The Past is a Foreign Country (18 page)

NIGHT. ARMCHAIR. HEAT. Vague memories in the pervasive dull fog of migraine.

It was his father the general, of course, who had decided that Giorgio would become an officer in the carabinieri. Just as he had been, and his father before him. The subject had never even come up for discussion.

The years Giorgio had spent, first in military school, then in the Academy, had been like swimming underwater, holding his breath, surrounded by silent, alien creatures like fish in an aquarium.

He had never had any problem adapting to discipline. You just had to withdraw, not actually be there. It was a strategy he had learned very well, right from the time he was a child.

In the last year of officers’ school he had met a girl. He had gone out with her for a few weeks and then that was it. He would find it hard, later, to remember her face, her voice. Even her name.

There hadn’t been any others since.

A psychoanalyst would have said that young Giorgio had severe problems forming relationships with women. Problems of
inadequacy
, narcissistic wounds dating back to his childhood, deep-seated traumas.

An unresolved Oedipus complex.

Is your mother’s suicide, when you’re not yet nine years old, enough to explain an unresolved Oedipus complex? And what has your mother’s suicide, when you’re not yet nine years old, got to do
with that desperate, painful need for things you can’t even name, because they make you afraid at least as much as you want them?

Fear and desire are a dangerous combination.

Giorgio sensed that, in a confused kind of way. During those sleepless nights, when the migraine attacked him mercilessly.
During
the breaks in that anaesthesia of the soul he’d had to learn too early. To survive the silence.

Fear and desire and silence are a dangerous combination.

You can lose yourself in it.

You can go mad.

THE AUTOMATIC GATE moved inwards, jerkily. When it was completely open I drove in and straight down the ramp leading to the underground garage. There was a space for visitors, and I
carefully
parked in it.

A week had passed since we’d got back to Bari. Just when I was starting to get worried and think that Francesco had handed over the coke on his own and kept all the money for himself, the call came.

‘It’s on for tomorrow. Pick me up about two.’

He already had the package with him. He directed me to a
residential
neighbourhood: apartment blocks with gardens and garages, people with money.

‘I’ll go, you wait in the car. There’s no point in you going, too. I trust the guy, but you never know.’

For a moment, I was disappointed. I’d have liked to be present at the handover, but Francesco was right. It was a needless risk. And maybe the customer just didn’t want to be seen.

Francesco took the rucksack – the same one we’d had in Spain – and disappeared into the service lift. I stayed in the car and waited. I imagined them cutting through the wrapping with a pocket knife to check the quality of the drugs. Then I told myself that was all bullshit, the kind of thing you only see in films.

After about ten minutes, the red light came on by the service lift
and I saw a rapid succession of images in my mind, like a scene from a film. The automatic doors opened slowly, only it wasn’t Francesco who came out, but two men carrying big guns. They were
policemen
. They shouted at me to get out of the car with my hands up. They made me put my hands on the bonnet, forced me to spread my legs, and frisked me.

I had to tell them I didn’t know what was going on. When they asked me about the cocaine, I would say I didn’t know anything. My friend Francesco had to see someone and he’d asked me to come with him. So I’d come, that was all. What was going on? What did they want with me? My voice sounded steady enough, but I felt as if I was about to burst into tears.

The lift doors opened slowly and Francesco came out with the rucksack over his shoulder. As he walked quickly towards the car, I realised I’d been holding my breath again.

‘Done,’ he said, getting in. I started the car, drove back up the ramp, lowered the window and pressed the button to open the gate. As we drove out into the street, Francesco pulled me by the sleeve. I turned and saw the rucksack. It was open, and packed full of
banknotes
. I didn’t yet know how much there was but I knew I’d never seen so much money. I felt like laughing. I felt like hugging him. It had been so bloody easy that all my doubts and fears seemed absurd. And anyway, what the fuck, we hadn’t done anything wrong. If this man – whoever he was – wanted cocaine by the kilo, well, that was his business. We could do a dozen deals like this, I thought in my euphoria, make a lot of money, and then call it quits. I liked the idea. At last I had my future mapped out. Things would have a meaning, and that was a reassuring thought. It swept away every vestige of guilt. It was a concept like Zeno’s last cigarette. With a certain flexibility to it. Obviously, I’d completely forgotten the
resolutions
I’d made before the trip. Like resuming my studies, going back to a normal life, and so on. All I could think about now was
the huge amount we could make, without doing anyone any harm. We didn’t have to rob banks. And we didn’t have to carry on doing it for the rest of our lives. A dozen deals like this – I repeated as obsessively as a madman – and then I would think about the future. I certainly wouldn’t have anything to worry about. If I wanted, I could even buy a house. I’d tell my parents I’d won the money on a horse race, or whatever. God knows how much there was in that rucksack. Nothing mattered except the money. I wanted to touch it, sink my hands into it. I was a normal 22-year-old.

