Steal You Away (8 page)

He had talked for a long time and Gloria had recorded him. Pietro had learned that it wasn’t mosquitoes that gave you malaria but micro-organisms that lived in their saliva, which they injected into you when they sucked your blood. Microbe-like things that got into your red corpuscles and multiplied there. It was strange to think that mosquitoes had malaria too.

With all this information they couldn’t fail to make a good impression in class.

Dark and cold.

The wind swept the fields and pushed the bicycle off course and Pietro had trouble keeping it straight and, when a gap opened among the clouds, the moon cast a yellow glow over the fields which stretched far away, right down to the Aurelia. Black shadows chased one another across the silver grass.

Pietro pedalled, breathed in and sang between his teeth: ‘Bir-dy bir-dy do not fly away! Ta ra …’

He turned right, went down a rough track across the fields and entered Serra, a little hamlet.

He shot through it.

At night he didn’t like that place at all. It was scary.

Serra: six ramshackle old houses. A warehouse that was turned into a farmers’ club a few years ago. The farm labourers and shepherds of the area go there to pickle their livers and play briscola. There’s a shop, too, but it’s always empty. And a church that was built in the Seventies. A parallelepiped of reinforced concrete with slits instead of windows and a silo-like bell tower at the side. On the façade a mosaic of the risen Christ is crumbling to pieces and the steps below the door are strewn with gilded tesserae. Kids use them as ammunition for their catapults. A dim lamp in the middle of the square, another on the street and the two windows of the farmers’ club. Such are the illuminations of Serra.

‘Lit-tle phea-sant do not fly away … Na na na …’

It was a like a ghost town in a Western.

Those narrow lanes and the shadows of the houses looming menacingly over the road, that gate banging in the wind and a dog barking itself hoarse behind another gate.

He cut across the square and came out onto the road again. He changed gear and pushed harder on the pedals, breathing rhythm ically in and out. The light from his lamp lit a few metres of road, and then there was only darkness and sounds: the wind in the olive trees, his own breathing and the tyres on the wet asphalt.

He’d soon be home now.

He should be able to get there before his father did and avoid
a scolding. He only hoped he didn’t meet him driving home on the tractor. When he was too drunk he would stay at the club till closing time, snoring on a plastic chair by the pinball machine, then climb onto his tractor and drive home.

In the distance, about a hundred metres away, three dim lights were zigzagging towards him. They vanished and reappeared.

The sound of laughter.

Bicycles.

‘Lit-tle wild …’

Who can it be, at this time of night?

He slowed down.

‘… boar do not run …’

Nobody goes out cycling at this time, except
…

‘… away …’

…
them
.

Goodbye record.

No. It’s not them
…

They were advancing slowly. Calmly.

‘
HEH HEH HEEEEEH HEH HEH HEEEEEH HEH HEH HEH
’

It’s them
.

That stupid laugh, as piercing as a fingernail on a blackboard and as stuttering as the bray of a donkey, odious, out of place and forced …

Bacci
…

His breath died in his throat.

…
Bacci
.

Only that idiot Bacci laughed like that. Because to laugh like that you had to be an idiot like him.

It’s them. Oh shit
…

Pierini.

Bacci.

Ronca.

The last thing in the world he needed at that moment.

Those three wanted to see him dead. And the ridiculous thing was that Pietro didn’t know why.

Why do they hate me? I’ve haven’t done anything to them
.

If he’d known what reincarnation was, he might have believed that those three boys were evil spirits punishing him for some wrong he had committed in another life. But Pietro had learned not to worry too much about why misfortune dogged him so persistently.

After all, it makes no difference in the end. If you’re going to
take a beating, you take it and that’s that
.

At the age of twelve Pietro had decided not to waste too much time wondering about the reason for things. It only made things worse. Wild boar don’t wonder why woods burn and pheasants don’t wonder why hunters shoot.

They just run.

It’s the only thing to do. In cases like this you have to get away faster than the speed of light and if you can’t, if they corner you, then you have to curl up like a hedgehog and let them vent their fury on you till it abates, like the hail when it catches you out walking in the country.

But what do I do now?

He rapidly considered the various possibilities.

Hiding and letting them go by.

Sure, he could hide in the fields and wait.

Wouldn’t it be great to be invisible. Like the woman in
The Fantastic Four.
They pass by and don’t see you. You just stand
there and they don’t see you. Amazing. Or, even better, not to exist
at all. Never to have been born
.

(
Stop daydreaming. Think!
)

I’ll hide in the field
.

No, that was a stupid idea. They’d see him.
And if they catch
you hiding like a coward you’re in real trouble. If you let them
know you’re scared, you’ve had it
.

Perhaps the best thing was to turn back. To flee as far as the farmers’ club. No. They’d give chase. Just as he had seen their lamps, so they had seen his. And for those mental retards nothing was more entertaining than a nice nocturnal game of hunt-the-dickhead.

It would make their day.

What about making a dash for it?

He knew he was fast. Faster than anyone else in the school, but whenever he tried to race he lost. And now he was exhausted anyway.

He wouldn’t be able to keep going for long. He’d slacken off and then …

There was nothing for it but to ride on, trying to look calm, pass by, greet them and hope they left him in peace.

Yes, that’s what I must do
.

Now they were only fifty metres away. They advancing relaxedly, talking and laughing, and probably wondering who was on that approaching bike. Now he heard Pierini’s deep voice, Ronca’s shriller tones and Bacci’s laugh.

All three of them.

In battle formation.

Where were they heading?

For the bar in Ischiano Scalo, definitely. Where else could they
go?

