A Little Lumpen Novelita

XIII

The rest of the time I spent looking for the safe.

It was a safe that began to seem more and more like an invention of my brother’s friends, a safe that existed only in their criminal minds and in their overwrought imaginations — because back then, even if I had a criminal mind too, that didn’t mean I let my imagination run wild after something nonexistent.

I wasn’t overwrought. In fact, what I felt was a strange stillness, as if before arriving at Maciste’s big old house on Via Germanico I had been on the run for months and even years, but from the moment I stepped into his house, from the moment I saw him naked and hulking and white, like a broken refrigerator, everything stopped (or I stopped) and now things were happening at a different speed, an imperceptible speed that was the same as stillness.

Sometimes I looked at them, at my brother and his friends, I looked into their innocent eyes and I was tempted to say:

“The safe exists in only one place — in your fucked-up heads.”

But I think I was afraid of convincing them. I was afraid that they would believe me and then there wouldn’t be any reason, money aside, for my weekly visit to Maciste’s house. Not that anyone would stop me. And the extra money came in handy. But I knew that to keep visiting him with no ulterior motive would destroy me.

Maciste’s eyes — unlike my brother’s eyes and his friends’ eyes — weren’t innocent. He almost always wore sunglasses. But sometimes he would take them off and look at me or pretend to look at me. Then I would shiver and close my eyes and hug him or try to hug him, which was always hard considering his size. One day the Bolognan said to me:

“That bastard is messing with your head. Find the safe and let’s get this over with.”

He wasn’t as dumb as he seemed. And in a way, he was right. The problem was that I couldn’t listen to reason anymore. But he was right.

And another time he said:

“Think of the future, think of all the things we have to look forward to in the future.”

But there he was wrong. Deep down I was always thinking about the future. I thought about it so much that the present had become part of the future, the strangest part. To visit Maciste was to think about the future. To sweat, to venture into pitch-black rooms, was to think about the future, a future that resembled a room in Maciste’s house, but in sharper focus, the furniture covered in old sheets and blankets, as if the owners of the house (a house in the future) had gone away on a trip and didn’t want dust to collect on their things. And that was my future and that was how I thought about it, if you can call it thinking (and if you can call it a future).

But most of the time I preferred not to think about anything. I let my mind wander and I spent a long time at one of the windows that overlooked the back garden, naked, my skin still lubricated, watching the night and the stars, the walls of the neighboring houses.

Sometimes I heard a strange sound that split the darkness like a ray of chalk, and Maciste said it was the cry of a hawk that lived in an abandoned house nearby, though I had never heard of a hawk living in a big city, but these things happen in Rome, strange things that were at the time beyond my comprehension and that I easily accepted in a way that today surprises and even repels me: with a shuddering ease, as if leading a life of crime meant always quivering inside, as if leading a life of crime brought with it mingled sensations of immense guilt and pleasure that made me laugh, for example, for no apparent reason at the least appropriate moments, or that plunged me briefly into sadness, a portable sadness that lasted no longer than five minutes and luckily was easy to hide.

At home, meanwhile, everything was the same.

Sometimes, on the nights that I didn’t visit Maciste, I left the door open for one of my brothers’ friends, with the lights off and my eyes closed, since under no circumstances did I want to know which one of them it was, and I made love mechanically, and sometimes I came many times, which caused me to erupt in fierce, unexpected bursts of rage and to cry bitterly.

Then my brother’s friend would ask me whether something was wrong, whether I was upset, whether I was hurt, and before he could go on, which would have given away his identity, I would tell him to be quiet or say shhh, and he would stop talking and keep fucking without a word, such was the force of conviction or persuasion or dissuasion that my acts had acquired.

It was an almost supernatural power, I sometimes came to think (though immediately I mocked the idea), making normally talkative people like the Bolognan fall silent, or silent people like the Libyan turn entirely mute, a force that wrested every last question from the mouths of the eternally curious, that created a space of artificial silence and darkness where I could cry and writhe in pain because I didn’t like what I was doing, but where I could also come as many times as I wanted and where I could walk (or probe the surface of reality with my fingertips) without false hope, without illusion, not knowing the meaning of it all but knowing the end result, knowing why things are where they are, with a degree of clarity that I haven’t had since, though sometimes I sense that it’s there, curled up inside of me, shrunken and dismembered — luckily for me — but still there.