We went to Francesco’s place to divide the money. There was ninety million. Ninety bundles of hundred-thousand-lire notes. Ninety incredible bundles.

Francesco took out his share, put it aside, and handed me the rucksack with my money in it. ‘Obviously, don’t put it in the bank,’ he said.

‘So what do we do with it?’ I asked, hoping he’d suggest some way we could get a return on that money.

‘Whatever you like, but don’t attract attention, and make sure no one can trace it back to you. If you want to put some in the bank – let’s say two million – then go ahead. If in two months’ time you want to put in some more – like we did with the money from the cards – there’s no problem. Just don’t pay in twenty-five million in one go, because one day someone might ask you to explain where it came from.’

That was an unpleasant thought, and I dismissed it immediately. I picked up the bag, closed it carefully, and put my arms through the two straps, though not in the usual way. I put it in front of me as if I was a kangaroo. This way, I thought, it would be easier to stop anyone stealing it. I said goodbye to Francesco, who didn’t reply,
and left. Once I was out in the street, with my hands on the coarse material, I partly walked, partly ran.

As I’d hoped, there was no one at home. After touching the
money
for a long time, and even sniffing it, I hid it in the big box where I kept my Tex and Spiderman comics. It was strange to see all that money in the middle of those magazines from my childhood.
Bundles
of banknotes mixed in with years of forgotten fantasies.
Bundles
of banknotes mixed in with the threadbare relics of my past.

After a while, the image made me a little nauseous. I had to turn away, do something else.

I put my favourite cassette in my ghetto-blaster and wound the tape forward. After a bit of trial and error, I found the beginning of
Born to Run
. I pressed play and lay down on the bed as the drums started up.

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes

on a last chance power drive

Everybody’s out on the run tonight

but there’s no place left to hide

THE NEXT FEW weeks were directionless. In my memory, they’re like a black and white film, shot unnervingly through a dirty lens, with a few distressing long shots.

Obviously, I didn’t know what to do with the money. I had much more than I could possibly spend. Every now and again I moved it to a new hiding place, for fear that my mother – or the woman who came to clean twice a week – might discover it.

Since selling the drugs and dividing the money, Francesco had vanished into thin air. He didn’t phone me and I couldn’t reach him at home. Occasionally, I’d go to one or other of the bars where we used to meet for a drink and a chat, hoping to see him, but he never came in.

I didn’t know what to do. I’d wander around the apartment and then walk the streets, with the same sense of dissatisfaction and
anxiety
, like a slight, annoying fever of the soul. Sometimes I took the car and went for a drive along the motorway. Two hundred
kilometres
an hour on the straight stretch, playing the game of keeping my foot off the brake – just slowing down a little – as I approached the bends, overtaking on the right, taking the ramps to the motorway cafés at a crazy, homicidal speed.

At other times, I’d drive along minor roads to the sea. I’d go to a different beach each time, bathe, and then lie down on a towel, thinking I would fall asleep in the warm September sun. But I never
fell asleep. After ten minutes I’d start to get restless. Before long I’d be feeling really anxious, and I’d get dressed again and walk back to the car.

Then the summer was over, and my strange excursions came to an end.

One morning, I tried calling Maria. The phone was answered by a man with a strong local accent, a hoarse voice and a rude
manner
. I put the receiver down immediately, wondering if he would be able to trace the call. A few days later I tried again, and this time a woman answered. I had no idea who she was.

‘Maria?’

‘Who is that?’

I put the phone down, and never called again.

I didn’t bother pretending any more to my parents that I was studying. I glided past them like a ghost, an alien being. I was aware of their pain, a pain made all the stronger, surely, by the fact that they didn’t understand what was happening. They didn’t say
anything
to me. But there was no aggression now in that silence. Only a kind of mute, uncomprehending anguish. A sense of defeat that I couldn’t bear.

In order not to have to bear it, I’d look away, fill my ears with music, barricade myself in my room, go out and wander the streets.

I couldn’t even read any more. I’d start a book, and after a few pages get bored or distracted. So I’d put it aside and never pick it up again. A few days later I’d take another one and try again, but the same thing would happen, even more quickly. I soon stopped even trying.

The only thing I could read was the newspapers. At least with a newspaper, you didn’t have to read it from beginning to end, you didn’t have to understand what you read, you didn’t have to concentrate.

In addition to that, I’d developed a morbid interest in crime
re
ports
.
What you might call a professional interest. I liked to read about the arrests and trials of drug dealers. In the same kind of malicious spirit as some old people who read the obituaries and tell themselves that, yet again, it was someone else’s turn.

I’d read about the sentences handed down to people who’d dealt a few grams of cocaine, and calculate how much I had risked – and avoided – for dealing a kilo. I’d feel a shudder every time, a mixture of fear and pleasure. Like someone huddling beneath the blankets, in the warmth, when it’s cold and rainy outside.

