Steal You Away (29 page)

Italo gaped, like a large tench caught on the hook, then breathed out through his nose. Blood was beginning to trickle down from the tampons in his nostrils.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know, I swear on the heads of my children,’ he whimpered, writhing on his bed. ‘I didn’t see them. When I entered the storeroom it was dark. They threw medicine balls at me. I fell down. They trampled over me. There were two or three of them. I tried to catch them. I couldn’t. Little bastards.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Well, there was another one. One who came out of the high-jump mattresses. And …’

‘And?’

‘Well, I’m not sure, I was some way away, I didn’t have my glasses on, but he was so small and thin it might have been … yes, it looked like the shepherd’s son, the one from Serra … I
can’t remember his name … But I’m not sure. The one in 2B.’

‘Moroni?’

Italo nodded. ‘Only it’s strange …’

‘Strange?’

‘Yes, it’s strange that a boy like that, such a well-behaved kid, could do something like that. But it might have been him.’

‘Right. We’ll check.’ The deputy head released the caretaker’s pyjamas and seemed satisfied. ‘Now you take care of yourself. Afterwards we’ll see what we can do for you.’ Then she turned to her companions. ‘Let’s go, it’s late. They’re expecting us at school.’

Giovanni Cosenza and Flora Palmieri jumped to their feet as if they had springs under their backsides.

‘Thank you, thank you … I’ll do anything you want. Come and see me again.’

The three went out and left the caretaker trembling in his bed, terrified of spending the last years of his life in jail, without a lira to his name nor even a pension.

A war was going on inside him.

Curiosity was battling with the desire to go home again.

Pietro’s mouth was as dry as if he’d eaten a handful of salt, the wind slipped under his hood and swelled his cape and the rain lashed his face, which had become as cold and unfeeling as a block of ice.

He shot through Ischiano practically in apnoea, through the middle of the puddles, and was about to turn into the school street when he screeched to a halt.

What would he find round that corner?

Dogs. Growling German shepherds. Muzzles. Studded collars. His schoolmates lined up, naked, shivering in the downpour. Their hands flat against the walls of the school. Men in blue tracksuits, with black masks on their faces and boots on their feet, walking in the puddles. If you don’t tell us who did it, we’ll execute one of you every ten minutes.

Who was it?

Me
.

Pietro steps forward between his schoolmates.

It was me
.

He would certainly find a lot of people with umbrellas, the bar crowded and the firemen sawing away at the chain. And in the midst of them would be Pierini, Bacci and Ronca enjoying the show. He had no wish to meet those three. Much less to share with them the secret that was burning his soul.

How he would have loved to be someone else, one of those who stood outside the bar enjoying the show, and who would go home without that great burden that weighed on his mind.

Another thing he was terribly anxious about was meeting Gloria. He could already imagine her. She would start making a fuss, jumping around all excited, trying to discover who the great genius was who had chained up the gate.

And what do I do, tell her? Describe to her exactly what happened?

(
Get moving, for Christ’s sake. Are you going to cower behind
this wall all day?
)

He turned the corner.

There was nobody outside the school. Or outside the bar.

He rode on. The gate was open as usual. No sign of firemen. In the car park were the teachers’ cars. Italo’s 131. The classroom windows were lit up.

There is school, then
.

He pedalled slowly, as if he were seeing the building for the first time in his life.

He entered the gate. He checked to see if there were any remnants of the chain on the ground. There weren’t. He leant the bike against the low wall. He glanced at his watch.

Nearly twenty minutes late.

He was in danger of getting a black mark but he walked up the steps slowly, spellbound, like a soul ascending the long stairway to heaven.

‘What are you doing? Get a move on! It’s late!’

Graziella, the caretaker.

She had opened the door and was beckoning him in.

Pietro ran inside.

‘Are you crazy, coming by bike like that? Do you want to catch pneumonia?’ she scolded him.

‘Eh? Yes … No!’ Pietro wasn’t listening.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing. Nothing.’

He trudged off towards his classroom.

‘Where do you think you’re going? Can’t you see you’re dripping all over the floor? Take that thing off and hang it on the rack!’

