Steal You Away (2 page)

This girl’s body doesn’t react to music, it is music. The physical expression of music. Her movements are as slow and precise as those of a t’ai chi master. She can stand immobile on one leg, wiggling her pelvis and sinuously moving her arms. The other girls are spastics compared to her.

Amazing
.

And the incredible thing is that no one in the disco seems to notice. Those fools keep moving around and talking when a miracle is taking place before their very eyes.

Suddenly, as if Graziano had sent her a beam of telepathic waves, the girl stops and turns towards him. Graziano is sure she is looking at him. She stands quite still, there, on the cube, and looks straight at him, him in the midst of that mayhem, him in the midst of those milling masses, him and nobody else.

At last he sees her face. With that short hair, those lips, those green eyes (he can even see the colour of her eyes!) and that perfect oval, she’s the spitting image of an actress … an actress whose name is on the tip of Graziano’s tongue …

What’s her name? The one who starred in
Ghost?

How grateful he would be if someone could prompt him: Demi Moore.

But Graziano is in no state to ask anyone, he’s mesmerised, like a cobra before a snake charmer. He stretches out his fingers towards her and ten little orange-coloured rays are released from their tips. The rays join together and trace a wavy path like an electric flashover across the disco, above the oblivious masses, and reach her, in the middle of the dance floor, enter her navel and make her shine like a Byzantine Madonna.

Graziano starts trembling.

He and she are linked by an electric arc which fuses their identities, transforms them into imperfect halves of one complete being. Only together will they be happy. Like one-winged angels, from their embrace will come flight and paradise.

Graziano is about to burst into tears.

He is overwhelmed by a boundless love, such as he has never felt before, a love that is not vulgar lust but the purest of emotions, a love that impels a man to reproduce, to defend his woman from external dangers, to build a den to raise children in.

He reaches out his hands seeking an ideal contact with the girl.

The Milanese couple gaze at him in amazement.

But Graziano can’t see them.

The discotheque is no longer there. The voices, the music, the confusion, have all been swallowed up by the mist.

And then gradually the greyness disperses to reveal a jeans shop.

Yes, a jeans shop.

Not a trashy little jeans shop like the ones in Riccione, but one that resembles in every way and every detail the stores he’s seen in Vermont, with neat piles of Norwegian fishermen’s sweaters, rows of Virginian miners’ boots and drawers full of socks hand-knitted by the old women of Lipari and jars of Welsh marmalade and Rapala lures and there are he and the go-go girl, now his wife, very obviously pregnant behind the counter, which is in fact not a counter but a surfboard. And this jeans shop is in Ischiano Scalo, in place of his mother’s haberdashery. And everyone who passes by stops, comes in and sees his wife and envies him and buys moccasins with penny buttons and Gore-tex parkas.

‘The jeans shop,’ whispers Graziano ecstatically, his eyes closed.

That’s what the future holds for him!

He has seen it.

A jeans shop.

That woman.

A family.

And no more of this footloose life, with all its trendy nonsense, no more loveless sex, no more drugs.

Redemption.

Now he has a mission in life: to meet that girl and take her home with him because he loves her. And she loves him.

‘She loves me,’ sighs Graziano, and he gets up from his chair and leans over the rail with arms outstretched to reach her. Luckily the Milanese guy is there to grab him by the shirt and stop him pitching over and breaking his neck.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ the woman asks him.

‘He fancied that little tart down there in the middle.’ The pet-food manufacturer bursts out laughing. ‘He wanted to kill himself for her. Can you believe it? Can you believe it?’

Graziano is on his feet. He is open-mouthed. He is speechless.

Who are these two monsters? And how dare they? Above all, what are they laughing about? Why are they mocking a pure, fragile love that has blossomed despite all the ugliness and filth of this corrupt society?

The husband looks as if he’s going to die laughing at any moment.

Now this son-
of-
a-bitch dies
. Graziano grabs him by the neck of his Hawaiian shirt and the man stops laughing at once and puts on a smile with too many teeth. ‘I’m sorry, I do apologise … I really am sorry. I didn’t mean …’

Graziano is about to punch him on the nose, but then thinks better of it. This is the night of redemption, there is no place for violence and Graziano Biglia is a new man.