One day, I read about a fight in an illegal gaming club in the Libertà neighbourhood, in which someone had been stabbed.
Anxiously
, I searched the article for names. I had a kind of premonition – no, more like a certainty – that Francesco had been involved. I was wrong, as always happens with premonitions, but even after I’d finished reading the item, I couldn’t escape a vaguely disagreeable feeling. In some way, it was connected with Francesco and me, and what was going to happen sooner or later.

Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be anything good.

There were also several scare stories about the series of sex attacks which had been taking place in Bari over the past few months. The investigators believed that all the attacks had been the work of one man. They warned women not to go out alone at night and appealed to the inhabitants for help.

I skimmed through the other pages distractedly, barely aware of what I was reading, though occasionally I’d be shaken from my mindless lethargy by a particular news item.

There’s one I remember especially well.

One day, I read that Gaetano Scirea had died. The sweeper of the Italian national team that had won the 1982 World Cup in Spain. I was fifteen at the time, and I remembered following their incredible, unrepeatable progress, watching as a very average group of players had turned into the best team in the world. They were unstoppable
against Argentina, Brazil, Poland and West Germany. As if Destiny itself were on their side. On
our
side. Even now, when I talk about it, I find it absurd but moving.

Scirea was thirty-six years old that September of 1989, and he’d stay that age forever. He was travelling in an old Fiat 125, on a
remote
, potholed motorway in the middle of Poland. The driver had made a foolhardy attempt to overtake and they had crashed into a lorry that was coming in the other direction, calm, unaware, lethal. When a man becomes champion of the world, does it occur to him that he only has a few years left? And when he gets in an old Fiat 125, on some stupid road in Poland, does it occur to him that he has only a few minutes left?

I phoned Francesco many times. At first, it was always his mother who answered. With that heavy local accent of hers, that sullen old woman’s voice redolent of mothballs, sadness and resentment. Francesco wasn’t in. No, she didn’t know when he’d be back. Could she please tell him I’d called? She’d pause needlessly, sigh, and say, Yes, she could tell him, but she didn’t know when he’d be back. Who was I? Giorgio again. Goodbye – or goodnight –
signora
. Thank you. I never managed to finish the word signora, she had already hung up. So I’d repeat thank you, to myself, out loud.

I don’t think she had it in for me personally. I think she had a stubborn, methodical hatred of the world. The whole world outside that apartment and its stale dust and heavy odour of sadness.

Francesco never called me back. I don’t suppose his mother told him about my calls, but that wasn’t important. Even if she had told him, he had other things to do during those weeks. Whatever these
other things
were, they didn’t include me.

After a couple of weeks and five or six of these surreal
conversa
tions
with the old lady – what was her name? I never found out – she stopped answering. Every time I called, I’d let the phone ring ten, fifteen times. But no one ever answered. It didn’t matter what time it was. Once I called at seven-thirty in the morning. Another time at eleven at night. No one answered. Eventually I stopped phoning.

One day – it was October by now – I met him in the street. He looked strange. He’d let his beard grow, but that wasn’t what made him different. There was something not quite right about him. Maybe it was the clothes, maybe something else, I don’t know. His eyes were wide open and for a few moments he looked at me as if he didn’t know me. Then, suddenly, he started talking as if we’d broken off our conversation just a few moments earlier. He touched my shoulder, and squeezed my arm until it hurt.

‘You see, my friend, we really,
really
have to meet and have a long talk. We’ve come to a major turning point in our lives. How shall I put this? We’ve started out on a path and we really,
really
need to see it through to the end. We need to work out a strategy to achieve our real objectives.’

In the meantime he had taken me by the arm. He walked and I let myself be pulled along. We were in the Via Sparano, surrounded by fashion boutiques, elegant ladies doing their autumn shopping, groups of young people. We made our way through the dense crowds, and as far as I was concerned, a sense of menace that was just as dense and concentrated.

‘In this phase of things, our very identities are at a crossroads. We have two options. The first one is to let events determine what we will be. Like pieces of wood in a river letting the current carry them along. Is that what you want? No, of course not. The second option is to swim for ourselves. Swim against the current, with strength and
determination, to achieve awareness and a true existence. You see what I’m getting at?’

I had the feeling he didn’t remember my name.

No, that’s not right. At that moment, I was sure he didn’t
remember
my name. A sentence appeared in my mind, as if written on an old typewriter: ‘He doesn’t remember my name.’ Then it turned into a flashing neon light.
He doesn’t remember my name
. It lasted a few seconds and then vanished.

‘…there is a categorical imperative, and we have to follow it
to the letter
. We have to realise our
true
natures. We have to take all that potential inside us and transform it into action.’

He continued speaking for a few minutes, at a crazy, hypnotic pace, holding me by the arm and every now and again squeezing me hard just below the elbow. Then, as abruptly as he’d started, he stopped.

‘Well, my friend, I think we see eye to eye about everything. We’ll meet again when we have time and work things out, come up with appropriate strategies. All the best.’

And he disappeared.