Pietro turned back and took off his cape. It dawned on him that she was the caretaker from Section A and that Italo should have been there, in the porter’s lodge.

Where was he?

He didn’t want to know.

Things were fine as they were. Italo wasn’t there and that was that.

His trouserlegs were wet, but it was nice and warm and they would soon dry out. He rested his frozen hands on the radiator for a moment. The caretaker had sat down and was leafing through a magazine. Otherwise the school was deserted. The only sounds were the rain beating on the windows and the water gushing down the drainpipes.

Lessons had started and everyone was in class. He headed for his own classroom. The door of the secretary’s office was open and the secretary was on the phone. The door of the headmaster’s office was closed. As usual. The staffroom empty.

Everything’s normal
.

Before going into class he simply must go down and see the technical education room. If everything was normal there, too, and there was no writing on the wall, and the TV was undamaged, one of two things might have happened. Either he had dreamed the whole thing, which was equivalent to saying that he was completely mad, or the good extraterrestrials had come and cleared
everything up.
Pow!
One ray from a photon gun and the TV and the video recorder were as good as new (like when you see a film running backwards).
Pow!
And the graffiti had gone from the walls.
Pow!
And Italo was disintegrated.

He descended the stairs. He turned the handle, but it was locked. So was the gym.

Maybe they’ve decided to clear everything up and pretend nothing
happened
.

(
Why?
)

Because they don’t know who did it so it’s best to play possum.
Right?

This conclusion reassured him.

He hurried to his classroom. As soon as he put his hand on the door handle, his heart began to race wildly. Fearfully he pushed it down and entered.

Flora Palmieri was sitting on the back seat of the headmaster’s Ritmo.

The car was struggling up Orbano hill. The rain was teeming down. All around was a grey thundering mass, with the occasional flash of lightning in the distance, out at sea. The raindrops drummed frenziedly on the roof. The wiper was having trouble keeping the windscreen clear. The road was like a torrent in full flood and the lorries sped past the car, as dark and menacing as whales, churning up spray like speedboats.

Mr Cosenza was hunched over the wheel. ‘I can’t see a thing. And these truckers are utterly reckless.’

Miss Gatta was navigating. ‘Overtake him, what are you waiting for? Can’t you see he’s making room for you? Step on it, Giovanni.’

Flora was pondering what the caretaker had said and the more she pondered, the more ludicrous it seemed.

Pietro Moroni break into school and smash the place up?

No. The story didn’t convince her.

It wasn’t like Moroni to behave like that. To get a word out of the little lad you almost had to go down on your knees and beg him. He was so quiet and good that Flora often forgot that he even existed.

It had been Pierini who had written that sentence, she was sure of it.

But what had Moroni been doing there with Pierini?

A few weeks earlier, Flora had set class 2B as homework the hoary old essay: ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’

And Moroni had written:

That was Pietro Moroni.

A little dreamer, a searcher for frogs in the desert, as timid and inoffensive as a sparrow.

And now what had happened to him?

Had he suddenly turned into a hooligan and teamed up with Pierini?

No
.

In the classroom everyone was present.

Pierini, Bacci and Ronca threw him some anxious looks. Gloria in the front row smiled at him.

They were all very quiet, a sign that Miss Rovi was doing an oral test. You could cut the tension with a knife.

‘Moroni, are you aware that you’re late? Hurry up, what are you waiting for? Come in and go to your place,’ Miss Rovi rapped, peering at him through her lenses, as thick as bottle-ends.

Diana Rovi was a dumpy old woman with a round face. Hunched up at her desk she looked faintly like a raccoon.

Pietro went to his desk, in the third row, by the window and started taking his books out of his backpack.

The teacher resumed her questioning of Giannini and Puddu, who were standing on either side of her desk, expounding their project: butterflies and their life cycle.

Pietro sat down and nudged Tuna, his neighbour, who was revising his project on grasshoppers.

Antonio Irace, known to all as Tuna, was a tall lanky boy with a small oval head, a studious boy with whom Pietro had never really made friends but who left him in peace.

‘Tuna, has anything unusual happened today?’ he whispered, with his hands in front of his mouth.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know, anything… Have you seen the deputy head or the head around?’