A man in love.

‘What do you understand, you … you heartless creatures,’ he mutters under his breath, and staggers off towards his beloved.

His love affair with Erica Trettel, the go-go dancer from the Hangover, proved to be one of the most disastrous episodes in Graziano Biglia’s life. Perhaps that mix of cocaine, ecstasy, seafood and Lancers that he had ingested at the Carillon del Mare was the immediate cause of the coup de foudre that short-circuited Biglia’s mind, but the remote causes were obstinacy and congenital blindness.

Normally, when you wake up after a night of over-indulgence in alcohol and psychotropic substances, you have a hard time even remembering your name, and indeed Graziano had erased from his memory the successes of the Carillon, the pet-food manufacturers, and …

No!

Not the girl who had danced on the cube.

He hadn’t forgotten her.

When Graziano opened his eyes next day, the image of him and her in the jeans shop had nested, octopus-like, among his neurons and, like Orion Quest inside Grandizer, continued to pilot his mind and body all summer.

For throughout that ill-omened summer Graziano was blind and deaf, he refused to see or hear that he and Erica weren’t suited. He refused to understand that his fixation was irrational and would bring only pain and unhappiness.

Erica Trettel was twenty-one and stunningly beautiful.

She came from Castello Tesino, a village near Trento. She had
won a beauty contest sponsored by a salami factory and run off with a member of the jury. She had worked at the Bologna Motor Show as an Opel girl. A few photographs for the catalogue of a swimming-costume manufacturer in Castellamare di Stabia. And a course in belly-dancing.

When she danced on that cube at the Hangover she could concentrate, give of her very best, blend in with the music, for positive images kept flashing, like Christmas-tree lights, in her mind: her in the dancing troupe of
Sunday Live
, photographs in
Novella
2000
of her coming out of a restaurant with a guy resembling Matt Weyland, and the big quiz show and TV commercials for the Moulinex stainless steel grater.

Television!

That was where her future lay.

Erica Trettel’s desires were simple and concrete.

And when she met Graziano Biglia, she tried to explain this to him.

She explained that these desires did not include getting married to a superannuated rocker who was obsessed with the Gipsy Kings and who looked like Sandy Marton at the end of the Paris–Dakar rally, much less ruining her waistline by giving birth to screaming brats, and even less opening a jeans shop in Ischiano Scalo.

But Graziano just would not understand and explained to her, like a teacher to an obstinate pupil, the world of television is a kind of mafia. He knew this only too well. He had played on
Planet Bar
a couple of times. He told her that success on TV was ephemeral.

‘Erica, you must grow up, you must understand that human beings weren’t created in order to make a show of themselves, but to find a space where they can live in harmony with heaven and earth.’

And that space was Ischiano Scalo.

He also had a recipe for getting
Sunday Live
out of her head: leaving for Jamaica. He argued that a holiday in the Caribbean would do her good – it was a place where people enjoyed themselves and chilled out, where all the stress of this crappy society
counted for nothing, where friendship was all that mattered and you just lay on the beach and did fuck all.

He would teach her everything there was to learn about life.

All this garbage might have made some impression on a girl who was into Bob Marley or the liberalisation of soft drugs, but not on Erica Trettel.

The two of them had about as much in common as a pair of ski boots and a Greek island.

Why, then, did Erica lead him on?

This snatch of a conversation between Erica Trettel and Mariapia Mancuso, another go-go girl from the Hangover, as they were getting ready in the dressing rooms, may help us to understand.

‘This rumour about you going out with Graziano, is it just baloney?’ Mariapia asked as she tweezed out a superfluous hair that had planted itself next to the areola of her right nipple.

‘Who told you that?’ Erica is doing some stretching in the middle of the room.

‘Everybody’s saying it.’

‘Oh … are they?’

Mariapia inspects her right eyebrow in the mirror, then attacks it with the tweezers. ‘Is it true?’

‘What?’

‘That you and he are an item.’

‘Well, sort of. Let’s say we’re seeing each other.’