Pietro had guessed right, that was exactly where they were going.

What else could they do? Pinch each other to death, have a headbutting contest, play grandmother’s footsteps, do their homework? The only thing to do was to go down to the bar, watch the older guys playing pool and try to filch some tokens from behind the counter so that they could get in a couple of games of Mortal Kombat.

No doubt about it.

All three of them were in agreement.

The trouble was that only Federico Pierini could really do as he pleased, tell his father to piss off, not go home and stay out till late at night. Andrea Bacci and Stefano Ronca had a slighter harder time handling the parent–child relationship, but gritting their teeth and
taking bawl-outs and kicks in the arse, they followed their natural leader.

They advanced in line abreast, through the darkness, pedalling slowly, in the middle of the road.

As calm as a pack of young hunting dogs in search of prey.

The hunting dogs of the African savannah live in packs. But the young ones form separate groups, outside the family unit. When hunting they help and support each other, but they have a strict hierarchy, established by ritual fights. The leader, the biggest and boldest (alpha), and under him the subordinates. They maraud across the grasslands in search of food. They never attack the healthiest animals. Only sick, old or small ones. They surround the gnu, bewilder him with their barking, then all of them tear at him with their powerful jaws and sharp teeth till he falls down and, unlike big cats, which break the backbone first, they eat him alive.

Federico Pierini, the alpha hunting dog, was fourteen.

He was still in the second year of junior high school, having failed his end-of-year assessment twice.

A group of American neurophysiologists did some research on the prison populations of the USA. They took the meanest, most violent individuals (thugs, rapists, murderers, etc) and analysed the graphs of their electroencephalograms. They didn’t use an ordinary electroencephalograph (which analyses the average electrical activity of the brain), but a more sophisticated one, capable of recording the electrical activity specific to each cortical region. They covered the prisoners’ skulls with electrodes and then showed them a documentary on the industrial production of tennis shoes.

The neurophysiologists noted that in most cases the activity of the frontal zone of these individuals was low, and weaker than that of normal (good) people.

The frontal zone of the brain is used for the absorption of information from the outside world. In other words, it is the seat of the ability to concentrate – for example to sit down to watch a film and, even if it’s a total yawn, to follow it from beginning to end without getting distracted or fidgety or starting to disturb your
neighbour, but at the very most to breathe hard with exasperation and cast the occasional glance at your watch.

This research led them to formulate the theory that violent people have a poor capacity for concentration, and that this correlates to some extent with their bursts of aggression. It is as if violent individuals are in the grip of a restlessness that they cannot control and the bursts of aggression are a sort of safety valve.

So if you have accidentally rammed into the back of another car and the driver steps out, jack in hand, with the intention of smashing your head open, don’t try to placate him by giving him a book about comets or a season ticket to the film club, it won’t be any use. In such cases it is far better, as Pietro Moroni would have put it, to scram.

The point of the foregoing explanation is to establish two facts.

He was tall, lean and well proportioned. He shaved his moustache and wore an earring. An aquiline nose separated two small eyes that were as black as coal and always half closed. A white quiff hung over his forehead along with his raven fringe.

He had all the essential qualities of a pack leader.

He was cunning.

Bold of manner, sure of gesture, he took all the decisions but led his sidekicks to believe that they shared in them. He had no doubts about anything. All events, even the most terrible ones, seemed barely to affect him, as if he were immune to suffering.

‘I don’t give a shit about anyone,’ he used to say.

And that was pretty well true. He didn’t give a shit about his father, who he said was a pathetic failure with no balls. He didn’t give a shit about his grandmother, who was a senile old bag. He didn’t give a shit about school and that bunch of jerks the teachers.

‘They’d better not fuck me around,’ was his favourite expression.

Stefano Ronca was small and dark, with curly hair and lips that were always moist. As lively as a flea on speed, unstable, ready to bare his throat as soon as anyone attacked him and to jump on them as soon as they turned their backs. He had the high-pitched voice of a castrated know-all, a petulant, hysterical whine that jarred the nerves, and the longest, sharpest tongue in the school.

Andrea Bacci, known as Snack because of his partiality for takeaway pizza, had two problems:

The natural reaction, on seeing him so round and so white, was to take the piss out of him, but that was a bad mistake.

Once a rash individual had tried it, drawing his attention to the fact that he was a freckle-faced ball of lard, and had found himself flat on the ground with Bacci raining punches on his face. It had taken four people to drag him off and for a quarter of an hour the fat lump had gone on spitting and shouting incomprehensible insults, kicking at the door of the toilet cubicle they’d locked him in.

Only Pierini could get away with teasing him, because he would alternate the insult ‘You know you eat like a sewer?’ with the sweeter and more accurate compliment ‘You’re definitely the strongest boy in the school and I reckon that if you got really angry you could even beat Flame.’ He kept him in a state of constant insecurity and dissatisfaction. Sometimes he told him he was his best friend and then he’d suddenly prefer Ronca.

Every day, according to mood and time, the ranking order of
his best friends changed. At other times he would disappear, abandoning them both, and go off with the grown-ups.

In short, Pierini was as changeable as a November day and as elusive as a buzzard, and Ronca and Bacci competed, like rival lovers, for their leader’s affections.

Bacci drew closer to Pierini. ‘What are we going to do now? What are we going to tell Miss Rovi tomorrow?’

The science teacher had assigned them a research project on ants and anthills. They’d decided to take some pictures of the large anthills in the Acquasparta woods, but had blown the money for the film on cigarettes and a pornographic comic. Then they had gone to break open a condom machine behind the chemist’s in Borgo Carini.