Antonio didn’t look up from his book. ‘No, I haven’t seen them. Let me revise, please, she’s going to pick me soon.’

Gloria meanwhile was waving her arms trying to catch his attention. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come,’ she called out in a low voice, leaning right over. ‘It’ll be our turn soon. Are you ready?’

Pietro nodded.

At that moment the class test was the least of his worries.

If it had been any other day, he would probably have been shitting himself, but today his mind was on other things.

Pierini threw him a ball of paper.

He opened it. It said:

Sure he’d closed it properly. He’d even tugged at the chain to check. He tore a page out of his exercise book and wrote:

He screwed it up and threw it to Pierini. His aim was awry and it landed on the desk of Gianna Loria, the tobacconist’s daughter, the nastiest and most spiteful girl in the class, who grabbed it and with a malicious smirk put it in her mouth and would have swallowed it had Pierini not made a timely intervention by giving her a well-placed slap on the back of the neck. Gianna spat the note out on the table and Pierini, quick as a ferret, whipped it away and shot back into his place.

None of the three had noticed that old Rovi, behind her bulletproof lenses, had seen it all.

‘Moroni! Has all that rainwater rotted your brain? What’s the matter with you? You arrive late, you talk in class, you throw balls of paper, what the devil’s got into you?’ Miss Rovi said all this without any anger, she seemed merely curious to understand the extraordinary behaviour of that little boy who was usually neither seen nor heard. ‘Have you done your project, Moroni?’

‘Yes, Miss …’

‘Who did you do it with?’

‘Celani.’

‘Good. Well, come here, both of you, and entertain me.’ Then she addressed the two pupils standing beside her. ‘You may go. Make room for Moroni and Celani. Let’s hope they do better than you did and at least merit a pass.’

Miss Rovi was like a huge, slow petrol tanker which ploughs
through the sea of life, come fair weather or foul. A thirty-year career had made her proof against the billows. She could get the children to work while retaining their respect, with very little effort.

Pietro and Gloria stood on either side of the teacher’s desk. Gloria began, describing the life habits of mosquitoes and the acquatic larval phase. As she talked, she sought out Pietro’s eyes.
See? I learned it well in the end
.

Science was Pietro’s favourite subject and he had to force Gloria to study it. With infinite patience, while her attention was constantly wandering, he would repeat the lesson to her.

But now she’s going really well
.

And she was breathtakingly beautiful.

There’s nothing better than having a beautiful girl as your best
friend. It means you can look at her whenever you like without
her thinking you’re trying to get off with her
.

When it was his turn, he began without hesitation. Perfectly calm. He talked about the draining of the marshes and DDT and, as he talked, he felt euphoric and happy. As if he were drunk.

The danger had passed and there WAS school and they could talk about mosquitoes.

He made a long digression on the best methods for keeping mosquitoes out of the home. He explained the advantages and disadvantages of mosquito coils, electronic repellents, ultraviolet lamps and Autan. Then he talked about a cream he himself had made out of basil and wild fennel, which you spread over yourself and which was so effective that when mosquitoes smelled it they didn’t just go away, they fled for their lives and became vegetarians.

‘All right, Moroni. That’s enough. You’ve both done very well. What more can I say?’ Miss Rovi interrupted him approvingly. ‘Now I just have to decide what mark to give y …’

The door opened.

The caretaker.

‘What is it, Rosaria?’

‘Moroni is to go to the headmaster’s office.’

The teacher turned to Pietro.

‘Pietro …?’

He had turned pale and was breathing through his nose and kept his lips tightly shut. As if he had been told that the electric chair was ready. With bloodless hands he gripped the edge of her desk as if he wanted to snap it off.

‘What’s the matter, Moroni? Are you all right?’

Pietro nodded. He turned and without looking at anybody walked towards the door.

Pierini got up from his desk and grabbed Pietro by the neck and before he could leave whispered something in his ear.

‘Pierini! Who told you to get up? Go back to your place at once!’ shouted Miss Rovi, slamming the register on the table.