‘How do you mean?’

Erica snorts. ‘What a pain you are! Graziano loves me. He really does. Not like that shit Tony.’

Tony Dawson, the English deejay at the Anthrax, had had a brief fling with Erica before ditching her for the lead singer of Funeral Strike, a death-metal band from the Marche.

‘And do you love him?’

‘Yes. He doesn’t create any problems. He’s a straightforward kind of guy.’

‘That’s true,’ Mariapia agrees.

‘Do you know he gave me a puppy? It’s really cute. A fila brasileiro.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A special breed, very rare. They used to use them in Brazil to hunt down the slaves who escaped from the plantations. He looks after it, though – I can’t be bothered. I’ve called it Antoine.’

‘After the hairdresser?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And what’s all this about you getting married and going to live in his home town and opening a clothes shop?’

‘Are you crazy? No, it’s just that the other evening we were on the beach and he starts going on about his home town, this jeans shop selling Norwegian sweaters, his mother’s haberdashery shop, saying he wants to have children and marry me. I told him it was a nice idea …’

‘Nice?’

‘Hold on a minute. You know how it is when you say things just for the sake of saying something. Right then and there it seemed like a nice idea. But he can’t get it out of his head. I must tell him not to go around telling everybody about it. It makes me look stupid. I’m going to get really angry if he goes on.’

‘You tell him.’

‘I certainly will.’

Mariapia switched to the other eyebrow. ‘And are you in love with him?’

‘It’s hard to say … Like I said, he’s very kind. He’s a really nice person. Ten times better than that bastard Tony. But he’s too superficial. And all this talk about the jeans shop … If I’m not working at Christmas he says he’ll take me to Jamaica. That’d be cool, wouldn’t it?’

‘And … do you give him any pussy?’

Erica got to her feet and stretched. ‘What kind of a question’s that? No. Not usually. But he keeps on pestering me, so every now and then, in the end … I give it to him … What’s the word?’

‘The word for what?’

‘When you give something but not all that much of it, you give it but you’re a bit reluctant.’

‘I don’t know … Gradually?’

‘Not gradually, stupid. What’s the word, now? Come on, help me.’

‘Stingily?’

‘No!’

‘Sparingly?’

‘That’s the word! Sparingly. I give it to him sparingly.’

Graziano in his courtship of Erica abased himself as never before, he cut a ridiculous figure waiting for her for hours on end in places where everyone knew she would never go, he was eternally glued to his mobile searching for her in Riccione and the surrounding area, he had the wool pulled over his eyes by Mariapia who covered for her friend when she went out with that bastard of a deejay, and he ran up huge debts to buy her a fila brasileiro pup, a superlight canoe, an American apparatus for doing passive gymnastics, a tattoo on her right buttock, an inflatable dinghy with a twenty-five horsepower outboard motor, a Bang & Olufsen stereo, heaps of designer clothes and shoes with eight-inch heels and an indefinite quantity of CDs.

People who were fond of him told him to stop it, that it was pathetic. That that girl would wipe the floor with him.

But Graziano wouldn’t listen. He stopped screwing old slappers and playing the guitar, and stubbornly persisted, though he no longer mentioned it because it got on Erica’s nerves, in believing in the jeans shop and that sooner or later he’d change her, that he’d uproot from her head that malignant weed that was television. It wasn’t him who had decided all this, fate had decreed it, that night when it had placed Erica on a cube in the Hangover.

And there was a time when it all seemed, as if by magic, to be coming true.

In October the two of them are in Rome.

In a rented studio flat at Rocca Verde. A tiny little place on the
eighth floor of a tower block squeezed in between the eastern bypass and the orbital.

Erica has persuaded Graziano to come with her. Without him she’d feel lost in the metropolis. He must help her find work.

There are lots of things to do: finding a good photographer for her portfolio. A smart agent with the right contacts. An elocutionist to get rid of that harsh Trento accent and a drama teacher to loosen her up a bit.

And auditions.

They go out early in the morning, spend the day doing the rounds of Cinecittà, casting offices and film production companies, and return home in the evening, exhausted.