and fooling around. I tried to sell it, but I could never find a buyer.'

So for a while Cristiano had taken to going down to the garage and trying to play it. But he was even less musical than his father.

Inside some boxes stacked up against a wall Cristiano found some old clothes. He took off his jacket and put on a moth-eaten cardigan and a pair of jeans. He washed his face in the basin and straightened his hair. He wished he had a mirror to check his appearance, but there wasn't any.

He locked up the garage and went back round to the front door.

The problem was his swollen lip. He also had grazes on his back and hands, and bruises on his leg, but those he could hide.

Another problem, which wasn't so much a problem as a disaster, was the thousand euros. Well, he would have to think about that later, think long and hard, because he didn't have the faintest idea how he was going to solve it.

Now he could only hope his father was asleep or already dead drunk, so that he could enter the house, slip past him as silently as a panther and steal upstairs into his bedroom.

He took a good, deep breath. He had another quick look at his clothes, then opened the front door and closed it behind him, trying not to make any noise.

In the living room only the lamp beside the television was on. The rest of the room was in semi-darkness.

His father was in his usual place, on the lounger; Cristiano could see his shaven head. Quattro Formaggi was with him, sitting on the sofa with his back to the door. Were they asleep? He waited for a while to hear if they were talking. He couldn't hear anything.

So far so good.

He tiptoed towards the stairs. Hardly daring to breathe, he put one foot on the first step and the other on the second, but he failed to notice a hammer and some pliers, which fell down with a clatter.

Cristiano gritted his teeth and looked up, and at the same moment he heard his father's hoarse voice: ‘Who's there? Cristiano, is that you?'

He suppressed an oath and replied, trying to sound casual: ‘Yes, it's me.'

‘Hi!' Quattro Formaggi raised an arm.

‘Hi.'

His father slowly turned his head, a mask which the television screen had painted light blue. ‘Have you been at home, then?'

Cristiano, as stiff as a statue, gripped the banister. ‘Yes.'

‘I didn't see any light in your room.'

‘I was asleep,' he improvised.

‘Ah!'

Emergency over. Rino was so drunk he wasn't interested in what he was doing. He took another step.

‘There should be some mortadella left. Could you bring it to me with some bread?' Rino went on.

‘Can't you get it yourself?'

‘No.'

‘Oh come on. Is it such a big effort?'

‘I'll get it for you,' Quattro Formaggi offered.

‘No, you stay where you are. If a father asks his son for some mortadella, his son goes and gets the mortadella. That's the way it works. What's the point of having children, otherwise?' He had raised his voice. Either he was in one of his bad moods or he had a headache.

Cristiano came back down the stairs, muttering to himself, and went to fetch the mortadella. There was one single slice left in the desolate fridge.

Then he got the bread. Still hidden in the shadows, he approached his father.

But just as he was handing it to him, misfortune struck again. On the television some guy gave the right answer to the twenty-thousand euro question, whereupon two thousand million-volt light-bulbs lit up all at once, flooding the lounge with light.

Cristiano lowered his eyelids, and when he raised them again his father's expression had changed.

‘What's the matter with your lip?'

‘Nothing. What do you mean?' He covered it with his hands.

‘And what are those scratches on your hands?'

‘I fell over.'

‘How?'

Out of the void of Cristiano's mind came the first, foolish lie. ‘I slipped on the stairs. It's nothing,' he said, airily.

His father eyed him suspiciously. ‘On the stairs? And you made such a mess of yourself? What did you do, fall all the way down?'

‘Yes … I tripped over my shoelaces …'

‘How the fuck did you do that? It looks like someone's punched you in the mouth …'

‘No … I just fell down …'

‘Bullshit.'

It was impossible to con his father. He had a special gift for spotting untruths. He used to say lies stank and he could smell them at
a distance of a hundred metres. And he always saw through you. How he managed it Cristiano didn't know. He suspected it had something to do with that quiver of the jaw which he could never control when he was lying to him.

It was strange – with everyone else he was brilliant at lying. He could spin the most outrageous yarns with such self-assurance that nobody doubted him. But with his father it was different, he just couldn't do it, he felt those black eyes boring through him in search of the truth.

And at that moment Cristiano wasn't in the right frame of mind to stand up to an interrogation.

His legs were still trembling and his stomach was churning. A wise little voice told him that the only person who could get him out of that mess with the thousand euros was his father.

Fatally, he lowered his head and, almost in a whisper, confessed: ‘It's not true. I didn't fall down. I had a fight …'

Rino sat in silence for a long time, breathing through his nose, then switched off the television. He swallowed saliva. ‘And by the look of it you came off worst.'

Cristiano nodded.

He shouldn't have spoken, because he could feel that all the strength he had been using to stop himself crying was exhausted. Coils of barbed wire seemed to be wrapped round his throat.

He lifted up his sweatshirt to show his grazed back.

His father looked at him expressionlessly for a moment, then started rubbing his hands over his face like someone who's just heard that his whole family has been killed in a road accident.

Cristiano wished he hadn't told him the truth.

Rino Zena looked up at the ceiling and asked, very politely: ‘Would you mind leaving us, Quattro Formaggi?' He breathed hard. ‘I need to be alone with my son.'

He's going to give me a thrashing
… thought Cristiano.

Quattro Formaggi got up without a word, put on his old overcoat, and, with an incomprehensible grimace at Cristiano, went out.

When the door was closed Rino stood up and switched on all the lights in the sitting room. Then he went over to Cristiano and examined his wounds and his mouth, as if he was checking a horse at the market.

‘Does your back hurt?'

‘A bit …'

‘Can you bend down?'

Cristiano leaned forward. ‘Yes.'

‘It's not serious, then. What about your leg?'

‘Yes, I can bend it.'

‘Your hands?'

‘They're okay.'

Rino paced silently round the room, then sat down on a chair. He lit a cigarette and stared at him. ‘And how about you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Did you hurt him?' He only had to look his son in the eye for the answer. ‘The hell you did!' He shook his head in despair. ‘You … you don't know how to fight, do you?' It was a revelation. ‘You really don't know how to.' He sounded half scandalized, half ashamed of himself. As if he had failed to teach his offspring to talk, or to walk. As if he had fathered a son with a fatal allergy to gluten and then forced him to gorge himself on bread.

‘But …' Cristiano tried to interrupt him, to explain exactly who Tekken was. But his father was in full flow.

‘It's my fault. It's my fault.' Now he was walking round with his head in his hands like a penitent at Lourdes. ‘He doesn't know how to defend himself. It's my fault. I'm a failure …'

God knows how long he would have gone on like this if Cristiano hadn't shouted, ‘Papa! Papa!'

Rino stopped. ‘What's up?'

‘He's eighteen years old … and he's an expert at Thai boxing. He won the regional championships.'

His father looked at him blankly. ‘Who is?'

‘Tekken!'

‘Who the fuck is Tekken?'

‘The guy who beat me up.'

Rino grabbed him by the collar. His face was contorted, his nostrils flared, his mouth clamped shut. He raised his fist. Cristiano instinctively shielded his head with his arms. Rino held him there, hesitating, then gave him a shove, so that he fell back onto the sofa.