Pierini turned towards her and smirked impudently. ‘Sorry, Miss. I’ll go back to my place straight away.’

The teacher looked round for Pietro again.

He had vanished behind the door with Rosaria.

Italo recognised me
.

When the caretaker had announced that he had to go and see the headmaster, Pietro had seriously contemplated jumping out of the window.

But there were two problems. First, the window was shut (
I
could always smash my way through it head first
) and second, even if he had managed to open it, his classroom was on the first floor and if he landed on the volleyball court he would be paralysed, at worst break a leg.

He wouldn’t die, in other words.

And what he needed was to be killed outright.

If there had been a just God, his classroom would have been on the top floor of a skyscraper so high they would have found him down there, smashed to a pulp like a rotten tomato, and the police would have investigated and discovered that he was innocent.

And at his funeral the priest would have said that he was innocent and that it wasn’t his fault.

He walked towards the headmaster’s office and felt physically sick.

‘If you split on us, if you mention any names, I’ll cut your throat, I swear on my mother’s head,’ that’s what Pierini had whispered in his ear. And Pierini’s mother had only recently died.

He felt a desperate urge to pee. To crap. To vomit.

He looked at that pitiless jailer who was about to hand him over to the executioner.

Can I ask her for permission to go to the bathroom?

(
No. Out of the question
.)

When the head’s expecting you, you can’t go anywhere, and besides she would certainly think he intended to slip out through the window.

(
You shouldn’t have come to school. Why didn’t you stay at
home?
)

Because I was born stupid
. He was disconsolate.
I was born
stupid because they made me that way. A perfect idiot
.

Italo had recognised him. And had told the headmaster.

He recognised me
.

He had never been summoned to the head’s office before. Gloria had, twice. Once when she had hidden Loria’s bag in the toilet cistern, and the other time when she had fought with Ronca in the gym. She had been given two black marks.

I’ve never even had one. Why did he only recognise me
?

(
You hid between the mattresses. Why did you hide between
the mattresses? If you’d hidden with them … He saw you
.)

But he didn’t have his glasses on, he was too far away
…

(
Now calm down. You’re scared shitless. They’ll notice at once.
Don’t say anything. You don’t know anything. You were at home.
You don’t know anything
.)

‘In you go …’ The caretaker pointed to the closed door.

Oh God, how terrible he felt, his ears … his ears had caught fire and he felt streams of sweat trickling down his sides.

He opened the door slowly.

The headmaster’s office was a stark room.

Two long neon lights bathed it in a wan, morgue-like yellow. To the left was a paper-strewn wooden desk and a metal bookcase containing some green files, to the right a small leatherette
sofa, two shabby armchairs, a glass coffee-table, a wooden ashtray and a rubber plant which leaned precariously to one side. On the wall, between the windows, a lithograph of three men on horseback driving a herd of cattle.

All three were there.

The head was sitting in one of the armchairs. In the other was the deputy head (the nastiest woman in the world). Miss Palmieri was sitting slightly further back, on an upright chair.

‘Come in. Sit here,’ said the headmaster.

Pietro shuffled across the room and sat on the sofa.

It was nine forty.

Disturbed children.

That was the teachers’ jargon for kids like Moroni.

Kids with problems integrating into the class group. Kids with difficulties in establishing relationships with their classmates and communicating with teachers. Aggressive kids. Introverted kids. Kids with personality disorders. Kids with serious family problems. With fathers with problems with the law. With fathers with drinking problems. With mothers with mental problems. With brothers with learning problems.

Disturbed children.

As soon as Flora saw him enter the headmaster’s office, she realised that Pietro Moroni was about to go through a very nasty experience.

His face was as white as a sheet and he was …

(
guilty
)

… terrified.

(
as guilty as Judas
.)

He oozed guilt through every pore.

Italo was right. He broke into the school
.

By nine fifty-seven Pietro had confessed to breaking into the school and was crying.

He cried as he sat up straight on the leatherette sofa in the headmaster’s office. Silently. Now and then he would sniff and dry his eyes with the palm of his hand.

Miss Gatta had succeeded in making him talk.

But now he wasn’t going to say anything else, even if they killed him. They had tricked him.